All tragedies are finish’d by a death,
All comedies are ended by a marriage.
Lord Byron
Don Juan, Canto the Third
The scandal surrounding Lord Elphick’s trial proved even more spectacular than the one that had attended his divorce. Newspapers devoted column after column to details of the trial. Mr. Cruikshank and his fellow artists created a feast of images for the print-buying public: Lord Elphick kissing Napoleon’s bum, Lord Elphick in a drunken orgy with a group of poxy damsels, Lord Elphick’s head as a toadstool growing on a dunghill, Lord Elphick defecating on a fallen Brittania, Lord Elphick stealing food from starving soldiers. These were some of the milder ones.
Each day, when his lordship was taken to Westminster for his trial, the mob pelted the carriage with dead animals and excrement, rotten fruits and vegetables being deemed insufficient to express loyal Britons’ feelings.
The trial was very long—longer than that of Queen Caroline and a good deal more sordid. In the end, to nobody’s surprise, he was found guilty.
Still he contrived to cheat justice. On the night before the execution, he was found writhing on the floor of his cell. He’d not been allowed a razor, knife, rope, or even braces, as a precaution against his doing away with himself. Excellent precautions but insufficient. He contrived somehow to get hold of poison. They found him still alive but it was too late. Nothing could be done. He died some hours later, in great agony.
Given the symptoms described in a newspaper clipping one of James’s sisters had sent, he decided it must have been arsenic. He also decided it was not suicide. “If he could contrive to get poison,” he told Francesca, “he could contrive to get a pistol or a razor. And of all poisons, to choose arsenic. So hard to get the dose right. I’ll wager anything it was a woman. It isn’t that hard to poison a prisoner.”
“Even one under vigilant guard?” said his wife. “How would you go about it?”
“I’m not telling,” he said. “If you decide to poison me, you must work it out for yourself, in the time-honored tradition of my ancestors.”
“Well, I shan’t try to guess who poisoned him,” she said. “It might have been one of any of the hundreds he used.”
“The ones who didn’t run away the instant the scandal broke,” he said.
“His dear Johanna didn’t wait that long,” she said. “She was gone before Quentin arrived in London.”
Not long after this conversation, the letters began to arrive. Lord Byron had already written gleefully to Francesca, “At least one of us is vindicated.” He’d enclosed a short poem he’d composed for the occasion, which included several naughty innuendoes about her second husband.
Lord Quentin had written, too, keeping them abreast of proceedings in London and thanking her for helping them complete the case they’d been assembling for many months.
But then, to Francesca’s great shock, came letters from old acquaintances and friends. There were letters of thanks and letters of apology.
Most shocking of all was a letter to them both from the King. Having traveled by special courier, it arrived late one day in February, long after the servants had collected the post. James and Francesca were awaiting company: Lurenze and Giulietta were to join them for dinner before they all set out for the opera.
James was lounging on the sofa, studying the putti. When they were discussing where to live as a married couple, he’d suggested they remain here at the Palazzo Neroni because the plasterwork had sentimental meaning for him.
Letter in hand, she came to sit beside him. He slid up on the cushions in order to read over her shoulder. Among other things, his majesty thanked her for putting herself in bodily danger on behalf of her country.
“Didn’t know that, did you?” James murmured, after they’d read for a moment in stunned silence. “When you were risking your life, trying to save me, you didn’t know you were performing a public service.”
“It was very good of Quentin to make me out to be a hero,” she said. “But really, I was only being stupidly in love.”
“It was very good of you to be stupid,” he said. “Stupid, but very good.”
She turned to the next page and read on. “Good heavens!” she said.
“Santo Cielo!” he said.
“The silly things,” she said. “What can they be thinking?”
“Lord and Lady Delcaire.” James looked at her. “How do you like the sound of that? We are to be ennobled—for state service, no less.”
“You are to be ennobled,” she said. “I merely go along as necessary baggage.”
“So you do, you baggage.”
“Oh, and I was just getting used to being Mrs. Cordier.”
“There are several Mrs. Cordiers, mia cara,” he said. “And more to come, undoubtedly. And only think: As my lady, you will get to wear a pretty coronet with silver balls and a coronation robe with ermine.”
“But I missed the coronation!”
“You can wear your coronet and robe to bed.”
She considered. “And nothing underneath.”
“An excellent idea. One of the many things I love about you is your fashion sense.”
“But we must go to London,” she said.
“It would be the polite thing to do,” he said. “Shall you mind? We needn’t stay permanently. But perhaps for a few months? The height of the Season?”
“How can I mind now?” she said. “My friends have asked me to forgive them. My husband has been granted a title. The height of the Season will do very well. We’ll have parties.”
The letter slid from her fingers as she became lost in happy plans. “A dinner party to start, I think. Oh, what fun it will be! I wonder if we can persuade Giulietta and Lurenze to come to London. I am sure we can manage it. If he would make her a countess or some such, no one will mind. And he is a foreign prince. Everyone lets royalty do as they please—especially foreigners. They’re not held to the same standards.” She nodded. “Yes, we can manage it.”
For a moment he only watched her, drinking in her exotically beautiful face, alight with pleasure. He could not count all the ways in which he loved her but this was, perhaps, the heart of it: her exuberance, the sheer fun of her.
“Come here,” he said. He moved closer to the back of the sofa, to make more room for her, and patted the place beside him. “I’ve never kissed Lady Delcaire before.”
“None of that,” she said primly while devilment danced in her extraordinary eyes. “You’ll wrinkle my dress.”
“That was my intention.”
“We have company coming.”
“How shocked they will be! Come, you baggage. All I want is a kiss…and perhaps a little husbandly fondling.”
She laughed and did as he bid, easing her beautiful body down alongside his. He turned her face to his and cupping her chin, kissed her, long and sweetly. She tangled her fingers in his hair and returned the sweetness.
And when at last they drew away, he looked into green eyes so soft, and thought, yes, he’d drown there, happily.
“When shall we set out?” she asked. “For London?”
“Whenever you like.” His hands strayed over the bodice of her dress. “A fortnight? How long does it take a woman to pack for a long trip?”
“I can manage in a fortnight, I think,” she said.
“We’ll come back, of course,” he said. “I’m not sure how long I can bear to be away from the children.”
She looked up at the ceiling and smiled. “They’re so ridiculous. And yet one does grow attached to them.”
“Or one attaches things to them—to their innocent bottoms, for instance.” He paused as his hand slid over the soft swell above the neckline of her gown. “That reminds me: When we do get to London, you are not to tell anyone where you’d hidden those letters.”
Her eyes, which had been fluttering closed, opened. “You never told Quentin? He never asked?”
She had stayed in the gondola that day. Quentin had come out to the landing place at San Lazzaro. Only James had left the vessel. “We don’t usually hold long discussions in such cases,” he said. “I gave him the packet and he said, ‘It’s about bloody time,’ and away he went.”
“If that was all the thanks he gave you, he doesn’t deserve to know,” she said.
“I wouldn’t have told him if he’d asked,” he said. “Who knows? Someday I might need the hiding place.” He returned his attention to his wife’s soft bosom.
“I thought you’d retired,” she said.
“I certainly did,” he said. “Despite how exciting it became with you as a partner in crime. Or anticrime, rather.”
“You said it was exciting, though. Your work.”
“By the time I came here, I’d had a bellyful of skullduggery,” he said. “But it stopped being boring when I met you. And that encounter with Marta Fazi was possibly the most hair-raising experience of my life.”
She sank back more deeply into the cushions. She lifted her hand and brushed it against his jaw. “That was exciting.”
He turned his head to kiss the palm of the hand caressing his face. “The unpredictability of you—that’s what did it. It added a thrill I’d not experienced in a long time: the thrill of sheer terror.” He frowned. “No, come to think of it, being married to you ought to be excitement enough. All the same, let’s keep the secret of the putti to ourselves, shall we?”
She traced his lips with her finger. “Sì, eccellenza,” she said.
He laughed, and she drew her hand away. “What?” she said. “Isn’t every nobleman addressed as ‘eccellenza’?”
“It’s your accent,” he said. “So English.”
“The marchese said my accent was charming.”
“It’s delicious,” he said. “You’re delicious. Forget the marchese.”
The devils were dancing again, there among the gold flecks in her eyes. “I’m not sure I can. I may need…a diversion.”
He slid his hand down the length of her magnificently curved body. “Very well, Lady Delcaire. Let’s see how diverting I can be.”