The Folly (8 page)

“Perhaps you may yet have children,” he said lightly. “You may marry again.”

“When one has made a bad mistake, or rather, one’s father has forced one into an unhappy marriage, then one is not anxious to marry again.”

He looked at her with quick sympathy. “I understand
what you mean. But there are good people in this world.”

Her eyes caressed his face. “I am beginning to think there are.”

He felt a little chill, a sense of withdrawal. Like all men, he wanted to be the hunter, not the hunted.

“How long do you plan to stay at Mannerling?” he asked abruptly.

To his horror, those beautiful eyes of hers filled with tears. “Alas,” she said brokenly, “I told George we had been too forward in coming. We will leave as soon as possible.”

He immediately felt like a brute. “My dear Miss Santerton, you and your brother are welcome to be my guests for as long as you wish.”

She dabbed at her eyes. “Too kind,” she said. “I must do something to repay you. Your poor children, I am sure, would appreciate some feminine company. I would be prepared to spend some time with them.”

“As to that, although I do thank you for your offer, the matter is attended to. Mark and Beth go daily to Brookfield House to be educated by the governess there, an estimable woman, and they also have the company of the Beverley girls.”

“Ah, yes, the Beverleys,” she said in a low voice. “You do not think the many scandals attached to that unfortunate family will affect your children?”

“I have heard all the scandals and no, I do not. They are very happy.”

“Mmm. Oh, well, if you are satisfied…I mean, I trust the girls are not using the children to ingratiate themselves with you.”

“Hardly. Miss Rachel gave me my character over my neglect of Mark and Beth.”

“We shall see,” said Minerva. “We shall see.”

The ball wound to its close. Rachel had not been asked to dance by Charles Blackwood and she felt it was something of a slight, for he had danced with both Lizzie and Belinda, a Belinda who, Rachel thought, had flirted quite outrageously.

She felt suddenly tired. The room was overwarm, faces were flushed, and quite a number of the gentlemen were drunk. But she knew her mother would not leave the ball until the general did. Rachel reflected that she had never seen her mother look so animated before. She still had a handsome figure and a neat ankle. She had rouged her face with two bright circles, despite Miss Trumble’s advice to the contrary, in an effort to banish the pallor caused by long bouts of imaginary illness when she was mured up in her bedchamber. But Rachel noticed how the general’s eyes kept straying to where Miss Trumble sat against the wall, and feared ructions ahead. Lady Beverley would have been shocked could she have guessed that the general’s reason for not taking Miss Trumble up for a dance was because he feared she might make life difficult for her governess.

At last Rachel, dancing a second dance with Mr. Cater, saw the Mannerling party leave and knew that they could now go home. Mr. Cater sought out Lady Beverley and gained her permission to call.

“He would do very well for you, Rachel,” said Lady Beverley in the carriage on the road home.

“You go too fast, Mama,” pleaded Rachel wearily.
“I know very little about the gentleman except that he owns sugar plantations in Barbados in the West Indies. He employs slaves.”

“I should be very surprised if he did not, my child. How else is the sugar to be harvested?”

But Rachel did not feel like entering into an argument on the rights and wrongs of slavery with her mother. The next day was Sunday, so there would be no visit from the Blackwood children, although they could expect to see the Blackwoods in church.

When Rachel was brushing out her hair before going to bed, Miss Trumble quietly entered the room.

“You look worried, Rachel. Was Mr. Cater not to your liking?”

“He is a very pleasant man. But he keeps slaves. The slave-trade was abolished, or so you told us.”

“The Abolition of the Slave Trade Act was passed in 1807,” said Miss Trumble. “But this act, be it remembered, did not abolish slavery but only prohibited the traffic in slaves. So that no ship should clear out from any port in the British dominions after May the first, 1807, with slaves on board, and that no slave should be landed in the colonies after March the first, 1808.”

“So why is there still slavery?”

Miss Trumble sat down with a weary little sigh. “The product is now home-grown, just like the sugar. Slavery has been going on so long that there are black children growing up into slavery.”

“It distresses me,” said Rachel in a low voice.

“Many things in this wicked world distress me,” said the governess. “But you are not going to reform a plantation owner. Should you marry him, all you could do would be to see that the slaves were
well-housed and fed and not ill-treated. With the education I have given you, you would be well-equipped to educate them. But in order to go to such a situation on the other side of the world, you would need to be very much in love. Arranged marriages often work out quite comfortably in England, but it would be different there. There would be so many stresses and strains.”

“It looked very much tonight as if our Mr. Charles will make a match of it with Miss Santerton.”

“I do hope not.”

“Why do you say that?”

“A feeling, that is all. I think there is an instability of mind there.”

Rachel gave a little shrug. “Where such beauty is concerned, I am sure a little madness would not even be noticed.”

“Perhaps,” said Miss Trumble.

At church in the morning, with the congregation heavy-eyed after the ball the night before, Rachel noticed that the Santertons were there, Minerva and Charles looking very much a couple. Mr. Stoddart, the vicar, preached in a monotonous voice. “I do wish that little man would end. Is he going to prose on forever?” Minerva’s voice sounded in the church with dreadful clarity. Mr. Stoddart flushed, but smiled down at the Mannerling party in an ingratiating way and brought his sermon to an abrupt close.

Outside the church, where ladies clutched their bonnets in a frisky, blustery wind, Mary took hold of Rachel’s arm in a confidential way. “It looks as if
Mannerling will soon have a new mistress. And so suitable!”

Rachel felt irritated and depressed at the same time. At that moment, the wind came to her rescue and whipped Mary’s straw bonnet from her head and sent it scuttling off among the tombstones, with Mary in pursuit.

At least Isabella will soon be with us, thought Rachel, her eyes straying to where Charles Blackwood was escorting Minerva to the Mannerling carriage. Charles had not spoken to her or acknowledged her presence.

She did not know that Charles had had every intention of speaking, not only to her, but to various other parishioners, but that Minerva’s hand on his arm had been like a vice and that, outside the church, she had instantly claimed that the sermon had given her a headache and that she wanted to return “home.”

As his carriage drove off, he saw that new fellow, Hercules Cater, approach the Beverley family and saw a smile of welcome on Lady Beverley’s thin lips.

Though he was finding Minerva a heady and enchanting beauty, she was beginning to annoy him. He did not like the unspoken and yet calm assumption of brother and sister that he should propose to Minerva.

Lady Beverley had invited Mr. Cater back to Brookfield House for a cold collation. Miss Trumble had planned to find out as much as she could about the young man, but Lady Beverley was annoyed that Charles had not spoken to her and blamed the presence of the governess. Lady Beverley always
had to have someone to blame. And so she gave Miss Trumble several tasks to perform, telling her that her presence was not needed in company. Miss Trumble went in search of Barry.

“I suppose Mr. Cater will be deemed suitable for Rachel,” she said as Barry straightened up from weeding a flower-bed. “I suppose one cannot expect all the Beverley girls to marry for love.”

“He seems a pleasant-enough young man, miss. Sugar plantations, I believe.”

“Rachel is troubled by the fact that he keeps slaves.”

“They all do, in them parts. One young miss can’t change the way things are done.”

“No, but she would either need to become hardened to the situation, which I would not like, or become distressed by it. I cannot think Mr. Cater is suitable, and yet he is surely better than some elderly gentleman with a great deal of money, for I cannot see Lady Beverley balking at anyone at all who is in funds.”

“It amazes me, miss,” said Barry, “that she is not throwing Miss Rachel at Mr. Blackwood’s head.”

“Ah, that is because my lady plans to wed the general and so secure Mannerling.”

“Any hope there?”

“I should not think so. Lady Beverley was once a very great beauty but I do not think she ever had the arts to charm. She probably relied on her beauty and fortune and felt she did not have to do much else.”

“I did hear tell that Miss Santerton is of outstanding beauty and people are already saying a match is expected.”

“Perhaps. She is certainly amazingly handsome. But tall, very tall. I always feel such a lady is to be admired from a distance, like a statue. She lacks human qualities. I have written to an old friend for the full story of the Santertons. I will let you know when her reply arrives, although it should be some days because I wrote the letter last night and cannot post it until tomorrow.”

Barry gave her a sly grin. “It always amazes me, if I may say so, miss, that a lady like yourself would gossip with an old servant like me.”

“That is because I am an old servant myself.” Miss Trumble gathered her shawl about her shoulders, nodded to him, and walked away.

As she approached the house, she could hear a burst of laughter from the dining-room. Mr. Cater appeared to be keeping the company well-entertained.

Only Rachel wondered at Mr. Cater’s conversation. He spoke of Barbados, of the climate, of the flora and fauna, of the tedium of the long sea voyage home, of the plays he had seen in London before travelling to the country, and yet he revealed nothing of his private life, of his family, or of where he originally came from and what had taken him to the other side of the world in the first place.

But Rachel chided herself on looking for flaws. To marry such a man would mean being well set up for life, of getting away from Mama, of having a household of her own. It would be adventurous to go to the Indies.

But after the meal, when Mr. Cater asked her
to show him the garden, Rachel irritated her mother by promptly suggesting that Belinda and Lizzie should accompany them. She described plants and bushes and all the while her errant thoughts kept straying to Mannerling. Had Charles considered his children if he was thinking of marriage again?

At that moment, Minerva was entering the drawing-room, holding Mark by one hand and Beth by the other. “We have had such sport,” she cried. “I quite dote on the children. Playing with them makes me feel like a child myself.”

“Come here to me,” said Charles to the children. “What have you been doing?”

“Playing with stick and ball,” said Mark in a low voice. Minerva had asked them whether they did not miss their mother, and he had replied, truthfully, that he could remember very little of his mother, for he had barely seen her. Minerva had then told him that he must always put his father’s happiness before any selfish thoughts, and should his father decide to find them a new mother, then he and Beth must do all in their power to make that lady welcome.

And Mark did not like Minerva. Her intense blue gaze unnerved him. But he did not want his father to retreat back into becoming the sad-eyed, withdrawn man he had been so recently and so Mark forced himself to look pleased with Minerva. He longed for Sunday to be over so that he and Beth could return to Miss Trumble and the safety of Brookfield House.

The Santertons slept late. On Monday morning, Charles surprised his father as he was getting into the carriage to go to Brookfield House with the children.

“Feel a bit dull,” said the general. “Thought I’d talk to that Trumble female. Very sensible.”

“I’ll come with you,” said Charles suddenly. He did not know what it was about Mannerling that had suddenly begun to oppress him. Perhaps it was Minerva, and yet, had he been a superstitious man, he could have believed the house itself was turning against him. He could sense a malignancy lurking in its quiet rooms, but decided he was becoming fanciful and that the haunting of his son was putting him on his guard, for whoever had played such an evil trick had not been discovered.

When they arrived, Miss Trumble said that as the day was fine and warm, she would give the children their lessons in the garden. Lady Beverley urged the general and Charles to step into the house but, to her irritation, the general said he would like to sit in the garden as well.

The girls joined them. Miss Trumble started by reading items of news from the
Morning Post,
explaining before she did so that she liked the children to be au fait with current affairs. Then an article caught her eye and she began to laugh.

“What amuses you, Miss Trumble?” asked the general.

“I just read a few sentences. It appears to be a very good description of a Bond Street Lounger.”

“Read it to us,” urged the general.

“Come now, General,” protested Lady Beverley.
“You would not like to see the education of your grandchildren neglected.”

“I think Mark should know all about Bond Street Loungers. Go ahead, Miss Trumble.”

Miss Trumble looked inquiringly at her mistress.

“Very well,” said Lady Beverley huffily.

Miss Trumble explained. “It begins with the necessary behaviour of a Bond Street Lounger in an hotel as he tries to establish his character as that of a man of fashion. ‘In short, find fault with every single article without exception, damn the waiter—’”

“Miss Trumble!” exclaimed Lady Beverley.

“Go on, do,” said the general with a laugh.

“‘—the waiter at almost regular intervals, and never let him stand one moment still, but keep him eternally moving; having it in remembrance that he is only an unfortunate and wretched subordinate, of course, a stranger to feelings which are an ornament to Human Nature; with this recollection on your part that the more illiberal the abuse he has from you, the greater will be his admiration of your superior abilities, and Gentleman-like qualifications. Confirm him in the opinion he has so unjustly imbibed, by swearing the fish is not warm through; the poultry is as tough as your Grandmother; the pastry is made with butter, rank Irish; the cheese which they call Stilton is nothing but pale Suffolk; the malt liquor damnable, a mere infusion of malt, tobacco, and cocculus Indicus; the port musty; the sherry sour; and that the whole of the dinner and dessert were infernally infamous, and of course, not fit for the entertainment of a Gentleman; conclude the lecture with an oblique hint that, without better accommodations, and
more ready attention, you shall be under the necessity of leaving the house for a more comfortable situation.