The Lost Garden (The Purchas Family Series Book 5)

by Jane Aiken Hodge

  ‘Folly indeed, from all I hear about him,’ said Mrs Bowles robustly. ‘What about that Gastong then?’

  ‘We’ve never even been friends,’ said Caroline. ‘I wouldn’t trust him across the street.’

  ‘So it was one of the others, just like I thought,’ said Mrs Bowles. ‘Lady Amelia or Lady Charlotte, and you left to bear the blame. Well, like mother like child, they do say, and we all know about the Duchess — and the Duke, come to that. Oh, I’m sorry, love, I didn’t mean to put you to the blush, and you’re not to start crying neither because if I’m not very much mistaken that’s Mrs Price’s carriage now, and Mrs Trumpler will be with her ‘cos they always hunt in couples, so you just greet them like the lady you are and leave me to sort things for you.’

  ‘Oh, thank you, Mrs Bowles. You really believe me!’

  ‘Course I believe you,’ said that lady comfortably, ‘your colour would show you up, soon enough, if you were to try any taradiddles on me. Mind you,’ she gave Caroline a very shrewd look, ‘I’m not so simple I can’t see there’s more to it than you’ve told, but that’s your business.’ She held out a fat hand encrusted with rings. ‘Friends, then?’

  ‘Friends, indeed.’ Caroline bent to brush a swift kiss against the highly coloured cheek. ‘I’m more grateful to you than I can say.’ She straightened up to greet Mrs Price and Mrs Trumpler, who came through the wide doorway side by side and stood for a moment gazing a question at Mrs Bowles, one tall, thin and curious, the other short, stout and censorious.

  Mrs Bowles rose or rather surged up to the occasion. ‘Mrs Tremadoc and I have had a good talk,’ she told them, putting a warm arm round Caroline’s shoulders. ‘I know all about what the poor child has gone through and have promised her my countenance.’

  ‘I’m so pleased.’ A neat curtsy from Mrs Price.

  ‘I’m quite delighted.’ A rather frigid little bob from Mrs Trumpler.

  ‘Those London papers,’ sniffed Mrs Price.

  ‘Those London ladies,’ suggested Mrs Trumpler.

  ‘I’m not a London lady at all,’ Caroline seized her chance. ‘I’ve only been there since the winter, and I don’t care if I never go back. Your marshes here remind me a little of the country round Cley where I grew up.’ She poured and passed madeira and cakes as she talked.

  ‘Country bred, were you?’ asked Mrs Price.

  ‘If you can call Cley the country,’ suggested Mrs Trumpler. ‘Bigger than Bodiam Castle, I’ve heard tell. Without the moat of course. I don’t rightly call that country living, Mrs Tremadoc, nor yet a proper breeding for a clergyman’s lady, by all one hears.’

  ‘No,’ agreed Caroline with unmistakable honesty. ‘I am entirely of your mind, Mrs Trumpler. Before I went to Cley I lived in a country vicarage in Herefordshire, not half so big and beautiful as this house, with a great big country parish that kept my father — my adopted father.’ She felt her colour rise. ‘Kept him busy from morning till night.’

  ‘Fancy that!’ said Mrs Price.

  ‘Only to think!’ chimed in Mrs Trumpler.

  ‘You never told me that,’ said Mrs Bowles, but without any hint of reproach. ‘So you do know something of what a parson’s lady should do?’

  ‘I should hope so,’ said Caroline. ‘But I expect the problems were different in Herefordshire from what they would be in a rich parish like this.’ And she managed a couple of informed questions to the three ladies before the door opened again to admit a fresh batch of guests. Greeting in turn the wives of the Collector of Customs and the town’s two leading lawyers, as Mrs Bowles introduced them, she felt the tide of opinion set in her favour.

  Mrs Bowles, surging up to her presently to say goodbye, confirmed her impression. ‘I’ve over-stayed my time,’ she said, ‘but I’ve been enjoying myself. You’ll do, dearie, you’ll do nicely. I just hope that husband of yours does half so well.’

  Tremadoc had been meeting his church wardens and when he returned for the light luncheon that had been set late for him, his fretful look and tone suggested that Mrs Bowles had been right to be doubtful.

  ‘How did you get on with the tabbies?’ He helped himself to a liberal glassful of his cordial. ‘If they are anything like their husbands you must be as fatigued as I am. There’s no pleasing them, I tell you! That Bowles fancies himself God Almighty because he’s town Mayor. Of all the Jacks-in-Office. Imagine objecting to the idea that I should have a curate! I ask you, how am I to write my masterpiece if I don’t have the help I need in the parish. Just because the old dodderer they had before managed without is no argument for me, and so I told them. Why, the Duke as good as suggested I have one!’

  ‘But they don’t seem to reckon much to the Duke down here.’ Caroline wondered as she spoke when her husband had met her father and what kind of shabby bargain had been struck. Had Tremadoc actually agreed to let her be slandered by the story of the elopement with Gaston? And what had he got in exchange? ‘They’re all Tories, Tench says.’

  ‘A parcel of nobodies. If they think they and their penny-pinching ideas are to come between me and the execution of my masterpiece they are fair and far off the mark and so I shall show them.’

  ‘You are absolutely right, my dear,’ she told him. ‘And I had been meaning to offer you my services as an amanuensis for your great poem.’

  ‘As a what?’

  ‘As a secretary. To write it down for you. I know what an effort composition is to you, what a strain on all your powers. Do you not think if you were to come into the morning room, where there is a good fire burning, and sit in a comfortable chair, and dictate to me as your genius moves you, you might find your poem growing fast, and what could more effectively silence these local busybodies than to publish at least a few stanzas, a canto or two?’

  ‘Why, Caroline, that’s the deuce of a good idea.’ He drained his glass of cordial and rose somewhat unsteadily to his feet. ‘We will start at once.’

  Sitting quiet beside him, pen in hand, Caroline had plenty of time for the thoughts that would wander, always, to Blakeney. She had had no word from him, and though it had been impossible not to go on hoping for one, she had not really expected it. Not after she had understood that he must have received her note too late to save her from her disastrous marriage. Too honest to congratulate her on it, he must have decided, as she had herself, that only time, silence and absence could help them. How long? She dreamt of him, night after night, painful dreams that now, horribly, mixed him up with Tremadoc. She would love him until she died, but presently, she prayed, she would love him as a brother. In the meantime, she comforted herself a little by putting her heart into a series of sonnets he would never see.

  She sighed and picked up her pen to take down a staggering iambic line and wonder if even Tremadoc could fail to see how bad it was. Her mind wandered again, this time to that surprising letter of Mattingley’s. What would she have done if she had received it the day it was written? Too late to be thinking of that now. She had not even been able to thank him for his amazingly generous offer, having learned from a casual remark of Tremadoc’s that he had surprised his friends by suddenly accepting a diplomatic posting to St. Petersburg, and had already left London when they returned from Gretna Green. Could her failure to answer him have had anything to do with this? He must have thought her discourteous beyond belief when he learned of her elopement.

  But his acceptance of the dangerous post in war-torn Europe merely added to the feeling of admiration and respect that had grown in her since she had received his surprising offer. It was odd, she thought, dutifully copying down another halting line of verse, how sheltered from the realities of the war they had been at Chevenham House. The Duke and his friends had talked of the war as if it were an aspect of politics. There had been military reviews, of course, which the Duchess and Mrs Winterton had attended in most becoming travesties of Hussar uniform, and Blakeney had done his duty with the Volunteers, but it had all seemed play acting, like the Duchess’ uniform. Down
here, on the threatened marsh, things were very different. Boulogne, with Bonaparte’s army and invasion fleet, was just across the Channel. She wondered, looking back, if the same invasion fears had not run through the towns of Cley and Blakeney as she felt here at Oldchurch. They were on the Norfolk coast, after all, equally exposed to the French threat. Was it only in the great houses that one lived an artificial life, sheltered from the fact of war?

  But Tremadoc was just as unaware as she had been, she thought, even if he was writing a poem about The Downfall of Bonaparte. With him, too, it was all talk, all play-acting…

  ‘Enough for today.’ His voice interrupted her thoughts, as he put a shaking hand to his brow. ‘I am quite worn out with composition. Read me what I have done.’

  She did so, and, reading, found how surprisingly easy it was to improve his stumbling lines as she went along.

  ‘Excellent!’ he said at last. ‘Ring for Jenkins. I positively must have a glass of my cordial before I choose my sermon for Sunday.’

  ‘You do not think you should write one of your own,’ she ventured. ‘Particularly for your first appearance?’

  ‘Nonsense,’ he told her. ‘They’ll never know the difference. Parcel of country bumpkins who can talk of nothing but war and the price of mutton.’

  He was proved wrong when Mrs Bowles paid Caroline a morning visit a few weeks later. ‘It won’t do.’ She accepted chair, stool, and glass of madeira like the regular visitor she was. ‘You must tell that husband of yours that it won’t do. Mrs Vail called on me yesterday and suggested I drop a word in your ear. She don’t feel it quite her place, as relict of the late vicar, but she brought me the book Mr Tremadoc took his sermon from, Sunday, and not even word perfect, neither. Said Samarian when he meant Samaritan, didn’t he? Well, dearie, there’s no two ways about it, it won’t do. And, another thing, he don’t seem to know we’ve got a war on. We need fighting sermons, something to keep folks’ hearts up, down here where we know we’re likely in for the worst of it. Did you see they’re repairing the walls, down by the Water Gate? How do you fancy being besieged? I can’t say I relish the idea, but I’m laying down an extra supply of food for the winter, just in case, and so should you, if you can see your way clear. I’d make your husband spend his money on that, if I were you, not on getting in some fancy curate to look down his nose at us commoners.’

  ‘Oh, Mrs Bowles—’ Caroline put out a protesting hand.

  ‘Not you, love,’ said Mrs Bowles, taking it and squeezing it warmly. ‘You’ve no more airs than one of my own girls, bless you. Anyone would think it was Mr Tremadoc was the Duke’s child, not you, the way he goes on. And him nothing but a cit, when all’s said and done, and would be a bankrupt one if it weren’t for your pa.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ sighed Caroline, used by now to the fact that in Oldchurch everyone knew everything about everybody.

  ‘Didn’t that foster father of yours write sermons?’ suggested Mrs Bowles, realistic to her fingers’ ends. ‘If you chanced to have some of those in your commonplace book, no one here could possibly know they wasn’t your husband’s. If you could get him to put something in about the war, that is.’

  ‘Goodness, I’m not sure.’ Caroline knew very well that she had none of Mr Trentham’s sermons, but it had given her an idea. ‘I’ll take a look, Mrs Bowles, and thank you a thousand times for suggesting it.’

  Tremadoc finished dictating that afternoon and gave a little sigh of satisfaction when she had read his stanzas back to him. ‘There!’ he said, with justified pleasure. ‘When that gets published those muttonheads in town will see what an unusual clergyman they have got, and stop fussing on about my sermons. As if I had time to be composing them too!’

  It gave her exactly the opening she had wanted. ‘Do you know, my dear?’ She looked up from a correction she had been making. ‘I had a thought about that. I found copies, just the other day, of a batch of sermons my foster father, Mr Trentham, wrote for just this time of year. It must have been in one of the early years of the war. I was amazed at how appropriate they seem to the way things are now. Indeed, they struck me as a little out of the ordinary run, so I copied a few out for you in the hopes that you might just possibly find them of some use.’

  ‘Oh?’ Tremadoc thought about it. ‘His own composition?’

  ‘Why, yes. He always wrote his own.’

  ‘Nothing else to do, I suppose, poor man. Well,’ carelessly, ‘let me have a look at them. It would certainly save the trouble of copying notes from one of those plaguey volumes.’ And when she returned with them. ‘Your handwriting? Why, of course, that fits. Dictated by me, just like my great poem.’

  ‘Yes, dear,’ said Caroline meekly.

  Autumn broke over Oldchurch with a frenzy of equinoctial gales. A wild north-easter lashed across the marsh, tearing branches from stunted trees and rattling windows in their frames; torrential rain poured in rivulets down the steep streets, and people went about their business more contentedly than through the fine weeks of summer. Not even the staunch Oldchurch fishing smacks could go out in this. There might be no fish, but there was no chance of an invasion either, so long as the storm lasted.

  Confined to the house by weather too bad even for her, Caroline missed the daily visits to the poor and sick that took her up and down the narrow lanes of Oldchurch. The fresh air and exercise had done her good after her confined London life, and so had the simple nourishing meals M Japrisot sent in.

  ‘She needs good food, the little madame,’ he had explained to Tench. ‘My sister had just such a blind little look, and I cured it for her with my cooking. I shall do the same for our little angel.’

  Full of new energy, Caroline sent for Tench after breakfast one stormy morning. ‘I’ve had it on my mind ever since I came, that I have not been through the cellars,’ she told her. ‘Now that we have quite filled the larder and pantries with preserved goods against an emergency, we might find there was some space we could use below-stairs. Will you ask Barrett to come to me, with his keys? And I would like you to come too, of course.’

  Tench was looking doubtful. ‘Ma’am, do you not think you should speak to Mr Tremadoc first? Mr Barrett’s that particular about his cellars! Why, Jenkins offered to go down and fetch up a couple of bottles for him when he had that feverish cold t’other day, and you’d a’ thought he’d asked for the keys to the Tower of London. And him being the only servant that come with the house does make him a mite difficult about things. Like not being here when you arrived. The idea! Luckily my Jenkins is not one to take offence, so we manage well enough in the room, but it ain’t easy, ma’am, and I’d be lying to you if I let you think it was.’

  ‘You should have told me, Tench.’ Caroline herself had never liked Barrett, who she suspected of listening at doors. But Tremadoc had agreed to keep him on when he had come down for his induction and when she had protested at it as an absurd extravagance for people in their position, he had flown into one of his frightening fits of rage and she had let the matter drop. It was a poor kind of consolation that Barrett behaved more like a pensioner than a servant, leaving Jenkins to perform all the other duties that usually belonged to a butler, while he was content with his absolute control of the cellar.

  ‘It’s ridiculous,’ she said now. ‘We pay that man good wages to do nothing!’ She had been shocked to find just how much Tremadoc had agreed to pay Barrett, and now, with the cost of living rising all the time, to get rid of him seemed an obvious economy. ‘I’ll speak to Mr Tremadoc,’ she decided. ‘You’re quite right, the order would come best from him.’

  ‘If he’ll give it,’ said Tench.

  Caroline decided to raise the subject in what she had learned was her husband’s happiest time of day, the glowing moment when she had just read back the verses he had composed, or thought he had composed. It was amazing how easily they had slipped into what was, in fact, hardly a collaboration. Tremadoc had planned his poem on a grand, classical scale, with the powers of good
and evil acting both as chorus and as the impulses behind the Allied Powers and Bonaparte. She was genuinely impressed with the magnitude of the scheme, and now that Tremadoc hardly seemed to notice the liberties she took with his actual verses, it seemed to her to be going remarkably well. The first canto, which would end when Bonaparte became First Consul, would soon be finished, and Tremadoc planned to seek a publisher for it as it stood, and then go on with his great work, publishing it a canto at a time.

  ‘There.’ She finished reading aloud the Spirit of Evil’s hymn of triumph. ‘I do congratulate you, my dear.’ She meant it.

  ‘It does read well,’ he said, preening himself. ‘Even you managed to make it sound quite thrilling. Indeed,’ he added, ‘you read well enough, for a woman.’

  ‘Thank you.’ She kept her voice neutral. He had gone to the Wednesday dinner of the Oldchurch Club the day before, and she was beginning to wonder just what went on there. He always came back from the dinners in a strange mood, both drunk and, she thought, frightened. He tended to talk wildly about equality and liberty, about the mastery of man and the wickedness of women. She had learned to expect a bad night with him, but last night had been worse than usual. It had almost seemed as if he felt he must hurt and humiliate her.

  Rain lashed the windows in the gathering dusk. Her spine prickled cold. Down at the foot of the hill, the Land and Water Gates would be being locked and barred as the city fathers had ordered at the height of the invasion panic. It was not pleasant to think that there was no way out now, until morning, from this close-packed hill town. From her husband whose moods she found increasingly frightening. Did other women in Oldchurch feel like this? Mrs Bowles? She remembered her, that first day, saying something about women standing up for each other. ‘If we don’t no one else will.’ But it was not the kind of thing one could ask about.

  ‘Your wits are wandering again.’ Tremadoc’s impatient voice recalled her to the present, the over-warm little room, and the faint, bittersweet smell of his cordial. ‘I said, “Have you heard from the Duke?”’