Playing the Duke's Mistress (Historical) Read online

  “Every actress wants to marry a duke!”

  Every actress, it seems, apart from leading lady Miss Calista Fairmont. And for Darius Carlyle, the Duke of Albury, that poses a challenge he can’t resist. So, to prove to his hapless cousin that all actresses are title-hunters, Darius will persuade Calista to assent to his marriage proposal!

  Calista wants nothing to do with Darius, but when she discovers the compassionate man behind the arrogant duke she also uncovers an attraction that addles her senses... Before long she’s considering her own proposal—to become his mistress!

  Against her white skin Miss Fairmont’s blue eyes were as brilliant as sapphires.

  “Is it beyond your imagination that some actresses might not want a coronet? I am one of them. I answer to the stage, not to a duke.”

  “Come, come,” he said. “You’re indulging in play-acting now.”

  Her eyes snapped blue fire. “You seem to think being a titled wife is such a prize. Why, I’d rather be a mistress than a wife to an aristocrat like you.”

  “My mistress?” He raised a brow. “At least you’ve made your price clear.”

  “You’re twisting my words,” she said through pinched lips. “I merely mean to say that being a duke’s wife is not what every actress wants.”

  Author Note

  I’ve always applauded the daring of great actresses of the past. Historically, ladies of the stage were considered not much better than ladies of the night. For centuries, being an actress was a scandalous if not dangerous profession, and the most an actress might expect was to become a wealthy man’s mistress. But in the nineteenth century this began to change. My interest was piqued when I discovered that a so-called “epidemic” of actresses married into the aristocracy. The theater became a marriage market as well as a playhouse.

  Playing the Duke’s Mistress is set in the theatrical world of Victorian London in the mid-nineteenth century. At that time many actresses were labeled title-hunters or worse—as Darius Carlyle, the Duke of Albury, initially suspects actress Calista Fairmont to be. Yet not every actress wants a coronet...

  Happy reading!

  Eliza Redgold

  Playing the Duke’s Mistress

  Eliza Redgold is an author, academic and unashamed romantic. She was born in Scotland, is married to an Englishman and currently lives in Australia. She loves to share stories with readers! Get in touch with Eliza via Twitter, @elizaredgold; on Facebook.com/elizaredgoldauthor; and Pinterest.com/elizaredgold. Or visit her at Goodreads.com and elizaredgold.com.

  Books by Eliza Redgold

  Harlequin Historical

  Enticing Benedict Cole

  Playing the Duke’s Mistress

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  For my muse, Nell Gwynne. If she’d learnt to write, she’d have penned a witty play.

  And for my long-time friend Erika Jacobson, playwright and fellow PhD finisher, who loves Nell too.

  Acknowledgments

  My thanks go first to my fabulous editor, Nicola Caws, at Harlequin Mills & Boon in London, who brought this book into being. Thank you, Nicola, for your patience, tact, insight and for your brilliant editing skills. You are amazing! Thanks to the Wordwrights critique group for their comments on early chapters and to my critique partner, Jenny Schwartz, who calls a plot a plot—writing would be no fun without our beachside café meetings. I’d also like to express my gratitude to the romance writing community, at home and abroad, for their warmth and generosity. Thanks also to my academic colleagues, including those in the emerging field of “Love Studies.” Finally, thank you to all the romance readers worldwide who keep the dream alive. Long live love!

  Who writes, should still let nature be his care,

  Mix shades with lights, and not paint all things fair,

  But shew you men and women as they are.

  With def’rence to the fair, he bade me say,

  Few to perfection ever found the way:

  Many in many parts are known t’ excel,

  But ’twere too hard for one to act all well;

  Whom justly life would through each scene commend,

  The maid, the wife, the mistress, and the friend.

  Nicholas Rowe: The Fair Penitent (1703)

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Epilogue

  Historical Note

  Excerpt from That Despicable Rogue by Virginia Heath

  Chapter One

  What! shall I sell my innocence and youth,

  For wealth or titles, to perfidious man!

  To man, who makes his mirth of our undoing!

  The base, profest betrayer of our sex!

  Let me grow old in all misfortunes else,

  Rather than know the sorrows of Calista!

  Nicholas Rowe: The Fair Penitent (1703)

  Covent Garden, London—1852

  ‘No dinners with dukes,’ said Calista firmly as she wriggled out of her costume and stepped into her petticoats, one lacy layer after another. ‘You know my rule.’

  ‘Please, Calista,’ Mabel entreated from the other side of the painted screen. ‘It’s a private supper party.’

  Calista’s fingers trembled as she adjusted the waistband of her top petticoat. She forced herself to keep a steady hand. She’d lost more weight and had to pull it tighter than usual. ‘A private supper is even worse.’

  She tossed a light cotton wrapper over her bare shoulders and tied the ruffled edges loosely across her corset. She knew she ought to put on her dress or even a woollen shawl, but her skin was still warm from the glare of the gas footlights.

  Mabel’s voice became a whine. ‘I can’t attend if you don’t come with me. It’s at the Coach and Horses, upstairs in one of those dining rooms. I’m longing to see it. Do you intend to keep me apart from Sir Herbert?’

  Calista stepped out from behind the screen and sat down at the dressing table, resting her elbows among the pots and jars of creams and powders.

  ‘Last month you were besotted with a marquis,’ she reminded her friend, who was slouched on the chaise longue in a pink silk dressing gown. ‘Now it’s a baronet. It’s actresses like you who give us all a bad name.’

  She softened her reproving words with a smile. Mabel had a good nature, even if she did care more for flirtation than learning her lines.

  Mabel giggled. ‘A bad name has turned many an actress into a lady or a duchess.’

  Calista sighed. Ever since a flurry of actr
esses had married into the aristocracy, many young women had come to consider the theatre as no more than a marriage market. It made it very difficult for those who aimed to become the best at their craft, as she did. Gentlemen from the audience hung around by the stage door, making advances, which Calista was forced to fend off, sometimes politely, sometimes by calling the doorkeeper to hasten the men away. The members of the aristocracy, she’d discovered, the more time she’d spent in the theatre, were the worst. They seemed to think they had offstage rights to an actress, in some form of noblesse oblige. A few so-called gentlemen behaved as if she were no more than a lady of the night. Indeed, some seemed to think actresses and courtesans were one and the same thing.

  Calista shuddered inwardly. She’d determined to stick to her rule more firmly than ever before since that awful incident that had occurred a few weeks ago. She’d told no one about it, not even Mabel. It still shook her to think of it, but she had to carry on coming here, carry on performing. She had no choice.

  ‘I know you have your rule, Cally, but perhaps I’ll be doing you a favour if you come to the supper party,’ Mabel wheedled. ‘It’s true my dearest Herbie is only a baronet, but his cousin is a duke with an enormous fortune. Why, he’s the Duke of Albury!’

  ‘I’ve never heard of him.’

  Mabel made a faint moan. ‘He sounds terrifying. Herbie told me to bring along another actress to keep him company tonight. I thought of you immediately. You can cope with anyone.’

  Calista picked up a pot of crème celeste, her favourite cold cream. It could remove the thickest powder and paint. She wanted to help Mabel. Beneath her friend’s brazen exterior, Mabel’s heart had been bruised more than once. Still she hesitated. ‘Can’t you ask someone from the chorus?’

  ‘I could,’ Mabel said doubtfully, ‘but you’re the leading lady. Herbie said the duke is frightfully intelligent and to pick someone who would keep him entertained.’

  ‘I have no desire to entertain a duke,’ Calista said crisply. ‘He can pay to see my performance, like everyone else.’

  ‘Please,’ Mabel begged, her blonde curls falling over her dressing gown and her big blue eyes widening in the fashion that had brought her so many admirers. ‘I’m scared to face the duke without you. You’ll know the right things to say. Do come to supper, Cally. Herbie is the man for me. I know it!’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mabel—’ Calista started. With her finger hovering above the pot, about to daub in the cold cream, she stopped halfway.

  The rouge on her cheeks would come away, like her costume, like the part she played. It was always the same after the tumult of applause at the end of a play when the curtain went down. When she curtsied to the audience there was a moment when she came back, when she stopped playing a role and became her own self again. It was the strangest sensation, as though she was dropped back into her body from the flies above the stage. If that feeling ever disappeared she would give up acting, she’d vowed. It was a kind of vainglory to seek applause for Calista Fairmont. The claps and shouts were for the character she created on the stage, the other person she inhabited the moment she stepped out of the wings.

  Tonight, she’d played Rosalind in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. From the first until the final act she became the daughter of a duke, forced to pretend to be a boy and hide in the woods of Arden. It was a role that suited her well, the theatre critics agreed, not merely for her more-than-average height and slim figure, but because of her portrayal of Rosalind’s intelligence and wit. She’d made the role her own.

  Yet recently, coming back to herself at the end of the play had felt like a jolt. Tonight in particular she’d experienced a horrid sense of deflation as she had come off stage to become once more Miss Calista Fairmont, with all her troubles. It was as if a dark cloud had edged across the painted backdrop of a perfect blue sky.

  In the looking glass, she studied her reflection and saw her fingers now clenching the pot of cold cream. Her hair had been pinned up while she’d played the part of a boy. Laying down the pot, one by one she released the hairpins.

  Her black locks rippled over her shoulders, but the curls were limper than they ought to have been. They shone with less gloss than before. Once they had glinted as blue-black as damson plums, or so her father had declared. Columbine had asked if they tasted like plums, too, and their father had picked the girl up in his arms and laughed, declaring that surely his daughters were sweeter than any fruit, his Calista and his Columbine.

  Columbine. Her young sister had caught a chill recently and it had given her a high fever. All day she had been red-cheeked, as she had continued to cough and wheeze.

  Calista stared again at her own scarlet cheeks. At least the rouge disguised her pallor, and beneath her eyes the dark circles of fatigue were hidden by the layers of powder. If only she could sleep better. Lately all she could do was toss and turn all night. One worry would turn her one way. Then when she flung herself over, yet another would grip her.

  Somehow, she must carry on. It might be better to try to keep her spirits high. A supper party would be a diversion from the constant cares that gnawed at her, and Columbine would be asleep at home; her sister and Martha didn’t wait up for her, not any more. In happier days there had been supper by the fire, a chance to talk and to share the play’s successes and failures. But now she walked alone.

  Alone.

  Her breath squeezed through her lungs. Fear had entered into her body, ever since...

  No. She refused to think about it.

  She put her hand to her chest and tried to breathe. This choking grasping of air must be what Columbine experienced when she had one of her terrifying attacks. Perhaps it would be good to be with company tonight and she could go part of the way home with Mabel after the supper party.

  It might be safer to walk a different way.

  There was no reason to hurry home. It was best to let her sister sleep peacefully, even if she could not do the same any more, and she was hungry, too. She might be the leading lady of the Prince’s Theatre and earn wages that were higher than those she had got for playing bit parts, only speaking a line or two, but the pounds weren’t stretching nearly far enough. The cost of warm lodgings, food, the doctor’s bills...all now had to be covered by her income alone. She often pretended to have eaten supper before going home, in order to save the price of a meal. No wonder that beneath the rouge her cheeks were hollowed and fitting her slim body into a boyish costume was easier than ever.

  Another long walk alone followed by a restless night full of worry suddenly seemed more than she could bear. Doing Mabel a good turn might take her mind off her cares.

  Calista laid down her hairbrush. ‘All right.’

  Her friend, who had slumped miserably on the chaise longue, stopped twirling a long golden ringlet in her hand and sat up eagerly. ‘What?’

  ‘I’ll come and have supper with the Duke of Albury, but I can’t promise to entertain him.’

  ‘You’ll come?’ A waft of rose enveloped Calista as Mabel leapt up and hugged her. ‘Oh, I’m so grateful, Cally, and my Herbie will be, too. You won’t regret it!’

  Calista sighed as she put the lid back on the unused cold cream. Already she suspected she would.

  * * *

  Darius Carlyle, the Duke of Albury, stretched out his long legs and waited for the actresses to enter the private dining room of the Coach and Horses Inn. The small wood-panelled room, where the oak was scratched and rubbed worn in some places, was safely upstairs, away from the crowd at the tables and bar, yet noise drifted up through an open, lead-paned window from the street below. The fog had crept in earlier in the evening, but it barely muffled the sounds of raucous voices and laughter that rang out all night in this part of London.

  Inwardly he groaned. He could be in his comfortable club right now, or at home in his bed in his Mayfair town house, the thic
k curtains drawn. Why had he allowed himself to get caught up in his younger cousin’s affairs yet again? It wasn’t the first time he’d been forced to rescue Herbert from some kind of scrape. Darius had been rescuing him ever since their childhood, when they had attended the same boarding school, and it seemed he was still forced to do so. Herbert was a fool, but he was a Carlyle. As head of the Carlyle family it was up to Darius to sort things out, as usual. No Carlyle would get into this particular mess ever again.

  Actresses. His cousin could always pick them. They were like showy birds, fine feathered, their cheap clothes brightly coloured, with too much paint on their faces.

  And they always had claws.

  Now one of them had got her talons into Herbert and it didn’t sound as if she was going to let go.

  She would be made to let go, if he had anything to do with it.

  He picked up his whisky glass and tossed back the remnants. He’d use the supper party as an opportunity to assess how far the situation had gone. It would be better to be cruel than to be kind and nip the affair in the bud. He was fonder of his cousin than he cared to admit, always had been. But it was his duty to ensure the Carlyle name wasn’t dragged once more through the mud of scandal. It wouldn’t be pleasant, but it had to be done, and Darius never shirked his duty.

  Herbert fancied himself in love, but he hadn’t yet made the mistake of proposing to the girl—not that it would make any difference if he had. Proposing marriage to an actress could always be hushed up as long as there was enough money thrown about to muffle the gossip. Actresses could always be bought off. He knew that much.

  Darius drummed his fingers on the table. The only question was how much money it would take. Tonight he would find out how greedy and ambitious the actress who’d hooked Herbert was.

  Tonight he would put an end to Herbert’s infatuation.

  The Carlyle curse must be broken.

  The door of the private dining room opened. In came the actresses, two of them, followed by Herbert.