The American Heiress (13 page)

‘Well then, what about a little Schubert?’ He stood up and rummaged among the piles of music on the floor until he found the piece he was looking for. He set it up on the piano and gestured to her to sit beside him on the stool. She walked towards him slowly, conscious that she had not played properly since leaving Newport, hoping that the piece he had chosen would not be too difficult.

The Duke gestured towards the music and said, ‘Which part would you like?’

Cora looked at the music, and felt her heart pounding in panic. The semiquavers exploded across the page. He certainly hadn’t chosen something easy. The lower part looked marginally calmer so she pointed towards it.

As he sat down next to her on the seat, she felt herself tense. But he was careful not to touch her. He spread his fingers out across the keys and she did the same.

‘When you’re ready, Miss Cash.’

Cora nodded and began. The piece started cantabile sostenuto in her part for a few bars and then the treble part came in with the melody. She played softly at first, hoping to muffle her mistakes, but as she grew more confident, her side of the piece met the melody in the upper register and suddenly they were playing together – their hands weaving round each other in the elaborate dance of the music. At one point the Duke’s left hand passed over her right and she felt the heat from his palm cross hers like a flame. But she could not afford to be distracted; to play the piece ‘adequately’ needed all Cora’s reserves of concentration and skill. The Schubert was just outside her level of competence but her desire not to fail meant that she was playing as well as she had ever done in her life. As the music reached the finale, there was a sequence of chords that were played in unison and to her surprise they played them in perfect synchronicity. Without thinking, she reached for the sostenuto pedal to hold down the final chord, only to find the Duke’s foot already there. She pulled her foot away but he had felt the pressure and as they finished, he turned to her with a smile.

‘I’m sorry I forgot to negotiate the pedals with you. It’s been a long time since I played a duet.’

‘And me. I’ve never played with anyone as good as you before.’

‘Duets are not about individual skill but about the relationship between the two players. The whole must be more than the sum of the individual parts.’

‘And were we?’ Cora could not stop herself asking.

‘It’s perhaps too early to say entirely, but on the whole I think we will do very well. Shall we have a go at the second movement?’

But Cora knew she must retreat now. She did not want to play again and be found wanting.

‘I think I have been lucky so far. I would like to practise before we play again.’

The Duke smiled. ‘As you wish, Miss Cash. But as I say, I think we will do very well.’

As Cora left the room, she heard him start the ‘Waldstein’ sonata again. It was clearly a favourite piece. As she listened to him play, she remembered his remark about Beethoven looking for satisfaction.

Chapter 8

We Have a Rubens

A
S AN UNDER-HOUSEMAID AT LULWORTH
, Mabel Roe started her working day at five in the morning. It was still dark so she had to dress and wash herself by the light of last night’s candle. Her hands were red and chapped, her knuckles swollen from years of scrubbing. It was not so cold this morning that she had to break the ice on the handbasin, but Mabel could see her breath issuing in frosty plumes across the unforgiving air of the attic bedroom.

Usually Mabel would linger in bed for a precious five minutes before getting up. But Iris had gone home for her mother’s funeral, so there was no extra warmth in the bed to ward off the chill, no one to grumble with about the rigours of the day ahead. Still, Iris’s absence meant that Mabel could spend more time than usual in front of the tiny square of mirror above the chest of drawers, adjusting her cap to sit becomingly on her thin brown hair. On the chair lay the thick brown holland apron that she wore in the morning while she was doing the fires, but Mabel picked up the light cotton apron that she wore in the afternoons and tied that round her waist. She wanted to look her best.

Mabel had been startled the first time she found the Duke in his dressing gown, sitting on the window seat, looking out to sea. When he had been Lord Ivo he had never been an early riser, except when he was hunting, but things were different now. Her job was to get the fires lit in the bedrooms without waking the occupants. Under-housemaids like Mabel were not meant to have anything to do with the ‘family’. The housekeeper had told her that she must turn and face the wall if she met any of them in the corridor. To reveal that the Duke now woke with the lark would have given Mabel some status among her fellow housemaids, who discussed the family endlessly, but she had said nothing. This silent audience with the Duke was Mabel’s talisman, the antidote to her aching knees and stinging hands. It had made her nervous at first to go through the lengthy ritual of cleaning out the ashes of the night before, polishing the grate and laying the new fire with His Grace sitting there so still. Once she had dropped the poker on to the marble hearth; the noise had been calamitous, it felt like the loudest sound she had ever heard, but the Duke had hardly stirred.

He was there on the window seat this morning as usual. She wondered what he looked at so hard. There was nothing to see out there but the green hills leading down to the sea.

Mabel finished laying the fire, building a neat little pyramid of kindling that burst into obedient flame the moment she put a match to it. She gathered together all her tools – the stiff hearth brush, the tin of blacking, the matches – and put them back in her work box; she wiped her hands on her apron and stood up slowly, her knees cracking as she did.

The Duke said softly, ‘Thank you, Mabel.’

Mabel very nearly dropped the ash bucket. She scraped her knees together in something like a curtsy and mumbled, ‘Yer Grace.’ He had never spoken to her before, and yet he knew her name. She felt herself going scarlet and backed out of the room as speedily as she could. She stood in the corridor, her heart pounding and the palms of her hands clammy with sweat. She leant against the wall and closed her eyes. The Duke knew her name. She felt like a character in a
Peg’s Paper
story. He had noticed her; surely this was the start of something.

Her reverie was interrupted by Betty who was coming from the Cash girl’s bedroom.

‘What you doing, Mabel?’ she said in a fierce whisper. ‘Don’t you know the old Duchess is coming today and we’ve got to turn out those rooms this morning? If you don’t get on you’ll miss breakfast. This isn’t the time to be daydreaming, and how come you’re wearing your best apron and it’s covered all over with smuts?’

Mabel looked down at the black smears on the white cotton. They were, she knew, impossible to remove.

Cora decided that she would go down to breakfast that morning before meeting the Duke for her tour of the house. As she walked along the corridor that led from her bedroom to the staircase, she saw a maid with a crumpled and soiled apron running in the other direction. Cora was enough of her mother’s daughter to notice the dirty apron.

As she walked through Lulworth she was torn between her admiration of the pictures, the walnut furniture, the faded brocade curtains, objects which looked as if they had been always been there, and her awareness of a rank, musty smell that lingered here in the less frequented parts. Cora had grown up in a dust-free world that smelt of fresh flowers, furniture polish and wet varnish. Only rarely in her native country did she enter a building that was older than she was. But here she was surrounded by an unfamiliar odour, one she was too young and too American to recognise as a mixture of damp, decay and disappointment. She did notice the chill, though, and wondered that the Duke could bear to live in such a cold house.

He was not at breakfast. Cora ate alone and then decided that she would not wait on his whim; she would go to the stables and see Lincoln. She was walking down the immense flight of stone steps at the entrance of the house when she heard the Duke calling her name.

‘Miss Cash, don’t tell me you have forgotten our arrangement?’

The Duke had evidently been riding already, he was hatless and his cheeks were flushed from the cold.

‘Not at all. I thought you must have found other business to attend to when I didn’t see you at breakfast.’

‘I went for a ride. Early morning is the best time for it. It clears my head for the rest of the day.’

‘I envy you your freedom. I wish riding were such a carefree business for my sex. You can just jump on your horse and go. I, on the other hand, have to spend at least quarter of an hour being laced into my habit and then I have to find a groom to ride out with me, and in my experience no groom has ever wanted to ride at my pace.’

The Duke made her a bow. ‘Miss Cash, I accept the challenge. I will ride out with you and I promise not to baulk at your pace, however reckless. If we break our necks, at least we shall do so together.’

Cora bridled at the implied criticism, she knew she was an excellent horsewoman. ‘I assure you, Duke, I am not in the habit of falling off my horse. What happened the other day was completely out of character. Unfortunately the fall has destroyed my memory of the moments leading up to it, but I am sure that something quite untoward must have happened for me to lose control like that.’

‘Perhaps you saw a ghost. Lulworth is full of them: headless cavaliers, wailing monks, medieval chatelaines rattling their ghostly keys. You won’t find a housemaid who will go into the gallery after dark in case she bumps into the Grey Lady.’

‘The Grey Lady?’

‘One of my ancestors, Lady Eleanor Maltravers. It was in the Civil War. Our Civil War, we had one too…The Maltravers were Royalists of course, but Eleanor fell in love with a neighbour’s son who went to fight for Cromwell. When she was told that he had been killed at the battle of Marsden, she fell into such despair that she threw herself off the cliffs. Turned out that the boy she loved wasn’t dead after all so she can’t leave the house till she finds him.’

‘And why is she grey?’

‘Oh, because she started wearing grim Puritan clothes – to please her lover or to annoy her family, who’s to say?’ The Duke gave Cora a knowing smile that suggested she might know something about the latter situation.

Cora was wondering whether to smile back when two rangy grey dogs raced between them, yapping shrilly and jumping up on to Cora’s skirts, leaving a pattern of dirty brown paw marks.

‘Aloysius, Jerome, stop it at once.’ The Duke spoke with an authority completely unlike his usual quiet tone. The dogs subsided instantly. ‘I’m sorry about your skirt, Miss Cash. Would you like me to get a maid to sponge it down?’

Cora shook her head. ‘No indeed. I want my tour. But I am curious about your dogs’ names. Back home we call our dogs things like Spot or Fido. These must be very special animals to warrant such fancy names.’

The Duke leant down to one of the dogs and pulled its ears. ‘The Maltravers have been breeding Lulworth lurchers for God knows how many generations but I think I am the first duke to name them after medieval popes.’ He stood up and the dog ran lightly to the bottom of the steps. ‘And now, Miss Cash, you shall have your tour.’ He bowed to her and raised his hand in a mock flourish.

‘Lulworth was originally built as a hunting lodge for Edward the Third. The long gallery, the dining room and the music room where you found me yesterday,’ he gave her a half smile of recognition, ‘were part of this original building. In 1315 he gave it to my ancestor Guy Maltravers as a reward for his services in the Hundred Years War. The front of the house and the great hall were built by my namesake Ivo, the First Duke. He was a favourite of James the First, who made him a duke and gave him the monopoly on sealing wax so he was able to build all this. Ivo had very good taste, he got Inigo Jones to do the designs. They ran out of money – the Civil War was very bad for the Maltravers – but with the Restoration things improved, except for poor Eleanor, and they were able to finish it. After that things went downhill rather. The Maltravers stayed Catholic when the rest of the country went Protestant so they spent a lot of time down here, praying. The family has only become smart again since my mother married into it. She had no intention of being a dowdy duchess. She spent a fortune on the place, put in the new servants’ wing and built the station so that her smart friends could get here easily from London. Very energetic woman, my mother, she did more to Lulworth in the last twenty years than had been done in the last two hundred.’ The Duke’s voice trailed off. They were walking along a paved path that led up a small hill to the right of the house. At the top was an elegant white stone building. The Duke paused on the steps flanked by two weathered stone pillars.

‘And this is the chapel, which as Father Oliver will have no doubt told you is the oldest consecrated Catholic site in continuous use in England. This chapel was built by the Fifth Duke who had a French wife who was very devout. She didn’t like saying her prayers in the draughty medieval chapel, so she ordered her husband to build her something modern, and this is the result.’ Ivo held open the grey painted door for Cora. As she walked past him, her hand brushed against his. It was the tiniest contact, as fleeting as a moth’s wing brushing her cheek, but it sent a tremor through her arm. She gave a gasp and Ivo looked at her.