A Most Unusual Lady Page 2
‘I must think, my dear. It is all so strange. I seem to have known nothing of your thoughts. We will discuss it later when I have had time to consider.’
She drifted unhappily out, leaving Louisa to bear the impact of her brothers’ enthusiastically detailed account of the morning’s chase.
As soon as she could extricate herself, Louisa made her way out into the garden. Walking slowly over the gravel, she frowned at the tufts of grass and dandelion that burgeoned determinedly through it, and at the whiskers of untrimmed yew that brushed her face as she dipped her head through the arch in the yew hedge. The rose garden lay beyond. She sighed, sat down on the stone bench standing in the sun against the hedge, and thought.
If only Papa had not died, perhaps the carefree days she had known in her childhood might have continued, with so many servants to keep the house and gardens immaculate, and Papa always entertaining. The local gentry had come, and groups of his friends from London; but not his elder brother. Lord Luddenay had been infuriated by his adored youngest son’s sudden marriage to a blonde beauty of no particular family, and ordered his family to cut all contact. They did—all except Lord Luddenay’s sister Honoria, who was a law unto herself and had always reduced him to exasperated impotence by ignoring him entirely. She, who had an affection for her charming, graceless, youngest nephew, did as she pleased.
It was through her great-aunt’s affection that Louisa became the only one of the Stapely children to have met her uncle and cousins. Just a year before his death, her father had insisted on giving Louisa a London season. In a whirl of excited activity she had been whisked away from the family at Thesserton to stay with her father at Aunt Honoria’s town-house. She had been overwhelmed with more new clothes than she had ever dreamed could be necessary for one person, provided by her father with reckless extravagance. She had danced, light-headed with breathless excitement, at her first London ball—there to meet for the first time her cousins, with their cutting little comments, superior smiles and sideways, behind-the-hand murmurs and smirks to their friends.
Memories of that ball still made her flush. She had felt herself become more gauche, clumsy and tongue-tied with every little snub. She’d stumbled in her dance-steps, spilt her drink and answered her partners in taut monosyllables. She had suspected that several of them had been sent over by her cousins to provide themselves with more food for mockery. It had been a bitter experience. Her father had merely raised his glass to her whenever she’d caught his eye, then turned back, smiling, to talk with his friends. He had been proud, and a little surprised that his daughter seemed to have blossomed so well.
After that ball Louisa had stiffened her resolve, and grimly attended every social function to which her aunt had procured invitations. She would not be put down by her cousins. She’d steeled herself against snubs, and brushed aside any comment she’d suspected of mockery with chilly stares or cold retorts.
Looking back now over the intervening seven years, Louisa could see that much of it had happened only in her own unhappy imagination. Her cousins’ unkind influence had probably been slight, but her own icy reserve had rightly offended many pleasant and well-intentioned people. She had been judged to be insufferably superior and proud, no one ever spotting the uncertainty and misery beneath the hard shell. Invitations became fewer.
Aunt Honoria was disappointed that she had not ‘taken’ in society circles, but added her own fuel to Louisa’s contempt of the fashionable people she believed to be all as spiteful as her cousins.
‘Quite right, m’dear. There’s not a particle of sense in most of their silly heads. Frivolous coxcombs. Don’t blame you, for wanting none of ’em. Wait till you find a man worth calling a man ... and if you don’t,’ she chuckled and dropped a squirming bundle of puppy on to Louisa’s lap, ‘be damned to the lot of ’em, and breed pugs like I do! You’ll have my money to live on one of these days, but don’t be in a hurry for it. I don’t aim to part with it just yet!’ She coughed, hawked and chuckled again, fondling another pug that had scrabbled on to her lap.
Louisa wished fervently that she had never gone to London. Papa had died suddenly in town a few months later of a fever, leaving the incalculable, ruinous debts that had plagued them to this day.
The knowledge that a part of those debts was the vast cost of her disastrous London season had helped to spur Louisa into her decision for her future. She would make amends to her family. So much money had been squandered on her alone, and to no good purpose at all.
If only she had found a man she cared for. She smiled wryly to herself. One rich enough to pay her father’s debts, give Mama a little more income, Susannah her season and the boys an education at Eton, their father’s old school. Even more, she thought wistfully, one who was not a painted, mincing fop to disgust her with his affectations, but tall, strong and constant, a man to be turned to in trouble, perhaps even one who could have understood the gauche miseries of youth and laughed them aside with a small gesture of his hand. Her thoughts wandered to the previous day, and her face was full of regrets.
Louisa raised her shoulders in a small, sad shrug. But she hadn’t. There was not a man she had danced with whom she would care to share a carriage with, let alone her life. How she must have wasted her chances! So she would choose to help her family another way.
She wondered guiltily, for the thousandth time, whether she ought to marry Mr. Sowthorpe. No! She rationalised her revulsion. Although he was now the biggest landowner locally, and had built himself an impressive new house to prove it, he was well-known to be close-fisted. It was clear that he was interested in using his marriage to improve his own social position, for his wife to be Lord Luddenay’s granddaughter. He had given no hint of financial help for her family.
It was ironic, Louisa thought, how people seemed to care that she was this man’s granddaughter, when he had made quite sure that she never met him, and had taught his family to despise her.
Louisa stood up abruptly from the stone bench, sharply aware of how cold and stiff she was. She made her way between the beds to the small raised pond in the centre of the rose garden. Clearing a space in the tangle of lily pads and duckweed with both hands, she peered ruefully down at her reflection. It was not so bad a face, she thought. The bright brown eyes were widely spaced and fringed with dark lashes. Her hair, a rich chestnut, was tied neatly back as demure as that of a governess already. Her generous mouth was a little wide for conventional beauty, and now tended to severity, but could on occasion break again into the infectious smile that lit up her face with gaiety. She frowned at the small straight nose that seven years ago had caused her such intense misery. It still sported the light dusting of freckles that had provoked so many of her cousins’ merry ‘rustic’ asides. Despite years of trying every suggested lotion or cure, and never venturing into the sun without the largest of sun bonnets, the freckles perversely remained. Now Louisa did not care any more. As a governess, the plainer she looked, the better, and when she grew elderly and bred pugs like Aunt Honoria they would not care what she looked like. Louisa splashed the water impatiently and shook her hands dry.
Returning indoors, she was about to mount the stairs when Richard called from the morning-room window. ‘Don’t go away, Lu. Here’s your swine ... er ... swain, come to call! You will have to talk to him. Mama has returned to her room with a headache and Susie is still not dressed.’
Exasperated, Louisa crossed the room to where her brother stood. Sure enough, Mr. Sowthorpe was striding up the drive from the village. Forgetting to reprove Richard for his impertinent reference to the farmer, who was intensely disliked by her brothers for the prejudiced views he held over ferreting on his land, she caught his arm.
‘I may as well tell him now as later,’ she said, ‘and burn all my boats. You answer the door and admit him, please, and I will speak to him quietly in here.’
‘Tell him what?’ Richard demanded in alarm. ‘You are not going to marry that man, Lu? Are you?’
Ignoring Richard’s aghast glance, Louisa patted smooth a wisp of hair, straightened her skirt, and stood by the empty fireplace, gripping the mantelpiece as if to steady her resolve.
‘Mr. Sowthorpe to see you, Louisa.’ Richard held open the door and the man strode in.
‘Good to see you, Miss Stapely,’ he declared, his loud voice jarring in the room as if unaccustomed to confined spaces. ‘Nice to catch you alone.’ He blew out noisily through his moustache, took her reluctant hand in his great fist and awkwardly kissed it, his coarse ginger bristles rough on her skin.
‘Please, sit down, Mr. Sowthorpe,’ Louisa said, extricating herself and backing to a seat on the far side of the fireplace.
‘Just a quick call. Won’t stay long. I left my horse at the smith’s in the village. Thought I would walk up to fill in the time. See how you were, you know.’
He stared across at Louisa, and his face, large and red under the thin, sandy hair, deepened in hue as he breathed in to speak, leaning forward seriously.
Panicking, knowing herself for a coward, Louisa cut in brightly, ‘And how are your pigs?’
Mr. Sowthorpe’s pigs were his pride and delight.
‘Well, with my name, what else would I breed?’ he had exclaimed time and again, slapping his great thigh and guffawing at his own jest.
For many years he had bred his pigs for size alone, and the monstrous brutes were now the envy of all the neighbouring farmers. Every new idea for improving their diet he experimented with, and would expound at length to anyone who cared to listen. They were splendid animals, if you cared for pigs, and housed and fed better than any of the labourers who worked for Edward Sowthorpe. She knew her query would side-track him, so Louisa listened with half an ear to the worrying moments Mr. Sowthorpe had had over a minor ailment in his great boar, Thorpe the Third, and made appropriate exclamations while she feverishly sought for words to tell him her plans.
‘So now he is back on form and raring to go!’ Mr. Sowthorpe concluded, smacking his huge hands together with satisfaction, then shifting with embarrassment on the already strained chair as he abruptly remembered where he was and to whom he was speaking.
‘Er ... quite fit again,’ he amended.
The girl took advantage of his pause.
‘Mr. Sowthorpe, in view of the proposals you have made me in the past...’
‘And will make again. Have no doubt of that. I will not take no for an answer, Miss Stapely. We could deal very well together, you and I, and I reckon you will come around to my way of thinking before long.’
He settled back complacently in the protesting chair, spreading great ham-like hands across the vast expanse of his thighs.
‘I must tell you,’ Louisa continued, desperation in her voice, and her eyes fixed firmly on his mud-spattered boots, ‘I feel I must let you know that I am leaving Thesserton to take a post as a governess and companion with a family at Upper Stoneham. I am sure you will realise that, although I am honoured by your proposal, my refusal of it is final, and perhaps I can take this opportunity to bid you farewell, as I will be leaving the village shortly.’
She concluded with relief and remained staring at her fingers, which were clenched in her lap.
‘Governess, eh?’
She glanced up at the mingled surprise and contempt in his voice. His face was mottled with rage. He surged to his feet.
‘Well, if that’s your choice ... minder of some pack of mewling brats for petty cash! After all I could offer you...’
He strode the room scowling and puffing, outraged, through the sandy bristles of his moustache. He turned to her, clenching his fists.
‘I’ll tell you fair and square, I accept your refusal. Some family’s governess is not what I want for my wife. No. Not at all. And if that is your choice, well ... this is mine.’
He marched to the door.
‘My regards to your mother. I will see myself out,’ he finished stiffly.
Then he was gone, striding ferociously back down the drive to the village.
Louisa discovered that she was shaking and near to tears. Fool, she told herself. This is what you wanted. She crept up the stairs and hid in her bedroom, her boats decisively burned.
CHAPTER THREE
Thus it was that a fortnight later all arrangements had been completed, the family was reluctantly reconciled to Louisa’s departure, and she had managed to acquire a lift to Alnstrop village, where she could pick up the stage-coach for Upper Stoneham and her new life as a governess.
The family she was travelling with, Mr. and Mrs. Tabbett and two shy young daughters, were city people using their new-found wealth to tour the southern counties and view the sights. They were staying at present at the Dog and Donkey, and, with an easygoing generosity, were happy to squeeze Louisa into their hired coach on their expedition to Alnstrop House.
Mr. Tabbett sat with his gaze fixed on his guidebook, while Mrs. Tabbett maintained a rambling commentary on anything that crossed her mind. Louisa found it easy to nod and smile while hearing little of the words, which was just as well, for her mind was suddenly bubbling with excitement at the wonderful enormity of what she was doing. She had not left the confines of Thesserton village for seven years. Now she was breaking loose to forge a new life in a new place. She would have her own independent income, and who knew whom she might not meet? Stupid! Her common sense told her that she would only be exchanging a tedious life in Thesserton for one possibly even more tedious in Upper Stoneham, but she could not quell the bubbling anticipation, and her heart continued irrationally to flutter and hope.
Her thoughts were interrupted by Mr. Tabbett’s diffident voice gently pressing in on his family’s eulogies over the views. The lane had suddenly emerged from between its sheltering hedges on to the bleak, open moor of the hilltop, with spectacular views and a biting wind. The sea looked a bright grey-blue to the south, with dark patches of cloud shadow scudding across it, and even at this distance it was possible to see white horses breaking.
Mr. Tabbett turned again to his guidebook.
‘Now, we should all know something about Alnstrop House, so we may gain maximum interest and instruction from our visit.’
Louisa heard one of the girls sigh quietly, but Mrs. Tabbett nodded enthusiastically.
‘That’s right, Mr. Tabbett. You tell us all about it. Then you two girls can do your best to look sensible while we are shown around such a great lord’s house.’
Their father cleared his throat self-consciously, and glanced at Louisa.
‘Now, let me see.’ He turned back a couple of pages. ‘The original house was built between 1530 and 1540 by one William Ferdinand, “a man of skill and ability much favoured by his monarch”. It has remained in the Ferdinand family until the present day. William was knighted for services to the crown.’
Mr. Tabbett skimmed down the page.
‘His descendant, one Gilbert Ferdinand, received a peerage and took the name of Alnstrop.’
Mr. Tabbett paused again and laid the book on his lap. ‘The present owner is the fourth Lord Alnstrop, and he came into his inheritance ... oh ... fifteen years ago now. A sad business that was.’
‘You know the family?’ Louisa asked, surprised.
‘No, no. But I well remember the newspaper announcements. Old Lord Alnstrop was injured in a hunting accident, took a terrible fall, by all accounts. He lingered for some time—months, I believe, but they couldn’t save him. The present lord was hardly more than a boy at the time. What a way to gain your estates! There was a younger brother and sister to care for, and the mother quite an invalid, so I heard. A very sad business.’
Mrs. Tabbett tutted and shook her head sympathetically, with murmurs of, ‘Poor young man!’ and, ‘What a thing, to be sure.’
Mr. Tabbett shook off his gloom and returned to the guidebook.
‘But old Lord Alnstrop did a great deal for the house during his life, that I hope we can admire today. The original Tudor house, with some later additions, still stands, but he added a fine Palladian wing, advised by the architect James Paine and supervised by one of his pupils. Are you paying attention, Millie? With an impressive Corinthian portico and fine pediment, the new wing looks across a broad sweep of sloping lawns to a newly created lake and the wooded hillside beyond.’
His daughter nodded and attempted an intelligent expression.
‘It sounds an interesting mixture of styles,’ her father concluded, ‘and visitors wishing to view the house should apply to the housekeeper, Mrs. Ruddick.’ He sat back happily. ‘Well, well, this should make an interesting excursion.’
The rest of the journey passed pleasantly enough, but Louisa was relieved at the prospect of being able to stretch her cramped limbs and escape Mrs. Tabbett’s chatter when her husband craned his head out of the window and called, ‘I do believe that must be Alnstrop below us now. See the house and lake?’
Everyone pressed to see out. The view was magnificent. From the bare heath of the hilltop which their carriage had just breasted they could see down over the wooded hillslopes to a small village nestled around a mellowed greystone church tower. One newly thatched cottage shone bright gold in the sunshine among its weathered neighbours. Just beyond the church a tree-lined drive could be distinguished, winding some distance through open parkland to a large house, with lawns and a lake beyond. A jumble of older buildings and formal gardens spread behind.
Even as they pointed and exclaimed to each other, their carriage plunged between high banks again and the hedges towered above them, cutting off the view.
Alnstrop village was even more attractive than it had promised from above, Louisa thought, as she climbed stiffly from the coach at the Alnstrop Arms and surveyed the cottages around her. They were bright and neat in the sunlight, their gardens proud with daffodils and primroses.