The American Duchess Read Online Free PDF Page B

with her father, but she had had no idea of its seriousness. He was dying! And he did not want her to know. He wanted her to marry an English duke and let him go home to die alone.
    Everything in Tracy rebelled at the thought. If he was to die, she must be there to comfort him and nurse him in his final hours. She would not let him leave alone.
    But as she stood, rigid, staring blindly at the flowers she had just been arranging so carefully, her father’s words seemed to sound again in the room. He did not want her to know. He did not want her to hold his hand, to nurse him and care for him. It came to her as she stood there, fighting a great battle within herself, that the greatest comfort she could give him was to pretend ignorance and let him go. He was a very proud man; she had always known that. He had never yet been beaten at anything. He would not want her to watch his final defeat.
    But to marry the Duke of Hastings! Such a thought had never crossed Tracy’s mind. She did not know if, even to please her father, she could bring herself to do that. If he were anxious to see her married and taken care of, why would Adam Lancaster not do as well?
    The visit to Steyning Castle was consequently fraught with tension and emotion beneath its surface pleasantness. The house was enormous, with two battlemented towers, a royal gateway and vestiges of a moat as evidence that it had at one time been a fortified castle indeed. A multitude of additions over the years had somewhat softened its martial look, however, and today, with the Duke’s flag flying, it looked merely grand and impressive, not martial.
    The Duke had offered to show the Bodmins around and Mr. Bodmin had accepted with alacrity. It was plain to see, as they paraded from room to room, that he was enjoying himself enormously. He could not hear enough of how the Castle had been held by the Deincourts since the thirteenth century, of how the royal coat of arms over the gate and the inscription Dom Rex Henricus Octov had been put there for a welcome to King Henry VIII on one of his visits, of how Henry, his daughter Elizabeth and Kings James I and Charles I had all slept in the state bedroom, of how Cromwell’s soldiers had stolen the royal gilt bed . . . The Duke remarked several times that he hoped he was not boring his guests with all this family history, but it was clearly obvious that Mr. Bodmin, at any rate, was hanging on his every word.
    Tracy was more interested in the house than in the Duke’s ancestors. She had thought Samuel McIntire had built the Bodmins a grand house on Chestnut Street in Salem, but she had never in her life seen anything like Steyning Castle.
    It had a fifteenth-century Great Hall with a hammer beam ceiling, a great seventeenth-century fireplace and a magnificent stone minstrels’ gallery. The drawing room had an Elizabethan plaster-work ceiling and elaborate wood paneling.
    “My grandfather had Robert Adam rearrange and redo the house,” the Duke said as they passed along a stunning marble-floored gallery that ran for fully eighty feet. “He added this wing, which also contains the library, and a wing for the servants.” As he finished speaking he led the way into the library and Tracy involuntarily gasped.
    “How many books do you have, my lord?” she asked reverently, her eyes going over the shelves and shelves of tooled-leather volumes.
    “About ten thousand,” he replied and Tracy felt her jaw drop.
    After dinner they all strolled outdoors on the lush, smooth lawn that was punctuated by ponds and copses of trees. The fishpond was what was left of the moat, the Duke told them. “The first duke and his sons fought strenuously for the king during the Civil War and Cromwell only let them return to the house on the condition that the moat was filled in and the battlements made useless.”
    Mr. Bodmin was content as he went to bed that first night. He had got what he wanted for his girl.  Success was sweet in his heart as he