An Ideal Duchess (46 page)

             
“No one wanted to listen to me,” Lady Dulcie said fiercely. “A common complaint amongst women, might I add.”

             
“You needn’t convert me, Dulce, you know I’m for women’s suffrage,” David said mildly.

             
“My word, are you?” Amanda looked at him in surprise.

             
“Naturally,” David waved a strong, fine-boned hand at the settlement. “Are you?”

             
“I haven’t yet made up my mind about it,” Amanda said hesitantly glancing at the three of them. “But I should like to learn.”

             
“Well, my dear Duchess,” Lady Dulcie said, linking their arms. “You may begin your lesson right now.”

*          *          *

              Anthony enjoyed a small dinner with Asquith, Grey, and a number of other Liberal MPs in the Members’ dining room. They engaged in a rather desultory conversation considering the hell that raged outside Westminster—namely, the coal strike across Wales, the matter of the suffragettes who had broken dozens of shop windows in the West End, ripped up golf greens, and set postal boxes on fire, and the thorny question of Irish Home Rule. He marveled at their ease in manner and dining even as it sometimes infuriated him; he had soon realized his new party could be as stubborn on issues of reform as the Tories. Yet, he was not comfortably—or suitably—radical enough to chuck it all and join the Labour Party.

             
He raised his glass of sherry to his departing dinner guests and then sipped it thoughtfully as the waiter cleared away the empty plates and glasses, and cigar stubs scattered across the white damask tablecloth. The question of women’s suffrage, and one suffragette in particular, worried at his brain. Asquith was more than evasive on the issue, as slippery as trying to catch an eel with his bare hands whenever he brought it up with the PM. Of course, being whipped and harassed by wild suffragettes did much to turn the PM against the cause, but Anthony saw a method in their madness.

             
He frowned at his now empty glass. He had not crossed paths with Jessica Trant since they were arrested, and she seemed to have disappeared from the face of the earth.
Or gone into hiding after being arrested one too many times
, he thought wryly.

             
Why he remained enthralled by her he did not know, for he met dozens of other intelligent and beautiful women at house parties, dinners, and balls (after all, he was an eligible
parti
in spite of his relative poverty), women who would meet the approval of his party leaders and their wives and give a boost to his career. But he was fixated on one woman who was the most ineligible
parti
he could ever desire to court and marry.

             
The clock on Westminster began chiming, almost vibrating within the Member’s dining room, and he lifted his hand to signal a waiter for his top hat and coat. He was assisted swiftly and efficiently into his coat and he settled his top hat onto his head. He turned to tip the young man when his eye caught the lone figure of the Duke of Malvern, idling over coffee and cigarettes at a small table.

             
He could leave right now and pretend he had not seen Bron, to cut him dead the way Bron—and in fact, most Tory peers—had done during crises of the previous year. It would be more than easy to do so, for Bron stared blankly at the cigarette in his hand and seemed buried too deeply into his own thoughts to notice he was being observed. Nevertheless, he moved towards Bron’s table and took a seat.

             
“Exalted company you keep these days,” Bron drawled, meeting his eyes.

             
“I could say the same of you, Cabinet Minister,” He replied neutrally.

             
“A minor post, so minor I haven’t a title to stamp behind my name.”

             
“It placed you on the sub-committee for the Committee of Imperial Defense.” Anthony sat back in the chair. “I hear His Majesty will sign the Royal Flying Corps into existence any day now.”

             
Bron nodded and lifted his cigarette to his mouth.

             
“And your family—how is Amanda?”

             
“Tolerably well, though I’m sure you know better than I since you two do correspond on a regular basis.”

             
Anthony returned Bron’s stony stare with a shrug. Let Bron believe there was more to their correspondence than there actually was—he had no qualms over carrying on with Viola throughout the years of his marriage, the ruddy hypocrite.

             
“Tell me Bron, how is Vi?”             

             
Bron jerked. He stubbed his cigarette into the ashtray and leaned forward, his voice low and glacial. “My bloody affairs are of no concern to you, and if you think to indulge in one of your light love affairs with my wife, I warn you to keep off the grass.”

             
They stared at one another, and Anthony was bemused and filled with sorrow that nearly twenty years worth of friendship could be broken by something as flimsy as political differences. But perhaps it was more than that—perhaps it had always been more than that, but he’d been too enthralled by the Townsend magnificence and the mercurial Bron’s friendship to watch the portents of a disastrous end.  He turned away with a grimace and sighed deeply, sadly, regretfully, as he rose to leave.

             
He paused and extended his hand. “Good-bye, Bron,”

             
Bron had the grace to flush as he stared at the hand, but he rose and shook it firmly, their gazes meeting for perhaps—quite definitely—the last time.

              Amanda entered the dining room at Bledington after having spent an entire exciting week in London and was almost stymied by how little she missed the routine of rising at nine, breakfasting at half past, and then going about whatever she haphazardly planned for the day. It was, she realized, a well-worn and entirely ambivalent groove, and she was very grateful to her father for inadvertently giving her the wherewithal to kick out of her traces.

             
And there was her father now, seated alone at the head of the table with a plate of half-eaten food and an empty glass she knew had contained two fingers of the finest Scottish whisky. Besotted with this brand of whisky her father was, she thought fondly, and made a note to telephone Harrods for another hamper to satiate her father’s taste for it for the duration of his residence at Bledington.

             
“Hello Papa,” She bent to kiss his cheek and then moved to the sideboard to fetch her breakfast.             

             
“Damn and blast!” Her father muttered. “I shall have to book a stateroom on another ship.”

             
She turned from the sideboard to face him. “What has happened?”

             
“That coal strike,” Her father shook the issue of the Times at her. “It’s uprooted the schedules of every ocean liner due to an inability to collect enough coal to run the things across the Atlantic.”

             
“Then you can stay longer, and wait for another ship,” She returned her attention to filling her plate and then sat opposite of him at the table. “We could put you up for another fortnight or so.”

             
“I wish I could, Puss, but I have urgent business in New York,” Her father lowered the paper and picked up the piles of travel brochures he collected from the village shop. “What about this…Titanic. I hear Morgan is going to be aboard.”

             
“You can send White to snoop in his trunks,” She teased. “Sniff out what Morgan purchased from Duveen this trip overseas.”

             
“That idea isn’t half bad,” He said. “Listen to this Puss: ‘45,000 tons, French á la carte restaurant’…it even has a Turkish bath.”

             
“That sounds luxurious,” Amanda reached for the brochure. “But are you certain you would like to sail on its maiden voyage? You know how uncomfortable those can be, the stewards and crew unfamiliar with their ship and causing all kinds of problems.”

             
“I’m making no commitment,” Her father said. “I shall ring up the White Star office to see if they have any available staterooms…but I’ll put in a call at the Cunard office as well, though I do like to support my fellow Americans.”

             
“A common sentiment held amongst your countrymen,”

             
“Malvern,” Amanda lowered her fork to the table. “I didn’t expect you back until the Whitsuntide recess.”

             
Her husband strolled into the dining room, a small frown between his brows, as though he disapproved of her and her father’s smashing of the silence that reigned supreme over the dining room. He glanced at the covered dishes on the sideboard, but sat at the far end of the table, in his usual place, with a cup of tea. Her father gave her a questioning look, but she desired to keep him in the dark about the state of her marriage, and she turned to Malvern.

             
“Papa and I are going out for a drive in his new motor, would you like to come?”

             
His mouth twisted wryly and for a moment, she thought he would say no, thus shattering her cozy illusion. But he nodded and lifted his shoulders. “What type of motorcar have you purchased this time, Vandewater?”

             
“A Pierce Arrow,” Her father boasted. “40 hp, jump spark ignition—the very top of the line. I’ve taken the dowager duchess out for a tour while you and Amanda were in London.”

             
“Papa, you flirt,” She raised a brow at her father. “Ursula swore she would never set foot in an automobile if her life depended on it. Horses and carriages were enough for her, she’s said.”

             
“I can be a very persuasive chap,” Her father preened.              

             
“You were in London?” Malvern asked slowly.

             
Amanda forced a smile to her lips as she turned to face him. “It was only a short while, so I didn’t want to bother you. Besides Malvern, we haven’t a house in town, so it’s rather inconvenient for us to go knocking about trying to figure out hotel accommodations when one of us plans to stay over longer than the other.”

             
“By Jove! That’s what I shall give you,” Her father cried.

             
“What, Papa?”

             
“A house in London,” Her father beamed at them both. “For your ninth wedding anniversary.”

             
“Papa, that really isn’t necessary,”

             
“Of course it is Puss,” He frowned at her. “I can’t have my daughter and son-in-law living in hotels—think of what the press would say if they caught wind of this: the Duke and Duchess of Malvern living like
pensiones
.”

             
“That is a generous gift, Vandewater,” Malvern replied gravely. “A little too generous when Her Grace and I are rarely in London long enough to suffice the costs of running another residence.”

             
“I am going to wire my man to draw up the necessary funds to purchase or build a home in London, and neither one of you will refuse this gift,” Her father wagged a finger at her and then at Malvern. “Now say thank you, Puss,”

             
“Thank you Papa,” she murmured uneasily.

             
“Good,” Her father nodded, satisfied as he always was when moving pieces of her life around the chessboard. “Don’t forget to remind me to ring White Star for a berth on the Titanic.”

*         *          *

Southampton

             
Amanda held tightly to Neil and Roddy’s hands to keep them from running off and getting lost—or worse, accidentally journeying to America!—as she followed the steward’s directions to her father’s stateroom on the Promenade deck of the RMS Titanic. Everywhere she looked, there were stewards and crew members dashing about, and passengers and their friends darting in and out of the lavishly appointed rooms (the advertisement for the ocean liner did not do it justice).

             
The general sounds of the pier met her ears in between the toots of the tugboats and steamers dotting the harbor, and she had a flash of a very distinct memory of her sailing away from England and Malvern at Liverpool some ten years before.

             
She turned her mind away from the ill feeling she could not seem to brush aside, and was grateful when they finally reached her father’s stateroom. White, his valet, opened the door at her knock, and she smiled in greeting, ushering her boys in ahead of her. Her father was on the telephone with someone, likely one of his business associates, and she guided Roddy and Neil to a pair of chairs, to wait for his attention.