The Hallucinatory Duke (8 page)

“If Jackson’s and Amy’s marriage was void as a result, their son would not have been the heir, right?”

“Correct. As strange as that seems to us now, that was the law then.”

“Then how on earth does Uncle Ben think he could be a legitimate heir to the dukedom?”

“That particular paragraph of the act resulted in so many problems that Parliament did away with it in 1822 and made the change retroactive. This would have meant that Jackson’s and Amy’s children were legitimate after all. But by this time, Amy supposedly had left England bound for America and Jackson had disappeared. Ben thinks Amy was pregnant with the future duke when she arrived in America.”

“Do you suppose she really was?”

“I don’t know. When I was transcribing the Comstock woman’s diary, I’d just come to a very interesting point. She was saying that Amy had arrived to visit her and was worried that her marriage could be voided so that her baby would not be the duke’s legal heir. Unfortunately, I couldn’t read any further. The following pages had been torn out of the diary.”

Jack slapped a hand to his forehead. “Damn. I forgot to tell you.”

“Tell me what?”

He ran a hand into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out a business-sized envelope. “When I stopped by Ben’s this evening, he gave me this to pass along to you. He said something about it containing pages from the diary.”

Chapter Seven

Struggling to keep her hand from trembling, Amelia reached for the envelope. “Where did he get these?”

“He said someone must have torn the pages out of the diary and then stuck them back in loose. He suspects Martha Comstock was responsible, but we’ll never know for sure. In any case, they apparently fell out of the diary and into the bag he’d carried onto the plane coming from England. He ran across these pages when he was filing some of the other papers he’d brought back with him.”

Ben had folded the brittle sheets in order to fit them into the envelope, which made Amelia long to call him up right now in the wee morning hours and inform him that he was an idiot, but she refrained. She didn’t want to get tied up on the phone with Ben when she could be reading the pages from the diary instead.

She carried them over to her desk, gently unfolded them, and turned her lamp on. She bent over to get a closer look.

Jack had followed her and now stood just slightly behind her right side. She felt his body heat and leaned sideways just a bit, so their shoulders were touching. She needed that right now, the feel of someone real and solid and sane. She needed to feel Jack beside her.

He wrapped an arm around her shoulders as though to steady her. “Are those the pages you were missing?” he asked.

“I think so. Pull up a chair and I’ll see if I can read the writing. This is more faded than most of the pages have been.” She reluctantly moved away from his comforting embrace to open a desk drawer and retrieve a magnifying glass. Then she sat down.

A second later, she nodded. “Yes, this takes up where the other entries left off. If I read slowly, can you type the words into the file I have open on the computer?”

“Sure thing.” He moved an extra chair up to the desk. “Okay. I’m ready. Can you make out the next entry?”

Amelia squinted as she moved the magnifying glass back and forth. “Yes, I think I can read this now. Here we go.

“Durbane’s cousin Charles called on us today. He said he will drop the court case against the marriage if Amy will agree to leave the country. He offered to buy both of us passage on a ship bound for America, along with giving each of us several thousand pounds if we will quietly slip away.”
Amelia took a deep breath. “It’s apparently just as Ben has always suspected. Amy came to America. I don’t think he had any reason to think that her cousin Martha accompanied her.”

“So apparently the duchess believed the courts would declare her marriage void,” Jack said.

“Obviously she feared that was a possibility, and with good reason. But perhaps there’s more in the diary about her thoughts.” Amelia picked up the magnifying glass and started reading again.
“I tried to talk Amy out of going. She’s a duchess here, but in America, she would be just another citizen. That was when she confessed there’s a possibility the baby isn’t Durbane’s. Apparently, her morals are no better than those of our grandmother. Amy has agreed to Charles’ offer. I suppose I shall go also. There’s nothing to hold me in England and the money would buy me a comfortable life in America. I fear for the duke’s life once we are gone and I told Amy so, but she merely laughed. She said he will agree that their marriage is void so he can marry again. But my real fears regard Charles and what he might do to attain the dukedom.”

Jack stopped typing and rested his hands on the desktop. “Dear God,” he murmured. “I can’t believe Ben wants to be related to these people. Frankly I pray that we
don’t
turn out to be related to that family.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that,” Amelia murmured. She’d been reading ahead. “Martha Comstock writes that when Charles came to visit again, she told him that Amy had lost the baby.”

“Wow! Guess Uncle Ben didn’t know that.”

“Obviously he didn’t. But Martha’s wording is a bit suspicious. She told Charles that Amy lost the baby, but she never actually says Amy miscarried. Perhaps she lied to Charles so he wouldn’t know there was a possibility of an heir being born.”

“Damn! You could be right. I’d love to know whether the duke really fathered a child. Why don’t we see if the diary contains any more clues? That is, if your eyes will hold out.”

“I’ll be fine.” Amelia picked up the magnifying glass again. “Next entry—
Charles has stopped visiting now that he thinks Amy is no longer carrying a potential heir. Amy is so distressed that I fear she might really lose the baby. I think she believed Charles had fallen in love with her, but clearly his reasons for visiting her in the past no longer exist.”

She paused to let Jack catch up on the keyboard. When he’d finished typing, he looked up and grimaced. “Obviously Amy is still carrying some man’s baby.”

Amelia nodded ruefully. “I agree. But Charles doesn’t know that, which to his mind means he is now the only heir to Jackson.”

“And if Jackson were dead, then Charles would be the duke.”

“You know…” Amelia sat in thought for a few seconds.

“What?”

“The duke disappeared shortly after that ship left for America—the one with Amy Pennycut’s name on the passenger list.”

“Right. Everyone assumed she was on the ship and that he followed her and met with some sort of misadventure.”

“But what if he never left England? What if Charles killed him and hid the body? With the duke having disappeared without leaving an heir, Charles figured he would eventually inherit the dukedom.”

“So did he?”

“No, he didn’t live long enough to do so. He tried to get Jackson declared dead, but without a body, that’s a long process. Charles only lived about four years after the duke disappeared, so when Jackson was eventually declared dead, there were no heirs and the dukedom became extinct.”

“But if Amy had actually given birth to a legitimate heir, there’s a possibility the dukedom could be reinstated, right?”

“Exactly, which is what Ben is hoping for. But the question remains, did Amy give birth to a living child and, if so, was Jackson that baby’s father?”

“Do you suppose, assuming the duke was murdered, that he was unsettled enough to come back when you started researching his life?”

“Ouch!” Amelia pushed away from the desk and jumped to her feet. “Ow! Ow! Ow!”

Jack also jumped up, his eyes wide with concern. “Amelia, what’s wrong?”

“The bastard’s making my thigh burn and I didn’t even say
hell.”
She ripped off her robe and pulled her nightshirt up to the top of her legs. “Can you see anything? Is my leg turning red?”

Jack bent over and stared at her thigh. “No, it’s not red. But wait, there’s a spot here that’s changing colour.” He laid a couple of fingers on the top of her thigh just at the base of her panties. “Is this where the pain’s situated?”

“Oh, well, hmmm…” Amelia hated sounding incoherent, but Jack’s touch on her upper thigh was creating warmth that had nothing to do with the pain she was experiencing on the tattoo site.

But he’d asked a question and deserved an answer. “Yes, that’s the spot.”

“Oh, I see now. It’s a butterfly. I didn’t realise you had a tattoo.”

“My tattoo’s back,” Amelia yelped, bending over to look at the top of her thigh. Sure enough, her little yellow butterfly had returned and the pain had completely disappeared. “Do you know what this means?”

“Ah, no. I’m afraid not. Had your tattoo gone somewhere?”

“That bastard duke made it go away but now it’s back. That means he’s gone for good.”

“That’s great news, but not if you’re in pain as a result.”

“It’s fading quickly. In fact it’s all gone now. We must have solved the mystery surrounding the duke’s disappearance when we speculated that Charles had murdered him and hidden the body.”

“But what about Amy? Do you suppose she’ll leave me alone now?”

“I don’t know. Maybe the diary will tell us more about what happened to Amy.” Amelia sat back down and picked up the magnifying glass. “Wow, this section is in really bad shape. The ink is faded and the paper is cracking where Ben folded it.”

Jack had also sat down and was holding his fingers above the keyboard, ready to type whenever Amelia could decipher any of the Comstock woman’s writing.

“It says…darn, this is fading quickly, but I think it says something about Charles turning his back on her and Amy. Yes, I can read it now.

“Although Charles swore he had bought our passage on a ship to America, he has not sent word regarding the ship, nor has he sent the money he promised us. I fear that he has betrayed us and we are now without friends we can turn to for help.”

Jack swivelled in his chair to stare at Amelia. “Since Charles thought Amy had miscarried and he didn’t have to worry about the duke having a legitimate heir, he obviously lost all interest in Amy. But if she didn’t come to America, I wonder what became of her.”

“I have no idea.” Amelia turned to the last of the pages that had been torn from the journal. “Strange. This entry is dated six months after the previous one.

“Amy is gone. She met a man passing through the neighbourhood. He was an American who appeared to be relatively wealthy, in that he is travelling all about England and Scotland and keeping a diary about his travels. He seemed quite impressed with Amy’s beauty and asked her to return to America with him. She agreed on the condition that he accept the child as his own, and they are gone. I am sure I will never see her or her little boy again. She told the man her name is Amy Butler, so there is no danger of her ever being traced to the duke. I don’t know why she’s concerned, since she swears the baby belongs to the duke’s footman. No doubt Amy will live a life of ease with her new conquest. I wonder if he knows she can bear no more children.

“And that’s the end of it,” Amelia said. “The next entry is about Martha’s plans to provide flowers for the church service the following Sunday.”

“Wow!” Jack typed in the last few characters and leant back in his chair. “Well, at least we can feel confident that you’re not descended from that branch of the Comstocks, and while I suppose there’s a very remote possibility that Ben is descended from the duke, I doubt we could ever prove it.”

“I agree,” Amelia said. “I just hope Ben won’t be too disappointed.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that. Even if it had turned out that Amy was one of our ancestors and that she had been pregnant with the duke’s son, Ben wouldn’t have been in line for the dukedom.”

“What? Why not?”

“Because my father, who died when I was a baby, was older than Ben. I would have been next in line.”

“You…you…you,” Amelia sputtered, then stared at him, her mouth hanging open for several seconds. When she shut it, she also punched him on the shoulder. “You could have told me.”

“Why? I didn’t want to be a duke. I just wanted to get Uncle Ben off my case and Amy Pennycut out of my dreams. I think now both goals have been accomplished, but there’s only one way to find out for sure.”

Amelia raised her eyebrows. “And that would be?”

“You said it yourself. We need to have sex.”

“Oh we do?” Amelia managed to keep her lips from twitching, but she knew the laughter in her eyes was giving her away. Still, she wasn’t about to admit that she’d been thinking the same thing.

“Absolutely, we need to have sex,” he assured her. He stood and pulled her to her feet, then gently placed a hand at the back of her head. “Well, truthfully, I don’t know about you, but
I
certainly need to have sex, because you are absolutely the most alluring woman I’ve ever met.”

Amelia stared into his eyes, which were already dark with his desire. She could have returned the compliment, because he was surely the most enticing creature she’d ever been exposed to, but she couldn’t resist teasing him a tiny bit. She cocked her head to one side and wrinkled her forehead as though giving the proposition some serious consideration. “Based on our recent experiences, I suppose we could consider sex as a scientific experiment.”

“We certainly could.” He nodded enthusiastically.

“But as I think I told you earlier, I don’t jump into bed with men I’ve just met.”

He groaned.

“On the other hand—as you once mentioned—perhaps we knew each other long, long ago.” She kept her gaze trained on him, watching carefully for his reaction. If he laughed at her, or insisted that he’d merely been kidding when he made that remark, she knew they’d have no future together.

He returned her stare, and his expression grew solemn. “What I’m about to say is not designed just to get you into bed. I need to know you believe me when I say that.”

Amelia moistened her lips. “I believe you.”

“The first moment I saw you, I had the strongest feeling of having met you before, but I knew that was impossible. Still, every time we’ve been together since then, I’ve experienced the same feeling. Somehow, someway, I think we’ve known and loved each other in the past.”