The Duchess

by Jude Deveraux

  “My mother—”

  “Ha!” Claire said. “You cannot lie to me now. I know too much about you. I think that if I’d spent more time with that woman I would have realized she was your mother. You two have a sameness of temper about you. You are both the personification of selfishness. She uses her lost love as her excuse and you use…”

  “Yes,” he said softly, “what do I use?”

  “Whatever is available. May I go now? You have tried to win my pity and you have failed. All of you have failed in your attempt to make me feel sorry for the poor, unwanted duke.”

  Trevelyan walked to a high-backed chair and sat down. “Did I fail in my attempt to make you love me?”

  “No. I loved you for a while, but that was before I knew you.”

  Trevelyan sighed. “So now you will marry Harry and breed blond brats.”

  She took a deep breath. “No, I don’t intend to marry Harry. I think I’m too much of a romantic. I want to marry a man I love. I know that will be difficult, especially since I have—”

  “Have what?”

  She looked at him in defiance. “Loved you. Loved someone like you,” she said softly. “You will be a difficult memory to supersede.”

  He gave a smile of irony. “I am thankful for any praise from you.”

  They were silent a moment.

  “Have you said what you wanted to say to me?” Claire asked. “I have things to do.”

  “Claire,” Trevelyan said softly. “I love you. I have loved you for a long time. I…I believe that I need you.”

  Claire’s lips tightened. “Yes, you need me. I am the only person on earth you cannot intimidate. I’m not afraid of you. I don’t cower when you look at me or shout at me. How refreshing—and infuriating—that must be for you. The great Captain Baker, the man who can make men tremble merely by looking at them, cannot put fear into a mere nineteen-year-old American.”

  Trevelyan smiled at her. “How right you are. From the moment I met you you were ordering me about. The first thing you said to me was that I was to fetch your horse for you. You have told me I was wrong on every count. You have criticized my books, my clothes, what I say and how I say it. Do you know how well matched we are?”

  Claire turned away so he wouldn’t see the tears that sprang to her eyes. She knew how well matched they were. She knew very, very well. Trevelyan was the only person in the world who was as curious as she was, who wanted to learn, who wanted to know about the world and what was in it.

  When she looked back he had risen and was standing behind her, close enough to touch, but he didn’t touch her. “Is your love for me completely dead?”

  “No,” she said honestly. “I think I will go to my grave loving you, but I will not live with you. I will not live with a man who can stand outside of life and not participate in it.”

  “I participate enough to—”

  She turned on him, furious. “No, you don’t! You make excuses. You say that you love me but that you can’t interfere in my marrying someone else. You make excuses as to why you can’t take your rightful place as the duke, but the truth is, if you were the duke, you’d have to involve yourself with other people, like the crofters and your mother. It’s much easier for you to stand back from the world and watch it.”

  She took a deep breath. “You know what I think? I think you asked me to marry you, but you didn’t really want me to. You told me how I’d hate you in a few years so I wouldn’t marry you.”

  He didn’t say anything for a moment, just stood there looking at her. “What would make you know that I love you? What would make you believe that I want you with me forever?”

  Claire gave a nasty laugh. “Show me that you’re not a man who can stand by and watch a young woman die. Show me that you’re human. Show me that you’re the man who wrote those letters. I haven’t seen that man.”

  Trevelyan didn’t say anything for a moment, then he walked to a tapestry along one wall and pulled it aside. She heard a door open.

  Claire heard Nyssa’s voice before she saw her.

  “You have left me in there too long,” Nyssa complained. “I am blue with cold. You—” Nyssa broke off as she looked at Claire’s face, her eyes wide in astonishment. “You have not told her,” Nyssa said to Trevelyan. “You could not have left her untold.”

  “I did,” Trevelyan said, smiling down at Nyssa. “She would not allow me to tell her, so you are my gift to her.”

  Claire turned on her heel and started toward the door, but Trevelyan caught her arm.

  “I thought you’d be pleased.”

  “Pleased that you tricked me? How you must have laughed when I begged the men to put the emerald on the cup for a woman who wasn’t dead.”

  Trevelyan’s face hardened. “Do you always believe the worst of me?”

  Claire jerked from him and started toward the door.

  Nyssa blocked her way. “I am most tired of this,” she said to Claire. “The man is insane with love for you. You must forgive him whatever you think he has done.”

  Claire glared at Nyssa. “I believed you were actually committing suicide. I didn’t know it was a joke, but then I have never been told anything about him.”

  Nyssa’s laugh trilled out. “But I did die. The Pearl of the Moon died as she was to have died. Frank decided to wake me and ask if I did not have second thoughts.”

  Claire frowned and Nyssa pulled her toward a chair. “Come, and I will tell you all of it.”

  Claire allowed herself to be pulled to the chair and began to listen to Nyssa’s story. She did not look at Trevelyan, who stood with his back to them, looking out the window.

  Nyssa told how she had meant to die when she had taken the poison—at least she thought it was poison, but Trevelyan had suspected that it was merely something to make her sleep. When the men from Pesha had been so anxious to burn Nyssa’s body, he thought that perhaps the burning was what killed her. Trevelyan knew that the two Peshans were merely messengers and that they might not know that the drink was not poison. Trevelyan gave the two men enough gold coins to persuade them to part with Nyssa’s lifeless body. He gave them ashes from MacTarvit’s fireplace to take back with them to Pesha.

  After Trevelyan had possession of Nyssa’s body, he and Angus spent three days waking her from her drugged stupor. Nyssa told of the bad-tasting drinks they had given her, how she had wanted to sleep but Trevelyan had made her walk. She told how Trevelyan had not slept for three whole days because he was afraid that if he slept, then Nyssa would, and she might not awake.

  Nyssa told how Trevelyan had said that if Claire wanted Nyssa alive, then he was going to bring her back from the dead.

  “I have died, as the Pearl of the Moon was to die,” Nyssa said. “And now I may live as I want. Frank says that I may stay here with his family for as long as I want.” She turned to look at the back of him. “I may go now?”

  Trevelyan nodded and Nyssa left the room.

  Claire stayed in her chair for a moment, then rose and went to him. “Why did you do it? Why did you save her?”

  “Because I wanted you.” He turned to her and his eyes were burning. “I wanted to go away. I wanted to leave that day of Nyssa’s death. I wanted to be able to shrug and say that it was the will of Allah if we were not to be together.”

  Suddenly, he grabbed her shoulders. “Claire, if you marry my brother, I will kill both of you. If you want a woman who wants to die to live then I will do all in my power to make it happen. If you want to be a duchess, then I will be a duke. Claire, don’t leave me.”

  It took her a long while before she smiled at him. And as she smiled at him, she slid into his arms, and she knew that it was the right place for her to be.

  “No, I won’t leave you,” she whispered. “I will never leave you again.”

  Epilogue

  Claire confronted her parents with the news that she was marrying a man other than Harry and they, predictably, said they would not approve her marriage to an expl
orer. Trevelyan closeted himself with her parents for fifteen minutes and when he opened the door, her parents, white-faced, said they would agree to the marriage. None of the three of them would tell what Trevelyan had said to make them change their minds, and Claire didn’t like to think about what he must have said—or threatened.

  Claire married Trevelyan in a quiet ceremony, and as soon as he was well enough, they went to Africa, where Trevelyan, still as Captain Baker, could make more of his journeys into the interior. Claire stayed on the coast and waited for him. She wrote a book about their life in Africa, which, to Trevelyan’s disbelief, became a best-seller. Encouraged by her success, Claire wrote several more books about their travels, and when she had a few gray hairs, she wrote the book that was the achievement of her life: a biography of Captain Frank Baker. But with the exception of the biography, Claire’s books did not withstand the test of time as Trevelyan’s did. His books were irreplaceable studies of people as they were before the influence of Westerners; a hundred years later the books are still read and enjoyed by generations of scholars and adventure seekers.

  Claire and Trevelyan were temperamentally well matched. They traveled all over the world together and were inseparable companions for all of their very long lives.

  Claire’s parents and her sister stayed with the Montgomery family, and eventually Brat married Harry—who kept the title of duke. They were well suited to each other. They loved each other in the physical sense but led completely separate lives. Brat became a renowned hostess and Harry was the greatest huntsman in England. The extraordinary beauty of the two of them produced a few exceptionally beautiful children.

  Because Brat was very conscious of the possibility of poverty, she became an excellent money manager and greatly increased the Montgomery fortunes (Claire helped her with this).

  Eugenia, the dowager duchess, retired to the dower house when Brat married Harry and was little seen after that.

  Angus MacTarvit’s sons came back from America and began producing MacTarvit whisky on a larger scale, and they were very successful.

  Nyssa stayed with the Montgomery family and lived to be ninety-five years old. She never married, and to the day she died she believed herself to be the most beautiful woman in the world—and she always had many young men around her who believed this as well.

  Dear Readers,

  Two weeks ago I finished a very special book. I don’t say that about all my books because the truth is, being a writer is rather like playing a never-ending game of Russian roulette. You never know what’s going to happen when you start a book, and as far as I can tell, there’s no way to predict the outcome. You can research for months, plot for months and when you write, the book just plain doesn’t have any sparkle. Once I spent six weeks traveling all over western America doing research for a novel about mountain men, then spent three months reading and plotting, but when I started writing the book, the hero and heroine didn’t like each other. Not romance-novel didn’t like, but genuinely cared nothing about each other. After a hundred and fifty pages, I threw the thing out—along with all that research—and started from scratch again.

  But every so often my Guardian Angel seems to say, “Let’s give Jude a break,” and when she does that I get a super book, a book that takes over my mind, my body, every fiber of my being. SWEET LIAR, the book I just completed, was just such a book.

  One day about a year ago, all day long I kept thinking about my grandmother, whom I loved very much, and that night on television there was a show about a man’s search for his grandmother, who had disappeared. The next day my editor called and said her grandmother had died the day before. These three things happening in the course of twenty-four hours made me think of a story of a young woman whose grandmother had left her family years before.

  Over the next few months I continued to work on a new novel, Eternity, but I also made lots of notes on my grandmother story. Then in April of 1991, I went to New York for a month to research my grandmother story, which I was now calling SWEET LIAR, and to see my friends. Ordinarily I am the most unsocial creature in the world. At home in Santa Fe I go out so seldom that I have my secretary start my car for me once a week so the battery won’t run down, but in New York, I go out to lunches and teas and movies—just like a normal person.

  The difference on this trip was that suddenly I didn’t want to see anyone. I stayed in my rented apartment for the whole month, doing nothing but thinking about SWEET LIAR—and for the next six months I thought of nothing else but this book.

  Sometimes I don’t talk about my books, but with this one I never shut up. If anyone had the misfortune to call me and ask how I was doing, it would be ten minutes before I quit telling them about SWEET LIAR.

  I was so wrapped up in this book and its characters that I cried for the entire last two weeks of writing it. I think the love story in SWEET LIAR is the most poignant, the most meaningful, the most personal one I’ve ever written. During the last three days of writing I didn’t sleep or eat much, I just typed and cried. I don’t know if the author bawling through the end of her book is a recommendation or not, but I can attest to the fact that the book is indeed involving.

  Last of all, I want to tell you that SWEET LIAR has a contemporary setting. Throughout my career I’ve found that each of my stories demanded its own special time and place. From its conception, SWEET LIAR cried out to be set in the present day. When I wrote A Knight in Shining Armor I thoroughly enjoyed working on the contemporary sections and so I was delighted to get the chance to write a novel set entirely in the modern world—a modern world with the fairy tale still in it.

  I loved everything about this book: the hero, the heroine, the story. And writing it was a great deal of fun (yes, even the parts where I cried were, in their own way, fun). I got to write about my beloved New York City, and I got to visit a few characters from some of my earlier books.

  On the day I finished the book, 14 August 1991, I went to my secretary’s office and told her I was done. She said I looked awful, but by then I hadn’t eaten or slept for nearly three days (no, I did not lose a single ounce. I guess my Guardian Angel is only willing to do so much) and I was shaky. After she read the book she said the story was worth whatever I had to go through to write it.

  I hope you, the reader, will like my story and will like my Michael Taggert as much as Samantha and I do.