A look of horror gathered in his eyes. “The public room? Are you quite sure, Your Grace? I noted a few unsavory-looking fellows in there, and I dislike to think of you exposing yourself to such company.”
Wilhelmina laughed. “One of those fellows is a captain in the Royal Navy and an old friend. I am going to have tea with him. With your approval, of course.”
“Your Grace!” He reared back, looking offended. “I would never presume to approve or disapprove of anything you chose to do.”
“I am happy to hear it. Now, be so good as to direct me to my room, and then send Marsh to me.”
“This way, Your Grace. And I believe Miss Marsh is waiting for you.” He led her up a narrow flight of stairs that turned back on itself twice before reaching the next floor.
The bedchamber she’d been given-or that Smeaton had commandeered-was clean and spacious, with a simple stone-fronted fireplace, solid oak furniture, and a bank of diamond-paned windows overlooking the inn yard. The bed-large and plain, hung with old damask bed curtains-dominated the room. Ginny, Wilhelmina’s maid, was making up the bed in the fine linen sheets they’d brought with them. The inn’s sheets lay in a heap on the floor. Marsh, her dresser, was unpacking a trunk and draping dresses over chairs in front of the freshly made fire so the heat might loosen any wrinkles or creases. They both bobbed curtsies when she entered the room.
“I have laid out a few dresses for you to choose from, Your Grace. I had thought this one…?” Marsh indicated a plain jaconet dress with a high standing collar of Vandyke lace. It was simple enough for a day indoors at a country inn, but not what Wilhelmina had in mind. She shook her head, and Marsh held up another simple dress of sprigged muslin. No, that wouldn’t do, either. Marsh seemed put out of countenance that Wilhelmina should reject her advice for dresses that were perfectly appropriate.
But Marsh wasn’t having tea with Captain Sam Pellow. Some might think the dowager Duchess of Hertford was past her prime-they would be wrong-but she still wanted to look her best when meeting a gentleman. And this was no ordinary gentleman. This was Sam. Her Sam. Her first love.
She selected a dress of French figured muslin with long sleeves and a crossed bodice and a neckline that provided a hint of cleavage. Wilhelmina was proud of her figure, which did not, she believed, show the matronly sags and bulges one might expect from a woman her age. She might as well show Sam that she still had the makings of a desirable woman.
Or perhaps she was being foolish. Sam would never desire her again. She might be a duchess now, but there had been a time when her favors had been for sale. And that was something he would never be able to forget, or forgive.
Ginny helped her out of the bonnet and pelisse while Marsh tried to smooth wrinkles out of the French muslin. Wilhelmina stood like a mannequin and allowed them to minister to her, as her thoughts drifted back to simpler times, when she and Sam were children in the Cornish village of Porthruan Cove.
Wilma Jepp, as she’d then been called, was the only daughter of the local blacksmith. Sam had lost his parents as a boy and had supported himself as a fisherman from the time he was about twelve. When he was sixteen, he’d suddenly shot up to a great height and become what Willie and the other local girls thought to be exceedingly handsome. But he’d only had eyes for Willie, the village beauty. They fell madly, wildly in love, as teenagers do, and talked of marrying one day when Sam had saved enough money to build a cottage.
Willie’s mother, a strict Methodist, had not approved of the impertinent young fisherman who lived by his wits and had nothing to recommend him. She had once caught Sam and Willie kissing, and had beaten Willie mercilessly for it. But that hadn’t stopped Willie’s youthful passion for the handsome young fisherman. When she was sixteen and Sam eighteen, they finally gave in to their desire one day and made love in a hayloft in her father’s barn.
A week later, he was gone.
Sam had not returned from fishing one day, and the next day his empty boat had washed ashore, damaged, with his gear still on board and a scrap of fabric caught on a nail. Everyone in the village assumed he’d had an accident in the boat and drowned.
Willie had been distraught with grief and ready to die, until she was befriended by a visiting London artist who was obsessed with her face and painted picture after picture of her. When her mother learned she was posing for a painter, she’d been livid, and eventually threw Willie out of the house. Some months later, having lost her love and her home and figuring she had nothing left to lose, Wilma Jepp had become Wilhelmina Grant and the artist’s mistress. Her face became her fortune, and soon she left the artist for another man’s protection, and then another, until she was courted by some of the highest men in the realm.
For five years she had cherished memories of the boy she had loved and lost, often dreaming of what might have been. But all those sentimental fantasies had been shattered in an instant when he’d walked into her box at the theater one night-alive, angry, and accusing.
Wilhelmina had been shocked to the core to see him. She had very nearly swooned, thinking at first she’d seen a ghost. Sam was then a midshipman in the Royal Navy, and she learned that he had been taken by a press gang back in ’89 when she thought he’d died. Though he claimed to have written her, she never received his letters. All that time he’d been alive and she’d never known.
And so Wilhelmina, by then a well-known demirep, had to face a furious Sam who didn’t understand why she had not waited for him. Even when she explained, he could not forgive her for the life she’d chosen to lead, for giving herself to other men. He had broken her heart when he’d walked away from her, shocked and angry and unwilling to forgive, and had taken a piece of that shattered heart with him. Five years after the wrenching pain of losing him, she lost him a second time.
Wilhelmina had never forgotten the boy she’d loved, and saw him a handful of times since that awful first reunion. Though she regretted having lost him, she could not turn back the clock. She had to live with the choices she’d made. And she’d done well for herself. She’d been with ambassadors and princes, generals and poets, even a prime minister. And her last protector, the Duke of Hertford, had loved her, and scandalized society when he married her.
All things considered, she’d had a wonderful life. A better life than she could ever have had if she’d stayed in Porthruan Cove. She had money and position, and now even a degree of respectability.
But she had sacrificed her first love for it, though she had not known so at the time.
Many years had passed, and she and Sam had mellowed with age. He no longer seemed to scorn her, and she no longer countered his scorn with arrogant condescension. They were mature adults who’d taken different paths but could perhaps meet in friendship, for old times’ sake.
Wilhelmina had hardly noticed the actions of Marsh, who’d removed her traveling clothes and dressed her in the French figured muslin dress with the deep vee neckline and the pretty rows of lace at the wrists and the hem. There was only a small dressing table mirror in the room, but it was enough to tell Wilhelmina that the dress flattered her, and she was satisfied. Her hair was still flattened from the bonnet, however, and she sat at the small desk that doubled as a dressing table while Ginny worked her magic. She unpinned the shoulder-length locks that were still golden-nature’s gold, not artifice, as some people believed-brushed them out, then deftly refashioned a French knot at the back, tied up with a ribbon of lace, and teased loose curls over the forehead and temples.