The Duchess

  Leatrice understood the feeling of loneliness all too well. Although the big house was full of people, there was no companionship in it. At least not for her. She didn’t want to sit in the drawing rooms with her aunts and gossip about the other people they knew, and she couldn’t go outside, for she couldn’t hear her mother’s summons if she were outside. “I know how she felt.”

  She listened to Trevelyan talk and as she did so she heard more than his words. She heard something in his tone that told her that he liked Claire a great deal. She heard him tell how Claire had read all of Captain Baker’s books. “All of them,” he said, and there was pride in his voice.

  She listened as he told of the extraordinary day he and Claire had spent with Angus MacTarvit. Leatrice hadn’t seen any of the MacTarvits since she was a child, when she and Vellie used to go sneaking through the brush to try and steal Angus’s whisky. She remembered being caught by the old man once and being terrified. But he’d just threatened her and let her go. She had run back to Vellie in a state of terror and he had laughed at her, said that the old man was all wind and nothing else.

  Now Leatrice was hearing that Claire had spent the day with the old man and had danced with the crofters. Leatrice could not have been more surprised if Trevelyan had told her Claire had spent the day with the fairies and drunk nectar for tea.

  “What else has she done?” Leatrice whispered, some awe in her voice.

  Trevelyan smiled. “Taken to Scotch like a sailor and eaten some very strange food and loved it and bribed her sister into lying about her so she could nurse me through a fever. And she’s made Harry take her on a tour of the estate and introduce her to the workers.”

  Leatrice looked up at Trevelyan in bewilderment. “How could Harry do that? He wouldn’t know one of his own employees if he ran over the man. I doubt if Harry knows his own valet’s name, and the man’s been with Harry for ten years.”

  “It seems that our clever little brother took Charles with him. Old MacTarvit said Claire thought Harry was a man of great humility because he allowed his employee to do most of the explaining.”

  At that Leatrice laughed, and as she did so she realized that it had been a long, long time since she had laughed. The only light in her life had been letters from her brother, letters that had allowed her to live his adventures vicariously. He had written little of their grandfather, only mentioning now and then that his back was sore from the old man’s latest beating or that he was thin from having had to live on bread and water for days at a time. But for the most part his letters had been full of all that he was seeing and doing.

  “What else has she done?”

  Trevelyan took a deep breath. “She has met our mother.”

  “She can be quite charming when she wants to be.”

  “It seems that she didn’t want to be. It’s my guess that she knew more about Claire than Claire knew about her. I think the old woman sensed Claire’s power.”

  “Power? Do you think Claire’s powerful? She seemed rather ordinary to me. She misses a great many meals and my maid says that Rogers runs her. Rogers brags about it in the servants’ hall. I think that Rogers reports on Claire to Mother.”

  “Yes, I imagine she does.” Trevelyan was thoughtful for a moment. “You asked me if Claire’s powerful. I think perhaps she is, but she doesn’t know it. She’s little more than a child. Her power lies in that she cares about people.”

  “That doesn’t sound like any power to me,” Leatrice said with great cynicism. It had been her experience that survival was the most important thing in life. One did what one could in order to survive.

  “You should have seen her with old MacTarvit,” Trevelyan said. “She had the old man eating out of her hand. And the crofters adored her. They looked at her with the respect that none of our family has received in a long time.”

  Leatrice pulled away and looked at him. “Vellie, you’re in love with her.”

  He pushed her back down to his shoulder. “What an utterly ridiculous thought. She’s a child and she’s in love with Harry and she wants to be a duchess and—” He cut himself off to laugh. “No, dear little sister, I’m not in love with her. Actually, what I want is a bit of revenge.”

  “Mother,” Leatrice said.

  “No one else.”

  “I’ll help,” Leatrice said without even asking what he planned. “Murder? Shall we feed her some exotic poison?”

  Trevelyan laughed. “No, nothing so quick and relatively painless. When Harry is the duke our mother plans on remaining the duchess. She plans to continue ruling this place and the others until the day she dies.”

  “Of course. Did anyone think there would be anything else? Don’t tell me your American thought she would be the duchess?”

  “She’s not my American. She belongs to Harry and, yes, Claire thought that after she was married her mother-in-law would quietly retire to the dower house and Claire would become the duchess. Claire had plans of taking meals off the strict schedules.” He paused. “She planned to control the money she would inherit upon her marriage and repair the crofters’ houses and plant fields and do other American business things.”

  “My goodness,” Leatrice said. “Did she really? Harry could have told her—”

  There was anger in Trevelyan’s voice when he spoke. “Harry has lied to her and told her whatever she wanted to hear. He’s told her she’ll be able to do whatever she wants after they’re married.”

  Leatrice sighed. “But then Harry would think she would be able to do so. He certainly does whatever he wants. And he thinks Mother is a darling. He can’t understand why other people don’t think so too.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Poor, poor Claire,” Leatrice said with feeling. “I would imagine she’s used to doing what she wants. Her mother is an awful woman. Quite common. She calls Harry the oddest names, such as Your Honor and Your Serene Grace. The aunts make fun of her mercilessly. I think they feed her misinformation, then laugh at her behind her back.”

  Trevelyan frowned. “And her father?”

  “Lazier than Harry.”

  “My God,” Trevelyan said in disbelief. “I had the impression she ran the family, but I think it’s worse than I thought.” He put his hands on Leatrice’s shoulders and held her at arms’ length. “Mutt, I think it’s time we did something about this. We can’t just stand back and let this girl be taken over by this household.”

  Leatrice pulled away from him, fear on her face. It was one thing to joke about revenge on their mother, but now Trevelyan’s face was serious. “No, Vellie, we aren’t children now. We can’t pull stunts any longer. Back then I didn’t understand what punishment was, but now I do. If I don’t behave myself, the old woman has ways of punishing that can make a person want to die. I’m surviving now and I have my small comforts. I don’t want those taken from me.” She tried to get out of bed, but he held her fast.

  “But this is a chance to do something about her. This is the chance we’ve always wanted.”

  “You maybe, but not me. You saw what she did when you displeased her. She sent you away and you never came back, and to me—” She broke off and looked away.

  “She did worse to you than she did to me. She broke your spirit.”

  Leatrice knew it was an insult of the highest magnitude and she took it as such. She broke away from him and moved to stand by the bed. “You haven’t changed, have you? Always trying to get into trouble. Always doing what you shouldn’t. You spent your childhood being beaten and starved and locked away in rooms, yet all of it taught you nothing. You never learned anything, did you?”

  “No,” he said softly. “I never learned. I always fought them. No matter what they did to me, I always fought back. And now I’m an adult and I go where I want to and I do what I want to and I live. But you’re still a frightened little girl being locked away in her room. You are thirty-one years old and you have no family, no home of your own. All you have are the letters of a brother you’ve rar
ely seen since you were a child and a bell that rules your life.”

  She wanted to yell at him, to tell him to get away from her, that she wished he’d never returned to upset her. She wanted to tell him that he didn’t understand, that he didn’t know how things were. She wanted to tell him that her life was fine, that she had everything she needed and wanted, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t lie to him because he knew the truth.

  But something else kept her from lying to him, and that was that she saw a glimmer of hope. For almost a year after Vellie had been taken away, she had continued to keep up her spirit. But Trevelyan was the fighter, not she. It didn’t take her long to realize that she was merely a follower, always had been, always would be. By the time Vellie had been gone a year, Leatrice no longer made any attempt to do anything but what her mother wanted. When she was twenty she had tried to defy her mother, but she’d lost that battle and she’d never tried again.

  “What do you plan to do?” She couldn’t keep her voice from trembling with fear.

  “To marry you to James Kincaid,” Trevelyan said.

  Leatrice stood there blinking at him. “What?”

  Trevelyan smiled at her. “It was the American’s idea. Harry’s American. Not mine. She told MacTarvit that the first thing she wanted to do was marry you to the love of your life. She thinks that if she can remove some of the old bat’s underpinnings it will weaken her. I don’t know if that means weaken your mother’s hold over Harry or the household or over Claire’s own lovely little self, but that’s what she wants to do. I thought I’d ask you if you’d very much mind marrying Kincaid.”

  Leatrice opened her mouth to speak but no words came out. She sat down on the edge of the bed, looked at her brother, again started to speak and again closed her mouth. She looked away for a moment. Then, when she looked back at him, she smiled. “Aren’t Americans the very oddest creatures?”

  Trevelyan’s eyes twinkled. “Had I any idea I would have forgone Pesha and explored America.”

  Leatrice laughed. “To marry James? I haven’t seen him in years. Or thought of him. What’s he doing now?”

  “I don’t know, but I imagine he’s still working on that one book.” He said this with all the contempt and derision that a prolific author has for one who takes years to write a single book. “It was about one of the Tudors, wasn’t it? Henry the Eighth and all his wives?”

  “It was Henry the Seventh and it had to do with his economic policy,” Leatrice snapped. “And you can stop making fun of James. There’s a great deal of research to be done when writing a biography. All you have to do is travel somewhere, then write about it. He has to spend hours reading medieval manuscripts. He has to find the manuscripts first and—” She scowled at him. “Just what is so amusing to you?”

  “Haven’t thought of him in years, have you? How far along is he in his writing?”

  Leatrice looked away and blushed. “The last I heard he was into the sixth year of Henry’s reign,” she said softly.

  “What was that? I’m not sure I heard you correctly. He’s working on Henry’s sixth wife?”

  “You!” she said as she tossed a pillow at him.

  Trevelyan caught the pillow. “For years James Kincaid was all I heard about in your letters. I think you wrote me about every breath the man took. I began to think he was a god on earth. I was sure I’d never met a man as wonderful as he. In all my travels I have seen many things and met many people but I have never come close to meeting anyone as miraculous as the great James Kincaid. It was difficult to believe he was the same boy who lived a couple of miles from Bramley and who used to run us out of his gardens, said our noise was scaring the birds away.”

  Leatrice wouldn’t look at Trevelyan.

  “Haven’t thought of him in years, eh? I always wondered, even as a child, why we were always walking past the Kincaid house. Remember how you used to hide behind trees and throw dirt clumps at him?”

  “I never did any such thing.”

  Trevelyan’s face lost its smile and he reached down and took her hand. “Why didn’t you marry him? Didn’t he ask you?”

  “Yes, he asked me. He asked me when I was sixteen and when I was seventeen and when I was eighteen.” She sighed. “He stopped asking when I was twenty.” Her voice lowered. “And now if I’m in a carriage with Mother and he happens to see me he looks away. He hates me.”

  “No doubt our dear mother—”

  Leatrice stood. “Yes!” she said, her hands clenched at her sides. “Yes, yes, yes. It was the worst scene of my life and I don’t want to think about it. Now here you are, Vellie, come back from the dead and you tell me that you want me to marry James.”

  “Not me. Harry’s American.”

  Leatrice took a deep breath and for a moment she looked at her hands. They were shaking. She knew all too well the harshness of her mother’s punishments; this American did not. If Leatrice once again tried and failed to assert herself to her mother, she could not imagine what her mother would do to her to discourage further insurrections.

  But if she were to try one more time and this time she succeeded…She didn’t like to think what this could mean. To get out of this house. To get away from the constant bells. To get away from her mother’s eternal demands and complaints.

  She looked at Trevelyan. “What should I do?”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Three nights after Claire met her mother-in-law to be, when she went to her room after dinner, two things happened at once. The butler came to her room carrying an envelope on a silver tray, telling her the message was urgent. At the same time, the enormous portrait in Claire’s room swung back on its concealed hinges to show Brat standing there. Her hair had fallen from its usually neat single braid to lie across her forehead; there were cobwebs on her shoulders and she looked greatly surprised.

  “Hello,” Brat said, great delight in her voice.

  Claire started to say something, but she didn’t want to in front of the butler. She tried to act as though her sister always entered her room from behind a portrait. Claire took the envelope from the butler’s tray and opened it.

  I am being held prisoner. Please help me. The old summerhouse. Come at once.

  Leatrice

  Claire read the note three times before she understood what it said. She looked up at the butler but his face was impassive. Claire knew she had to get rid of Miss Rogers, who was now in the dressing room. (Claire was back from dinner four and one-half minutes earlier than Miss Rogers thought she should have been so she had therefore not come in to help Claire.) And she had to get rid of Brat.

  “May I be of assistance, miss?” the butler asked.

  “Miss Rogers…” was all that Claire could get out.

  The butler bowed. “I will see that she is busy for the evening,” he said, then walked through the bedroom and toward the dressing room.

  “Oh!” Claire said, “and…” She glanced toward the doorway where Brat still stood.

  The butler permitted himself the smallest smile. “In this house one learns not to see a great deal.” With that he left the room.

  Brat sauntered into Claire’s bedroom. “You can’t believe this place. I found a map. Actually this old man gave it to me. I hadn’t met him before. He’s in a wheeled chair and there’s a legend that he killed four of his wives until the last one shot him, but now he lives at the far end—”

  “I don’t have time for your stories now. You have to go back to your room and stay there.”

  Brat looked at her sister. “What’s the letter say?”

  Claire pulled her riding habit from the wardrobe and Brat’s eyes widened. Brat used the opportunity to grab the note from Claire’s hand. “I want to go too.”

  “Absolutely not. I want you to go back to your room and I don’t want you to tell anyone about this. I don’t know what this is about but I mean to find out.”

  “Why did Harry’s sister send the note to you? Why not to Harry?”

  Claire
paused a moment in her dressing. “That’s a good question, but I have no answer. Now get out of here. And don’t tell anyone about the tunnels.”

  Brat stood there and looked at her sister, then she took a deep breath. “If you don’t let me go with you I’ll tell Mother you’ve been seeing another man besides Harry and I’ll tell Father you’ve been mean to me and I’ll tell Harry there are footprints in the dust in the tunnels leading to your room and I’ll tell—”

  “All right!” Claire said. She had no time to argue with her sister. “You may come with me but you must stay in the background and do what I say. Do you understand?”

  “Of course.” Brat cut her eyes at her sister. “Do you have any idea where the old summerhouse is?”

  Claire didn’t have to give an answer because at the next moment there was a quick knock at her door, then Harry entered. “Claire, did you receive one of these?” he asked, waving a note just like the one Claire held. He was frowning, but then he saw Brat and his face changed to a smile. “Hello, Sarah. You get prettier every day.”

  “I do, don’t I?”

  Claire groaned. “Harry,” she snapped, making him look back at her. “Yes, I received a note just like that one. We have to go to the summerhouse.”

  Harry didn’t seem to think there was any urgency in the message. In fact, he acted as though every day his sister sent him notes saying she was being held prisoner. “I must say that this is a great deal of bother. Who do you think is holding her?”

  Claire paused as she pulled her boots from the wardrobe. Sarah Ann gave Claire a look that said Harry wasn’t the brightest person on earth, but Claire ignored her. “I have no idea, but it looks as though she wants us both there, or else her captor wants us both. Harry, could you leave the room while I get dressed? I’ll meet you downstairs in ten minutes.”

  “Of course,” he said and left the room.

  Brat sprawled on Claire’s big bed. “I bet the two of you have some real interesting talks. Harry has a mind like a fiery blaze.”