The Duchess Read online

  Claire didn’t move. For all his hostility, for all that she sincerely disliked this man, oddly enough she didn’t feel half as unwelcome here as she’d felt when she tried to enter the library. “Are you staying here?”

  “I don’t have time to talk to little girls. I have work to do.”

  “Oh? What are you working on?”

  “Nothing you’d understand,” he snapped.

  She stood where she was, warming her hands, wanting very much to see what was on the tables. They were certainly an odd assortment of tables: two were Jacobean, one a Queen Anne, one that looked as though it had come from the gold drawing room, two tables that had obviously been outside in the rain for quite some time, while the others were from every time period in between. Some were quite valuable, some worth little more than firewood.

  As he sat at the far table, his back to her, she leaned as far forward as she could without taking a step that he might hear and tried to see the papers on the nearest table.

  He turned abruptly and stared at her. Claire straightened and tried to act as though she hadn’t been prying. She tried to cover her nosiness with a little smile, but her red face gave her away.

  He picked up his tea cup, sipped at it, then replaced it in its saucer before he spoke. “Why aren’t you eating? Isn’t a meal being served now?”

  “I missed luncheon again.”

  “Again? Have you missed it often?”

  “Unfortunately, yes. I can’t seem to calculate my walking so I get back in time to change for luncheon. But I’m sure I’ll eventually learn.”

  He gave a little snort at that, a snort that let her know he had doubts she’d ever learn anything. “In the meantime you starve.” He turned back to his writing. “I guess it’s one of the fees you’ll pay for being a duchess.”

  Claire made a little face at his back after he turned away. She knew she should leave but she couldn’t think what she’d do if she did leave. She didn’t like this man, didn’t want to be near him, but the sight of books and papers was too intriguing to her. She couldn’t leave.

  Very slowly, without making a sound, she reached out to pick up a paper off the nearest table. It was covered with writing. She no more than had the paper in her hand when he snapped at her.

  “Put that down!”

  She dropped the paper so suddenly that it fell to the floor. She stood still for a moment, shaking like a child, but then she smiled at his back. He was acting as though he were ignoring her, but he was aware of every movement she made.

  “What are you writing?” she asked.

  “If I’d wanted you to know what I was writing I would have invited you to a reading.” Still with his back to her, without so much as a glance at her, he got up and moved to another table and instantly began writing again.

  Claire started to tell him that he’d left his cup of tea behind but then she seemed to become fascinated with it. It was still steaming and it looked like the best cup of tea she’d ever seen in her life. “I have no intention of disturbing you,” she said and found herself walking toward the table with the cup on it. “I was merely out for a stroll and I saw the door open and I went inside. Harry, I mean, His Grace, said I could explore all that I wanted.”

  At the end of this speech she had reached the table with the teacup on it and she had the cup in her hand before she realized what she was doing. She was aware that as soon as she had put her hand on the cup Trevelyan had spun about in his chair to look at her. Feeling quite defiant, she continued moving the cup toward her lips. She was tired of being hungry and of no one seeming to care. She drained half the cupful, then was sure she was going to die.

  “It was whisky,” she gasped, her hand to her throat.

  “Scotland’s finest,” Trevelyan said, amused.

  Claire staggered backward toward him, clutching tables as she moved.

  “If you’re planning to collapse, might I suggest that you do it on a chair. The floor is quite hard.”

  In spite of a throat and a stomach that were on fire, she managed to give him a look that told what she thought of his not coming to her aid. She caught the back of a chair and sat down on it hard.

  “I…could have been killed,” she at last managed to say.

  “Stealing a man’s whisky is an offense, but hardly punishable by death. At least not in most countries. Of course there are the moral implications of stealing anything.”

  “Would you please be quiet? Can a person die from that much whisky?”

  “Not likely.”

  He was watching her with his intense eyes, and after a moment she began to relax against the chair. “My goodness,” she said. “I do believe this is the first time I’ve been warm since I came to this country. I feel rather…” She trailed off.

  “Drunk is what you feel.” With that he clapped his hands twice and almost at once there appeared a man in the doorway.

  Claire, in spite of her relaxed state, widened her eyes. He was the tallest man she had ever seen, several inches over six feet and dressed in a strange white outfit. He wore a tunic that reached his knees and beneath the tunic were trousers that were tight about his ankles. A wide sash edged in pale gold fringe encircled his waist. His face was dark brown, with black eyes, a thin mouth, and a large nose that looked sharp enough to cut metal. Wound about his head was a round bundle of white cloth and in the middle was pinned an emerald that had to be two inches square.

  “Oman,” Trevelyan said, making the name sound like Ooomahn. “Food for our drunken guest.”

  “I’m not—” Claire began but stopped. She certainly did feel as though she were floating. “How very pretty the fire is. How pretty the tables are. Does Harry know you’re here?”

  Trevelyan turned away from her and went back to his writing. “I have His Royal Highness’s permission if that’s what you mean.”

  Claire giggled. “Not His Royal Highness. It’s His Grace. Not that my mother can remember.”

  Trevelyan turned back around. “What does your mother call Harry?” His eyes were intense; he looked as though he were exceedingly interested in her answer.

  “Whatever comes to mind.” She couldn’t help laughing. “Yesterday she called him Your Sereneness.” Claire put her hand over her mouth. “Harry thought it was very funny. He’s such a good sport.”

  “Perfection, is he?”

  “I rather think he is,” Claire said in wonder. “He’s kind and considerate.” She held up her left arm. “Under here is a bandage. Harry made sure that I stayed in bed one whole day after I hurt my arm.”

  “Alone?”

  At that Claire started to stand. “I will not remain here to be insulted.” But as she stood her head began to spin, and she sat back down.

  Trevelyan looked up as Oman reappeared in the doorway. “Food is through there,” he said and turned back to his writing.

  Unsteadily, Claire stood and walked through the doorway and into a bedroom. It was a beautiful room, the walls hung with gold-colored silk brocade, beautiful Persian carpets on the stone floor, and in the middle of the room was the most astounding bed she had ever seen. It was enormous, with two deeply carved posts at the foot that had to be a foot and a half square. The headboard and the top of the bed were also heavily carved. The big bed itself was draped with plush red silk velvet.

  She had an impulse to jump onto the bed, but then she saw that a plate of food had been set on a table against one wall and she went to it. But it wasn’t food she had ever seen before. There was a bowl of white creamy stuff, boiled potatoes, thinly sliced meat, and a bit of green stuff in the middle of the plate. There were tomatoes and sliced cucumbers also. It was not the same kind of food that she’d eaten since she came across the ocean, or before that for that matter.

  She sat down, picked up the spoon, and dipped it into the bowl. Was it soup or was it, for some reason, a bowl of cream? She smelled it.

  “It’s called yoghurt,” Trevelyan said from the doorway. “Fermented milk.”

&n
bsp; “It looks delicious.”

  “It’s an acquired taste.”

  At that Claire put a spoonful in her mouth. It was sour but she rather liked it. She smiled up at him and, for some reason, her liking the yoghurt seemed to please him. He came into the room and sat on a chair that was against the wall, took a pipe and a can of tobacco off the windowsill, packed the pipe, and lit it.

  Claire tore into the food ravenously. “What are you doing here?” she asked between bites. “Why do you have eleven tables in there? Whose room was this? Are you the only person who lives in this part of the house? Are you very, very ill?”

  He looked at her through the haze of the pipe smoke. “Lonely for company, are you?”

  “Why, no, of course not. There must be a hundred people living in this enormous house. How can I be lonely?” She looked down at the empty plate. With the food in her, she was losing the delicious feeling the whisky had given her.

  “And there’s always Harry.”

  She put her fork down. “I think I’d better go now.” She started to get up.

  “This is Charlie’s room.”

  She looked back at him. “I haven’t met any Charlie.”

  “Charlie as in the prince of that name.”

  Claire stood still a moment. “Bonnie Prince Charlie? That Prince Charlie?”

  “None other. He came this way in…”

  “1745.”

  “I think that was the year. He came by here and of course some of my relatives, as well as Harry’s, were helping him, so they asked him to spend the night. He did.” Trevelyan pointed with the stem of his pipe toward the bed.

  Claire looked at the bed with new eyes. “Bonnie Prince Charlie slept in this bed?”

  “Left some things in a drawer over there.”

  Slowly, Claire made her way to the small table next to the bed and opened the drawer. Inside was a bit of tartan cloth that she knew to be the prince’s sett. She had seen several pieces in museums. There was also an old, yellow, folded piece of paper in the drawer. Tentatively, she opened it, and inside was a curl of light brown hair. She looked at Trevelyan. “His?”

  “Yes,” he said and smiled a bit.

  Carefully, she put the items back into the drawer and closed it. “These things should be in a museum.”

  Trevelyan shrugged and drew on his pipe.

  Claire looked at the bed in reverence for a moment, then she did what she had always wanted to do when she saw wonderful things in museums: she touched it. Gently, she ran her hands along the carving of the post and along the coverlet.

  “The bed’s not exactly fragile. As I sleep on it every night, I can assure you that it’s quite sturdy.”

  Claire looked at him to see if he were joking but then, with a smile of great joy, she climbed onto the bed and stretched out. She was looking up at the underside of the same bed that Bonnie Prince Charlie had looked at.

  “I think I hear bagpipes,” she said softly. “This is the real Scotland.”

  Trevelyan watched her intently. “And what is your idea of the real Scotland?”

  She sat up on her elbows. “The history of what has gone on in this place. Are you Scots?”

  “Half. My mother is English.”

  “Then your parents must have hated each other.” She lay back on the coverlet.

  “True enough,” he said. “I’ve never seen a married couple hate each other more than my parents did.”

  “Of course they did. The English have persecuted the Scots for centuries. Did you know that one of the English kings was called the Hammer of the Scots?” She smiled up at the canopy. “But no one, absolutely no one, could defeat the Scots. Not everything the English could do to them could make them surrender. And in the end they won.”

  Trevelyan drew on his pipe. “If we Scots are so poor and the English are so rich, how have we won?”

  “James the First, of course. Elizabeth the First turned all of England over to a Scotsman. All the rest of the English kings and queens are descended from Scotsmen.”

  Trevelyan stood and walked toward the bed to look down at her. “What a romantic you are. Do you always tell yourself what you want to believe?”

  She lifted herself to her elbows. “I know my history and—”

  “Bah!” he said. “James the First spent only the first few months of his life in Scotland. He was as English as your young duke, and our present queen, Victoria, is more German than she is English.”

  Claire well knew all this, but she much preferred to ignore it. “Just the same—” She broke off when he left the room. She lay back on the bed and smiled. It was rather nice to talk to someone who knew some of the things that she did. Actually, it was just plain nice to talk to anyone at all, about anything. She got off the bed and went into the sitting room. He was already back at one of his tables and writing.

  “How—?” she began, but he turned on her.

  “If you stay you must be quiet. I can’t abide chattering while I’m working.”

  “If you’d tell me what you’re working on, I might be able to help you.” Just the thought of having something to do made her feel better than she had in days.

  “Can you read Arabic script?”

  “No, but I can—”

  “Then you are of no use to me. Go and sit there.” He nodded toward a cushioned window seat. “Get a book or take some paper and a pen.”

  Claire went to the window seat, sat on it, and looked out the window. She had to open the ancient iron hinges to be able to see, as the glass was old and too imperfect to be able to see through. She looked across the gardens to the woods and the heather-covered hills beyond.

  She sat there for a long while, breathing the sweet, cool Scottish air and looking at the hills. After a while she turned and saw that Trevelyan was staring at her. He seemed able to read her thoughts, but she had no idea what he was thinking.

  As usual she was startled by the intensity of his eyes and the greenish cast to his skin. “Are you very ill?” she asked softly.

  “I have been,” he answered curtly and it was obvious that he didn’t want to talk about his health. “Do you read or are you one of those simpering misses who is capable of doing nothing for days on end?”

  “Are you always bad-tempered or is it just me?”

  He almost smiled at that. “I’m the same for everyone.”

  “Horrible thought,” she said under her breath.

  He did smile at that, and she saw that he didn’t look so ill or quite so ugly when he smiled. Just as she opened her mouth to speak, he interrupted her. “Don’t start asking me questions again.” He stood and went to two small oak doors imbedded in the stone walls. When he opened the doors she saw there were books inside. She gasped and came off the seat to stand by him, and, as he had his hand on the top corner of one of the doors, she slipped under his arm to see the titles on the books more clearly. She was unaware of how Trevelyan looked down at the top of her head. He leaned forward to smell her hair. It smelled of sunshine and heather and he had difficulty controlling an urge to put his lips against her neck.

  Claire didn’t know what was happening to her, but suddenly her body broke out in gooseflesh. As though she’d been scalded, she jumped away from him. “I…I think I ought to leave.”

  He was again wearing that infuriating look on his face, his eyes lazy looking, almost hooded. Under his mustache, his lips curved into a slight smile as he pulled a book from the shelf. “I thought you wanted to read. Ah, here’s one. Tibet Rediscovered. Oh, no, it’s in Italian.” He started to replace the book on the shelf but she snatched it from his hand, staying as far from him as possible.

  “For your information, I can read Italian, but, as it happens, I’ve read this book. I’ve read all of Captain Baker’s books. I told you I had.”

  “So you did. So then I doubt they bear a second reading.”

  “I have read the parts that I like repeatedly.”

  “What does that mean, ‘the parts you like’?�
��

  “Why do you take criticism personally? The man wrote on every aspect of everything he saw. Some of it was quite boring.”

  “Such as?”

  He had taken a step closer to her, but, frowning, Claire moved back. “His descriptions of wagons, for instance,” she said quickly, looking away from him. “He would measure them and tell all the dimensions of the wheels and the seats and the length of the thing. He’d go on and on until a reader could scream.”

  “You should not have taxed your small brain with his books if you didn’t like them,” he said softly, teasingly. “You—”

  She turned to face him, and there was such passion in her eyes that for a moment Trevelyan was startled. Her eyes were the eyes of one who believed in something. It had been so long since he had believed in anything that at first he didn’t recognize the emotion on her pretty face. He looked at the way her eyes lit, at the way anger made her lips fuller. How had he not seen that she was a beauty? How had he not seen the passion just under the surface of her? He took a quarter of a step closer to her.

  “What is wonderful about his books are the parts about people,” Claire said vehemently. “He was a magnificent observer of people. Most explorers’ books make for such dull reading. They write of distances, and when they come to something interesting, they write, ‘Saw a very unusual tribe today. Believe they eat ants to stay alive.’ That kind of thing can drive a reader crazy. You immediately want to know whether they bake or fry the ants, and do they cultivate them. There are just lots of questions that spring to one’s mind. But Captain Baker would never leave the reader unsatisfied. He tells the reader everything.”

  “Including the dimensions of the wheels of the wagons,” Trevelyan said automatically, but he was looking at her more than hearing her.

  She shook her head in exasperation, then turned back to the case of books. “I don’t think you’re capable of understanding.”

  “But Captain Baker no doubt would understand, and of course young Harry would.” Trevelyan shocked himself when he heard what sounded like jealousy in his own voice. He was glad the little American hadn’t seemed to hear him.