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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Sprache: Englisch
Following the success of The Shape of Sand, shortlisted for the CWA Historical Dagger award, comes this dramatic story of love, war and intrigue. It is 1910 and the bloodstained body of an unknown woman is found in the grounds of Sir Henry Chetwynd's Shropshire estate. It is a murder that unveils dark shadows of the past, and has an unexpected impact on the lives of Sir Henry Chetwynd and his family. But it is not only the Chetwynds whose lives lie under a shadow: Hannah, living in London, has lost part of her memory after being involved in a serious accident. As she attempts to piece together the fragments of those missing years, it seems that the ongoing murder investigation in Shropshire could hold the key, and finally allow her to bring the past and present strands of her life together. Switching between the troubled South Africa in the last years of the nineteenth century and the mysterious murder in Shropshire ten years later, Marjorie Eccles' delicate narrative reveals the lies and deceptions concealed beneath the veneer of polite Edwardian society.
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Seitenzahl: 573
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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Shadows and Lies
MARJORIE ECCLES
Contents
1909
MARCH
The exercise book stares accusingly back at me, its pages as blank as when I first opened the book. After half an hour, I don’t yet have the faintest idea how to start.
There they stay, the lost years, tantalisingly beyond my reach, and for perhaps the hundredth time, I ask myself why I am able to remember nearly everything about my life up to a certain point, but not the time between then and my present situation? What fate has decreed my life should be split in two – and that I should simply have no recollection about what happened in that gap? Nine years have been effectively erased from my consciousness, so successfully that I might never have lived through them. The dark suspicion that I might well never know what happened to me during that time doesn’t bear thinking about.
Dr Harvill has suggested that if I start at the beginning and focus all my concentration on writing down that part of my life I do remember, the missing years may follow quite naturally. Well, he is a professional mind doctor, he should know. Myself, I am sceptical. But since I have nothing to lose – and nothing much else to do, either, and perhaps everything to gain – I suppose it cannot do any harm to do as he suggests.
So here I am, in my house in St John’s Wood, sitting at my desk, a small walnut davenport with drawers at the side and a sloping top; an elegant piece of furniture, like the chairs and the coromandel wood table, the upright piano with the tasselled runner across its top, and the cushioned sofa. Did I choose any of these pieces myself? Did I decide on the narrow, elegant vases on the mantelpiece? The pictures? Occasionally, I have lightning stabs of near-memory about little things: I can almost believe I see myself stitching that silk cushion over there, buying the sheet music for The Merry Widow that I found in the piano stool, but perhaps not. I am more inclined to believe that it is wishful thinking, since I cannot even remember how many years I’ve lived in this house, when I first came, or if indeed I’ve always been alone here, except for someone like Rosa – though this seems unlikely. There are, after all, those presences, sometimes glimpsed, sometimes just sensed, which must mean something.
So what, precisely, do I know? Almost everything about my earlylife, at any rate. I know that I was born in 1876, which makes me thirty-three years old. I know that my name was Hannah Jackson, and yet the money in the bank is in the name of Smith, which is a great mystery in itself, since I never had any money. I wear a wedding ring, so I am presumably Mrs Smith, and however that came about I still haven’t fathomed. The name seems as improbable as the title of Mrs, since I have no recollection of any husband. Although…
Yes, if I am honest, that is one thing I do not need to question; I have known what it is to be married. How else would I have these unsatisfied longings, that memory of passion, and love?
I apparently own this house and have a small but adequate income from investments. I have learned that I was injured in an accident when I was riding on the top of a London omnibus, one blowy morning last autumn. And now it’s March, and I still remember nothing of it, except for that one last, blinding moment, that piercingly clear picture which flashed across my eyes before I lost consciousness: the runaway brewer’s dray colliding with the motor omnibus in the milling traffic on Ludgate Hill; the shouts and cries of the passengers; the barrels rolling all over the road; the screams of the horses…‘Trauma’ (which is what Dr Harvill calls the state occasioned by that blow to the head which I received in the accident) has effectively erased what went before it.
This sitting-room of mine is a comfortable, even luxurious room; not ostentatious, but certainly not the room of someone who has ever had to watch the pennies. The bright fire has been lit by my maid, Rosa. She is the one who cooks and keeps everything spotless, with the help of a woman to do the rough. The household consists only of Rosa and myself, so the work is undemanding.
She has become something more than a servant, Rosa Tartaryan, though not yet someone I can regard as a friend. A dark, intense woman, she has her own friends, whom I’ve yet to meet; she is part of a small circle of Balkan émigrés, who seem to exist in a shadowy half-world, meeting in gloomy cafés and plotting ways in which they can return to their own country. Revenge is what they want, for the bloodshed and misery inflicted on their people by the Turks who have occupied their land. She came to England in a roundabout way, exactly how I’ve never been able to discover, for no one can be more tight-lipped than Rosa when she wishes to keep her owncounsel. She says she came to work for me in answer to an advertisement I had inserted in The Gentlewoman, just before the accident. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, I must believe her.
Though she dislikes talking about her own past – I have the feeling that terrible things may have happened to her before she reached England – she is forever trying to get me to talk about the old days, in an effort to help me remember my lost years. She never presses me too much, which is not like fierce Rosa – so that I occasionally have the feeling she knows more than she pretends, despite her assurances that she wasn’t with me in what I always think of as The Time Before: those lost years. She is much the same age as me; she looks after me well, cooking nourishing, tasty meals to which I fail to do justice. The clothes in my wardrobe, from my previous existence, don’t fit. Rosa tut-tuts over me and says I’m nothing but skin and bone, and will become ill again, but I don’t care. There is nothing, as far as I am aware, for me to live for. Inside, I feel dead.
I am apathetic about this trying to remember: in fact, I am sure Dr Harvill believes me downright perverse, though this, I think, is rather than admit his methods are not working. But why should I even try? Knowledge of those lost years, I feel sure, will bring me nothing but pain. But in the dream last night, I again saw the boy, and though I haven’t today glimpsed his shadow-self, his mischievous, faun-like face, as I’ve always done previously after dreaming of him, I feel the pain even more than usual; and something small and hard and stubborn inside me is insisting that for his sake I should do as Dr Harvill suggests and make some effort.
Very well, then, I will. But not until it is finished will I show it to the doctor. It’s not exactly that I don’t trust him, though he is a little too smooth for my liking; his answers come too quickly, his solutions sound too pat. Yet who am I to question his methods? Perhaps they will work, after all.
I stare out over the small, pleasant garden. I can see other gardens along the quiet street, several of them with forsythia bushes making a great show, and suddenly, I see the forsythias Mrs Crowther ordered to be planted at Bridge End House.
They’ll do well enough for a beginning.
Chapter One
SEPTEMBER
He hadn’t let them know he was coming, but that was Sebastian all over.
He and Louisa had driven all the way down into Shropshire through intermittent, heavy rain, arriving in the village in the middle of a thunderstorm. He drew up to her father’s house and she made a quick dash to the door, throwing a cheerful goodbye over her shoulder and disappearing inside with a shake of her umbrella and a wave of her hand. Having driven circumspectly enough until then, Sebastian put his foot down, at last able to give his new Austin Ascot the full reign of its fifteen horse power, taking the next two miles at a reckless thirty miles an hour along the narrow lanes towards the lodge gates of Belmonde.
Thunder continued to roll over the distant hills, the skies wept and draughts insinuated themselves round his ankles. As the vehicle sluiced up the long, rising drive, winding through the mixed conifers and huge banks of dripping rhododendrons, so magnificent in spring, so ineffably dreary in the wet, his cheerfulness began to evaporate. The motorcar hood had given little protection from the rain which drove in at the sides and without Louisa, small as she was, beside him, he felt cold, damp, and acutely conscious of her absence. The depressing thought came to him that it always rained when he came home these days, perhaps echoing his mood. The pathetic fallacy, as Louisa might say: nature possessing human feelings.
It was nothing of the kind, of course – the truth was, he was simply annoyed with himself for having declined to go across the Channel to Longchamps for the racing with Inky Winthrop, a decision that had left him twiddling his thumbs in a London tiresomely bereft of friends and acquaintances. The weather hadn’t helped, of course. The exhausted end of summer had turned wet and cold, with London permanently wrapped in rain, umbrella spokes catching you in the eye whenever you went out, and everyone splashing duck-footed about the pavements. The theatres had nothing new to offer and with the House in recession, there were none of the usual hullabaloos issuing from Westminster to cause a bit of excitement: even the Irish were quiet. Most of his other friends were up in Scotland, shooting grouse, and moreover, every amusing young woman he knew seemed to have taken herself off abroad to capture the last few weeks of sun in Biarritz or Monte Carlo or some such place. Pretty little Violet Clerihugh was in San Remo with her mother, and Sebastian, having just emerged, blinking like a mole, from the concerns which had occupied him exclusively for weeks, and feeling he needed a respite to refresh himself, was left disconsolate for many reasons, and short of cash. In a nutshell, he was thoroughly put out.
Though nothing like as much as Louisa, tossing her bright brown hair, incandescent with fury about the arrest and imprisonment of one of those dangerous women’s rights persons she so admired, declaring that the treatment being meted out to this woman in prison – confinement and the appalling threat of being fed by force if she persisted in her hunger strike – was nothing short of inhuman. If anything was needed to sway Louisa from an admiring but reluctant hesitation on the brink of the women’s suffrage cause, that was it. After having begun to think her enthusiasm had at last begun to wane, Sebastian was now very much afraid she might be poised to plunge right in. He hoped that her father, over the next few days, would make her see sense. He was the only one who might.
Louisa was very good at advising other people, not so good at listening to what was best for herself. She’d neatly turned the tables when Sebastian had tried to steer her away from such dangerous involvement: “Oh, stuff! Involvement’s what being alive is all about, isn’t it?” When he hadn’t replied, she’d added abruptly, giving him a very direct look, “You’ll have face up to the facts some time, you know, stop fooling around and start taking things seriously. It’s been nearly a year, after all.”
“Dearest Louisa, you should know by now I’m not cut out for taking life seriously.”
“Oh, Seb!” Then, sighing softly, “All right, sorry. Sorry.” She said no more, and he’d been grateful that she hadn’t pressed this particular, emotionally fraught point.
After all, she wasn’t to know (though he thought she might suspect) that it wasn’t the fact of his brother’s death he couldn’t face – it was the consequences resulting from it that weighed him down. When Harry, after resigning his commission in the regiment had, more for the devilment of it than anything, got himself taken on as a war correspondent for the Daily Bugle during the struggle against the Boers more than a decade ago now, it had forced them all to accept that the golden boy, Harry, everyone’s darling, might not, after all, be invulnerable. Wholly admiring, and envious of his brother, but prepared for grave news at any time, Sebastian, then still a schoolboy, had first become aware of what would inevitably follow if the inconceivable were to happen, and Harry should be killed: that the mantle of heir to Belmonde, which his elder brother wore with such debonair ease, would then fall upon his own shoulders. Harry, however, had continued to lead his usual charmed life, showing incredible bravery in getting his despatches through and emerging from the war with barely a scratch – only to die last year in that shockingly inglorious way. Leaving Sebastian back where he started, seeing no possibility of doing anything more exciting with his life than fulfilling the role of a country gentleman, when what he wanted was…well, he hadn’t known what – until now. But, afraid of tempting fate, aware of battles ahead, so far he’d mentioned nothing of that to anyone, not even Louisa.
In the dark afternoon, a sudden sharp curve appeared in the long winding drive. Although he knew every inch of the road and that particular bend was very familiar to him, the speed at which he was travelling had made him take it faster than he ought (though he was unlikely to encounter anything other than a pheasant from the game preserves either side) so that when he saw the – the apparition, was how he afterwards thought of it – he wasn’t able to stop immediately. As soon as he could, he slowed and reversed back round the curve to the same spot, but now he could see nothing. It must have been some trick of the light, he told himself, that had made him think he’d seen the figure of a woman, wrapped in a heavy coat and with a hat pulled low over her eyes, standing a few yards back from the drive in the shadow of a dripping larch. Almost as if she’d heard the approach of the motor car and hoped not to be seen.
Yet still unwilling to believe she’d been a figment of his imagination, for Sebastian was not given to fancies, and was gallant enough not to wish to leave any woman alone in such conditions (despite the hat and coat, she must have been soaked to the skin, for she hadn’t appeared to have even an umbrella to protect her) he stayed for a while until his eyes should become accustomed to the gloom under the trees, trying to convince himself that they hadn’t been playing him tricks. Another lightning flash, however, lit up the scene and showed it to be quite devoid of any human presence – unless the woman was unaccountably hiding behind some tree or, more likely, had turned and hurried back the way she had come. The lightning was followed very soon by a great clap of thunder and another torrential cloudburst. More unnerved than he should have been by the occurrence, he drove forward again, this time more circumspectly, dismissing it from his mind.
The drive opened out presently and there appeared in front of him Belmonde Abbey; an abbey no longer, not for nigh on four centuries, but a sprawling pink brick-and-sandstone house which had grown in a haphazard manner on the original site. Nothing to speak of architecturally…parts had been added, and others demolished at the whim of subsequent owners, with scant regard for aesthetics, and its manifold crenellations and turrets were an affront to Sebastian’s sense of style – but he’d grown up with it and regarded it with an exasperated affection. Unprepossessing under the lashing rain, creeper covered, it was anchored to the earth by surrounding trees on three sides and on its front by a parterre of four circular and four ogee flower beds. These were placed with geometric precision within a smooth grass square, which itself was weighted at strategic points by the solidity of yew topiary clipped into perfect spheres and cones. A design much approved of by his father.
Ignoring this horrid sight, Sebastian drew up to the front door in a scatter of wet gravel and stopped the engine. Leaving the motor where it was, he dashed up the front steps through the pelting rain and burst into the hall before the footman could get to the door to open it.
“Mr Sebastian! How very good to see you.”
This was Blythe, arriving hard on the heels of the footman, only a little breathless, quickly regaining his composure at being thus outflanked, mortified to think the famed hospitality at Belmonde was lacking in welcome, even by the unexpected arrival of the young master.
“It’s OK, Mr Blythe,” said Sebastian, disregarding the old butler’s pained expression at the use of the Americanism, and allowing himself to be divested of his waterproof coat, and his cap. “Anyone at home?”
An unaccustomed air of quietness hung about the house, making him wonder belatedly if he hadn’t been too hasty in his decision to come down without first ensuring that his mother would actually be here, or whether she was away on a Saturday-to-Monday at some friend’s country house. There were no mandatory events in the social calendar she might be attending, at this dead end of the season, but it did occur to him that he hadn’t come across her for some time at any of these sort of occasions, which was where he most often met his mother. For the last few years, Sebastian had had his own bachelor rooms in Albemarle Street.
Blythe, however, informed him that all the family were at home. “A quiet weekend has been planned. Her Ladyship has been slightly indisposed, and she and Sir Henry – and your grandmother – are all here. The only guests are Mrs and Miss Cashmore. Fortunately, no others were expected.”
Thank God for that, thought Sebastian, suppressing a groan at the thought of the Cashmores. An empty house, without his mother’s support in his approach to his father, would have meant a wasted journey. It would have been even worse to have arrived to find the place full of the same set forever encountered in one country house or another – but he frowned. “My mother, ill? And no one let me know, Mr Blythe – why was that, I wonder?”
“It was nothing serious, I understand. She is much improved.”
“I’m relieved to hear it.”
“Yes, quite well again, though I believe she is resting at the moment. Sir Henry is in the business room.”
“In that case,” said Sebastian hastily, “I won’t disturb him. Have my bags seen to, there’s a good fellow. I’ll just have a wash and then I’ll go and see my grandmother.”
“You will not be regarding this – attachment – with any seriousness, of course, Sebastian,” stated his grandmother, Lady Emily Chetwynd, approaching her subject at once, but smiling. “Dalliance with a village maiden is all very well, dear boy, almost a rite of passage, one might say, but you have enough good sense to be aware that one – especially you – must always have regard to the future.”
Sebastian automatically returned her smile – a reflection of his own, a sideways smile and one that showed great charm. He wasn’t particularly handsome, or not quite so obviously so as Harry had been, but he had an open, pleasingly mobile face showing a quick intelligence, and a readiness to smile that quickly endeared him to people. Folding his long legs and perching on the stool near to where his grandmother sat, very upright on the edge of her chair, declining the use of the backrest for support, he reached out and took her hand, bending his head over it to avoid her quick old eyes. Gently he adjusted her rings, which had recently been enlarged to fit over the swollen knuckles and which consequently slipped about loosely above them. The softness of her hands was eloquent testimony to the fact that she’d never had need to do a day’s work in her life, but even Lady Emily was mortal, and arthritis was no respecter of persons. Apart from a stick to help her rise from her seat more gracefully, however, she allowed no concessions to painful joints.
Sebastian, though exceedingly fond of his grandmother, was in fact surprised by how angry her words had made him – in so far as he ever was angry, for he was too easy-going to let such emotions trouble him overmuch. But Louisa, to whom Lady Emily was referring jocularly (though not by any means as jocularly as a stranger might suppose) was not in any circumstances to be regarded as a subject for jest.
“Dash it, I only gave her a lift from Town. You’ve got it all wrong, Grandmama. There’s no question at all of any – attachment, as you put it. Louisa’s a jolly girl, but there’s nothing remotely like that between us. Too clever for me, for one thing.”
“Yes, I’m quite aware of Louisa’s intelligence – and my admiration for her knows no bounds,” she returned drily, “but being a clever young woman with strong opinions does not preclude the possibility of falling in love with the wrong person. On the contrary, I’ve often observed that people of high intelligence do not always possess much common sense.”
“Well then, since I don’t know anybody with much more common sense than Louisa, you needn’t be afraid she’s in the least in love with me,” returned Sebastian, with a laugh that was not quite as light as he might have hoped. “And besides —”
“Besides what, my dear boy?”
“Oh, nothing.”
He knew this was an infuriating reply. His grandmother, much as he loved her and admired her indomitable courage, invariably had the effect of reducing him to the language and attitudes of the schoolroom, though he hoped she didn’t mean to. But devil take it – Louisa! She was coming down a bit hard on someone he’d known all his life, someone he’d always thought she liked. Not good enough in her eyes for a Chetwynd, of course (Lady Emily was herself the daughter of an earl), especially not the heir. As children, the Chetwynd and Fox families had played together without any of the stuffy social distinctions so many people thought fit to perpetuate. To his mother indeed, with her transatlantic tolerance, such nuances – or so she declared – were absurd, they could have played with the under-gardeners’ children for all she cared. Besides, the Fox’s were so charming, all of them, with their easy manners and good looks. Even Sir Henry hadn’t objected to friendship with them, and was civil enough with their father when he invited him to dine at Belmonde, as he ritually did, once or twice a year, in the interests of good neighbourly relations. Eccentric as Augustus Fox was, his was a decent family, after all. Not the same class as the Chetwynds, but respectable. Louisa’s maternal grandfather had been an archdeacon, and Augustus himself had been a much esteemed Oxford scholar in his day.
The only problem, as far as Sebastian was concerned, was: who would be good enough for Louisa? A question which had recently begun to occur to him with surprising and troubling regularity.
Lady Emily picked up her tapestry, destined for a fire screen, in which game birds and other fauna gambolled wantonly together amongst autumn foliage, and dexterously threaded her needle with scarlet wool. Despite her painful fingers, she did a little work on her project each day, as a discipline. “Well, it’s good to see you,” she said, changing the subject. “How long is it since you’ve been down, you disgraceful boy?”
“Too long, perhaps, Grandmama,” Sebastian admitted. “But I’m forever bumping into Mama in London, you know – and Father, too, sometimes, though he’s always so dashed busy, seeing to his affairs. When he’s there, that is.”
Lady Emily did not immediately reply. Sebastian, too, thought he had better not elaborate this point. It was becoming all too increasingly obvious that his father was inclined to spend less and less time away from Belmonde, that Adèle was often left to attend social functions alone in Town and elsewhere; though this left her free, of course, to entertain and be entertained, to attend concerts, theatre and the opera, all of which were anathema to her husband; to shop or to slip across to Paris to visit her dressmaker. To do as she wished, in fact.
The silence lengthened between them as Lady Emily stitched on, and thought about Sebastian. It was all very well to say let the boy sow his wild oats, as his mother did – he was a young man, and young men needed their diversions; a gay life was only to be expected – but that sort of thing could not go on forever. He had been through the requisite wild, reckless period but she was optimistic that it was now over, though she did not care for some of the young bloods he called his friends, such as George (Inky) Winthrop, his old schoolfellow, who spent too much time at the races, or so she heard through the grapevine. And he still showed more inclination to gallivant around Greece and Italy with a sketchbook than to find himself a useful occupation which might be the making of him: the Army, perhaps, or even politics, like her second son Monty, though not, she thought, the Church. He was in no hurry either, it seemed, to look for a suitable wife who would provide him with a son and heir, and she was afraid of that independent streak in him that might at any time make him marry someone unsuitable: Louisa Fox, for example.
He said abruptly, in the way he often had of picking up her thoughts, “It’s all a nonsense, isn’t it? I’ve never wanted – all this, you know, Grandmama.” He had no need to elaborate his meaning, but he added, “Harry would have done it so much better than I.”
“Do you really think so?”
For a moment darkness lay between them: things which could not be said. Not for the first time, Sebastian wondered how much his grandmother knew – or guessed – about Harry’s private concerns. Then she rallied. “It cannot be helped, the way life turns around. Don’t sulk over it, Sebastian dear. It’s not in your nature. And the sooner you accept the inevitable, that you are now the heir and there is nothing you can do about it – and a great deal more you should be doing – the happier we shall all be.”
It was briskly said, though Lady Emily had not meant the advice unkindly. It was what her grandson needed to hear, little as he wished to. At the moment, his mind was as stubbornly set as his father’s.
“There’s no hurry. You know Father wouldn’t thank me for pushing my nose in. He must do everything himself, doesn’t trust anyone else.”
Lady Emily sighed. Indeed. She must speak to Henry. It was high time her eldest son came to his senses and realised that he and Sebastian had both taken up a stance from which it was difficult to back down, though one of them had better do so. It might seem to her grandson that there was no hurry, but Lady Emily was no stranger to the sudden vicissitudes of fortune and knew it was dangerous to discount them – look at what had happened to Harry. And Henry did have an alarmingly high colour at times, just like his father, who’d died of an apoplexy when he was fifty, leaving Henry with a mass of debts, enormous death duties, a run-down estate and not much idea how to go about setting things right. Given his nature, however, Henry had immediately buckled down and learned how to do so. Since then, he’d become more and more wrapped up in Belmonde, giving little thought to anything other than the conviction that his heir should never be left to pick up the pieces as he had been – in itself an undoubtedly laudable ambition. The irony of it was that Henry and his son were at loggerheads not, Lady Emily was sure, because Sebastian was unwilling to learn how to shoulder his future responsibilities but rather that he was convinced – with some justification – that his father couldn’t accept that everything would not run away out of control should he let go of the reins for one single moment. While Henry chose to believe his son was congenitally bone idle. She often felt she would like to knock their heads together.
It was Sebastian’s turn to change the subject. “What’s all this about my mother being ill?”
“Not ill, my dear, just a trifle under the weather. I don’t think it’s anything much, though I do believe she’s worried about Sylvia – which, of course, is the last thing she would admit. Your sister has apparently taken up with this frightful woman from India who has persuaded her to join some peculiar sect.”
“Annie Besant,” returned Sebastian gloomily. “I have heard rumours.”
“That’s the name, Annie Besant.” Lady Emily’s lips pressed together. The woman was dangerous, a radical. A person who took up with one cause after another. To be sure, her championship of those poor little girls who worked with phosphorous in the match factories had caused some improvement in their terrible working conditions. But she was also outspoken on taboo subjects such as birth control, and had indeed – quite rightly – been prosecuted for publishing material on the same subject as likely to deprave or corrupt those whose minds were open to immoral influences. Well, at least Lady Emily couldn’t see Sylvia being caught up in anything like that…though one had hardly thought her inclined to religion, either. Perhaps it was her childless state, after seven years of marriage, which was, contrary to appearances, worrying her and causing her to turn to whatever might bring her hope.
“I am right in assuming, am I not,” she enquired with a dangerous inflection, “that this Besant woman now calls herself a Theologist?” She drove her needle through the red eye of a particularly haughty-looking pheasant.
“Theosophist.”
“Theosophist, then. Let us not split hairs.”
Sebastian, knowing her views on the subject, thought that he had better not add that Annie Besant was also a sympathiser with the women’s suffrage movement. One dangerous thing at a time.
“No wonder your poor mother is worried. It’s worse than I thought. I believe those people believe in Buddha and reincarnation and no red meat – and free love to boot, I have no doubt,” Lady Emily stated with ill-informed exaggeration.
Sebastian shrugged. “Algy should put his foot down.”
“Algy? Oh, my dear!”
Well, no, perhaps not.
Sylvia had married well, but Algy Eustace-Bragge was – in Sebastian’s words – an awful muff, despite being able to give Sylvia every material thing a woman could want. Her grandmother, however, suspected Sylvia did not have it all her own way, something which she understood and rather approved of: a man should be master in his own house, while at the same time, a woman should be capable of getting what she wanted, without resorting to outright dominance. She herself had never had any difficulty in bringing Chetwynd around to doing exactly as she wished. It was something upon which she and her daughter-in-law were at one. Henry was putty in Adèle’s hands, though she was clever enough not to let him know this. Which was just as well, because Henry, ever since he was a child, could only be pushed so far. Since his marriage, his mother had learned that applied to his wife, too.
Despite herself, she had become quite fond of Adèle, able to overlook the fact that her father had made his fortune in meat-packing in Chicago, and not only because she had most certainly saved the fortunes of the Chetwynd family – if only temporarily. From the fastness of her own unmodernised wing at Belmonde, where nothing, not a stick of furniture or a piece of wallpaper, had been changed for half a century, Lady Emily observed with a keen eye the changes Adèle had brought to Belmonde, and while she certainly did not approve of everything, she had found it expedient, on the whole, not to interfere. Adèle was not, as she had expected a daughter-in-law to be, biddable. She knew how to charm, but she had an iron will and was unscrupulous in getting what she wanted, despite being deceptively softly-spoken, and entirely agreeable. Indeed, she quite often got the better of her mother-in-law, which few people did.
There was no denying Adèle was hopelessly extravagant, renowned for her hospitality and the lavish parties she loved to give, never mind that Henry thought them – and most of that circle of those so-called clever people she liked to call her friends, come to that, largely a waste of time and money; he was terrified of being cajoled into joining them in their after-dinner pencil and paper games; he could not have composed an epigram if his life had depended upon it.
“Speaking of your mother,” said Lady Emily, glancing at the gold fob watch pinned to the armour-plated elegance of her splendid bosom, and putting an end to disagreeable thoughts for the time being, “I told her I would join her for tea. Shall we go along?”
Chapter Two
“Don’t light the lamps, Margaret. It’s so pleasant here in the firelight, with the rain outside.”
Louisa, now warm and dry, leaned back and settled her head against the comfortably cushioned inglenook seat and stretched her legs to the great fireplace, heaped with blazing oak logs. Her father and her sister Margaret, a fair-haired woman of mild disposition, sat on a similar seat, opposite. Between them was a laden tea-table, and behind them the large, shadowy room that stretched across the width of the house. The firelight winked on shining brass and copper and polished floors, throwing long, leaping shadows on to the low ceiling and into hidden corners, and Louisa thought how lovely it was to be home. Yet for all that, she would not permanently exchange it for her freedom, her frugal little room in London.
This need for independence (she was studying at the London School of Medicine for Women in Bloomsbury) was something Margaret would never completely understand. Louisa caught the anxious glance cast in her direction before her sister turned to spear a crumpet on the two-foot long toasting fork and hold it to the fire. She ought not worry so much, it made her look every one of her thirty-five years, though she probably couldn’t help that by now; it had become a habit.
Margaret’s next words reproached Louisa with their sweet concern. “You look tired, Louisa, are you sure you’re not at your books too much?”
Louisa smiled and shrugged, though if the truth be told, she did feel a trifle listless, an unusual state for her. She might be small, but she made up for it in energy.
“Fiddle-faddle!” their father intervened robustly, taking another scone. “Since when did studying ever hurt anyone?”
“Not you, at any rate.” Louisa smiled affectionately. “What are you working on now, Father?”
“I must show it to you.” He became loquacious, explaining his latest enthusiasm, a contraption he’d made, involving two revolving glass plates and a thin metal wiper, a machine designed by a fellow called Wimshurst to demonstrate the workings of electricity. Now that he’d finished it, in time to show his small grandsons when they came to visit, he could get back to The Book. For as long as Louisa could remember, Gus had been engaged in compiling a tome (which no one, not even himself, realistically ever expected to be finished), comprehensively and ambitiously entitled “The Complete Lepidoptera of the British Isles.” Now retired from his practice as a doctor, he spent most of his time scratching at his manuscript – when some new experiment or idea wasn’t catching his fancy – poring over his butterflies and insects or venturing out to catch them with his net. His disinclination to kill other wild animals did not endear him to the local hunting fraternity, but this worried him not one whit.
“There’s too much flame on the logs, you’ll burn that crumpet, Meg,” said Louisa. “I’m only tired because I was up late last night after attending a meeting.”
“Your suffragettes?” Margaret nearly lost her crumpet in the fire as she turned to gaze at her sister. “Oh, my dear, I do hope you’re not going to become too involved!”
“Of course not, you know I can’t afford to let anything get in the way until I’ve qualified. I’ve no time for anything else,” answered Louisa impatiently.
“At least that’s something to be thankful for. How can these women submit themselves to the prospect of such degradation? How can they be so unladylike? Disgracing themselves. Screaming, being carried off kicking by the police! And as for hunger striking…I’ve read that there’s talk of actually feeding them by force.” Margaret’s indignant face was vividly flushed, perhaps from being too near the fire. She herself would never dream of being associated with anything of the sort, but one could never be sure with Louisa. The twelve years’ difference in their ages might have been thirty, so differently did they view life.
“More than talk – there’s at least one of my friends, at this very moment, who is refusing to eat and is being force fed.”
“What?” Two shocked faces were towards her.
“I daresay she feels the cause is worth it,” Louisa said. “But as a doctor – an embryo one, at least – it horrifies me. As a woman, it enrages me. It’s an utter abomination, whichever way you look at it. Now they’ve started, they will carry on. One day, some woman will die, and then perhaps they’ll take some notice.”
“Then they shouldn’t refuse to eat. But oh, Louie, it would surely never come to that?”
“It could, Margaret,” came from their father. A doctor himself, he could not but be in full agreement with Louisa’s views on this unspeakable practice. At the same time, though he had a certain sympathy for the cause she espoused, he agreed with Margaret; it was self-inflicted, and in any case, such extreme methods were unlikely to have the desired effect, he was sure. These women were right in their aims and ideas, but the way in which they were trying to forward them could only be counter-productive. Putting people’s backs up, throwing bricks and stones like street urchins, damaging property. The last time he’d seen Louisa, she’d been on fire with an idea which was being mooted, that of organising a regiment of women to descend on the West End of London, mingle with the homegoing workers and then shatter as many shop windows as they could. Deliberately get themselves arrested and sent to prison, in order to make an open stand for their rights, no doubt to achieve the same end result as this mistaken young woman Louisa had spoken about – a flamboyant gesture which had unpleasant undertones of martyrdom. But his fears for Louisa’s safety forbade him to voice such thoughts, aware that his younger daughter needed little encouragement. Despite her denial of any participation, the words ‘not yet’ had hung in the air, and he was only too afraid that when she had gained her qualifications, she would instantly become more active in support of this franchise business. Louisa had been a tomboy and could throw a cricket ball with the best of them. Hurling a stone through Swan & Edgar’s window wasn’t that much different, after all. He sighed. Out of all his seven children, he had a special bond with Louisa, which was why she worried him most – even he, easy-going, eternal optimist that he was.
“I would have thought, Louisa,” Margaret ventured, “that you’d seen enough of fighting for causes to know what damage can ensue.”
Gus threw her an affectionately exasperated glance. Margaret had no tact, though she was good as gold. When his dear Ellen had died in late childbirth this eldest daughter of his had selflessly assumed her mother’s role, thereby missing her chances of marriage. She appeared quite content to remain here, seemingly forever, satisfied to be nothing more than a homemaker in the same tradition as her dead mother. Her self-effacement had not rubbed off on to Alice; the baby she’d brought up had become a blithe and confident child, though she, too, lacked Louisa’s vehemence. Louisa, of course, had enough of that for all three.
“Oh, I don’t forget that, Margaret,” she was saying now, “how could I? My one and only adventure.”
“No doubt there will be others.”
Louisa threw her a quick glance, but her sister’s profile remained as serene as ever, her eyes innocent of guile. Sometimes, Louisa wanted to shake her composure with true stories of what had really happened to her during that legendary escapade but mostly, she wanted nothing more than to forget it. She was sick and tired of having to remember, and to recount for people’s entertainment tales of what had happened to her when she was still a child. It was not, and never had been, in her opinion, a subject for entertainment – in fact, the whole episode, despite its heroism, had been so much talked about that it was in danger of becoming a tremendous bore. Over and done with, it should be relegated to the past, where it belonged. As far as she was concerned, the best thing to come out of that experience was that it had decided her future. From that time on, she had known that the only thing she wanted to do was to study medicine and become a lady doctor – regardless of the fact that the title was still regarded as being a contradiction in terms by many people.
Margaret’s voice broke into her thoughts. “What a pity Sebastian couldn’t spare the time to have tea with us,” she murmured, accepting her father’s cup for another refill.
“I asked him, but he wanted to get home.”
“Only natural, I suppose – I scarcely remember the last time he was at Belmonde.”
“Since he only gets a lecture from his father every time he does come down, one can scarcely blame him for that.”
There was a short silence, and Gus added pacifically, “Sir Henry’s naturally hoping for a great deal from Sebastian now. He suffered a hard blow in losing Harry.”
“So have they all suffered, Papa,” Louisa said sharply, trying to banish from her mind the worry she’d had quite often lately, that one of these days Sir Henry’s patent disapproval might cause Sebastian to do something quite stupid and irrational, which he would certainly later regret.
“Quite so,” Gus agreed, as neutrally as he was able. To lose a son so young – and one so attractive, so full of life and charm and promise as Harry had been – and still to be alive oneself…the old left behind, the young taken…Gus had seen this many times in the course of his working life, and had never come to terms with the sadness of it. He did not like Sir Henry – or not very much – but he could sympathise with the views of a man in his position. Harry had had his faults, of course, but they had been forgotten; he was remembered – and perhaps should be – for his quickness of spirit, the smiles that could charm the birds off the trees, and his jokes. But Gus suspected that his brother’s elevation to sainthood since his death must be an added burden for Sebastian to bear.
Well, no doubt everything would take care of itself, given time. Every family coped with grief in its own way. What worried him more was the growing intimacy between this, his dearest girl, and Sebastian. Louisa was well able to take care of herself, of that he had no doubts, but the two young people had been thrown together in London, and from what he could gather, they were now very thick and spent more time together than he would have thought mere friendship dictated, when of course anything closer than that was doomed. Gus was extremely fond of the young man, but…Louisa and Sebastian, no, it simply wouldn’t do. Their upbringing, their destinies, were too far apart. Marriage between them wasn’t to be thought of. It wasn’t only their different stations in life, or that Gus was afraid his dearest daughter wouldn’t acquit herself properly among these people (he was proud that Louisa could hold her own anywhere) but that the aimless, pleasure-loving existence of Sebastian and his acquaintances would very soon get on her nerves. Work, to her, and a purpose in life, was the very backbone of existence, it made you what you were, a principle she had inherited from him.
Chapter Three
Sebastian’s arrival at Belmonde had made no difference to his father’s routine. Sir Henry took his tea in his business room, as he invariably did, excusing himself from joining Adèle on the grounds that he had no time to waste. In fact, he was addicted to tea, which he had brought in to him in a giant teapot at intervals throughout the day, and which it pleased him to drink from a workman’s pint mug, an eccentricity which would not have been appreciated in his wife’s drawing room. The truth was he felt out of place there: the potted palms and the heavy scent of the tuberoses, gardenias and other exotic flowers she loved, and ordered to be brought in from the hot-houses in opulent profusion, made him feel claustrophobic. The room’s delicate colours, the watercolours in gilt frames, the draped ivory silk shades over the lamps, the white fur rugs, made him uneasy, as though he might have brought something in on the sole of his shoe – a not improbable supposition, given the amount of time he spent in the stables and on his farms.
He would, in fact, have liked nothing better than to spend every day of his life at Belmonde, and signified this by donning Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers immediately he came down, only changing into anything else under protest. Begrudging any time spent elsewhere, he kept up with the demands of the social season only when necessary, to appease his wife, for he did not, like the rest of his family, or so he repeatedly said, need the constant stimulus of the outside world.
So, on this miserable, wet afternoon, following an unprecedented series of events which had shaken him to the core of his being, he lit one of the Egyptian cigarettes he always smoked, and took a welcome swig of the extra-strong Indian tea he preferred. A naturally dark and gloomy place, the business room was made even darker by oak panelling and high bookshelves in the fireplace alcoves which contained mouldering, leather-bound volumes rarely, if ever, taken down. The light from the single, green-shaded lamp on the desk threw the corners of the room into deep shadow and glanced off a series of steel engravings over the mantelpiece. A rubbed and buttoned velveteen sofa, once a fine Victorian peacock colour but now faded to a patchy and indeterminate greyish green, provided a repository for half a dozen amorphous cushions and a crotcheted and fringed Afghan shawl. This room, and the gun room which led off it, comprised the heart of his own little kingdom. Now, while the dogs, after their walk, snored and steamed damply on the moth-eaten zebra skin spread in front of the fire, Sir Henry sat in his fat brown leather chair which had, over the years, sagged in the seat, split on the arms, and accommodated itself comfortably to his form, while his land agent sat opposite.
“Well, now, Seton,” he began, forcing his attention on to the serious business of replenishing the yew hedges along the park boundary, by the Seven Oak Field, which had caught some sort of disease and were apparently dying off.
“Must come out, all of them.”
Although the fifth baronet had every last detail of the management of the estate at his fingertips, he was undoubtedly helped by having such a competent agent as Alexander Seton, a cultivated and amiable man with whom Henry had been at school. He had taken up estate management after suffering a severe reversal of his fortunes when his father died, leaving him with a mountain of debts to pay off and no alternative but to sell his family home in Northumberland. That this, a situation similar to, but so much worse than Henry’s own, could happen to Seton (whose wife had been a Percy) had so shocked Henry that he’d agreed to employ his friend as his agent. He was cautious, however, about letting him have his head, and Seton might have resented this had he been temperamentally less amiable, but as it was, Henry’s controlling and overriding need to be in on every last detail suited them both, and had ultimately resulted in a long and mutually rewarding partnership.
Henry pushed back his chair, walked restlessly over to the fire and stirred it with the brass poker, then added another large lump of coal from the scuttle with the tongs. “By the way, you were right, Seton. Had a look at Jordan’s cottage when I was up there with the dogs this afternoon – time we did it up and let him move back. Suit us better, of course, for him to live permanently in the lodge if he had a wife to see to the gates during the day, but since he hasn’t…bad policy to leave them unattended, with all these malcontents around. Tell him he can move back to the cottage as soon as we’ve had the roof seen to and found another lodge-keeper, will you? Married, this time.”
“He’ll be over the moon. He hates living in the lodge – can’t bear to be more than a few yards from his pheasant chicks.”
Seton tactfully forbore to remind Henry that he’d been told this situation might arise – in fact, he’d warned him only last week that he was in danger of losing one of the best and most experienced keepers he would ever have. Jordan was seething with resentment at having had to move into the vacant lodge when his original cottage further in the woods had been judged unfit to live in and too expensive to repair. It was one of the niggling, sometimes counter-productive, economies that Henry was introducing all the time – but at least he’d been man enough to acknowledge his mistake this time. The amount of money needed to make the keeper’s cottage sound was relatively small, and the repairs would be little trouble compared with losing Jordan. He wondered what had made Henry change his mind and see sense – though on second thoughts it was fairly obvious: up there in the woods today with the dogs, in this weather, he must have seen how quickly the cottage was disintegrating, left entirely as it was to the elements.
“And there’s also the question of Ensor’s farm,” Seton added, pressing the advantage. “No doubt you’ll wish to discuss that with Sebastian, if you’re going to sell?”
“When he condescends to come down.” Henry’s black brows came together.
“He’s here. Arrived about half an hour ago.”
“What?”
“I understand he didn’t wish to disturb you.”
Henry said nothing to this, uneasily aware of the usual mixture of feelings aroused in him whenever his son and heir paid them a visit, or even when they met by chance. He was never as comfortable with Sebastian as he should have been. It had fallen to Sir Henry’s lot to be a gentleman landowner and he saw it as a privilege, but one which entailed many responsibilities, to his tenants, to the land; duties which he fulfilled conscientiously. As he saw it, it was necessary to devote the whole of one’s time to the business. One couldn’t pick it up and discard it whenever one felt like it, and Sebastian should realise this. He ought to be learning to manage the estate economically (which God knew was in deep enough waters), being ready, when the time came, to step into his father’s shoes, though Henry didn’t consider himself in his dotage yet, and tried not to remember he was fifty-six and that time might be running out. Not leading, as Sebastian did, what seemed to Sir Henry to be an aimless way of life: when the boy wasn’t at the races or chasing some pretty young woman, he was wandering around Europe, messing about with pencil and paper, when at his age he ought more properly to be thinking about getting himself settled in life. By that Henry meant the absolute necessity of finding a wife with money and providing an heir. If Sebastian didn’t watch it, Sylvia might even yet upstage him with a son and heir. He’d have to look to his laurels then, or Belmonde could go to a Eustace-Bragge, God forbid.
Adèle, as was to be expected, excused the boy, said he was simply lively and impetuous, but Henry called this attitude bumptiousness. He didn’t want to listen to Lady Emily, either, when she said it was a defect time would cure, especially if he was allowed more rope.
More rope? What the devil did she mean by that?
Encouragement, perhaps, rather than disapproval, she replied.
Encouragement? Good God. The boy would get above himself – he’d want to make changes. Besides which, Henry feared his son might have inherited his mother’s extravagance, though to give him his due, he rarely asked for money to augment the small legacy left him by his grandfather, as Harry, regrettably, had often done. “Which goes nowhere nowadays,” Adèle had recently exclaimed. “Henry, can’t you allow him a little extra?” No, he’d replied flatly. With the new government land taxes he found so deeply offensive, income tax up to one-and-two in the pound, plus supertax, he was not disposed to fling money around.
And now there was this other, unbelievable, damnable business.
When Seton had gone, Henry poured himself a Scotch and to the devil with whether the sun was over the yard arm. His nerves were shot to pieces – and he knew Seton had noticed. He reached out across his desk, and after selecting another cigarette from the heavy Britannia metal box with a picture of the Taj Mahal in enamel on the lid, and lighting it, he slid the box aside and picked up the sheet of paper it had concealed. For the tenth time he read the words written on it, and for the tenth time he didn’t believe them.
Adèle, at least, in the scented and modish luxury of her pretty drawing room, was delighted to see her son. “Sebastian, how lovely. And how well you look. London must indeed suit you, to keep you away from us for so long.”
“Don’t tease, Mama. But I’m sorry I haven’t been down to Belmonde lately – and to hear you haven’t been so well.”
She waved a deprecating hand. “It was nothing. Not the tiniest need to worry, dearest.”
Standing facing her with his back to the fire, he searched her face as she rang the bell for tea. Despite her denial, she did not seem quite up to the mark – not as soignée as usual, and she was having difficulty with her breathing, which usually happened only when she was agitated or upset. His searching glance also revealed a grey hair or two that he’d never before noticed (but wouldn’t dream of mentioning) in her luxuriant, wavy dark hair; she was unusually fidgety with it, patting and smoothing it into place, evidently having been out riding or walking so that the damp had frizzed up its usual silky smoothness. It was not beauty (Adèle was not beautiful, though her sudden, illuminating smile sometimes made her seem so), but her intriguing, somewhat elusive personality that had charmed all London when she first appeared on the scene and still, wherever she went, made her the centre of attraction. There were rumours, never substantiated, of numerous men who – despite the glowering Chetwynd – had offered themselves as her lover. Half Sebastian’s friends declared themselves devoted to her. Nevertheless, to have all London at your feet, to flirt and be a little naughty was as far as she would permit herself to go, of that he was certain. Yet he was always aware that behind the outward extroversion was an enigma, hiding secrets she chose not to reveal. Not being possessed of a devious mind himself, Sebastian didn’t allow himself to dwell on what they might be. Of one thing he was quite certain: he had never come within a mile of understanding the complex and subtle woman his mother was.
Outwardly so agreeable and accommodating, there was, in fact, very little Adèle wanted that she didn’t get. On her arrival here as a bride, for instance, she had seen the state of Belmonde and promptly put it in order, so that now it was exactly as she wished it to be. She’d installed a heating system to combat the chesty coughs brought on by the English winters. She had been ruthless in disposing of whatever furniture she took a dislike to, and greedy in the acquisition of treasure from other parts of the house to furnish the flower-filled rooms she had made quintessentially her own. The glossy white paint and fashionable pale mauve walls of this particular room made for a modish background that nevertheless went well with the Chippendale furniture, the upright walnut piano with its brass sconces, and the Georgian mirrors. Sebastian was amused to see that her elegant, narrow silk tea-gown with its split skirt, revealing slim ankles in pale silk stockings and elegantly strapped shoes, although faintly striped with turquoise, was of the same delicate mauve as the walls, and wondered whether it was deliberate. Knowing his mother, he thought perhaps it was.
