The Duchess
Trevelyan sat where he was for a while, trying to think what he could say to his brother to make him understand, but he knew there was nothing that he could say. Harry had never been able to see there was anything wrong with his mother.
Trevelyan had hoped to talk some sense into his younger brother. If he could show Harry that Claire needed his help, then Trevelyan would be free. He could go back to work with his mind clear, knowing he’d repaid Claire for having helped him. It had been such a good idea. Such a good idea that had no hope of success because Harry didn’t think anything needed to be done. Harry was content to allow what was going to happen to happen.
Trevelyan thought of Claire. He remembered her dancing and laughing. If she married Harry and came to live in this hellhole of hatred, would she become like Leatrice? A shadow of herself? Would she give in to the duchess and do whatever the old woman wanted whenever she wanted it done? Trevelyan thought of how Claire had told MacTarvit that he could go on stealing cows, but Trevelyan knew that within six months after the marriage MacTarvit would be gone from the Montgomery lands.
Trevelyan leaned back against the chair. He didn’t want to become involved in this. He wanted to go back to his room and write. He had so much work to do on the Peshan language. He didn’t care about these people who were related to him. He didn’t want to get involved in the family or the house or with anything to do with them. He liked the idea of their thinking he was dead. It gave him a great deal of freedom.
But another part of him thought of his sister. He hadn’t seen her since he’d returned, not in the house or out of it. According to what Claire had told MacTarvit, Leatrice was about the unhappiest person Claire had ever seen.
He looked at Harry, already asleep. It was obvious that his little brother wasn’t going to help Claire replace the duchess. Harry was too comfortable to try to change anything. Why should Harry want to change something that was so perfect for him?
So now what was Trevelyan to do? Go back to his room and stay there? Go back to his writing and stay out of this? Allow Harry to marry his American and let her fight it out with her mother-in-law? Claire was a strong and healthy young woman, and if nothing else, she’d outlive the old hag. Then she could do what she wanted.
Again the images that Claire had drawn of him appeared before his eyes. He wiped his hands over his face. Would he return ten years from now and find that happy young woman carrying trays into her mother-in-law’s room? Would her handsome husband even notice that his wife’s spirit had been killed?
Trevelyan stood up and walked to the door. Maybe if he talked to Leatrice. He wouldn’t do anything, just talk to her. Maybe she wasn’t as unhappy as Claire thought she was.
Chapter Fifteen
Leatrice, snuggled deep in the cocoon of her bed, at first didn’t know what the creaking sound was. In her sleep-dazed mind she knew that any and all disturbances came from her mother, so she tried to rouse herself. What did the old woman want now? Her feet rubbed? Her hair brushed? Hot water? Tea? Did she want Leatrice to read to her? Sometimes Leatrice thought the old woman sat up late trying to figure out things for her daughter to do. Her uncle James had once said that Eugenia couldn’t possibly sleep because no one could be as mean as she was without having a full twenty-four hours a day to work at it.
Leatrice pushed the cover off and, her eyes still closed, began to make her way out of the bed. It was when the light penetrated her lids that her eyes flew open. Standing near the east wall, the old door that was hidden in the wall panel open behind him, holding a candle, was the ghost of her dead brother. Leatrice sat up, put her knuckles to her mouth to keep from screaming, then backed against the headboard of the bed, pulling the coverlet with her
The ghost smiled at her.
Leatrice tried to move farther away and pulled the cover higher about her. If her life had depended on it, she couldn’t have said a word. She just sat there, staring in stark terror.
“Ah, Mutt,” said the ghost, “it’s just me.”
Leatrice sat there, still trembling, staring wide-eyed, then she began to blink. This apparition didn’t look like a ghost. He looked like a flesh-and-blood man who had entered her room through the old door. She leaned forward a bit to get a better look at him, and he took a step closer to her.
“I’m real,” he said. “As real as I ever was.”
She let the cover drop from her throat and kept looking at him. Could it really be her brother? “Vellie?” she whispered.
He nodded once, then he was across the room to her. Leatrice opened her arms and he came to her, burying his face against her neck while she hid her face in his hair.
He was real! Oh thank God and all that was holy, he was really and truly alive!
Leatrice began to cry then. The tears began to pour from her eyes softly at first, then, as she ran her hands over his arms and down his back, touching him as though to reassure herself that he was actually there, the tears began to run harder.
“Ssssh, love,” he whispered, holding her to him, clutching her.
He wore some odd garment of silk, a robe of sorts, and soft boots. He used the toe of one foot to remove first one boot, then the other, and he crawled in bed with her, stretched full length beside her, and held her, as much like a lover as a brother. And he let her cry. When she didn’t stop at his first admonitions, he didn’t try again to halt her; he just held her while she cried and cried and cried.
It was a long while before Leatrice could control herself enough to speak. And when she had her tears under control somewhat, all she could think of was how good it was to touch someone. It had been years and years since she had felt human flesh against her own. She and Trevelyan were only a year apart in age, and when they had been children they had been close. Their brother Alex had been too full of himself and too dignified to have much time for a mere girl, but she and Vellie had been friends—or, as some people said, co-conspirators in crime.
She hadn’t seen him since he was nine, on that most horrible day in her life when he had been sent away with their horrid grandfather. The vision of Vellie, her most beloved friend, her brother, her…her soul mate, turning around in that open carriage and looking back at her would be imprinted on her mind to the day she died. Their father had said Vellie would return in a few months, but Leatrice had looked at her mother’s stern face and known her brother would not be allowed to return, at least not to live. He had committed the unforgivable: he had defied their mother. He had stood up to her and laughed at her punishments and her warnings and her threats. But in the end the old woman had won, for, after all, Vellie was just a little boy and she was the duchess and his mother. It was she who had the authority. Their father had had his son Alex to train to become the duke, and Leatrice thought that maybe her father had been just a bit glad to see Vellie taken away, for the second son had been a problem since the day he was born.
“Are you really here?” she whispered, her breath coming in jerks as she tried to control her sobbing.
“Really and truly.”
His arms were wrapped about her and her back was to his front as he held her close. This was the way it had always been: the two of them together. Even when he was just a bit of a boy their mother had had him whipped for even the tiniest infraction of her rules. Leatrice thought it probably infuriated the old woman that her second son would never cry. He used to swagger away from the woman’s beatings, his little shoulders back, a smirk of a smile on his face as though to say she’d not hurt him. But at night, Leatrice would sneak through the tunnels and go to his room and crawl into bed with her brother and he’d hold her and cry. He’d cry and say, “Why does she hate me so?” Leatrice never had an answer for him.
“The papers said you were dead. They said you died of a fever, that you never reached Pesha and that you were sick and—”
His derisive laugh cut her off. “I’m much harder to kill than that. I was sick for a while, maybe more dead than alive, but I healed. I stayed behind until I cou
ld stand getting on a damned boat and I came home.”
She held one of his hands to her face and rubbed it against her cheek. She knew it had been months since the man Jack Powell, who had traveled with Trevelyan, had returned to England and announced to the world that he and he alone had entered the secret city of Pesha. He’d told the press that Captain Baker had been too ill to enter the city so the captain stayed behind. The man Powell said that Captain Baker had been so ill that he’d had to be carried all the way back to the coast and then, just as they were to board the ship back to England, Captain Baker had died.
“Where are you staying?” she asked.
He hesitated before answering. “In Charlie’s room.”
Leatrice didn’t say anything for a moment. When she did speak, she tried to sound nonchalant. “Have you been there long?”
“A few weeks.”
She understood what he was saying. He had been there for some time, but for some reason he had not come to see her. She wondered if he’d meant to come to her at all. She wondered if this was the first time he’d stayed there. Had there been other times when he’d stayed in that old, uninhabited, unvisited part of the house and not come to her?
“What brings you here now?” she asked, trying to sound easy and carefree, as though her feelings weren’t hurt.
But Trevelyan knew exactly what she was thinking—he always had—and he laughed at her. Laughed in a way that made her furious.
She pulled away from him, grabbed a pillow, and began pummeling him. “How could you let me believe you were dead? Do you have any idea what I’ve suffered? Your letters have been the only thing I have in my life. I have all of them, every last one of them.”
He was lying on the bed, grinning up at her. She hadn’t seen him in years but she would have recognized that grin anywhere. It was that same defiant, devil-may-care grin of the nine-year-old boy. “They must fill a room.”
She smiled back at him. “Four trunks.” She reached out and touched his cheek. “Oh, Vellie, are you really, truly here? Are you sure you aren’t a ghost? Aunt May said she’d seen your ghost.”
“I ran into her early one morning as I was slipping through the corridors. Haven’t any of those old relics died? They were ancient when I was a boy. I can’t imagine how old they are now.”
“Mother would like for them to die, I’m sure, but they don’t seem to. Uncle Cammy has enlisted Harry’s fiancée’s sister in his plays. I wonder if they fight over the costumes?”
“From what I’ve heard of the Brat I would imagine she wins.”
At that Leatrice narrowed her eyes. She was beginning to get over the shock of his return and beginning to realize what his appearance here meant. “What do you know of the child? Have you met Claire? Have you seen Harry?”
Trevelyan turned on his back, put his hands under his head and looked up at the ceiling. “What do you think of Harry’s little American?”
Leatrice hit him smack in the face with a pillow and tried to hit him a few thousand more times, but he grabbed the pillow from her and held her arms to her side.
“What is wrong with you?”
“You’ve been here weeks and you’ve seen Harry and probably his fiancée but you’ve allowed me to believe you were dead. How could you do that to me? I’ve loved you more than anyone else in the world has. For twenty-two years I wrote you at least once a week, sometimes five and six times a week. I told you everything that happened in my life. I poured out my soul to you. For all those years you were my closest and at times my only friend. But then you go off to find your beloved Pesha and I hear nothing from you. Not one letter for over two years, then I read in the newspaper that you’re dead. I believed it! Do you know how much I’ve grieved for you? Do know how much I’ve cried over you? And now I find that you aren’t dead. Not only aren’t you dead, but you’ve been living but a few feet from me and you’ve been sneaking about the tunnels talking to daffy old Aunt May, talking to Harry who doesn’t even really know you, at least not the way I do, and now—”
She broke off as he sat up, leaned against the headboard, and pulled her into his arms, for she had begun to cry again.
“I thought it would be better for everyone if they went on believing I was dead.”
“What a very stupid thing to say,” she said, sniffing against his chest. “How could you think it would be better if we thought you were dead?” Even as she said it, she knew the answer. She hadn’t thought of it until this moment, but their elder brother’s death made Trevelyan the duke.
She pulled away to stare at him, wide-eyed. “Your Grace,” she whispered.
“Exactly.”
Leatrice put her head back on his shoulder. This did indeed change things. “She won’t like this,” Leatrice said softly and they both knew “she” meant their mother. “She won’t like that Harry is no longer the duke. But I guess he never was, was he?”
“I don’t want it,” Trevelyan said softly. “I never did. Harry is a perfect duke. He shoots and he gives parties and he can sit in the House of Lords and snooze with the best of them. I would never fit in. I don’t want the responsibility of the title.”
“But Vellie—” she began.
He pulled her head back to his chest and stroked her hair. “No, I don’t want it and I don’t mean to take it. Harry’s said he’ll fund all my expeditions and that’s all I want. I have much more to do in my life and it doesn’t include moldering away in one of these houses while married to the richest heiress I can find.”
It was the second time he had referred to Claire. “Have you met her? Have you met Claire?”
Trevelyan took so long to answer that Leatrice pulled away to look at him. Always, even as a child, he’d had those eyes. Sometimes she thought that those eyes of Trevelyan’s were what so infuriated their mother. They were intense and bright and unreadable. They were unreadable unless you knew him, as Leatrice did. When Trevelyan was twelve their father had allowed his second son to return home. But the return had lasted only two weeks, for Trevelyan had been caught breaking into the church cellar one night. He’d said he was searching for tombs. The next week Trevelyan had climbed a ladder and entered the second floor of a widow’s boarding house, a house that was reputed to be one of illicit dealings. Their father did not forgive his son the second time and sent him back to his grandfather. There had been other visits, but on each one Trevelyan had managed to anger his father so that he was quickly sent away again.
She may not have seen him very often while they were growing up, but she’d received thousands of letters from him and he’d sent her hundreds of photographs. She’d watched Vellie grow up, for he rather liked dressing in what he called his disguises and having his photo taken.
Now she looked into his eyes and saw that he was hiding something. “What has made you come to me now? Had you planned to come at all? Or had you planned to leave here without even seeing me?” The answer was in his eyes.
She resisted the urge to call him every vulgar name she knew, and, thanks to him, she knew several in some very unusual languages.
She put her head back down. It was no use screaming at him. He had been screamed at by the best and all the noise had had no effect on him. “Tell me everything from the beginning, and I mean everything. I don’t want any of it left out.”
“It’s late and—”
“I’ll tell Mother you’re here.”
He chuckled, knowing it was an empty threat. She’d never in her life tell. “You have forced me into this,” he said, smiling. “I came here to this house to rest. I was very ill and I needed a place to hide and to recover. I didn’t plan to tell anyone I was here. Truthfully, I wasn’t sure the family was here. I can’t keep up with the seasons. I thought the lot of you might be in the south now.”
She lay against him and listened as he told her about meeting Claire, about fainting after he caught her horse. “It was a bit…”
“Embarrassing?” she said, laughter in her voice. She knew his re
putation with women. When he was younger, when he was in his teens, he had written to her of his exploits with women, how he had sneaked over the wall of a girls’ school in the middle of the night, how he had hidden in one girl’s bed when the Sister had come to see what the giggling was about. As he’d grown older, he had told her less of such exploits, but Leatrice, locked away with a harridan of a mother and an uninterested father and two brothers, and living a life of undescribable loneliness, had begged him to tell her of all his adventures.
“Claire is very pretty, isn’t she?” Leatrice asked as she watched him closely.
“There are many kinds of beauty. Claire has…life.”
Leatrice knew what he meant. Claire moved quickly and said things quickly and always seemed to be watching people. She wasn’t a person who was content to look only into herself. “And did you seduce her?”
At that Trevelyan stiffened. “She’s engaged to Harry.”
Leatrice stifled a laugh. “That didn’t bother you in Egypt with that pretty little dancer. And what about the time you raided the harem? Aren’t those women married to someone else?”
“They weren’t married to my brother.”
Leatrice smiled. For all Trevelyan’s travels and his bohemian outlook on life, underneath he was as conventional as other men.
“And besides, she didn’t like me.”
Leatrice looked at him, aghast.
“She said I was old and sick and weak.”
Leatrice put her head back down so he wouldn’t see her laughing. But he felt her body shake with her humor.
“Laugh all you want, but she wanted nothing to do with me. She’s mad about Harry. Talks about him all the time. She says he’s perfect.”
“Harry?”
“Harry.”
They were silent as they savored this great joke. Then Trevelyan started talking again and told her about his other meetings with Claire. “I knew I should have told her to go away, but she was so lonely. She couldn’t understand this house, and Harry completely ignored her.”