How to Tame Your Duke, page 32
“Mmm.” Ashland kissed her neck and found the bottom of her chemise with his long arms. He wasn’t wearing anything at all. He was simply and splendidly naked, all gleaming tanned skin and endless muscles: the privilege of having anchored the yacht off an uninhabited island and sent the children off with the Doctor on a voyage of exploration to the other side of it. He’d spent the morning in a slow and painstaking exercise of his husbandly rights, from various inventive positions (the traditional ones having become a trifle awkward of late), and now, having refreshed himself with picnic and nap, seemed to find his bride overdressed. “How vexing, madam. And how long has this condition been troubling you?”
Emilie laughed again and pushed at his elbows, but it was no use. Ashland untangled the chemise with expert fingers and drew it upward over her belly, and she let her arms fall back into the sand. “Several months, in fact. And it grows worse every day. By the beginning of October, I shall probably explode.”
“What a beast of a husband you have, putting you in such a state.”
“A dreadful beast. And I suspect he feels no remorse at all.”
Ashland lifted the chemise over her head and kissed her. “None at all?”
“None. Instead he looks at me with an air of the most insufferable self-satisfaction.”
“The cat who caught the canary?” He bent to swirl the tip of her breast with his tongue. His shoulders, broad and hard with muscle, shimmered with the sun’s own light.
“Exactly. Though I can’t quite understand it, just between the two of us. These days, I begin to resemble the giant dodo more than the canary.”
“I suppose your beast of a husband takes the opposite view. No doubt he, in his demented state, believes you grow more beautiful every day.” His immense hand cradled her belly; he kissed the very top.
“Then I weep for him, for he has evidently lost the sight in his single remaining eye.”
“Or perhaps he sees more clearly than ever.”
Emilie giggled aloud. “You, sir, have turned out to be an appalling flirt.”
“Ridiculous. I was an appalling flirt from the beginning. I am grieved to say that by the age of twenty, I was notorious throughout London.” He kissed his way back up her bosom.
“No doubt. I suppose you once had all those debutantes at your feet, with your Guardsman’s uniform and your young Apollo looks.”
“Only practicing for you, Your Highness.”
Emilie wrapped her hands around his neck. He held himself effortlessly above her, his honed sinews betraying not a quiver. She ran one finger along the pits and scars of his jaw. “Beautiful man. I love you madly.”
Ashland turned his head to kiss her finger. “Beautiful lady. I love . . .”
Three faint belches of the ship’s horn carried over his words.
“What the devil?” Ashland rose to his knees.
Emilie tried to rise, failed, rolled to one side, and tried again. Her heart made a tiny skip against the wall of her chest. “Not the children, surely!”
“They’ve an armed guard with them, and the Doctor. I’m sure they’re all right.”
But Emilie knew his voice, and she could hear the faint note of alarm beneath his steady words. Four months ago in Sydney, they had taken aboard Dr. Yates, a physician with the highest reputation, to keep a watchful eye on Emilie as her pregnancy advanced and to assist with the delivery in October; he was also a devoted naturalist, and he acted in the double faculty of tutor for Freddie and Mary. He was brilliant and trustworthy, almost a member of the family. Surely he wouldn’t take any undue risks?
Ashland was already thrusting himself into his shirt and trousers. “I’ll go around the point with the glass. Should be able to see the signal flashes from there.”
Emilie struggled with her chemise. By the time her head emerged from the neckline, Ashland was striding off at a jog to the rocky end of the lagoon where they’d set up their idyll this morning, deliberately out of sight of the Duke of Olympia’s luxurious steam yacht and its curious crew.
She reached Ashland just as he was lowering the glass from his eye.
“Well? What is it?”
“It’s your bloody uncle, of course. We’re to head home at once.”
“Head home?” Emilie said, as she might say, Head into the guano-infested rocks at the entrance to the Underworld.
“Head home.” Ashland closed the glass and shoved it into the waistband of his trousers. He turned to her, bent, and caught her up in his arms, belly and all. “But I’ll be damned if the old chap can’t bloody well wait a few more hours.”
And the Duke of Ashland carried his burgeoning young bride straight back to the powdery white sand of the beach, to her endless and rather noisy delight.
HISTORICAL NOTE
While Emilie, her family, and the principality of Holstein-Schweinwald-Huhnhof itself are entirely fictional, the dangers she would have faced as a European royal in 1890 were quite real.
If the eighteenth century was the age of great revolutions, the nineteenth century saw the rise of small ones. This was not for lack of big ideas. By the time of the short-lived establishment of the Paris Commune in 1871, any number of “isms” flourished in the cafes, streets, and universities of the Western world, addressing the great problems of social and political inequality with ambitious solutions. Moreover, they had acquired distinctly international goals, and conceived often violent means to achieve them.
The anarchism movement took many forms, but at its core rejected the state as unnecessary and evil, and authority itself as tyranny over the individual. For those who believed that violence was the only effective means of achieving the overthrow of state and hierarchy, the so-called propagande par le fait (“propaganda of the deed”) held irresistible allure. In the decades before the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, assassination took the lives of tsars, kings, empresses, presidents, and prime ministers across Europe and the United States: President McKinley, Tsar Alexander II of Russia, and the beautiful Empress Elisabeth of Austria were among the victims.
But among the organizations responsible for these assassinations—to say nothing of countless bombings, kidnappings, riots, and uprisings—the Revolutionary Brigade of the Free Blood does not, and never did, exist.
* * *
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HOW TO MASTER YOUR MARQUIS
Coming in January 2014 from Berkley Sensation!
* * *
Old Bailey, London
August 1890
The courtroom was packed and smelled of sweat.
James Lambert, the Marquess of Hatherfield—heir to that colossal monument of British prestige, the Duke of Southam—was accustomed to the stench of jammed-in human perspiration and did not mind in the slightest. He feared, however, for the young woman who sat before him.
Hatherfield couldn’t watch her face directly, of course, but he could sense the tension humming away in her body, like the telephone wire his stepmother had had installed into her private study last year, in order to better command her army of Belgravian sycophants. He knew that her back was as straight as a razor’s edge; he knew that her eyes would appear more green than blue in the sulfurous light waxing from the gas sconces of the courtroom, and that those same eyes were undoubtedly trained upon the presiding judge with a fierceness that might have done her conquering Germanic ancestors proud.
He knew his Stefanie as he knew his own hands, and he knew she would rather be boiled in oil than sniff a human armpit. His darling Stefanie, who thought herself so adventurous, who had proved herself equal to any number of challenges, had nonetheless been raised a princess, with a princess’s delicate nose.
The judge was droning on, precedents this and brutal nature of the crime that, and Latin tags strewn about with reckless enthusiasm. He was a man of narrow forehead and prodigious jowl; the rolls about his neck wobbled visibly as he spoke. A large black fly had discovered the interesting composition of the curling white wig atop his pear-shaped head and was presently buzzing about the apex in lazily ecstatic loops. Hatherfield watched its progress in fascination. It landed atop the fourth roll of wiry white hair with a contented bzzz-bzzz, just as Her Majesty’s judicial representative informed the mass of perspiring humanity assembled before him that they were required to maintain an open mind as to the prisoner’s guilt ad captandum et ad timorem sine qua non sic transit gloria mundi et cetera et cetera et cetera.
Or perhaps he was now addressing the jury. Hatherfield couldn’t be certain; the man’s face was cast downward, into his notes; or rather into the jowls overhanging his notes. Like that chap at Cambridge, that history don, the one who would insist on taking tea at his desk and dropping bits of crumpet unavoidably into the jowly folds, to be excavated later as he stroked his whiskers during lectures. On a good day, the dais might be strewn with the crumbly little buggers, and a positive trail left behind him on the way back to his chambers. What had they nicknamed him? Hatherfield screwed up his forehead and stared at the magnificent soot-smeared ceiling above.
Hansel, that was it.
A flash of movement caught his eye. Something was going on with Stefanie’s fingers: She was scribbling furiously on the paper before her, biting her tender lower lip as she went. She looked up, locked eyes with him, and flashed the paper up and down again, the work of an instant. He saw the words, nonetheless. They were written in large capital letters, underlined twice for emphasis:
PAY ATTENTION!!
Ah, Stefanie. He tapped his fingers against the rail before him and composed his reply in Morse code:
I am paying attention. To you. You look exceptionally handsome in that waistcoat. I should very much like to kiss you.
He watched as her eyes dropped down to his fingers. He tapped the message again.
She changed color. Well, he couldn’t see her well enough to verify, but he knew anyway. The flush would be mounting up above her stiff white collar, spreading along the curving wedge of her regal cheekbones. The tip of her nose would be turning quite pink right about . . . now. Yes, there it was: a little red glow. Just like when he . . .
With her elegant and agile fingers, Stefanie tore the paper in half, and in half again; she assembled the quarters together and tore them rather impressively once more. She hid the pieces under a leather portfolio and locked her hands together. The knuckles were bone white; Hatherfield could see that from here.
Familiar words struck his ear, jolting him out of his pleasant interlude: his stepmother’s name. “. . . the Duchess of Southam, who was found murdered in her bed in the most gruesome manner, the details of which will become clear . . .”
The Duchess of Southam. Trust her to toss her bucket of icy water over his every moment of happiness, even from the grave, merely by the sound of her name in a room full of witnesses. He had tried by every means to deny her that power over him, and still she laid her cold hands on his body.
Hatherfield found he couldn’t quite bear to look at Stefanie now. He trained his gaze instead on the judge. The fly had disappeared, frightened away perhaps by the thunderous vibration of those tempting white curls, as the speaker worked himself up to an indignant climax—a theatrical chap, this judge, for all his comical jowls—and asked the prisoner how he pleaded.
Hatherfield’s hands gripped the rail before him. He straightened his long back, looked the judge squarely in the eye, and replied in a loud clear voice.
“Not guilty, my lord.”
Devon, England
Nine months earlier
Princess Stefanie Victoria Augusta, a young woman not ordinarily subject to attacks of nerves, found to her horror that her fingers were twitching so violently she could scarcely fold her necktie.
True, it was a drab necktie. She had longed for one in spangled purple silk, or that delicious tangerine she had spotted through a carriage window on a dapper young chap in London, before she and her sisters had been hustled away by their uncle to this ramshackle Jacobin pile perched on a sea-cliff in remotest Devon. (For the record, she adored the place.) But the array of neckties laid out before her on the first morning of her training had offered three choices: black, black, and black.
“Haven’t you any interesting neckties?” she had asked, letting one dangle from the extreme tips of her fingers, as if it were an infant’s soiled napkin.
“My dear niece,” said the Duke of Olympia, as he might say my dear incontinent puppy. “You are not supposed to be interesting. You are supposed to be the dullest, most commonplace, most unremarkable law clerk in London. You are hiding, if you’ll recall.”
“Yes, but must one hide oneself in such unspeakable drab neckties? Can’t they at least be made of silk damask?” Stefanie let the necktie wither from her fingers to the tray below.
“Law clerks do not wear silk damask neckties,” said her sister Emilie. She was standing before the mirror with His Grace’s anxious valet, attempting a knot with great concentration.
“How do you know they don’t?” asked Stefanie, but Olympia laid a hand on her arm.
“Stefanie, my dear,” he said affectionately, for she was his favorite niece, though it was a close secret between them, “perhaps you don’t recall what’s at stake here. You are not playing parlor games with your courtiers in charming Hogwash-whateveritis . . .”
“Holstein-Schweinwald-Huhnhof,” said Stefanie, straightening proudly. “The most charming principality in Germany, over which your own sister once reigned, if you’ll recall.”
Olympia waved his hand. “Yes, yes. Charming, to say nothing of fragrant. But as I said, this is not a friendly game of hide-and-seek. The three of you are being hunted by a team of damned anarchist assassins, the same ones who killed your own father and kidnapped your sister . . .”
“Attempted to kidnap,” said Princess Luisa, smoothing her skirts, except that her hands found a pair of wool-checked trousers instead and stopped in mid-stroke.
“Regardless. No one is to suspect that you’re being scattered about England, dressed as young men, employed in the most invisible capacities . . .”
“While you and Miss Dingleby have all the fun of tracking down our father’s murderers and slicing their tender white throats from end to end.” Stefanie heaved a deep and bloodthirsty sigh.
Miss Dingleby had appeared at her other elbow. “My dear,” she’d said quietly, “your sentiments do you credit. But speaking as your governess, and therefore obliged to focus you on the task at hand, I urge you to consider your own throat instead, and the necktie that must, I’m afraid, go around it.”
Four weeks later, the neckties had not improved, though Stefanie had become a dab hand at a stylish knot. (Too stylish, Miss Dingleby would sigh, and make her tie it again along more conservative lines.)
If only she could make her silly fingers work.
The door opened with an impatient creak, allowing through Miss Dingleby, who was crackling with impatience. “Stefanie, what on earth is keeping you? Olympia has been downstairs with Sir John this past half hour, and we’re running out of sherry.”
“Nonsense. There are dozens of bottles in the dungeon.”
“It is not a dungeon. It’s merely a cellar.” Miss Dingleby paused and narrowed her eyes at Stefanie’s reflection in the mirror. “You’re not nervous, are you, my dear? I might expect it of Emilie and Luisa, straightforward as they are and unaccustomed to subterfuge, but you?”
“Of course I’m not nervous.” Stefanie stared sternly at her hands and ordered them to their duty. “Only reluctant. I don’t see why I should be the law clerk. I’m by far the shadiest character among the three of us. You should have made me the tutor instead. Emilie will bore her pupil to tears, I’m sure, whereas I would . . .”
Miss Dingleby made an exasperated noise and moved behind her. “Take your hands away,” she said, and tied Stefanie’s black neckcloth with blinding jerks of her own competent hands, to a constriction so exquisitely snug that Stefanie gasped for breath. “The decision was Olympia’s, and I’m quite sure he knew what he was doing. Your Latin is excellent, your mind quick and retentive when you allow it to concentrate . . .”
“Yes, but the law is so very dull, Miss Dingleby . . .”
“. . . and what’s more,” Miss Dingleby said, standing back to admire her handiwork, “we shall all be a great deal reassured by the knowledge that you’re lodged with the most reputable, learned, formidable, and upstanding member of the entire English bar.”
Stefanie allowed herself to be taken by the hand and led out the door to the great and rather architecturally suspect staircase that swept its crumbling way to the hall below. “That,” she said mournfully, “is exactly what I’m afraid of.”
Olympia and his guest were waiting in the formal drawing room, which had once been the scene of a dramatic capture and beheading of a Royalist younger son during the Civil War (Stefanie had verified this legend herself with a midnight peek under the threadbare rugs, and though the light was dim, she was quite sure she could make out an impressively large stain on the floorboards, not five feet away from the fireplace), but which now contained only the pedestrian English ritual of a duke taking an indulgent late-morning glass of sherry with a knight.
Or so Stefanie had supposed, but when she marched past the footman (a princess always greeted potential adversaries with aplomb, after all) and into the ancient room, she found herself gazing instead at the most beautiful man in the world.
Stefanie staggered to a halt.
He stood with his sherry glass in one hand, and the other perched atop the giant lion-footed armchair that had been specially made a century ago for the sixth duke, who had grown corpulent with age. Without being extraordinarily tall, nor extraordinarily broad-framed, the man seemed to dwarf this substantial piece of historic furniture, to cast it in his shadow. His radiant shadow, for he had the face of Gabriel: divinely formed, cheekbones presiding over a neat square jaw, blue eyes crinkled in friendly welcome beneath a high and guiltless forehead. He was wearing a uniform of some kind, plain and unadorned, and the single narrow shaft of November sunshine from her uncle’s windows had naturally found him, as light clings to day, bathing his bare golden curls like a nimbus.
