“With my body I thee worship, and with all my worldly goods I thee endow.” The duke’s voice thrummed with emotion when he said the words. He’d never fully understood how outrageously passionate they sounded, tucked in surreptitiously as they were amidst the solemnity of the rest of the vows from the Book of Common Prayer. But it was true: his body was hers. He would lay down his life for her. He would give her the world, if he could. Or at least, as many pairs of shiny satin slippers as she wanted.
There was nothing modest about the picnic that followed. It was supplied by Helga and the kitchen staff, paid for by the duke, and talked about with misty reverence by Mr. Delacorte for years to come.
(Mr. Delacorte had sold a few impotency cures to a viscount and a baron, respectively, during the intermission of the Night of the Nightingale.)
Angelique and Delilah and Captain Hardy and Lord Bolt were not shocked, though, when the duke informed them, quite calmly, of his impending nuptials, they did pretend to be surprised.
“One could almost have predicted it,” Angelique said. “Do you suppose we’re to blame?”
“I think one might say we’re to thank,” Captain Hardy countered.
Both he and Lucien felt protective of the duke’s happiness. The unknowable man had found someone who knew and loved him. They had both experienced this sort of miracle at The Grand Palace on the Thames, and had been transformed.
“Do you suppose they broke the rules while they were there?” Delilah asked.
They were all quiet, imagining how and when it had all happened. The tiptoeing to the duke’s suite in the dead of night, because that’s what must have happened. The tiptoeing back again.
Then again . . . Delilah and Angelique had stolen moments with their husbands against their own rules, too.
Of course, it was possible it had been the world’s most chaste affair. A meeting of hearts and minds over Italian lessons.
Looking at the two quietly besotted people, they really didn’t think that was the case at all.
They would rather miss having both Mariana and the duke about, but they now counted them as friends, after a fashion. And friends could be so helpful when it came to referring new guests.
For instance, even now, unbeknownst to them, a letter was winging its way to them from a wonderful potential new guest, referred to them by Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Farraday, who had been among the first to stay at The Grand Palace on the Thames (and not married to each other at the time).
But the young woman with the French accent who would knock at the door of The Grand Palace on the Thames in about a week . . . well, she was going to prove to be quite a surprise.
“I love her,” the duke told Arthur the day before the wedding ceremony, as they stood near the river together. He did not ever think he would tire of saying those three magical words in a row, but he was not and would not ever be one to gush. He’d said this firmly, unequivocally, and as a bit of a warning. “I think you will come to love her, too, and I hope this is true. Regardless, I should be grateful if you and your wife are civil and welcoming to her, regardless of your inclinations.”
Arthur, understandably, was shocked into speechlessness.
His silence was lengthy but not stormy. He was clearly reflecting. The duke simply waited, quietly, and allowed him the time to do it.
And upon reflection, Arthur found he was not shocked, after all. “I knew it was the wiles.”
But he was, carefully, teasing.
The duke laughed softly. “Oh, yes. The wiles.”
Arthur idly threw a rock into the water.
“That’s why you looked different to me that day, Father. You were happy. You were in love.”
Oh, for God’s sake.
This silenced James immediately. He did not yet have any sort of facility for discussing such a thing with his son. But he found, oddly, he did not mind being read so clearly. He hadn’t been fully known to himself, until Mariana happened along. What a strange new pleasure it was to be known by people who loved him.
“And you must miss having a wife,” Arthur suggested. He was not naive. He’d known his parents had lived apart.
“Yes,” James said, simply.
He looked forward to spending more time with Arthur, whom he loved and liked, but whose heart he could not claim to fully know. He regretted this deeply. Perhaps it could not have been helped, but he would make it right.
There were more reasons to celebrate: he learned that Lady Cathryn, Arthur’s wife, was with child. He would be a grandfather inside the year.
And the four of them, he and Mariana, Arthur and Cathryn, shed tears of joy at the news.
“I’d have people to care for,” Mariana had once said, wistfully, when she’d talked of being a cobbler’s wife.
And now she would.
And at the rate he and his new wife were going, he would also be a father again before too long.
“I think Primrose and Phillip would be wonderful names for children,” he teased, lying alongside her, spent and nude and blissfully happy, on his wedding night.
“Oh, I should think ‘James,’” she said dreamily. “‘James’ is all I think all the time, really.”
After the wedding, another message was dispatched to Paris, to regretfully inform Signor Roselli that Mariana was no longer able to play the role of the lobster. She would indeed have gone to Paris, anyhow—she loathed breaking a commitment—but James needed to stay in London for parliament, and she wouldn’t dream of leaving him for even a moment.
They sent Signor Roselli a tidy little sum to soften the blow of the loss of her and to apply toward hiring a new soprano.
“I’m afraid I’ve some difficult news,” James told his publisher two days after the wedding. “I will not be finishing my memoirs. It seems my life is not quite over yet.”
His publisher, Mr. Alcock, stared at the Duke of Valkirk with a pleasant smile, and thought, I will hang if I murder him, but would anyone blame me? Or perhaps suicide is the way to go.
“But,” the duke continued, “I’ve written something else, and I should be grateful if you’d read it.”
He’d in fact been writing a libretto.
And he’d called it The Cobbler’s Daughter.
It was Mariana’s story—their story—told right up until the moment he’d given it to Mariana to read this morning.
She’d read it, and afterward she could not speak for weeping.
His publisher read it straightaway, and lowered it slowly, and thought: Dear God, if I publish this story, I’m going to make a fortune!
He did and he did.
As it so happened, Signor Antonio Grieco, the composer who’d written the score for The Queen of the Deep, was responsible for its success. He was wonderfully gifted and craved an epic tale, a canvas upon which to unleash the whole of his talents. That canvas was The Cobbler’s Daughter.
The score he wrote was exquisite and triumphant, heartbreaking and furious, then, at last, peacefully rapturous.
Mariana would sing the lead role for a dozen or so performances. But when their third child came along—James was born two years after they were married, and Primrose and Phillip followed in quick succession after that—she happily passed the torch to another talented soprano and took parts only occasionally. She and James reveled in their family and their outrageous good fortune in finding each other, and their family, and the whole of life, sufficiently, beautifully, exquisitely operatic.