The Duchesss Tattoo Read Free

skin he…well. he kissed me just here.” She pointed to the point on her wrist where the two blue veins crossed.
    â€œHe didn’t want to tell me what the tattoo meant, at first—” the Duchess smiled— “but I can be very persuasive. And when I did get it out of him, I was horrified. To think that I might have got a tattoo that would have told the whole world that I was no better than I should be. Why, I have met the Prince of Wales now and he’s old enough to be my father. That’s not a club I want to join, and besides, I love my husband very much.”
    She placed her white hand on Palmer’s arm. “I was so angry with you back then, but now I reckon that you were just trying to save me from my own folly. Am I right?” Palmer looked down at the fingers on his sleeve and his mouth twitched.
    â€œAs I told Your Grace at the time, I suspected that you did not have all the information.”
    She smiled. “I’ll say that again, Mr. Palmer.” She pulled a purse out of her reticule. “You know I would really like to repay you for your kindness, I was beginning to give up on the English. I thought, perhaps, a hundred guineas. You could go to the Berlin Exhibition in style.”
    Palmer closed his eyes for a moment. “You are too kind, Your Grace. But I don’t want your money.” Taking a deep breath, he continued, “There is one thing, though, that I would ask in return.”
    She smiled at him. “Tell me, Mr. Palmer, whatever you want; it’s yours.”
    â€œThe chance to practice my art,” and he swayed slightly as he thought of the butterfly he would put on the dense white skin just above her shoulder blade.

 
    Daisy Goodwin on writing The American Heiress
    I was visiting Blenheim Palace a few years ago and saw the portrait of Consuelo Vanderbilt, the American heiress, or “dollar princess,” who married the ninth Duke of Marlborough in 1895. She was very beautiful, but she also looked spectacularly unhappy. When I read that she was basically blackmailed into marrying the Duke by her social-climbing mother, I thought what a great setting this would be for a novel.
    I started working on The American Heiress at the height of the economic boom (remember the boom?), when the newspapers and magazines were full of billionaires having fabulous parties on their diamond-encrusted yachts. But even the excesses of Trump or Abramovich pale in comparison with the consumption of America’s Gilded Age, when diners at one Newport mansion were invited to prospect with tiny silver shovels for real gems in the miniature river that ran down the center of the dining table.
    While certain details in The American Heiress might seem unbelievable, like the solid gold on the corset that Cora Cash wears on her wedding day, her trousseau is a replica of Consuelo Vanderbilt’s. At her wedding to the Duke, Consuelo carried orchids that had been grown in the greenhouses of Blenheim and then shipped to New York in a specially refrigerated chamber because Marlborough brides always carried flowers from Blenheim. When I borrowed the detail about Cora’s bouquet being brought over from England for my novel , my editor produced her red pencil and said, “This can’t possibly be true.” But in fact, you would have to have a very vivid imagination indeed to match the real extravagance and excess of the Gilded Age. Just as contemporary starlets are written about in the media today, every detail of Consuelo’s wedding was chronicled in Vogue.
    In the late nineteenth century, American heiresses who fancied being called “my lady” subscribed to a periodical called Titled Americans —a pre-digital version of Match.com—that listed all the titled bachelors still on the market. The trade-off between money and titles was so successful that about a quarter of the members of the House of Lords in 1910 had American wives.