Page 59 of From Unwanted to Duchess
“So this is the mysterious bride,” he said, looking her up and down appraisingly. “James, you sly dog. You’ve done well for yourself. You must be the Duchess I have heard so little about.”
Frances raised her eyebrows at James. “You did not tell your dear friend about our wedding?”
“About the wedding, yes. Clearly, he knows—he just referred to you as the Duchess. But no, I have not had a chance to tell him much else.”
“You see, I have been overseas,” Gideon explained. “I had business to attend to in Spain, and I have just returned. I received news of your marriage, of course, and I must say that I am most surprised. Pleasantly so.” He shifted in his seat and crossed one leg over the other. “I have to apologize for interrupting your conversation. I caught the tail end of it, and it sounded most intriguing. Were you talking about Wentworth?”
“Indeed, we were,” Frances confirmed.
“No, we were not,” James said.
“I shall go with your wife on this, dear friend. Pray, have you had a run-in with that insufferable prig?”
“He was a guest at my godmother’s tea party a few weeks ago, and he goes by Blatt these days.”
“Does he now? His old man cocked up his toes at last? Well, it was about time. The man was almost seventy years old. And is he as delightful as ever?”
Frances gathered from Gideon’s tone that he did not think Lord Blatt had ever been delightful in any capacity. He had always been an insufferable prig, even as a lad.
“Frances found him most charming,” James said, jealousy lacing his voice.
How dare he act jealous when he had barely given her the time of day? In fact, this was the most she had heard him speak in weeks.
“Did you now?” Gideon asked.
“I found him pleasant enough,” Frances said. “But a few of his opinions did not sit right with me.”
“Wentworth posited the idea that we might have our heads chopped off once the common folk discovered that they outnumber us,” James scoffed.
Gideon roared with laughter. “Did he now? He was always a silly fellow who did not understand anything about his environment. Commoners are well aware that they outnumber us, and there were many times in history where they could’ve overtaken us quite easily, but they never will. Not by force, anyway. I imagine the time of the great houses will eventually come to an end, but it will not be through a violent uprising.”
“That is exactly what I told her.” James smiled at Frances, seeming most pleased with himself.
“How do the two of you know him?” she asked.
Gideon looked at James and smirked, before grabbing a loaf of bread that had just been placed down and ripping it in half. “We all went to Eton together. What a horrid creature he was, even back then. Made James’s life a perfect misery.”
Hadn’t Marianne said something like that? Frances remembered her cousin mentioning it.
“In what way?” she asked.
“We need not rehash the past,” James said, before taking a spoonful of soup.
“Well, you see,” Gideon went on, ignoring him entirely. “James here was somewhat of a pariah. He was never selected first for any game, not even second, usually toward the end. Always the last man standing, poor devil. Unless I was the captain, then he was always first.” He winked at his friend. “Then there were people like Wentworth, who liked to pick on people who they thought were beneath them.”
“Beneath them?” Frances frowned in confusion. “But James is a duke’s son.”
“A second son,” James corrected her. “A spare, not an heir. In titled circles, that does not mean much. After all, how often does tragedy befall both the title holder and his heir? I was quite the exception. In any case, Wentworth delighted in finding ways to torment poor James here. There was, of course, the incident where they pushed him face-first into some cold soup, sending him to the infirmary?—”
“I thought it was scalding hot,” Frances cut in.
“They had placed a pot of steaming hot tea right beside it so it looked like steam was blowing up into the air,” James explained. “Dunked me like a biscuit in tea.”
“Yes. Another time, they emptied a chamber pot’s worth of night soil into his bed, and he had to scrub the bedsheets and the floor, and everyone in our dormitory knew. The vilest prank imaginable.”
Frances cringed. “That is terrible.”
“I was a child,” he said. “A foolish child.”
