Autumn Duchess: A Georgian Historical Romance (Roxton Series) Page 19

  “You read letters without the author’s permission,” the Duke stated, unimpressed.

  “We do what we have to, my boy, if it means we further our cause and can save English lives,” said Lord Shrewsbury.

  “It has come to our attention that the rebels are very well informed regarding the deployment of our troops, and the position of our fleet along the eastern seaboard of the colonies,” Sir Kenneth continued, allowing the map of the West Indies to curl up in on itself and sitting back on the wingchair as the Duke retreated to lean his buttocks against the rounded edge of his mahogany desk. “This is alarming in itself, but what disturbs us for the future of the English war effort is when, and I say when and not if because we believe it is only a matter of time before the French enter the war. Thus it is imperative that we put a stop to any treasonous lines of communication at their source. You understand what I am saying, your Grace.”

  “Yes. And I understand your very real concerns if, as you say, the French openly declare war. But I am still at a loss as to why this committee in particular has sought me out. I have always maintained that what is required is open dialogue with our neighbors across the Channel. However, that is merely my humble opinion and as the Foreign Department prefers skulking backstairs spies and closet double-agents to face to face diplomacy, I bow to their judgment, better or otherwise.”

  Lord Carstairs scooped up a bundle of letters he had put to the carpet and slapped them down on the low table. He was not as subdued as his colleagues and sighed his annoyance with what he saw as Sir Kenneth’s pandering to, and Shrewsbury’s esteem for, the ducal house of Roxton.

  “Just come out and say it, Kenny!” Carstairs said with exasperation, tugging on the ribbon that kept the bundle of letters in a neat pile. He looked up at the Duke and said without a blink, “Roxton, you’re a straight arrow, so I’ll just say what my colleagues won’t or can’t say to your face: We have good reason to believe the Dowager Duchess your mother is working for the French and we want you to put a stop to it.”

  There was a moment of utter quiet in the library and then the Duke burst into incredulous laughter. No one else laughed.

  “My—mother? My mother: a-a spy for-for the French? My God, are you insane?” Roxton grinned, but looking from one solemn face to another suitably sobered his mood. “Are you all insane?”

  “Is this the Duchess’s handwriting?” Carstairs demanded, holding up several sheets of correspondence.

  “You have opened and read my mother’s letters?”

  The Duke was astounded.

  “It was necessary,” Shrewsbury apologized. “If there had been any other way...”

  Roxton stared with disbelief at the pile of paper on the low table.

  “Do all those sheets belong to my mother? How many letters are there? To whom are they addressed?”

  “Is it her handwriting or not, your Grace?” Carstairs continued, still holding up the correspondence.

  The Duke’s astonishment turned to anger. He snatched up several sheets of paper, green eyes ablaze. “It is beyond my comprehension to think you took it upon yourself to read the personal correspondence of the Dowager Duchess, whose good character is beyond reproach and who could never do a harm to any living thing, least of all cause mischief that would not only call into question her unblemished reputation but bring in to disrepute her family’s good name and disgrace to the Roxton dukedom.” He slammed the sheets of paper face down on his desk without looking at them, and kept his open palm covering the letters. “I will not read her personal correspondence. Not now. Not ever.”

  Lord Shrewsbury eased himself off the wingchair and took several sheets of paper off the pile on the low table. He took a cursory glance at the elegantly sloping script and then let his arm drop to his side and regarded the handsome nobleman who had averted his face, the thunderous fury evident in his reddened cheeks and the hard set to his strong jaw. “Roxton... Julian... My boy... No one other than the four of us here in your library knows what we know and we would prefer it remain that way. We have come to you because we do not mean to take this matter further. We just need your word you will put a stop to your mother corresponding with persons who are known traitors, in the colonies and in France. At the very least, ensure her letters go no further than the tray on the hall table and never leave the estate.”

  Roxton looked into the light blue eyes of his father’s old friend. “She has very little left to her as it is and you expect me to take from her one of her remaining pleasures? No. I won’t do it. She can write to whomever she pleases, traitor or no.” He looked over the old man’s padded velvet shoulder at Carstairs and Hibbert-Baker. There was no warmth in his deep voice. “You’ve read her letters. You tell me what treasonous utterances she’s made and to whom.”

  “She regularly corresponds with Mr. Benjamin Franklin,” offered Sir Kenneth.

  “The inventor and publisher?” The Duke was dismissive.

  “An American traitor presently in Paris seeking French support for the rebel cause,” stated Lord Carstairs.

  “She’s known Ben Franklin for years! He stayed here at my parents’ invitation when I was a boy. And she visited him at his lodgings in Craven Street once or twice, at his invitation. Her correspondence with Mr. Franklin would be full of academic discourse for its own sake.” Roxton shrugged a shoulder. “I’ll wager neither she nor Mr. Franklin mention the war in the colonies. He is too good mannered and she too respectful of the delicate position in which he now finds himself.” When the three men did not dispute this he demanded, “Who else?”

  “There is the French Foreign Minister, the Comte de Vergennes,” said Sir Kenneth.

  “What? Vergennes is my mother’s second cousin. Her father’s mother, her grandmother was a Gravier by birth. For God’s sake, do I have to state the bloody obvious? My mother is French! She is so French that in all the years she has lived here in England, she has only managed to speak English with a broken accent. What of that? My father spoke exclusively in French with her, he preferred Paris to London and he had a French wife, but that did not make him a traitor to his King and country. He was every bit an Englishman and loyal to the House of Hanover! My mother knew this and respected his wishes.” When this was met with silence, the Duke ran his fingers through his black curls and dropped his hand heavily to his side. “Christ! She isn’t the only Frenchwoman living in London! Why her?”

  “She is the only French noblewoman with an English Duke for a son, who has mixed in the highest circles at the French Court, indeed is related to more than one French aristocratic family as you so rightly pointed out, who has access to politicians, is friends with politicians and Ministers on both sides of the Atlantic and across the Channel and can speak and write fluently in three or is it four languages? Perhaps she isn’t openly committing treason. Perhaps Her Grace is the unwitting pawn in someone else’s game. But as we know, and you say yourself, she is something of a bluestocking, so I would be insulting her intelligence if I was to believe she was exchanging information with her French cousins and her American friends unknowingly.”

  “You’re drawing a very long bow, Carstairs, and I don’t care for it!” Roxton growled. “Where is your evidence?”

  “You have it on your desk, your Grace,” Sir Kenneth said quietly. When the Duke snatched up the papers he continued just as calmly, “At first glance there appears nothing amiss with what is written on that page but take a closer look at the recipe for portable soup and you will see the quantities are too great if one was to try and put all the ingredients into cauldron, however large.”

  The Duke glared at Sir Kenneth as if he had sprouted a second head. “What are you driveling on about, Kenny? Quantities of what?”

  “It’s not a recipe for portable soup at all. It is a rather ingenious method of relaying numbers. If you remove the names of the ingredients you are left with quantities, but they are not in fact quantities but numbers that perfectly align with our troop deployment numbers aro
und the time the Hessians were defeated at Trenton. And only those in the inner war cabinet knew those figures.”

  The Duke was still baffled. “And where the hell would my mother get such figures?”

  “That is what we need to discover, your Grace.”

  “To whom was this letter addressed?”

  “To a Mlle Anais d’lese.”

  “Who the deuce is she?”

  “It’s not actually a she, your Grace,” Sir Kenneth apologized, “but a he. Anais d’lese is an anagram for Silas Deane.”

  “And this personage is...?”

  “He is an American merchant and secret agent, sent to Paris by the rebels to directly negotiate with the French Government,” Sir Kenneth continued when his colleagues remained mute. “He is a particular associate of Mr. Franklin and is presently residing at an apartment at the address that was, until last year, your family’s home on the Rue Saint-Honoré. The letters were sent to Mr. Deane under the alias Mlle Anais d’lese. You will see, if you look on the reverse of the second page your are holding, that the direction is indeed written in the Duchess’s handwriting.”

  Roxton turned over the pages, took a cursory glance at the handwriting on the reverse of the second page, and shook his head in disbelief. “Dear God,” he muttered more to himself than his audience, “what chance have we of saving the colonies if the Foreign Department expends its time and energies on this wasteful venture.”

  He shoved the page at Lord Shrewsbury, suddenly weary after a long day that had started at first light when he had made the harrowing visit to the mausoleum to pay his respects to his father on this the third anniversary of his passing, followed up by a day of Regatta activities that had turned into an even more traumatic experience with the dramatic rescue of his youngest son from drowning, and now this Committee for Colonial Correspondence of Interest had accused his mother of being a spy for the French or was it the American rebels? Or perhaps it was both? He wasn’t quite sure. His patience was threadbare and he wondered if the few remaining hours left in the day could offer up anything further to see the threads unravel and he lose his temper altogether.

  He looked from Shrewsbury, who had sidled over to the undraped window wearing his spectacles to read a page with the aid of the fading afternoon light, to Carstairs and Sir Kenneth who were perched on the edge of the wingchairs as if about to make a dash for the door should their noble host unleash a tirade of abuse upon their powdered heads. The Duke did not have the energy or inclination. He leaned his palms on the edge of his writing desk and summonsed up what little reserves of energy he had left to say derisively,

  “Well, gentlemen, I can tell you two things for certain: The hand that wrote out that recipe was not my mother’s elegant fist, although the direction on the reverse of the second page was written by my mother, but what of that? When my father was alive he addressed and franked all my mother’s letters, as is a common practice. Instead of reading other people’s letters without permission all you had to do was ask her to whom these letters belonged and I’m sure she would have obliged you.

  “Secondly, while my mother is perfectly at home between the pages of a Latin text by her favorite Roman historian and could point to the location of the island of Tahiti on a map of the Pacific Ocean, even wax lyrical about Mr. Franklin’s experimentation with electricity, she is utterly bereft of those feminine abilities usually touted as necessary in a wife. She cannot embroider, paint, play a musical instrument and knows not the first thing about cookery. So regardless of the quantities, she would not know the ingredients in a venison pie or a berries and custard pudding if they were laid out on a table before her, or written up on a scrap of paper in whatever language you care to choose that she can read. You would better expend your energies on hunting down real spies and traitors than misdirecting your efforts on the private scribbles of a widow who has a morbid obsession with the dead. Shrewsbury, I thought you would have shown more sensitivity to my mother’s condition.”

  The old man’s smile was sad. “It was because of her obsession I presumed...”

  He could not finish the sentence and looked away, out the window. He did not need to, the Duke knew exactly what he meant and was about to make comment when he was accosted.

  “Julian! Attend me! Is it true? Is it true you have sold the Hôtel?”

  The Duke stepped forward, a glance down at his mother and then over her head at his wife. Antonia’s words had not registered but he saw her expression and it was enough to start his heart racing.

  “Maman? Deborah? What is it? Not-not Gus?”

  When the Duchess shook her head, but bit her lower lip, a warning glance at Antonia before opening wide her brown eyes, the Duke relaxed knowing his son was all right, but only for a moment because his wife’s silent gesture alerted him to the fact that something or someone had greatly upset his mother.

  “I beg your pardon, Maman?”

  “Is it true? Have you sold the Hôtel?”

  “The Hôtel? Surely we can talk about this later? I am in a meeting and—”

  “So you have sold it.”

  “Now is not the time to discuss this. If you will just—”

  “No! No, I will not just just anything, Julian! You will tell me now if our home on the Rue Saint-Honoré it is sold.”

  Antonia clasped her hands tightly together and continued to look up at her son, waiting his response, forcing herself to remain in control because she still did not believe it was true and she did not want to believe that she would never again be able to set foot in the Hôtel Roxton. When he hesitated she launched into speech, as if by telling him her feelings it could somehow alter the unalterable.

  “Monseigneur your father he was born in that house. As was his sister, your aunt and her son your cousin Evelyn, he too was born there. And your grandfather, Monseigneur’s father he lived there with your French grandmere because he could not bring her to England because she was a Papist. And the Hôtel it was her sanctuary because she had married a Protestant and her family the Salvans and His French Majesty banished her from court.”

  “I know, Maman,” the Duke replied gently. “I know our family’s history in that house very well indeed.”

  “Frederick, your son and heir he too was born in that house. Does that not mean anything to you?”

  “It means a great deal. Maman, what is the point of this?”

  “It was the home you grew up in. Where you and Evelyn would play hide and seek and we would pretend we did not see you.”

  “Yes.”

  “And your little brother... Have you forgotten Henri-Antoine spent many happy years in that house? He and Jack... He and Jack also played hide and seek... And then there were the many, many parties we had there for you and Evelyn and for Henri-Antoine and your friends. Lucian and Estée lived at the Hôtel with us. We were one big family... And there is the bowling green between the chestnut trees...”

  “I remember it all, Maman. How could I forget?”

  Antonia searched her son’s handsome face, hands so tightly gripped now that she no longer had sensation in her fingertips.

  “The-the house in Paris it is very important, very important to Monseigneur.”

  “Yes. Yes it was important to mon père.”

  “It was my first home...”

  “Yes. I know that, too.”

  “And so it is very important to me also.”

  Her voice was little more than a whisper and her eyes had begun to fill with tears. The Duke looked away with a swallow, forcing himself to recall his father’s sage advice in those last days of his life; that he had made the right decision in selling off the family home in Paris.

  Sell it, Julian. Sell the Hôtel, for her sake and yours. Your mother will never live there again, not without me. There are too many memories... There is a dark cloud hanging over France these days. The thunderstorm, when it breaks, will mean the end of the old order, of the France of my generation. I predict blood in the Parisian streets and in yo
ur lifetime... You must protect your sons. No more should there be a M’sieur le Duc d’Roxton. Put your own stamp on the dukedom, as it should be... Your mother you cannot protect...

  He had tried to convince his father that he could indeed look after his mother. But his father had disagreed and been almost apologetic in his response: Julian, you are not the man to make her happy, as she deserves to be happy.

  Those words, the last his father had spoken to him, still smarted and looking down at his mother, at the sorrow in her eyes, he wondered if his father was right. No matter what he did or said, no matter how hard he tried to be understanding, she remained inconsolable and at times such as these, infuriatingly unfathomable.

  “You have sold our home in Paris, yes?” Antonia stated.

  He did not try to explain himself or his actions. What was the point? It would make little difference to her reaction.

  “Yes.”

  So Charlotte had told the truth. Her home in Paris, the house that held so many wonderful memories for her, had been taken from her and was no more. She wanted to sink to the floor, to curl up in a tight ball and sob. Instead, she remained resolutely upright and asked numbly,

  “And our belongings? What has become of them? Of our books? Of Monseigneur’s collections of fans and snuffboxes and trinkets in his cabinets? Our backgammon board, where is that? The-the pictures of family members upon the walls, where are they now?”

  “An inventory has been taken. The books and pictures and curios have been crated and will be brought here. If there are any pieces of furniture you particularly want, the new owners, I am assured, are only too willing to oblige.”

  “Our house, who now owns it?”