Page 5 of A Duke in Disguise
“Are you sleeping, Nate?” Ash asked. Their rooms shared a wall, and sometimes Ash heard stirring from his friend’s chamber well past midnight. Nate had never been a sound sleeper, and seemed to require only half the sleep of the average person, but now he looked haggard.
“Not much. And what sleep I get is... not good.” Ash reached out to put a sympathetic hand on Nate’s shoulder. “I’m not going to feel bad for myself,” Nate insisted. “There are bigger troubles in the world than my bad dreams.”
“If you put them aside just for an evening, you might wake and feel even more equipped to fight some of those troubles,” Ash said, squeezing his friend’s shoulder before dropping his hand.
“It’s not like that. I can’t just take off my worries like an ill-fitting coat.” He frowned at Ash. “Talk about something else, will you?”
“What was Mrs. Allenby doing here?” Ash tried to sound casual.
“She called on Verity for a quarter of an hour. I don’t think they’re resuming their...” He made a vague gesture that Ash decided was meant to suggest sexual congress. “If that’s what you’re asking.”
“Ah.” Ash tried not to sound relieved. “I didn’t realize their... liaison had ended.”
“And it’s a damned pity, because my sister was a lot easier to deal with when she was going to bed with Portia. I don’t even like the woman, filthy snob that she is. But I’d dearly like Verity to take up with almost anybody if it meant she’d stop nagging me for half a minute.”
Ash bit back a smile at the reminder that Nate was more concerned with the political inclinations of his sister’s lover than with her gender. A sapphic love affair with a proper revolutionary would be entirely satisfactory as far as Nate was concerned.
Ash climbed the stairs and found Verity sitting at her desk, a stack of magazines before her. It was only noon, but already her hair had escaped the confines of her coiffure, and no fewer than three ink spots adorned her face.
“Oh, there you are, Ash. Where have you been?” She gestured at the portfolio he carried.
“Southampton Street. I had to drop off the finished plates.”
“Oooh,” Verity said with an enthusiasm that was neither facetious nor completely sincere. “What will the ladies be wearing this winter?”
“The usual. Fur and velvet and miles of blond lace. Enough to have one longing for the guillotine along with your brother.” Ash was not unaware of the tension between his two principal sources of employment—drawing political caricatures for radical pamphlets, and producing fashion plates designed to sell ridiculous fripperies at unconscionable prices to people who had more money than anybody needed, all while their fellow men starved in the street. “The good news is that waistlines will be dropping.”
“Well, they could hardly go any higher. Today Portia had on a gown that shouldn’t be physically possible.”
“Annie,” he said, referring to the dressmaker who was his principal source when drawing fashion plates, “says that now every shopgirl has hoisted her bosoms up to her armpits, the ladies will allow theirs to descend.”
“What a relief,” Verity said, affecting a refined accent. “One does like to breathe.” Verity herself had on a simple brown woolen frock, with a plain cambric fichu tucked into the neckline. He knew she also had a black dress, equally plain and severe, because he had seen her wear it to the gravesides of both her parents. “Do you think I could write an advice column?”
Ash strove to find a diplomatic way to sayNo, definitely not. “Well, perhaps of the more bracing sort. Some people do like being flogged. Specialized interest, you know.”
“I can be sympathetic,” she protested.
“To people you agree with, certainly.”
“Am I really that bad?”
“There’s nothing bad about it. You’re uncompromising. It’s one of the things I like best about you. But why are you writing an advice column?”
“I’ve decided to start a ladies’ magazine. Advice columns seem to be common, and they’re among the features I could conceivably write myself, which would make it cheap to put together. A serialized novel, some theater reviews, maybe a fashion plate if you’d oblige.”
“Did I hear somebody say advice columns?” asked Nate, appearing in the doorway. “Are we talking about Mrs. Merriweather?” All traces of his earlier worry were gone from his face, and he looked like the mischievous, cheerful lad he had been not so long ago. “I think I want to marry Mrs. Merriweather,” he said, putting a hand over his heart and striking what he doubtless thought a romantic pose.
“I want to elect Mrs. Merriweather to Parliament,” Ash mused.
“Don’t tell me you both read theLadies Gazette?” Verity asked.
“TheGazette,theLadies’ Mercury,theLady’s Magazine, all of them. But Mrs. Merriweather at theGazetteis the best of the lot.”
“Dear Mrs. Merriweather,” Ash said, as if reading aloud. “I discovered that my husband has a wife and children in Barnstaple—”
“This other wife is a very low sort—” Nate chimed in.
“Wears the cheapest muslin frocks—”
