His Unlikely Duchess
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Amanda McCabe
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15,9K
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26
Prologue
‘I don’t know why you still read that rubbish. Happy-ever-afters aren’t real,’ Violet Wilkins announced.
Lily Wilkins looked up from the book in her lap to smile at her younger sister. She had to laugh at Vi, who looked so disgruntled standing there at the gate to their mother’s prized rose garden. Her arms were crossed over her rumpled shirtwaist and her scowl made her look much older than her sixteen years, despite the schoolgirlish braids and hair bows their mother still insisted on. Stella Wilkins would never admit to being old enough to mother quite so many growing girls.
Though, at almost twenty, Lily wouldn’t be a girl much longer. She was already ‘out’ in Newport, and soon she would be in Manhattan, too, after a grand ball Stella was planning for the autumn. Lily shuddered to think what would happen after that.
‘Of course I still read these,’ she said, putting the book down on the marble bench beside her. ‘And they’re French novels, not fairy tales. No happy endings guaranteed.’
Just like in the real world. Lily had spent her whole life watching her parents sitting at opposite ends of vast dining tables, barely tolerating each other’s presence, smiling in public so no one would know ‘Old King Coal’ Wilkins, one of the richest men in New York, and his genteel Old South wife couldn’t stand each other any longer.
That was the last thing Lily ever wanted, either for herself or her sisters. And that was why she took refuge in books. The fictional perils, dangers, adventures and, yes, romances of those heroines were preferable to daily life. Walks in the park, tea parties, letter writing, dancing with men who could only talk about Wall Street and horses...
Yes. Books were better.
‘The French,’ Violet said with a sniff. ‘What do they know about fairy tales anyway?’
Lily laughed, her heart almost bursting with love for her redheaded sister. She had always tried to take care of Violet and her gentle twin sister, Rose. They had been her pride and joy ever since she saw them come into the nursery, tiny, pink-cheeked and howling. Almost as if they were her daughters rather than her sisters. The three of them had to stick together against the rest of the world, or they would surely be lost.
‘What do you know of the French, then, Vi?’
‘I know Monsieur Anatole’s cooking, which is too salty, even though Mother is so proud she stole him from Mrs Vanderbilt. And I know Monsieur Worth’s gowns, which are too heavy and itchy. I bet Frenchwomen never go walking or swimming, or play tennis, at all. I bet they don’t even laugh.’
Lily noticed that Violet’s hair was still damp in its untidy braids, dark red glinting with gold in the sun. She was fiddling with her beloved ‘Talbot’s Mousetrap’ camera, as usual. Photography had become Violet’s passion and she was constantly begging to take portraits of family and friends, or wandering the seashore taking pictures of the waves. ‘Were you swimming in the cove again? If Mother catches you...’
Violet laughed and kicked out at a clump of dirt. ‘Mother is much too busy planning next week’s dance to fuss about my swimming or my camera. It’s you who should be careful now, Lily.’
Lily frowned. She couldn’t quite trust Violet when her sister got that ‘I have a secret’ light in her changeable hazel eyes. Where Violet’s twin Rose was calm and serene, always so careful about her lessons and concerned with proper behaviour, Violet had other concerns. Concerns such as always knowing exactly what was happening in every corner of the vast Wilkins household and taking a photo of it if she could.
Lily had no idea how Violet did it and Violet never told her secrets. Forewarned is forearmed, Violet would always say as she skipped away.
Their mother, who was always very excitable anyway, and much prone to fainting fits and crying jags, had been preoccupied for weeks, putting together a grand dinner and ball that she intended to be the sparkling highlight of the Newport summer season. It was easy to hide from Stella Wilkins when her every energy was focused on besting Mrs Astor, but sometimes she would suddenly remember Lily should ‘help’ with the arrangements. That Lily was a vital part of her great social plan.
Heaven help Lily then.
‘Has Mother been asking for me, Vi?’ Lily said, reaching for her book again. As if French princesses and castles on the Loire could save her. She’d learned long ago that nothing could save her, or her sisters, but herself. She was the key to their freedom.
Violet gave her a sympathetic grimace. ‘She’s talking to Papa in the library. He just got here from the city a few hours ago.’
‘Oh, no,’ Lily moaned. It was never a good sign when her parents actually spoke to each other. Her father seldom even came to Newport, since the seaside was a ladies’ world and men were only meant to pay the bills and come in for dinners or balls or to sail a yacht when needed. When their father did venture out of his New York office, he mostly stayed hidden in the library.
If he was talking to their mother...
Something serious indeed must be going on.
‘Were they speaking about Adam Goelet again?’ Lily asked in dread. Her mother had been pestering her to ‘be nice’ to Mr Goelet for months. After all, Stella would say with tears in her eyes, he was the only son of her father’s closest business associate, heir to much of Madison Avenue and estates in Pennsylvania, and ‘not so bad-looking’ at all. If one overlooked his unfortunate squint and perpetual onion breath—and the fact that even Lily could see he clearly preferred the company of his male friends to any lady.
Violet kicked harder at the dirt. ‘I think she’s quite forgotten about poor Mr Goelet.’
Lily would have hoped that was a good thing. But she knew their mother all too well. Ideas were much too sticky in Stella’s head, and she wouldn’t give up one scheme unless she had another to replace it. Especially when it came to her daughters and their marriages.
‘So what are they talking about now?’ Lily said.
‘I’m not quite sure, but I think you should go listen for yourself.’
Lily sighed. She didn’t want to leave the sanctuary of the quiet rose garden for the chaos of a house embroiled in party preparations, but she knew she had to eventually. If she didn’t at least try to make Stella happy, her mother could curtail her visits to the Women and Children’s Hospital again, or to one of her other charities, and some days that was all that kept Lily sane, being able to be of some use outside the hothouse of the Wilkins house.
She rose from the marble bench and quickly smoothed the navy dimity skirt of her sailor-style dress. ‘No, don’t worry, Vi. I’ll find out what’s going on, you and Rose don’t need to worry.’
Violet gave her a relieved smile. ‘I know you will, Lily. We never worry when you’re here.’
‘And I never worry when I know you’re keeping watch. Shall we work on my photograph after tea? The light will be good then.’ Violet brightened and Lily gave her sister a quick hug, then hurried towards the house. ‘Go and check on Rose. I’ll see you both at tea.’
It had grown later than she’d realised, she noticed with dismay as she rushed across the manicured green expanse of the lawn. Rose Garden Cottage, as her mother had named the seventy-room house, gleamed a golden rose in the waning sunlight, all red brick and pale stone, rising above the roll of perfect gardens and the distant crash of the sea against the cliffs. The silk curtains weren’t drawn yet over the windows, but Lily knew they soon would be. Maids would be hurrying to finish pressing evening gowns and grooms would be polishing up the carriage horses.
She had spent too long with her book.
Lily found Rose hovering just inside the French doors that led on to the terrace. Rose, like Violet, was a small, slender girl, but her red hair was neatly braided and twisted about her head, her white muslin dress spotless, her skin fair and not freckled. But her hazel eyes were just as wide and worried.
‘Is Mother in the library still?’ Lily asked her, trying to smile carelessly as she checked her own reflection in the nearest gilt-framed mirror. Unlike her sisters, she had plain brown hair and dark eyes, but her posture had been perfected by years with a German governess and a back brace, horse riding lessons and corsets. She had learned long ago that a straight spine and a serene smile hid much.
But not from her sisters. ‘Yes, with Papa,’ Rose said, her eyes wide. ‘There were...raised voices.’
‘Not to worry, Rose Red,’ Lily said, kissing her cheek. ‘Probably just a problem with the peach ices coming in Papa’s refrigerated train car or something.’
Rose laughed, but Lily knew she wasn’t fooled. Nor was Lily. But she still marched down the corridor, past the marble tables from Versailles and the van Dyck portraits of someone else’s ancestors, past the towering flower arrangements in alabaster vases and maids bobbing curtsies, to where the tall double doors of the library waited.
Normally no one went into the library. That was the one room out of all of the rooms at Rose Garden Cottage that was their father’s. Today, though, Lily could hear her mother’s voice floating past the thick oak panels.
‘...I won’t stand for it, do you hear me, Coleman?’ her mother was saying, her usual dulcet South Carolina tones hard and brassy. ‘You’ve always left our girls’ education to me and I have worked myself to the bone to make sure they are a credit to us. My own health has been broken, but that doesn’t matter to me. Only the darlin’ girls matter. And now we have the opportunity I’ve been praying for...’
Lily’s father’s voice answered, a rough rumble too low for Lily to understand. Whatever he said made his wife wail.
‘You don’t care about us at all! I tell you, I shall die if you don’t...’
Lily thought it would be much better to get this over with, before her mother’s maid came running with the smelling salts. She quickly knocked and pulled the door open.
‘You sent for me, Mother?’ Lily said brightly, even though officially no one had ‘sent for her’. She studied the library in front of her: the carved dark panels of the walls, the red brocade curtains, the tapestries copied from a set at Hampton Court and her parents grouped around the tall, ivory-inlaid desk; her father in his velvet chair, his gouty leg propped on a footstool, his mutton-chop whiskers, once darkest jet, now half-grey, his spectacles slipping down his nose; her mother standing in front of him, tall and slim still after twenty-five years of marriage and three daughters, her pale hair piled atop her head, striped chiffon and silk floating around her. A handkerchief was pressed to her eyes.
This was what Lily had seen over and over in her parents’ marriage, ever since she was a tiny girl trying to keep the peace so her sisters wouldn’t hear the quarrels and start crying. It was precisely what she never wanted for her own life and definitely not for her sisters’.
Her mother turned to her and held out a slim, white hand, sparkling with diamonds and pearls. ‘Thank the stars you are here, Lily my darlin’!’ Stella Wilkins cried. Lily hurried to clasp her hand, hoping to hold her mother steady. ‘You must help me talk some sense into your papa. We have a golden chance here and he wants to toss it all away.’
‘Not toss it away, Stella,’ Lily’s father muttered, shifting his aching foot on its stool. ‘Just wait a year or two. What’s the hurry?’
‘Hurry!’ Stella shrieked. ‘Lily is already nearly twenty. All her friends are married. We must seize the chance now.’
Lily swallowed hard, afraid this was about Adam Goelet again. ‘Perhaps you should tell me what is happening, Mother?’
Stella clutched her hand even tighter and led her to the brocade sofa near the window. She didn’t look at her husband again, but smiled brightly at Lily. ‘My dearest girl, it is quite, quite wonderful! You remember that my mother went to school in England when she was a girl? She told me about it so often.’
Stella gestured to the portrait in the shadows on the panelled wall, of a stately, golden-haired woman in massive, pink silk skirts and puffed sleeves, marble columns behind her, magnolia blossoms in her hand. Lily’s grandmother. ‘Of course,’ Lily said. It had been all her grandmother had ever talked about when Stella would take Lily and the twins to South Carolina when they were children—the glories of England she had seen in her golden girlhood, before her genteel Southern world fell apart.
Lily had never minded those stories, though, for the long history of England, the romance of it, was most fascinating. The castles and monuments, the battlefields and museums. She’d pored over books about it all, peppering her grandmother with questions.
A tiny spark of excitement kindled to life deep inside, but she dared not let it take hold, not yet. Too many things disappointed in the end.
‘Well, I had a letter from the daughter of one of her English schoolfriends,’ Stella said. ‘Lady Heath, her name is, the widow of a viscount. She spoke most kindly of the old friendship and offered to meet us if we ever came to London. Lady Heath has many connections, even to the royal court, and meeting her could be so beneficial to you girls. Don’t you think?’
The excitement grew. Was this escape, then? An end to Newport and Fifth Avenue, to her mother’s constant struggle to belong, to outdo everyone else? Was she going to see England at last? But she glanced at her father, still trying to find a comfortable position on his stool. ‘I would certainly like to see London,’ Lily said cautiously. ‘The centuries-old buildings and museums...’
Stella tossed a tearful look at her husband and her hand tightened even more on Lily’s. ‘Of course you would. You are such a good, scholarly girl. Papa, though, is being ridiculously obstinate.’
‘It’s a long way, Stella. You wouldn’t let them go when they were younger—why suddenly now? That’s all I am saying,’ Coleman Wilkins said wearily.
‘They were not ready before now! And England is not too far for Jennie Jerome, is it? Or Consuelo Yznaga,’ Stella cried.
Lily saw in a flash what this was all really about and she felt like a fool for not realising immediately. It wasn’t about her grandmother, or culture or education. It was about marriage. Stella seemed to have something bigger in mind now than the Goelet money.
Jennie Jerome was the daughter-in-law of a duke now. Consuelo Yznaga would one day be a duchess herself. Her mother wanted a coronet for the Wilkins family, too.
Of course she did.
Lily felt a sudden wave of fear, washing away that tiny spark of excitement. She had known she couldn’t hide in her books for ever, but—to jump into English society, a pool whose depths she could not fathom? Everyone would be watching, everyone would know why she was there in London and she was sure to disappoint her mother again. ‘Mother, I don’t know. Perhaps Papa is right, perhaps I am too young...’
‘You are almost twenty! And the twins are almost seventeen. They need polish so badly,’ her mother wailed. Stella collapsed on to the sofa, her face buried in her handkerchief. ‘There is no more time. If you were settled, the other girls would be safe, too. No one could touch us!’
‘It’s all right, Mother, I promise,’ Lily said soothingly. She reached out and rubbed her mother’s silk-covered shoulder, meeting her father’s gaze above Stella’s head. In his eyes she saw her own feelings: resignation. They would go to London. But Lily had no idea what would happen then. She only knew she couldn’t be afraid. Rose and Violet were counting on her to help them make their own choices for the future and she would never let them down.
