Rhapsody for Two - Theresa Romain
Chapter One
“The Duke of Amorous had many pleasures. He was equally delighted by cards as carriages, equally seduced by paramours as piquet, equally charmed by eau de vie as filles de joie.”
From How to Ruin a Duke by Anonymous
* * *
May 1819
Bond Street, London
Rowena Fairweather had many pleasures. She was as equally delighted by piecing together a damaged violin as she was at bringing an instrument into tune. She was seduced by records of income from her luthier’s shop when profits exceeded the inevitable long columns of household expenditures.
And on days like this one, when her accounts bled red ink and the rent on the shop building was soon to increase beyond a prayer of paying it, she was charmed into forgetfulness for a few brief moments by a book.
At last, her turn had come for a copy of How to Ruin a Duke, the titillating novel that had all of London Society buzzing that it was no fiction at all. Rumor had it that the book was a thinly veiled revelation about the handsome Duke of Emory’s private life—much like the novel Glenarvon that had skewered Lord Byron three years before.
The author of Glenarvon, Lady Caroline Lamb, had been ostracized for writing such a livid satire of Society. Wisely, the author of How to Ruin a Duke hid under the cloak of anonymity. Which meant London’s elite had the pleasure of gossiping not only about the Duke of Emory, but also about who could have written the book.
As a shopkeeper, Rowena was hardly a member of London’s elite. But she entered their homes to tune their pianofortes; she repaired their violins and restrung their harps. It was good business for her to know their fortunes and pedigrees…along with the latest gossip.
And so it was for business, she told herself—and not entirely for curiosity’s sake—that she had put her name down for a copy of How to Ruin a Duke. Her subscription to a circulating library—an expense shared with her friend Lady Edith Charbonneau—allowed her to devour every Gothic novel published. But today, on this misty spring day, the Duke of Amorous was more fascinating even than an insane monk or a mysterious skeleton in a castle tower.
Elbows propped on her worktable, she turned the pages of the volume with growing wonder. How much gin could a duke drink without dying of it? Why would he race from London to Brighton in a curricle by the light of the moon? In what manner could a man wager against himself in the White’s betting book?
As her right hand weighted down the pages, she gasped at one particularly scandalous anecdote. “He hid a note inside a violin?”
Lifting her head, she regarded the tools of her trade. The long worktable with the great magnifying lens in an articulated frame. Tools for carving and clamping, for applying glues and varnishes. Neat racks along the wall for scraps and planks of boxwood, rosewood, spruce, maple, ebony. Strings of pale catgut in neat loops. Instruments in all stages of repair, from the restored violin ready to be returned to Lady Davidson, to the just-arrived violoncello with a broken neck, its scrolled top and pegbox dangling sadly from the strings.
And the Duke of Amorous, and perhaps Emory, had shoved a note inside one of these lovely instruments as if it were a mail coach. Rowena shook her head. “What a monster.”
From a cushion on the workshop floor, all the better to chase and eat beetles, Rowena’s hedgehog Cotton lifted her spiny head and twitched her little black nose as if in agreement.
Had the Duke of Emory really inspired every action of his fictional near-namesake? Rowena would ask Edith. Edie had worked in Emory’s household for two years as the companion of the present duke’s mother, leaving her post only five months before. She’d know how true to life the portrayal of Emory was.
But Edith would have to wait her turn to read this book, as she had taken both Nightmare Abbey and Frankenstein before Rowena. Rowena had had to wait for endless-seeming days to read them herself, while Edith had hinted winkingly at every twist in the plots. Not that Edith would really spoil the secrets of a good novel. Unlike the Duke of Amorous, she wasn’t a monster.
As Rowena turned the page, the bell over the shop’s front door jingled.
“Hullo?” called a male voice from the other side of the velvet curtain that separated the workshop from the small public office.
Rowena sighed. How badly she had wanted