Desperate Duchesses by Eloisa James Page A

surely came as no surprise?”
    “That’s my Harriet! I missed your peppery little comments. You always deflated my absurdities.” She leaned forward. “Are you al right? You seem tired.”
    “I should be quite over Benjamin’s death,” Harriet said. “It’s been twenty-two months. But somehow thinking of him makes me tired, and I can’t stop thinking, no matter how I try.”
    “Thinking of Beaumont makes me tired, and he’s not even dead. At any rate, Frenchwomen make difficult friends. They’re given to thinking that Englishwomen are, by nature, inelegant and rather foolish. But even if one overcomes the prejudices of one’s nationality, I have never felt as easy with a Frenchwoman as I do with you, Harriet.” And as if to demonstrate her point, she stood up, reached under her skirts and untied her panniers. With a little clatter they fel to the ground and Jemma curled bonelessly back into the chair. “Go on,” she said, “you do it too! You are spending the day with me, aren’t you? I must introduce you to Roberta; she’s a young relative come to live with me and make her debut.”
    Harriet hesitated. “You have a bal tomorrow. Surely you have—”
    “Absolutely not! I have a marvelous secretary who handles al the wretched details of putting on an event. She thrives on it. My role is to stay to my rooms and keep out of the way.”
    Harriet got up and dumped her hoops. “How I loathe these things.”

    “I adore them,” Jemma said. “There’s nothing better than arranging huge swathes of silk just so; one always makes a grand entrance if one’s hoops are large enough. This season the fashion in Paris is for smal er panniers, which in itself was a good reason to leave.”
    Since Harriet loathed the idea of a grand entrance under any circumstances, and particularly with huge wire baskets attached to her sides, she changed the subject. “So who is Roberta, and what is her surname?”
    “Lady Roberta St. Giles. She’s great fun; I am persuaded the two of you wil like each other enormously. The only problem is that she’s quite desperately in love and the man is rather unlikely.” She reached out toward the bel cord. “I’l ask if she could join us, shal I? She’s been in fittings for a bal gown but perhaps she is finished.”
    But Harriet quickly waved her hand. “I want to ask you something first.”
    Jemma dropped the cord. “Of course.”
    “It’s—It’s about Benjamin.” Whenever she brought up her dead husband, people’s faces took on one of two expressions.
    If they knew only that she was a widow, their faces took on a practiced look of sympathy, often quite genuine. They would offer stories of aunts who were widowed and found true love a mere week afterward, as if she, Harriet, were lusting to marry over the very coffin of her husband.
    But if they knew that Benjamin committed suicide, their faces had an entirely different look: more guarded, more truly sympathetic, slightly horrified, as if suicide were a contagious disease. No one offered stories of relatives who put themselves to death.
    Jemma looked purely sympathetic.
    “He kil ed himself,” Harriet said bluntly. “He shot himself in the head after losing a game at which he gambled a great deal of money.”
    Jemma blinked at her for a moment. Then she jumped out of her chair and plumped down next to Harriet. Without panniers, the chair was more than wide enough for both of them. “That is absolutely terrible,” she said, wrapping an arm around her. “I’m so sorry, Harriet. No one told me.”
    Tears stung her eyes. “I’ve gotten used to it.”
    “Does one? I supposed I would get over my husband doing such a thing, simply because we aren’t very close to each other. But you and Benjamin—how could he do such a thing?”
    “I don’t know.” Despite herself her voice cracked a bit, and Jemma’s arm tightened. “He was so miserable. He was never good at being miserable.”
    “No, I think of him as always