Sheri Cobb South (11 page)

The reason for this soubriquet soon became obvious, as James passed through a paneled door into a large square chamber hung with scarlet silk and carpeted with a rich crimson rug of Oriental design. The furnishings here, though less overtly threatening than the medieval armor in the Hall, were nonetheless intimidating by their very elegance. A more knowledgeable eye might have recognized the hand of Robert Adam in the classically inspired carvings adorning the fireplace, but James, knowing little of such things, was more interested in the portrait hanging over the mantel. Depicting a family at the turn of the previous century, it comprised a long-nosed man with elaborately curled and powdered hair, and a haughty, equally long-nosed young man who held his chin at an arrogant angle. The duke and his heir, James judged, as indicated by the father’s hand on the shoulder of his son. Between the two men, a rather mousy woman in wide satin skirts and an elaborate coiffure held a small child on her lap and gazed fondly down at her feet, where a dog of indeterminate breed lapped up milk spilled from an overturned pail.

James was not alone in his interest. Amanda moved toward the painting as if drawn by a magnet. “Oh, how lovely! And yet,” she temporized on closer inspection, “it looks somehow unfinished, does it not? Perhaps unfinished is the wrong word, but—out of balance, surely?”

“Why is the duchess simpering at that cur?” demanded Philip.

“You’ve a good eye, both of you, and no mistake,” said Mrs. Collins, beaming at both of them in turn. “That’s the fourth duke, painted by William Hogarth before he become famous.”

“I thought so!” cried Amanda, immensely pleased with herself. “But an early Hogarth? It must be worth a fortune!”

“No, miss, that it’s not, and I’ll tell you why. Not long after this painting was done, the duke’s second son, Lord Robert, up and married a dairymaid.”

“Oh, how romantic!” cried Amanda, to her sister’s dismay.

“Well now, miss, I’m afraid that’s exactly what it was not,” Mrs. Collins continued. “The old duke, he was that angry, he cut off poor Lord Robert without a brass farthing, and forbade anyone from so much as mentioning his name. Yes, and then he hired a painter to paint right over Lord Robert’s picture.”

“But that’s criminal!” cried Margaret.

James regarded his employer with new eyes. “Why, Miss Darrington, I had no idea you were such a romantic.”

“Oh, bother romance! I find it appalling that a portrait which might have been one of England’s great treasures should be vandalized merely for spite.”

“I say!” Philip exclaimed, peering more closely at the portrait as if looking for the prodigal son concealed beneath the crudely applied outer layer of paint. “I’ll bet the duchess is supposed to be smiling at Lord Robert!”

“Indeed, she is,” nodded Mrs. Collins. “Lord Robert was ever her favorite, or so they say. In fact, some claim that it was for her sake that the artist didn’t erase every last trace of the lovers as the duke had ordered, but hid them within the painting.”

“Where?” demanded Philip. “I don’t see them anywhere.”

“Of course you do,” chided his elder sister. “They are right in front of you—the dog and the overturned milk pail.”

“How very clever of him!” exclaimed Amanda, examining the portrait with renewed interest. “He may not have Hogarth’s talent, but surely his use of symbolism cannot be faulted. Pray, what happened to them? Lord Robert and his bride, I mean.”

“No one knows for sure,” the housekeeper informed her enthralled audience. “His Grace banished the pair of them from Montford, and they were never seen nor heard from again.”

“It must have been quite a shock to the dairymaid, supposing herself to have made a brilliant match only to discover that she was even more impoverished than before,” Margaret observed.

James regarded her quizzically. “Indeed it must. It should serve as a lesson to anyone who thinks of marriage as nothing more than an opportunity for material gain.”

“I hope they were happy,” Amanda said with a sigh. “They sacrificed so much for each other.”

While the three Darringtons speculated on the probable fate of Lord Robert and his bride, James examined the other works of art adorning the walls. Except for an enormous landscape over the sofa, these were portraits of various members of the Montford family, as evidenced by the dark coloring and prominent nose. The full significance of this latter feature, however, did not dawn on him until he found himself confronting a silhouette from the previous century. Unlike Miss Amanda’s painted handiwork, this one was cut from white vellum and mounted on black paper. But aside from the artist’s choice of medium and the long periwigged hair of the subject, it was a near twin of the one tacked onto the wall of his own bedroom. As he stared at the long, slightly concave nose, his hand crept upward to trace the line of the protuberant proboscis that had once been the bane of his school days. A loud roaring filled his ears, and he squeezed his eyes shut against the onslaught of images that assailed his brain. A hundred, a thousand memories came rushing at once into his consciousness: a red-haired schoolboy laughingly calling him Weathervane; a highly unflattering caricature drawn by a recalcitrant young Latin scholar; a bespectacled London solicitor saying, “It is my duty and privilege to inform you ...”

His legs suddenly balked at supporting him, and James reached out a shaking hand and grasped the back of the nearest chair. If this were true—and no one comparing the framed silhouette to his own profile could doubt it—then he could have told Mrs. Collins what happened to Lord Robert and his bride. Indeed, he had a duty to do so.

“Mr. Fanshawe?”

Margaret Darrington’s voice seemed to be calling him from a very great distance. Focusing his eyes with an effort, he found her regarding him with an expression of concern and bewilderment.

“Mr. Fanshawe, are you all right?”

“Quite—quite all right,” James assured her with perhaps less than perfect truth. “It—it is very warm in here, is it not? If you will excuse me, I should like to step outside for a breath of fresh air. I—I shall rejoin you directly.”

Having delivered himself of this disjointed speech, he made his escape as if the Furies were at his heels, bumping into a small side table in his haste and almost oversetting a china shepherdess. He set the rocking figure to rights with a vague apology to no one in particular, and reached the safety of the Hall without further mishap.

Here he was faced with a decision. If he truly wanted fresh air, he could either retrace his steps to the kitchen through which he had come, or he could try and see if the massive oak door opening onto the front portico was unlocked. But even as he weighed these two possibilities, a third and even more tantalizing option presented itself. For directly opposite that front door, the broad staircase stretched upward to the private family rooms above.

Before he was even aware of having made a decision, his hand was on the carved banister, and his foot on the first riser. He chose his steps with care, taking pains to make no noise which might alert the housekeeper even as he acknowledged his own foolishness in skulking like a thief through a house which, if a certain London solicitor was to be believed, now belonged to him.

He reached the top of the stairs, and found a thickly carpeted corridor stretching off to the left and right. After a moment’s hesitation, he turned to the left. Here were the rooms where generations of his family had lived out their lives: a music room with a pianoforte positioned before the window and a harp standing in the corner; a library with half a dozen marble busts standing guard over shelf after shelf of calf-bound volumes. Emboldened to explore further, he mounted a less imposing staircase to the next floor. This was the most intimate part of the house, for the rooms lining the corridor on each side were bedchambers, some decorated in delicate pastels, others paneled with wood polished with beeswax until it shone. At last, all that remained was a pair of double doors at the end of the corridor. James pushed them open, and blinked in amazement.

“Good God!”

This bedchamber was much larger than the others, and far more luxuriously decorated. Emerald green silk covered the walls while sumptuous velvet of an identical shade adorned the windows, the lavish folds held back by plump gilt cherubs. Over James’s head, more cherubs cavorted across the plastered ceiling. At one end of the room stood a raised dais containing an extravagantly curtained four-poster bed so large that a family of four might comfortably sleep there.

This was unquestionably the duke’s own bedchamber. A collection of exotic knick-knacks testified to the travels of some now-departed holder of the title: Carrara marble from Italy, jade from the Orient, gleaming mahogany from Abyssinia. It occurred to James that the dreams of travel he had recently confided to Miss Darrington could now be realized. He took a step forward to examine the collection more closely, and the movement drew his attention to his own image reflected in a large mirror of elaborate rococo design. The contrast could not have been more marked. His worn, sober-hued coat and oft-darned stockings appeared ludicrous amid such splendor. Had the room’s previous occupants (particularly the specimen captured on canvas downstairs) not already abandoned it for a place in the family vault, the shock of seeing him, the hope and future of the house of Weatherly, must surely have been sufficient to kill them.

The hope and future of the house of Weatherly . . .

He turned away from the mirror to look once more at the enormous bed. If he was indeed the tenth duke of Montford—and Mr. Mayhew, the London solicitor, seemed quite certain that he was—then he had a responsibility to marry and sire the future eleventh duke of Montford without delay. And this obligation raised yet another hitherto undreamt-of possibility.

He could marry Amanda Darrington.

Chapter 8

James’s head was still spinning when he rejoined the party downstairs, but he dared not linger in the ducal bedchamber lest someone come searching for him. He found them just settling down to partake of tea and cakes in the housekeeper’s room belowstairs, the redoubtable Mrs. Collins having apparently won her point after all.

“Ah, Mr. Fanshawe, there you are,” said Margaret, regarding him with a puzzled expression. “We had almost given you up for lost.”

Incapable of framing a coherent reply, James merely tossed back the steaming cup of Darjeeling proffered by Mrs. Collins, and wished it were something stronger. Somehow he contrived to choke down a seed cake, striving all the while to behave normally—although what constituted normal behavior for a man who had just remembered inheriting a dukedom, he could not begin to guess.

After what seemed an eternity, the last cake was finally eaten and the last empty teacup set aside. The Darrington sisters thanked Mrs. Collins very prettily for her time, and the foursome began the trek back to Darrington House. As they crested the hill from which vantage point the priory ruins could be seen, James was reminded of the robed figure he had encountered there. Was it possible that he had seen Miss Darrington’s ghostly monk? Nonsense, he chided himself. Such things did not happen in real life. Still, the apparition was said to appear only to the heir. The idea that someone—even a specter—had recognized him as such was sufficient to embolden James to put his changed circumstances to the test. As they neared the stile, he took Amanda’s arm and assisted her over.

He was rewarded by a shy smile. “Thank you, Mr. Fanshawe.” Amanda peeped up at him beneath the wide brim of her gypsy hat. “How very good you are.”

James, thinking of the ducal bed, flushed scarlet. “The— the pleasure is all mine, Miss Amanda, I assure you. That is—” he amended hastily, “any way I may be of service to you—”

“Ahem!”

Rescue came from a most unlikely source. Miss Darrington had already navigated the stile under her own steam, and now awaited the pair with displeasure writ large upon her countenance. James realized that he still clasped Miss Amanda’s elbow, and released it with some reluctance. For the remainder of the walk, he contented himself with admiring Miss Amanda—his future bride—from a respectful distance. He tried to picture the pair of them joining hands in church, and failed utterly. It was vaguely unsettling to think of her in such terms, she seemed a charming stranger, but nothing more. Far more vivid in his imagination was the highly gratifying scene in which he formally asked the elder Miss Darrington for her sister’s hand, and presented that mercenary miss with a proposed marriage settlement that would make her head spin. Would she fall on his neck (an interesting prospect in itself), or would she find it galling to be beholden to the self-same fellow she had once coolly informed of his own ineligibility?

“You have been strangely quiet,
Mr. Fanshawe,” observed Margaret as they stepped onto the front portico. “I hope our excursion has not proved too much for you.”

“No, indeed, I found it—most educational. Still, I should welcome the chance to rest quietly in my room.” He held the front door open for her, and touched her sleeve when she would have passed through it. “First, however, I wonder if I might have a word with you—”

“Margaret, my love, I’m so glad you are here!” cried Aunt Hattie, bursting into the hall with much wringing of hands and twisting of apron. “The collier’s boy is here. He was lying in wait for me when I returned from Lady Palmer’s. He wants paying, you know, and won’t go away without it!”

“Oh, dear! Thank you, Aunt Hattie, I shall settle the matter at once. Mr. Fanshawe, it appears our discussion must wait. If you will excuse me, I shall be with you directly.”

She cast her bonnet and gloves onto a nearby chair and strode from the room. James, fully confident of her ability to make short shrift of an insolent village lad, followed as far as the kitchen door and froze on the threshold at the discovery that he had much mistaken the matter. The collier’s “boy” was no stripling, but a beefy young man well into his third decade of life. He sprawled in a chair before the fire, taking frequent pulls from the tankard of cider with which Aunt Hattie had attempted to placate him.