The Secrets of Wiscombe Chase

by Christine Merrill

  ‘Perhaps not. But I will not have to. You are so very good with men, little sister,’ he said, touching her shoulder.

  She shrugged off his hand. ‘I will not help you hurt him.’

  ‘You did once, Lillian.’ He patted her shoulder again.

  ‘And I regret it,’ she said. She had been young and foolish, and there had been no choice. It would not happen again.

  ‘Regret?’ Ronald laughed. ‘You are a North, Lillian. That is not an emotion we are capable of. The time will come when blood will tell and you will come around to our way of thinking again.’

  ‘Never,’ she said.

  ‘We shall see. But now I must go to my own room to dress. I will see you at dinner.’ He smiled. ‘Remember to look your best for Gerry. If he is a happy and contented husband, it will be that much easier to bring him into the fold. And once we are assured of his help, we will be even better off than before.’

  * * *

  As it usually was at Wiscombe Chase, dinner was a motley affair. Guests were either tired from the hunt, well on the way to inebriation, or both. Today, most of them still wore their fox-hunting pinks, having gone from the stable to the brandy decanter without bothering to change for dinner.

  At the centre of the table, as it so often was, there was venison. When she’d first arrived here, Lily had liked the meat. She had to admit that Cook prepared it well. The haunch was crisp at the end and rare and tender in the middle. The ragout was savoury, with thick chunks of vegetables from the kitchen garden. The pies were surrounded by a crust that flaked and melted in the mouth like butter.

  But venison today meant that yesterday another stag had been shot and butchered. The supply of them seemed endless, as did the stream of guests that came to hunt them. Was it too much to ask that, just once, a hunt would end in failure? Perhaps then the word would spread that the Chase was no longer a prime destination to slaughter God’s creatures.

  Of course, if there were no more deer, they would just switch to quail. A brace of them had been served in aspic as the first course. At tomorrow’s breakfast, there would be Stewart’s fresh fish. A starving person might have praised the Lord for such abundance, but Lily had come to dread meals when requesting vegetables had begun to feel like an act of defiance.

  At the head of the table, Captain Wiscombe stared down the length at the plates and gave a single nod of approval. His eye turned to the guests and the approbation vanished. And then he looked at her. Did she see the slightest scornful curl of his lip?

  He must think her totally without manners to have arranged the table with no thought to precedence. But she could hardly be blamed for the tangled mess that these dinners had become. Attempts to arrange the ladies according to rank before entry to the dining room were met with failure, as none of them seemed to understand their place. If she resorted to name cards beside their plates, they simply rearranged them and sat according to who wished to speak to whom. The men were even worse, with businessmen bullying lords to take the place next to the earl.

  With the addition of Captain Wiscombe, things were even more out of balance than usual. The ladies at either side of him were the youngest of the four. Miss Fellowes, who had pulled her chair so close that she was brushing his right sleeve with her arm, was not even married. Mrs Carstairs hung on his left, laughing too loudly at everything that he said, as though polite dinner conversation were a music-hall comedy.

  Her father and brother had packed themselves into the middle of the table on either side and chatted animatedly with the guests who lacked the spirit to fight for a better chair.

  On her end of the table, the earl took her right, as he always did. He remained oblivious to the insult of the cit at his other side, as long as he was supplied with plenty of wine and an opportunity to ogle her décolletage.

  The space between them was punctuated by silence. He had long ago learned that if he attempted to speak to her, she would not respond. But even if she did not look in his direction, she could still feel his eyes upon her like a snail trail on her skin. She took a deep sip of her wine to combat the headache that came with pretending indifference to it.

  On her left was Sir Chauncey, staring dejectedly up the table at Miss Fellowes as though watching his romantic hopes disappearing over the horizon. Tonight she made a half-hearted effort to engage him in conversation, to take his mind from the sight of his lover flirting with her husband. But eventually she tired of his monosyllabic responses and let their end of the table return to silence.

  Then she looked towards the head of the table as well and hoped that the captain would not catch her studying him. Who would have thought that a shy boy could turn into such a magnificent creature? Even when at ease, he still had the air of command that she had noticed in the sitting room earlier. He did not stare, nor did his eyes dart from face to face. Yet he seemed aware of each action taken and each word spoken up and down the table.

  While he took care that this observation of his guests did not seem ill-mannered, the women surrounding him did not bother with niceties. They stared openly at the way the candlelight shone gold off the waves in his hair and the shadows accented the sharp planes of his cheeks. When he smiled, and he did so often, they could not contain audible sighs of admiration. Fox hunting might have held their attention this afternoon. But if such a fine male specimen showed even a hint of interest, the women of the party would be doing any future sporting inside the house with the captain.

  The feeling this aroused in her was unfamiliar, but she assumed it must be jealousy. It explained the urge she had to pry the two women away from him and claim the place at his side. When she’d imagined his homecoming, it had not been at all like this.

  For one thing, he was even more splendid to look at then she’d dreamed. She had pictured him as growing taller, leaner and more mature, an older version of the ordinary boy who had left her. She had not expected the blond god lounging at the head of the table tonight.

  She stared, fascinated, as he rolled the stem of his wine glass between his fingers. Was it a sign of irritation? Boredom? Or was it simply a habit? It did not matter what it meant to him. To her, it hinted that the hands that had been brutal on the battlefield were gentle enough to hold a wine glass, or a woman.

  Miss Fellowes was watching his hands, as well. And there was another difference. In Lily’s fantasies, there had been no competition for his attention. Nor had he stated plainly, during their first conversation, that he might desire others and that she was to have no say in the matter.

  She should have spent less time on dreams and focused on the harsh realities. He had no reason to like her, much less love her. Even in the best marriages, male fidelity was not guaranteed or expected.

  Her father had no such trepidations. He was smiling up the table as if Christmas had arrived in September. A dragoon in dress uniform was just what the table needed to convince a band of foolish cits that they were dining with the upper class. The splendid red jacket hugging his shoulders had an excessive amount of gold braid covering it. Despite the time spent on horseback, the breeches beneath it were still snowy white and tight enough to display the muscles of a superlative horseman. Though the captain’s excuse was that his clothing would arrive in a day or two, the full uniform made him into just the sort of prize that would have guests swarming to the Chase to meet him.

  Her father stood, raising his glass. ‘May I offer a toast to our host and thanks for his safe return?’

  Lily tried to contain her flinch. No, he might not. If a toast was to be made, especially so early in the meal, her husband should be the one to offer it. Even while attempting courtesy, her father was rudely overstepping his place.

  Gerald accepted it with a smile and only the slightest narrowing of his eyes, to show his annoyance.

  As she feared they would, the guests responded not with a polite, ‘Hear, hear’, but
with raucous laughter and applause. The toast itself resulted in several spills on the linen and a cracked glass from Mr Wilson. Greywall, who always drank twice as much as the other guests, needed to have his glass refilled before he could participate. He drained it rather than sipping and gestured for the footman to leave the bottle. He turned to smile at her, lifting his glass in a private salute, and Lily could feel the slight pain in her head turning to a full megrim, tightening about her temples like an iron band.

  From halfway down the table, Mr Burke began to regale them with a tale of the day’s hunt. Conversation on all sides ground to a halt, except for the interjection of needless details by Mr Wilson and a brief argument between the two over whether the wind was easterly or from the west when the dogs first caught the scent.

  At the head of the table, her husband was silent. His eyes were on his guests, but the knife in his hand was slicing the meat on his plate with mathematical precision.

  When, at last, the poor vixen had been run to ground and her gory dispatch applauded, the table turned to Captain Wiscombe for his reaction.

  He responded with a smile. Then, very deliberately, he set down his knife and fork and pushed his plate of venison away as if he’d lost all appetite.

  Mr Burke stared at him in surprise. ‘Do not tell me, Captain, that you do not enjoy hunting.’

  ‘Not so much that I would wish to kill the animal a second time, during the meal,’ he said, continuing to smile.

  ‘Surely a little blood does not bother you, Wiscombe,’ Greywall said. He forked up a large bite of rare meat and waved it before him as if to goad his host.

  ‘A little blood?’ He considered for a moment. ‘It depends on whom it belongs to. I am more bothered by a small amount of mine than a large amount of another fellow’s. And that of a fox?’ He shrugged. ‘If it does not come into my home to provoke me, then I see no reason to run through its home with a pack of dogs, waving my gun.’

  ‘Did you see very much blood, when you were in Portugal?’ This question came from Mrs Carstairs, who seemed to find nothing unladylike in broaching such a topic at the table.

  The others at the table leaned in expectantly.

  Lily held her breath.

  ‘See blood? Yes. Yes, I did. But, unlike a fox hunter, I did not intentionally rub it on my face to mark my first kill.’ His smile dimmed and his distant expression made her wonder if he still saw carnage when he closed his eyes at night.

  Mrs Carstairs was as oblivious to the slight as she was to the small fleck of blood left on her cheek from her first hunt. ‘I am sure you have stories that are far more interesting than Mr Burke’s. Was stalking Napoleon and his men so different from hunting dumb beasts?’

  He thought for a moment. ‘I wonder if, in a table somewhere in France, there is a man being asked the same thing about hunting me?’ He offered nothing more than that, staring at her with a fixed smile until she looked away and changed the subject.

  * * *

  When dinner had ended, her father stopped her before she could escape to her room to ease the pain in her head. ‘Lillian, a moment, please.’

  For a moment, she considered pretending she had not heard him, as she usually did when he spoke to her. She had learned, years ago, that there was little point in conversing if she could not believe anything he might say. But if they did not talk here, he would follow her to her room, just as Ronald had done. A conversation in the hallway would be shorter and less painful. She rubbed her temple. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I have not yet got the chance to speak to your husband about the future of our endeavours here. And I was wondering if you—’

  She cut him off. ‘It will not be necessary. There is no future for them.’ Then she glanced about her to remind him that they were on the main floor where anyone might overhear them.

  ‘No future?’ He seemed surprised. ‘It has taken years to get things running just as they are. We cannot stop now.’

  ‘On the contrary. What you are doing is wrong. You should stop it immediately.’

  Her father was looking at her as Stewart had, when she’d explained that nice little boys did not pull Kitty’s tail. ‘Wrong? The guests enjoy their visits here. In fact, they leave as happy as they arrive.’

  ‘But poorer,’ she reminded him.

  ‘But they do not mind it,’ he argued. ‘If they do not, then I fail to see why you do.’

  ‘The fact that they do not mind it does not make it right,’ she said. She was using her patient, mothering voice. But she did not feel at all patient. She should not have to teach decency to this man. He should have been the one who taught it to her. The imaginary metal band that circled her head was tightening with each word.

  ‘Right and wrong are nebulous things, Lillian. If no one is hurt, has a wrong truly been done?’

  ‘How would you know that no one has been hurt?’ she snapped. ‘Have you ever asked them? Have you thought, for even a moment, about anyone other than yourself?’ She was getting angry. If she was not careful, people would notice. And then everything would be worse and not better. She took several slow, deep breaths and felt the pain in her head lessen somewhat.

  Other than to stare at her in shocked silence, her father did nothing. And that was just as expected.

  When she’d calmed herself enough to continue, she said, ‘What happens will be Captain Wiscombe’s decision, because it is his house. He is an honourable man and he will want no part in the humbug you have created.’

  Her father favoured her with a childishly eager smile. ‘Then you must make an effort to persuade him.’

  ‘I?’ she said, shaking her head in amazement at his stubbornness. ‘After all that has happened in this house, you come to me for help to keep things as they are?’

  Now his expression turned to one of puzzlement. ‘Of course I do. Who else could better help me persuade the captain?’

  The pain in her head was near to unbearable. If she did not go to her room soon, the servants would have to carry her there. ‘Even if I wanted to help you, what makes you think he would listen to me?’

  Now it was her father’s turn to speak to her as if she were an ignorant child. ‘Because he dotes on you, my dear.’

  ‘He certainly does not.’ If anything, the opposite was true. She’d had years to develop an infatuation with her own husband. But his affection grew more unattainable with each passing minute. ‘He hates me,’ she said and the ache in her head seemed to move to her heart.

  ‘Nonsense. He adored you when he offered. I saw the look in his eyes after you’d accepted him. It was as if the crown jewels had fallen out of a tree and landed in his lap. I am sure nothing has changed.’

  He was telling her what she wanted to hear, to win her to her side. But then, her father had always been good at making people believe in the impossible, even as he ignored the obvious. She must not be swayed by him. ‘Everything has changed, Father. Everything.’

  He smiled. ‘Then you must change them back. Captain Wiscombe might have prevailed against Napoleon’s army. But you, Lillian, are a North. The poor man does not stand a chance.’

  Chapter Six

  Gerry had begun to envy his wife her megrim.

  Lillian had claimed illness and disappeared immediately after the meal, forcing the female guests to settle in the parlour with only a footman for company. The elder North and the earl had joined them, seeking a quiet game of cards by the fire.

  The other men were proving themselves to be as annoying after dinner as they had been at the table. At Ronald’s suggestion, the six of them remaining had retired with their port to the billiard room.

  Either Lillian had not completed her redecorating, or she had given up on trying to make this room look like anything other than what it was. The tiny game room retained the utter lack of charm that had been
so evident in the home of his youth. Hunting trophies still lined its upper walls, staring down at them as they played. Their glassy eyes glittered in the smoke from too many pipes and cigars.

  Gerry leaned against the wall under a moth-eaten roe, sipping a brandy and watching as Lillian’s brother toyed with his third opponent of the night. It was clear from the way he played that no one had bothered to take care of the slight warp that existed in the surface of the table, nor had they taken the time to properly iron the baize covering before the game began. The small wrinkles that still marred its surface would make play difficult.

  The problems were near invisible to the naked eye, especially in a smoky room. But Gerry had found his ball trapped by the table’s deficiencies often enough when learning the game from a competitive father who showed no mercy. When he’d whined about the unfairness of it, his father announced that a man who played a game without assessing the risks deserved what he got.

  The elder Wiscombe would have got along well with the Norths. Tonight, Ronald was using the same philosophy to remove money from his guests. Poor Carstairs had just lined up a shot he had no hopes of making. Before he attempted it, he paused to chalk his cue by grinding it into the plaster of the ceiling like the barbaric cit that he was.

  Gerry gritted his teeth into a smile and retracted his sympathy for the man. Then, without a word he offered Carstairs the cube of white chalk that sat on the table’s edge. He would have to come back in daylight to assess the damage to the ceiling. Judging by the current company, there were likely years’ worth of marks left by men that had no sense of how to deport themselves outside of a public billiard hall.

  For now, he would enjoy the surprised look on Carstairs’s face as his ball rolled just short of its mark and stopped.

  Ronald’s response was to pot two balls in one stroke and finish the match.

  ‘Game to me,’ he said with a smile.

  ‘You are a damned lucky fellow,’ Carstairs said, wiping his brow and reaching for a pad and pencil to write a marker of his debt.