Minuet

MINUET

Joan Smith

Chapter One

It was summer, but the rain pelting against the windows of the mansion in Berkeley Square was cold enough to remind the inhabitants how far north of the equator the island lay. The blazing fire in the grate was welcome, as was the brandy that sat on the sofa table, its crystal decanter taking on a rosy hue from the fire, while the potent liquid reached an agreeable temperature.

Lord Harlock was particular about his brandy. “I think you’ll find this a good brew, Degan,” he said, handing a glass to his cousin.

Degan regarded the glass suspiciously, certain he would find nothing of the sort. Why must Frenchmen go ruining good grapes by turning them into this paint remover?

“At least it ain’t bleached,” Harlock went on, sipping judiciously, and smiling in satisfaction. “The last batch I got had been sunk to escape the revenuemen. Must have been underwater two weeks, and was bleached. Ah, that takes the edge off the chill,” he said, putting his glass on the table, where Degan’s had already found its way, untasted.

“But I didn’t ask you here to discuss brandy,” Harlock said, his countenance assuming a businesslike cast.

“I am curious to hear why you did ask me, John,” the younger gentleman replied. He was in his thirtieth year, but gave the air of being older. The serious expression on his face might have accounted for it, or the jacket of a sober hue. His dark hair, simply styled, and his outfit, devoid of any ostentatious ornament—all bespoke a man of moderation.

“About time we discussed the inevitable, what?” Harlock replied, not happily, but as one who is resigned to accept an unpleasant task, provided a glass of brandy was at his elbow.

“You refer to your family, I take it—your immediate family?”

“Aye, Marie and the children. I think we must acknowledge they are lost—dead—and see to arranging the estate.”

“Have you had word from France?” Degan asked with quickening interest.

“No. No word from them now in nearly five years. Since the beginning of the Revolution I have heard nothing.” He took another sip of his drink, and though it calmed him, it did not bring cheer to the dismal discussion.

“I wouldn’t jump to conclusions, John,” the younger man said. “Your wife was not a French noblewoman. No reason to assume she has been executed.”

Harlock winced at the picture this conjured up—his lovely Marie, with her lovely white neck stretched on the guillotine—but Degan was not a gentleman of great sensitivity. He said what he thought in the plainest words.

“Pitt tells me the Terror intensifies in Paris,” Harlock went on. “That damned Robespierre has it all his own way. Has managed to defeat the Cordeliers now, the last remnant of hope for any moderate policy. There are thirty or more carted off to the guillotine every day. He got rid of the Girondists last October. Marie’s father would have gone with that lot. A ringleader of the Gironde, old Armand Augé. The Tribunal is thorough—Marie would not have long escaped. She had no wits,” he confessed sadly.

“A woman and a couple of children—the Tribunal would not have bothered its head with them. They are half English as well,” Degan pacified him.

“They do not spare women and children in Paris,” Harlock said resignedly. “Animals! A race that would decapitate their king and queen would stop at nothing.”

“You forget we did the same to Charles I,” Degan reminded him.

“It has gone beyond sense there. The Tribunal prepares accusations in advance with a blank left for the suspect’s name to expedite executions. Five years and never a word. They are dead,” he said in a hollow voice, and had recourse again to the brandy glass. He was only forty-eight, but looked sixty. His hair was gray, his cheeks pouched and his eyes dull. The brandy of course had something to do with it, but the losing of his family under such harrowing and long-drawn-out circumstances had more.

“If that is the case, then you must remarry and start a new family,” Degan said with a certain air of heartiness. “You are not yet fifty, John. It is nonsense to behave as though you were an old man. Marry a wife young enough to give you another son and heir, and for God’s sake make it an
Englishwoman
this time.”

“Can’t be done till I receive positive word Marie is dead,” Harlock pointed out. “Thus far, it is all conjecture. Even if Marie is gone, the children might have survived. If Edward lives, then there is no need for me to remarry. Well, there is no need in any case. You, though you are only a cousin, will inherit the title. What’ll that make you, eh?”

“An earl. Somewhat redundant, as I already am one. Never mind that. What does Pitt suggest with regard to getting any positive information out of France? Is there no way of getting ahold of their records, of finding out whether Edward survived?”

“Our countries are at war. There is no official communication. Best not to call attention to them in any way, he says. They might have found a quiet corner somewhere to hide. Not that Marie would have had the sense to do it. It would be the bright lights for her, ninnyhammer, but old Armand was as crafty as may be, her father. You can’t imagine what that devil was up to. He may have arranged something. He saw what was coming and urged her to come back to England two years before the Revolution. He always looked out for his children, but she would have none of it. We never did patch it up between us, you know.”

Degan stirred uncomfortably in his chair, fearing he was about to hear what he had no desire to hear—why his cousin and his wife had parted ten years previously. Unlike the general run of mankind, he was truly disinterested in the sordid details of others’ lives. The marriage of Lord Harlock and Mademoiselle Augé had been considered a scandal by the entire family, most of all Degan himself. It was the result of a brief diplomatic career in France. The marriage had worked out as disastrously as everyone had prophesied it would, but it had taken longer to do it. For ten years they had continued under the same roof, producing first a daughter, Céleste, then a son, Edward, along with a constant barrage of marital battles, and finally the long-awaited scandal—separation.

Degan himself had been only nineteen at the time, and neither close to his cousin nor particularly interested in his problems. He knew some French relations and friends of Marie’s had come to visit the Harlocks, and assumed she had been smitten with a passion for one of them. What could one expect of a Frenchie? In any case, she had either left John or been thrown out. Had it been the latter, he would have given his absolute approval. He shared the view, not uncommon in England, that the only good things to come out of France were wine and courtesans. He would personally no more have proposed marriage to one than the other. France and French things were for entertainment, not for the serious business of fostering the advancement of one’s family.

Marie had returned to France, taking the children with her for a visit, and had got caught up in the Revolution. Daughter of a Girondist, a politician of moderate views, she had been hostess for her father till affairs got out of hand. Her husband had repeatedly urged her to send the children home, but with a blithe disregard for his wishes and their safety, she had only rarely answered his letters, and never done as he asked. The result was that for five years nothing had been heard of any of them. Plenty was heard of France, however, and what was going on there. The storming of the Bastille, the execution of the monarchs, the Reign of Terror with Robespierre chopping off the heads of the aristocracy and confiscating their estates.

“What do you plan to do, then? Why have you asked me here tonight?” Degan inquired, to divert his cousin from more intimate matters.

“I want to discuss with you the arrangement of my business affairs. If you inherit, Harlock Hall will go to you, but I have other unentailed assets, and want to find out what you think I should do with them. There is my nephew, Paul’s boy, who will come into next to nothing, and he is a bright, good lad. I thought the Dorset place would give him a little something to fall back on. And then there is Aunt Deirdre’s estate. It was left to my daughter, Sal.” The Harlock man and wife agreed on nothing, not even the names of their children. Céleste was invariably anglicized to Sal by the father, and Edward was frenchified to Édouard by the mother. “If Sal is gone, then it must be taken into consideration as well.”

“Nonsense leaving such a large estate to a woman in the first place,” Degan said brusquely, visions of the fine old home, also in Dorset, rising in his mind. “What is it worth by now?” In his own family it was the custom to give them a small allowance till marriage, at which time their portion was turned over to the husband, carefully scrutinized by the father.

“With the income racking up for eight years since Deirdre’s death, something in the neighborhood of forty thousand in cash, plus the place itself. Fifty thousand easily,” Harlock told him, frowning, and showing no pleasure at the accumulation of so much wealth.

“Hang on to it and do as I tell you. You’re only forty-eight and—”

“And feel eighty,” Harlock said, tipping up the glass and draining it. “What do I want with a young wife and a nursery of babies at my age?”

“It’s what comes of marrying a
French
woman,” Degan said in a condemning way. “I’ll tell you who is hanging out for a husband, and she is not young precisely, but still in her childbearing years, is Lady Sylvia Rothely.”

Lady Sylvia was mentally held up for comparison with Lady Harlock. The image caused Harlock to shake his head sadly. “Nothing can be done at present,” he said, to delay the doing of anything, ever. One wife was enough. His adventures in the marriage arena left him with no desire for an encore, certainly not with a thin, dull Lady Sylvia Rothely.

“In the event that they’ve all perished, I’ll be saddled with Harlock Hall then,” Degan said fatalistically. “I hope I have a large family of sons.”

“Hope you get yourself buckled first,” Harlock said mischievously, and received a blighting stare. Degan did not find lasciviousness a matter for levity. “How old are you, Degan?” he asked to smooth over the implied rebuke.

“Twenty-nine.”

“Is that all?” Harlock asked, with a little rueful shake of his head. Solidity and seriousness were all well and good in an old crock like himself, but why Degan should set up as a citadel of propriety at such an age was beyond him. “You’re the one ought to be getting married. What happened between you and that Oldfield girl you were seeing?”

“I stopped seeing her.”

“Why?”

“A personal reason.”

“Well, but what was it?”

“She was a little fast in some of her ideas,” Degan said, stiffly uncomfortable.

“Oldfield’s daughter
fast?
You’re mad. She’s the slowest woman in London. Would have been a perfect match for you.”

It was Degan’s turn to stare. “What did she do, eh?” Harlock pressed on, with a waggish smile.

“Nothing serious. I don’t mean to carry tales.”

“Must have done
something
.”

“If you must know—and it is not to go beyond these four walls, John—she gambled. Also borrowed some money and didn’t return it.”

“How much?”

“A half crown. It is not the
sum,
but the principle of the thing. It augurs an unsteady character, and the neglect of repaying—”

The speech was interrupted by a pèremptory banging of the front-door knocker. “That’ll be a courier from the office,” Harlock said wearily. An active member of the House of Lords, he was accustomed to having his every social activity interrupted by the pressures of state business.

“Nom d’un nom, quelle grande maison!”
a high young voice trumpeted from the precincts of the front hallway. The gentlemen exchanged a look of astonishment to hear French being spoken, and by a child, in this august household. They sat listening as the butler queried the young person as to his reason for being at the door—front door at that—of Lord Harlock’s establishment, which was more likely to welcome a minister or an archbishop. The entire exchange was not clear to either, and the French half of it entirely incomprehensible to Harlock, who rather prided himself on his uni-lingualism. Degan was slightly conversant with the foreign tongue, by no means fluent.

“He wants to see you,” Harlock was told by his cousin.

“Now what the devil...” the old lord said, arising with some reluctance from his comfortable, warm chair by the fire.

Degan too arose and walked to the doorway of the saloon. He was nearly knocked over by a fast-moving ball of gray rags that appeared to be inhabited by some form of human life. It catapulted against his legs, pursued by the outraged butler.
“Mon Dieu,
ça
n’est pas possible!”
the ball exclaimed, regarding Degan steadfastly from a crouching position at his feet.

Staring at it in consternation, Degan perceived that beneath the tatters and filth a pair of bright topaz eyes stared at him. They were markedly slanted, like a cat’s eyes, and bore the luster of youth.