An American Duchess

“What are we going to do?” wailed her mother from the passenger seat.

Zoe stood, tugged the end of her tasseled scarf away from a black-nosed sheep and tossed it over her shoulder. “Unless you plan to push out the car while I steer, Mother, we are going to walk.”

Her mother’s face crumpled and she began to cry.

Perhaps she was being a bit harsh, but it was Mother’s fault she had to marry in haste, and she felt a distinct lack of sympathy. If they had not needed almost immediate access to her trust fund to sort out Mother’s disastrous debts, she would have had time to actually mourn her lost fiancé before she’d had to find a new one and marry to get at her trust fund to save Mother from disaster.

It was sheer luck she’d met Lord Sebastian. She was an heiress who needed a quick marriage to access her fortune; he was an impoverished aristocrat. The perfect ingredients for a marriage of convenience that would end in a divorce almost before the ink dried on the license. A marriage that would cost her a relatively small settlement to Sebastian for his trouble.

Now she had an abbey to find. That was the name of Sebastian’s home—Brideswell Abbey.

Zoe plucked her raccoon coat from the rear seat and slipped it on. Ever since the Olympic had docked in Southampton, she had been frozen stiff. And this was May.

“You can stay here if you wish,” she informed her mother. “I’m going to walk. There was a farmhouse behind us and I’ll bring someone to pull us out.”

“That stone house, do you mean?” Mother looked distraught, staring behind the car in utter panic. “It was miles back there. I didn’t see an automobile there at all. No one in this country has a vehicle. It’s simply uncivilized.”

“Wait here, then. It’s not going to take hours.”

“I should hope not. We’ll be late for dinner. Really, Zoe, if we’re going to have to suffer this journey, I wish you were at least marrying the duke.”

Mother, I am doing all of this for you. But she didn’t say that. In truth, it wasn’t all for her mother. Once she had decided to make this marriage to free her trust fund, she had got rather excited for her upcoming independence. She wanted to manage her money her own way, spend it how she wished, invest it as she saw best. She wanted to be autonomous—a prize now available to a modern woman.

The truth was, she simply wasn’t going to fall in love again. After her trust fund was released and her divorce settled—when she knew Mother was safe and she could finally breathe again—then she would take up her airplane, and she would drink a toast to Richmond in the sky with a bottle of champagne. She would finally, properly, say goodbye to him. And when she landed she would cry until she could do it no more.

“Mother,” she said, “I have never met the duke.”

“Well, you are going to meet him now, honey. Why in heaven’s name did you agree to marry his brother before you met him? You would have been a duchess.”

“According to Sebastian, his brother is scarred, reclusive, emotionless and thoroughly dislikes American women.”

Mother gave a sly look. “I bet you could change his mind about that, Zoe.”

“Sebastian has said his brother has vowed to never marry.”

“Never marry?” Mother echoed. “Then his brother...” A cunning smile lifted her mother’s lips. “You will be the duchess.”

“In a country you just called uncivilized.”

Her mother’s large violet-blue eyes gleamed. “There are a lot of sacrifices that could be endured for a coronet—”

“Mother, Consuelo Vanderbilt just ran away from hers. Apparently it’s not as great a treasure as so many heiresses have been led to believe. And I’d better go if I’m to get us out of this muck before dark.”

Mother flicked open her compact and painted on a new scarlet mouth. “Just think, Zoe, we will even be presented at court. All those snobs in New York can stick that in their pipes and smoke it.”

“I’m sure they will. For now, I’m going to get help.” She would never be a duchess. Her union with Sebastian would be dissolved long before that, but there was no point in poking her mother with that particular sharp stick right now.

Her determined steps tried to swallow up the road, but her heels sank in the mud. Down the way, hidden by a muddy hill, plumes of light gray smoke rose against the darker gray sky. If she could see the smoke of the chimney, she couldn’t be far away.

She pulled her heels out of the mud, found a firmer place to walk and trudged on with no idea how close to nightfall it actually was. As far as she could tell, the English countryside was perennially dark. A bitter wind rushed across the fields, whipped across the wall and raced up her skirt—one of the shortest in New York that year, cut above the knee.

She pulled her raccoon coat tighter around her. But the English cold seemed to penetrate everything.

Drizzle began then, of course. Rain spattered on her cloche hat, struck her nose and lips. She could not wait to plunge into the warmth of Sebastian’s home. A long soak in a great big bathtub filled with steaming water would be heavenly.

Zoe turned a corner. Two things stood ahead of her: the simple stone farmhouse and a solid mass of sheep. She’d never be able to wade through them.

A grunt at her side and the scent of smoke startled her. She whirled around, confronting a deeply lined, ruddy face and a pipe held close to what appeared to be a toothless opening with no lips at all. It was an old man; a stout one with muddy boots, dirty trousers, a brown coat and a tweed cap. He was curled up in a crumpled way, seated on the low wall.

The elderly farmer studied her with small, dark eyes from beneath the low brim of his cap. He pulled on his pipe and didn’t say a word.

“Good afternoon.” She walked up to the man and stuck out her hand.

He remained utterly still, except for his lips, which released his pipe and sent a ring of smoke into the air. He might have been made from granite himself. He certainly made no move to shake her hand.

She knew, in general, the British did not shake hands, except in some business matters. In New York, she’d hired Lady Fannering, an elderly, broke viscountess, to teach her how to curtsy to Sebastian’s family and how to address them. No one had told her what to do with ordinary people.

“My name is Zoe Gifford. I’m here from America—New York City—with my mother. We were driving to Brideswell Abbey when our automobile got stuck in the mud.”

She paused, expecting some sort of sympathetic response. The farmer merely smoked his pipe and didn’t say a word.

“My wheel is stuck. Do you have an automobile?” she asked. “You could tow me out. Just have to loop a chain around the bumper, hit the gas pedal and out I come.”

Again silence.

Her shoe sank again, as if realizing she was getting nowhere. She gave a hard tug and her shoe came free, but it fell off her foot. She was not going to put her stocking sole down in this freezing English mud, liberally peppered with sheep poo. Hopping on the other foot, she lifted her leg, knee bent, to slip her shoe back on.

Her coat fell open as her skirt hiked up. Cold, damp air whisked between her legs.

The farmer made a sputtering sound, like a conked-out engine. His pipe dropped from his lips and landed in the muck between his worn boots. His eyes bulged, and he stared at her exposed thigh.

At least she had his attention. She was freezing and desperate enough to use the sight of her legs to get what she needed. People in New York called her wild and sophisticated. But she wasn’t truly. At heart, she was still a girl who had grown up dirt poor and who felt a knife-twist of pain every time anyone looked down on her. But she had learned, in the frenetic, moneyed world of Manhattan, that demure didn’t get a woman very far. More people respected her for her daring than ever would if she followed rules.

Zoe plucked up his pipe and handed it to the farmer. Up close, the gnarled old man smelled of smoke, damp wool and an earthy scent that she was sure came from his barn. But she was used to being at the aerodrome, where everything smelled of motor oil and gasoline. She batted her lashes. “Could you help me?”

“Bur urn gar burn,” the farmer said, or at least that was how the series of grunts and mutterings sounded to her.

It must be his accent. She couldn’t grasp it yet. After all, she’d had trouble understanding exactly what people had been saying when she and Mother had disembarked at the pier, and their luggage and her automobile had been unloaded.

“Excuse me, I didn’t quite understand. Do you have a motorcar? It’s what we need to have our car pulled out of the mud. Perhaps even horses could do it—”

He broke in unintelligibly, gesturing toward his house with his pipe. Then he gave a satisfied nod of his head.

This was not going to work. “How far is it to Brideswell Abbey?”

His answer was yet another guttural rush of incomprehensible sounds.

She tried again. But there was not one word in his speech she could recognize. Unfortunately, she had been misled. The inhabitants of England did not actually speak English.