“She painted you as the very image of a perfect English gentlewoman: sweet, docile, perfect in every way.”
Isidore gasped.
“You are particularly skilled with needlework, and sometimes stay up half the night stitching seams for the poor. But when you aren’t engaged in charitable activities, you knot silk laces that are as light as cobwebs.”
“What?” she said faintly, dropping back into her chair.
“Light as cobwebs,” Cosway repeated, reseating himself as well. “I remember actually considering whether I should request further details. I was establishing a weaving factory in India.”
“You were—what?”
“Weaving. You know, silks.”
“I thought you were wandering around the Nile.”
“Well, that too. But I’m afflicted by curiosity. I can’t go to a new place without wanting to figure out how things are made, and how they might be made better. That leads to shipping them here and there, generally back to England for sale.”
“You’re a merchant,” Isidore said flatly. “Does your mother know of this development?”
He thought about it. “I have no idea. I expect not.”
“I truly feel sorry for her. You do realize that I wasn’t even living with her during the time when she wrote all those letters describing my domestic virtues?”
“A revelation I find, sadly, unsurprising. I’m afraid my arrival has been a terrible shock to my mother. All the time she was sending me letters about my submissive, chaste wife—”
“I am chaste!” Isidore flashed.
He met her eyes. “I know that.”
A flare of heat went straight down her back to her legs. “So you thought I was a meek little Puritan—”
“Tame,” he said, nodding. There was an annoying hint of a smile in his eyes. “Meek and obedient.”
“Your mother has much to answer for.”
“I formed a picture of our marriage based on that wife.”
“Who doesn’t exist.”
He nodded, but his face sobered. “You’re obviously far more intelligent than the pliable woman my mother described, Isidore. So I have to tell you that from what I’ve seen in the world, the best marriages are those in which a man’s wife is—well, biddable.”
Isidore felt her temper rising again but pushed it down. What could she expect? He may not have the outward trappings of an English gentleman, but he was voicing what many a man believed.
“I agree,” she said. “Although I would broaden the category. Were I to choose my own spouse, for example, I would like him to be, shall we say, civilized?”
His teeth were very white against his golden skin when he smiled. “Meek and obedient, in other words?”
“Those are not popular words among men. But I could see myself with a husband who was more quiet than myself. I have—” she coughed “—a terrible temper.”
“No!”
“All this sarcasm can’t be good for you,” she said. “You told me in the carriage that you like your every utterance to be straightforward.”
He laughed. “I can see you riding roughshod over some poor devil of a husband.”
“I wouldn’t,” she said, stung. “We could simply discuss things together. And come to an agreement that didn’t involve my opinion losing ground to his simply because I was his wife.”
“That’s reasonable. But the truth of it is that you would smile at him, and crook your finger, and the man would come to you as tame as a lapdog.”
Isidore shook her head. “It’s not the sort of relationship you would understand.”
“I shall enjoy seeing you engage in it. If we annul our marriage and I can watch some other fellow experiencing it with you. Naturally I would repay your dowry with ample interest.”
So he didn’t want to come anywhere near her. Isidore was so stoked by rage that she could hardly speak. She was being rejected—rejected!— by her husband after waiting for him for years. She got up again and walked a few steps away, the better to regain control of her face.
“I think it’s important in any relationship that there be a clearly designated leader,” he was saying. “And I would rather be the leader in my own marriage.” Then he added: “If you don’t mind, Isidore, I won’t rise this time.”
Cosway would rather annul the marriage than marry her.
She waited for that news to sink in, but the only thing she could feel was the beating of her heart, anger and humiliation driving it to a rapid tattoo.
“As it happens,” she said, schooling her voice to calm indifference with every bit of strength she had, “Jemma gave me the direction of the Duke of Beaumont’s solicitor in the Inns of Court. I shall make inquiries as to how we go about an annulment.”
There was a flash of something in his eyes. What? Regret? Surely not. He sat there, looking calm and relaxed, like a king on his throne. He was throwing her away because she wasn’t a docile little seamstress, because she would make him angry.
Angry—and lustful. That was something to think about. She could unclothe herself right here, in the drawing room, and then he would have to marry her, but that would be cutting off her nose to spite her face. Why would she bind herself in marriage to a man like this? With these foolish ideas learned in the desert?
“Why don’t we make a trip there tomorrow afternoon?” he was asking now.
Isidore refused to allow his eagerness to visit the solicitor to throw her further into humiliation. He was a fool, and she’d known that since the moment she met him.
It would be better to annul the marriage.
She sat down opposite him, reasonably certain that her face showed nothing more than faint irritation. “I have an appointment at eleven tomorrow morning with a mantua-maker to discuss intimate attire.”
“Intimate what?”
“A nightdress for my wedding night,” she said crushingly.
“If we visit the solicitor first, I would be happy to accompany you to your appointment .”
Isidore narrowed her eyes, wondering about the look on her husband’s face. She was no expert, but it didn’t look like a man who was in control of his lust.
There were three things that no man was supposed to act on, weren’t there? Anger, lust…and an idea of marriage that included what?
Oh yes.
An intelligent woman within a ten-foot radius.
That must be where fear came in.
Chapter Eight
Gore House, Kensington
London Seat of the Duke of Beaumont
February 26, 1784
“Your Grace.”
Jemma, Duchess of Beaumont, looked up from her chess board. She had it set out in the library, in the hopes that her husband would come home from the House of Lords earlier than expected. “Yes, Fowle?”
“The Duke of Villiers has sent in his card.”
“Is he in his carriage?”
Fowle inclined his head.
“Do request his presence, if he can spare the time.”
Fowle paced from the library as majestically as he had entered. It was a sad fact, Jemma thought, that her butler resembled nothing so much as a plump village priest, and yet he clearly envisioned himself as a duke. Or perhaps even a king. There was a touch of noblesse oblige in the way he tolerated Jemma’s obsession with chess, for example.