‘And you, Sara ‒ what of yourself? What will England have for you?’ His voice had a rough edge to it, although he kept it low.
‘For me? Very little, I think, Jeremy. I must be with Elizabeth of course, and then …’
‘Yes?’
‘I want to be on hand to prompt the return as soon as David and Duncan begin to think of it. They forget so easily … They’ll fritter their time away, and the memory of Kintyre and Banon and Dane Farm could grow very faint if I were not there to keep bringing them up.’
Jeremy regarded her in silence again. Then his eyes left her, and watched Edwards’ silhouette moving across the two curved windows. Outside, the Maclay name-sign creaked a little in the wind; the candle fluttered wildly as a sudden stronger gust forced a draught under the door.
At last Jeremy spoke, turning to look at her. ‘Why don’t you tell me the truth?’
She stiffened. ‘What do you mean?’
With a loud, smacking noise he crashed one fist into the other. ‘Oh, damn you! Do you think I’m taken in by your sentimental notions of going to England just to be with the children? You may often have forced me into doing things I didn’t want, Sara, but you’ve never yet succeeded in hoodwinking me!’
Angrily she took a step towards him. ‘Tell me exactly what you mean, and stop this quibbling!’
He was breathing heavily. ‘You’re going to England because of that fool, Richard Barwell. Isn’t that it? You’ve always wanted him, and now he’s practically yours.’
She almost recoiled before his words. ‘How dare you say that to me! How dare you say it when Louis is only dead two days!’
He tugged at his coat, dragging it back on his shoulders.
‘I think I’d say anything to you … now that I know what is really in your lying little soul! God, when I think of how long I’ve tried to believe that you were different! I made excuses for the way you behaved. I told myself that you acted as you did because the hardships of your life had taught you to look after yourself first. When you came to Kintyre, I hoped that Andrew’s love for you, and the way he worked to give you the things you wanted, might chip away some of that crust of self-love. You assumed a softer façade, but you didn’t really change ‒ not ever! For years I’ve pretended to myself that you’ve altered ‒ but you haven’t. Here you are, now, planning to have yet another prize that you’ve always hankered after!’
‘Don’t you preach to me, Jeremy Hogan!’ she cried passionately. ‘Don’t you set yourself up to be my conscience! Anyway, what do you know of women like me? Haven’t you always told me that you were brought up among women who had soft voices and slept in soft beds? Don’t you come here like a twice-a-year parson and tell me what I must do, and mustn’t do! You think you know me through and through ‒ you’ve always thought that ‒ but I’m telling you right now that you couldn’t even begin to understand what sort of woman I am. You’ve only known two kinds ‒ the kind who played the piano in your mother’s drawing-room, and the convict strumpet you’re living with now! And I’ll tell you something else … I’m sick to death of having you order me about ‒ I’m sick of your moralising and your preaching! Ever since I’ve known you it’s always been, “Sara, you must do thus, and thus!” Or, “Sara, Andrew would expect you to do this, and this!” And all the time you’ve been rotten with jealousy because I didn’t fall into your arms when you wanted me. Long ago, at Kintyre, you confessed that to me … and I’ve never forgotten it.’
‘Be quiet!’ he snapped. ‘You’re talking like a street-woman!’
‘Do you think I care about that? Listen to me, Jeremy, I don’t have to ask anyone’s permission for what I’ll say or do. Do you understand that?’
She flung out her hands. ‘Oh, I’ve many reasons to be grateful to you, many reasons ‒ and I’ll not forget them, either. But my gratitude doesn’t give you the right to tell me how I’ll behave. From the day Andrew died, you’ve tried to tell me how to live my life. Well, I haven’t lived it as you wanted ‒ neither has it turned out to be the disaster you predicted. I’ve had a pretty full life ‒ but if you had your way I’d be sitting over my needlework, weeping for Andrew. Louis knew the sort of life I wanted ‒ and that’s why he married me. Do you understand now?’
He picked up his hat and riding-crop.
‘Yes, certainly I understand ‒ very clearly.’
‘Well?’ she demanded.
He walked up close to her, and stared into her face.
‘I understand it all so clearly, that I’m going out of here and I’ll marry the first presentable woman I can find. The only thing I’ll ask of her is that she has no ambition, and no thoughts beyond her own fireside. I want her to be meek and pliable and biddable. She’ll be, in fact, as different from you, Sara, as it’s possible for a woman to be. Because, if you’re sick to death of me ‒ then I can tell you that I’ve had my belly and guts full of you, and I hope to God I never lay eyes on your kind again!’
Then he turned and strode across the floor, cramming his hat on his head, and flinging open the door. Edwards, leaning against it, staggered back wildly, clutching at a large keg to keep his balance. The door closed with a mighty crash, setting an assortment of frying-pans, hanging from the ceiling, swaying and tinkling. Edwards stood with his mouth open a little, staring up at them dumbly.
‘Mr. Hogan has gone, Edwards,’ Sara said, unnecessarily. ‘You’d better go and tell Clapmore he can come out now.’
PART SIX
Chapter One
Sara opened her eyes slowly to the sight of her familiar bedroom in the house in Golden Square, on a morning in June, 1814. Every morning for six months past she had awakened with just the same sense of expectancy, as if this day, above all the others, might have something different about it. But within a few moments the feeling of disappointment and indifference had fastened upon her again. The room was dim with the drawn curtains, and she had no idea what the time was, but already the sounds of the London day had begun to penetrate ‒ the street cries, the rumble of heavy carriage wheels, the shrill voices of servants gossiping together as they swept the area steps. These were the sounds with which she had grown familiar but never resigned to ‒ and each morning they struck her ear as if for the first time. She stared up at the silk canopy above the bed, and knew that her resentment was entirely unreasonable; she wasn’t any more pleased with herself being forced to admit it. With an almost savage movement she reached out and pulled at the bell-cord.
As she lay waiting for the hurrying footsteps to come in answer to her ring, she thought of the day ahead of her. It wouldn’t be much different from most other days ‒ there was correspondence to be attended to, perhaps a visit to her shipping agents, a drive in the Park, and then to end it a party in Lady Fulton’s house, in St. James’s Square. She would hardly be in bed again before dawn. Until a few weeks ago she had been quite willing to accept this routine, hardly questioning it, because it was new to her, and, in its way, exciting. The sharp contrast between the London she now inhabited, and the London of the cheap lodging-houses in and about Fleet Street and the Strand, which she had known with her father, was somewhat of a balm for the boredom and impatience she sometimes felt. To rent one’s own London house, to keep a carriage and good horses, to have liveried servants on the box when one drove in the Park ‒ all these things, the marks of belonging in a fashionable world, would have seemed no more than an idle fairy-tale to the young child who had served as a dressmaker’s apprentice an almost forgotten number of years ago. She remembered that child vividly, and she remembered how her mind, sharpened by the need to scrape some sort of living from Sebastian’s precarious earnings, had seized upon every opportunity towards advancement, and, as quick as a monkey, she had seen her chances and taken them, until the day Sebastian’s debts had finally forced them into the coach bound for Rye. Now Sara herself was a respected patron of one of the most fashionable of the dressmakers, but, unlike most of the other patrons, she had a curiously naive habit
of paying her accounts promptly. She had a strange feeling sometimes, that the young Sara was at her elbow when she attended receptions and parties, giving those same appraising glances to the furnishing of the houses, and the smartness of the carriages in which the guests arrived, and the quality of the clothes they wore.
She turned over in bed and sighed. Once she had taken a chaise ‒ hired, because the servants would have wondered at their mistress’s errand if she had ordered the carriage ‒ and driven to Villiers Street, off the Strand. She took it all in carefully ‒ the tall, narrow houses, the street-pedlars, the dirty children, the dogs. This was the street Sebastian had told her she was born in; but it evoked no particular sense of familiarity. She didn’t stay long ‒ the young Sara seemed to have deserted her at the crucial moment ‒ and a richly dressed woman in a waiting chaise excited too much comment in that outspoken neighbourhood. She returned to Golden Square with the feeling that she had lost something infinitely precious to her.
A trim, middle-aged maid tapped softly, and opened the bedroom door. She went directly to the windows and drew back the curtains; the clear, bright sun of a summer morning flooded in.
‘It’s what you might call a fine day, ma’am.’
‘Yes, Susan,’ Sara returned indifferently. She sat up to take the light shawl the woman had brought for her shoulders, and then the comb, which she ran through her hair.
She took the breakfast tray and rested it across her knees. ‘The children …?’ she asked. ‘Are they about ‒ or have they gone out already?’
‘Mr. David and Miss Elizabeth are still here, ma’am. I believe Mr. Duncan has gone, though. And Miss Henriette has just begun her lessons.’
Sara nodded, and waited with an unaccountable impatience for Susan to finish her fussing, and be gone. They exchanged a little more conversation about clothes for the day’s programme, and then she was left alone. She sipped her coffee thankfully.
It had been easier than she believed to slip into her present position in London. Louis was more than accurate in his estimation of what London would have to say of her. She could not, of course, escape the tales that were told of her past, but she soon found that there were many people among the smart set who were not anxious to look beyond her obvious wealth, and were then willing to cultivate her society. She knew well enough that most of her new acquaintances ‒ the people whose invitations she received to dinners and receptions ‒ did not belong to the top bracket of the circles in which they moved, but she weeded them out, and accepted the most attractive. To all but the royal circles, elegance and wealth seemed to be the only arbiters of one’s acceptability, and in these two factors Sara held her own. Stories of her convict origin, naturally, circulated; but shrewd guesses had been made at the extent of her fortune, the half-forgotten history of Louis de Bourget revived, and the power of money had, in many minds, turned her from a convicted felon into the innocent victim of a judicial blunder. On most occasions she was very well received; she was admired, and made much of. Bligh, now a Vice-Admiral, and living in Lambeth, came to call on her; he seemed delighted to see her again, and, in his embarrassed manner, expressed deep sympathy over Louis’s death. He took her to visit his friend and patron, Sir Joseph Banks, who, as president of the Royal Society, wielded an immense influence. To Banks, Sara was something of a colonial oddity, and she appeared to amuse him; but more important, she had brought back with her Louis’s meticulous collection of botanical specimens, and, for the sake of possessing them, Banks ‒ the scientist before all else ‒ was prepared to receive her into his house. Those who met her there were soon given the information that she had been pardoned, instead of serving her full sentence. Sara had good reason to remember, in those first months, that she had once done something to earn Bligh’s gratitude.
Richard Barwell had played his own part in introducing her to the fashionable world in which he moved. He was now in full possession of Alison’s fortune, had taken a town house on the edge of Green Park, and was leading the sort of life to which he had always seemed eminently suited. On his return to England from New South Wales, he had joined Wellington’s army in Spain, and he carried the glamour of that successful campaign about with him ‒ added to that, he had a reputation for gallantry, earned by a shoulder wound which would not respond to the treatment of the army surgeons, and was responsible for his being sent back home. He had been one of the great Wellington’s soldiers, and he wore the distinction with becoming ‒ but, Sara suspected, not very sincere ‒ modesty.
Richard had greeted her, on her arrival in England last November, with undeniable enthusiasm, coming to Portsmouth to meet her, and later in London helping in her search for a house. The Golden Square house had been finally rented through a friend of his ‒ a Lady Fulton, sister of an earl, and wife of an Irish peer, who never himself appeared in London, and whose estates were squeezed dry to meet her expenses. The house belonged to a cousin of her husband, and Sara shrewdly guessed that Lady Fulton was herself collecting a commission on the rent. In a practised, skilful fashion she assumed a proprietary air towards Sara, and more especially towards Elizabeth. With a full knowledge of what was happening, Sara found herself paying for the parties and dinners Lady Fulton gave to introduce Elizabeth, David and Duncan to suitable friends. In a way, this relationship between herself and Anne Fulton pleased Sara. There was no pretence that, in other circumstances, they would have been friends; it was simply that they were useful to each other. Anne Fulton had important connections, and for the sake of having some of her debts paid with de Bourget money, was quite prepared to use them. She was a friend of that exquisite grandmother, the Marchioness of Hertford, the confidante of the Prince Regent. Sara had once attended a reception in the house in St. James’s Square, when the Marchioness arrived unexpectedly with the Prince. They had strolled around, played cards, eaten supper, laughed and gossiped with some of the guests; then, just before they left, the Prince had indicated to Lady Fulton that he wished Madame de Bourget to be presented to him. Something of the fabulous story London society had woven around Sara had been whispered to him, and his bulging blue eyes were full of amusement as he questioned her about the colony, which, he said, seemed to be quite beyond the reaches of the civilized world. He was unpopular, hated by many, but his taste in the elegant and graceful was unsurpassed in Europe, and the fact that Sara de Bourget had found favour with him, even for a brief five minutes, was commented upon and remembered. With faintly flushed cheeks she withdrew from his presence, reflecting that, in some circles, the cut of one’s gown and the arrangement of one’s hair seemed to matter more than the sentence of a judge in a court of law.
The months of winter advanced to spring and summer, bringing the news of Wellington’s great victories north of the Pyrenees, the capture of Paris by the allied armies, Napoleon’s abdication, and his imprisonment on Elba. Europe drew a breath of relief, and settled down to long-drawn out quarrels over the spoils of war. But to London, this June, came the Czar Alexander of Russia, and the King of Prussia, attended by their victorious generals, on visits of state. London’s welcome to them was wild and exuberant. The very height of the season’s shows were the official entertainments given to them, but in a lesser degree the whole capital celebrated. The Czar was mobbed whenever he appeared; crowds waited all night in the streets to glimpse him. With equal fervour they hissed the Prince Regent’s carriage when it passed by.
Sara put aside the tray and lay back on her pillows. It was exciting to even breathe the air of London this summer, but she was appalled to find how weary of it she’d grown ‒ all the endless round of drives and dressmakers, dinners and entertainments. It seemed so purposeless as she faced each new day of it.
Her thoughts were interrupted suddenly by Elizabeth’s appearance, after a brief tap at the door. She entered with a rustle of silk, and wearing a new bonnet. She came to Sara’s side immediately, and bent to kiss her.
‘It’s a perfect morning,’ she announced. ‘Just about as warm a
s a spring morning at home …’
‘Home?’ Sara said.
‘Don’t tease,’ Elizabeth answered, wrinkling her nose. ‘You know what I mean. It’s the sort of morning when I long to be riding at Banon.’
Then she stood and surveyed the remains of the breakfast, and began to pile butter on the last piece of toast. ‘How is it,’ she said, biting into it, ‘that you manage to get the only unburnt toast that comes out of the kitchen in the morning?’
‘I probably ask nicely for it,’ Sara answered casually.
Elizabeth flung herself down in a chair, licking her fingers. ‘I don’t think I want to go to Lady Fulton’s party this evening,’ she said.
Sara’s eyebrows went up. ‘Oh …? Lady Fulton says she’s particularly asked some young people she thought you’d all enjoy meeting.’
‘Oh … them!’ Elizabeth gave a shrug of exasperation. ‘I know their sort. Young men who won’t look sideways for fear of spoiling their neckcloths. And besides …’
‘Besides what …?’
‘David says he’s not coming. I’d counted on him being there. When I run out of talk with these silly creatures I count on him being about to help me.’
‘Well … you should know David well enough by this time,’ Sara said as casually as she could manage.
Elizabeth fingered her dress, straightened the set of her bonnet and looked down at her slippers, carefully avoiding Sara’s eye. In the past months Sara had been made aware of her stepdaughter’s growing attachment for David, and had been equally aware that David treated her as he had always done, with a mixture of affection and playfulness. She grew afraid as she considered the situation that could develop between them; she knew Elizabeth’s nature well enough ‒ she had all of Louis’s passion and possessiveness, and a formidable determination to have what she wanted. All through the months here Sara had watched her, and saw her keep her head amidst a surge of flattery and attention that would have made most other young girls breathless. In a few years Elizabeth would inherit the first part of the fortune Louis had left to her ‒ a fortune swollen by the careful investments of his London agents. She had a spirited beauty about her that attracted attention wherever she went. Sara knew that Elizabeth was fully aware of all this ‒ and the fact that, if she wished it, she could make a titled marriage here in London. She was aware of it, and at the same time she seemed to understand that it was of very little use to her. For so long as David remained unimpressed she seemed to take little pleasure in her money and her pretty face.
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