Marianna (12 page)

She gave a long sigh, dreading the prospect of these few days spent in the company of three people who so bitterly resented her. She could only hope that William’s absence would not be taken as an opportunity to show their hostility more openly. As she turned and reached for the bell rope, she made a fervent resolve that any unpleasantness would not be due to her; she would remain calm, be civil, and conduct herself with dignity whatever might arise.

Hilda answered her summons a few minutes later, bearing a tray of morning tea. Against the white porcelain teapot was propped a sealed envelope; a note from her husband, Marianna discovered.

My darling girl looked so angelic lying there with her silken locks all tumbled about the pillow, that I could not bring myself to waken her from her sweet dreamland. I shall be desolate, my treasure, until I have completed these tiresome business matters that call me away and can return in haste to my own little precious. A thousand kisses, your ever-loving B.

B for Billykins. It was the pet name he had several times hinted that she should call him when they were alone together, but Marianna had not yet brought herself to do so.

After drinking her tea, she slid out of bed and carefully locked away the note in the ivory and tortoise-shell casket containing her mother’s jewels, which her father had passed on to her now she was married. Marianna had no wish to leave such an epistle lying around where it might be read by prying eyes. Then she rang for Hilda again to help her dress.

On reflection she had decided to breakfast downstairs, as yesterday with William — a brave decision, when she might have kept to the sanctuary of her bedchamber a little longer.

In the breakfast parlour, a room only a little less grand than the dining room itself, Ralph was seated at the oval table moodily eating poached haddock and scanning a newspaper propped against a bowl of fruit. The black mastiff, Cato, was flopped on the carpet at his feet. Ralph made no attempt to rise when Marianna entered, and his eyes gleamed with mockery.

‘Good morning to you, dearest stepmama.’

‘Good morning, Ralph,’ she replied evenly, controlling her features. ‘I thought it was understood that you should call me Marianna.’

He adopted a crestfallen expression, ‘Have I been a naughty boy? Are you cross with me? Am I to be packed off to the nursery and put on bread and milk?’

She ignored this jibe and inquired if Miss Fielding and Eunice normally took breakfast in bed.

Ralph nodded. ‘And I would too, by Jove, as I always do when I’m
at Oxford — only the guv’nor has laid down the law, By his reckoning, breakfast in bed is unmanly for a fellow.’ He gestured to the sideboard. ‘This haddock isn’t bad. Or there’s devilled kidneys, or York ham ...’

He did have the courtesy to ring for fresh tea for her, and this was brought by a sour-faced, sleepy-eyed young maidservant whom Marianna had not seen before. Setting down the tray, she ran for cover when Ralph thwacked her on the rump with the folded newspaper, saying, ‘Trust you enjoyed your Sunday off with that randy swain of yours, Sally my girl. This is your new mistress, you know. You’ll need to watch your p’s and q’s with her. She’ll not put up with any of your skylarking, I’ll be bound.’

Marianna was outraged. Clenching her fists, she sent the maidservant away, saying briskly, ‘That will be all, thank you, Sally. ’ Then she turned on Ralph, endeavouring to moderate her anger.

‘It is very wrong of you to speak about me in such a familiar way with one of the servants,’ she said. ‘Your conduct just now was quite unpardonable.’

An unpleasant scowl appeared on Ralph’s handsome face.

‘I tremble and quail before the fearful wrath of my stepmama,’ he mocked.

‘And don’t call me by that absurd name, if you please.’

‘But my stepmama is what you indubitably are, is that not so? Though one or two choice epithets spring to mind which might suit you somewhat better, my dear Marianna.’

Despite all previous evidence, she was shocked at the depth of Ralph’s resentment towards her.

‘Ralph, please ... cannot we try to be friends?’ she begged, reaching across the table impulsively and laying a hand on his sleeve. As if her very touch repelled him, he jerked his arm away and stood up.

‘I prefer to select my own friends,’ he said coldly. ‘Not have them thrust upon me by my father.’

Later, it proved just as hopeless with William’s sister-in-law. Directed by the butler, Marianna found Miss Fielding in the small morning room, seated at a rosewood writing-table. With Harriet was the housekeeper, who stood clasping her hands obsequiously. She was a tall, thin woman wearing a black stuff dress, and her greying hair was drawn back tightly in an unflattering bun.

‘Ah, good morning, Marianna.’ Harriet’s tone was far from welcoming. ‘Just take a seat over there, will you, while I conclude my business with Mrs Thorpe.’

Complying with this request, Marianna offered a greeting to the housekeeper, who ventured, ‘I trust the girl Hilda is proving satisfactory, Mrs Penfold, ma’am?’

‘Thank you, Mrs Thorpe. She is quite adequate for my needs.’

Harriet prevented any further exchange between them by embarking upon a complaint about having found traces of dust on the picture frames and beeswax smears on the furniture. Marianna had to sit through a long dissertation on the need to keep housemaids up to the mark, or standards would slip in each and every direction. The purpose of all this, Marianna suspected with growing conviction, was to demonstrate that the control of the household lay firmly in the hands of Harriet Fielding.

When the housekeeper was finally dismissed, Marianna said tentatively, ‘I really think that I should begin to take some of the burden from your shoulders, Miss Fielding.’

‘Indeed? You imagine that I am incapable?’

‘Of course not. I was suggesting no such thing. But after all, I
am
William’s wife, and—’

‘I scarcely need to be reminded of that unpalatable fact!’ Harriet penned an entry in her accounts book, blotted it with deliberations then closed the book and snapped the metal clasp into place. ‘I confess that I am curious to know how you contrived it.’

‘Contrived it? What do you mean?’

‘Oh come now, my dear, don’t pretend with me. William has reached his middle years, a stage in life when any man feels that his appeal to the feminine sex is waning, William is particularly vulnerable to the wiles of a determined young woman such as yourself, especially one who—’

‘But I used no wiles against him,’ Marianna protested.

‘No? Are you saying that you did not turn those big blue eyes of yours upon him, swimming with childlike adoration? You did not flatter him with soft, appealing words? Come now, Marianna, you are talking to another woman, remember, and that means I can see through your disguise of fresh young innocence.’ She placed the accounts book in the writing-table drawer and locked it away. ‘William must have been a truly magnificent catch for you, the daughter of a hard-pressed wine shipper,’ she went on reflectively. ‘I gather from the newspapers that this
phylloxera
is severely affecting the wine trade in Madeira.’

It was so shrewd, so near the mark, and yet such a cruel distortion of the truth. Marianna said heatedly, ‘That is an outrageous suggestion to make, Miss Fielding.’

‘So I am asked to believe that you married William because you fell head over heels in love with him — a man three times your age and more. Is that it?’ Receiving no immediate reply, Harriet pressed her advantage. ‘Well, Marianna —
do
you love your husband?’

Marianna fingered her wedding ring nervously. ‘Why do you find that so difficult to believe? Did your sister not love William?’

About to make a sharp retort, Harriet paused and began again. ‘Ruth was no older than you are now when he married her, more than twenty years ago. Did you know that?’

As she spoke there was a look of suffering in her eyes, and her two hands were clenched together tightly. Marianna was surprised to discover that, beneath her anger, she felt a stir of reluctant sympathy for Harriet Fielding. Years ago, she had hoped to marry William herself, but instead he had chosen her considerably younger sister. And after the sister’s death, it appeared, he had turned back to Harriet and used her, briefly, as a solace. And then, had abandoned her without a word of explanation. It seemed heartless treatment for any woman to have to endure.

Marianna began falteringly, aware that she was being disloyal, ‘I fully realize what a shock it must have been for you the other day to discover that I was William’s wife. I was very distressed myself that he’d not seen fit to inform you in advance. But he said he wanted to keep it as a surprise. I... I think it was a mistaken decision. I’m sorry, truly I am, Miss Fielding. Believe me, I have every sympathy for you.’

‘I can manage without your sympathy, thank you.’

‘Then perhaps you might spare a little for me,’ Marianna said, losing patience. ‘I too received a surprise when I arrived. I had no idea that William’s first wife had a sister living here at Highmount, who was in charge of the household — a function which I had anticipated would be mine. So had you and I not better accept one another and make the best of things? If we cannot be friends, then at least let us not be enemies,’

Harriet was totally unmoved by her appeal. ‘I accept your presence under sufferance, Mrs Penfold, because I have no other option. But ask no more of me than that.’

Despairing, Marianna went up to her room and busied herself with sundry trivia. Then she remembered Pruella, so she changed into her riding habit and went down to the stables. The familiar sensation of being on horseback was strangely comforting, and as they set off through the beech grove she allowed her mind to wander. She was invaded by a sweet ache of longing for her father, for Linguareira. For Jacinto ...

At luncheon, Eunice was full of excitement because she just received a telegram from her fiancé. He would be arriving the next day on a brief, unexpected leave. Though Marianna was pointedly excluded from the conversation, by listening she deduced that Cedric Kendall’s parents — his father was a baronet — lived in an Elizabethan manor house just across the county boundary in Sussex. Cedric, it emerged, was twenty-three years old and a lieutenant in the Blues; and if Eunice’s opinion could be trusted, the young man was utterly perfect in every conceivable way. William’s daughter was quite transformed when the bitterness left her eyes, into a girl blissfully in love. Marianna could not suppress a feeling of envy for someone whose cup of happiness was full and brimming over.

Somehow, she wore away the long hours of the day. She read a little from a book she found on the library shelves, a novel of Mr Thackeray’s, and then she took her sketchbook and walked down to the river to make a drawing from the little rustic bridge, as she had promised herself. But the day had turned bleak again by now, with a flying wet mist that shrouded the countryside. Marianna shivered and in angry frustration she ripped out her attempted drawing and crumpled it in her hand. She was thankful to get back to the house, and the warmth of a fire.

She retired early, and though she composed herself to sleep, she was still restlessly awake at midnight. There was no denying it, she missed the closeness of her husband beside her; the closeness of another human being who did not hate and resent her. William
loved
her, he had repeatedly made that clear, he loved her with extreme devotion. And she would come to love him too, in due course of time. When babies began to arrive, her role as William’s wife would take on its proper meaning. Marianna was filled with a sudden longing for a child, clinging to that happy prospect as the answer to all her problems. But for her to bear a child her husband must first implant his seed. Till then, her marriage bed seemed devoid of its true purpose.

* * * *

Cedric Kendall arrived the following afternoon. He came directly from the train and secured Harriet’s permission to carry Eunice off to stay overnight at his parents’ home. He was a tall, dashing, fresh-faced young man — everything that a young officer in one of the most fashionable Guards regiments should be, looking quite splendid in his uniform of blue with scarlet facings.

Harriet introduced him perfunctorily to Marianna, and it was manifest that a few hasty explanations had already been made regarding herself. The young man was far from being at ease in the presence of his future stepmother-in-law. Nevertheless, with inbred good manners, Cedric applied himself to making conversation as they drank tea in the drawing room, while his fiancée was upstairs preparing for her night away from home.

‘Er ... I daresay everything in England must strike you as different from what you are accustomed to, Mrs Penfold?’

‘Indeed yes, Lieutenant Kendall.’

‘Vastly different,’ Harriet observed coldly.

‘I find the bleakness of the weather and these cold winds somewhat trying,’ Marianna added, after a slight pause.

‘Yes, I imagine you must do.’ In his grey eyes there was a kindly, sympathetic expression, conveying to Marianna an understanding that she had worse than merely the weather with which to contend. ‘Tell me, was the voyage comfortable?’

‘Yes, very smooth and agreeable. It was the first time I had travelled by ship, Lieutenant Kendall, and I found it vastly exciting. Also, after we docked at Southampton, I was thrilled to ride in a train, and likewise in a wheeled carriage. You know, perhaps, that we have no wheeled carriages in Madeira, for the terrain is too mountainous?’

‘I was unaware of that,’ Cedric replied with a smile. ‘I hope, most sincerely, Mrs Penfold, that you will find many other new experiences in England to afford you pleasure.’

The pleasant conversation continued. Was not Highmount a fine house? Yes, very splendid, and the grounds were truly delightful. Harriet suggested with a tight smile that perhaps Marianna found the park and pleasure gardens bewilderingly large, after her father’s much
smaller
estate in Madeira. A faint flush appeared under Cedric’s clear skin and he hastily inquired if it were true, as he had heard, that Madeira was an exceedingly beautiful island, with magnificent scenery and all kinds of exotic flowers?