A World Apart (3 page)

‘Good. And I should like you to consider yourself almost a member of the family.' The viscount leaned back in his chair and refilled his glass from the decanter. ‘A little more port, Martin.' He filled his companion's still almost-full glass to the brim. ‘I have a mind to tell you something of my family.'

‘Thank you, sir.' Martin raised his glass and sipped a token portion.

‘As you know, I have two young children, a boy and a girl,' the viscount began. ‘Their poor mother died in childbirth. What you may not know is that I have another daughter, Hepzibah, aged nineteen. She spends most of her time in London, living with the aunt who raised her. Hepzibah is the sole issue of my first wife.' He paused. As Martin watched his patron from the corner of his eye, it seemed that the man was taking time to shape his facial expression into a more solemn one.

‘God rest her soul,' the viscount continued a moment later. ‘She too died in childbirth.' John De Havilland looked at his glass, found it empty, reached for the decanter and refilled it. ‘Now Hepzibah is not handsome, I acknowledge,' the viscount continued. He drank slowly and stared into his glass before he spoke. ‘But she brings a goodly portion with her. Her poor mother's will saw to that. Hepzibah is her sole heir. My first wife was an extremely wealthy woman, Martin. It's most…unfortunate that she was taken from us so young.' He paused. His young guest waited, maintaining his sideways glance.

‘Hepzibah is but a child, Martin,' he said eventually. ‘Though a buxom one, to be sure. She will need much help in the nurture of her immortal soul. And I remind you that I count on you to provide that help, my boy. She plans to spend more of her time with her father now that she is, er, a young woman of means.' He took another drink, looked down at the carpet. ‘I think
twenty one is the perfect age for a maid to marry, Martin. Hepzibah will be old enough to have developed a modicum of common sense, but young enough to encourage her husband in his enjoyment of the rightful pleasures of the married state. Think on that, Martin. Another drop of port before you go?'

A month before Martin's last night in Charlotte's bed, Hepzibah had celebrated her twenty first birthday. After the celebrations, the viscount had pointedly addressed the young parson. ‘You will understand, sir, that a woman of one-and-twenty should marry soon. Otherwise she will likely be consigned to a future as an old maid.'

Charlotte had expected Martin to lie low during the days following their times together. Throughout the whole of their affair, he had shown extraordinary timidity. That this was offset by his intense ardour during their lovemaking was some compensation to Charlotte. She came to expect that their trysts would be infrequent because he was so fearful of discovery. However, now that she was a widow, she believed she might expect his visits more often. The joyous reality of the child in her womb should bond the two of them with an even deeper love than they had already shared. As the days passed without word from him, doubts began to prickle at the edge of her happiness.

She wiped those doubts from her mind. Had Martin not told her, as they lay fulfilled in each other's arms, that he had never in his life been ravaged by such desire? Had he not confessed the first time they made love that he had nursed a passion for her since the morning he first saw her walking through the village, basket on arm? She received his letter a long fortnight after their last evening together.

Charlotte received the letter on a dull, chill afternoon which threatened rain. That morning she had decided to give the cottage a good cleaning. Now she found she lacked the will. She picked up her needlework, intending to sew a dress for the child she carried. She pictured the little dress as a love token to her child, sure that it would be a girl.

Before she broke the letter's seal, she divined its message. As she read the first words, she felt struck like a beast led through a slaughterhouse killing gate. She sagged onto the bed they had made hot with their passion, and let a river of tears flow, hour upon hour, until she seemed fit to drain herself of life. As she lay wretched, looking up at the broken ceiling of her mean cottage, she knew she did not want to live. She gave thought to ways she might end her life — quickly, tidily. As she took this thought and teased it into small threads with the intention of examining each one to its end, she came to a conclusion. She look the letter and put it behind the loose stone above the lintel where she hid spare coins from Silas, and the silver cross her father had given her before he died.

When Charlotte's belly began to show, Mother Turlington, the widow who knew the business of everyone in the village, smiled and spoke to her one morning as she walked through the high street to deliver some dressmaking.

‘Oh Charlotte. T'is God's blessing indeed that Silas has left you with a new life to replace his own, so sadly broken off. I'm sure it will be a boy. Perhaps you will call him Silas?' Charlotte thanked her and made to go about her business. But something in the old woman's smile hinted at unspoken confidences. She would not be brushed aside until she had finished her homily.

‘My dear, I hope Vicar is giving your immortal soul good care. It's at times of sorrow a body can begin to doubt the will of Providence. I noticed that he was most kind to you after the funeral. Perhaps he…you and he…might — '

‘Thank you, Mother.' Charlotte felt as if she were suffocating. ‘Our vicar has many other people in his flock to care for. He was most generous with his help after Silas died. But now I must make a life for myself.' She hurried on her way. The sympathy of her neighbours was becoming almost as hard to bear as the loss of her lover.

A few weeks after her conversation with Mother Turlington, the village rejoiced in the news that the vicar was engaged to be married to Hepzibah, the viscount's eldest daughter, only child of his first marriage.

‘T'is good that Sir John will have his daughter back from London to comfort him as he grows older,' Mother Turlington said when she waylaid the depressed Charlotte as she walked home from the village. ‘And no doubt, there will be the blessing of grandchildren for him one day. But the poor girl is plain. Very plain.' She sighed and wiped the corners of her mouth with a lace handkerchief. ‘Though beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I always say. I'm sure the poor
girl has a loving heart. And she brings a fair portion with her. T'is said her dead mother came from a family of great means. That will be a blessing for Vicar.' She eyed Charlotte's belly. ‘And it looks as if it won't be long before you'll have the joy of your little Silas. You've looked quite peaky of late. He'll soon put an end to your loneliness, my dear.'

‘You've given birth to a beautiful girl child, Charlotte.' The midwife wiped bloodied hands on her apron and bent to the ear of her semiconscious patient. ‘She has golden curls.' Then the middle-aged woman slipped the newborn child into her mother's arms. Charlotte opened her eyes for long enough to look down on the little head. She took in the golden hair plastered over the roundness of its pink scalp, wet from its first washing, springing tiny tendrils of damp curls at the sides. She saw its tiny nose, its clenched fists, its eyelashes pale against the purple skin of closed eyelids. Charlotte's eyes closed against her will. She felt the midwife take the child from her arms.

‘You are the most special child,' Charlotte whispered. ‘You were made in sublime love. You will shake the world, my little one.' Then the lethargy she had fought for hours dragged her down into numb unconsciousness. She ached to hold her child again, but some barrier stood in her way. At times she knew that helping hands put the baby to her breast, then took it away after it had suckled with a will and lay dozing in her arms. She felt a tingling on her skin where the baby had lain against her.

‘The blood, Mary. It won't stop.' Charlotte heard voices seeming to come from a cloud floating far above her.

‘I know. T'is The Lord's will. We can but pray.'

Charlotte died from loss of blood in the small hours of the following morning. The young vicar presided over her funeral as she was buried in the village churchyard beside her husband. Mother Turlington noticed Martin Townsend wipe away a tear as the gravediggers shovelled earth onto the coffin. As he turned away from the grave, a biting wind rattled the bare twigs of the oak trees which bowed over the old churchyard.

‘Such a caring soul, our poor vicar,' Mother Turlington said to those standing near. ‘So young to be the bearer of other folk's burdens. It will be a blessing for him when, God willing, his new wife has a child. He'll find fatherhood such a joy.'

The midwife took it upon herself to name Charlotte's child Eliza, after a sister of the dead woman who had herself died of fever a few years before. The name was cheerfully embraced by Hannah, the youngest of Charlotte's sisters, who volunteered to raise her little orphan niece. Hannah had married Joseph Hodgkins, the viscount's head gamekeeper, some years before. Joseph, a man older than his bride by twenty years, occupied the solid, well maintained gamekeeper's cottage in the grounds of the Great House.

Joseph's fine cottage was a perquisite very visible to the young women of the village. Hannah had earned her place in it when, as a pert sixteen-year-old working in the kitchen of the Great House, she caught Joseph's eye. It was the custom, when the viscount called him to discuss such weighty affairs as badger baiting and the breeding of hounds, for Joseph to wait below stairs. There he would be fussed over by Hannah until the master pulled the bellrope to summon his gamekeeper to the library. While Joseph was being thus entertained, he found his taciturnity thawed by the effervescent, pretty young woman who brought him cups of the special coffee kept only for the master.

Within two years of their wedding, Hannah had borne two children, a boy and a girl. When the infants were taken from her by a typhus epidemic, she plunged into a fit of melancholy no one seemed able to cure. Her rheumaticky husband Joseph, who might have been expected to give his bereaved wife more children to settle her grief, could not. Cook, who had lasting affection for her able little kitchenmaid, persuaded Hannah to return to the kitchen, giving her the duties of assistant cook when the viscount held his hunting parties.

But the bereaved Hannah had lost her art. The cakes she baked were hard and lumpy when she neglected to cream the butter to the right consistency. They might burn to a cinder while she sat in a daydream beside the oven. Hannah's moping forced Cook to set her favourite to the job of pot scrubbing, the only activity she could be trusted to fulfil without disrupting the busy kitchen. After a few weeks, Hannah found even this task beyond her, and retired behind the walls of her cottage. It was remote enough from the village, and close enough to the intimidating bulk of the Great House, to discourage visits from her former friends.

Then, without notice, Eliza, an orphan not a day old, was thrust into her arms. The village folk murmured amongst themselves that the little orphan was a gift sent by God directly to Hannah — the only possible cure for her unremitting sickness of soul. They marvelled that she so soon roused herself from her melancholia and took to mothering. Mother she did, eager to pour her pent-up reservoir of maternal love onto the pretty child. Even when she was newborn, Eliza had a head of golden curls.

‘A beautiful child,' Mother Turlington said when she bent to look into the carriage that Hannah paraded through the village. ‘But don't expect her to take after her mother. I fancy her hair will darken soon. Why, my own hair was fair till I was three, and my sister's too. And sad to say, I fear the curls will disappear too. Then she'll look more like poor dead Silas, you'll see.'

As Eliza grew into a winsome three-year-old, Martin Townsend was often seen engaging her in playful moments after Sunday morning chapel. Then he asked her foster-mother if the pair of them might pay regular visits to his library.

‘It be Vicar's notion to teach you to read, Eliza,' Hannah told her. It seems as he saw you peering into a bible after chapel. He took me aside. Told me as he thought you were very clever. So we will visit him, sit in his library with him, and have him teach you. Every Thursday afternoon.'

That weekly event became a central part of Eliza's life. First, the vicar guided her burgeoning passion for learning. Village folk watched in some alarm as the scholarly young man, fresh from Oxford, spent hours with the village child who was rather too clever for her lowly station in life.