Deception (Daughters of Mannerling 3) (3 page)

The twins hung their heads.

‘Let me hear no more of your nonsense,’ said Miss Trumble severely. ‘You must look your prettiest for this ball. There will be eligible men there. If you behave well, then other invitations will be forthcoming. Now, off with you!’

The twins went out. Each usually knew what the other was thinking and so, by a sort of unspoken agreement, they went to Abigail’s room. Abigail sat down wearily on the edge of the bed. ‘She did make me feel the most utter fool.’

‘I feel she spoke nothing but the truth about Harry and Jessica,’ said Rachel. ‘I remember now that Jessica’s gown was ripped, but what happened was evidently so awful that no one would tell us about it and I had forgotten about the state Jessica arrived home in that day.’

‘Perhaps if it stays dry tomorrow,’ said Abigail, ‘we will walk over to Mannerling for one last look. I feel if I go and say goodbye, then my brain won’t trick me any more.’

‘We will not be allowed to go out walking alone,’ said Rachel.

‘We will take pails and say we are going to pick blackberries. Then we can leave the pails in the nearest hedge and make our way.’

Miss Trumble was so sure that she had knocked sense into their heads that she did not worry about anything when she saw the twins setting out with pails to collect blackberries. She would have been worried had she known that Lizzie and Belinda had offered to go with them and had been rudely told that their company was not wanted.

After hiding their pails in the hedgerow and resolving to pick at least some blackberries before they returned home, Rachel and Abigail made their way towards Mannerling, under a clear, cold blue sky, the iron rings on their pattens clattering on the frost-hard road. Birds piped cold little dismal cries from the hedgerows, which gleamed red with hips and haws. There was a scent of decay in the air.

When they reached the great gates of Mannerling, they both gazed hungrily through the iron bars.

The gardens had been laid out in the last century by Capability Brown. He had earned the nickname Capability because of the noble simplicity of his vision in remodelling great parks. In fact, his boast was that he could not go to Ireland because he had not yet finished refashioning England. The gardens at Mannerling contained all the hallmarks of Brown’s landscaping. Great sweeps of greensward, relieved by clumps of trees, extended right up to the house itself and sloped down to a level sheet of water created from diminutive streams. A belt of trees encircled the whole park, breaking in places to open up vistas onto the surrounding country. Humphry Repton, Brown’s successor, had added the long line of trees on either side of the drive, the rose garden, the kitchen garden, and the terraces.

The sound of a carriage made the twins turn round in alarm. It was shameful to be discovered thus in their old gowns. The carriage stopped and Mrs Devers looked out. ‘Pray join me, ladies,’ she called as the footman jumped down from the back-strap to let down the carriage steps. ‘We will take a dish of tea.’

The normally haughty Mrs Devers’s impulse was prompted because she felt ‘poor Harry’ was still in deep disgrace because of that ‘little misunderstanding’ over Jessica Beverley. Therefore it followed that if she became on good terms with the Beverley family, people would discount that story about Harry.

Rachel and Abigail shared the same thought as they climbed into the carriage. How furious Miss Trumble would be if she could see them now.

Once inside Mannerling, Abigail gazed about her with something close to despair. So does a woman feel when she thinks the obsession she has suffered for some man has finally left her, only to see him again and find the obsession is as strong as ever. Every room seemed to call to her, ‘I belong to you.’

‘I think this place is haunted,’ said Mrs Devers as she led the way into the drawing room.

‘By Mr Judd?’ asked Rachel.

‘No, I think it takes people’s souls. I would have persuaded Mr Devers to sell it, but of course Harry would not hear of it. He loves this place.’

She rang the bell and asked for tea to be served. Soon the tea-kettle was bubbling on its tall three-legged stand. Japanned trays swirling with patterns of blush roses were carried in, laden with biscuits. Then there was the cake basket they remembered, and wondered why their mother had not taken it with her. It had ‘barley-sugar’ handles and pierced sides. The rosewood tea caddy and silver tea-strainer, the little silver cream jug, all stood on fragile tables among the cups and saucers of so thin and fine a china as to be almost transparent.

‘I believe Lady Evans over at Hursley Park is to give a ball,’ said Mrs Devers.

‘Yes, we are invited to go,’ said Abigail proudly.

‘Really! I have no doubt our invitations will be arriving shortly. I apprised Lady Evans of the intelligence that Harry is shortly due home on leave. This terrible war. Will it never end?’

The twins said nothing. The lecture from Miss Trumble still rang in their ears.

‘Of course,’ went on Mrs Devers hurriedly and without her usual stately calm, ‘Harry did behave so badly towards your sister and it did get about. But he was always such a
wild
boy. Young men are so headstrong, and he was so terribly much in love with your sister that he got quite
carried away
. He is such a
romantic
fellow and he knew he was losing Jessica’s affections to his cousin, Robert Sommerville, and he lost his head. He has been so dreadfully punished for his folly and has become so
changed,
so quiet and gentlemanly, you would not recognize him at all.’

‘Perhaps he will be at Lady Evans’s ball,’ suggested Abigail.

Mrs Devers busied herself with the tea-kettle. ‘Well, as to that,’ she said with an awkward laugh, ‘Lady Evans is so very
old
, don’t you know, and the old are so intolerant of foibles in the young, quite as if they had never been young themselves.’

Miss Trumble, thought Abigail, would no doubt wonder acidly whether Lady Evans had assaulted anyone in
her
youth.

Rachel changed the subject and chatted about the dresses they were having made for the ball at one of London’s leading dressmaker’s. Mrs Devers then turned the conversation to London, saying she had been there recently, and began talking of plays and operas she had seen.

The twins suddenly realized that time was passing, and if they did not hurry, Barry would be sent out looking for them. They rose to their feet to make their goodbyes.

‘But you must not walk,’ Mrs Devers exclaimed. ‘I will send you home in the carriage.’

Rachel opened her mouth to say hurriedly that they would enjoy the walk home and heard, to her horror, Abigail accepting the offer. She did not say anything until they were in the carriage and bowling down the drive.

‘Are you run mad?’ she demanded angrily. ‘What will happen when Miss Trumble sees us arriving in the Mannerling carriage?’

‘She won’t,’ said Abigail. ‘We’ll tell the coachman to stop where we left the pails and walk from there.’

Rachel heaved a sigh of relief.

Miss Trumble met them as they came in, swinging their empty pails. ‘No blackberries?’ she asked.

‘Not a one,’ said Abigail cheerfully. ‘We were playing at swinging our pails and we upset them all over the road.’

‘Where was that?’

‘Beyond the entrance to Currie’s farm, where that thick hedgerow is,’ said Abigail.

After dinner, Miss Trumble took a lantern and walked along the road until she reached the hedgerow by Currie’s farm. She held the lantern high. Frost sparkled like marcasite on the road, but of spilled blackberries there was not any sign at all.

She walked slowly back. Should she accuse them of lying? Where had they really been? But if she accused them, that might make them more secretive than ever. She would wait and watch.

The fine weather broke and the rain came down in floods, turning the roads about Brookfield House to rivers of mud. The girls began to fret. The roads were impassable. Their dresses would never arrive in time, and how could they get to the ball anyway in such weather? Even Miss Trumble began to lose hope and suggested they look out their old gowns so that she might reshape them.

But the rain ceased as suddenly as it had come, followed by an unseasonably warm drying wind from the south. The dresses duly arrived and everything was set fair for the ball.

Miss Trumble received a note from Lady Evans. In it Lady Evans had listed the eligibles who were to attend the ball and said, ‘Lord Burfield is the prize. He is vastly rich and vastly handsome. But he is in his early thirties and no girl has caught his eye yet. I wonder why?’

I wonder, too, thought Miss Trumble. He might prove to be another Harry Devers!

O, Love’s but a dance,

Where Time plays the fiddle!

See the couples advance, -

O, Love’s but a dance!

A whisper, a glance, -

‘Shall we twirl down the middle?’

O, Love’s but a dance,

Where Time plays the fiddle!

HENRY AUSTIN DOBSON

Lord Burfield would have not been in the least surprised had he learned that he was the talk of every family that was to attend the ball. He was used to being the centre of attention. As a child, he had been doted on by his parents – a most unusual state of affairs in the Regency, where children were expected to stay out of sight, watched over by governesses or tutors. But he had been a rosy-cheeked cherub with a mop of golden curls, and the pet of the servants as well.

He had left the comfort of his home at the age of eighteen to join the army. His father, the Earl of Drezby, had cried fond and proud tears at the sight of his golden-haired boy in his hussar uniform. It was a tradition in England that the aristocracy went into the army and the gentry to the navy, and neither the earl nor the countess expected army life to change their sweet-natured scholarly son in the slightest. Rupert, Lord Burfield, had ridden off to fight the French and ended up in the misery of the Duke of York’s disastrous campaign in the Low Countries. The countryside was in the grip of ferocious frosts, and it was, wrongly, assumed that the French would keep to their quarters until the hard winter was over. But the French came speeding down the frozen canals, defeated the Dutch, seized all their ports, and sent the exhausted redcoats staggering towards Hanover, into a new hell of cold and wretchedness. ‘I shall not feel this as a severe blow,’ the Duke of York wrote to his royal father, but the British public viewed it differently and chanted in the streets:

The noble Duke of York

He had ten thousand men,

He marched them up to the top of the hill,

And he marched them down again.

As one of the unhappy ten thousand who had done the marching, Lord Burfield prayed to be home as soon as possible, but he was kept an extra six weeks on the banks of the Waal by the French, sleeping in his clothes and turning out once or twice a night. From across the river, the French shouted insults. Nor was his mood helped by the contempt he had for his fellow officers. There was a scandalous traffic in field offices by army brokers who made an officer out of anyone who could pay. And the rank and file were a disgrace. The Duke of Wellington was to describe them as ‘the off-scouring of the nation, who could be purchased at a cheap rate by the crimpscriminals, decrepit old men, raw boys, the halfwitted, the feebleminded, even downright lunatics.’ The wagon-train was named The Newgate Blues, after London’s most notorious prison.

Lord Burfield, who had endured a rigorous training at a military academy before gaining his captaincy, was appalled at the degradation he saw all around him. His golden curls were full of lice, so he shaved his head and wore a wig. When they finally marched towards the river Ems and then to Bremen and the Weser, Lord Burfield watched men break ranks to loot. The weather was so cruel that many of the men stumbled and fell, to add their bodies to the piles of already frozen bodies by the roadsides.

The innocence left Lord Burfield’s blue eyes, and his face thinned and hardened. He was sickened by the sights of war and felt he had aged years. But he did not leave the army. Instead, he applied his wits to studying more war strategy, determined to be the best officer he could find it within himself to be. After the Low Countries, under the command of Colonel Arthur Wesley, later to become the Duke of Wellington, he sailed to India, where he fought well and served the first man in the army he had found to admire.

After the Indian campaigns he returned to London on leave, to enjoy his first Season. He had become a tall man, just over six feet in height, with sunbleached hair cut in a Brutus crop and a handsome tanned face with a firm square chin below a passionate and sensitive mouth. He was rich and he was handsome, and the ladies flocked to his side. But although he enjoyed a few light affairs with bored married ladies, he found the frivolities of the London Season shallow and empty. He returned to the army and served five more years, until he inherited his great-uncle’s house and estates. He sold out and settled down to the life of a landowner. He was thirty-three and reluctantly decided that he should find a bride. He was staying with Lady Evans, a friend of his parents’.