The Love Knot

by Charlotte Bingham

  Leonie was immediately sad, and she was not alone. The other nurses too had become devoted to Lord Freddie. Despite his terrible injuries, in between his bouts of unconsciousness he had always seemed determined to charm whenever he could. But following on the normal feelings of sorrow naturally came others of practical reasonableness. Lord Freddie had been blinded and paralysed by the terrible hunting accident. He had been old. He had not accepted the way he was, though he had, thank God, never known the full extent of his injuries. All these factors made the nurses sad but resigned to his death.

  As Leonie helped to lay Lord Freddie out she found herself thinking back to the night, and the terrible pleading of the spirit in her dream, and she shivered inwardly. It was dreadful to think that all that gaiety and humour might now be condemned to everlasting darkness. But she had been brought up to believe whole-heartedly in hell fire, and much as she wanted everlasting happiness for Lord Freddie she found it impossible to believe that a man who had thought only of his own pleasure would be gathered straight away to some heavenly mansion. He must, she found herself realizing, be helped on his way by the prayers of those who loved him, and so, silently, in the hours that followed his laying out, Leonie prayed for Lord Freddie to an all merciful God who would, she imagined, love him for what he was, as everyone at the nursing home had, and in His forgiveness would lie Lord Freddie’s redemption.

  Much later in the day Lady Angela called Leonie into her office.

  ‘We are all feeling sad that Lord Freddie has been gathered, Miss Lynch, but we are all of us assured that it was indeed a happy release.’

  ‘May I have your permission to attend Lord Freddie’s funeral?’

  There was a small silence before Lady Angela shook her head.

  ‘No, Miss Lynch, I am afraid not. I do not, for many reasons, think that would be wise, really I don’t. We do not make a practice here, as you know, of attending the funerals of every patient who dies, although I shall be going on this occasion. It would be a bad precedent, I am afraid, if I allowed you to come with me, although I know that Lord Freddie seemed to have become rather dependent on you in his last weeks. But you do see, if I let you in this case – well.’ She stopped and then went on, seeming to want to change the subject. ‘You know he called you his “little nightingale”?’

  ‘In that case it is just as well perhaps that he never heard me sing.’

  Lady Angela smiled. She always liked people who counteracted a rebuff with humour.

  ‘It was your speaking voice. He said you had such a pleasing voice that just hearing you say “good morning” made him feel better.’

  ‘I shall miss him.’

  ‘We all shall. It is always the same with patients such as Lord Freddie Melsetter, you will find, Miss Lynch. Although sometimes we are, in many ways, glad that they have been released for their sakes, they do tend to leave a big gap in our lives.’

  Perhaps that might have been that, as is the way of things, had not Lord Freddie been such a very special kind of character, as generous, it seemed, as he had been dissolute, for a few days after his funeral Leonie was called again into Lady Angela’s office.

  Lady Angela’s expression was so solemn that Leonie found her heart beating faster, yet again.

  ‘I shall not waste time, Miss Lynch, but get straight to the point. Lord Freddie Melsetter…’ Lady Angela stopped, clearing her throat. ‘Lord Freddie Melsetter has left you a great deal of money. I can tell you, on the authority of relatives encountered at the funeral, that it is in the region of five hundred pounds, in other words a sizeable bequest.’

  Leonie stared across the desk at Lady Angela. Money, left to her? It did not seem possible.

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘I suppose because, in some way, you became special to him.’ Lady Angela looked at Leonie quite calmly. ‘Remember how, in those first days when he was brought in here, you made it your duty never to leave his bedside? And I had, eventually, to reprimand you, as you remember, fearing that you were becoming too involved in this case? Well, you may have become too involved but for his part you were, I think, never very much out of his mind.

  ‘And then, of course, having been told that you had gone away for a few days, and fearing, I think, that he would not last until you returned, he made his last will and testament and being Lord Freddie he included you in his bequests. It often happens with the older patients and their nurses. I happen to find it, as I am sure you do, most touching.’

  Leonie could not describe her own feelings. She had never thought about money as she was nursing Lord Freddie Melsetter, or indeed of anything except that she wanted him to get better, to be free of pain.

  ‘But – it does not seem possible that he should single me out in this way. To suddenly leave a person he hardly knew such a large sum of money. What can he have been thinking?’

  ‘Oh, that is Lord Freddie Melsetter all over, believe me. He was always famous for being as generous as he was foolhardy and impetuous. Oh dear, no-one ever knew what to expect of him next. Believe me, Lord Freddie was what my old nurse would call something other. If he wasn’t in a jam he really and truly thought life had come to a stop. No amount of exile ever straightened him, and in the end he was accepted by everyone for what he was – something other.’

  Leonie was surprised at the older woman’s sudden change of tone. It had become fond and amused, and yet it was as if her words had been spoken on a sigh, and behind them, of a sudden, it seemed to Leonie that she could hear an orchestra playing, a little too slowly, at some country ball in the early eighties of the nineteenth century.

  It seemed that Lady Angela was in the mood to be reminiscent, because she went on, ‘You have no idea what a fellow he was when he was young. By the time his reputation had recovered from locking royalty and his parents into the dining room with his horse, we were all in love with him. Every woman in his neighbourhood, or anyone else’s for that matter! It was not just that he was handsome, but that he was so – so debonair, and so witty. He could ride all day, dance all night, and then if you bumped into him a few hours later walking down St James’s you would find him quoting Horace. He knew the Georgics by heart, and Shakespeare’s sonnets, all of them; he quoted them as if they were nursery rhymes. He could play tennis and swim like a champion and lost his best horse on the turn of a card. We will indeed never look on his kind again. It is said of many, but never so truly as of Lord Freddie Melsetter.’

  Leonie stared at Lady Angela, entranced by her description of the old man when young but somehow feeling that there was something more she was leaving unsaid.

  ‘I always felt, when I was nursing him,’ Leonie ventured at last, fearing that she had glimpsed tears in Lady Angela’s eyes, ‘that Lord Freddie Melsetter was just the kind of man every girl would dream of having for a father, Lady Angela. Do you not think, dashing, and handsome as he must have been, and charming too? And now he is gone, and alas I can not thank him in person for being so kind and generous to me.’

  ‘Quite so, quite so.’

  Lady Angela walked over to ‘her view’ of London and stared out, not really seeing very much, except perhaps the past.

  ‘Well, well, this is good fortune for you, Miss Lynch. Always remember that good can come out of bad. Always. It is a lesson for life. That will be all.’

  After the young nurse had left her office, Lady Angela turned and looked at the closing door and gave a great sigh of relief. She raised her eyes to heaven and imagined Freddie Melsetter smiling his impish smile, his turquoise eyes lighting up at perhaps the sight of a pretty girl sitting on a cloud next to him and playing a harp.

  ‘Oh, Freddie, Freddie, I could wring your neck. Twenty years on and we are all still sweeping up after you, you attractive wretch!’

  Eleven

  The time was exactly four thirty in the afternoon when the heir to Brindells in Sussex, a town house in London and a hunting box in Leicestershire made his first appearance in the world. The snow outside his future
inheritance seemed to its present occupants to be six feet deep. And indeed it might as well have been twice that, for all the roads were quite impassable when they finally realized that there was no longer any point in hoping that the doctor could get through to help with the birth of young John Edward.

  Upstairs on the first floor, in a back room next to one of the new bathrooms, Mercy had long ago surrendered her soul to the Almighty, so sure was she that she was going to die.

  The old housekeeper, as she ran in and out with hot water kettles, was also satisfied, seeing how her mistress was suffering, that she was going to die. She had mentally laid out Mercy in her best dress and pearls before the baby’s head at last started to make its appearance.

  Only Josephine, Mercy’s personal maid, and one of a long line of children, was quite certain otherwise. She, who had been quite used to helping to deliver her mother’s babies from an early age, and in far more cramped conditions, was quite sure that Mrs Brancaster was not going to expire.

  ‘Baby came out head first, no cord round his neck, and here you are both alive, now what more could a body want, Mrs Brancaster, ma’am?’

  The girl, younger than Mercy by about a year, looked down at her, smiling, while at the same time mopping her mistress’s brow with a cold flannel.

  ‘And don’t you worry, ’bout nothin’. As soon as the snow’s cleared Mrs Tomkins has promised to get the news through to Mr Brancaster. Although, judging from the wine drinking and the celebrations downstairs, there might be no need – Mr Brancaster will hear the cheers for hisself in Leicestershire!’

  ‘Mr Brancaster said he would be coming today. Nothing to do with the baby, but he was coming! He did say.’

  Josephine nodded, smiling, efficient, and full of her own importance at being able to safely deliver the son and heir to Brindells.

  ‘Like our mother’s always saying to us when we was growin’ – You don’t want gennelmen at the births, theys only goin’ to get under our feet, Josie. Theys a bloomin’ nuisance to be truthful, and same can be said for doctor. Last doctor that attended our mother, and that were by mistake, he passed right out on the floor and our Gran and I we had to put burnt goose feathers under his nose. Such a nuisance, men is. Still, this one is going to be that different, isn’t he, Mrs Brancaster? Now let him suck, if you would, Mrs Brancaster, and then you’ll feel your belly all tight an’ nice in a trice.’

  Mercy took hold of her son, already feeling the power of his personality, and seeing to her astonishment that he looked the spit of her eldest brother – in other words, all Cordel and not a hint of Brancaster. She stared from his pink and crumpled face to Josephine’s beaming round one and smiled. It was no good denying that she was pleased. She was really more happy at that moment than she had ever been.

  In Park Lane, as the snow fell, despite the weather, the dreadful dirty look to town snow, and the strange silence of the few trade horses and carts passing below her window – so quiet were their feet and the wheels of their trade carts, it was as if they were ghosts – Dorinda was feeling not just on top of the world, but on top of her world. She had now been living under her dear Mr L’s protection for a whole month, and to be truthful she was adoring every minute of it.

  To begin with, and indeed to go on with, she had quickly made it her business to become used to being not so much rich as wealthy beyond the dreams of woman. That, happily, had not proved as difficult as she might first have thought. Mr L was more than generous as far as she was concerned, he was overwhelming in his generosity, so much so that she found herself actually holding back from admiring anything, in case he felt compelled to buy it for her.

  ‘You know you should not buy me all these things, Mr L,’ she reproached him, twice daily. ‘It is very bad for a person to have everything they want, really it is.’

  ‘I have more than most men to give, my dearest, that is the only difference between me and anyone else. If I was a street trader I should give you a shiny silk garter once a year, but since I am not I buy you, like the street trader, what I can afford, and I can afford a great deal.’

  ‘Yes, but Mr L, there is a question of restraint. If you buy me jewellery every day what will you then give me for my birthday?’

  Dorinda was ever practical and she could see that this amused him no end.

  ‘For your birthday? Well now, let me see. Hampton Court. Or a country house. Or a string of racehorses. Or a painting by Sargent. Or a golden coach. Or a skating rink. Or a swimming pool so that you can swim up and down with your lovely hair streaming behind you. That is what I shall give you for your birthday. After all, anyone can give jewels.’

  ‘Except the street trader.’

  ‘Well, quite.’

  ‘But Mr L – should you…that is, I mean…’ Dorinda held up a diamond that he had hidden in the napkin on her breakfast tray. ‘Diamonds for breakfast. That is a little too extravagant, surely?’

  ‘This is an extravagant age, I must treat you extravagantly. You know very well how I feel about you. You are my jewel. That is why I give you so many.’

  There was a short pause while Dorinda, lying against her sumptuously dressed and pillowed gilt bed in her great boudoir with its vast silk curtains, looked genuinely modest.

  ‘As a matter of fact I do not actually know how you feel, Mr L. After all, you could have any woman you wanted. The thought has to occur, why would you want Dorinda Montgomery?’

  Leveen was standing by the bedroom door, about to hurry off to his offices, to conduct his empire along its usual profitable lines.

  He was not prepared to show his hand so early in the game, so he waited for a few seconds before he framed his reply.

  ‘I wanted you from the first moment that you came here, and you know it. I wanted you because you have the most beautiful sapphire coloured eyes, because you are impudent, because you have a brilliant smile, and because I was lonely for someone just like you and had quite given up on finding anyone who would be half as beautiful, or kind.’

  Dorinda sat up, suddenly indignant.

  ‘I am not kind! How can I be? I left my poor husband and ran off with––’

  She stopped suddenly, instinctively knowing that it would be a mistake to mention the name of her former lover in front of the present incumbent.

  Unfortunately Lawrence Leveen mistook the hesitation, and the look of what was actually caution in her eyes, for some remaining hidden emotion, some perhaps still deep rooted affection for her former lover, and such was the possessiveness he felt towards her, it cut into him so sharply that had he been asked to describe the sudden pain he would have said crisply, Lemon juice in an open wound.

  ‘My dearest,’ he told her smoothly, after only a fraction of a pause, having taken in her sudden hesitation, the look in her eyes, the way the name Gervaise had been avoided, ‘we will meet for luncheon, and you will doubtless be ready to amuse me with your chatter then, I hope.’

  He closed the door of her boudoir behind him, but did not move away from it until he had composed his thoughts. He knew Gervaise Lowther, Dorinda’s former lover, really quite well. They were both members of the Prince of Wales’s set. Lowther was likeable and handsome, and perhaps, as far as women were concerned, even mesmerizing, but he did not have Leveen’s money, which was at least something. Dorinda might not be in love with her ‘Mr L’, but she was at least here with him. He did, for the time being, possess her.

  He walked down to the great marble hall of his Park Lane house, nevertheless, feeling oddly restless, even ill at ease with himself. He had not wanted, or sought, to fall in love. In fact, as he had explained to Dorinda, it had not been among his priorities even to search for another woman to occupy his house, or play hostess to his friends. He had loved his wife, and only her, and she had filled his every living moment until she had been killed when her coach had overturned returning from the races. And he had thought never to replace the irreplaceable.

  But then Dorinda had happened to him.

&
nbsp; Perhaps if she had not walked into his drawing room that day looking quite so beautiful, and somehow, for a member of the demi-monde, so utterly ingenuous, perhaps if she had not offered him her late husband’s watch with all the guile of a young girl quite unused to talking about money, and in fact looking for all the world as if she could not have cared less about it, he might not have fallen in love with her. But since she had, and he had been on the receiving end of all this enchantment, he had fallen hopelessly and passionately in love with her at that moment, and perhaps for ever.

  But while he recognized that he could afford most things in this world, he also knew, from seeing the look in her eyes when she nearly mentioned Gervaise, that he could not afford to tell Dorinda how he felt about her. He must keep her in suspense, until, perhaps, one day, she discovered how she felt about her ‘Mr L’.

  Upstairs in her beautiful, vast, gorgeously decorated bedroom with its Louis Quinze and Louis Seize furniture, her new silver backed hairbrushes and hand mirrors, and her endless tea gowns, all sent round from Mr Worth in London, with her new jewellery box that was already overflowing with the kind of jewels of which sensible women never dream, Dorinda became seized with guilt. She had been brought up from babyhood to believe in sin, and now she was living in sin, and she was far too aware of sin not to feel that she should not be receiving diamonds in her napkin at breakfast when outside the window there were people who did not have a bread roll in theirs.

  ‘Mrs Goodman,’ she asked her former landlady, suddenly very worried. ‘What shall I do about Mr L?’

  ‘In what way, Mrs Montgomery?’

  ‘His generosity, Mrs Goodman.’

  Like Leonie’s Mrs Dodd, Mrs Goodman was a shrewd woman.

  ‘If I were you, my dear,’ she said, lowering her voice for no reason that Dorinda could imagine, ‘I would just take what is your due, while the going is good, and worry about Mr Leveen’s generosity later.’