The Sleeping Sword (62 page)

‘Well, perhaps he is not, but his mother is certainly very keen on it and the girl is willing. It is an excellent match, but of course there can be no need to tell you that. She is thoroughly tedious but very rich and, I must admit, rather beautiful. Gideon came over to dinner last night and spent quite an hour with her alone in the Long Gallery, so I imagine we may expect the announcement at any time.'

They were sitting in the garden screened from the sun by Aunt Faith's wide-spreading chestnut trees before a table set with a lace cloth and the expected tea-time apparatus of silver tea-kettle and sugar-tongs, wafer thin cucumber sandwiches on flowery china plates, scones and chocolate cake; Aunt Faith, like Blanche, in a gown of soft white silk, Aunt Caroline in a robust shade of magenta; another white dress at which I only glanced as I walked slowly across the lawn.

Chairs were awaiting us, and Aunt Faith welcomed us into them, talking easily, ignoring the awkwardness she knew was coming, presenting Miss Hortense Madeley-Brown to me with the simple explanation that she had come with Aunt Caroline, until the Duchess herself, who had not forgiven me for introducing Camille to her brother and had piled up other grievances against me since then, announced crisply: ‘Well, Grace, I had not expected to see you here today, since Blanche does not acquaint me with all her plans, and I find it most awkward. My son Gideon is to join us presently to escort us to Tarn Edge and I am not sure he should be asked to meet you.'

‘I beg your pardon,' I said, not quite so sharp-spoken as I might have been, since, for a shocked moment, I thought she was implying knowledge of our tempestuous, night-long affair. But of course it was my connection with the
Star
that troubled her and which, as she quickly informed me, raised doubts in her mind as to the suitability—even to herself—of my company.

‘Caroline,' said Aunt Faith smoothly, since in her view this was simply ‘Caroline being Caroline', ‘that is very harsh.'

‘I believe it to be just. Forgive me, Hortense dear, for speaking of these matters in your presence. I regard you quite as one of the family already, from whom no secrets should be kept. And, like all families, we do have our little difficulties. Grace can hardly deny that she has been disloyal—'

‘I most certainly
can
deny it.'

She smiled at me with the same total self-assurance which exasperated me so thoroughly in Gideon.

‘Nonsense, my dear, of course you cannot. Is it not disloyalty to ally yourself with a man who has deliberately slandered my son—your own second cousin—a man who has whipped up so much ill feeling that my son might have lost his life only the other day as a result of it? If that is not disloyalty, then the world must really be changing.'

I did not wish to lose my temper, partly for Aunt Faith's sake, partly because I considered it essential to be composed when Gideon came, and so I answered rather quietly, ‘Aunt Caroline, it is a very complex situation and I am truly sorry about the accident to Gideon's horse. But Liam Adair is not my ally. He is my employer. I am not responsible for his opinions and, after all, he too is a member of my family.'

‘Good heavens!' she said, diverted, as I had intended, into matters of genealogy. ‘He is no such thing.'

‘Indeed he is,' Aunt Faith said quickly, understanding my motive.

‘Faith, he is no such thing. Her grandmother married his father, and what sort of a relationship is that? But on our side of the family, her mother was your sister and my first cousin. She married my brother's son, although the least said about that the better—'

‘Do you really think so?' murmured wicked Blanche. ‘For my part I find Gervase much improved. I am sure Grace does too.'

‘And what would Grace know about Gervase?' Aunt Caroline snapped, her eyes, bright with the dawning of a new suspicion, flashing from one politely smiling face to another. ‘You surely haven't been
seeing
him, have you, Grace?'

And although she was both deeply mortified and deeply shocked—for how could I be so shameless and what effect might it have on Gideon's inheritance?—at least it distracted her sufficiently from Liam to enable us all to drink our tea, while I took my first uninterrupted stare at Miss Madeley-Brown.

She was, indeed, the kind of girl who, in her first appearance in London's drawing-rooms is acclaimed a ‘beauty', a tall, in fact a very tall girl with fine, broad shoulders, a bosom which even now, in the seventeenth or eighteenth year of her age, was magnificent, a lovely if rather vacant face and a haughty manner, coils of bright gold hair doing exactly as they had been bid beneath an expensive, much beribboned hat.

‘You will be pleased with Tarn Edge,' Aunt Caroline told her. ‘It is not a palace, of course, but for a town house, and for this part of the world, I do not think one could do better. My father built it for my mother and I must confess it has been sadly neglected since she left it. My brother's wife, Mrs. Nicholas Barforth, took no care of it, my niece Venetia even less, and now, although my son has made many improvements since Mr. Barforth retired to the sea, it is sadly in need of a woman's touch. I know it will please you.'

Hortense Madeley-Brown smiled, a dazzling exposure of strong, pearl-white teeth which did not waver for one moment when Blanche, who had raised pained eyebrows over Aunt Caroline's deliberate failure to mention my own meticulous housekeeping, now lazily enquired: ‘I dare say it will. But tell me, Aunt Caroline—for I am often puzzled by it—to whom does Tarn Edge actually belong?'

She received no answer, Aunt Caroline detecting a bee somewhere in the branches above her head; Aunt Faith quickly handing round more chocolate cake, which Miss Madeley-Brown, with the keen appetite of youth and something not too much under six feet of thoroughbred blood and bone, began placidly to consume.

She would look superb, I thought, on horseback, her riding-habit cut so tight that her maid would be required to stitch her into it every morning. She would be a luxurious adornment to any man's table, that creamy bosom half-revealed in the candlelight. Those pale, slender limbs of hers—I could not dismiss the image, no matter how hard I tried—would look more than enticing on the satin sheets Gideon now used to cover his bed. She was the kind of girl I had expected him to choose when Venetia died, the kind his mother had always wanted for him, rich, conventional, not too bright, who would obey him and please him, produce for him a pair of healthy, uncomplicated sons; a girl who would bring out the worst side of him and stifle the rest. Vapid creature, I thought, sitting there sipping her tea with nothing in her head but how pretty she looked, a bosom like a Renaissance Venus and a brain no bigger than a pea—how could he demean himself by wanting a girl like that?

I must not think of it. I drank my tea too quickly and too hot, burning my tongue in my determination not to think of it. It made no sense. I had given him up and in order to do so effectively had hurt him and made him despise me. Now, because of the increasing bitterness between him and Liam Adair, he must despise me even more. I had known quite well I must face him sooner or later. The time had come. And if it was to be made more painful by the presence of his mother and his recently acquired fiancée, then I would have to grit my teeth a little harder and bear it. What else could I do? Certainly it was not the moment to begin examining my own feelings towards him, and as Blanche—more perceptive than she used to be—drawled: ‘Here comes Gideon now', I arranged myself carefully and decided to model my own behaviour on his, whatever it turned out to be.

If he had really wanted me as much as he had said he did just six months ago—
if
—and if I had hurt him as much as I had intended, then the situation might have been difficult for him too, although nothing in his manner, trained first by Lady Chard and then by the rigours of a particularly harsh public school, betrayed it.

‘Aunt Faith,' he said easily, kissing her cheek with the degree of affection exactly appropriate to a nephew. ‘Have I kept you waiting? I do apologize.'

‘No. You are just in time,' Aunt Caroline answered instead, squeezing the hand he held out to her across the table in vigorous welcome. Blanche received no more than a nod from him, a smile and an almost imperceptible wink, a familiar, friendly greeting quite suitable for the woman who, as he must know quite well, was making both his brothers happy. And then: ‘Hortense. How are you?' he said very quietly, the whisper of the accomplished, successful lover who can create a moment of intimacy while still permitting others to hear. And taking her hand he kissed it lightly but so near the wrist—bringing his head too close, in fact, to that splendid bosom—for casual gallantry.

‘I am very well,' she told him, which so far was the longest sentence I had heard her speak.

And it was not until Aunt Faith, fearing he did not mean to speak to me at all and hoping to cover the gap, had placed a teacup in his hand; and even then not until he had slowly helped himself to milk and sugar, stirred his tea, replaced the spoon in his saucer, that he glanced in my direction, nodded curtly, and said, ‘Grace.'

‘Good-afternoon, Gideon.'

‘Do you know,' Aunt Faith said brightly, ‘I believe it is the warmest afternoon we have had this summer.'

‘Oh, I don't think so, mother,' murmured Blanche. ‘Last Sunday was scorching and the one before it. What do you think, Hortense?'

‘Oh, absolutely,' she said, ‘scorching—quite.'

And thus we settled it.

He took his golden young Amazon strolling in the rose-garden soon afterwards—the same roses, I supposed, which Venetia used to admire with Charles Heron—and no sooner were they out of sight than Aunt Caroline leaned towards me and said crisply, ‘Well then, Grace, I was not prepared to speak of this matter in Hortense's hearing, since it could concern her very closely, but I suppose you are in a better position than most to have some inkling of my brother's intentions. Does he intend to remain in Scarborough, which is quite bad enough, or is he so lost to reason as to contemplate setting that woman up at Tarn Edge?'

And turning to Aunt Faith she made a wide gesture, half anger, half distress. ‘You understand me, Faith, I am sure of it. Here is my poor Gideon, after all he has done—the work, the responsibility—and all he has suffered—yes, here he is without even a home to call his own. Tarn Edge, as you well know, belongs to Nicholas and I cannot tell you how much I regret making over my share in it to him when my father's property was divided. Yes, I know, I was paid handsomely, or so I thought at the time, but those few paltry thousands—I forget how many—would be no compensation at all for seeing that woman in the house my son has
earned
. Yes, Faith, earned—not only by his labour, and he has laboured very hard, but by the insult he has endured there. The Madeley-Browns are great people, Faith—this is the best marriage I could have made for him—and he must have somewhere decent, somewhere fitting, to take his bride. And you, Grace, I cannot tell you how deeply it shocks me to learn you have been in contact with Gervase. He has been over to Scarborough too, I hear, making up to that creature, so one must assume his travels have taught him on which side his bread is buttered. He has just bought three hundred acres of Winterton land adjoining his own, my son Noel tells me, and since I have not heard that he has sold any Barforth shares to pay for it—and my son Gideon would be sure to know—one may safely assume that the money was a gift from my besotted brother Nicholas. Certainly the world
is
changing.'

For Aunt Caroline it was and for that reason I found it easier to be patient, accepting her scolding as I would not have done in the days of her social glories. But her husband, the Duke, had declined rapidly this last year or two, and when he passed away his land, his title, his property, would pass with him, placing Aunt Caroline in the same dilemma from which on her first husband's death she had extricated herself. A new duke would take possession of South Erin the very day the old one was carried out of it, bringing a new duchess to preside at his table, giving Aunt Caroline nothing to do but hand over her keys and the family jewels and take her leave.

She would have been surprised to know how well I understood her bitterness. She was a strong-willed, intelligent, forceful woman who had nevertheless accepted one of the roles traditionally assigned to her sex and had played it brilliantly and to the full. She had devoted herself entirely to the ambitions, interests, property of others, living her life not through her own achievements but at second-hand through theirs, and was now beginning to find that one by one those who had depended on her to create an atmosphere in which they
could
achieve were in their different fashions leaving her.

She had raised Listonby from the dust to create a splendid home for her husband and a fitting inheritance for her eldest son, had surrounded herself for years with influential, possibly quite boring men, who might one day make a Cabinet Minister, a Prime Minister, of Dominic, only to find that he preferred tiger shoots and polo games and—and she surely knew this—brown-skinned women. And then there was Noel, who should have been a general by now—
she
would have been a general by now in his place—content to roam about the farms with none of the dash and swagger she had bred into him, refusing, for all her coaxing, to restore the Listonby Hunt Ball because it would be ‘too much'for Blanche. Only Gideon remained and I knew how fiercely she would defend him against all comers, against Camille who, apart from the luxuries which would be lavished upon her, might further complicate the Barforth inheritance by producing a bastard but much-loved son; against the existing son, Gervase, who might worm his way back into his father's favour; against that son's former wife who, if she became his wife again, might claim Tarn Edge and more besides.