The American Heiress Read online

  ‘I shall look forward to seeing Lulworth again. The shooting there has always been good. As soon as you have got the house to your liking, we will visit. I know the Prrrincess would like you.’

  Cora remembered what Ivo had told her about the building of the railway line and how it had almost bankrupted his father. She wondered how pleased Ivo would be to entertain the royal couple.

  ‘I look forward to entertaining Your Royal Highnesses at Lulworth, although being an American I feel I cannot have anyone to stay until we have sufficient bathrooms.’

  The Prince rumbled with laughter. ‘Hear that, Fanny? Your new Duchess thinks Lulworth is unhygienic.’

  The Double Duchess smiled at him lazily. ‘We seemed to manage, though, didn’t we, sir. Perhaps I am just set in my ways but I cannot help but think there is more to life than hot water. But Cora has grown up with every convenience, so it is only right that she should mould Lulworth to her own taste. I just hope the character of the place may be preserved. It is such an atmospheric house.’ The Duchess’s voice dropped to its most thrilling timbre. ‘Although I love it here at Conyers, I do miss the romance of Lulworth, the mist on the trees in the morning, and the Maltravers ghosts. Poor Lady Eleanor and her broken heart. I do think there is something peculiarly English about Lulworth. It is as if a little bit of England’s soul had been frozen there forever.’

  The Prince leant over to Cora, and raised an eyebrow. ‘The question is, can Lulworth have soul and hot water?’

  Cora did not hesitate. She was tired of Duchess Fanny’s condescension. ‘Most definitely, Your Highness. In my country we have houses that have history and bathrooms. We even have ghosts.’ She flashed her most jaunty smile at the Prince and her mother-in-law. The Prince gave her an appraising glance. The American girl had spirit.

  ‘Well, there you have it, Fanny. The voice of the New World,’ and he shot the Double Duchess a malicious glance, to show that he thought that she had been bested by her daughter-in-law. And then, as if suddenly bored of the rivalry between the two women which he had stirred up, he began to drum his fingers on the table. The Double Duchess saw this with alarm and hastily changed the subject to the composition of the bridge fours after dinner.

  Cora leant forward in the hope of seeing Ivo. He was still talking to Lady Bessborough even though by rights he should be talking to Charlotte. As she turned back to her plate, she noticed that Odo Beauchamp was staring at his wife. Despite their rancorous little exchange earlier, it struck Cora that he was looking at Charlotte as if he could not bear to let her out of his sight.

  The meal went on and on. The Prince tackled each one of the nine courses with relish and teased Cora, who found she had lost her appetite, for not doing the food justice.

  At last the Double Duchess gave the signal for the ladies to withdraw. When the ladies had followed her into the drawing room, Cora was surprised to find that Charlotte came to sit next to her.

  ‘So have you survived the ordeal?’ Charlotte’s voice was friendly.

  Cora smiled uncertainly. ‘I think so. It was a very long dinner.’

  ‘The Prince likes his food. Anything less than nine courses and he thinks you are trying to starve him. I simply dread the day he decides to stay with us. Everything, the guests, the menus, the seating plans, even the sleeping arrangements have to be approved before he comes. Even Aunt Fanny gets nervous.’ Charlotte looked over to the Double Duchess, who was drinking coffee with Lady Bessborough.

  ‘I didn’t know she was your aunt. Does that mean you and Ivo are cousins?’ Cora was curious. Ivo had never mentioned that he was related to Charlotte.

  ‘No, aunt is just a courtesy title. My mother and Aunt Fanny were friends as girls. Then they both got married.’ Charlotte gave a little shrug. ‘Aunt Fanny married a duke and my mother married an army officer who died when I was a baby. But they remained friends. My mother died when I was sixteen and Aunt Fanny took me in. She had promised my mother that she would bring me out. She kept her promise.’ Charlotte’s smile had a slightly hard edge to it.

  Cora tried to imagine what it would be like to have no family.

  ‘I can’t think what it must be like to be an orphan.’ She thought of the way her mother had monitored every minute of her life until her marriage.

  Charlotte gave her a half smile. ‘I hope you won’t be shocked if I tell you that it is liberating.’

  Cora was shocked, but then she thought of the endless afternoons in Sans Souci and she nodded at Charlotte. ‘I think I understand.’

  Charlotte put her hand on Cora’s arm. ‘Good. I hope that means we can be friends.’

  Cora was surprised at this but tried not to show it. She said in what she had come to think of as her Duchess voice, ‘I hope so too.’

  Before Charlotte could say any more, there was a flurry of activity as the men arrived. The guests were organised into bridge tables. Charlotte was summoned by the Double Duchess and with a rueful backward glance at Cora she was swallowed up into the card players.

  And then to Cora’s relief she saw Ivo’s tall figure coming towards her.

  He sat down next to her in the place just vacated by Charlotte. She was about to tell him about her conversation, when he said quietly, ‘In a minute my mother is going to ask me to play the piano. When she does I want you to come with me. We’ll give them the Schubert.’

  Cora looked at him in dismay. ‘But Ivo, I haven’t been practising. I can’t play in front of all these people.’

  He smiled at her. ‘Don’t worry, no one here is going to notice if you hit a wrong note. We will do very nicely.’

  Cora swallowed and tried to smile back.

  As Ivo had predicted, a moment later the Double Duchess approached them.

  ‘Dear Cora, would you mind awfully if I asked Ivo to play for us? It would be such a treat.’ She turned to her son. ‘I don’t remember the last time I heard you play.’

  ‘Don’t you, Mother? It was a long time ago.’ Ivo stared at his mother, who lowered her gaze.

  Ivo stood up and kept Cora’s hand in his so she had no choice but to follow him. Cora saw the flicker of incomprehension in her mother-in-law’s eyes as he took her with him to the piano, and then as they sat down together in front of the keyboard, she watched the Duchess turn her face to the side suddenly, as if she had been struck.

  Ivo’s hands were poised over the keys. He looked at Cora gravely. ‘Are you ready? One, two, three…’

  They plunged into the Schubert. Cora played harder than she had ever done before. She could feel the Duchess watching her. As they played, the room grew silent, even the card players paused to listen. Her part supported his rippling arpeggios with a succession of minor chords; if her timing was a fraction out, the piece would sound discordant and harsh, but Ivo was with her, hovering above the foundation she was laying with his own comments and interpolations. A few bars before the end, Cora had forgotten the other people in the room, she was completely caught up in the music. She could feel Ivo’s leg pressed against hers and she found herself swaying with him as they reached the finale. As they came to the last bars, she knew they were perfectly in time and she gave her last chord every ounce of feeling she possessed. The sound faded away and she leant against him.

  Ivo whispered in her ear, ‘I told you we would do well together.’

  And then he was up, smiling his acknowledgement of the applause that greeted the end of the piece. He turned to her and lifted her hand and kissed it. The applause grew louder still. Cora felt herself blushing.

  She heard the Prince saying to Ivo, ‘So you’ve found yourself a new parrrtner, Wareham. I rrremember you used to play with your mother. But I think your new Duchess is quite capable of keeping up with you, what.’

  ‘You are very perceptive, sir.’ Ivo made a little bow to the Prince.

  Duchess Fanny approached in full throaty flight. ‘My dears, what a musical honeymoon you must have had.’ She turned to Cora. ‘I hope Ivo didn’t make you pra
ctise all the time?’

  Cora smiled but said nothing. She knew that her mother-in-law was furious at having been upstaged. As Fanny moved on, Cora caught a glimpse of Charlotte Beauchamp, who was sitting very still, her arms folded. As the Prince went back towards the card table, Charlotte rose to greet him and Cora saw that she had four red marks on her smooth white upper arm where the nails had dug into the skin.

  That night, Cora sent Bertha away as soon as she was out of her dress. Before her marriage she would have told her maid everything about the evening, but Ivo had made it clear that he did not think that a duchess should be gossiping with the servants. He had even wondered whether Bertha was an altogether suitable maid for a Duchess, but Cora had refused to listen, Bertha was the only familiar thing in her new life. But out of loyalty to Ivo’s wishes, she no longer confided in her maid as she used to. Now as she sat in front of the dressing-table mirror brushing her hair, she felt lonely. She thought of writing to her mother. Mrs Cash would want to know every detail of her encounter with the Prince. She wondered what her mother would think if she wrote what she really thought, which was that the Prince was fat and alarming and that he had pressed his foot against hers several times during dinner. She ran her hand over the smooth skirts of her wedding dress lying on the chair; she would not wear it again.

  She was tired, but she was too anxious to sleep. She wanted desperately to see Ivo. If only she could go and find him. She sat on the bed, twisting her hair, waiting for the door to open. At last she heard his step outside. He looked flushed and before she could tell him anything he was kissing her bare neck and shoulders and tugging at the strings of her peignoir and she was caught up in the urgency of the moment.

  When he finally reared up, giving a yelp of what was both pain and pleasure, she pushed herself towards him, willing him to continue. She wanted him to stay deep inside her forever – only by keeping him there would he be really hers. As he collapsed, spent, she still yearned for him. She lay in the dark for a while, listening to him breathe; once he stirred and pulled her to him, whispering her name. She moulded herself against him and at last she, too, fell asleep. But when she woke in the morning, he was gone.

  Chapter 16

  Madonna and Child

  IT WAS THE FIRST REALLY COLD DAY OF THE YEAR and the track leading down to the sea was beginning to be covered by fallen leaves. This was Cora’s favourite part of the ride: going down the narrow pathway through the wood where the undergrowth was so dense that she could see only a few feet ahead, and then about halfway down the rumble would begin and she began to smell the salty tang of the sea air through the rotting smell of leaf mould. The wood ended and then she was on the cliff overlooking the cove. She thought that it looked like a lady’s drawstring purse, a weighted oval with an opening through a break in the cliffs into the sea. The mist that had lain over Lulworth all week had finally been blown away. Today the sea beyond the cliffs was dark blue and here in the shallower waters of the cove it was almost turquoise. The sun had turned the sandstone cliffs a warm gold. But for the bite in the air, it might have been summer. There were sheep grazing on the fields surrounding her, their white shapes echoed by the stray white clouds in the sky. Cora loved the scale of the cove, the coastline was so charming here compared to the rocky outcrops and pounding surf of Rhode Island. She looked at her pocket watch – eleven o’clock. She should turn back, Ivo might return tonight and she wanted to make sure that everything was ready.

  After their week at Conyers they had come back to Lulworth, but Ivo had almost immediately been called away to his estates in Ireland. There had been a rent strike and Ivo did not trust his steward to handle it alone. She had wanted to go with him but there had been Fenian activity in the area and he had declared it too dangerous. The last seven days were the longest they had been apart since their marriage six months ago in March. Ivo had suggested, almost seriously, that she might go back to Conyers while he was away but Cora had chosen to stay at Lulworth. She had wanted to get to know the house, to make it hers. When Ivo was there she was always conscious of his relationship with the house; every inch of it, she knew, had meaning for him. On their return from their honeymoon, Cora had been shown the Duchess’s rooms, a set of exquisitely panelled rooms on the south side of the house facing the sea. She had been delighted with their proportions, their lightness and the distant glimpse of a triangle of sea through the shouldered hills. She had at once decided to make these rooms her own and had ordered new furnishings, jettisoning the red velvets and beaded fringes that the Double Duchess had favoured in favour of a Liberty fabric with birds and pomegranates. The first night after the rooms were finished, Cora had got ready for bed and waited for Ivo. He had been late, it was past eleven, and when he came in, instead of embracing her, he had skirted round the room, touching the curtains and the walls like a dog getting to know unfamiliar territory. In the end she had taken his hand and led him to the bed but there he had been restless and angular and had left her in the small hours. He had even smelt different, there had been a sour undercurrent to his normally warm sweet skin. This behaviour had gone on for three nights, with Ivo behaving as normal during the day but turning into a twitchy facsimile of himself at night. Cora had tried to talk to him about it but he had been evasive, so the next night she had gone to his room, the Duke’s room, and Ivo had fallen on her before she had even closed the door. Clearly no amount of new curtains could erase his mother’s presence from her rooms. After that she only used the Duchess’s apartments during the day when Ivo was out on the estate.

  Cora tilted her face to the sun and closed her eyes. It was not warm, thanks to the south-westerly wind, but she enjoyed the light burning through her eyelids. The sun was the thing she missed most; at home she had always taken it for granted but here every sunny day felt like a blessing. She opened her eyes and looked out to sea and saw a flash of white in the waters just beyond the mouth of the cove. She kicked Lincoln’s flanks and trotted along the cliff for a closer look. As she grew nearer she saw that it was a pod of dolphins lacing through the waves. There were about five of them moving in unison as they spiralled through the water. Cora had seen individual dolphins before in Newport but this was the first time she had seen a pod and she found herself smiling till her cheeks ached.

  Usually, about halfway back to the house, Lincoln would prick up his ears and she would let him canter home. But today she did not let him have his head but reined him in tightly as they walked sedately back up the hill. Lincoln snorted in protest but Cora did not relent. Normally she liked to be shaken up but today she wanted to prolong her state of dreamy content. As she approached the stables a groom ran out to take Lincoln.

  ‘Good morning, Your Grace.’ The groom touched his cap and led Lincoln over to the mounting block.

  ‘What a beautiful day! I saw some dolphins in the bay. Is that common round here?’

  The groom scratched his head. ‘Well, I’z bin here close on seventeen years and I ain’t never seen no dolphins, Your Grace.’ The groom clicked his teeth and held out his hand to Cora as she dismounted. ‘They say as dolphins are lucky, and Lulworth ain’t had much luck lately, though I reckon that’s changin’.’ And the groom smiled, showing a row of broken brown teeth, his eyes moving across her body.

  Cora’s understanding lagged behind as she struggled to decipher the man’s thick Dorset accent, but then she felt herself flushing. What did he mean? How could he possibly know? She had only begun to suspect herself these last few days. No one else knew, except possibly Bertha, and she was unlikely to start gossiping to the grooms. She threw down her whip and gloves and stalked off towards the house. As she reached the garden entrance, the butler appeared with a telegram on a silver salver. She tore it open.

  ‘It’s from the Duke, Bugler, to say he will be here for dinner. Have they finished in the chapel?’

  ‘Yes, Your Grace. I think the men are only waiting for you to come and approve their work.’

  ‘Have you seen it
? Do you think the Duke will be pleased?’

  Bugler looked at her from under his hooded eyelids. He had worked at the house for thirty years, starting as a footman, then under-butler, and he had been in his present position for the last ten years. He had many duties: the upkeep of the family silver, the maintenance of the cellar, upholding good behaviour in the servants’ hall, even the conveying of bad news (it had fallen to him to tell Duchess Fanny about her older son’s death) but he was not paid to have opinions. The new American Duchess should know better than to ask.

  ‘I really couldn’t say, Your Grace.’

  ‘But you saw the old one, do you think this one is as good?’

  ‘They both seem to be of the same size, Your Grace.’

  Cora gave up. ‘Tell them I will be up there directly I’ve changed.’

  Bugler noted with disapproval that the new Duchess ran up the stairs to her rooms, holding her habit so high that he could see her legs nearly to her knees. Cora was running because she had felt an overwhelming desire to be sick. If only she could reach her room first. But her door was a good hundred yards away. To her horror she found herself on her knees retching on the carpet in the corridor. She prayed that Bugler had not seen. Feeling clammy and shaky, she got to her room and rang for Bertha.

  Before Bertha reached the Duchess, the mess on the carpet had been cleaned up by Mabel the housemaid, who had seen the whole episode. By the time that Bertha had sponged her mistress’s temples with eau de cologne and had helped her into her morning dress, and the cook had sent up some dry toast and weak tea, the news of the Duchess’s indisposition had spread through the servants’ hall, much to the jubilation of the second footman, who had drawn May in the downstairs sweepstake on the birth of an heir.

  Aloysius and Jerome, the Duke’s dogs, followed Cora as she walked up the path to the chapel. It had been nearly a year since she had first seen the chapel. Every time she had entered it since then, she had felt reproached by the rectangle of light paint above the altar. In Venice she had written to Duveen Brothers, the art dealers who her mother used, and asked them if they could trace the painting of St Cecilia that had hung there. In July she had received a letter telling her that the painting had been sold to one Cyrus Guest of San Francisco, who was not minded to sell. Undaunted, Cora had asked the dealers to find another painting by Rubens that would fit in the alcove above the altar in the Lulworth chapel. Two weeks later Duveen wrote to say that there was a Madonna and Child by the same painter being offered for sale by an impoverished Irish earl. Was the Duchess interested in viewing it? Cora decided to buy the painting on the spot. A Rubens was a Rubens, after all. The price had been higher than she had expected but she had found that reassuring.