All for Love (21 page)

CHAPTER II

But down in Sussex, some ten days later, Jennifer Purchas stamped her foot on its Waterloo heel and glared up at her Uncle Gurning.

‘I’ll not have him, Uncle, were he the Czar of all the Russias.’ She had just returned from a gallop on the Downs. Her cheeks were flushed, her auburn hair glowed against the dark green of her habit.

‘But Jenny my dear, only consider,’ bland, placating, he loomed over her, a red-faced monster of a man.

‘Don’t “Jenny” me.’ The foot stamped again. A year’s pent-up rebellion had exploded in a day when her uncle had announced, with odious certainty, that she was to marry George Ferris. The bitterness had been growing within her since that sun-drenched June day when her Uncle Gurning, the banker, had arrived from London with the news that she was alone in the world. ‘But my dear Jenny, never trouble yourself, I will take care of you...’ He had failed to conceal his pleasure in the prospect and she had never forgiven him.

But there had been no escaping his control. Only sixteen, she had been unable to prevent him from moving his household into the big house near Denton that was, she supposed, now hers. Her father’s sister, kind Aunt Julia, had protested feebly, then, routed by the patronising takeover of Uncle Gurning’s city wife, had packed her trunks and fled to cousins in Yorkshire.

Since then, a year has passed. A wretched year in which Jennifer had watched her uncle’s penny-pinching ways on the estate and fought skirmish after skirmish with her aunt. Loathing both of them, she had grown reluctantly fond of their daughter Elizabeth, a year her junior, and even of their ward, bumbling, good-hearted Edmund Butts.

But here was the last straw. Marry to please her uncle she would not. Nor did she believe his claim that the man who asked her hand did it as her brother’s friend; she had known her uncle’s shifts too well for that. She gave him one of the straight looks that still reminded him uncomfortably of her father: ‘If he’s Richard’s friend, why has he waited so long to come to me? It was last year I lacked a friend.’ Unspoken between them lay the truth of this.

But he tried to shrug it off. ‘Nevertheless, he claims much knowledge of Richard—and Francis too.’

She could not bear to hear him speak her brothers’ names. ‘No doubt he had drunk with them often enough; they were never over nice in their choice of acquaintance. But a friend, Uncle, would have come sooner. No,’ she shook off the damp hand that fell placatingly on her wrist, ‘I have no doubt you have reasons to wish for the match, but I’ll hear no more of it.’ With a swirl of skirts, she broke from him. In a minute she would be in tears, and she had never let her uncle see her cry.

Running up the house’s wide central stairway to her own room, she dug furiously in a cupboard to find the precious bundles of her brothers’ letters. Yes, there it was, in a letter from Richard: ‘Rather bosky last night, I fear,’ he had written not long before Waterloo, ‘but who could help it with Ferris passing the bottle? He has taken me regularly in hand since I joined the Beau’s staff. The other fellows say I’m damned lucky to have such a friend. He’s a regular Corinthian; older than me, of course. He was with the Beau right through Spain. A friend of Brummell’s too...and, oh Jenny, you should just see his cravats.’

Tears filled her eyes at the boyishness of the phrases. Already, after a year of grief and trouble, she felt older than her brothers would ever be. And as for this rakehelly boon companion of theirs, who had doubtless been the reason for the pile of debts her uncle had paid with such intolerable grumbling after their deaths...she would show him what their sister thought of him.

There was a discreet tapping at the door.

‘Yes,’ she called impatiently. Was there to be no end of this persecution?

But it was only Soames, the butler, to say with unspoken sympathy that Mr Gurning wished her company in his study.

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