The Lost Heiress of Hawkscliffe

by Joyce C. Ware

  Gently I tucked in the errant folds of coarse wool, whose pungent odor vied with the rusty smell of blood. Harry looked back at me over his thick, hunched shoulders.

  “She’s past caring for that, missy,” he said, baring his yellowed teeth in a wet gummy smile. “Took Mr. Death to bring her ladyship down off her high horse, didn’t it?”

  He laughed then, and the jeering, unfeeling sound of it made me turn to Thorn for reassurance.

  “Was it so foolish of me? She was so proud. So very proud.”

  He lifted his bowed head to look at me gravely. “Not foolish at all.” He slid a comforting arm around my shoulders and drew me close. You are as good as you are brave and bonny, Kate Mackenzie.”

  We trudged on in the gathering dusk, made companions by tragedy. The warmth of his encircling arm reminded me of my first glimpse of Hawkscliffe as I stood side by side with Uncle Vartan on the deck of the Mary Powell, straining to follow the path of his pointing finger. As we approached the many-spired mansion now, with dread in our hearts, I realized sadly this might well be my last sight of it.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I could not stay at Hawkscliffe, of course. Once I had recovered from the numbing shock of discovering Louise’s broken body, I realized I had no more place in that distressed household than at the hearing--delayed now by events--that would determine who would inherit C.Q. Ramsay’s estate. I had informed Thorn Ramsay I would be leaving in twenty-four hours, and, albeit in tragically altered circumstances, I did just that.

  That I was able to escape so soon was due largely to Mary Rose and Agnes. Summoned from the kitchen by Thorn, they wordlessly viewed Louise’s gray waxen pallor, compared it with my trembling exhaustion, and decided, with but a single knowing glance between them, that their duty lay first with life. Accordingly, despite Lance’s grief-stricken pleas, they bundled me off to bed before attending to his mother’s bloodied corpse.

  Those stalwart women! Coarse in speech and dress, they lacked all the finer social graces, but it was their stubby, reddened fingers, unsuited for crooking elegantly over teacups, that gently sponged the chill from my body, their stout arms that supported me when representatives of the local constabulary, alerted by Harry, demanded I join the others in the parlor.

  The method of interrogation employed by these simple country policemen, unnerved by a violent death among the gentry as well as unequipped by training for its proper investigation, consisted largely of bluster. If the occasion had not been so melancholy, their strutting and posturing might have seemed comical.

  At length, intimidated by Thorn’s gruff insistence that I had suffered enough for one day, the sergeant in charge reluctantly agreed to consider accepting my written statement in lieu of my appearance at an admittedly pro forma inquest to be held the next week. “But no promises, mind you!” he called after me as I mounted the stairs to return to my bedroom to prepare it.

  “Miss Mackenzie has better things to do than cool her heels in this gloomy house so’s to answer again the questions you’ve already put to her, Joe Bollocks!”

  Agnes’s tone of familiarity and belligerent posture, with fists planted firmly on ample hips, noticeably flustered the pompous little man when he tramped upstairs an hour later to pass judgment on my statement. She was quick to press her advantage. “Why, she has a business to attend to in New York City!”

  Mary Rose, lent courage by Agnes’s scornful treatment of this minion of the law whose character flaws, she later told me, were a fruitful source for town gossip, chimed in. “An important business, Sergeant. Miss Mackenzie has her own shop, she does, filled top to bottom with priceless carpets from the Orient. Isn’t that right, miss?”

  Fearing this immoderate claim might have an effect opposite from that intended, I smiled wanly and assured the harried officer of my sincere desire to do whatever the law required of me.

  “Well then, miss,” he began in an expansive tone, obviously placated by my submissive manner, “since you are all agreed it was death by misadventure, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be allowed to attend to your business. You do agree, miss?”

  Alerted by a sudden sharpening of his tone, I looked up from the paper on which I was completing my statement as rapidly as legibility would allow, and nodded.

  “And you maintain you did not know the deceased’s state of mind at the time?”

  I hesitated fractionally before answering. I knew Louise Ramsay was greedy and overbearing and unkind; I knew she was angry—very angry—the last time I saw her alive, but how could I possibly claim, based on our brief if unpleasant acquaintance, to have known her state of mind?

  “I hardly knew the woman, Sergeant Bollocks,” I stated firmly.

  Hours later, as the train to New York City clickety-clacked its way south alongside the broad silver ribbon of river, I pondered Sergeant Bollocks’s final question. I may not have known Louise’s state of mind, but I knew she was a fighter.

  I closed my eyes and leaned my head against a window frame greasy with coal dust.

  You all agreed it was death by misadventure, Sergeant Bollocks had said. He had talked of accident, hinted at suicide, yet the possibility of murder was never so much as mentioned.

  I recalled Philo’s raw knuckles and abraded palms, kept carefully concealed and unremarked within his pockets throughout the interrogation. He had suffered the injuries, he had told me, in an attempt to escape Harry’s attention. But couldn’t they as well have resulted from an unexpected encounter with the woman who threatened all he held dear?

  I remembered Zulu’s snarling lunge through the shrubbery the day I arrived, and my unthinking scramble up the wall to escape her. Might Thorn have anticipated a similar reaction from Louise? Could he have seen her making her way along the unfamiliar path, nearing the precipice? That huge gray shaggy beast, bounding out of the mist, would have seemed a veritable hound from hell.

  Might Harry have crossed Louise’s path on the cliff top and, having misinterpreted her chatty friendliness on arrival as readiness to accept his advances, grown angry when she refused? Had he slyly edged her out onto the platform and then, failing to frighten her into submission, sent her plummeting to her death in a fit of frustrated rage?

  Then there was Cora. It was Cora who had suggested Louise might have been searching for C.Q.’s sketch site for the monumental painting she so admired. If Louise had been less fearless, Cora had told the police, she would never have stepped out upon the platform, certainly not without inspecting it. “But Mrs. Ramsay,” she added, “was nothing if not fearless.”

  Her admiring tone had made it sound like a compliment, but out of the corner of my eye I saw a feral smile quiver fleetingly on Cora’s thin lips.

  I shuddered then, remembering the gardening tools I had seen Cora carrying and the wiry strength she could have employed to undermine the platform’s frail hold upon the edge of the cliff, grim purpose dulling the pain in her arthritic fingers.

  Nobody inquired about any possible motives for assisting Louise in her headlong plunge from the platform, and nobody volunteered any. They were all kept hidden, secret, protected from the outside world.

  In short, we closed ranks after Louise’s death much as we had immediately before her arrival at Hawkscliffe. Misadventure? Perhaps. But how, in all that murk, had a woman unfamiliar with Hawkscliffe found the particular site she was seeking? And why would she then, fearless or not, step out upon a precariously perched platform to view a scene shrouded in fog, a scene which had not been revealed in all its vast golden glory until after she had fallen?

  It made no sense. It made no sense at all.

  What made even less sense was my profound feeling of loss. It had nothing to do with Louise or with Hawkscliffe’s grand spired folly of a house or the wonderful rugs contained there. No, what shone in my memory and haunted my heart was the fire in Thorn Ramsay’s green eyes and the proud spirit animating his careless grace. I ached to feel again the comforting warmth of his encircling arm, t
o experience the exciting pressure of his demanding mouth on mine. I would have welcomed even his baseless suspicions and the contemptuous withdrawal which had seared me on more than one occasion.

  Our parting had been brief, practical, cool: Did I feel strong enough to leave? At what time would I need a conveyance to take me to the train? I was thanked for my forbearance; I was told I would be informed when I could return to complete the rug catalog. Nothing was said one way or the other about my notes and Lance’s sketches, so I had packed them along with my belongings, trying not to feel guilty about my sense of triumph.

  I kissed Mary Rose and Agnes goodbye; Lance kissed me. Philo took both my hands in his and wished me a quietly fervent au revoir, but Cora had more pressing things to do than bid farewell to a houseguest who had been unwelcome in the first place. Thorn, after offering me a hand into the carriage, gave me a brooding look from under dark brows and nodded curtly. No further words were exchanged between us--for my part, I could think of nothing appropriate to say.

  I looked back once as Harry clucked up the horse, but Thorn had already turned dismissively away, his head bent toward Lance as he attended to something the boy was saying. As they disappeared together into the house, I realized with dull anguish that I was once again an outsider, no more than a watchful onlooker of events that, as Thornton Ramsay had so often reminded me, were no concern of mine.

  Damn Louise Ramsay! To think it took her death to accomplish what all her carefully calculated disparagements of me had not. I continued to brood upon this irony, a bitter envoi indeed, until we arrived, in a great chuff of steam, at Grand Central Depot.

  * * * *

  Mariam, my housekeeper and faithful companion, held me at arm’s length after our initial hug of greeting.

  “Miss Kate! You look as if you came home on a coal barge!”

  I turned to the tall, oak-framed hall mirror as Mariam relieved me of my wrap and bags. A broad smear of greasy soot, transferred from the train’s window frame to my cheek, had smudged across to the tip of my nose and down to my jaw. No wonder the cabdriver hailed by my porter had looked at me askance.

  When I returned downstairs after a wash-up and a welcome change of clothes, Mariam apologized for the meagerness of the larder.

  “If only I had known you were coming,” she explained as she set before me a bowl of hot, thick bean soup and a basket of crusty bread. “As it is, I only have a bit of lamb and some carrots.”

  “Anything you prepare for supper will be delicious, Mariam,” I said, cutting short her menu recital. “I’m sorry I didn’t send word I was coming, but….” I paused, wondering how much need be said. “There was a sudden death in the Ramsay family.”

  Mariam’s momentary look of sorrow, dictated by convention, even for someone known only by name, was followed by a contrite gasp. “Sweet Lady Mary, I almost forgot. Krikor has been after me and after me about when you were expected home. Something about a Mr. Marquand and a carpet?”

  Krikor Jorian, who had succeeded his uncle as assistant manager of Avakian’s as I had succeeded mine as owner and manager, was not given to unnecessary agitation. If Mr. Lawrence Aloysius Marquand was the cause of it, I thought as I hastily tied on a bonnet, I had better learn why without delay.

  “If you have no time to rest after your journey, at least take the time to put on your bonnet properly,” Mariam reprimanded me as she tugged the silk and feathered confection into place on my upswept hair.

  “Haven’t got it,” I replied breathlessly as I dashed out the door, down the brownstone steps that fronted on busy Madison Avenue, and around the corner of Twenty-Seventh Street to an even busier Fifth Avenue.

  The rich, familiar odor of carpets old and new, a homely mingling of wool, wood smoke, and camel dung, greeted me as I entered the shop that had become my second home. A jangle of brass bells suspended on the back of the door heralded my arrival, and I was soon engulfed by an excited babble of Armenian in the Stamboul dialect that had been my first language, much to my learned father’s despair.

  “Miss Kate!” cried a tall, dark young man with a luxuriant black moustache. “At last you have come!”

  “What is this about Mr. Marquand? What carpet could be causing him—and you—such distress?”

  “No carpet that he has purchased from Avakian’s, I assure you, Miss Kate. No, it is the palace carpet he wishes to buy for his ballroom.”

  His ballroom? Surely Krikor had misunderstood. “No one could want a carpet for a ballroom—”

  “Excuse me, Miss Kate, but Mr. Marquand wants one. You see,” he continued, “the youngest Miss Marquand—”

  “Daisy? The one with the squint?”

  “And the squeaky voice. She is going to be married. She wanted a spring wedding, but Mr. Marquand, I think, does not wish for that much time to pass.”

  “Sensible man,” I commented approvingly. “Squints and squeaks have but a fleeting charm.”

  “Just so,” Krikor agreed. “That being the case, he plans to bring springtime to Fifth Avenue in December, and he wishes to have a garden carpet underfoot for the reception. Then, before the dancing begins, the carpet will be rolled up and concealed behind a row of potted flowering trees.”

  “I see. It will have to be a newish rug, of course; the old ones are too narrow. Let’s see, now, I remember seeing just the thing about two years ago—a palace-sized carpet. But we won’t sell Mr. Marquand the carpet, Krikor, we’ll lend it to him. Here’s what we’re going to do….”

  Lawrence Marquand was delighted when I told him that not only was it unnecessary for him to buy the carpet he wanted, I would not even charge him a fee for the service of providing it.

  “Consider it a wedding present,” I said, happily anticipating the order for the rugs needed to furnish the house being built for the young couple. “Just think! A spring wedding in December! It is much too lovely a concept to involve an exchange of money.”

  Mr. Marquand was not fooled for a minute by my expansive gesture, but he appreciated my style. A man does not become enormously wealthy by disdaining the saving of small expenses, and I would not prosper if I begrudged providing an opportunity for these minor but satisfying exercises in thrift.

  As day succeeded day with still no summons to return to complete my work at Hawkscliffe, the exotic mansion and the strange events that had occurred there took on a fabled quality, like my long-ago glimpse of its spires from the deck of the Mary Powell.

  The only reality left to me, the lodestar of my otherwise busy life of commerce, was the vivid, pulsing memory of the green fire in Thorn Ramsay’s eyes.. At one moment I bitterly regretted that blaze of ardor; the next, my blood ran hot at the thought of it.

  What had he seen in mine? I searched my mirrored image not once but many times, searching in vain for an answer. My eyes were large, to be sure, and dark as Turkish coffee, but otherwise unremarkable. Foolish questions. The lengthening silence rebuked my yearning, questing thoughts, telling me more eloquently than words that those sparks of desire had guttered out to lifeless ashes, as cold and gray as the November days fast drawing to a close.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  December was almost upon us, and the urban scurry associated with readying wardrobes and houses for the winter social season forcefully reminded me that I had better things to do than fret about a man I might never see again.

  I had new stock to check against invoices, and orders to dispatch to Avakian’s agents in Turkey and Persia. I also had my fall reminder letters to write.

  The hands on my office clock read three before I was able to turn my attention to the orders, and I had barely begun the first draft when Krikor appeared in the doorway.

  “Miss Kate? There’s a young man out front asking for you.”

  “Oh, dear, will you take care of it for me, please? It’s probably just another salesman.”

  “I don’t think so. Salesmen usually have a smile on their faces; this one…. I think it’s a personal matter,” he added so
lemnly.

  “Good Heavens, Krikor,” I said in mock alarm. “An unsmiling young man here on personal business? That sounds ominous indeed.”

  I swept through the kilim portieres that separated the showroom from the office and stock area and moved briskly toward the tall, slim, oddly familiar figure that stood, turned away from me, looking out of one of the display windows that faced on the avenue.

  “You wished to see me?” I inquired cheerily.

  The young man turned. It was Lance Ramsay.

  “Lance! How are you? It’s wonderful to see you, but whatever brings you here?”

  Lance removed his kid gloves one finger at a time and fussed with the cuffs of his immaculately tailored chesterfield before answering. His dark eyes, scrutinizing me through a disdainful sweep of lashes, were indeed unsmiling.

  “To New York City or to Avakian’s, Kate?” A wave of his arms encompassed the showroom furnished with brass, copper, and carved wood ornaments which complemented the exotic effect of the glossy rugs hung upon the walls, draped upon racks, and artfully strewn across the drugget-carpeted floor. “I am impressed,” he continued in a sardonic tone remarkably like his Uncle Thorn’s. “It is no wonder you would do whatever you could to preserve what is, I am sure, a most profitable enterprise.”

  I fought to keep from gaping. What on earth could have happened to transform my sweet, lighthearted companion into this ... this popinjay?

  “But to answer your question, I have come to New York to see Mother’s—that is, my lawyers about my mother’s estate, and to Avakian’s to deliver a message to you from my Uncle Thorn. He asked me to tell you that the hearing postponed by—” Lance broke off abruptly, and the sudden tears that filled his eyes moved me to step impulsively toward him.

  “Lance, do sit down,” I gently urged, indicating the low cushioned couches provided for customers.