Gayle Wilson - His Secret Duchess

Often it was bread and a piece of cheese, some nights a glass of the strong port he kept in the decanter on the sideboard. Sometimes he dismissed her, and she was always thankful for those rare occasions, grateful to escape.

“Nothing, thank you, Mary.”

She had already turned to go when he added the rest, and she felt the tight bud of the fear she had fought during the three weeks he was away blossom sickeningly in her stomach.

“Except your answer to the question I told you must now be considered,” he said.

She hesitated a moment, seeking control, before turning back to face the man standing before the fire. This was a discussion they had had with increasing frequency during the past two months. Always her response had been the same. And always he had pretended to believe she simply needed time to better think through the proposal he was making.

“I cannot wed you, Mr. Traywick. I thought you understood.”

“You are living in my home, Mary. Already there’s talk about the unseemliness of our situation.”

“There will always be those willing to gossip. And those willing to listen. I have lived in your home, sir, for more than six years. I am your son’s governess.”

“Indeed you are,” Marcus Traywick said, his thick lips moving, almost in a sneer. “However,” he continued smoothly, controlling his amusement at her argument, “until two months ago, my wife was also living in this household. There was then no reason for tongues to wag. The situation has changed. Surely you understand that.”

Mary Winters had held the fragile, reedlike body of Abigail Traywick as she breathed her last, her health stolen first by the too-frequent miscarriages and then by the illness whose evidence had grown large and mocking in her womb, a malignant growth rather than the child she had so fervently pined for, a growth whose only outcome could be death.

Long an invalid, unable at the end even to leave her bed, Abigail Traywick had died as she had lived these last years, with only the company of Mary Winters and the small fairhaired boy who sat contentedly for hours on the bright coverlet of her bed.

The laughing conversations of the three had been almost a conspiracy, quickly hidden when Mr. Traywick returned from one of his frequent business expeditions into the outside world. At those times, Mary and the boy had sought the dim, fire-warmed isolation of her small room, removed from the sounds that always accompanied the master’s return.

‘’I need a wife, Mary. The boy needs a mother. It is up to you if you wish to be the one to fulfill those roles.”

He wanted someone who would satisfy his carnal needs. Not just someone, she acknowledged. He wanted her, and she had been made aware of that for a long time. He had made the first approaches even before his wife’s death. The unwanted brush of his hand against her arm or her hip. The sly, inviting smile. The slide of his eyes across her body.

Not that he had stopped his conjugal visits to Abigail, not even when her body was so wasted that it made almost no disturbance of the bed’s smooth coverings, except for the grotesque swelling of the tumor in her belly. Mary knew the reality of his continued visits too well, having seen the evidence of his passions clearly revealed in the dark bruises on the dying body of the woman she cared for, gently bathing the thin limbs and dressing her, at her instruction, in a pretty nightgown, pitifully awaiting her husband’s expected return.

When Mary finally found the courage to ask, Abigail’s eyes had not met hers.

“Because he’s my husband,” she had said softly. “It’s my duty. I cannot deny him, Mary. It is his right. “

Mary Winters had nodded, placing the skeletonlike arm tenderly under the warmth of the quilts that she piled around the dying woman.

“There are others, Mary, more than willing,” Traywick reminded, pulling her thoughts back to the present, to the question for which she could not imagine an answer.

She knew the truth of what he said. He was rich, prominent in the affairs of the district, tall and stout, his thick body taken as a sure sign of his prosperity. It would be thought that spinster Mary Winters had made a match far above her expectations. Tray wick’s florid complexion and the slightly protruding, mud-colored eyes were not flaws serious enough to put off the women who would be more than willing to take over the running of this house Mary had entered more than six years ago.

In those years, the reins of its management had slipped slowly and yet inexorably from Abigail Traywick’s fragile fingers into Mary’s capable ones. She could not imagine anyone else living here.

Nor could she imagine sharing the upbringing of the boy with another woman. Certainly it would not be with the instantaneous, sisterlike rapport she had found with Abigail.

“You may go or stay. That is your decision, Mary,” Traywick went on. “Your right. But if you choose to stay, it must be, given the change in our circumstances, as my wife.”

“Go?” she repeated unbelievingly. Surely he couldn’t mean—

“I don’t think another woman will be willing to share the management of the household with you, as Abigail was. Her health, you know, almost forced that surrender of her duties, but another woman.”

He let the sentence trail off, its implications clear. Another woman would perhaps demand sole control. Not only of the house, a task she would gladly surrender, but also of the child.

“What of Richard?” she asked. The central question, of course. She watched his thick lips move again into that knowing smile.

“There is Richard, of course. Did you think I had forgotten Richard, Mary?”

“Even if you remarry, sir, he shall still need a governess. A new wife might not be so willing to take on the raising of a child from a previous marriage.”

“Especially if she has sons of her own,” he suggested.

The idea was one that she had not considered. How stupid she had been that the realization of what he really wanted did not cross her mind. She had done everything he demanded. All these years, knowing that she was entirely at his mercy, but knowing also, in her heart, that Abigail Traywick’s body would never produce the son her husband’s vanity demanded.

They had been married five years before Mary came to live here. Even then, there had been eight small markers in the churchyard of the village, all the stones bearing the name of Traywick. A few of the babes had been stillborn, carried long enough for hope, she imagined, to flourish in Abigail’s breast that this time, this time at last, she might produce the son her husband wanted so desperately. And his obsessive desire for a son to carry on his name had been Mary’s protection.

“Besides,” he went on, “Richard is old enough to be sent away to school.”

“He’s still a baby,” Mary argued, but suddenly she knew what he intended: to ease aside the child he had been so willing to claim as his own six years ago, and to put into his place a son of his own loins—now that the convenient death of his barren wife had freed him to marry again. She could be his new wife and could bear the sons he wanted, sons of his own seed. In that position, she would be able to care for and protect Richard. Otherwise…

“Your decision, Mary. Shall you become my wife and continue here in the household you have surely come to think of as your own? To care for Richard as if he were your own son…”

Again he allowed the sarcastic suggestion to fade away. There was no reason to voice the truth. They both were aware of it. She had given him her son, and in exchange she had been allowed to live in this house, to care for the baby and for the woman who willingly pretended she had finally carried a living child within her womb, carried it this time to term.