The Lost Heiress of Hawkscliffe

by Joyce C. Ware

  * * * *

  Mary Rose and I made short work of preparing the top floor rooms for the unwelcome guests. Feather dusters and the crisp November air invited in through the opened windows soon routed the dust and mustiness. There was nothing exotic about the furnishings. In fact, the only Eastern touches were the rugs that lay overlapped on the floors and piled carelessly in a large unfinished space given over to the storage of miscellaneous furnishings that had fallen out of favor.

  Mary Rose crinkled her nose at the sight of them. “Horrid, dusty things,” she declared. “Just look at this,” she added, curling back one of the rugs with her toe. “The edges are coming apart, and this hole-- why, it’s almost in tatters, miss.” She looked around the room disdainfully. “They all are, more or less. Shall we bundle them into the dust bin, then?”

  “No!”

  My cry of alarm made Mary Rose blink in astonishment. I smiled reassuringly. “That’s not our decision to make, Mary Rose. Let’s just choose the least disreputable for the guest rooms and store the rest. I’ll take the matter up with Mr. Ramsay myself, after I’ve had a chance to add them to my inventory.”

  I yearned to wash away the clouding film of dust that clung to the rugs’ neglected pile. Waiting there to be revealed were rich indigo blues, warm madder reds, and a distinctive shade of yellow found only in antique rugs.

  These forgotten rugs were very old, by far the oldest in the Hawkscliffe collection. Actually, they looked rather like ...

  I surveyed them more closely, then realized excitedly that they were, in fact, the very rugs whose distinctive, archaic designs my uncle had roughly sketched many years before. I recalled his telling me he had collected them one by one from mosques in remote Anatolian villages where the modest sum he offered for them was eagerly accepted.

  Those sketches and his incomplete notes still languished in a drawer of my uncle’s desk. I had often wondered why he had abandoned the study he had planned of the rugs, and now I knew. He had neither set foot in this house nor had access to these wonderful rugs for fifteen years or more. But by whose choice? Had Uncle Vartan turned his back on Hawkscliffe, or had Charles Quintus Ramsay refused him entry? And whatever the case, why?

  I smoothed my dully aching temples with my fingers, no nearer an answer now than I had been when I first asked to visit the splendidly spired castle I had viewed longingly from that Hudson River steamer so many years before. One thing I did know was that I would keep my discovery to myself for the time being, lest Philo Ramsay snatch another opportunity from me.

  After Mary Rose returned to the kitchen to assist with preparations for supper, I decided the rooms needed a personal touch, something to make the uninvited guests feel welcome, even if they weren’t. Accordingly, I hastened downstairs and applied to Agnes and Mary Rose for a stout knife to cut a few branches of autumn leaves to arrange on the bureau tops. As I had expected, the usual chatter over the pots and pans was considerably enlivened by what Mary Rose had heard while serving the noonday meal.

  After the brief pause my unexpected arrival occasioned, Mary Rose turned to me breathlessly. “Do you think he is, Miss? Do you think Mrs. Ramsay’s son could really be a...a.…?” She was unable to force the offending word past her lips.

  “A bastard? I don’t know, Mary Rose, and I won’t know any better tomorrow. One can hardly tell by looking at a person, can one?”

  Mary Rose blushed redder than I thought humanly possible. Poor girl, apparently she mistook my teasing for chastisement.

  “I told you I overheard them carrying on about it, Mary Rose,” Agnes said crossly. “It’s not the sort of thing a person forgets, not even after all these years. They were in their bedroom on the second floor of the New York house, miss,” she said, turning to me, obviously pleased to have new ears for her tale. “I was passing through the hall, collecting the morning tea trays—I was only cook’s helper in those days—and their door was open just a crack. They was all but shouting, so unless I stopped up my ears, which I couldn’t very well do with my hands full, I couldn’t help but overhear. She even boasted of it at first. Told the mister it was the one thing he couldn’t do for any woman.”

  “She never did!” Mary Rose was shocked, but not so much as to neglect asking the obvious next question. “Who was it then, Cook?”

  I was as curious to hear the answer to that as Mary Rose, but Agnes was unable to supply it.

  “Don’t know,” she replied, sounding quite put out about it. “I have me guesses, though,” she added with a smirk, “and none of ‘em’s farther than the highroad to Hendryk. But to tell you the truth, I don’t think Mr. Charles Quintus Ramsay cared much who it was.”

  “Saints preserve us, why ever not?” Mary Rose was astounded. In her world, being cuckolded was not the sort of thing husbands took lightly.

  Agnes’s plump mouth described a grim downward arc. “Why? Because he was glad of an excuse to rid himself of that stuck-up thing, that’s why! You’ll see when you meet Missus High-and-Mighty yourself.”

  I was already beginning to regret my involvement in the family conspiracy.

  “But if you ask me,” Agnes added, “he jumped out of the frying pan smack-bang into the fire.”

  Anticipating yet another denunciation of Roxelana and her foreign ways, I slipped out the back door with the knife I had borrowed and a basket to put my cuttings in.

  The trees near the house had largely shed their autumn dress, so I had to wander farther afield than I had planned. My first stop was in a grove of young beech where leaves the color of parchment still fluttered. Next, I spied orange bittersweet twining through a thicket of barberry, and beyond, the frosty blue-green of field juniper berries beckoned. It was while I was gathering their pungent, densely fruited stems that I heard a menacing growl close by.

  I froze. Not daring to move my body, I turned my head slowly and saw Harry Braunfels above me on the path. Two large dogs, both of the Turkish Akbash breed, accompanied him, one on either side. Although only one was growling, neither dog was leashed, and the light had grown too dim to allow me easily to distinguish which was which. Long moments passed. Exasperated, finally, by my unwilling participation in this impromptu tableau of intimidation, I stuffed the juniper in my basket and advanced up the hill, intent on calling Harry’s bluff. The growl grew louder as I approached, but I noticed that the ears of the dog on the left had relaxed ever so slightly, and I was sure I could see the white tip of its tail vibrating against the dusty path. Mentally crossing the fingers on both my hands, I strode forward without a pause, patted the chosen beast on the head, and addressed it in the most cheerful tone I could muster.

  “Good girl, Zulu! Out for a walk, are you?”

  The big dog, bless her, ambled forward and nuzzled my hand amiably. The snarler on the right—Pasha, I assumed, or were there more than one of his hostile nature in the kennels?—was quickly silenced by a gruff command and tethered with a hastily produced stout leather lead.

  “Why, it’s you, missy!” Harry said in an exaggerated tone of surprise. “I didn’t recognize you at first.”

  “Does Mr. Ramsay know you’re in the habit of allowing the dogs to threaten unidentified young women?”

  “I’m in the habit of doing mostly whatever I please because they can’t get no one else to do what I do.”

  We stared each other down for a long moment—he wasn’t the kind of man to admit defeat easily, especially to a woman—and as I prepared to return to the big house, where I could see the swelling glow of lamps being lit, he tried another gambit.

  “Louise and her pup are expected tomorrow, then?”

  I was startled as much by the familiar tone of his reference to Mrs. Ramsay as by his question. Either Mary Rose or Cora must have told him of the expected guests or he had read Thornton Ramsay’s telegram before delivering it.

  “You know Mrs. Ramsay?” I had assumed that his employment went no further back than the construction of Hawkscliffe, but now that I thought of it,
those landscapes he appeared in—to lend scale to the elms, as Thornton Ramsay had put it—must have been painted considerably earlier.

  “We’ve had a go-round or two,” Harry said enigmatically. He gave a bark of laughter. “Should liven things up around here, having Louise and her by-blow in residence.”

  I refused to rise to his bait. “Hardly in residence, Mr. Braunfels,” I replied calmly, ignoring his coarse reference to Louise Ramsay’s son. “For a few days at most, I understand.”

  “No matter how short, it won’t be sweet, miss. But if she gets to be too much for you, you can always come to Harry for comfort, that you can, but leave your airs at home.”

  I spun on my heel with an indignant huff, immediately regretting I had allowed him the pleasure of knowing he had finally succeeded in ruffling my feathers. His self-satisfied chuckle echoed in my ears long after he set off with the dogs for his quarters above the kennels.

  “A bit late for an afternoon walk, isn’t it, Miss Mackenzie?”

  “I have no foolish fears of things that go bump in the night, if that’s what you’re suggesting,” I said more sharply than I intended. Thornton Ramsay’s tall figure looming up unexpectedly on the dark terrace had, in fact, given me quite a start.

  “Not a bit of it,” he replied in a surprised tone. “It’s just that it has grown colder since the sun went down, and you seem to be without a wrap. We can’t have you sneezing and coughing among the prayer rugs, can we?”

  “Should that be the case, I shall be well positioned to petition Allah for a rapid recovery, won’t I?”

  He slowed his restless pacing, and even though I could not see his green eyes, I sensed their curious regard of me.

  “You seem a bit snappish this evening.”

  “If so, I am merely following the example set for me here.” My hand flew to my mouth as I realized I had crossed the thin line between defensiveness and impertinence. “Forgive me, it’s just that I’ve had an unpleasant encounter with your friend Harry Braunfels.”

  “My friend? Whatever gave you that idea? And what do you mean by ‘encounter’? Is that a ladylike way of saying he made improper advances?”

  “Please do not patronize me, Mr. Ramsay. Harry Braunfels gave me the distinct impression that you and he were comrades or chums or something of the sort, so I was trying to put the best face on it. Yes, he made advances, on more than one occasion I might add, and I did not like it one bit. He threatened me.”

  “Threatened you?”

  I did not have to see his face to recognize disbelief. “Must you repeat everything I say in that tone? Yes, he threatened me, or implied as much. He said the dogs sometimes ran loose after dark, and he suggested they might attack me.”

  Even to my own ears that didn’t sound much of threat. “It was the way he said it,” I continued lamely, “and one of the dogs—it may have been Pasha—growled very...very....”

  “Threateningly,” Thornton completely gently. “Miss Mackenzie, Harry’s bark is, or at least always has been, worse than his bite; I can’t say the same for Pasha and his kennel mates.”

  There were others, then.

  “Zulu is a bit of a fraud, as you already know, but the other dogs—well, you’d do well to heed Harry’s warning.”

  I knew there was no point in pursuing the subject. Experience had taught me that intuition was not infallible, and no man took a woman’s intuition very seriously anyway.

  “Am I at least correct in my assumption that Harry worked for Mr. Ramsay before Hawkscliffe was built?”

  “Oh, yes. He was the caretaker of Charles Quintus’s lodge in the Catskills, long since sold. Harry was raised in those parts. When I needed practice scrambling up rocks preparatory to more serious climbs in the Alps, he always knew the best places to go.”

  Thornton Ramsay was an alpinist? The very thought made me shudder, as heights always did.

  “Feeling the chill are you, Miss Mackenzie? I suggest we continue our conversation indoors.”

  Once inside, I placed my basket of cuttings on the stair landing, then followed in his long stride to the library, where a cheery fire blazed and crackled with a warm invitation to draw near. The fireplace in the Ramsay Catskill lodge would have been three times as big, probably, fashioned roughly of lumpy stones and supplied with a rustic mantel of native oak. It was hard to imagine an aristocratic woman like Louise Ramsay in such a setting.

  “Did Mrs. Ramsay ever go to the lodge? Harry said he knew her.”

  “As a matter of fact, she did. Harry’s hawks fascinated her. They used to go off after pheasant together, and I believe he trained a peregrine for her. Lord knows they didn’t have much in common otherwise,” he concluded with a chuckle.

  “Extraordinary,” I murmured. I was sure Harry’s use of the term go-round in reference to his employer’s wife meant more than hawking, but perhaps my imagination was overactive in this regard, too.

  “Harry’s the kind of man who would be challenged by the seemingly unobtainable,” Thornton said, as if he had read my mind.

  “And no doubt boast of nonexistent victories,” I declared.

  “Don’t be too sure. He wasn’t always as grizzled as he is now, you know, and many women are attracted to roughhewn men with a swagger in their walk. Ask Mary Rose.”

  Mary Rose? I was as astounded as he intended me to be. “Good heavens, the man’s old enough to be her father!”

  Thornton Ramsay smiled at me. The firelight glanced off the smooth planes of his face and reflected in the deep green of his eyes. I could feel a warm spark spiral from them into my own.

  “May-to-December liaisons are hardly unheard of. Look at C.Q. and Roxelana. And no one would find it at all remarkable if you and I.…yet I’m almost old enough to be your father.”

  “Hardly likely!”

  “I’m thirty-six. Miss Mackenzie.”

  “I repeat, hardly likely—unless you were in the habit of fathering children at the age of thirteen.”

  “No, not at thirteen.” His voice was very low, and as he turned away the light left his face as the lightness had his voice.

  We stood a moment longer in a silence that threatened to become uncomfortable, and when I excused myself to arrange the branches I had cut for the guest rooms, he nodded wordlessly and turned back to the fire. I sensed he was as relieved as I to abandon a conversation which seemed to be leading into thickets best left unexplored.

  Basket in hand, I made my way slowly up to the third floor, trying to make sense of what I had learned that afternoon. Thornton Ramsay had confirmed the existence of a relationship between Harry and Louise Ramsay, but I told myself again that what had actually happened between them might be quite different from what I inferred Harry had meant by his use of the term go-around.

  Harry Braunfels and Thornton Ramsay, both presently in resident above the highroad to Hendryk, met Agnes’s test. And then there was Philo, also younger than his aunt, but elegant and refined….

  I must have made arrangements of those leaves and berries for the guest rooms, but I have no memory of doing it, or of how they looked afterward. All I could think of were Harry, Thornton, and Philo, and by the time I joined the Ramsays in the dining room I was convinced that of the three, Philo was the only logical candidate.

  Supper was an uneasy affair. Conversation was conducted in fits and starts and peppered with non sequiturs. Apparently the time for protesting the approaching visitation was past; Cora, Thorn, and Philo were now trying to come to terms with it, each in his or her own way.

  Cora excused herself immediately after the meal, leaving Thornton, Philo and me to have coffee in the library. Thornton was even more restless than he had been earlier, poking needlessly at a perfectly made fire, twirling the ancient globe until it creaked in protest.

  “Must you do that, Thorn?” Philo’s tone was thin and querulous, and although I sympathized with his complaint—the globe’s brass fittings shrieked like chalk across a schoolroom slate—I began to have
doubts about casting him in the role of Louise Ramsay’s lover. He was perhaps too refined, too lacking in manly vigor for his blood to have run much hotter at any age.

  “How about a game of backgammon, Philo?”

  Then again, few men could match Thornton Ramsay in that respect.

  “What’s the point. Thorn? You always win.”

  His expression was dispirited, his voice plaintive, almost petulant. No, there was no contest.

  Contest? What contest! Whose lover are we choosing here, I asked myself, Louise Ramsay’s or Kate Mackenzie’s? My head awhirl with confusion, I failed to hear Thornton Ramsay address me.

  “Do you think you might descend from those clouds long enough for a game of backgammon, Miss Mackenzie?”

  It was a tempting prospect. Although I was sure I was asked only as a last resort, I was good at the game. “Are you prepared to lose to a woman, Mr. Ramsay?”

  That stopped his pacing. “I don’t know,” he said, lifting one eyebrow in mild surprise. “The possibility has never occurred to me.”

  “That should make our match interesting, then. But not tonight, I fear. I have yet to change rooms as I promised I would.”

  “Then perhaps I’ll pop down to the kennels and engage Harry in a game of checkers. He’s good enough to be challenging, yet when he loses he takes it so badly it’s rather amusing.”

  Philo frowned. “I wouldn’t have thought either your ego or your pocketbook were that much in need of bolstering.”

  “That’s unworthy of you, Philo,” Thornton retorted. “Tonight I’m more interested in distraction than in victory, and you know perfectly well I never gamble.”

  Philo grimaced. “Sorry, Thorn; I had forgotten about your mother’s problem in that regard, truly I had.”

  As Thorn grunted his acceptance of the apology, I wondered how many more family skeletons awaited revealment.

  “As for distraction,” Philo added bitterly, reaching for the decanter of brandy brought in with the coffee, “oblivion’s more to the point.”