The Love Knot

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘Why are you doing all this for me?’ Dorinda asked, having duly kissed her thanks to him.

  ‘Because you are beautiful, and you please me, why else?’

  For a second just a tiny part of Dorinda had hoped that she might be going to hear that he loved her, but since her husband – tiresome Harry Montgomery – had never once told her that he loved her, not even when engaged in intimacies, Dorinda knew not to expect too much. And so having smiled her appreciation of Gervaise’s compliment she lay back on the pillows and fell resolutely into a blissful sleep.

  Duty is unyielding until it

  Comes to love unbridling.

  Three

  Mercy Cordel would have been astonished had she known what a good daughter to her father, a good stepdaughter to her stepmother, a good sister to her brothers, she had been, for the fact was that she considered everything about her life at Cordel Court in a remote corner of Somerset as being really her good fortune, possibly because all her relatives had told her so, and many times.

  Of course she knew herself that she was fortunate in being born both aristocratic and rich. Even as a child she was grateful for knowing that she was destined to follow a certain kind of life, a life in which she had grown up, that she had come to accept as being not only her lot, but the lot of every other daughter born into an old family who still possessed a large estate, and a town house in London.

  She also knew that she would grow up to know all the sons and daughters of those other fortunate aristocratic families, children who like her had been confined in their parents’ country homes, given ponies to ride, lakes to boat on, and woods in which to roam.

  Sometimes when Mercy was on her own and both her brothers were away at their schools, she would dream what it must be like to be a boy and be sent away. She could not imagine ever being allowed the freedom that her brothers enjoyed. Free to go anywhere on the estate, free to use their brand new bicycles and venture as far as they wished, free to meet whomsoever they chose for shooting, and go hunting without a groom. At these times it seemed to her that the world was closing in on her, instead of being large and exciting as her atlas told her that it was. It had been terrible for the Cordel children to bury their beloved mother, after she had died from typhoid fever – caught while staying at Hurst Castle where she had been invited for a Friday-to-Monday – but when, very shortly afterwards, their father married Lady Violet Mancer, a widow with no children, Mercy came to realize that she had indeed found that rarest of all beings, a truly kind second mother.

  Mercy was not pretty, she knew, but her stepmother was so kind and so sweetly encouraging that she always made Mercy feel pretty. And all the time Mercy was growing up she felt that if she just tried a little harder she could make the miracle happen and that by just thinking and praying one day she would wake up as beautiful as her stepmother, who always said, Will is everything. If you will something enough – it will happen.

  But Mercy was not content to leave everything to the power of her will. She knew that she needed God’s will too, so she also prayed, daily, in the little chapel which was situated up two stairs and hidden behind the great fireplace in the first floor reception room at Cordel Court – although sometimes she did find herself stopping to wonder what she was praying for. A beautiful life, certainly; to marry someone she truly loved, naturally; to be good, of course; but also, in so many other ways, she knew that she was praying to be rescued from just being.

  Very occasionally Lady Violet would join her at prayer, and they would leave the little private chapel together, Lady Violet with her slender arm around Mercy’s waist, and Mercy, as always, lost in admiration, listening to her talking of so many things: of the outside world, but most of all of the need never to relinquish her faith in God.

  But all that was in the past. Now it was growing near to Mercy’s seventeenth birthday, and she was to be taken up to London for only the second time in her life. London – where she would put up her hair for the first time and be fitted for dresses for Ascot and coming out balls; sent to Busvines for her riding habit, for hats to the top milliners; measured for elaborate gowns for every kind of occasion, and naturally for a presentation dress for her Court curtsy to the monarch. But most of all she was being sent to London to hope against hope that she would find herself a dashingly handsome husband, and be married by the end of the Season.

  ‘Head up, Mercy, my dear, just so, very good, shoulders exquisitely straight, just so, just so.’

  That was what Mercy found so excessively generous-natured about her stepmother. She never ceased to help her and her brothers, Henry and Humphrey, to become better people, correcting them in the kindest possible way, advising them in the most tactful tones. Yet neither did she relax any of those rules for herself, applying them assiduously to her own life. She did everything to the best of her ability, running her husband’s three homes with tact and efficiency. Just to see her beautifully dressed figure, its hourglass shape almost breath-takingly elegant with its tiny, tiny waist and its long trail of graceful skirts, was for Mercy to take heart and realize that if she tried harder she too could become like her stepmother, elegant and beautiful, but most of all fun. Because the truth was that Lady Violet made every occasion that she graced delightful. It did not matter if it was something quite routine and dull, she would turn it into an occasion of gaiety, and long before Mercy rounded the corridor and entered the room where her stepmother was busying herself she would hear the echo of laughter from everyone around Lady Violet. She brought fun and music, beauty and lightheartedness to wherever she was, to the extent that Mercy had to struggle to remember her own mother’s qualities compared with this stepmother whom she and her brothers so adored, not to mention her father, Lord Duffane, whose face would light up the moment Lady Violet came into sight.

  ‘Just watching her trip down the Great Walk gives me hope for the world,’ he murmured, every now and then, to his only daughter, and they would both watch with admiration that wonderful figure swaying in front of them.

  ‘Beauty is very important, is it not, Papa?’

  Mercy posed the question with feelings somewhere between dread and anticipation, and in the certain knowledge that she would never be so.

  ‘It is everything,’ Lord Duffane murmured in reverential tones. ‘Beauty in a woman is like honesty in a man: it is everything.’

  Mercy wanted to say, But what happens if you are not beautiful? What happens if God and nature and your ancestry have made you very much less than beautiful, if your profile is very much less than Greek, and you are small in height, and although slim not possessed of Step-maman’s wondrous grace?

  But her father was too stern for Mercy to dare to ask these questions of him. He did not think that girls ‘counted’, which is to say that, although Mercy knew that he loved her, he could not possibly be expected to love her the way he loved his sons. It was just a fact, like the sun coming up in the morning, or the moon and the stars coming out at night.

  Before going to London with her stepmother in the family barouche Mercy stood in front of the cheval mirror in her small bedroom and stared at her reflection, determined to be as heartless and realistic about herself as she knew that Society would be about her.

  I am small and slim, but not at all pretty. This has to

  be faced. I have nice eyes, but not much else. My nose is too big, and turns up, my lips are not full enough, and my profile is much less than Grecian. So I shall just have to work on my personality. I shall have to work so hard on it that it shines through my eyes and I shall just have to hope that someone in some ballroom or at some tea, or at the opening of the Academy – someone somewhere will look into my eyes and see my potential as a person. For not only am I no beauty but my hair is a very dull colour, being brown and not blonde, and my skin although pale is not quite the marvellous bright white that Step-maman’s is. No-one will write a poem to my beauty, I fear, but even so, please, please, God, help someone to fall in love with me!

&n
bsp; Mercy felt much better after putting herself through her own personal honesty test. She felt she could face the world without wearing a heavily veiled hat from fear people would reel back in shock at her lack of looks. She felt that in seeing herself as she truly was, in facing up to the world as she was and not as she would like to be, she had somehow made strides, put her best foot forward.

  ‘What shall I say if people ask me for my opinion on art? I cannot remember what you advised.’

  They were in the coach on the way to London. Lady Violet turned her brilliant brown eyes on her stepdaughter.

  ‘No-one – no gentleman – will ask you such a question,’ she said with her usual mixture of wry humour and hauteur. ‘To begin with, the gentlemen beside whom you sit at dinner, or with whom you dance in the ballroom, will not want to know what you think. No Englishman ever wants to know what is going on in a woman’s head, he is only ever interested in what is on his plate. And that being so, you will find that the only person asking the questions and making the conversation, as the saying goes, will be you. And we have been through that, have we not? We have been through what to ask? And whom to ask it of?’

  Mercy nodded obediently, and then stared out of the window. She was well aware that she was having a nervous crisis about going to London, about coming out into Society, about everything, and it was foolish to continue with this conversation as Lady Violet’s slightly stern reaction and her quick turn of the head to stare forward had just made clear.

  Lady Violet went to London for the Season every year. In fact she had been to London for the Season every year without interruption since the age of seventeen. It was obvious that it was not in the least bit interesting for her to talk about what Mercy might or might not say at dinner. She already knew every social grace there was to know. She knew exactly how to provoke and question, how to tease or put at ease, any gentleman, anywhere. Mercy knew this because her father had told her so.

  ‘Your stepmother can bring out anyone she chooses. People flower in her company. I have never seen her stumped with a personality of the day, not once,’ he had told Mercy many times, which, since Lord Duffane was so very shy himself,

  was, to him, a heavenly gift in a wife. ‘You can see her having drawn the shortest straw at dinner, sitting next to some fellow whom no-one else has ever seen laugh, or become interested in anything except his gun or his fishing rod, and within seconds Step-maman has taken him on and he has become as playful as a kitten with her. She is a remarkable woman, believe me, Mercy, remarkable. The Prince of Wales adores her – everyone adores her.’

  As the daughter of a peer below the rank of earl Mercy was the Honourable Mercy Cordel, Cordel being an old Norman name, tracing back to 1176, but she was not an heiress, as her mother and stepmother had been. Both she and Lady Violet, not to mention Lord Duffane, knew that whoever married her must want her for herself, and not much more, for she had no inheritance.

  ‘Oh don’t worry, little sister,’ Henry, her eldest brother, had teased her. ‘You will break hearts in the ballroom, I promise you, if only because you dance like a dream and you have beautiful eyes. There will be no gilt chair with your name engraved on it because of too much use. You will dance every dance, until finally you are waltzed off into a conservatory and proposed to by some handsome masher.’

  But Henry was her brother, after all. Just the eldest brother whom she adored, and for whom she would do anything at all, and sometimes had, risking all to steal jam from the kitchens for him and Humphrey when they were little, not to mention ice creams on a hot day, and tomatoes from the greenhouses when they were fishing and not wanting to leave their rods, although she too, it had to be admitted, longed to bite into the fruits’ fragrant, warm, scented middles.

  ‘Life is very special at Cordel,’ Henry would say, sighing and looking round dreamily at Mercy standing beside him on the river bank when he fished.

  Although they were cheerful words, they were somehow sad too, for Mercy always felt that he sensed life would not always be as it had been for them when they were children. She imagined that Henry wanted to stop them all somehow from growing up, wanted everything to stay just as it was, a sort of permanent Maytime. A time when everything is just out and the green is at its greenest and the blue of the sky pale and kind, and the sunlight warm but not scorching, and just watching ducks snatching at midges, or horses eating the sweet new buttercup-strewn grass, was in itself a fulfilling pastime.

  But now there was no time left any more for any of those things, her brothers had long ago left home for their regiments, and Mercy’s hair was already put up. And not just her hair, her portmanteau and all her stepmother’s luggage were put up too, in the back of the family carriage. Now moments from a past life that would never come again – fishing with her brothers and running through the fields to steal apples and pears for them from the orchards – ran through her mind as she followed Lady Violet into the old barouche with its much faded coat of arms on the door and its equally faded coachman and ‘boy’, both of whom had been in family service for longer than perhaps even they could remember.

  Mercy leaned out of the carriage and waved to ‘her friends’ which was to say those of the kindly older upper servants who had gathered on the steps to wave goodbye to her. They knew, as she did, that she had to find a husband, that now was the beginning of the end of her days of innocence at Cordel. Quite as much as her father and stepmother they wanted ‘Miss Mercy’ to marry well, if only to prove to everyone that having grown up at Cordel Court, where they had all grown up on the estate, would stand for something in that London, as the folk in Somerset called the capital. For London to all the people who lived in or around Cordel Court was not just another world, it was another country. The housekeeper had never been to London, but the butler had, although only once, on a train. It stood for something, though, in the servants’ hall. It meant that Tallboy was cosmopolitan and could stride about with a man of the world air, and be believed.

  ‘Welcome spring, welcome my favourite time of the year, the start of the Season, the start of fun and gaiety. At last!’

  Lady Violet turned to Mercy after she had made this speech and as she did so it seemed to Mercy that her stepmother’s unaffected happiness was perfuming the air. She followed her garlanded announcement with laughter, for no reason that Mercy could see, so that Mercy realized with a little jolt that perhaps her stepmother did not love Cordel Court quite as much as Mercy herself, for if she did why would she look so thrilled and excited at leaving it?

  Soon the talk was of dresses for the coming Season, something about which Mercy knew nothing at all, having only a riding habit (and then only because it was found in the attic and dusted down for her re-use), some cotton dresses for summer – ‘dreadfully old fashioned’ as her stepmother had been the first to admit – and some tartan wool costumes cut again from old outfits of her grandmother’s, and also retrieved from Cordel’s endless upper floors. Up in those attics you never knew what you might find, but somehow if you outgrew your winter coat, or had need of a petticoat, something was always found. The last few winters Mercy had managed to make do with cloaks from an old trunk, venerable garments that had great brass catches at the throat and were so heavy with fur lining that she sometimes felt that she was growing up stooped from the weight of them.

  ‘I must be the first to admit that although we have had some nice dresses made for you, and some pretty hats in Bath for day to day events, for your coming out dress we shall have to do just a little bit better, I fear. I myself will be going to Worth in Paris for my Court dresses – the Prince of Wales does so hate to see anyone in anything twice, and one never knows quite what is to happen during some of these Friday-to-Mondays one is asked to where as many as fifteen changes are required. But at least for you, Mercy my dear, we need not be so extravagant. You are after all only going through your first Season.

  ‘We can choose you some beautiful creations from Madame Chloe in Dover Street, yet with no n
eedless extravagance, which would never do. Madame Chloe is very clever and adroit, and her costumes and dresses will be quite sufficient for a debutante. No-one, no debutante, must ever look too extravagant, my dear. It gives the wrong impression to the young men. They start to imagine that you are an heiress, and you, alas, are not.’

  Strangely for a girl as romantic as Mercy, she genuinely liked this very practical side of her stepmother’s nature. It recognized life for what it was, which Mercy found somehow reassuring.

  From listening to her stepmother as she grew up over the last few years she had garnered a shrewd idea that the world was not an easy place to inhabit, and that being a young girl was a hazardous business, not to be regarded lightly. If Lady Violet told Mercy ‘this is how it is’ she believed her, and all the more because she was so very down to earth sometimes. It made her realize just how much she owed her stepmother, and how lucky she was that Lady Violet was so practical and easy to talk to about really anything. In fact Lady Violet was so much her friend in every way, she could not imagine making or needing any new ones.

  ‘But,’ Lady Violet continued, ‘that is not to say that we are not going to see to it that you make a great match, because we are. The Season and coming out can be difficult, and sometimes even a dangerous time for a gel, but – and you must bear this in mind at all times, Mercy – there is and always will be a chance that a man, a man from a most suitable background, perhaps even a handsome rich man, will fall in love with you. It does not happen often, for as you know wealth is usually attracted to wealth, but it can occur. And does. Why only last Season Lady Caroline Scaradale walked off with the heir to the Duke of Stonner – three castles and a London square, not to mention railways in America and Canada, and so on, and so on. This is the kind of thing that can happen. I do not say it will, but it can!’