The Proposition (45 page)

She nodded. "All right."

He missed a step. "All right?" He stopped entirely, his face full of wonder. A couple ran into them before dancers knew to detour around. "All right?" he repeated.

"Yes."

He didn't know what to say. He looked about them a moment, then grabbed the first person to dance within reach. He told a surprised, elderly woman with a tiara, "We're engaged." As if she'd disputed
it,
he added, "No, truly. We truly, in fact, are engaged. We're to be married."

He grabbed hold of Winnie then, taking one hand tightly in his, his other palm pressed her back, and pulled her up against him, flat against him, as he danced them in pivots, round and round, double-time. Then he kissed her on the mouth, still dancing.
Dancing with your mouth on someone you like.
It was harder than she'd thought, bumpier, but nice.

He laughed at her gracelessness with it, then danced them some more. If she'd thought people would disapprove, she'd been wrong again. A little space cleared for them, and people began to applaud.

"Tell me again," Mick said. Over and over, "Tell me again, tell me again…"

"Yes."
And again, "Yes, yes, yes." She was delighted with his elation, his candor. More practically, she couldn't help asking, "Can't we stay in London? Do you really want to go to Newcastle? Do you really want to be a valet? I don't know what I want exactly or how to manage it all. Could you give up something so I could be in London a little—"

"Shush." He put his finger over her lips as they danced. Then, making his ridiculously fine half-smile up one side of his face, he said, "We'll bargain. Figure out what you want most, and it's yours. You're the queen of propositions, Win."

Chapter 29

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T
he next day, Winnie and Mick were awakened by the arrival of an urgent message from Vivian Bollash.

HE WANTS TO SEE YOU. HE ISN'T WELL. PLEASE COME SOON.

Lady Arles greeted them herself at the front door of their London home. "I have something I want to show you first."

Winnie and Mick followed her through a vast entry room with thick carpet and trickling fountains. It took Mick somehow aback. He halted when he first saw it.

He murmured to Winnie, "I think I ratted this place once. I know this house."

He seemed disoriented when they entered the front library. Then out and out stunned, as was Winnie herself: In the center of the far library wall was a portrait. "Oh, my Lord," she whispered, grabbing Mick's arm as if she could hold him back from looking.

The painting, five feet high and placed prominently in view, was of a man in his thirties, a man who wore clothes from decades ago, yet who, other than that, looked so like Mick, it was hair-raising. The man in the oil portrait had Mick's long bones, his deep brow, his black hair.

And a faint, lordly version of his perfectly crooked smile.

"His eyes are blue," Mick said as if in contradiction to something.

"Xavier's are green," she murmured. "You look like this man. Exactly like him. Mick—" She left the thought unfinished.

He put his hand up over his mouth, thinking, then he turned around, scanning the books on the shelves, then the room. His eyes slid along a heavy desk the size of a grand piano to the lamp on it that dripped with crystal. A tray beside the lamp held glasses of cut crystal. He frowned at this, then looked at Vivian.

"Was there ever a decanter on that tray?"

She looked at the desk, frowned, then shook her head. "I don't know. Oh, wait. How odd." She turned again and reached toward the portrait, its frame. "Here," she said. "I've never seen a decanter in this room as long as I have been here, but Xavier won't fix the picture frame. He says his son did this."

She ran her hand over a gash in the side of the wood, then explained, "He told me his son broke a decanter on it, when he threw it against the wall. He had quite a temper apparently." She looked at Mick. "Do you suppose it's the same decanter you remember?"

Mick shook his head. "I don't know. I'm not even sure it's significant." He shrugged. "Winnie has one, too. They're not so uncommon."

They walked upstairs then into the darkened room of Xavier Bollash. They could hear him before they entered. He was cursing someone, complaining that people were always trying to trick him, take his money, that no one ever told him the truth. That no one ever loved him enough.

It was his doctor, who was packing up, leaving, disgusted with him.

"What's wrong?" Winnie asked from the doorway. Xavier was in bed. He didn't look strong enough to be sitting up, though he was.

He turned toward them. "I've had a heart attack is what's wrong."

"Oh, no," she said. Then, "I did this
by
bringing ferrets to your ball and by—"

He
cut her
off,
saying, "I'm ninety-six years old, you arrogant girl. Who do you think you are? God? I'm dying because I'm old, and nothing works anymore." Then he motioned them close, to stand by his bed.

There, Winnie looked down and saw a surprise.

"My God!" Mick said.

It was Freddie. The ferret lay on the
old
man's chest, snoozing.

"It's yours, isn't it?" Xavier's crackly voice asked. "Do you know it only eats foie gras, crème fraiche, and Russian caviar? An expensive little beast." He laughed, rasping and coughing again as the complacent animal allowed him to pet it despite his joggling it on his chest. "What's its name?" he asked.

"Freddie."

His eyes brightened, a genuinely lively burst, and he smiled without reservation, delighted, surprised. "Freddie," he repeated, settling back again, stroking the shiny brown fur. "I should have known."

He lifted his gaze to Mick's as the small, pointed tip of his tongue came out, trying to wet lips that looked as dry as paper. His eyes grew round and glassy. "My grandson loved animals," he said. "Of course, what child doesn't? But he was marvelous with them. At two and a half, he would call; they would come to him. They weren't afraid." He closed his eyes, remembering, a beatific look of bliss coming over his face. "Oh, he was a magic child." Then he opened his eyes and scowled at Winnie. He pointed a long, boney finger at her, shakily. "Instead we were stuck with her. A girl. And an ugly one at that."

Mick didn't like the remark, but he sat down on the edge of the bed anyway. Very quietly, he began to explain, "Sir," he said, "we've come because you asked. But you have to know: I'm not your grandson. I had a mother. I have a family. I come from Cornwall."

The intransigent old man, though, would only smile and shake his head. "No," he insisted, "you're my grandson. You're Michael. Though I called my grandson Freddie. They wouldn't name him after me, so to confound them, I called him by his middle name, my father's name." He smiled with vindictive pleasure.

Mick glanced at Winnie, glad he hadn't been raised by the fellow. Glad he had nothing to do with him. Sorry that she had.

The old man crooked his finger, inviting them both closer. When Mick leaned forward, the old man said, "You are Michael Frederick Bollash, the sixth Duke of Arles by nightfall, I would guess."

"Now, now," Mick said quickly. "Let's have none of that." He frowned. "I'm telling you: I had a real, loving mother. She always said that she nursed me too long, and I was a difficult birth."

No help at all, Winnie asked, "Mick? Don't you think it's a rather large coincidence that your name is Michael and you named your ferret Freddie?"

"Yes." He grew annoyed with both of them. "I do. A coincidence. Let's not call it more than what it is." When he looked at her, though, she believed it. She thought he was the duke's grandson. "I'm not," he told her. "I'm not."

He didn't want to be. Despite the fact that Winnie might deserve a fancier husband, he didn't want the absurd wealth he saw around him. He felt a real and sure attachment to his own family in Cornwall. Moreover, he certainly didn't want to be related to the self-centered old man lying here in bed.

Meanwhile, the self-centered old man, his eyes still closed, his mouth faintly smiling, spoke into the room as if for all posterity. He said, "My grandson's wet nurse was Cornish. I don't remember her name, but she wouldn't wean him, so we dismissed her. She was too lax, too indulgent. She went back to Cornwall." He shifted grammatical person. "And your birth
was
difficult. My daughter-in-law almost died."

The old man believed it, too.

He added, "The wet nurse was Catholic, deeply religious. We worried she would turn him into a Papist."

Mick, the Papist, remained unconvinced. There were many parallels, but many gaps. "I remember nothing, not any of this."

"Two and a half," Winnie told him. "The child was only two and a half when he disappeared, Mick."

The duke said, "She took him. We let her go months before he was kidnapped. It never occurred to me
she
might have been the one, but now it makes sense. She'd lost a child just before she came to us. She knew the house, our schedules, where to find him. He would have gone with her happily. After all these years, I remember now her saying she thought we were a terrible family, that he should have a better one." He chuckled. "Can you imagine? A Cornish wet nurse thought she was better than the heir to a duchy and all his blood, lineage, and kin." As he nodded off, he muttered, "What an idiot." He settled to sleep.

Vivian asked if they could stay for dinner. She looked harried and alone. Winnie wanted to, so Mick agreed. They stayed, taking turns sitting with the cantankerous patient upstairs. Xavier awoke several times, but seldom for very long. Mostly, he slept with short bursts of demanding one thing or another in fits.

It was Winnie's turn when he awoke, saw her, and motioned her over. Once she was beside him, he patted the bed.

She sat down nervously on the counterpane.

Just then, Vivian brought in his dinner. The moment she entered, he was distracted.

Winnie had already noticed that he never took his eyes off his young wife when she was about. He watched her with ceaseless interest, while she was polite to him. Sweet. Obedient. If he asked for water, she put her sewing down and fetched it for him. When he asked for tea, she went downstairs to brew it herself.

After she'd gone again, Xavier looked at Winnie. Then he whispered in his hoarse voice, "She doesn't love me. She never loved me." His teeth found the edge of his lip. His round, milky eyes filled with tears that didn't flow. Rather the tears sat in small pools in the bags of his lower lids. He wiped them away with his hand, then tried to bring all his emotion into a bitter laugh that only ended in coughing. His hand found the ferret. Odd, the way the two of them had found each other. Freddie seemed to like his attention.

Petting the animal, Xavier told Winnie, "I've lived for a dozen years right beside what I've always wanted most, what I thought everything else would bring." Then he shocked her by saying, "But, no. She's still in love with the man I stole her
from."
He added bitterly, "Though I gave her everything. I gave her a hundred, a
thousand
times what he could have." He curled his lip. "Would she even pretend though—" Even he realized the thought was unworthy. He let it go.

How strange that she had imagined he didn't suffer. How foolish to think, because he was rich and powerful and mean as the blazes that he somehow had life by the tail.

His eyes held Winnie's. She patted his hand. He nodded once—in a kind of thank-you, though she wasn't certain for what. For a moment, his watery eyes clung to hers, hungry for something. She would have given it, if she'd known what it was.

Then she watched as Milford Xavier Bollash slipped out from behind his eyes. They glazed, staring sadly at her, seeing nothing; seeing eternity.

She reached and closed them for him.

It was only when Mick came upstairs that they noticed that Freddie had slipped away, too. The old man and the ferret had wandered off together.

* * *

Even for a man of ninety-six, for whom everyone expected that death wasn't too far away, it was a shock. Mick and Winnie stayed to help Vivian through the worst of the first twenty-four hours. Mick took care of the practicalities, organizing the servants, the particulars of the room, calling the doctor, while Winnie fixed Vivian tea with brandy in the kitchen.

As the duchess's husband had imagined, she was not struck down by his going. She was quiet. Quietly set free, Winnie suspected.

She must have been preoccupied though, because she didn't remember to give them an envelope till it was well past midnight and they were leaving.

"I almost forgot. Oh, dear. Here. He said to give you this when he died. I just didn't expect—well, you know. I didn't expect it to be today."

She handed the envelope to Mick, a letter from a dead man.

He opened it as the three of them stood in the severely formal entry room, fountains trickling. Then he had to sit on one of the stiff velvet benches.

"Dear God," he said, then handed the letter to Win.