Love's Way (2 page)

We were off in our landaulet, back home to Ambledown. I might just take a moment to explain that this means of conveyance was less elegant than it sounds. Ours was an antique, one of the first landaulets seen in the country, so ancient that it had been imported by our ancestors from Germany before they became the fashion in England. The front half of the top had wilted into mildewed disrepair a decade or so ago, so that it was only of use on a fine summer day.

One of its chief advantages was that it was capable of being pulled by one horse, whereas the old black family carriage is so heavy it requires a team to haul it. If you hope to exceed six miles an hour you would need four horses, but we are infrequently in such an almighty rush as that to get anywhere. In a fit of poetical light-heartedness a year ago, Edward painted our landaulet a rather pretty apple green colour, and I with my own fingers added a pair of yellow geometric arabesques down the sides. Nora declared at the time that it resembled nothing so much as a travelling tinker’s wagon and called it by that name. Edward and I did likewise, to let our neighbours know we considered the carriage an item of family whimsey, not a serious vehicle.

As I took Belle’s reins into my hands, I turned to Nora. “What did that remark about Black Jack Gamble mean, pray? How does it come
you
know something about the man, and I do not?”

“He has been gone for fifteen years, Chloe. You are not so old yet that you could have heard of his crimes before he left. Still a child you were. You must remember
seeing
Jack Gamble though. He visited the Hall a few summers before he went away. He lived over in the west district—Cumberland.”

I harkened in my mind back through the mists of time to the summers when I had been a carefree eleven or twelve. I dredged up a hazy impression of a dark-haired youth on a bay stallion, thundering across the meadow, down the road, and occasionally into town, swaggering and impressing the local bucks and damsels with his posturing. “Did he win the fell-race one year?” I asked.

Fell-racing is unique to our district, I believe. It is incredibly arduous—climbing up the fells and scampering down again. It sounds like child’s play till you take into account the roughness of the terrain, the naked rock in places, the treacherous moss in others, and of course the great speed involved. No lowlander has ever won, to my knowledge. Whoever wins is the local hero for a week or so, which is perhaps how I came to remember Jack Gamble at all.

“I believe he did. Fancy your remembering that. His other exploits would not be known to a child, however.”

“I am no longer a child, Auntie.”

“It never ceases to amaze me how well-reared young ladies are so eager to hear tales of wrong-doing. It was not spoken of a great deal hereabouts, but Lady Carnforth was still alive at the time, and a friend of mine. She told me the story. Jack seduced his cousin Wilbur’s fiancée. That same year he won the fell-race, it was. He was popular with the ladies after that, and Millie Henderson was always a ninnyhammer anyway.”

“You mean he actually got her in trouble?”

“Enough trouble that Wilbur felt free to call off the match. And then Jack hadn’t the integrity to offer the girl marriage but sneaked off to India and left her in the lurch. I imagine it is the only reason he ever went, for he had a decent home and prospects from his father. Nothing so grand as Carnforth Hall you know, but a respectable estate. A mine, I think his papa owned, like Carnforth. Though it might have been sheep, as he won the fell-race. It is usually won by a sheep farming family.”

I regarded her with an unbelieving eye, for I knew perfectly well that Millie Henderson had been happily married to another gentleman for some years, as she would not have been had she been termed ruined.

“Old Carnforth patched up some match for her,” Nora explained. “The old aristocratic families arrange these matters. In any case, Jack Gamble was never any good. He was a wild young buck—gaming, wenching, gambling, fighting, and riding. We were glad to see the back of him, I can tell you. So if he is to inherit Carnforth Hall, it hardly matters whether the estate goes to the courts now or a year from now. Of more importance to us is that Lady Emily hasn’t a penny to her name. Edward cannot offer for her. Pity. Even if she had five thousand ... But with the mortgage at home standing so high, it is not to be thought of.”

As Nora’s eyes were not required for netting in the carriage, she could spare me a glance, and as mine were required for driving, I could ignore it. I knew, though, that she regarded me hopefully. If I accepted Tom Carrick, of course, Edward would have one less encumbrance. Or perhaps two, if Nora came to live with Tom and me.

“I don’t consider it a total tragedy,” I said. “Outside of her right to the title of ‘Lady’, and of course a pretty face, Emily has not much to offer. She is not the best manager the countryside has seen, is she?”

“To be sure she is not, Chloe. You are, but you would continue to manage family affairs until ... as you always have done.’’

“A new mistress might have something to say about that,” I pointed out.

“Not Lady Emily. She would not care two straws for it. It really is a great pity,” she repeated, then cast her gaze about the countryside, to nod and smile at the blue-gray hills in the distance, patched with green and dotted with sheep.

“At least Edward has not fallen madly in love with her,” I mentioned.

“If she keeps hanging about the way she has been doing, he soon will,” she forecast gloomily.

She was right. Lady Emily kept on coming, at least twice, often four times, a week throughout that spring and summer. She caught Edward at home often enough that her beauty penetrated his consciousness. He was half in love with Lady Emily and half in love with love, as becomes a poet. He was not so fond of her as to curtail his jaunts over to Rydal Mount to meet with Mr. Wordsworth’s circle.

It seems to me that a man wishing to do honour to our beautiful Lake District (as our northwestern corner of England has been misnamed since the poets brought it into fashion) should do so with brush and canvas. All these poets have accomplished is to have us overrun with tourists who come in carriages to glance at what they call the lakes. Actually there is not a lake in the whole area. We natives refer to our bits of water as meres and tarns. A lake is something much larger, and much less lovely. It was Thomas Gray who first went spouting tales of the “lakes” to be enjoyed here. He was soon followed by others—Southey, Coleridge, and of course our own William Wordsworth, who lived right in Grasmere for several years.

Over the past ten years we have become
the
tourist attraction of the country. I cannot begin to describe the mess and confusion these visitors bring. In the first place, they have no real appreciation of our landscape. They peer from a carriage window when the beauty can only be gained by walking, by clambering up fells to look down at the tarns of various hues and shapes. The colour will change before your very eyes from blue to green or even black, as the clouds pass by overhead. The waters nestle in secret dales and valleys between the hills, the pikes, and the fells. The tourists who do not get out of their carriages miss the bracing air, the aroma of the bog myrtle, most of all the challenge of the fells. The fells are the real attraction of the place.

For maximum viewing pleasure one should avoid coming during the bracken season, as we call that time between late June and late September, which is exactly when the greatest number of tourists come. At that time the contours of the fells are hidden by the monotonous fern that covers them like a green blanket. The weather too is wretched
—
too hot most of the time, relieved only by the wettest rain in the world. It comes in blankets, in sheets, in counterpanes to saturate us. You have not been wet till you have been rained on here.

If you want to see us at our best, come in April or October. Do not come in the dead of the summer, like the tourists who clutter up the hotels and inns and drive up prices. Not that you will find a lack of accommodation! We have been inundated by a sea of businessmen wishing to capitalize on the new tourist industry. Many a garish mansion has been thrown up, to clash dreadfully with the simple architecture of the countryside and to take up land needed for our livelihood. I refer, of course, to our Herdwick sheep. Unlovely, smelly, oily, white-faced, and rugged as the natives, they dot the fells year round, eking out a diet that would starve other sheep, and growing a coarse, long fleece used for carpets and roughage in the Cumberland tweed.

But I have digressed into a travel brochure. Edward succumbed to Nature, in the form of Lady Emily. They walked out together; his poems found a new object of dedication. The “barren fells” and “limpid blue pools” of yore were transformed into “sweet delights” of femininity. The limpid blue pools remained but came in pairs, fringed with lashes. Edward had not begun to think of anything so down-to-earth as marriage, I am sure, but Emily was beginning to look about the saloon with a somewhat proprietary eye. She had hemmed up half a dozen handkerchiefs for him, embroidered with a design which Nora thinks is supposed to be an E. I think she would be better employed wielding a mop or broom at home.

Nora had not completely abandoned all thoughts of sharing the roof with a Lady. She is a
wee
bit of a snob, to tell the truth, but no one is perfect. “A pity about the dowry,” she was wont to say, but soon began adding such leading remarks as, “At least she is not demanding. She is always perfectly happy with pot luck.” On another occasion the remark, in the same insinuating spirit, was, “How very much at home Emily (sans the Lady now) looks in our little tinker’s wagon.”

Each sally was met with a steely eye from myself. I (who was in charge of the accounts for the establishment) knew we must marry Edward to at least a small heiress, not an impecunious Lady who might well change her demands once she was installed as mistress of Ambledown. Due to Edward’s detached, lackadaisical way of going on, June waned into July, the heat rose, the old earl at Carnforth Hall declined, and still there was no firm announcement of any approaching nuptials. There was soon an announcement of a much more distressing nature to plague us, but it had nothing to do with Edward or Emily or marriage.

Chapter Two

Ambledown (my home, if I failed to mention it) is located just at the northern tip of Lake Grasmere, right at the heart of the Lake District. Windermere, just below us, is thought to be prettier by some, but I prefer the wilder, craggier fells of home. Being right at the hub of the whole delightful region, Grasmere has fallen due to most of the unwanted tourist activity. We blame the majority of this on a certain Captain Wingdale, retired officer of the Royal Navy. His pockets are heavy with prize money taken during the late wars. It is his aim to make them even heavier by destroying our whole town and neighbourhood with his business activities. Bad enough he threw up a spurious Elizabethan inn, whose half timbers stand out like a sore thumb in this area that has still a strong Nordic flavour. Bad enough indeed that every cit and clerk who can afford the journey comes with a carriageful of children to fill his rooms and our streets, and to make such a racket into the night and on the Sabbath that the local inhabitants have no peace. Captain Wingdale is in the process of modernizing us by holding assemblies in the largest room of his hotel—not monthly, not even weekly, but nightly throughout the summer for the delight of his clients and the less discriminating of the local inhabitants.

There are some folks broad-minded enough to forgive him all these atrocities, for while he has driven up prices in the local shops to ridiculous heights, he has brought more custom than usual to the village. Rooms are let by many a spinster and widow who would otherwise be deprived of this little additional income. Tea shops flourish; souvenirs are imported from London and stamped with the names of the various lakes; pamphlets abound bruiting our charms to the travellers. As Ambledown is two miles from the village, even I was large-hearted enough to forgive Wingdale, but his latest crime neither I nor anyone else for miles around can condone.

The crime (and the distressing announcement referred to earlier) is this Captain Wingdale has taken into his head to create an entirely new town. It is to be located between the present village and Ambledown—right on our doorstep, you see. He has used the coincidence of there being several places ending in the termination “dale” to name the town after himself, Wingdale, ignoring the fact that Dunnerdale, Grizedale, and so on are not named after people, but are in fact dales—valleys. Wingdale is nothing of the sort. It will be built on a slight incline. By some underhanded means he snapped up several acres of land outside of Grasmere and was busy every day trying to seize the rest of it. It would not surprise me in the least if he has set his greedy sights on Ambledown.

Indeed, the plan of his new town is incomplete without it. Our ancestral home forms the focal point of the road that runs north from Grasmere, with Berwick Pike towering behind it. Ambledown would be incorporated into the town even if Edward manages to hold on to it—a thing by no means certain in our perilous financial state. The Plans for Wingdale are on prominent display in the window of Wingdale Hause. In his sublime ignorance, the Captain mistook the old Nordic “hause” to mean house, or so I assume. It means a narrow pass, in case you are interested. Wingdale Hause is his spurious Elizabethan inn, right on the main street. He pulled down three shops and the existing inn to build it. The inn was of great historical interest, being several hundred years old, but Wingdale does not even profess to have any interest in history, unless it is recent enough to concern his own naval exploits.

When you have been accustomed to look out your door or window on to quiet meadows, to serene fells and water, it is distressing to consider that within a year or two the sight will be changed to a hodge-podge of poorly designed modern cottages with not two yards of land between them, those two yards doubtlessly cluttered with noisy youngsters and dogs. He speaks, too, of bringing some “industry” in as an added incentive to lure people to Wingdale. The exact nature of the industry has not been revealed, which is in itself suspicious. If it were some clean, light business, he would not hesitate to name it. My imagination fails to give me any notion what he has in mind, but with mines closeby the ugly spectre of some smoke-belching foundry occasionally looms up.