When the Duke Returns (5 page)

Revels House
February 24, 1784

T
he next morning the weather changed, and with it the odor in the house swelled and grew to a stench, the kind that reached out, grabbed a man's breath, and took it away. It wasn't that Simeon hadn't smelled it—or worse—before. But he hadn't expected to smell it in his own home.

He was literally staring down into a pile of shit. He dragged a hand through his hair and turned to Godfrey.

“What the hell is this?”

“The water closet?” Godfrey said.

“I see that.” He would have loved to summon up withering sarcasm, but he was too tired.

Godfrey leaned over and showing extreme bravery,
peered down the hole. “Loathsome smell. I hate the water closets. The servants' privy behind the kitchen gardens is much better.”

“So you're telling me they're all like this?”

“Yes. They're always worse on damp days and it's raining today. You should smell the house after ten days' rain.”

“They're not working,” Simeon said flatly. “Water closets are supposed to have
water
running through them. These need to be cleaned out.”

The concept had clearly never entered Godfrey's mind. “I don't think Honeydew would like one of the footmen to go down there,” he said. “They might never come back up. Do you know what we pay a footman?”

Simeon sighed. He knew precisely how much a footman should be paid for a year's work—and the Cosway estate had been paying approximately half of that amount. “Footmen don't do this sort of work. I believe iron-workers do.”

“Iron-workers?” Godfrey sounded puzzled, as well he might be. Clearly, no iron-worker had lifted a finger to the pipes in years.

“We need help.” He was going to have to postpone the wedding until the spring. Simeon raked his hand through his hair again. God knows what Isidore would make of that announcement. He could hardly tell her that his mother had become so tight-fisted that the water closets hadn't been cleaned since the days of good Queen Bess.

“Do you suppose,” Godfrey said tentatively, “that we could possibly have a proper water closet? Do you remember the Oglethorpes in the next county? Rupert showed me their new water closet. It's all marble. I mean, we couldn't afford anything like that, but perhaps running water?”

Simeon backed out of the privy. “Godfrey, we can have the whole house kitted up in marble if you wish.”

Godfrey was at the stage where his legs were almost as long as the rest of him. He trotted along beside Simeon. “What do you mean?”

“We have a large, thriving estate,” he said, glancing at his little brother.

His eyes were round and his mouth was open. “Mother said we should never discuss the question of substance.”

“Why not?”

“It's not proper.”

“It's not proper to have a house stink like a pigsty in summer,” Simeon said witheringly. He couldn't criticize his mother to her face, nor yet to her child's. But he could point out the facts. “This is an extremely profitable estate. My wanderings resulted in a second fortune. We can have running water piped into every room, though I wouldn't know why we'd want to.”

Godfrey stumbled and almost fell over.

Simeon stopped. “Why aren't you at Eton?” he said, something finally clicking in his brain.

“We can't afford it,” Godfrey said. “I've been teaching myself since mother dismissed my tutor.”

“Aw…
shit!
”

Having left Godfrey wide-eyed at the idea that he would be attending Eton in the fall, Simeon walked back into the study and sat down. In front of him was a letter from a Mr. Pegg, requesting to be paid for the work he did between 1775 and 1780. Mr. Pegg had shoed the duke's horses, as well as kept the carriages in good repair. And while the Peggs had long served the Dukes of Cosway, he was afraid that he would no longer be able to…

Simeon picked up the letter and walked upstairs to his mother's parlor. He went through all the elaborate
rigmarole that prefaced a simple conversation with her: the bows, the kisses, the request to sit, etc.

“Your Grace,” he began.

But his mother raised a hand. “A lady initiates the subject of conversation, Cosway.”

He gritted his teeth.

“I want you to promise that you will be on your best behavior so that your wife is not frightened away by your oddness.”

“I shall do my best,” Simeon said woodenly. “I intend to travel to London tomorrow and beg her pardon; I'm afraid that our wedding celebration must be delayed.”

“I shall send a letter with you,” she announced. “I shall inform her that you suffered a brain fever. You will do me the great courtesy to confirm this account.”

Simeon blinked. “A brain fever?”

“Indeed. Everyone knows that brain fevers are common in foreign parts. It could explain so much.” She leaned forward. “Your wife is a kindly woman. It is true that she and I had some difficulties living in the same house; she was a headstrong and sometimes impudent girl with an odd habit of song. I found it onerous to have her about me. But I'm sure all will be different now that she has reached an advanced age.”

“A brain fever?” Simeon repeated.

“To explain yourself,” she said. Then she added, obligingly: “You.” With a wave of her hand.

“Me.”

“Look at yourself, Cosway. You don't look like a duke. You look like some sort of minor accountant. You have none of the easy carriage of a true aristocrat. There are dark circles under your eyes, ink on your cuff. You wear no wig and no powder, you are inappropriately dressed, and although I have managed to coerce you into an ap
propriate level of manners when approaching me, I am not such a fool as to think you would be able to carry off such a trained dog show in front of others.

“In short, I need a story to present to the
ton.
” She leaned forward again with an audible creaking of whalebone. “Are you sure that you
didn't
suffer a brain fever, Cosway?”

Simeon wished that Valamksepa were in his place right now. It would be interesting to see whether the guru could maintain his composure. After all, now that Simeon thought about it, Valamksepa sat about in a tent doing his teaching. It was a nice, clean tent, without a duchess in sight. Easy to banish anger in those circumstances.

“No, Mother,” he said through clenched teeth. “I was lucky enough to escape brain fevers. This is simply the way I am.”

“Indeed, so I thought.” An ominous pause: “The brain fever will explain everything.”

“There was no brain fever.”

“There is now!” She indicated a stack of sealed letters. “I've informed everyone of your precarious health. I'd like you to frank these letters at your earliest convenience. My acquaintances will be kind, Cosway. Noblemen are kind to each other.”

“Mother, can you explain why Mr. Pegg's bill for shoeing the horses and maintaining the carriages was never paid?”

“Pegg? Pegg? Who's that?”

“The Pegg family has acted as blacksmiths to the Dukes of Cosway for generations, or so he tells me.”

“Or so he tells you!” she said, pouncing on it like a cat on a mouse. “Ay, there's the rub! They'll say anything. Don't pay it! Make him show you the work before you give him a ha'penny.”

“The work was done four years ago.”

“Well, a good blacksmith's work would endure a mere four years. If it hasn't, then you needn't pay him on the grounds of shoddy work.”

“If you'll excuse me, Mother, I must return to the study.”

“I shan't excuse you just yet,” she said. “Honeydew informs me that you find the water closets inadequate in some way.”

“Yes. They stink.”

She bridled, but it was his turn to raise his hand. “They
stink
, Mother. And the reason they stink is that Father installed water closets throughout this house and then neglected to have them cleaned out. The pipes must have burst years ago. Water is no longer running through the drains; they must be cleaned.”

Her face was rigid with anger. “The duke did everything just as he ought!”

“He ought to have had the pipes cleaned once a year. Honeydew tells me that Father judged it an untoward expense. Why, I can't tell. But the odor that infects this entire house is the result. For God's sake, it smells worse in a duke's house than it does in a Bombay slum!”

“You have no right to speak to me in that pestering fashion! The duke installed the water closets in good faith. The pipes were created of such inferior material that they fell to pieces.”

“Why didn't father have them repaired?”

“He demanded the pipes be repaired, naturally!”

“I expect he hadn't paid for the original work,” Simeon said.

“He had paid more than a reasonable amount, given the slip-shod work that was done. As witnessed by the fact that the drainage failed almost immediately. He was correct not to pay those thieving rascals!”

“Indeed.” He rose, ignoring the question of protocol. “I wish I could find it in my heart to believe that was the truth. You have my apologies.” He bowed and left, closing the door quietly behind him.

Gore House, Kensington
London Seat of the Duke of Beaumont
February 26, 1784

T
he carriage drew up at the Beaumonts' townhouse at precisely ten o'clock. Simeon knew because he had timed it to perfection. He was used to planning expeditions like minor military excursions, accounting for wayward tribes, robbers, sandstorms. In England, the road was smooth, the carriage functioned, nary a thief lurked to bring down his horses. He arrived in London the night before, woke up at dawn and waited for the appropriate hour to pay a call on his wife. It was all easy.

And nothing was easy.

For one thing he had to tell his wife, who already
thought he was cracked, that their wedding had to be delayed. Again.

Isidore was undoubtedly contemplating annulment, and perhaps he should just let that happen. They could both find more suitable mates.

She wasn't what he pictured.

When he thought about his wife—and he had, now and then—he remembered a portrait of a sweet-faced little girl, dressed as richly if she were a Renaissance princess. That was why his father had arranged the marriage, of course. The Del'Finos were rich as Croesus and his father wanted her dowry, and never mind the fact that his son was a child when the original contracts were drawn up.

Simeon had readily approved the proxy wedding when he was eighteen and far away in India. He had just begun studying with Valamksepa, and he refused to come home merely so that his father could draw down the second half of a dowry attached to a bride whom he'd never met. He spent the next three years in rigorous solitude, learning endurance, manliness, the Middle Way. He had learned to create an oasis of calm around himself, no matter what happened on his right or his left.

But now that he was back in England, it all seemed complicated. One look at Isidore had dispelled his image of a sweet-faced child bride.

She
was
like a Renaissance princess. Or a queen like Cleopatra.

She was the most sensual woman he'd ever seen in his life, and he had the women of the Sultan of Illa's harem for comparison.

If Isidore put on a gauzy dress and a couple of bracelets, she would have thrown the sultan's first wife into
the shade. She was ravishing, with a mouth like a ripe cherry and a body that would make a eunuch weep. She was not what he expected in a wife.

In truth, she was not what he
wanted
in a wife.

Wandering the East for years had taught him a few things about women and men, and all his conclusions led in one direction: it was much easier for a man if he had a docile wife.

Somehow, without even noticing it, he'd fashioned Isidore into the picture of that wife. Shy, sweet, veiled. Of course he'd been offered women—and women had offered themselves—numerous times over his adult life.

But they had never been tempting enough to overcome the teachings of Valamksepa.
Lust,
he had said repeatedly,
is at the heart of many evils.
Simeon had to admit that he probably would have brushed aside the question of evil, except for his inherent dislike of disease. For all he told Isidore that it was a moral decision, he didn't bother with fooling himself.

He liked to be healthy. Very healthy. And a man has only to be in the East for a day before he becomes aware of just what a syphilitic face looks like without a nose. Or he hears a joke about a private member dropping off the body.

He decided early that it wasn't worth it. The women he was offered were members of harems. The women who offered themselves were regularly partaking in all sorts of interesting bedroom activities, with a variety of partners.

He could wait.

And he had waited.

Imagining, all the time, his cool, docile wife…the one who would have to be coaxed into kissing him, the one who would scream faintly at the sight of his body. In the
month after he decided to return to England, he ran miles across the desert at night, curbing his body, preparing himself for careful, delicate advances to a terrified woman.

Idiot that he was.

His wife burned with sensuality. When he first met her she was wearing a gown that fit like a glove. It was the color of rain in the summer, and it sparkled with tiny diamonds. She had them in her hair too, and on her slippers. Everything about her said,
I am delicious. I am expensive. I am a duchess
.

And everything about her face said,
I don't want to be a virgin
.

The front door to the Duke of Beaumont's house opened and a footman trotted down the steps. Simeon's groomsmen had already leapt down and were surrounding the carriage, rigidly at attention, like tin soldiers.

Isidore greeted him at the door to the sitting room. She wasn't the kind to wait sedately in a chair for a man's arrival. She was dressed in a gown that resembled a man's military costume. Huge flaps at the shoulders narrowed to a point at her waist before the skirts belled out again, over panniers, he supposed. He'd seen a few women wearing those in the last few years—mostly missionaries' wives, trying to preserve a ridiculous way of life while living in the wilds.

But on Isidore he suddenly understood the fashion. It was made to draw a man's eyes to the waist. Her impossibly small, delicate waist. And then above that, to the way her breasts swelled, with no hoops, just delicious, pink flesh against the military braid of her—

He wrenched his eyes away.

What was he doing? He didn't care about women's clothing. Nor the body within. Valamksepa would say such things were mere frivolities.

“Good morning, Isidore,” he said, once the door closed behind the butler.

“Duke,” she said, with a bend of her head.

“Even my mother didn't address my father with such formality in private.”

“Good morning, Cosway,” she said, meeting his eyes. Her eyes were almond-shaped, and so beautiful that his heart skipped a beat.

A pulse of annoyance followed directly afterwards.

He didn't want a wife so beautiful that every jackal for miles would be slavering at her heels. No wonder his mother started babbling when she learned that Isidore was at Lord Strange's house party. Every hound in five countries must have been sniffing after her.

One might worry whether she had lost her virginity—but no. Isidore's eyes were clear and true. Disdainful…annoyed…virginal. She had waited for him. There was something about that fact that gave him a queer feeling.

“My given name is Simeon,” he said.

“We hardly know each other.” Once you got past her beauty, there was another thing about her. She was angry.

He'd spent years curbing his bodily impulses—but every inch of his body was telling him like a drumbeat,
she's yours, yours, yours…take her!
Every bit of native caution, learned from years of dangerous living, was on the alert.

He could do without her.

It would ruin the quality and calmness of his life to have Isidore Del'Fino as a wife. She had turned around and was now sitting down on a little sofa, pulling off her gloves. Her fingers were slender, beautiful, pink-tipped.

“Do you know,” he said, sitting down opposite her, “I think we should discuss the question of annulment.”

She gasped, her eyes flew to his, and one of her gloves dropped to the floor.

“You must have thought of it,” he said, more gently. He picked up her glove and dropped it back in her lap.

“Of course.”

“If you would like an annulment, I would not stand in your way.”

She blinked at him for a moment, and then said, “I don't understand you.”

He didn't understand himself. He'd been offered one of the most beautiful women on three continents, and he was throwing her away. But she was trouble. The skin prickling all over his body told him that…as much trouble as he'd ever encountered, and that included the crocodile who almost chewed off his toes.

“I know that I behaved in an extraordinarily ungracious way, wandering around foreign parts and not returning to consummate our marriage. The least I can do is offer you another option, should you wish to take it. My mother has made it vehemently clear that I am unfit to marry a proper gentlewoman.”

Her eyes rested on his trousers. He wasn't wearing breeches. He didn't mind baring his lower leg when he was running, but he simply couldn't get used to slipping into stockings. His mother had shrieked, of course. Apparently no one wore trousers except for artisans and eccentrics.

He had replied with the obvious truth: it seemed that he was an eccentric.

“Eccentrics and robbers!” his mother had added. “Yet even they wear
white
trousers!”

“I am wearing a cravat,” he said to Isidore now.

He couldn't read her face. She had obviously noted the fact that he wasn't wearing hair powder or a wig. “I
tried on a wig with three rows of little snail shells over the ear. I looked like a lunatic.”

There was just a suspicion of a smile at the corner of her mouth. If he could find rubies that color, he would…

“Do you wear color on your lips?” he asked.

She shot him a look. “Why? Are you averse to women wearing face paint?”

“No, why should I be?” he said, surprised.

She seemed to relax. “There are men who consider themselves an apt judge of what a woman should or shouldn't wear on her face.”

“I'm hardly the one to complain,” Simeon said, “given as I do not conform to all the customs of an English gentleman.”

“Obviously.”

“My mother tells me that I greatly underestimated your complaint regarding Nerot's Hotel and that, in fact, ladies stay in such establishments only while traveling outside London. I had no idea from your protest that the experience was prohibited for women.”

“Is it my fault, then? I should have been more vehement?”

Simeon opened his mouth. Paused. “I should have listened to you?” he suggested.

There was a hint of a smile on her lips. “You must have worn a cravat at Eton.”

“Of course I did. But that feels like a lifetime ago. I am who I am because of the places I have been. And Eton is just a tiny kernel of my past. I'm fond of English seasons. There were times in the midst of the desert when I almost cried to remember how beautiful our rain can be. But the core of me was shaped by the deserts of Abyssinia, by the sands of India.”

She sighed.

“I know,” he said, nodding. “That's why I thought it was better to bring up the question of annulment rather than let it fester silently between us.”

“Why don't you wish to marry me?” she asked bluntly, looking up at him.

He opened his mouth but she raised her hand. “Please don't tell me once again that you are offering me an annulment for my sake. I know precisely the weight you put on my opinion; it was eloquently expressed by your absence in the past years.”

He deserved that. And she deserved the truth.

“I am beautiful,” she added with a pugnacious kind of honesty that suggested it was second nature to her. “I am a virgin. And we are married. So why would you wish to annul that ceremony?”

“The desert changed me.”

She waited, and he had the feeling that it was only by a masterful effort of self-control that she didn't curl her lip. Well, it did sound insane. Put that together with his virginity…“I met a great teacher named Valamksepa, when I first traveled to India. He taught me a great deal about what it means to be a man.”

“Ah,” she said. “A man is obviously not defined by his wig or his legs. So do tell me, what is the measure of a man?”

Her voice was calm, but underneath were banked fires. He was right to annul the marriage.

“A man is measured by his ability to control himself,” he said, not allowing the scorn in her eyes to shake him. “I wish to be the sort of man who never falls prey to his baser emotions.”

She looked a little confused.

“Anger,” he told her. “Fear. Lust.”

“You want to avoid anger? How will you do that?”

He grinned. “Oh, I feel anger. The key is not to act on it, not to let it affect me or become an intrinsic part of my life.”

“But what has this to do with me?”

They'd reached the stickler. “I was taught,” he said carefully, “that a man comes to his life with many choices. Only a fool believes that fate gives him his hand of cards. We make decisions every day.”

“And?”

“Marriage is one of the most important. If you and I were to marry—really marry—I would want to undergo the marriage ceremony with you because it marks that important decision. It was something I should never have left to a proxy. Those are
my
vows to make and to keep.”

“Or not to make at all,” she said flatly. “The fact is, Cosway, that your decision after meeting me is not to make those vows. Am I right?”

“I—”

“You were initially happy to go through with a wedding ceremony,” she said. “Yet now you talk of annulment.”

She was playing with her glove again, pulling the fingers straight. A flare of fire went up from his belly. That small hand was—
his
. His to unglove, his to kiss, his to…His.

He glanced down at his coat to make sure it was thoroughly buttoned. “You are not what I expected,” he said bluntly. “My mother sent me a miniature once we were married. That's how I recognized you at Strange's house.”

“I remember. I sat for it while I was still living with your mother.”

“You looked sweet and docile. Fragile, really.”

Isidore's eyes narrowed.

She had suddenly realized precisely why her so-called husband had initiated talk of annulments. He didn't think she was sweet or docile. And he was right.

“My parents had both died several months before the portrait was painted,” she pointed out. “Likely I was fragile. Am I to apologize that I have now recovered from that event?”