Regency Rogues and Rakes: Silk is for Seduction / Scandal Wears Satin / Vixen in Velvet / Seven Nights in a Rogue's Bed / A Rake's Midnight Kiss / What a Duke Dares. Loretta Chase
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hurried to Town and took possession of Clevedon House, determined to bring him to his senses. On Wednesday afternoon, they’d settled down for a bout of tea drinking and bullying their nephew when Halliday ushered in his grace’s prospective wife and in-laws and, as heavy artillery, Lucie. the aunts might have withstood the Noirot charm alone, but charm combined with mouth-watering dresses weakened their defenses, and Lucie, at her winsome best, routed them utterly.
On the Monday following the wedding, the youngest aunt, Lady Adelaide Ludley, visited the queen, with whom she shared a given name and was on warm terms. Her ladyship extolled the new duchess’s deportment and taste. On learning that the queen had admired Lady Clara Fairfax’s dress, Lady Adelaide pointed out that Maison Noirot patronized British tradesmen almost exclusively—a cause dear to Their Majesties’ hearts. She mentioned that the Noirot sisters were founders of the Milliners’ Society for the Education of Indigent Females—another point in their favor.
Lady Adelaide agreed with the queen that the Duchess of Clevedon, in intending to keep up her shop, presented the Court with a social dilemma. On the other hand, said her ladyship, the duchess acted on good moral principle in being unwilling to abandon either her customers or the young women she was training as seamstresses. In any event, as the duke had pointed out to his aunts, one could not expect an artist to give up her art.
In the end, Lady Adelaide received permission to present the new duchess to the queen. She did so at the Drawing Room held in honor of the King’s Birthday, commemorated on the 28th of May. At one point during the festivities, the king summoned Clevedon, and spoke to him privately. His Majesty was heard to laugh.
When Clevedon returned to his wife’s side, she said, “What was that about?”
“The Princess Erroll of Albania,” Clevedon said. “He asked after her.” His smile was conspiratorial. “I think we’ve done it. They’ve decided I’m eccentric and you’re irresistible.”
“Or the other way about,” she said.
“Does it matter?” he said.
“No,” she said. She bent her head, and the sound was soft, but he recognized it. “Duchess,” he said, “are you giggling?”
She looked up, laughter dancing in her dark eyes. “I was only thinking: This has to be the greatest trick any Noirot or DeLucey has ever brought off.”
“And to think,” he said, “this is only the beginning.”
Not many days thereafter, in the course of a promenade in St. James’s Park, Miss Lucie Cordelia Noirot allowed the Princess Victoria to admire Susannah. The doll, as would be expected, was dressed for the occasion, in a lilac pelisse and a bonnet of paille de riz, trimmed with white ribbons and two white feathers.
She did a great deal he found intriguing—starting with the way she walked. She carried herself like a lady, like the women of his class, yet the sway of her hips promised something tantalisingly unladylike.
‘I married Marcelline knowing she’d never give up her work,’ Clevedon was saying. ‘If she did, she’d be like everyone else. She wouldn’t be the woman I fell in love with.’
‘Love,’ Longmore said. ‘Bad idea.’
Clevedon smiled. ‘One day Love will come along and knock you on your arse,’ he said. ‘And I’ll laugh myself sick, watching.’
‘Love will have its work cut out for it,’ Longmore said. ‘I’m not like you. I’m not sensitive. If Love wants to take hold of me, not only will it have to knock me on my arse, it’ll have to tie me down and beat to a pulp what some optimistically call my brains.’
‘Very possibly,’ Clevedon said. ‘Which will make it all the more amusing.’
LORETTA CHASE has worked in academe, retail and the visual arts, as well as on the streets—as a meter maid (aka traffic warden)—and in video, as a scriptwriter. She might have developed an excitingly chequered career had her spouse not nagged her into writing fiction. Her bestselling historical romances, set in the Regency and Romantic eras of the early nineteenth century, have won a number of awards, including the Romance Writers of America’s RITA®.
Website: www.LorettaChase.com.
This book was made possible by the support of: my insightful and inspiring editor, May Chen; my indefatigable agent, Nancy Yost; my witty and fashion-wise friend and blogging partner, Isabella Bradford, aka Susan Holloway Scott; my patient French adviser, Valerie Kerxhalli; my loyal, funny and crazy sisters, Cynthia, Vivian and Kathy; and, most especially, my brainy and brave husband, Walter, a hero every single day.
Observe his fierce, fighting-cock air; his coal-black gipsy curls; his aristocratic (not to call it arrogant) expression of countenance—never laid aside, whether he is smiling on a fair dame or frowning on a fawning dun.
—The Court Magazine,
“Sketches from Real Life,” 1835
London
Thursday 21 May 1835, early morning
The trollops knew how to throw a party.
On Wednesday nights, after dancing or playing cards with Society’s crème de la crème at Almack’s, London’s wilder set continued more eagerly to a very different assembly at the house of Carlotta O’Neill. On offer was a roulette table, along with other games of chance, as well as spicier games with the demireps who played ladies-in-waiting to London’s current queen of courtesans.
Harry Fairfax, Earl of Longmore, was on the scene, naturally.
Carlotta’s wasn’t the sort of place his father, the Marquess of Warford, would wish his twenty-seven-year-old son and heir to frequent, but heeding his parents’ wishes, Longmore had decided a long time ago, was the fast and easy route to murderous boredom.
He was nothing like his parents, on any count. He’d inherited not only his great-uncle Lord Nicholas Fairfax’s piratical looks—black hair, black eyes, and a tall, muscular physique usually associated with buccaneers—but Great-Uncle Nicholas’s talent for Doing What He Was Not Supposed To.
And so Lord Longmore was at Carlotta’s.
And she was draped over him, wafting waves of scent. And talking, unfortunately.
“But you’re intimately acquainted with them,” she was saying. “You must tell us what the new Duchess of Clevedon is really like.”
“Brunette,” he said, watching the roulette wheel spin. “Pretty. Says she’s English but acts French.”
“My dear, we could have found that out from the Spectacle.”
Foxe’s Morning Spectacle was London’s premier scandal sheet. The high-principled Marquess of Warford called it disgusting tripe, but he read it, as did everyone else, from London’s bawds and pimps on up to the Royal Family. Every detail it published regarding the Duke of Clevedon’s new bride had, Longmore knew, been artfully crafted by the bride’s fair-haired sister Sophia