The Duchess (Montgomery/Taggert 16)

“It’s late and—”

“I’ll tell Mother you’re here.”

He chuckled, knowing it was an empty threat. She’d never in her life tell. “You have forced me into this,” he said, smiling. “I came here to this house to rest. I was very ill and I needed a place to hide and to recover. I didn’t plan to tell anyone I was here. Truthfully, I wasn’t sure the family was here. I can’t keep up with the seasons. I thought the lot of you might be in the south now.”

She lay against him and listened as he told her about meeting Claire, about fainting after he caught her horse. “It was a bit…”

“Embarrassing?” she said, laughter in her voice. She knew his re

putation with women. When he was younger, when he was in his teens, he had written to her of his exploits with women, how he had sneaked over the wall of a girls’ school in the middle of the night, how he had hidden in one girl’s bed when the Sister had come to see what the giggling was about. As he’d grown older, he had told her less of such exploits, but Leatrice, locked away with a harridan of a mother and an uninterested father and two brothers, and living a life of undescribable loneliness, had begged him to tell her of all his adventures.

“Claire is very pretty, isn’t she?” Leatrice asked as she watched him closely.

“There are many kinds of beauty. Claire has…life.”

Leatrice knew what he meant. Claire moved quickly and said things quickly and always seemed to be watching people. She wasn’t a person who was content to look only into herself. “And did you seduce her?”

At that Trevelyan stiffened. “She’s engaged to Harry.”

Leatrice stifled a laugh. “That didn’t bother you in Egypt with that pretty little dancer. And what about the time you raided the harem? Aren’t those women married to someone else?”

“They weren’t married to my brother.”

Leatrice smiled. For all Trevelyan’s travels and his bohemian outlook on life, underneath he was as conventional as other men.

“And besides, she didn’t like me.”

Leatrice looked at him, aghast.

“She said I was old and sick and weak.”

Leatrice put her head back down so he wouldn’t see her laughing. But he felt her body shake with her humor.

“Laugh all you want, but she wanted nothing to do with me. She’s mad about Harry. Talks about him all the time. She says he’s perfect.”

“Harry?”

“Harry.”

They were silent as they savored this great joke. Then Trevelyan started talking again and told her about his other meetings with Claire. “I knew I should have told her to go away, but she was so lonely. She couldn’t understand this house, and Harry completely ignored her.”

Leatrice understood the feeling of loneliness all too well. Although the big house was full of people, there was no companionship in it. At least not for her. She didn’t want to sit in the drawing rooms with her aunts and gossip about the other people they knew, and she couldn’t go outside, for she couldn’t hear her mother’s summons if she were outside. “I know how she felt.”

She listened to Trevelyan talk and as she did so she heard more than his words. She heard something in his tone that told her that he liked Claire a great deal. She heard him tell how Claire had read all of Captain Baker’s books. “All of them,” he said, and there was pride in his voice.

She listened as he told of the extraordinary day he and Claire had spent with Angus MacTarvit. Leatrice hadn’t seen any of the MacTarvits since she was a child, when she and Vellie used to go sneaking through the brush to try and steal Angus’s whisky. She remembered being caught by the old man once and being terrified. But he’d just threatened her and let her go. She had run back to Vellie in a state of terror and he had laughed at her, said that the old man was all wind and nothing else.

Now Leatrice was hearing that Claire had spent the day with the old man and had danced with the crofters. Leatrice could not have been more surprised if Trevelyan had told her Claire had spent the day with the fairies and drunk nectar for tea.

“What else has she done?” Leatrice whispered, some awe in her voice.

Trevelyan smiled. “Taken to Scotch like a sailor and eaten some very strange food and loved it and bribed her sister into lying about her so she could nurse me through a fever. And she’s made Harry take her on a tour of the estate and introduce her to the workers.”

Leatrice looked up at Trevelyan in bewilderment. “How could Harry do that? He wouldn’t know one of his own employees if he ran over the man. I doubt if Harry knows his own valet’s name, and the man’s been with Harry for ten years.”

“It seems that our clever little brother took Charles with him. Old MacTarvit said Claire thought Harry was a man of great humility because he allowed his employee to do most of the explaining.”

At that Leatrice laughed, and as she did so she realized that it had been a long, long time since she had laughed. The only light in her life had been letters from her brother, letters that had allowed her to live his adventures vicariously. He had written little of their grandfather, only mentioning now and then that his back was sore from the old man’s latest beating or that he was thin from having had to live on bread and water for days at a time. But for the most part his letters had been full of all that he was seeing and doing.