Earl's Well That Ends Well

by Jane Ashford

  It hardly mattered now, in any case. Gerald was gone, and she must think what to do. With shaking fingers Diana opened her reticule and counted the money she had managed to scrape together. Four pounds and seven shillings. It would never be enough to pay the postboys and the inn. She could give them what she had, but where would she go afterward, penniless?

  Tears started then, for her present plight and for the ruin of all her hopes and plans. Diana put her face in her hands and sobbed.

  It was thus that the innkeeper found her sometime later. He strode into the parlor with an impatient frown, but it faded when he saw Diana’s misery. “Here, now,” he said, “don’t take on so.” His words had no discernible effect, and he began to look uneasy. “Wait here a moment until I fetch my wife,” he added, backing quickly to the door. Diana paid no heed. She scarcely heard.

  A short time later a small plump woman bustled into the room and stood before Diana with her hands on her hips. Her husband peered around the door, but the older woman motioned brusquely for him to shut it, leaving them alone. “Now, miss,” she said then, “crying will do you no good, though I can’t say as I blame you for it. An elopement, was it?”

  Diana cried harder.

  The woman nodded. “And your young man has changed his mind seemingly. Well, you’ve made a bad mistake, no denying that.”

  Still, the only response was sobs.

  “Have you any money at all?”

  Diana struggled to control herself. She must make an effort to honor her obligations, however she felt. “F-four pounds,” she managed finally, holding out the reticule.

  The innkeeper’s wife took it and examined the contents. “Tch. The blackguard! He might have left you something more.”

  “He only cared about getting my money,” murmured Diana brokenly.

  The other’s eyes sharpened. “Indeed? Well, miss, my advice is to put him right out of your mind. He’s no good.”

  Diana gazed at the carpet.

  “You should go back to your family,” added the woman. “They’ll stand by you and help scotch the scandal. You haven’t been away so very long, I wager.”

  Diana shuddered at the thought of her father. She couldn’t go back to face his contempt. Yet where else could she go?

  “Tom and me could advance you some money. Not for a private chaise, mind, but for the stage. You could send it back when you’re home again.”

  “W-would you?” She was amazed.

  Something in the girl’s tear-drenched brown eyes made the landlady reach out and pat her shoulder. “You’ll be all right once you’re among your own people again,” she said. “But you’d best get ready. The stage comes at ten.”

  In an unthinking daze, Diana paid the postboys and dismissed them, gathered her meager luggage, and mounted the stage when it arrived. A young man sitting opposite tried to get up a conversation, but Diana didn’t even hear him. Her mind was spinning with the events of the past few days. As the miles went by, she recounted them again and again. Why had she not seen Gerald’s true colors sooner? Why had she allowed him to cajole her into an elopement? What was to become of her now? She was surely ruined forever through her own foolishness. How could she look anyone in the eye again after what she had done?

  Wrapped in these gloomy reflections, Diana was oblivious until the stage set her down at an inn near her home in Yorkshire. And once there, she stood outside the inn’s door, her small valise beside her, afraid to reveal her presence.

  “Yes, miss, may I help you?” asked a voice, and the innkeeper appeared in the doorway.

  Diana tried to speak, and failed.

  “Did you want dinner?” he added impatiently. She could hear sounds from the taproom beyond. “Are you waiting for someone to fetch you? Will you come in?”

  “No,” she answered, her voice very low. “I…I am all right. Thank you.” She would walk home, she decided. The house was four miles away, but all other alternatives seemed worse.

  “Wait a moment. Aren’t you the Gresham girl?” The man came out to survey her, and Diana flinched. “I’ve seen you with your father. They managed to get word to you, then, did they? There was some talk that Mrs. Samuels didn’t know where you’d gone.”

  Diana frowned. Mrs. Samuels was their housekeeper. What did she have to do with anything?

  “You’ll just be in time for the funeral. It’s tomorrow morning. Was you wanting a gig to take you home?”

  “Funeral?” she echoed, her lips stiff.

  “Well, yes, miss. Your father…” Suddenly the innkeeper clapped a hand to his mouth. “You ain’t been told! My tongue’s run away with me, as usual. Beg your pardon, miss, I’m sure.”

  “But what has happened? Is my father…?”

  The man shook his head. “Passed away late yesterday, miss. And I’m that sorry to tell you. I reckon Mrs. Samuels meant to do it face to face.”

  “But how?” Diana was dazed by this new disaster.

  “Carried off by an apoplexy, they say. A rare temper, Mr. Gresham had…er, that is, I’ve heard folk say so.”

  He had died of rage at her flight, thought Diana. Not only had she ruined herself, she had killed her father. With a small moan, she sank to the earth in a heap.

  The furor that followed did not reach her. Diana was bundled into a gig like a parcel and escorted home by a chambermaid and an ostler. Delivered to Mrs. Samuels and somewhat revived with hot tea, Diana merely stared.

  Finally Mrs. Samuels said, “I told them you had gone to visit friends.”

  Diana choked, then replied, “But you knew… I left the note.”

  “I burned it.”

  “Why?”

  “It was none of their affair, prying busybodies.”

  The girl gazed at the spare, austere figure of the only mother she had ever known. Her own mother had died when Diana was two, but she had never felt that Mrs. Samuels cared for her. She did not even know her first name. “You lied to protect me?”

  The housekeeper’s face did not soften, and she continued to stare straight ahead. “’Twas none of their affair,” she repeated. “I don’t hold with gossip.”

  “So no one knows where I went?”

  Mrs. Samuels shook her head. “No one asked, save the doctor. The neighbors haven’t taken the trouble to call.”

  And why should they? Diana’s father had had nothing but harsh words for them during his life. Part of the burden lifted from her soul. She still felt ashamed, but at least her shame was private.

  “Are you home to stay?” asked Mrs. Samuels, her expression stony.

  “I…yes.”

  “And will you be wanting me to remain?”

  Diana stared at her, mystified. The woman had saved her, yet she seemed as devoid of warmth and emotion as ever. If she felt nothing, why had she bothered? What was she thinking? “Of course.”

  Mrs. Samuels nodded and turned away. “Mr. Gresham is in the front parlor. The funeral is at eleven tomorrow.” She left the room with Diana’s valise.

  Diana hesitated, biting her lower lip. She walked slowly to the closed door of the front parlor, stepped back, then forward. She could not imagine her father dead; his presence had always pervaded this house. Her whole life had been turned upside down in a matter of days, and she was far from assimilating the change. She could not even imagine what it would be like now. Slowly her hand reached out and grasped the doorknob. She took a deep breath and opened the door.

  Two

  On the day after her twenty-fifth birthday, Diana Gresham followed a second coffin to the churchyard. Mrs. Samuels had been ill all that winter, and late in February she died, leaving Diana wholly alone. Diana had nursed the old housekeeper faithfully, and she tried to feel some sadness as she stood beside her grave and listened to the rector intone the ritual words, but she could not muster much emotion. She and Mrs. Samuels
had never been true companions. The closeness that Diana had imagined might come from their shared adversity had never emerged. Indeed, the older woman had merely become more dour and reclusive as the years passed, and Diana had felt increasingly isolated.

  When the rector and the few mourners were ready to depart after the brief service, Diana resisted their urgings to come away and wrapped her black cloak more closely around her shoulders as the sexton and his helpers began to fill in the grave. It was a dreary morning, with low gray clouds and a damp bitter chill. Warm weather earlier in the week had turned the winter earth to mud, but there was as yet no hint of green to reconcile one to the dirt. The moors rolling away beyond the stone church were bleak. Yet Diana did not move even when the wind made her cloak billow out around her, bringing the cold to her skin. She did not want to return to her family house, whose cramped rooms were unchanged since her father’s death.

  For some time, Diana had been feeling restless and dissatisfied. The shocked immobility that had followed her disastrous rebellion seven years before had modulated through remorse and self-loathing into withdrawal, contemplation, and finally, understanding. She had forgiven her younger self a long while ago. Her faults had been great, but they sprang from warmth of feeling and lack of family love rather than weakness. Her mistakes had been almost inevitable, given her naiveté and susceptibility.

  But with greater wisdom had also come a loss of the eager openness that younger Diana had possessed. The habit of solitude had become strong; Diana seldom exchanged more than a few sentences with her scattered neighbors. I am like Mrs. Samuels myself now, she thought, gazing over the moors. I have no friends.

  Her restlessness reached a kind of irritated crescendo, and she felt she must do something dramatic, or else she would scream. But she did not know what to do. Some change was inevitable. Even had she not been inexpressibly weary of living alone, she could not remain completely solitary. Yet she had no family to take her in. Mr. Merton, the banker, had called yesterday to congratulate her and solemnly explain that she was now in full possession of her fortune. She was a wealthy woman. But she felt resourceless. Money was useless, she realized, if one did not know what to do with it.

  Shivering as the wind whipped her cloak again, Diana felt she must come to some conclusion before she returned to the house. If she did not, some part of her suggested, she would slip back into her routine of isolation and never break free. She would indeed become a Mrs. Samuels, reluctant to venture beyond her own front door.

  I must leave here, she thought, looking from the small churchyard to the narrow village street with its facing rows of stone cottages. All was brown and gray and black; there was no color anywhere. She had never learned to love the harsh landscapes of Yorkshire, a failing, no doubt. But where could she go?

  Diana felt a sudden sharp longing for laughter and the sounds of a room full of people. Wistfully she remembered her short time at school. Her father had kept her there less than a year, concluding that she was being corrupted by association with fifty empty-headed girls. Diana recalled their chatter and jokes as part of the happiest time in her life. If only she could return to that time! But her new financial independence would not give her this, however pleasant it might be.

  Briefly she was filled with bitterness. It seemed a cruel joke that she should get her fortune now, when events had rendered her incapable of enjoying it. She could buy a different house, hire a companion, enliven her wardrobe, but she could not regain her old lightheartedness or her girlhood friends. If only her father had been kinder, or Gerald… But with this thought, Diana shook her head. She could not honestly blame them for her present plight. Her father had been harsh and distant; Gerald had treated her shamefully. But she herself had repulsed the world in her first remorseful reaction, for no reason that the world could see. Naturally, those she rejected had withdrawn, and it seemed to her now that she had been foolish in this as well as in her rash elopement.

  Gathering her cloak, Diana turned and walked through the churchyard gate and along the street toward home. Her father’s house, hers now, was beyond the edge of the village, surrounded by high stone walls. As she approached it, Diana walked more slowly, a horror of retreating behind those barriers again growing in her. Was she fated to spoil her life? Had some dark destiny hovered over her birth?

  “Diana. Diana Gresham,” called a high, light voice behind her. “Wait, Diana!”

  She turned. A small slender woman in a gray cloak and a modish hat was waving from a carriage in the center of the village. Her face was in shadow, and Diana did not recognize her as she got out and hurried forward.

  “Oh, lud,” the newcomer gasped as she came up. “This wind takes my breath away. And I had forgotten the dreadful cold here. But how fortunate to meet you, Diana! Cynthia Addison said you had left Yorkshire, and so I might not even have called! Are you back for a visit, as we are?”

  When the woman spoke, Diana recognized Amanda Trent, a friend she had not seen for eight years. Amanda, two years older, had married young and followed her soldier husband to Spain. They had exchanged one or two letters at the beginning, but Amanda was an unreliable correspondent, and Diana had ceased to write after her elopement, as she had ceased to see acquaintances like Cynthia Addison, who could not be blamed for thinking her gone. “Hello, Amanda,” she answered, the commonplace words feeling odd on her tongue.

  Amanda peered up into her face, sensing some strangeness. She looked just the same, Diana thought—tiny and brunette, with huge almost black eyes. Those eyes had been the downfall of a number of young men before Captain Trent won her hand. “Diana?” Amanda said, a question in her voice.

  Making a great effort, Diana replied, “I am not visiting. I never left. After Papa died…” She didn’t finish her sentence because the story seemed far too complicated to review; none of the important things could be told. And she didn’t want pity.

  Amanda held out both hands. “Yes, they told me about Mr. Gresham. I am sorry, of course, though…” She shrugged. Long ago, Diana had confided some of her trials.

  Awkwardly Diana took her hands. Amanda squeezed her fingers and smiled. “Come back with me, and we shall have a cozy talk. I want to hear everything!”

  Diana wondered what she would say if she did. Amanda seemed the same gay creature she had been at nineteen; she felt ancient beside her. Yet the chance to put off going home was irresistible, and shortly they were sitting side by side in Amanda’s carriage riding toward her parents’ house a few miles from the village.

  “George is invalided out,” Amanda told her. “He never recovered properly from the fever he took after Toulouse, so we decided to come here for a good long visit. I am so happy to be in England again! You cannot imagine how inconvenient it sometimes was in Spain, Diana.”

  Thinking that “inconvenient” was an odd characterization of the Peninsular Wars, Diana watched her old friend’s face. Now that they were closer, she could see small signs of age and strain there. Amanda was no less pretty, but it was obvious now that she was nearly a decade past nineteen. Her friend’s chatter seemed less carefree, more forced. Diana felt relieved; it had been daunting to think that only she was altered. “You have been in Spain all this time?”

  “Oh, lud, no! That I could not have borne. I spent two seasons in London, and I was here for the summer a year ago. I am sorry I did not call, Diana, but I was…ill.” She turned her head away. “Here we are. Mama will be so pleased to see you.”

  Wondering uneasily if this was true, Diana followed Amanda into the house. Mrs. Durham was one of the acquaintances she had ceased to see years ago.

  As it happened, none of the family was at home. George Trent was riding with Amanda’s father, and Mrs. Durham had gone to visit an ailing tenant rather than share Amanda’s drive. The two women settled in the drawing room with a pot of tea and a plate of the spice cakes Diana remembered from childhood visits.

 
; “Are you still in mourning?” asked Amanda then, her expression adding what politeness made her suppress. Diana’s clothes and hair were even more unfashionable than before her father’s death.

  Diana put a hand to the great knot of deep golden hair at the back of her neck as she explained about Mrs. Samuels. Amanda’s dark cropped ringlets and elegant blue morning gown brought back concerns she hadn’t felt for years. The black dress she wore was the last she had bought, for her father’s mourning.

  Amanda looked puzzled. “But, Diana, what have you been doing all this time? Did you have a London season? Or at least go to York for the winter assemblies?” When Diana shook her head, she opened her eyes very wide. “Do you mean you have just stayed here? But why?”

  It must indeed seem eccentric, Diana thought, and she could not give her only plausible reason. Her neighbors had probably judged her mad.

  Amanda was gazing at her with an unremembered shrewdness. “Is something wrong, Diana? You…you seem different. You were always the first to talk of getting away.”

  Miserably Diana prepared to rise. She could not explain, and Amanda would no doubt take that inability for coldness. Their long-ago friendship was dead.

  But Amanda had lapsed into meditative silence. “I suppose we are all changed,” she added. “It has been quite a time, after all. What else could we expect?”

  Surprised, Diana said nothing, and in the next moment their tête-à-tête was interrupted by the entrance of Amanda’s family.

  The Durhams were familiar, though Diana had not seen them recently, and their greetings were more cordial than she had expected. They did not mention her strange behavior or seem to see anything odd in her sudden visit to their house. But as they spoke, Diana gradually received the impression that they were too preoccupied with more personal concerns to think of her.