Elisabeth Kidd (3 page)

She favoured him with a summary of the morning’s trials, and ended
by saying, “I am charged with asking you if one of the boys will catch some fish for our dinner.”

“Jamie will do it. He’s been longing for an outing, and in this mild
weather, it won’t hurt him.”

“Is he quite recovered from his mumps?”

“Oh, yes. Having spread them generously amongst the other five
children, he found he had no further use for them himself. Where are
you escaping to?”

“Melton Mowbray. But I am not escaping—I have some errands to
perform there.”

“How is it you go alone?”

“I am to meet Imogen Curtiz and to bring her back to dinner.” As Ned
was still eyeing her disapprovingly, she felt obliged to point out that there
would not have been room for a third party in the gig.

“You have a perfectly serviceable—if admittedly outmoded—barouche.”

“But had all the proprieties been observed, you would not be enjoying
this splendid opportunity to give me a scold!”

He laughed and disclaimed any intention to do such a thing, as well as of having any errands of his own which she might execute for him in the
village, and they parted both in better spirits.

Antonia reflected as she drove away that Ned was the principal reason for the ease with which Wyckham was now being run, and therefore also
for her own contentment there. She had the duties to her tenants which
Anthony, especially during the hunting season, had often neglected— she must visit the Hatchers, who had a new baby, and take some broth to
old Silas, now she thought of it—but these tasks were not oppressive.
Even if, as Charles had reminded her, she had not taken so much as a
holiday jaunt to Nottingham for over a year, nor been to London since
her coming-out, she had not missed these dissipations, nor even thought
much about them until she had recently begun to consider how to
provide Isabel with a few similar delights. But then Isabel—practical,
unromantic little Isabel —had announced her intention to throw herself
away on a
mariage de convenance
, and her shocked aunt could not help
wondering where she had gone wrong.

She should have married; that was it. She should have behaved like a proper lady, thrown away her foolish dreams, and made a respectable
marriage herself, so that she would now be in a position to foster Isabel’s
dreams—for she must have them, as all seventeen-year-old girls did. Proper ladies of five-and-twenty, on the other hand, were expected to
have forgotten such youthful follies.

But of course, Antonia had never intended to marry anyone but
Charles Kenyon. Indeed, she had gone off to London for her first season
secretly betrothed to him—secretly because she had promised Anthony
not to make up her mind too quickly and felt the heavy guilt of having already done so, and because, more important, Charles had agreed with
Tony. But she knew that she could never give her heart to anyone but her
childhood hero.

When, at ten years of age, Antonia had been thrown from her pony,
Charles had picked her up and carried her all the way home. When she
was twelve, he had taught her to play backgammon and cribbage and loo
and all the other games she had imagined to be very grown-up and
fashionable. By fourteen, when Charles had just come of age and had
reached his full, impressive six feet of height, he had seemed to her, with
his blond hair and smiling blue eyes, the model for every Galahad she had
ever read about, and she had worshipped him. At sixteen, she herself
blossomed suddenly into a sunny beauty who, however attractive now to
other men, was still loyal to her dream, so that when she was eighteen
and Anthony packed her off to London to see if she could not do better for herself than the son of a middling-prosperous neighbouring squire, she went simply to get it over with. She became, quite unintentionally,
the belle of the season—beautiful, vivacious, and—best of all from the point of view of all the confirmed young bachelors—not in the least
concerned about making a suitable match.

However, it was scarcely a month before Charles came to London to
investigate the discrepancy between the number of Antonia’s admirers
and their lack of serious intentions, and Antonia, on an impulse prompted
as much by the pleasure of seeing a familiar face as by the passion she had
thus far contrived to maintain within decorous bounds, flung herself
joyfully into his arms. Unfortunately, she chose to do this in the middle
of Vauxhall Gardens, in sight of a number of fascinated spectators who
had already been enjoying the sight of Miss Fairfax and three of her
admirers dangling their bare feet in a fountain along the Italian Walk, and
who lost no time in spreading the tale, to Charles’s acute embarrassment.

Since there was no shrugging off the incident, Antonia embroidered
upon it in an attempt to persuade Charles into announcing their engage
ment or, better still, eloping to the border immediately. But Charles kept
his head, remembered that he was a gentleman even if his impetuous
beloved had proved herself no lady, and escorted Antonia back to Wyckham,
where she was to wait for the nine days’ wonder she had inadvertently
stirred up to die down again. Anthony rang a half-hearted peal over her. Maria could not look at her sister-in-law for weeks afterward without
hartshorn-and-water at hand to lessen her palpitations. Charles returned
to London on the business Antonia’s escapade had caused him to neglect.
The engagement was not broken, but somehow no more was said about
it.

The scandal did indeed die down quickly, but Antonia remained
quietly at home for a year, while Isabel, her intelligence outstripping even
her tutor Imogen Curtiz’s broad knowledge, began her systematic absorp
tion of the entire Wyckham library, and Carey, as impulsive in his way as
Antonia was in hers, got himself sent down from Cambridge and was
boarding a transport ship to Portugal with scarcely a break in stride.

Then the year stretched into two, and three, and four. Antonia had
other offers during this period, which she declined—after some practise-
deftly and with growing amusement. Mr Trent had gone down on his
plump knees to beg her to allow a ray of sunshine into his life; she had
laughed and suggested he would do better to take a turn in the garden.
Mr Romney, not knowing how to take no for an answer, proposed for the
second time in a month, vowing that he could never love another, upon
which Antonia forestalled a third declaration by confessing regretfully that she did not think she could say the same for herself.

She joked to Imogen Curtiz about her swains, knowing that they
offered for her for no more powerful reason than that she was pretty and
descended from an old, if unpredictable, family line. It did not pain her to turn them down
when they compared so unfavourably with her first love, who Antonia
was certain would send for her as soon as he had made the fortune he was well on his way to achieving in the carting business he had established in
London. She learned to be patient.

Then Anthony died, and she threw herself into the challenge of
running the estate, losing herself in the predictable daily round of
household affairs and the pleasure of watching Isabel grow up in her
charge. Maria was a less pleasurable charge, but Antonia soon discovered
that keeping her in tea and cinnamon toast and lending-library comforts
dimmed her sister-in-law’s resentment at Antonia’s authority to a degree
that made cohabitation between them tolerable if not precisely cosy.

After a time, she succeeded, too, if not in forgetting Charles Kenyon,
at least in pushing him to the back of her mind, where he was easier to
overlook behind her myriad daily concerns. His letters came regularly, if
infrequently, but Antonia learned to wait for a quiet moment to read
them instead of tearing them open the instant they arrived. Once, in her worshipful stage, she and Charles had been walking in a deserted lane,
and he had picked a wild rose for her. She had kept it pressed in a volume of poetry for years, until one day she had taken it out and was surprised to
find it no more than a bit of potpourri, no longer resembling a living thing. She threw it into the fire.

And now, Antonia could not help thinking, all this un-Fairfax-like patience would reap its reward. She had no doubt that, her advanced age
notwithstanding, she was a more eligible connexion for a man like
Charles Kenyon now than she had been in her giddy youth. She had
proved her ability to manage a large household, had established a reputation for generosity to her dependents and graciousness to her neighbours,
and had kept—she hoped—a pleasant disposition. She hoped she could
still look up to Charles, but she knew she need no longer feel unworthy of
his regard.

A vision of Charles’s pleased surprise when they met again came into
Antonia’s mind, and she smiled at it. But then the accompanying vision
of her own smugness at her inevitable conquest caused her to scold herself aloud, “Well, you needn’t puff yourself up so!”

Dolly looked back at her enquiringly, and Antonia could not help
laughing. “Oh, get along, you silly animal! You were the one in need of
fresh air and exercise.”

Dolly obligingly quickened her gait and carried Antonia into the
tree-lined lane that ran for some distance along the border between
Wyckham and Windeshiem, the neighbouring Kenyon estate and Charles’s
boyhood home. It was colder there, where the sunlight did not penetrate
the close-knit grey branches overhead. But coming out of the lane again,
Antonia could see in the distance to her left the massive stone walls of
Windeshiem Hall rising behind tall cedar trees.

It was a large building and normally appeared more forbidding than
welcoming, but today the sun was at such a height as to reach the narrow windows of the Long Gallery, which reflected back the light and gave the
old stone an unexpected brightness and charm. Antonia smiled, for that
was how she always saw Windeshiem, which was almost as dear to her as
her own home, even at that time when she had nearly lost hope of ever
becoming mistress of it. It was satisfying, too, to see it unchanged despite
the changing seasons, ever springlike even in the deepest winter cold.

Her brief pensive mood was banished, and she began to sing to herself.
Dolly trotted placidly on, over the road that she, too, knew well from old memories.

Beneath the worldly veneer of the patrons of Melton Mowbray’s
most fashionable Lounge and Lending Library beat an unextinguishable
country curiosity. This was the finest and most renowned hunting
country in England, and it was true that had the great Beau Brummell
himself appeared there (as he had once frequently done), he would have caused scarcely a ripple of comment amongst persons so accustomed to
the glories and fripperies of fashion. Yet it was also true that, like the
bored habitués of White’s Club and Almack’s Assembly Rooms, Melton’s
residents were, from whatever motive, ever alert to anything or anyone of
a truly original style.

Thus the man who now stood in the light of the bow window of the
Lending Library, cursorily examining a volume of poetry, was being
secretly stared at by a variety of persons all affecting a sublime indiffer
ence to his presence. Mr Wakefield, an impressionable young man
aspiring to the Corinthian set, looked him over and detected beneath the
multi-caped driving coat the unmistakeable cut of a coat (blue, very
fashionable) by Weston over a veritable jewel of a waistcoat (watered silk,
silver buttons) and a pair of modish buff-coloured pantaloons; the boots
were by Hoby, and a beaver hat by Baxter restrained black curls that looked to be unaccustomed to discipline of any kind, but which Mr
Wakefield took of be of a style with which he was as yet simply
unacquainted.

Miss Amelia Pritchard, peeping out from behind her mama’s ample form, had almost decided on a place for the gentleman in the novel she had obtained from these very shelves the week before (when she came
with her friend Miss Nutley and
not
her mama), for he was darkly
handsome and enigmatic enough to have come undiluted from the pen of
Mrs Radcliffe herself. Nevertheless, one could not deny—or could do so
only reluctantly—that there was a decided air of—well, of propriety
about him. And he was quite old, really—five-and-thirty if he was a day! It was such a pity.

The gentleman looked up at that moment, revealing under heavy black
brows a pair of startlingly grey eyes. Miss Pritchard blushed and hoped
she had not been observed staring so rudely at him. But Colonel Fairchild,
standing near her, started, squinted, and apostrophised himself for an old
fool. It was impossible, of course, for such a young man to have been
there, but something about the stranger… Bless him if the colonel was
not struck by the oddest notion that he was young again himself and watching campfires flicker in an Indian twilight. It was very strange, to
be sure!