by Issy Brooke
Dido smiled. “He was terrifying to us when we were small.”
“No! You were never scared of him, were you?”
“Well, perhaps only a little, when he talked very seriously and looked so stern. Once I grew older, I was not so very scared, except for that time I climbed a tree and fell and he was scathing about how I had misjudged the strength of the branches and my own weight, suggesting I was far heavier than I had thought. I was upset for a little while about that. And Mary was never scared of him but she was his favourite. I imagine that she still is. How is she? I have letters from her, but you know how tight-lipped she can be about her travails. She will always pretend that nothing is wrong.”
“The summer has been good to her and her lungs are better than they’ve ever been. Her husband treats her like a queen. She is well,” Adelia said.
“I’m glad to hear it. She is so sweet that she deserves to be treated properly. Now, Felicia was always scared of father. And she definitely still is.”
Adelia shook her head. Of her seven daughters, Felicia had been born fourth and was the silliest, sweetest thing she’d ever encountered. Her head was nothing more than the fairy-like fluff of dandelion clocks. No wonder she was troubled by Theodore’s forthright manner. She was scared of unseen things, ghosts, gossip, creaks in the night, sideways looks from strangers and the passing of a black cat. But it was a shame. No child should be scared of their parents. “We could invite all of your sisters to this garden party,” she said, tapping the paper on the table in front of them. “Although Felicia might not come.” As she spoke, Philippa slipped into the room, looking flushed.
Dido clapped her hands. “Have you been meeting with Sir Henry?”
“I? No – I have been walking in the garden but it grew too hot.” She pulled at her tweed walking dress in annoyance. “I should dress like a lady golfer. They have much better ideas about clothes.”
“Oh, please don’t be so common. You should go to the fishpond. It is always cool there.”
“I don’t like the yew trees. They loom over me.”
“I agree with you there,” Adelia said. “They can be nasty things, all dark and deathlike.”
“Mama, please don’t!” Dido said hastily. “You are as bad as father with your speaking sometimes. Don’t plant nightmares into my head. It is a good job Felicia isn’t here. She would not sleep for days after hearing you say that. Let us finish this additional guest list. Philippa, do sit down and help us.”
Lord Mondial had decreed that they were to hold a lavish garden party before many people headed north to Scotland for the start of the grouse hunting season. And he had given his wife barely a scant three weeks to prepare everything. He simply assumed that it would be done as soon as he commanded it; he seemed to have no concept of the work that would go on behind the scenes. The main invitations had all been sent out, but they were double-checking the list and the subsequent replies and adding a few extra guests as they saw fit.
They bent to the task in hand for a little while before Philippa sat back and said, out of nowhere, “Oh, Dido, did they tell you about the man?”
“What? What man is this?”
Adelia laughed. Philippa had been an impetuous child and clearly some things had not changed. She sometimes started conversations in the middle, forgetting that she had engaged in the first half of the conversation in her own head and not out loud.
Philippa explained, “There was a man caught lurking in the garden earlier.”
“Where, and when? No, no one has told me this.” Dido sounded angry.
But as the explanation unfolded, Adelia began to feel annoyed rather than alarmed, although she held her tongue about her suspicions. She thought she knew who the man might have been, particularly when Philippa said, “One of the gardeners chased him off with a spade. The man said he was here to visit someone but wouldn’t say who that was; he said ‘she’, though. He was not old, not young, and very well-spoken but dressed like he’d been sleeping on the floor of a tavern.”
“Goodness,” said Dido. “I do not know whether to be horrified or sympathetic. Perhaps he is a rich man down on his luck.”
“No doubt there will be a reason for that,” Adelia said. “I am relieved that the staff are aware of this trespasser and I am sure we will all be perfectly safe.” If it was who she thought it was, he was an annoyance but nothing dangerous. He plagued her in ever inventive ways but he was harmless. “Now, about this garden party. Should we not invite the local vicar? I notice he has been omitted from the list. Is that accidental or is there something I should know about the man?”
Dido did not seem to notice the swerve in topic and for that Adelia was grateful. Adelia did not want to explain to her daughter that the strange man lingering in the bushes was almost certainly Dido’s Uncle Alfred.
THE GUEST LIST WAS finally agreed upon and talk turned to Sir Henry, but before Philippa could be persuaded to spill her feelings on the matter, someone tapped at the door and entered before anyone could call out. Of course, Lord Mondial would not wait for permission to enter any room in his own home. He cast a glance over the three women. A lesser man – or a more amusing one – might have made a joke about the opening scene of Macbeth. However, Lord Mondial had never made a joke in his life. He nodded briefly to Adelia, even more briefly to Philippa, and then turned to his wife.
“My lady,” he said formally, as if they were in a public gathering, “I should be grateful for your attention to a personal matter.”
“Is it the children? Is everything all right?” Dido was already getting to her feet.
He blinked as if he had forgotten they had two boys. “I imagine that they are fine. They usually are. No, I need you to walk with me in the gardens. There is something we must discuss. Don’t look so worried; it is a minor matter and wrinkles will ruin your face.”
He turned away and left the room abruptly, secure in the knowledge that his wife would jump immediately to do his bidding. Adelia tried to catch her daughter’s eye as she went, but Dido studiously avoided Adelia’s gaze as she left.
Adelia made a neat pile of the paperwork. If Theodore ordered me about like that, she thought, the man would find himself starving in a ditch before the day was out. She kept her feelings to herself and said, “Well, that is that, for the moment. Miss Lamb, I must say, we have quite a history together...”
“We have, and I shall be forever grateful to your care when I was a girl. You can still call me Philippa, you know. It would remind me of happy times.”
Adelia smiled. “You know I care little for false ceremony but I want to give you the respect that you deserve. And it is of happy times now that I want to speak. This is a somewhat delicate question and I am talking with you as a woman speaks to another woman, as equals. I am only Dido’s mother, but you are her close friend. Tell me: is she truly happy in her marriage with Lord Mondial?”
Philippa said, quickly, “Oh yes, of course she is!” Then she turned her face away and sighed.
“Go on,” Adelia said.
“It is nothing.” Philippa stood up and shook out the folds of her skirts. “I feel restless. My walk was short and unsatisfactory. I wish this weather would break.”
“Go down to the fishponds, perhaps? Ignore our nonsense about the yew trees. I meant no harm by it.”
“I think that I might. Thank you, my lady, and please do not fret about Dido. You have nothing at all to worry about. He is a most excellent man. Everyone says so, especially he himself.”
“I shall try not to worry. But it is a mother’s lot to fret endlessly, and I have seven of these worries to carry with me. They marry and leave my house but they never leave my heart.”
Philippa smiled weakly and slipped away.
Adelia tidied up the rest of the writing paraphernalia. She paced the room and glanced out of the window. The air was shimmering with the heat and nothing stirred in the gardens. She stood in the shade looking north, and wondered if she ought to return to her
own home. She didn’t care much for the idea of the garden party and the house was soon to be filling with more and more people. It would be exhausting.
In a way, she knew that she was running away from the problem of her husband’s idiotic medical practice and it wasn’t going to solve itself. Their absence would let the current scandals die down a little but as soon as they returned, Theodore would take up his crusade again, and the problems would resume as before.
If only he could accept that he lacked the bedside manner that a good doctor needed! Perhaps if he had been able to pursue his career when he had been a young man he might have learned the necessary skills – though she doubted that. His blunt rationality ran deep in his nature. It went right back to the relationship he had had with his own father, and the country doctor who had saved his father’s life.
Adelia had to come up with something else to give Theodore’s life meaning. But now that all of his daughters had grown up and were married, what else could a wealthy Earl do? He was not one for dalliances and affairs; he did not gamble; he had little interest in sport, literature or the theatre. He travelled from time to time, and collected things that he carefully arranged in cabinets around the house, but one could not spend one’s life on the move, gathering up the objects of the world. That would not satisfy his need to be essential. Essential in a way that his dead father would recognise.
She left the room and walked slowly back to their assigned suite, which was on the floor above. Mondial Castle was large and rambling, and the interior corridors were blissfully cool by virtue of the thick stone walls. She wanted to loosen her stays, perhaps throw off her day dress altogether, and cast a loose silk robe around her shoulders like a dissolute actress. It was exactly the kind of weather for lounging on a couch and drinking something cool and faintly alcoholic. Maybe I should, she thought with a secret grin. Goodness knows, I am old enough to be able to do as I please.
But the matter of her background – which was never quite good enough – meant that she was forever doomed to be judged against higher standards than those born into the aristocracy. It was the curse of the middle classes, she thought. A woman born into the peerage could run naked through Covent Garden if she pleased, and the scandal would light the papers for a little while but soon fade. Only if the woman continued to act in such a manner would questions be asked. But a woman of the gentry had to do everything so correctly at all times that it was a wonder they managed to function at all.
She was doomed to be always climbing higher simply to stay still, and to be despised for that climb nevertheless.
Well, despised by old-fashioned sorts like Lady Montsalle, perhaps. Others were more kindly and generous, and for that she was grateful. Life would have been intolerable otherwise. She spotted one of those kindly others on the floor below, and she leaned over the bannisters to call out a greeting. It was Sir Henry. But before she could speak, he had already moved out of sight.
She turned around and headed back down the stairs that she had come up. His ochre-coloured coat slipped around a corner and she tried to catch him up without exerting her old bones too much; but it was no use. By the time she reached the ground floor, he was gone. She carried on to the wide front doors, where a manservant in formal livery was just closing them. He spun and began to open the door once more to allow her to leave.
“No, thank you; but tell me, did Sir Henry pass this way?” she said to him.
“Yes, my lady, a moment before you. Shall I call him?”
“No, thank you. It is too hot to be walking, calling or any other such thing.” Then she remembered that Philippa had gone out for a walk, too.
She smiled.
“My lady?”
“Oh – no, thank you, that will be all.” She headed back upstairs again, and couldn’t repress her smiles. So the match between Sir Henry and Philippa Lamb looked more likely than ever. For surely he was following her – perhaps on an arranged assignation! Adelia ought to have disapproved of it but this was exactly what they had all planned. She had no doubts as to Sir Henry’s honour. Even a secret tryst among the yew trees offered no hint of danger to Philippa’s chastity. And if a little gossip emerged, it would not matter if they were soon to be wed anyway.
Adelia could have clapped her hands in joy. Her prowess as a match-maker was indeed great.
Five
Lord Calaway loitered grumpily in the stable-yard. On the previous day, he’d loitered grumpily in Lord Mondial’s extensive library and he had actually had fun in between bouts of grumpiness though he wasn’t going to admit that openly. He had lost himself in books for many hours and made copious notes about scientific developments that he had missed. At home, of course, he took all of the most important London journals, and made pains to attend lectures at the Royal Institution where he was well-known as a significant patron, yet there always seemed to be something new happening that he didn’t know about. It was both infuriating and exciting. The miserable lot of the majority of humankind was improving on an almost daily basis. He had little to do with the truly poor folk in his everyday life but that did not mean he wasn’t sensitive to their plight on a very abstract level. He might not have noticed if someone in front of him was worried about their children, but he would have noticed their malnutrition and if the person was an estate worker of his own, he would have taken that matter very seriously – almost as a personal slight against his own management of his lands.
The previous evening had brought on a headache which he self-diagnosed as an excess of close study and bad lighting, and he had prescribed himself a dose of fresh air. He had hoped to take a bracing walk on the hills but the oppressive heat had made his head feel as if it were in a vice. He wanted to avoid any laudanum-containing cure, as he tended to suffer sweaty after-effects once the opium wore off. He envied his wife, who could retire to her chambers with a moderate dose of silver-coated opium pills and emerge the next morning as fresh as a daisy.
Thinking of his wife made him sigh in exasperation. She was right, of course, to drag him away from home so that Mr Postlethwaite could do whatever it was that he did and make all the problems relating to the potential lawsuit go away. And she was an absolute marvel, of that he was certain, when it came to arranging marriages. She seemed to know how people would fit together with the skill of a cabinetmaker carving out a mortise and tenon joint. She had spoken lately of a slight ill-ease about Lord Mondial and their daughter, but as far as Theodore could see, Dido could not possibly have been any happier. Theodore did not doubt Adelia’s talents as a match-maker in any way. If Adelia had once thought Lord Mondial was the best husband for Dido, then he was, and that was that. The case was closed.
Theodore wandered past the loose boxes that ranged around the courtyard of the stable area. The horses stayed well back in the shade, not even caring to let their curiosity override their desire to stay cool. Only one big rangy hunter came forward briefly to eye Theodore sideways in the hope of treats. Theodore put his hands behind his back and the big bay horse retreated, swishing his short tail in annoyance.
A shot rang out.
Both Theodore and the hunter had the same startled reaction: a tensing of the body, a stiffening of the legs, a freezing of the head while the eyes rolled in the direction of the sound.
A second gunshot echoed off the stone walls of the castle and the courtyard, but Theodore had just begun to tilt his head and he got a sense of the origin of the sound. It didn’t come from the castle itself, but from the lower grounds though it was distorted and possibly deflected by the walls.
He ran. And he ran towards the shots, of course. He tried to shout as he went but he was in his late fifties and he had to make the choice to breathe well and run silently. He hurtled over the hard parched lawns and headed down towards the walled area that enclosed the ornamental fishponds. Alongside this area was a dark path lined with gloomy yew trees and he could see a pale shape deep in the shadows.
And he could hear groaning and it wasn’t co
ming from his own tired lungs.
Theodore slowed down, thinking now of his own safety. “Who’s there?” he called out as strongly as he could manage. “There is an army of us, you know, behind me – so show yourself and throw down your weapon!”
“Calaway, for God’s sake, get over here,” replied Lord Mondial in a broken voice thick with something strange.
Tears.
To hear another man cry seemed to plunge a cold knife into Theodore’s heart. He leaped forward into the darkness of the yew tree walk. His eyes adjusted slowly but there was enough light to make out a scene of horror.
Philippa Lamb, the dear sweet girl who had been Dido’s friend in childhood, and who was now being courted – at his wife’s management – by Sir Henry Locksley, lay on the floor, her upper body supported by Lord Mondial who was kneeling in the yew needles and dusty dark earth. Philippa’s pale dress was shockingly marred by a huge red circle in the centre of her torso. Her head hung down and she made no sound.
“Help us!” Lord Mondial said, trying to hold her up. Theodore fell to his own knees and reached out for Philippa. As she slumped forward, becoming a sudden dead weight in his arms, he noticed that Lord Mondial was also injured.
“Your arm, Mondial,” he said urgently.
“It will heal – see to her, see to her, damn it! You’re a doctor! What’s the bloody point of you if you can’t save her? Oh God – no...”
All Theodore could do was lay her flat on the ground and arrange her clothing to make her decent in death. “The internal organs have been ripped apart,” Theodore said, assessing the situation quickly. The poor girl. He clung to rationality, using his training to stave off the clawing and cloying emotion of impending grief. “She is not breathing and her pulse is quite gone. Even if the bullet had not lodged so deep inside her, causing such massive bleeding, no doubt the shock would have killed her. Her lungs might have been punctured. Also...”
