Diana the Huntress (4 page)

‘Sad. But should you change your mind, my offer still stands. And now to bed. Can you find your way?’

‘Oh, yes,’ gabbled Diana, springing to her feet and oversetting a chair. Miserably, she quickly bent and picked it up. ‘I thank you for your hospitality, my lord, and bid you good night.’

‘Good night, Mr Armitage,’ said Lord Dantrey softly. ‘Sleep well.’

Those green and gold eyes of his held a mocking look.

Diana ran up the stairs to her room, locking the door behind her and letting out a deep breath only when she was sure she was safe.

Safe? What an odd thought. For her host had been all that was proper.

Diana went to the window and leaned out. The storm had died away and the night was cold and still. She pulled a chair up to the window after changing back into her riding clothes and settled down until she judged the time right to make her escape. She would leave a letter for Lord Dantrey, of course, and then hope and pray she would never see him again.

But as she sat waiting, his offer to take her to London returned to plague her. If only, before the rigours of feminine boredom closed down on her for life, she could be free just once.

She had not been missed. Frederica had gone to sleep over a book, Mrs Armitage had dosed herself with laudanum, and the vicar had spent a tiring and humiliating evening with Squire Radford.

The vicar could never stand up to the normally gentle squire and sometimes thought bitterly that Jimmy Radford had been sent to earth for the sole purpose of giving uncomfortable jabs to Charles Armitage’s conscience.

But the matter, put by the squire, had alarmed the vicar. He, the vicar, had put his daughter’s future in jeopardy. It would get about that she had been hunting, dressed as a man, and riding astride. Her morals, her manners, and the intactness of her virginity would be in question. Her value on the marriage market would slump.

No man would wish to be allied to a girl who had shown herself capable of the grossest, the most
indecent
behaviour. Diana must be
broken
, like a wild colt,
the squire had insisted. The bit must be put in her mouth and the saddle on her back before some man took up the reins. Diana, in short, must be
feminized
. There was time and enough for little Frederica. Schooling and the company of her peers was what she needed at present. It would be arranged that she would be sent to a boarding school for young ladies. The squire privately thought Mrs Armitage a useless sort of mother. As for Diana? She must be sent to Lady Godolphin in Hanover Square as soon as possible to begin her training for her debut at the next Season. Lady Godolphin had been instrumental in bringing out the elder girls. Let her do what she could with Diana.

As a weak protest the vicar pointed out that a certain Lord Dantrey had taken the Osbadiston place and was reported to be rich. That hope was quickly dashed. Mark Dantrey, the squire had said severely, was in his mid-thirties, and although he had been travelling abroad for some years, he had had the reputation of being a terrible rake when he was younger. Not at all the sort of son-in-law for the Armitage stable.

Weary with worry, bad conscience and the aches and pains of a long day’s hunting, the vicar retired to bed, vowing to face Diana in the morning.

Diana had arrived home in the small hours, having climbed back up the ivy to her room, after stabling her still-weary horse. She took off her hunting clothes and locked them carefully away in a trunk so that the maid, Sarah, would not find them. Something would have to be done about her hair before she faced her father in
the morning. He would be in a towering rage in any case and Diana did not want to make his temper any the worse.

She had managed to make her escape from Lord Dantrey’s mansion without even alerting one of the servants. She had left a letter of thanks, apologizing for her early departure. Before she fell asleep, she heard Lord Dantrey’s voice in her ears offering to take her to London.

Sarah, the maid, who had been rattling at Diana’s locked bedroom door for most of the morning, succeeded at last in awakening her. She exclaimed in amazement over Diana’s cropped hair, wondering aloud why miss should take it upon her head to change her hairstyle in the middle of the night. Sarah finally decided that with a little extra curling she could contrive a style she had recently seen in one of Mrs Armitage’s magazines – ‘irregular curls, confined in the Eastern style and blended with flowers’. Sarah, for all her brash country air, was a good lady’s maid with a sophisticated touch that Betty had lacked.

‘Flowers are a bit odd for morning, Miss Diana,’ she said, neatly placing small pink silk rosebuds among Diana’s black curls, ‘but master’ll be pleased to see you looking so pretty.’

Diana consented to wear a Polonese robe with a petticoat of fine cambric and jaconet muslin.

When she went downstairs the vicar was waiting for her, striding up and down, slapping his short riding whip against his boot.

He swung around furiously as Diana entered the
room but his angry stare softened somewhat as he beheld the unusually elegant Diana Armitage.

‘Sit down,’ he barked, ‘and listen to me. Squire Radford recognized you and so there’s no more hunting for you, miss. Before any more damage is done, I’m sending you to Lady Godolphin to get some training in the genteel arts. Your manners is awful to behold,’ said the vicar, pausing to spit in the fire. ‘Thought there might be hopes in the direction of Lord Dantrey but it seems he’s some old rake and Ann Carter is welcome to him.’

Although Diana had expected hunting to be banned, she had not expected to feel such pain and such loss. ‘There are things a gently-bred miss does not do,’ went on her father inexorably, ‘and hunting’s one of them. I’ve allowed you too much licence and it’s time to mend your ways.’

‘I don’t want to get married,’ said Diana. ‘Ever.’

‘Stuff. A strong man is just what you need and Lady Godolphin will see to it that you get one.’

‘If she is not too involved in her own amours,’ said Diana caustically.

‘Enough o’ that, miss. We all know she ain’t exactly a saint but Minerva tells me she’s settled down amazing.’

‘Can’t I go to Minerva?’ begged Diana, her eyes filling with tears. Before her marriage, Minerva, the eldest, had acted as ‘mother’ to the smaller girls, and although they had all chafed somewhat under her strict rule, that rule had brought them love and warmth and security.

‘Minerva’s baby is ailing, not Julian, Charles.
Annabelle
ain’t got children but she’s so taken up with that husband o’ hers, she won’t have time to give you her undivided attention and Daphne and Deirdre are in the country. You’ll be best off with Lady Godolphin.

‘Now I’ve got this here letter to say you will be arriving on Wednesday of next week. We won’t trouble to wait for a reply,’ added the vicar with a crafty look. ‘Just you give this to the post boy when he comes.’

The vicar rode over to the hall that afternoon to pay a visit on his brother, Sir Edwin Armitage. If there was any bad gossip going about the neighbourhood about Diana then Sir Edwin would be sure to know. Sir Edwin had never been able to understand why the poor vicarage girls had married so well while his own daughters, Emily and Josephine, had fared so badly.

Josephine was now married to a middle-aged squire over in Hopeminster, and Emily had grown plain and sour and like to be an ape leader. The only time she showed signs of animation was when a letter arrived from America from Mr Wentwater, the former slave trader who had plagued the vicar’s family. No one had heard of his aunt, Lady Wentwater, for some time, and her ivy-covered mansion still stood empty.

As usual, Sir Edwin, thin, pompous and fussily dressed, quite obviously did not relish a visit from his brother. He loathed the vicar’s hunt, which he blamed for the ruin of his crops and the scarcity of his pheasants.

But although Sir Edwin made a few snide remarks
about Frederica’s bookishness and Diana’s hoydenish ways, he showed no sign of having heard anything of Diana’s hunting exploits. The vicar then rode over to the squire’s to tell Jimmy Radford of Diana’s
forthcoming
visit to London, waxing quite eloquent and sanctimonious over the whole business as if he had thought of it himself.

Diana spent most of the day in a daze of misery. She dared not go near the kennels or stables for fear of breaking down. It was only when she was sitting in her room in the early evening that she suddenly realized the sound of sobbing was coming from
outside
of her and not inside. Frederica! Diana went quickly along to her sister’s room.

Frederica was lying face down on the bed, crying her eyes out. Diana gathered the younger girl’s slender body into her arms and rocked her against her breast.

‘There, there, Freddie,’ said Diana. ‘Tell me about it. You are always such a dreamy little thing, I never thought you were so unhappy.’

It was some time before Frederica could compose herself enough to reply. She raised a blotched and tearstained face to Diana’s. ‘I am being sent away,’ she moaned. ‘I am to go to school to
board
. I-I d-don’t want to go away. I’m
frightened
.’ Frederica began to cry again.

‘Shhh!’ said Diana. ‘Remember how frightened the boys were when they finally set out for Eton? And Minerva told me
she
was frightened when she had to leave for London.’

‘Minerva!’ exclaimed Frederica, sitting up and
beginning to dry her eyes. ‘I would not have thought Merva afraid of
anything
.’

‘We are all afraid of something, sometime,’ sighed Diana. ‘I am to go away, too, Freddie. Did you know I had been hunting with papa?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Frederica. ‘I thought it odd, but I did not tell anyone, not even Mama.’

‘I went out with the hunt yesterday,’ said Diana, ‘and Squire Radford recognized me and read Papa a sermon. So I am to go to Lady Godolphin to be taught the arts of a lady. Pah!’

‘Lady Godolphin!’ Frederica gave a watery smile. ‘I have never noticed Lady Godolphin quite behaving like a lady. I love her dearly, but she is so very shocking and gets all her words mixed up and she wears such a lot of paint.’

‘Papa feels she is a lucky chaperone because of the good marriages of Minerva, Annabelle, Daphne and Deirdre – although it is my opinion Lady Godolphin had not much to do with any of their marriages. The fact is that all the four are so very beautiful they could have married
anyone
, with or without Lady Godolphin’s help.’

Frederica took Diana’s hand in her own and gave it a squeeze. ‘I think you are more beautiful than any of us when you are not trying to be a man, Diana. I like your new coiffure. Vastly fetching. Don’t you want to fall in love?’

‘Not I,’ said Diana. ‘All I want is freedom.’ Her large eyes glittered with tears of frustration as she thought of all the beautiful hunting days ahead, days in which she
would be trapped and confined in some stuffy saloon. ‘And yet there might be some man for me, Freddie. There was this gypsy woman on the Hopeminster Road who said a tall and dark man was going to enter my life.’

‘Pooh, they always say that,’ said Frederica.

‘How would
you
know?’ scoffed Diana. ‘You haven’t even met a gypsy.’

‘But in the books I read, gypsies are always saying things like that. Of course, it comes true in books …’

‘There you are, then!’

‘Never mind the gypsies. Do you think the other girls at the school will be cruel to me?’

‘Nobody could be cruel to you, Freddie. You’ll have friends to talk to and lots of books to read. It is very lonely here. I wish I were a man. I wish I could run away. Look here, I’ll tell you a secret, Freddie, only you’re not to breathe a word to anyone, not even if they threaten you with terrible things.’

Frederica sat up in bed and hugged her knees with excitement.

‘Do tell, Diana. I won’t breathe a word to a soul.’

‘Well, it was yesterday. Last night, as a matter of fact. I had been out hunting, but Squire Radford was there. Papa failed to catch that old dog fox that’s been plaguing him and he was mad with rage. You know what he can be like, Freddie! So I simply rode away. But the storm came down and it was so dreadful and so black that I did not know where I was. And then, all at once, I saw a light through the blackness and headed towards it …’

Frederica listened enthralled to the tale of Diana and Lord Dantrey. When Diana had finished, Frederica said, ‘I heard Papa tell Mama that cards are not to be sent to this Lord Dantrey on account of his being so wicked. Mama said …’

‘You mean Mama is alive to the world again?’

‘Yes, she was actually in the parlour for quite two hours. You know how she
can
be sometimes.’

Both sisters smiled at each other in sympathetic understanding. They had become so used to their mother’s increasingly long bouts of self-inflicted illness from trying out this or that new patent medicine that they still found it rather a shock when she appeared back downstairs, for however brief a period, with all her wits about her.

‘Anyway,’ went on Frederica, ‘Papa was telling her about meeting a Mrs Carter and her daughter, Ann, at the Chomleys. He said this Ann was very beautiful and that Mrs Carter was trying to catch Lord Dantrey for her. Mama shook her head and said she had heard of this Lord Dantrey some time ago. He ran away with a lady and
ruined
her.’

‘Perhaps he was very young,’ said Diana, wondering at the same time why she should wish to leap to Lord Dantrey’s defence.

‘I have heard that gentlemen often do odd things when they are young. He was most correct in
my
presence though a trifle broad in his speech, which was understandable considering he thought me to be a man. Oh, I did not tell you! He asked me about my ambitions and I told him I had always wanted to have
the freedom to wander about London without being confined to the social life of the West End. He said he would take me to London should I wish to go.’

‘That was very wrong of him and very shocking.’