The Duchess

  He looked down at her and marveled at her youth. She wasn’t just young in age, but young in what she knew and had seen and what she believed of the world. He wondered if he had ever been as innocent as she was. He doubted it.

  He sat down on the side of the bed and smoothed her hair out of her eyes. She stirred in her sleep but didn’t awaken. The arm of her gown was pushed up to her elbow and he ran his hand down her smooth skin. For a moment it startled him at how much he wanted to run his hands over every inch of her skin.

  Wanting to touch a pretty young thing like Claire wasn’t what startled him, but that he wanted her did. He wanted her to look at him with her big brown eyes blazing with all the passion he’d seen when she’d talked of Bonnie Prince Charlie.

  She moved, lifted her head a bit, and gave him a half smile. “Good morning,” she murmured, then turned her head to the other side.

  It was a moment before she turned back to gape at him.

  “Good morning,” he said brightly.

  She sat up, pulled what cover she hadn’t thrown to the floor to her throat. “What in the world are you doing in my room?” she whispered and glanced toward the open door to the dressing room.

  He put his finger to his lips and stood.

  Her eyes widened when she saw him standing. “Oh, Trevelyan,” she said in a hoarse, sighing whisper. “It’s the philamohr,” she said, giving the Scottish name to the great kilt.

  He paused to smile at her, trying his best to not let her see how very, very pleased he was with her reaction. Getting into the contraption had been worth it if she knew what it was, and if she sighed over his name in that tone. He walked quietly to the dressing room and looked in to see Rogers lying prim and proper on her narrow bed. He gave a snort of derision, then shut the door.

  “You didn’t tell me you had Rogers for a maid.”

  Claire had to get control of herself, control over her feelings at the sight of Trevelyan in the ancient form of Scottish dress. To her surprise, his legs were not thin as she would have thought. His legs were muscled, as those of a man who has spent much of his life walking over rugged terrain. And he wore the plaid with the grace and ease of someone born to it, as though he had worn it since he was a child. Once again pipes began to play in her head, but they were the pipes of the ancient songs, not the new, modern music that she heard when she saw Harry. She was sure all this was because Trevelyan was older than Harry.

  Claire shook her head to clear it. “Miss Rogers.”

  “Monster, isn’t she? When we were kids we used to do all we could to terrorize her.”

  “You couldn’t have succeeded.” The skirt made by the draping of the plaid swirled about Trevelyan’s legs when he walked.

  “Not in the least.” He leaned over her and Claire drew back from him, her breath held. He wouldn’t try to kiss her, would he? But he didn’t try to kiss her. He whispered, “Are you ready to go to MacTarvit’s?”

  As he moved away from her, she blinked at him for a moment, looked at his lips still so close to hers, then realized what he’d said. “Really? You’ll take me?” she asked, sounding about ten years old.

  “If you can get dressed in a hurry. I don’t like to be kept waiting.”

  With that she almost knocked him down as she got out of bed and ran behind a screen. “My clothes!” she said in a stage whisper. “You’ll have to hand them to me.”

  “You can come and get them,” he said in a mock-seductive voice. “I assure you I won’t ravage you.”

  Claire looked at him from around the screen, and put her hand over her mouth to stifle a giggle. “Of course you won’t.” He’d sounded like the villain in a melodrama and Claire knew how they ended: with the heroine unmarried yet with a baby she had to give away to strangers, then the heroine dying alone in a snowstorm. The Trevelyan who walked about the room in the ancient form of dress, the man who leaned over her and whispered to her, was a threat, but the man who leered at her from behind the screen was not a threat.

  Still amused, wearing her long-sleeved, high-necked, voluminous nightgown, she left the screen to go to the wardrobe to get her wool walking suit and her lowest heeled, sturdiest walking shoes, then returned to behind the screen and dressed faster than she ever had in her life. She came out from behind the screen still fastening buttons down the front of her jacket.

  “Ready?” Trevelyan asked, pleased that his teasing had amused her.

  “No,” she whispered back. “We have to adjust you.” With that she set about adjusting the gathers that were made by his belt and settling them into neat little pleats. When she was done, she took her time smoothing the drape of wool over his shoulders. She didn’t look into his eyes as she repinned the brooch.

  Trevelyan held his breath while she touched him, wanting to touch her in return. He wondered what she’d do if he were to put his hands on her hips and run them down to her thighs. Probably run, he thought, or worse, laugh at him. What is someone your age doing thinking about things like that? he could hear her saying. He thought he might like to take her to bed and show her that even though he looked to be an old man, he was only thirty-three and not at death’s door as she seemed to think.

  “You’re not supposed to wear that brooch, you know,” she said softly. She didn’t want to move away from him. Touching him, she knew he wasn’t thin as she’d first thought. He wasn’t thin; he wasn’t fat.

  “What?” he said, pretending he couldn’t hear her so he had to lean closer to her lips.

  “That’s the laird’s brooch and only Harry should wear it. See, it has the crest on it but no garter, or belt, surrounding it. The garter shows that you belong to Harry’s clan. This brooch is the clan chief’s.” She put her fingers on the brooch.

  “I’ll have to remember that,” he said, clasping her fingertips in his. He wondered what she’d say if he told her the truth, that he was actually the duke and the laird of his family’s clan. Would she fall into his arms and tell him she was in love with him, that she’d thought she loved Harry but now knew that Trevelyan was the man she loved? Trevelyan had never had to resort to a title or anything else to get any woman he wanted, and he didn’t plan to now.

  “Ready?” he asked again and she pulled her hand from his grasp.

  She started for the door, but he went to the floor-length portrait, picked up the candle, and nodded for her to follow him. He saw her face light up at the impending adventure. She certainly didn’t seem to be cowardly.

  Claire followed him down dirty, unused stairs, through cobweb-hung four-foot-high tunnels, up to the roof, across it, back into the house, and at last outside through a door at the end of the east wing.

  “Wonderful,” she said. “Just wonderful.”

  He smiled at her. “Feel like walking? It’s a long way to MacTarvit’s.”

  “I would love to walk,” she said, breathing of the sweet Scottish air.

  Two hours later she almost wished she hadn’t been so confident. She had followed Trevelyan up and down ravines, across little streams, up one hill that should have been called a mountain, and over four logs that lay across streams too wide and deep to ford. Trevelyan had handed her a piece of dry, hard bread that he’d had in his sporran, and twice he’d lent her his heavy staff.

  “Why do you carry a cane made out of iron? Wouldn’t a wooden one do just as well?”

  “I need to rebuild my strength,” he said over his shoulder.

  She wanted to ask him about his illness but she didn’t, for she’d already learned that he didn’t like any mention of it.

  After they’d walked for three hours they sat down on a rock and Trevelyan pulled dates from his sporran, frowning at Claire when she began to hungrily devour hers. She managed to control herself enough to munch the fruit.

  “Last night when I got back to my room there was a newspaper hidden under my pillow.”

  “And who do you suppose did that?” he asked.

  “At first I thought it was you, but I didn’t think the
re was any way you could get into my room without being seen.” She smiled at him, then laughed at his smug expression. “Do you know who I think it was?” She paused. “Leatrice.”

  Trevelyan looked off at the hills, at the way the soft purple heather blended with the gray-green of the rocks and the grass. He remembered the laughing girl he’d known and the timid woman who now stayed in her room at the beck and call of her mother. “Lee would do that. There’s a bit of a rebel inside her.”

  “That’s hard to believe.” She told him about somehow offending Leatrice at tea the day before. “All I did was ask how her mother was.”

  “It’s forbidden to mention the old woman’s injury. At least not out loud.”

  Claire ate the last of the dates he’d handed her and went to the stream to get a drink. “Why is the water brown?”

  “It runs through peat,” he said impatiently. “That’s what makes the whisky taste so good. Good Scotch can’t be made anywhere else in the world except Scotland because the peat-filled water is here. Are you ready to go?”

  She nodded and began to follow him. “Anyway, I finally got to read a paper last night, and you’ll never believe what I read.”

  “That the Campbells are rising again?”

  “Don’t be cynical. It doesn’t become you, although I do think cynicism is natural to you. Were you born believing the world is a bad place or have you developed this attitude?”

  He turned and narrowed his eyes at her.

  Claire smiled sweetly at him. She was beginning to love being able to pierce his hard outer shell. “I read that Captain Baker’s former partner, Jack Powell, is going to speak to the Royal Geographic Society about having entered Pesha.”

  “Is he?” Trevelyan said softly. “And do you plan to go hear him speak?”

  “You are joking, aren’t you? Personally, I don’t believe that the man ever entered Pesha.”

  At that Trevelyan stopped walking and turned to look at her. “And how did you come to that conclusion?”

  “Because I know Captain Baker.”

  He turned away so she couldn’t see his smile. “Do you, now?”

  “You can stop laughing at me. I’ll never believe Captain Baker didn’t make it into Pesha.”

  “We have another hour of walking. Why don’t you tell me how you reached this conclusion? It might make the time pass faster and I could use a good laugh.”

  “I shouldn’t tell you anything, not with your attitude, but I will. You have to understand what Pesha meant to Captain Baker. I know that to the rest of the world it’s just a name of fable, a name that conjures exotic…” She trailed off.

  He turned back to her, smiling in a smirking sort of way and started walking backward. “Exotic pleasures where a man’s fantasies can come true? A city of riches beyond belief? A place where women are beautiful and plentiful and don’t wear corsets and bustles that keep a man from feeling their flesh? A place—”

  “Would you mind? As I was saying, Captain Baker wanted to see the place. He wanted to be the first man from the outside world to reach it and prove it existed, because there were rumors that it didn’t exist, that it was merely a legend. Like Atlantis. He wanted so much to find the place that he spent three years of his life looking for it. I’ve read how when he returned from that first trip without having found it he was sick and dispirited, but he swore he’d return. He vowed he’d die if he didn’t make it.”

  “He did die.”

  “But he didn’t die until he had completed the second trip. He didn’t die until he was at the dock ready to return home. I believe he made it into Pesha.”

  “Powell says he didn’t. He says Baker was too sick to enter the city. Powell says Baker stayed in camp while he, Powell, went alone into the city.”

  “Ha!” Claire said. “You don’t know Captain Baker as I do.”

  “Do you, now?”

  “Don’t laugh at me. Captain Baker was a very vain man.”

  Trevelyan looked surprised. “What has vanity to do with this?”

  She sighed. “It has everything to do with this. Baker had the knowledge. After his first trip he’d learned a great deal. He’d found out that on his first trip he’d been hundreds of miles away from Pesha, so he returned to England to raise funds and write up his notes.”

  “What does this have to do with his vanity?”

  “Think about it! After he had done all that work, do you think he would have turned over all he knew to another man?”

  “If he were sick and he couldn’t go he might have. Do you think the man had no generosity in his soul? Would he rather that no one go if he couldn’t? Was he such a selfish man?”

  “Not selfish. He was—”

  “Vain. I heard you.”

  “What is wrong with you? I was merely telling you that I don’t believe Captain Baker didn’t see Pesha. I think this man Powell is a liar.” She looked up at him with horror on her face. “You don’t think Powell murdered Captain Baker and took his notes, do you?”

  Trevelyan grimaced and turned back around. “Someday I shall have to visit America to see what atmosphere produces such lurid imagination in its inhabitants.”

  “It’s not such a farfetched idea.”

  “What would Powell have to gain by stealing Baker’s notes and lying to the world?”

  She was astonished. “Prestige. Honor. Medals from your queen. A place in history. Possible immortality. Not to mention money.”

  “Isn’t that a little exaggerated? Immortality?”

  “It is not an exaggeration. The first man who enters Pesha and returns from it alive will be remembered forever.” She clenched her hands into fists at her side. “How I wish I could have read Captain Baker’s notes. He would tell all the story. This man Powell would never be able to tell all of it.”

  “Why not? If he’s seen the place he should be able to tell what he’s seen.”

  “But he hasn’t seen Pesha. He couldn’t have. No man alive could have entered that sacred city unless he looked, acted, and spoke like a Peshan. Only Captain Baker could have done that. Who is this man Powell but a mere man?”

  “And Baker wasn’t?”

  “No. Captain Baker was a great man, and it would have taken a great man to get into Pesha. From what little I’ve read of Powell he speaks a mere five or six languages.”

  “The man is only semiliterate.”

  “Do you sneer at everything?”

  “Yes,” he answered honestly. “No doubt your Captain Baker sneered at nothing.”

  She thought about that a while. “I think Captain Baker was basically a cold man. That’s what made him a great observer. He could watch unspeakable cruelty and report it. Most of the rest of us would be too sick or weeping too hard or trying too hard to change the behavior of savages to be able to sit back and observe without feeling. But Baker watched it all and never felt anything.”

  “I think perhaps he felt,” Trevelyan said softly.

  “No, Captain Baker was a great man and he deserves to live in history but I doubt very much if he had any heart at all.” She put her head up. “Look! There’s smoke. Is that MacTarvit’s house?”

  “Yes,” Trevelyan said as though from a distance, “that’s it.”

  “Well, come on.”

  Trevelyan was so lost in his thoughts about what she’d said he didn’t realize what she was doing. The shots rang out before he could grab her.

  Chapter Eight

  It’s amazing that two people can see the same thing, yet think they see two completely different things. When Claire saw Angus MacTarvit, all five foot four of him, built like the bull he resembled, she knew that at last she was seeing a real Scotsman, a man who didn’t wear a kilt because it could impress a woman but because it was what he always wore, had always worn, and what his ancestors had worn. The MacTarvits had probably worn the kilt throughout the ban, when England, in another attempt to subdue the Scots, had outlawed the wearing of kilts.

  What Trevelyan saw wa
s a cantankerous little man who’d never given away or shared anything in his life, a man who could be thirty-five or a hundred and five. You couldn’t tell his age by looking at him, for he was smoked brown by the peat he used in distilling the whisky. He used peat for whisky; he didn’t drink the water and he’d certainly never bathed in it.

  Trevelyan turned to Claire, planning to make excuses for the horrid little man, but what he saw were two people who had fallen instantly in love with each other. Claire, her face alight, walked forward, her hand outstretched. “Lord MacTarvit.”

  “Lord MacTarvit,” Trevelyan said with a snort. No one had called the old man anything but MacTarvit for years. But he was the clan chief, even if he was the last of his clan.

  Trevelyan saw the old man’s face soften, the leathery wrinkles relax into a ridiculous expression that made him look like a gnome. “Ah, lassie,” the old man practically purred, taking Claire’s hand in his right and caressing it with his left. “Come into this humble home. Would you like a wee dram?”

  “Of your whisky?” Claire asked, conveying the impression that she’d tasted every whisky in the world and his was by far the best.

  Trevelyan, with a grimace, started to follow the two of them into the low, thatched cottage, but MacTarvit blocked his way.

  When he looked at Trevelyan, those gnomish features rearranged themselves back into his normal expression of rage. “And what would you be wantin’?”

  “If you think I’m going to let her in there alone with the likes of you, your brains are more pickled than I thought.”

  This seemed to please the old man and he stepped aside to let Trevelyan by, but then blocked his way again. “I thought you were dead.”

  Trevelyan gave him a hard look. “She thinks I’m dead.”

  MacTarvit frowned at that and stood for a moment as though considering this, then he nodded and went inside the cottage, Trevelyan following him.

  From the moment Trevelyan entered that little cottage, everything in it black from centuries of smoke from peat fires, he became an observer. All his life he’d heard members of his family curse the MacTarvits. His father had complained endlessly about the thievery of the family and their refusal to buy and sell like the rest of the modern world. Trevelyan had grown up thinking that the MacTarvits were something the world would be better off without.