“I’m not talking about that! Anyone could have that happen—but she was alone when it happened.”
“I gather you’re criticizing my ability to hire nursemaids.”
“That governess was as feckless and beautiful as the rest of the women in this house,” she said flatly. “She had no real care for Eugenia: none.”
“She was in love. That could happen to anyone.” Though he was starting to wonder if it had really happened to Harriet.
“She was part and parcel with the women who pay you visits,” Harriet snapped. “My mother would have called her a wag-tail. She was nothing more than a ladybird, looking for her next meal!”
Jem could feel himself growing rigid. Ice poured down his back. “I regret that you think I willingly hired a ladybird to care for my daughter.”
“You didn’t hire her willingly,” Harriet cried. “I suspect you simply don’t know what a decent woman looks like.”
“I am not a hermit,” he pointed out, counting to one hundred in the back of his mind. “I frequently visit London, which is stiflingly full of boring woman who must, therefore, be virtuous.”
“Oh, of course virtue is boring!”
“Exactly. And it makes such claims for itself. The very smell of virtue makes a woman utterly tedious, and at the same time, utterly conceited.”
“I am a virtuous woman,” Harriet said through clenched teeth.
“We’ll have to agree that you are an exception,” Jem said. He was vibrating with rage over her criticism of his childrearing. “I shall do my best to engage a truly virtuous nanny for Eugenia. Or else I’ll just try to find one like yourself.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“You came to my house under a false name, dressed in breeches,” he pointed out. “When it became clear to both of us that we were of compatible genders, you fell into bed with me without showing an undue amount of virtue. Thank God.”
“In short: you think I’m a strumpet.”
“Only in the best meaning of the term.”
“A ladybird.”
His back stiffened again and his jaw tightened. “There would be nothing so terrible about being a ladybird, Harriet.”
“So is that the future you have in mind for Eugenia? Is that why she is locked in the west wing, hardly able to enjoy fresh air—while all the ladybirds trot around your estate?”
“I have never kept Eugenia from the fresh air. Neither have I unreasonably immured her from our guests. She has come to know a few of the young women very well.”
Too late, he realized this was a mistake. Harriet’s eyes flashed and she made a sound that could have been a growl, on a man. “I gather it is your ambition to turn her to a ladybird, then, since you give her such excellent companionship.”
“Can you please find some other term for this conversation?”
“Doxy?” Her tone was delicate but sharp as knives. “Drab or strumpet? There are so many appropriate words.”
“And as a virtuous woman, you know them all,” he said, pushed beyond endurance. “Good women delight in throwing terms at those less fortunate—even while they gaily engage in precisely the same behavior.”
She paled and he knew that went home.
“I suppose you’re right,” she said, a second later.
“You virtuous women shun and scorn those whom you believe to be weaker, less righteous. And yet—”
“You’re saying I’ve played the doxy in your house, and now I have no right to condemn you for your taste in companionship. After all, I transformed myself into precisely what you always desired.”
He was never very good at sorting out a whole swirl of emotions, and he felt buffeted by them. “I’m not sure—”
“Luckily, I am quite certain. You are right.”
She waited until he said, cautiously, “Oh.”
“I had no right to ask you to change, or to think that you were even capable of it. I thought—” and something flashed across her eyes “—I thought you saw my heart. I thought you knew me. What a fool I was.”
She almost whispered the last.
“Don’t look grieved,” Jem said, catching her arm. “I do know you, Harriet. I love you.”
She didn’t even hear him. “I wove it all in my head, of course, fool that I am. I was playing the doxy and you saw me as a doxy, and that—”
“I never saw you as that! Never!”
“That is that,” she finished.
“What are you talking about?”
Finally, she looked at him again. “I am extraordinarily slow in my understanding, Jem.”
“So am I,” he said. “Because I have no idea what is going on here.”
“This will make you laugh.” There was something empty in her eyes that made him want to scream at her. “I actually thought you would—you would change.”
“I will change! I told you I would change. I want to marry you.”
“Not that.”
“I’ve never asked anyone to marry me, by my own impulse and reckoning. I didn’t think it would be thrown away so lightly.”
“I thought you knew what kind of woman I am. I thought you would—I thought you would become that sort of man.”
“Jesus,” he said. “I am the sort of man for you, Harriet. Don’t you understand that?”
She shook her head. “You are a wonderful companion. I thought you could be something you’re not at all. I thought you could be the sort of man who marries a woman like me—the real me, not Mr. Cope. Not me under a secret name and having a wild affaire. The me who runs an estate, Jem. The me who sits in judgment in the shire court. I did behave like a ladybird.” She must have seen him flinch. “But I thought you knew that it wasn’t the real me…I thought you would come home with me.”
He laughed, heard his own laugh, like a bark. “To the little farm your husband left you?”
“It’s not little.”
“Whatever size it is, darling,” he said, reining in his impatience, “Fonthill is hundreds of acres. It’s not practical to leave my estate and move to yours.”
“I meant—I meant not just physically come with me. Come with me in other ways.”
“Do you mean become some sort of country squire, like your husband?”
“My husband wasn’t a country squire.”
“Whatever he was,” Jem said impatiently. “A gentleman farmer, living off in the country with his hogs. I don’t care if he wasn’t a gentleman, Harriet. I’ve never cared for rank. You should know that about me.”
“I see that,” Harriet said. “But Jem, I haven’t been honest with you. I played the doxy, and I’m not one. I—I frolicked with the Graces, and I led you to believe that I could live in such a way for my whole life.”
There was something in her face, something almost resigned, that made him feel slightly crazed.
“I don’t care—”
“I lied to you by omission.” Harriet said flatly. “My husband was a duke. And I am a duchess.”
The moment she said it, he knew the truth in his bones. Of course, she was a duchess. She had the spine of a duchess, and the natural tone of command.
