The Duke Comes Home Read online

  She had, before she went round the house with the Duke, told Mrs. Bird to take the best sheets, which were monogrammed and trimmed with lace, out of the linen cupboard and put them in the Master bedroom, which her father had always used.

  She had intended while the Duke had dinner to make up the bed for him and, when they came from the library, which had been the last place they visited, the Duke’s servant was waiting for him in the hall.

  He salaamed in Eastern fashion as the Duke said,

  “Oh, here you are, Singh. You have brought everything that I wanted with you?”

  “Yes, Master,” Singh replied in very good English. “Some tradesmen kept me waiting longer than promised, but I have most things the Lord Sahib requires.”

  “Good,” the Duke said, “and I imagine you found my room?”

  “Yes, Lord Sahib and have made up bed.”

  He looked a little curiously at Ilina and the Duke said,

  “This is Miss Ashley, who is in charge of the house. If there is anything you need, you should ask her assistance.”

  Singh then salaamed to Ilina and she told him,

  “I am sure that the butler will show you where you can sleep and will make you as comfortable as possible.”

  “Thank you, Memsahib.”

  Singh salaamed again, and the Duke turned to Ilina,

  “As Singh will have my bath ready, I will go now and change for dinner. I shall expect you to dine with me. Miss Ashley.”

  Ilina hesitated, wondering what she should reply and he said with a slight twist to his lips,

  “I find that the ghosts of my ancestors and the disapproving way that they look down at me from their frames somewhat overwhelming and definitely indigestible. The least you can do is to go on trying to persuade me that they are different from how they appear.”

  The way he spoke made Ilina give a little laugh as she replied,

  “Thank you, Your Grace, for your invitation. I am sure that you are aware it is not usual for the Curator to eat in the dining room.”

  “If you are worried about the conventions, Miss Ashley,” the Duke commented dryly, “I cannot imagine who you are afraid of shocking except, of course, those who are no longer with us thank goodness!”

  The way he spoke took the smile from Ilina’s lips.

  Then, as he walked slowly up the fine carved Georgian staircase, she ran to the pantry.

  “His Grace insists that I dine with him,” she told Bird, who was taking the silver candelabrum from the safe.

  “That’s as it should be, my Lady.”

  “Miss!” Ilina corrected him. “Lay another place and, as Mrs. Bird will have Gladys to help her, she will not miss me.”

  She did not wait for old Bird to reply, but ran up a side staircase that led her to the West wing where the schoolroom was situated.

  When it came to dinner gowns, she had very little choice except for those that had belonged to her mother and were hanging in the wardrobe of the room that had once been occupied by the Governess.

  Until now Ilina had never had an occasion to wear them and so she had not had time to change them from a crinoline into a bustle.

  But, rather than wear the old gown that she had put on every evening while her father was ill and there had been nobody to see her and which she thought was almost bursting at the seams, she took down one of her mother’s pretty dresses.

  It was made in the blue that matched her eyes and the crinoline swung out from her slender waist while her shoulders were encircled with a bertha of lace embroidered with small pearls.

  When she had it on, she wondered if the Duke would think that she looked like a picture in the family album and almost ludicrously out of fashion.

  Then she told herself that it did not worry her what he thought. What was important was to persuade him to repair the house and the farms.

  She could not believe that he had been serious when he said that he had no interest in being a Duke.

  But she had the alarming feeling that there was nobody but herself to persuade him that he must not only do his duty but bring honour to the family name and make it as prestigious as it had been in the past.

  Because she was frightened that she might fail, she looked up at the portrait of her brother and said in her heart,

  ‘Help me, David. Help me to make him see, as you did, that however remiss Papa may have been and, although Grandpapa’s extravagances have crippled us, the Burys must still contribute to the greatness of England, just as you would have done if you had lived.’

  As she spoke, she thought that David’s eyes were twinkling at her as if he understood, and at the same time was almost laughing at her intensity.

  It was as if he told her that eventually the Duke would become conscious of what was required of him simply because of the blood that coursed in his veins and the house itself would speak more eloquently than she could.

  ‘I only hope you are right,’ she said as if he had argued with her. ‘But he is a strange man and I don’t like him.”

  ‘You wanted him to be ruthless,’ she thought David said to her and she replied,

  ‘But for us – not against.’

  Then, as if she was suddenly aware that there was no more time to go on talking to her brother unless she was to be late for dinner, she ran downstairs to find, as she expected, that the Duke was already in the study.

  He held a glass in his hand and one quick glance told Ilina that there were two decanters on the silver tray that stood on the grog table, which meant that Bird had located the Madeira as she had told him to do.

  Then she realised that the Duke was looking at her somewhat critically and, although she had had no intention of making any explanation, she said almost despite herself,

  “I am afraid you will think I look very old-fashioned, but in this part of the world we have only just realised that the crinoline is out of date and that the bustle has taken its place.”

  “You look very charming. Miss Ashley.”

  He spoke in his usual dry, almost sarcastic tone, and she did not feel that it was much of a compliment.

  When he offered it, she accepted a small glass of Madeira, thinking that it was something she had not drunk since her father was crippled and the doctor had forbidden him any form of alcohol in case it should increase the pain that he was already suffering.

  Sometimes he would demand that a bottle of brandy be brought upstairs and he would drink it to drown the pain.

  When she remonstrated with him, he shouted furiously that, if he wanted to kill himself, he would do so without asking her permission.

  He could be very rude and very aggressive and, as the months went by and nothing the doctor gave him was of any use, Ilina felt it was only right that he should have what he wanted.

  If alcohol helped him, why should she object?

  When all the brandy in the cellar was finished, and there had been a great deal of it, her father had drunk what other spirits there were and was demanding more, which they could not possibly afford, when he died.

  Because the way he behaved when he was drunk was to Ilina’s mind so humiliating that her father’s valet had refused sometimes to let her enter his bedroom.

  Towards the end she was saved from seeing him except the next morning when he was suffering from a hangover.

  This made him so disagreeable that he was hardly recognisable as the man she had known as a child and whom she had loved.

  She often wondered how her mother would have coped with such a situation.

  Then she told herself miserably that, because her father had loved her mother, he would never in her lifetime have sunk to such depths of depravity.

  On the other hand she only made him worse because he hated her for not being the son he wanted her to be.

  Now it was all over and she tried never to think about it.

  But now there was a new problem of the new Duke to confront her.

  As he drank a small glass of sherry slowly and she thoug
ht abstemiously, Singh came to the door of the study to announce,

  “Dinner is served, Master.”

  Ilina was glad that old Bird did not have to walk the long way from the dining room to the study, which would have been a tax on his legs.

  She was even gladder when they reached the dining room to find that Singh was also waiting at table and, she noticed, fetching the dishes from the kitchen.

  Tonight’s meal was very different from what the Duke had been given for luncheon and Ilina guessed that he must have given the Birds some money to purchase it.

  There was soup to start with, but now it was made of cream and fresh mushrooms, which Jacobs must have been able to buy in the village.

  To follow there was a leg of spring lamb, which Ilina found delicious having subsisted for weeks on rabbits that Jacobs snared in the shrubs near the house or on pigeons, which the farmers gave her when they were scaring them off the crops.

  Mrs. Bird had cooked the lamb perfectly and the young chicken that followed it was so tender that it seemed to melt in the mouth.

  The Duke did full justice to both courses and appeared to enjoy the gooseberry fool and the stuffed tomatoes that followed as a savoury.

  It was the sort of meal that her father had appreciated when her mother was alive and Ilina knew that Mrs. Bird cooked well, especially when she had Gladys to whom she could demonstrate her culinary skill.

  To her surprise the Duke said as he had a second helping of the lamb,

  “There is no excuse, seeing how good your cook is, for you to be so thin, Miss Ashley. Or are you one of those tiresome females who are afraid of putting on weight?”

  Ilina laughed, knowing how little opportunity she had of being anything but a skeleton seeing how short of food they had been.

  Sometimes when the chickens refused to lay and Jacob’s snares caught no rabbits, there was nothing but vegetables from the overgrown garden to eat.

  She had often thought that if it was not for the potatoes, which because Williams’s arthritis was so bad she herself had planted, they would all have starved.

  In which case when the Duke had come to inspect his inheritance, he would have found the house peopled with skeletons.

  “What is worrying you?” the Duke asked suddenly.

  “Do I look – worried?”

  “You have looked worried ever since we met,” he replied. “Is it because I don’t agree with you on the inestimable importance of my ancestors?”

  “Surely what I have said makes you realise your own importance?” Ilina said, anxious to get away from the subject of herself.

  The Duke laughed.

  “I doubt if living here would make me feel important. Certainly not as things are at the moment.”

  “Once you have established yourself and people realise that there is another Duke of Tetbury, then there are a great number of opportunities open to you that you would not have anywhere else.”

  “And what can they be?” the Duke asked sceptically.

  He leaned back in the high armchair as he spoke and she had to admit that even though the evening clothes he wore were shabby and somewhat unconventional he had a presence that was inescapable.

  She could not quite explain it to herself, but she was conscious of his vitality and a strength that was not entirely physical but seemed to emanate from him.

  She found it overpowering in some ways and admirable in others.

  ‘It is what a Duke should be,’ she thought and remembered that it was what her father had been like when he was a young man.

  She also thought that this particular strength, or was it a vibration, must have come from all her ancestors and especially from the second Duke, who had been a hero in India and in consequence received the gift of the Nizam’s jewels.

  Then she told herself that she hated the present Duke because he had no feeling as he should have for the family, the house or anything else that she had shown him.

  Because she was so eager for him to be impressed, she hardly realised at the time that he had said nothing as she showed him the pictures, the Sèvres china that one Duke had brought from France and the armoury where from early in their history the Burys had begun to assemble weapons of every sort.

  It had now become a unique collection, as were the cups, the boxes and the objects of every sort and kind that had been presented to them in different parts of the world.

  There was also one room that had cabinets containing the medals that various Burys had won on the battlefields or been awarded by the reigning Monarch.

  Among these was the Order of the Garter glittering with diamonds and only one stone from it, Ilina had often thought, would keep them in food for a least six months.

  Then there were foreign Orders, which were decorated with real jewels and which were so pretty that her mother had often said laughingly that she would like to wear one round her neck.

  The Duke had hardly spoken a word and now, looking at him sitting at the end of the table and wearing a cynical expression on his face, Ilina thought despairingly that to him the house only contained relics of the past that he was not even remotely interested in.

  “Tomorrow,” the Duke said as Bird poured him out another glass of claret, “I would like to see the estate and, of course, the farms that you have described to me.”

  There was a little silence.

  Then Ilina said,

  “You realise that you have to ride?”

  “Of course,” the Duke answered. “I presume you have a horse for me?”

  “Actually you have two to choose from,” Ilina answered. “They are in the stables in which the fourth Duke kept forty horses, but one of them belongs to me.”

  She thought that the Duke looked surprised and she added quickly,

  “I brought Pegasus – with me when I – came here.”

  He made no comment and she went on,

  “The other horse I bought cheaply or rather Mr. Wicker did on behalf of the estate a year ago.”

  The Duke raised his eyebrows and she continued,

  “It was a young horse that a local farmer found too obstreperous and too wild to manage. I have therefore broken him in with the help of Jacobs and he is not quite amenable unless he is upset.”

  She paused and looked at the Duke a little uncomfortably as she said,

  “I expect you are a good rider and I am quite prepared to lend you Pegasus, if that is what you prefer.”

  “I think you are insulting me, Miss Ashley.”

  “No, please, I don’t mean to,” Ilina said quickly. “It is just that I thought perhaps you would be more used to riding on – elephants and camels than on horses.”

  “Yaks, dromedaries and buffalo,” the Duke added. “Of course, Miss Ashley, you show the usual ignorance of the insular English with regard to foreign countries.”

  Ilina made an apologetic little sound and he carried on,

  “I assure you in Calcutta we have just as good racehorses as you will see as Ascot or Epsom and I am not afraid of your wild horse.”

  Because he spoke so scathingly, Ilina could only say humbly,

  “I am – sorry and, of course, I am very – ignorant of the life you have – lived before you came here.”

  The idea that any man dressed as badly as he was made her want to add that she could not expect him to have a stable of racehorses.

  But she knew that it would be rude and she only said as if in her own defence,

  “I will tell Jacobs that we will require the horses tomorrow morning and I was only thinking of which one he must put on the side-saddle.”

  “I know exactly what you were thinking, Miss Ashley,” the Duke said sharply, “and, as I am quite certain that all my ancestors were exceptionally fearless riders, I am confident that I shall not prove the exception to the rule.”

  Ilina gave a little sigh, thinking that she had made a mess of what seemed to her quite a reasonable question.

  Then, as if he felt that he had been unnecessaril
y harsh, the Duke suggested,

  “Tell me about yourself. It seems strange that your relatives should allow you to live alone in this house and to work yourself to the bone, however much you may be paid for doing so.”

  He paused and then he added,

  “Incidentally, what is your salary?”

  Because Ilina had not expected him to ask the question so quickly, she had to think swiftly before she replied,

  “I am supposed to receive forty pounds a year, Your Grace, for my services as Librarian and Curator, but I have, as it happens, received no wages for quite some time.”

  “That does not surprise me,” the Duke remarked. “It seems extraordinary that you have not looked for employment elsewhere.”

  “I am very happy here and, as I told you, I have always lived on the estate.”

  “And you would be afraid to go elsewhere?”

  “Very afraid – in fact I – want to stay here. Please – let me stay.”

  She was pleading with him and there was an undoubted expression of fear in her eyes that he did not miss.

  “We must talk about that another time,” he answered, “but I still find it strange that you prefer this lonely life in an empty house to being with young people of your own age and, of course, young men to pay you compliments.”

  Ilina laughed.

  “That is the last thing I want and I am not entirely alone.”

  “No? You have a friend?”

  “Somebody who matters to me more than anything else in the world,” Ilina replied, “who is always glad to see me, is never critical and who I know loves me.”

  There was no mistaking the surprise on the Duke’s face or the mocking note in his voice as he asked,

  “Who is this paragon? And am I to assume from what you have just said that you are about to be married?”

  Ilina shook her head thinking it amusing to puzzle him.

  “No,” she replied, “Although I promise you, that if the Gods were kind enough to turn him into a Centaur, that is exactly what I should be ready to do.”

  Far quicker than she expected the Duke came the point of what she was saying and replied,

  “Now I understand that you are referring to your horse.”