“But what had Cora to do with you and Roxelana?”
“I thought she might know what to do.”
I gaped at him. “You asked Cora to help Roxelana?”
“You don’t know how Roxy could be, missy. She was beside herself-- after me and after me to do something, an’ it was a woman kind of thing an’ Cora and me allus got along pretty good….”
Harry broke off and raised his arms helplessly, the resulting tug on the reins causing the little chestnut to shy and toss her head in protest. I could almost feel sorry for him.
“So Cora told Charles Quintus, and he threw Roxelana out, and no one has seen her since,” I pronounced flatly, bleakly anticipating the neatly uncoiling chain of events, hoping my uncle, to whom honor meant everything, never realized how unlikely it was his stern warnings would curb his wayward daughter’s excesses.
She had ended up just as he most dreaded: banished and penniless. C.Q. may not have found her in the stews of Stamboul, as Cora luridly supposed, but she had probably ended up as badly. Once past the first flush of youth, it’s a short walk from the Broadway dance houses to the pavements between Canal and Bleecker.
Harry, who had been distracted by the fidgety mare, turned back to me. “You have it pretty well figgered out, Missy. ‘Cept I did see Roxy again. Only once, for a little bit, after the old man died.”
I could hardly believe my ears. “You saw Roxelana after Charles Quintus died?” I asked as calmly as I could. “You’re sure of that, Harry?”
“Course I’m sure. The place was in such an uproar an’ all. Thorn and Philo was here and Cora at sixes and sevens.” He grinned complacently. “Yep, Roxy came trailing back. My guess is, with C.Q. dead she decided maybe she’d have me after all. But I’d changed my mind by then.”
My guess was that Roxelana had come for her inheritance, not Harry, but I decided to leave him his small illusion.
“So you sent her on her way?”
He shrugged. “You could say that. When I told her the vultures had gathered, she went steaming up to the house—to try and collect the valuables he give her, I guess—and she must have met one of ‘em along the way, “cause I heard her screaming and carryin’ on.” He shook his massive head. “She could really give a person what-for, missy.”
“And that was the last you saw of her?”
“The very last. None of ‘em ever said anything about her to me, and I wasn’t about to say anything to them. Especially Cora. I was still mad at Cora for crossing us. After a while, though,” he added thoughtfully, “I was sort of glad she did, if you know what I mean.”
I nodded. Roxelana, whose favors had once been an unexpected benefit, had become a shrewish liability. “But didn’t you wonder what happened to her?”
Harry looked at me in amazement. “I guess they took her back with ‘em, missy. Philo had come up from the city in a fancy new rig—never occurred to him how bad the dust would be, what with the dry spell we’d been having.” Harry’s shoulders shook with glee. “That yeller head of his was as gray as Father Time’s. Come by train ever since.”
Interpreting my silence as reproof, he added, “It wasn’t my place to inquire.” The expression that accompanied this genteel disclaimer of responsibility for his lover’s fate was a caricature of affronted dignity. Harry Braunfels’ code did not include offering a woman a second chance.
Harry pulled up in front of the house, remaining stolidly seated as I scrambled out of the springy carriage. The snow was falling faster now in smaller flakes, and although Hawkscliffe’s new white cloak disguised the evidence of decay, it seemed to me a looming ghost seeking redress for the years of neglect. I shuddered and hurried inside.
Harry’s astonishing news had changed the complexion of my situation altogether. Assuming Harry’s story could be confirmed, I was not only back in the race but once again ahead of the pack. This time, however, I would take my story to a lawyer and deal with the Ramsays from a safe emotional remove. Thorn’s dismissal of me as an adventuress had robbed that role of the enticing excitement I had once fantasized. The reality of being thought unscrupulous brought nothing but pain. I would rather he had shouted at me, struck me even, anything but that calm, cold contempt.
But if Thorn had been cold, the house at least was warm, a tribute to the status of the Ramsay men in Cora’s scheme of things: apparently she had decided that since the old furnace’s days were numbered they might as well make the most of it.
I unbuttoned my coat with a relieved sigh and consulted my lapel watch. My relief was short-lived. One-thirty. Within the hour Harry would return to take me to the train, pick up the Ramsays at the courthouse they must be entering just about now, and bring them back up to Hawkscliffe. Time was of the essence!
I hurried up to the suite, only to find it colder than ever. There was no longer the slightest trace of the potpourri’s scent. I retrieved my bag from where I had left it next to the wardrobe and hurriedly exchanged my damp bronze shoes for my stouter traveling boots. I didn’t have time to pull on woolen hose over my thin silk stockings, so I thrust the pair I had brought into my pocket, thinking to change them on the train.
I hated to leave my bag unguarded downstairs. I was sure my jewelry was safe, but I dared not take the chance of curious eyes perusing Uncle Vartan’s journals and letters, so I locked it, strapped it, and pinned the key inside my other pocket. Bag in hand, portfolio tucked under my arm, I hastened down the staircase. I must speak with Cora before leaving.
Mary Rose and Agnes, wreathed in steam and the homely odors of pot roast and baking bread, distractedly directed me to Cora’s cottage. I asked Mary Rose to tell Philo the catalog portfolio was on his desk, and before she could dutifully finish repeating my instructions, I had pushed through the kitchen door and swept through the main corridor, depositing my bag at the door before retracing my steps via the studio and Philo’s desk to the courtyard that opened out above the sloping path to Cora’s cottage.
I gave but a cursory glance at the pink marble fountain imprisoned by the icy spikes of dried herb stalks. It seemed out of place in this suddenly arctic setting, like so much else at Hawkscliffe. The tall yew hedge which softened the steepness of the slope below me, seemed transformed by its snowy cloak into a huddle of white formless creatures. I hastened silently by lest they turn and snarl and rake me in to store against the long winter ahead.
The only unchanging element was Cora Banks.
“Well, Miss Mackenzie, you didn’t leave after all. My, you are full of surprises.”
I didn’t care for her smile, or rather what passed for one, but then, I never had.
“May I come in. Miss Banks? I have something to ask you before I leave. Harry is taking me down for the four o’clock train.”
She raised her sparse eyebrows, but before she could wonder aloud why she had not been informed that the twelve o’clock departure had been advanced to four, there was a clattering commotion outside that drew us both to the window. Cora lifted her drab skirt—had she nothing in her wardrobe other than blue-gray and rusty brown?— and wiped the fogged panes with the edge of it.
“What on earth—”
A large, clumsy cart had begun to slide off the roadway onto the slope, but a great cracking of whips and pushing from behind and mouthing of oaths soon enabled it to resume its plodding journey to the big house.
“I expect it’s the new furnace,” I explained. “Thorn thought thought it best it be delivered before the storm worsened.”
“Better still if it had been delivered before the storm started. I am a great believer in foresight, Miss Mackenzie, aren’t you?”
The mocking glint in her small brown eyes reminded me to take care. This woman had already thrown her lot in with Philo.
“Please, Miss Banks, I haven’t much time. An old friend of Charles Quintus’s—Duncan Meriwether?—stopped in at Avakian’s last week and mentioned a rug, a silk Turkish prayer rug, that used to hang on the wall in the stairwell, where the port
rait is now, and I wondered if, when Roxelana returned to Hawkscliffe after Mr. Ramsay’s death, she took it away with her.” I had stretched the truth in a way my father would not have condoned, but in this case my ends, I decided, justified the means.
Cora stared at me. She might have been a wax figure.
“Harry thought she might,” I added in an apologetic tone, hoping to provoke some response.
“I remember Mr. Meriwether. And the rug in question is among my illustrations for the catalog. It is in the suite you have so lately occupied—how could it have escaped your notice?”
“Oh, that rug! I should have—”
“Harry told you Roxelana came back? After C.Q.’s death?”
Ah! The bait was taken, after all. I could sense her marking time to collect her wits.
“He told me that, among other things. It is hard to believe they were… that he was the man responsible for….” I shrugged. “It’s hard to believe.”
“Harry is a foolish, stupid man. He never should have told you that.”
“It’s untrue, then? He said he heard her quarreling with someone after she left his quarters. He thought it might have been you.”
Please say yes, I silently implored. All I need is corroboration, a second witness—is that too much to ask?
Cora’s eyes flicked from side to side, like a little brown rat trying to escape a corner. But why? She knew nothing of my relationship to Roxelana; did her loyalty to Charles Quintus Ramsay extend to protecting his image seven long years after his death? Did she really think anyone still cared if his mistress had betrayed him with his grounds-keeper?
The shrill whinnying of a horse close by made us both jump. The freight cart had already departed, and the deepening snow had muffled the hoofbeats heralding this new arrival.
Cora hurried to the window. “Merciful heavens! It’s Thornton Ramsay!” she reported.
“But it can’t be,” I protested, joining her at the window. “Harry was going to pick up the three of them at….”
My words drifted into disbelieving silence. She was right. There was no mistaking Thorn’s tall, erect posture as he calmed the horse he must have hired from a Hendryk stable. He was hatless, and the snow starring his thick, dark curls gave him the look of a Norse god. Why was he here? What urgent errand could account for his unexpected arrival? Hope leaped up in my heart, but Cora’s fierce clutch forestalled my move toward the door.
“No, Miss Mackenzie! I beg you to let him pass by!”
“But why, Miss Banks? What are you trying to tell me?”
She shook her head wildly from side to side, seemingly unable to speak.
Dazed with shock, I gripped her thin shoulders and tried to shake an explanation from her. “Dear heaven, woman, I must know!”
The words poured out of her then, and as I listened, dread washed over my soul. It was Thorn who had been Roxelana’s lover, she said. Thorn who had gotten her pregnant, just as he had Louise. It was Thorn that Harry had overheard Roxelana berating, and Thorn—she was sure of it—who had last seen her alive.
“But Harry said—”
“Harry is a drunkard and a braggart. He was merely a straw man, easily used.”
Duncan Meriwether told me Roxelana had left the Hoffman House in Manhattan with Thorn at two in the morning. Had the rough, heavyset man she had quarreled with there been Harry?
My head was spinning. I couldn’t make sense of what Cora was saying. As the flood of words spilled forth, my mind struggled back against its rushing flow to fasten on the phrase that had all but drowned me in dread: it was Thorn, she said, who had last seen Roxelana alive.
“Are you saying he killed her?” My voice was harsh, my grip on her shoulders rough. “Is that what you’re implying? But what motive did he have? He had no claim on C.Q.’s estate!”
Cora’s gush of words ceased. The shoulders under my hands tensed.
“His motives have nothing to do with Hawkscliffe, Miss Mackenzie; they have to do with power: the power of men over women.”
My hands relaxed their grip and slipped away.
“Thornton Ramsay has never been able to dominate the women that most attracted him. Roxelana cost him Eloise; Louise, his pride. And their pregnancies ... Lord only knows what guilty price he paid for those!
“I’ve seen you look at him, hoping you could coax some warmth from those green eyes. Foolish girl! He is cold as a snake at heart, and as deadly; a man consumed by rage and frustration, Miss Mackenzie, and the roots run deep: his mother—what a charmer she was!—was a gambler. Soon after Thorn started to practice law, which at first was modestly self-supporting at best, his stepfather washed his hands of her. Until she died five years ago, Thorn was never out of debt because of his responsibility for hers. He grabbed at the fees Charles Quintus’s estate offered him— you heard him admit as much yourself!”
Cora’s hands had fastened on my wrists, and as I looked into her eyes I sensed a link deeper than friendship, stronger than blood: two women against their age-old adversaries, men. Foremost among them for me now was no longer my father, but Thornton Ramsay, the man I thought I loved.
My very first day at Hawkscliffe, as Zuleika and I trailed across the terrace in his wake, I suspected even then that our silent docility fulfilled his requirements for females of whatever species. The few brief, wonderful moments since—his grudging admiration, his warm touch, his searing kiss—seemed more the stuff of fantasy than memory when compared with his cold, quiet, deliberately contemptuous dismissal of me at the Hendryk station.
Fear replaced my lingering sense of humiliation, clutching me, distorting the rational pattern of my thoughts. Thorn knew by now I was not docile, and unlike Cora, he knew the threat I posed to the orderly disposition of C.Q.’s estate. He could not take the chance of my asking questions whose answers he was unsure of. He did not know if anyone else had seen Roxelana at Hawkscliffe after C.Q.’s death, but the long dormant realization of the full significance of her return awaited only my prodding to unfurl into the light of day. The answers were seven years buried; his sudden and inexplicable return could only mean he intended them to remain so.
I returned Cora’s intense gaze. I had to trust her; there was no one else. “Help me. Miss Banks. Tell me what I should do.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
My plea for help was rewarded with a thin-lipped smile and a curious little bob of the head, as if a decision had been made and secretly acknowledged.
She’s going to refuse me, I thought helplessly. She’s going to—
“Come along, then,” Cora at length commanded. “I’ll take you to Harry. I’ll tell Thorn that Harry ... I’ll say he tried to take advantage of you, and you chose to ride down on the freight wagon.”
I nodded. Thorn would accept that. “But won’t Thorn find us there? Or pass us on the way? He’ll—”
Cora cut off my panic-stricken babble with a brusque gesture. “I know a shortcut through the spruce grove.” She tossed a wooly hooded cape around her shoulders. “From the end of it we can see the stables, Harry’s quarters, and the roadway to the main house. We’ll simply shelter there until we see Thorn well away on it.”
She beckoned me through the pantry to a small door that opened out upon a long, narrow fenced service area masked further by a planting of mountain laurel extending beyond the high palings. As we neared the end of the evergreen shrubbery, I stopped short.
“My bag! I left my bag just inside the main entrance. Thorn will know I’m still here.”
Cora whirled, her skirt carving a shallow arc in the snow. “How could you be so—” She broke off, compressing her mouth grimly.
Stupid. That was what she meant to say. How could you be so stupid, so careless—but at the time I left my bag there, how could I know?
“I’ll take care of it,” she said. “Just follow the grade behind the house and up the other side to the spruces. Wait for me there. You can’t miss it,” she added, waving me impatiently ahead.
> I hesitated, loath to relinquish the bag containing Uncle Vartan’s journals and his last precious gift.
“I’ll send your bag on to you. Miss Mackenzie. You needn’t fear for your little emeralds.”
I resented her sneering dismissal of my anxiety about my belongings. I had, however, locked and strapped my bag, and besides, what choice had I?
I recognized the grove of Norway spruce as the one below the precarious cliffside path I had scrambled up to Hawkscliffe’s summit and my first meeting with Harry. Enough snow had escaped capture by the long, darkly feathered branches to blaze the trail crisscrossing the dark maze. On my first visit, I had been aware only of the path illumined by the rays of the setting sun.
I stamped my rapidly numbing feet, regretting I had not warmed them before changing out of my bronze slippers. I hoped we didn’t have much further to go.
“Not much further,” Cora said when I posed the question to her when she rejoined me. “But don’t worry, Thorn won’t find your bag,” she added, mistaking the reason for my anxious query. “Nobody will.”
Why did I fail to find that reassuring? And why, as we debouched from the grove into an unsuspected declivity, did I have a sense of unease? The slope above the other side of the widening gulf must, I was sure, rise to the rough meadow that lay below the stables. How would we cross to it, and where was the shelter Cora had promised?
“Miss Banks, are you sure this is the right path?”
Cora turned. “Oh, yes, Miss Mackenzie, quite sure. Hawkscliffe is my home, you see. I know it very well.” She smiled serenely before resuming her steady progress, heedless of the snow that, lacking convenient branches to lodge upon, swirled ankle deep around our plodding steps.
“Miss Banks!” I exclaimed a moment later as she halted before a pile of stone that looked crudely cut, almost as if quarried. “Miss Banks,” I repeated more calmly, “I’ve been thinking, as we walked, about your situation, and it seems to me that if—”
The Lost Heiress of Hawkscliffe Page 22