A Love Song for the National Impotent

Thinking on it again, it was horrific. Even when postpartum depression had me wishing I were dead, he never once offered me a single gentle word. My twenty years—and the ten of them I had actually spent living skin to skin with him—had amounted to nothing more than that.

Right. I've decided. This life, I am not going to live with James.

I had already borne a child. I had already endured a relationship that brought me nothing but misery. This time, even taking the veil and giving myself to God seemed as though it would do.

Whatever I chose, how could it be worse than living as the puppet duchess of Parnel?

And yet, for all that resolve, the problems were piled before me like a mountain. To begin with, the very man who would have to set his seal to my divorce—the Duke of Parnel himself—was off at war.

His Majesty the Emperor arranged this marriage. Getting free of it will not be easy.

The Emperor had not sponsored our wedding without reason.

The House of Parnel was the sword of the imperial family, a house that had served the Empire for nearly a hundred years. But they had spent that succession shoving one another aside, until in this generation only James remained. And was James himself not a so-called precious heir, born of a maid's womb?

Send a man like that to war, and of course the talk began.

"The House of Parnel is so short of heirs. How can we send an unmarried duke onto the battlefield?"

"It has always been the custom not to send an unmarried man to war."

"He has three mothers who depend on him. How can they send him off to war? There ought to be at least one person left to look after those ladies..."

Pious arguments, every one of them, and perfectly transparent underneath.

The battlefield was dangerous, yes, but it was also a place where wealth and glory could be seized in very little time. Once they had pushed aside that young upstart, Duke James Parnel, they meant to install a man of their own as commander of the army.

To shut those mouths, the Emperor made an exceedingly swift decision.

"If the problem is that he isn't married, then he need only get married!"

The bride selected for the part was me. No dowry, no family worth the name—nothing but a stack of credentials earned studying accounting at the Academy, about as far from the mistress of a great house as a woman could get. Me.

The only reason was that our birthdays happened to match...

A mere thing, and yet no one was permitted to call it mere. However slipshod the standard, I was the Duchess of Parnel whom the Emperor himself had chosen.

Then what on earth am I supposed to do?

The blankness closed over me again, and I gnawed at my nails. That dreadful future seemed to press down on me once more. When I hadn't known, I had simply lived believing it was the best path there was. Now that I did know, it was a brutal road I could not even bring myself to set foot on.

I cannot walk that path again.

I had to think of something—a way to live a second life that did not overlap with James. A way, in other words, to obtain a divorce.

Should I pretend I've gone mad? And if they lock me in a sanatorium for the rest of my life, I'll have gained nothing either way.

Should I provoke my mothers-in-law even further? And if I still can't divorce, and only lose what little regard I have in that house—then what?

I could not have said how long I sat there chewing my nails. Neither notion was any kind of answer, and at last the irritation boiled over and I cried out:

"I'd be better off weeping at His Majesty's feet! Telling him I can't live with the bastard because my husband is impotent!"

And my own words brought me enlightenment.

That's it. Impotent.

Divorce in this country was damnably difficult. As one of the policies meant to strengthen the imperial authority, every divorce had to receive the Emperor's approval.

Whether that approval came or not depended entirely on His Majesty's whim—but there was one provision under which a marriage was dissolved without question or inquiry.

When the husband was impotent.

James is not impotent.

Far from it. He overflowed with appetite—enough that, in my irritation, I rather wanted to make him impotent myself.

But.

His Majesty does have an impotent cousin.

A man whose impotence was known so excessively, so universally, that people had taken to calling him the National Impotent.

Duke Ian Tyrone.

Duke Ian Tyrone was a beautiful man, with golden hair and blue eyes.

His thick, abundant brows were lovely as molten pure gold, and his deep-set eyes gave him a look of perpetual brooding. He always swept his soft, wavy golden hair neatly back with pomade, and yet—for all the hard, stern cast of his face—one or two buttons of his shirt were forever undone. Most women of the Empire were agreed that this was precisely what made him better: he felt like a precarious man.

Astonishingly, he had not so much as a lover, let alone a fiancée, and the reason was already known to the entire nation.

"Impotent, with a face like that. God is fair indeed..."

Yes. That man was the National Impotent.

Two years earlier, in the late autumn, the incident had been caused by a young lady who could no longer endure her burning love for Duke Ian Tyrone.

The innocent young lady spent months alone in the delusion that she and Ian were courting, until at last she could no longer tell her thoughts from reality. And so, at a ball attended by none other than His Majesty the Emperor, she caused an enormous scene.

"Hold me, Ian. As hotly as you did that night."

Drunk, she clung to him as she said it, and the onlookers stared at the pair with their mouths open, stunned by the magnitude of the scandal.

Until that day, of course, the two of them had never so much as exchanged a greeting. The misunderstanding, however, had already begun.

So they were that sort of pair?

I knew it! A man in the full flush of his blood, and not a single ordinary scandal to his name!

Heavens. What is happening?

Whatever Ian said, the situation could only turn against him. Even if he insisted there had truly been no point of contact between them, no one would believe it. A thoroughly awkward fix.

He cut through it with a truly staggering answer. Looking down, as if bothered, at the young lady who had laid a hand upon his chest, he shrugged.

"Something would have to stand before I could say whether I'll hold you or not."

His tone was perfectly unruffled. The substance of it was not. Gazes dropped, quite of their own accord, to the space between Ian's legs.

For the ball he was wearing trousers tight as tights, the sort that laid bare the solid line of his thighs... and the outline thus unavoidably revealed made it perfectly plain that his answer was the truth.

"Oh my."

"Oh, God in heaven."

From that day forward, Duke Ian Tyrone acquired one deeply disgraceful nickname.

The National Impotent.

Well. He himself didn't seem to mind it much.

I thought it while spinning the pen in my fingers, around and around.

I had, of course, met Ian in my previous life, as Duchess of Parnel. He was a thoroughly unsociable sort of man; I had never exchanged more than two words with him. Even twenty years on, he had no wife. By every circumstance, then, his impotence was certain.

Well, what if he is impotent? The Emperor's one and only cousin, a duke in his own right, rich, and handsome besides.

His merits were endless. And the truth was, I did not dislike that he was impotent.

Where the marriage bed was concerned, I had already had more than enough to be sick of it.

A ridiculous thing to say, but it was the truth. It would have been unthinkable to me now, but the girl I had been ten years ago was very young, and she had been terrified of James. Small wonder, when the man had appeared at their first meeting plastered in blood. And so she had been unable to refuse his demands for relations that hurt, and in which she could not for the life of her see what was supposed to be pleasant.

I may have no point of contact with James yet in this life, but to marry another man when I lived with him for ten years... it feels uncomfortably like taking a lover while I still have a husband.

Better, then, never to have a marriage bed at all. Once I had settled that, Ian began to look more and more like a fantasy bridegroom.

Even twenty years later, His Majesty was still fretting that he could not arrange a match for his impotent cousin. If I step forward and offer to marry Ian, he will gladly take my side. And this will not be a divorce people can point fingers at, the way they did in the old days.

Every condition was in place. All that remained was Duke Ian Tyrone's agreement, and mine.

First, let me write a letter.

I closed my hand tight around the pen I had been spinning and, on stationery that had sat blank for a long while, began to set the words down one by one.

I got exactly that far, and could not write what ought to follow. I knew what sort of man Ian was.

What do I write? That I have, in fact, been in love with you all this time? Or marry me—I don't mind that you're impotent?

I could write neither.

He was not a man who would be taken in by words like those.

If he were the sort to be swept clean off his feet by so little, he would not have lived alone for twenty years.

Just as I had reached my own conclusion, there were women in the Empire who did not care that Ian was impotent. What he possessed was brilliant enough to cancel out the flaw. But he met even them with a coldness like perpetual snow, and that manner of his made people nod and think:

Now that is the National Impotent!

I will never so much as see that man's face by any ordinary means. I have to think of some other scheme.

A paltry letter, sent in the present circumstances, would plainly go unanswered. I clutched my head and sank into thought. How long I stayed that way, I could not have said.

It was just as I bit my lip, no sharp idea coming, that I heard it.

A bright little tune came leaking through the crack of a badly fitted door, where the wind already slipped in freely. Some young maid, it seemed, was humming as she cleaned. There was not a person of the Empire who could fail to know that Mother Goose rhyme, "Lily Bridge Is Falling Down."

Oh, for heaven's sake. I was anxious enough to die already.

I was thinking just that, sweeping my silver hair back, when a scheme flashed through my mind like lightning.

Yes. A song...

Every soul in the Empire loved songs—loved them enough that the bards on the streets made a handsome living. Those minstrels turned the doings of the Empire's famous people into music, and when James had won his war, there had even been an "Ode to Duke James Parnel."

I can use that.

If even the likes of James had a song, there was no reason Ian could not be the hero of one.

Yes. I'll make a song.

A love story of Ian and me, so thick it was practically sticky, set down as lyrics.

The song was a roaring success. Within a week of its making, there was hardly a soul in the Empire who did not know it.

Perhaps I ought to live this life as a lyricist.

I hadn't known it myself, this astonishing talent. Fevered lyrics that called Duke Ian Tyrone to mind without containing a single letter of his name.

"If this works out, I'll have to release a second smash hit."