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“To see Flash. I propose to leave you and go to the Seawitch. I plan to get more herbs from Blick. Particularly more of the one that ensures clean innards.”
He grabbed his belly. “I don’t feel well already. I need succor now.”
Victoria looked at him, her hands on her hips. His smile broke through, showering her fully, and she couldn’t help herself. She cursed, even as she grinned back at him. “I don’t know, you wretched creature, I just don’t know.”
I feel the same way. Come here, Victoria. We’ll succor together.”
EPILOGUE
Carstairs Manor, Cornwall, England, January 1814
It is not enough to conquer; one must know how to seduce.
—SHAKESPEARE
“Our table will collapse under the weight of all this fowl and collective consequence. Mrs. Beel’s delicious stuffed quail will be buried beneath these noxious-looking brussels sprouts.”
Victoria laughed at her husband’s words and looked around at their guests. “Rafael is quite right, you know. We’ve never been so coroneted and peered.”
Hawk, the Earl of Rothermere, said in a pensive voice to his wife, Frances, “I think that if Victoria wishes to be condescended to properly, we should immediately write to my father. He and Lucia together, with Didier in their wake, could out-consequence the Regent.”
Diana Ashton, Countess of Saint Leven, swallowed a bite of her artichoke bottom, then shook her head ruefully. “I’m still reeling from the shock. Lucia marrying the marquess.”
“My father,” said Hawk, “informed me that Lucia reads aloud her gothic novels to him. At night. In bed.”
Frances giggled, unable to help herself.
“All right, I’ll tell them the rest of it,” Hawk said. “My father also let slip that Lucia is marvelously inventive. If the plot of the novel doesn’t suit her purposes, in other words, if it isn’t sufficiently wicked, she alters it without my father even realizing it.”
“Then everyone is content,” Frances said. “No, no, Hawk, don’t you dare say another word. You’ve already gone beyond what is acceptable dinner conversation.”
“She’s turning boring and proper on me in her old age,” said Hawk. “Where’s that wild Scottish girl I dragged into the tackroom and—”
“Hawk. Philip. Whoever you are, stop now.”
Hawk raised a hand. “I apologize. I am now a pious fellow, nearly a Methodist. Please pass me some of that delicious plum pudding, Diana. Frances, my love, your face is a charming shade of red.”
Frances, ignoring this aside, said in a meditative voice, “I wonder about Lucia’s tatting since she married the marquess.”
Rafael said, “I want to know what you, Diana, do when you wish to punish yourself. Do you tat with as much energy and determination as Lucia?”
Diana was grinning shamelessly into her own plum pudding, and Rafael added, “I was good enough to bring Victoria to Lucia as a replacement penance, so to speak. Victoria came into the drawing room and the tatting went underneath Lucia’s chair for the duration, so Didier told me.”
“I have a feeling that Victoria will serve you up for that remark, Rafael,” Diana said. “As for what I do for a penance, let me see—”
“She makes me do her penance,” said Lyon Ashton, Earl of Saint Leven. “The rounder her belly becomes, the more outrageous the demands she makes. ‘Lyon, darling, would you please fetch me just one small strawberry tart? And perhaps just a tiny bit of whipped cream on top of it? It’s only three o’clock in the morning, Lyon dear. Please? I have three more months of this.”’
Hawk leaned forward, waving his fork. “Lyon, that’s nothing at all. Let me tell you what Frances did that scared the very devil out of me this past August. She dressed up like a boy and actually rode in a race at Newmarket. Another jockey didn’t like the fact that he was losing, and thus took his whip to her. She very nearly fell, and, well, if anyone had discovered the truth, she would have been roundly ostracized.”
“Ha. Your father thought it a marvelous lark.” Frances added in a wistful voice, “I always wanted to ride Flying Davie, in a real race where it really counted. It was worth pulling the proverbial wool over your eyes, my lord. As for that other jockey—Dorking was his miserable name—you forgot to mention that he received just enough desserts.”
“What did you do?” Victoria asked, all eyes and interest.
Hawk said, “She didn’t recruit any former mistresses to help her, thank God.”
Frances said, “I didn’t waste an instant. I brought my whip down across his miserable face. He howled and pulled away fast enough, let me tell you.”
“Yes,” said Hawk. “Then he sent three bully-boys around our stables to beat up the jockey who had struck him.”
