Autumn Duchess: A Georgian Historical Romance (Roxton Series) Page 18

  “M’sieur, if you dare to touch me again I will render you less than a man.” She jabbed his genitals with the closed ivory sticks of her fan and smiled when he gave an involuntary yelp. “Bon. We understand each other.”

  At the heavy double doors to the library two liveried footmen stood sentry.

  Antonia waited for the doors to be opened for her but when the footmen did not move and stared straight over her fair hair she was so taken aback that for one moment she was at a loss and just stood there waiting. Footmen opening doors for her was as natural as breathing—done without thinking.

  When she took a step forward the footmen moved sideways to close the gap to the door handles. Again she hesitated. She could not really believe they were denying her entry to her favorite room. She had spent more hours in the library than anywhere else in this house. Even when Monseigneur was at his desk working on important papers or in meetings she sat curled up in a wingchair by the fire, with the view of the fragrant gardens beyond, reading. She did not often enter the library through these double doors. She had used the secret stairwell that connected the private apartments she had shared with Monseigneur with the library below. The secret door was behind a bookcase at the base of the spiral stairs that wound up to the walkways that wrapped around three walls of the library and gave access to two levels of bookcases that stretched to the domed ceiling.

  Nevertheless, when using the main entrance, she never expected to be denied entry. She regarded the impassive faces of the two footmen. Neither looked down at her but continued to stare out over her fair head and above the heads of her ladies-in-waiting to the opposite wall with its large dark portrait of the forbidding fourth duke and duchess wearing their bejeweled ducal coronets and ermine robes.

  “Lawrence. Please, you will open the door for me.”

  The footman on Antonia’s right shot a startled look at his fellow. He did not understand French but he heard his friend’s Christian name clear enough. Lawrence swayed and was no less astonished to be addressed by the Dowager Duchess of Roxton. It made him speak without thinking.

  “You know my name! How?” then remembered just whom he was talking to and added with an audible gulp and a bow of his head, and in French, “Forgive my outburst, Mme la duchesse.”

  “Yes, I know your name. And you know mine,” Antonia replied with a smile. “I also know that your grandfather he was a most treasured servant of Monseigneur, the butler Duvalier, and that your father he is our head gardener, and that until you broke your arm you had hopes of becoming head groom. So now, you will please open the door, or let me open the door so that I may enter the library to speak with M’sieur le Duc.”

  Lawrence the footman looked stricken. “I cannot,” he replied in a whisper, genuinely apologetic. “I may not, Mme la duchesse. I-I wish that I could, for you, but I-I cannot.”

  Antonia was not angry by the footman’s refusal but pondered the young man’s distress and what she could do about her dilemma without getting either servant in trouble with her son and yet allow her to enter the library. She had to speak to Roxton about the Hôtel for her peace of mind, and tonight.

  The footmen’s refusal to acquiesce and bow to nobility was too much for Willis. “Step aside at once!” she blurted out. “This is her Grace the Duchess of Roxton, you ignorant oafs!”

  “Willis, me they know,” Antonia said over her shoulder. “That seems to be their dilemma. Oh! Deborah!” she added, turning away from the door spying her daughter-in-law with the butler at her back. She met her half way across the anteroom. “Deborah, when does Roxton next send post to Paris?”

  “Post to Paris, Maman-Duchess?” Deborah repeated. The butler had fetched her the instant he was alerted by a passing upper chambermaid that the Dowager Duchess was headed for the library. She had expected to be met with an imperious demand so the question completely threw her off-balance. “I-I—To where in Paris, Maman-Duchess?”

  “To the Hôtel,” Antonia replied, as if it was self-evident she would be talking about their house on the Rue Saint-Honoré. “I sent letters to Tante Adelaide yesterday but I want something brought back from the Hôtel with the next post.”

  “Brought back, Maman-Duchess?”

  “Yes. There is a travel journal in our private apartment that I think the boys they will enjoy, particularly Gus who wants so badly to be a pirate.”

  “A-A travel journal? About-about pirates?”

  The Duchess wondered where the conversation was headed. But she was willing to entertain the idea of pirates or anything else that took her mother-in-law’s fancy but her mention of the Hôtel as if it was as it had always been when the old Duke was alive alerted Deb to what the conversation might really be about. She had warned her husband to tell his mother about the sale of the Parisian mansion months ago but he would not hear of it, believing she was not emotionally capable or ready to accept such news. Now Deborah wondered if he had left it all too late. She glanced at the library double doors and wondered for how much longer the Duke would be in conference with members of the American Colonial War Committee.

  “Yes. Yes, Maman-Duchess, I am certain Gus would love a book about pirates.”

  Antonia saw her daughter-in-law’s anxious glance at the double doors and noted she was holding her hands together rather too tightly. She was a little ashamed of herself for being less than transparent with Deborah but she needed to discover if there was a grain of truth to what Charlotte had told her, and Deborah’s behavior would tell her better than any outright statement. She did not want her daughter-in-law to be burdened with the guilt of revelation; of knowing she had been the one to tell her the Hôtel had indeed been sold off and thus broken her mother-in-law’s heart – that was a burden only her son should bear.

  With every halting response Deborah gave, Antonia began to crumble inside.

  “Oh, this book is not about pirates, but Gus I am sure will want to be one, or a sailor at the very least,” Antonia chatted on, the only sign of her inner turmoil showing itself in the way her left hand hard gripped her right wrist above the gold bangles until her knuckles were white. “If I remember correctly, it is a journal of a certain Captain Cook who commanded His Majesty’s ship the Endeavour. Monseigneur was presented with a signed copy by a Mr. Banks who was the naturalist who accompanied this Captain Cook about the Pacific seas.”

  “Captain Cook and Mr. Banks? It sounds most fascinating.”

  “It is. There are some exceptionally fine engravings of the unusual flora and of the natives on their islands, with tattoos and feathered headdresses...” Antonia met Deborah’s worried brown eyes with a sad smile. “I remember this book most particularly because it was one of the last books Monseigneur requested be brought here but sadly, there was no time...”

  “Maman-Duchess, I—”

  “So you see why it is very special and why I would want the boys to have it. It would greatly sadden me to think it is no longer on the table at the foot of the bed in our bedchamber, along with the other volumes that were Monseigneur’s particular favorites—”

  Deborah’s eyes filled with tears. “Maman-Duchess...”

  “—because I am certain he would very much approve of his grandsons having the pleasure of their Papa reading to them about Captain Cook’s many adventures and being shown the engravings.”

  “I know the boys will love Julian to read the journals to them, and cherish it all the more because it once belonged to their Grandpère. I am certain we can find it, Maman-Duchess,” Deborah assured her, another glance at the doors. “It will just take time...”

  “Time? Why, when I have told you where it is? Oh! You mean to send for it from Paris. Of course! How silly of me. But... Won’t it take the same amount of time as it does for my letters to reach the Hôtel, yes?”

  “Yes. Yes. About the same time,” Deborah lied, biting her lower lip.

  Now Antonia’s eyes were tearing up because she had forced her daughter-in-law to lie and she hated herself for doing so. B
ut she was almost beyond caring. The images in her mind’s eye of the intimate rooms she had shared with Monseigneur in their seventeenth century Parisian mansion were so vivid, so eternal, that to think they were now only that—images in her head—was unfathomable.

  “But what I do not know... But perhaps you can enlighten me... How much time will it take to locate Captain Cook’s journal if it has been packed away in some nameless crate with the hundreds of other nameless crates under covers gathering dust in a nondescript Parisian warehouse?”

  “Maman-Duchess! Please. You must understand... He did—He did what he thought—what he thought was for—”

  Antonia had turned away from Deborah the moment she started trying to justify the Duke’s actions and with a swish of her petticoats she swept to the library doors, her ladies-in-waiting forced to scatter in her wake. She glared at the two footmen with her chin up. “Get out of my way! Immédiatement.”

  Both footmen did not hesitate. They instantly parted shoulders and Antonia marched between them and pushed down on the ornate door handles and so hard that the doors flew open and swung wide to bang up against the wood of the bookcases. She advanced up the length of the library, neither looking left or right, until she was standing before the Duke’s massive mahogany desk.

  She did not see the two gentlemen lounging on upholstered wingchairs or their ancient colleague standing by an undraped window holding up a sheaf of correspondence to the light to better see the print through his corrective lenses. A scatter of paperwork and a rolled parchment littered the low table. A soft-footed footman was collecting used glassware and providing further refreshment while another was collecting up gold and enameled snuffboxes to be refilled.

  Antonia saw only her son, buttocks leaning against the rolled edge of his desk, long legs crossed at the ankles, his handsome face in profile because he was addressing the old gentleman by the window.

  The gentlemen had heard the bang of the doors and reacted to the noise with a cursory glance up the long book-lined room. But when they saw the small majestic figure in gold and green hooped silks marching up the length of the library they hastily put aside paper and glass and scrambled up as one to bow to her, their astonishment at her angry intrusion masked by mute politeness and diffidence to rank. Five paces behind and looking distressed was the Duchess and all eyes instantly turned on the Duke.

  “Is it true?” Antonia demanded. “Julian! Is it true you have sold the Hôtel?”

  About an hour earlier, when the ladies had retired to the Gallery and the gentlemen remained at the dining table to unbutton their embroidered silk waistcoats after a long meal to talk of horses and politics over the port, three of their number with their noble host excused themselves to their fellows and removed to the Duke’s sumptuous library for a meeting of the Committee for Colonial Correspondence of Interest. The only topic on the agenda: when, not if, the French would declare their hand and join forces with the American colonial rebels in their war against his Britannic majesty King George the Third.

  “Your Grace, we have known for some time now that the French have been secretly funding the rebel cause in the colonies through a bogus Portuguese company Roderigue Hortalez and Company,” Sir Kenneth Hibbert-Baker told the Duke of Roxton, a glance at the two other noblemen who constituted the Committee. “Our sources tell us that Roderigue Hortalez has the full support of His French Majesty and that it is through Louis’ agent, one Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, that all manner of materials are being secured to aid the rebels against us.”

  “Such as?” asked the Duke, signaling for the gentlemen to sit and with a nod to the footman to set down the silver tray holding port decanter and glasses on the low table between the arrangement of striped silk chaise and wingchairs.

  “Gunpowder, cannon balls, mortars, tents, cutlasses, pistols, that sort of thing,” Lord Shrewsbury replied with a wave of lace-covered hand, perching on a wingchair.

  “And enough apparel to clothe thousands of traitorous blackguards,” stuck in Lord Carstairs with disapproval. “French cloth got Washington’s rebel army through a damnably awful winter; more’s the pity for us! Bloody French!” he spat and snatched up a port glass off the silver tray

  “How does this French largesse find its way to American shores?” Roxton asked calmly.

  “Roderigue Hortalez has its headquarters on the island of St. Eustatius,” Sir Kenneth told him.

  “Which is where?”

  “If your Grace will permit...?” asked Sir Kenneth, picking up off the low table a rolled parchment. When the Duke nodded, Shrewsbury obliged by pushing aside the silver tray and putting to the carpet a stack of papers he had brought into the library to make room for the parchment to be spread wide on the low table. Roxton left his desk to peer down at what was a detailed map.

  “This is—”

  “—a map of the West Indies,” finished the Duke with a nod. “The Antilles Sea is here to the south west, the Atlantic to the east. There are literally thousands of islands claimed by one European power or another in the past three hundred years or so since Columbus claimed everything for Isabella and Ferdinand. Sugar and spices and built on slavery. A veritable stock-pot.”

  Shrewsbury smiled thinly when Sir Kenneth and Carstairs exchanged a glance of surprise, saying with smug satisfaction, “I did warn you. Roxton has his father’s shrewd brain and his divine mother’s good-looks.”

  Roxton gave a bark of embarrassed laughter at the old man’s compliment and blushed in spite of himself. “I was rather hoping I had inherited my father’s haughty demeanor and my mother’s quick thinking, sir. But I’d settle for either parent’s brain.”

  Shrewsbury inclined his powdered head and savored his port. “Just so, my boy. Although I rather think you have too much of your mother’s sentiment, which is no bad thing, and that it is Henri-Antoine who inherited the full measure of M’sieur le Duc’s sublime arrogance,” he said, referring to Roxton’s much younger brother. He glanced down at the dark liquid in his glass and sighed. “I miss him and his enlivening conversation...” and then raised his glass and his eyes skyward. “Repos dans paix, cher ami.”

  There was a moment’s respectful silence, for Lord Shrewsbury’s heartfelt confession and the fact it was the third anniversary of the old Duke’s passing. Shrewsbury had been at Eton with the old Duke of Roxton and was one of his closest confidants; of the same vintage, his own mortality was not far from his thoughts. The Duke sipped at his port to clear a tightening in his throat and moved the discussion forward. He wanted to visit the nursery to ease his mind Gus was no worse for his ordeal and that his children had settled for the night after the dramas of the regatta. He was also acutely aware that he had left Deborah alone to deal with their guests, and with his mother on this of all days, and there was a recital in the Gallery before he could retire for the evening. As for the absurdly named Committee for Colonial Correspondence of Interest, which he reckoned was a thinly veiled title that gave legitimacy to these three noblemen and their select group of Governmental administrators to read and report on other people’s correspondence without the author’s permission, he was at a loss to know what they wanted of him.

  “The headquarters of our fleet in the West Indies is harbored here at Antigua, isn’t it?” he asked, long finger on an island in the middle of a chain known as the Leeward Islands.

  “Yes, your Grace, that is so,” Sir Kenneth agreed, impressed the Duke should know the precise location by the mere glance at a map, justifying Shrewsbury’s estimation that here was a nobleman of the highest order who had brain as well as brawn.

  The Duke grinned at Sir Kenneth’s wide-eyed surprise. “As well as instilling in me a love of languages, my mother is a keen cartographer. There was always a map and grammar before bedtime. But what I don’t know is the location of this island of St. Eustatius and its significance to this conversation, which, I might add, I am still mystified as to its direction.”

  “St. Eustatius is here, bet
ween our fleet at Antigua and St. Barthelemy—St. Bart’s—which is part of Guadeloupe, here, a possession of our dear friends the French,” explained Sir Kenneth, stabbing at various islands in close proximity to one another. “St. Eustatius is part of the Netherlands’ possession and—”

  “—claims to be neutral! Ha!” stuck in Carstairs. “Neutral my lobcock! The Dutch have always been white-feathered whiddlers. They’d sell their own grandmother for a guilder. Profit is God to those lily-livered curs.”

  “As his lordship so eloquently put it, St. Eustatius is neutral and as such is used by every privateer, pirate and thief that sails the Atlantic,” Sir Kenneth stated calmly. “And because it is neutral our fleet is forced to watch and do nothing while the French under the guise of their Portuguese company Roderigue Hortalez load up rebel ships with French supplies vital to the American cause.”

  “And while this company keeps alive the rebels’ bid for independence the French can continue to deny with impunity their involvement in the war on a diplomatic level? How ingenious,” the Duke commented. He looked at all three noblemen, a puzzled frown between his brows. “This is all very interesting but I am confident our Foreign Department is doing everything possible to expose the underhandedness of our French friends on the one hand while at the same time making diplomatic overtures at Versailles to ensure his French Majesty does not openly declare his support for the rebels. We certainly do not want war with France and they most definitely cannot afford to go to war with us... So, what has this to do with my good self?”

  “Well put, your Grace,” Sir Kenneth agreed soberly, an anxious glance exchanged with Lord Shrewsbury. “As you are aware we three make up the Committee for Colonial Correspondence of Interest which is part of the larger American Colonial War Committee that deals with all matters related to the war in America. What we, Shrewsbury, Carstairs and myself, have been charged with is investigating the lines of communication between the rebels, the French and persons of interest here in London and Paris, and what is being relayed to and fro. It allows us to make informed judgments and to gather intelligence vital to the war effort.”