The Lost Heiress of Hawkscliffe

by Joyce C. Ware

  He stepped back from me, and ignoring my invitation, doggedly continued. “The hearing to determine who will inherit Hawkscliffe has been rescheduled for December fifth. It would be appreciated if you could return to complete your commission at Hawkscliffe before that date. May we assume that will be possible?”

  I all but snorted at this mincing locution. It would be difficult—there was the delivery of Lawrence Marquand’s palace carpet to arrange, among other urgent matters—but I would do it. “And how is your jolly Uncle Thorn?” I asked, deliberately delaying my answer.

  Lance looked discomfited by the sarcastic edge to my question. “He’s fine, Kate ... he’s been very kind. They all have been, really, but especially….” His voice drifted off uncertainly as he sensed the change in my mood. He cleared his throat. “We’ve ... I’ve been wondering about those rugs on the top floor. The drawings I did of them— as well as your notes about them—seem to be missing.”

  I could hardly believe my ears. I had wondered why Lance had come to deliver a message that could as well have been conveyed by one of Thorn’s clerks.

  “I have them, Lance.”

  “Well, I really don’t think—”

  “You offered to make those sketches for me. Lance—you had nothing better to do, you said—and my notes about those particular rugs are unrelated to the work I was commissioned to do, aside from certain technical information I have already incorporated into the catalog.”

  “But if you will remember, my mother—”

  “I remember your mother’s words very well, but she had no authority, legal or moral, to dictate to what use your sketches or my notes should be put, and as far as I am concerned her death has not altered the situation.”

  Lance’s jaw set in a stubborn line so uncharacteristic of his former, devil-may-care nature I began to suspect that someone had deftly played upon the boy’s postmortem guilt about his innocent defiance of his mother on my account.

  “If you wish me to return your gift of sketches,” I continued deliberately, “I will do so, but the request must be yours and yours alone. I will not honor one reaching from the grave.”

  Lance’s eyes widened with shock. I had determined to be forthright, but perhaps I had gone too far, thus inadvertently accomplishing exactly what had been intended. Once Lance’s puppyish affection for me was allayed and the rug catalog completed, all my ties with Hawkscliffe would be severed. But whose purpose would be served? Cora’s? It was not difficult to imagine her bidding good riddance to my bad rubbish, unable to separate me in her mind from Roxelana, the interloper who had robbed her of the chance to extend her domain from Charles Quintus Ramsay’s home to the man himself.

  Or perhaps Philo had come to regret how much he had revealed about himself to me in the gazebo. If so, he would be strongly motivated to discourage any lasting relationships between me and his family. Since the Ramsays and I did not move in the same social or professional circles, I would then largely cease to be a threat once I had completed my mission at Hawkscliffe.

  And then there was Thorn, whose suspicions of my motives had never been very far from his mind. Could he be trying to protect his nephew from the sly manipulations of an adventuress for whom Thorn himself had felt desire? And how much more protective might he be if Lance was, in fact, his son?

  “Well, Kate? What shall I tell my uncle?”

  I preferred his frowning impatience to his earlier pomposity. “When will you and your uncles be arriving?” I had no wish to see any more of them than necessary.

  “The hearing is scheduled for two in the afternoon at the Hendryk courthouse; we plan to go up together that morning.”

  I nodded. “Then I will arrive the preceding day to collect Cora’s watercolors so I may write the appropriate explanatory notes for them. I also wish to resurvey every room against my final draft of the catalog.”

  “Just in case an overlooked rug should be lurking under the fern fronds in the conservatory?”

  “Exactly!” I said, responding eagerly to this welcome flash of the old Lance. I needn’t have bothered.

  Averting his eyes from mine, he ducked his head and muttered, “Well, then, I guess I’ll be going, Kate.” He shuffled indecisively, rocking from toe to heel, as if unable to make a clean break of it.

  “Goodbye,” I returned succinctly, unwilling to prolong this painful leavetaking.

  I offered neither my hand nor the cheek he had kissed upon my departure from Hawkscliffe, but as he reached for the doorknob, I called after him impulsively. “Lance, wait! I do not want you to leave thinking me unmindful of your feelings about your mother. I know you loved her, and it was right that you should. But if I have learned anything in the few more years I have lived than you, it is that we need not unfailingly admire those we love, nor is it necessary that they always be worthy of our respect. In fact, if love were not so blind, I fear few of us would be loved at all.”

  Lance looked at me for a long time, soberly, thoughtfully, but I could not tell at all what he was thinking, and when he left it was without a word or backward glance. I remained staring after him, numbed by a profound sense of loss, my eyes following in mindless fascination the slowly diminishing arc of the plait of bells swaying on the back of the door.

  “Are you still working on your orders, Miss Kate?”

  I jumped at the sound of Krikor’s voice, which pulled me out of a reverie set far from my office, swathed now in the shadows of approaching night. I stared up at the dimly lit clock on the wall. Two hours had ticked by since Lance’s disturbing visit.

  I sighed. “I can’t think where the time has gone. Now this will have to wait until tomorrow, and we have Mrs. Wentworth bringing her husband in at eleven to look at that Kashan for their parlor. If only that woman wouldn’t prattle on so about her spaniels.” I sighed again. “Oh, well, if it weren’t for those ill-trained dogs of hers, she wouldn’t have to keep buying rugs.”

  Krikor looked confused. “Mrs. Wentworth is coming tomorrow morning? I thought Yervant Keyishian had arrived in New York and was taking you to lunch tomorrow.”

  “He is. They are.” I threw up my hands at the impossibility of the situation I had gotten us into. “Tell you what, Krikor, I’ll leave the Wentworths to you.”

  “Miss Kate? Is anything wrong? All this week, especially today, you seem ... distracted.”

  I summoned up a smile, shook my head, and blamed my advancing years. Looking relieved, Krikor laughed at that, probably deciding it all had something to do with being female.

  I don’t know what Mariana thought was the cause for my distraction, but I managed to hurt her feelings because of it.

  “What do you wish me to prepare for your Thanksgiving dinner. Miss Katherine?”

  I looked at her blankly.

  “It’s the day after tomorrow,” she said stiffly.

  “I know that, Mariana, but I’m spending the holiday with the Hagopians as usual. Surely I told you.”

  Mariam stared at me, her mouth a curve of woe. I stared back at her, aghast. Obviously, I hadn’t told her. I knew how much she looked forward to spending Thanksgiving in the Bronx countryside with her niece’s lively family.

  “We’ll send a messenger up in the morning, Mariam, at my expense. And I’ll hire a carriage to take you up there on Thursday in style. I’ll even lend you that lavender bonnet you so admire,” I offered magnanimously, for it was my favorite bonnet, too. “Now am I forgiven?”

  Mariam beamed. “Oh, yes, Miss Kate!” She bustled off to prepare my supper, then, pausing at the door, she turned to look back at me thoughtfully. “Perhaps we should have more fish.”

  Whether seafood actually has the salutary effect on the brain ascribed to it, I do not know, but the oysters served at the Hagopians’, nestled in beds of crushed ice, pleased my palate enormously.

  “My sons got them yesterday at the Fulton Market,” Salome Hagopian said, smiling fondly at the two strapping young men, Armen and Aram, seated across the table from m
e. Square of head, broad of shoulder, with identically set dark eyes and coarse black hair combed similarly straight back from wide, slanting foreheads, I could hardly tell them apart.

  “And the honey and nuts for Uncle Yervant’s baklava,” chimed in little red-headed Anouk, a blazing poppy in this family of black tulips.

  The title of uncle given to Yervant Keyishian was, in fact, honorary. A distant relative of the Hagopians, he had been my uncle’s oldest friend and most trusted agent. This was his first visit to America, and I was delighted when I learned he had been invited to share this traditional holiday with us.

  “Let us give thanks to God for a good harvest,” I said.

  “And for prosperous business,” added Leymel Hagopian.”

  “And the blessing of good friends,” said his wife.

  We toasted the occasion solemnly with rich, dark homemade red wine, and then, as an excuse to drink more of it as quickly as possible, toasted each other and anything else we could think of that was remotely appropriate.

  After dinner I prowled restlessly through the big house, unwilling to suffer the pipe and cigar smoke generated by the menfolk in Leymel’s study “discussing business”—the term used by men to lend dignity to an exchange of trade gossip—although I had been courteously, if not enthusiastically, invited to do so.

  I turned back with a resigned sigh toward the kitchen, where the women were helping the servants put away the mountains of leftovers, but I had nothing to add to the chatter about food and fashion, and the rather piggy face of Zaruki Hagopian Sassouni’s new baby, delivered like a sultan’s treasure into my awkward arms, failed to charm.

  Surely I would love my own child, I thought as I tried to rock away the baby’s scowl of discontent. It was no use; the child began to squawk. Zaruki hastened to rescue her small son and, cradling the flailing infant lovingly, cooed endearments into its tiny, unheeding ears.

  Yes, I told myself again, as the squalling sound of Zaruki’s baby pursued me down the hall toward the front parlor, I would love my own. For if, as I had told Lance, love is blind, then maternal love is the most blind of all I concluded as. Why else would a mother put up with all that noise?

  But without a man to love enough to bear his children, how would I ever know for sure?

  I could find no ready answer. I entered the ornately furnished parlor and sank down upon a horsehair sofa whose shiny surface was as unyielding as my despair. It was there that Yervant Keyishian found me.

  “Ah! Katherine! I thought I caught a glimpse of your pretty dress as I passed by.”

  Pleased, I smoothed my skirt of soft green Russian cashmere. “Do you really like it?” I asked shyly as I drew aside the overskirt of silk striped in autumnal shades of crimson, gold, and plum to make room for him to sit beside me. “I seldom have an opportunity to shop.” In fact, it was only the previous week that I had dashed over to Arnold Constable and found this costume, expensive but ready-made, requiring only a few adjustments. “I fear it is rather plain.”

  “Not at all. It suits you admirably and sets off your coloring to perfection, as does your jewelry. If you ask me,” he continued in a confidential whisper, “it is only plain girls who require to be decked out like a candy box.”

  Unused to compliments, I blushed and fingered the simple but elegant gold and emerald brooch on the fine ecru lace of my collar. “Uncle Vartan gave me this and the matching earrings for my twenty-first birthday,” I volunteered. “Oh, I do miss him so!” I blurted.

  Yervant slid a stout arm around my hunched shoulders. “Come now, my girl. Save your tears for the living. Are there no young men vying for the opportunity to give you pretty things? No special man that makes your heart beat faster?”

  “There is one,” I admitted. “But he has no eyes for me.” As if beckoned by my words, recollections of Thorn’s green eyes flashed through my mind: now the dark, brooding shade of hemlock; then brilliant emerald, a reflection of the cold fire animating their depths; and finally, fleetingly, a green as soft as brookside moss in spring.

  “Perhaps someday—”

  I shook my head. “No. Not him. Not ever.”

  “You are still young, Katherine. There will be others for you, many others, men who have the wit to recognize a jewel when they see one. Why, if I were just a few years younger….” Yervant eyed me roguishly. “What do you think, eh? Thirty years younger? Thirty-five?”

  We smiled at each other.

  “Oh, well, in that case,” I teased, I’d say yes so fast it would make your gray head spin. In the meantime, while you’re searching for that elusive fountain of youth, I’ll have the shop to occupy my time. By the way, did I tell you….”

  Yervant allowed me to chatter away. He shook his head over the late hours I kept in order to finish the Hawkscliffe catalog and expressed his disappointment at being unable to see it before it was delivered. “A collection to be proud of, that one,” he said.

  Yesterday, at the shop and during lunch at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, our conversation had been impersonal, about the bales of rugs en route by steamer and the special orders I saved for him, as my uncle always had. We had talked, too, of the centuries-old Anatolian rugs Lance had sketched for me.

  “Tell me, Katherine,” Yervant said to me now, “that book you told me about yesterday, the one you plan on writing about those early rugs—you will send me a copy?”

  “Of course! However, it won’t be my book, you know. If published at all, it will bear Uncle Vartan’s name, in tribute to his lifelong dedication to the weaving tradition.”

  Yervant Keyishian gripped my hands tightly and nodded his head several times. “Just so, just so,” he said in a gruff voice when he was finally able to speak. “It is no wonder he loved you like a daughter, Katherine Baji. More, much more, than he ever loved his own.”

  I laughed. “But I was his own daughter, Uncle Yervant. He adopted me, you know.”

  “Yes, yes, but I mean his daughter by blood. That ungrateful girl, Araxie. A wild, cruel, greedy girl, that one, not a drop of filial loyalty in her. I remember the time she traded the silver jewelry her parents could barely afford to buy for her, one by one, out of the pitiful sum left them each year after the terrible taxes levied by the Turks. How she wheedled and sulked to get those pretty trinkets! Traded all of them for one old Ottoman bauble, can you imagine? Magic, she called it. Hah!” Contempt dredged from the past transformed his deep, kindly voice into a harsh growl. “What an insult to a devout household. I ask you. what kind of daughter….”

  Uncle Yervant’s flood of words trailed off into confusion at the sight of my uncomprehending face. His forehead creased in an anxious frown as he tried to make sense of a distress so deep it robbed me of words to express it.

  “You didn’t know?” he whispered at length. “Oh, my dear child! I assumed ... I had no idea….”

  A daughter? Uncle Vartan had a daughter I never knew about? Impossible!

  “What happened to her, this Araxie? Where is she now?” I stared at Yervant accusingly, as if he were somehow responsible for the shattering effect of this unwelcome revelation.

  He reached out and awkwardly patted my hand. “I’m so very sorry, Katherine, if I had had any idea….” He sighed. “To answer your question, I don’t know where Araxie is or what happened to her. I know she went away to school, somewhere on the Bosphorus. She was a clever girl and Vartan hoped the academic discipline might help her settle down.” He shrugged. “At the time I had worrisome family responsibilities of my own, so Vartan traveled our old routes alone. Later he never spoke of Araxie, and I was reluctant to pry. She may have died in the same outbreak of the plague that took your Aunt Vosky.”

  He looked at me and snapped his fingers. “But you did meet her once, Katherine. I remember Vartan telling me about a big celebration at your house, a wedding, I think, and something happened, something Araxie did, that so shocked and angered your father he told your uncle’s family to leave. Imagine denying hospitality to your wif
e’s only brother!” Yervant’s voice shook as he recounted this outrage. “Poor Vartan, he was so humiliated! It was after that—now I remember!—that she was sent away to school.”

  Something that had shocked and angered my father? I smiled wryly and shook my head. Almost anything could and did arouse his ire, from his students’ inattention at lessons to my championing of our wayward servant girl Halide. Dear Halide! How good she had been to me, and how nourishing her high spirits as she laughed and sang and twirled me around in little dances of her own making. I doubted that her banishment from the excitement and temptations of Stamboul to the barren Anatolian hills with a man she didn’t love allowed much opportunity for dancing….

  Dancing.

  All at once the connection became clear. In my minds eye I saw again that roomful of giggling, chattering girls reduced to awestruck silence by the half-naked, ebony-haired dancer who boldly defied my father and was thunderously banished from our midst. That girl must have been Uncle Vartan’s daughter. That voluptuous stranger who undulated so thrillingly to the sensuous rhythms she struck from Halide’s zil twinkling on her fingers, was his daughter, and my cousin, Araxie.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The Friday and Saturday after Thanksgiving were busy days at the shop, and the lack of time for reflection allowed me to pretend, once the initial shock of discovery had passed, that Yervant’s revelation about Araxie Avakian was of academic interest only.

  The Wentworths had purchased, Krikor smugly informed me, not only the Kashan I suggested he show them to replace the damaged carpet in their parlor, but a very fine Ravar Kerman for their bedroom. It seemed a spaniel puppy had amused himself with a silk Hereke prayer rug that never should have been on the floor in the first place.

  In truth, although the rug’s chewed edges and fringe were unsightly, the repairs presented no particular difficulties except for the time it would take to execute them properly, which was too long for the impatient Wentworths. Roused to indignation by their casual dismissal of this exquisite piece, Krikor offered an absurdly low trade-in price meant to shame them; instead, to his amazement, it was readily accepted.