The Lost Heiress of Hawkscliffe

by Joyce C. Ware

  He placed a long finger against my lips. “Not enough,” he said. “Always, or not at all.”

  Always.

  I closed my eyes, unable to breathe, afraid I might shatter this wondrous dream. “Always, then,” I murmured, opening my eyes to an even more wondrous reality. “Oh, yes, my darling, always….”

  He knelt over me and removed my gossamer pantaloons, my beaded vest and brassiere with a swift, caressing deftness that thrilled me. As each garment slipped to the floor, I felt softer, rounder, smoother, more purely female than I had ever thought possible. The violet scent I had stroked across my skin breathed forth, spring-like, denying the wintery reality of the season.

  As he bared my body to his questing fingers I was no longer Katherine Mackenzie. The mysteries he was about to teach me were inaccessible through bookish learning or rug lore. Here, in this bed I had freely sought, I was Thorn’s Kate, and I felt magnified by his desire.

  My head lifted up, then fell back to receive his kiss upon my throat. My breasts felt as full as peonies, their buds aching to blossom. My mouth eagerly accepted his, my untutored tongue a hummingbird darting in to sup his honey-sweetness.

  Shyly my hands explored the unfamiliar map of his body. Roughness and sleekness informed my curious palms, and I boldly claimed the hot column of flesh that rose from the delta of his thighs.

  Instinctively I arched my back and opened my body to his gentle thrust, a moment of pain soon lost in the glory of our union.

  The snow, a soft whisper against the windowpanes, continued to fall. “A perfect night for a sleigh ride,” Thorn whispered as he glided down my snowy flanks and explored my hills and valleys. “My beautiful ice maiden,” he groaned. But again and again I melted in his hot embrace.

  Even the hottest flames subside. Dawn found us still entwined, as befits new lovers, but our mouths exchanged confidences now instead of kisses.

  Thorn confessed how bitterly betrayed he had felt when Louise, after seducing him, had sent him on his way with a sneering review of his fumbling inexperience echoing in his ears. “She was a stunner, Kate. I could hardly believe my good fortune, and I was much too full of myself to question the right or wrong of it.”

  He shook his shaggy head. “From start to humiliating finish within a week. After it was over I felt weak, sick. I think that’s why Eloise’s childlike air so appealed to me. My injured pride couldn’t risk another failure, yet I fretted at the celibacy her fears imposed upon me. She resisted all our efforts—mine and her parents’—to set a date for our wedding, yet she demanded constant attention. I was at a loss, completely frustrated—I think that’s why Roxelana’s mischief-making at the Hawkscliffe fete had such a startling and unanticipated effect: on me, on Eloise, on everyone who witnessed it.”

  “I’m surprised Louise didn’t use her wiles on someone older, more worldly.”

  “But all she was after was revenge, Kate. She wanted to see if she could attract boys as young as the girls C.Q. habitually debauched. Besides, an older man, one of their set, might have proved hard to discourage once her purpose was achieved.”

  “Poor Philo was her first choice. He was older, and seemed both more sophisticated and more malleable than his raffish young cousin. But he was unable to rise to the occasion—I think it was then he realized he was. . . different.”

  So that was the great wrong Philo thought he had done Louise, I realized. How furious she must have been!

  “Didn’t it occur to Louise that she might become pregnant?”

  Thorn shrugged. “She never had. I suppose she assumed it was her fault, not my uncle’s. Once her condition could no longer be concealed, I think she rather enjoyed throwing it up to him, especially when she realized he would never publicly admit he had either been cuckolded or was unable to father a child. In fact, until Roxelana came along, the situation suited her very well. She had her independence and her respectability, which she found worth the favors C.Q. showered on your cousin.”

  I looked pained.

  “Well, she was, you know,”

  “What about Roxelana’s pregnancy? You seemed shocked I knew of it, and Cora implied….”

  Thorn gave me one of his old sardonic sidelong glances. “I can imagine what Cora implied. The truth is, I was deeply in debt, thanks to my mother’s gambling, and I foresaw nothing but years of scrimping ahead of me. That’s why I drew up C.Q.’s bizarre will. His health was failing, and I needed the fees my executorship would bring me. But it all depended upon Roxelana remaining his heir. Her adventures were common gossip by then—if they reached his ears, I knew C.Q. might destroy his will and wash his hands of me for not warning him against drawing it in the first place. That was the kind of man he was, Kate.

  “Friends told me she’d been seen at the Hoffman House with an unsavory-looking character—her taste ran to ruffians. I intercepted them, threatened her lover with an entirely illegal bluff, and bundled Roxelana out by the scruff of her neck. She told me she was pregnant. It was hard to convince her that C.Q. would turn her out, but that’s when she must have bullied Vartan into supplying funds for an abortion. According to what Harry told you, she sowed her wild oats closer to home after that. When the next crisis inevitably occurred, C.Q. died before he could decide what he wanted to do about his will.”

  He laughed. “By the time we met, my practice had grown and my debts were finally paid, no thanks to C.Q.’s estate. The last thing I needed was Hawkscliffe hanging like a millstone around my neck.”

  “Thorn?”

  “Hmm-mm….” His fingers began tracing lazy patterns on the tender inner surface of my thighs.

  “My plans for Hawkscliffe, you’re sure you approve?”

  “Approve? My darling, I’m ecstatic! Let Philo cope with balky furnaces and cracked tiles. All we have to do is decide whose house we’ll live in after we’re married, yours or mine.”

  “Thorn? Did you and Roxelana ever--”

  “No, never.” Thorn shifted above me and cradled my face between his hands. “She had nothing I wanted, and lacked everything I did. She had no honor—” he kissed one of my eyelids, “—and no pride,” he kissed the other. “God knows, Louise was greedy, but Roxelana was truly monstrous.”

  “Thorn?”

  He groaned, and addressed the gold fleur-de-lis above my head. “Will the woman never stop talking?”

  “Did you say ‘after we’re married’?”

  “Yes, Kate.”

  I smiled up into his eyes and found I had nothing further to say.

  EPILOGUE

  I sold my dear house to Krikor, my shop manager, for a price well below its market value. I knew my profit would be realized in the peace of mind his loyal supervision of the business would afford me when I was distracted by maternal duties.

  Thorn’s spacious townhouse fronting on Gramercy Park has proved the perfect place to raise an active little boy. Vartan—the name was Thorn’s suggestion—turned three just last week. His babble of Armenian—courtesy of Mariam, who delights in being his nursemaid—bemuses his father, but as I keep reminding him, think how useful it will be in the business!

  Lance makes his home with us—when he is home at all, that is. He is a student in the new school of architecture at Columbia University, and his professors tell us he shows considerable promise. Thorn wishes he took life a bit more seriously, but I enjoy his nonsense, and little Vartan adores him.

  Philo and Ralph are well settled in at Hawkscliffe. A ride up to the fabled mansion via charabanc has become quite the thing to cap off a day’s outing on the river, and Philo has developed a flair for theatrics in his weekend role as tour conductor. The ladies, he reports, relish their titillating peek at Roxelana’s suite and wardrobe; the menfolk are content to ogle her portrait and dig each others’ ribs. Philo did, however, draw the line at Lance’s scheme to enliven the tour by engaging a girlfriend of his to model the harem costumes. Smacked of the carnival, Philo said. Thorn, who had insisted I take the azure ensemble—and
one of violet-toned gray as well—solemnly agreed.

  The tours have been modestly profitable, but the Hawkscliffe rug catalog earned nothing but prestige, the printing and binding costs having proved shocking. Charles Quintus’s estate continues to be the major source of the funds supporting Hawkscliffe, recently augmented by a handsome sum thanks to Ralph Watkins’s discerning eye.

  Ralph, whose real parentage is a secret I have shared with no one, not even my darling husband, has prospered in the clear, cool air above the Hudson, enough to resume his work on a limited basis. While cleaning C.Q.’s canvases, he kept being drawn to the begrimed forgeries C.Q. had acquired in Europe and hung as a private joke in the dining room.

  Although Philo cautioned him not to waste his energy on dross, his absence over a fortnight’s time to attend to a press of curatorial business at the Metropolitan left time hanging heavy on the younger man’s hands. When Philo returned, three of the ten fakes were revealed to have been overpainted on older, much finer works. Needless to say, I lost no time giving my permission to consign them to auction at Duveen’s in London, where the winning bids totaled well into six figures.

  This windfall allowed us to hire another groundsman, a young, energetic, sober fellow whose healthy good looks and kind heart soon won Mary Rose’s heart. Whether or not Harry Braunfels’ was broken in the process I neither know nor much care. I suspect that by now his heart is too pickled to do more than bend.

  The young people are living in Cora’s cottage. Mary Rose—who has developed into a splendid housekeeper— has brought the second of her sisters up from Hendryk as nursemaid for their expected baby, but until Agnes retires as cook I anticipate no need for a third.

  Thorn and I rarely visit Hawkscliffe. We are busy with our family, our work, and our social life in town, and although Thorn and Philo are on good terms now, they are too unlike ever to become good friends. I brought almost nothing away with me: the wisps of silk chiffon and brocade I mentioned; the very old Turkish village rugs from the top floor—my scholarly monograph on them is almost ready for publication--and the brass zil. Its pure ringing sound can be heard now and again from behind our closed doors.

  The crystal evil-eye amulet—the one Uncle Vartan enclosed in his last letter to me?—lies in the box with the others I collected so long ago in Constantinople. The Ottoman gold ring was buried with Roxelana’s bones, removed from the quarry the spring following the snowy December day I found them. They rest in a hidden hollow under a stone marked with her true name, Araxie Avakian: no more, but in deference to my uncle’s reverence for family, no less. The only cries that mourn her passing are those of the migrating hawks that gave her splendid folly its name.

  Copyright © 1990 by Joyce C. Ware

  Originally published by Zebra Books (Kensington Publishing Corp.) (0821728962)

  Electronically published in 2006 by Belgrave House

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  This is a work of fiction. All names in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to any person living or dead is coincidental.