by Joan Smith
“A doctor, eh? I suppose he’s a church doctor. One of the local Thornes?”
“Yes, you remember Dorion.”
“Ah, Dorion—the purebred, like yourself. You sure the Dame isn’t choosing your beau for you? I can’t believe you are much impressed with his sang-froid, and I mean that to be taken quite literally, as you always do interpret the French idiom, my little cabbage.”
“Mama favours him, of course, but he is well thought of hereabouts by everyone.”
“Let us say nearly everyone. I consider him in the nature of a Thorne in the side. I never liked him above half, but maybe that’s because he was always held up as a model of perfection to me—going to college on scholarship and nabbing every prize going. I can’t imagine what you see in that dull fellow. Shall we get down and walk? I see the yellow sally is running in the creek. I’ll pick you some if you like.” He threw a leg over the mount’s back and hopped down, looking expectantly to Eddie to make her own descent, but she sat waiting for his help.
“Learning all the ladies’ tricks, I see,” he laughed up at her and raised his arms to help her down. She suddenly felt embarrassed and hesitated a moment, so that he stood looking up at her shy smile; and, when she did jump down, he was aware of the soft feminine feel of her waist between his hands. After her feet touched the ground he held her a moment, looking at her. “I think you’ve grown,” he said. “You didn’t used to be up to my chin.”
“Yes, I’m taller than Mama now,” she replied, and stepped back from him.
He kept looking at her. “You’ve got—bigger,” he said, which sounded a little foolish as she was quite slim. “Filled out, I mean,” he enlarged.
“Well, I am a girl, Helver,” she said, laughing lightly.
“No, you’re a woman,” he answered, and seemed quite displeased to have discovered it. They walked through the fields, leading their mounts; and, with every tree and hillock recalling some childhood exploit to them, Helver soon forgot the nasty trick Eddie had played him by growing up. He also forgot to pick the yellow sally but remembered more tales from abroad. The creek appeared to remind him of Italy.
“What we need for this is a gondola,” he told her.
“A raft, do you mean?” she asked.
“No, a boat, you ignoramus. And a gondolier so we can sit down and talk and make love while he rows us.”
“Is that what you did in Spain?”
“It’s Italy where you use gondolas. In Venice the sidewalks are all water.”
“Does it rain a lot?”
“There wasn’t a speck of rain all the time I was there. Actually, I was only in Venice a week.”
“Why don’t they put cobblestones down?”
“In a canal? Use your head, Eddie. Really, you’re as ignorant as a hummingbird. I should take you to Italy and Spain. You’d love it. It’s time you discovered what’s going on in the world.”
“I’d better get married first, don’t you think? I wouldn’t want to scandalize the Venetians.”
“Yes, single ladies don’t have any fun. Couldn’t we rig up a gondola for this creek, I wonder?” he asked, looking around for logs.
“It’s only six inches deep,” Eddie reminded him.
He stuck in his boot to the ankle to test it; it was a very fine boot, too, of Cordoba leather, purchased in Spain. “At least we wouldn’t drown. Did I tell you about the girl in Venice who pushed me into the canal from our gondola?”
"No."
“No, and I guess I’d best not tell you, either, as the details return to me. Let’s tether the horses to a tree and leap across to the other side. There are some nice bluebells there. They’ll match your eyes. You don’t see many blue eyes in Italy.”
“My eyes are grey,” Eddie mentioned.
“Are they though? I thought they were blue. Travers’s eyes are blue. I must have seen your eyes a thousand times. How unobservant of me. It’s pebbles or slate I should be giving you to match them,” he said, looking to confirm that indeed they were grey. With the longest lashes he had ever seen anywhere.
“Let’s go,” he said, and with a leap he was across the creek, with just one foot landing in the water on the other side. “That will teach me to jump off my hocks,” he laughed, shaking the water. “Come on, I’ll catch you.”
“I’ll never do it,” Eddie answered, looking with some uncertainty at the creek, which was at its highest point in the spring.
“Yes you will. You used to jump it ten years ago when your legs were only half the length they are now. Come on."
Helver had always demanded the impossible of her on their excursions in the meadow. She had been forced up trees whose height terrified her, into caves where the shadows scared her half to death and many times she had been commanded across this same creek. She went back a few steps to give herself a start, daintily lifted her skirts and jumped across it. With a longer start than Helver, she got both feet on to dry land. Helver caught her, though it was not strictly necessary for safety purposes.
“Good girl,” he said. But with his hands again on her waist, he was reminded that she was no longer a slip of a girl. And, really, he couldn’t think how he came never to have noticed her grey eyes before.
“You can let go now,” she said, pushing his hands gently away.
“Oh, yes, I must remember you’re not a married lady yet. Too bad,” he replied lightly.
“You’d best remember you’re back in England, too. Married ladies aren’t so available here.”
“No, you have to wait around till they’re widowed. Though I must say in London the married ladies are not at all untouchable.”
Eddie sighed wearily at his indefatigable pursuit of women, but he grabbed her hand and ran off to a nearby field to pick three bluebells and hand them to her. She also picked one, and gave it to him.
“In Spain, you know, when a lady gives you a flower, it’s an invitation.”
“An invitation to what?” she asked.
“To—nothing.”
“That’s not much of an invitation, is it?”
“No, I guess not.” He looked at Eddie closely and couldn’t quite decide whether she was grown up or not. She still had a blunt, childish way of speaking.
“Is it an invitation to amor?” she asked, quizzing him.
“Something like that.” In the old days she would have been treated to an unexpurgated telling of all his knowledge, but now there was some strangeness between them. He was impatient with it.
“You should have warned me. I think I’ll take my flower back.”
“No, I’ll keep it. You’re not getting out of your invitation that easily.” He put it in his buttonhole, and they walked on in a silence not so comfortable as it used to be between them till Helver spotted their old cave and had to go in and rediscover it. “Look at the pile of stones. Do you remember we were going to kill dinosaurs with them?”
“And rabbits, to skin and eat,” she remembered. “I hate rabbit stew, actually. It makes me sick.”
“I was sick as a horse in Florence from eating some bad seafood—flat on my back for a week. I saw the house where Dante lived.”
“Dante who?”
“Eddie, don’t you know who Dante is?”
“No, who is he?” She probably knew more about English history than anyone in Wiltshire except her mother, but she realized that in other matters she had something to learn. Her conversations with Doctor Thorne also made her aware of her ignorance, but with him she could not admit so baldly that she didn’t know what he was talking about. Yet he would explain more kindly than Helver, and not say a word to make her feel ignorant.
“He was Beatrice’s lover,” he told her.
“Who is Beatrice?” she asked, unabashed to reveal the full depths of her lack of knowledge.
“They were the greatest pair of lovers ever known.”
“You couldn’t expect Mama to tell me that! Was he her cavaliere servente?”
“No, he
was engaged to another lady.”
“Can’t an engaged man be a cavaliere?”
“It wasn’t that way with them. It was a real love affair. The kind that only happens once in a century or so.”
“It shouldn’t happen—except between a man and his wife, I mean.”
“You can’t control a passion like that. It has nothing to do with marriage—with man-made laws and settlements and legal papers. It’s like some great elemental force that you couldn’t combat if you wanted to, and who would want to?”
“I would if I were engaged to someone else.”
“Well, I wouldn’t. I’d give anything to have been Dante. It was worth the trip to Hell and Purgatory and all the rest. I’ll try to find you a translation of The Divine Comedy. Then you’ll understand. It’s a poem Dante wrote.” Helver had been reading The Divine Comedy steadily for a year himself and considered it the greatest thing ever written.
“Good, I like comedies.”
“It’s a poem, Eddie.”
“Oh, a holy poem, I suppose. I mean, you said ‘divine.’”
“A divine poem—holy, if you like, or a story or an allegory or a mystical explanation of life. It’s everything.”
“I’m reading Walter Scott’s Waverley novels,” she offered, to show him her mind was occupied, too; and, despite his enthusiasm for Dante, he had also taken considerable enjoyment from the Wizard of the North and was ready to discuss his works.
Helver kicked a few stones from the pile at the cave’s mouth and looked at Edith. “I should be getting back to the Hall. There are usually half a dozen people waiting to see me.” This was a new formality between them, for excuses to be necessary. In the past he would just have gone, saying goodbye if he thought of it. But Eddie was a lady now, and he felt some sense of decorum must be maintained. “Shall I ride you home?”
“Oh, no. I’ll go alone.”
“Did the Dame rip up about my calling the other day?”
“No—no, it’s not that.”
“I see,” he said, and here was something else different. Eddie was lying to him, and he was pretending to believe her. They were becoming polite to each other, like adults, or strangers.
They recrossed the stream at a narrower point where no help was required by Edith. He helped her up into the saddle and stood till she rode off, waving a salute. Everything had changed. The meadow had changed, he had changed and Eddie Durden had changed. He wished things were back as they had been. What he really wished was that he was a boy again, with no group of people waiting to be interviewed, and no responsibilities. He was unhappy as he rode home, even angry—with Eddie, and the world.
Edith cantered rather quickly back to the Court. Her mouth was turned down at the corners. He hadn’t changed a bit, she thought. He was still wild, woman-crazy, still thinking she was a child. He didn’t even know her eyes were grey, and they had been as close as brother and sister. She knew every line of his face, every scar and every contour. She knew him inside-out.
* * *
Chapter 5
Helver Trebourne, used to a life of idle dissipation, found that as Duke of Saymore a great change was taking place. Instead of awaking mornings with twenty or so hours to kill, for he never slept much, he had a crowded calendar on his hands. When his father was alive he had never been induced to take any interest in the domain that would one day be his, had no clear idea of how many acres or tenants he had, nor even what was his income.
Now he spent his mornings seeing a crowded anteroom of people ranging from office-seekers to tenants with problems and his afternoons with Forringer, his bailiff, riding about the estate to decide on projects. Such arcane matters as tilling fields, trying a new strain of sheep and building new fences were brought to his attention for consideration, and he realized his own ignorance. But Forringer did not despair of making him a good landlord. He was quick to learn the rudiments of farming, swift of eye to see a field lying fallow due to an excess of water, good at figures to realize the profit to be made from spending money on improvements. He was also more daring than the old Duke, ready to try anything and to institute improvements on a grand scale. The tenant farms along the Avon that were slowly sinking into the river would not be jacked up and moved back a dozen yards but rebuilt from scratch in brick, not plaster and wood.
“It’ll cost you something,” Forringer warned.
“Yes, and a good deal more if we move them this year and they take to crumbling on us in another three. As well do the thing right. I’m richer than I knew.”
“Aye, well, the late Duke was an accountant, if you’ll pardon my saying so, Your Grace. He had an eye to the interest always. If you invested the difference between moving and building into the funds, you’d be making five percent.”
“Which would cover about one-quarter the cost of building in three years’ time.”
“The costs will be up in three years’ time, too, but meanwhile you’ll be losing the interest.”
“And my tenants gaining decent roofs over their heads. There are rats in those thatched roofs, Forringer. I think I must bring a team down here for a rat hunt. It’ll be great fun.” Fun was never quite abandoned in his pursuit of duty.
“Her Grace likes the thatched roofs. Gives the place a quaint look, you know.”
“Her Grace doesn’t have to have rats gnawing their way through her larder.” She did, however, have still a leaky roof over her own head, as Helver hadn’t gotten around to having it mended.
“We’ll go ahead with the brick homes, then?” Forringer asked hopefully.
“Yes, get in touch with suppliers and builders and send them around to see me. We’ll want to give the work to local people as much as possible.”
He came home tired after his outings but with a feeling of quiet satisfaction of a day’s work done, to be greeted by his mother, Aunt Sara and her husband, Uncle Egbert, to tell him the men hadn’t come to start on the roof, and the fires in the succession houses had been allowed to go out, and the cook’s helper must be turned off for she was a thief, stealing the eggs. A dozen short today alone.
“Things weren’t let run to rack and ruin when your father was alive,” Sara told him.
“That’s news to me,” Helver returned, thinking of the homes along the Avon where you couldn’t step out the front door without wetting your feet.
“What you need is a wife to look after the house,” Egbert would add.
“I have a mother, an aunt and an uncle,” Helver said shortly. “I should think between them they could see to a thieving servant girl and make sure the fires in the conservatories are kept lit. I suppose the pineapples are ruined, are they?”
“They’re not frozen, at least, for it’s a warm April,” Sara allowed.
After an unpleasant, bickering repast, one or the other of the old crones would bring out the cards and remark how handy it was that Helver was there to make a fourth for whist. An appealing eye to Travers usually worked, and he fled the house to escape their harping and to find a couple of hours amusement in more congenial company before going to bed. Travers had exaggerated to say all his flirts were married. There were still a few around, but it was masculine company in which he spent most of his time. It was soon being reported in the neighbourhood that “that Helver Trebourne” hadn’t changed a bit. Had kept the fellows up till three o’clock gambling at the Green Man, and had you heard that the young parlour maid at the Hall was already in trouble? That the fault for this was Helver’s had to be denied, but it was seen as an omen of the population increase to be expected soon in the environs. Knowing shakes of the head accompanied these words, and the community sat back to see what he would be up to next. He did not disappoint them.
During his absence on the Continent a character nearly as interesting to the locals as himself had moved into Tisbury. She was the Baroness De Courcy, a youngish widow and a decided dasher. Her beautiful red tresses were brushed back from an alabaster brow; her
eyes were large, dark and amorous, and her pouting lips a feature considered obscene by the females but divine by the men. It was as good as a play to see her saunter down the narrow streets of the village, a different parasol every day shielding her face from the sun, and, unfortunately, from half her audience, as well. But she had a cunning way of tilting it to give a view if the approaching feet wore a well-cut pair of topboots or Hessians. Her gowns turned every woman’s eye green with envy and every tongue loose with chastisement.
Why she had come to a backwater like Tisbury was a subject of infinite conjecture, but, whatever the reason, the result was perfectly obvious. There wasn’t a man in the village or for five miles around who didn’t spend half his waking hours gawking in front of the apothecary shop across the road from her residence, waiting for her to come or go, and the women weren’t much better occupied. They contented themselves to await her presence from behind their lace curtains, for they wouldn’t give the bold hussy the satisfaction of letting her know of their interest.
It was the collective wish of the women of the village to have the pleasure of snubbing her, but the wish was not fulfilled. She ignored them. She smiled and spoke to every man or boy with whom she had the slimmest acquaintance, and they had most of them scraped an acquaintance by holding open a door for her or retrieving her pug, who had the habit of slipping his leash when she walked him. It was no secret to the women that she did it on purpose, of course, buckled the pug’s collar up loosely so he’d bolt on her. The Baroness was very much aware of the title she bore, and the only females with whom she was on terms were the Duchess of Saymore and her sister, Lady Sara. There was another woman, Jessie Hartman, who was honoured with a nod. Her brother was a successful merchant, reputedly a millionaire, which might have accounted for her recognizing a commoner.
It was as clear as day and as certain as Fate that some major drama would be enacted when “Milady,” as the villagers mockingly called Lady De Courcy to cast aspersions on her title, met Helver Trebourne. The curtains were well occupied hiding the women when it was learned that Helver was back at the Hall, for no one wanted to miss the first meeting. It was not quite the passionate affair the onlookers could have wished, but it promised interesting events to follow for it came to light that Milady already knew Helver. It was even conceded by a few of the more charitable that she might really be a lady when the acquaintance was discovered.
