‘That ‒’ she choked. ‘That must be the most unromantic proposal on record!’
‘It’s not a proposal. I told you that. And I’m not a romantic guy. I might love you, cherish you, want to be everything to you, do anything for you, but I doubt if I’ll ever have any romantic illusions about you. Well, will you do it? Will you come to Fenton Field?’
Very slowly she said, ‘I can’t. Next week I have to go to Scotland.’
It seemed to her that his face turned white with fury. He loosened his grip on her wrist with an abruptness that seemed as if he wanted to fling her away from him.
‘Scotland! Then you’re still going through with that! God, what is it with you! Do you think you can play the whole field and then have me still running round like a fool after you? If you don’t intend to marry Blanchard, why are you leading him around by the nose? Is it just for the fun of turning him down? Or are you really thinking in that scheming little head that you’d rather like to be a duchess, but unfortunately Blanchard hasn’t actually asked you yet? Like Richard ‒ and Gerry Agar. Like Lloyd Fenton. No one’s actually asked you.’
‘Now that you mention it ‒ no one has. So I’m asking you if you’ll kindly ask me to marry you.’
‘You’ll come to Fenton Field then?’
‘No ‒ I’m going to Scotland. But I’d like to go knowing you’ve asked me to marry you. That’s what I want.’
‘You mean you want to marry me, or do you just want to have some insurance in case Blanchard doesn’t come through?’
‘That’s an absolutely outrageous thing to say!’
‘Then in God’s name, why don’t you be straight about it! If we ever are going to get married, it’s time you took it seriously. How am I to believe you’re taking it seriously when you’re dashing off to Scotland so you can watch some other poor guy go through the hoops ‒’
‘Lloyd, stop it! I can’t take any more.’ Her voice was shaking and she couldn’t control it. ‘I’m not going to Scotland for myself. I’ve promised Aunt Iris. I promised her this one season. She expects me to go through with it all and going to Scotland is the last thing. She can’t make me marry Harry Blanchard or anyone else. But we made ‒ we made a sort of bargain. I would do what she wanted just this one season. After that ‒ well, after that there’s a sort of understanding that I can please myself. She’s done her best. I’ve done my best. It won’t be her fault if I don’t become a duchess. But it will be my choice. You have to understand ‒’
‘I don’t understand. I don’t understand one bit of it. It’s the most cold-blooded arrangement I’ve ever heard of. You must be a monster. Or your aunt is. Maybe both of you are. You know you’re talking a load of rubbish. This is some never-never land you’re talking about. This isn’t the real thing at all … People with any real sense don’t make bargains like that.’
‘You don’t understand,’ she said helplessly. And her voice dropped away. What she hadn’t done, and couldn’t now do in the face of his anger and bewilderment, was to tell him about Anna. That the bargain had been made as much to repay Anna as to please Iris. Back there, in New York, when Anna had written that letter, she had expected much of Nicole, she had expected what the background and position Iris and Charles Gowing could supply, and Nicole’s intelligence and hard work could achieve. She too would have demanded that the bargain be carried out fully. Iris had played her part. Nicole must do the same. She shivered in a sort of fear, not of displeasing Iris, but of betraying Anna, of feeling, from wherever in America she had made her home, the disappointment, the near-anger because the sacrifice she had made, that unnatural demand of a sick old man she had agreed to and lived with, were to be thrown away. She would have expected the full season from Nicole. As much as Iris, she would want that marriage to a duke’s son that everyone predicted. Nicole knew she herself could not go so far. The bargain had been for a season, not for life. In the end Anna and Iris would have had to accept that.
She turned to Lloyd. ‘Please wait for me. Please ask me to marry you. I’ll explain it all, very soon. You see, you don’t understand …’
He got to his feet. ‘I don’t understand. I never will. And I am not asking you to marry me. You hear that? I’m not asking you to marry me.’
And then he started down the steps, and she had sat and watched him. And as she sat, with anguish and anger growing inside her, the last of innocence seemed to leave her. There was, after-all, no such thing as love. It was all the fairytale Lloyd Fenton had said it was. You could only believe in love for a few weeks, and then it was gone, and such things as suitability and convenience took over. He had said it himself. ‘I don’t think it will all work out beautifully because of love’s young dream.’ Well, she’d had her dream, and it had come and gone very quickly. She checked the tears which threatened. She never cried. Anna had been very sure that Nicole would never cry. Nicole would go on and do all the things that were expected of her, and she would never cry.
But even as she told herself these things, as she reminded herself of all the discipline of Anna’s life, the work, the courage of that last action which she had expected Nicole to live up to, still the last of the girl left in Nicole couldn’t quite believe it. She still expected Lloyd to stop, turn and come back towards her. But he didn’t.
After fifteen minutes she stopped trembling and gathered herself together. At the Alexandra Gate she found a cab and directed it to Elgin Square. Once there she went to the music room and played scales until lunchtime. The household heard them and took note. And at lunch, as she picked her way through the food set before her, the food she now had no appetite for, responding mechanically to questions from Iris, Charles saw with regret that her face had assumed once again that grave, guarded look, and he wondered what had happened in this last month that was now so suddenly ended.
5
The clippings were coming now quite regularly to the post office box which Anne Maynard had rented under an assumed name in Santa Ana. She had made arrangements for the service after seeing an advertisement in the Wall Street Journal. She had been afraid that the London magazines she subscribed to would not catch every item about Nicole, so the clipping service had been the answer. The gossip columns gave her the snippets of news she craved and were less discreet than the glossy magazines. It was weeks after each event before she received news of it, but her hunger for them fed upon itself. She saw informal photographs of Nicole ‒ Nicole at Henley, Nicole at Ascot. It was long after August before she received the first rumours of a possible engagement to the duke’s heir. When she read that, she had drawn in her breath sharply, and she had known how great had been the pain and resentment she had nursed all these years. Now her impatience to learn more consumed her. The mails were so slow; and she did not want to appear at the Post Office in Santa Ana more than once a week. She worked longer hours, worked at Frank Hayward’s office, worked in the vegetable garden at her house, studied the financial reports that had become her consuming interest, and still Nicole hung always in the back of her mind. She found herself more impatient with each day; it was like those dreadful serials they were showing at the movies, always the question left unanswered until the next week. And then she grew ashamed of her own ambition, and in a contradictory move, she allowed herself to buy a silver samovar when the contents of a house in Pasadena were auctioned. It bore the crest of some noble Russian family unknown to her. It was as if she were offering an apology to the background she had denied by polishing it and placing it prominently in her living-room.
The next day, as if to return herself to her senses, she took a plunge and bought her first shares in a largely unknown company called International Business Machines. The depression continued, seemingly not much relieved by Roosevelt’s moves to bring work to the people. America seemed just to stagger along, still gripped by poverty and fear of worse poverty to come. People hoarded their savings, and no one but the very daring, or the very rich, bought shares. It seemed the height of folly for a woma
n stretched as thin as she was financially, with mortgages on small properties spread all over Los Angeles, to risk still more. And yet the sense of risk-taking was about all now that gave her pleasure ‒ only that and the acres at Desert Hot Springs, her old car, her dog, and the growing pile of clippings about Nicole.
Chapter Five
Alice, Duchess of Milburn, was not unapproving of her elder son’s choice of a wife. She had expected a different reaction, and her own feelings surprised her. But she had had two days now to study Nicole Rainard, and she was beginning to understand why she had been the surprise débutante of the season, and, against all tradition, she had been its greatest success. To start with, she was not English. The Duchess dismissed the fact that her father was English; the inheritance did not show. There was something decidedly foreign about the girl, her looks, her deportment, the way she spoke, almost as if English had been taught to her. The Duchess had observed her at various gatherings in London; they had been introduced twice, and she had thought little about it. Now that Harry had insisted on her coming to Carrickcraig, the Duchess had prepared to show a far greater interest. Each year for the last four years Harry had invited some girl or other to come to the opening of the shooting season here, and each time the Duchess had either managed to persuade him that the girl was not right, or the girl herself had decided that Harry was not right. The fact that two girls had refused to marry her son did not entirely surprise the Duchess; if she’d been a young girl, she might not have married him herself. Though she could remember that his father had been very little different. But she had married to become a duchess, and a duchess she was. The two girls who had refused Harry had been of a different breed, and now the times were different. The two girls she had persuaded him not to propose to at all had been too much of his own kind. Between them they would have bred children with even longer faces, more staring blue eyes, taller, more ungainly bodies. She rather liked this small, neat, dark girl who would bring a new kind of inheritance to Harry’s children. The Duchess was, in fact, bored with her elder son. All her love had gone to the younger child, handsome, clever, adaptable. He could, as the younger son, have a great career in politics, or wherever else he decided to launch himself. But the immutable fact was that Harry was the elder and the heir to the title as well as the estate. The Duchess sighed. Nature didn’t always arrange things as well as it might.
When she knew that Harry was serious, she had, as before, gone seriously into the background of the girl concerned. She was American, of Russian background. The Duchess knew about St Columba’s and about Fairfax & Osborne. She believed that both parents were dead. The American background didn’t daunt the Duchess. Her own grandmother had been American and had brought the family a fortune and an infusion of new blood. This girl, Nicole Rainard, was not nearly as rich as the Duchess’s grandmother had been, but the Milburns were so rich, additional money didn’t matter. The function of this girl would be to bear children, and a great name. The Duchess was beginning to believe she might do both very well.
She had come impeccably dressed. That much might have been expected of Iris Gowing, who had money and sense enough to assure that. She had come with her maid, who was obviously devoted to her ‒ the Duchess set some store by what servants thought of their mistresses. She had behaved with beautiful grace and manners; the Duchess had not missed the fact that she liked to talk with the older men of the house party, and, equally, they liked to talk to her. She could, in time, develop into a brilliant hostess, a boon for poor Harry, who tried his best, but had never, so far as the Duchess knew, said anything interesting in his life. There was just enough of unpredictability in the match to give it a chance of an unexpected success. After Harry having brought along four other prospective brides, the Duchess was more than ready to take a gamble on the unknown quantity in this girl who talked little but listened well, was rather frighteningly professional at the piano, and who could make older men smile at her. She might, in later years, lead poor Harry a bit of a dance, but it would be better than dying of boredom. Yes, all things considered, the Duchess decided that she approved.
2
It was Henson, of course, who summed up the situation with all the authority of the servants’ hall. ‘You’re being a great success, Miss Nicole,’ she said. ‘Everyone noticed that old Lord Hawkings spent all his time yesterday at lunch with you ‒ and everyone knows that he detests silly girls. Lord Hawkings, of course, is a very close friend of His Majesty and Queen Mary. Quite a powerful man in the Lords. And as for Lord Blanchard’s brother, Lord Peter, well, they do say he’d like, just for once, to be in his brother’s shoes. But of course he’d never cut in …’
‘You’re all so sure, aren’t you, Henson? I’ve no intention ‒’
Henson clicked her tongue but smiled at the same time.
‘Well, we’ll see, Miss Nicole, we’ll see, won’t we? How did you enjoy the shoot, Miss?’
‘I hated the shoot. The birds didn’t have a chance! And I was terrified one of the beaters was going to be shot. They call this sport?’
‘Well, never mind, Miss Nicole. You looked very well in your tweeds. And there’s a new member of the party today, I hear. Lord Ashleigh.’ As always, Henson knew exactly where everyone fitted in the social scene, who was related to whom. ‘You won’t have met him before. He broke a leg just before the season opened, and he’s been in the country recuperating all this time. He’s Manstone’s only son. Only child, actually. Lord Manstone’s wife was the Honourable Cynthia Barrington. Poor thing was killed in a motoring accident ‒ in France, I believe it was ‒ when Lord Ashleigh was only a baby. Manstone’s never married again. A charming young man, Lord Ashleigh is. I remember him when he came to visit the Hetheringtons. He was about fourteen then ‒ still at school. Lovely manners, he had, and very good-looking.’ Henson talked on happily as she laid out Nicole’s clothes for tea, commenting on the gossip which filtered with amazing rapidity through the servants’ hall, who had said what, who had worn what, what jewels were being worn. Henson was in high good humour. Her mistress was going to marry the elder son of a duke, and therefore would be a marchioness, and one day, a duchess. Henson’s own position in any household, wherever they travelled, would, among the servants, equal the social position of her mistress. The prospect made Henson very content.
It was with less contentment that Nicole went with the other women in shooting brakes to meet the men on the moors at lunchtime. She had known no moment of contentment since Lloyd Fenton had walked away from her, down the steps of the Albert Memorial. Through the days that followed, before she had travelled north to Carrickcraig, she had waited, waited by the minute and by the hour, she thought, for some word from Lloyd. It didn’t seem possible that he had meant what he said, that he truly had given her an ultimatum, and it had expired all in those few minutes while they talked. As she twisted, almost helplessly, in the grip of pride and hurt, the days had gone by, her bags were packed, and she was due to go. At the last minute, unbelieving still, she had tried to reach Lloyd by telephone at St Giles’s. He was on leave, they said. She tried his flat and got no reply. Finally, from Euston Station, she had telephoned Fenton Field. She listened to Judy’s surprised voice, telling her that they had heard nothing from Lloyd and weren’t expecting him. ‘But he could show up ‒ he has before. Why don’t you come down? It’s been a long time since we’ve seen you. Of course we hear about you from Rick ‒ but that’s rather different.’
‘I can’t, Judy ‒ not for a week or so. I’m on my way to Scotland.’ There was a prolonged pause. ‘Judy, are you still there? Can I come down when I get back from Scotland?’
Judy’s voice took on a shade of coldness. ‘Well, yes ‒ of course. But I expect you’ll be rather busy when you get back from Scotland.’ And Nicole knew that at Fenton Field they also had been reading the gossip columns.
‘Judy, I ‒ I want to explain …’
Henson was rapping on the glass of the telephone booth. ‘Miss, the tr
ain leaves in three minutes!’
She had, of course, taken the train. She had, in most situations, done what was expected of her. She had gone through the ritual of observing the men out shooting, meeting them at a prearranged place where lunch was served with a magnificent simplicity which depended on many servants, and a marquee ready should the Highland day turn showery. She concealed her disgust with the orgy of bird slaughter itself, and her boredom with most of the people around her. The nineteenth-century baronial splendour of Carrickcraig oppressed her. She found herself drawn more and more to the company, during these lunches, of the elderly and witty Lord Hawkings, and she didn’t really mind being asked to play the piano in the evenings in the drawing-room. But she did it all mechanically, thinking, through her hurt and anger, that somehow when she returned to London, she would again see Lloyd Fenton. The promises would have been kept. It was a vision of freedom which beckoned. She now accepted the fact that within the next few days Harry Blanchard was going to propose to her, and she dreaded the moment. She had been a fool to come, to be pushed into accepting this invitation; she would now appear to be that callous little flirt that Lloyd had labelled her, and poor Harry’s face would show hurt and disappointment, and perhaps more. She had never meant anything to go this far. For the first time she began to feel that her life was out of control; she could no longer order and direct it as she chose. She was bewildered and unhappy, and covered it all with complete success; she heard herself laugh at the jokes that were told, she made herself pleasant to the older women and did not try to outshine the younger ones, and she was miserably aware that the eyes of the whole house party were on her because they presumed that she would be, very soon, the Marchioness of Blanchard.
Perhaps because his was a new face to the house party, someone who didn’t appear to be observing every movement in the light of Harry’s infatuation, she felt comfortable, almost happy, with David Ashleigh when he introduced himself at the lunch party on the day he arrived at Carrickcraig. ‘I’m David Ashleigh, and you’re Miss Rainard. Can I get you some cold chicken? ‒ I’m sure you don’t want any more grouse.’ He laughed as he said it, and limped away.
The Lynmara Legacy Page 21
