The whole room was in disorder. Four large trunks lay open and at one of them knelt the Duchess’s maid, packing papers and books and an array of china, enamel boxes, work bags, miniatures, ornaments and pin trays, all of which were strewn around her on the floor.
At the escritoire by the window was seated the Duchess. She wore a frilled peignoir of pink muslin over her night robe, and her nightcap was made to match. Her skin was wrinkled in the morning light and her eyes were swollen and puffy as if she had spent the night in weeping. She glanced towards Iona, but continued to take out of a drawer of the escritoire bundles of letters tied with ribbon.
“Oh, it’s you, girl,” she said ungraciously. “Come in, you may be of some assistance.”
“What is happening?” Iona asked, looking round in astonishment.
Bureaux were open, drawers lay on the floor, and one chair was piled with material of every sort and description. There was velvet, muslin, brocade, satin – several bales of it half unravelled and trailing on the floor.
No one answered her and after a moment Iona asked somewhat stupidly,
“Are you packing to go away?”
“Yes, I am going away,” the Duchess said almost angrily, looking up suddenly, and Iona saw there were tears in her eyes. She put her fingers up to her forehead.
“I am tired,” she said suddenly.
The maid rose from the trunk.
“Shall I fetch Your Grace some wine or a pot of tea?” she asked. “Your Grace never touched a bit of the breakfast I brought you.”
“I will have tea,” the Duchess answered, “and bring a cup for Miss Iona,” she added with a surprising solicitude.
“Very good, Your Grace.”
The maid withdrew from the room, shutting the door behind her. The Duchess looked at Iona and made a little gesture with her hands.
“As you see, I am going away,” she said.
Her face puckered, accentuating the lines round her thin lips, and Iona thought for a moment that she looked like a sick monkey. The colour of her skin in contrast to the pink muslin was almost ludicrous.
“Surely this is a very sudden decision?” Iona asked, wondering if the question would seem impertinent and yet feeling somehow that the Duchess expected her to ask it.
The Duchess rose from the chair and walked across the room, the train of her peignoir, more suitable for a girl of eighteen, trailing behind her and knocking over several china ornaments arranged near another trunk.
“Sudden? Yes, I suppose it is a sudden decision,” she said, speaking more to herself than to Iona, “and yet I have always known that the time must come when I must go. I have hated this place, hated it from the first day that I came here, and now it has defeated me. The castle has won, as I always knew it would.”
Her hands shook and the twitch in her eye was so violent that it contorted her whole face. Iona suddenly felt sorry for her, however disagreeable she had been to her personally, however unkind, here was a woman who was suffering almost beyond endurance.
“You are tired, ma’am,” Iona said. “Come and sit down by the fire. You will feel better after you have had a cup of tea.”
“I doubt it,” the Duchess said uncompromisingly, but she sat down in the chair Iona pulled forward for her and held out her thin, bony hands to the blaze.
“Where are you going?” Iona asked a little timidly.
“Back to England,” the Duchess said. “Back to my home in Kent. Do you think they will be pleased to see me?”
“I am sure they will,” Iona said brightly, feeling it was the only possible answer.
“Then you are wrong,” the Duchess said. “My father has married again and his new wife has no liking for me. She is my stepmother, yes, my stepmother!” She suddenly gave a high, cackling laugh poignant with bitterness and misery. “It is a jest! Yes, a rare jest that I, who am a stepmother, will now have to live with mine. She will hate me, she will intrigue against me and do her best to be rid of me. I have done all those things, haven’t I? And now I shall have them done to me.”
The Duchess’s voice died away, and now the tears were running down her wrinkled cheeks. She made no effort to stop or to wipe them away. She only sat staring at the fire, and Iona saw that she had bitten her lips until they bled.
“But must you go there – if it will make you so unhappy?” she asked at length, feeling that the Duchess was waiting for her to speak.
“If I do not go home, where is there a place for me?” the Duchess asked. “You know full well that I cannot stay here. No, you do not know it, but never mind, it is of no consequence. You will learn the reason fast enough.”
“Does it concern Lord Niall?” Iona asked.
The Duchess grasped the arms of her chair and her face was livid.
“Yes, it concerns him,” she hissed. “Lord Niall and that woman he loves – that harlot from St. James’s. Well, he is welcome to her, but she will bring him nothing that he needs. Instead she will destroy him. But, oh God, I have loved him so.”
Her voice broke. She covered her face with shaking fingers and wept noisily, rocking herself backwards and forwards in the chair as Iona had seen the peasant women do when they were bereaved. She felt there was nothing she could say or do, only sit silent, more sorry than she could say for this broken, miserable woman.
At length the Duchess’s sobs ceased and she groped for her handkerchief. Iona retrieved it from where it had fallen to the floor and put it into her hand. The Duchess wiped her eyes.
“I am a fool,” she said sharply. “It is a waste of time to grieve, and yet I cannot help myself.”
She looked at Iona as if she saw her for the first time.
“You are young and pretty,” she said. “Waste little of your youth, for it is gone so quickly and then there is nothing left but regrets.”
She gave a deep sigh that seemed to shake her whole body.
“Once I was pretty. You would not think it now. But I was pretty enough to attract men – pretty enough to have them desire me. And then I fell in love. God sent love into this world to torture women, did you know that? People talk as though it were an enviable thing, something to be sought, to be prized, to be treasured. Poor deluded fools! What they seek is a poison, a weapon which will destroy them as completely as if they put a bullet through their brain.”
The Duchess paused, her eyes closed for a moment as if she were thinking back into the past, remembering what had happened, recapturing the pain and torture of that first love.
“How old were you when you fell in love?” Iona asked.
She was not really curious, for it horrified her to hear these revelations and see the agony on the Duchess’s face, yet she felt that in some way it relieved the stricken woman to talk the bitterness out of her rather than keep it bottled up.
“I was sixteen when my mother took me to court,” the Duchess replied. “My father was proud of me. I was his only daughter and his favourite. To his three sons he was a tyrant, and a hard taskmaster, but to me he was always lenient and understanding. But I was well aware than I must exert myself to earn his favour.
“I was a success at St. James’s, and I came home to Kent with several suitors and the assurance that there would be many more. My father had no intention of letting me be betrothed to anyone he did not consider to be his own equal both in wealth and breeding. He turned my suitors away and as my affections were not engaged, I was content to see them go, knowing that there would be others to take their place. Then on my twentieth birthday I fell in love.”
The Duchess put her fingers to her eyes.
“Love, love,” she muttered. “What is it? Nothing but a crucifixion for those who succumb to it.”
Her words were so wild that Iona said quickly,
“Was he nice, this suitor whom you loved?”
“Who said he was a suitor?” the Duchess asked, taking her hands from her eyes, then staring almost resentfully at Iona. “He was no suitor, girl. He would never have dared rais
e his eyes in my direction had I not loved him first, had I not encouraged him, had I not told him that I loved him.”
The Duchess’s voice softened.
“He was dark and very handsome,” she said softly. “I have always liked dark men – they seem so strong – so virile.”
“Did he love you?” Iona asked.
“Yes, he loved me,” the Duchess answered. “He, the penniless son of a country parson, who had come to my father’s house to tutor my younger brother, loved me as I loved him.”
The Duchess sat up in the chair, pulled her handkerchief between her fingers, staring at it as if she had never seen it before.
“I know not why I am thinking of this now,” she said in a voice which tried pathetically to be light. “I suppose packing up brings back old memories. One finds letters and other things one has treasured and hoarded.”
“Oh, please – tell me what happened,” Iona said, interested now despite herself.
“I will tell you,” the Duchess said. “For this story should be a warning to you, a warning never to fall in love. I loved David with all my heart and soul. That was his name, David Dunn, son of an obscure parson. For five years I loved him, refusing all offers for my hand, taking care that no suitors of any import approached my father before I had made it very clear to them that I would under no circumstances become their bride.
“Then my father discovered about David. We had grown careless with the years. First we had been content with looking into each other’s eyes, with the touch of each other’s hands, a hasty kiss snatched once in a while behind an open door or in the twilit garden. Then we wanted more. It was torture not to be alone. We wanted to talk, to discuss things, and it was heaven to be in each other’s arms.
“It was a servant who betrayed us, a maid whom I had dismissed for impertinence. She went to my father. It was not difficult for him to discover the truth. David was sent packing without a reference, without even the salary that was due to him. I was sent to Yorkshire to stay with my uncle, and while I was on the visit, broken hearted, miserable, yet striving to hide my hurt from the curious eyes of my cousins who had an inkling that I was in disgrace, we had an invitation to visit Edinburgh.
“A friend of the family invited us all to stay – my aunt and her two daughters, myself and one of her sons. There was to be a ball in Edinburgh. My aunt accepted the invitation, principally, I think, because she thought that the distraction would relieve my obvious unhappiness.
“It was at the ball that I met the Duke of Arkrae. He was an old man, but of fine appearance and great import. I was flattered that he paid so much attention to me. Not for a moment did I guess that his interest in me was anything more than the desire of an aged men for the company of a young and pretty girl. When my uncle told me that he had asked for my hand in marriage, I nearly swooned in astonishment. My uncle was delighted. He pressed me to accept the Duke, and because I was afraid to go home, afraid of my father’s anger and more afraid than anything of the loneliness and emptiness of the house without David, I did not refuse.
“We were married in Yorkshire. It was a quiet ceremony and my father came north for it. That is how I became the Duchess of Arkrae, the third Duchess to a Duke of over seventy.”
The Duchess gave the handkerchief between her fingers a sharp tug. The delicate lace tore and the sound of it seemed to give her a sense of satisfaction, for her lips twisted in a tortured smile.
“Yes, I became a Duchess.” she went on. “My cousins were full of envy, my friends wrote me pages of congratulations, but only I knew what marriage to an old man could mean. Difficult and set in his ways, a man with a strange taciturn nature, a man without any tenderness or understanding for the feelings of a young and sensitive girl. I know you are thinking that I ought to have been grateful at making such a good marriage after behaving clandestinely with my brother’s tutor, but I wasn’t at all grateful. Had the Duke been tender or compassionate, things might have been different, but he was not, and having enjoyed me as he might have enjoyed a good day’s hunting or a well served meal, he forgot my very existence. I was lonely. Scotland seemed big and empty and the castle a severe prison from which I could never escape. I wanted youth and laughter, companionship and – and love.”
The Duchess got to her feet and, brushing past Iona who was sitting on a low stool by her side, moved across to the window. As she stood there looking out on the loch, the clear morning light revealed every wrinkle and flaw of her unprotected skin. It showed up the twitch of her eye, the discoloured, swollen eyelids and the sagging skin over her jaw. It was the wreck of what had once been a pretty face, a spectre of a long forgotten youth.
“I have stood here so often,” the Duchess said in a strange voice. “Once I remember wondering if the waters of the loch were very cold and whether one died quickly when one was drowned, or if such a death was slow and agonising. I shall never stand here again. In a short while, when I look out of the window, I shall see green fields, wide spreading trees and the hedges and meadowlands always green in the mellow English climate. I shall forget the cruel sharpness of the wind, the long snow locked winters here when it seems as if the spring will never come. I shall forget how I hated this castle – but shall I forget the rest?”
She turned towards Iona and in a voice of terror asked,
“Shall I forget Niall and all he has meant to me? Shall I forget his face, his hands, the way he comes into a room, the way his hair grows from his forehead?” Once again the tears sprang into her eyes. “Can I forget? Can I forget all that?”
Blindly she groped her way back to the chair she had vacated by the fireside. Iona helped her into it. There was nothing she could say and there was nothing she could do.
She was thankful to hear the door open and see the Duchess’s maid return. Two footmen entered a moment later carrying a huge silver tray. They set it down on a table by the Duchess’s side and she busied herself unlocking the little caddy containing the tea and spooning it into the big crested pot. The maid knelt down at the trunk and resumed her packing. The moment for confidences was passed. Iona accepted a cup of tea from the Duchess and asked if she might retire.
“If Your Grace will excuse me, I would like to go out into the sunshine.”
The Duchess nodded absently. Since her maid’s return she had not spoken one word, and Iona knew that she was thinking of the past, remembering other things of Lord Niall or perhaps of David, her first love. There was nothing she could do to help, no soothing potion she could offer to allay her sufferings or bring her forgetfulness.
As she came from the Duchess’s suite into the main passage on the first floor, Iona felt as if she escaped from an over-heated greenhouse. The emotions and miseries of the past hour had left her with a feeling of vague unhappiness mingled with a sense of apprehension. While she had listened to the Duchess, while she had heard her bemoaning the loss of Lord Niall’s love, a question had sprung into her mind. Why had this happened now and at this moment?
Lord Niall was in love with Lady Wrexham, that was obvious, but why had he been brave enough to admit it to his stepmother? Why, when but a few days earlier he had been ready to lie about his visit to Inverness, had he been so frank now that the Duchess felt it impossible to remain at the castle? Something was happening, Iona thought, and she wondered what it might be.
Reaching the door of the Crimson Salon, she stood still. Two people were in the room, standing at the far end before a window that opened on to the balcony. They had their backs to the door and Iona could see them while they were unaware of her presence.
Lady Wrexham, gorgeously attired in the gown Iona had seen her maid taking down the passage, had a scarf of ermine draped round her shoulders. Her hair was unpowdered but elaborately arranged, and her hand, glittering with rings, was laid familiarly on Lord Niall’s arm.
“There are a vast number of things I should want to alter,” she said to him.
“The whole place shall be arranged exactly as you wish,
my sweet,” Lord Niall replied.
Iona had the feeling that this was the end of their conversation and that they were about to turn from the window. Swiftly she moved away from the door and without really thinking where she was going moved down the passage towards the library. The door was open and a footman was replenishing the fire.
He glanced up as Iona entered and she recognised him as a flunkey who was often on duty at the top of the main stairs and to whom she usually said good morning and good night. She smiled at him now and he smiled back.
“’Tis a grand morning’, miss,” he said.
“I was thinking of going out,” Iona replied, “but I would like to speak with His Grace. Have you any idea where he is?”
“His Grace isna in the castle, miss,” the footman replied.
“He has gone riding, I suppose?” Iona questioned.
“Aye, ridin’ it is, miss,” the footman replied, “an’ His Grace started richt early frae wha’ I heard.”
Iona suddenly felt perturbed.
“Was there some reason for that?” she inquired. “Has His Grace gone on a journey?”
“I dinna ken for sure,” the footman replied, “but I heard ane o’ the grooms say that His Grace asked for his horse verra early this mom. He took naebody wi’ him, but gaed off on his ain. ’Tis strange noo I came tae think on it. I hae niver known His Grace dae tha’ afore an’ I hae been here for nigh on four year.”
“It does seem strange,” Iona said.
“But ye dinna hae tae fash aboot His Grace,” the footman went on. “He’s a fine mon an’ he can tak care o’ himsel’, can His Grace.”
There was no doubting the flunkey’s admiration for the Duke, but Iona was not reassured. Slowly she left the library. There was something wrong. Something was happening to everyone, to the Duchess, to the Duke, to Lady Wrexham and to Lord Niall. What it was she did not know, but it overshadowed her, dark and menacing. Suddenly she knew that she was afraid, yes, terribly, inexplicably afraid.
An Introduction To The Eternal Collection Jubilee Edition Page 45