Courting Lord Dorney (2 page)

She found Bella directing her harassed servants to pile the trunks near the door, explaining that she would be staying just one night and only needed her small dressing case.

‘Bella! What in the world brings you here? I thought you were to be in Harrogate for another month? And who is this?’

Ignoring the first question Bella rapidly explained Jed’s plight, and he was despatched to the kitchen for food and a bath. Meg, disassociating herself from such goings on, retired to unpack what her mistress would require for the night. Bella went into the small neat drawing room laughingly trying to stem Jane’s avalanche of comments and questions.

‘Have mercy, Jane! I’m cold and hungry. When do you dine?’

‘In half an hour, but you know we can’t talk freely then, Bella, for Bates insists on waiting on me, doing everything ceremoniously as though Philip were here. Though he didn’t bother to discover the name of the gentleman who brought that book. Just said he looked a well set up cove who’d strip to advantage and was riding a bang-on horse!’

Bella grinned. She knew exactly what Jane meant. Bates was an old friend, a seaman Philip had taken pity on when he’d lost a leg as a result of an encounter with a French cannonball. Now he stumped round on his wooden peg, ordering the other servants about, and behaving as he thought a butler in a ducal residence would behave. But no ducal servant would treat his mistress as though she were a helpless child, or join in his employers’ dinnertime conversation as with equals. Bella had even known him, when moved to vehement expostulation about conditions for the ordinary seaman aboard most ships, to pull out a chair and sit down with his employers.

‘I wish I’d met your visitor,’ she said. ‘He sounds a pleasant change after the fops I’ve been seeing in Harrogate.’

Jane sniffed. ‘Even the note Lady Fulwood sent with the book didn’t say who she was making use of this time! For all she cared he might have had to ride dozens of miles out of his way. But forget him.  Tell me why you’ve come home now, or I shall die from curiosity!’

* * * *

Before they could sit down at the table, though, a harassed maid appeared to ask what Lady Grant wished them to do with Jed.

‘Cook says she won’t have the little varmint - beg your pardon, ma’am, but that’s what she said - in her kitchen no more.’

‘What has he done?’ Jane asked. ‘Bella, I won’t have him upsetting Cook.’

‘We filled the bath in the scullery, ma’am, but he wouldn’t get in, and while Ann and I were trying to undress him, he kicked the bath over. Then he ran out into the yard and hid in the hay loft. He won’t come down. He’s got hold of a hay fork and won’t let Walter get near him.’

Bella stood up. ‘I’ll make him come down. Get another bath ready, please, but in the yard this time.’

She marched across the stable yard and halted under the opening to the hay loft. She could see Jed peering down at them, and the prongs of the hay fork were visible at the edge of the opening. Walter, the groom, looked abashed as he stood beside the ladder.

‘He’ll come down when he’s hungry,’ he said, but without much conviction in his voice.

‘He’ll come down now. Jed, if you don’t come down at once I’ll take you back to the mill. I won’t go to Preston and find your sisters, and somewhere for you to live together again.’

Jed protested that he didn’t want no bath, but in the face of Bella’s repeated threats he gave in. Bella’s last view of him was of Walter holding him firmly as he squirmed, while the maids stripped his skinny body and dumped him unceremoniously in the hip bath.

* * * *

‘Bella, it’s a mad idea!’ Jane was sitting behind the tea tray in her elegant drawing room, looking at Bella and frowning.

‘Why? It’s the only way I can see of finding someone to marry who doesn’t want me for my fortune. Aunt Maria and Cousin Gareth made such a fuss when Uncle Peter left me everything, the whole country must know how much it was.’

‘You could always give it to him! You’re not poor. You have quite a respectable income from what your mother left you.’

‘Why should I? I’m a Trahearne, he’s not. And Uncle Thomas Carey left them both well provided for. Besides, if I did give him any he’d wager it all in a twelvemonth. I have a better use for it.’

‘But if you married your husband would have control over it.’

Bella sighed. ‘I know, but if anyone wants to marry me for myself, I’ll insist he allows me to use the money as I wish. I want it partly to repair Trahearne House, there’s so much needs doing and Papa never even notices if the chimneys smoke or the roof leaks. But Papa won’t hear of using it for that sort of thing. Yet if I’m married and have a son who can inherit it after me he’d agree, I know he would. Besides, if I don’t marry and have a child the wretched Gareth or his equally wretched children would claim it. He said he’d go to law if I tried to give it to the houses for orphans I’m setting up. He’d get a crooked lawyer and probably convince a court I was mad! Then he’d try to get control of my money.’

‘Surely not! He can’t do that. Your father would stop him.’

‘But Papa won’t live for ever. And Gareth’s very convincing when he wants something badly enough. How do you think he persuaded Helen to marry him? She had far better offers. There’s no one else I can leave it to but you, and you say you won’t take it, and you’re older than I am anyway. I have to have a child, and to do that I need a husband!’

Jane was persevering. ‘Gareth is older than you are.’

‘Only by a couple of years. But he could start to try and prove I’m mad as soon as Papa died.’

‘He doesn’t have any children. He only married Helen six months ago.’

‘But she’s increasing.’

‘And you want to use the rest of money to house your orphans?’

‘Yes. Most of it, I’m not saintly enough to give it all away! I found one house in Preston before I went to Harrogate, and left Papa’s attorney to deal with the purchase, and hire a decent couple to run it.’

‘Does the attorney approve?’

‘It wouldn’t matter to me if he didn’t, he’d do what he was told if he were being paid for it! But as it happens he’s all in favour, and so are his brother, who’s a Wesleyan preacher, and their wives. They will find more children, supervise the house, start to raise money to finance it, and perhaps find other people to help.’

‘Can you trust them?’

‘Yes, they’re all good people. They’re not of the Evangelical persuasion. They’ll give the children a good Christian upbringing, but they won’t be forever preaching duty and virtue at them, and not permitting innocent pleasures. I’ll take Jed there and get his sisters out of the workhouse. It’s iniquitous to split families like that, especially when their mother has just been killed in a horrible accident! They’ll all go to school and get a better start in life.’

‘What about their father?’

‘He was a soldier, he died at Waterloo. They all had to work in that wretched mill just to earn enough to eat. ‘

‘You can’t rescue all the mill children,’ Jane said.

‘But we can persuade other people to help, to give money, set up decent small houses, so much better than those horrid, monstrous workhouses where families are split. We’ll employ sensible couples, who are kind yet firm, to look after them and see that they are trained for decent trades.’

‘Was it really so dreadful in Harrogate?’ Jane changed the subject.

‘I hated the whole business. The men were all odious. I could see their busy little despicable minds calculating exactly how much a year I’m worth. They wouldn’t have cared if I’d been a hideous old hag with unspeakable diseases if only they could have laid their hands on my beastly money.’

‘Were they all fortune hunters?’

‘Yes, hateful ones. And the distressing thought is that now I could never be sure anyone wanted me and not my money. So I determined on this plan and I need you to help me.’

‘I thought you might,’ Jane said, with a laugh that was partly a sigh. She’d been involved in the younger girl’s exploits many times before, and although she normally enjoyed them in retrospect, at the time she was too apprehensive to appreciate them. ‘What are you going to do?’

Bella grinned at her, knowing quite well what she was thinking. ‘I mean to find a husband who doesn’t know about my wretched fortune.’

‘But how can you do that?’ Jane asked.

‘I know I’m not beautiful, tall and slim and blonde like you are, but I’m not a complete antidote, even if I am three and twenty!’ she declared indignantly. ‘Someone might wish to marry me. I did have two offers when Aunt Maria brought me out with cousin Caroline.’

‘Yes and you told me one was a widower of fifty, a parson who had six children under ten and wanted someone to undertake parish duties.’

‘No wonder his poor wife expired! And the other was boy only a year older than I was. How could I even contemplate marrying a boy of eighteen, even if he hadn’t had dreadful spots he tried to hide with some sort of flour paste? Besides, you know how pretty Caroline is! She had a dozen offers, good ones.’

‘And married a rake who gambled away his fortune and her portion too. No wonder her mother is eager to get your uncle’s money. She must have been devastated when Gareth married so imprudently last year, and Helen had only a couple of thousand.’

‘She was, and I’m sure she’s hoping Helen dies when the baby is born! Then dear Gareth could offer for me. But let’s forget them. I’m determined on my plan, Jane. And I suppose I can lose weight if I eat less,’ she added more doubtfully.

‘I didn’t mean you were ugly!’ Jane protested, laughing. ‘You keep saying you’re not pretty, but Philip says you’re very attractive when you’re animated.’

‘Does he? Truly?’ Bella asked wistfully. Since her only season in London she had known few people, apart from neighbours and her father’s elderly friends, until her visit to Harrogate. No one had ever complimented her on her looks before she had unexpectedly inherited her uncle’s fortune a year before. She had soon grown suspicious of compliments after the first few days in Harrogate when she’d found herself surrounded by attentive men, old as well as young.

‘What I meant,’ Jane went on, ‘was that everyone here knows about it, and now everyone in Harrogate too. How can you meet a suitable man who doesn’t?’

‘Yes, that’s the difficulty, but if I change my name it ought to be possible to find someone, especially if I let it be known that I have a modest dowry. I have to do it soon or I’ll never know whether a man can love me for myself. And soon I’ll be too old for even a desperate parson or widower to consider!’

‘Will you go to London?’

‘I’d love to,’ Bella sighed longingly. ‘But how can I? Some of the people I met in Harrogate will be there for the Season, as well as some of our neighbours here in Lancashire, and they’d recognize me, even if the ones I met six years ago don’t remember me. No, I mean to go to Bath.’

‘Bella, do think! If you do as you say it will cause all sorts of complications. And there could be someone from Harrogate who’d know you.’

‘No one I know in Lancashire goes there, it’s not so fashionable now, and from what those horrid men in Harrogate said they regard it as dreadfully slow. I didn’t meet many of the older people who went to take the waters, so if any of them move to Bath they probably won’t recognize me. But I need you to chaperone me.’

‘They can’t all have been old.’

‘Well, some of them were young, but they were mainly the sons of wealthy mill or mine owners who’d never been out of Yorkshire in their lives except to go to London.’

‘And none you felt even the slightest tendre for?’

‘Not a whit! But they all knew I was rich and it was almost a race to see who could make me an offer first.’ She chuckled. ‘Lady Salway was afraid her job would be over almost before it began. It was, but not the way she expected. Really, Jane, I didn’t think even Papa would have foisted such a dreadful woman onto me.’

‘She answered an advertisement, didn’t she?’

‘With all sorts of glowing recommendations. I imagine they said those things to get rid of her. If they were genuine and not forged.’

‘So what happened?’

‘It was when she left me alone with her nephew. He’s a beastly creature, and he tried to kiss me. Ugh! His lips were wet and flabby, and he kept trying to paw me. I kneed him where it hurt, and then told her she wasn’t fit to be a duenna, and she could pack her bags and go that very night. I don’t know if she did. I didn’t see her again before Meg and I set out early this morning.’

‘Then it’s unlikely she’ll complain to your father?’

‘She knows I’d tell him what happened. But Jane, I can’t endure to be foisted off with another woman like that. Please won’t you help me? Philip is away for another two months and you must be lonely here on your own, so why not?’

‘It’s being deceitful,’ Jane said slowly. ‘Your father would be horrified.’

‘He won’t even know. Jane, it could be fun!’

Jane shuddered. ‘For you, no doubt! You have no shame!’

‘If you won’t do it I shall have to travel on my own and hire someone from an agency when I get there.’

* * * *

Sir Daniel Scott clapped Lord Dorney on the shoulder.

‘Well met, Richard. It’s months since we last had a good talk. But what brought you up to Lancashire? I thought you only visited Fellside in the autumn, for the shooting?’

Lord Dorney frowned. ‘I do, and so I decided it had to be sold. I’ve found a  buyer but he has not yet offered a good enough price. He’s a wealthy cotton merchant who wants a country seat, and if he can offer what I think it’s worth it would allow me to carry on with the renovations at Dorney Court.’

‘I thought Robert had made all good, after your father died?’

‘He repaired the roof and the windows, but neglected to do anything for the farms. The rent roll is pathetically small. And Selina ruined the inside. I can’t live in her monstrous extravaganza.’

‘So you are selling the properties your mother left you to finance it?’

‘I have little choice. They are my only source of capital. I still have the hunting box, and I’ve rented out the town house for the season. I don’t want to have to sell them if it’s at all possible to keep them.’