“Dear me,” Villiers said, sipping his wine. “I must be losing my touch.”
“If—if I go after Harriet it won’t be because I’m afraid that you’ll snatch her up. She wouldn’t have you, anyway.”
“A terrible blow,” Villiers murmured. “It takes a friend to dash one to the ground.”
“She—” He stopped.
“I suppose it could be that she loves you, and therefore she would reject me,” Villiers concluded. “How unfortunate, under the circumstances. Luckily, I am used to the circumstance. Well, I must to bed. This has been an utterly charming conversation, Strange.” He rose and bowed, magnificently.
“Jem,” Strange said, looking up at him.
“Dear me. First names are so very intimate. In that case, my name is Leopold, but I’ll thank you not to use it.”
“Leopold,” Jem said, trying the name out. “It suits you, in a emperor-ish type of way.”
“I dislike it,” Villiers said.
“You must call me Jem. So much advice and delivered with such poisonous precision…we must be the best of friends.”
Villiers paused for a moment, and a smile warmed his wintry eyes. “Indeed,” he said. “That is my impression.”
He turned with a swirl of his magnificent coat, and was gone.
Brouncker was sick in the corner.
Chapter Thirty-nine
The Origins of Paradise
March 22, 1784
“H arriet said I could visit her,” Eugenia reported. “I can, can’t I, Papa? I know she has kittens in the barn, because she told me so.”
“Of course.”
Eugenia climbed up onto his lap, and Jem’s heart thumped when he felt how light she was still. “Did you have a big lunch?” he demanded.
“Stew,” Eugenia said. “And a special egg that Cook made me.”
“What was special about it?”
“It has a very fancy cheese called fromage bleu mixed into it,” Eugenia reported.
“You eat like a lady of eighty,” Jem said, tightening his arm around her.
“I like fromage,” Eugenia said, obviously relishing the sound of the French syllables on her tongue. “I like Harry too. Or Harriet. I miss her.”
“I miss her too.” In fact, the pain of missing her was almost like a physical pain in his chest. He couldn’t imagine how to get through yet another day.
“I thought she might stay with us,” Eugenia said.
He cleared his throat. “I hoped she would too, poppet. But she’s a duchess, and she had important things to do.”
“I asked her what they were.”
“What did she say?”
“She kind of laughed, and said that people on her estate needed taking care of, the same as your people do. And that she had a very old dog, who would miss her. His name is Mrs. Custard.”
Jem opened his mouth—and shut it again.
Harriet had a very old dog waiting for her. She was going back to an empty house. It hit him like a brick in the head.
Eugenia was looking at him with concern. “Don’t worry, Papa,” she said sweetly. “I’ll never let you be all alone. When I grow up, I’ll have a house and you can stay with me.”
He was an idiot. He was beyond an idiot. He loved Harriet. And love meant that you didn’t let someone go home to an empty house and an aging dog, even if she did turn out to be a duchess. And even if she was infuriating, and holier-than-thou.
And even if—
He looked down at Eugenia and suddenly realized something so obvious that he couldn’t believe he hadn’t understood it before.
That pain in his heart, the one that was so deep it made his bones ache, that was his fault. He accused Harriet of lying. But in reality, he was the one who concealed who he was.
He was a fool, an idiot, a child who was unable to stop looking for his father’s approval—even when he knew his father was dead and immoral in the bargain.
Why else did he turn his house into his father’s version of Paradise? Why wasn’t he the sort of father he truly admired—a father who created a house that was safe?
Because he wanted his father’s approval…a man who was dead and gone, and before that, drunk and dissolute.
Eugenia was pulling at his sleeve. “Papa, don’t look so sad. I promise you can always live with me.”
He buried his face in her hair. “I know that, poppet. I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what?” Eugenia asked, snuggling close but, as always, logical.
“Sorry for not being a better father. For allowing a rat to bite you, and keeping you in the west wing so you wouldn’t meet my guests.”
“It’s not your fault the rat came in from the cold, Papa. Goodness!”
How could he have been so stupid as not to see the pattern of his life? Fonthill was designed and driven by his boyhood wishes. He wasn’t ashamed of that deep, driving wish he always had that his sister’s life hadn’t been ruined by circumstances outside her control, that she had been able to marry and have babies, as she deserved. But he was ashamed that he took his guilt and love for her and allowed it to blind him to the kind of household in which he was raising his own child.
But he was even more ashamed of the way he allowed a boy’s wish for his father’s approval to linger and shape his life, even when as a man he understood his father’s corrupt nature. The way his father’s shallow, careless attitude toward women that had led to his only daughter’s violation.
He couldn’t give every woman in peril a safe harbor…and his father would never come back to life and recognize that Fonthill was his version of Paradise.
If Harriet would just take him back, he would never sit down at the Game again. And every brick in Fonthill could crumble to the ground, that blasted bordello of a tower included.
“Eugenia,” he said, “do you think that perhaps if we went to Harriet’s house, she might see us?”
“Of course she would, Papa.”
Despair plunged through him. She wanted a Jem who didn’t even exist. “We can’t just go fetch her,” he said, thinking it through. “We have to move to her house.”
“Harriet has kittens,” Eugenia said, reasonably.
What if she wouldn’t take him? How could she possibly take him—and she, a duchess? With his house and his reputation and his habits and—
“That will make Harriet very happy,” Eugenia said. “I could tell she didn’t want to leave me, Papa. She doesn’t have a little girl of her own, you know.”
“I know.”
Harriet had said that she loved him, there at the end. She’d begged him, and he threw it back at her. She had given him the most precious gift in the world and he flung it at her feet.
Jem felt as if he had been hit on the head and suddenly started thinking rationally. He loved Harriet. And yet he’d hurt her so much. If there was even a chance that she would take him back…
He would do anything for her. Sell the house, disperse the Game, say goodbye to the Graces…
All those things were easy compared to the possibility of living a lifetime without her.
Chapter Forty
Duchess By Day
March 30, 1784