Miracle (3 page)

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Epilogue

Acknowledgement

Marriage and love have nothing in common. We

marry to found a family, and we form families in

order to constitute society. Society cannot dispense

with marriage. If society is a chain, each family is a

link in that chain. In order to weld those links, we

always seek for metals of the same kind. When we

marry, we must bring the same conventions

together; we must combine fortunes, unite similar

races, and aim at the common interest, which is

riches and children.

from A Grandmother's Advice

by
GUY DE MAUPASSANT

Prologue

Basingstoke Hall, Salisbury, England

1800

Ah weddings! What a glorious tradition. What pomp! What circumstance!

What a royal pain in the derrière.

The dowager duchess of Salterdon gazed out over the elaborate landscape of her grandson's home, watched the harried goings-on of the servants—at least a hundred of them—as they erected the brightly colored awnings, the scores of banquet tables, the array of plush chairs, and the multitude of potted blooming plants that flanked the winding, red-carpeted aisle that led to a dais before the distant fountain of rearing marble horses. The fountain was drained and dry, but soon, it would flow with champagne—enough champagne to more than sufficiently intoxicate the five hundred guests whom she had invited to witness this most auspicious occasion.

So far so good.

With a sigh, she turned back to the vast drawing room,
allowed her sharp eyes to peruse her surroundings while her ears listened to the murmur of her grandsons' voices in the next apartment. As yet, their tone sounded friendly enough—the usual sparrings between brothers. Trey, her oldest grandson and therefore heir to the dukedom when his father died so tragically those many years ago, would offer Clayton, the younger brother, a drink, a pinch of snuff, perhaps a somewhat off-colored joke or two before they got down to business. She could so easily picture them in her mind—her beloved children who she had adored since the moment they took their first breaths, only minutes apart, thirty years ago.

Who could have known on that beautiful spring day that their mother would have given birth to identical twins?

"Praise God that he has blessed us with two fine and strapping lads!" the duke (the duchess's son) had exclaimed, then proceeded to spoil the
shavelings
rotten.

Who could have imagined that two such adorable, cherub-faced little tykes, with flashing gray eyes and smiles that could melt iron would have grown into such scoundrels who, consciously or unconsciously, immersed themselves in the sort of mischief that gave even the gossipmongers enough wag to make them heady with disbelief.

Who would have thought that she, the duchess of Salterdon, at the age of sixty and looking forward to retiring to the country where she might die in peace (should the good Lord decide it was her time to go), would suddenly find herself, due to the boys' parents' untimely death, in charge of rearing the "arrogant monsters," as their many
nannys
and governesses had termed them, through the stormy years of their adolescence.

Not that it had
all
been trying.

The duchess sniffed and dabbed her perfumed monogrammed hanky to her nose, cocked her head slightly, and listened more intently to the muted conversation through the wall, then raised one eyebrow at the sudden, deep silence.
Any moment now,
she thought, and
moved
to another window where she could better see the activity surrounding the west wing conservatory, which was not so much an adjunct to the palatial house as a miniature Gothic cathedral conceived by
a fin de siècle
voluptuary a century before, with a nave and aisles formed by clusters of carved pillars, stained glass windows, and a ceiling whose glazed traceries flooded the surrounding marble pavement with light.