Belgravia (7 page)

“Mr. and Mrs. Trenchard pay our wages, and for that they are entitled to be treated with dignity.”

“Yes, Mr. Turton.”

The giggles had subsided by now as Turton took his place at the table and the servants’ dinner began. The butler lowered his voice as he spoke to the housekeeper, Mrs. Frant, who sat in her usual place beside him. “Of course, they’re not what they like to pretend, and it is only the more obvious when they’re alone.”

Mrs. Frant was a more forgiving person. “They’re respectable, polite, and honest to deal with, Mr. Turton. I’ve known far worse in households headed by a coronet.” She helped herself to some horseradish sauce.

But the butler shook his head. “My sympathy is with Mr. Oliver. They’ve brought him up as a gentleman, but now they seem to resent him for wanting to be one.” Turton had no problems with the social system then operating, only with his own place in it.

A sharp-faced woman in the black garb of a lady’s maid spoke up from farther down the table. “Why shouldn’t Mrs. Oliver have a house where she can entertain? She’s brought enough money to the table. I think it’s unjust and illogical of Mr. Trenchard to try to force them into a rabbit hutch when we all know he wants to be thought of as the head of a great family. Where’s the sense in that?”

“Illogical? That’s a big word, Miss Speer,” said Billy, but she ignored him.

“It was Mrs. Trenchard who provoked Mrs. Oliver at dinner,” said Morris.

“She’s as bad as he is,” said Miss Speer, helping herself to a large slice of bread and butter from the plate before her.

Mrs. Frant had more to add on the subject. “Well, I’m sorry to say it, Miss Speer, and I’m glad if you think her a good employer, but I find Mrs. Oliver very hard to please. You’d think she was an Infanta of Spain with all her airs and graces. But I’ve never had any trouble with Mrs. Trenchard. She’s straightforward in what she wants and I’ve no reason to complain.” The housekeeper was warming to her defense of their employers. “As to the younger pair—wanting houses and estates that are bigger and grander than his parents’, what’s he done to earn them? That’s what I’d like to know.”

“Gentlemen don’t ‘earn’ their houses, Mrs. Frant. They inherit them.”

“We don’t see these things in the same way, Mr. Turton, so we’ll have to agree to differ.”

Miss Ellis, Mrs. Trenchard’s maid, seated on Turton’s left, did not appear to disagree with the butler. “I think Mr. Turton’s right. Mr. Oliver only wants to live properly, and why shouldn’t he? I commend his efforts to better himself. But we must feel some sympathy for the master. It’s hard to get the trick of it in a single generation.”

Turton nodded, as if his point had been proved. “I quite agree with you there, Miss Ellis.” And then the conversation turned to other topics.

“Of course you can’t tell her! What are you talking about?” James Trenchard was having the greatest difficulty keeping his temper. He was in his wife’s bedroom where he generally slept, even though he was careful to have his own bedroom and dressing room farther down the landing, as he had read this was customary for aristocratic couples.

The room in question was another tall and airy chamber, painted pale pink, with flowered silk curtains. Her husband’s rooms could have been the private apartments of the Emperor himself, but, as with all the rooms Anne had arranged for her own use, her bedroom was pretty rather than splendid. At this moment, she was in bed and they were alone. “But haven’t I a duty to her?”

“What duty? You say yourself she was very rude.”

Anne nodded. “Yes, but it was more complicated than that. The whole situation was so peculiar. She knew exactly who I was and that her son had been in love with our daughter. Why shouldn’t she know? Her sister had no reason to keep it secret.”

“Then why didn’t she just say so honestly?”

“I know and I agree. But perhaps she was trying to learn what kind of person I was before she would admit the connection.”

“It doesn’t sound as if she has admitted it yet.”

“She would have disapproved of it, fiercely, if she’d known at the time. We can be sure of that much.”

“All the more reason to keep her in the dark.”

James pulled off his silk dressing gown and flung it angrily over a chair.

Anne closed her book and put it carefully on the little Sheraton table by her bed. She picked up the snuffer. “But when she said, ‘There will be nothing left of us…’ If you’d been there, you’d have been as touched as I was. I promise.”

“You have taken leave of your reason if you think we should tell her. What can come of it? The ruin of Sophia’s reputation, the end of our chances as we label ourselves creatures of scandal—”

Anne could feel her temper starting to rise. “That’s what you don’t like. The idea that Lady Somebody will turn up her nose at you because you had a daughter who was no better than she ought to be.”

He was indignant. “I see. And you like the idea that Sophia should be remembered as a harlot?”

This silenced her for a moment. Then she spoke, more calmly this time. “It’s a risk, of course, but I would ask her to keep it to
herself. Of course I know I couldn’t force her to, but I don’t think we have the right to keep it from her that she has a grandson.”

“We’ve kept it from them for more than a quarter of a century.”

“But we didn’t know them. Now we do. Or at least, I know her.”

James had climbed in beside his wife and blown out his candle. He lay down with his back to her. “I forbid it. I will not have our daughter’s memory defaced. Certainly not by her own mother. And get that dog off the bed.” Anne could see there was no point in arguing any further, so she gently snuffed out the candle on her side, settled down under the bedclothes, and lifted Agnes into the crook of her arm. But sleep was a long time in coming.

The family had returned to England before Sophia told them. The aftermath of the battle consumed James’s efforts for some weeks, but at last he had brought them all back to London, to a house in Kennington that was an improvement on their previous abode but hardly a fashion leader. He continued to supply foodstuffs to the army, but catering to an army in peacetime was not the same as dealing with the drama of war, and it was increasingly clear to Anne that he was bored with the work, bored with the world he was operating in, bored with its lack of possibilities. Then he started to notice the renewed activity of London’s builders. The victory over Napoléon and the peace that followed had stoked a new confidence in the country’s future. The figure of the French emperor had loomed over them all, more perhaps than they had recognized, for twenty years, and now he was gone to a faraway island in the South Atlantic, and this time he would not be back. Europe was free, and it was time to look ahead. And so the day dawned when James came into the house flushed with excitement. Anne was in the kitchen, supervising the stores cupboard with her cook. There was no need for this. Their life and income had overtaken the way they used to do things, as James never tired of pointing out, and seeing his wife in an apron checking groceries was never very pleasing to him, especially as he was still flying high from their experiences in Brussels. On this particular evening, however, nothing could spoil his humor.

“I have met an extraordinary man,” he said.

“Oh?” Anne stared at the label on the flour. She was sure it was wrong.

“A man who is going to rebuild London.” Anne didn’t know it then but he was right. Thomas Cubitt, a former ship’s carpenter, had devised a new method for managing a building project. He undertook to deal with, and employ, all the different trades involved: bricklayers, plasterers, tilers, plumbers, carpenters, stonemasons, painters. Those responsible for the commission would only ever have to deal with Cubitt and his brother, William. Everything else would be done for them.

James paused. “Isn’t it brilliant?”

Anne could see that there was considerable appeal in this system, and it might have a bright future, but was it worth throwing over a perfectly established career when James knew nothing about it? Still, she soon learned that he wouldn’t be shaken. “He’s building a new home for the London Institution at Finsbury Circus. He wants help with the funding and dealing with the suppliers.”

“Which you have been doing all your working life.”

“Exactly!” And so it began. James Trenchard the developer was born, and everything would have been as merry as a marriage bell if Sophia had not dropped her bombshell barely a month later.

She came into her mother’s room one morning and sat on the bed. Anne was at her glass as Ellis finished her hair. The girl waited in near silence until the work was done. Anne knew something was coming, something big, but she wasn’t eager to begin it. At last, however, she accepted the inevitable. “Thank you, Ellis, you may go.” The maid was curious, naturally; if anything, more curious than the mother, but she picked up some linen for the laundry and closed the door behind her.

“What is it?”

Sophia stared at her. Then she spoke in a kind of gushing sigh. “I’m going to have a child.” Once, as a young girl, Anne had been kicked in the stomach by a pony, and she was reminded of that sensation when she heard the words.

“When?” It seemed an oddly practical question, given the circumstance, but she didn’t see the point in screaming and writhing on the floor, even if it had considerable appeal.

“The end of February. I think.”

“Don’t you know?”

“The end of February.”

Anne counted backward in her mind. “Do I have Lord Bellasis to thank for this?” Sophia nodded. “You stupid, stupid fool.” The girl nodded again. She was putting up no resistance. “How did it happen?”

“I thought we were married.”

Anne almost burst out laughing. What tomfoolery had her daughter been put through? “I take it you weren’t.”

“No.”

“No, of course you weren’t. Nor ever likely to be.” How could her child have been so absurd as to think Bellasis would really marry her? She felt a sudden wave of fury at James. He had encouraged this. He’d convinced the girl that impossible things were possible. “Tell me everything.”

It was hardly an unfamiliar story. Bellasis had professed his love and persuaded Sophia that he wished to marry her before he went back into action. At the news of Napoleon’s march on Brussels, he had come to her, begging her to let him arrange a marriage that would be clandestine at first, but which he promised he would reveal to his parents when he felt the time was right. Either way, she would have proof of the ceremony if anything happened to him, and she could claim the protection of the Brockenhursts if she needed it.

“But didn’t you know you should have had your father’s permission for it to be legal? You’re eighteen.” She said this to provoke more self-flagellation from Sophia, but instead the girl just looked at her for a moment.

“Papa gave his permission.”

That brought a second pony kick. Her husband had helped a man to seduce his own daughter? She felt so angry that if James had walked through the door at that moment, she would have scratched his eyeballs out of their sockets. “Your father
knew
?”

“He knew that Edmund wanted to marry me before he went back to the fighting, and he gave his permission.” Sophia took another deep breath. In a way it was a relief to reveal it. She was tired of carrying the burden alone. “Edmund said he’d found a parson to marry us, which he did, in one of the army chapels they had erected. Afterward the man wrote out a letter certifying it and… that’s when it happened.”

“I assume the marriage was false?”

Sophia nodded. “I never suspected it, not for a moment. Edmund spoke of his love and our future, right up until the moment we were leaving his aunt’s ball on the night of the battle.”

“So when did you find out?”

The girl got up and walked over to the window. Below, her father was climbing into a carriage. She was glad he would be out of the house, giving her mother some time to calm down and think up a plan. “As we came out of the Richmonds’ house into the street, there was a group of officers on horseback, all in the uniforms of the Fifty-second Light Infantry, the Oxfordshires, Edmund’s own regiment…”

“And?”

“One of them was the ‘churchman’ who married us. So there you have it.” She sighed wearily. “He was a soldier, a friend of Edmund’s, who had turned his collar around to deceive me.”

“Did he say anything?”

“He never saw me. Or if he did, he pretended he had not. I wasn’t close and, of course, once I’d recognized him I shrank back.”

Anne nodded. The scene when they had left the ball together suddenly made sense. “Now I understand what put you in such a state that night. I thought it was simply Lord Bellasis leaving for the battle.”

“The moment I saw the man I knew I’d been taken in. I was not loved. I was not heading for a golden future. I was a stupid young woman who had been treated as a streetwalker, tricked and used, and no doubt I would have been thrown aside into the gutter where Edmund thought I belonged, if he had lived.” Her face seemed so mature in the daylight, the bitterness in her speech adding ten years to her age.

“When did you know you were carrying a child?”

“Hard to say. I suspected it a month later, but I wouldn’t admit it until any further denial was pointless. Edmund was dead, and for a time, like a madwoman, I pretended nothing had changed. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was at my wit’s end. I confess I have taken some foolish remedies, and paid a gypsy five pounds for what I am quite sure was sugar water. But they all failed. I am still
enceinte
.”

“What have you told your father?”

“He knows I was deceived. I told him that morning in Brussels when he brought me the news of Edmund’s death. But he thinks I got away with it.”

“We must make a plan.” Anne Trenchard was a practical woman, and one of her chief virtues was that she did not linger over a disaster but sought, almost immediately, to remedy what could be remedied and to accept what could not. Her daughter must be spirited away from London. She would have an illness or a relation in the north who needed caring for. They would have a story ready before the day was finished. Sophia must be four months gone at least, and now that Anne concentrated on it, the girl’s figure was thickening. Not noticeably so, yet, but it wouldn’t be long. They had no time to lose.