Wicked (48 page)

He stood perfectly still for a moment, staring at her, frustrated by her thwarting cavil, knowing if this was a transient impulse he could have lived his life without misery anytime these past three months. "Don't move," he quietly ordered, holding her lightly by the shoulder. Shifting his stance slightly so he could address the guests, he shouted, "She's having my baby and she won't marry me!"

"How did you know?" Serena gasped.

He spun back to face her, a smile slowly unfolding across his face. "I didn't. I just said that so your friends would pressure you to marry me. You really are?" he incredulously murmured. "Just teasing, folks!" he called out over his shoulder, ignoring the shocked, horrified expressions conspicuou
s
among the guests. "Now you
have
to marry me," he added
,
i
n
"a whisper, his mouth inches away from hers. "You're having my baby."

"That's not reason enough to marry."

"Damn right it is."

"If you sleep around, I'll kil
l
you," she warned, wondering if she was actually agreeing to take on the daunting task of keeping him faithful.

"Ditto," he countered. "Well, maybe not
kill
you," he amended, "but you'd be locked away on one of my remote country estates for the rest of your life."

She looked directly into his eyes. "We understand each other then."

"Perfectly." He blew out a breath. "This is going to be different."

"You may actually like it." A small giddy jo
l
t reminded her of the blissful degrees of happiness he could evoke.

He smiled. "I do already. A wife and a baby all in the same night. Two for the price of one."

"You're not buying me, Rochefort, the way you've bought everything else you've wanted in your life," she sternly admonished.

"Don't I know it, darling. I would have had you as my mistress months ago if you'd been for sale."

"And I'm staying in Florence until I finish my studies," she peremptorily asserted, knowing she'd be overwhelmed by him if she allowed it.

"Don't I have anything to say about it?" he mildly questioned. "The French are going to be in Florence in a few weeks."

"Perhaps we could discuss it later," she said, smiling for the first time.

"When later," he murmured, basking in her smile, knowing everything was finally resolved when she smiled like that.

"Tonight," she softly said.

"After our wedding."

"After that."

"On our honeymoon, you mean."

She offered a flirtatious caveat. "I warn you, dear Glory, I can be very demanding."

"I remember," he said, smiling faintly.

"You don't mind?" she seductively murmured.

"I'm here to serve you, ma'am," he drawled. And then the easy mannered style of the rake altered. "You have my heart, lollipop," he softly added, all the insolence stripped from his voice. "You really do."

"You've had mine from the first," she whispered.

"And you don't have to worry," he gently said. "I'll never cheat on you. My word on it."

Her eyes filled with tears. "It's a lavish gift."

He shook his head in negation. "It's nothing. From now on we'll only have glad days and sof
t
breezes and sunshine. I've put in my order," he said with a lazy smile and lifting her chin, he gently brushed her lips with his. "For us and the baby."

"I've wanted your baby from the first too."

"Not from the very first. Not on the
Siren."

"After Minorca I did."

He smiled. "Minorca was nice."

"But
you
didn't want to be a father," she reminded him, not sure even now she could visualize th
e
possibility.

"At least not till now."

A sudden terrible thought struck her. "Do you have children?"

He shook his head. "The ladies I know aren't interested in motherhood."

"Will they be surprised?"

He shrugged and said, "Who knows?" when he knew everyone in the Ton would be wildly astonished.

"Should we move to the country to escape your paramours?" she teased.

"I know how to say no," he casually replied, understanding that no matter how distant the country there would always be women, so he had to be certain of that. "And I needn't remind you I expect you to be equally incorruptible."

"I know how to say no as well."

"Really? When was that?" he impudently murmured.

"So I find you irresistible. Am I supposed to apologize?"

"Not for a thousand years at least," he said, grinning. And leaning over to kiss her he paused midpoint. "When did it become so quiet?" Swiveling his head, he took note of the keen scrutiny focused on them, all activity arrested as if they were performing on a stage. "Haven't they ever seen a man and woman talk before?" he murmured.

"Your remark about my pregnancy may have piqued their curiosity," Serena sardonically noted.

"Give m
e
the rings," he briskly ordered, reaching for the boxes in her hand. Plucking the rings out, he slid them on her f
i
ngers. "Now
we're
formally
engaged," he said, patting her hand with avuncular complaisance.

"Will it be a long engagement?" she asked with levity.

"Longer than I'd lik
e
—
t
en minutes, maybe eleven. . . . Now smile, darling, for our rapt audience." And swinging her around with him, Beau proclaimed, "Miss Blythe has had a change of heart." He held her hand with the glittering rings aloft. "She's done me the honor of accepting my marriage proposal. You're all invited to our wedding—
t
o be celebrated forthwith."

A collective gasp masked Serena's whisper.

"If the Castellis allow us the use of their salon," Beau added, reminded of their hosts.

Beaming, Julia nodded her approval.

"Do we need a priest?" Beau inquired in an undertone.

Serena shook her head. "But we need Mrs. Calvacanti. She's been adamant I marry. She wouldn't want to miss this."

"Marry whom?" A small scowl formed between Beau's brows.

"Preferably you but she wasn't fussy. Father Danetti was one of her numerous candidates."

"Numerous
candidates?" he repeated with heated male affront.

"Hers, not mine.
/
had no candidates."

"You'd better not have had."

"Don't take that tone, darling, or I may find I prefer a priest after all."

"You're marrying me," he curtly declared. "It's
my
child."

"Maybe," she sweetly said.

"What the hell does that mean?"

"It means I'll marry whom I please." It never hurt to set boundaries.

"Just so long as it's me." Another boundary setter.

Serena's mouth twitched into a smile. "I can see you're going to be difficult to control."

"Impossible, I think, is the word generally used," he softly murmured, his answering smile luscious as sin.

"Our life should be interesting then."

"And happy . . .
madly
happy."

"Yes," she whispered. "Always . . . with you."

"Come here," he said, pulling her close. "Where I can keep you safe from the other matrimonial candidates until the wedding, my sweet seductress . . . my joy, my deligh
t
—"

"My honeymoon fantasy," she breathed.

He paused an infinitesimal moment, her hand enclosed in his, the scent of possibility nearly palpable. "In an hour," he quietly said. "We should be married by then. Can you wait?" he graciously asked, because he knew she often couldn't.

Her eyes sparkled with merriment. "I'd like an abbreviated ceremony."

"Done," he said, competent and assured.

"And a
long
honeymoon."

"Would a lifetime do?" Whisper soft, he offered her paradise.

"I'd like that," she said, her eyes suddenly filling with tears.

When he kissed he
r
—
a
boyish, deep-in-
l
ove kis
s
—
a
n outburst of applause rippled over them, followed by gasps and giggles as their kiss deepened, took on risky undertones of scandal. Raised eyebrows, broad smiles, and knowing glances ensued.

But the Earl of Rochefort and his bride-to-be didn't notice
.

They were conscious only of the warm magic of love.

They were married in the Castellis' parlor a short time later, the ceremony delayed only briefly, awaiting Mrs. Ca
l
vacanti's arrival and the delivery of several cases of Champagne. Most of the guests were delighted by Serena's nuptials and those men disgruntled at the news soon realized that she was enormously happy and contented themselves with that.

The honeymoon lasted a month, until the French armies approached Florence, as Beau knew they would and then he persuaded Serena to go back to England at least for the sake of the baby. She couldn't argue with such sound logic, and after packing all her paints and canvases, the young St. Jules couple left for Leghorn on the first stage of their journey home.

They were feted at Palermo and then at Minorca, where they stopped for an amorous fortnight holiday, the news that the Earl of Rochefort had been caught so precipitously a great wonder to all who knew him. The ladies wished to meet his new bride, who had managed what no one else could, and the men were fascinated to see the woman who could hold Beau's interest.

Serena was large with child when they reached London, although it was still early fall, and Chelsea immediately said, "Twins" when she saw her daughter-in-law, while Beau said with a pleased smile, "Who is this?" of the baby in his stepmother's arms. He was introduced to his two-week-old baby brother by his other siblings, who now felt very grown-up with a newborn in the house. Serena immediately asked if she could hold Ian and father and son stood apart from the noisy, milling group cooing over the baby and exchanged complacent glances. Life was good.

The twins came early, as is often the cas
e
—
t
he first week of Februar
y
—
a
nd the Earl and Countess of Rochefort welcomed a tiny boy and girl into the world. The infants were very fragile but a score of midwives kept them warm with hot bricks wrapped in lamb's wool and they thrived. By spring Felicity and Seth were plump and cooing, the absolute center of their parents' life.

And the young Earl of Rochefort found he preferred his country home and his family to the gaming rooms and vice-ridden activities in his past. "Can't explain it," he'd say when his friends would rail at his tame amusements and lack of interest in their amorous play, "but I recommend it. Vastly."

1.
        
See page 2. When Great Britain plunged into the revolutionary
wars at the beginning of 1793, her national debt amounted to
£230,000,000. From that point the war was financed by means of
loans to such an extent that the funded debt for Great Britain and
Ireland at the time of the Peace of Amiens in
18
02 had risen to the
astounding sum of £507,000
,
000. The figure is perhaps best
understood when contrasted with the funded debt of England at
the outbreak of World War I. In 1914 it amounted to no more
than £587,000,000.

Both in England and on the Continent during this period, there were doubts as to the durability of the British system of credit, particularly after the Bank Restriction Act of 1797, which released the Bank of England from the obligation to redeem its note
s
—
a
n obligation it didn't resume for twenty-two years. Great Britain had a paper currency throughout the whole of the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods.

2.
        
See page 74. Sponges as a form of contraception have been used since ancient times and Mediterranean sponges were always readily available. The sponge in various forms, with or without strings attached for ease of removal, functioned as a mechanical barrier to sperm.

3.
        
See page 97. Angelica Kauff
m
an and Mary Cosway are two examples of female artists much feted by British society in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Kauffman, Swiss-born and trained in Italy, spent the years 1766—81 in London, where she became a founding member of the Royal Academy of Art. Her neoclassic history paintings garnered high praise throughout England and Europe; she was much in demand for her portraits as well. Her client list included a glittering array of international nobles who paid her enough to make her a wealthy woman. Married when she was young to an imposter masquerading as a count, she separated from him immediately when his duplicity was revealed, but she wasn't able to remarry until he died in 1780. Her second husband was the Italian artist Antonio Zucchi.

Mary Had
fi
eld Cosway, born in England and trained in Rome, married Richard Cosway, a painter of miniatures who had the patronage of the Prince of Wales. Her paintings, mostly poetica
l
—
C
upid and Venus, Psyche, Rinaldo and Ar
m
id
a
—
w
ere first exhibited at the Royal Academy in
17
80.

She and her husband enjoyed entree into the finest aristocratic circles and their receptions were always crowded with the most select lords and ladies. They lived as ostentatiously as the wealthiest of aristocrats, but after the prince regent turned his portly back on Richard Cosway because of Cosway's imprudent sympathy for the French Revolution, the splendid crowds melted away.

The haut
m
onde was always fascinated and intrigued with the newest fashionable artists but with a dilettante and fleeting interest. Artists were reguarded as distinguished craftsmen, not equals, no matter how charming their social aquaintance might be. As for those nobles who dabbled at painting, they never actually
sold
their work; it would have been déclassé.

4.
        
See page
16
9. Lord Byron in
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
had sung the praises of Sintr
a
—
t
hat "glorious Eden." He writes to his mother in August 1809: "The village of Cintra, about fifteen miles from Lisbon, is, perhaps in every respect, the most delightful in Europe; it contains beauties of every description, natural and artificial. Palaces and gardens rising in the midst of rocks, cataracts and precipices; convents on stupendous height
s
—
a
distant view of the Sea and the Tagus. ... It unites in itself all the wildness of the western
highlands, with the verdure of France."

5.
        
See page 172. The Carronade was a short, lightweight ship's gun developed by the Carron Ironworks in Scotland in 1778. It was a
 
weapon of particular attraction to the merchant marine. Because it was light, it was also relatively cheap and could be handled by a very small crew, an important consideration on merchant ships. The gun was optimal for short-range work.

6.
        
See page 174. Larboard is the port or left side of a ship as one looks forward.

7.
        
See page 198. Chelsea's proposal is on page 12 of
Sinful
by .

8.
        
See page 199
.
Divorce in England required an act of Parliament. Disturbed by France's legalization of divorce on grounds of mutual incompatibility in 179
2
—
a
fter which the floodgates of divorce opened in Franc
e
—
c
onservatives in England attempted to make divorce harder to obtain.

The first concrete attempt to turn back the tide of divorce petitions to the House of Lords was the introduction by the lord chancellor in 1798 of a new set of Standing Orders, known as Lord Loughborough's Rules.

The first of the Standing Orders of 1798 demanded that an official copy of proceedings for separation in an ecclesiastical court be provided to the House with every bill of divorce. The second Standing Order was more far-reaching. It ordered that every petitioner must present himself at the bar of the House, to be cross-examined about possible collusion and prior separation.

In the hands of an energetic and intelligent lord chancellor, these Standing Orders offered a formidable weapon. Even before their passage, Lord Thurlow, lord chancellor from 1778 to 1792, had shown that it was possible, by relentlessly harassing petitioners, both to drive down the numbers applying and to increase the proportion of bills that were rejected. Whereas in the fourteen years before he took office, all 37 petitioners for divorce had been successful, during Thurlow's chancellorship the success rate fell to twenty-five out of thirty-two. (Note the small number of divorce
s
—
t
hirty-seven in fourteen years. Divorce wasn't an option generally considered except in extreme circumstances.)

In 18
01
Lord E
l
don succeeded Lord Loughborough in the office of lord chancellor; he was to hold it for over a quarter of a century, until 1827. Using to the full the new powers of investigation offered by the Standing Orders of 1798, E
l
don by fierce cross-examination almost single-handedly succeeded for at least his first twenty years in office in frightening off petitioners and greatly increasing the number of bills that were abandoned, withdrawn, or rejected.

Under those conditions, it behooved a petitioner to have a strong phalanx of supporters in his camp.

9.
See page 209. When King Ferdinand's Neapolitan army was
routed from Rome and the French followed the retreat in hot pursuit, the royal family fled Naples. But the escape had to be kept
secret or the populac
e
—at times more resembling a mo
b
—
m
ight
try to prevent the king from leaving the city.

Prior to their departure, the royal family's possessions, including the crown jewels and the state treasury, were secretly brought down to the quay from the palace in covered wagons in the dead of night. And on the evening of December 21, 1798, under the cloak of a grand reception for the Turkish minister, the Hamiltons, and royal family along with numerous courtiers, diplomats, ambassadors, and household servants, surreptitiously slipped away from the festivities and made their way on foot to the quay, where boats took them out to Admiral Nelson's ship in the bay.

After a storm-tossed journey in which the royal family's young son died and many passengers feared for their lives in the turbulent seas, the
Vanguard
at last sailed into Palermo harbor on the twenty-sixth. The royal court would remain in Sicily until the Peace of Amiens was signed in
18
02.

10.
      
See page 2
11
. Emma Hamilton had come a long way from her
humble birth as the daughter of a blacksmith in Cheshire. Sent out
to work as an under-nurse
m
aid at twelve, by sixteen she was the
past mistress of one of the Prince of Wales's most intimate cronies,
Captain John Willett Payne, and the current mistress of Sir Harry
Fetherstonhaugh. She had a daughter at this time, fathered by
either of those men, and soon after when she was deserted by
Fetherstonhaugh, she came under the protection of the Hon.
Charles Greville, second son of the Earl of Warwick and nephew of
Sir William Hamilton.

When Emma was twenty, Greville found a rich heiress to marry—
a
necessity for a penurious younger so
n
—
a
nd wishing to dispose of his mistress, struck a deal with his uncle to have Emma come stay with him in Naples. Sir William was reluctant although he found Emma very pretty and likable. He knew she was in love with Greville.

But Greville persisted and Emma was sent to Naples ostensibly, for a brief visit. She didn't know her exile would be permanent.

As the months passed and Greville didn't appear in Naples to fetch her home, she became frantic with anxiety, writing him poignant, pleading letters asking him to come to her. Receiving no reply, Emma was forced in the end to realize Greville had no intention of coming.

Although she was fond of Sir William, she still resisted his polite advances. But after a time rumors began circulating that they were married; she began serving as hostess for him and was accepted as such by Neapolitan society. On returning to England in 1791, Sir William received the king's permission to marry Emma and they became husband and wife September 6 at St. George's, Hanover Square.

Sir William never regretted his marriage. "I have no reason to repent of a step which I took contrary to the approbation of the world," he told Lady Mansfield. "Marrying Emma was my own business. I knew what I was doing for as you know I had lived with her for five years before I married. . . . Look round your circle of prudent well assorted matches in the great world and see how few turn out so well as our seemingly imprudent one."

11.
See page 223. £10,000 in today's terms is equivalent to
£600,000.

12.
      
See page 227. "Monkey" was the slang term for fifty pounds.

13.
      
See page 2
53.
Sir John Acton officially held a minor ministerial post in the government of Sicily, but was one of the most influential advisers to Queen Marie Caroline. Sir John had intended to remain a bachelor and to bequeath his estate in Shropshire to his younger brother Joseph. But since Joseph had served in the French army, he was disbarred from inheriting. So Sir John asked his brother for the hand of his daughter, who was not yet fourteen. Joseph had no objection: a papal dispensation for Sir John to marry his young niece was forthcoming. But the girl herself was naturally reluctant to marry an uncle sixty-four years old. She hid under the sofa while Sir John and her father discussed her disposal and then attempted to escape from the house in boy's clothing. Caught as she was running across the courtyard, she was brought back and married in the Hami
l
tons' house by Lord Nelson's chaplain.

14. See page 259
.
During the siege of Genoa, Major Franceschi had been sent off by General Massena on April 24 with a dispatch to Bonaparte detailing the serious condition
of
the garrison. On May 27, after leaving Antibes in a rowboat
,
he slipped past the British corvettes blockading Genoa and swam ashore with a letter from Bonaparte written a fortnight previously, informing Massena that the Reserve Army had begun to cross the St. Bernard Pass. This was tremendous news for Massena, who knew the Austrians would be compelled to turn round to face Bonaparte in a few days and abandon the siege. Massena calculated that Bonaparte might be able to break through to Genoa and raise the siege by the thirtieth. He was determined not to capitulate before that dat
e
—
t
he latest his rations would last.