The American Duchess (13 page)

It did not disturb her that Tracy attracted men so easily. Lady Bridgewater was a typical woman of the world, more eighteenth than nineteenth century in her thinking. It was not wrong for a woman to have lovers. What she thought inexcusable was for a woman to neglect her duty to her family, or to act in such a way as to outrage social standards. She determined, now that she had a week of unlimited access to the young Duchess, to impart some of her code into Tracy’s pretty but ignorant ear.

For Tracy, the house party became more upsetting with every passing day. On the one hand she had Lady Bridgewater, with her air of indescribable distinction, imparting to her a philosophy of life and marriage that Tracy found appalling in its immorality, and on the other hand she had the increasing fear that it was a philosophy in which her husband might share.

The crux of her unhappiness was a guest at the house party, the Comtesse d’Aubigny, wife of a French diplomat. The Comtesse was very French, very clever, very brilliant, very charming and very beautiful. She was, in short, a woman of the world
,
a highly developed type that was utterly alien to Tracy.

When the Comtesse had first seen Adrian, she had put out her hand to him without moving from her place, and he had gone to kiss her fingers immediately. That they knew each other well was immediately clear to Tracy. The Comtesse called him
Monseigneur
and talked to him in a sophisticated ripple of small talk that made him laugh. Tracy distrusted her instantly, a distrust that only grew as the week progressed.

She had come up to Tracy after dinner on the first evening of her arrival, all charm and smiles. “So, you are the American girl who has married
Monseigneur de Hythe—
ah
no, he is
Monseigneur de Hastings
now, no?”

“Yes,” replied Tracy briefly. “He is and I am.”

The Comtesse sighed with melancholy charm. “How we miss him in Paris. It is all so flat now that he has gone.”

“I rather doubt if Paris could ever be flat, Comtesse,” said Tracy dryly.

The Comtesse made a graceful gesture. “But it is. Decidedly. All the woman, they weep nightly.” She shook her head. “You are a fortunate girl,
Duchesse.”
She tilted her head to one side. “And you are very pretty. Yes, one can see why he married you.”

Tracy could feel her temper rising. Who
was
this woman and what had she been to Adrian? “I had no idea that Adrian had left half of French womenhood in sackcloth and ashes when he left,” she said tartly, and the Comtesse laughed.

“He did,
madame.
I assure you, he did.”

The gentlemen came into the room at that moment and Tracy stood up. “I am so sorry for you all,” she said sweetly, “but it must have been heaven for Adrian,” and she walked over to the door to join her husband as he entered.

She felt such a foreigner. She was surrounded by a totally different scale of values from the one with which she had lived all her life. The rapacious worldliness of all these great people rasped on her spirit. It was not a worldliness that she thought her husband shared, but as the week went by, she began to doubt him. She watched him. She watched the Comtesse d’Aubigny, her clothes stylishly worn, her cleverness gracefully displayed, her social utility brilliantly exemplified. It began to seem to her that perhaps it was someone like the Comtesse who Adrian ought to have married.

It was not that he neglected her. At night, lying in his arms, carried away by him to the farthest reaches of passion and surrender, she could not doubt him. But by day, she did. He was so practiced a man of the world, so agile in his response to the various nuances of social atmosphere, so able to adapt himself. Did he just show to her the things she would want to see?

Dishonesty was the one thing that would kill Tracy’s spirit, and she resolved to drag her suspicions out into the open.  She resolved to tell him of her fears.

* * * *

It was a confrontation that she put off for the duration of the visit. It was not until they were in their coach, away from the corroding atmosphere of Matching Castle, that she dared to bring up the subject that had destroyed all her peace of mind.          “The Comtesse d’Aubigny told me that all the women in Paris weep nightly since you left,” she began in a small voice.

He laughed easily. “She exaggerates,
ma mie
,
”
he said. “I’m quite sure no one wept to see me leave.”

Tracy kept her eyes on her lap. “You seemed to know her very well.”

“Yes, we were quite good friends in Paris.”

Tracy took a deep breath. “Did you make love to her, Adrian?”

“Ah,” the Duke said quietly. “Now that is a question a gentleman never answers.”

“And it is a question, I gather, that a lady never asks.” She turned and looked for a minute directly at him, then she dropped her eyes again. “But a lady—a married lady—can make love with a man who is not her husband.
That
does not stop her from being a lady.”

He exhaled a long breath and said carefully, “You must understand that Paris is not New England, Tracy.”

“No. Nor is London. I have ears. I have eyes. I have seen what goes on here.”

He put his arm around her and drew her close. For the first time she did not immediately relax in his embrace. She sat stiffly, afraid that he was not going to answer her, that he was resorting to familiar magic to avoid responding to her concerns.

After a minute, with his arm still around her, he said very seriously, “What I did before I met and married you does not concern you, Tracy.”

She sat silent, resisting the possessive curve of his arm, the pressure of his body against hers. He continued, “But I am a married man now, and things are different from what they were when I was in Paris. If you don’t trust me to realize that, then we do not have what I thought we did.”

“I thought we had a marriage. But in New England we take marriage more seriously than you appear to take it here.” Still she resisted her husband’s grasp. “For me, you see, marriage means fidelity,” she said.

She was looking straight ahead of her in the dimness of the carriage.
He reached over with his free hand and took her fingers in a firm grasp. She looked down at his narrow hand; she loved the long fingers, the shape and color of the immaculate nails. She bit her lower lip to keep it from quivering. “Then let us have a New England marriage,” he said.

A little of the rigidity left her back. “I’m willing if you are,” she said in a muffled voice.

“I won’t find it at all difficult,” he answered promptly. “I find I’ve lost all my interest in women who are not my wife.” She turned her face into his shoulder. “And,” he continued, “if I ever find you acting like a Parisian
,
I shall beat you.”

“I’ll lend you the whip,” said Tracy into his shoulder.

He began to laugh and after a minute, shakily, she joined in.

Chapter 17

Afterward let him obey, please, and honor with all reverence his woman, and reckon her more dear to him than his own life, and prefer all her commodities and pleasures before his own, and love no less in her the beauty of the mind than of the body.

—The Book of the Courtier

If someone had told the Duke six months previously that he would be promising absolute fidelity to his wife and meaning every word of it, he would have been amazed. When he had decided to make Tracy his wife, he had had every intention of being a good husband.  But his idea of the duties of a good husband did not—then—include the obligation of sexual fidelity. He had thought he and Tracy had the basis of a successful marriage: he brought to their union an ancient title and lineage and she brought beauty and money. Each had something to offer that the other lacked. Many successful marriages had begun with less.

But his marriage, and his wife, had not been what he expected. For one thing, she had not married him to become the Duchess of Hastings. She had married him for himself; there was no other reason he could find for her action. She loved him. He did not doubt that, and the thought was ineffably sweet to him.

He had married her for her money. As the weeks went by, and he fell ever more deeply under her spell, that thought began to bother him. It had not bothered him at the time of his marriage; he had thought then that he was making a bargain. But the bargain had been made with Mr
.
Bodmin, not with his daughter.

She had asked him once, point blank, with her usual devastating honesty, if he was interested in her money. He had reassured her and the question had not come up again. He did not ever want it to come up again. It was a subject upon which he had become extremely sensitive.

Mr. Bodmin’s settlement had been hugely generous. It had needed to be; the condition of the Duke’s estates was worse than he had realized. His morning sessions with his man of business and his estate agents left him feeling very bleak indeed. And very angry. His ancestors, in his opinion, deserved to have been horsewhipped.

He did not want his wife to know the extent of his embarrassments. Thanks to Bodmin money, they would all be rectified. But he did not want her to know how necessary that money had been.

Quite simply, he loved her.
He loved her intensely, with all the passion and the possessiveness that was in his nature. When he told her he had lost interest in all women who were not his wife, he had spoken the simple truth. Next to Tracy’s glowing vitality all other women paled into insignificance. He loved her and he wanted no shadow cast on his marriage.

Tracy, fortunately, seemed sublimely unconscious of money. She was the daughter of a rich man, but she herself had never handled much money; the simple life in Salem had not lent itself to lavish expenditure. She had an allowance from the money her father settled on her at her marriage, and from that allowance she bought clothes and books. She was thrifty in a way the Duke was not accustomed to see in the women he had known. She might spend a great deal of money on a dress, but the dress was worn with more frequency than another woman with her money would have worn it. It was also, to the Duke’s mind, invariably more attractive than the dresses worn by those other women.

The subject of money never came up between them. He paid all the household expenses, an arrangement Tracy never questioned. When she bought something for the house, he told her to have the bills sent to him, and she did so unhesitatingly. In fact, their arrangement was very familiar to her; at home her father had handled all the financial matters of the household.

She was the wife he wanted. It did not bother him at all that she didn’t agree with his politics. He didn’t want a political wife like his aunt was. Tracy’s interest was in people, not politics, and in the matter of character her judgment was usually excellent.

He had first realized this a few weeks after their marriage, when they had returned from a diplomatic reception at the Russian Embassy. Prince Vassily, one of the new attaches, had devoted himself to the young Duchess for a good part of the evening. The Prince was handsome, charming, vivacious and ambitious. The Duke asked his wife what she thought of him on their way home in the carriage.

“Prince Vassily has a delightfully open, honest manner,” she said, “but I wouldn’t trust him farther than I could see him.”

He had been surprised by the shrewdness of her observation and by its accuracy. He had known the Prince in Paris and had come to the same conclusion. But it had taken him weeks to see the young man’s deviousness; it had taken his wife less than an hour.

She was accurate about a number of other people whom the Duke knew, and he had come to the comfortable conclusion that if he were ever in doubt on a matter of a person’s trustworthiness, he could rely on his wife’s judgment. She laughed with them and charmed them; she talked about books and music and theatre and voyages to the South Seas; and she got their measure.

He knew her father was on her mind, and he did everything he could think of to keep her occupied. He took her driving as often as he could, and he encouraged her friendship with Miss Alden. When they returned from Matching Castle he had the happy notion of complaining about the state of the linen in his own home, and that triggered Tracy’s housewifely instincts. She began a campaign to brighten up and refurbish the house, and he agreed with all her suggestions. It was going to cost him rather a lot of money, he thought philosophically, but his wife’s peace of mind was worth it.

Then, on November 28, a letter arrived from America. It was from Tracy’s maternal uncle, Francis Breen. Her father was dead.

Her initial response was a strange feeling of peace; the waiting, the wondering, the restlessness, were over. Adrian bundled her up in a warm cloak, wrapped a blanket around her legs, and took her for a long drive. They went down to the sea. She sat next to him in the curricle and gazed out at the sparkling water off Beachy Head. Her eyes misted over and she quoted softly from Robert Thorne’s letter to Henry VIII:  “’There is no land unhabitable, or Sea innavigable
.
’ That was one of Papa’s favorite sayings. He loved the ocean so.” She closed her eyes and put her cheek against his shoulder.

He did not answer but put his arm around her and drew her close. The long firm pressure of his arm, the feel of his warm body against hers, comforted her more than any words. “Adrian,” she murmured and for a moment he held her closer. Then he turned the horses and started the long drive back to Steyning Castle.

Shortly thereafter, Mr. Bodmin’s London lawyers contacted Tracy. “Papa had his will drawn up in America and sent to Mr. Spencer in London,” she said to the Duke in a carefully collected voice. “Mr. Spencer says that he wishes to make me acquainted with the contents. He will come down to Sussex at our convenience.”

The Duke had just come in from a ride and now he laid his gloves down on a table. “Write to tell him to come next Tuesday,” he said calmly. “It will be as well to get the business over with before Christmas.”