When Beauty Tamed the Beast

“Why?” Piers said, leaning back against the bedpost at the foot of her bed. “Would it be so terrible to have scarred skin after the pox?”

“Of course it would,” Linnet said crossly. “Is my face clean again?”

“Blooming. Why would it be so terrible?”

“Because,” she replied, nonplussed. “It just would.”

“But many women aren’t as beautiful as you, and they live perfectly happy lives,” he pointed out. “Even the scarred ones.”

“Yes, but—”

“Queen Elizabeth had a fine time of it, by all accounts,” he added.

“She never married, did she?” Linnet took her hot chocolate away from Piers and took a sip.

“There’s no rule that says women with bad skin can’t marry.”

“Yes, but there are all sorts of unwritten rules about what makes a woman desirable. Beautiful skin being paramount.”

“And you have every single criterion, haven’t you?” He narrowed his eyes, looking as if he were examining her minutely for faults.

She didn’t answer. Anything she said would leave her open to mockery.

“I wonder if it’s worse for an ugly woman to get the pox or a beautiful one,” Piers said.

“A beautiful one,” Linnet said without hesitation. “She has more to lose.”

“I can’t go swimming this morning,” he said, changing the subject. “Sébastien has to operate on that patient who appeared last night, and I need to stand by and harangue him.”

Linnet felt her mouth droop. “Oh, of course.”

“I thought we might go in the afternoon instead.”

“That would be acceptable,” she said demurely. He wasn’t looking at her, but was concentrating on poking the pile of novels on the far bedside table.

“What’s the pleasure in knocking them over?” she asked.

“I’m not knocking them over. I’m seeing what percentage of the top book has to overhang the rest before they all fall.”

They fell.

“Around forty percent. I told Prufrock that I want the guardhouse refurbished,” he said, getting up from the bed.

She blinked at him. He stepped forward, and then swooped down for a kiss. “Mmm,” he said, “essence of Linnet with a dash of chocolate.”

Linnet sat looking at the closed door, her cooling chocolate in hand. He told Prufrock that—and why?

But she knew why. Her burning cheeks knew why. The little tremble that went through her thighs knew why.

One more time, she promised herself. That wasn’t too trollopy. She wouldn’t be too trollopy.

But when they actually got to the guardhouse? Trollopy.

There was no other way to describe her behavior. Nor the day after, nor the day after that.

Certainly not the day when Piers caught her in the corridor after she had read Camilla to a group of patients, pulled her into an alcove and with a quick hand between her legs, reduced her to . . .

Well, trollop-hood.

It’s just playing, she told herself every night before sleep. Though the phrase began to sound a bit anxious.

We’re just playing, giving the duke time to . . . to reacquaint himself with his wife. Or vice versa. No one could miss the fact that the formerly married couple seemed to be spending more and more time talking to each other in a reasonably civil manner.

Then came a week in which Linnet had absolute proof that no baby had been created in their first encounter. Even so, Piers argued that he was not yet ready to send a retraction of their betrothal to the Morning Post. “One never knows,” he said, and then explained exactly how French letters might fail in their duty.

“In that case, perhaps we should stop now,” Linnet said, knowing full well that neither one of them wished to do so.

“We’re just playing,” Piers stated.

And trolloping, as Linnet pointed out.

“I don’t think trollop can be used as a verb like that,” Piers retorted. He never came to her bedchamber to make love to her, never slept with her. But that night he had come upstairs around midnight, pulled her straight out of bed and brought her down to the library to show her a very important text, specially written (he said) to mark the end of her courses.

It turned out to be written on little scraps of paper that he had strewn over the sofa before the fire. And on each little scrap was a suggestion.

“Nor as an adjective,” he continued, thoughtfully. He was sitting on the sofa stark naked, firelight gleaming on his chest, his muscled legs stretched out before him. “I couldn’t say, for example, that my Maman is acting in a trollopy fashion, parading around as she does, dressed in a handkerchief for the most part.”

“But you couldn’t say she was a trollop either,” Linnet said, “because she’s not. So the word is more useful in degrees, as an adverb or an adjective.”

“You are not a trollop, because such a woman moves from man to man,” he said, tacitly giving in to her grammatical point, but, characteristically, countering it with a different argument.

“In fact, any woman who goes to a man’s bed without the benefit of matrimony deserves the label,” Linnet said. “She needn’t visit more than one such bed. I have become everything that most of London believes me to be.”

“Does that bother you?”

She was nestled on the opposite end of the couch from Piers, sitting on her chemise rather than wearing it. “Just look at me.”

He did, and she liked the gleam in his eyes.

“That’s not what I meant,” she said. “Here I am in a gentleman’s library, without a stitch of clothing on my body. I begin to think that I am truly my mother’s daughter. Though I still hope that I won’t earn a reputation akin to hers.”

Inside, she wasn’t afraid of losing her reputation . . . she was afraid of losing her heart. But there was no reason to share that lurking fear.

They had found they both liked to sit by the side of the pool, or in the guardhouse, or in the library, and dissect things. Words. Bodies, though only through Piers’s descriptions. People, at least metaphorically. Patients, as regarding their behavior.

Because Linnet was regularly visiting the rooms of the non-infectious patients, she had funny stories about Mrs. Havelock, sometimes known as Nurse Matilda, and her skirmishes with those few who, rather surprisingly, dared to rebel.

One night, Linnet had reduced Piers to helpless laughter by mimicking the antics of a certain Mr. Cuddy, who had taken advantage of his wife’s visits to have her smuggle in a flask of gin, whereupon he promptly became inebriated, to Nurse Matilda’s disgust. “I don’t know that hearing this kind of thing is good for me,” Piers said.

“Why not?”

“Patients,” he said, waving his hand. “One shouldn’t know too much about them. They’re just illnesses, after all. That’s all I can treat.”

Linnet was sitting on the floor between his outstretched legs, wrapped in a blanket. “You’re a hopeless fool,” she told him.

He bent forward, scooping up her hair in his hands. “We should sell this.”

“There’s no market.”

“It gleams in the firelight like guineas, if guineas had more red in them.”