The American Heiress (9 page)

Cora was lying in an immense wooden bed hung with green damask with carved angels at each corner. She looked pale and, to Mrs Cash’s irritation, rather plain. Much of Cora’s charm lay in the vividness of her colouring: the bright chestnut curls, mossy green eyes and rosy skin. Lying there with dark circles under her eyes and with her hair limp and unkempt against the snowy mounds of linen, she did not look at all like the belle of Newport. Mrs Cash, for the first time since her daughter’s accident, began to worry about the extent of her injuries. She hoped that her daughter had not been, in some way, damaged.

‘Hello, Mother.’ Cora smiled.

‘Cora, I am so relieved to see you.’ Mrs Cash bent over to kiss her daughter’s cheek and stayed there for a moment before sitting down on the bed, making sure that her daughter had her right side and saying, ‘What an unbecoming nightgown, it makes you look quite sallow.’

Cora’s smile vanished. ‘It belongs to the Duke’s mother.’ She started to play with one of her limp ringlets. ‘Mother, did you bring Bertha with you?’

‘You would think that a duchess, a duchess twice over, would be ashamed to wear something so shabby. The cheapest kind of cotton and not a scrap of lace. I wouldn’t even give this to my maid.’ Mrs Cash pinched the cuff of fabric round her daughter’s wrist. Cora pulled her hand away.

‘Mother, did you bring Bertha?’

Mrs Cash was looking at the canopy above the bed. She lowered her head slowly and met her daughter’s gaze. ‘Bertha is following in the Bridport governess cart. You surely didn’t expect her to travel with me.’

Cora sighed, and lay back against her pillows. She had found it difficult to sleep last night in this strange house that creaked and shivered in the dark, prey to fears she could not give shape or name to. The doctor had said she might feel some light-headedness for a few days, but had said nothing about hallucinations. But the irritation and annoyance that pecked at her the moment her mother began to talk was reassuring. Her mother was real enough. This part of her mind, at least, was unharmed.

Mrs Cash was wandering through the room on a tour of inspection. She turned to Cora. ‘These English houses are so haphazard. There is no planning, nothing matches. I could do so much with this house.’ Mrs Cash paused and narrowed her eyes a little as if mentally remodelling their surroundings. Those casement windows with leaded frames – so antiquated and dismal. The English had lived in their houses so long that they no longer noticed them. It took a New World eye like hers to see them as they really were. The situation here was really quite good, if a little isolated. How long, she wondered, would it take to build a new house worthy of an American duchess?

Cora read her mother’s thoughts. ‘Mother, you know that my being here is nothing more than an accident.’

Mrs Cash chose to misunderstand her. ‘My poor girl, how frightened you must have been. Still, it was really most fortunate that you should have been rescued so promptly. And by such a Samaritan.’

Cora realised that nothing would prevent her mother from believing that her accident and subsequent rescue was a sign that Providence was supporting her ambitions for her daughter. Cora might think she was a free agent but Mrs Cash and the Almighty knew better. Indeed, Mrs Cash was prepared to concede that Fate’s method of bringing her daughter within proposing distance of a duke was more ingenious than anything that she might have engineered. The only blemish in the divine plan was that Cora’s injury was not so serious that she would be obliged to stay at Lulworth indefinitely. A broken ankle would have been so much more definite. Really, there was nothing more appealing than a pretty girl confined to a sofa. Still, it couldn’t be helped. The important thing was to get Cora out of that hideous nightdress into something more becoming. She began to regret leaving Bertha behind, perhaps it wouldn’t have been so bad to have brought her in her coach. But she didn’t want the Duke to think that she was the kind of woman who travelled with the help. A pointless scruple it turned out, as the Duke had not been there to greet her in person. Was that intended as a slight, or was there something in the impenetrable English rule book which meant that hosts above a certain rank never waited at the door to welcome their guests? It was one of the many things she would ask Mrs Wyndham.

She turned to Cora. ‘I must leave you now, Cora, the Duke is expecting me at lunch.’

‘I don’t think you’ll be disappointed, Mother. Maltravers is everything a duke should be. But I wouldn’t make your dissatisfaction with the décor too plain. I have the feeling that he is very attached to this house.’

‘As if I would do anything so ill-bred! Really, Cora, sometimes I think you forget that I am mistress of a house quite the match of this one.’

‘I am not sure the Duke would agree. I don’t think he is in the habit of comparing himself with others.’

Mother and daughter glared at each other. Cora closed her eyes in feigned weariness. But Mrs Cash was not to be silenced so easily.

‘Even dukes can count, Cora,’ she said, sweeping from the room.

Cora lay back, imagining her mother’s impatient progress through the house. Unconscious when the Duke had brought her to Lulworth the day before, she had so far only seen the inside of the bedroom and a glimpse of the dark corridor beyond. If only Bertha were here. She needed to see the house for herself, but she couldn’t very well wander the corridors in the Duchess’s second-best nightgown. Not for the first time, Cora cursed her mother’s notions of propriety.

Mrs Cash found a footman waiting outside her daughter’s room, ready to escort her to the dining room. The wide oak boards creaked as she walked carefully down the polished steps.

The footman opened the library door.

‘Mrs Cash, Your Grace.’

Mrs Cash wondered if she should curtsy, but thought on the whole not. She had been expecting one of those milky Englishmen whose youthful slimness was almost a reproach to the corpulence to come, but the Duke was darker almost than any Englishman had a right to be, his hair was black and his slightly hooded eyes were a golden brown. She couldn’t make out his age. She knew he couldn’t be more than thirty but there was nothing youthful in the grave way he took her hand. Deep grooves ran from his nose to his mouth and there were flecks of grey at his temples.

‘Mrs Cash, welcome to Lulworth. I hope your stay will be a pleasant one even if the reason for your visit is not.’ His words were cordial enough but he did not smile or meet her eyes. For the first time in many years, Mrs Cash felt awkward. She had come here expecting to assess the Duke’s suitability as a match for her daughter, but the man before her was not acting like a suitor. Perhaps he was not aware of the prize that was within his grasp. But from what she had seen of Lulworth, he could not afford to be indifferent.

She replied in her most gracious tones. ‘Your Grace has been most kind in taking in my unfortunate daughter. Who knows what would have happened if you hadn’t found her. A young girl, alone and hurt and so far from home.’

The Duke replied, ‘Oh, I don’t think she would have come to much harm in an English beech wood, and from what little I have seen of your daughter, she seems more than able to take care of herself. American girls have so much spirit.’

Mrs Cash was not encouraged by this speech. It sounded as if the Duke had judged her daughter and found her wanting. She felt at a disadvantage, an entirely unfamiliar and unwelcome sensation.

The Duke led the way into the dining room where they were joined, rather to Mrs Cash’s surprise, by a priest.

‘Mrs Cash, may I present Father Oliver. He is writing a history of Lulworth and the Maltravers.’

The priest, whose face was as perfectly round and smooth as a balloon, advanced towards her beaming. ‘Delighted to make your acquaintance, Mrs Cash. I am so fond of your country. I was in New York only last year staying with Mrs Astor. What a peerless woman. Such manners! And taste!’

Mrs Cash smiled weakly. She wondered if Father Oliver knew that her acquaintance with the fabled Mrs Astor was not as intimate as she would like. Was everyone here determined to wrong-foot her? She might throw the most talked-about parties in Newport but so far Mrs Astor had never accepted one of her invitations. It was one of the reasons that she was so anxious for Cora to marry splendidly. Even Mrs Astor could not look down on a duchess, or the mother of a duchess.

But despite the Duke’s apparent indifference to her, she noticed that he beckoned her to sit at his left so that the undamaged side of her face would be turned towards him, even though as the only woman present she should have been on his right. Mrs Cash was surprised and grateful at this tactful gesture. Father Oliver sat on the other side of the table. Father Oliver said grace, to which the Duke said Amen very loudly. The food was, as she had predicted, barely lukewarm.

They ate their soup in silence and then the Duke said, ‘I’m afraid you will find us very quiet here, Mrs Cash. My mother used to entertain on a grand scale, but now that she has moved to Conyers the parties have gone with her. My mother is so wonderfully energetic.’ He said the word ‘mother’ with a peculiar emphasis, almost as if he was calling their relationship into doubt.

‘Why, the quiet couldn’t be more delightful,’ Mrs Cash assured him. ‘Cora and I came to Europe after a hectic summer in Newport. We had nearly a thousand guests for Cora’s coming-out ball. People were kind enough to say that it was the event of the season. But after my accident,’ Mrs Cash fluttered her hand towards her cheek, ‘the doctors said I must rest and recover my strength.’ She watched the Duke’s face carefully but he did not react to the mention of the thousand guests.

‘Did you have a pleasant crossing, Mrs Cash?’ asked Father Oliver solicitously. ‘No storms in the Atlantic, I trust. My last journey was so rough that some of the passengers were asking me to hear their confessions! I became quite the parish priest for the upper deck.’ Father Oliver was talking too much and too fast, but he had been at Lulworth for six weeks now, and too many meals had been eaten in silence. There had been few visitors and none like Mrs Cash. He had been asked to write the history by the Duke’s brother. It had been a handsome commission but he sensed that the current Duke was not as eager as his brother had been to commemorate his family’s past.

He leant towards the American woman. ‘Which boat did you come over in, Mrs Cash? I believe there is a new vessel on the White Star line that has its own tennis court.’

Mrs Cash’s smile of triumph spread over the good side of her face. Here was a chance to make her place in the world quite clear.

‘We have our own steam yacht, the
Aspen
. My husband Winthrop had it built five years ago, after a bad crossing on a steamer. He has a dread of being cooped up with strangers.’

Father Oliver was silenced, but the Duke looked up, interested.

‘Oh, that explains it. I was wondering how your daughter had brought her horse over.’

‘Horses you mean, Duke,’ Mrs Cash said with a little trill of satisfaction. She decided that it was time to use the more familiar form of address – ‘Your Grace’ felt altogether too subservient. ‘She brought three hunters with her and insisted on walking them on deck morning and evening whatever the weather. There were days when I thought all four of them would be washed overboard. But Cora is so headstrong. She takes after my father the Colonel. He had more decorations for gallantry than any soldier in the Confederate Army.’

‘You are from the South then, Mrs Cash?’ enquired Father Oliver.

‘My family, the Lovetts, is one of the oldest in Virginia. The original Delmore Lovett came over from England two hundred years ago. Not many families can go that far back. Our family place L’Hirondelle was one of the finest plantations on the Chesapeake River.’

‘Two hundred years? I had no idea you Americans had so much history,’ said the Duke, but before Mrs Cash could answer, the priest broke in.

‘“Was”, Mrs Cash?’

‘It was razed to the ground by Sherman. I don’t think my father was ever in his right mind after that.’

‘How savage,’ murmured the Duke.

‘It is only through God’s grace that Lulworth did not suffer a similar fate in the seventeenth century, Your Grace,’ said Father Oliver. ‘Think of what Cromwell’s armies did to Corfe Castle just twenty miles away from here. They could so easily have marched to the coast. Indeed, it is very surprising they did not, given that the Second Duke was such a close friend of the King. But like so many families, they had a foot in both camps. Your namesake, Lord Ivo, the Duke’s younger son, was in the Protector’s army. He must have been the reason that Cromwell didn’t head south. So fortunate.’

‘Fortunate indeed,’ said the Duke without enthusiasm. Mrs Cash looked at him in surprise.

‘But without ever relinquishing the true faith, Your Grace,’ said Father Oliver unctuously. ‘The Maltravers are one of the very few aristocratic families that can claim an unbroken allegiance to Holy Mother Church since the Norman Conquest. To a convert like myself it is an extraordinary achievement. You are, if I may say so, Your Grace, a living link to a simpler time when the whole country was united in one faith.’ The priest folded his hands at this last remark as if giving a blessing.