The Lost Garden (The Purchas Family Series Book 5)

by Jane Aiken Hodge

  It was a couplet Tremadoc had insisted on inserting into their stanzas about the death of Burke. It made, Caroline thought sadly, a very suitable epitaph for him.

  ‘Thank you.’ She smiled a kind dismissal to Francis, who was hopefully lingering beside her, and turned eagerly to the letters.

  Nothing from Chevenham House. One was in Comfrey’s small, neat hand. It was addressed to her, not to Tremadoc, so he must have heard the news. Her hand shook as she opened it.

  He wrote with great kindness and sympathy to the woman he imagined desolate for her genius husband. Every word of praise for the lost poet made her feel worse, more of a hypocrite, more of a murderess. If she had not turned Tremadoc into something he was not, Bowles and his gang would probably not have killed him. It was knowledge she must keep to herself and learn to live with. She turned the closely written sheet and came to the nub of the letter. ‘Is it too much to hope,’ wrote Comfrey, ‘that our lost genius has left some publishable fragments of his great poem? He spoke, when he was last in town, of a canto devoted to Lord Nelson, but we differed about the line he intended to take. He was critical of our hero then. If he did some work on the new canto, I devoutly hope he allowed his genius to be over-ruled by my caution. If anything does remain, flattering to Nelson, and worthy of your husband, I would wish to publish it with as little delay as possible, however imperfect. We must catch the moment, Mrs Tremadoc.’

  He turned to kind enquiries about her own health, and asked if he might give himself the pleasure of visiting her, as soon as she felt equal to it, to look over and discuss any fragments Tremadoc might have left. He would also, he said, like to consider publishing a collection of Tremadoc’s sermons, which he had heard highly praised. ‘I only wish I had heard him give one of them.’

  From the tone of the letter, she was sure that Comfrey expected a runaway success for both poem and sermons if he could only publish them while the news of Tremadoc’s ‘heroic’ death was still fresh. She must lose no time in finding somewhere to write the new canto she planned. But where? She opened the next letter, belatedly recognising the hand as Amelia’s. Dated from the Ffether country house near Cley, it was short and to the point.

  Mamma has sent me your news. Fancy Tremadoc a hero! Fancy you a widow! I don’t know which I find harder to credit. Mamma thinks I should ask you to stay, and really it seems an uncommon good notion. I’m breeding, of course, and bored to distraction here on the cold fens. I asked Skinny, but she won’t leave that brother of hers and his puling infant, so do come and cheer me up. I’ll even let you read to me, as you used to do to Mamma. See how low I’m sunk.

  And then, a postscript:

  We’re all to pieces here since that fool of a housekeeper left.

  Caroline sat for a moment, looking sadly down at the letter. So that was the plan for her future. Unpaid housekeeper, companion and whipping boy to whichever member of the family chanced to need her. The reference to Miss Skinner gave it all away. But of course she would not leave her brother and his motherless child. If only there was more room in the little Cambridge house, but by what rights would she ask asylum there? She turned to the last letter, her heart sinking as she saw that it was from Tremadoc’s mother. She had written to her as soon as her hand could manage a pen, making the most of Mattingley’s story about Tremadoc’s gallant death, but Mrs Tremadoc had not had the letter when she wrote. Her letter was one long, bitter accusation. Caroline was an adventuress, a seductress, a murderess. She had turned son against mother. She would reap her reward now: ‘Expect no help from me.’

  It was all true. Caroline stared at the letter with unseeing eyes. Every word of it was true. She had trapped Tremadoc into a loveless marriage. She had made him famous, and, by doing so, had condemned him to death. And she was indeed reaping her reward now. No help from anyone. She could not stay here. She would not go to the Ffethers. Chevenham House and Mrs Tremadoc’s seemed equally closed to her. She turned back to Comfrey’s letter, so kind, so friendly…He said nothing about terms for publication, doubtless feeling that this would be out of place in a letter of condolence, but she thought him a fair man. If she were to write and ask him to advance the money for her to live on while she ‘prepared’ the sermons and the next canto of The Downfall of Bonaparte for the press, she was sure he would send it to her.

  Live by herself? Where? Not in Oldchurch. Mattingley was right about that. Suddenly, overwhelmingly, she was filled with longing for the old vicarage at Llanfryn, the lost, fragrant garden of her childhood. Go there? But Mr Trentham was dead and a new clergyman installed in the old house. Sophie was doubtless mistress of the Thornton household now, but to write to her was merely to apply for another post as unpaid companion. And, besides, she and Sophie had never really been friends. She wondered, as she often did, what had happened to Giles. Had he made his fortune in India, or had he just sunk there without trace? She would probably never know. Poor Giles. Sometimes, thinking of that distant past, she had wondered if her own coming, their adoption of her, had not done something to destroy that happy family. Am I a Jonah? Do I harm whomever befriends me? Blakeney was in the regular army now, serving under General Moore. If he was killed, it would be her fault too.

  Calling on her two days later, Mattingley was troubled by her drawn look. ‘What have you been doing with yourself?’ he asked. ‘You are supposed to be resting and getting better.’

  ‘I’m being shamefully indulged.’ She could not tell him that she now sat up to all hours in her cold bedroom, wrapped in a heavy cloak, writing her elegy for Lord Nelson until the candle failed her. ‘But I must leave here, Mr Mattingley. They have been kindness itself to me, but for that very reason I must go.’

  ‘The boys, is it? I noticed that they had not gone back to Cambridge.’ He did not add that he had come on them quarrelling in the stable yard and guessed she was the cause. ‘You’ve heard from Chevenham House?’ He had written to the Duchess urging that Caroline be invited back there, and, wise though he was in the ways of women, it had not struck him that his very urgency might defeat its own end.

  ‘Indirectly.’

  He had never heard her so very nearly bitter.

  ‘Amelia writes to invite me to stay with them. Indefinitely. I am to be something, I think, between housekeeper and companion.’

  ‘You’ll go?’

  Did he hope she would?

  ‘No. I have written to Mr Comfrey, the publisher, asking for an advance payment that will let me take lodgings in London and get my husband’s papers in order for publication.’

  ‘Lodgings in London? By yourself? Impossible. It would be social ruin.’

  ‘I see no alternative.’ Cold comfort that she knew he was right.

  ‘You must go to Chevenham House! Of course they will take you in if you present yourself there.’ And then, seeing her mutely shake her head, ‘Well, that settles it! Caroline, marry me.’ He knew it for a mistake before the words were out. ‘I know it’s too soon…’

  ‘You are a very gallant gentleman, Mr Mattingley, and I thank you.’ She was on her feet, paler than ever. ‘But I’ll spoil no more lives. Besides, what would the Duchess say?’ She turned with a quick breath of relief as Jennifer bounced into the room, her arms full of black crêpe. ‘Jennifer and I are very busy,’ she told him, ‘making favours for the day of Nelson’s funeral.’

  He retired, cursing himself, and when he called again, a few days later, was amazed to learn that Caroline had left for London.

  ‘She received an urgent summons from her mother-in-law’s housekeeper,’ Dick Purchas told him. ‘It seems the old lady’s been ill for some time; thought her daughter-in-law knew, but young Tremadoc never troubled to tell her it was serious. His death brought on a paralytic stroke. They need young Mrs Tremadoc to see to things. I’m sad, but I can’t say I’m not relieved. Sometimes I think there was — oh, it sounds crazy — not a curse exactly, but my poor sister Julia brought bad luck wherever she went. The boys have gone back to Cambridg
e.’ It was very far from being a non sequitur.

  ‘Mrs Tremadoc left no letter for me?’

  ‘A message. Her kindest thanks. She went off in a great rush; the carriage was waiting. My little Jennifer’s quite broken-hearted.’

  And so am I, thought Mattingley. How strange. How very strange. The first time he had asked Caroline to marry him, it had been merely a quixotic gesture…Or had it? Had he always felt more about the Duchess’ protégé than he quite understood? At all events, the long, friendly association in Oldchurch, when she treated him as the wise counsellor and older friend she thought him, had done his business for him. Idiot to have spoken so absurdly too soon. What madness had made him do it? It was not just the thought that at all costs his future wife must be prevented from the social ruin of setting up house alone in London. It had been something else…something about the feel of her in his arms that night in the cellars. Surely the spark that had lit in him when he roped her up for the dangerous plunge must glow in her too? Or was it all his imagination? What did he know about a young thing like her? Suddenly, passionately, he found himself regretting his long affair with the Duchess. If only they had remained the good friends they could have been…But she had needed more than that, and he had been young and under her spell.

  Caroline had spoken of the Duchess, just before Jennifer’s disastrous interruption. He had hoped she did not know of that long-standing affair, but it had probably been absurd to do so. Just as well that she was not going to be living in Chevenham House. He could not have visited her there without seeing the Duchess too. Risking re-involvement in the relationship he had hoped to end when pique at Caroline’s failure even to answer his proposal had combined with anxiety about her move to Oldchurch to send him down to live there all the time. Caroline had transformed him from the dilettante part-time spy, who left his servants to keep the watch he had undertaken in Oldchurch, while he played his outworn part as the Duchess’ devoted slave in London. It was a mercy he had gone down to Oldchurch. If he had not been there, events on that Guy Fawkes Day might have worked out very differently. The little town might now be a bastion for Napoleon’s army of invasion, and Caroline dead as well as her husband.

  He would follow her to London, just as soon as he could, but for the moment duty kept him in Oldchurch where the government’s agents were having a hard time of it trying to combine punishment for the surviving conspirators with secrecy about what they had actually planned. It would be a while before he could abandon his part as John Gerard, and he told himself that was probably a good thing. Respectably established in her mother-in-law’s house, Caroline would have time to get over the shock of her husband’s death. He had known hers, always, for a marriage without love. After all, he had seen her and Blakeney together on that fatal day in Richmond Park, and known that in marrying Tremadoc she had consciously taken second best. He had sometimes been surprised that she did not show more respect for the brilliant figure her husband had become, but then, he told himself, no man is really a hero to his wife. Would he be? What a strange question. First, I must persuade her to marry me, he thought, and returned to Oldchurch to plunge back into John Gerard’s business, to get it finished.

  Reaching London, Caroline was appalled by Mrs Tremadoc’s condition. She knew the servants, since Mrs Tremadoc had taken them with her from the house in Grosvenor Square, and they were silently reproachful at first, until she explained that Tremadoc had given her only the most casual hint that all was not well with his mother.

  ‘I should have thought of that,’ said Mrs Jones, the housekeeper. ‘He never did take the poor mistress’ trouble seriously. And of course she did her best to put on a brave face for him when he came to stay. She’s past that now, poor lady. The news of his death did for her, I think. She wrote to you, and sent for her lawyer, Mr James, but the spasm took her before he got here. She’s been as you see ever since.’

  ‘What does the doctor say?’ Caroline looked down at the motionless figure in the big bed.

  ‘That it’s a matter of time. Anything from days to years, he reckons. I’m glad you’re come, ma’am. We all are. We was afraid it might be the mistress’ nephew, son of her brother that lost all that money for her. Worried her to death, he has, with his begging letters. You must look for a visit from him, just as soon as he hears the news.’

  ‘He’s not been told?’

  ‘We sent to you, ma’am.’

  The lawyer and doctor both called that afternoon, the doctor to confirm what Mrs Jones had said, and Mr James to expand on it.

  ‘I’ve never been gladder to have been out of town,’ he told her. ‘From Mrs Tremadoc’s note, I think there was no question but she meant to change her will. As it stands, everything goes to her son, and therefore to you. She is in no state to change it now, and I’m glad of it. That nephew of hers did his best to suck her dry. If you’ll be advised by me, Mrs Tremadoc, you’ll have no dealings with him. Send him to me, if he proves importunate. You’ll have little enough as it is, I am afraid. Don’t go thinking it a fortune But I suppose Mr Tremadoc’s poetry may bring you in something?’

  ‘I hope so,’ she told him. ‘I am seeing his publisher tomorrow.’

  ‘A sad loss, Mrs Tremadoc.’ He rose to his feet. ‘A most surprising and brilliant young man, your husband. A very sad loss to the world.’

  She was getting used to these curiously painful, ill-founded condolences. If she could bear them from Charles Mattingley, she thought she could bear them from anyone. She pushed the idea of Mattingley resolutely to the back of her mind, but it would keep recurring. It was so hard to get used to the idea that he was her wise old friend, John Gerard. She blushed angrily as she remembered how she had confided in him, admitted her ignorance, asked his advice as one might of a father if one had ever had a proper one. And all the time, her grey-bearded friend had been Charles Mattingley, the Duchess’ lover, playing at spies.

  He had saved her life by his spy-playing. No getting away from that. And impossible not to remember that moment of helpless ecstasy when he tied the harness around her. Doubtless that was the way he affected all women. Doubtless, too, he knew it was, and had taken it for granted that she would leap at marriage. Well, thank God, her instinctive reaction had been the right one. She had shown him his mistake, and next time they met he would be the Duchess’ devoted slave again.

  She would not call at Chevenham House for a while. They obviously did not want her there, and she very much did not want to see her good friend John Gerard transformed into Mattingley and dangling after the Duchess. She hated to think of them together, could not help it, and found her thoughts flash back to a day long ago, when she was a terrified child, new to Cley, and Gaston had sent her to burst into the Duke’s private apartments. It had been a long time before she realised that it must have been Frances Winterton, not the Duchess, concealed in the huge four-poster. Her mother. And her father. And he had never forgiven her. Of course it was he who had closed the doors of Chevenham House to her now. The Duchess had done her best for her by arranging Amelia’s invitation. Impossible not to love the Duchess, who had always been more of a mother to her than Frances Winterton. She must never know of Charles Mattingley’s brief defection. Well, why should she? He would be regretting his moment of madness by now. All over, all past, all done with.

  She moved over to a window to look out at the house’s small, winter-bare town garden and think about fathers. The Duke was still in town, she knew, although parliament had been prorogued until January. A little shrimp, he had called her, all those years ago. Often and often, remembering this, she had imagined scenes in which he changed his tune. She was dressed for her presentation at court, for her wedding, for some state occasion…plumes and diamonds and a great sweep of crinoline, and he was looking at her in amazement.

  ‘My beautiful daughter!’

  Tears came suddenly to her eyes. Forgetting the Duke, she remembered Mr Trentham. Suddenly, clearly, she saw his face as the Duke said those slig
hting words, years ago, his loving father’s face, feeling with her, feeling for her, knowing it all, loving her. What friends they had been, working together in his study, what wonderfully good friends. Had he, she wondered, looking back, had he perhaps favoured her at the expense of his own children? Had she really been a disaster to that family?

  A disaster everywhere? She turned impatiently away from the window and pulled out the sheet of paper she had hidden when the lawyer was announced. She was a good halfway through the canto on Lord Nelson now, and must make up her mind just what she was going to say to Mr Comfrey when he called next day. What would the publisher be like? Tremadoc had never given her any kind of a picture of him, but then, describing people was hardly Tremadoc’s strong suit. Deep in self-love, he hardly even saw them. She was going to have to be very careful how she talked to Comfrey. He said nothing about himself in his letters, but he was most evidently no fool. He had spent a good deal of time with Tremadoc, had refused to introduce him into the literary world, must therefore have seen the discrepancy between the man and the work. How would he have explained it to himself? If he had imagined the possibility of a collaborator, she would have to be cautious indeed. Unless she confessed it all? Could she perhaps tell him the whole story, and would he advise her what to do?

  Deep mourning did not suit her. Eyeing the quenched, slight figure in the glass next day, she dismissed those fantasies about confiding in Mr Comfrey. Nobody would believe that this inconspicuous figure was the real author of The Downfall of Bonaparte. She would show him what she had written, and tell him with timid, apologetic blushes, if she could manage them, that the rest had been taken down verbatim, in such a scrawl that nobody but she could understand it. She would be every inch the incapable young female and explain that she could only transcribe a little a day. That would give her time to finish.