A Web of Dreams
The Corvill Family Saga Book 1
Tessa Barclay
Copyright © The Estate of Tessa Barclay 2018
This edition published 2018 by Wyndham Books
(Wyndham Media Ltd)
27, Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX
First published 1988
www.wyndhambooks.com/tessa-barclay
The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
With the exception of where actual historical events and people are described, this book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, organisations and events are a product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, organisations and events is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
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Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
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Chapter One
Captain Bobby Prentiss leaned his chair back as far as it would go without falling over, stared at the cracked ceiling of the makeshift room, and reflected that it might break the monotony if he fetched his shotgun and blew a hole through it.
On the other hand, it might not even be heard. There was so much distance between him and any other occupants of this godforsaken building that he might shoot not the ceiling but himself, and be unnoticed until nightfall.
Nightfall. Day had hardly even got started so how could night fall? The grey sky drizzled down on Balmoral Castle, dampness clothed the muddy surroundings in a dismal mist, some poor little bird piped from a tree at the far side of the rough lawn.
And for this, Captain Prentiss said to himself with some bitterness, I got myself sent away from my regiment as military attaché to the dullest embassies in Europe. I learned German, because the Prince Consort and the Queen like to have German-speaking staff around them. I actually sought an appointment to the Royal Household.
I will definitely go for my hunting rifle. I will shoot the glass out of the windows. I will shoot holes in the wall plaster. When they come to take me away, I will say I did it as a protest at the awful conditions under which the equerries are expected to exist in this damnable building, in this damnable country.
The captain hated Scotland. The cool climate irritated him, the grey skies depressed him. The people were taciturn and critical. Her Majesty might rhapsodise about the worthy folk of Deeside, but he thought them a bore. A bore, a dead bore, an utter and crashing bore.
With this last vehement surge of detestation, he gave a shove with his elegantly booted foot at the desk in front of him. The chair finally toppled over. He fell in a tangle of chairlegs, fluttering papers and inkpots.
‘Damn,’ he said, scrambling up. But then as he dusted himself off he had the grace to laugh ruefully. ‘I’ve come to a pretty pass,’ he muttered, ‘when I can’t even sit upright in a chair.’
He turned his head to the window. It hadn’t been cleaned for weeks. During the remodelling of this ‘pretty little castle’, as Her Majesty was wont to call it, dust, grit and mud had been everywhere. The stone used for the new wings was of a very fine grain and very hard to work, so that a thin dust from the masonry had silted over the glass. The room in which he was standing was the best available for the equerries, though it was shabby, one wall only boards roughly plastered as a temporary measure.
To be sure, the main building was in better shape. The roofers were at work there, with slates carted across the hills from Strathbogie. The workmen from Cubitt’s of London were putting in the plumbing for the hot and cold baths. In the rooms on the first floor of the west side, His Royal Highness the Prince Consort was at this moment conferring with the decorator over the subject of wallpaper and upholstery for the royal bedrooms.
Captain Prentiss couldn’t understand why anyone should want to come to this dank, dreary place for any part of the summer or autumn. To judge by his experience, the temperature seldom rose above sixty degrees and usually it rained. Yet Victoria and Albert genuinely loved Scotland. They thought it ‘romantic’.
Romantic! How could any place be romantic where the inhabitants had such stern moral principles?
Bobby Prentiss knew from experience that it was very hard indeed to awaken any romantic feelings in the young ladies of the neighbourhood. He was fairly adept at spotting those of a generous disposition, for he was often separated from his wife Laura and you couldn’t expect a man of his lively nature to go without feminine sympathy, now could you?
Alas, you only had to look hopefully at one of the pretty girls here to have her parents frowning and inquiring into your family. It was, of course, no use pretending he was a single man. The members of the Royal Household were subjects of great interest to the local gentry, and of course were expected to behave with as much circumspection as the royal couple themselves.
Which certainly put a curb on any ‘romantic’ notions Bobby might have, unless he were to go after a chambermaid or someone of that sort. But then they talked in such a peculiar way, almost a foreign language ‒ how could you have any kind of fun with a girl like that? You could go to bed, of course ‒ oh yes, easy enough, if you showed the glint of a silver coin. Yet his tours of duty abroad had taught Bobby that making love could have more to it than a florin’s worth of physical relief.
Still, no use making himself miserable by thinking of the girls he’d known in France, the pretty little mistress he’d kept in Saxony. He was miserable enough, heaven knew, cooped up in this uncomfortable little office without even the possibility of getting out with a gun and a dog. He was on duty, a junior equerry ‒ he must stay where he was.
He gazed out through the dusty panes. The drizzle had actually stopped! There was even a glimpse of watery sun on the downtrodden grass of what would be a sloping lawn. There was a sparkle on the leaves of the sad-looking bushes, struggling to stay alive among the piles of planks and the scaffolding.
And there, stealthily making her way among them, was a slender young lady!
>
Bobby couldn’t believe his eyes. A girl! A girl of medium height, the hood of her mantelet dropped down to reveal very dark hair pulled back in a high chignon. In the faint silvery light of the September sunshine her face seemed very pale but she was gone before he could distinguish her features.
He blinked. Had he imagined her? He saw her at once in his mind’s eye: the mantelet of dark cloth trimmed with something white ‒ ermine, perhaps. The dark hair touched with the gleam of moisture from the dripping trees. Her movements quick and supple. Yes, and secretive. She had been skulking.
Skulking! And carrying a package!
He called it up again in his memory. A package in her arms ‒ something about a foot long and not quite so wide, wrapped in dark strong paper or perhaps canvas.
A bomb?
The royal family weren’t universally popular. Now and again madmen leapt out to make attempts on their lives. Could this neat little lady in the dark clothes by any chance be an anarchist?
All this had taken a fraction of a second to pass through his mind. Before the girl could have taken another step after she disappeared among the building equipment, Bobby Prentiss was out of the door and after her.
There was a pile of stone blocks immediately outside the office. He crouched behind it, listened intently, and heard a soft footfall some yards away. He moved without sound towards it. At the end of the stone pile he glanced in the direction the sound had come from. She was walking with a gentle tread and with an anxious turning of her head towards the open French windows of the drawing-room.
In two strides Bobby had overtaken her. He caught her by the shoulder, swung her round. ‘Hey!’ he said. ‘What d’you think you’re up to?’
She gave a little shriek of fright. She threw up her hands to protect herself. The package fell from her grasp into the wet mud.
‘Oh, goodness!’ she gasped. ‘Now look what you’ve done!’
She seemed much more concerned about her package than anything else. He stooped as she did, to recover it. It proved to be yielding to the touch, not at all bomb-like. In fact, it felt like a parcel of cloth.
They straightened together, the girl clutching the parcel to her bosom. The mantelet proved to be of fine dark cloth but edged with white felt, not ermine. Her features, now that he could see them, were worth looking at. She had dark eyes, almost Latin in their lambent blackness. Her eyebrows arched over them with a strong, emphatic curve. Her mouth, now half-open in alarm, revealed straight white teeth in her narrow jaw.
He knew in a moment that she wasn’t what he thought of as a lady. She might perhaps be some kind of superior servant ‒ a lady’s maid, perhaps. But no, there was something about her as she glowered at him now ‒ none of the acquired demureness or servility of the domestic employee.
‘Who the devil are you?’ he demanded. ‘And what are you doing, creeping about in the grounds of Balmoral?’
‘Creeping about? Who’s creeping about? I’m going to see the Prince Consort.’
It was so unexpected that he gave a snort of laughter. ‘The Prince Consort? Are you, indeed!’
‘Yes, I am, and now look what you’ve done to my sample!’
‘Your what?’
She hugged the parcel closer to her. ‘It’s got wet! Why did you jump out on me like that?’
‘You’re lucky I didn’t shoot you on sight,’ he declared. ‘How did you get past the gates, anyway? Surely there’s a guard ‒’
‘The guard’s only there to keep out bad people. I have an appointment with Prince Albert, so of course he let me pass.’ The more she said, the more he was convinced that despite her bright, intelligent face she was as mad as a hatter.
‘Oh, so you’ve an appointment with Prince Albert, have you? Since when, may I ask?’
‘Since the beginning of August, if it’s any of your business.’
‘That’s very interesting. And for what hour was this appointment?’
‘For any time after His Highness’s lunch ‒ naturally I wouldn’t expect to know exactly when he’d be free but I said any time after two o’clock.’
‘You said?’ Captain Prentiss echoed. He felt a certain unease. ‘You’ve talked to the Prince?’
‘No, no, I said it in my letter.’
In the way she said, ‘No, no,’ there was a lilt of the Scottish speech which in general he found almost unintelligible. She was a local girl, perhaps, but not one of the thick-spoken country girls he’d heard among the shielings when Their Majesties went for a tour of the countryside.
‘You wrote a letter to the Prince?’
‘Am I not telling you I did? So you see you’re keeping me from my appointment ‒’
‘A moment, young lady,’ the equerry said. ‘I know all His Royal Highness’s appointments for today, and I can assure you he has nothing in his diary about seeing you.’
‘Well, that just shows how little you know,’ she said, ‘because I wrote to him on our printed notepaper on behalf of my father and you can be sure the appointment’s there in his book if you just look to see ‒ Miss Genevieve Corvill on behalf of William Corvill of Edinburgh.’
‘So you wrote to him, Miss Corvill.’ Despite himself, Bobby Prentiss was smiling. ‘Did you receive a reply?’
‘No, but then, of course, His Highness’ll be too busy a man to reply to every letter he gets from those that want to do business with him ‒’
‘Business! Miss Colville ‒ what can you mean? What are you?’
‘I’m a webster,’ she said, drawing herself up to her full height at about the level of his shoulder. ‘You’ll not have heard of us, not being one that buys much cloth, I dare say ‒’
‘A webster?’
She frowned, the dark brows coming together like a strong parenthesis. ‘You’re an Englishman, I suppose. A webster ‒ you’d say, a weaver.’
‘A weaver?’
‘Aye, the best in Edinburgh.’ There was a tilt of the chin that showed how strongly she believed it. ‘William Corvill, my father, of Dean Village in Edinburgh. Ask anybody. They’ll tell you ‒ the finest cloth in the best patterns of anybody in Scotland. The cloth on the loom is the “web”, you know, and those that make it are the websters ‒ it’s common as a surname even in England, I believe, though you don’t seem to use it for the trade.’
Captain Prentiss forebore to tell her that he never concerned himself with trade of any kind, let alone weaving. ‘My dear Miss Corvill, I’ve no doubt your father is foremost of his kind. But that makes no difference to the fact that you have no appointment with His Royal Highness for this afternoon or any other afternoon. I assure you ‒ your name does not appear.’
She gave him a haughty stare. ‘And how can you possibly know that, my good man?’
He kept a straight face. ‘Because I’m a junior equerry to His Highness, and it’s my role to know what his appointments are. Besides, my dear girl …! Surely you know better than to think you have an engagement with the Prince just because you wrote to say you were coming?’
To tell the truth, this was a point which had troubled Miss Genevieve Corvill a little. Her father, always unwilling to be involved in anything new or unusual, had muttered that His Highness wouldn’t want to be bothered with a visit from the likes of her.
To this she gave the same answer she now gave to the handsome equerry. ‘The Prince Consort is known, is he not, for being a goodhearted man, very punctilious in his dealings with those beneath him. He’d have sent a message if he didn’t wish to see me ‒ he’d never have wanted me to come all the way from Edinburgh for nothing.’
There was just enough truth in this to perturb Bobby Prentiss. There should have been a letter telling her Their Majesties had no need of her services. But all the same …
‘You must understand that the Queen and the Prince Consort have secretaries to deal with correspondence.’ He pictured her letter, continually put to the bottom of the mahogany filing tray until finally the refusal was written and posted at the last m
oment. ‘When did you set out from Edinburgh, Miss Corvill?’
‘Yesterday morn.’
‘Well then. The letter may have arrived after you set out.’
That was possible. But Miss Corvill had no intention of allowing it to be so. ‘On the other hand, a letter may have arrived saying His Highness would be delighted to see the cloth we’ve made for him. It’s well known that Their Majesties are very interested in Highland plaid designs, and my letter offered something particularly fine. You cannot deny, sir, that an acceptance is just as possible as a refusal.’
She saw uncertainty gaining ground in his blue eyes. She had been looking up at him with a confident, inquiring gaze, and now she tilted her head a little in unconscious coquetry.
She knew he liked her. There was something about the way his mouth kept curving towards a smile as he spoke to her.
She liked him. Apart from that first moment when he had scared the very hair upon her head as he whirled her round, she found him very pleasing.
He was quite unlike the sombrely-clad young men of the small Huguenot settlement to which she belonged. They were pale and quiet, weavers, mostly, like her father William and her brother Ned. She met them at the tiny Huguenot church, their Bibles held against their black-clad breasts. They walked her home with a sedate step.
One of them, in due time, would be selected by her father to pay court to her. He would be her husband.
But none of them gave her this faint flutter in the throat she felt now. The young equerry was tall, fairish, pink-complexioned. He had no beard, but a soft wide moustache above his smiling mouth and little curling sideburns down his cheek. She found herself, most unexpectedly, wishing to touch those curling sideburns with an approving finger.
‘What is your name, sir?’ she inquired, looking down.
‘Captain Robert Prentiss of the Ninth Cavalry.’
She gave him a polite little curtsey. ‘Sir, I’m sure you would wish to carry out your duties efficiently. It may well be that His Highness is expecting me at this very moment.’
It was unlikely in the extreme. The Prince had come to Balmoral to oversee the next stage in the rebuilding. He had appointments with the architect, Mr Smith of Aberdeen; the chief mason, Mr Beaton; various estate workers, such as the head dairyman and the wife of the gardener who cooked for the bothy-occupants; and of course the decorator and the upholsterer who were with him in the first floor rooms at present.
A Web of Dreams Page 1
