“A fool,” Jemma diagnosed.
“And then when I said I was leaving, and I even—I even begged him to come with me, but he wouldn’t. He was so angry with me. He said I was a typical duchess, that I thought he was a toy that could be bought. It wasn’t like that, it really wasn’t like that.”
She was crying so hard now that she bent over at her waist, arms wrapped around herself, crying in big ugly gulps and odd noises.
“I loved him and he didn’t love me enough,” she said, her voice wavering. “And I’m sick—I’m so sick of always being second rate, of never being enough. The moment he found out I was a duchess it all just changed.”
“Oh,” Jemma said, softly. Her hand paused for a moment, stroking Harriet’s hair. “People always treat duchesses differently,” she said. “A duchess is the highest in the land. There are many men who would never even flirt with a duchess.”
“He didn’t have to flirt with me,” Harriet said, sitting upright again and wiping her nose. “He just had to marry me! And then I wouldn’t be a duchess anymore. I’d be plain Lady Strange.”
“Maybe he wanted to but he couldn’t imagine it,” Jemma suggested.
“He didn’t love me enough. And you know? I’m tired of people who don’t love me enough,” Harriet said, her voice rising. “I’m not so terribly second rate. I’m really not like Mother Goose. I’ll never be as beautiful as you, Jemma, but I am beautiful. I am. I look best in boy’s clothing, but—but he saw me in boy’s clothing. And I look really good with no clothes at all!”
Jemma chuckled. “I believe you.”
“I’m smart. Maybe not as smart as you—” Her voice stopped. “Oh God, listen to me. I said it myself. You are beautiful and intelligent, and I’m just good enough, and smart enough.”
“I really don’t have much intelligence,” Jemma said matter-of-factly. “I can’t figure out much except chess, for example. And how far has that got me? I have won a lot of chess matches. And where am I because of it?” The bitterness in Jemma’s voice silenced Harriet for a moment.
“Chess didn’t stop my husband from having a mistress. Chess didn’t stop me from ruining the prospect of our possible happiness by retaliating and bedding a man. Chess didn’t make Elijah love me, or care what I was doing in France. Chess won’t do anything.” Her tone was fierce. “There’s nothing special about a head for chess.”
Harriet blew her nose.
“Strange is a fool,” Jemma said. “You are wonderfully intelligent, and gorgeous clothed and unclothed, and you don’t even play chess—what more could a man want? You would have been loyal to him—”
“I would kill him if he took a mistress,” Harriet said fiercely. “I started to think about him taking a lover on the way home and I almost turned around the carriage.”
“See what he gave up?” Jemma said. “The potential of being married to someone who loved him enough to become homicidal. You have a broken heart but broken hearts do mend. You are free to find a man who knows exactly what a intelligent, beautiful person you are.”
Harriet sniffed.
There didn’t seem to be much more to say on the subject, so after a time they both retired to their rooms.
Harriet fell onto her bed and waited for a tide of misery to wash over her—but it didn’t.
Instead she kept thinking that she deserved better. Anger made it too hard to lie still, so she leapt to her feet and walked the room. She deserved someone to love her.
She wasn’t second rate, she really wasn’t. Perhaps she was clumsy in panniers, but Jem didn’t know that. What he knew was that she was nimble at fencing.
And perhaps she looked like a partridge in women’s clothing—but again, he didn’t know that. He’d seen her at her best. And she felt beautiful, those times when they made love. Even thinking about their afternoon in the barn made her feel a little teary—and very angry. What was he doing, throwing away something as precious as what they had?
She almost dissolved into tears, remembering the way he cupped her face, and said that he’d make love to her in the stable on her eightieth birthday.
The crucial thing was that she had said—she had actually managed to say that she loved him. She’d begged him not to leave her.
And he had still let her go.
That was the only thing that mattered, not how he felt about her being a duchess, or whether he thought she was a liar, or those other things he said.
It was like a cold knife, but it was also good. If she’d had the time to beg Benjamin not to leave her, he would have done so anyway. She knew that. But she would have liked the chance to tell him one last time that she loved him.
It was the same thing all over again, except that Jem was alive, presumably sitting around at the Game, flirting with the Graces…
It was the same thing, all over again.
He was dead to her.
Chapter Thirty-eight
The Definition of Manhood, Under Discussion Again
March 21, 1784
I t was time for the Game, so Jem made his way to the study. Lord Brouncker arrived with news of a great quarrel between the East India Company and a man named Stallybrass, which was inflaming both Houses of Parliament. Jem didn’t care.
He bet wildly and without interest. He ended up betting that Fox would not prevent passage of the Mutiny Bill, even though he hated engaging in that sort of random expenditure of money.
The Game dissolved into nothing more than a series of drunken reminiscences, all of which had to do with a certain opera singer named Noelle Gray who seemed to have a generous temperament, to say the least.
Jem could hardly control his irritation.
Villiers was smiling his secret little smile across the table. It provoked him, so he said belligerently, “What?”
“I was maintaining a dignified silence,” Villiers observed.
“Distasteful,” Jem snapped. “Gentlemen, shall we have another hand?”
“Noo,” Brouncker said, shaking his head. “Can’t manage it. My stomach’s upset. Might shoot the cat.”
Jem decided never to invite that idiot again. He looked around the room. He didn’t want to see any of these men again, with their belching and pettiness. Lord Oke was peeing against the wall again, though he knew perfectly well that there were chamber pots in the hall. Now he would pretend that he saw—
“Damme if I didn’t see a chamber pot there but a moment ago!” Oke roared.
“Missing something?” Villiers asked.
The tone of his voice was nicely calibrated to sting. Jem turned and snapped at him. “If you wish to say something, just do so. Be a man, for once.”
“Isn’t that really the subject at hand? What is a man, after all?” Villiers asked softly. He was magnificently dressed in a flared coat of raspberry, edged with an elaborate braided twill. He had his hair tied back and unpowdered, of course. Only fools like Oke bothered to powder their hair for the Game.
“A man,” Jem said, “is not a woman.”
“Concise.”
“Men are not fools who—”
“Who?”
“Who turn out to be what they are not.”