Jaffrey House was crammed with guests: a large number from outside the county had been staying at some of the better inns, or with local landowners who had been invited to the joint weddings. Athene and Nick Cameron, together with Athene’s mother, who had recently married the Duke of Inglesham, her first, and only love, had taken over the Filmers’ old home. The Duke had had it renovated and improved in double quick time as an occasional refuge for him and his Duchess when London society became too much for them.
‘Who would ever have believed that we should be here, having celebrated my wedding and being about to celebrate yours?’ Athene had whispered to Louise when the Ingleshams and Camerons had called at Jaffrey House, the day before the wedding.
‘Do you remember the many times we walked in the woods and talked about our prospects in life and our possible futures? You said to me on the last occasion on which we met before you ran away from Sywell, “I have no future—and no past, either,” and now look at you! Louise Cleeve, long deprived of her inheritance, restored to it, and about to marry one of the nicest men in society—after my Nick, of course. It’s better than a play, is it not? And as for my mama, words fail me, which, as you know, they rarely do.’ And she looked across to where the Duchess, a smile on her pretty face, was talking eagerly to Marissa about her new and happy life. ‘But she deserves all the happiness she can get. I was always troubled that because she was so good and gentle she would remain lost in a country village for ever. It only goes to show that we never know what the next day may bring.’
‘Which is fortunate,’ said Louise in her quiet way. ‘Because the next day is not always happy.’
‘Oh, but tomorrow will be, that I do know,’ said Athene in her forthright way—she was nearly as forthright as Marcus, thought Louise, amused and enlivened as she always was by her best friend.
‘A double wedding cannot be other than a triumph. Inglesham says that everyone in London is furious at being deprived of the opportunity to be present, but commends your common-sense for depriving them! Nick, of course, agrees with him. By the by, have the Kinlochs been invited?’
‘Invited,’ said Louise, ‘but they are unable to be present. Emma is breeding, is having a poor time of it and her Mama and Papa have gone to Scotland to visit her for Christmas, so they will be absent, too.’
‘And thank goodness for that,’ exclaimed Athene. ‘But poor Emma, to have her mama inflicted on her at such a time—although Nick tells me that since she married Kinloch Mrs T’s manner towards her daughter is greatly changed, and so it is to be hoped.’
‘And what has Nick been saying that you quote him?’ asked Athene’s husband, who had come up to where they sat side by side on the sofa.
‘Oh, Nick, there you are. I was telling Louise that Mrs Tenison no longer bullies Emma so much now that she is married to a peer of the realm.’
‘True,’ said Nick, and the three of them, Louise remembered, chatted together about this and that—‘Because,’ said Athene, ‘you will have little time to spend on us when you are busy tomorrow entertaining the hordes who I understand have been invited.’
Now she gazed at the clock, and realised that she would shortly be no longer plain Louise Hanslope but fancy Louise Cleeve who was about to marry her Prince Charming. And what a comic name that was for forthright Marcus Cleeve! But it suited him because he had rescued her, and made sure that she did not have to run away before midnight, but would be waiting for him to marry her without the intervention of fairy godmothers. Nor did she have any ugly sisters nor a wicked stepmother either.
Only Marissa, who was Marcus’s stepmother, and she was proving to be the mother whom she had never had. On cue, as if she had read her mind, Marissa entered, to help Mary put the final touches to Louise’s toilette.
‘Oh, you look ravishing,’ she exclaimed, handing her a spray of Christmas roses, white chrysanthemums, winter jasmine and green Christmas ferns, tied round with a wide cream sash ending in a giant bow. ‘And here is your bouquet. The gardeners collected the flowers from the hothouse for you and Sophia this morning, and my maid and I prepared them for you both.’
Impulsively Louise leaned forward and kissed her benefactress on the cheek. ‘You have been so good to me,’ she murmured, the tears not far away. ‘I did not know such kindness existed.’
Marissa smiled at her. ‘This is no time for repining,’ she said. ‘Marcus and Sharnbrook are already making their way to the chapel, and you must be ready to join them in a few moments, and do exactly what you did at yesterday’s rehearsal. Remember that afterwards you and Sophia and your bride and groom will enter the drawing-room on either side of the Earl and will be led in by Cardew, who will announce you.’
‘I know I am being silly,’ Louise said, ‘but how is it that it all seemed so easy yesterday, but today I am all of a quiver?’
‘Oh, wedding day nervous fits are commonplace,’ said Marissa, smiling again. ‘I was supposed to be beyond such megrims, but when I married Marcus’s father I was barely able to walk down the aisle. That—and the Earl’s frail health—persuaded me that a small private ceremony at Jaffrey House might be the best thing for us all. To be married among friendly surroundings takes much of the apprehension away—at least I hope it will for you.’
It had certainly taken it away from Sophia, who was on her highest ropes, but Louise found the whole business so dazzlingly exciting that the ceremony, and the reception afterwards, passed in a dream.
Was it she who walked towards Marcus, Sharnbrook, and the waiting parson? Or was it someone else? She remembered that Marcus had never looked so handsome, that the Parson had smiled at her, that she managed to say all her lines in the right order, and if her voice had sounded strange to her, it seemed to have appeared quite normal to everyone else.
Marcus had kissed her at the end, whispering, ‘Welcome, Lady Angmering, to your new title.’ After that she and Marcus, Sophia and Sharnbrook walked ahead of the Earl and Countess and the rest into the Great Hall, where the other guests were waiting for them. The hall had been decorated with boughs of holly and ivy to celebrate Christmas as well as the weddings of the house of Cleeve.
A long table, piled high with food, had been laid at one end of it—the whole arrangement being rather like those in exclusive gaming hells, was Marcus’s private joke to Sharnbrook. Chairs and little tables had been distributed around the walls so that the guests might have somewhere reasonably comfortable to sit.
Everyone clapped when they entered, and after the formalities were over, conversation became general, and friends who had not seen each other for many months found one another after the newly-weds had received them, and rapidly began to exchange news and views.
‘I had so hoped to meet Beatrice and Harry Ravensden,’ exclaimed Lavender Brabant. ‘I know that they were invited, but I gather that like Lewis’s wife, Caroline, Beatrice is also breeding, and the journey here would have been too much for her.’
‘Oh,’ said Athene, ‘they are very much in the fashion, for she is not the only one. I am beginning to think that there must be something in the air of Northamptonshire to produce such an army of babies! Jack and Olivia Denning are also unable to be present for the same reason, but I gather that there are others here who have been more fortunate, since their condition has allowed them to travel.’
‘And you, Athene?’ asked Lavender, her eyes alight with mischief. ‘Are you one of that number?’
Athene offered her a sphinx-like smile. ‘At this present moment, my dear, all that I can say is, perhaps, but I am hopeful. And you? I hear that I must congratulate you on being delivered of a book. A Flora, I believe, most apt. I shall boast about you when I go north. It is not everyone who knows an author.’
Lavender’s pleasure was apparent. ‘You are very kind,’ she said. ‘But I fear it is only a modest offering—not at all like something written by the Author of Waverley.’
‘But much more useful,’ returned Athene, ‘only you must not tell Nick so! Be
ing a true Scot, he is sure that no one can compare with a writer who comes from Caledonia. I need not ask if you are happy,’ she added, before moving on. ‘Both you and Barnabas look like the man who lost a halfpenny and found a half-crown! I hope to speak with him before we leave. At present he is being cornered by Dungarran. They are probably having a jolly coze about Newton and numbers!’
On the contrary, as Lavender later discovered, Barnabas had been quizzing Dungarran about the marriage state. ‘I gather,’ he had just said to him, ‘that you and Hester are the Romeo and Juliet of Steepwood. How are you faring now that you are married? Do you talk about mathematics all day and everyday—or only on Sundays when the Parson’s sermon has been dull?’
‘Not all the time,’ returned Dungarran with a straight face, before reducing the crowd about him to happy laughter by saying, ‘But I do have to tell you that addition having been completed we are now multiplying.’
Barnabas was, for once, a little slow in grasping the joke, but on doing so said with a grin, ‘Oh, I suppose that you mean Hester is expecting. Congratulations and all that.’
‘Accepted,’ said Dungarran with a bow, ‘and I gather that you, too, are to be felicitated, you lucky dog. It is not everyone who acquires a vast inheritance—but I suppose that you deserve it more than most. Looking around me, I would hazard a guess that most of our friends and relations have much to be pleased about.’
‘Yes,’ said Barnabas. ‘The odd thing is that most of our good luck seems to have occurred since Sywell’s demise, but we’d better not dwell on that.’
‘No, indeed,’ agreed Dungarran. ‘I understand that the Home Office has given up the search for his murderer, on the grounds that they are desperately short of staff, and that rather more important crimes need to be solved. After all, Sywell was no great loss.’
‘True,’ replied Barnabas. ‘I must say that I am relieved to have heard the last of that business. So long as that shadow was hanging over us, no one connected with the wretch could be truly happy today.’
They were not the only persons present who touched briefly on Sywell’s murder, but no one was tactless enough to mention it to Louise, or any of the Yardleys.
Louise, indeed, looking around her, Marcus’s comforting presence by her side, many of her friends and acquaintances enjoying themselves before her, was starting her new life by banishing her old one to the shades.
Marissa whispered in her ear, ‘You look even more radiant than you did this morning, and your deportment during the wedding ceremony was all that was perfect. You see how foolish your fears of the morning were.’
So she had not disgraced herself as she had feared, and now she could enjoy herself. Hugo Perceval was coming towards her, his wife, Deborah, by his side, looking as radiant as Louise was beginning to feel. She must be sure to congratulate them prettily when they had congratulated her.
Alas! On their way towards her Deborah half-turned to acknowledge a friend she had just seen, and in the doing she collided with a footman carrying a trayful of glasses of champagne to the long table. Glasses and champagne cascaded to the carpet, but by great good fortune many of the glasses remained unbroken, so that the champagne missed drenching most of the surrounding guests.
Deborah looked at Hugo in dismay. He grinned, ‘Things are improving, my love. Usually I am your victim, but I seem to have escaped unscathed this time.’
‘Oh, Hugo, I never mean any of it to happen, you know that.’ She sighed. ‘It’s very sad. I haven’t had an accident for ages.’
‘No, indeed. Not since you drove us into the duckpond shortly after our wedding,’ he agreed, smiling down at her.
‘What an unhandsome thing to say! That wasn’t my fault,’ she began indignantly. Then, with a characteristic change of mood, she said gloomily, ‘What a liability I am. I don’t know why you put up with me.’
Hugo laughed and raised her hand to his lips. ‘Deborah, you are the delight of my life, and I adore you. I wouldn’t change you for the world.’
He led her to where the Duke and Duchess of Inglesham sat with Athene Cameron and her husband Nick in an octagonal recess away from the main noise in the room, but where they could see everything which happened. They were busily engaged in enjoying the good food and wine which the Yardleys had provided in such quantity.
Hugo said, ‘Sit here, Deborah, my darling, and talk to Athene while I collect some food and wine for us. She is sure to make you laugh.’
‘Now that,’ said Athene, with mock severity, ‘is a statement certain to doom me to conversation of such absolute dullness that all it will result in will be heavy yawning—but do fetch Deborah something nice. We can all eat, drink and be merry together.’ And she pulled forward a chair for the embarrassed Deborah.
‘Oh, you cannot imagine how…’ Deborah began to Athene, who gave a jolly laugh in reply, saying, ‘Oh, yes, I can. I tripped over my overlong court dress when I was presented to the Prince Regent. Imagine my consternation and the expression of all the flunkeys present when I ended up in a position suitable for someone who wished to kiss his feet. Now that is true embarrassment.’
‘Are you funning me, to make me feel better,’ asked Deborah doubtfully.
‘Indeed not. That is all perfectly true, is it not, Nick?’
‘Yes,’ nodded Nick. ‘The only person present not overset was the Regent himself, who said, “The spectacle of a pretty woman prostrate before one is a sight to delight Princes is it not?” And then he offered her his hand to enable her to rise. More than that, her popularity was ensured when she did so without apology and offered him a grand curtsey before moving on.’
Hugo returned with ‘enough fodder to feed a regiment’, as he informed them cheerfully, to find his wife chattering animatedly away, all her hesitant and apologetic manner quite gone.
Of course, as Nick and the Duchess well knew, the whole Prince Regent farrago was a total myth designed by kind Athene, and adroitly supported by her husband, to put poor Deborah at ease, and in that it certainly succeeded. Louise, meanwhile, might have lost Deborah and Hugo to talk to, but she had gained Dungarran and Hester, who were invited by the Earl to join them at the separate table before the empty hearth where the main wedding party was about to be served.
Once seated, Dungarran leaned over towards Marcus, saying cheerfully, ‘I was never so surprised in my life as when I received an invitation to your wedding, Angmering. Some fellow named Jack Perceval who claims to be a distant relative of mine—with what justice I don’t know—said that he had a bet with you that you would not be married before the year was out. He took you on—and here you are—well and truly hitched. Was there any truth in his claim or was it just a silly on dit?’
Marcus, with one rueful eye on Louise, said, ‘Yes, indeed, and willy-nilly I paid Perceval his winnings when I lost my bet. Not that it was a major sum, mind you, but even if it had been, once I met my wife, I knew I was going to have to cough up. What’s money compared with winning a peerless woman?’
‘What indeed! But I have to inform you that, charming and clever though your wife is, she is not peerless so long as my Hester is in the running for such a title.’
‘To say nothing of my Sophia,’ quipped Sharnbrook, breaching etiquette by kissing his bride on her cheek. ‘If there are any peerless stakes being run she is sure to be a prime candidate!’
‘There speak three happily married men,’ said the Earl, who had been listening to what his son had got up to with some amusement. ‘I thought that you never gambled, Angmering, but now I know differently.’
‘Ah, well, sir,’ said Marcus with a grin. ‘I only did so that night because I was half-cut and miserable—unusual states for me, you will agree.’
‘That is true,’ admitted his father. At which point Ned Two leaned forward and said, ‘I thought that you never got drunk, Marcus. What a horrid bad example you do set to the pair of us, eh, Ned One? I shan’t listen to another of your lectures about our bad behaviour after hearing tha
t.’
‘Now, boys,’ said their mother. ‘You are not to be impertinent towards your brother on his wedding day.’
Ned One, from his position down the table, said, ‘Does that mean that we can be impertinent towards him on all other days, Mama?’
‘Oh, I can see that we have a future logic-chopping lawyer here,’ said Dungarran, laughing. ‘A Lord Chief Justice, no less.’
Ned One shook his head vigorously, ‘Indeed not, sir. Marcus told us that you are a noted mathematician, and that is what I intend to be when I leave Oxford. Perhaps you could give me some advice on the matter, after luncheon is over.’
‘Well, if I can’t,’ said Dungarran, raising his glass in Ned One’s direction, ‘then Hester will. I am the more pedantic of the pair of us, and she is the more original—a regular female Pascal.’
Hester, thus called on, engaged in mock reproof of her husband. ‘Now Dungarran,’ she said. ‘Behave yourself. You make me sound fearsome, but no matter, I shall be only too happy to help Ned with his maths.’
This lively and light exchange set the tone for the table’s conversation. Louise, who was already dazed by the mere fact of being married, was quite overcome by the cheerful banter which went on around her. She had never before been a member of a happy family party, and so she whispered into Marcus’s ear.
‘Are they always like this?’ she ended.
‘Usually,’ said Marcus. ‘But particularly so today, when they can see how happy Sophia and I are.’
‘Truly,’ said Louise, who could scarcely believe that she had finally arrived in what seemed to her an earthly paradise. Oh, she was not foolish enough to believe that there would be no unforeseen pitfalls in her future life, but to someone who had always been ignored, exploited, overlooked and neglected they would be as nothing compared with what she had experienced in the past.
The Missing Marchioness (Mills & Boon Historical) Page 17
