The Lost Heiress of Hawkscliffe

by Joyce C. Ware

  “I have not yet discussed my idea with Mr. Ramsay,” I said. “My contribution would be secondary to yours, you see.”

  Admittedly, I was shading the truth a bit, but it was all in a worthy cause, and she was clearly flattered to have been the first to be informed of the project.

  “I’m sure dear Philo will approve.” Cora nodded absently, her gaze settling somewhere, unseeingly, beyond me. I had to strain to hear her next words, which I sensed were as much to reassure herself as to inform me. “We could work together here at Hawkscliffe, once his inheritance is assured. He has promised me this will always be my home....”

  She chattered on, not because she considered me a confidante, I was sure of that, but because the relief associated with the imminent end of seven years of uncertainty was too great to suppress.

  “You feel there is no chance Roxelana will be found, then?” I queried gently.

  She turned on me a look of purest dread so stark and undisguised I had all I could to keep from gasping aloud.

  “Found? Found, you say? Who would be looking for that. . . that creature at this late date? Answer me that!”

  Oh dear. I seemed to have revived all her suspicions. Walk softly, I warned myself. “All I meant was that usually there are published notices, are there not? I seem to remember reading something of the sort in the New York papers when my uncle died. Legal advertisements to notify possible claimants—tradesmen, distant or unknown relatives, that sort of thing.”

  Cora visibly relaxed. “Oh, but that was done years ago, Miss Mackenzie. All that is behind us now. This is my home, you see,” she repeated firmly. “And now, if you will excuse me, I must return to my duties.”

  This time, I welcomed my dismissal. Conversation with Cora Banks was like traversing a glacier laced with crevasses ready to claim the unwary. However, as I trotted up to the house by way of the walled garden, my mental fatigue surrendered to the pleasant anticipation of my conversation with Philo Ramsay.

  I rapped smartly on the door to the studio and entered before Philo had quite completed his invitation for me to do so.

  He looked up from a desk heaped with papers and regarded me frowningly. “Well, Miss Mackenzie, been running a footrace, have you? You look at sixes and sevens and more than a little out of breath. May I relieve you of your wrap?”

  Disconcerted, I realized I should have gone to my room to change, or at least refresh myself, before meeting with my meticulously groomed employer. I smoothed back errant wisps of hair and surreptitiously dusted the toes of my shoes across the backs of my stockings before seating myself in the chair he drew up for me.

  “I have just come from tea with Cora Banks,” I announced. My initial statement elicited a raised eyebrow of surprise; then, as my eager words describing my proposal for the Hawkscliffe catalog tumbled out, the sparking glint in Philo Ramsay’s eyes, which I assumed was struck by interest, was succeeded by an expression I found impossible to read. It left me woefully unprepared for his reaction.

  “No, Miss Mackenzie.”

  I gaped at him, unwilling to believe my ears. Perhaps he felt the result would not be worth the effort? I searched the set lines of his face, hoping to detect uncertainty, or at least a hint of his usual gentleness, but even the soft blond hairs of his moustache seemed to bristle with resolve.

  “There is nothing else like it, that I know,” I persisted doggedly, “and I’m sure an illustrated volume of Charles Quintus Ramsay’s celebrated carpet collection would be both prestigious and profitable.”

  “I have no doubt of it.”

  “Then I...I don’t understand.”

  “You accepted the fee I suggested in my letter, did you not?”

  “Why yes, it was quite generous, but—”

  “Then any prestige or profit that may accrue to the Hawkscliffe collection once you have completed your commission is no concern of yours.”

  No concern of yours.

  A popular phrase with the Ramsay men. I continued to sit numbly. Et tu, Philo. The hurt I felt must have shown in my eyes, for he avoided meeting them.

  “Miss Mackenzie?” His manner remained stiff and unyielding. “If you don’t mind? I have business to attend to here.”

  “Of course.” I rose abruptly. “I’m sorry to have intruded.” I reached for my wrap, and in my awkward haste I nudged a pile of papers on his desk, loosing the top few to float to the floor. As I stooped to retrieve them, ignoring Philo’s plea to leave them be, I couldn’t help noticing that the sheaf I collected were bills, medical bills—and sizeable ones at that. I had seen no evidence of ill health among those residing at Hawkscliffe—were these for the ailing friend he had mentioned? No concern of yours, I reminded myself.

  I retreated to the library to lick my wounds, pacing restlessly in the gathering darkness as I sought to come to terms with what had happened. Perhaps, as Philo Ramsay had hinted, I had overextended myself. The Hawkscliffe collection was literally no concern of mine. Perhaps the payment of my fee was all I had a right to receive, but was a simple thank-you too much to expect? Had Philo’s earlier expression of camaraderie been for him merely a passing amusement? I caught my lip between my teeth, hating to be so suspicious, but a young woman in my position could not afford to be otherwise.

  In the East, my uncle had often told me, business agreements were sealed with a handshake, “but in America,” he once added with a regretful sigh, “it is more complicated than that. And for you, dear child, it will be even more so, as it is for any woman. Much more.” Then his shoulders hunched in that characteristic, dismissive shrug of his. “But if you put into practice everything I have taught you, and remember to look over your shoulder every step of the way, it will be good to you, this business.”

  I already knew and accepted the fact that the antique carpet trade was demanding, but good to me? For the first time I doubted Uncle Vartan’s wisdom. The disloyal thought brought sudden tears to my eyes, blurring the light which suddenly spread across the leather bindings on the facing bookcases.

  “Communing with the shadows, Miss Mackenzie, or are you a creature of them?”

  Stooping over the newly lit lamp, adjusting the mantle’s glow, was Thornton Ramsay. His deep voice seemed to penetrate my skin, my nerves, my very bones. I was appalled to discover how much his presence thrilled me. I dabbed at my moist eyes with the heels of my hands and turned to face him.

  “Neither, Mr. Ramsay. I was merely absorbed by the puzzle presented me by one of the Hawkscliffe carpets,” I fibbed. “My mind’s eye functions as well in darkness as in the light, you see.”

  “What I see is a very pretty young woman more suited to raising rosy-cheeked cherubs than losing track of time among heaps of dusty floor coverings.”

  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Losing my temper would solve nothing. “Chacun a son gout,” I said evenly.

  Thornton Ramsay regarded me in silence.

  “Each to his own taste,” I translated.

  “I know what it means.”

  “But you’re surprised I do? What a snob you are, Mr. Ramsay.”

  “I may be many things, ” he retorted hotly, “but snobbish is not one of them. And surely I’m not the first person—man or woman—who suggested that being a mother—”

  “And a housekeeper and obedient wife is my proper role in life? No indeed, you are not the first. Another man, who also thought me willful and unnatural, well preceded you. If my father had lived, he would have seen to it that my learning and my capacity for it was imprisoned in domesticity.”

  “A home is hardly comparable to stone walls and iron bars!”

  “Do you think a prison cell pleasanter if softly padded, Mr. Ramsay?”

  “I think your uncle has a lot to answer for if he encouraged your narrow view of life.”

  “My uncle valued my intellectual curiosity and, because of it, my company. My father was a domestic tyrant; Uncle Vartan was my mentor. I will never exchange the freedom I enjoyed with him for the d
omestic chains my mother wore.”

  We stood staring at each other, Thornton Ramsay and I, the very air seeming to vibrate between us. His next words erased my self-satisfaction.

  “And has love no place in your scheme of things?” His voice was low and soft. Its careless tone was matched by the lazy smile that curved his wide mouth, but challenge glinted in the depths of those green eyes.

  For a long moment I was at a loss for words. Love? What did I know of love? An exchange of soulful glances at a party, a sigh, at most a fluttering of the heart, soon eased. But the love to which I sensed he referred—the love of a man for a woman, carnal love—the very thought of it dizzied me. Then, from out of the whirl of my confusion, the perfect retort presented itself.

  “That, Mr. Ramsay,” I pronounced triumphantly, “is no concern of yours.”

  As I moved forward to sweep by him, Thornton Ramsay reached out to grasp my arm above the elbow. The hard, rough, unfamiliar touch of strong masculine fingers, his fingers, seemed to burn through my sleeve to brand the soft flesh beneath it, unleashing a wave of sensation—electric, frightening, and so overwhelming that my proud steps faltered. I stumbled against him. His chin grazed the top of my head, and his warm breath stirred the tendrils of hair on my brow.

  “I’m not so sure of that, Kate,” he whispered, “are you?”

  Hardly able to draw a steady breath, I shrugged off his encircling arm and walked away without another word. As usual. Thorn Ramsay had the last one.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  In the days that followed, I felt like a boat adrift on a tropical sea beneath whose calm surface an alien life swirls unseen through secret coralline paths and mysterious shadowy caverns.

  Polite inattention became the order of those days. Cora substituted vague smiles for her former suspicious scrutiny of me. Whether she was distracted by the book proposal I had discussed with her or by the approaching legal proceedings to determine the disposition of Hawkscliffe I could not say, but it was a change of attitude with which I had no quarrel, as I preferred being overlooked to being made to feel unwelcome.

  Philo observed the forms punctiliously, inquiring after my health with a solicitude belied by an obvious lack of interest in my answer. If I had told him I was at death’s door, his expression would have been no less agreeable.

  Thornton Ramsay appeared to be biding his time, but to what purpose I could not imagine. At meals, when Philo and I exchanged surmises about the origin of a carpet motif—for he was indeed well versed in art history—I could sense those green eyes contemplating me, and once when Cora’s tongue sharpened long enough to dismiss as rubbish the Ottoman textiles I had been extolling, he laughed and suggested that perhaps her concern about Roxelana had adversely affected her aesthetic judgment.

  As might be imagined, that comment did not sit at all well with Cora Ramsay. The murderous look she aimed at him waslike seeing a shark’s fin knifing through my placid metaphorical sea.

  Roxelana. She was always lurking at the core of it, wasn’t she? What was it like, I wondered, to have the power this woman, lost these seven years, still possessed? Cora hated her, Philo feared her return, and Thornton bitterly resented the toll taken on his personal and professional life as a result of C.Q. Ramsay’s indulgence of her demands. They were strong emotions, and perhaps not the nicest way to be remembered, but I was sure no one ever thought of Roxelana in terms of niceness. She was an elemental force that carried all before her, and I was horrified to realize that I envied her.

  Gentle persuasion and good sense had always been my stock-in-trade, but, oh, how I coveted the ability to snare admirers with a single sidelong glance, or, as Roxelana had, to gain a palace on a hilltop by the shrewd exercise of a seductive smile! Alas, I was unlikely ever to fathom her secret; even if I did, I doubted my willingness to pay the price that putting it into practice would exact.

  Three days before the hearing which would declare Roxelana legally dead, my foolish longings and discontents were routed by a veritable maelstrom of emotion that whirled Thornton, Philo, and Cora into its vortex, leaving me teetering uncertainly on its perimeter.

  It began unremarkably enough with a telegraph message brought up from Hendryk by Harry Braunfels and delivered to Thornton by Mary Rose as she prepared to serve us our noonday meal. Assuming it to be of a private nature, Cora, Philo, and I exchanged banal comments about the weather—it had remained brisk and bright, as I remember—when a loud oath from Thorn startled us into silence.

  “Not bad news, I trust. Thorn,” Philo said, observant of the niceties as always, although I sensed a lack of genuine concern in his dulcet voice.

  “It is too soon to say if it is bad news, but at the very least it is bothersome. A damned nuisance, in fact.”

  We all stared at him expectantly as he folded the telegram and placed it alongside his place setting. “It’s from Louise Ramsay,” he finally said. “She is arriving tomorrow afternoon with her son. Lance, in tow.”

  C.Q.’s ex-wife arriving with her son? Good heavens, I thought, is there no end to the complications here? I turned to Philo, curious about his reaction to this surprising news, and found him almost as pale as the ivory damask cloth.

  “Louise and her son?” His voice echoed Thorn’s words in a whispery, strangled sort of way. “Why now? Whatever can she want?”

  “Well might you ask, coz,” Thornton returned with a sardonic lift of one eyebrow. “Well might you ask indeed.’’

  “But she can’t!” Cora said, frantically eyeing the cousins in turn. “She mustn’t! Thornton, you can’t allow this, you must tell her—”

  “Tell her what, Cora?” he broke in sharply. “That there’s no room at the inn? She’s still our aunt, Philo’s and mine, and the boy—” Thornton broke oft, scowling, and drew his finger back and forth along the fold of the telegram.

  “No longer a boy, I warrant,” Philo said bleakly. “He must be sixteen or seventeen by now.”

  “Eighteen,” Thornton muttered. The cousins exchanged wary glances.

  “Whatever his age, that boy is her bastard,” Cora announced flatly.

  “We don’t know that, Cora. Not for sure,” Thornton cautioned her.

  “He is! I know he is…Philo?” Twisting her napkin in her hands, she turned to the blond cousin for reassurance, but Philo Ramsay had slumped in his seat, his face puckered with anguish.

  “She’s here to put in a claim, isn’t she, Thorn? After seven long years that harpy—”

  “They were divorced, Philo, there’s no doubt about that. She has no grounds for a claim.”

  “Not for herself, for the boy.”

  “For the boy,” Cora echoed.

  “You put her up to this, Thorn,” Philo accused, his long, nervous fingers tracing aimless patterns on the tablecloth. “That’s why you went to New York last week, isn’t it? Admit it! It offends you to think of Hawkscliffe in the hands of someone like me.”

  Thornton looked at him in alarm. “Hold on, old man. I grant you I’m concerned about the commitments in both time and money that ownership of Hawkscliffe will demand of you, but believe me, Philo, my trip to New York had nothing to do with her, in fact I haven’t seen her, except in passing, for years. Why, I’d as soon face down a speeding locomotive as conspire with Louise Ramsay.”

  The last, delivered in a tone of jocular exaggeration, eased the tension in Philo’s face, like a hand smoothing out a sheet of crumpled paper. I couldn’t help marveling at Thornton’s pains to soothe him, and I was, of course, agog with curiosity about this interesting turn of events, as was Mary Rose, who served us in a carefully maintained silence, absorbing juicy tidbits to chew over later in the pantry with Agnes.

  “Where shall we put dear Aunt Louise, then? In fair Roxelana’s suite?” I was sure Philo’s question was deliberately provocative.

  “No!” Cora said. “I suggest we move Miss Mackenzie into the suite. Then, since we can be sure Louise Ramsay would turn up her aristocratic nose at the maid’
s room she will be vacating, we can put both her and her son on the top floor, out from underfoot.”

  “But those rooms haven’t been used in years!” Philo cried. “Louise will raise a fearful fuss, I just know she will.”

  “Then let her, Philo. It’s more than she deserves on such short notice,” Cora added with a meaningful look at me. “Mary Rose and I will make sure the rooms are clean, although with all there is to do—”

  “I’ll be happy to help, Miss Banks,” I offered. “The carpet inventory is largely complete except for those on the top floor; this way, I could kill two birds with one stone.”

  “But will that give you sufficient time to settle into your new quarters before Mrs. Ramsay arrives?”

  “It is important that your tenure appear to be well established,” Thorn Ramsay added. “The thought of Lulu in Roxelana’s suite. ...” His proud face wore, for a moment, an expression I can only describe as desperate.

  Why, I’m being asked to participate in a conspiracy, I realized, not knowing whether to feel uneasy or amused.

  “I brought so little with me, I can easily accomplish that after supper this evening.”

  Once said, the die was cast, and my willingness to take part in what seemed a harmless enough deception was so eagerly seized upon I experienced an uneasy tremor of doubt.

  “Thank you, Miss Mackenzie,” Thornton Ramsay said with heartfelt sincerity. “I’m just sorry to involve you in this tedious family affair.”

  “No more than I, Mr. Ramsay. Shall we pretend I have heard not a word of it?”

  “You are a very unusual young woman,” he remarked in a voice pitched low for my ears alone. “Very unusual indeed.”

  “If I am, sir, it is because my uncle encouraged me to be so,” I replied with a demure smile.

  He grinned in recognition of my sly reference to our lively exchange in the library several days earlier; then, to the mystification of our companions, he raised his water goblet to salute me. As I met his admiring glance, I reflected that gentle persuasion did, after all, have its advantages.