The Ugly Duchess (20 page)

Twenty-seven

T
heo decided to go to supper wearing the green gown and the ruby ring. After a moment’s thought she added a ruby necklace as well.

It rather amused her to think that she was dressed like a pirate’s queen. Or would that be empress? Even her heeled slippers twinkled, as well they should, given their trim of diamond chips. Theo narrowed her eyes at her reflection. Surely the consort of a pirate glittered from head to toe.

She had the suspicion that pirates didn’t have empresses. They had doxies. But one glance showed her that no one could possibly mistake her for a woman of the night. She looked regal, perhaps a bit too stern. As if she didn’t laugh enough.

Theo frowned at herself again. Of course she laughed. All the time.

But as she descended the stairs, she couldn’t remember when. Probably the last time she saw Geoffrey; he always made her laugh. Most likely he had a group around him at this very moment, and he was driving them into fits of laughter by describing the way the “savage” had waltzed into the House of Lords almost in time for his own funeral.

There was something remarkably tasteless about Geoffrey; the more she came to know him, the clearer it seemed. She didn’t want to make fun of James; she just wanted to be free of him. In fact, she didn’t want anyone else to ridicule him, either.

She was still thinking of Geoffrey’s probable mockery of James when she entered the drawing room.

“Her Grace,” Maydrop announced and closed the door behind her. For a moment her eyes met those of James, and then she saw his attire. Her lips parted in astonishment, and she came to a halt.

James was wearing one of the most extraordinary costumes that she had ever seen, in Paris or out. His coat was made of dull gold silk with a lustrous sheen. Under it he wore a waistcoat embroidered with roses, and fastened with azure blue buttons. His neck cloth was a glorious Indian silk dyed in colors that shifted from orange to rose. The final touch? Breeches that clung to every inch of his muscled thighs, tied with small rose-colored bows just below his knees.

Those bows were the most incongruous thing of all. Slowly, she looked back up his body. The costume was so beautiful as to be unmanly. The fabrics were exotic, and the tailoring Parisian: the collar was edged with deep cuts and much wider than worn in London. His breeches were tighter than Englishmen chose to wear them.

Yet no one could glance at the unmistakable aura of tightly controlled power that hung around James like a cloak and ever,
ever
think of him as unmanly.

It was the first time in over a year that Theo found herself riveted by a bolt of pure sartorial lust. “Your coat,” she said finally, “was made by Monsieur Bréval, was it not?”

James strolled toward her holding a glass of champagne. “That sounds familiar,” he said amiably. “A round little man with very small feet and a propensity for gilt?”

“His waiting list is two years long,” Theo observed, accepting the glass.

“Every man has his price, and, if I remember correctly, Bréval found himself dazzled by a garnet set in silver. If I had realized he was so sought after, I would have been less abusive when he wanted to decorate this coat with tassels.”

Theo laughed and sipped her wine. A wash of relief hit her, so strong it made her feel a bit unsteady. James no longer resembled a pirate. His neck cloth fell in an expertly tied cascade; his short hair was tousled into a Brutus. True, he was large, but as always, in the right clothes, a man took on his best self. He looked every inch a duke.

“What exquisite silk,” she said, running her fingers down his sleeve. It was only stupidity that had her noticing the contained power beneath the silk.

“How awkward,” James said, after a tiny pause. “It’s difficult to know where to begin with a spouse one hasn’t seen in seven years. The weather doesn’t seem an appropriate subject for conversation, somehow.”

Theo walked away from him and sat down on a small settee. For a moment she thought he would take the spot beside her; there was something intense, almost lit-from-within, in his eyes. But instead he sat, most appropriately, in a chair opposite her.

“Will Sir Griffin join us for supper?”

“No. He had meant to leave in the morning to join his wife in Bath, but journalists crawling through the back garden changed his mind. He has already left, and asked me to give his apologies for not thanking you personally for your hospitality.”

“His wife!” Theo exclaimed, distracted by the thought that there was another gentlewoman in her position. “Did
she
know he was a pirate? And that he was alive?”

“She knew he was alive,” James said. “I’m not sure about the piracy.”

“Well.” She pushed away the fact that Sir Griffin Barry didn’t leave his wife in the dark about his safety. Presumably they had not parted on such unpleasant terms as she and James had. “I would like to hear about the life of a pirate,” she said, taking another sip of the champagne, and then putting it aside. She preferred not to drink overmuch.

“Ah, the life of a pirate,” James said musingly. He put down his glass as well, permitting Theo to glimpse a narrow starched ruffle at his wrist, trimmed with metallic gold thread.

“Oh!” she cried, interrupting him. “Your ruffle is superb!”

He held out his arm, staring at it. “You don’t think it’s a trifle overdone? I thought so, but then a princess on the island of Cascara shared your enthusiasm.”

From his smile, Theo surmised that James had pleasant memories of the princess. She straightened her back.

“She was quite bent on assuring me that my galleon would always have a warm welcome in her harbor,” he went on. “Not that I chose to dock my ship in that port.”

“Why ever not?” Theo said coolly. “Too fatiguing for a man of your years?”

“Too crowded,” he replied, his eyes shining with wicked humor. “Pirates prefer to find an island so small that no man has walked her sand. We like to find a small haven that lies dreaming in the sun. Waiting.”

Despite herself, she felt a smile tugging at the corner of her lips. James had loved punning nonsense when he was a boy. He used to make her laugh until her ribs ached. Perhaps he hadn’t changed
that
much.

“So you’d like to know about the life of a pirate,” James said, stretching out his legs.

Theo jerked her eyes away from his thighs and looked at his face instead. When he was a young boy, James’s face looked as if a master sculptor such as Donatello had carved it. She was never surprised that his mother considered him angelic: he had looked and sounded like a cherub, the kind who would spend his life singing hymns so joyful that birds would weep with envy.

No longer. His face had broadened along with the rest of him, and what had been elegant cheekbones had become more spare and brutal. His nose had clearly been broken in some conflict. And there was the tattoo, of course.

“What did you enjoy so much about that life?” she asked and held her breath. Despite herself, there was a silent addendum in the air:
so much more than you liked me.
Damn it, this was no time for vulnerable Daisy to make an appearance.

Yet it
hurt
to be hurt.

Twice, she had felt as if her heart was torn from her chest: when she realized that James had lied about his reasons for marriage, and when her mother died. The memory steadied her.

“You know what I’m like,” James said lazily, ignoring, or not catching, the question she didn’t ask. “As a boy, I was forever dashing out of the house, trying to calm myself by tearing around the garden. The first three or four years, I stayed in motion. Every day, all day. Sailing is hard work; taking down pirate ships is even harder.”

“I can only imagine,” Theo said. She got up and walked to the bell cord. She couldn’t take much more of this intimacy. It would be better to be in the dining room, where she would have something to do with her hands and be flanked by footmen. “And what did you see?” she asked, seated once again.

He told her about huge fish that leapt from the water to smile at them, the long arms of an octopus, the dawn breaking over the ocean when all around there was nothing to be seen but blue water, bending gently to hug the curve of the earth.

When they moved to the dining room, James dismissed the footmen behind their chairs with a jerk of his head. Theo was about to protest that her household ran smoothly because . . . and realized it wasn’t
her
household any longer.

But then he asked a question about the weavers, and it was such a pleasure to talk to someone interested—to whom she didn’t pay a salary.

The candles guttered, and still they talked, on and on. A few times she reiterated that she would leave the house in the morning. But James seemed entirely reasonable in response, not at all like the ferocious brute who had snatched her in the hallway earlier that day.

In point of fact, he escorted her up the stairs and ushered her into her bedchamber, bowed like a perfect gentleman, and withdrew.

It wasn’t until Amélie had put her in bed that she realized that she felt a little sad. Flying fish had been enough to keep him from her?

She had been such a fool. Somehow she had preserved the idea of her childhood friend. And now, even as a grown-up version of that friend smiled across the table, urbane and charming, she wanted more. She wanted him to adore her, the way she remembered.

Obviously, he had changed.

In the end, she lay for hours staring into the dark, feeling a little maudlin from a surfeit of champagne. For all James said that he didn’t sail into that princess’s harbor, he probably did. And judging from his smile, the harbor had been seductive.

Curved, no doubt.

Theo could be charming, perhaps . . . but seductive, never. Her old ragged hurts presented themselves, and in the middle of the night, she decided that no matter how beautiful the silks and satins in which she draped herself, she still felt ugly. No need to refer to waterfowl of any variety.

Just
ugly.

Not to mention sorry for herself.

It was all very depressing.

T
he next morning she woke feeling angry—mostly at herself, though she reserved a bit for James as well. Couldn’t he have simply stayed away and lived his life out with those golden island maidens with their hidden coves and all the rest of it?

She would have been a happy widow. She would have found a man with intelligent eyes and a thin face. He would have been strong, but lean. And very gentle. After a moment’s hesitation she gave him a slightly longish chin. She didn’t want beauty.

Every once in a while she would think about how amiably James had regarded her from across the table the previous night, and how kindly he had asked her questions—precisely as if he were a well-meaning uncle whom she’d somehow mislaid—and another little ember of irritation would light in her stomach.

When she finally came downstairs for luncheon, Maydrop met her at the newel post. “The situation has only grown worse outside the house,” he told her, keeping pace as she walked to the dining room. She had taken only a cup of hot chocolate for breakfast and she was ravenous.

“Worse?” she asked, hardly listening. She didn’t wait for him to open the door to the dining room but opened it herself.

James was sitting at the table, eating what looked to be half a roasted pig and reading a newspaper. Theo took a deep breath. He looked up and rose to his feet. “Forgive me for having started the meal. I erroneously believed you were not joining me for luncheon. I thought you were eating in your chamber.”

“I
never
eat in my chamber,” Theo said, keeping her voice level with an effort.

James’s eyebrow shot up and he looked at Maydrop. “That would suggest you didn’t have breakfast. Does no one in the household understand that you turn into a whirling dervish if you don’t eat frequently?”

A footman held out a chair, and Theo dropped onto it. By the time she’d eaten a piece of trout, delicatedly cooked with just a touch of butter, she was feeling better.

James hadn’t said another word. And he hadn’t stopped reading the paper, either. If this was what married life was like, she wanted none of it. Courtesy was what made life tolerable. If people read newspapers when they should be engaged in civil conversation, they might as well just squat before a fireplace and gnaw on charred hunks of meat like savages.

Maydrop offered three different desserts, each presented by a footman who advanced one step, at precisely the same time. At least not everything in her household had fallen to pieces. She nodded at the pear cake.

Across the table, James drawled, “I’ll have a piece of that as well.”

Maydrop paced around the table, followed by the footmen.

“I saw what Her Grace was offered,” James said impatiently. “There’s no need to come around here.” He pointed at the cake with his fork.

The air in Theo’s chest felt heated, as if she’d walked into a smithy. But she began eating her pear cake, trying to ignore the fact that James was still reading.
And
chuckling as he read, but without bothering to share what amused him so.

“This is absurd,” he finally said, raising his head. His eyes were brimming with laughter. “I’ve never seen this sort of paper before.” He held up a page. “They don’t name anyone except by an initial.”

“Gossip rags. I don’t have twaddle of that nature delivered to this house,” Theo said. “Where on earth did you get it?”

“Maydrop sent a footman out for all the papers,” James replied, turning back to his newspaper. “I wanted to see how my entry into Lords was described. Vulgar curiosity, I admit.”

“And?” She took a last bite of pear cake, which was truly delicious.

“Her Grace will try the blackberry tart,” James said, pointing his fork at the appropriate footman.

“I make such decisions for myself!” Theo flashed. She made it a practice not to overindulge in sweets. But the footman had already placed a slice of the tart in front of her. It smelled wonderful and she took a bite despite herself.