“I can’t even imagine what Mama and Papa would do if the goose that promised golden eggs was turned into pâté de foie gras by the French,” Olivia said, a bit sadly.
“What happens if the FF dies before marrying you?” Georgiana asked. “Legal or not, a betrothal is not a wedding.”
“I gather these papers make the whole situation a good deal more solid. I’m certain most of the ton believes that he’ll cry off before we get to the altar, given my general lack of beauty, not to mention the fact that I don’t eat enough lettuce.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You are beautiful,” Georgiana said. “You have the prettiest eyes I’ve ever seen. I can’t think why I got plain brown eyes and you have those green ones.” She peered at her. “Pale green. The color of celery, really.”
“If my hips were like celery, then we’d have something to celebrate.”
“You’re luscious,” her sister insisted. “Like a sweet, juicy peach.”
“I don’t mind being a peach,” Olivia said. “Too bad celery is in fashion.”
Two
In Which We Are Introduced to a Duke
Littlebourne Manor
Kent
Seat of the Duke of Sconce
At the precise moment that Olivia and Georgiana were engaged in an agricultural wrangle over the relative merits of peaches and celery, the hero in this particular fairy story was certainly not behaving like the princes in most such tales. He wasn’t on bended knee, nor on a white horse, and he was nowhere near a beanstalk. Instead, he was sitting in his library, working on a knotty mathematical problem: specifically, Lagrange’s four-square theorem. To clarify my point, if this particular duke ever encountered a beanstalk of unusual size, it would doubtless have spurred a leap in early botanical knowledge regarding unusual plant growth—but certainly not a leap up said stalk.
It should be obvious from the above that the Duke of Sconce was the sort of man repulsed by the very idea of fairy tales. He neither read nor thought about them (let alone believed in them); the notion of playing a role in one would have been preposterous, and he would have rejected outright the notion that he resembled in any fashion the golden-haired, velvet-clad princes generally found in such tales.
Tarquin Brook-Chatfield, Duke of Sconce—known as Quin to his intimates, who numbered exactly two—was more like the villain in those stories than the hero, and he knew it.
He couldn’t have said at what age he’d discovered how profoundly he did not resemble a fairy tale prince. He might have been five, or seven, or even ten—but at some point he’d realized that coal-black hair with a shock of white over the forehead was neither customary nor celebrated. Perhaps it was the first time that his cousin Peregrine had called him a decrepit old man (a remark that had led to a regrettable scuffle).
Yet it wasn’t only his hair that set him apart from other lads. Even at ten years of age, he’d had stern eyes, fiercely cut cheekbones, and a nose that screamed aristocrat. By thirty-two, there were no more laughter lines around his eyes than had been visible twenty years earlier, and for good reason.
He almost never laughed.
But Quin did have one major point of resemblance with the hero of The Princess and the Pea, whether he would have acknowledged it or no: his mother was in charge of choosing his wife, and he didn’t give a hang what criteria she applied to the task. If she thought a pea under a mattress—or under five mattresses—was the way to ascertain the suitability of his future duchess, Quin would agree, just as long as he didn’t have to bother about the question himself.
In this crucial fashion, he was as regal—as real—as the nameless prince in the fairy tale, as dukified as Georgiana was duchified. He rarely saw a doorway without advancing through it as if he owned it. Since he owned a good many doorways, he would have pointed out that this was a reasonable assumption. He looked down his nose because he was taller than most. It was there to look down, and arrogance was his birthright. He couldn’t conceive of any other way of behaving.
To be fair, Quin did acknowledge some personal failings. For example, he seldom knew what the people around him were feeling. He had a formidable intelligence and rarely found other people’s thought patterns very surprising. But their emotions? He greatly disliked the way people seemed to conceal their emotions, only to release them in a gassy burst of noise and a tearful exposition.
This antipathy to displays of feeling had led him to surround himself with people like his mother and himself: to wit, those who responded to a problem by formulating a plan, often involving experimentation designed to prove a stated hypothesis. What’s more, his selected few did not cry if their hypotheses were proven incorrect.
He rather thought that people shouldn’t have so many emotions, given that feelings were rarely logical, and therefore were of no use whatsoever. He had embarrassed himself once by falling into a slough of emotion—and it hadn’t ended well.
In fact, it had ended miserably.
The very thought sent a pulse of black pain through the region that he generally supposed to house his heart, but he ignored it, as was his habit. If he paid attention to how many times a month, a week—a day—he felt that little stab . . . There was no point in thinking about it.
If there was one thing he had learned from his mother, it was that regrettable emotions are best forgotten. And if one cannot forget (he couldn’t), then that personal failing should be concealed.
As if thinking of his mother brought her to his side, the door to his library opened and his butler, Cleese, intoned, “Her Grace.”
“My plans are in order, Tarquin,” his mother declared, entering on the heels of Cleese’s announcement. She was followed closely by her personal assistant, Steig, and by her personal maid, Smithers. Her Grace, the dowager duchess, preferred to have a little flock of retainers in tow wherever she went, rather as if she were a bishop trailed by anxious acolytes. She was not a tall woman, but she projected such a formidable presence that she achieved the impression of height, albeit with some help from a towering wig. In fact, her wig bore a distinct resemblance to a bishop’s miter. They both advertised the wearer’s confidence in his or her rightful place in the universe: to wit, on top.
Quin was already on his feet; now he moved from behind his desk to kiss the hand his mother held out. “Indeed?” he asked politely, while trying to remember what she was talking about.
Fortunately, the duchess did not view responsiveness as an obligatory aspect of conversation. Given a choice, she would prefer to soliloquize, but she had learned to give addresses that could almost be classified as interactive.
“I have selected two young ladies,” she pronounced now. “Both from excellent families, it hardly needs saying. One is from the aristocracy; the other is from the gentry, but recommended by the Duke of Canterwick. I think we both agree that to consider only the aristocracy is to show anxiety about the matter, and the Sconces need have no such emotion.”
She paused, and Tarquin nodded obediently. He had learned as a child that anxiety—like love—was an emotion disdained among the aristocracy.
“Both mothers are aware of my treatise,” his mother continued, “and I have reasonable faith that their daughters will surmount the series of tests I shall put to them, drawn, of course, from The Mirror of Compliments. I have put a great deal of thought into their visit, Tarquin, and it will be a success.”