The Duchess Read online

  “If he marries her,” said Claire’s fourteen-year-old sister, Sarah Ann, better known as Brat, while she went through Claire’s jewelry box again.

  Tired and irritable from a day of standing still while she was pinned and repinned, Claire snapped the jewel case shut.

  Brat just laughed. “I shall marry a man who adores me. He will do whatever I tell him to do. And he will be very, very rich. I’m not going to marry a man who’s poor even if he does have nice legs.”

  “You’ll marry who I tell you to marry,” Arva said as she grabbed her younger daughter’s ear and pulled her from the room. Claire shrugged when she saw them, for she knew her mother would never actually punish her adored younger daughter no matter what she did. Within minutes the clever child would have her mother feeding her chocolates and promising her some forbidden outing.

  Claire walked to the window and looked at the trees in the little park outside the hotel. The leaves were just beginning to turn in the fall air, and she thought of her home in New York. Both Paris and London seemed so different from New York, so much slower. She thought of all her nineteen years in New York and her summers in the coolness of Maine. She had taken her easy life for granted up until now, had thought it would never change. She was used to kissing her father good-bye as he went out the door to go away on his yacht, or off to some week-long hunting trip, or off for months to the wilds of the West after grizzly bear and mountain lions.

  She’d grown used to the sound of her mother giving orders to their many, many servants as Arva decorated their big Fifth Avenue house for yet another party. Claire used to stop and admire the thousands of orchids hanging from the walls and mantels and the ceilings as she left on her way to the library or the museum.

  For the most part, her parents had ignored their two daughters, thinking they were well cared for in the hands of their governesses. Both Claire and Brat had found it easy to bribe their overseers; for the most part, they’d led their own lives. Brat liked society, just as her mother did, and often wandered down to her mother’s parties, where everyone made a great fuss over her prettiness.

  But Claire hadn’t much taste for society. What she liked were libraries and museums and talking to people who were knowledgeable in their chosen fields. Her mother hated it when Claire brought home for tea ancient professors of obscure branches of history. Arva always made derogatory remarks about how much the skinny little men could eat. “I like intelligence,” Claire had said.

  But both Arva and George had been too busy to pay much attention to their daughters until their accountant had that horrid talk with them. After that, it seemed to Claire, their lives had changed overnight.

  Now the house on Fifth Avenue was gone, the house in Maine was gone, her father’s yacht had been sold. All of it, their possessions and their whole way of life, had disappeared.

  Now it was up to Claire to do something about it. When she married Harry and became the duchess, everything would be all right again. Her parents would have what they most wanted and her little sister would have a chance to get a rich man who adored her.

  As Claire looked out the window, she smiled. She had been dreading it all, but Harry had made it easy. The old saying that it was as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor one was true. It had certainly been easy to fall in love with a duke.

  On their third day in Paris, books that Claire had ordered while in London arrived. She began to read them between fittings, and between her mother’s constant warnings and questions. (“Will people have to curtsy to you when you’re a duchess? Will they have to curtsy to me since I’m the mother of a duchess? How will people address me? Is it as Your Honorable?”) Claire soon gave up trying to explain the difference between aristocracy and royalty, and she hated breaking the news to her mother that she, as the mother of a duchess, would have no title at all.

  The books were about the history of Harry’s family, the Montgomerys. She found out how old it was and that this Scottish branch of the family, which was called Clan MacArran, had at least once had a woman as its chief. In the early fifteenth century one of the Montgomery men had married into the MacArrans and had taken the name MacArran, and then more Montgomerys had married more MacArrans until the Montgomerys were almost a separate clan. In 1671 Charles II had given the family a dukedom. There was a great deal of speculation as to why he’d done this. Some said it was for having rendered years of faithful service, but there was also a rumor that the MacArran laird had volunteered to marry a very ugly and very shrewish woman who was rumored to be a half sister of the king.

  For whatever reason the clan was awarded a dukedom, at the time there was a great deal of discussion as to what name the family should be called. Should the family name be MacArran and the dukedom called Montgomery or the other way around? There was a legend that a coin was flipped. So, Harry was the duke of MacArran, yet his name was Henry James Charles Albert Montgomery.

  During those days in Paris, Claire sometimes thought she was going to break under the fatigue of fittings and preparations and being part of her mother’s busy social life, but she kept remembering that Bramley was waiting for her at the end of it.

  At night, tired as she was, she often couldn’t sleep, so by lamplight she read the books on Harry’s family and novels by Sir Walter Scott, read the Scottish author’s accounts of the beauty of the Highlands and the courage of the men who lived there. Claire went to sleep dreaming of heather and armies of men who looked just like Harry.

  When Claire and her family returned from Paris, Harry was waiting for her. He escorted her to his carriage with the ducal crest on the door. Autocratically, he told her parents and sister that he and Claire were traveling to London alone. Claire could have cried with joy at the prospect of a few minutes away from her mother’s admonitions. Once inside the carriage, she saw that Harry had filled it with pink roses. She took the fluted glass of champagne he handed her and smiled at him—and suddenly she wished he’d kiss her. She wished he’d take her in his arms and hold her. She’d like to have him force all doubts from her mind.

  But Harry didn’t touch her.

  “I’ve missed you,” he said, smiling. “Did you think about me?”

  “All the time,” she answered, looking at the way his broad shoulders practically filled one side of the coach.

  “And what were you doing while you were away from me?”

  “Buying dresses and reading. What did you do?”

  Harry smiled at her over the glass of wine. He wasn’t about to tell her what he had done, for it involved mistresses and a few actresses, and some horses that he’d lost too much money on. But he was going to marry a very rich heiress and it didn’t matter how much money he lost.

  “I thought about you,” he said and the way he said it made Claire’s heart flutter a bit.

  To control herself, she looked out the window. “My mother won’t like that I am alone with you.”

  “I think your mother would allow anything if it resulted in her daughter marrying a duke.”

  Claire gave him a look of surprise. “I’m marrying you because I love you, not because I want to marry a duke.”

  “Is that so?” he said, smiling, and when he smiled like that Claire forgot everything in the world except him. “And what about all this history you keep talking about? What about that place? That Cull something or other?”

  “Culloden? But that was—”

  “Yes, yes, a very great battle.” He leaned forward and took her hand in his, playing with her fingers. “When I think of marriage, I think of other things besides war. You’re not going to lecture me on history after we’re married, are you?”

  His fingers were on her forearm. Only lace separated their skin. “I’m looking forward to getting you into bed,” he said very softly.

  Claire held her breath as he leaned toward her. She knew she should not allow him such liberties, but, on the other hand, they were going to be married in a short time. Thanks to several books she’d read—bo