Noble Satyr: A Georgian Historical Romance, page 21
“The—er—condition, my dear,” he answered softly. “My dear cousin won’t allow the girl to leave Paris unless he has my word I will not make my bow to her again until such time as she is the Vicomtess d’Ambert. Thus, I remain in France. Oh, do spare me that pained expression! I don’t deserve your sympathy.”
Lord Vallentine shook his head. “You needn’t have agreed to that, surely? It’s a greater punishment than either of you deserve, my friend.”
“Yet, how fitting,” mocked the Duke. He nudged an errant log with the toe of his boot. “If nothing comes of Theophilus Fitzstuart’s claim then ’tis better for Antonia I remain in—er—exile.”
“You think you can sit back with ease and watch her become the Vicomtess d’Ambert? You think your life will go on as if nothing has changed—” asked his lordship then broke off because he sensed an intrusion.
Peering through the blue-grey morning light that filtered through the undraped window at his back he smiled as Grey poked his muzzle around the library door, closely followed by Tan. Spying their master they trotted up to the Duke and demanded a pat. Roxton crouched on a knee to oblige them and scratched one, then the other, under the chin.
“Don’t think they’re neglected,” said Vallentine pulling Grey’s ear affectionately. “Antonia spoils them. I am reliably informed that she and your punctilious valet were spied playing at fetch in the courtyard. He’s got a tendre for the girl.”
“Ellicott?” Roxton was greatly amused by the dark look on Vallentine’s face. “Should I have words with him?”
“No. Just warning you.”
Roxton grinned.
“What’s so amusing?” his lordship demanded darkly.
“Apart from the picture in my mind’s eye of my valet playing at—er—fetch, the look on your face, dearest Vallentine. Has it never occurred to you that Ellicott is of a different—er—inclination to you and me.”
“Good morning, chit!” cut in Lord Vallentine. “It’s a bit early for you to be wandering about. The servants ain’t even up yet.”
Antonia stood hesitantly in the doorway in her slippered feet. A flowered silk robe was buttoned carelessly over her thin chemise and her hair was a mass of unbrushed curls. She smiled shyly at his lordship and came gingerly into the room.
The Duke looked up from his whippets and wished he had not. He flicked Grey’s ear in dismissal, stood up and gave Antonia a view of his back. “I don’t recall asking for you,” he said coldly in English, which surprised Vallentine because he had never considered it a possibility that Antonia was able to understand or speak that of all tongues.
When Antonia all but ignored him and went straight up to the Duke and whispered something at his back, Lord Vallentine politely retreated to stand half way down the long room in the semi-darkness. He took out his snuffbox for want of occupation.
“When I woke up and you were not there… The truth is I find I cannot now sleep without you,” Antonia confessed naïvely in whispered French. She glanced over her shoulder and was relieved Vallentine had had the manners to move out of earshot. “Ellicott, he told me you had taken Grey and Tan to the chestnut grove late last night, and that you did not tell him when you would return—”
“I may come and go in my own house as I please, may I not?”
“Y-yes, yes, of course,” she stammered, confused by his cold demeanor and the fact he continued to address her in his native tongue. “I only told you because I was worried for you and I presumed—”
“You presumed?” he interrupted, glancing down at her with disdain. He took out his snuffbox and tapped the lid. “You presume a great deal too much.”
“If-if I have intruded on you and Vallentine I will return to your apartment and wait—”
“You will return to your rooms.”
“My rooms…” she repeated, startled. “Why?”
“You are being sent to your grandmother in London—”
“London?”
“—while arrangements are completed for your marriage to the Vicomte d’Ambert.”
Antonia blinked with incomprehension. “Marriage?”
The Duke ventured to take a pinch of snuff, but his hand was trembling so much that he gave up on the attempt and closed the lid, shoving his hand in a frockcoat pocket and hard-gripping the little gold box. “Your maid will have your portmanteaux packed and you and your belongings will depart my house by noon.”
“Noon?” she murmured, dazed.
And then it hit her.
Noon.
Time.
Her glance darted to the mantelpiece and she was suddenly wretched. There stood a carriage clock in its gold filigree case, brightly polished and keeping perfect time. She had the presentiment that time had sped forward without her and the dream she had been living, the dream she did not want to wake from, had, without her knowledge and consent, turned into a nightmare. Hot tears sprang to her eyes.
“Please. No. It is too soon,” she pleaded in a whisper, and clung to the Duke’s great upturned velvet cuff, warm breasts pressed against his arm. She looked up at his profile in angry disbelief. “I do not want to go to London. I do not want to leave you. I will not!”
Roxton forced himself to shrug her off. “Stop this childish display at once. It is unbecoming and vulgar.”
“But there has not been enough time for-for us,” she whimpered, hand still clutching at the lace ruffles at his wrist.
He turned on her, a hard glitter to his black eyes, and pulled her fingers free of the Brussels lace. “I have indulged you long enough and now this interlude is at an end.”
“In-indulged?”
“That is not to say your company hasn’t been amusing.”
“Amusing?” she echoed in a tiny voice. “I—I thought… that with me—”
“—it was different?” he drawled with amused condescension, finishing the sentence for her. “My dear girl, they all think that and eventually they are all sadly mistaken.” He chuffed her under the chin and said patronizingly, “In time, you, like those before you, will come to look upon my expert tutelage as a stepping stone to greater things. Your future husband should certainly thank me.”
Tears were now coursing down Antonia’s hot cheeks and she felt physically ill. She wanted to run from the room, to be a thousand miles from his hateful, cruel words, and yet her legs would not move her feet. “That was beneath the contempt of even such a one as you, M’sieur le Duc,” she said in a low voice.
The Duke swept her a formal bow and without daring to meet her tear-filled gaze shouldered past her to the lacquered escritoire. He grabbed up a pile of unopened correspondence, saying to Lord Vallentine as if Antonia was no longer in the room, “Vallentine, be good enough to inform Estée I won’t be home until Thursday week. Madame Duras-Valfons is waiting for me to rejoin her at Fontainebleau…”
Too fraught to speak, drained of all prospect of future happiness, and knowing it was not all a bad dream from which she would soon awake, Antonia fled the room at the Duke’s mention of his mistress, hand pressed tightly to her mouth to stifle her shattering sobs.
“Jesus! Roxton. That was a wretched piece of work,” Lord Vallentine threw at him, coming out of the shadows with the door slammed on Antonia’s back. The look of utter despair on her pale and tear-stained face was enough to bring the color flooding into his own. “Was it necessary to treat her so damned brutally?”
“For God’s sake, Vallentine,” the Duke rasped in a dry throat, the tremble in his right hand threatening to invade his entire body, “not now. Not ever.”
“Aye, I’ll hold m’tongue,” Vallentine said on a long sigh. “I hope for your sake and hers—bless her precious heart—the next few months prove their worth, before any real damage is done.”
“My dear, it has been done,” stated the Duke. “The damage has been done.”
Antonia’s grandmother, Augusta Mary Fitzstuart, the Countess of Strathsay, had turned fifty-one a month back. Ordinarily this circumstance would not have bothered her. She was still considered a beautiful woman, had not one grey hair in her flaming curls, and her voluptuous figure was not to be scorned. She appeared younger than her years, kept long hours, and never tired of taking a new lover in the long intervals she did not see her one true love. The fact she was grandmother to a beautiful young woman had never crossed her mind, until the girl was thrust upon her.
She lived a lifestyle considered by more than a few of the ton to be outlandish for a woman of her years; the more prudish going so far as to condemn her as a common harlot for fornicating with her widowed brother-in-law, Lord Ely. He was the man she should have married thirty years ago, and now legally could not, the law such as it was. They had been lovers for more than twenty years. He would be in London tonight, in this room, and although she could not wait to see him again after an absence of four months, she was apprehensive of his coming. For that she blamed her granddaughter. The girl she also blamed for the fault she now found with her face. She wished she had never set eyes on her.
Her incestuous relationship—in the eyes of Church and State—with the Earl of Ely had never caused her a sleepless night. Having Antonia under her roof had caused her more sleepless nights than she cared to remember. It was not that the girl was the slightest trouble. She kept much to herself and spent a good deal of time in the company of her uncle Theo, Lady Strathsay’s only son. So there was nothing to complain of in that. She was not vain, or over modest, spiteful or childish. She had a ready tongue and was too educated for her own good, but that was the fault of the girl’s father. It was the fact she was not the least nuisance that proved a constant worry. That, and the girl’s likeness in form to herself.
She should have been flattered to discover her only grandchild had inherited her unusual emerald-green eyes, famous breasts, and cream complexion. There was no denying such a marked resemblance. Lady Strathsay wished she could deny it, and ignore it. And as if this wasn’t enough to send her scurrying to her paint pots and powder, there was the number of gentleman callers who kicked their heels in the foyer of her Hanover Square residence. And not to see her. All came to pay calls on her granddaughter. It gave her the headache. It so reminded her of her own youth. Yet, whereas she had welcomed the attentions of suitors and still did, Antonia was indifferent to them all. It was Lady Strathsay’s sinking belief her granddaughter would not have cared in the slightest had no gentleman ever called to see her.
She was about to speculate on the reasons for this odd behavior when a scratch on the boudoir door disrupted her thoughts and she sat up on an elbow, signaling to her black page to answer it. A footman gave her Mr. Percival Harcourt’s card and she shooed him away, ordering the visitor to be sent up at once.
“My dearest lady, as always I am at your feet,” exclaimed Mr. Harcourt as he swept into the room and presented the Countess with a magnificent bow. He pocketed a scented handkerchief and kissed the hand she held out to him. “You never fail to dazzle me!”
“You never fail to flatter me, my dear boy,” she said. “I like it. The young men of today are not quite as attentive as they ought. It is a shame. A modern tendency I deplore. But you, my dear Percy, are of my generation in thought, though perhaps not in dress. What is that you have about your neck? One hopes it is dead.”
Mr. Harcourt tittered and held out the large sable muff which was suspended about his neck from a ribbon, and rested on the silk burdash tied about his waist. “’tis but a muff, my lady. The weather is frightful. Positively dreadful! I am forced to wear cotton gloves to bed all this week for fear of chaffed hands. There is an awful north-east wind and snow is predicted. Theo tells me in a letter I had from him yesterday that the man on the land predicts snow for all this week, and I’d believe the farmer before a Cit any day!”
“Snow? I do hope the boy returns from Treat before that eventuality,” said Lady Strathsay and indicated a spindle-legged chair opposite her chaise longue for Mr. Harcourt to perch on. “He’s been there a fortnight or more. God knows what he is up to for Roxton. Some building project or draining of a lake or some such nonsense. Why he should bother when there is no indication the Duke is to return to London any time soon, I know not!”
“Very true, my lady. We all expected his Grace at Christmastime. That is the usual time he opens his house in St. James’s Square. But the knocker is still off the door. Not even Theo has had word, well, not in an informal way.”
Lady Strathsay caught the note of censure in the young man’s voice and frowned. “You need not tell me my son is slavishly devoted to that roué. So degrading for a man about to come into an earldom. But he refuses to give up his position as the Duke’s major-domo until such time as his claim to the Strathsay title is verified by King and Parliament.”
Mr. Harcourt was somewhat surprised. “I thought—that is—there is a will, isn’t there, my lady?”
Lady Strathsay smiled thinly. “Let’s not fadge, Mr. Harcourt. Of course Strathsay left a will. What papist would not? Nor leave this world without confessing all to his squalid little priest. I suppose he had to make amends for his sins or he’d be denied the last sacrament or rites, or whatever it is priests perform on a dying man’s last breath. Throw buckets of holy water on them possibly. That Strathsay could have done with; the water, that is. He was never one to wash or scent his person. God knows I can still remember it all!
“Here is our tea. Sam, pour out for Mr. Harcourt. It’s bohea, you know, and blended for me by a little man on the Strand.” She shifted to adjust the shawl which had slipped off her white shoulders, her conversation barely lagging. “Where was I?—Oh, Strathsay! At least he had the decency to put matters to rights on his death. If it hadn’t been for his papist conscience I still maintain he’d have gone to the grave denying Theo as his own. Conscience and vanity both. Men are such vain creatures. To leave a son and heir to carry on the name is all-important to them. And after Strathsay proclaiming Theo a bastard for twenty-seven odd years is it small wonder the poor boy’s claim is questioned?
“James never did have any other children after Theo was born; not even bastards. I suspect the pox put an end to that. Not that it interfered in any way with his abilities under the covers. Oh, no, Mr. Harcourt. That was the only thing I admired about him in the end. Well, it is the only fond memory I have of him—Oh dear, you’ve spilled tea on your lovely canary-yellow breeches! Tea too strong, my boy? Sam, fetch a cloth for Mr. Harcourt.”
The page dashed out of the room and Mr. Harcourt was glad for the diversion. He fumbled with the tea dish and mopped a knee of his satin breeches with a dainty handkerchief. He should not have been surprised by the Countess’s ramblings. Her affairs were legion, her reputation notorious, and her blunt speech legendary. Above all she was the most vain creature he knew and her jealousy of her granddaughter was so blatant as to be pathetic. He had not come to visit the grandmother, but the granddaughter. Yet he was wise to the fact a visit to the younger without first visiting the elder would not have been politic.
“Blended on the Strand did you say? How interesting, and how very good this tea is, my lady,” he said frowning at the dark spreading stain on his breeches. “And I shouldn’t worry yourself about Theo’s claim. The King will put his signature to it without hesitation. Especially with Roxton and the Lords behind him. And he is Strathsay’s heir after all. There’s no disputing that!”
“I believe you are right,” said her ladyship with a sigh. “You can imagine the strain this has put on me. What with this inconvenient period of mourning and having Antonia to stay…” She picked up the hand-mirror to gaze at her reflection. “I will turn positively old I know it!”
Mr. Harcourt did not take the hint, so eager was he to defend Miss Antonia Moran. Thus he did not give Lady Strathsay the reassurances she craved from her gentlemen callers that she was still as beautiful as the first flowering of her youth. It annoyed her, but he did not see this, saying with a little laugh peculiar to him when faced with an awkward situation,
“Miss Moran must be a comfort to you at such a trying time, my lady. To have a granddaughter to give you every attention and to look upon her who is not the slightest trouble must be a blessing.”
Lady Strathsay tossed the mirror aside and viewed the young man and his absurd muff with disfavor. “Comfort? Antonia? Mr. Harcourt, it is plain you have not the slightest idea what a trial that girl is to me! To have responsibility for an eighteen-year-old girl who is pursued by every gentleman in London like hounds to a fox can hardly be called a comfort! She may have inherited my great beauty, but she is not like me in the least. She positively shrinks if a man so much as ogles her breasts from a distance. And what is the good of that? It is my belief that inside that beautiful shell is an ugly girl! Ah! I can do nothing with her—Dear me, Mr. Harcourt, my blend of tea certainly does not agree with you. Your face is the same shade as your scarlet frock. Sam, fetch Mr. Harcourt a glass of burgundy.”
The black boy left the room as the Lady Strathsay’s good friend, the Lady Paget, entered it, almost colliding with the little man. She sidestepped him with a sweep of her hooped petticoats and laughed when he made her a quick clumsy bow and disappeared. Her large brown eyes alighted on Mr. Harcourt’s odd attire and the stain on his breeches with the merest flicker of recognition. She held out her hand to him and sat uninvited on the chair opposite the chaise longue. Mr. Harcourt was quick to kiss her fingertips and resume his seat. Lady Paget wondered what the fop was doing ensconced with her friend, and if he shaved his eyebrows to achieve such a perfect arch.
“My dear Gussie,” she said sweetly, “I expected to find you with a man, but not one as young as this! Richard given his marching orders, my love?”
“Dear Kate! Out of sorts?” responded Lady Strathsay with a hollow laugh. “Dick was here only this morning. Perhaps I will send him to you. After all, John is down from Ely for the whole of this week, so I really don’t know what is to be done with poor Dick. Shall you amuse him for me?”
