How To School Your Scoundrel, page 33
“True, he doesn’t need a fortune,” said Penelope, still gazing dukeward from the corner of her eye. “But he does need an heir, a proper heir of his own body. Both his sons died early, and the dukedom will pass to a grand-nephew, whom nobody knows.”
At the words heir of his own body, Ruby looked as if she might be ill, right there atop the polished first-class floorboards. “I would rather die. Die, I tell you. That old man.”
“Nonsense. I imagine he knows his matrimonial business better than most gentlemen half his age. A certain discreet lighting is all that’s required. No, you’re simply determined to dislike him, because of Robert. I think if you give him a fair chance—”
“He’s nothing to Robert. Don’t even begin to compare them.”
“Compare a stockbroker to a duke? I should say not.”
“Robert is the handsomest man in the world, and the dearest, and he adores me. While this . . . this . . . duke of yours”—she pronounced the word like an epithet—“no doubt recalls the Battle of Waterloo. What on earth would we talk about?”
Penelope paused. “Miss Austen, perhaps?”
“He probably knew her personally.” Ruby tilted an obstinate chin at the heaven from which Miss Austen watched tenderly over her, the patron saint of unmarried young ladies.
Well. Ruby had a fair point. The august Duke of Olympia was far too old for a glittering twenty-year-old American beauty like Miss Ruby Morrison. The very idea of a union between them struck Penelope as distinctly unwise, to say nothing of . . . well, my goodness, she wanted a word . . . distasteful. That was it. Distasteful. No, she couldn’t blame Ruby for blanching so perilously at the thought of married life with a man old enough to be her grandfather.
But like the doomed six hundred, theirs was not to question why. Penelope had done that once—questioned why—and found herself delicately uninvited from the Washington Square mansion of her first cousins the Schuylers, her bags packed and her train ticket purchased, and two distant relations later she had landed here, under the thumb of Mrs. Stewart Morrison, her late husband’s mother’s second husband’s second cousin, the end of the line. She had a roof over her head, and a decent clothing allowance, and a first-class berth on the RMS Majestic, bound for Liverpool, and having faced the prospect of no roof and no clothes and no berth at all—what was she fit for, after all, at her age? You couldn’t start a profession at age fifty, at least not a legal one—she was now more than willing to ride obediently into the mouth of Hell, even if Mrs. Morrison had most assuredly blunder’d.
Another quasi-accidental glance across the room, where His Grace was offering Mrs. Morrison the ducal arm, looking rather like a Great Dane magnificently enduring the attentions of a vociferous Yorkshire terrier.
Yes. Most assuredly blunder’d.
“Good Lord. He’s coming,” said Ruby.
“No great surprise. Your mother did arrange the seating.” With the skill of a master strategist, Penelope thought, to say nothing of a strategic bit of civil bribery.
“I can’t endure it. They’ll make me sit by him.”
“Do compose yourself, my dear. It’s only dinner. And I assure you, His Grace is likely to prove the most interesting dinner companion in the entire ship, if you can set aside your prejudices and simply enjoy his company.”
Ruby’s mouth formed a stubborn moue. “I would far rather sit next to Robert.”
“Well, Robert remains at his desk in New York, so you had best put him out of your mind.”
“You have obviously never been in love,” Ruby said, in bitter tones. Her high forehead took on a single tragic line across the middle which, combined with the moue, created the distinct impression of a young child about to execute a monumental tantrum.
The words hit Penelope like a fist to her chest. She grasped Ruby gently by the elbow and turned her in the direction of her approaching mother. “Be polite,” she said. “Be brave.”
And the great glory of Ruby—the miracle of her, really, considering her creamy young beauty and her indulgent upbringing and her impossible mother—was this: She straightened her back and transformed, in the passage of an instant, from a stubborn child into a lady.
Penelope took a single step back, as belonged to a distant widowed relation who had reached a certain age. She allowed the duke to take in the miracle of Ruby: her iridescent skin, her honey-blondness, her mouth like the bow of a particularly strong-fisted Cupid. Her graceful waist, the swell of her youthful bosom. Her well-trained voice, rounded and lowered and molded by the experienced hands of the very best Swiss finishing school. (Penelope herself had attended that school, thirty years and a stock market crash ago, and she thanked God the lawyers couldn’t take that away from her at least, they couldn’t reach into her throat and take away her beautifully fashioned voice.) When Mrs. Morrison made the ecstatic introduction, and the Duke of Olympia made some rumbling courteous reply, Ruby held out her slender hand and said, as if she were quite accustomed to meeting dukes, “How kind of you, Your Grace. The honor is all ours, of course.”
And then the duke said something else, and a brief silence floated in the air, and Penelope realized that his words had been directed at her.
She turned her surprised gaze from the curve of Ruby’s cheek to the man standing before her.
“Oh!” said Ruby, before her mother could open her mouth. “This is our dear cousin Mrs. Schuyler, who was kind enough to agree to take the voyage with us. Though I do wonder if she’ll repent her generosity by the time we sail past Nova Scotia.”
“Mrs. Schuyler.” The duke fixed his eyes on her, and a rather queer sensation overcame the sensible Mrs. Penelope Schuyler, who had borne so much misfortune with so much fortitude, who had carried on regardless beneath a thick layer of aplomb.
She felt as if someone had just painted the world a most extraordinary shade of summertime blue.
She was too far away to offer her hand, tucked as she was in the shadow of Ruby. She inclined her head politely instead. She was an American, by God, and she didn’t curtsy to dukes. “Your Grace.”
The Duke of Olympia’s eyebrows lifted, as if he were expecting more. But what was she supposed to say? That she was honored to meet him? She couldn’t quite remember.
She must be a little unstrung, she realized, a little thrown off by the intensity of color in the ducal pupils. She’d never seen a shade quite like that, certainly not in the center of a magnificent face like that. Ruby was wrong: The duke wasn’t eight feet tall, or even seven, but he did stand a good three or four inches above six, towering physically and metaphorically above them all. Up close, his hair was more silver than white. He was remarkably lean-waisted and broad-shouldered, a man who evidently didn’t choose to lounge with the other aging dukes in the leather-scented quiet of the club library, snoozing away his remaining afternoons over crisp sheets of newspaper. No, he radiated vigor. He was made of energy. His stomach lay quite flat beneath his white silk waistcoat. His evening clothes fit him elegantly. In short, he wore his six and a half decades with remarkable ease, and Penelope was trying to work out why and how he effected this almost youthfulness, and was just concluding that it had something to do with his lack of whiskers, when she heard Ruby laugh.
“She’s not usually so tongue-tied, Your Grace. I think you’ve got to stop glowering at her like that.”
“I beg your pardon,” said the duke, making a little bow. “I must have been lost in thought. A consequence of my ancient years, I suppose.”
“Oh, no, your lordship,” said Mrs. Morrison. “Not ancient at all. Isn’t that right, Ruby?”
Ruby laughed again. “Mama, Your Grace. Not your lordship. Because dukes, we presume, are just chock-full of divine grace. Isn’t that right, Your Grace?”
“In truth,” said Olympia, with a single pat to the watch pocket of his waistcoat, “a simple sir will do. Or duke, if you must.”
“What do your friends call you?” asked Ruby.
The look he cast her was not the slightest bit amused. “I have no friends, Miss Morrison. But my family, when they deign to address me by something other than a vulgar epithet, call me Olympia.”
“How very intimate,” Penelope said, under her breath.
The duke’s eyes shot back to her. “We are English, after all.”
The gong sounded over the end of his sentence. Penelope wondered at its temerity.
“Dinner at last,” said Mrs. Morrison. “I believe we have the honor of sitting with you, your . . . your . . . that is . . . Duke?”
The Duke of Olympia turned to the elegantly set table before them, snowy of linen and gleaming of silver. The captain’s table, toward which the captain himself was now advancing, resplendent in uniform and whiskers.
“I fear I shall perish from the pleasure,” said His Grace, with a sigh.
• • •
A small white rectangle of a letter lay on the carpet, just inside the stateroom door. Penelope bent and picked it up.
Miss Ruby Morrison, the envelope proclaimed, in calm black handwriting.
She held it out to Ruby, who was just entering behind her. “For you.”
“For me?” Ruby’s eyebrows arched upward. She took the paper between her fingers and opened the flap of the envelope.
Penelope proceeded to the small washstand, where she unscrewed her garnet earrings—a gift from her husband, deemed too insignificant for the lawyers to bother with—and began to remove the pins from her heavy dark hair. John had always loved her hair. Her skin might be taking on lines, and her bosom no longer resided at quite the same height, but her hair remained thick. And her eyes were bright, she thought, staring intently into the mirror. Not so luminous as Ruby’s wide hazel man-traps, perhaps, but then she wasn’t trying to trap a man, was she?
No, of course she wasn’t. At her age, in her lowly condition. The idea.
She glanced to the side, where Ruby’s reflection hovered over her shoulder. The Cupid lips had formed into a pink-rimmed O, slightly parted in the center.
“Something interesting?” Penelope asked.
Ruby’s mouth closed. She looked up, smiling, and folded up the paper and stuffed it back into the envelope. “Not really. That awful Miss Crawley we met at tea wants to go walking with me tomorrow morning.”
“Walking where?”
“The promenade deck, I suppose. If the weather holds.” Ruby stifled a yawn. “My goodness, I’m exhausted! What a great effort it is, talking to a duke all evening. Watching every word.”
“You? Watching your words?” The last pin came free, and Penelope picked up her brush.
Ruby laughed her tinkling young laugh. “Well, comparatively speaking, of course. He wasn’t so bad, I’ll admit. But I’m not going to let Mother marry me off to him.”
Penelope set down the brush and turned around to unbutton Ruby’s dress. “Don’t get ahead of yourself, my dear. After all, before you can claim the glory of refusing the Duke of Olympia’s hand in marriage, he first has to offer it.”
• • •
Ruby was dead right about exhaustion, however. Whether because of the duke at dinner, or the cold salt air on deck, or the previous week of frantic preparation, Penelope couldn’t even remember drawing up the covers and falling asleep in her berth.
She only found herself startling awake into the dark room, some unknown time later, under the distinct impression that something—or someone—was moving about the cabin.
Juliana Gray, How To School Your Scoundrel
