James’ whole life changed when his brother died.
With him, James’ dreams of joining the navy died also. James became Marquess of Daventry in his brother’s place and heir to the Middlewich duchy.
And he inherited Enfield as his valet. So, when the idle and discontented James began his career as a rake three years later, exploring the pleasures and vices of London, Enfield was ready.
It was Enfield who ensured that the young lord always had a ready supply of prophylactics or French Letters. He was not going to let this heir go the way of his brother. Enfield explained to James that the French Pox, also known as syphilis, came from lying with women who had lain with other men who had the pox. Although sensation was thought to be blunted by the French Letter, pleasure was still obtainable and the sheaths prevented unwanted bastards as well as the transmission of diseases. Including the French Pox.
James, having seen William’s horrible disfigurement and heard his ravings echo through the castle in the last weeks of his life, needed very little persuading. James used a French Letter with women, without fail. He carefully regulated his drink so that he would never lose so much control that he would forget his phallic protection.
When James lectured his old friend Thomas, the future Earl Drake, on the use of the French Letters, Thomas laughed and said he had been using them for seven years and was James only learning to whore now? James had better stick close to Thomas, who knew all the really pretty doxies.
James then learned to satisfy his masculine appetites safely, cautiously, and under the supervision of both Enfield and Thomas. Enfield himself had a wife of thirty years who lived in a cottage on the grounds of Middlewich Castle; he said she was a lovely, warm woman who had given him five children and who put up with his cold feet and he would be a fool to enrage her by wandering into a brothel. He was always content to wait until he got home to lie with his wife. Thomas, on the other hand, was never content, often bedding three whores a night, seemingly insatiable and driven by lust.
James found the middle road. He could take pleasure when it came his way but he was not driven to it. Nothing to excess. Drink, women, gambling. He chose moderation in all things.
His friends said he was barely a rake. The joke was that the future Duke of Middlewich was a rake “by means of courtesy title only.”
Then, at the age of twenty-three, James became more dissolute. His friends came to know him as a louche marquess—perpetually tipsy and joking. A lighthearted lothario with a bottomless thirst and an inexhaustible fund of innuendo and smutty stories. The earnest James was gone.
Rake was a courtesy title no longer.
His sea-change came, ironically, whilst at the seaside. In Brighton, in that summer of 1813, James and Thomas and their friends all had gone whoring, as they were wont to do. They had escaped the swelter of London at the end of the Season and traveled down for some fun along the shore, following in the wake of the Prince Regent and his court. They arrived in the afternoon and by the evening, Thomas had sniffed out the best brothel. The choice was not extensive since Brighton, even when swollen with visitors, was not a large place. His friends all claimed the few available courtesans, so James shrugged, bought a small glass of whisky, and settled in a chair in the outer parlor to read a newspaper and wait for his friends.
An older man came in, found that his favorite whore was occupied by Thomas, grumbled, and sat in the wing chair opposite James. James offered him his paper but the man waved it away politely. He had an accent but spoke English well. He had dark hair, dark eyes, dark whiskers, the olive skin of the Mediterranean. He eyed James’ whisky and James called for another glass and a bottle to be brought. He knew the man would have a long wait since Thomas liked to take his time, had boundless energy, and always tried multiple positions with a doxy that was new to him.
They toasted to the whores of Brighton.
The man’s name was Astigar Zubiondoa. He was a Basque, a merchant captain. He currently carried barrels of port wine on his ship, but, he confessed to James, he personally preferred Scottish whisky. He had crossed the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas many times in his youth but now plied the shorter but still dangerous passage between the Iberian Peninsula and England. He liked to come into Shoreham-by-Sea with his ship, leave the unloading and selling to his eldest son and make the short overland trip to Brighton for the pretty ladies, more refined than those he would find in a shipping port. He regaled James with stories of his travels, of evading warships and pirates, sailing in storms. James topped up his glass again and again, and Astigar grew more and more voluble.
The man mentioned San Sebastian, a town held by the French and currently under siege by the British. The hair on the back of James’ neck stood up. Before leaving London yesterday, James had heard word of the Marquess of Wellington’s failed assault on the heavy fortifications there last week.
Astigar knew San Sebastian well. He had grown up there. There was an island in the bay called Santa Clara. It was a very small island with steep sides. It was thought to be impossible to climb. But he knew how to do that. He had done it many times with his friends growing up. There was a way on the west side. There were handholds. One could get to the top easily.
James laughed. He told Astigar that until a few years ago, he had loved to scale impossibly high things as well, but that the only climbing he did nowadays was climbing out of bedchamber windows when husbands came home too early. It was a lie, but it seemed to endear him to the merchant, who laughed at the young rogue and drank more whisky.
James then told another entirely false story about climbing Ben Nevis in Scotland when he was seventeen and the fine whisky he had drunk from a leather canteen on the way up and the Highlander’s daughter he had enjoyed on the way down. In the telling of his tale, he wove in questions about San Sebastian and the way up Santa Clara’s cliffs.
When Thomas was finally done with Astigar’s favorite whore, the Basque wine merchant got up, swayed a bit, and stumbled off to have his pleasure with the likely exhausted woman. James escorted Thomas and the other rakes back to their inn, made sure all were snoring in their beds, and hired the fittest horse he could find and rode out for London, leaving a note to explain his absence. Some problem with an unpaid tailor’s bill that his father insisted he handle immediately.
He arrived in London late in the afternoon, and at his club, he found the man who had told him about Wellington’s failed assault on San Sebastian. It was a baronet named Fudge, Charles Fudge. A bit of a fool. But he had a brother-in-law high up in the government and that was the source of his news. Would Sir Charles or his brother-in-law know how he, Marquess of Daventry, could reach someone at this hour who might be interested in some information about San Sebastian?
After a series of false leads, bureaucratic blockades, and noncommittal answers, James finally found himself at midnight in a rowboat with empty oarlocks in the middle of the Thames with Mr. Bulverton of the Home Secretary’s office. They had been towed there by another boat and then anchored and left.
“This is very private,” James said, shivering despite the heat of the August night and the suffocating humidity.
“Yes.”
“How are we going to leave this boat? I don’t fancy a swim in the sewage of the Thames.”
“No, my lord. When you have told me what you know, I will unshutter this lantern, which is a signal for the boat that towed us here to come back and pick us up.”
“If I tell you what I know.”
“Shall I unshutter the lantern now? It’s all the same to me.” Mr. Bulverton made a move toward the lantern.
“No! I mean to say . . . I just thought I would be talking to someone in the Royal Navy.”
“You tell me what you know, and if it is good information and of use, I’ll tell the navy. I am what is called the middle man. The local middle man, my lord.”
James hesitated. This ordinary Mr. Bulverton with his ink-stained cuffs was so far from James’ idea of a spymaster or a navy hero. On the other hand, likely a young Marquess of Daventry was just as far from anyone else’s idea of a spy.
Perhaps that was the point.
And that is when he had a glimmer of hope that he might have found a way out of the dullness that informed his life.
“If I tell you and the information is of use, would you let me help you again? In other ways?”
Mr. Bulverton said gravely, “We are all servants of the crown, my lord. It would be, uh, foolish to deny any of us, even a future Duke of Middlewich, the chance to serve, the chance to be useful.”
Mr. Bulverton’s words were to James like a swallow of cold water to a man in a desert.
James told him everything about the island of Santa Clara that sat in the bay outside San Sebastian and provided a perfect location for mounting guns and firing on the fortifications of the town. How it was thought to be unscalable by almost everyone, including the French, but there was a way up the cliffs on the west-by-northwest side. How it might easily be stormed by two hundred men or so. How it might be the answer to Wellington’s problems with San Sebastian’s seemingly impenetrable fortifications.
Mr. Bulverton asked many questions. Satisfied at last, he unshuttered the lantern and said, “Not a word of this to anyone, Lord Daventry.”
A month later, James read in the newspaper that the island of Santa Clara had been taken at the end of August by a small force of British sailors, and eleven days later the French garrison at San Sebastian had fallen, in part due to guns placed on the island by those self-same sailors who had valiantly crawled up the steep cliffs.
Mr. Bulverton had proven he knew how to pass information up the line.
And James had proven that he could gather that information. And keep his mouth shut.
James was unsurprised the next spring when Arthur Wellesley, already the Most Honorable Marquess of Wellington, was named the Duke of Wellington in reward for being the conquering hero on the Iberian Peninsula.
And by that time, James had behaved wickedly at several house parties and hunts—fallen over his feet, slurred drunkenly, told bawdy stories that verged on the obscene, groped a willing and mature countess, and leered at several maidens. The behavior had then spilled over into the Season.
Such a flirt, the older ladies of the ton said behind their fans. Maybe more than a flirt. He was rumored to be quite a swordsman. Wouldn’t he be a fun romp in bed? That slouch. Those tight breeches. Those seductive half-lidded eyes. And terribly funny when he had gulped a glass or five. Really, Lord Daventry who had been such a serious young man was turning into a wickedly dissolute rake. Almost a wit, one might say. No, more of a flirt. One must have him at one’s ball. He was such fun.
James felt he was finally living the life he was meant for. And the deception, playing the naughty boy, was a good measure of the fun. Especially when it was all spiced with a little danger. There was not much, but there was some, surely.
He welcomed his new, scandalous reputation. His father raged at him even more than previously, if such a thing was possible. James felt badly for his mother, but only a little. After all, she had never stopped James’ beatings. His sisters, maidens all of them, seemed impervious to the stories and not a one of them had ever looked at him askance or scolded him. For that, he was glad.
Isabella’s room at Madame Flora’s became the chosen rendezvous point for James and Mr. Bulverton. James, as would be expected of a rake, came openly through the front door of the brothel. Mr. Bulverton came through an underground passage that connected the brothel to a bakery. That accounted for the flour on his clothes. Mr. Bulverton would collect James’ information here, secretly, and give him his instructions.
Mr. Bulverton would also collect Isabella’s information. Isabella DuMornay was of French extraction on her mother’s side, which was the only side she had, really, as the illegitimate daughter of a prostitute. But she had been born in England. Her mother, a notorious French uppercrust putain and mistress to more than one aristocrat, had fled the terror of the French revolution and settled in London. Isabella had been born four years later. She was fluent in French but also affected a French accent when she spoke English. She was well known to male visitors to London from France—merchants, displaced aristocrats, others. She was their whore of choice and had been successful for a long time in teasing secrets from men. She said she acted like a child and said stupid things and the men couldn’t help but explain to her how wrong she was before they ravished her again.
James had bedded Isabella once and only once. Four years ago. Isabella had insisted. “Chérie, you must know me, for vraisemblance, for the verisimilitude. After all, all of London thinks I am your favorite, sans exception.”
They had spent an agreeable afternoon in bed so that James knew her birthmarks and her scent and Isabella could faithfully describe his cock and where he was ticklish.
But in truth, the languid Isabella did not arouse James.
James craved a woman with more spirit, more energy. An intelligence. A wit. A sparkle. A woman of the world who was still sweet. A strong woman who was still vulnerable. And who might be vulnerable to him. Who could both swoon and keep her head.
A woman like . . . Viola of Twelfth Night.
Of course, he had never met such a woman.
Until Catherine.
And now she had bolted.
He went back to London and found himself on her street two or three times a day, looking up at windows, trying to spy some movement. He called formally once a day and was always told that Mrs. Lovelock was still not at home.
