by Joan Smith
The time was also passing pleasantly at the Court. “The Dame won’t like it,” Helver remarked to his bride. “Shall I tell her, or would it come best from you?”
“We’ll both tell her before you leave. But whatever she says, Helver, it won’t make any difference. She is a worse judge of character than I am myself, and I won’t be talked out of it by her.”
“I personally am prepared to dash to the border if necessary. The village will expect no better of me, though I would prefer to do it up in style for your sake.”
“If Mama objects, we could be married from the Hall. Or will your Mama object, too?”
“She never objects to anything but the roof, and Sara and Egbert like you. They will all be amazed at your having me.”
They hadn’t much longer to wait to discover the Dame’s attitude. She soon came into the living room and stopped a yard inside the door to behold the sight before her eyes. Edith sat very close to Helver on the sofa, their hands intertwined, their heads together. It looked so right, so natural to see them there—as if little Helver were again her playmate—that the Dame’s eyes actually moistened up. But sense soon returned.
“Edith!” she said in alarm. “Where’s Dorion? What are you thinking of, child?” Yet even as she spoke she noticed the glow of happiness on her daughter’s face. Such a different face than she had been wearing since her engagement to Thorne. Helver was looking at her, too, with such a tender expression—such love—that she had grave misgivings as to what she had wrought in forcing the wedding of her own choice.
“He’s gone, Mama,” Edith said, edging away from Helver and extracting her hand from his.
“Gone where? What has been going on in my absence?”
“I have been making advances to your daughter,” Helver said fairly firmly. “I know you don’t favour my suit, Dame Durden, but I am pressing it forward all the same.”
“Oh, Helver!” the Dame fretted. “It’s too late. Why didn’t you come forward in the proper way when you got home if you wanted to marry Edith?”
“Because I didn’t think you’d let me in, and besides, I didn’t know I wanted to marry Eddie till it was too late. But I do want to, and she’s turned Thorne off; so I mean to badger and pester you till you give your consent.” His voice became firmer as he spoke, seeing that she didn’t flare up at him.
“Turned Thorne off? Why?” She tried to sound angry but some soaring in her heart prevented it, and there was even a half smile trying to find a place on her lips. “Oh, dear, what must he think? I don’t know why you always have to do things in such a scrambling, uncivilized way, Helver. We shall have to face him every Sunday, and I for one blush to see him again.”
Helver was amazed at the lightness of the attack. Not a word about forbidding the match, and a full-blown smile now quite open on the Dame’s usually worried face. “You won’t have to see him. He isn’t to be our new Vicar. Under the circumstances . . ."
“I hope it was his idea; you surely didn’t sack him, as well as steal his bride!”
“Not exactly.”
“Helver was very generous, Mama. He gave him a year’s salary,” Edith said.
“Did you indeed, Helver? Well, that was very generous of you. But you never were clutch-fisted. No one ever said that of you.”
She walked towards the sofa but sat in a chair instead, as intrusion on the two seemed inappropriate.
“Have I your consent, Dame Durden, to court Edith?” he asked.
“Consent? Much difference it would make if I forbade it! You’d be sneaking off to meadows. Well, you have my consent, but mind you come to the door like a gentleman, Helver. I won’t have the neighbours talking about Edith as if she were just one of your flirts.”
“It would be best to make a formal announcement. We’ll do it today, and that way the villagers will have a legitimate piece of news to discuss. And, Dame Durden, we don’t want to wait awfully long to get married.”
“No, the sooner the better. Well, we have a wedding half planned, so that is no problem.” She did feel, though, that with bringing a mongrel into the family, and titled mongrel blood at that, stewed goldfinches and boars’ heads might be out of place. “I’ll discuss it with your mother,” she decreed, her spine stiffening.
“Shall I ask her to call on you?” Helver asked, well aware that this last statement indicated an unprecedented change in the Dame’s normal behaviour. He wished to put forward the option that would be less galling to the Dame, but as no calls between the two homes had ever been made, he didn’t know which to mention.
“I’ll call at the Hall,” the Dame said. It was to be complete capitulation.
“That’s very kind of you, Ma’am,” Helver said and looked his amazement at his bride.
“Edith has been to call, and, if we are to be connected with this marriage, I must make the best of it. I daresay you’ll be wanting champagne and lobster patties and that sort of fare for your wedding feast.” Tudor times were being tossed to the winds, and a new era was settling in at Durden Court.
“And a smoked boar’s head with rosemary leaves,” Helver added, smiling. “Don’t change for us, Dame Durden.”
“Edith will be changing, and I don’t mean to lose her,” she answered simply.
Edith ran to her mother and threw her arms around her. “I’m not changing, Mama. Helver knows me exactly as I am and wants to marry Dame Durden’s daughter.”
“I always thought you had a good head on your shoulders, despite your pranks,” she allowed through a mist of tears. When Helver heard his scarlet past become a series of pranks, he felt much better about himself.
“I always came closer to beating the quintain than any of them,” he reminded her. “Yes, and I will beat it next year."
“You only want to get to kiss the Queen of the May,” Edith jeered.
“Only if the Queen of the May is you,” he answered readily.
“We don’t bother with that any more,” the Dame said.
“I wish you hadn’t given it up. Couldn’t we have it, just once more?” Helver asked.
The Dame looked at him with quickening interest. “I suppose we could . . . But mid-summer’s eve is closer. In the old days it was the custom to have bonfires . . ."
“I love bonfires,” Helver said, both to appease her and because he did like any sort of pleasant nonsense.
Her thoughts ran to white garlands for the lintels, and at the back of her mind she remembered she had a dozen goldfinches she had been trapping for Edith and Dorion’s wedding feast.
She wrote up the announcement herself, not noticing that her pen flew over the page, whereas it had dragged along when accepting Thorne’s offer. At the corner of her lips a smile hovered. Durden Court would remain Tudorish during her own lifetime; but she would go often to the Hall, and there she would enter the nineteenth century. The Tudors had actually been forward-looking people, she recalled. Especially the last of them, Elizabeth I, with her sending her sailors out to conquer new worlds.
* * * *
It was a month till the wedding, during which time she vacillated between being more Tudorish than the Tudors and giving way to the sweeping wind of change that followed hard at Helver Trebourne’s heels. He was still Helver Trebourne to her and not the Duke, though Edith was already mentally assigned the title of Duchess.
In the village the news was a boon. It was said that Dame Durden, for all her talk of Saxon blood, had been happy enough to exchange it for good old blue mongrel blood when it was all said and done, and likely it was the Duke she had had in her eye all the while, with her airs and graces.
There was plenty to talk of that month. The wedding, the loss of their Vicar under such strange circumstances, and soon his replacement, a single gentleman from Devonshire with a tidy property of his own there, they heard. He had to have a wife chosen for him. The house across from the apothecary shop was sold to a retired merchant from London, rich, they soon learned, and with
two daughters and a son that gave themselves fine discussable airs. Helver Trebourne was not doing much to amuse them, but then the lad had to grow up sometime.
They occasionally forgot his past and accidentally called him the Duke, but to his bride he was still Helver, the beloved friend of her childhood grown up. And sometimes not too grown up either.
“Shall we leave this mess and move into one of the cottages?” he asked her when he took her to inspect her new home, whose second storey was damp and becoming mildewed.
The sound of hammers on the roof came to them quite forcibly. “What—three bedrooms, and us with a dozen children to house? Goodness, I don’t blame your relatives for moving to the Dower House, but I wish Travers had stayed with us.”
“We’ll lure her back when we get the nursery started. Try if you can keep her out! But she was always as discreet as a diplomat. She knows we’ll want to be alone at first.”
“I like Travers. I don’t mind if she’s here.”
“I do,” he said, drawing her into his arms. “We couldn’t do this if she were always with us.” He kissed her lightly on the lips.
“She wouldn’t always be with us. Just sometimes.”
“That means that sometimes I couldn’t kiss you, and I want to. All the time.”
“Do you, Helver?” she asked, well satisfied with his limited ambition.
“No, sometimes I want to do a great deal more,” he warned with a charming smile.
When Travers slipped quietly past the door, returned to the Hall purposely to have a word with Edith, she thought it discreet not to intrude. Helver was doing what he always wanted to do and nothing more, but he was doing it with such enthusiasm that it seemed a shame to interrupt him.
About the Author
Joan Smith is a graduate of Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, and the Ontario College of Education. She has taught French and English in high school and English in college. When she began writing, her interest in Jane Austen and Lord Byron led to her first choice of genre, the Regency, which she especially liked for its wit and humor.
She is the author of over a hundred books, including Regencies, many with a background of mystery, for Fawcett and Walker, contemporary mysteries for Berkley, historical mysteries for Fawcett and St. Martin's, romances for Silhouette, along with a few historicals and gothics. She has had books in the Doubleday Book Club and the Literary Guild, had one book condensed in a magazine, and has been on Walden's Bestseller list.
Her favorite travel destination is England, where she researches her books. Her hobbies are gardening, painting, sculpture and reading. She is married and has three children. A prolific writer, she is currently working on Regencies and various mysteries at her home in Georgetown, Ontario.
Publishing Information
Copyright © 1978 by Joan Smith
Originally published by Fawcett Crest
Electronically published in 2003 by Belgrave House
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
No portion of this book may be reprinted in whole or in part, by printing, faxing, E-mail, copying electronically or by any other means without permission of the publisher. For more information, contact Belgrave House, 190 Belgrave Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94117-4228
http://www.belgravehouse.com
Electronic sales: [email protected]
This is a work of fiction. All names in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to any person living or dead is coincidental.
