‘I have an idea. Why not let this sharp blade persuade our Royalist dove to disrobe herself? If you all draw back and give her space everyone will be able to see and nothing missed.’
‘Never!’ she shrieked amid the roar of agreement.
Adam’s voice cut through. ‘The jest is over. There’ll be no dishonouring of a lady on my land.’ He had ridden up sharply and was looking down on them all. His note of authority and his severe expression defused the whole situation. ‘One of you make a step for Miss Pallister to remount.’
She wished she could have mounted without assistance, but she had to get away as quickly as possible. Settled in her side-saddle, she held out her hand for her whip and it was returned to her with her cloak. As she swung her horse round to leave she gave Adam a look of such hatred that his lids narrowed, his eyes glinted with an expression she could not define.
‘I’ll never trespass here again!’ she assured him wrathfully. ‘You and your friends are barbarians!’
‘Neither you nor I have been well received on each other’s land,’ he replied dryly. Then he half turned his face, enabling her to see the ragged scar across the side of his cheekbone. For the first time she realized how narrowly her missile had missed his eye.
‘At least you’ve extracted full vengeance for that mishap!’ she flared out, ‘but I’m still left with a heavy score to settle!’
Urging Charlie to a gallop, she thundered away back through the woods out of his sight. Then he saw that his friends were again in their saddles. His set expression deterred any from quipping about his terminating the sport they were having with the girl. A few were relieved it had ended the way it had, not quite sure how they had allowed themselves to be influenced by the ring-leaders, something they discussed among themselves out of Adam’s hearing as he led the way back to Warrender Hall.
The circle of churned-up turf remained for a long time on the brow of the hill. Adam never rode by it without being reminded of that certain afternoon. At first he had been amused by his friends’ encirclement of Julia, seeing it as a just return for his reception at her hands. He had expected their sport to end after a few minutes, letting her go free, and had not foreseen that the situation would suddenly blaze out of hand. In a matter of seconds his smiling mood had changed to a cold, murderous wrath when he saw she was being offended and mishandled. His first shout had gone unheard. If any had defied him after he had ridden up he would have drawn his sword with savage intent. The three main culprits had not re-entered his gates that day, for he had turned them away before they could do so, their invitations to the Hall at an end. Yet even then he believed that none had suspected he had marked Julia for his own, all doubtless thinking that his honour as a gentleman would have caused him to defend any one of her sex in those circumstances.
It was strange that he could remember the first time he saw her. It had been on his tenth birthday and he was riding a new pony. In seeing her adoring appreciation of the lovely animal, he had felt an overwhelming urge to share his joy and pride. His cold, hard father had admittedly chosen a sound, well-bred mount, but neither he nor anyone else at Warrender Hall was interested in his enthusiasm and pleasure. His mother had been having one of her tantrums that morning and Meg, his last unmarried sister, the only one to whom he was close, was locked in her room. At the age of thirteen she was refusing to marry a wealthy baronet older than their father, and was beaten twice a day by their mother to force her to submit.
Two days after he had seen Julia there had been a fresh development at his home when his sister had been shut up in a cellar cupboard. Meg had always been terrified of the dark and her screams still echoed in his memory down through the years. He had been frantic to release her, trying to shake the door of the cupboard open when his desperate search for the key had failed. His father had found him there and wrenched him away to throw him halfway across the cellar floor. It was after that that he had been sent to St Paul’s School, and he had been glad to go, for Meg had given in. His grandfather, who would never have allowed such treatment of her, was just a memory of kindly eyes, broad old hands that were well used to horses’ reins and that could always find a sweetmeat in a jar for a child, and a wide knee on which a small boy could sit and hear exciting tales of long ago.
It was odd how he had never forgotten Julia. Maybe that mop of distinctive curls had consistently jogged his memory each time. Once he had seen her through the shop window of a Chichester tailor. He was being fitted for new school clothes. Nothing could have been more severe than those garments, for his father had seen the Cavalier taint in the simplest type of trimmings. There was a similar outfit in the shop window to that for which he was being measured. Julia was in the company of her girl cousin, and must have made some derisory remark about the plainness of such garb, for they both giggled as they went from his sight. For some reason he had felt extremely angry as if she had mocked him and his whole Parliamentary background.
There had been other sightings too, but if she noticed him she never showed it. Once they had met riding in opposite directions along the road, but they had ignored each other as those of differing political views did, although neither of them was old enough to be actively involved in the war raging at that time. His visits home were rare, for it was possible to board at school all the year round and his mother preferred him out of her sight. It was not a personal dislike; it was simply that she was not maternal and children bored her. He did not doubt but that she had been fun-loving as a girl, but an arranged marriage with his father had soon crushed that out of her. All her frivolous instincts had had to be channelled into sober tasks and conversation, souring her outlook and bringing forth all her worst qualities of spitefulness, greed and selfishness, which a gentler and more loving union would have tempered. His two older sisters had grown up much like her, but happy marriages had made pleasanter people of them and they were good mothers to their children. Meg alone had suffered and was still suffering. He saw her as often as he could, and when at Cambridge he had been able to meet her every week, for the great mansion where she lived in splendour and misery had been little more than a stone’s throw away.
Now he was alone at the Hall, his parents gone and his sisters far distant. Locally he had many amiable friends for company and was never short of a pretty woman to bed, and the husbandry of his land was of intense personal interest to him. He liked to think that no blade of corn came up or cow calved without his knowledge. If he had wished it, he could have eaten dinner and supper out at a different house every day without retracking, while marriageable daughters were being dangled at him by hopeful matrons at every opportunity, but his liberty was too important to him at the present time for it to be dashed away.
As for his stables, he had inherited some of the best thoroughbreds in the country, for he had the same eye for good horseflesh as his father, who had given him his first lessons in what to look for when he was barely old enough to sit in a saddle. The white pony had not only been a birthday gift but also a reward for showing intelligent judgement, exceptional in a boy of his age, over a number of horses for sale. Pegasus must have been the most handsome pony ever born and it had ever been linked in his memory with Julia.
At present there were seemingly insurmountable barriers in his path to her, the incident on the hill having added another. It was a horrific situation that his father should have fired the bullet that had resulted in her father’s death, albeit that both men would have seen it as a continuation of the conflict in which they had fought with such energy. Robert Pallister had fired back and it was by the merest chance that they had not both been fatally injured, for Adam had seen the bullet hole in his father’s hat. At a personal level he felt the deepest regret over Robert Pallister’s death. No-one of any conscience could do anything but mourn the passing of a brave soldier whether Royalist or Parliamentarian. It was abhorrent to him that his father had celebrated the death of a long-standing enemy.
Julia had much to learn about him, man
y deep-rooted prejudices to overcome, for it was easy to see she had tarred all Warrenders with the same brush. He could have offered her and her family a well-built, spacious house on his land. Apart from the fact that he knew Julia would sleep under a hedge before she would shelter under any roof belonging to him, it was the refusal of the gatekeeper to accept his letter, which could only have been on the orders of Mrs Pallister or her mother-in-law, that convinced him it was useless to offer assistance in their present plight.
But one day he would have Julia in his own bed. Sooner or later she must come to realize that. If he was like his father in any other way than being an expert on horses, it was in his intractable determination to get what he most wanted.
*
Julia told no-one of what had occurred on the hill. She felt too foolish over allowing herself to be ensnared. Almost by the same token Anne had not mentioned the question of moving from Sotherleigh when, with Julia on one side of her and Mary on the other, she said farewell to the servants. She had a special word for each of them as well as a purse from a stock embroidered by herself, which contained money and a letter of reference. It was a harrowing occasion, for all the women were in tears. Cook forgot herself, embracing Julia as if she were still the child for whom there had always been an extra baking of gingerbread men on Saturday morning, and was hugged soundly in return. The old gardener had a last worry about his duties that were now finished.
‘Who will clip the hedges of the maze?’ he asked. ‘Mistress Katherine won’t want no stranger let into its secrets.’
‘I’ll do it,’ Julia reassured him.
‘But after you’ve left ’ere — ’
‘Don’t think of that.’
‘No, miss. But it’s ’ard not to.’
When the servants had all gone, trailing off down the drive with their belongings, Anne stiffened her shoulders. ‘Come with me, girls. Mr Walker’s domestic staff is lined up in the entrance hall.’
Julia and Mary followed her. Thirty men and women with two scullions, one a girl about ten years old and the other a boy slightly older, stood waiting. Julia noted the different expressions, some severe and hostile, others curious about this Royalist family about to be displaced and a few who might have smiled if their Puritan shyness had not been so acute. Both sexes were sombrely dressed in dark olive green with starched cape collars, the hose of the men cream, the women with snowy aprons and caps with a fold back from the brow that covered their pinned-up hair. Anne gave them clear outlines as to their individual duties and then dismissed them, several assigned to unpacking Makepeace’s household effects that had come with them in boxes on a wagon.
Anne suppressed a sigh as she and the girls returned to the west wing apartments. ‘I could see that several despised me for having no housekeeper, but I should say they were the ones equally unsympathetic towards our Royalist loyalties and our plight.’
Outwardly Sotherleigh changed little with Makepeace’s occupation. Apart from the frieze, he had objected to nothing in the furnishings. Some tapestries of his own were hung and a portrait of Cromwell, whom Julia thought an extremely ugly man, replaced to her chagrin the one of Elizabeth on the stairs. The royal portrait was rehung in Katherine’s parlour.
He also possessed several fine paintings of scenes from the Old Testament. Julia saw two of them being carried to his bedchamber, one of David watching Bathsheba bathe and the other of Susannah naked before the Elders; both were women whose stories Katherine had not allowed her to hear until she was old enough to be enlightened in sexual matters. She drew her own conclusions over his casting of the frieze into the flames like a prophet of old and his tolerance of these pale-fleshed, seductive beauties. Makepeace was a hypocrite.
Katherine made a little progress. She recognized those at her bedside and one day questioned the identity of one of Makepeace’s maidservants cleaning the room. The girl, willing and obliging, and one other equally amiable, had been selected by Anne for the domestic chores of the apartment. She had briefed them both as to the possibility of such an enquiry.
‘I’m new here, madam.’
‘What is your name?’ Katherine asked in her weakened voice, propped against her lace-smothered pillows.
‘Elizabeth, but everyone calls me Bess.’
‘You are well named for service in this house, Bess.’ Katherine smiled and closed her eyes to doze again.
It was her longest lucid conversation since her attack and Anne took it as a promising sign. She thought this marked improvement would be welcome news to Makepeace when she put the further appeal to him that had become necessary after the replies she had received from Christopher and from the cousins in Steyning.
Christopher had acted with the swiftness characteristic of him when his friends were in trouble. He had gone to Whitehall immediately and had had only half a day to wait before the Lord Protector received him. His letter had been written the same evening from the Gresham college where he had accommodation. He had to relay the bad news that nothing he had said could persuade Cromwell to change his mind. The argument was that both Robert and Michael had committed treason against the Commonwealth, which made the sequestration of Sotherleigh and its reallotment to a staunch Parliamentarian long overdue.
‘In any case, Mr Wren,’ Cromwell had concluded, ‘no gift once given can be taken back again, a principle which any gentleman would uphold, and this aspect alone should have saved you from rearranging your lectures.’
But Christopher was not leaving his friends in the lurch. He wrote that his sister, who by good fortune was at Oxford the day Anne’s letter arrived, was ready to welcome the Pallister ladies most heartily to her home where they might stay for as long as they wished. Later on, when Katherine was stronger in health, there was a most pleasant house next door that could be rented when the time came and Anne could be assured that Susan and William would be ever her friends and the most helpful of neighbours. The warmth and compassion of Susan’s offer dissolved Anne into tears. She consulted the doctor as to what she should do, but he stated categorically that Katherine would not be able to survive such a long journey now or in the future. This information Anne penned in her reply, while also expressing her immense gratitude for the invitation.
The letters from the cousins in Steyning arrived later when Makepeace had been twelve days at Sotherleigh. The servant of one cousin came with the correspondence from all three, showing there had been a family conference. One offered to take Anne and Julia; another would take Mary on condition she did domestic work in the house since she appeared to be a distant relative of Anne’s toward whom they had no real obligation; while the third knew of an impoverished widow with a cottage who would nurse Katherine and care for her in her dotage. Anne had thrown all three letters into the fire, a foolhardy act since the servant waiting to carry back an answer had seen her do it. After he had left empty-handed she realized she had burnt more than the letters. All her boats had gone up in flames as well.
Now she had to make a definite approach to Makepeace and ask him if he would rent a house in the village to her. It was her opinion that, in spite of his original stipulation, he would never turn her out with a desperately sick woman in her care. She believed he might be presently troubled by the prospect of having to relent and let her stay on, for nobody would want outsiders at variance in every way under the same roof for long and she wanted to relieve his mind. Julia would never give him credit for such charitable thoughts, but it was often impossible for Anne to attribute to another person deeds that would have been inconceivable to herself. Again, unlike her daughter, she did not loathe him for the good fortune that had befallen him. It was merely their own misfortune that was to be bemoaned. Had victory at the battle of Worcester swung the other way, it would have been Parliamentarians’ property being sequestered instead of Royalists’.
She and Mary kept to the section of the house allotted to them while Julia flouted the restriction constantly. The only time Anne had ventured out of her terrain ha
d been at Makepeace’s summons when he had a household detail to query or wanted to question a point of administration by the former bailiff, who had been dismissed with the rest of the Pallister employees and replaced with one of the new master’s choice. Even now, wishing to speak to him, Anne sent Sarah with a note of request for a meeting that same evening. In return she received an invitation to have supper with him, which she accepted. She decided to say nothing to Julia, knowing there would be a tempestuous scene of fury that she should consider sitting down to table with him. But Anne was desperate for his goodwill and to snub him now might shatter everything.
It was a long time since she had given thought on how to array herself in order to look her best for a man. She decided on a rich apricot satin, one of those that had remained unaltered in the clothes chest, and she adjusted the bodice seams herself not to let even Mary know to what extent she had committed herself. When it was done she spent the rest of the day attending to Katherine.
Sometimes after a long spell with the invalid Anne would retire early and neither Julia nor Mary, who were playing backgammon, was surprised when she bade them good night at eight o’clock instead of staying for supper.
Sarah was off duty until ten and Anne was thankful to be able to dress without any silent disapproval from her maid, who would have guessed her purpose. The apricot satin gown had a low-cut neckline. When she had donned it she added a gauzy bertha, something she had never worn with it before, which she fastened with a moonstone brooch, a piece that had escaped seizure during the Roundhead raids, having been in the purse pinned to Katherine’s petticoats. Makepeace had already proved how easily shocked he could be and she did not want to start off by offending his sensibilities with her décolletage.
She added matching ear-bobs to her lobes and then picked up a handglass to study her facial reflections critically. Her eyes were pools of nervousness. She blinked twice as if it were possible by that means to banish the timidity she saw there. What a coward she was! But she would get permission to move her family to the house in the village if she had to go on her knees to Makepeace. Their shelter and well-being came first, and her pride was a small price to pay. Leaving her room, she took the back stairs where she could be sure of not meeting Julia, glad for once of her daughter’s rebelliousness. Explanations as to her absence from supper in the apartment could come when she was upstairs again with, she hoped, her mission accomplished.
Circle of Pearls Page 26
