She laughed. “I expect you to lend me a strapping footman, Villiers! I must needs get to that inn. I’ve been on the road for hours and I’m famished. I set out yesterday from London, if you can believe it. We lost a wheel, and I had to spend the night a mere hour from the city.”
He held out his arms. “Come, then.”
Jemma froze. “You’re convalescing.”
He scooped her off the step as if she were no more than a girl of five. “I’m feeling better. Of course, it could be that I’ve miscalculated my abilities.” His steps slowed. “Oh—”
She shrieked as his hands suddenly gave a little and she dipped toward the ground. “No!”
“Oh, all right then,” he said. There was a dark strain of laughter in his tone.
“You’re evil,” she accused him.
“And you’re not the first to tell me so,” he said comfortably, putting her down within the door of the inn.
“Well,” Jemma said, shaking out her skirts. “I do thank you, Villiers. Naturally I would have preferred to walk on that cloak of yours, but I’ll take what I can get.”
“A sensible notion. Life is, alas, full of compromises.”
Jemma felt a bit strange about the whole thing.
“Your Graces,” the innkeeper was gobbling, “I’m afraid that I have no private rooms at the moment. The south chimney has collapsed.”
Villiers turned his cold eyes on the innkeeper and a moment later it transpired that the public room had no other customers, and the innkeeper would take it upon himself to keep out any who might appear.
“Until the duchess has had some tea,” Villiers said gently.
Jemma felt so oddly unbalanced that she found herself chattering as they walked into the room, telling him that she was on her way to pay a visit to his one-time fiancée. “Roberta’s father, the Marquess of Wharton and Malmesbury, is marrying a mermaid he met at a public fair.”
“My joy at the dissolution of that engagement deepens by the moment,” Villiers said languidly. “Does the mermaid come with piscine accoutrements?”
“Naturally,” Jemma said. “I believe she straps on a tail and speaks in verse for a few shillings.”
“Just what one wants in a mother-in-law. Yes, I truly made a lucky escape.”
“I should like some tea, please,” Jemma told the innkeeper. “And something to eat as well, if you would be so kind.” She had a strange uncertainty in her stomach, and it was always best to eat in those circumstances. “How odd that we should meet at the same inn.”
“I’m off to pay the Duke of Cosway a visit, as I told you I would,” Villiers said.
The innkeeper put down a tea tray and she busied herself with pouring. It was rather awkward to find herself in an inn with Villiers. Why, it was almost like an assignation, though of course it wasn’t. Would Elijah believe that, though?
It was entirely surprising how strongly she wanted to believe that Elijah would not think it an assignation. An affaire.
“The fact that you and I have both been summoned to the side of errant people of our rank may be tedious,” Villiers pointed out, “but entirely unsurprising. To whom could they turn?”
“Anyone,” Jemma said, wishing that she had paid no attention to that letter from Roberta.
There was a great commotion in the innyard. “The innkeeper said that he would keep this room—” Jemma began, but before she could finish the sentence the door swept open. She looked up to find the Marquise de Perthuis, dressed in a black travelling gown badly splashed with mud at the hem.
“What a remarkable pleasure,” the marquise said, strolling forward. “My carriage has been stuck in the mud for an hour, and I was feeling miserably tedious. What a delight, an absolute delight, it is to find you here, my darling duchess!”
Jemma ground her teeth and swept into a curtsy that was just a shade on the disrespectful side.
“Along with the Duke of Villiers,” the marquise trilled. “What extraordinary luck to find that we are all stranded at the same time.”
The worst thing Jemma could do would be to emphasize the truth of that account. No one would believe that she and Villiers had found themselves at the same inn by mere happenstance. So with a nicely calculated twist of indifference, she said, “Not so strange, after all. After all, we are surely all going to the same event?”
The marquise’s face stilled. “No,” she said, but now her smile had a drop of ice to it.
Jemma paused just long enough to indicate a touch of embarrassment that the marquise was without an invitation. “It’s nothing, of course,” she said, just hastily enough. “I’m quite certain now I think of it that the ceremony was to be a very small one. Didn’t the Duke of Cosway say as much to you, Villiers?”
“So small as to be infinitesimal,” Villiers drawled, which was really quite wrong of him.
“What ceremony is in question?” the marquise said, accepting a cup of tea. She had lost the delighted glow she had when she walked in and found them together, and Jemma’s stomach relaxed. It was better for the marquise to feel unpopular, than for her to be overjoyed by the discovery of Jemma’s supposed affaire with Villiers.
“Oh, a wedding,” Villiers sighed. “Cosway’s wedding.”
The marquise knit her brow. “Dear me. I am so ignorant about the English…who is this Cosway?”
“I believe it was Henry VIII who elevated the Earl of Cosway to the rank of duke, did he not?” Villiers said.
Jemma never paid any attention to that sort of thing. “The current Cosway was wed by proxy. He has now returned from years travelling abroad and plans to re-consecrate the marriage.”
“Dear me, how peculiar,” the marquise observed. “In my experience men are so very willing to break the marital bonds, rather than renew them.”
There was something bleak in her eyes. “Whom are you visiting, Madame la Marquise?” Jemma asked.
The marquise fiddled with her sugar spoon, and Jemma wished she hadn’t asked. Then she shrugged, a little, helpless shrug. “I am the fool everyone thinks I am,” she said, sighing. “I heard that perhaps my Henri is to be found in Lincolnshire and I travel there to find him.”
“The Marquis de Perthuis?” Villiers said. “In Lincolnshire…the wilds of the British countryside? Surely not.”
“Perhaps no,” the marquise said, putting another spoonful of sugar in her cup, although it was already, by Jemma’s reckoning, sickeningly sweet. “I cannot sit about London and be pitied.” Her voice was calm but her eyes weren’t.
Villiers met Jemma’s eyes over the tea tray and she read in his the pity she felt. In Villiers’s eyes! Was that possible? The duke was known for his cruel indifference.
The marquise stirred and stirred her thickened brew of tea, as the three of them sat in silence and stared at her spoon. Then she raised her head and looked to Jemma. “Would you do it again?” she asked. “Your marriage, if I remember correctly, was arranged for you. If you were given the choice, would you marry your duke?”
“Yes,” Jemma said without hesitation.
“Then you’re a fool in love,” the marquise said bitterly. “As was I. They say—” her voice was savage—“that it’s better to have loved once and lost, than never loved at all. They are wrong. You should warn this Cosway, if he’s a friend of yours.”
