A Duke for Christmas

by Cynthia Bailey Pratt

  “So he can put her to the question? You’re as crazy as he is. Don’t you think they’ll be looking for her?”

  “They won’t find her before she tells me what I want to know. Wake her up,” Clarence ordered.

  Angelina looked at her husband with great love shining in her beautiful dark eyes. “You should rest. I’ll make gnocchi. You like my gnocchi; it’s the best in Rome. You haven’t had a bite since last night.”

  “I don’t want anything. Leave me alone.” He hardly looked at her, staring constantly at Sophie, watching for any sign of life. Angelina shook her head and went to kneel down beside her sister.

  “She doesn’t look so good. I don’t like her color,” Lucia whispered.

  Angelina propped Sophie against her shoulder. Sophie moaned when she was moved and the pain seemed to bring her back to her senses. She blinked against the light that seemed so bright.

  “Is she awake?” Clarence came closer, standing over them.

  “She’s coming around. Lucia, get some water.”

  “Yes, bring the bucket. Some water sloshed over her will wake her up,” Clarence said eagerly.

  Lucia stood up. “You’re both crazy,” she said, but went off to do as she was told.

  Sophie wanted the man to go away. His presence was like a suffocating cloud of fear. She couldn’t think clearly and she associated this more with him than with the two blows on her head. She could feel blood trickling onto her neck. “The poems,” she said in a whisper. “The answer is in the poems.”

  “Do you hear, Angelina? I was right. What about them? What about the poems?”

  “Can’t tell you. Show you.”

  “I’ll get them.” He spun around and sprinted for the stairs, taking them in great leaps.

  “Let me help you up,” Angelina said in her ear. “Show him what he wants to know. I promise you’ll be safe after that.”

  “He’ll kill me.”

  “No, no. I won’t let him. We’ll put you back into that nice room and before we leave for Italy, I’ll tell someone where you are.”

  “Here’s the water. Where’s the crazy man?” In one hand Lucia carried a heavy oaken bucket, banded with blackened steel. In the other, she held a tin tankard. “Oh, she’s better.”

  Sophie still leaned heavily on Angelina. “Help me,” she said. She raised her eyes to Lucia. “Help me, please.” Her gaze traveled down to the bucket.

  Clarence Knox came clattering down the steps, still moving fast, holding the satchel in his right hand, the knife in his left. “I keep dropping the damn things.” He looked around and saw a round table against one wall. He dragged it out into the middle of the room, scratching the finish on the wooden floor. He threw back the flap of the satchel and upended it. Pages covered with Sophie’s handwriting cascaded out, some falling on the floor.

  Clarence Knox threw aside the satchel and bent, gasping, to pick up the fallen sheets.

  Lucia dropped the tankard and started to lift the bucket up in order to throw it. Then she shrieked, dropping the bucket. Water flew everywhere. Lucia stood, staring down as if fascinated by her left hand. The handle of a knife protruded there as if it had appeared by magic. She screamed again, piercingly.

  “No tricks,” Clarence Knox snarled. He strode over to her, his breathing loud in the sudden silence. Without hesitation, he jerked the knife from the wound. Lucia sank to her knees, clasping her wrist as blood welled from between her fingers.

  “You. Bring her to the table. Show me the answer, Sophie.”

  “No!” Angelina left Sophie and ran to her sister. After one glance, she turned on her husband and slapped him before he could come on guard. “You are insane!” Her hands curled into claws and she attacked him, trying to reach his eyes.

  He fended her off, seeming to forget about the knife still between two of his fingers. It fell, point downward into the wood. He and Angelina reeled back and forth, slipping in the water, tripping over Lucia.

  Sophie, standing but swaying like a sapling in a wind, became aware that someone was pounding on the door. It seemed very far away, but the constant sound began to disturb her with a sense that this was somehow very important. Slowly, still as if her body had to translate every message, she began to work the lock. Either it was very stiff or she was growing weaker.

  Even before the door swung open, she knew who she would see.

  “Sophie!” He seized her as she began to fall.

  “Dominic.” She smiled at him as she would have smiled at a dear memory. “I love you. Did I tell you that already?”

  “You’re hurt.”

  “Only slightly...”

  A shattering shriek rang out, louder than Lucia’s when she’d been wounded, comprised of all the misery and loss in the world. “Clarence! Clarence!”

  Angelina, on her knees in her clinging wet dress, pulled at the buff waistcoat of her husband. He lay very still, only his head lolling.

  “He’s dead,” Lucia said dully. “He fell on his knife.”

  “No, no. It’s there. Look. There’s not a mark on his body.” She pointed with a shaking hand to where the handle lay, snapped from the blade which lay some inches further along. Yet Clarence Knox lay dead.

  “Then the evil spirits came for him,” Lucia declared. “You are well out of it. He was bad, that one. A very bad poet.”

  * * * *

  Sophie awoke in a strangely familiar room. Her hair lay over her shoulder in a neat braid which, oddly enough, ached. The coverlet was drawn to her chin and her arms lay outside it, neatly clad in a white lawn nightdress—as was the rest of her, she assured herself after a peek.

  Struggling up, for someone had tucked the sheets in too tight, Sophie reached out for the carafe of water and began to pour herself a glass, but her hand trembled so that she was afraid she’d drown herself.

  A lean brown hand reached out and took the carafe. “May I help you with that?”

  “Dominic? This is unconventional of you. Alone in my bedroom.” She sipped the water, feeling as though she‘d never tasted it before.

  “That’s what your mother said.” Dominic reached for the bellpull and gave a vigorous tug. “Until I told her we are engaged. She said it would be quite conventional.”

  “Engaged?”

  “Yes.”

  “I must have loss of memory from being struck on the head. I don’t remember that.”

  He stood over her, his hands on his hips. “Now listen, my girl, you can’t greet your rescuer with ‘I love you’ and not be engaged. It would be too shocking.”

  “You’re quite right.” She held out her arms to him. Dominic sat on the bed and wrapped her up in his embrace. Sophie was a little shy about kissing him, but one touch of his mouth on hers made her forget any other kiss she’d ever known.

  All too soon, her mother rapped on the door. “I came to see if you felt well enough to come down to Christmas.”

  “Christmas? Impossible. It’s not for two more days.”

  Mrs. Lindel smiled indulgently. “You’ve been asleep two days. Dr. Richards said it was nerve stress and you’d wake up when you wanted to.”

  “I am hungry.”

  “Excellent.” She turned back and took a tray from some unseen maid. “Eat this soup and then let Dominic carry you downstairs.”

  The house servants had hung up the garlands, rich with gilt nuts and alive with red berries glowing in the golden light of the hall chandelier. A huge kissing ball hung under it. Dominic kissed her so long that the family came out to see what was keeping them.

  “The presents are in here,” Maris said. “Come on. I’ve waited long enough.”

  She sat beside her sister on the window seat, holding her child in her arms. Sophie dangled a cluster of the gilded nuts in front of her nephew, delighting in his random reaches. “Have you named him yet?”

  “Of course. Dominic Kenton. We think you should return the favor in a year or so.”

  “Have a heart, Maris. I don’t even know when
I’m marrying him.”

  “Soon, I think, considering the way he looks at you.”

  “He always looks at me like that.”

  “Precisely.”

  Maris received her handkerchiefs from her mother. A few minutes later, a very similar parcel appeared on Sophie’s lap. Unwrapping the silk covering, she found a half dozen handkerchiefs. The carefully embroidered initials in a cluster of strawberry leaves were not SLB, but SLS.

  Later, when the baby had begun to cry and parents and fond grandmother had gone to see it bestowed in the nursery, Sophie rested against the strong arm of her future husband.

  “What happened to Clarence and the Ferrara sisters?”

  “Clarence will be buried, for he was certainly dead. Dr. Richards says his heart simply wasn’t strong enough to support him very much longer. He said he might have dropped dead at any moment.”

  “He was doing a great deal of running and fighting.”

  “He also carried you from this house to Finchley Old Place. You’re not heavy, but that’s a long way. I should know. I earned you back again.”

  She was too comfortable to argue. “I suppose Angelina hit me on the head the first time. She must have been very afraid of him. I think he must have been the one to bruise her face.”

  “I think so too. I hope you don’t mind. I’m giving them enough money to go back to Italy, though I’d rather they didn’t accompany us.”

  “I quite agree. I’ll write their parents, explaining that they were unhappy here. I don’t suppose, while you are in such a generous mood, Your Grace, that you’d consider paying my back rent?”

  “Hmm, I’ll think it over.”

  She reached up and brought his face down to hers. After a long, suspended moment, he pressed her head— gently—against his shoulder. “You talked me into it.”

  Epilogue

  The Duchess of Saltaire stood on a dusty road in the middle of nowhere in particular. Above her stood a cliff, not so very high, formed long ago when a volcano, which still smoked, erupted and covered the land with lava. Many centuries after that, but still a long tune ago, a man fled from those who would pillage his country. His name would never be known, but he found a cave and filled it with treasures. Years passed, rock slid, sheep came and went, followed by shepherds who, though keen-eyed, never saw the cave. Another rock slide, who can say, uncovered the cave just so that an Englishman could take shelter from the rain.

  A tall man appeared on the shelf above her head and waved his arms. “Come up, Sophie. Come up.”

  “All right. Prego, Padre,” she said to the slender priest beside her.

  Together they climbed the low cliff, helping each other. Padre Adriano’s house had been the starting point for Broderick’s gothic map of words. By walking west toward the only field outside of Bronte where white lilies bloomed in the spring—though it was summer now—one could look up and see the top opening of a cave. To a casual eye, it looked like black rock.

  The two reached the shelf. Dominic was there to help them over the last few feet, the rocks slipping beneath them. “I can’t think how he climbed up in a rainstorm,” he said.

  “God helped him, my son, evidently,” said the priest. “Is it there?”

  “Yes, Father. It’s all there.”

  They went into the dark opening of stone, vaguely heart-shaped in form. At the end of a tunnel, after a sharp turn, they saw the torches of the workers. Every flame was answered by a blaze of gold. Bright sparks in every color broke the light. Sophie saw eyes in the faces of saints, inlaid with stones. Beside her, the priest dropped to his knees.

  Sophie and Dominic clasped hands while the Sicilians prayed.

  As they followed the wagonload up the dusty track, Father Adriano asked the question he’d been asking regularly since they’d come to Bronte. “You don’t want any of it? It is all for the people of Sicily?”

  “That’s right, Father,” she said again. “Broderick wanted it that way.”

  “You are certain?”

  “I have the word of his murderer.”

  Since she’d explained the story to him, he nodded. He didn’t ask again for a whole week.

  They stayed until the papal representative left, but before they sailed from Palermo, Sophie went down to the small Acattolica cemetery, reserved for those not of the Catholic religion. There were no crosses here, only the tombstones, carved with names and dates. A new one, very white and clean, stood above the spot where Broderick lay. She stood beside it for a few minutes but could think of nothing to say. Finally, she laid a small book on top of the grave. The cover lifted slightly in the sea breeze. The pages rippled, showing glimpses of the stanzas he’d written, read by the sun.

  Sophie left by the gate. Dominic stood there, leaning with his casual grace against the wall. “Everything all right?”

  “Wonderful. I’m very happy.”

  “I’m not,” he said glumly.

  “No?”

  “The only way to return to England is by sea! You know how I was on the journey out.”

  “Is that all that’s troubling you?”

  “Isn’t seasickness trouble enough?”

  She fell into step beside him, wrapping her arm tightly about his waist. “I can suggest something else to worry about if you would like.”

  “What’s that?” he said warily.

  “Kenton Dominic.”

  “Our nephew?”

  “No, he’s Dominic Kenton.”

  He walked on another two steps before turning to look at her. She nodded. The local citizens were treated to the sight of two more mad English, embracing crazily in the middle of the street.

  Dedicated to my family

  For putting up with the madness ...

  again.

  Copyright © 2004 by Cynthia Bailey-Pratt

  Originally published by Zebra (ISBN 0821776371)

  Electronically published in 2014 by Belgrave House/Regency Reads

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  No portion of this book may be reprinted in whole or in part, by printing, faxing, E-mail, copying electronically or by any other means without permission of the publisher. For more information, contact Belgrave House, 190 Belgrave Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94117-4228

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  This is a work of fiction. All names in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to any person living or dead is coincidental.