by M C Beaton
“Silly old cliffs,” the countess said petulantly. “Why can’t they stay where they are? And no money to do anything about it. If we had money, it would not matter if this drafty, miserable place sank to the bottom of the briny deep.”
“The what?”
“The sea, precious.”
“Oh.”
“If only Harry were here,” the countess went on, “he would know what to do.”
Lord Harry was their only son. They had a seventeen-year-old daughter, Lady Lucy, who at that moment had just joined them and was filling a champagne glass for herself, guessing that her parents were too worried about something to notice what she was drinking.
“Don’t see what Harry could do about the demned cliffs,” remarked the earl. “Stand there like King Canute.”
“King Canute ordered the sea to go back,” Lucy pointed out. “He didn’t do anything about cliffs. Why can’t I have a Season?”
“Can’t afford it,” her mother said. “Maybe next year. Harry wrote and said something about prize money.”
Lucy brightened, and then her face fell. “But this dreadful war might go on for a hundred years.” She was a plump, cheerful girl, rather slatternly in her dress.
A footman came in and handed a letter to the earl.
He opened it and read it carefully. “The Chadburys are back.” he said. “Request the pleasure of our company for dinner.”
“Thank goodness for that,” said the countess. “They keep a good table. Pity they don’t have a son for Lucy. Do they say anything about an engagement for Isabella?”
“No.”
“That means she hasn’t taken again,” said the countess. “All that fortune and beauty. But she’s a cold fish, that girl.”
“Not with me,” said Lucy. “We always have fun.” She hiccupped.
“Stop drinking champagne,” the countess snapped. “I am drinking it for medicinal reasons. Do you know a part of the east wing went over the cliff last night?”
Lucy brightened. “I must go and look. How do you mean, went over the cliff? You make it sound as if someone had shoved it.”
“The cliffs, dear Lucy, crumbled.” The countess sighed and raised her small, dainty, slippered feet and rested them on the back of a shabby deerhound that was snoring on the floor. “Look if you must, but don’t fall over.”
Lucy scampered off, and a footman brought in the morning’s post.
“Bills, bills, bills,” grumbled the earl, flicking through them. “Oh, here’s an interesting one. Could be from Harry.” He opened it up and read it quickly. “Listen to this. He’s at Portsmouth! He had the fever and was invalided home from the Peninsula, but he said the voyage back did him the world of good and he should be with us shortly, although he thinks he has to stay in Portsmouth for about another ten days.”
“Hooray!” cried the countess. “We’ll have a party.”
“With what?”
“Oh, I’ll sell something.” She looked around vaguely. “I’ll ask Stokes. He’s awfully clever at selling things.” Stokes was the butler. “Have some champagne, dear. This calls for a celebration.”
So the earl took champagne and stayed drinking with his wife until Lucy returned and said acidly that they had better both go and lie down or they would be as drunk as sailors at the Chadburys’ dinner.
Unlike the earl’s castle, Appleton House, home of the Chadburys, was relatively modern with a fine Palladian front looking out over landscaped gardens and was a good two miles from the sea. But when she was younger, Isabella had always envied Lucy. It seemed much more exciting to live in a ruin of a castle on the edge of the cliffs.
Mr. and Mrs. Chadbury had exquisite taste. The tall, cool rooms were filled with the finest furniture, paintings, sculpture, and objects d’art.
The earl and his family had been invited to come at five o’clock to sit down to dinner at six, the Chadburys feeling that the new fashionable dinner hour in town of seven o’clock was just too late for the country. Isabella and her parents were seated on a long terrace at the front of the house, awaiting the arrival of their guests.
“How odd!” remarked Isabella. “I see them in the distance. They are on foot! And they appear to be punching one other.”
It had all been the earl’s fault. He had declared that they were all losing the use of their limbs by driving here and there in carriages. Horses and carriages were a needless expense, and so they should walk the ten miles to Appleton House.
The countess would never have agreed had she remembered it was ten whole miles. The day was fine, and they set out with a cursing and grumbling old retainer carrying the lamp that was to light their way home. After five miles, the countess began to complain that her feet hurt. She was wearing old-fashioned shoes with high red heels which, her husband was quick to point out, were the problem and not the distance.
“Do so be the gurt distance,” moaned the old retainer, “and a curse be on you and yours.”
Lucy swung round. “Shut your mouth you old fool or I will shut it for you,” she snapped. She marched on but pretended not to notice when a clod of earth thrown by the enraged old retainer went whistling past her ear. The servants had not been paid for ages, so as the countess pointed out, one must allow them their little grumbles and foibles.
They were just approaching Appleton House when the earl began to whimper. “I have corns. Bless me, why did I ever think of this scheme?”
“Yes, why did you?” the countess demanded, punching him on the arm.
“Gurt old fool,” muttered the old retainer. Lucy, who would not take any criticism of her father from anyone other than her mother, kicked the old retainer in the shins, and then ran to catch up with her parents who were now running toward the house, both having decided that was a good way to shorten the distance.
The old retainer stumbled after them, stooping occasionally to pick up stones and turf to throw at them and fortunately missing every time.
“Oh, heaven!” cried the countess, sinking down into a chair on the terrace beside Mrs. Chadbury. “My poor broken feet. My darling, Sophia,” to Mrs. Chadbury, “get one of your well-trained minions to fetch me a bowl of mustard and water for my feet.”
“That’s for colds,” Isabella said, highly amused.
“No, no, my duck. Mustard and water for the feet and brandy for the inside of me, and I shall be a new woman.”
Isabella tried not to laugh as a bowl of water and mustard was placed at the countess’s feet. Lady Tremayne kicked off her high heels, pulled off her stockings, deposited a pair of worn red garters on the table, and sank her feet into the water with a loud “Aaah!” of pleasure.
The old retainer tottered forward and helped himself to a glass of brandy.
“That’s a bit forward of him,” remarked Isabella.
“Horrible old thing, isn’t he?” said Lucy. “But he’s been with the family for years and hasn’t been paid in ages, so we let him have a lot of license. Oh, you’ll never guess. Part of the east wing fell into the sea last night.”
“What on earth happened?”
“Part of the cliff fell away.”
“But, my dear Lucy. Your life may be in danger.”
“Not yet. My apartments are in the west wing.”
Isabella looked at Lucy with affection. Lucy’s face was shiny, and her gown was shabby. Her hair was frizzy and auburn, and her face was dusted with freckles. She lay back in her chair comfortably while Isabella sat bolt upright as she had been trained to do by a severe governess. Miss Chadbury, a lady’s back should never touch the back of the chair!
The air was warm and sweet and smelled of roses and newly cut grass. Bats fluttered about overhead in the twilight, and Lucy thought it odd that bats should fly about Appleton House instead of round Tregar Castle, her crumbling family home.
She became aware that her parents and Mr. and Mrs. Chadbury were rising to their feet.
“Dinner?” she asked.
“Not yet,” said Mrs.
Chadbury. “You girls stay here. We have business to discuss.”
“What business, I wonder,” Lucy mused when they had gone inside. “Papa cannot be asking your father for money because he never asks people he likes for money. What was the Season like?”
“The same as last one,” said Isabella. “Hot rooms and hot gentlemen.”
“Didn’t you have a beau?”
“Plenty of beaux, but none suitable.”
“I should not be so hard to please,” said Lucy. “Only I couldn’t bear one of those Nonpareils, you know, all elegance and manners. He would scare me to death.”
“I don’t like fops either,” said Isabella.
“What kind of man do you like, Isabella? We all dream.”
Isabella smiled, a little sad smile, “Oh, I have dreams of my own. I would like to live here until the end of my days, unwed.”
“Oh, Isabella. Why?”
“Why not? I have a very good life. I wonder what our parents are talking about?”
“So that’s settled,” said Mr. Chadbury. “Lord Harry will marry Isabella. Our lawyers will get together tomorrow. Here is a miniature of Isabella to send to Lord Harry. Are you sure he will want this marriage?”
“He’ll do what he’s told,” said the countess ruthlessly. “He knows we need money. Besides, he’s thirty. Hasn’t shown a fancy for anyone before this.”
“He cannot have had much opportunity,” said Mrs. Chadbury doubtfully. “He joined the army at fifteen and he’s been at one war or another ever since.”
“I don’t think Isabella is going to like this,” remarked the countess, ignoring Mrs. Chadbury’s remarks about her son.
“Oh, well,” said Mr. Chadbury, “she is just going to have to like it, is she not? Shall we go in to dinner?”
Isabella, unaware of her fate, enjoyed that dinner party. She had never seen the earl and countess in such high spirits before. Lucy, like her parents, ate a vast amount of the delicious food before her, although she privately decided that Mr. Chadbury must have given her father some money to cause all this hilarity. She found herself glancing from time to time at the beautiful statue that was Isabella, cool and gracious in white muslin with a gold filet binding her hair. She had wanted to ask Isabella to go looking for gulls’ eggs on the cliffs with her on the following day but somehow felt that one could not ask a fashionplate to do anything so vulgar. But perhaps that would happen to her in another couple of years. Perhaps she, too, would become graceful and elegant. But graceful and elegant people did not seem to have any fun. Isabella was enjoying the company, but Lucy sensed a coldness in her.
“Harry’s coming home,” she said to Isabella. “I wonder what he’s like now. I saw him five years ago. He’s old now, of course. Thirty! Fancy being thirty!”
“Thirty is a mature age,” said the countess and gave Mrs. Chadbury a vulgar wink.
At last, the Tremaynes rose to leave. The old retainer was found lying drunk on the terrace, an empty brandy bottle beside him.
“Silly old fool,” said Lucy impatiently. “He’ll kill himself if he goes on drinking like that.”
“You musn’t walk,” said Mrs. Chadbury. “We’re having the carriage brought round for you. I insist.”
“Oh, do, do insist,” said the countess gratefully. She looked down at the old servant. “What are we to do with what’s his name? Put him in the basket?”—meaning the long basket slung behind carriages for luggage.
“We can’t do that,” said Lucy. “He’ll roll about and break his neck. He’ll just need to travel inside with us and lie along the seat where we can hold him.”
And so as Lucy pushed her feet against the recumbent body of the drunken old retainer so that he would not roll off the seat in the carriage, she asked her parents why they were so merry.
“We’ve arranged a marriage,” crowed the countess. “Isabella and our Harry. The Chadburys have been most generous, in fact part of the arrangement is that you are to have a Season when you are nineteen, Lucy.”
“Oh, lor’” Lucy frowned. “What’s Isabella to say to things?”
“Nothing at all. Her parents have had enough of her playing fast and loose. It’s to be an arranged marriage.”
“Harry, as I remember,” said Lucy, “is not the sort to be ordered around. And Isabella? Goodness, she could have her pick.”
“She’s had her pick of the best,” said the earl happily, “and she didn’t want any of them, which is why the Chadburys are arranging a marriage.”
“A marriage of inconvenience!” said Lucy, and laughed.
Chapter Two
KNOWN AFFECTIONATELY by the men in his regiment as Lord Harry, Isabella’s future husband’s title was in fact that of Viscount Tregar as, being the heir to the earldom, he used one of his father’s courtesy titles. His rank in the army was that of colonel. But he was rarely called Viscount Tregar, even the Cornish locals referring to him as Lord Harry.
He was a tall, athletic man, careless in his dress and possessing a mischievous nature that he had not outgrown. He accepted everything life sent his way with good nature. He considered his bout of fever extremely good luck, for it had brought him a chance of leave, away from battling with Napoleon’s troops. What he also rated as another piece of good fortune was that his best friend, Captain James Godolphin, also a Cornishman, had also caught the fever, and like Lord Harry had recovered on the voyage home. Lord Harry had invited the captain to stay with him at Tregar Castle. The friends were in complete contrast. Lord Harry had thick black curly hair, a strong handsome face, wide blue eyes, and a firm chin. Clothes as far as he was concerned were just things to protect one from the weather. Captain James, on the other hand, was tall, slim and neat, and fanatical about the niceties of dress. He was a brave soldier and yet would never dream of going into battle in an unpressed uniform or unshaved any more than he would have dreamed of turning up at Almack’s, say, in anything but the latest fashion. He had blond hair teased into that elaborate style known as the Windswept, and his cravats were a miracle of starched design.
Lord Harry was lounging at his ease in the regiment’s mess in Portsmouth opening up the morning’s post when he gave a surprised exclamation.
“What’s amiss?” asked the captain.
“It seems I am to be married,” said Lord Harry, “and here’s the bride.” He handed Captain James the miniature of Isabella that his father had sent him.
“Goodness, can she possibly really be as beautiful as this?” asked the captain.
“It doesn’t matter if she is,” said Lord Harry. “She’s an heiress, and my parents are in need of funds. They assume I will do my duty. They are going ahead to arrange the marriage.”
“A bit high handed that,” commented the captain. “What if you don’t want the girl?”
“I don’t want anyone else. May as well let them get on with it. I’ll be going back to the Peninsula soon, so I needn’t see much of her, parents get her money and everybody is happy.”
“Do be careful. What if you fall in love with someone else after you are married?”
“I won’t,” said Lord Harry cynically. “I’ve dealt with all the business here, so we may as well leave right away and get this marriage over with, unless you’ve got anything to keep you.”
“No. But you must allow my man plenty of time to pack. I refuse to turn up in a creased coat.”
“You’ve never been to Tregar Castle, have you James? My parents wouldn’t notice if you arrived in your nightshirt.”
Lucy rode over to Appleton House on the following day to see Isabella. She was curious to find out how the beauty had taken the news of her arranged marriage.
She was ushered into the drawing room where Isabella was embroidering the bodice of a dress.
“Goodness, it’s hot.” Lucy sighed, taking off her old straw bonnet and hurling it into a corner. “Well, Isabella, so you are to marry my brother?”
“We will see,” said Isabella. “I do not remember your br
other, although I must have met him. What is he like?”
“I haven’t seem him in ages, but he is great fun and quite good-looking, I think. Very easy going.”
