When the Duke Returns (3 page)

Revels House
Country Seat of the Duke of Cosway
February 21, 1784

S
imeon Jermyn, Duke of Cosway, expected to feel an overwhelming tide of emotion when his carriage drew up before Revels House. After all, he hadn't seen his childhood home in well over ten years. He arrived just before twilight, when the lowering sun made every turret and angle (and Revels House had many) look sharp and clear against the fading blue sky.

Of course he was poised to quell any such unwelcome emotion. As a follower of the Middle Way, he understood that to live in peace was to anticipate the danger of chaos. Revels House reeked of chaos: even as a mere child he had longed to escape his parents' pitched bat
tles, his father's frenzied speeches, his mother's fierce claims of privilege. They sent him to Eton, but that meant that he had free access to a library full of books describing countries unlike his own. Families unlike his own.

Of course, it was possible that when he came home to the sleepy, tamed English countryside, with Revels House sitting in the midst like a plump teapot, he would be overcome by a sense of righteous pride.

But instead of pride, he found himself looking at the fields as they drew closer and marking their neglected appearance. The gravel on the long drive wasn't just unraked; great swaths of the road were nothing more than ruts carved from dry mud. The trees hadn't been pollarded in years.

Instead of pride—or joy—he felt an unwelcome prickle of guilt, which intensified as he climbed from the carriage to find a broken window in the east wing, and bricks that badly needed pointing.

At least Honeydew, the family's butler, looked the same. For a moment it felt as if Simeon had never left home. Honeydew's three-tiered wig still ended in a stubby tail in the back; his frock was cut in the style of twenty years ago, and lined with brass buttons. Only his face had changed: years ago, Honeydew had a youngish, mournful face, from which his nose jutted like some sort of miserable mistake. Now Honeydew had an older, mournful face. It suited him. He used to look like a boy who had unexpectedly discovered a dead body; now he looked like a man who had judged life and found it wanting.

A moment later Simeon walked into his mother's sitting room. Some of his earliest memories involved interminable lectures delivered in this room. His mother believed in driving her points home with enthusiasm—and repetition. On one occasion she had taken a full
hour to inform him that a gentleman does not curl his lip at a portrait of an ancestor. Even if the said ancestor looked like a silly booby in a ridiculous frill.

Like Honeydew, the Dowager Duchess looked the same…and yet not the same.

She sat bolt upright on a settee, her skirts occupying whatever space was not taken up by her bottom. He knew little of current women's fashions, though styles had obviously changed since he left England. Yet his mother seemed to be wearing clothing from twenty years ago.

She rose and he saw her embroidered bodice, decorated with a ladder of bows down the front, and revised his estimation: more than twenty years ago. In truth, her costume was precisely as he remembered, from her tall white linen cap to her train. It was only her face that had changed. He remembered her bursting with authority and life, her rosy cheeks and sharp eyes epitomizing the model of duchess-as-general. But now she looked wrinkled and surprised, like an apple gone soft after a winter in the cellar. She looked old.

She extended a hand. He fell to one knee and kissed her beringed finger. “Cosway,” she said. “I trust that you recovered your wife from that den of iniquity.” He had arrived in London to find alarmed letters directing him to travel immediately to a country house party to rescue Isidore. Which he had done.

“Mother, I missed you these twelve years,” he said.

Her eyes sharpened and he saw a trace of the woman he remembered, one who abhorred any display of emotion other than disdain and disappointment.

“Indeed,” she said, her voice glacial. Then he remembered how many hundreds—nay thousands—of his comments had been received with that single, damning word. “You will forgive me for doubting your word, since you were at liberty to return at any time.”

It was a fair point. “On receiving your note,” he offered by way of amelioration, “I traveled to Fonthill. My wife was perfectly fit.” He paused for a moment, wondering if he was supposed to report on the state of his bride's virginity.

“I trust you both left the environs immediately.”

She folded her hands together. It was almost impossible to see her knuckles due to the flare of jewels. He remembered that about his mother too: she was like a magpie in her delight in shiny things, jewels, gold, silver.

He nodded.

“Where is the duchess? She should be here with you. Your responsibilities to the Cosway line of descent have been sadly neglected.”

Simeon couldn't help wondering if his mother intended to monitor how often he visited his wife's bedchamber. “Isidore is in London. She will remain there while I prepare a wedding celebration.”

“Wedding! You are married; what need have you for a wedding?”

“We were married by proxy. I should like to celebrate our vows properly.”

“Stuff and humbug!” his mother snapped. “That's one and same with those other romantic notions with which you always stuffed your head! Rubbish!”

“Isidore agrees with you.”

“Isidore? Isidore? Who is Isidore? Are you, by any chance, referring to your wife, the Duchess of Cosway, by her personal name?”

“Yes.”

“Indeed.”

Now they were on familiar ground. The groundswell of a lecture rolled toward him. He sat down, remembering a second too late that he should have asked her permission.

But he settled back into his chair rather than spring to his feet. The lecture, which began with his impertinent behavior in referring to his wife by her given name and deviated into the disgraceful, un-English nature of that name (Isidore), swelled like a river in springtime, giving him time to catalog perplexing aspects of his return.

His mother was brilliantly dressed in figured silk. But her chamber had faded, the hangings and upholstery apparently not having been touched since long before his father died three years ago. The house didn't even smell good. There was an underlying miasma that hinted of the privy. Had no one noticed?

He would have returned to England sooner, had there been a problem with money. His solicitor forwarded the estate summary every year and at no time did it indicate a shortage of funds to furbish the house, to pollard the trees, or to keep the fields in good trim.

It was a long hour.

Revels House
February 22, 1784

“W
here
are you going dressed like that?” The Dowager Duchess of Cosway was no stranger to a shriek, but on this occasion she excelled. Any reasonable elephant would have stampeded.

“Running,” Simeon answered. For propriety's sake he had pulled on a simple tunic; he usually ran bare-chested, dressed only in short trousers.

“Running to what?” his brother Godfrey asked, following their mother into the entry.

It was a reasonable question. Simeon had outrun the occasional lion (but only with the help of a friendly tree). He had failed to outrun a crocodile and almost got eaten as a punishment. There was nothing to outrun in the
prim English countryside that surrounded Revels House; one had the feeling that not even wolves dared intrude on the duchy's herds.

“I just like to run,” he explained. “It's excellent exercise and I enjoy it.”

His mother and brother spoke at the same moment. “What are those shoes?” Godfrey asked, and “You must stop that practice at once,” his mother commanded.

Simeon sighed. “Shall we retire to the drawing room and discuss it?”

“The drawing room?” his mother asked. “With you—with you unclothed as you—” She didn't seem to be able to continue, just flapped her hand in the air.

Godfrey was just the age to be enjoying himself enormously. The only way Simeon could explain the fact that he had a thirteen-year-old brother, when he himself was almost thirty, was to picture his mother and father having a prolonged and energetic marital life. Given that his mother had a look of perpetual outrage and a figure that resembled a cone-shaped beehive, he refused to imagine it.

“You're not clothed,” Godfrey said, laughing madly. “I can see your knees!”

“It's easier to run like this,” Simeon said. “Would you like to try it? I have several spare trousers of this nature.”

“Don't you dare try to contaminate him!” his mother blustered.

“Mother,” Simeon said.

“You may address me as Your Grace when we are in public.”

“We aren't in public.”

“Unless I invite you to my private chambers, we are in public!” she snapped.

Simeon ignored this. “When I return, if you would be so kind as to grant me the honor of an audience for a mere five minutes, I would be most grateful.” He swept a bow, a duke's bow.

“The honor of an audience?” Godfrey said. “Do you say that to savages when you meet them, Simeon?”

“Do
not
address the duke with such familiarity,” the duchess snapped at Godfrey.

Simeon winked at his brother and pulled open the front door before Honeydew could reach it. Then he tore down the steps, leaving his family temporarily behind.

Two minutes later he was running down a neglected lane behind his estate. The estate could fairly well be summed up by the word
neglected
. He pushed that unpleasant thought away and fell into the physical pleasure of feeling his legs pound against the ground, his heart race, the wind tug his hair back from his head.

He had learned about running for pleasure, rather than for escape, from an Abyssinian mountain king named Bahrnagash. To cross into Abyssinia by the mountain pass, one must appease Bahrnagash. Given that the man was famous for putting strangers to death and dividing their possessions among his tribesmen, Simeon had been a bit concerned.

When Simeon was challenged to a race—the reward for winning being his life and the lives of his men—he thought he had a decent chance. Bahrnagash turned out to be a little man with a close-shaven head, wearing a cowl and a pair of short trousers. He had to be fifty years old. He wore no shoes, and showed no inclination to remove his coarse girdle, into which was stuck a heavy knife. Simeon estimated he could run his way to freedom.

They gathered in the great courtyard of the mountain
fortress. Simeon's cavalcade cheered with all the lustiness of men wildly outnumbered, and picturing themselves sliced open from gullet to gizzard. Bahrnagash's men cheered with the enthusiasm of men seeing horses for the first time, and knowing a good thing when they saw it.

A gun cracked—and Bahrnagash leapt away like a man possessed. He ran up the pass as if he were a mountain goat. Simeon ran after, head down, heart pounding.

Bahrnagash ran straight up, leaping from rock to rock. Simeon followed, his longer legs allowing him to cover ground quickly, though his lungs were burning.

Bahrnagash was in his stride now, and they ran on and on. The air was thin and Simeon's head started swimming. He thought blearily that he couldn't possibly win the race, so he might as well die trying.

Three hours later Simeon collapsed. Bahrnagash hesitated, waited, returned. Simeon's chest hurt so much that he thought there might be blood in his lungs.

After a while, he sat up and asked whether Bahrnagash intended to stab him and leave his body for the jackals, or whether they would return to the fortress first.

Bahrnagash was picking his teeth with his great knife. He grinned, every huge white tooth visible. No challenger had ever survived three hours, and rather than kill Simeon, Bahrnagash thought he'd like to have him in his army.

It took several weeks for Simeon to convince his new mentor to let him continue into Abyssinia. “No one even knows why they are fighting in that country,” Bahrnagash told him grumpily, “but they always are. They will have your head for no reason.” Simeon didn't bother to point out that his welcome could hardly be less dangerous than that of the mountain king himself.

When Simeon finally left, he took with him the traditional insignia of a provincial governor, a lasting friendship—and a penchant for running.

Running cleared his mind. It energized his body. He meant to get Godfrey onto the road in the next few days; the poor boy was a bit tubby around the middle. Godfrey needed exercise as much as he needed male companionship.

Simeon let himself run another mile before taking out the fact that his father was dead and thinking about it.

He'd known his father was dead, of course. The news reached him relatively soon after the event, a mere two months after the funeral. Simeon had been traveling through Palmyra, going to Damascus. He had ducked into an English church that loomed up on a Damascene street and offered prayers.

But it wasn't until he walked through the door of Revels House that he really understood. His burly father—the man who had thrown him in the air, and thrown him on a horse, and thrown him out of the hay loft once for gross impertinence—that man was gone.

The house seemed like a dry well, empty and lifeless. His mother had turned into a shrill, screaming dictator. His little brother was plump and indolent. The estate was neglected. Even in the house itself, things were cracked and broken. The rugs were stained; the curtains were faded.

Whose fault is it? asked his conscience.

I'm here now, he retorted.

He was back in England, to clean up the estate, manage his family, meet his wife.

His
wife.

Another subject that he could examine only cautiously. He'd probably mishandled their first meeting. She was the opposite of what he expected. The Middle
Way taught that beauty was only an outward shell, but Isidore's beauty flared from within, as potent as a torch. She was like a princess, only he'd never seen a princess who had all her teeth.

At the very thought of her he had to slow down, because of confusion in his body about what he wanted to be doing at that moment. Running? Or—

The other.

He adjusted the front of his trousers and started to run faster.

 

Luncheon began on the wrong foot when Honeydew served bowls of thin broth. Simeon had forgotten that foolish English idea that broth was filling or, indeed, suitable for anyone but a wretched invalid.

He was ravenously hungry, having run an extra hour in a punitive effort to regain control over his body.

“I'll wait for the next course,” he told Honeydew.

Honeydew nodded, but Simeon thought he saw anxiety in his eyes. The table was lit with tallow candles fit only for the servants' quarters, so Simeon couldn't see his face very clearly, but the reason for Honeydew's anxiety was soon clear. Next they were each served one paper-thin slice of roast beef.

The following course was even more surprising. Simeon stared down at a sliced hard-boiled egg, across which was drizzled a brownish sauce, and lost his temper.

“Honeydew,” he said, keeping his voice even with an effort, “would you be so kind as to detail the menu?”

His mother intervened. “
I
designed the menu, as is necessary and proper. You can thank me, if you wish. This is a dish of
oeufs au lapin
.”

“Eggs,” Simeon said. “I see that.”

“With a sauce made from rabbit.”

“Ah.”

“Likely you have grown accustomed to rough fare,” she commented.

Godfrey was forking up his egg with a sort of desperate enthusiasm that made Simeon wonder about the next course.

There wasn't one.

“You must be joking,” Simeon said, incredulous.

“We had eggs and meat in the same meal,” his mother said, staring at him. “And a sustaining broth to start. We do not eat lions' flesh in England, you know! Your father and I always kept a moderate table.”

“This is not a moderate table,” Simeon said. “This is starvation fare.”

Godfrey leaned across the table and whispered loudly, “One of the footmen will bring you a large plate of bread and cheese before bed if you wish, Simeon. Sometimes there's drippings as well.”

Their mother clearly heard, but she curled her lip and stared at the opposite wall.

No wonder the poor boy was round. Since his mother was not providing the food a growing boy needed, he had learned to hoard like a hungry beggar—and overeat when he had a chance. Simeon turned to the butler. “Honeydew, ask Mrs. Bullock to send whatever she can serve up within a few minutes, and I do not mean bread and cheese.”

Honeydew bowed and hastened from the room. His mother huffed and averted her eyes as if Simeon had belched in her presence.

But Godfrey asked, rather shyly, “Have you ever eaten a lion, brother?”

The dowager duchess opened her mouth and Godfrey amended his question, “Your Grace?”

“Not on a regular basis,” Simeon said. “There are tribes in the Barbary states who depend on lions as a source of
food. I assure you that if they did not eat an occasional lion or two, the lions would multiply and gobble them instead.”

It was amazing the way his mother could convey utter disdain without glancing at him or saying a word. He turned back to Godfrey, whose eyes were shining with interest. “I once ate a stew composed of three different lions, as I understood it. It was rather gamey and tough, and not a flavor that I would wish to repeat.”

“Have you eaten a snake?”

“No. But—”

“Enough!” their mother said sharply.

That was all the conversation enjoyed at the Duke of Cosway's dinner table.