by Eloisa James
“The Yellow Salon,” Honeydew named it. In truth, the previously buttery upholstery had faded to a grayish-cream. But the room’s proportions were beautiful. At one point, there had been an exquisite band of blue and gold plaster around the cornice at the top of the walls.
“New drapes, obviously,” Isidore said. “This sofa looks quite good and merely needs reupholstering. I very much doubt that all this work could be done locally in a timely fashion; shall we ship the lot off to London? I seem to remember that the Duchess of Beaumont made use of Mr. George Seddon’s workshop.”
Honeydew beamed. “I agree, Your Grace.” He lowered his voice. “If I might suggest that we send payment along with the furniture. I’m afraid that the duke has a reputation to overcome.”
“We’ll pay double,” Isidore said. “I would like the furniture reupholstered as soon as possible.” In fact, the more she thought about last night and that kiss…“I believe I would like this house to be shining and habitable in ten days, Honeydew. What do you think?”
The smile dropped from his face and he looked a bit winded. “That is hard to imagine.”
“I find that ready money does wonders. Do we have a cart for all this furniture?”
“Yes, Your Grace,” Honeydew said. “We do, but—”
Isidore smiled at him. “I have absolute faith in you.”
Honeydew pulled himself up and nodded. “I shall do my best.”
“Let’s put those yellow sofas and that large piece there on the list. Goodness, is that a harp?”
Honeydew nodded.
“Missing all its strings,” Isidore said. “We’d better make two lists. One set of furniture should go straight to London, with instructions that it be either repaired or reupholstered. The remainder can retire to the attics, the harp among them. We need a plaster-worker as well; the bones of the room are lovely but the walls need redoing. The criss-cross gold and blue around the top merely needs freshening.”
Honeydew scribbled at his list. “Yes, Your Grace.”
“Thank goodness this mirror isn’t broken,” she said, stopping before an eleven-foot-high mirror set into the paneling. “Whose portrait is set at the top there, in the medallion?”
“His Grace,” Honeydew said, “as a young boy. The chandelier,” he added, “is only missing one strand of glass pearls.”
“Make a note of it,” Isidore said. “I am monstrously fond of the new embroidered chairs, Honeydew, and they would look lovely in this room…perhaps with cherry blossoms on a pale yellow background?”
The door behind them opened suddenly and Isidore turned about. In the doorway stood the dowager duchess. She looked pinched and faded, and yet the same pugnacious light that Isidore remembered shone in her eyes.
Isidore immediately dropped into a curtsy that nearly had her sitting on the floor. She didn’t raise her head from its respectful position for a good moment before murmuring, eyes still lowered, “Your Grace, what an honor. I had not thought to disturb you at such an early hour.”
“Honeydew,” the duchess said, “I’m sure that you have much to do.”
Isidore turned to Honeydew. “If you could arrange for the cart as we discussed, I shall rejoin you shortly.” The dowager seated herself on one of the sofas, so Isidore followed.
Her mother-in-law didn’t bother with preliminaries. “We never could abide each other,” she said grimly, “but need comes to want, and we have to work around that.”
“I am truly happy to see you in such good health, Your Grace.”
The older woman waved her hand irritably in the air. “My generation doesn’t care so much for that sort of flummery. You don’t give a damn about my health, but I imagine that you’re as interested in my son’s as I am. Have you spent some time with him?” She narrowed her eyes.
“I have. We dined last night with Godfrey.”
The duchess’s face softened. “Godfrey is a good lad. My elder, on the other hand—” she shook her head. “I’m not of a generation to beat about the bush, so I’ll tell you, he’s unhinged. I thought at first that I might be able to keep it from you, long enough to head off an annulment, but I realized that talk of brain fever is impossible between a man and a wife. I would have known if my husband grew unhinged, and I expect you know as well.”
Isidore cleared her throat. “He is certainly original in his thinking.”
“He’s mad. Cork-brained. He’ll cause you many a humiliation if you stay in the marriage.”
It was no more than Isidore herself had initially thought.
“But,” Simeon’s mother continued, “he’s a duke. That’s a fact and no one can take that away from him, whether he looks like a common thief or not.” She threw Isidore an icy look. “You’re on the old side to catch another husband, may I point out? You’ll never find one at the level of a duke. Your being Italian and all, you’d be lucky to catch a baron.”
Isidore didn’t bother to answer.
“He’s a duke and that makes you a duchess,” she continued. “It isn’t trivial to be a duchess. You’ll be among the highest in the land. People may talk behind your back about your husband’s proclivities, but they won’t do so to your face. And who gives a fart what they say behind your back?”
Isidore managed to close her mouth with an effort.
“Don’t look so mealy-mouthed!” the duchess snapped at her. “I’ve never lost a moment’s sleep thinking about what little people say behind my back. I advise you to do the same. You’re not born to be a duchess, but we chose you carefully enough.”
“You chose me due to the dowry my father offered,” Isidore put in. She was starting to feel a rising wave of fury. How could a mother speak about her son in such withering terms? True, Simeon was unusual, but—
“He promised you were a biddable girl,” her mother-in-law said crushingly.
“He was mistaken,” Isidore said, showing her teeth in an approximation of a smile.
“I realized that the moment I saw you,” the duchess said. “Only twelve years old, and as saucy as a lower housemaid. I thought then that it would fall apart before the wedding and likely it would have but for my son’s refusal to return to England. Of course he was suffering from brain fever.”
“He didn’t have brain fever,” Isidore said.
“Put your gloves back on!” the duchess barked. “No duchess would show her ungloved hands in public. I can see that making you into proper duchess material is going to be as hard as bundling my son into acceptable shape.”
“Your son is more than acceptable,” Isidore said, placing her gloves on the table before her with some precision.
It was a signal of war. The duchess, who had up till now resembled an elderly bulldog, suddenly straightened and took on the air of a mastiff. “I foresee the long lineage of the Cosways dragged into the dirt.”
Isidore smiled kindly at her. “I will do my very best to get the dirt out of this room, not to mention this house, which smells worse than most slums.”
“A duchess does not lower herself to such inconsequential matters.”
“Your—and I use the word advisedly—your house looks like the tumble-down shack owned by an impoverished peasant. The house stinks like a privy, the furniture is falling apart, and the servants haven’t been paid. I may not have been raised by a duke, but my father would have been ashamed to treat his dependents as you have routinely treated your staff.”
She paused, but the duchess didn’t seem ready to take up her side of the argument yet, so Isidore continued. “My father would also have been ashamed to allow the house of his forefathers to fall into such disrepair.”
“It is not in disrepair,” the duchess said, her voice a growl. “There might be a piece of rackety furniture here and there that could use repair, but problems with the—”
But Isidore was just beginning. “Broken windows,” she said. “Warped wood that will need to be replaced. The chimney in the west wing seems to have toppled in on itself, from what I could see.
My father, Your Grace, would call it a disgrace!”
Silence followed.
Her mother-in-law was red in the face and seemed to have blown up slightly, as a frog does before croaking. Isidore reached out and picked up her gloves. “You might be more comfortable retiring to your chambers,” she said, her voice even. “All the furniture in the downstairs rooms will be removed in the next few hours and sent to London for refurbishing or replacement.”
That goaded the duchess into speech. “By whose authority do you dare that action!” she shouted.
Isidore stood. “By my own.” She pulled on her gloves, snapping them onto each finger. “That of the Duchess of Cosway.”
“You’ll bankrupt the estate!”
“Nonsense. The Cosway estate is one of the richest in the kingdom, and even if it were not so, I inherited my father’s entire estate. I, Your Grace, am likely the richest woman in this kingdom, barring their royal highnesses. Not to mention the fact that your son brought back a fortune in tiger rubies from Africa. If we wish to gild this entire house so that they can see the glow from London, we can afford to do so.”
“So that’s the way of the world! The young waste the substance that the elderly worked so hard to build up, on fripperies, trivialities, gilded walls…”
“In this case,” Isidore said briskly, “the young make a necessary outlay of funds to repair the neglect and damage by the uncaring—”
“Don’t you call me uncaring!” the duchess said, leaping to her feet with a great creaking of corsets. “I may not have thought that the broken window was terribly important, and I certainly never prided myself on being one of the richest women in the kingdom, the way you do, but I cared for this estate. I love it. It’s—”
She turned, very precisely, and walked from the room, closing the door behind her.
“Oh…hell,” Isidore said. Obviously she had bungled that. “It’s my temper,” she said out loud, staring down at her gloves.
The door opened again to Honeydew, ushering in a bevy of strong-looking men. “If Your Grace would help us select furniture for the cart, that would be most kind.”
By the end of the morning, the downstairs had been emptied. Even the dining room table was gone. “It’s scarred,” Isidore told Honeydew. “I love that black oak, but it needs work. And frankly, I would prefer a table with more graceful lines. I have a mind to order a complete dining room set by Georges Jacob. He created a beautiful set for Queen Marie Antoinette in her Petit Trianon.”
Honeydew gulped. “From France, Your Grace?”
“Yes, of course,” Isidore said. She was ticking off a mental list on her fingers. “The furniture is dispatched to Mr. Seddon’s workshop. This afternoon I’ll send to Signora Angelico about an appropriate person to sew new curtains, and another to Antoine-Joseph Peyre about the broken statuary in the ballroom.” She paused because Honeydew looked confused. “Monsieur Peyre did some work on my palazzo in Venice, and it so happens that he’s in London. I’m sure that he will help us.”
“Palazzo?” Honeydew enquired.
Isidore smiled at him. “If only it were closer, I would have furniture shipped from there. Monsieur Peyre worked all my walls in Venice with delicious flowers, in the style that I most prefer.”
“By next week?” Honeydew said faintly.
“He won’t finish by then, of course.”
She turned about as she heard the study door open: the study was the only room on the first floor that they had not yet stripped of its furnishings. Simeon walked out. His hair was standing on end and there were dark circles under his eyes. “Honeydew,” he said, apparently not even seeing her, “have you ever heard of the Brothers Verbeckt?”
Honeydew frowned.
“They are asking for a large sum and though the reference is rather obscure, they seem to be talking of hunting. I thought perhaps the author was German.”
“That would be Verby, down in the village,” Honeydew said, his face clearing. “Now that’s a pack of nonsense! For hunting, does he say? Verby used to go along with your father as a gun-cleaner now and then, and only when the duke had no one better to take with him. Brothers Verbeckt indeed!”
Simeon turned to Isidore and bowed. “Forgive me, duchess; I didn’t see you were there.”
That was a lie. Isidore knew the moment his door opened. She could feel his presence even behind the door, as she made her lists. And the moment they were standing together in the same room, desire strung between them like an invisible thread.
But she smiled at him. He wanted to preserve the illusion of his life without desire, without fear. “Good morning.”
His eyes drifted over her and even though she was rather dusty and tired, suddenly, under his gaze, she felt all curves and female beauty.
“I’ve heard mysterious thumps,” he said, recovering first. “What on earth has been happening, Honeydew?”
“Her Grace has sent all the furniture to London,” Honeydew said. He was no fool, and was backing toward the hallway. “If you’ll forgive me, Your Graces, I must see to luncheon.” He stopped. “The table!”
“We’ll eat in the Dower House,” Isidore said soothingly. “Her Grace will undoubtedly wish a light luncheon in her chambers, just as she did last night.”
“What happened to the table?” Simeon asked, once Honeydew disappeared. “Did a leg fall off?”
“Oh no,” Isidore said. “I’ve sent everything to London, just as Honeydew said. Wouldn’t you like to see?”
They walked into the dining room. Without furniture, and with the moldering curtains torn down, it was a wide, echoing room. Honeydew had sent maids in the moment the furniture was gone, and even the walls glistened.
“The house should be ready to receive guests in a few weeks at most,” Isidore said, since Simeon seemed to be silenced by the total lack of furniture.
“You got rid of all the furniture?”
There was a kind of controlled anger in his voice that made Isidore’s eyes narrow. “I didn’t get rid of it,” she said. “Well, I got rid of some it. But everything that could be refurbished has been sent to London.”
Simeon walked to the door leading to the great sitting room and stopped. Isidore knew exactly what he was looking at: the empty, stained floor where there had been two threadbare Aubussons and clusters of furniture in various states of disrepair.
“You sent away all my furniture,” Simeon stated. He ran a hand through his hair.
Isidore stared at his back. His shoulders seemed very tense. “It is presumably my furniture as well,” she told him.
“If we remain married,” he said. Then he whirled about. “You have no right to send away every stick of furniture in this house. People live here. I live here. You could have done me the nominal courtesy of asking my permission.”
“Your permission?” Isidore echoed. “Your permission for what? Would you have said that you wished to keep the rug that your father’s incontinent dog chose as his private privy, or the one with a rip down the middle?”
“Do you mock me?”
Surely there were women who would have cowered at this point. But Isidore had never cowered at anyone, including Simeon’s mother, and she wasn’t going to start now. “Absolutely,” she said. “Mock where mockery is due, I say.”
“You—” he said violently, and broke off.
“Yes?”
And then, when he didn’t answer: “Are you sure you don’t want to characterize my heinous crime? That of sending the furniture out to be repaired so that this house is livable, if not hospitable?”
“Where is my mother to eat dinner?” he asked.
Isidore opened her mouth—and paused. “In the Dower House?”
“All four of us, happily crowded in the corner?”
“Honeydew will find a larger table,” Isidore said.
“Could you please consult with me before you embark on projects such as emptying out the house?” he asked.
He had himself under control ag
ain. Isidore almost sighed. There was something magnificent about Simeon in a rage. Not that she wished to court that condition, she told herself. “Of course,” she said. “Instantly. Every time. I’ll ask you so many questions that you’ll grow tired of the very sound of my voice.”
He shot her a sardonic look, but at least his mouth relaxed.
“What on earth could have happened to this wall?” he asked, wandering over to examine a gap in the paneling.
“Your father kicked it,” she said, answering his query.
“My father—”
“Your father apparently kicked the paneling after a game of cards. The strength of his leg was such that he remained stuck with one foot in the wall and the other on the floor, until the footmen could extract him.”
Simeon turned around and ran a hand through his hair. “Isidore, have I lost my mind? Is this normal behavior for an English family?”
She smiled at that. “How would I know? I’m Italian, remember?”
“I spent the entire morning going through a most unpleasant stack of letters. They are all dated from six to eight years ago, and not only did each of them ask for money, but each had been denied by my father.”
He was a beautiful man: spare, large, wild-looking. Even his eyes were beautiful, filled with disappointment though they were.
He ran his hand through his hair again. “Am I truly mad, Isidore?”
“No,” she said promptly. “I should tell you that I had an argument with your mother this morning.”
“I apologize for my mother’s undoubted vehemence.” He leaned against the wall next to her.
“I lost my temper,” Isidore said, meeting his eyes. “I spoke in a most inappropriate manner. And I said things that I wish I hadn’t.”
“That pretty much sums up my experience of England,” he said, looking down at her.
Isidore suddenly felt as if her knees were weak. He was going to kiss her—he was—he did. His lips felt more familiar now. He licked her lips and she almost giggled, but then she put an arm around his neck and drew him close.
Thoughts fled as their bodies met. He was all hard muscle, and she melting softness. They both smelled of dust. But under the dust and faint smell of ink, she could smell the spicy cleanness that was Simeon. It made her tremble. It made her put both arms around his neck and hold on.