The Duchess (Montgomery/Taggert 16)

He looked at Harry, already asleep. It was obvious that his little brother wasn’t going to help Claire replace the duchess. Harry was too comfortable to try to change anything. Why should Harry want to change something that was so perfect for him?

So now what was Trevelyan to do? Go back to his room and stay there? Go back to his writing and stay out of this? Allow Harry to marry his American and let her fight it out with her mother-in-law? Claire was a strong and healthy young woman, and if nothing else, she’d outlive the old hag. Then she could do what she wanted.

Again the images that Claire had drawn of him appeared before his eyes. He wiped his hands over his face. Would he return ten years from now and find that happy young woman carrying trays into her mother-in-law’s room? Would her handsome husband even notice that his wife’s spirit had been killed?

Trevelyan stood up and walked to the door. Maybe if he talked to Leatrice. He wouldn’t do anything, just talk to her. Maybe she wasn’t as unhappy as Claire thought she was.

Chapter Fifteen

Leatrice, snuggled deep in the cocoon of her bed, at first didn’t know what the creaking sound was. In her sleep-dazed mind she knew that any and all disturbances came from her mother, so she tried to rouse herself. What did the old woman want now? Her feet rubbed? Her hair brushed? Hot water? Tea? Did she want Leatrice to read to her? Sometimes Leatrice thought the old woman sat up late trying to figure out things for her daughter to do. Her uncle James had once said that Eugenia couldn’t possibly sleep because no one could be as mean as she was without having a full twenty-four hours a day to work at it.

Leatrice pushed the cover off and, her eyes still closed, began to make her way out of the bed. It was when the light penetrated her lids that her eyes flew open. Standing near the east wall, the old door that was hidden in the wall panel open behind him, holding a candle, was the ghost of her dead brother. Leatrice sat up, put her knuckles to her mouth to keep from screaming, then backed against the headboard of the bed, pulling the coverlet with her

The ghost smiled at her.

Leatrice tried to move farther away and pulled the cover higher about her. If her life had depended on it, she couldn’t have said a word. She just sat there, staring in stark terror.

“Ah, Mutt,” said the ghost, “it’s just me.”

Leatrice sat there, still trembling, staring wide-eyed, then she began to blink. This apparition didn’t look like a ghost. He looked like a flesh-and-blood man who had entered her room through the old door. She leaned forward a bit to get a better look at him, and he took a step closer to her.

“I’m real,” he said. “As real as I ever was.”

She let the cover drop from her throat and kept looking at him. Could it really be her brother? “Vellie?” she whispered.

He nodded once, then he was across the room to her. Leatrice opened her arms and he came to her, burying his face against her neck while she hid her face in his hair.

He was real! Oh thank God and all that was holy, he was really and truly alive!

Leatrice began to cry then. The tears began to pour from her eyes softly at first, then, as she ran her hands over his arms and down his back, touching him as though to reassure herself that he was actually there, the tears began to run harder.

“Ssssh, love,” he whispered, holding her to him, clutching her.

He wore some odd garment of silk, a robe of sorts, and soft boots. He used the toe of one foot to remove first one boot, then the other, and he crawled in bed with her, stretched full length beside her, and held her, as much like a lover as a brother. And he let her cry. When she didn’t stop at his first admonitions, he didn’t try again to halt her; he just held her while she cried and cried and cried.

It was a long while before Leatrice could control herself enough to speak. And when she had her tears under control somewhat, all she could think of was how good it was to touch someone. It had been years and years since she had felt human flesh against her own. She and Trevelyan were only a year apart in age, and when they had been children they had been close. Their brother Alex had been too full of himself and too dignified to have much time for a mere girl, but she and Vellie had been friends—or, as some people said, co-conspirators in crime.

She hadn’t seen him since he was nine, on that most horrible day in her life when he had been sent away with their horrid grandfather. The vision of Vellie, her most beloved friend, her brother, her…her soul mate, turning around in that open carriage and looking back at her would be imprinted on her mind to the day she died. Their father had said Vellie would return in a few months, but Leatrice had looked at her mother’s stern face and known her brother would not be allowed to return, at least not to live. He had committed the unforgivable: he had defied their mother. He had stood up to her and laughed at her punishments and her warnings and her threats. But in the end the old woman had won, for, after all, Vellie was just a little boy and she was the duchess and his mother. It was she who had the authority. Their father had had his son Alex to train to become the duke, and Leatrice thought that maybe her father had been just a bit glad to see Vellie taken away, for the second son had been a problem since the day he was born.

“Are you really here?” she whispered, her breath coming in jerks as she tried to control her sobbing.

“Really and truly.”

His arms were wrapped about her and her back was to his front as he held her close. This was the way it had always been: the two of them together. Even when he was just a bit of a boy their mother had had him whipped for even the tiniest infraction of her rules. Leatrice thought it probably infuriated the old woman that her second son would never cry. He used to swagger away from the woman’s beatings, his little shoulders back, a smirk of a smile on his face as though to say she’d not hurt him. But at night, Leatrice would sneak through the tunnels and go to his room and crawl into bed with her brother and he’d hold her and cry. He’d cry and say, “Why does she hate me so?” Leatrice never had an answer for him.

“The papers said you were dead. They said you died of a fever, that you never reached Pesha and that you were sick and—”

His derisive laugh cut her off. “I’m much harder to kill than that. I was sick for a while, maybe more dead than alive, but I healed. I stayed behind until I cou

ld stand getting on a damned boat and I came home.”

She held one of his hands to her face and rubbed it against her cheek. She knew it had been months since the man Jack Powell, who had traveled with Trevelyan, had returned to England and announced to the world that he and he alone had entered the secret city of Pesha. He’d told the press that Captain Baker had been too ill to enter the city so the captain stayed behind. The man Powell said that Captain Baker had been so ill that he’d had to be carried all the way back to the coast and then, just as they were to board the ship back to England, Captain Baker had died.

“Where are you staying?” she asked.

He hesitated before answering. “In Charlie’s room.”

Leatrice didn’t say anything for a moment. When she did speak, she tried to sound nonchalant. “Have you been there long?”