The Duchess Read online

  Since she’d first seen these tables she had been very curious as to what Trevelyan was doing on them, but now she seemed to be bursting with curiosity. She glanced toward the silent bedroom door and went to the first table.

  There were many bits of paper on the table, stacks of the little pieces. Some were only an inch square and some were as big as three inches square. All of them were covered with the tiniest writing she’d ever seen. She picked up one of the larger pieces and looked at it, but could make out nothing.

  With another glance at the bedroom door she carried the paper to the window and held it up to the fading light. The writing seemed to tell of the walls of a city. It wasn’t easy to read the small writing but what she could understand described the height of the walls and what they were made of. On the back of the paper were dimensions of the stones in the walls and a bit of theory on when the walls were built.

  She put the paper back on the table and went to another table. These papers seemed to be a translation of poetry from incomprehensible script. Nothing she had seen so far made any sense, so she went around to all the tables. There were four tables dealing only with translations, each from a different language, and not a modern language. There was a table containing pages that seemed to be about traveling in China. Another table had pages pertaining to the search for gold in Arabia.

  It was when she reached the seventh table that the answer began to dawn on her. On the seventh table was work on creating an alphabet for the Peshan language. It wasn’t that she recognized the language, but there were extensive notes near the alphabet describing the sounds of the language. The name Pesha was everywhere.

  Claire didn’t think she was feeling too well as she walked back to the first table and looked again at the little pieces of paper. She had read that Captain Baker often went to places where the act of writing wasn’t understood. Had he allowed any of the people in these towns to see him writing he would have forfeited his life. So he often wrote on tiny pieces of paper that could be hidden at a moment’s notice. When she used to read Captain Baker’s accounts of these secret writings, she would thrill at his daring. If even one of these papers had been seen he would have been killed.

  She picked up one scrap of paper after another and read what she could. There were notes on the language of Pesha, on the people. There were tiny sketches of the people in their long gowns, with all their jewelry about their arms. There were notes on the size of and distance between the walls of the city.

  She went to the eighth table and there she had the shock of all her short life, for there were notes about her. Written out in what she was beginning to recognize as Trevelyan’s strong, pointed handwriting was every conversation she’d ever had with him. She quickly scanned a page that told of her trying to cope with the inhabitants of Bramley. Trevelyan rather brilliantly made her seem like a well-meaning but very stupid child.

  Under the written pages was a stack of cartoons. She had seen hundreds of Captain Baker’s illustrations and knew his style well. On top was a cartoon of her pushing Harry over a chair and knocking the cherry pit from his throat. She was depicted as a big, strong, rather horsey-looking woman and Harry as somewhat feeble. There was another cartoon of her curled in Trevelyan’s window seat, eating an apple, her nose less than an inch from the pages of a book. The caption read, “American Heiress meets Captain Baker in the original Latin.”

  There was another cartoon of her on a rearing horse. She was using her whip to command an old, sick man to calm the horse. She saw a cartoon of herself sitting at the head of an enormously long table, wearing a coronet and presiding over Harry’s odd relatives, each of them perfectly caricatured.

  There were more pages of notes, more pages of cartoons, but she couldn’t bear to see any more. Very slowly, she put the notes down on the table and walked to the window.

  “Find out what you wanted to know?” Trevelyan asked from behind her.

  She wasn’t startled to find out he was there and had probably been watching her for some time. When she turned to look at him he was wearing a long robe of some strange design and smiling as though he expected her to congratulate him on having kept his secret.

  “You are Captain Baker,” she said so softly that the sound was little more than a whisper.

  “I am.” There was pride in his voice, along with that sound of expectation.

  “I must go. Harry will be waiting for me.”

  The smile left Trevelyan’s face. He caught her arm before she reached the door. “You have nothing to say? You’ve asked so much about Captain Baker before now.”

  She didn’t look at him. “I have nothing to say.” As politely as she could, she pulled away and started down the stairs.

  “I will see you tomorrow?” he asked.

  She stopped on the stair but she didn’t look back at him. “No, I will not come tomorrow.” She started walking again.

  “Come or go, I don’t care,” he called after her, then turned back into the room. What a very, very odd way for a woman to act, he thought. From the first day he’d met her all he’d heard was how wonderful, how great…Yes, that was it, how great Captain Baker was, yet now that she’d found out she was in the same room with the man she thought to be great, she acted as though he were poison.

  His head came up. Perhaps she was in awe of him. He’d encountered that in people before. They had heard of him and knew of his work and when they spoke to him their voices quivered. He smiled and bounded down the stairs two at a time.

  He reached her just as she reached the door to the outside. He caught her arm. “There’s no reason to be afraid of me,” he said. “You’ve seen that I’m a man like any other. You’ve seen that I’m flesh like any other man. You may continue to visit me.”

  “May I?”

  “Yes,” he answered, completely missing the irony in her voice.

  She stood still for a long while and looked at him. “The scars on your cheeks are from the lance in Africa? It went through one side of your jaw and out the other.”

  He nodded.

  “The scars on your back, they’re from a lion, also in Africa?”

  He smiled broader. It was quite soul satisfying that this woman knew so much about him. Many men knew about what he had done in his life, but not many women were allowed to read what he had written. And, right now, had he been given a choice, he would rather Claire know what he had done in his life than any other person on earth.

  “And the knife wounds on your ribs?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer right away.

  “You are a Master Sufi,” she said softly.

  He was very impressed with her knowledge of him.

  Claire gave him a humorless smile. “Now I know what others don’t. You wrote that you had become a Master Sufi, but one critic said that was impossible, that to pass the…graduation I guess you’d call it, you’d have to go through a ceremony. It is, I believe, a ceremony in which you are put into a trance and you inflict—” She broke off, not liking to think of what he had done, but then he was a scholar as there had never been a scholar. He wasn’t content with researching a subject, he wanted to experience what he saw. To become a Master Sufi, a priest of what has been called the Religion of Beauty, he would have had to put himself in a trance and, while singing and dancing, stab himself with a knife. It is said that initiates’ wounds would later be healed by the touch of their master.

  Trevelyan gave her a bit of a bow to acknowledge that she was right.

  Claire looked at him a moment longer, then put her hand on the door.

  He covered her hand with his. “It doesn’t matter what’s gone before. You may still visit me. I will…” He smiled. “I will teach you Peshan.”

  She pulled her hand away from his. “And what will I teach you?”

  “I don’t know what you mean. I know all the languages you know. I—”

  “Perhaps I can teach you more about being an American heiress. Perhaps I can teach you what it feels like to be