Belgravia (28 page)

“Susan, my dear,” he murmured as he rolled over in the bed toward her, edging himself closer and beginning to kiss her arm.

“This is very nice.” Susan could feel a request was on its way, a favor, perhaps a command. She knew him by now. She knew his selfishness. She knew his greed. And yet, with all that, when she was on her way to see him, she could feel her heart pounding in her chest. She wasn’t sure if it was love or lust, but it was more than she had ever felt with Oliver. So she waited for her orders. She would oblige him if she could.

He was watching her. “I must be careful. I’m getting quite fond of you.”

It wasn’t overwhelming as a compliment, but Susan took it as such. “I’m glad.”

“I need you to do something for me,” said John.

“Of course. If I can.”

“I need you to find out more about Charles Pope.”

“What?” She sat up, the mood broken. “Not you as well? Everyone seems to be obsessed with that wretched man! It’s driving Oliver mad.”

“I hesitate to agree with your husband on anything, but that is exactly the point,” said John, sitting up alongside her. “I don’t know what it is, but there is something about him I don’t trust.
He seems to have a kind of hold over my aunt, and when I called at his office this afternoon, I found your mother-in-law there. As well as Ma—”

“As well as?”

“Never mind.”

This made her smile, which was not the reaction he was looking for. The fact was, she knew the name he had nearly spoken. In a way, she was even pleased to see he was so considerate of her feelings. One day she might need to use it against him. “Why did you call at his office?” she said. “Does he have a hold over you, too?”

“I wanted to know why they are all pursuing him. Why have they selected him as their protégé?”

“Instead of you?” Susan laughed.

“I’m not joking.” John’s voice was hard and cold. He could turn in an instant.

“No,” she agreed. But she was not his creature. Already she was asking herself whether this situation might not be switched to her advantage.

“What bothers me most,” he spoke as he turned his back on her to sit on the edge of the bed, “is why they have both given him so much money.”

Studying his profile, she could easily see that this bothered him very much indeed. “How is Lady Maria?”

“Why?”

“No reason, particularly. But if you saw her this afternoon…” She dared him to deny it but he was silent. They both knew it annoyed him when she strayed into the territory of his own life, but he had given away that the girl had been at Charles’s office, and she liked to jerk his chain. Susan could make trouble for him if she chose to do so, and it pleased her to remind him of the fact every now and then.

“She’s very well, as it happens. Shouldn’t you be getting back?”

But Maria Grey was not very well at that moment, or at least she was not getting the better of her mother in the argument that had
been caused, deliberately, by John. He’d found time, on his way to meet Susan, to drop into his club in St. James’s and scribble a note to Lady Templemore lamenting that she did not care for racing. He finished by asking that they might arrange some other outing soon.

“Why did you say I don’t like racing?” Lady Templemore sat very still as she spoke. She was not a clever woman, but she had an instinct for people, and she was fairly sure that something was happening that she would not have approved of if she only knew what it was.

Maria almost wriggled under her mother’s gaze. “Do you?”

“I like it as much as I like any other of the pointless activities we have to spend our time on.”

Maria stared at her mother. “Then write back and accept his invitation.”

“For us both?”

“No, not for us both. For you.”

They both knew what they were discussing, even though neither had yet admitted it. “I hope you don’t imagine you can go back on your word,” said Lady Templemore, and waited for her daughter’s answer. But Maria said nothing. She simply sat there, in her mother’s pretty drawing room, hands clasped, silent. She would neither confirm nor deny her mother’s suggestion, which was ominous. Lady Templemore had been afraid of this, and for a while she had been tempted to bring the girl’s brother across from Ireland, but she was by no means sure that Reggie would take her side and not his sister’s. When all was said and done, he had nothing to gain from John’s fortune. It was she, Corinne Templemore, who intended to profit from the security of a son-in-law with money and position, to give her the comfort in her declining years that she felt she fully deserved. “Haven’t I protected you since you were a child? Don’t I deserve a little security at the end? You will not have long to wait to see the last of me.” She swallowed a sob and leaned back in the damask-covered
bergère
, waiting to see if her words had their desired effect. They didn’t.

“Mama, you are as strong as a horse and will bury us all. As
for being looked after, I will certainly look after you as well as I possibly can, so you have nothing to fear.”

Corinne dabbed her eyes. “You will look after me by marrying John Bellasis. That is all I ask. What’s the matter with him?”

“I am not sure how much I like him or whether he likes me.” This seemed like a perfectly reasonable argument to Maria, but her mother was having none of it.

“Pshaw. Fiddle-faddle!” The tears were done with as Lady Templemore got back to business. “A young couple must learn to like each other as they get to know each other. I hardly knew your father when I married him. How would I? When we were never allowed to meet unchaperoned before the engagement? Even then we might sit together on a sofa, but never out of earshot of our companions. No young girl of our kind knows her husband before she marries him.”

Maria stared at her mother. “And is your marriage to dear Papa to be the model that encourages me to accept the situation with John?” This was rather a low blow, which Maria regretted in a way. But the time was coming when they would have to face the fact that she was not going to marry John Bellasis. She may have doubted it before today, but after this afternoon she knew it beyond any doubt, so she may as well start laying the ground now.

Of course she had no proof of Charles’s intentions toward her. That was true. No spoken proof, that is. But she was quite certain it was her engagement and her rank that were holding him back. She was not so sheltered that she could not see when a man was attracted to her, and she was confident she could bring Charles up to the mark when she wanted to. She was not worried about her brother. Reggie might have liked the idea of his sister as a countess, but he would not force her into it against her will. And he would like Charles. She felt quite confident of it. No, the main task that faced her was persuading her mother to allow her to entertain the suit of a Manchester mill owner instead of an earl, and it would not be easy, she was well aware of that. But first things first.

“You have given your word.”

Actually, as she listened to her mother’s arguments, Maria found it quite strange that she
had
given her word to John Bellasis. What could she have been thinking? Might the reason be that she was never in love before and did not know what the word meant? Was she in love now? She supposed she must be. “I would not be the first woman to change her mind,” she said.

“You will not throw away a great future. I won’t let you. I forbid it.” Lady Templemore sat back in exasperation. Watching this, Maria decided to let the matter drop. For the moment. She must allow her mother to understand gradually that the desired marriage would never take place, but there was no need to rush. As she silently said these words to herself, Maria found she was smiling. She had admitted for the first time that she was planning a true
mésalliance
for herself. Her heart was thumping at the enormity of the scheme, but the fact remained that this was what she intended, and she meant to see it through.

Susan wouldn’t normally have accepted Anne’s invitation to accompany them on a trip to Glanville. She despised the place. There was nothing about the great Elizabethan house and its beautiful gardens in the heart of Somerset that she found interesting or even comfortable.

First, there was the arduous journey to get there, which involved careful planning and endless amounts of bed linen, as Quirk steered the vast traveling carriage, stopping at coaching houses along the route to take luncheon, or to dine, sleep and change the horses for the next leg. It was a two-day journey at the very least, but Anne Trenchard preferred to take three. She said she was too old to have her bones shaken about by traveling at speed, and she liked to keep stopping to let Agnes have a run. No doubt a new railway would soon change things, but they were not changed yet. So Susan would be stuck in a carriage, discussing the finer points of gardening, for three whole days at a time—sometimes more, if it was raining and the coach got stuck in the mud.

But the main reason for her resistance to Glanville was that
she didn’t see the point of making the journey at all. Once you got there, what was there to do? Except engage in yet more discussions about gardening, walk around those very gardens, and eat endlessly at the long dining table. Occasionally these dinners would be attended by various local dignitaries, keen to make the acquaintance of James Trenchard in the hope that they could persuade him to part with some of his money and fund their worthy causes. Of the county’s gentry they saw almost nothing. As everyone knows, thought Susan wryly, social climbing is notoriously harder in the country. In London people care less who you are as long as you dress properly and say the right things. In the country they are less forgiving. It made her yawn just thinking about it.

But this time John had persuaded her that it would be a good idea. As they spent the rest of the afternoon in bed together, he’d outlined his plan. She was to find out exactly who Charles was, and why James Trenchard was so interested in funding him, not to mention the curious alliance growing between John’s aunt and Susan’s mother-in-law. There might be something in all this that she could make use of. At any rate, it suited Susan’s own agenda to put John Bellasis into her debt.

Oliver was perhaps the most surprised when Susan accepted the invitation to spend a month in the country with his parents. There would normally be tantrums and tears. He might even have had to go shopping and buy her a little something from his jeweler as a further argument for her compliance. But not this time.

Her reaction had pleased him. Truth be told, lately he’d found he rather preferred life at Glanville to that in London. He had made a real effort, or so he thought, to take an interest in his father’s business, but the truth was he felt more cut out for the traditional life of a country squire. Why shouldn’t he? They’d brought him up as a gentleman and this was the result. He liked hunting and shooting, in fact all the traditions, and the easy conviviality of country life, much more than the hours spent poring over plans and accounts in his father’s or William Cubitt’s office. He would walk about the estate, conversing with the tenants, listening to
their concerns. It made him feel busy and valued and able. At one time he had accepted that they would not live at Glanville when his parents died, that Susan would insist on something bigger and grander and closer to London, but lately, as he and his wife had gone their separate ways, he’d begun to wonder if some accommodation might be possible. Then again, he had no heir, and life at a house like Glanville was all about continuity.

His heart soared as the carriage finally turned through the tall, honey-colored gates. At the end of the long drive stood a fine, three-story house that was in a significantly better state than when his mother had first found it in 1825. On a rather grandiose whim, James had instructed his wife to “find a seat” in the country for the family. Of course he’d expected her to buy somewhere impressive but convenient, a decent pile in Hertfordshire or Surrey, or at least somewhere relatively close to London. But Anne had had other ideas. When she’d chanced upon Glanville, a fine example of transition architecture as the fashion moved from Mediaeval Gothic to Renaissance Classical, with its gardens and park surrounded by thousands of acres of farmland, she knew it was what she was searching for. What she had always been searching for, in a way. That said, it also had a large and leaking roof as well as almost every kind of rot and beetle, and James had initially refused. It was not what he’d had in mind at all. He had no desire to live in Somerset, and he’d imagined a house that did not need to be almost entirely rebuilt. However, for one of the few times in her life, Anne had insisted.

Now, almost twenty years later, they both regarded it as her greatest achievement. She had painstakingly restored the house, falling in love with its little quirks: the stone monkeys that clambered up the Dutch gables, the Nine Worthies in their niches on the East Front. Sometimes James thought this labor of love was compensation for something else—if Anne had not been able to save her own daughter, then at least she might save this glorious old house. And the more she strove, the more enthusiasm and life she breathed into it, the more the place shone.

Her real triumph was the creation of the gardens, shaped from
an expanse of nothing, and, as the carriage pulled up outside the house, the head gardener, Hooper, was already waiting for her. But before she could greet him, the rituals had to be observed, and Turton, who had traveled down ahead of them, stepped forward to open the door.

“Madam,” said the butler as Anne climbed down the steps, her dog under her arm, “I trust you had a pleasant journey?” His voice was a little jaded. To tell the truth, he felt much the same as Mrs. Oliver when it came to Glanville. He too hated the journey down, but what he disliked even more was the quality of the local servants he had to deal with during these time-wasting stays in the country. Unlike most aristocrats, whose main residence would be on their estates, the Trenchards based themselves in London. So their principal staff remained there, and only a skeleton group traveled back and forth to Somerset. Turton, Ellis, Speer, and Billy the footman, who was also required to dress Oliver, were the only ones who accompanied the family to Glanville. The cook, Mrs. Babbage, had originally made the journey, but the tension and arguments that her arrival created in the kitchens became too disruptive and Anne had decided to employ a local woman, Mrs. Adams, who was much more convivial and less likely to demand ingredients that must be sent down from the capital. The result being that the food was significantly simpler in the country, the service a little slower, and Turton always wore a look of purgatory about him.