“You are unwell?” Gabrielle asked hesitantly as Antonia put aside her coffee cup, stood and shook out her petticoats, unsure where the conversation was leading.
“I never once felt unsure or worried and now me I worry all the time!” Antonia replied as if Gabrielle had not spoken. “That cannot be right, can it? I mean, he tells me at every opportunity he loves me so why do I worry?”
Gabrielle watched Antonia pace between the two sofas and unconsciously fan herself. She tried but failed to keep her voice neutral. “He tells you, Mme la duchesse?”
“All the time. It is too much! Who is he trying to convince, me or him? No! That is unfair. I believe him. But why does that make me feel uneasy when it should make me so very happy?”
“When-when did he tell you, Mme la duchesse?” Gabrielle asked, reasoning it was better to humor Antonia’s delusion that not only could she talk to the dead but the dead replied. Seeing Antonia out of her black had given Gabrielle such hopes that the Duchess was finally putting her mourning aside, but by her conversation it seemed the Duchess was suffering from a deterioration of the mind. It truly frightened Gabrielle and she wondered if the present Duke was aware of his mother’s mental decline. For now it was best to keep up the pretense, if only to soothe whatever unfounded fears had taken hold of the Duchess.
“When did he tell me?” Antonia repeated with a frown and felt her face grow hot. “I told you. He tells me all the time. In and out of the bedchamber, which means I cannot dismiss his declarations as mere lust driven ravings.” Antonia stopped pacing and leaned over to Gabrielle to say quietly, as if fearing to be overheard, “At least I do not need to worry about the bedchamber anymore. It did worry me but after that first kiss, I knew, and then our first night together...” She straightened and resumed fanning herself. “I cannot describe it but you must believe me when I assure you we are well matched...” She closed her eyes and gave a little shudder. “Il baise magnifiquement. He is so virile...” She mentally shook herself from her reverie and giggled, quickly suppressing her mirth behind her fan, but adding with a mischievous smile, “With his clothes on I thought him very handsome, but, Gabrielle, without them he truly is magnificent.”
Gabrielle shot up off the sofa, face white as the lace at her elbows. “Mme la duchesse! I do not understand at all what it is you are telling me!”
“I do not know why you are so shocked by my confidences,” Antonia grumbled. “Almost twenty years as my maid should have prepared you for any eventuality. Although,” she conceded magnanimously, “perhaps not this eventuality.” She sat again and spread out her petticoats before holding up her empty cup on its saucer. “I fear I have shocked even myself this time. Another cup of coffee, if you please.”
Gabrielle took the cup on its saucer and stood blinking down at the Duchess. “You are not talking about M’sieur le Duc at all, are you, Mme la duchesse?”
“Don’t be absurd! Why would I be talking about Monseigneur when he was taken from me three years ago? Where are your wits, Gabrielle? Four daughters and an idle life as a rich man’s wife and your mind it has gone counting the sheep!”
“Perhaps I have been counting sheep and fallen asleep, Mme la duchesse, because I feel I am in a dream.”
“You not the only one!” Antonia said with asperity and took back her replenished coffee cup and stirred the little silver spoon to dissolve a sugar lump.
“You will please excuse me if I am a little dull-witted, Mme la duchesse, but are you trying to tell me that there is someone—that you and this someone—”
“I have a lover, Gabrielle. There I have said it out loud. It does not make me feel any better about it. To point out fact, I am miserable. He makes me feel miserable!”
“Miserable? But did you not say that he told you he love you? That he only has to smile or wink at you for you to have the oddest feelings? That your heart it beats faster when you see him?”
“So your wits they have not left! Yes, that is what I said, so is it any wonder I am miserable?”
“And as well as these miserable feelings you and he—you and he enjoy making love... And he wants to marry you?” When Antonia nodded bleakly, Gabrielle de Crespigny smiled and squeezed the Duchess’s hand. “Oh, Mme la duchesse, have you any idea what this means?”
“If I knew that would I be here bothering you?”
Gabrielle de Crespigny laughed and it was such a carefree laugh that Antonia sat up tall, face ablaze. “It is not a matter to laugh at, Gabrielle! He is annoying and-and infuriating and I will tell you how miserable he has made me because he dares to say to me that he would not think it a bad thing if we were to have a child. Imagine! At my age! And what do I do? I start thinking not how ridiculous that idea is, but that perhaps I would like that very much, when it is not something that will happen. So you see what he has done to me making me have these ludicrous thoughts!”
“You said he was virile.”
“Yes.”
“And you are still fertile?”
“Yes, but...”
“Bernard was five and sixty and I just turned fifty when we had Toinette. And you are years off that, so it is still possible, yes?”
“But my youngest child is fifteen!”
“Pardon, Mme la duchesse,” Gabrielle said quietly. “The last time you were pregnant was only six years ago; it was the strain of Monseigneur’s illness that brought on that miscarriage, was it not?”
“Yes. It was very sad. But the birth of Frederick... He means that much more to me because he was born when our child it was due...”
“So it is not within the realms of fantasy to think that a child it is possible, yes?”
“Gabrielle! This is nonsense! We are talking nonsense over our coffee and all because I am being made miserable by a man who is one day a merchant and the next he tells me he has inherited a Scottish title and a castle which he must go and live in because he has responsibilities to his tenants. That is all well and good for him but he cannot expect me to go to Scotland and live in this castle with him. That is the realm of fantasy!”
“But if you loved him you would do just that.”
“Loved him? I do not understand why you say if I love him?”
“But you do love him.”
“That is utter nonsense! I love Monseigneur. I have always loved Monseigneur and always will. No one will ever replace him.”
“That does not stop you loving this man.”
“His name it is Jonathon—Jonathon Strang.”
“You say this Jonathon Strang has made you miserable because you have the oddest feelings for him. Those odd feelings are love, my dearest dear. Don’t you see? You are in love with this man.”
Antonia pouted. “No. I do not see at all!” Yet as soon as she said this she knew it for a lie and when Gabrielle de Crespigny smiled at her in understanding she felt hot tears well up. She was only too willing to be gathered up in the older woman’s comforting embrace. “Gabrielle. Oh, Gabrielle, I am so very, very miserable...”
“Of course you are. That is only natural,” Gabrielle replied soothingly. “I will tell you about my dearest Bernard. His first wife Elisabeth was the love of his life. They had three sons and when she died he was inconsolable and reconciled himself to being a good father and grandfather, and never remarrying. He said he could never replace Elisabeth, which is true. You will never replace Monseigneur, but you do not want to. And I can never replace Bernard’s Elisabeth. I remember the day we met. You were strolling in St. James’s Park with Lord and Lady Vallentine and your straw bonnet it blew off and I chased it and Bernard, he caught it and returned it to me. He was at the pond with his sons sailing their little boats... He did not know then that he loved me but he did not forget me from that day. But I knew. Five minutes conversation with him, I knew, Mme la duchesse, that I loved him and would marry him.”
She smiled down at Antonia, whose head rested on her shoulder and said with an even broader smile, “I am very sure Bernard never expected to b
ecome a father again, and of four girls! He has seven grandchildren by his sons and at sixty-eight he is father to a three year old. Incroyable. So unless Jonathon Strang he cannot have children...?”
“He has a nineteen-year-old daughter.”
“So! He can breed too. There you are then! You tell me he is more than capable in the bedchamber, so who is not to say that at his age he cannot father another child?”
Antonia sat up at that and dried her eyes with a lace handkerchief. “Gabrielle, there is something I neglected to tell you about M’sieur Strang...”
Antonia’s stricken expression caused Gabrielle to go pale. “Yes, Mme la duchesse?” she said softly, silently praying that the Duchess’s lover was much younger than Monseigneur who had been old enough to be her father; her Antonia deserved at least that from a second husband.
“You must promise not to be shocked.”
Gabrielle nodded. Mon Dieu, she thought, this Jonathon he is just as ancient as M’sieur le Duc.
Antonia tried to keep her tone neutral, but she could not suppress her dimple or the sparkle in her green eyes. “He... Jonathon... He is just eight years older than Julian.”
Gabrielle blinked. Surely she had misheard. But the Duchess just sat there regarding her with an odd little expression, a mixture of embarrassment and smugness hovering about her lovely mouth. And then Gabrielle’s eyes went very wide and she exclaimed,
“Mon Dieu! Oh là là! Je suis si étonné, je suis sans mots!”
“Yes, I thought you would be. I hope my priggish son he, too, will be lost for words, which will spare me his thin-nostriled lecture on family morality. Gabrielle, I tell you, it is as well he Julian does not know the half of his mother’s wickedness. His nostrils they would never come unstuck!”
And no longer able to suppress her amusement, Antonia giggled and so did Gabrielle, and when a few minutes later the door opened to admit M’sieur de Crespigny come home for nuncheon, it was to find his wife and Mme la Duchesse de Roxton hanging off each other with tears of laughter on their flushed cheeks. He quietly closed over the door again and left them to their moment.
Antonia arrived home to the news the boys had returned safely and were none the worse for their adventures in evading the militia and that Lady Cavendish was waiting her in the Blue drawing room. Antonia went to the book room and had Kitty Cavendish brought to her.
Lady Cavendish took a sweeping look about the book room, saw the Duchess warming her hands by the fireplace, and went quickly up to her, her anxiousness making her forget her manners to say without preamble as she rose up from a curtsey, “Tommy and Strang have been taken into custody. Shrewsbury’s brutes came back for Tommy once they’d caught up with Strang. Dair Fitzstuart is also answering questions at Shrewsbury’s invitation. Something must be done!”
Antonia suppressed her apprehension, picking up on the woman’s slip of the tongue. She had never warmed to Kitty Cavendish or her husband. It was nothing to do with the fact they were members of her daughter-in-law’s set, indeed Tommy Cavendish was Deborah’s cousin which made their predatory natures all the more unacceptable. The couple spent their year, sometimes weeks at a time at the same fine address, hopping from the largesse of one country estate to another, and yet they never reciprocated. And as guests of their extended social network of friends and relations, they ate, drank, gambled and imposed themselves in every way possible on their noble hosts as if they were owed a living.
Antonia may never have voiced her disapproval to her son and daughter-in-law but she had eyes and on too many occasions to mention she had watched Tommy Cavendish gorge himself to the point of bursting and Kitty Cavendish ingratiate herself into the good graces of other guests, as if her husband’s next meal and clean bed depended upon it. The couple’s championship of Kitty Cavendish’s two nieces, the Aubrey twins, as a possible wife for Jonathon had all the hallmarks of their desire to see themselves set up with a permanent address for the season should one of the nieces become Mrs. Strang. Antonia was certain the Cavendishs were well aware Jonathon had inherited an ancient relative’s Scottish title and that a remote Scottish castle would not be far enough away for him to escape the avarice of Lord and Lady Cavendish.
Kitty Cavendish glanced about at the vacant wingback chairs and sofa grouped in front of the fireplace expecting to be offered a seat but when Antonia remained standing, she was forced to do likewise, aware that the lack of civility meant the Duchess expected her visit to be of a short duration.
“You say that Lord Shrewsbury’s men came back for Lord Cavendish. What do you mean by that, my lady?”
“Your Grace? Came back? Oh! The militia were at our door at dawn demanding to know the whereabouts of Charles Strathsay. Naturally we said we did not know.”
“Yet your husband he directed them here, for why else would the militia want to search my house?”
Lady Cavendish smiled weakly and Antonia had her answer.
“Tommy thought it best for Strang to deal with them. After all, Charles Strathsay is marrying Sarah-Jane and so—”
“Disappointing for you.”
“Yes. Yes. It is disappointing. We had such high hopes of Sarah-Jane making a fine match. She could have been Countess of Strathsay one day. Instead she—”
“—followed her heart? Leaving one less house for you and your husband to impose your persons upon. Sarah-Jane, as your niece, would hardly have refused you an invitation to stay as her guest for the entire season, if that was your wish, now would she? But as she and Charles will make their home in Paris and one day the Americas it puts her house, her fortune and her good graces out of your reach.”
Kitty Cavendish blinked and baulked and would have offered a weak, almost hesitant and practiced, naïve response, but the hard light in the green eyes that regarded her without sympathy or friendliness was enough for her to realize the Duchess knew her for what she was and could not be duped. She did not like to be outwitted and certainly not by someone she had always regarded as of no more value than a beautiful ornament and wholly resented her for the same reason. She had always believed that Antonia Dowager Duchess of Roxton was who she was precisely because she was a beautiful ornament. She would never have guessed that beneath the beautiful facade there was an acute mind.
“Do you want to know why Strang chose to pursue you, your Grace?” When Antonia continued to stare at her, unmoved, Kitty Cavendish said waspishly, “Because you occupy the house that once belonged to his ancestor Edmund Strang-Leven and which was stolen by the fourth Duke of Roxton when he married Edmund’s sister. Not only has the ownership of Crecy Hall been disputed ever since, so has the land on which this house stands. Did you know Roxton has given Strang permission to take over the lease? He is also determined to have Crecy Hall returned to him by whatever means necessary.”
“And I am that means?” Antonia shrugged a shoulder. “He should have looked into the matter more carefully. I may live in the house but it is not mine to dispose of. Neither is this house. They, like everything else, were left to my eldest son. I am merely his guest. And, if you are correct, I am now M’sieur Strang’s guest in this house. You of all people will appreciate the difficult position that puts me in.”
“Tommy was at pains to warn Strang that his stratagem would not work, your Grace. Not that he thought you wouldn’t be taken in by it, but that the Duke would thwart the outcome.”
Antonia smiled thinly. “How fortunate then that I have a son who is always there to watch his mother’s back.” She shook the little bell that brought a footman. “And while M’sieur Strang was exerting himself to persuade me, your nieces were being sadly neglected by him? It seems your plan was no more successful, my lady.” She picked up her neglected Rousseau and sat in her favorite wingchair, not offering Lady Cavendish a seat, indication the interview was at an end. But when the woman did not move, despite the footman at her elbow, Antonia looked up and said with genuine concern, “Do not fret, Lady Cavendish. I am certain Lord Shrewsbury wi
ll soon release Lord Cavendish. His part in Charles’ treasonous activities must be quite minor indeed, yes?”
Kitty Cavendish bobbed a curtsey. “I wish that were true, your Grace.” And would have gone out but in through the book room double doors strode Jonathon Strang and with him was Tommy Cavendish.
“My dearest strawberry dumpling! Here I am unwhipped and unbaked!” Tommy Cavendish announced, taking his wife in his embrace. He whispered a few quick words in her ear and then released her to make the Duchess a sweeping bow. “Mme la duchesse, accept my humble pie thanks for sheltering dear Lady Cavendish while poor Strang and I were being mildly spit-roasted by Lord Shrewsbury. We won’t encroach on your hospitality a lozenge longer. Strang tells me you are off to the theater to see a new play by that fellow... Sheridan? How delightful. Lady Cavendish and I are already late for a select card party with the lamb and potato Connellys.”
“But, Tommy, I thought we were for Dub—”
“Yes, my dear,” Tommy Cavendish said through smiling teeth, “to not only cut cards but to cut our losses. The Connellys are indeed in Dublin. Curtsey prettily now and let us be on our way before my beefy brother-in-law changes his mind and turns me into minced meat for pies.”
Kitty Cavendish did as she was told, a suspicious glance at Jonathon before being whisked out of the book room by her husband and the double doors closed on their backs by two blank-faced liveried footmen. In the silence, Antonia watched Jonathon who was frowning at the closed doors.
“Did Charles and Sarah-Jane make it safely to their barque?” she asked quietly.
“Yes. Yes,” he answered, coming out of his abstraction and smiling down at her. “They’d have sailed by now. The boys here?” When she nodded but did not meet his gaze the frown returned. “What did Kitty say to upset you?”
“And Dair?” she asked, ignoring his question. “Has Shrewsbury released him too?”
“No. Charles’ brother has confessed to his part in the secret correspondence with the American Silas Deane.”
Autumn Duchess: A Georgian Historical Romance (Roxton Series) Page 38