Jemima wanted to cry, except that there was suddenly, miraculously, nothing to cry for. Her hands were safe in his strong, warm ones; his gentle eyes were looking into hers with such love, such promise of cherishing; here at last was her friend, the one perfect friend, whom she could trust and confide in, care for and depend upon.
‘I love you,’ she said. ‘I have loved you all of my life. Did you really come home for me?’
‘I came home to ask you to marry me, and if you would not marry me, to offer you my service for the rest of my life. You have been shamefully abused and neglected, but while I have life, you shall want for nothing that one man’s energy and devotion can provide.’
Her answer was to place herself in his arms, and he held her close, and after a while she slipped down from her chair onto the hearth with him, and turned her lips to his to be kissed. Neither of them heard Pask open the door and look in, only to close it discreetly and go away again. In the circle of the golden firelight time stood still for a little while. Jemima, dazed with joy, giving and receiving love, thought only how happy and lucky she was, and, inconsequentially, how glad she was that she was still a maiden, so that Allen would be her first true husband, her only husband. Some time she would tell him that – but not now, not now.
The next time Pask came in, he made enough noise at the door to rouse them, and they got up from their absurd position on the floor, flushed and smiling, and sat correctly on chairs as he came in with candles, followed by maids to make up the fire, and footmen with trays.
‘I have brought you supper, madam and sir. I thought you would prefer to eat here, where it is warm.’
‘Supper? Is it so late?’ Jemima said. ‘I had not imagined.’ Irresistibly her eyes went back to Allen, exchanging smiles and secret thoughts.
‘It is past eight, madam.’ The footmen put down the trays and Allen lifted the covers and smiled at the contents.
‘Venison pasty, veal collops, celery salad – cold pigeon – and what’s this? Eating posset? And champagne! All this for supper, Pask? You must imagine we have something to celebrate, your mistress and I.’
Pask, busy lighting candles, only grinned.
Jemima said, ‘It seems I have something to thank you for, Pask. I never knew you were such a renowned correspondent.’
‘Perhaps we might have a merry Christmas after all, madam,’ he said, and chivvied the maids and footmen out of the room to leave them alone.
Some time later Jemima said, ‘You know that I am penniless? I shall have nothing but my widow’s portion. You know that I am no longer mistress of Morland Place? The new Earl owns it, and he is going to sell it, as soon as he finds a buyer.’
‘Did you think I wanted to marry you for your inheritance?’ Allen said. ‘I am sorry about it for your sake, but we shall live somehow, don’t fear. As an officer in the French army I had a good income and nothing to spend it on. If we had succeeded in the year ’45, 1 should have had an estate to offer you, but as it is …’ He shrugged, a very French shrug … ‘we shall not starve.’
Jemima smiled and touched his hand. ‘If I can be with you, I shall not even very much mind losing Morland Place,’ she said.
They did have a happy Christmas, and the servants gave themselves wholeheartedly to the celebrations, and Uncle George even stayed awake to enjoy the games, and organized the hunt on St Stephen’s day, the first thing he had ever organized in his life. Jemima, in one of those long conversations that she and Allen had, sitting up late by the fire when everyone else was in bed, said, ‘We shall have to take Uncle George with us when we go – wherever it is we are going to. I could not abandon him.’
‘Uncle George will be provided for,’ Allen said. ‘Don’t worry about anything.’ And Jemima sighed and put her head on his shoulder.
‘I must say that at the moment I am so happy I am finding it hard to worry. I ought not to let myself get out of practice.’
After Christmas Allen said he must drag himself away from her for a few days to go to London on business. ‘I shall be as little time as I can,’ he said. ‘Don’t fret about anything while I am away.’
She clung to him when he went away. ‘I am so afraid I shall wake up and find it was all a dream, and that you are still in France, and not in love with me.’
‘It’s real,’ he said, kissing both her eyes, the end of her nose, and her lips in rapid succession. ‘When I come back from London, I shall never leave you again. You may grow to be sick of my company before you die.’
He was away a fortnight, and Jemima thought it the longest two weeks of her life. She spent the time putting things in order for the forthcoming sale, packing her personal possessions and making lists of the household possessions for the new owners. When she was not working thus, she rode out a great deal, saying goodbye to all the places she knew so well, the favourite haunts of childhood and young womanhood. Allen had not said where they would live, but she supposed they would go abroad, where he could earn a living more easily. Perhaps they would live in Italy. She had liked Italy.
He arrived back one afternoon at dusk, just before the outer gates were closed for the night. It was a day of grey sky and raw cold, and she hurried him in to the fire and herself drew off his boots and chafed his feet, despite his protests.
‘Well, did you get your business done?’ she asked. He nodded.
‘And I have brought you something,’ he said, pulling a roll of paper from his breast and handing it to her. She unrolled it, and read the words at the top ‘Bill of Sale’ and further down her eye jumped to the words ‘Morland Place’. She felt a stab of pain in her heart, and looked up at him reproachfully, wondering why he had done something so needlessly cruel as to bring her this paper that marked the end of her home. ‘Read it,’ he insisted, smiling. ‘Read it all through.’
Reluctantly she read it, finding it hard at first to take in the words and the strange, legal phraseology. It said that the house known as Morland Place together with all its appurtenances and furnishings, its demesne, its outbuildings, and its stock, its rents and revenues and tithes and all other benefits belonging to the estate, were now the property of Jemima Morland, Countess Dowager of Chelmsford, of Morland Place in the County of Yorkshire.
She could only stare at him, wordless and bewildered. He smiled triumphantly.
‘I bought it,’ he said. ‘That was my business in London.’
‘But—’
‘I didn’t say anything to you before, because I did not know how much your brother-in-law the Earl would want for it, and I did not want to raise your hopes only to have to dash them. But he was kindness itself. He seemed very glad to sell it to me, and I’m sure the price he asked was not all that it is worth.’
‘But – if you bought it, why does it have my name down here?’ she managed at last.
‘I bought it for you, of course,’ he said. ‘It is yours by every right, left to you by your father. It is your home, your inheritance, and now it is yours absolutely and nothing can ever take it from you.’
She shook her head, astonished by such generosity. ‘I can’t believe it.’
‘Dearest Jemima, Morland Place is yours. Of course, I did hope that you would let me live here with you. I hope I was not mistaken?’
She took both his hands, and said, ‘I have nothing to give you in return for this gift, which is like the gift of life to me, too precious to comprehend. I love you, and to marry you would be the greatest joy of my life. And,’ she felt herself reddening but forced herself not to lower her eyes, ‘I want you to know that I – that you will be my first husband. I was not really married to Rupert. Do you understand what I am saying?’
He lifted her hands to his lips and kissed them, first one, then the other. ‘I understand,’ he said. It was a gift beside which the whole of England would have been a mere trinket.
They were married in April 1761, a month before Jemima’s twenty-ninth birthday. It was an occasion of such perfect and universal happiness that the se
rvants and estate workers talked of it for months afterwards, and used it as a standard of joy for the rest of their lives: ‘It were near as good as Miss Jemima’s wedding,’ they would say of some high point in their lives. The couple did not go away, for as Jemima said, there was nowhere on earth they could be happier than at home. She was glad that it was Allen’s home, too, that he knew it as intimately as she did, had the same memories of it, and loved it as much.
‘It is terrible to see it brought so low,’ she said at the wedding feast. ‘Everything sold off, only the home estate left. And you know, now that you have spent your fortune in buying it, we have nothing left in the coffers at all.’
But he said, ‘Don’t worry, there are lots of ways in which we can improve it. There are new ways of farming – fertilizing the ground, draining, planting new crops, root crops and artificial grasses, which will actually improve the soil. I have always wanted to be able to put my ideas into practice. I have been reading of these new ideas for years, and now I can shew you what land can really do.’ She laughed, and he said, ‘Yes, you see now I did not buy Morland Place merely to please you. Then there’s stock-breeding – did you know you can improve the weight of a sheep and its fleece simply by breeding with the best rams and the best ewes?’
‘And the cloth-making side I can tell you about,’ she said eagerly. ‘There are improvements to be made there, too.’
‘And there is always a good market for our horses,’ he said. ‘Oh Jemima, in a few years we’ll be able to start buying our property back. We’ll have a wonderful estate to leave to our children.’
‘Our children,’ she said, and thought of the night to come. She was not afraid; she loved him, and all her senses clung to him. ‘I hope we have lots of children.’
And much later that night, when the feast was over and they had danced the soles out of their shoes, they simply linked hands and walked up the stairs to bed, with no ceremony, or formality, or embarrassment; as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
Dynasty 8: The Maiden: The Maiden (The Morland Dynasty) Page 41
