That decided, and her sad morning visit paid to the sickroom where Mrs Tremadoc lay inert as ever, she settled herself to await her caller in the neat, dull front parlour. The sound of a curricle, driven fast, drew her to the window because it was so unusual in this quiet, unfashionable street. To her amazement, it drew up smartly outside the house and the driver threw the reins to the smart boy who sat up behind, jumped down and strode up the two steps to the front door.
A moment later, he was being shown into the room, where she had hurriedly composed herself on one of the uncomfortable chairs.
‘Mr Comfrey, ma’am,’ said Mrs Jones.
‘I’m early. Forgive me.’ Bowing over her hand, the publisher looked as surprised as she felt. Tremadoc had spoken of his youth, but had said nothing about his good looks. He had very likely been jealous, she thought sadly. She herself had expected some drab young city-looking man, but this handsome stranger was fashionable from artfully dishevelled golden curls and whiskers to narrow grey trousers. He was thin, and very brown, and his hand, as he took hers, felt full of life as if he were charged with one of Mr Mesmer’s electric currents.
‘You are Mrs Tremadoc?’ He looked about the room as if he half expected to see someone else.
‘I am not what you expected?’ She motioned him to a seat, sadly dismissing that dream of a confidant.
‘Forgive me,’ he said again, moving with controlled grace to hold her chair for her. ‘I had…I had quite the wrong idea.’ Looking momentarily out of countenance, he seemed younger still. ‘Absurd of me.’
What in the world could Tremadoc have said about her? Or was it the voice of scandal Comfrey had listened to? What did the world say about the products of Chevenham House? She would rather not know.
‘I was quite wrong about you, too,’ she told him. ‘I had expected an experienced publisher whose advice I would revere.’
‘Which you will not mine?’ Now he was laughing at her. ‘Dear Mrs Tremadoc, I do hope I can persuade you otherwise. I mean to be frank with you, as I was with your husband.’ He paused, looking abashed. ‘I beg a thousand pardons; there are so many things I should be saying.’
‘You said them, Mr Comfrey, most gracefully in your letter. Now we are to talk business, you and I. Let us, please, be frank with each other. I am a widow, and poor. I think you mean to make money from the work my husband has left. I hope you do. I need it. I mean to help you, and share it.’
‘Help me?’ Now she had indeed surprised him.
‘Yes. I should explain. My husband came back from his last visit to London much impressed with what you had said to him in praise of Lord Nelson. He started at once to work on a whole new canto, devoted to him. He worked fast, when the spirit moved him. I was his amanuensis, Mr Comfrey, but he was too quick for me. He was…impatient when he was composing. I took it down as best I might; there are alterations, interpolations, he even left passages open, or wrote alternative passages…In case of victory, in case of defeat…Even in case of death. He said you might be wrong about Nelson — forgive me? I have it all, in my notes, but it will take me some time to transcribe it, to set it to rights. Don’t look so doubtful! It’s what I always did for him. You met him several times, Mr Comfrey, you must have seen that he was an impatient man. He threw off his work at white heat, then left the shaping to me.’
‘I see.’ He thought about it for a moment. ‘It’s wonderful news, Mrs Tremadoc. Tell me, how much? How soon?’
‘A whole canto, I think. Early in the new year? It depends a little on the condition of my mother-in-law. She is gravely ill.’
‘I’m sorry.’ It was merely an automatic response. ‘But publication must not depend on anything, Mrs Tremadoc. Lord Nelson’s funeral is on January the ninth. Hire nurses! Hire as many as you please and let me stand the expense. I must have the poem, sheet by sheet if necessary, so that it can come out in January at the latest. I am a man of business, and I tell you, speed is of the essence here. The volume of sermons can wait…should wait until we have hit the public with the poem. I beg that you will bend every nerve to the transcription. Is there any way that I can help you?’
‘I am afraid not. But there are a few pages I have already transcribed. I thought you would like to see them.’ She was both amused and irritated that he had not asked her what she thought of the new canto. ‘I copied them for you last night.’ She picked up the neatly written sheets and handed them to him.
He took them reverently. ‘Excuse me?’ He read fast, as she had written, totally absorbed, and she watched with equal intensity. Suppose, just suppose, she had written too fast, had deceived herself when she thought this the best of all…How strange to think that he held her future in his hands, this curly-haired young Adonis.
He put down the last sheet, and sighed. ‘Magnificent. It will bring tears to every eye. Good God, Mrs Tremadoc, what a tragedy, what a loss! And you have the whole canto?’ He came to his feet and strode to the window as if the room was too small for him, then back to loom over her chair. ‘I’m a selfish man, Mrs Tremadoc. When I heard of your husband’s death, I thought it meant my ruin. Mine’s a small publishing house, a new one. When I received the first canto of The Downfall of Bonaparte I thought my chance of establishing myself had come. I have poured everything I had into promotion of your husband’s work.’ He laughed. ‘More than everything! I thought the risk was justified. Now I know it was. May I send you a copyist, and may I call on your man of business to discuss terms?’
She smiled up at him. ‘I’m sorry, but no to both, Mr Comfrey. I have always fair-copied my husband’s work; he liked me to do so. He was grateful for the small changes I made in it. His was the grand design, mine the attention to detail. I do not propose to change that. But I will hire nurses, if you wish to pay for them. My poor mother-in-law knows no one; it can make no difference to her, and I have as great an interest as you in the poem’s success. We should publish it on the day of the funeral, I collect?’
‘If you can do it.’
‘If I can, I must. I shall be glad to have an excuse to keep to the house and see no one.’
‘Very well. But the agreement, Mrs Tremadoc. We must have a new agreement. Surely your man of business?’
‘I would much rather settle it with you here and now, Mr Comfrey.’ She had thought about this and had her proposal for improved terms ready. He listened to it with surprised respect, agreed at once, and promised to have it drawn up for signature that same day.
‘You are a very surprising young lady, Mrs Tremadoc, if you will not mind my saying so.’ He was on his feet, ready to go, but looked down at her thoughtfully for a moment, studying her face. ‘It’s a strange thing. You remind me of someone…No, that’s not it. I feel as if I had met you before, but that is impossible. I have never been to Sussex in my life.’
‘Sussex?’ She realised, with wry amusement, that Tremadoc must have told his publisher nothing about her. Well, why should he have. But, curiously enough, she, too, had begun to feel the faint stirrings of an old memory. What exactly was it? Something about the way he moved? ‘Quite impossible.’ She was answering herself as much as him. ‘We have most certainly never been introduced. Your charming name is not one I would have forgotten.’
‘Oh, that!’ He had a fine, carefree laugh. ‘Just right for a publisher, don’t you think? Memorable, I hope. But all my own invention, Mrs Tremadoc. My own name’s disgraced. I thought, when I returned to England, that I would make it good again, for my father’s sake, my mother’s. We were all to be happy together. A boy’s plans, forgive me for boring you with them.’
‘You’re not boring me. I am so sorry. Do please go on.’
‘They were dead, of course, when I got back. Both of them. And my sister had doubled the shame I brought on the family. An unlucky name, Mrs Tremadoc, best forgotten. Giles Comfrey does very well.’
‘Giles?’ He had always signed with the initial only. ‘Good God! You’re Giles!’ She was on her feet, holding out both han
ds. ‘No wonder we remembered each other! Oh, dear Giles, I am Caroline, your sister.’ And then, remembering what he had just said. ‘Disgraced? Sophie? What do you mean?’
‘Little Carrie?’ He bent to kiss the hands swallowed in his, and once again, endearingly, he blushed. ‘You did not like to be called that! Did you get in a great deal of trouble about those pearls?’
‘No — well, yes.’ She must not tell him that that had been the moment when everything began to go wrong between her and the Trenthams. ‘It’s all over now, best forgotten. But Sophie?’
‘Ran off with young Staines. Just after my father died. She’s living with him still. No marriage, of course. Dr Thornton could not afford to divorce her, and if he could it would mean professional ruin. She writes boldly enough, but there are two children, poor little things.’
‘You’ve not seen her?’
‘No. Her letter was enough. I would rather not. Caroline.’ His colour deepened under the dark skin. ‘Were they lies, the things she said about you? I think they were the hardest to bear. I had thought about you so much, all that time in India. I have a string of pearls at home, bought for you, Carrie. Tell me they were lies!’
‘What did she say?’
‘Not much. Enough. That we must forget you. She named no names. Just said you had gone to your real mother, and — forgive me — gone the same way she had. That it killed our mother.’
‘How could she!’ Anger was warming. ‘If you had thought for a moment, Giles, you would have known that could not be true. Your mother died when I was still a child. Just before Sophie’s own marriage. And—’ It was her turn to blush. ‘She’s wrong about my mother, too. Well, you live in the world, you must know about her. She’s Frances Winterton.’
‘Good God!’ He obviously did know about Frances, and was taken all aback. ‘Caroline, forgive me.’
‘No need. There was a scandal about me. I do not propose to tell you about it. But I was innocent, except for a foolish elopement with poor Mr Tremadoc.’
‘I should not have believed her,’ he said. ‘I should have sought you out, Caroline, but I have been so busy, setting up my publishing house. I only got home a year and half ago. That’s why The Downfall of Bonaparte is so important to me. Lord, Carrie?’
‘Yes?’
‘You used to write poetry. Reams and reams of it. And read it aloud to me. Did you perhaps help your husband a little? I never could quite understand about him…You really worked with him on his great poem?’
‘Why, yes, you could say I did.’ But this was dangerous ground and she shifted it. ‘I am beginning to recognise you now,’ she said. ‘But you look so much older. And your hair, Giles…It used to be dark.’
He laughed, a little self-consciously. ‘The Indian sun. A fortunate thing we men do not care about our complexions the way you ladies do.’ He had been thinking about what she had told him. ‘But, Carrie, if Mrs Winterton is your mother, your father must be…’
‘The Duke of Cley.’ She confirmed it without pleasure.
Chapter Nineteen
Even through the warm happiness of rediscovering Giles, Caroline kept her head, and her secret. She admitted to a closer collaboration with Tremadoc than she had previously suggested, but that was as far as she went. Every instinct warned her that she must not tell Giles that she was in fact writing the new canto and sending it to him, sheet by sheet, as she went along. If the poem was the success he confidently predicted, it would be time enough to confess to her authorship. Then, she thought, she might even risk showing him some of her own work, the sequence of sonnets she had written to Blakeney, which could easily be passed off as a young girl’s first love poetry, to an imagined hero, and which she continued to think well of.
London was an anxious place that winter. The tragedy of Nelson’s death had cast a shadow over his victory, and soon Trafalgar was almost forgotten in the grim news of allied defeats at Ulm and Austerlitz.
But for Caroline it was a peaceful, preoccupied time. Her mother-in-law’s illness combined with her own deep mourning to give her a complete excuse for keeping out of society. What could a young widow do more suitable than sit at home and copy out her dead husband’s work? Busy writing his memorial, she was able to keep at bay her nagging sense of guilt over Tremadoc’s death.
She was not at home to any visitors except the doctor, Mr James the lawyer, and Giles. Mrs Jones, turned dragon in her defence, effectively routed even Mrs Tremadoc’s nephew, who went grumbling off to Mr James, got no good there either, and returned to Manchester. Giles visited her every other day to collect the sheets she had ‘copied’, and would have come daily if she had let him. But she was having a little trouble with Giles, who thought that if she could amend her dead husband’s work, so could he, a delusion of which she had gently but firmly to dispossess him.
But they were wonderfully good friends and she had even accepted the exquisite string of pearls he had brought home from India for her, because it would have seemed churlish not to do so. He had wanted to write and quarrel with Sophie on her account, but she had been able to persuade him not to do so.
‘Poor Sophie, she must have troubles enough of her own.’ They had finished reading through the batch of verses she had produced for him and were sitting comfortably together in front of the fire in the little front room she had gradually turned into a study.
‘I suppose so. But it makes me angry, just the same, to think how she slandered you. Caroline, I have been thinking…I would like…I would very much like to be presented to your mother.’
‘My mother?’ It was amazing how, here on the wrong side of the park, it had been possible almost to forget about Chevenham House. She had, in the end, had kind notes from both the Duchess and her mother, who appeared to have accepted the fact that she was, for the moment, self-supporting, but she had ignored their invitations to call at Chevenham House. There had been no word from the Duke, but then, as the Duchess had remarked, he was involved in the ceremonial arrangements for Nelson’s State Funeral, and very busy indeed. Reading between the lines of the two notes, Caroline thought that the Duke must have been persuaded by his two ladies that however much he disliked her he could not absolutely cut the connection with his daughter. But she was sure he would be relieved not to see her at Chevenham House.
Giles was repeating his request: ‘Yes, your mother. And…’ He blushed his engaging blush. ‘Your father, if you think it appropriate.’
‘Which I do not. I’m sorry, Giles, but I prefer not to go to Chevenham House at the moment.’ She had still heard nothing from Charles Mattingley, and did not even know whether he was down at Oldchurch, or whether he was once again a habitué of Chevenham House. She most certainly did not intend to risk meeting him there, seeing him once again the Duchess’ faithful slave. It’s all wrong for him, she thought angrily, that’s why I dislike the idea so. If only her imagination would leave it alone.
Giles was looking disappointed. ‘Your family, Carrie?’
‘I look on you as quite as much my family as they are.’
She had explained their relationship to Mrs Jones, who had begun to look a little askance at his frequent visits, and had no doubt that that lady was busily putting it about in the close-knit servants’ underworld that her mistress had found a long-lost brother. The news would doubtless get back to Chevenham House soon enough.
‘Thank you for saying that, dear Carrie.’ He was on his feet now, making ready to go. ‘I mean to be.’
Left alone, she sighed, and shrugged, and went back to work. She thought she had never worked so hard in her life. Since the poem was being set as she wrote it, there was no way, without extreme inconvenience and expense, that she could change anything. It made her task doubly difficult, and so did the lack both of a library and of the reliable advice about matters of fact that she had been able to get from ‘John Gerard’ when she worked in his. It was no use asking Giles in what year Nelson became an admiral or when Bonaparte had made himself Emperor.
Giles would merely shrug, and smile and point out that he had most likely been in India at the time, busy making a fortune. And even on the events that had taken place since he returned to England he proved a disappointing source of information.
‘I’m sorry, Carrie dear.’ He shrugged off her questions. ‘I’m a working man, you know. No time for politics and the papers.’
She bit back a sharp reply. After all, she hoped he was engaged in making both their fortunes, but she wished she could make him see that just for that reason it was important that she get her facts right.
‘But if Mr Tremadoc did not mind, why should you?’ asked Giles unanswerably when she tried to explain this. He left her still distractedly wondering just exactly what had been so masterly about Nelson’s battle plan for Aboukir Bay.
She was interrupted by Mrs Jones, to ask, doubtfully whether she would see Mr Mattingley.
‘I told him you were not at home, ma’am, but he said you’d be at home to him. A very masterful gentleman.’
‘An old friend. Yes, I’ll see him.’ She jumped to her feet to study the flushed reflection in the glass. Of course her heart was beating faster. The last time they had met he had asked her to marry him.
Forget that. But she could not conceal her pleasure when he appeared. ‘You have come in the nick of time.’ The touch of his warm hand sent the blood racing through her, and she found herself babbling. ‘I need your help. John Gerard’s help. I am engaged in copying poor Tremadoc’s poem for the publisher, and I cannot make sense of what he says about Nelson’s battle plan. My notes are almost indecipherable, I’m afraid.’
‘Unlike you.’ He took the seat she had indicated. ‘I’m glad to see you so well occupied, but you look tired. Are you working yourself too hard? The poem is to be published on the day of the funeral, I understand. It is being puffed everywhere by that busy publisher of yours.’ Was there an implied question in the statement?
The Lost Garden (The Purchas Family Series Book 5) Page 29