The American Duchess Read online

  She had been pleased by what she had seen. There was scarcely a flaw to be found in Tracy’s deportment. The girl moved and spoke and gestured with all the unconscious grace one usually saw only in women of great beauty. Tracy was not a great beauty; her eyes were too widely set, her nose too short, her mouth too full, to qualify her for that category. But when one looked at Tracy, one did not notice these defects; one saw the vitality, the carefree brilliance, the vivid charm. It was generally accepted in London that she was the prettiest girl anyone had seen for quite some time.

  It was a pity that she was an American, but Lady Bridgewater had decided to overlook that flaw. There was something faintly exotic in her being an American, the Duke’s aunt decided. And an American was preferable to the daughter of some vulgar cit. Tracy was not vulgar. Nor was her father, though he was certainly different.

  It never occurred to Lady Bridgewater to wonder if Tracy might not take kindly to the position she was being considered for so carefully. Adrian St. John Geoffrey George Deincourt was the eleventh earl and sixth duke of his line. He was twenty-six years of age, heartbreakingly handsome and utterly charming. Lady Bridgewater knew all too well the fatal attraction her nephew appeared to exercise upon her own sex. She had observed his behavior with her usual acuteness the winter before last in Paris. It might be an exaggeration to say that all of the women in his circle were in love with him, but then again, it might not.

  It was perfectly clear to Lady Bridgewater that any young lady who was offered the chance of becoming the bride of her nephew—her nephew who was as beautiful as a god; who had the bluest blood in England running through his veins; who was the Duke of Hastings, the foremost young man in England, (which meant in the world) —any young lady offered such a chance would thank heaven on her knees and jump at it.

  Chapter 3

  This is the prettiest lowborn lass that ever

  Ran on the greensward.

  —Shakespeare

  Tracy Bodmin stifled a yawn and replied politely to the observation of Lady Margaret Southington, who was seated next to her on the sofa. The ladies were in the drawing room of Lady Margaret’s house in Grosvenor Square. The gentlemen were still sitting over their port in the dining room. For the last half hour Tracy had been wishing devoutly that she were in the dining room as well. She did not admire the English custom of separating the men and women after dinner. She found English women very hard to talk to.

  “Do you like London, Miss Bodmin?” asked her hostess, clearly trying to find the proper way to speak to an American.

  Tracy smiled. “Everyone has been most kind to Papa and me.”

  “It must be so interesting for you, meeting so many new people and seeing so many new things,” Lady Margaret smiled with conscious grace.

  Tracy looked at that superior smile and felt a flash of temper. The smugness of the English, she thought. She had never in her life been patronized until she had come to England.

  “It is enjoyable, certainly, to see new people and new things,” she returned pleasantly. “But I guess one always likes most what one knows best. I shall be glad to see home again.”

  Lady Margaret raised a skeptical eyebrow. “You come from Boston, I believe?”

  “From Salem,” said Tracy definitely.

  “I am afraid I am woefully ignorant of American geography,” said Lady Margaret graciously.

  “Really? I’m so sorry,” said Tracy. Lady Margaret stared. It was presumably the first time she had been condoled with upon her ignorance.

  The door opened and Tracy felt a surge of relief as the gentlemen came in.

  There was an empty chair next to the sofa and three young men headed directly for it. Lord James Belton was the victor and, sitting down, he proceeded to do all he could to make himself agreeable to Tracy. Tracy smiled at him, delighted to be talking to someone who wasn’t Lady Margaret. All the young men she had met in London had been very pleasant, but then that was nothing unusual. Tracy was used to young men who made themselves pleasant. The fact that many of these young men were styled “Lord” something or other meant very little to her. She found the ranks and standings of the English aristocracy vague and basically uninteresting.

  Tracy was a true daughter of the American Revolution, a republican to her fingertips. She was proud of her family, proud that her father had worked his way from ship’s boy to where he stood today. If truth were known, her mind was as prejudiced as those of the people with whom she was now consorting, only in the opposite direction. To Tracy there was actually a special virtue in being lowborn; to her mind only the self-made bore the mark of true ability. For those who lived off the wealth of their ancestors she felt something that might with some accuracy be called contempt.

  However, there was not a trace of contempt in the flashing smile she turned upon Lord Belton. That young man, clearly bedazzled, pulled his chair a little closer to the sofa. “I say, you are looking awfully pretty tonight. Miss Bodmin,” he said. Tracy laughed and made an appropriate reply.

  Later that night, as she was preparing for bed, Tracy went over again in her mind the strangeness of her present position. She had no idea why her father had taken it into his head to come to England, nor, now that they were here, did she understand why they lingered. William Bodmin was clearly enjoying himself, and clearly delighted by their reception in English society. He was, however, the kind of man who always had a purpose. It was not like him to spend his time simply in the pursuit of pleasure, yet that appeared to be what he was doing.

  It was not that Tracy begrudged her father his pleasure. It was the oddity of his behavior that concerned her. And she was worried about his health as well. He had a chronic cough that she did not like, and he appeared to lose his breath far too easily. She had had no success in getting him to see a doctor.

  “I’m just fine. Trace,” he would say heartily. “Just not as young as I used to be, that’s all.” Which was nonsense, to Tracy’s mind. One did not, at age fifty-eight, suddenly develop a cough. But he seemed to get annoyed when she pushed him, and so she had let the matter drop. But she worried.

  In most ways she was enjoying her visit to England. She was moving among people whose ways were unknown to her and she often felt like standing still and just staring at all of them - they seemed so strange and exotic. But the experience was interesting, and many people—especially the young men—had gone out of their way to be friendly. She didn’t exactly approve of the English, but she really couldn’t dislike them.

  And there was one area in which she admitted, without reservation, that they excelled over Americans. Tracy had a great love for, and an enormous appreciation of, the written word. It was tremendously exciting for her to think that she was in the very country that had produced writers like William Shakespeare and John Milton and Samuel Johnson. Samuel Coleridge, whom she idolized, was actually living in London at the present time, and it was Tracy’s fondest hope that she might meet him. She had recently been reading a newly published poem by a hitherto unknown poet: it was called Endymion: A Poetic Romance, and Tracy was in ecstasy about it and about the author, Mr. John Keats. She thought she could forgive much of a nation that produced writers like these.

  She picked up Endymion now as she got into bed. Her mind was uneasy and she turned, from long habit, to the never failing magic of literature. She read for half an hour and then put out her lamp and went to sleep.

  She had a visit the following afternoon that seriously ruffled the tranquility of her feelings toward the English. She and her father were staying at the Clarendon Hotel, and Tracy was sitting by herself reading in the drawing room of their suite, when Lord Belton was announced. No unmarried English lady would dream of receiving a gentleman caller without a chaperone, but Tracy was not an English lady and was accustomed to speaking and walking with a young gentleman just as she might with another young lady. So she put her book down and smiled as Lord Belton came into the room.

  That young man took the hand she offer
ed and stood for a moment gazing into her face. Tracy recovered her hand gently but decidedly. “Why are you not at your club. Lord Belton?” she asked. “I thought all English gentlemen spent the day at their clubs.”

  “I had much rather come to see you,” said Lord Belton simply. Really, he thought, as he took a deep breath and prepared to take the plunge, really she was quite the prettiest girl he had ever seen.

  “That is very nice of you,” she was saying. “May I give you some tea, Lord Belton?”

  “No.” They were by this time sitting opposite each other on the long sofa. “Actually, Miss Bodmin, I have come here with a definite purpose in mind. It is to tell you how much I love you, so much in fact that I wish to make you my wife.”

  There was a little pause. “I thank you for your admiration, Lord Belton,” said Tracy at last. “I am honored. But I cannot be your wife.”

  The young man moved closer to her on the sofa and managed to possess himself of her hand. “Do not say that!” he said earnestly. “Of course there will be some little fuss about it, your being an American, I mean, but no one will hold it against you, I assure you.”

  Tracy’s back stiffened. “Indeed?”

  “I have a very good income of my own. I want you to know that I am not interested in your money.” “Indeed?” said Tracy again.

  “I can give you as good a position as any man in England. You will be Lady Belton.”

  “Lord Belton,” Tracy said with dangerous calm, “I rather think that wherever I am, I can make a position for myself. I am the daughter of William Bodmin. I do not need you to lend me countenance.”

  “Of course you do not!” said Lord Belton hastily, conscious at last that he had erred. “I did not mean that personally you lacked for anything. I simply meant to say that I can make an English lady out of you.”

  “You have said quite enough, Lord Belton.” Tracy rose to her feet and stared at the young man, her eyes flashing. “I am an American citizen and that is quite good enough for me. I have no desire to aspire to the heights of being an ‘English lady.’”

  “Miss Bodmin, you have mistaken my meaning ...” said Lord Belton miserably.

  “Perhaps I have. However, let you not mistake mine. I do not wish to marry you, sir. You may take your title and your income elsewhere.” And she rang the bell.

  “And is this all the answer I am to have?” he asked, beginning to look angry.

  “You have asked me a question and I have replied,” said Tracy. “You will find consolation enough in the future when you realize the horrors I have spared you.” The waiter from the hotel came in and Tracy said, “Lord Belton is leaving.”

  Lord Belton picked up his hat, looked unhappily at Tracy’s implacable face, and left.

  Tracy had not completely recovered her tranquility by the time she and her father were leaving for Lady Bridgewater’s reception that evening. There was no doubt at all in Tracy’s mind that she was one of the best, and she resented fiercely Lord Belton’s implication that marriage to him would raise her in the eyes of the world. It was all part of the smug patronage she had detected in the English attitude toward Americans. It was not an attitude that Tracy appreciated.

  However, she said nothing to her father about Lord Belton’s proposal. One of the things that was beginning to disturb her most was the suspicion that her father would agree with Lord Belton’s assessment of the situation, not with hers. And she was also afraid that her father would not regard with the same disdain as she a proposal of marriage from Lord Belton, a man whom Tracy would not have considered marrying even had he been an American. He was good looking enough, she supposed, but stupid. Compared to Adam Lancaster he was trivial and inconsequential.

  Chapter 4

  The courtier, therefore, beside nobleness of birth I will have him to be fortunate in this behalf, and by nature to have not only a wit and a comely shape of person and countenance, but of so a certain grace, and, as they say, a hue that shall make him at the first sight acceptable and loving unto whoso beholdeth him.

  -Castiglione, the Book of the Courtier

  Lady Bridgewater’s reception was not as large as Tracy had anticipated. Her experience with London social functions had been that they were generally conducted on a massive scale. A reception for a mere fifty or so people seemed very small. As she caught herself thinking this, Tracy was conscious of a flash of amusement. Until her visit to London her idea of a big social function had been a subscription ball for 150 people at Hamilton Hall in Salem. In all her previous life, she had been to but one formal dinner, at the Derby family mansion on Chestnut Street.

  Salem did not go in for a grand social life. Tracy was used to occasions like sleigh-riding parties in winter or fishing parties in the bay in summer. Society, as it was conducted in London, had been amazing to her.

  Lady Bridgewater greeted the Bodmins with a warm smile and looked with particular approval at Tracy. The girl, she thought, was always immaculately groomed. Tracy seemed to have the knack of looking just right no matter what the occasion. Her clothing was simple, elegant and expensive.

  This evening she was wearing a gown of lemon yellow Italian silk that served to bring out the blonde in her hair. She wore an exquisite string of matched pearls around her neck, and pearl-encrusted combs held her hair back from her temples. That hair was allowed to fall in a seemingly careless tumble of silky curls almost to her shoulders. Lady Bridgewater had no doubt that Tracy’s distinctive look of casual perfection took hard hours of preparation, but the result was always fresh and delightful.

  “I am happy to see you this evening, my dear,” Lady Bridgewater said kindly. “I have not planned anything too elaborate—just a gathering of a few friends.”

  What Lady Bridgewater did not say was that those friends were the crème de la crème of English society, that people would be willing to kill for an invitation to one of these “gatherings of a few friends,” and that the inclusion of the Bodmins was occasioning a great deal of comment.

  Tracy, completely oblivious to the honor she had been accorded, smiled back at Lady Bridgewater and went with her father to speak to the Princesse de Lieven. About fifteen minutes later, as Tracy was speaking to Lord Morehouse, a little rustle of electricity ran around the room, and Tracy automatically looked around. The disturbance seemed to be caused by a young man who was standing in the doorway speaking to Lady Bridgewater. As Tracy watched, he offered his arm to the Countess and they advanced together into the room. They stopped for a moment to speak to Mrs. Nesbet and her daughter, who both curtsied.

  “Who is that?” Tracy asked Lord Morehouse curiously.

  “That, my dear young lady, is Lady Bridgewater’s nephew, the Duke of Hastings. No one has seen very much of him since he came back from Paris last winter after his father’s death. He must have come up to London for her ladyship’s reception.” Lord Morehouse was watching the Duke as well. “One has always heard of him, of course.”

  The Duke was slowly circling the room with his aunt, stopping to greet people as he progressed, and Tracy was conscious of a sudden feeling that the room had expanded, had become higher and wider and more appointed for occasions of state and royalty. It was an odd impression to receive from the mere sight of a slender young man, however good looking he might be, at a reception.

  Resolutely, she went back to talking to Lord Morehouse. Ten minutes later, Lady Bridgewater was at her side. “Miss Bodmin, I should like very much to introduce you to my nephew, the Duke of Hastings,” she said smiling. “Adrian, may I present Miss Teresa Bodmin, of Salem, Massachusetts.”

  Tracy held out her hand. As a good republican she had no intention of curtseying to anyone, and most certainly not to an English aristocrat. “How do you do, Miss Bodmin?” said the Duke, receiving her hand into his own. “I had the pleasure of the acquaintance of your Minister in Paris, Mr. Gallatin, and I remember him speaking highly of your father. I understand you are visiting London for a few months?”

  Tracy was
immediately disarmed. She gave him a friendly smile. “Yes. That is, Papa and I have been here for a month now, and I haven’t heard him say anything about leaving, so I guess you might say we are here for a while.”

  “Splendid.” He smiled back at her and turned to say a few words to include Lord Morehouse in the conversation. After another minute or so the Duke and Lady Bridgewater moved off, and Tracy saw them go up to her father, with whom they remained in conversation for at least fifteen minutes.

  Ever since the Duke had come in, the atmosphere in the room had changed. Tracy sensed it, sensed that people were looking at him, sensed the almost awed respect with which people addressed him. He was a presence even though he did nothing that seemed to attract attention.

  He was, in fact, a slender young man of no more than average height. Adam Lancaster, who was six feet three inches at least, was physically much more imposing, thought Tracy to herself, as if she had to justify her feelings about the Duke.

  Half an hour later she was seated on one of the small gilt chairs talking to Sir Arthur Brett, when the Duke, this time by himself, approached them. The Duke said to Sir Arthur, “Would you mind giving me your chair so that I may talk with Miss Bodmin for a while?”

  Tracy was amazed by such rudeness, but the Duke was smiling charmingly at Sir Arthur, who got up with alacrity. Evidently he was not at all put out and considered it a privilege to be able to vacate his chair for the Duke of Hastings.

  “I have a very high opinion of Americans, you see,” the Duke said to Tracy when he was seated next to her, “and I take whatever opportunity I can to further my acquaintance with your countrymen.”