Banishment (Daughters of Mannerling 1)

by M C Beaton

  BANISHMENT

  The Daughters of Mannerling Series (in order)

  Banishment

  Intrigue

  Deception

  Folly

  Romance

  Homecoming

  BANISHMENT

  M. C. Beaton

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  55–56 Russell Square

  London WC1B 4HP

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First ebook edition published in the United States by

  RosettaBooks LLC, New York, 2011

  This edition first published in the UK by Canvas,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2014

  Copyright © M. C. Beaton, 1995, 2011, 2014

  The right of M. C. Beaton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without written permission from the publisher and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in

  Publication data is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978-1-78033-323-6 (A-format paperback)

  ISBN 978-1-47211-288-0 (ebook)

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Typeset by TW Typesetting, Plymouth, Devon

  Printed and bound in the UK

  Cover design by Joe Roberts

  This series is dedicated to Rosemary Barradell, with love

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  ONE

  And behold there was a very stately palace in front of him, the name of which was Beautiful.

  JOHN BUNYAN

  Everyone who had ever visited Mannerling, home of the Beverley family, declared it to be the most beautiful house in England. It was ornamented with the finest sculptures and paintings and also ornamented by the six daughters of the house, all accounted diamonds of the first water.

  But one hot summer’s day, as they sprawled around the schoolroom at the top of the house, they seemed for once to have forgotten that they were the fabulous Misses Beverley. For life had held out the promise of a dizzying success for all of them – success for ladies of the Regency meaning suitable marriage. And yet Isabella, the eldest, now nineteen, had just returned from her come-out at the Season unwed. She did not ‘take,’ much to her parents’ and sisters’ bewilderment, for Isabella was undoubtedly a flawless beauty. She was tall and statuesque with masses of rich curly brown hair, a straight little nose, and a small, well-shaped mouth. Being chilly and haughty themselves, her parents, Sir William and Lady Beverley, had trained Isabella from childhood to believe that no one was good enough for her and it was that attitude that had kept suitors at bay, even the ones who would have liked a share in the Beverley fortune, all being perfectly sure that any offer of marriage would be rejected.

  To her equally haughty and proud sisters it was a mystery, and they had foregathered in the schoolroom to try to find out – tactfully – if Isabella could offer any suggestion as to the reason for her failure. They made a pretty picture. Jessica, at eighteen, rivalled Isabella in beauty with her auburn hair and hazel eyes. Then there were the twins, aged seventeen, Rachel and Abigail, with fairer hair than the rest and very wide blue eyes. After them came Belinda, black-haired, quiet and placid, and then Lizzie, the youngest, red-haired and green-eyed and considered too waiflike to ever aspire to anything like her sisters’ beauty but accounted well enough in her way.

  Jessica slid into the attack, saying as if idly, ‘You have not yet told us of the balls and parties, Isabella. And what of suitors?’

  ‘There were many, both balls, parties, and suitors,’ said Isabella with studied vagueness. ‘We must go shortly. We are to call at the vicarage.’

  ‘Must we?’ asked Lizzie. ‘I cannot like Mary.’ Mary Stoppard was the vicar’s daughter. Sir William and his wife liked to patronize Mr and Mrs Stoppard, who toadied to them quite dreadfully, and so the girls were expected to be civil to Mary, whom they heartily despised. Despite their arrogance, the Beverley sisters had reason to despise Mary. She paid them extravagant compliments with a little smile pinned on her mouth that never quite reached her perpetually watching and calculating black eyes.

  ‘To return to your Season,’ went on Jessica with rare persistence, ‘I cannot understand why you will not tell us more about it.’

  ‘Well, to be sure,’ said Isabella, affecting a yawn, ‘it was all quite tedious and exhausting. One dances until dawn.’

  ‘One does that when we have a ball here,’ put in Rachel.

  But in vain did they try by various ways to get Isabella to tell them anything about her Season. They were worried. They had been brought up to believe that they, the Beverley sisters, were the cream of society and could have their pick of gentlemen.

  They dispersed to put on their bonnets and collect gloves and fans and parasols, keeping their lady’s-maids running here and there. Then they gathered in the hall, that splendid hall with its high painted ceiling and from which sprang the grand staircase, leading to an upper chain of saloons on the first floor, each one decorated a different colour, each one richly furnished. The Beverleys liked to show off the grandeur of their home, although doubting that anyone in the county could match their Norman lineage other than a duke, but would invite lesser mortals to balls and routs, a double row of footmen dressed in gold-and-red livery lining the staircase. The Beverleys kept a great number of servants and so the girls had grown up never knowing what it was like to dress or undress themselves, open a door for themselves, or even to draw a chair forward to sit down.

  In the open carriage, Isabella lowered her parasol and looked up at the great house, Mannerling, as if for comfort. It was a seventeenth-century mansion in warm red brick with two wings on either side, added in the eighteenth century, springing out gracefully from the central building. The gardens around the mansion were a miracle of manicured lawns, vistas, a Greek temple, trees, and flowers. The day was sunny and clear with only the lightest of breezes.

  Isabella could not understand her failure herself. She had had private dreams of bringing some earl or duke home with her, watching his face as he first saw Mannerling, of showing off her home, her beloved home. But she had not dreamt of love or kisses. Like her sisters, the only passion she had ever known was for Mannerling.

  The sisters lounged in the carriage in graceful attitudes as it moved slowly down the long drive lined on either side with lime trees. Normally, they were contented and at ease with each other. But Isabella’s failure and her refusal to talk about it had cast a shadow on them. As they alighted at the vicarage, Isabella had the mortification of hearing one twin whisper to the other, ‘Do not press her. Obviously no gentleman wanted her.’

  Isabella knew that her younger sisters had always looked up to her. She believed she had lost stature in their eyes, a stature that was further diminished, she felt, by Mary Stoppard’s oily attemp
ts at tact.

  ‘Dear Miss Beverley,’ she cooed, ‘so wonderful to have our brightest star shining amongst us once more. Mrs Turlow was just saying the other day that it was a wonder Miss Beverley had arrived back unengaged, but I quickly put her in her place. “There is no man good enough for our beauty,” that’s what I said.’

  ‘Can we talk about something else?’ demanded Isabella, her normally dulcet tones showing a new edge.

  ‘To be sure, to be sure,’ said Mary. ‘You are holding the summer ball as usual?’

  ‘Next month,’ said Jessica. Isabella suddenly longed to leave the stuffy vicarage and run away, run across the fields and be entirely on her own. But she never ran or made any rapid vulgar movement. She had overheard her parents going through lists of gentlemen to be invited to the ball. ‘Surely Isabella will find someone,’ she had heard her mother wail.

  ‘The invitations have been sent out this age,’ said Lizzie. ‘Didn’t you get yours, Miss Stoppard?’

  ‘Yes, I did, yes, I did,’ said Mary. ‘But someone was just saying it might be cancelled in view of . . .’

  ‘In view of what?’ demanded Jessica.

  ‘Stupid little me,’ said Mary, putting a coy finger on the tip of her chin. ‘It’s the heat. I do not know what I am saying.’

  But Isabella suddenly knew that the gossips were no doubt speculating that the Beverleys might cancel the unnecessary expense of a ball when they had already spent so much on a lavish Season to no avail.

  ‘My apologies.’ Isabella stood up. ‘No, stay,’ she said to her sisters. ‘I need some air.’

  She went outside and walked up to the carriage and threw her parasol and fan into it and then her hat. ‘Tell my sisters I will walk,’ she announced to the amazed coachman. She walked off down the dusty road under the summer sun and then climbed over a stile into a meadow and then began to run and run, bone-pins scattering from her elaborate Roman hair-style. She felt she was running away from every hot London saloon and ballroom, from every whisper, every speculation. She reached the other side of the meadow and plunged into the green shade of the woods, finally slowing down to a walk and then sinking down on a flat rock which lay beside a lazy little river.

  What had gone wrong? She had behaved just as she ought, a model of decorum. At first, at the beginning of the Season, it had been wonderful. Men had stood up in their carriages in Hyde Park to get a better look at her beauty. At the first ball, she had been besieged by partners. She had despised the hurly-burliness of some of the debutantes, who, in her opinion, had flirted disgracefully. Isabella Beverley would not stoop to flirt. Her conversation was always about the beauties of Mannerling. And yet, young Lord Riverdale, who had taken her into supper, had yawned, cut across one of her descriptions of the grand staircase at Mannerling and said, ‘I say, look at that quiz of a man over there!’ Startled, she had politely followed the direction of his waving quizzing-glass and then had returned to her favourite subject. And he had yawned again! Quite openly and for all to see. And two of the debutantes, quite plain girls, surely not to be considered rivals, had tittered behind their fans. But one of the plain girls had subsequently become engaged to Lord Riverdale before the end of the Season. There was also a feeling that she, Isabella, was a bit of a joke. She thought for one awful moment at a rout towards the end of the Season that she had heard herself called boring. ‘Here comes Miss Boring,’ a man had said as she had mounted the staircase of a London town house flanked by her parents, but he could not possibly have been referring to her. And yet . . . and yet . . . no suitor had come calling. Other girls received bouquets of flowers and poems, but not Isabella.

  She knew that her parents were hopeful of puffing her off at the annual summer ball. They had sent an invitation to the Duke of Severnshire but he had sent a polite reply to say he would be otherwise engaged on that evening. The Beverleys had never seen this duke. Sir William and Lady Beverley had even gone so far as to call at his home. His butler had said he was out and yet as they had driven off, Lady Beverley was sure she had seen him looking out of a window. She knew what he looked like, for she had seen a portrait of him, albeit a bad portrait, on display at the local town hall.

  The Beverleys had decided that the duke must be a recluse and eccentric at that, for who in the rest of the county did not crave an invitation to Mannerling!

  Isabella felt dusty and hot and, leaning down, cupped some water from the little stream and splashed her hot face.

  Then she rose to her feet and began to make her way home across the fields, well aware that the coachman would have reported her strange behaviour to her parents. For a while, as she walked under the summer sun, past fields of wheat turning and shining in the breeze, she felt tired and somehow free. She wondered what it would be like to be Miss Beverley of Nowhere.

  And yet, as she finally walked up the long drive and saw the magnificence of her family home spread in front of her, she felt a tug at her heart as if approaching a lover. She realized for the first time that she must look like a guy with her gown all white dust and her hair tumbling about her shoulders. Her lady’s-maid, Maria, ran out to meet her, chiding and exclaiming. Then her mother followed her up the staircase, saying in her flat cold voice that the doctor had been sent for. The coachman had reported that Miss Beverley was suffering from a touch of the sun.

  In vain did Isabella protest. She was firmly put to bed, a towel soaked in cologne was placed on her forehead, and then the doctor came and prescribed a purge. Isabella waited until he had left, dismissed her maid, and poured the mixture out of the window. She had endured this doctor’s purges before and did not want another.

  She tried to insist later that she was well enough to rise for dinner, but the Beverleys, that is, mother, father and sisters, were too shocked by her behaviour to risk more of it and so she had to content herself with invalid food on a tray in her room.

  By next day Isabella, looking back on her own behaviour, came to believe that she had indeed had a touch of the sun. Restored once more to elegant beauty, exquisitely gowned and coiffed, walking through the elegant rooms of her home, under the painted ceilings where gods and goddesses disported themselves in a way that meant nothing to the virginal Isabella, she felt once more in her proper place and at peace with herself. Was it her fault that she was too good and too beautiful for any man in London? There must have been a poor crop at the Season. She had been unlucky, that was all.

  In the time leading up to the ball, Sir William was increasingly absent from home, saying he had pressing business matters to attend to in London. But these were masculine things, surely, and of little interest to the daughters of Mannerling, who discussed endlessly what they would wear and how the rooms should be decorated.

  Lady Beverley had never concerned herself with such vulgar matters as the price of anything. Swathes of silk to decorate the walls of the saloons were ordered from the mercers of Ludgate Hill, and new gowns for her daughters from the finest dressmaker; Gunter, the confectioner, was to be brought all the way from London at great expense to cater for the guests; and Neil Gow and his band, who played at Almack’s during the Season, were hired to entertain the guests.

  After a discreet lapse of time, the bills for all this splendour would come flooding in, to be coped with by Sir William’s secretary, James Ducket. Extra servants were hired for the great evening, although Mannerling already had a large staff. As a last extravagance, Lady Beverley had ordered new livery for the footmen and gold dress swords to ornament them further.

  Although the Beverley sisters did not work at all to help with the preparations – such a thought never entered their heads – they all confessed wearily that they would be glad when the great night arrived, for so much bustle and fuss was exhausting.

  And yet it was Isabella who began to feel slightly uneasy about all the expense, particularly when she found a few days before the ball that her mother had ordered all the bed hangings to be changed for new ones. Now that she had attended balls and pa
rties in great houses, she knew that even the grandest did not go on in such a lavish style, with the possible exception of the Prince Regent.

  The sisters were to be gowned in various pastel shades of muslin. It was unfashionable for young ladies to wear expensive jewels, a simple strand of pearls or a coral necklace being the fashion. But Sir William liked to see his daughters bedecked and glittering with the finest jewels, although Isabella had conformed to fashion while in London.

  The sisters bent their heads over the guest list, groaning a little over familiar names of gentlemen. That one lisped, this one was too poor, that one was too old, until they came to a late entry, Viscount Fitzpatrick. Mr Ducket, the secretary, was pressed for details. Lord Fitzpatrick, he said, was an Irish peer who had recently bought a property in Severnshire. ‘Oh, an Irish peer,’ they said in dismay, Irish peers being not bon ton, and dismissed the viscount from their minds.

  The evening of the ball arrived. Isabella wondered what had happened to her as she stood at the top of the grand staircase with her parents. Her poise and equanimity were slowly deserting her again. Sir William had returned from London only that day and he appeared to have aged, but he stood with his wife and daughters and smiled and bowed as he greeted the guests. When Isabella finally moved into the ‘ballroom,’ which had been made from the chain of saloons, she realized that the mysterious Irish viscount had not put in an appearance. Her hand was instantly claimed for a dance by a Mr Tulley, who was not handsome at all and whose property was reputed to be falling into rack and ruin. Isabella stifled a sigh. The diamond tiara, which she had not worn in London, once more ornamented her hair, and a heavy diamond necklace, her neck. She had a brief little memory of what it had been like to run free across the fields but quickly banished it. Such thoughts were treacherous. She was the eldest sister and must set an example to the others. What of? ‘Failure,’ jeered a nasty new little niggling voice in her brain.