The Art of Love (25 page)

Caroline nodded sombrely and dropped her voice to a whisper. ‘It was gambling, my uncle lost everything, the house, the lands, the tenants’ cottages. The moment he died they were all forfeit and Leo had nowhere to live. That’s why he went to London. He didn’t want to come here where everybody knew him, he couldn’t bear the shame.’

‘I see,’ Tara said slowly. So Leo had originally come from an affluent family. Maybe her mother wouldn’t consider him beneath the Penges after all, maybe she would see him as an eligible suitor for her daughter. Tara stamped out that thought, hard. What good would it do her to have her mother accept Leo, when Leo himself had made it quite plain that he never wanted to see her again? Suddenly Tara felt that she could not carry on at the party a moment longer. ‘Please excuse me,’ she murmured to Caroline and went to find Lady Penge.

‘I was just coming to find you,’ her mother said, when she discovered her smiling benignly to people in the dining room, but not actually engaged in conversation. ‘It’s getting late, I think it is time we took our leave.’ They made their farewells to Mark and his parents and a footman and a maid were helping them on with their coats when door from the parlour swung open and Lord Davenham came up to them. Tara was surprised, she didn’t think she had made much impression on him, but it was to Lady Penge that he spoke.

‘Lady Penge, I was hoping for a quick word before you left,’ he said, and to Tara’s ear he sounded a little breathless. ‘I’m holding a small ball next Saturday night, and I would very much like to invite you and your charming daughter…’

‘Tara,’ Lady Penge supplied and Tara was surprised to see a small smile play over her mother’s lips. Bournemouth must be doing her good.

‘Tara,’ Lord Davenham echoed, but his eyes were all for Lady Penge.

Lady Penge smiled at him graciously. ‘We would be delighted to attend,’ she said, and allowed Lord Davenham to kiss her hand goodbye.

‘You have a beau!’ Tara said to her mother the moment they were ensconced in their carriage, momentarily distracted from her own concerns.

‘I do not,’ Lady Penge said repressively, but she glanced sideways at Tara as she said it.

‘You do!’ Tara said, suddenly seeing her mother in a whole new light. Lady Penge was not, after all, so old, and perhaps she and her mother were not as different as she had always believed.

‘Maybe,’ Lady Penge said and refused to say any more on the subject until Tara asked her what she would wear to the ball. ‘My black silk evening dress,’ she said neutrally. ‘I did not bring anything else suitable for that sort of occasion.

‘You will not wear black!’ Tara said at once. ‘We will find a dressmaker first thing on Monday morning. ‘You may wear any other colour you like, but you will not wear black!’

‘Yes dear,’ her mother said, surprisingly meekly, and Tara felt lifted out of her misery for the first time that night.

When he arrived at his aunt and uncle’s house the next morning Leo found only his cousin Caroline at home. ‘Everyone else is in church,’ she said rather reprovingly as she rang for tea to be brought to the parlour.

‘Oh,’ said Leo, feeling rather abashed, ‘I had forgotten it was Sunday.’

‘Then you are living the life of a heathen,’ Caroline said, sitting down on the sofa and taking up her cross-stitch.

‘You’re not there either,’ Leo pointed out, ‘and should you be sewing on a Sunday?’

‘Mama thought I might be fatigued after the party last night, and I am embroidering a biblical text,’ Caroline said piously, showing him.

‘
The meek shall inherit the earth
,’ Leo read. ‘I don’t think that’s very likely, do you?’ Tara was anything but meek and she seemed to get everything she wanted.

Caroline shrugged. ‘It was a short piece of text,’ she said. ‘Mama will like it. You,’ she added archly, ‘can hardly be tired after last night, you left so early.’

‘Oh, yes, I would like to apologise for that,’ Leo said uncomfortably. ‘Perhaps you could convey my regrets to your parents and Mark?’

‘I expect I could,’ Caroline said and Leo sensed she wasn’t going to let him off the hook so easily; he waited for her question but she merely said ‘Lady Tara was enquiring about you after you left.’

‘She was?’ Leo instantly felt twice as alert and the heaviness which seemed to have settled on him since last night lifted a little.

Caroline nodded, ‘She was particularly interested to learn about the circumstances of your father’s death.’ That was perhaps the last thing Leo wanted to hear, he groaned and buried his head in his hands. ‘Shouldn’t I have told her?’ Caroline asked, suddenly sounding a lot less grown up.

Leo shook his head. ‘No, it’s all right, she would have found out sooner or later anyway, it’s common knowledge around here. Still, finding out how my father ruined the family name and squandered his fortune is going to make Tara even less impressed with me than she already is.’

‘Why do you want to impress her?’ Caroline asked.

Leo raised his eyes and looked into a pair of dark brown eyes very similar to his own, only far more innocent and trusting than he remembered ever being and he suddenly felt the need to unburden himself. He had not told his friend Freddie of his interest in Tara and he certainly couldn’t tell Mark, but he could talk to Caroline and perhaps she could give him a woman’s perspective and tell him if there were any way to salvage his relationship with Tara. ‘Can you keep a secret?’ he asked. Quickly he outlined the bare bones of the situation, glossing over the circumstances in which he had met Tara and certainly not mentioning any of the passionate moments they had shared, although several crossed his mind as he spoke, serving to reinforce his conviction that he and Tara were made for each other.

‘But when you helped Lady Tara with the running of her estate, surely that must have brought you even closer together?’ Caroline asked when he paused in his narrative.

‘One would have thought so,’ Leo growled and forced himself to go on. ‘In fact she was very impressed with what I did. So impressed in fact that she offered me the position of estate manager to Penge.’ Caroline burst out laughing. ‘I’m glad one of us finds that amusing,’ Leo said, highly disconcerted.

‘It’s funny,’ Caroline protested weakly. ‘Lord Fosse, offered a job as a farmer. Whatever did you say to that?’

‘Naturally I declined,’ Leo said haughtily.

‘So what was the problem?’ Caroline asked, she sounded earnest, but Leo could still see a smile lurking around her eyes.

‘We quarrelled,’ he said reluctantly. ‘Tara felt I had no right to be insulted by the offer.’ Of course he had been even more insulted by the implied offer which went hand in hand with the job, but he wasn’t going to tell his young cousin about that.

‘I see,’ Caroline pursed her lips. ‘What I don’t understand,’ she said after a moment, ‘was why Lady Tara offered you such a job in the first place. She must be aware that a gentleman of your station couldn’t possibly accept such a position. You’re a lord!’

‘I don’t believe Tara actually knows that,’ Leo said slowly. ‘I don’t believe we were ever formally introduced and I don’t use my title when I sign my paintings.’

‘Why not?’ Caroline asked. The bluntness of youth had its uses, Leo thought wryly. None of his friends would have asked him such a thing and forced him to put his feelings into words. He tried to explain his reasoning to Caroline, as much for his own benefit as for hers.

‘It’s meaningless,’ he said. ‘A lord has lands, income, status. I have none of those things.’

‘Is that why you haven’t simply asked Lady Tara to marry you?’ Caroline asked. ‘Would she think you’re not good enough for her?’

‘Yes,’ Leo said quietly.

‘But you are!’ Caroline said passionately. ‘It she knew you were a lord she’d marry you in a shot!’ Leo suddenly saw the great gulf between his age and Caroline’s.

‘She might,’ he said, ‘but I don’t want her to respect me only for my title.’

Caroline looked at him rather impatiently. ‘Then make her respect you as an artist,’ she said, as if it were the most obvious answer in the world. Leo was about to tell her not to be so naive, that he was not St George battling the dragon and winning fame and glory in a single stroke, and that life was not a fairy tale, when he realized she was right. At the moment Tara saw him merely as a portrait painter, little more than a tradesman, but he had been preparing landscapes for months, ready to launch an exhibition in the spring. He was confident enough of his reputation to expect his work to be well received; all he had to do was finalize terms with the gallery. Then, when he had made his name as a landscape painter he would not hesitate to claim his hereditary title, he would feel he had earned it.

‘You’re right,’ Leo said, his heart lifting. He would arrange his exhibition, Tara would see him as her equal and their quarrel would be forgotten. He would propose, she would accept and they would live happily ever after. He seized his cousin by the shoulders and kissed her on the cheek. ‘Perhaps life is a fairytale,’ he said, laughing at her surprise. ‘I must go now. I have paintings to paint and letters to write.’

As soon as he arrived home Leo wrote a letter to the curator of the Dulwich Picture Gallery outlining his proposal for the exhibition. Then he spent the rest of the week painting furiously. He had been working mostly in oils, but now he turned to watercolours, they were faster to paint and he knew he needed some smaller pieces to complement the major paintings in his exhibition. He was rewarded on Friday when the boy who brought his water arrived with two letters for him. Both were addressed to Lord Fosse.

He tipped the boy and ripped one of the letters open. It was a reply from the gallery regarding his exhibition. It could not have been more positive. Lord Seaforth, the curator, was very keen to show Leo’s work, he suggested showing a few paintings in December with some other artists at a Christmas exhibition and then a large collection in the spring.

I would like to meet with you to discuss the details of your proposal
, Lord Seaforth wrote.
Please call on me with a sample of your work, or perhaps we may meet at your studio in the near future
.

Very satisfied, Leo turned to the other letter. It was an invitation, he saw at once, from Lord Davenham with whom he was only distantly acquainted, but he seemed to recall that the man was a friend of Mark’s. He was invited to a ball the following evening and Leo’s first thought was to decline, he had plenty to keep him busy but then he reconsidered. Many of the paintings in his spring exhibition would be of Bournemouth and many of its residents would be in London for the season. It might help with his reputation and with making sales if he mingled with them at Lord Davenham’s ball. That was his only reason for going, he told himself firmly, it had nothing to do with the fact that Tara would almost certainly be there.

On Saturday morning Tara woke up feeling listless but her mother did not. ‘My hair!’ Lady Penge suddenly exclaimed over breakfast causing Tara to jolt her tea in surprise.

‘Your hair looks just as it usually does,’ she said after a moment’s scrutiny.

‘Exactly!’ said Lady Penge. ‘I shall be decked out tonight at the ball in my new chartreuse evening dress and my hair will be as plain as that of a farmer’s wife.’

‘Betty will dress it for you…’ Tara began, but her mother interrupted her.

‘With what?’ she demanded. ‘You do not wear chartreuse. I cannot borrow any of your ribbons. Oh, this is what comes of engaging a provincial dressmaker, she should have thought of this and found me a ribbon to match the dress.’

‘Mrs Cates worked very quickly,’ Tara said, feeling her mother was not being fair. ‘You said you were pleased with the dress.’

‘Yes, yes,’ Lady Penge. ‘Now, I expect it is not too late to deal with the matter. You are to go along to her straight after breakfast, it looks like it will rain later so you cannot leave it. Don’t come back until you have a ribbon in chartreuse. Chartreuse, remember that, not red or burgundy, chartreuse.’

‘Yes, mother,’ Tara said, hiding a smile behind a piece of toast. She was not looking forward to the ball at all, she could not envisage it being anything but dreary without Leo by her side, but she was seeing an aspect of her mother that she had never seen before and it was as endearing as it was amusing.

Obediently Tara put on her bonnet and set off for the dressmaker’s cottage on the far side of the town, as soon as she had finished her breakfast.

‘Look,’ said Mrs Cates as soon as she had relayed her mother’s request. ‘I have a length of that wine coloured ribbon right here. Happen it’ll match her ladyship’s dress perfectly.’ Tara looked closely at the piece of ribbon she proffered, suspecting that her mother had even more of an eye for such details than she did herself. But as far as she could tell the two dark reds were indistinguishable from each other.

‘That will do very nicely,’ she said, and paid the dressmaker.

On her way back home Tara walked along the high street and through the market. She was starting to recognise people, she realized. The girl on the fruit stall smiled at her and she nodded hello to a couple of Mr and Mrs Reeves’ friends whom she had met at the party last week.

‘Lady Tara!’ Tara turned at the sound of a familiar girlish voice and came face to face with Mark’s sister, Caroline.

‘Good morning,’ Tara said brightly, and then found herself tongue-tied. All she wanted to do was ask if Caroline had seen Leo since the party, or whether he was still in Bournemouth. She had seen no sign of him during the past week, despite taking several scenic rides in the carriage with her mother. Fortunately Caroline did not seem to be suffering from the same affliction.

‘I am so looking forward to Lord Davenham’s ball tonight,’ she said. ‘It will be my first proper ball, although I haven’t really had my come out, but Mama thought the occasion would be quiet enough that it would not matter.’

Tara couldn’t help smiling at Caroline’s enthusiasm although she wished she could share it, but the best she had been able to manage was a feeling of neutrality. Lord Davenham’s ball promised her nothing special, but she expected she would not dislike it. ‘How very enlightened of your mother,’ she said, ‘I’m sure you will enjoy yourself.’ She made to move on but Caroline fell into step beside her.