The LadyShip (24 page)

She needed no second invitation and was shortly de
scending the low-beamed staircase to the coffee room,
where a fresh fire had been kindled and two places laid
over a clean cloth on the heavy oaken table. Elinor seated
herself, and when Alice came in with a pot of coffee and her
breakfast, she watched with professional interest as it was laid before her. The girl curtseyed respectfully, but appre
hensively, Mrs Judson having doubtless read her a stern
lecture on her conduct of the night before. Elinor smiled at
her, which caused Alice to become even more flustered
and almost to take away again the coffee-pot she had just
come in with, before Elinor stopped her.

She had more appetite than she had realised and had
made a healthy dent in her breakfast by the time Ned came in, properly assembled in white shirt, buckskins and russet
coat, and top-boots. His hair and moustache were neatly
groomed, and a red neckcloth was tied around his neck. He still wore a faintly military air, but Elinor thought he could
not have looked more elegant. Instead of kissing her, he bowed formally—and grinned.

“Good morning, Lady Elinor,” he said, seating himself
opposite her and, since his sister did not appear in any
haste to do it for him, poured himself a cup of coffee.

“Ned,” said this lady, peering at him doubtfully, “you
haven’t been drinking your breakfast, have you?”

Ned raised a supercilious eyebrow at her and said in his
most haughty accents, “Is that any way to address a peer of the realm, madam? I will thank you to show a little respect
to your betters—to your equals, anyhow.”

Elinor put down her fork and said more firmly, “Ned, you will have to explain this nonsense before you take a
single bite of that ham!”

At that, Ned smiled and once again regarded his sister with the affection and comradeship she had been looking
for in him since he came home from France. She returned
the smile and reached out to lay her hand over his.

“Well, m’dear,” he said, taking a deep breath, “it’s quite
a tale—but had you really no notion of it?”

“I cannot tell you that until you explain what it is, dar
ling!”

He laughed. “Yes, all right. I know I am a poor hand at explanations, but I will try to repeat it as Lord Vernon told
it to me—but did you know, Nell, that our father was not
who we believed him to be?”

“Our
father?
But I thought it must have been— Well,
never mind that, Ned. Go on.”

“What I mean is, James Bennett was not our father. Our
mother had been married before she met him. Lord Ver
non—or Uncle Vernon, as he insists we call him now— explained it to me. You see, his brother Richard was Marquess of Redding; his son and heir was David, Viscount St
C
lair. This David married a young woman—an orphan, of no fortune, who had been a servant at Redding—or rather,
the mistress of a school for orphans that was one of Lady
Vernon Dudley’s charities. The marquess did not approve
of the match—he was violently against it, in fact—and
would not speak to his son after he heard about it. The cou
ple ran away to live together in a village near Newbury, and
they had children. Twins, Nell—us.”

Elinor stared at him in silence for a moment. She had
been spinning tales like this in her imagination ever since
she found her mother’s letters in that old chest, but she had only half-believed that any of them might be true; now the
reality was even more difficult to comprehend.

“But this David—our father—what became of him, Ned?”

“They had enough money to be comfortable. David—or
rather, Viscount St Clair—had reached his majority before
they were married and had come into some property that
was not under the marquess’s control, but he was not satis
fied with this, and wanted to provide for his children himself. He bought a commission in the Navy—thinking, I
suppose, of the prize money and a possible promotion
which would give his family the standing they could not
otherwise achieve without the marquess’s recognition. But he was killed—at Cape St Vincent—in 1797.”

“We were not yet four years old! That is why I remember
nothing of him.”

“Nor do I, I’m sorry to say. Of course, he was away at sea
for months at a time before that, so it is small wonder we do
not remember. But I do remember one thing, Nell—don’t
you? We had a tiny bedroom, with blue-printed curtains
over the windows. I used to think it was at The LadyShip,
although there is no such room there now; I thought per
haps it had been repainted at some time when we were
very young and I simply did not recognise it. I see now that
it must have been in their cottage—it was near Highclere, at
the edge of the downs. We shall have to look for it now, for
it is the only link we have with David.”

“No, there is something else,” Elinor said, and told Ned
about the letters she had discovered and kept hidden away.

“I knew somehow that they were important to us—but I
never imagined that it would be in this way! But Ned—why
did you call me Lady Elinor just now?”

“Because David was the marquess’s only son. There
were no other heirs, although after the marquess died last
year, Uncle Vernon began the search for one. They had had
no word of David and Mary since Vernon’s wife, Sarah,
died. She had been the only one in the family to support
them, you see, and she kept in touch with them, although
the marquess would not let her tell him about us, or about
anything else to do with them. He may have been our grandfather, Nell, but I have to say I do not regret not
having known him. He was unpardonably cruel to them— although Vernon says that David had his own kind of stub
bornness. It gave him the strength to do what he felt was right.”

“I should like to have known Sarah,” Elinor said. “She
must have been much like Lord Vernon.”

“Not according to what he says, but I expect they both
had the same kind heart. Sarah must have been the ‘ladyship,’
you know—the one James Bennett named the inn after.
Mother married James the year after David was killed, and
Sarah provided the means to buy the inn, so that we might be raised in comfort there. Mary would not tell Sarah what
she had done with the money, however, and after James
and Mary were married and moved away from Highclere,
she did not write to Sarah again. That is where Vernon lost
the connexion when he came to look for us. He went to
Highclere but never to Newbury.”

“Did Sarah not know about James, then?”

“It seems not. Vernon says she was unhappy about not
hearing from Mary again, but could not blame her for refus
ing to accept any more charity from David’s father—which
is what it amounted to, even if the money did come from
Sarah. Sarah did not press her to accept more, nor to be
kept informed of what Mary did with it, so that when Ver
non came to search for us, he did not know where to start.
He says he was going down to London with Mr Allingham
the other day to make enquiries there, on the chance that
our birth was recorded and some clue to our whereabouts
would surface—although he had already been to the Admiralty and a score of other places besides, with no luck. He says,
though, that as soon as he saw you, he sensed something fa
miliar about you. I think if you had said I was your twin, he
might have made the connexion sooner.”

Elinor looked into the eyes that so exactly matched her
own—and Lord Vernon’s. “It never occurred to me to
mention it to him, nor that there could be some special sig
nificance in it. Ned, are you trying to tell me that you are
the Marquess of Redding’s heir?”

“No, love—I’m telling you I am the Marquess of Red
ding.”

As carefully as Ned may have explained this, the news of
it still did not fully penetrate Elinor’s muddled brain. The
first notion that did was that now Ned could marry Clarissa with her family’s blessing—that is, if Lord Vernon did not
talk them into continuing on to the border, just for the devil of it!
She was glad for them—and grateful to Lord Vernon, with
out whom unhappy history might well have repeated itself
in Ned and Clarissa.

Had Lord Vernon been the kind of man
his brother Richard was, the present escapade might have turned out very differently, for Richard would never
have tolerated the marriage of any niece of his to an
innkeeper’s son, however much military glory hung about him. Lord Vernon, on the other hand, more than probably
saw his own history repeating itself and wished only that
Ned and Clarissa would be as happy as he and Sarah had
been.

Elinor’s thoughts then turned to Lucy. Her sister had ob
viously been attracted to Felix Dudley—but what would
come of that? Elinor had it so firmly fixed in her mind that it
was Lucy who was the daughter of a lord, that it was some
time before she could consider her own situation at all.

After finishing her cold breakfast and tepid coffee, she left Ned to go to the girl he hoped would be his bride, and
repeat the story to her. Elinor preferred in any case to be
left alone to think; she donned a cloak and went outside,
slogging through the sunlit snow to the stables. She stood
there for a moment, listening to the melting snow dripping
from the roof and absently stroking the coach horses while,
at last, she pondered her own future.

“Don’t frown,” said a voice behind her. “It’s meant to be
good news.”

Elinor turned, to find Marcus Allingham standing in the
doorway. He had the sun at his back so that she could sense
rather than see him smiling at her. The light cast a halo
around his fair hair and the woollen coat he had tossed over
his broad shoulders; his boots were still damp from his
earlier outing.

He had, of course, been in the back of Elinor’s mind all
morning, but she had not yet been able to face squarely
what the “good news” meant to her relationship with
him—she had indeed thought of everything and everyone
else deliberately to avoid thinking about it.

“Isn’t it good news?” he persisted, coming into the stable and smiling at her puzzlement.

“Yes, of course,” she said, closing the stall door but not moving any closer to him. He had no hesitancy in coming
to her, however, and she found herself uttering inanities
and wishing he would go away again. “I am happy for Ned.
He can marry Clarissa now, and not have to work himself to
death to provide for her—not that he would have had to do
so, really, but I cannot imagine Clarissa would have been
happy living over an inn—”

“Elinor, I am not speaking of Ned or Clarissa. Do you
never consider yourself in all this?”

“Well, no. I mean, I have not had time to do so. It has all
been so sudden—so unexpected. I don’t know yet just
what it all means.”

Her voice trailed off, and she looked up at him. He was
studying her as if trying to judge how much more she knew
than she was aware of knowing. He knew from long experi
ence that she was no fool; it was, rather, as if she did not
want to face the truth. He rarely acted impulsively—he had
never even been tempted by impulse until just the day
before, in the coach beside Elinor Bennett—but now he
stepped closer and took her hand in his, drawing her close to
him. It was such a natural motion, not at all like his clumsiness with Clarissa, and it was a moment before she realised what he was doing—a moment that afforded him a tantalising glimpse of the way her thick, dark lashes separated in a
neat fanlike arrangement on her cheeks when she lowered
her eyes, and of the soft curve of her full mouth. He moved
his head closer to her, but she pulled away sharply.

“No, please! You cannot be thinking of what you are
doing!”

He laughed. “On the contrary, my dear, I have been
thinking of it all morning, and if you have not given it at least a passing thought, I am very much disappointed in
you!” He held her at arm’s length for a moment and said
more quietly, “Do we not know each other well enough
after all these years to understand each what the other is
thinking? Need we stand on unnecessary ceremony?”