The Portrait of a Duchess by Scarlett Peckham

Cornelia made sure to seem cool tempered as she saw Rafe out. Having floundered more than she was accustomed to today, and in front of him no less, she wished to be perceived with her usual elegant composure as she said farewell.

She lasted until the door was shut behind him. At which time she promptly locked it, collapsed on a settee, and stared at the ceiling, shaking.

She felt as though the floor had turned to water, and she was struggling to float.

She and Rafe had promised to take their secret to their graves. As a matter of survival, she had pushed him from her mind, erecting a brick wall between her past and future—a task that had become easier over the years as Rafe’s life had become tied to the sort of people that she loathed.

She’d shrunk him into a small, uneasy detail she rarely thought about. A slight pang in her side when she heard his name. A fleeting memory when she wore breeches, or smelled leather in the rain.

But it was a different matter entirely to be near him. For in person, he was no inconvenient detail. Nor was he the ogre she’d imagined when she heard his name in reference to Tory politicians.

She didn’t know what he was at all, save for six feet, five inches of oddly friendly man with a wild scheme that could lead to wilder riches. Her instincts told her not to trust him, but they were overpowered by what she’d gain if the arrangement he proposed worked. For if she herself was shocked by the idea of revealing she was a duchess, imagine how the public would react. And she was in the business of inciting public reactions. It was the lifeblood of her art.

But first, she must elicit private reactions. A more unappealing task.

She locked the studio and climbed the stairs up to her jewel box of an apartment. It was half parlor and half bedchamber with a little hearth and table where one could cook, were one so inclined. Cornelia was rarely inclined.

“What was that about?” Sera asked immediately.

She and Elinor were sitting on the floor in their tunics, drinking tea and playing with Seraphina’s daughter, Ella. They were a study in contrasts, Sera angular and tall with a mane of wild brown hair, Elinor short and plump, her perfect blond coiffure fading into white. Cornelia wanted to sketch them—were it not that she had to perform the odious chore of shocking them with her decades of a singular omission about her past.

“Something rather piquant, I’d gather, by the looks of you,” Sera added.

Cornelia scratched the chin of her cat, Lucius, who was curled up on a sketchbook languorously licking a paw. She was not pleased they could see her discomfort on her face.

“There is something I need to tell you,” she said quietly, with no earthly idea exactly how to phrase what she should say.

“Then you’d better wake our sleeping beauty,” Elinor said, smiling over at Cornelia’s bed, where Thaïs was sprawled, wearing nothing but a sheet and her mermaid-length red hair, snoring.

Cornelia poked her foot. “You cannot possibly be asleep.”

“I am, I am,” Thaïs mumbled, throwing an arm against her eyes to block the light.

“Well then, wake up, slattern. There is something we must discuss.”

Thaïs groaned so loud and long that Cornelia plucked a grape from the fruit basket on the windowsill and tossed it at her.

Thaïs, nimble in the art of erotic showmanship, caught it with her teeth.

“It is three in the afternoon, Thaïs,” Cornelia said.

“Well, excuse me for needing rest, Miss Lady.”

Thaïs enjoyed underlining the difference in their origins—Thaïs, an orphaned child of a brothel; Cornelia, an orphaned child of the fifth oldest family in England—when she was cross with her. Which was usually. They’d been bosom friends for fifteen years, and each year Thaïs had made a point to be ever more irascible.

Cornelia sat down at the edge of the bed, twisting her fingers as she gathered the courage to say the words.

“What is it, darling?” Elinor asked gently, her face evincing so much concern that it almost made Cornelia want to cry.

She had to brace herself to get it out. “I’m, erm—well, to start, I’m married.”

Thaïs jolted up with such force the headboard of the bed slammed against the wall. “Wot! To start?”

As much as she found Thaïs’s dramatics tiresome, this was a fair reaction. Cornelia had long espoused the view that marriage was not compatible with her bone-deep zest for freedom. She might have yelled about it on multiple occasions, broken hearts based on the notion that the closer a relationship resembled marriage, the more it bore the chokehold of one.

She had done this without disclosing the technicalities of her matrimonial state.

Even if becoming shackled had been her idea, it was not one she had ever intended to publicly acknowledge.

Thaïs shot out of bed and marched to Cornelia, her pointer finger and her legendary breasts preceding her.

Cornelia slumped. “Oh, conserve your theatrics, Thaïs. I’m not finished.”

“Can’t do,” Thaïs squawked. “You just told us something very, very wicked.”

“Well, it gets worse, I’m afraid. It would seem I’m also—” she inhaled, smoothed her smock, gathered her resolve “—a duchess.”

Thaïs froze.

Then she threw back her head and laughed.

And laughed.

She laughed until she had to hunch over, her hand pressed against her belly like she’d injured herself with her cackling.

It physically hurt to offer Thaïs such a mortifying morsel of gossip. Cornelia could feel it in her grinding teeth. She was usually a calm, even-tempered, even cheerful sort of person. Marriage was bad for her equanimity.

Meanwhile, Thaïs was galloping around, continuing to hoot even as she smacked her chest for air. Sera and Elinor only stared at Cornelia, their faces in matching expressions of disbelief.

“I’m still sore at you for ruining my nap,” Thaïs said, “but to hear Miss Lady make her very first joke in all her days is worth it. Maybe by the time I’m old and dead you’ll make another one.”

She came and clapped Cornelia on the shoulder, her bosom bouncing so exuberantly the sight was likely against the law. “Oh, applause to you, my girl. Applause.”

Baby Ella whimpered at all the noise.

Lucius hissed and ran beneath the bed.

Cornelia shrugged off Thaïs’s hand. Her nails were long and sharp, and Cornelia didn’t want them going errant and gouging out her eye.

“Very well, Thaïs, you’ve had your merry time of it. You are scaring the innocent child. And the poor cat. May I go on?”

Thaïs snatched a robe hanging from a peg—a damask chintz embroidered with nude figures frolicking en flagrante in hell that Cornelia was quite fond of—and shrugged it over her shoulders.

“Please, go on,” Thaïs said. “I can’t wait to hear your tale.”

“Stop it, you two,” Sera said. “Cornelia, tell us how it is you came to believe you are a duchess. I do hope the story does not begin with a blow to the head.”

“I’m afraid not,” Cornelia said quietly. “It’s merely a convenient arrangement but legally speaking I’m married to . . .” She couldn’t say it. Thaïs would burst the blood vessels in her eyes if she continued to quack on like this, and, as a legendary whore, Thaïs’s income depended on her beauty.

Cornelia coughed, summoning her strength of will. “I’m married to the Duke of Rosemere.”

“You can’t mean you’re married to Rafe Goodwood,” Elinor uttered.

Her aunt searched Cornelia’s eyes, waiting for her to reveal this to be another joke. The kind that no one found amusing.

Cornelia said nothing.

“You’re serious?” Sera whispered. “You’re married and you didn’t tell us?”

They were used to her being close-lipped, she knew. But even she could see that this was different.

“It was years ago,” she said, disliking the pleading in her voice. “Decades ago.”

Thaïs grabbed the grapes and pelted one at Cornelia’s forehead. “You rail against marriage every chance you get, and you never thought to say you’ve got a husband? Let alone a bloody Tory one?”

Cornelia thought back to that night. To her fear and desperation.

“You don’t understand, Thaïs. I had no choice. Let me explain.”