The Disdainful Marquis Read Online Free PDF

wit, nor even scandalous history.
    Her next season, she traveled with Mrs. Coalhouse, a younger woman with pleasant looks and a genteel manner. And although the duchess now cultivated the affectation of taking snuff, and had gone so far as to purchase outrageously expensive antique and imported snuff boxes, this eccentricity was only duly noted and not remarked upon. For in an age where the reigning eccentrics kept upward of a hundred dogs, or traveled without male companions to the Near East, or rode horses into drawing rooms, a handsome elderly female who took snuff was not much noticed. Even her newly emerged forceful personality was not enough.
    The following season, in a sort of desperation, she combed carefully through all the applicants for the position of companion. She stopped checking their references and began to note only their physical persons and personalities. For if she could not develop her own startling personality, somewhere in the recesses of her mind she reasoned that she could buy the services of one. Her choice settled on one Miss Violet Peterson, who was nothing like any lady’s companion the duchess had ever seen. She was, to the duchess’s myopic eye, more like the sort of female who ran the gaming halls and parties she had lately been to.
    Violet was young—still in her twenties, the duchess thought, although a clearer eye could have said thirties with more certainty. She was buxom, and red haired, and staggeringly attractive. Her dresses were all slightly too extravagant: a bit too low, a bit too colorful, a bit too embellished. But she was bright and alert and cheerful as a songbird. Men’s heads swiveled when she flounced into the room. She was, the duchess thought, sometimes a bit too cheeky, but there was no harm in the girl, no harm at all. If it came to that, she was good company, even though it was not company the duchess was after, but the admiration of company.
    It was during that first season with Violet, at the country home of a notoriously dissolute duke, that the first whispers about Violet came to the duchess’s ears. The whispers grew louder at Brighton, and by the time they got to the scandalous Lady Chester’s country retreat, they were a roar. One late evening at the faro table, a noted gossip, a beau of the ton, eyed Violet as she left the room a few moments after their hostess’s husband had signaled to her and he leaned over to the duchess. “I say,” he said in a loud stage whisper, “did you know that your companion has spent more time between our host’s sheets than her own? And for a price higher than the stakes we’re competing for?”
    Two high red spots appeared on the duchess’s cheekbones. All the others at the table were pointedly looking elsewhere, but all were listening. If her sensibilities were offended, the duchess knew it would be social death in this room to admit to it. She decided to brazen it out, and, in a somewhat confused state of agitation, referred instead to what she felt were Violet’s good qualities.
    “Let the gel be,” she said in stentorian tones. “She gives good service. Worth every penny she asks.”
    The duchess was a raging success after that. She and Violet were welcome to every affair they wanted to attend. If they were not welcome at the sort of parties and houses that the duchess was used to frequent during her long years of social correctness, well, she had put all that behind her now anyway. Attention was paid to the pair of them wherever they went. The duchess, through no overt act of her own, was now considered an amusing, clever, and charming eccentric. She even had the felicity to overhear society’s pet bad girl of the season whisper to her cicisbeo, “There goes the Duchess of Crewe. Isn’t she delicious? So dignified, so correct, such presence, such wit, to have a common trollop as companion. Plying her trade in the best houses. Oh, it’s such a clever comment on society.”
    So the duchess turned a deaf ear