‘Here she is at last.’ The Duke sat at the head of the table, facing Caroline as she entered the room. A small man, but magnificent in deep blue satin and a full wig, he looked unlike anything she had ever seen, an illustration from a story rather than a real person. ‘“Great heart in tiny body,” you say, Blakeney? Well, she’s tiny enough. So you’re the Trojan, are you, Miss Thorpe? Can stand fire with the best of us?’
‘I’m afraid I was frightened, after.’ Caroline had dropped a deep, general curtsy.
‘What…what does the child say?’ He turned to the woman on his left, whom Caroline remembered as her sweet-smelling friend, now magnificent as her host in low-cut crimson satin and a blaze of rubies. ‘I can’t bear a child who mumbles,’ the Duke went on.
‘I expect you frighten her more than the shot did,’ said the lady. Mrs Winterton, of course. Caroline suddenly understood the two girls’ cruel joke about the Winter Ton, though in fact Mrs Winterton was elegantly slender, a glowing dark-haired beauty. ‘I don’t suppose the child has ever seen a gentleman in full dress before,’ she went on. ‘Come here, my love.’ She held out a hand to Caroline, and Blakeney, who had been sitting beside her, got up to make room, giving Caroline a swift little smile of encouragement as he did so. The other boy, Gaston, was sitting, black-browed with rage, beside the plump, blonde lady on the other side of the Duke, who must be the Duchess. She, too, was resplendent in blue silk and diamonds but she looked tired, Caroline thought, and sad.
She turned to the glowering boy beside her. ‘Now’s your time, Gaston. And yours, Blakeney, to apologise to Miss Thorpe for frightening her so, and to ask her to name your punishment.’
‘That’s it,’ said the splendid Duke. ‘Two young rascals, not fit to be out with guns! Must apologise, must make amends. What shall it be, Miss Thorpe? Hit them where it hurts, eh? No more riding, no more shooting, that kind of thing?’
‘Oh, no, please.’ Caroline made herself speak clearly. ‘I don’t want them punished on my account. It was all just a joke, you know.’
‘Must be punished, though,’ said the Duke. ‘Took my duelling pistols without a by your leave or with your leave. And loaded one of them too. Must have. I never leave them loaded. Blakeney, what do you say to that?’
‘I most certainly did nothing of the kind, sir.’ Blakeney was standing behind Caroline’s chair.
‘No more did I,’ said Gaston.
‘Calling me a liar, now, hey? The two of you!’ He turned angrily from one to the other and Mrs Winterton put a restraining hand on his arm.
‘Please, sir, they both looked dreadfully surprised,’ said Caroline. And then, belatedly, remembered Gaston’s damning remark about meaning to fire a shot if the carriage had not stopped. Blakeney must remember it too. His hand touched her shoulder, very gently. Miss Skinner would remember, too. She looked round for her and found that she had vanished.
‘Looked surprised, did they?’ said the Duke. ‘Well, by God, so they should. Nearly killing a young lady. Well,’ he raised his quizzing glass to look her over, ‘not quite a young lady yet.’
‘She’ll grow.’ Mrs Winterton patted Caroline’s hand. ‘And she has quite forgiven our bad boys her fright, have you not, Caroline?’ Her smile was at once a plea and an enchantment.
‘Yes, indeed, I wish we could say no more about it.’
‘Spoken like a lady,’ said the Duke. ‘Very well. Boys, you’re forgiven.’ He turned to the Duchess. ‘You’ll be wishing to get back to your embroidery. Let me alone to give the boys a scold over their port.’
Chapter Four
‘There you are, Caroline.’ Gaston looked in at the schoolroom door and found her sitting alone, struggling miserably with the lesson in perspective the art master had set her. Charlotte and Amelia were out on their ponies, having very reasonably refused to take her with them until she looked like something more than a sack of potatoes on horseback. ‘The Duke wants to see you,’ Gaston went on. ‘In his office. Lord, I wouldn’t be you for toffee. He looks cross as ten sticks.’
‘The Duke? Me?’ In the confused and homesick wretchedness of her first weeks at Cley, Caroline had not learned enough of the habits of the great house to realise how very improbable such a message was. Since she was equally frightened of Gaston and of the lordly footmen, it did not strike her that the Duke would never make a member of the family his messenger. ‘He’s angry? Oh, Gaston, why?’
‘How should I know? In his office, mind. Right away, he said. I suppose you know where it is?’
‘In the turret?’ She had a feeling Amelia had said something in passing about the isolated suite of rooms where the Duke spent a good deal of his time, but so many people had told her so many things…She stood up, the habit of obedience strong in her. ‘At once? Oh, Gaston, do I look tidy? Is he very cross?’
‘He will be if you don’t hurry,’ said Gaston. ‘And do for goodness sake remember, Caroline, that family don’t knock.’ He laughed. ‘He wouldn’t hear you anyway. Try and speak up, baby, or he’ll be crosser still. You know how he hates it when you mumble. He’ll probably be in the inner room, by the by. No use waiting in the lobby.’
‘Oh, dear. Will you come with me, Gaston?’
‘Not likely,’ said Gaston. ‘I’d cut across the garden, if I were you. It’s quicker.’ Having thus ensured that Caroline met as few people as possible on her way to the apartments that were rigorously private to the Duke, Gaston left her to her fate and went whistling off to the stables.
He had picked his time well. It was late morning, when all the staff who could get there congregated in the servants’ hall for a well-earned dinner after the morning’s labours that had got most of them up long before dawn. Caroline saw no one except a belated garden boy who merely gave her a puzzled look in exchange for her polite good morning. Reaching the garden door of the octagonal turret, she took a deep breath, remembered Gaston’s warning, and boldly opened it. It gave on to a lobby paved with big black and white tiles, and Caroline paused, looking timidly up at huge, naked statues, trying to gather her courage.
At once, Gaston had said. The catch of the next door was stiff and she opened it with difficulty, only to reveal another empty room, obviously the Duke’s office. A huge desk faced her, and the room smelled strongly of tobacco and dog. One of the Duke’s spaniels came and thrust a friendly nose into her hand as she stood, trembling and looking at yet another door. Go straight in, Gaston had said, don’t knock. But, surely, he had meant the room she was in. Only where was the Duke?
She thought she heard voices from the next room. He must be there. Best get it over with. But, this time, instinct was too strong for her, and she knocked on the forbidding mahogany. Someone heard her. There was an exclamation from inside — a woman’s voice? And then a long pause before the big door swung open to reveal the Duke, magnificent in frogged crimson dressing gown.
‘What the devil?’ He was even angrier than she had expected as he looked down at her.
‘P…p…please sir.’ Trying to speak loudly, she stammered. ‘Gaston said…’
‘Gaston! An emergency, you thought!’ He turned furiously to address crimson curtains round the huge four poster bed that dominated the luxurious room. ‘A mare’s nest! Get out!’ He looked at Caroline with loathing. ‘Get out, brat, learn some conduct, and stay out!’
Caroline crept to her room, too frightened to mention the disastrous adventure to anyone, and never learned what happened after that, but Gaston and Blakeney left early for school a few days later and she sometimes felt the Duke looking at her with what seemed like hatred. Mrs Winterton, too, who had been wonderfully kind at first, seemed to have lost interest in her, and only the Duchess continued invariably kind. She was having trouble with her eyes and often sent for Caroline to read aloud to her, saying that she found her gentle voice soothing.
‘But you must try to speak up for the Duke,’ she reminded her. ‘I am afraid it makes him impatient when he cannot quite hear.’
‘All kinds of things make him impatient, don’t they?’ And then, blushing crimson, ‘I beg your pardon. I should not have said that.’
The Duchess smiled at her very kindly. ‘Well, better not. Or, only to me, Caroline. Be sure and come to me, child, with any little troubles you may have. With Gaston, maybe? I’m afraid it must be strange for you, in this great house.’
After that, Caroline’s happiest hours were the ones she spent safe in the Duchess’ rooms, reading her favourite Shakespeare to her. Arriving unannounced one day, she was appalled to find her friend in tears.
‘It’s nothing.’ The Duchess held out her hand. ‘Don’t mind it. I have a piece of sad news, Caroline. A baby I loved very much has died, a long way away, in Ireland, and I cannot even go to the funeral. Look.’ She held out a soft curl of fine, dark hair. ‘It is all there is left.’
‘Oh, ma’am, I am so sorry.’ Instinctively, she went into the Duchess’ arms, and they cried together.
But the Duchess could not protect her from Gaston’s teasing through the long summer holiday.
‘Miss Skinner.’ She had found her alone. ‘May I ask you something?’
‘Why, yes, of course my dear.’ What could be coming?
‘Please, when am I to go home?’ And then, stammering again, ‘I do not wish to seem ungrateful, but it is Sophie’s wedding soon. I am sure Mamma will need me, and…and…’ She was developing just a hint of a stammer, Miss Skinner noticed with concern.
‘Yes, my dear?’
‘I am forgetting all my Latin! Oh, please, don’t laugh at me. Not you too! You see, when I grow up, and that will be very soon now, I will have to be a teacher like you, only I thought I would like to teach in a school, and it would make all the difference to have Latin.’
Miss Skinner sighed inwardly. What could she say? She knew that the Duchess and Mrs Winterton had been trying in vain to get the Duke to make up his mind what to do with Caroline. He had never explained Gaston, though all the adults knew perfectly well that the boy was his own son by a French gouvernante encountered in the family of friends. Gaston had been in the family so long that the children accepted him without question, though she herself was often anxious about the way the Duke favoured him. It was bad for the boy, she thought, and hard on Blakeney, and then comforted herself wryly with the fact that the Duke did not much look like favouring Caroline. That was probably why he was being so slow to decide about her, and there was nothing in the world anyone could do about it. If Mrs Winterton could not bring him about, the thing was hopeless.
Naturally the child was homesick. Charlotte and Amelia found her dull and made no secret of it. She was not interested in dress. She could not talk about ponies, or London. She could not make fringe, or draw, or play the harp or even the pianoforte, and, worst of all, she had a habit of looking through them with large, thoughtful eyes that they did not like at all. Miss Skinner thought sadly that it had made the two of them better friends than they had ever been before. But it left Caroline very much of a poor little fish out of water.
When he was at home, Blakeney was wonderfully kind to her, almost as if he felt the kinship between them, but Gaston had taken one of his black dislikes to the poor child, and, she suspected, lost no chance of setting the Duke against her, so that she really sometimes wondered if it might not be for the best if the Duke should, in fact, decide to make some sort of provision for her and send her back to those good Trenthams at Llanfryn. But, for the moment, there was Caroline gazing hopefully at her, the big brown eyes enlarged by the threat of tears.
‘I think Mamma really will be needing me now,’ she said. ‘I know I’m not much good at the things Charlotte and Amelia like to do, but Nurse Bramber says I’m worth my weight of gold in the stillroom. And then there will be the invitations to Sophie’s wedding. Papa says I write almost as good a hand as he does.’
‘I am sure you do, my dear. But as to Sophie’s wedding, I think perhaps you should not set your hopes too high. I am sure the Duke intends your visit to be a long one.’
‘The Duke is like God, isn’t he? It’s frightening, rather. Oh, Miss Skinner, I do wish this house was not quite so big. Or so full of people. Are there always so many visitors?’
‘Why, yes, when the family are here. That’s the way they live. You’ll grow used to it.’
‘Will I? Sometimes I think, when we go down for dessert, that they look at me as if I were…oh, I don’t know, a travelling bear, or one of those monkeys at fairs.’
‘It’s just friendly interest. They know you are the Duke’s little protégé.’ But it was more than that, of course. The children might not know about Caroline’s birth, but the adults in the Chevenham house circle most certainly did.
‘It may be interest.’ Caroline suddenly sounded very grown up indeed. ‘But I don’t think it’s friendly. And I’m not the Duke’s…’ She boggled at the strange word. ‘It’s the Duchess who is always so kind. I do love the Duchess!’
‘We all love her,’ said Miss Skinner.
Later, she sought out Mrs Winterton when that lady was dressing, and laid the case before her.
‘Poor little thing.’ Frances Winterton leaned back to let her maid attend to her glossy ringlets. ‘Of course she’s homesick. Lord.’ She smiled thoughtfully at the ravishing reflection in the glass. ‘I remember when my Uncle Purchas fetched me to Denton Hall how wretched I was. And how badly I behaved!’ She laughed. ‘I ruined his wedding breakfast! Put pepper in the syllabub and spilled the cream. No! That was Cousin Hart’s wedding. Uncle Dick married Aunt Ruth later that day. She was kind to me, Aunt Ruth. I loved her. If she had lived…No use thinking about that. As to Caroline, she’s a disappointment to the Duke, I am afraid. Pity she didn’t take after me. And no good telling him she and Blakeney both favour him.’ Smiling at herself, she caught Miss Skinner’s eyes in the glass. ‘Do you really think it would be best for the child to go back?’
‘Ma’am, I’ll not lie to you. I do. She’s…’ Miss Skinner paused, feeling ill-timed colour flush her cheek. ‘She has been brought up very strictly. If she stays here, sooner or later, it is bound to come out…’
‘That she’s my bastard.’ She felt her maid Povey’s fingers twist in her hair. ‘Oh, come, Povey, don’t pretend you don’t know; that everyone doesn’t know except the children. Which makes you right, of course, you wise Skinner. My fault, as usual. I could have got the Duke to make provision for her, instead of asking her here. But I did so want to see her. A pity she’s not a more attractive child. You can’t blame the Duke for being disappointed. I really believe he expected her to be the image of me!’
‘She has your charm,’ said Miss Skinner.
‘Do you think so? The Duke doesn’t. Well, he can’t hear a word she says.’
‘Poor child,’ said Miss Skinner. ‘I’m afraid she is still terribly shy. I found her in tears the other night. She was missing her garden, she said. But I think there was more to it. I’m afraid Gaston had been teasing her again. It’s a great pity he’s taken such a dislike to her.’
‘Tiresome boy! Well, maybe I had better suggest to the Duke that he give her a dowry and send her back to sink or swim in Herefordshire. Povey, you’re pulling my hair.’
It was Wednesday, open day at Cley, the day Caroline dreaded most in the week. Anyone who was anyone in the county could come to Cley that day, walk about the grounds as if they owned them, and dine, if they were brave enough, with the Duke himself. In the family, he made no secret of his dislike of the open days, but they were a political necessity, and if he suffered them, so must everyone else. The children must wear their best clothes and circulate among the crowd ‘doing the pretty,’ as Mrs Winterton put it. The boys might sometimes escape this duty, but then they had to appear at the crowded early dinner the Duke so disliked, while the girls were excused at least from this.
Today, Charlotte and Amelia had let Caroline join them in the phaeton Charlotte liked to drive through the admiring crowd of her father’s tena
nts. She had been given the little carriage with its matched grey ponies for her twelfth birthday, and fancied herself as a whip.
‘And it means we don’t have to talk to anyone beyond “good day” and “goodbye,”’ she said with satisfaction, steering her way neatly between the ornamental water and the Chinese pavilion. ‘Just listen to them saying what a picture we present. And so good to our little friend, too.’ An excellent mimic, she lapsed into the broader speech of a Norfolk farmer’s wife.
‘You’re very quiet, Caroline,’ said Amelia. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘She’s always quiet, our Miss Mouse,’ said Charlotte. ‘I expect she’s still pining over the unkindness of the Winter Ton. We could have told her, couldn’t we, that dear Frances sets out to charm everyone who comes her way, and loses interest once they’re her slaves.’ She giggled. ‘Do you remember how she threw out her lures at Farmer Coke?’
‘And got a set-down for her pains,’ said Amelia. ‘I enjoyed that.’
‘Father didn’t. Move over, Caroline, you’re squeezing the breath out of me.’ She smiled and bowed as they approached a group of tenant farmers and their wives, visibly ill at ease in their Sunday best. ‘Good morning, Mrs Charlesworth…Mrs Stokes…Mrs Smithson…Yes, a very fine day, but hot.’ She flicked the ponies’ ears with her whip and got them clear of the little group. ‘Did you smile and bow, Caroline?’
‘It’s not my place,’ said Caroline miserably, fighting back the tears that had threatened ever since her disappointing interview with Miss Skinner.
‘I suppose not,’ said Charlotte. ‘Considering what a good friend your mamma was of our parents, we don’t hear much about her, do we? I expect there was some rip-roaring scandal, really, and the less said the better. Just another of Mamma’s lame ducks, like the Winter Ton. Do you know, Amelia, I learned something about darling Frances the other day? I heard Miss Berry telling someone about her mother. Apparently, she was a great goer at the time of the Gordon Riots. Set her cap at some rich American cousin of hers with a comic name. What was it now? Purchas, that’s it. As if they were parcels or something. And at the eleventh hour his wife turned up to forbid the banns, and they discovered she’d had an affair with someone else long before and our Frances was the result. No wonder if she’s not much better than she should be.’
The Lost Garden (The Purchas Family Series Book 5) Page 7