Page 9 of His Illegitimate Duchess

“W hat are you saying, Your Grace?” Lady Genevieve asked with tears shimmering in her beautiful eyes, but Talbot failed to be moved. He dispassionately watched the knuckles on her slender fingers turn white as she gripped the heavy gold bracelet his valet had selected as a parting gift for her.

“I am saying that our association has come to an end, Lady Genevieve. I wish you the best in all your future endeavours,” he replied.

“I don't understand, have I done something to displease you?”

“Nothing like that. The time has come for both of us to move on, as simple as that.”

“You know how I feel for you, Colin, I thought you felt the same,” she sobbed.

And there it was, the real reason for ending the association. Like all the other women Duke Talbot had had the pleasure of associating with over the years, Lady Sinclair had (during a particularly passionate bout of lovemaking) blurted out that she loved him.

His women were always widowed, genteel, and beautiful, but the duke of Norwich never harboured any deeper feelings for any of them. He’d fancied himself in love once – the summer his mother’s bewitching friend had introduced him to the ecstasy of copulation.

The more experienced woman had laughed when he'd declared himself to her (during a particularly passionate bout of lovemaking).

“Calf love,” she’d called it. “It’s nothing time won’t heal,” she’d said, and she'd been right.

Talbot shuddered at the thought of what his life would be like today if Lady Violet Turner hadn’t been so opposed to the idea of remarrying.

“The idea of shackling myself to another husband is most disagreeable to me. Isn’t it better like this?” She’d whispered into his ear as she dragged her palm down his naked chest while they relaxed in bed next to each other, “Freely enjoying all that life has to offer?”

The truth was, even if Lady Genevieve hadn't said what she'd said, their days together had already been numbered. Lately, the young duke had been feeling restless.

It had all started last year with that simpleton Hawkins lecturing him on loyalty and love as a thank you for Talbot’s efforts to save him from himself.

The dark, mad, terrifying things that Colin had known about love ever since he was a child would give old Nicholas nightmares, but Talbot wisely kept that knowledge to himself.

Perhaps it was time to select a bride this Season.

He was eight and twenty, rich, titled, and had repeatedly been called good-looking by a number of ladies.

It was time to enter matrimony, produce an heir for his prosperous estates, attend the appropriate events and functions with his perfect bride (a daughter of a peer, naturally), and continue living his life as he saw fit in between those things.

It’s grand to be me , the inappropriate thought ambushed him as Genevieve continued to cry inconsolably.

“Goodbye, Lady Genevieve,” he said as he stood to leave.

He heard something hit the door after he closed it – perhaps a slipper, or the bracelet, but he couldn't spare any more thoughts on that.

He had to go meet Pratt and Stone at the gentleman's club, and in the afternoon, he'd go through his stack of invitations and decide his next move.

The company of

His Grace, Duke Colin Talbot

is requested at

His Grace Duke Nicholas Hawkins’s home

November 10th at 8 o’clock

for a Ball in honour of Lady Elizabeth Hawkins.

We trust we shall be gratified with your compliance with the request of the pleasure of your company.

***

During breakfast, Lizzie kept glancing at her sister's face, trying to ascertain if she was the only one who considered being subjected to one of Aunt Isolde's lectures about men and marriage to be a special kind of torture.

Now that Charlotte was days away from being betrothed to Ian Sinclair, the Earl of Pembroke, she seemed to be soaking every word in.

Elizabeth, on the other hand, felt that Isolde was the last person who should be giving advice of the sort to anyone, based on (among other things) the fact that her uncle had been away, “hunting,” for as long as she’d known her aunt.

“And as for the marital bed, it is to be endured until you've given him an heir and a spare, after which you can begin to truly enjoy life as a married woman,” their aunt concluded primly.

Lizzie couldn't help but frown slightly. Mary had told her a little about how fun the marital bed (or, according to Mary, all kinds of different furniture) could be.

But Elizabeth quickly reminded herself that Mary loved Robert and had waited seven years for his apprenticeship to be over to become his wife.

What would the marital bed be like with a man from her brother's circles, one whom she married solely because he was “an advantageous match,” in her beloved brother's words?

Elizabeth had spent the last two years adjusting her vision of the future to her new circumstances, and the conclusion she'd come to was that, in order to keep her place in her new family, she'd have to improve her station in life by marrying well, and then proceed to live a life so uneventful and proper that they'd all be forced to forget where she came from. Most of the time, at least.

None of them liked seeing Miss Williams , and Elizabeth felt guilty at how much and how often she resented her mother for merely living in the same house as her.

Aunt Isolde never passed up an opportunity to lecture Lizzie against iniquity, often using the former governess to her children, who seduced her married brother, as an example of how a lady should not act.

Elizabeth had been mortified when she first pieced together that her aunt’s house had been the scene of her parents’ meeting, and this sense of shame had caused her to make herself smaller in Isolde’s presence, eager to atone for whatever the woman blamed her for.

Whenever a lack or gap in Elizabeth's education or manners was uncovered, she'd inevitably be asked why her governess mother hadn't taught her better.

Because she kept obsessing and primping and waiting for her married protector to grace her with his presence , Elizabeth had wanted to shout on more than one occasion, but by then, she had almost perfected the art of balling up all of her anger and resentment and righteous indignation at how she, an innocent, was being treated, and stuffing it in a trunk deep inside her mind.

Elizabeth had a clear goal for herself, and she was nothing if not industrious.

As Isolde continued talking about how husbands were not to be questioned, how proper wives knew their place, and about the importance of setting up the right kind of drawing room, Elizabeth’s thoughts turned to her sister's future husband.

He was Nicholas's best friend, and that was his only attractive quality as far as Lizzie was concerned.

She felt a pang of jealousy whenever she imagined the years ahead or thought about how close Charlotte and Nicholas' families would always remain, thanks to this union.

Outside of his connection to her family, the Earl was not a man Elizabeth would consider interesting.

He was kind and polite and very well-bred; there was no question about it.

And yet she found him… bland. She wasn't sure if it was her nature or her upbringing, but she liked imagining herself with a strong man. Someone who towered over her. Someone who was passionate and laughed loudly, who wasn’t almost painfully subdued and suppressed.

Someone who didn’t have soft, feminine hands.

None of the men in her brother's circles were like that, and Elizabeth was clever enough to know that it didn’t matter.

“Just one more week of the banns being read and I shall be wed,” Charlotte sighed dreamily.

“Well done, my dear girl, you have, indeed, made a good and suitable match. You shall make a wonderful countess. Now, Elizabeth, I don't want you getting your hopes up. Not all of us can snag an earl. As I always say, bloom where you are planted. You shall do well with a second or third son who is in need of your dowry, or a young widower. Just keep studying Fordyce’s Sermons .”

“Yes, Aunt Isolde,” Elizabeth swallowed a sharper retort and wondered, for the thousandth time, whether her sister loathed her existence so much that she derived a perverse enjoyment from Isolde's treatment of Lizzie.

Whenever (not so) thinly veiled insults like this one were delivered, Charlotte always lowered her eyes and pretended her teacup was the most marvellous thing in existence.

Whereas, on the other hand, Sophie always chastised the older woman and came to Elizabeth's defence.

That afternoon, as she waited for Lady Burnham to arrive, Elizabeth once again thought about this marital business.

“Are you woolgathering, my dear?” Lady Emilia Burnham teased her affectionately, for she had come to know Lizzie rather well in the last two years, and was aware that the younger woman was not one for daydreaming.

“Quite the contrary, I’m afraid, Lady Burnham,” Elizabeth rose to greet her etiquette teacher with a smile. “I’m pondering a most rational matter.”

Elizabeth loved their lessons. Lady Burnham never made her feel small or silly or embarrassed for not knowing things.

She had endless patience while repeatedly explaining the purpose of all the different forks and spoons and other (to Lizzie) hitherto unknown utensils needed to survive a Ton dinner, or while practising curtsies and the forms of address for different ranks, and she seemed to genuinely love explaining the differences between landed gentry and titled nobility to Elizabeth, who absorbed all of it with child-like wonder.

She spent her evenings poring over Debrett’s peerage book and The Mirror of the Graces almost religiously, to Mary’s amusement and vexation.

“I’d love to hear about it,” the older woman suggested kindly, and not for the first time, Lizzie thought about what a wonderful mother she had to have been.