The Duchess Read online

  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