“That is a great piece of nonsense!” Antonia said dismissively. “Dair is an officer. He would never betray his regiment least of all his country! I do not believe it and if Shrewsbury does he is not the spymaster he thinks he is. Charles betrayed his country on philosophical grounds, because he is an idealist; that I can stomach. For Dair to do the same would mean betraying his fellow soldiers, and for what? He does not believe in the American cause. He does not share his brother’s ideals.” She bustled over to ring the little hand bell again. “I will send Julian a note and he will talk sense to Shrewsbury.”
Jonathon got to the handbell first and he placed it out of her reach on the carved mantle piece before taking her hand and drawing her to sit with him on the sofa. “Sweetheart, Roxton was there. He was there while we were questioned by Shrewsbury. Uncomfortable and more than a little embarrassing to get a dressing down in front of your son, but better to have him there than as not. Particularly for Dair, who will need all the family support he can get. You see...” Jonathon stopped and swiftly kissed the back of her hand, “My money was on Tommy wanting his slice of the American colonial pie. That he was somehow involved in providing the American patriots with troop numbers and English supply routes, because Tommy would do anything for a guinea if it means a full stomach, soft bedding and a gilded drawing room where he can perch his fat buttocks. But all Tommy’s treasonous activities amounted to was blackmailing Charles, and as it turns out, his brother, too.”
“But I do not understand why Dair he would do such a thing. Tommy, yes. And Kitty. Those two would rob a grave rather than exert themselves to provide for their own living. But Dair? It is incomprehensible.”
“Debts. A great pile of IOUs to the tune of some fifteen thousand pounds.”
“He is a gambler? No! This I do not believe! A womanizer. A risk-taker. But a wastrel?” When Jonathon made no comment she asked with a sniff, “What will happen to him?”
“That’s for Shrewsbury and Roxton to sort out with the American Colonial War Committee. I doubt they’ll want a fuss because Dair is one of them.”
“And the Cavendishs?”
“Ireland and exile. No one will welcome them here. Roxton will see to that.”
Antonia looked at her fingers entwined with his and then into his brown eyes. “And has my son also seen to giving you this house we now sit in and Crecy Hall as well? Is that what this is about?”
He shook his head, holding her gaze. “No—I mean, yes. Yes, I have leased this house and yes, I had every intention of pressing my ancestor’s claim for Crecy Hall but—”
“—but why try to convince my son when you could just marry his mother and as my husband claim the house as yours by right of marriage?” When he hesitated to reply, a flush to his bronzed cheeks, Antonia pulled her hand free and stood, roughly shaking out her petticoats. “If you expect me to believe anything less, you too have grossly underestimated my intellect!”
“No! Yes! It would have been easier, but no, that is not the reason I want to marry you!” Jonathon argued, up off the sofa too and following her down the book lined room to a wrought-iron spiral staircase that mirrored the one in the Roxton library at Treat. “God! You have every right to think me an utter whoreson, but I tell you in all honesty, I gave up the notion of pressing my claim for the dower house the day of the regatta when you came to the pier to see Frederick and me off. You were holding that posy of wild daises given to you by Old Ernest and it was the first time I had seen you out of your black... My God! I just wanted to pick you up and twirl you round and round and shower you with kisses and tell you how much I loved you even then.”
He watched her ascend the black iron steps, climb to the first gallery and travel half its length, searching the shelves until she found what she was looking for. He had to step back into the room to watch her fossick amongst the leather tomes of a particular bookcase, pulling a book out here, another there, sliding them back and then finally finding the one she wanted. She opened out a slim, red leather bound journal, flicked through several pages and finding what she wanted, she closed the journal and hugged it to her chest as she descended the black iron steps. She stopped on the third step from the bottom so that she was eye-level with Jonathon who now had a hand to the filigree railing and a booted foot on the bottom step.
She looked into his brown eyes, so troubled and searching and she briefly pressed her lips together, green eyes just as searching. “I do not know whether to believe you or not. My heart it is a very determined organ and it beats too hard when you are near, and it so very much wants to believe what you tell me. And then there is my head, which remembers the promise you made to me in the pavilion.”
“I gave you my word I would never do or say anything to intentionally deceive or-or hurt you,” he said softly, a hand up to her cheek. “And I stand by that, sweetheart. Have-have I hurt you?”
“Perhaps... A little. You should have told me the truth from the beginning instead of me finding out from Kitty Cavendish. I do not know why Julian he did not tell me also!” She opened up the journal at a particular page, removed a folded piece of aged paper and handed it to him. “Here is the fourth Duchess of Roxton’s diary for the year 1681. If you read the entry for New Year’s you will see she records the death of her brother Edmund. It is very sad because Edmund he had gone skating on the Thames and the ice it broke and he drowned. The ink it is smudged from her tears. What is important for you to read is what she says below this entry.”
Jonathon scanned the page of closely scripted female handwriting and found the Duchess’s entry for New Year’s Day—25 March 1681 and skimmed what Antonia had just told him and then slowly read the two sentences below this.
“Edmund left Crecy Hall to his sister in his will because he owed the Duke a great deal of money?” Jonathon said in surprise as he closed over the journal.
“And here is Edmund’s letter, tucked in the pages of her journal.”
Jonathon took the yellowed folded pages but did not open them out because Antonia had put her arms about his neck.
“I have had years to read the books on these shelves. Some are more interesting than others. The fourth Duchess’s diaries are the former. As she is your ancestress also, I can direct you to the entries where she talks about her Strang-Leven cousins.” She tilted her head to the side, regarding him pensively. “Odd that I did not make the connection earlier. It was the subcontinent and your bronzed skin; much more fascinating, yes?”
She leaned in to kiss him and he let the journal and the letter drop to the steps to take her in his arms. After awhile he asked softly,
“Come to the theater with me?”
“Yes.”
He looked into her eyes. “You know what that will mean, don’t you?”
“Of course. To be seen in public with you... For us to share a box at the theater... It is very much a declaration. I do not care. It is the truth. We are lovers.”
“Roxton will be there. It’s opening night.”
“Can you think of a better way of opening his eyes?”
“I think his eyes are open wide, sweetheart,” Jonathon said with a laugh and from the deep pocket of his frockcoat he removed a flat box covered in worn black velvet. “He said you might want to wear this to Drury Lane.”
Antonia did not need to open the box to know what was inside, yet she did, just as a matter of course. Inside nestled on a bed of velvet was the emerald and diamond choker Monseigneur had given her on her eighteenth birthday. Jonathon also handed her a small velvet pouch.
“Bangles, earrings and hair clasps to match.”
Antonia merely nodded, too overcome to speak, for surely her son’s gesture in returning to her the jewelry she had discarded the night they had argued over the sale of the Hôtel was one of hopeful reconciliation. She pressed the velvet box and pouch back at him, saying quietly,
“Please to put me down. I want to show you something... This is a portrait of my grandmother Augusta, Countess of Strat
hsay,” Antonia told Jonathon when they were standing in the entrance foyer to one side of the broad staircase before a full-length portrait by the painter Allan Ramsay. “She was a great beauty and when she was fifteen she married my grandfather who was a Scottish General and a bastard son of King Charles. It was not a happy marriage and she fell in love with her sister’s husband, Lord Ely who was the great love of her life.”
“You inherited her eyes and breasts and Charles her coloring. She is most decidedly a beauty,” Jonathon agreed and smiled down at Antonia, “but you are far more beautiful.”
Antonia stared up at her grandmother with her mane of flame red hair, oblique green eyes and who was draped provocatively in oyster silk dishabille that showed her deep décolletage to best advantage. She nodded with a sigh. “Yes. I did not please her at all,” and when Jonathon gave a bark of laughter squeezed his arm, saying, “I am not exaggerating. She did not like me at all. I was very shocked by her immorality. But now that I am older I better understand what her life was like: To be in love with someone she could never marry; to not be able to live openly with that person because it would cause one big scandal. She had scores of lovers when Lord Ely was away at his estate. He wanted her to live with him and she would not leave the city. They were both very stubborn. But I will not take other lovers while you are in Scotland,” she added. “I am not like her in that way. And when you return to London for the sitting of Parliament, we can be together here in this house.” She turned away from the portrait to stand before him, chin tilted up, a hand to the silky smooth front of his embroidered waistcoat and said resolutely, “I do not care what anyone says and-and I will not enquire about your life in Scotland if you do not wish to tell me. But if you wish to tell me about your wife and your children then I would be pleased to listen—”
“Stop! Stop there!” he demanded. “Have you not been listening to me? Don’t you believe me when I tell you I love you? Are you mad, woman?” He pulled her to the broad stairs and then down to sit beside him and took her face between his large hands. “Listen to me, Antonia. If you do not marry me I will not marry anyone. If you want to live in sin with me, then so be it. But we will live in sin together.” He kissed her gently and then let her go to hold her hands. “My Scottish peerage demands that I live at my estate for six months of the year. And to do justice to my elevation and my tenants I could not do anything less. I want you to come north with me. I cannot conceive of living there without you. The other six months we will live here, in this house, and yes, I will attend Parliament. But in what capacity, that depends on you. If you do not marry me, I will disclaim my peerage and enter Parliament as the Member for Leven. If you marry me, then I will keep my title and all the pomp and grandeur that goes with it, for you.”
“But I do not want you to be anything but Jonathon Strang!” Antonia argued. “Why must you keep this title because of me? If you keep your title then you must marry and have children, an heir, to carry on after you. That is the natural order of things. That is what will be expected of you.”
“Sweetheart, my actions have never been dictated to by what others expect of me. Until I fell in love with you I had every expectation of disclaiming my title. Keep the estates, meet my obligations, sit in Parliament, but wear a coronet? I could not think of a more awkward hat for my merchant head! And I certainly had no intention of remarrying because of it. But I cannot envisage spending my life with anyone but you and you as anything less than a duchess, my duchess, and so I will reluctantly don the ermine and accept my ancient relative’s elevation.”
Antonia blinked at him and before she could ask the question he took from his waistcoat pocket a thin red bracelet of finely plaited cotton threads that was open at both ends. Antonia recognized it as the circlet he had been platting the day the pirate ship tree house and swing had been unveiled and, instinctively, she held out her left wrist. He deftly platted together the open ends so the circlet closed around her wrist and then kissed it saying with a smile,
“It’s not diamonds or emeralds but if you want those too, I can easily supply them. But this has far more value to me, and I hope it will for you too. This bracelet is a kavala, a scared Hindu thread that once complete cannot be broken. Nor can the bracelet be removed. The cotton must naturally deteriorate. You are now mine and I am yours.” He smiled into her eyes. “Marry me?”
She touched the bracelet. It was far more precious to her than had he given her jewels, and she drew his fingers up to kiss the back of his hand.
“I love you.”
“And I you. So marry me. Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow? Why tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow I must travel north.”
“You are leaving me tomorrow?”
The disbelief in her voice and bleak, astonished expression were oddly comforting.
“I must accompany my ancient relative’s coffin north. He will be buried in the family chapel at Leven Castle with all the pomp and circumstance his title demands; though I doubt he will be missed, certainly not by his neglected retainers and tenants. As it so happens, I’ve been banished to my ancestral pile in Scotland on Shrewsbury’s order—the condition for my release for helping Charles evade capture.” He flicked her cheek and tried to sound cheerful. “It has turned out rather neatly, all things considered.”
“Neatly? But I do not want you to go away at all! It is too soon!”
“I must but let me go a happy man. Marry me, tomorrow.”
“But there are such things as banns, and arrangements and—Oh! A hundred other ridiculous formalities that my son he will insist upon all in the name of family honor! That is, if he was to give his consent and we don’t—”
Jonathon held up a document affixed with the Archbishop of Canterbury’s seal. “A gift from your son.”
Antonia’s green eyes went very wide. “Parbleu! No? A-a special license? From Julian?”
Jonathon’s lean cheeks flushed. “I can only presume it suits his sensibilities to have his mother married to a Scottish nobleman than she the mistress of a merchant. So, marry me tomorrow?”
“But... Even if I were to marry you tomorrow, I could not leave my sons, Frederick, my babies... It is too soon! And I must—I must tell Monseigneur...”
He helped her to stand with a sigh of understanding. “Yes. That is true. I had not thought of that. Yes, you must tell Monseigneur... Then I shall travel north tomorrow after we are married and leave you here with every expectation of returning in the autumn to claim—to claim my autumn duchess.”
Antonia pouted. “I shall miss you dreadfully.”
“And I shall miss you, sweetheart.”
“Maman! Strang! If we don’t leave in the next hour we’ll miss curtains up!” Henri-Antoine announced from the first landing and came down to meet them. “Roxton’s got a box and he and Deb have brought Grand-père Martin up from Bath.” He looked at Jonathon. “I can’t wait for you to meet him. You’ll like Martin. He’s a good ol’ stick, isn’t he, Maman?”
“It is not right of you to call your brother’s godfather a-a stick, Henri,” Antonia admonished her son without heat, suppressing a smile.
“But will Martin like me, Henri?” Jonathon asked with an eyebrow cocked at Antonia.
Lord Henri-Antoine stuck out his bottom lip in thought. “That’s hard to say. He was mon père’s valet for thirty years so that makes him practically a duke.”
Jonathon rolled his eyes. “Just what I need,” he murmured to himself as he went to change into raiment befitting an opening night, “the living embodiment of Monseigneur to ruin my evening.” But he was to be pleasantly surprised when Martin Ellicott made himself known to him at Drury Lane theater.
“Isn’t this what you predicted, Julian?” Deb Roxton asked her husband as she fanned herself in the ducal box at Drury Lane theater, fixed smile directed out across the crush of theater goers in the stalls to the private boxes that hugged the walls in a semi-circle where powdered and bewigged heads had turned in directio
n of one box in particular closer the stage and whose occupants were just settling in for the performance.
“A scene? Yes. It can’t be helped,” replied the Duke, slipping his snuffbox into a pocket of his blue damask and silver thread frockcoat and pretending an interest in a speck of powder on the knee of his black silk breeches. “Let us pray the curtain rises before they fully realize she is here.”
“Too late,” said Martin Ellicott. “They have not only noticed, but she has obliged them by coming to stand at the railing.” The old man smiled and sighed. “How gratifying to finally see her out of her black.”
Roxton looked up and straight at a box that was near the stage and there was his mother, resplendent in embroidered gold silk, the emerald and diamond choker about her slim throat, her hair left unpowdered and thus the same luminous color as her petticoats. She had a long gloved hand to the polished brass railing, and was languidly fanning herself and talking over a bare shoulder to a bronzed colossus in a magnificently embroidered emerald-green frockcoat, with matching breeches and an oyster silk waistcoat of which the pockets and buttons had emerald-green and red embroidery. He was stooped to hear her words over the din of loud conversations and laughter echoing off the walls. At Jonathon Strang’s shoulder and looking more narrow shouldered than usual because of who he was standing beside, Mr. Gidley Ffolkes in habitual red waistcoat and riband. And on the Dowager Duchess’s left, Henri-Antoine, elegant in black velvet, was peering out across the crowd through his quizzing glass, a miniature version of their father and with practice he would also, in time, have his elegance and arrogance in equal measure; and beside him his wife’s nephew Jack, beaming from ear to ear and unable to keep his head still at so much color and light. This did bring a smile to the Duke’s mouth and he turned away to smile at his wife and grab her gloved hand.
“We shall get through this, Deb. I am determined.”
“You must, Julian, for her sake,” the Duchess replied with a smile, squeezing his fingers in response.
Autumn Duchess: A Georgian Historical Romance (Roxton Series) Page 39