To Felice’s question about when they should expect Lord Deventer, Sir Leon was bound to admit, ‘I really don’t know. He’s sent no word ahead, but I’ve no doubt he’ll be anxious to see the damage. Is his room ready now?’
‘Yes, everything. Beds made up and fires lit.’
‘Kitchens?’
‘Yes, ovens and spits working, larders stocked.’
‘You’ve worked miracles. And I’ve got a load of trout from the Paynefleetes’ fishpond, so with two kitchens working and all the supplies from Winchester, we should be able to manage. Have you heard anything from Dame Audrey?’
‘Yes. I went to call on her.’
She and Lydia had called early upon both Dame Audrey and Dame Celia, the newly widowed vicar’s wife. At her brother’s house, the widow was in the comforting arms of her family, shocked but calm. She had known of her husband’s chest pains but could not think what he was doing at the guesthouse when she had believed him to be at the church.
The brief visit to Thomas Vyttery’s small but well-appointed house was not half so reassuring. Dame Audrey had hurriedly bundled away the embroidery she had been working on a sizeable frame which she was strangely anxious Felice should not see, and all questions to Mr Vyttery had been fielded by her as if she was afraid he would say something of interest. Which Felice didn’t think was very likely. It had been a tense but revealing visit.
There had been one moment, as Dame Audrey was showing them out, when Felice detected a softening in the anxious woman’s attitude as if she would like to have confided in her, but it passed with the usual acid smile and an evasion of eye contact, and any thought that Felice had had about speaking of their daughter’s tragic death was abandoned. Waste of time, Lydia had said on their way back.
It was a time for abandoned discussions, apparently. The one Felice had been preparing to ask Sir Leon about how much of their new relationship to reveal to her stepfather was cut short by a cry from the outer door. A servant, breathless and damp, could hardly wait to reach his master. ‘The boat, sir! They’ve found the boat!’ he yelled.
‘How many times have you been told not to yell across the hall, lad?’ Sir Leon frowned. ‘Whose boat? Smith’s? But no body?’
The man’s excited voice dropped obediently. ‘No body yet, sir, just the boat. It was on the bottom, weighted down with…’
‘Shh! Not here, lad.’ Sir Leon led the way outside into the heavy overcast greyness of the late afternoon where a crowd of men carried a dark boat across from the river towards the ruined guesthouse. ‘On the bottom, you say?’
‘Yes, sir. Come and look. Two heavy sacks smashed straight through the hull. That’s what filled it with water and took it down just below the mill bridge.’
The two sacks had already been cut open by inquisitive fingers, their contents marvelled at and hurriedly replaced. Gold plate, jewel-studded chalices, censors, chains and rings, beakers of silver, salt-cellars as big as buckets, clasps, buckles and bowls, priceless gems from the monastic church that were supposed by now to have been in the London coffers of the Royal Treasury.
‘Riddle solved,’ he told Felice later. ‘The boatman was Smith stealing treasure from the church vaults that somebody had taken good care to hide from the king’s receivers when the abbey closed twenty years ago.’
‘But someone was helping him,’ she said. ‘The man who passed us on the river-path on the night of the bonfire.’
He took her elbow and turned her to face him in the darkly panelled entrance to the Abbot’s House, enfolding her waist with his arms. ‘I’m rather surprised, my lady, that you can remember anything of what happened that evening. Personally I’m more inclined to remember what didn’t happen because a certain person took it into her head to stalk off in a huff.’
‘Did she so, sir? I wonder why. Perhaps it was because she felt herself to be playing second fiddle to a shadow. If so, who could blame her?’
‘Second fiddle, lady? Is that what needled her, then?’
She could have told him, before his mouth stopped her, that any woman so unsure of a man would be unnerved by his slightest lack of attention, especially when every other condition was tailor-made to suit his purpose. But as his embrace bent her into the strong curve of his body, the searchingly tender warmth of his kisses banished those lingering doubts, reminding her only of the hunger she had felt then, of the decision to give herself without reserve, if he had asked it. Fiercely, avidly, and trembling with a sudden surge of love for him, she slid a hand around his bare neck and into his hair that felt damp and warm, seeking even more sensations to add to her store whilst being aware that this was not to be hers for long. Like Timon, he would go. Like Timon, he had never been hers from the start.
‘Tonight,’ he whispered. ‘I’ll come to you tonight. Wait for me, this time. No more playing second fiddle to shadows, eh?’
Even without Lord Deventer’s imminent arrival, there would still have been much to do to restore order to the chaos that followed the fire, for now her carefully laid plans for the rooms, particularly those on the ground floor, had had to be revised, and the New House, which had once appeared vast and spacious, had suddenly become cramped with men and their belongings. She had worked tirelessly all day, but was still finding shortcomings which Lord Deventer would surely mention, if she did not. Reluctantly, she had to admit that, but for him, she would probably not have been so fastidious. Then she allowed herself to be lulled into a sense of false security by the lateness of the hour and, instead of going to change out of her housewifely grimy clothes, she loosed her hair and took a last stroll into the orchard to check that the beehives had been closed for the night.
It was here, beneath the low leafy boughs of the apple and damson trees, that she was found by young Elizabeth who, overcome by her excitement, quite forgot to tell her why she was being sought. ‘Suppertime, I think,’ said the scatty girl, giggling. ‘Oh, no…wait, it’s not that, is it? Oh, yes,’ she giggled again, reminded by someone’s warm knuckle recently caressing her cheek, ‘My lord says he’s hungry and to hurry.’
‘My lord?’ said Felice. ‘Are you telling me…oh…good grief!’
With loose hair flying and a new tear in her gown from the old wicket gate, Felice sped out of the orchard, across the stable yard and round the front of the Abbot’s House where she was instantly caught up in the tail-end of Lord Deventer’s retinue of men, packhorses, waggons and, rising above it all, the leather-covered roof of a coach.
‘My mother?’ she said to Elizabeth. ‘You didn’t say my mother was here. Now what on earth possessed him to bring her all this way?’ The words dried on her lips as the carriage moved away, leaving its occupant to walk with Sir Leon arm-in-arm up the front steps of the New House. Even from this distance, Felice noticed the woman’s swaying voluptuousness inside the long pointed bodice and extravagantly wide farthingale that almost swamped Sir Leon’s legs with shimmering folds of silk.
‘What a ridiculous gown for travelling in,’ Felice snapped.
‘I thought it was rather…’ Elizabeth began but, seeing her mistress’s face, thought better of it. ‘Who is she?’
‘Lord Deventer’s niece,’ came the terse reply. ‘Levina.’
‘What a pretty name.’ Fortunately for Elizabeth, her eyes were too fully occupied with the woman’s glamorous and totally impractical costume to notice Felice’s murderous look.
It was not something Felice had feared because she had never for one moment expected it. Not here, of all places. He would have disappeared to London, eventually. That woman would have reappeared at Sonning, but not here at Wheatley, to claim her property so soon.
In a haze of anger and jealousy, she heard her name being called and, turning to search the crowd, came face to face with Marcus Donne who, in spite of being usually so observant, failed to recognise any of the signs that a woman would know as uncompromising dislike of a rival.
‘My lady,’ he called, holding out two hands to take hers. ‘
You could not do without me, could you? Tell me you need me, or I’ll die.’ His laughing face begged for some witty reply and forced her to relent.
‘Marcus Donne,’ she said, smiling. ‘There is no one in the world I would rather see at this time. Truly. But why have you come? Not merely to see the damage, I hope?’
The truth, had he been able to part with it, was that after only three days of Levina’s visit to her uncle’s house at Sonning, he was not willing to be left behind while she chased off to Wheatley to see Leon at the first opportunity. If she and Leon saw fit to resume their inconstant friendship, then he would resume his with the ward. Not to see the damage, but to do some.
‘To see you, my lady,’ he said, making her blush with his bold eyes that made no secret study of her loosened hair and dishevelled appearance. ‘You should have sat for me like that. ’Twould have been my best ever.’
‘I must go in, Marcus. Loose my hands, if you please. Will you come with me? It should be interesting finding rooms for everybody.’
It proved to be more impossible than interesting, it having escaped Lord Deventer’s comprehension that a disaster and an unready house was hardly the place to bring an extended retinue of guests and their servants, especially a guest as elaborate as his niece.
Her strident voice had already reached the high-notes of demand by the time Felice and Marcus entered the great hall, her silver-grey spangled silk gown almost eclipsing Lord Deventer’s orange-red legs and puffed breeches. ‘Lord, how cold it is in here! Bring my bags, man! And find a chamber for me at the front of the house overlooking the lake.’
‘It’s a river, Levina,’ Sir Leon told her. ‘And we’ve put Lord Deventer at the front of the house, I believe.’
‘Then change it, Leon dear. He won’t mind, will you, dearest uncle?’
Dearest uncle spied Felice, and though he held her glance with little obvious approval, he preferred to reply to his niece before greeting his stepdaughter. ‘Of course I don’t mind. Give her what she needs…ah, here’s the one we need to show us to our rooms. Do we have hot water, Felice?’
If that was to be her only greeting, Felice was willing to accept it, but Sir Leon was not. ‘My lady,’ he said, drawing her forward, ‘will you act as hostess to our guests? You ladies know each other, I believe?’
Regardless of protocol, it was Levina’s extra four years that motivated her to assume an instant superiority over a titled lady. ‘Yes, we met once, didn’t we, though I cannot remember much about you.’ Her open stare was conspicuously cold. ‘Have we caught you in the middle of your toilette?’ she asked with undisguised sarcasm, glancing sideways at her uncle for approval of the jibe.
‘Good day to you, Mistress Deventer.’ Felice inclined her head and then, turning to her uncle, curtsied dutifully with a natural grace that put her distant relative’s sneers to shame. ‘You are welcome, my lord. And, yes, we have hot water and fires ready for you upstairs.’ As she spoke, she reached up to gather her long dark hair into her hands, twist it quickly and hold the heavy coil up onto the crown of her head from where silken wisps drifted downwards into the curve of her long neck.
She heard Marcus suck in his breath behind her and felt the stares of everyone nearby, including her stepfather, but it was to Levina she spoke again. ‘There now. Toilette completed. I’ll get my maid to find you a chamber, mistress, while I show my stepfather to his.’ Keeping her hair up with one hand, she brushed past the hugely puffed shoulder of her ill-mannered guest, called her two deerhounds to heel and led the way up the wide staircase to the accompaniment of silent admiration.
It was an ordeal she could never have repeated. Even so, it had an effect upon her stepfather she could not have foreseen, softening his abrupt manner and, she suspected, causing him to see her in a somewhat different light.
‘Change rooms by all means, if you wish, my lord,’ she said, dropping her hair. ‘As you know, some are large, some not so large, but this is the one you and my mother will eventually occupy. Do you have a message from her to me?’
‘Ahem! Er…yes, indeed.’ He spoke too loudly, still astounded by the stranger he thought he knew. ‘Yes, she’s well. Sends her…er…love. Right, this’ll do nicely, I thank thee. Looks better now with a few bits of…oh, where’s that bed come from?’
‘Winchester, my lord. It cost you twenty pounds. Curtains and bed linen and extra…’
‘Yes, right! It’ll do well enough. Do we get any supper?’
His boorishness never ceased to make her wonder. ‘Supper has been waiting this last half-hour, my lord. We shall have it served as soon as you are ready for it.’ She glanced at his state of unreadiness and judged it might take another two minutes, by his standards. He would once have been handsome, she thought, in a heavily flamboyant way, but was now even more coarsened by an over-indulgence of every appetite, from what she knew of him. His hair was thick and almost white, making him appear taller than his impressive six feet, his eyes heavy-lidded and wrinkled and cleverly concealed from view. With a large family to tend, it was obvious why her mother found him attractive.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘And where’s young Donne going to lay his head?’
Having given the matter no thought, she opened the doors that led off the great bedchamber, showing Lord Deventer’s servants where they could sleep and keep their master’s belongings, noting with some relief how her two hounds kept close to her heels and refused any offers of friendship. The matter of Marcus Donne’s head would easily be resolved, one way or another.
Recovering her equanimity was no new thing for Mistress Deventer and soon her voice was heard carrying across the first floor. Failing the room at the front, she would have one near Sir Leon’s. Obligingly, Felice replied, ‘Certainly, mistress, if that’s what you prefer. He’s downstairs near all the men. The rooms are minute, but you’ll have constant company, and you’ll be able to check each of them in at night and out again at dawn. This way,’ she called, merrily, knowing that the yapping woman would not be following.
She had brought an army of servants, three maids (one for her hair alone) and enough baggage for a year. Felice’s main concern was where to accommodate them all, even in such a large house, for until the extra beds came from Sonning there would be less than enough. For a moment or two, she and Lydia watched the hysterics, unable to decide whether it was put on for their benefit or whether the woman was truly overwrought. They were fascinated by her costly furs and jewels, her neck ruffs, shoes, paddings and wirings.
‘Probably collapse when all that’s removed,’ whispered Lydia rudely, closing the door on the scene. ‘Did you see the bum-roll? Fancy having to wear that thing tied round her waist like a monstrous sausage.’
They had been fascinated also by Mistress Deventer’s striking attractiveness and her obvious skill with cosmetics that reddened her cheeks and lips and accentuated her arched brows with an unnatural black that looked odd, they thought, with her fair hair. In what they presumed was the latest fashion, Levina’s blonde tresses were drawn back off her face and rolled over a heart-shaped pad, its point on her forehead, the rest of it covered by a jewelled cap which included several waving feathers. But it was the dress itself that had made them stare, being a bell-shaped contraption of Lady West’s dimensions and sumptuous combination of bright reds and golds enriched with embroidery, braids, jewels and frills at neck and wrist, balloons of padding on each shoulder and a tightness as far as the elbow.
‘Just as well Sir Leon designed wide doors,’ Lydia muttered, following her mistress down the stairs. ‘She’d never get into the Abbot’s House.’
‘It seems to keep the men on their toes,’ Felice remarked drily, thinking of Sir Leon’s undisguised pleasure at her appearance, ‘but he’ll not find me competing on those terms. Popinjay!’ she growled.
Lydia smiled. She had seen the men’s looks at Felice’s artlessness just now and, in her experience, the competition was already won.
After that disconcerting intr
oduction, it was not to be expected that the two Deventers would even notice what was being presented at supper or the impeccable service at the table by newly liveried servants, the new linen napery, the silver plate and matching spoons and knives, all unpacked that day. The new kitchen yielded a feast which the superb Levina picked at distastefully and her ravenous uncle wolfed down without even tasting: trout and pike with oranges in their mouths, loins of beef, mutton and veal, capons and conies, new-baked bread, young lettuces and radishes, apple fritters, clotted cream and six different sauces.
‘I’d have liked a marchpane,’ Levina said, loudly, as the last dishes were removed. ‘Her Majesty’s confectioners…’
Sir Leon interrupted the comparison. ‘We had a major disaster here only a day ago,’ he said, ‘and this is the first meal from our new kitchen. Lady Felice and I returned from Winchester only twenty-four hours ago, mistress.’
Far from being grateful for this intervention, Felice was on the defensive from the start. ‘I don’t need you to make excuses for me,’ she said, attempting to outpace her guardian along the cloister walkway at the back of the New House. Having done her duty, she was attempting a quick exit to her own abode when Sir Leon caught up with her.
‘It was not an excuse,’ he said, catching her arm. ‘And look where you’re going or you’ll fall over those slabs of stone. Listen to me!’
A Most Unseemly Summer Page 18
