The Duke Comes Home

CHAPTER ONE ~ 1875-1

CHAPTER ONE ~ 1875“ – to my only surviving child, my daughter Ilina, the Nizam’s jewels.”

The voice stopped and Mr. Wicker, the Solicitor, put down on the table the legal documents that he had been reading from.

Lady Ilina Bury stared at him in such surprise that her eyes seemed to fill the whole of her small face.

“Is that – all?” she asked in a voice that quivered.

Mr. Wicker found it difficult to look at her.

“I am afraid, Lady Ilina, that your father altered his will a year before he died. I argued with him at the time and hoped that it was just a passing phase, but then as you know he became unapproachable.”

“Just the – Nizam’s jewels!” Lady Ilina murmured beneath her breath.

Then the words seemed to burst from her lips as she added,

“He hated me! He hated me violently from the moment David was killed, so I suppose I might have expected something like this to happen.”

“Although I cannot believe,” Mr. Wicker answered, “that your father really hated you, if I am frank I would say that from the moment your brother died, his brain became a little deranged.”

Ilina nodded.

She knew that this was the truth and that her father was so desperately unhappy when his only son and heir was killed in Egypt in what was not even a battle but just a skirmish between British troops and some rebellious natives that he was no longer himself.

And yet she could hardly believe that the only thing he had left her in his will was something that did not in reality exist.

The Nizam’s jewels were a legend in the Bury family and it had amused Ilina and her brother David when they were children to search for them in the huge rambling house.

All that was known was that when in 1805 the Marquis of Bury returned from India where he had been serving under Sir Arthur Wellesley, he brought with him what was reported to be a fabulous and extremely valuable collection of jewels that had been given to him by the Nizam of Hyderabad.

History related that he had saved the Nizam’s life and in gratitude had been rewarded with huge diamonds from the Nizam’s own mines as well as emeralds, rubies, sapphires and inevitably large strings of pearls, which would be worth a fortune.

The Marquis, who had later become the second Duke of Tetbury, was, however, already a rich man and he had given them to his wife for safekeeping until the war was over.

When his father died in 1812 and he inherited the title, he set his estates in order and decided that he must fight again under the Duke of Wellington, who was now advancing into France with a large Army.

He was apparently welcomed by the great Duke with open arms, only unfortunately to be killed at the Battle of Waterloo.

It was a generation later that it was learnt from his letters, which had been kept by the Duchess, what had happened to the jewels.

In one of them he wrote,

“I would be worried my dearest wife, that you might be in fear of robbers and thieves had I not hidden the Nizam’s jewels in such a clever way that it would be impossible for any outsider to find them. Be very careful therefore not to mention where they are to any member of the household for, even though our servants have been with us for a long time, greed can sometimes undermine loyalty and, as we both already know, that particular treasure is worth a great deal of money.”

He then went on to describe his activities as a soldier and there was no mention in that letter or any of his others of where the jewels had been hidden.

The Duchess died soon after her husband it was said of a broken heart, but either she did not have time or did not wish to confide to anybody where the jewels were hidden.

The story of their magnificence had intrigued and excited the children of each succeeding Duke and Ilina and her brother had been no exception.

Often when it rained David would say to her,

“Today we will go treasure hunting and I will bet you two sweets to one that we will find first the diamonds and then the rest of the spoils.”

The way he spoke always made Ilina feel that she was betting on a certainty only to find herself at the end of the day the recipient of his sweets while the treasure still evaded them.

Now, as she looked at Mr. Wicker in despair, she thought that despite the size of Tetbury Abbey they had over the years searched every nook and cranny from the attics to the cellars.

In fact she had long ago begun to suspect that the jewels either had never existed or had been stolen long ago.

That her father, whom she had tried to love, should have left her nothing else in his will was not only insulting but in his own rather cruel way was telling her how much he resented that he had no heir.

“Why were you not a boy?” he had asked furiously after David was killed.

Then in a different tone he shouted,

“I must be married. I am not too old to beget another son. Find me a wife. God damn you, there must be some woman who will have me!”

That he was crippled and unable to leave his bed would have made him an object of pity if he had not been so intensely disagreeable and so often cruel to Ilina that at times she felt that she would rather be dead like her brother.

Her father, the fifth Duke, had lived his life fully, handicapped only by the restriction of not having enough money.

When a fall out riding left him partially paralysed and unable to move unless he was carried, he railed against Fate.

He then found life so intolerable that the only solace he could find was in drinking until his fingers were distorted with gout.

Alcohol, however, did not make him merry but merely more aggressive and, as Ilina was the only person who would stay with him and tolerate his behaviour, she found herself enduring a life of such misery that, although she was unwilling to admit it, her father’s death was a merciful release.

And yet now he was stretching out beyond the grave to hurt her again.

Because she had known the grey-haired Solicitor all her life she said after a moment,

“What – can I do – Mr. Wicker?”

“I have lain awake asking myself that very question, Lady Ilina,” he replied, “and to be honest, I have not found an answer.”

Ilina rose to her feet and walked to the window to stand gazing out, not seeing the overgrown garden, the ancient oaks in the Park or the few remaining swans on the lake which would have died or flown away long ago if she had not remembered to feed them.

The sunlight touched her hair and Mr. Wicker thought as he had so often before that she was one of the loveliest girls he had ever seen.

Her gown, threadbare and out of date, did not disguise the elegant and youthful curves of her body.

He suddenly remembered with almost a start that she must be nearly twenty-one, having spent the last two years tied to a sick man’s room and having practically no contact with the outside world. And no longer a girl but a woman.

Now he said a little hesitatingly,

“I suppose there is no relation who you could go and live with?”

Ilina turned from the window.

“Who?” she asked. “You know that Papa quarrelled with everybody we are related to. He disliked them even before David was killed and afterwards refused to have anything to do with them.”

“Nevertheless, ‘blood is thicker than water’,” Mr. Wicker replied.

Ilina sighed.

“What do you think my life would be like if I foisted myself onto some distant cousin and could not even pay for the food I put into my mouth?”

Mr. Wicker’s lips tightened.

“I agree it is an intolerable situation and I only wish that there were something I could do about it.”

“Everything in the house and on the estate is entailed,” Ilina said as if she was talking to herself, “and I suppose the only things I could claim are the few pieces of furniture that belonged to Mama and there are not very many of those.”

Mr. Wicker was aware of this and said,

“There is just one thing which may help you, although I admit it is not very much.”

“What is that?”

“My partners and I sold a cottage on the outskirts of the estate a year ago,” Mr. Wicker explained. “I reckoned at the same time that you had spent some of the money your mother left on her death on things that were needed in the house.”

Ilina was listening intently as he went on.

“As we were aware of this cruel clause in your father’s will, we set aside fifty pounds of what we received for the cottage, which we considered to be yours, should necessity arise.”

Ilina smiled and it made her look lovelier than she was already.

“That was very kind of you, Mr. Wicker, and I shall be very grateful for the fifty pounds. It is almost exactly the amount I spent on a new kitchen stove when the old one was burnt out and Papa refused to replace it.”

She gave a little sigh before she continued,

“The rest of the money, which, as you know was less than one hundred pounds, has been spent on food, clothes and charities. The last, I regret to say, claimed a very small share.”

There was a faint smile on her lips and just a fleeting glimpse of two dimples one on either side of her mouth.

Then, as she walked back towards the old Solicitor, she declared,

“So I have fifty pounds and, of course, Pegasus! He is mine and nobody can dispute that.”

As Mr. Wicker knew, Pegasus was her adored horse, which her brother David had given her as a birthday present before he went abroad never to return.

He had then been only a foal, but Ilina had loved him and brought him up so that he followed her everywhere and came when she called as a child or a dog would have done.

She sat down on a chair facing the Solicitor and asked,

“What can I do? Shall I set off on Pegasus with my fifty pounds to seek my fortune or do I stay here and throw myself on the – mercy of the – new Duke?”

There was a note in her voice that told Mr. Wicker how disagreeable the second idea was to her.

“I am sure that His Grace will do his duty,” Mr. Wicker replied hastily.

“Duty! Duty!” Ilina cried. “I know exactly what that means. Christian charity and the expectation that I shall grovel and be effusively grateful for every crumb he allows me.”

The way she spoke made Mr. Wicker give a little laugh before he replied,

“Now, Lady Ilina, it need not be as bad as that. After all we know nothing about the new Duke and he may in fact be a charming man.”

“That was not Papa’s impression. He had always hated the new Duke’s father and used to refer to him as my ‘crooked cousin’.”

“I have heard His Grace say it,” Mr. Wicker admitted, “but I was never brave enough to ask the reason.”

“It was something quite simple,” Ilina said. “He either had charged my father too much for a horse he had bought for him or Papa suspected, without there being any foundation in fact that he cheated at cards.”

She gave a little sigh as she added,

“You know what Papa was like once he had an idea in his head.”

“I do indeed,” Mr. Wicker agreed, “and I know that there was no love lost between His Grace and Mr. Roland Bury.”

“Papa always said that his son Sheridan was a ‘chip off the old block’ and just as crooked and unpleasant as his father.”

“You have never met your cousin Sheridan?” Mr. Wicker enquired.

“You don’t suppose Papa would ever let Cousin Roland come here and his son being tarred with the same brush. Papa barred him too.”

“That all happened a long time ago,” Mr. Wicker pointed out in a tone that tried to be consoling. “After all the new Duke is now thirty-four or thirty-five and his father has been dead for years.”

“I know that, but Cousin Sheridan has been abroad for so long I doubt if he will understand English – ways and English requirements.”