The Desirable Duchess

by M C Beaton

Her mother’s voice called to her from the door of the drawing room. “What are you doing, Alice?”

  “I gave John the footman a letter to Sir Gerald to take over to the stables so that a groom might deliver it, but someone called him back,” said Alice, turning round from the edge of the balustrade. “I hope he does not forget.”

  “I shall see to it, my pet,” said her mother.

  And so she had, thought Alice, as the footman soon reappeared and set off at a fast trot to the stables. She would have waited longer, waited to see the groom and horse disappearing down the drive, but the chill wind of autumn was tugging at her dress and ruffling her hair, so she went back inside, closing the long French windows behind her.

  When she went down to the breakfast room, she found her mother and father in the hall, dressed to go out. “No need for you to come, my love,” said her father. “We are just making a call.”

  “On whom?”

  “Why, on old Mrs. Jones in the village,” said Mrs. Lacey. “She is feeling poorly again.”

  Alice was surprised. Usually her parents did not trouble to visit the sick of the parish and often tried to stop Alice from doing so, saying the poor were notoriously infectious, just as if the rich never caught anything.

  But Alice was content to let them go—for it meant she would be alone when Sir Gerald sent his reply. He always kept her servant waiting while he sent a letter of reply. But the long day wore on toward dusk and there was no sign of that precious letter. She swung a heavy cloak about her shoulders and walked over to the stables. She asked the head groom which servant had been sent to Sir Gerald’s.

  He bowed and said he had sent Sam.

  “And is Sam not yet returned?” asked Alice.

  “Returned this whiles back, Miss Alice.”

  “But that cannot be. He would have a letter for me.”

  “No, Miss Alice.”

  “I must ask him myself.”

  “Very good, Miss Alice,” said the head groom. He sent a stable boy to fetch Sam.

  Soon Sam appeared, a small, wizened man who looked like an old jockey.

  “Now, Sam,” said the head groom before Alice could speak, “Miss Alice wants to know if Sir Gerald gave you a letter for her, which you know he did not, and you knows I expect you to be honest and not to be chattering away ’bout things what don’t concern you. So—and your job stands or falls on it—you just answer yes or no to Miss Alice’s question. Now, Miss Alice, you go ahead.”

  “Sam,” pleaded Alice, “did Sir Gerald answer my letter? Did he give you a reply?”

  “No, miss.”

  “You are sure?”

  “Yes, miss.” Sam’s eyes flickered nervously to the head groom, who have him a slight nod of approval.

  “Did you see Sir Gerald? Did you hand the letter to him personally?”

  “No, miss. To a footman.”

  “And did the footman ask you to wait?”

  Sam looked at the ground.

  “Now, now, Miss Alice,” said the head groom heartily. “You’re making poor Sam’s head spin with all these questions. He be a simple lad. Off you go, Sam.”

  There was nothing else for Alice to do but walk slowly back to the house. Her parents had returned. They were sitting before a roaring fire in the drawing room, drinking champagne.

  “Come and warm yourself, my love,” said Mrs. Lacey. “You look half-frozen.”

  “I went over to the stables,” said Alice, holding her hands out to the blaze. “I was so sure Sir Gerald would have sent a reply to my letter. He must be very ill. Do you think, Papa, that we might drive over tomorrow just to see how he fares?”

  “Actually, a letter did come for you by hand,” said her father. “It is on the table in the hall.”

  Bright color rose in Alice’s face and she darted from the room, ignoring her mother’s cry of “Ladies do not run.”

  She seized the letter from the table in the hall, wondering why one of the servants had not brought it to her. But it was Gerald’s writing and Gerald’s seal.

  She went up to her own private sitting room, clutching the letter to her breast.

  She sat down by the fire and opened it.

  At first she could not quite take in what the words said. It was incredible. Ridiculous! She began at the beginning and read it very slowly once more.

  Dear Miss Lacey, she read, I am leaving to go on the Grand Tour and am still in an infectious state and so dare not call on you in person.

  I shall be gone for some time and am writing to wish you all health and happiness. I do not expect you to wait for me. In fact, it was monstrous cruel of me to even dream of courting you when my intentions were none other than idle amusement and I was flattered that someone so young and beautiful as yourself should favor an old fellow like me.

  Alice bit her lip. Sir Gerald was twenty-five.

  Please forgive me, the letter went on, but I always was and always will be a sad rake.

  Yr. Humble and Obedient Servant, G. Warby.

  She threw the letter away from herself and burst into tears. She cried for quite some time and then, drying her eyes, picked up the letter again. Anger took over. How dare he! She had not imagined his protestations of love. It was he who had made all the plans of where they would live and what they would do when they were married.

  A servant scratched at the door to say that supper was served and that her parents were waiting for her. She changed her dress and bathed her face and went downstairs to the dining room.

  Her parents looked anxiously at her set face, but they said nothing until supper was served and the servants had withdrawn.

  “What is up, Alice?” demanded her mother. “You look as if you have been crying.”

  “I have received a letter from Sir Gerald,” said Alice in a thin voice. “He was only trifling with me. He has left to go on the Grand Tour.”

  “Monstrous,” said her father, “but there was always something unstable and rackety about that young man. Better to find that out now than later. You are a great heiress, my dear, and must protect yourself from adventurers in future.”

  “But there was nothing in his manner to suggest anything other than that his affections were strongly engaged,” cried Alice. “I am not a fool.”

  “You are a wise young lady most of the time,” said Mrs. Lacey, “but men like Sir Gerald are experienced in the ways of deception. It would be best if you occupied yourself in the days to come and forgot about him completely. Believe me, his name will not be mentioned in this house again.”

  On Monday, as usual, Alice went down to the village of Lower Dibble to her sewing class of ladies who made clothes for the poor. She was accompanied by her lady’s maid, Betty, a severe middle-aged woman who was efficient at her job but rarely spoke. The village hall, where the ladies met, was surrounded by elegant carriages.

  Alice took a seat next to Lucy Farringdon, who was knitting rather than sewing. Lucy delighted in knitting stockings and scarves in a mixture of bright colors that delighted the peasantry they were meant for, most ladies considering the only suitable colors for the poor to be plain gray, and although Lucy was often chided on her extravagance in decking them out in bright reds and yellows, she refused to change, saying dull colors depressed her and it was depressing enough to be poor without being dingy as well.

  “You were the success of the ball.” Lucy sighed, her needles flashing. “Oh, if only the duke had even looked at me. And when he took you into supper, we were all nigh dying of envy. Not at all fair when you have your Sir Gerald.”

  “Not my Sir Gerald now,” said Alice, taking a half-finished farm laborer’s smock out of her work-bag.

  “Why? I heard he was ill. He is not seriously ill, is he?”

  “Unfortunately, no,” said Alice, stabbing her needle furiously into a hem. “He had the grace to write to me and tell me he had merely been trifling with my affections and is now gone on the Grand Tour.”

  “How dreadful!” Lucy gasped. “Are you h
eartbroken?”

  “I do not know whether I am heartbroken or in a perpetual rage,” said Alice. “I thought I was so lucky having indulgent parents who were prepared to let me marry for love.”

  “So now I suppose you are just like the rest of us,” said Lucy sympathetically. “I have my first Season next year, as you know, and it has been dinned into my head that I must be betrothed to anyone at all suitable by the end of it. Perhaps God should have made us poor,” said Lucy, who believed like most of her peers that God put one in one’s appointed station, “and then we could marry whom we pleased.”

  “I think romantic shepherds and shepherdesses exist only in poetry.” Alice sighed. “Even the poor use their daughters as pawns to get a little more money. But Mama and Papa will not force me into marriage with anyone I do not like. I would rather not get married at all.”

  Lucy looked at her friend in alarm. “But the ignomy of being an old maid! Everyone sneers so. Then, unlike you, I have five little sisters who will all grow up and get married and I do not want to be the spinster aunt, passed from one household to another during my declining years. Besides, spinsters are odd, have you noticed?”

  “I have often thought that spinsters might be happy enough were not society determined to find them odd,” said Alice. “Please do something for me, Lucy. Only a few friends of mine—such as yourself—knew of my affection for Sir Gerald, for my parents would urge me not to talk about him until I was engaged.” A tear ran down Alice’s cheek and she brushed it angrily away. “Do not ever mention his name again.”

  “Gladly,” said Lucy. “Although I would like to poison the man. But all saw him paying court to you. I shall say, if asked, that there was nothing to it.”

  Around them voices rose and fell, talking about the duke, how handsome he was, how different life would be now that this new duke appeared determined to entertain.

  “Will he come to your birthday party next week?” asked Annabelle Buxtable, a long-nosed young miss on Lucy’s other side.

  “My parents sent out the invitations,” said Alice, “so I do not know whether he has been invited or not. It is not a very grand affair…”

  Her voice trailed away and she angrily shook out the smock she was working on. She had dreamed about her birthday party. She had been so sure that she would have heard her engagement to Sir Gerald announced then. A special gown sent down from a famous London dressmaker’s still lay in its folds of tissue. It was of the inevitable white muslin, but cut so cleverly with little puff sleeves, her first really low neckline, and with four flounces at the hem, with a spider gauze overdress fastening with silver clasps. How often she had imagined Gerald’s black eyes when he saw her in that gown. Now he would not be there. There would be plenty of other young men from the county, but she was not interested in any of them—from the hunting-mad Lord Brent to the wispy and poetic Mr. Anderson, who claimed that his Scottish ancestry allowed him to actually see fairies dancing in the grass.

  As she drove her little pony and trap back home, Betty, the maid, said suddenly, “I think I saw that duke riding off in the distance over the fields. I wonder whether he has been calling on Mr. and Mrs. Lacey.”

  “Perhaps,” said Alice. “If he has, I am glad I have missed him. A very grand, formidable sort of man.”

  “Dukes always are,” said Betty dismissively.

  Alice found her parents in the downstairs Yellow Saloon, haranguing the servants. It transpired someone had left the door of the icehouse in the grounds open and the precious few blocks of ice, left over from the previous winter, had melted.

  “Someone will need to go over to the Farringdons and beg some ice,” said Mrs. Lacey, looking quite frantic. “What is a birthday party without ices? And all the furniture must be taken out of these downstairs saloons and stored. We must have decorations. Silk draped on the walls and hothouse flowers. An orchestra! We must have an orchestra.”

  “Mama, what is all this?” cried Alice. “We had agreed to have a few couples only; the drawing room would be enough for them with the carpet rolled back and the fiddler from the village.”

  “Fiddler from the—My stars, only hear the child! Alice, Ferrant is coming.”

  “But he will hardly expect us to compete with the grandeur of Clarendon,” said Alice.

  “We are not going to have the Duke of Ferrant damn us as shabby,” said her father. “Leave all arrangements to us. He called here in person to pay his compliments to you, Alice. I did not tell him where you were, but he said he suddenly remembered your saying you sewed for the poor on Mondays. There was no need to tell him that.”

  All Alice could think in the days that followed was that she would be glad when her birthday was over. Another London Season was looming on her horizon. Her parents said they were opening up the town house again next year. Her heart ached for the fickle Sir Gerald.

  She often stood on the belvedere, looking down the drive, hoping to see him ride up, hoping to hear him laugh and say it had all been a joke, that he still loved her and wanted to marry her.

  But the day before her birthday party, she looked out and saw a gardener burning leaves over near the stables.

  She went to the writing desk in her sitting room and took out a packet of letters that Gerald had sent her. Then putting on her cloak, she went down and out across the lawns to the bonfire.

  She thrust the pile of letters into the blaze and then nodded to the under gardener, who stirred up the fire so that a tongue of flame from the letters shot up into the chilly autumn air.

  Alice stood for a long time, her cloak wrapped tightly about her, gazing until all the letters had been reduced to ashes.

  Then with dragging steps, she walked slowly back to the house.

  Chapter Two

  The Duke of Ferrant took a clean cravat from his valet and applied himself to tying it in the Mathematical. His valet waited anxiously, more clean cravats at the ready, but the duke’s deft fingers sculpted the starched muslin into place.

  He was preparing to go out to Alice’s birthday party. He had a gift already wrapped to take with him. It was a musical box, a pretty trifle made of carved sandalwood and lined with silk that played “My Heart’s Desire,” a song that had been popular for over ten years now. It was hard to know what to buy a young girl, as anything very expensive would be frowned on. He hoped he would not be the oldest there. What a vast gulf there seemed between his age and that of young Alice, a gulf caused not so much by years as by experience. He had fought in the Low Countries, in India, and then in the Peninsula before coming into the dukedom. Also Alice Lacey quite obviously had doting parents. He could barely remember his mother, who had died when he was six years old. His father had been a cold, austere man who had turned the training of his son over to servants to make sure he excelled in everything from riding, to shooting, to a thorough knowledge of the classics. It had been a lonely childhood. The only time he appeared to have pleased his father, the old duke, was when he expressed a desire to join the military at the age of sixteen. His father had bought him a commission in a crack regiment and had then apparently forgotten about his existence.

  To the duke, a sensitive young man, the army was a brutal awakening. But he quickly adapted, and soon the end to his lonely life outweighed all other drawbacks. He never returned home on leave, preferring to spend his time in London before returning to the battlefront. He had never been in love but had enjoyed the favors and company of several experienced mistresses. He had never thought to marry but, somehow, now that he was a duke, now that he was settled and held the main position in the county and one of the highest positions in society, he found his thoughts frequently turning to marriage. He had gradually decided that the best prospect for a future wife would be a young girl who could be trained to the responsibilities of being a duchess. He thought about Alice Lacey. She was very beautiful and desirable; this evening, he would have an opportunity to study her further.

  His butler entered and said, “Mr. Edward Vere h
as called, Your Grace.”

  The duke’s face lit up. “Send him up immediately.” Edward was his closest friend, but he had not seen him for over a year, for Edward had stayed with the regiment, right up to the surrender of Napoléon.

  Edward Vere was a small, round, jolly man with a cherubic face and a mop of black curls that he desperately tried to tame into one of the fashionable styles without success. The duke hugged him and then stood back and gazed down at him affectionately. “Can you bear to get dressed very quickly and accompany me to a young lady’s birthday party? Or are you too exhausted after your journey?”

  “Fit for anything,” said Edward, with a grin. “What’s in the air? Marriage?”

  “Only a social occasion. My neighbors, the Laceys, have an exquisite daughter. This is her nineteenth birthday.”

  “I should have a present for her. Can’t go without a present.”

  “The family will understand. I shall send a footman on ahead of us to warn them of your arrival.”

  “Actually, I got something for you, but maybe it’s more suitable for a lady.”

  “And what is that?”

  “A parrot.”

  “Does it speak?”

  “Not a word.”

  “Very suitable. Parrots are inclined to swear. It was a kind thought, but I would be delighted if you gave the bird to Miss Lacey. What is it called?”

  “Polly.”

  “So original,” mocked the duke. “Hurry and change. Take my man with you.”

  Soon both men set out, the bird in a cage between them. “That is not a parrot,” said the duke, peering at it in the swaying light of the carriage lamp. “It’s black. Parrots have gaudy colors.”

  “A sailor told me it was a rare black parrot,” said Edward a trifle huffily.

  “I saw something like that in a book,” said the duke. “I have it! It’s a Gracula Religiosa.”

  “Speak English.”

  “A mynah. Comes from Southeast Asia. Member of the starling family. I’m sure I read they were great talkers.”

  “Not this one.”