Chapter 2 #2
James kept laughing. “And I think Father has already engaged her to the Marquess of Wentworth, to boot!” They both hooted. The Marquess of Wentworth was seven years old.
“But, seriously, why don’t you marry?” James said when he was finally done laughing. “It’s a well-established way of injecting money into a family. And, as you must know, you’re awfully good-looking. Some rich girl will quickly set her cap at you.”
Thomas rubbed his jaw. “I have thought of marrying,” he said slowly.
“Well, why not? I don’t think the stallion will get jealous.
We’ll find you a lovely daughter of a rich man who wants his grandchildren to be lords and ladies.
We’ll give your future father-in-law some of this claret, draw up some very generous articles of marriage, you’ll hie yourself to the altar, and, in a jiffy, the estate is saved.
And you’ll have some company when you’re out here in the country.
It must be lonely, knocking about this big house all by yourself.
What about that pretty girl, Mr. Dunbar’s second daughter?
The redheaded one. I think she has a bit of a fancy for you. And you for her, surely?”
“Maybe.” Thomas stood, picked up a candle, and strode around the room.
He had never been as good with words as he would have liked, and he felt it would be especially difficult to voice his thoughts on this subject. He stopped his pacing and looked at himself in the one mirror hanging in this room lined with dusty volumes of books he had never read.
He knew women liked his looks. At least, the women he had bedded told him so, and he didn’t think it was just because he had paid them.
At balls and dinners among the ton in London, ladies often gazed at him.
He held up the candle and tried to appraise himself from a neutral standpoint.
His eyes were blue, even as his hair was so dark as to appear black.
His brows were dark, too, and if he concentrated, he could even relax them enough not to appear menacing.
His jaw was strong. His mouth was fine, and his teeth good.
His nose was straight and a bit too prominent for his own liking.
But, again, women told him it was a well-proportioned nose.
“See?” James called out from where he sat next to the fire. “Devilishly handsome.”
Thomas walked back to him. “It’s not the handsome part I’m worried about.”
“So, Tom, what is it? You must hurry as I am getting quite drunk and the quality of my counsel is quickly degrading.”
“It’s the devilish part.”
There was a pause. Thomas looked at his friend. James smiled up at him, gray eyes crinkling. Oh, could James understand?
Thomas threw himself into his own wing chair.
“I’m not an evil man.”
“Of course you’re not!” James thumped the arm of his chair in agreement.
“But, Jamie, I have appetites.”
James chortled. “As do all men.”
“But to tie myself to one . . . dish to eat for the rest of my life . . .”
James shook his head as if to clear it. “I’m drunk, so let’s not speak in metaphors. You are worried about bedding one woman, your wife, for the rest of your life? Well, you won’t. You will still whore with all the rest of us fellows, just as you have always done.”
“But you know I have always needed more . . . companionship than all the rest of you.”
“And now you’ll be able to afford it, Tom.”
“But those girls you think I should pursue and marry, women like Hope Dunbar—"
“Don’t dismiss the Dunbar girl. She’s exactly the right type for you.
First, she’s rich. Second, she’s a redhead, and I know how you feel about redheads.
Third, she’s probably sharp as a needle about money since her father is in trade.
She could get Sommerleigh organized along some modern scheme.
And lastly, she’s amply endowed in other ways.
” James wiggled his eyebrows lasciviously.
Hope Dunbar was very beautiful, it was true.
And she had seemed taken with Thomas when they had met at country balls.
And the lower necklines young ladies often wore did show off her breasts to great advantage.
Thomas had to admit there were times in his bedchamber, alone, when she had risen to the top of his thoughts and stayed there, naked in his imagination, until he had spent.
But no. She wouldn’t do. Thomas groaned again.
“I can’t marry her.”
“Why not?”
Thomas took a deep breath. “These girls, these young girls, they are so . . . please don’t laugh, Jamie, please don’t. They are quite perfect, aren’t they? Pristine. And I am so . . . not.”
James closed his eyes and rested his head against the back of his chair. “You think the men—the other men besides you—who marry these virgins are holy saints?”
“No,” Thomas said abruptly. He knew they weren’t.
Even as a little boy, Thomas had known his distant cousin Mr. Hugh Drake was no saint. Mr. Drake was next in line to inherit the title after Thomas, and he said the reason for his visit to the old earl and Sommerleigh was “to see what I might get if the boy dies.”
Thomas had immediately taken against Hugh Drake and the way he looked at Thomas’ sister Jane. He was ten years of age at the time, so he didn’t know what those roving eyes meant exactly, but it was as if Mr. Drake were hungry and Jane, an iced cake.
During that visit, Thomas’ father sold Jane to Mr. Hugh Drake.
Thomas used the word sold deliberately in all his thoughts on the subject.
His father took money from Mr. Drake and married Jane to the man when she was just sixteen.
It was an unusual arrangement, but now Thomas knew his father must have had no money for a dowry and the bride price Jane brought had allowed the estate to stumble on for a few more years.
Jane did not even have the pleasure of a Season in town before she married.
Thomas knew Jane must have been frightened.
She had no mother to prepare her for her marriage.
Indeed, Jane had been a mother herself to Thomas his whole life, ever since their mother had died giving birth to him.
His nurse Turner maintained that Jane had insisted on carrying infant Thomas everywhere when she was just six.
“She was a mite and you were a big baby, my lord,” Nurse Turner said with a chuckle. “She gave me and the other nursemaids very little to do.”
So Jane—delicate, sweet, lovely Jane—went to her wedding bed with the very coarse Hugh Drake.
And when she arose the next morning, she was no longer Jane.
Thomas knew no other way to describe it.
She had disappeared. She said nothing, she did not even meet Thomas’ eyes before her husband bundled her into a coach and took her away to Manchester.
Thomas saw Jane only once more before she died.
After numerous letters, he secured an invitation to visit the couple when his nephew Phillip was two years of age.
He himself was thirteen, full of himself as a young viscount, his courtesy title as his father’s heir apparent.
After a long journey, he arrived at the Drakes’ town house in Manchester.
Jane’s physical change was astonishing. Her pale-blue eyes held pinpoint pupils, which did not seem to see him.
She sat propped up on a sofa in the drawing room, wearing a stained dress—she who had been so careful with the few pretty things she had owned as a child.
A bottle of laudanum was near at hand. She smiled absently as Thomas told her about his new colt Octavius, and then she fell asleep, drooling.
He asked Mr. Drake about Jane’s health, and Mr. Drake assured Thomas the best doctors were attending his sister. And then Mr. Drake took Thomas out for the evening and introduced him to, and paid for, his very first whore.
Thomas stayed a week in Manchester. He spent all his nights with whores chosen for him by Mr. Drake, and he spent all his days walking the streets of the town, spending his allowance money on women of his own choosing.
Mr. Drake schooled Thomas on the use of prophylactics or French Letters, so Thomas spared some coin for those as well.
Thomas lost himself that week in the pleasures of the flesh.
In some ways, he felt he never found himself again.
He learned all parts of the female anatomy.
He had been as Magellan and discovered new worlds in breasts and thighs and buttocks and every orifice a woman had.
He felt the unfettered power of using female bodies to please his own.
Several of the women were amused enough by his age and his lordly ways to take him in hand and show him ways of pleasing them.
He liked that, too. It aroused him. Not as much as coupling did or the use of a whore’s mouth on his cock, but he quickly learned that a little teasing, a little attention led to some extras that never appeared on his bill.
And he learned he liked kissing. Wet mouths meeting, lips and tongues touching—kissing was fornication writ small.
When he returned to his brother-in-law’s house for clothes and food and more money, he also made time to amuse his nephew in the nursery. Phillip was a lively little fellow, inquisitive and affectionate. Thomas was glad to see the nursemaids were careful to keep the boy away from Jane.
He avoided his sister until the day of his departure.
Her eyes were almost normal that morning, but she was agitated, plucking at her own hands and her dress in a near frenzy.
He bent to kiss her cheek, and she must have seen the unmistakable love bites on his neck.
Perhaps she had even smelled the strong sea scent of last night’s whore on his face.
She slapped him. She did not really injure him, she was too weak for that, but his Jane had never raised a hand to him or any living creature when she had lived at Sommerleigh.
She slapped him again. And then she howled like a beast skewered in the gut.
A maid rushed in and pushed Thomas out of the room.
As he left the house, his cheek burning, her scream ringing in his ears, he passed the boy from the apothecary going round the side of the house, carrying several bottles of laudanum.
“You’re late.” Thomas heard the housekeeper standing at the side door, scolding the boy.
Six months later, his father received a curt note from Mr. Drake saying Jane had died and been buried in Manchester.
Six years after that, a coach carrying only Phillip and a nursemaid came to Sommerleigh.
The nursemaid carried a page from a Manchester newspaper that said Mr. Hugh Drake had been murderously stabbed in a brothel.
The paper did not say it was a brothel explicitly, but it was implied.
Thomas recognized the location mentioned.
It was the very same den of vice where Mr. Drake had first schooled Thomas in exchanging money for pleasure.
Unlike last night’s violent storm, it was mizzling tonight at Sommerleigh.
Thomas got up and moved away from the fire to the windows. He couldn’t see anything except darkness and the rain on the glass panes. It was like Sommerleigh had already vanished.
“Eureka!”
Thomas turned around to see James dancing a jig in front of the fire.
“Congratulations, Tom! You are acquainted with genius!” James crowed.
Thomas snorted. “Genius for drunken buffoonery, maybe.”
“No, Lord Drake! Just extraordinary, astounding genius. I have the solution to all your problems.”
“Tell me.”
James swept up the almost-empty decanter and brought it over to where Thomas was standing. James poured half the remainder of the wine in his glass, shoved it at Thomas, and then held up the decanter as if for a toast.
“The solution is to marry a very particular kind of rich woman.”
Thomas lowered the glass. “I—"
“I know, I know,” James interrupted. “You have some mistaken idea about the purity of women and that you will ruin them. I remember now how you’ll never take a virgin at the brothel.
But it’s all foolishness, I tell you. Girls are as randy as we.
I know, I have sisters.” He belched. “That came out wrong. Let genius have its moment, please. The solution is to marry . . . a rich widow.”
Thomas hunched his shoulders.
James went on. “Marry a mature, rich widow. There will be no illusions, no false promises, no deceptions. She will know exactly what she is getting in you. A handsome man on her arm, the title of the Countess Drake, the occasional poke.”
“Marry an old woman?”
“An older woman, not an old woman. And one as rich as Croesus! I mean as rich as Croesus’ widow!” James drained the decanter and took Thomas’ glass and drank his wine, as well.
“You already have an heir in your nephew, so she need not be of childbearing age. She won’t mind your whoring.
She’ll be happy to have you occupied so she can spend more time on gossip and clothes.
She’ll probably have a very good cook in town.
All the best widows do. She’ll be no virgin whom you can ruin.
Her flower would have been definitely, absolutely, certainly, already plucked.
” James swayed. “I think I drank more of this claret than you. I better go to bed. Will you ring for my valet? And now I think of it, I remember Croesus’ wife committed suicide before Creesh—whatitsname popped off, so maybe I’m thinking of Midas. ”
Thomas laughed despite himself and put his shoulder under his friend’s arm just as James murmured, “Upsidaisy,” and slumped. Thomas got him to the sofa, and James’ longtime valet appeared and took James up to bed.
Despite last night’s sleeplessness, a day full of exercise, and far too much claret, Thomas stayed awake late, musing over James’ idea.