Put the duchess’s hair together with a lush figure and the unmistakable intelligence in her face—“She is,” Charlotte reminded her sister, “the best chess player in all France, or that’s what they say”—and her argument was finished.
The husband of such a paragon…and Miss Charlotte Tatlock?Never.
Chapter 20
August 1
Poppy didn’t really expect Fletch to visit again, and he didn’t.
She cried herself to sleep every night for another few weeks, dressing in the morning to look her very best, in case Fletch paid her a call. After all, her mother was still living with him. How could he survive?
Clearly, he survived. One morning Poppy dismissed her maid before her hair was curled and powdered, put on a dressing gown, curled up next to the window and watched the birds in Jemma’s garden. Starlings hopped from branch to branch, took sudden flight and spilled up into the sky like gravy thrown into the air, settled back down on the branches to chat. She stayed there all day, wondering about starlings’ nests and their conversations.
It was the kind of question her mother loathed. “Why waste your time?” she would demand whenever Poppy ventured such a question. “Why waste my time?” she would continue, leaving the room.
Jemma seemed to find it perfectly sensible that Poppy had stopped dressing formally. “I often don’t dress myself until the late afternoon,” she said. Not that she knew anything about starlings.
“I only know about chess,” she confessed. They both watched for a time. “They seem to be chattering to each other, don’t they?” Jemma asked, rather startled. “I expect they’re friends.”
“I’ve never had a real friend before you,” Poppy said.
“A pretty compliment but untrue! There’s a salver stuffed with cards downstairs to attest that you have many friends, and not all of them are merely curious about your current situation. The ladies from your sewing circle for the penitent poor, for instance—”
“The sewing circle is for indigent mothers,” Poppy said. “The reception of penitent poor meets at Lady Cleland’s house, and we don’t sew. In truth,” she added gloomily, “we just talk about the immorality of prostitutes.”
“The seamstresses and gossipers have all paid you calls, though most of them have now retreated to the country,” Jemma said. “Every charitable lady in the city has summoned up her courage and crossed my threshold. No! That’s not quite true.”
“Someone faltered?”
“Could one picture Lady Langhorne faltering?”
“No,” Jemma said, picturing that stout and invincible woman.
“She sent her card from the carriage, because presumably she could not bring herself to enter such a den of iniquity as Beaumont House when the duchess is in residence,” Jemma said. “So tell me no more fibs about your lack of friends.”
“It’s not that,” Poppy said, feeling weary. “They are friends of a kind. They wouldn’t approve of my lying about in my nightgown all day long.”
“That’s due to their virtue,” Jemma said. “Having been born with a complete lack of virtue myself, I never worry about the harsh standards the rest of you put to yourselves.”
“Born with a complete lack of virtue?” Poppy said, laughing a little.
“The curse of the Reeves,” Jemma said. “That’s my maiden name, you know. We’re a scurrilous lot. I have an uncle who is stark raving mad. And my brother is hardly a model of sober behavior. The duel with Villiers was his fourth, you know. Is there anything I can get you, Poppy?”