The American Duchess

by Joan Wolf

  “Certainly. Enjoy your ride.” She went back to her paper and, out of the comer of her eye, watched the brothers leave the room. Harry did not greatly resemble the Duke. He had red-blond hair, light blue eyes and freckles. He was also, at fourteen, an inch or so taller than his elder brother. But he did not have the Duke’s character. Tracy was quite certain that, at age fourteen, the Duke had already had the air of regal distinction that was so much a part of his personality today. It was an air that one could not but find impressive, no matter how much one might disapprove of it in theory.

  Chapter 6

  What say you? Can you love the gentleman? —Shakespeare

  The Duke looked with obvious pleasure at his guest when she joined him that afternoon for their appointed drive. Tracy deserved the appreciation; she was looking lovely in a dress of lime-green cambric with a little jacket and a hat that perched dashingly on the side of her brown-blonde head. The skirt was cut close to her body and showed off her elegant slenderness to admiration. As the Duke watched her walk toward him, he thought to himself that he had always liked best a long-legged woman.

  No hint of this private observation appeared on his handsome face, however, as he greeted Tracy and helped her into his phaeton. Without seeming to look at all, he also ascertained that she had splendid ankles.

  The Duke was pleased more than ever with Miss Bodmin. Any woman who did not expect to be entertained at the breakfast table was a pearl beyond price in his view. He had every intention of speaking to Mr. Bodmin before dinner this evening. His own code of conduct would not allow him to approach Tracy until he had her father’s sanction, but he had little doubt that that sanction would be forthcoming.

  Meanwhile, his plan for the afternoon was to charm Tracy. He was a man who had known many women and his personal magnetism, when he chose to exert it, was enormous. She knew what he was doing, having been forewarned by what she had heard in London of the probable reason for this visit, and thought that she did not want to marry him, and yet—she was charmed. But, even while she felt the power of his spell, she was also distrustful of the power of her own response

  They were driving along a narrow path through the estate woods when they turned a corner to find a tree down across their path. The Duke pulled the horses up abruptly, then turned to Tracy. “Are you all right. Miss Bodmin?”

  “I’m fine,” she assured him. She looked at the obstacle in their path. “However did that get there?”

  “It must have come down in a storm. Can you hold the horses while I take a closer look?” She assented and he handed her the reins, vaulting lightly to the ground. He went over to the obstacle. “It’s a dead branch,” he said, coming back to the phaeton. “There is no way I can turn the horses on this narrow path. I’ll have to get it out of the way.” He was taking off his coat as he spoke and Tracy looked at him dubiously. The branch looked very heavy and he was not a big man.

  “Are you sure you can’t turn around?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he replied briefly and handed her his jacket. He looked a great deal stronger in his shirtsleeves than Tracy had expected. He advanced to the tree branch and bent over, lifting it up off the road. Tracy could see his back muscles ripple through the thin fabric of his shirt. He moved the branch to the side of the path with little difficulty, dusted his hands together and came back to the phaeton. He accepted his coat from Tracy and said, “I’ll send someone out here to get rid of it entirely.” It was still protruding a little onto the road because the trees grew so closely together that there was not space to throw it entirely into the wood.

  He took the reins back from Tracy and as he turned toward her she noticed a light beading of sweat on his forehead. Without thinking, she put up her hand and lightly touched his brow with her forefinger. “Sweat!” she said teasingly. “I did not know that dukes could sweat.”

  He did not answer but looked back at her, suddenly intent, his eyes narrowing. Tracy was abruptly aware of their isolation, of the cool green woods all around them, of the silence. He was going to kiss her, she thought, and her heart began to hammer. It seemed as if he moved toward her, but then he checked, like a man on the brink of an unexpected cliff. He turned to the horses. “Oh, yes,” he said, as he put the team into motion. “A duke is, after all, only a man, Miss Bodmin.”

  Tracy didn’t answer, and after a moment he began to talk of something else.

  The Duke invited Mr. Bodmin into his study that afternoon and broached the topic that was the reason for the Bodmin’s visit. “I should very much like, Mr. Bodmin,” the Duke said calmly, “to marry your daughter.”

  Mr. Bodmin leaned back in his chair and stretched his legs. “I won’t pretend that this is a surprise,Your Grace,” he replied. “There are, however, a few questions I want to ask you before I give you my answer.”

  The Duke nodded. “Certainly.”

  “I want, first, to tell you about Tracy’s parents. I was a poor cottage boy from a fishing village in Cornwall. I went to America when I was thirteen, I worked hard, and I made my fortune. I am a very rich man and in America I am both esteemed and honored, but I am not your class of people. My dear wife was the daughter of a poor Irish lad from County Kerry, who came to America, like me, and, like me, also made a fortune. She was solid gold through and through, but she was not what you would call a ‘lady’.” Mr. Bodmin leaned a little forward. “Now, what I must know, Duke, is if Tracy, the daughter of such parents as I have described to you, will be accepted by your people as their equal. Will your family, and all those countesses and earls and marquises we have met, accept her and welcome her as your wife. As your duchess?”

  “She will be accepted, Mr. Bodmin. I know what you are saying, and I will not hide from you the fact that such a marriage is bound to occasion comment, but she will most certainly be accepted.” The Duke smiled. “There is a brightness and a grace about Tracy which would ensure her acceptance in any society, I believe.”

  Mr. Bodmin nodded with pleasure and the Duke went on gravely. “If you fear that this would be an unequal marriage from the point of view of birth, I must tell you, Mr. Bodmin, that it would also be unequal from the point of view of fortune. You say you are a very rich man. I am not.”

  “The land you own must be worth a fortune,” Mr. Bodmin said.

  “There are mortgages on nearly everything. If the mortgages were cleared, and money put into the land instead of wrung out of it, then, sir, the land would indeed be worth a fortune. Painful for me as it is, I must admit that my father and grandfather were not good stewards of their property. The result of their profligacy is my own near bankruptcy.”

  The American was looking at him out of keenly narrowed eyes. “If you were to come into a fortune, Duke, how would you use it?”

  “I would put it into my estates,” the young man replied promptly. He looked straight at Mr. Bodmin, his dark blue eyes very serious. “I am not a profligate, Mr. Bodmin.”

  The two men looked at each other for fully ten seconds, then Tracy’s father said slowly, “No, Your Grace, I don’t believe you are.” He sat back in his chair. “You may speak to Tracy, my lord Duke. It will be up to her. If she agrees to marry you, I am sure that my lawyers and your man of business will be able to work out a satisfactory financial arrangement.”

  Tracy had spent the hour that her father and the Duke were discussing her future in the stables with her proposed brother and sister-in-law. Lord Harry, with the air of giving her a great treat, had invited her down to the stables to see his horse, and once there they had encountered Lady Mary. The two young people had shown Tracy all around the stables, which were immaculate, with stalls for at least forty horses. Most of the stalls, however, were empty.

  As Tracy listened to the two youngsters chatter away she began to get a sinking feeling at the pit of her stomach. It seemed the whole Deincourt family was horse mad.

  “Does your brother like to ride?” she asked Lord Harry.

  “Adrian? Like to ride?” Harry sta
red at her as if she could not be serious. “He is the best rider I ever saw. He was in the cavalry, you know. Had three horses shot out from under him at Waterloo.” Harry rarely missed an opportunity to mention this fact.

  “I didn’t know he had been at Waterloo,” said Tracy. The Duke was far more reticent about his exploits than his admiring cadet.

  “You didn’t!” Harry thought the whole world knew that.

  Lady Mary said disgustedly, “Adrian is not such a braggart as you, Harry.”

  Tracy laughed. “Well, as Lord Harry is bragging about someone else, we really cannot accuse him of conceit.”

  “True.” Mary smiled at Tracy. The Duke’s sister was very like him, with the same dark blue eyes and dark brown hair. Mary was aware, as was every living creature at Steyning Castle, that this American girl was likely to be the next duchess. Mary had been determined to like her, and from what she had seen of Tracy so far, it did not appear that that task would be too difficult. “Perhaps you would care to ride with us tomorrow?” said Mary, diffidently.

  “Oh dear,” said Tracy, “I suppose I will have to confess. I don’t ride.”

  Two pairs of blue eyes, one dark and one light, stared at her in consternation. There was an appalled silence. Then Mary said, “But you didn’t seem to be afraid when we showed you the horses.”

  Tracy’s eyes flashed. “I did not say I was afraid of horses, Lady Mary. I said I did not ride them. I never learned, you see.”

  “But how did you get around?” Harry was obviously dumbfounded.

  “By boat, mostly. I grew up on the coast of Massachusetts, Lord Harry. I can sail just about anything that floats. Can you?”

  “No,” said Lord Harry. Tracy raised an eyebrow and he gave her a reluctant grin. “I’ll tell you what, Miss Bodmin,” he offered generously, “I’ll teach you how to ride if you teach me how to sail.”

  Tracy grinned back. “That sounds a fair bargain.” The three of them left the stables, harmony restored, and Tracy did not think even privately to herself that it would be unlikely that she and Lord Harry would have an opportunity to further their friendship,

  The Duke had no opportunity to speak to Tracy that evening. She excused herself immediately after dinner and went to her room, saying she had letters to write. In reality, she was confused about her own feelings and wanted time to think before she was confronted by the proposal of marriage she was now positive was in the offing. She made no attempt to write a letter and was sitting in her lovely bedroom looking out the window at the twilight when there came a knock on the door and her father’s voice said, “Tracy?”

  “Come in, Papa,” she called.

  Mr. Bodmin entered the room and came across to the window where she was seated. “I didn’t think you wanted to write letters,” he said, with a little quirk of his eyebrow.

  She smiled faintly and looked up searchingly at him. He turned away to cough and when he looked back at her she thought that he had turned gray. “Sit down. Papa.” She gestured to another chair and he slowly lowered his tall frame into it.

  “Do you like the Duke, Tracy?” he asked directly.

  “Yes, Papa, I do.”

  “I had a chat with him this afternoon,” Mr. Bodmin went on, watching her closely. “He asked me for permission to address you.”

  Tracy’s eyes had turned a grass green. “And what did you say, Papa?”

  “I said it would be up to you, that if you wanted to marry him, I would agree to the match.” She did not say anything and he went on, “I spoke to him of my concern for your happiness should you accept him and find yourself rejected by the English aristocracy. He assured me that you would not be rejected, that your position would be secure to you.”

  “A Duchess of Hastings must always be accepted, I suppose, no matter what her background,” Tracy said, keeping strict control over her voice.

  “He made no mention of your future position in his reply,” Mr. Bodmin said gravely. “His words were ‘There is a brightness and a grace about Tracy that would ensure her acceptance in any society.’ “

  Tracy smiled a little ruefully. “He is certainly a formidable young man.”

  “He is a kind of young man you have not met before. We do not have young men like that in America.”

  There was unmistakable admiration in Mr. Bodmin’s voice and Tracy said simply, “Would it please you to see me the wife of such a man, Papa?”

  “Yes, it would,” came the unhesitating reply,

  “Why?”

  “He represents a way of life I admire very much,” said Mr. Bodmin, and his eyes went to the window, to the wide, flawless lawn that stretched away below him. “When I think of my own life, I realize that my sole aim has always been to make money. I was successful, but I was always so occupied with earning money that I had very little opportunity to reflect upon its uses. What might one do with a life into which one has succeeded in introducing a fortune? I look around here and I see the kind of life that understands the uses of money, not just the making of it. I see grace and beauty and learning.” His eyes turned back from the window and rested on his daughter.

  “It is the kind of life I want for you, Tracy. You are not like me or like your dear mother either. You have been given a good education. You have an understanding of things like art and music and literature. I would like to see you given an opportunity to let those parts of you grow and flower as they would not in the America of today.”

  “When I used to think of marriage, I thought of a man very different from the Duke,” she said hesitantly.

  “You thought of Adam Lancaster, no doubt,” said Mr. Bodmin and Tracy flushed a little. “I have not a word to say against Adam, Tracy, and if he is the man you love I will welcome him as my son. But Adam is too like me. In his own mind, the only reason he was born was to wrest a fortune out of the world. And I have no doubt he will do it—he is well on the way, I should think. But, like me, he has no idea of how to use it when once it has been won.”

  Tracy had been listening to him very seriously, but as he concluded, she flashed a smile. “Confess now. Papa. You would love to see your daughter a duchess and your future grandson a duke.”

  He grinned. “I would,” he admitted. “But it is up to you, Tracy. My feelings do not enter into this question at all. You are to do what will make you happy.”

  “I will think about all you have said. Papa,” she replied softly, and he rose from his chair, kissed her good night and went off to his own room.

  Chapter 7

  I might call him

  A thing divine, for nothing natural

  I ever saw so noble. Shakespeare

  Tracy slept very little that night. She went over and over again what her father had told her. “My feelings do not enter into this question at all,” he had said, but of course they did. Knowing what she now knew, it was more important than ever that she do what would make him happy. She would have few, if any, chances to please him in the future.

  Tracy was very fond of her father, although she did not know him all that well. It was true what he had said to her tonight: all his energy and time had gone into making his fortune. As a child she had seen very little of him; it was her mother who had brought her up. Then, after her mother had died, she had gone away to the Bradford Academy, where she had indeed received an excellent education. It was only in the six months that she had lived at home since leaving school that she had really ever seen a great deal of her father. But she cared for him and, especially now, she desired to please him.

  Then there was Adam Lancaster. She had not said she would marry him, but she had said she would listen to him after she returned from England, and she had let him kiss her. It had been very pleasant, that kiss, and she had thought Adam the most impressive man she had ever seen. She laid in bed now, trying to recall his strong, dark-skinned features, his flashing brown eyes, but his face would not materialize for her. She kept seeing instead the dark blue eyes and aristocratic face of someone very differ
ent from Adam Lancaster.

  The Duke was nothing in comparison to Adam, she told herself. Why, Adam had shoulders that would fill a doorway. But her mind’s eye kept seeing a very different figure, a man whose shoulders were surprisingly wide and strong, even if they would not fill a doorway, a man who moved with a grace and precision she had seen on no one else, a man who, she suspected, had always gotten what he wanted. And now he wanted her.

  One of the questions that bothered Tracy was why did he want her? She might not agree with the English prejudice about birth, but she acknowledged that the prejudice existed, and would have to be coped with by both sides of the marriage that was being proposed to her. Why would a man like the Duke want to marry a girl such as herself—a girl not of noble birth, a girl who had no idea of what might be required of an English duchess?

  She remembered the one other proposal of marriage she had received from an English nobleman. “I am not interested in your money,” Lord Belton had said. Tracy wondered if the Duke was. From the luxury of his house it seemed impossible that he could want money. But Tracy remembered the empty stalls. She recalled Lady Mary’s sad words about “the horses that had to be sold after Papa died.” It was not at all unlikely, she concluded, that money was an important consideration in the Duke’s choice of a wife. Tracy determined she would ask him; she did not at all care for the idea of being married for her money.

  The Duke did not delay. He appeared in the library the next morning shortly after Tracy herself had settled into a comfortable chair. “May I interrupt you, Miss Bodmin?” he asked quietly, crossing the room toward her.

  “Of course, my lord.” Tracy put down her book and looked at him gravely. He stood between her and the window, so that the sun coming in shone on his brown hair, which glinted with a copper sheen she had not noticed before. He looked perfectly relaxed and the thought crossed her mind that he had probably never assumed an awkward posture in his life.