“Good advice, but too late for me,” he sighed. “How can I keep you guessing about something you already know? And why should you fear the loss of my love when you don’t want it?”
“But I might not want to let it go,” she mused.
“My love is not a book to be put on the shelf until you are ready for it,” he pointed out. “There is more to life than books, as one day you will find out.”
“Do not belittle books – there is much to be said for them. They are so varied, so infinitely diverse. Unlike men, who are all exactly the same, bar a few unimportant details.”
“It will come to this,” he foretold gloomily. “You will end up marrying me because no other man will be able to endure you lecturing him.”
“Well then, I shall end up by saying yes, which is what you keep saying you want?”
“But I had hoped you might marry me for love of myself alone, you see,” he explained. “Or at least try to snare me for the sake of my money, like the others.”
“That’s how you approve of a woman behaving, is it?”
“No, but it’s what they do whether I approve or not. I thought if you did it too, at least I would know that I had something you wanted.”
“You don’t fool me with this humble talk,” she told him severely. “You are far too used to females pursuing you. You take it all for granted and the minute one of us doesn’t follow suit, you cannot cope.”
“Not any one of them, just you.”
“But you have always known that I will not marry you. How many times have I refused you?”
“I lost count when it got to five,” he replied sadly.
“Then you should be well used to it by now.”
“Too used to it. But I live in hope.”
“Don’t hope for me,” she parried gaily. “I have decided never to marry. I am devoted to Reason.”
“I know. You have told me so many times. But I want you to be devoted to me.”
“I have made my decision in favour of Reason,” she insisted, with a decidedness that struck a chill into his heart.
“Could you not be devoted to us both?” he suggested.
She shook her head.
“Reason is a jealous lover. He leaves me no attention for anyone else.”
“Then your life will be cold and lonely.”
“But very interesting,” she riposted.
Perceiving that she was in a mood where he could not reach her, he did not ask for another dance. Instead once they had parted, he sought congenial male company in the card room.
His attention was caught by a young man with a handsome face and dark brilliant eyes. He was sitting at the table concentrating on his cards in a fierce way that made Sir Hugh’s heart sink.
As the game ended the young man threw his cards down in despair. But at once he began to prepare for another game.
“Robin, my dear fellow,” Sir Hugh started, quickly claiming his attention. “Come and have a drink with me before you play any more.”
Robin, Lord Brompton, looked up with his ready smile.
“Hugh, by all that’s wonderful!”
He rose and strolled away with Sir Hugh. The two men took glasses from a tray proffered by a powdered footman and then walked out through the French windows into the night air.
“You talked about giving up gambling,” Sir Hugh reproved him gently.
“I know but I thought my luck might have changed for just one last time.”
“But it never does, you keep losing and your debts must be mounting up.”
“You don’t need to tell me,” Lord Brompton sighed. “The plain fact is that I am so devilishly bored.”
“But I heard you were about to become engaged.”
“Hush!” Lord Brompton said hurriedly. “Don’t go spreading that rumour. I am not engaged or even thinking about it, but the traps are closing in on me even as I speak.”
Sir Hugh’s dark eyes gleamed with amusement.
“I see. A bad case of a match-making Mama?”
“And a Papa, and all the aunts and an uncle! And it’s not just a bad case, it could be terminal. Laura Vanwick is a decent girl in her own way, but I have no desire to marry her. If only I could persuade her family of that fact.”
“Could you not flirt outrageously with another lady?”
“And then have another family trying to frogmarch me up the aisle,” Lord Brompton replied, pale at the thought. “Thank you, no!”
“I only mentioned it because I have known you to have enjoyed several light-hearted flirtations at one time – ”
“Oh, flirtations!” Lord Brompton interrupted dismissively. “They come and they go and they mean nothing. What I would like is what you have, a woman who means so much that everything else pales into insignificance.”
“The lady you refer to – whose name must not be mentioned – ”
“Certainly not!” Lord Brompton was shocked. “I hope I know better than to bandy a lady’s name around. And you should know better than to remind me.”
“Your pardon, my dear fellow.”
“It is just that you were once good enough to confide in me and nobody could miss the way you look at her.”
“Unfortunately she does not return my feelings,” Sir Hugh reminded him. “You need not envy me that much.”
“But isn’t it better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all? Would you really choose not to have loved her, even if you never win her?”
Sir Hugh was silent for a moment.
“No,” he said at last. “You are right. Even if I never win her, I have felt the joy of loving her and I certainly have not yet given up hope.”
“And you will always harbour that hope until the day she marries another man.”
“Do not say that,” Sir Hugh said quickly.
“But it must be possible, unless you plan to carry her off by force.”
“No, I am not planning anything excessive. I abhor a man who thinks he can win a woman by such methods. The lady I love must come to me gladly of her own free will and with a heart that is all mine. Anything less could only lead to misery for both of us.”
To his great relief a noise from within the house enabled him to change the subject.
“Whatever is that commotion?” he demanded.
“It sounds like a man laughing,” Lord Brompton observed.
“The creature making that row isn’t a man, it’s a hyena,” Sir Hugh commented caustically.
Together they turned to return inside, just as Lady Bellingham came flying out.
“Do come and help me,” she begged. “That dreadful creature, Rupert Ingleby, has arrived.”
“My dear madam,” Lord Brompton expostulated, “you should not have invited him.”
“I couldn’t help it. I wanted Miss Lawson and Miss Shepton, so I had to invite the whole family. Anything else would have been extremely rude. But I counted on him not coming, especially when the girls arrived with Lady Fayebourn.”
“And he has suddenly turned up?” Sir Hugh asked.
“Yes, and even worse, he’s brought an even more dreadful creature with him. His name is Brendan Muncaster and he is a factory owner!”
The loftily dismissive way she said ‘factory owner’ made Sir Hugh smile faintly. He knew, of course, that to a true aristocrat the scent of trade was anathema. But he had his own reasons for finding her remark amusing.
“May I remind you, madam, that my own grandfather made his fortune from factories,” he said.
“That is quite different,” Lady Bellingham brushed the objection aside. “You are clearly a gentleman – ”
“Ever since my grandfather bought himself a title,” Sir Hugh teased.
“I wish you wouldn’t raise these irrelevant objections,” Lady Bellingham scolded him. “You do not have a red face, ginger whiskers and a voice like a banshee.”
“My compliments, madam,” Sir Hugh replied solemnly. “Most people wouldn’t even know what a banshee sounds
like.”
From inside came a bellow of laughter that would have shattered glass.
“It sounds like that,” Lady Bellingham said acidly. “Now for pity’s sake, the two of you, come inside and help me.”
Inside they found Brendan Muncaster holding two glasses that he had seized from a footman. He quaffed one, next the other and then howled for more.
“A real drink this time! What was that stuff?”
“That stuff was the finest champagne,” Lady Bellingham informed him, gimlet eyed.
Behind his hand Lord Brompton murmured,
“Not quite. The finest ran out an hour ago.”
“Hush!” Sir Hugh muttered.
“Champagne is not a drink,” Mr. Muncaster boomed. “Someone fetch me a proper drink. Brandy. Now there’s something to seize a man’s throat.”
Lady Bellingham, who would have happily seized Mr. Muncaster by the throat, nodded to a footman, who disappeared.
“Not a bad little place you’ve got here?” Muncaster boomed. “I told my friend, Ingleby, I wanted to see the best place in London and he assured me that this is it.”
If Lady Bellingham was flattered by this tribute she concealed it admirably.
“I’m building my own place, up North,” Muncaster declared. “I’ll make it like this, I think. Send me your architect. I’ll pay him good money.”
“Unfortunately the architect who created Bellingham House died three hundred years ago,” his hostess informed him in a kind of suppressed shriek.
“That’s a pity. He was a good man. On second thoughts I’d rather have something a bit more up to date. I’ve got the money to pay for it.”
The footman had returned with a tray full of brandies. Muncaster seized two.
Seeing that Lady Bellingham was about to burst with rage and anguish, Sir Hugh took pity on her and moved forward. Rupert Ingleby, the man who had brought Brendan Muncaster to the ball, immediately pounced and introduced him as “my friend Sir Hugh.”
Brendan Muncaster wrung him by the hand, breathed brandy in his face and shouted that any friend of Rupert Ingleby was a friend of his.
Whereupon Rupert Ingleby also wrung his hand and spoke of the entirely fictional good times they had apparently enjoyed together.
Ingleby was a burly man with mean little eyes that seemed to be sinking back into the flesh of his face. Like his friend his cheeks were ruddy with self-indulgence and he wore a corset in a vain attempt to disguise his paunch.
Sir Hugh had always thought of him as the most repellent specimen of humanity it had ever been his misfortune to meet. But that was before he met Brendan Muncaster.
He steeled himself to endure Ingleby’s effusions, fortified by the sight, out of the corner of his eye, of Martina entering the room with Harriet just behind.
“And here is my daughter, Harriet,” Ingleby broke off swiftly, turning to Harriet and drawing her forward so firmly that Martina was elbowed out of the way.
“Step-daughter,” Harriet murmured, regarding both men with equal revulsion.
Sir Hugh edged his way around to Martina.
“That behaviour was the outside of enough,” he fumed. “To shove you aside in such an ungentlemanly fashion.”
“True, but it saved me from having to meet Mr. Muncaster and for that I would endure a great deal!”
“You are right,” Sir Hugh agreed. “And if you dance with me, you will be further saved from meeting him.”
She gladly swept into his arms and they joined in the waltz that was just beginning.
“Poor Harriet,” Martina mourned. “Imagine how it must feel to have no escape from those two vulgarians. At the end of the evening she will be forced to go home with her stepfather. If it comes to that, so will I.”
“Why was he so anxious to call her his daughter?” Sir Hugh wondered. “There’s no love lost between them.”
“Harriet is a lady and behaves like one,” Martina answered wryly. “Maybe he is hoping some of her gentility will rub off on him if he claims kinship. Oh, look, there she is.”
Glancing across the room Hugh saw Harriet dancing with Brendan Muncaster. On her face was a smile that seemed to be held on by force and her whole body displayed her reluctance.
‘Poor girl,’ he thought.
But then he banished her from his thoughts. He held his beloved in his arms and he was going to make the most of it.
So he smiled at her and rejoiced at the smile she returned as the music swelled and they whirled around the floor together.
CHAPTER TWO
Harriet awoke early next morning and rose to sit by her window watching dawn break over the grounds of Shepton Grange. The light touched the tops of the trees and then the stream in the distance, glittering in the early sun.
This had been her home for as long as she could remember. She had always loved it, but these days it no longer felt like her home.
Not since Rupert Ingleby had forced his way in and stayed.
Her heart was heavy when she remembered Lady Bellingham’s ball the night before.
Her stepfather had shown himself in his least pleasant light. But there was no surprise in that, she thought. All his lights were unpleasant to a greater or lesser degree.
But last night he had produced a man shockingly like himself, a loud-mouthed vulgarian with mean eyes. The effect was doubly horrible.
She knew that Ingleby, who had run the house and the estate after he had married her mother, was well-known for being mean. He spent as little as possible on anyone but himself.
At one time he had been poor and now that he had succeeded in marrying money, he counted every penny, never giving away as much as a farthing if he could possibly help it.
Sadly, Harriet remembered her father, the Honourable Gavin Shepton and how generous he had always been, ever willing to share his wealth with others. He tipped generously, treated his servants well and lavished treats on his wife and child.
Harriet was sure that Ingleby had married her mother only because she was rich. Her mother always saw the best in him and insisted that he had married her for love.
But Harriet could never understand how Mama could possibly put another man in her father’s place, especially when he had only been dead for little more than a year.
“I am lonely, darling,” her mother had said. “I find it very difficult to go on living and running the estate without your father to guide me as he always did.”
She was particularly at a loss when her daughter was at school.
“You must understand,” she said, “that it’s terrible for me to sit alone in that great house, which is so empty, except for the servants.
“When you are at school, how do you expect me to eat dinner alone and to sit until it is bedtime with no one to talk to and no one to discuss – as I always did with your father – what has happened today and what will happen tomorrow. Now I am completely and absolutely alone.”
Then Rupert Ingleby appeared unexpectedly. He claimed to be an old friend of Gavin Shepton, but neither Harriet nor her mother had ever heard his name mentioned.
“If he ever knew him at all it was only as a brief acquaintance,” Harriet had told her dear friend, Martina.
But in her loneliness Mrs. Shepton had invited him to the house several times and gradually Harriet realised that he was determined to stay for good.
Harriet’s mother was not the kind of woman who could live alone. Although she was forty, she was still exceedingly pretty and attractive to men. She wanted a man who loved her, who would protect her and relieve her from the responsibility of giving orders.
It became clear that Ingleby was all too ready to relieve her of that responsibility and to give her at least the illusion of being loved and protected.
Harriet loathed him and hated the marriage, but to begin with she had not realised that he was so dangerous.
Her home had changed completely from the place where she had lived and been so happy into what at times became nothing but
a prison. Ingleby started to interfere almost at once.
“If you want to go to so-and-so,” he would say, “I think it is a waste of time. We will stay here. I have no wish to be uncomfortable in a hotel when this house is so delightful and I sleep peacefully in my very large and comfortable four-poster bed.”
It was the sort of remark which made Harriet wish to say that it was her father’s house and as he was no longer here, it was her mother’s and hers.
Perhaps because he knew that she could see through him, he disliked Harriet almost as much as she disliked him. He had moaned about the cost of keeping her at school.
“It is disgraceful that they should charge as much when they are only teaching girls and not boys,” he had complained.
For almost the only time, her mother insisted on having her own way.
“The school has a very good reputation,” she had told her husband. “I have always wanted Harriet to receive the best education possible and to meet girls of good family, who will be presented at Court and then be invited to all the best and most exciting parties in London.”
He had yielded grudgingly and Harriet had gone to the best school. But he was forever grumbling about the bills.
It was only because Harriet had wept on her mother’s shoulder, saying she needed a friend and someone to accompany her, that Martina had come into the household.
Harriet had first met Martina at school.
They had been great friends and just once in the holidays Harriet had stayed with her and her widowed mother in London.
It was at the end of that year that Martina’s mother had died after a very cold winter which had sapped her health and strength.
It was then Harriet had said to her mother,
“Please allow me to ask Martina to come here and stay with us. She is so alone now that her parents are dead and she is not close to any of her relatives.”
“Of course the poor girl must come to us,” Mrs. Ingleby had agreed. “We must be very kind to her and help her forget her loss.”
So Martina had arrived for a very long stay. At first she was desperately unhappy, weeping in Harriet’s arms night after night. But eventually she recovered from her grief and expressed her passionate gratitude to Harriet, the dear friend who had taken her in.
Journey to Happiness Page 2
