Desperate Duchesses - Page 21/77

A moment later they were reunited. Charlotte looked at him over their raised hands. “You understand that I have only read the accounts in the Gazette.”

“They have been fairly accurate, which is unusual.”

“I thought that perhaps you might emphasize the question of treason in your next speech,” she said. “As I understand it, you are trying to drum up support against Fox. But if I were you, I would swing this particular discussion to support for the King, rather than antagonism against the Secretary of State. Fox is so very popular.”

His eyes narrowed. “I suppose I could. But Fox is the problem and he absolutely must be removed.”

“Tell the House of Lords that anyone who votes for the bill would be regarded as the King’s enemy. Don’t even mention Fox.”

For a moment he lost his step in the measure and then recovered. “Miss Charlotte, I’m grateful indeed that I asked for this dance.”

Charlotte’s heart sped up again. He drew her to the side of the room. “Did you have a chance to read the debate published in the Gazette between Lord Temple and Fox?”

Roberta knew that she should be in the ballroom. She knew that all she had to do was walk down that last flight of stairs and she would enter the buzz and hum that was drifting through the house. She had been dressed for at least forty minutes.

The problem was that her dress was all wrong. She stared at herself in the mirror again. “You will be a perfect jeune fille,” Jemma had told her that morning. “We’ll dress you very simply, some rosebuds here and there, a strand of pearls.”

“I don’t want to be a jeune fille,” Roberta had protested.

But Jemma had been firm. “I realize that you are a Reeve at heart. But your first appearance in the ton must be as an exquisite bud of young innocence. Later you can show your true colors. After you’re married.”

Roberta sighed. She had dreamed of going to a ball. But it was difficult to pretend to be docile and modest. She tried casting down her eyes again. No one could be innocent who had lived with her father for long. She felt like a fool. A wolf in lamb’s clothing.

Just then the door burst open. “There you are,” Jemma cried. “You look adorable!”

Roberta looked back in the mirror. Her hair had been carefully curled and powdered by the lady’s maid assigned to her. She was wearing pearls, and there were sprigs of apple blossom in her hair. Her panniers were large enough to be elegant, but not large enough that she would have trouble dancing in them. And she had just a faint shading of pink to her lips and her cheeks. She simpered at herself.

The only thing she really liked were her slippers: they were exquisite, and pink.

That and the little patch high on her cheekbone.

“You don’t like the way you’re dressed, do you?” Jemma asked, appearing at her shoulder.

“Oh I do!” Roberta said hastily. “It would be most ungracious of me to dislike it, and I promise that I love it. I’ve never looked so wonderful in my life! In fact,” she said in a burst of honesty, “this is the first time I’ve ever worn powder.”

“Itchy, isn’t it? I avoid it whenever I can,” Jemma said sympathetically, “but one’s hair simply must be powdered on occasion.”

“Truly, I am so grateful, Jemma.”

Jemma narrowed her eyes as she stared at the mirror. “What do you wish you were wearing?”

Roberta knew the proper answer to that. “Exactly what I am wearing! Shall we go downstairs now?”

But Jemma was smiling. “Fancy yourself a séductrice, do you?”

Roberta caught another glimpse of the pretty shepherdess in the mirror. “I’m not sure,” she said.

“But you’d like to find out?”

“I don’t think that Villiers will be interested by maidenly docility,” Roberta confessed. “He’s not the type to court young girls, is he?”

Jemma laughed. “Absolutely not.”

“So what good is it to wear this clothing? It’s not going to work with him,” she said desperately. “And I don’t care about the rest!”

“You need to fool the ton before you take on Villiers,” Jemma said. “They are invariably sheep-like and once they get a fixed idea in their head, it’s hard to move it. If you act in an innocent and demure manner tonight, that is how they will see you. All talk of your father’s companions will die quickly. Then—and only then—will you receive invitations to the parties where you will find Villiers. He’s downstairs, you know.”

“He is?” Roberta felt a wave of dizziness that spread from her toes to her hair line.

“Succeed tonight and tomorrow morning invitations will shower on your head. Villiers will be at most of them.”

Roberta snatched her gloves. “I am ready.”

Jemma smiled. “Be docile.”

Roberta simpered at her.

“Very good,” Jemma said. “Innocent?”

Roberta cocked her head to one side and gave her a brainless smile.

“Not quite that innocent,” Jemma said. “You are obviously quite accomplished at prevarication, though how you learned it while penned up in a house with a poet, I don’t know.”

“There are many opportunities to prevaricate when one lives with a poet,” Roberta said. She walked down the stairs by herself, as the width of Jemma’s skirts did not allow her to walk beside anyone. “It would not always have been advisable to inform my father of my true opinion of a given poem, for example.”

“Fibbing is an extremely useful sport,” Jemma said. And as if to prove it, she paused just inside the ballroom door and introduced Roberta to a group of matrons as a close relative, whom she’d known for years. Then she leaned closer and Roberta caught the word “heiress.”

One of the mothers produced her son, a lanky boy, out of thin air and introduced the two of them. Roberta obediently simpered at Lord Rollins and set off into the dance.

By an hour later, she felt fairly confident that all of London thought she was an innocent, albeit rich, maiden from the country.

“Which you are,” Jemma said in passing. “Remember the eleven peach trees.”

“I don’t need peach trees,” Roberta said. “I’m sure that Villiers has his own orchard.”

“A woman should always have an auxiliary target, a man in the wings, as it were.”

But Roberta had no man in the wings. Villiers was everything she wanted in a husband. She glimpsed him briefly, across the room, and her feeling of rightness was almost overwhelming. He was resplendent in a coat extravagantly embroidered with poppies, a cloth that might seem feminine on another man. But his dark, coiled features turned the delicacy to a jest.

She was no fool. Villiers wasn’t going to be attracted by simpering innocence and powdered curls. If she meant to marry him, she would have to play a very tricky game indeed.

Chapter 10

J emma had to acknowledge that if her husband was beautiful, the Duke of Villiers wasn’t. His face was long, with narrow cheeks and black eyebrows. He had a rakish look, like a buccaneer of Queen Elizabeth’s time. He wore a patch high on his cheek, and his lips were the same deep red as the poppies on his coat. It made her consider lip color—was that possible? Yet his hair was just pulled back carelessly from his forehead, unpowdered, no wig.