Page 72

He could tell the butler didn’t like it, but Simeon merely left. It would be a sad day when he cowered before his own butler.

Chapter Twenty-four

Gore House, Kensington

London Seat of the Duke of Beaumont

March 3, 1784

Jemma stared sightlessly into the glass above her dressing table. Then she pulled open the crumpled piece of foolscap and read it again.

It read precisely as it had a moment ago.

His Grace the Duke of Beaumont asked to be remembered to the duchess, and apologized for the fact that the note was written by his secretary, but he was unavailable today. And unfortunately tomorrow looked just as busy. With regrets, etc. Signed Mr. Cunningham, Elijah’s secretary.

Elijah had never done that before, never actually written her through his secretary, when they were living in the same house. The note had been delivered, along with a letter from her sister-in-law and an invitation to dine from Lady Castlemaine, as if her husband were no more than another acquaintance.

He had withdrawn. Elijah had retreated back to his chambers in the Inns of Court.

Obviously he had misunderstood her.

Not seeing him was a torment. She’d just come from breakfast, and Elijah wasn’t there. And she had driven her maid to distraction, trying on two breakfast gowns before she chose just the right one, before she tripped into the room looking as fresh and elegant as she possibly could.

Only to be told by the butler that His Grace had eschewed breakfast. Jemma had pretended total indifference, naturally.

Can there be anything more humiliating than living out one’s life in front of servants who are both observant and intelligent? Sometimes Jemma felt as if she were acting in a play, and she seemed to have lost her ability to dissemble. Brigitte, her maid, surely suspected. Her butler, Fowle, quite likely.

It was humiliating to hanker after one’s husband. To be dazzled by his eyes and his attention, until he suddenly withdrew it.

Perhaps Elijah has an appointment with his mistress, she told herself, just to test the pain of it. But she was no better at believing in mistresses now than she had been when they were first married. She would never, ever have thought Elijah had a mistress. She couldn’t have imagined that he rose from her bed only to welcome the woman to his chambers at noon.

Even now…

Even now she couldn’t believe it.

She stared unseeingly into her glass. Was it that she thought she was too beautiful to be scorned? The only person who had ever scorned her, so to speak, was her own husband. Perhaps the right way to put that was that the only person who had ever shown indifference was her husband.

For a moment, an image of Villiers flashed across her eyes. Her revenge was ready at hand. She needn’t watch as her husband turned from her company to the House of Lords, with as much interest as if he had selected a game of billiards over one of macao. She could turn to Villiers. All of London would know within hours of their first public appearance together.

Elijah would be humiliated and it would serve him right.

But she knew even as she envisioned it that she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—do it. Villiers was no pawn; he was a man. A dangerous man: beautiful, witty and easy to love. That was where the danger lay, in the fact she could fall in love with him.

Then her marriage would truly be over.

Somehow, it had never been over in her mind, not even when she fled to France and Elijah didn’t follow, nor the first time she found herself in bed with another man. Even when she tormented herself with remembering Elijah’s declaration of love for his mistress.

He never said he loved her, Jemma, his wife. Surely that in itself was enough to end a marriage?

The invisible bonds had grown thin over the years that she lived in France without him. Attenuated by memory and her dalliances with other men.

But they never broke.

And all those memories were fresh to her now: of their wedding, when she hardly knew him, and yet her heart thrilled at the sight of him waiting for her in St. Paul’s Cathedral. Of their wedding night, when she was so awkward and he thoughtful, if (she thought in retrospect) rather reserved. But of course he was in love with another woman. Still…

There was a habit of mind, a way of thinking and talking, that came from being married to someone. A sort of bone-deep intimacy that survives even blows such as their marriage had taken.

Love, it could be called.