by Amy Myers
Edith was obviously searching for a comment. She found one.
‘It’s the servant problem, isn’t it?’
Elizabeth agreed with her warmly, as sympathy oozed from her guest’s voice. ‘Indeed it is.’ Then, unable to resist temptation, she added: ‘I should be quite distraught if any of our efficient servants left, now I have fully trained them.’ She felt she was being unfair to Edith, who had done nothing to deserve such a put-down, even if she would never recognise it as such.
‘I wonder,’ Edith asked brightly, ‘if you would care to join my Committee for the Relief of Fallen Women, Mrs Lilley? We meet at the Pump Room in Tunbridge Wells.’
‘I regret not.’ Elizabeth gave her slow, warm smile. ‘I never join committees. It sets such a bad example.’
Edith stared at her nonplussed, as Elizabeth knew she would be. ‘Oh, quite,’ she said weakly.
Elizabeth was the daughter of a Kentish hop farmer. What extra money there was at the Rectory had come from her, not Laurence, for all that he was a son of the Earl of Buckford. He had only the money from his living, a sum of £490 a year, greatly diminished over the last thirty years owing to the general agricultural depression, and always at the mercy of late payers and deliberate avoidance, sometimes to Elizabeth’s fury, by those who so officiously carried out Church duties. It was love, not money, however, that had brought about her marriage to Laurence. She knew Ashden found her puzzling as a Rector’s wife, for she did not move among the cottagers unless the need was great. Her parish was the Rectory, her parishioners her family, and through her ministry her husband and her children prospered. Why waste time on a thousand essentially useless missions?
With relief, she heard Agnes beat the gong inside; it seemed a fanfare of release – until she remembered what was to come.
Thank goodness Reggie arrived promptly at the Rectory. Luncheon had been a nightmare. Caroline was aware she had not behaved well, though better than Phoebe and George, who had giggled together whenever Mother’s eye was not on them, aided and abetted by the frightful Patricia Swinford-Browne, who was not above mocking her own mother, Caroline noticed. The tradition of eating the first lamb of the year at Easter persisted in the Rectory despite the fact that modern farming meant they could enjoy it in January if they wished. Now that treat had been spoiled, and so had that of the primrose pie. How could one enjoy such delights while having to entertain Robert Swinford-Browne, who was sitting next to her? He was tall, good-looking in a vapid kind of way and, to her at least, as interesting as a tailor’s dummy. She liked him, but she found him hard to talk to, since he seemed to have no purpose or interests in life – save tennis, of course. She had obligingly raised the subject of Anthony Wilding and his prospects at Wimbledon, about which she knew little, and he, unfortunately, knew a great deal. ‘He’s like Brookes, he can play from any position on court. Of course, Brookes’ horizontal volley …’
And then it had happened.
‘Reggie, what do you think?’ Caroline could wait no longer. She had hardly taken in a word Reggie had been saying, so full was she of the thunderbolt that had struck at luncheon. They had reached the wicket gate of Crab’s meadow and Pook’s Way, the track which led to the nearest gate into Ashdown forest, before she could contain herself no longer.
‘She’s a stunner!’
‘Who?’ Caroline was thrown.
‘Penelope Banning, of course, Caroline, you never listen, that’s your trouble. I’ve been in love with Penelope for three whole months now. Why do you think I’ve dragged you out today? I need your advice and I’m blowed if I’m going to have the whole of your blessed family chipping in on my romantic life.’
‘Your romantic life, Reggie,’ she replied, nodding to Alf Tilbury as he painfully hobbled down the garden path of Whapples Cottage, ‘can wait for once. I have something much more important to tell you. Now listen.’
‘It’s hard to listen when you’re stumbling over stones and your dog is intent on seeing me come a cropper. What do you think horses were made for? Why wouldn’t you ride? Smith needs exercise too, you know.’ Smith was his hunter.
‘Because shouting at someone on horseback is not conducive to having a serious conversation. Besides, Poppy isn’t mine, she belongs to all of us, and Felicia wanted to ride this afternoon.’
‘Mother would have lent you her mare.’
Would she? Caroline doubted it. Lady Hunney’s famous charm seemed to have a steel edge where Caroline was concerned. Isabel called her Aunt Maud, but there had never been any suggestion that Caroline should adopt the same informality. It had occurred to Caroline that since she got on well with Reggie, Lady Hunney might fear she had designs upon him, something that would not look well in her social book. The second daughter of the third son of an earl, and an impoverished one at that, was the kind of catch that Lady Hunney would immediately throw back in the sea.
To her annoyance, he continued to talk non-stop of the wonders of this Penelope Banning as they strolled into Five Hundred Acre Wood. The Forest – a misnomer now that much of Ashdown Forest was open heathland – was heaving with signs of spring and the sun had chased away the clouds of the morning. Yet Reggie hardly noticed. Couldn’t he feel, as she did, the magic of this place?
‘Oh, Reggie, do stop to look.’ Caroline was momentarily side-tracked from her impatience at not being able to impart her news.
‘What is there to look at? Trees, flowers, birds.’ There was all the gloom of the frustrated romantic lover in his voice.
‘That’s a Dartford warbler,’ she said crossly. ‘Very rare. What more could you ask?’
‘Penelope.’
‘Reggie, pretend I am Penelope, and listen to me.’
‘All right. What is it? You overboiled the jam again?’
‘No,’ she said scathingly. ‘Real news. Isabel is engaged.’
‘What?’ He staggered around, clutching his brow. ‘My secret hopes blighted.’
‘Don’t be an idiot, Reggie. It’s Robert Swinford-Browne.’ The awfulness of it engulfed her again. It had seemed unbelievable at first. Father standing up and making the announcement in his ‘parish’ voice, so she knew he wasn’t happy about it either; then William Swinford-Browne opening bottles of champagne which he’d brought with him … and all the time Isabel, sitting there nakedly displaying not dewy-eyed love, but a kind of triumph – or so it seemed to Caroline. Perhaps that was just the champagne which had made her head swim, and Isabel suddenly seem a stranger.
‘By Jove, she kept quiet about that.’
‘Exactly what Phoebe said. Perhaps Isabel didn’t want it to be known in case we teased her, but if she loves him –’
‘Aha. Did I note an “if”?’
‘Oh, Reggie, I can’t believe she does. Robert’s not like his father, but marry him? It would be like marrying Fred Dibble. I’m not being unkind,’ Caroline added hastily.
He glanced at her bright hazel eyes and the light brown hair leaping out as usual from its restraining pins, saw that she was indeed worried, and began to take the matter seriously. ‘You’re never unkind. But it’s not the same. Robert’s got his own mind – somewhere. He’s a decent chap, is Robert. Handy with a racket, too. And a lot of money.’
Caroline sighed. ‘You know Isabel. Once she gets her way, she no longer wants it. I suppose I shouldn’t say that either.’
‘It’s only me, Caroline. You’re not being disloyal.’
She looked at him gratefully. ‘After she came home from finishing school and got presented at Court, and after that man backed out of marrying her, I think she grew obsessed with marriage.’ There had been two men, in fact, one who backed out and one highly unsuitable one (if rich) whom Father had chased off.
‘It’s always the same with you girls that have got no money,’ Reggie said encouragingly. ‘Family isn’t everything these days.’
‘How nice of you to put it so tactfully. Isabel obviously agrees with you, or I can’t believe she’d be marrying into the S
winford-Browne family.’
‘Perhaps the patter of tiny feet will change her.’
‘It wouldn’t me.’
‘It would most women.’
She fell silent. Did he mean she was not a womanly woman? Not like her mother? She wanted to be like Mother, only there was a restlessness in her that made her suspect she could never be so.
‘Look,’ he continued, ‘even you and Isabel have more choices than me. I didn’t ask to be the eldest son, after all. Yet here I am, and as soon as the old man dies, I’m lord of the manor and the Ashden estate whether I like it or not.’
‘Don’t you want to be?’
‘Of course I do. It’s an honour to carry on the torch like that, I love the old place, and I love the village. There have been Hunneys at Ashden for over three hundred years. But just once in a while, I feel like cutting loose.’
Caroline had never questioned Reggie’s attitude to his heritage before, and now she wondered why. The established order must continue under Reggie. Daniel, his younger brother, would be off travelling the world as soon as he came down this summer from Oxford, but Reggie had had no hope of taking up a full military career after his degree, despite his time in the university officers’ training corps, and his periodic visits to something called ‘camp’. His father had been called back to Whitehall to assume his formal title of Major-General Sir John Hunney, on the Balkan troubles in 1912 – ‘Just an army desk job’ was all he said about his duties there. Since then Reggie had had to take his place running the estate. He ran it well. The bailiff was a good man, but Reggie was the one the village turned to. He may be young, but he was a Hunney.
‘But I’m a woman. How can you say I have more choices than you?’
‘You chose not to go to finishing school. You’re helping your father.’
Helping, Caroline wondered? Was what she did now worth those rows, first with her grandmother when she refused to go to the Paris finishing school, for which Lady Buckford was so generously paying. Instead she had remained at St Margaret College in East Grinstead, and then taken up her duties as the Rector’s daughter. Just like Reggie. Little by little, she had gained ground in expanding her role, first writing the parish magazine, and then helping her father by copying and making sense of old decaying registers; now she also worked in the Ashden Manor library – Reggie’s suggestion – cataloguing and repairing volumes. Interesting, but ultimately stultifying. In return for this, she sometimes took the Rector’s wife’s traditional place at the Mother’s Union, and in organising flower shows and fêtes. Recently she had done some teaching at the village school, which was Church of England controlled. But at times, particularly now in spring, none of this was enough. Much as she loved home and Ashden, she felt her life was straining against a liberty bodice that had grown too small.
Reggie broke into her thoughts. ‘I suppose you’ll get married some day anyway.’
‘Why do you suppose that?’ Her step quickened; the criss-cross of beaten paths was taking them across exposed heathland, the bedraggled dead bracken still covering most of the ground, with only a few green shoots struggling through here and there. Ferns were the oldest greenery, Father said, prehistoric, pagan, and here in the middle of the forest-land it was easy to believe it. All around them must be hidden some of the thousands of animals that dwelt here, retiring, waiting for the friendliness of night before they emerged. Unknown shapes in the dark. Like the future. Like marriage.
‘Women have to.’
‘Suppose no one asks me?’
‘Oh, come. What about that curate, Oliver, who stomped off to drown his sorrows in Manchester? Or Philip Ryde? He’s always making sheep’s eyes at you. Don’t say you hadn’t noticed.’
She had, but was carefully ignoring it. She liked the schoolmaster, but that was all. Marry him? She simply couldn’t imagine kissing him. ‘I have no intention of marrying Philip Ryde. If it’s any of your business,’ she added brightly, glad that the path was taking them back into the comforting shady woods full of the familiarity of the known.
‘It is,’ he said seriously. ‘In my position as future lord of the manor, I feel I have to keep an eye on you village girls. It’s my droit de seigneur.’ He yelped with laughter as she attacked him with a dead branch, to the great astonishment of a young couple walking decorously by who quickly averted their eyes.
‘That’s a fine example to Agnes,’ Caroline said ruefully. Agnes was so restrained, she was never quite sure what she was thinking, though her sweetheart always had a twinkle in his eye.
‘Your parlourmaid, wasn’t it? And young Jamie Thorn?’
‘It was. Future lord of the manor brained by branch wielded by Rector’s daughter, the Courier will say. Maybe even the Church Times.’
‘I won’t tell Joe Ifield,’ he reassured her. ‘No charge will be made to the police.’
‘Joe Ifield doesn’t know what a charge is. He thinks it’s made by a goat. In this case he’s right.’
Crashing over the dead bracken to catch her as she tried to escape, Reggie pinioned her arms from behind. ‘Apologise.’
‘No,’ she said suddenly.
Reggie watched her, knowing she was upset, not knowing quite why. ‘When’s the wedding?’ he asked casually.
‘The first of August. They wanted it in July, but there’s the Rectory fête, Sunday School treat, the flower show and my birthday.’
‘Good.’ Reggie was pleased. ‘Daniel will still be here before he goes off on his grand tour. Come up to the Manor after church and meet him. You haven’t seen him since Christmas, have you? Bring the whole bunch of lilies if you like. Come to dinner.’
‘No. I can’t miss supper. The lily bunch will be chewing over events.’
‘You can spit them out at the Hunney Pot afterwards, then. If I know the Mater, she’ll be dying to hear, though she’ll pretend she isn’t.’
If only to gloat, Caroline thought crossly.
Sleep was coming hard that night. Unfinished thoughts whirled round her mind like rose petals on a windy summer’s day, falling to earth only to be whisked up once more. Isabel engaged – that meant she would leave the Rectory when she married. What would happen here when she did? They all loved the Rectory as home, but Caroline saw it almost as a member of the family with its own character, one who needed to be consulted on such major events as Isabel’s marriage.
She knew the old red-brick house was far from beautiful to most people’s eyes, but it was to hers. It was a higgledy-piggledy mixture of styles from the mediaeval to the almost modern, including one wing which was an early Tudor house, serene in its red-brick, mellow glory, and a pretentious tower and porch added last century. The centuries had settled down contentedly together, however, into something that shouted home. Inside the house was a children’s paradise and a maids’ nightmare. Odd steps linking different levels provided traps for the forgetful; nooks and crannies beckoned everywhere.
Bedrooms … Who would have Isabel’s bedroom now, the coveted one on the corner? Would she still be the same Isabel after she was incarcerated in The Towers like Rapunzel? Would there be a baby? She’d be Aunt Caroline, if so. The Swinford-Brownes would become part of the family, take part in the games, be present at their table … Her thoughts raced on. Why had Felicia been so quiet this evening at the Manor? She was always subdued, but this evening it had been very noticeable. Only she and Felicia had gone to the Manor, for the others could not be prised away. Daniel, Reggie and Eleanor had made up for it, firing questions like a machine-gun at them, but it was nearly always Caroline who answered – even when Lady Hunney was questioner. Her rigidly corseted self-control shimmered within its midnight blue velvet dinner gown, and its high-necked lace fichu displayed the Hunney pearls as a discreet reminder of her qualifications to render what would be overbearing inquisitiveness in others into her proper sphere of concern. Eleanor, bless her, a silent but whole-hearted sympathiser with Caroline’s predicament, winked in a most unladylike manner as her mother pr
oclaimed:
‘Such a pity Isabel takes nothing with her to the marriage. I presume that is the case?’
‘Yes, Lady Hunney.’ Nothing but her youth, warm heart and good spirits, she had thought angrily, loyally overlooking her sister’s defects.
‘A home wedding. At the Rectory, you say?’
‘Naturally.’ In fact there was no ‘naturally’ about it. The Swinford-Brownes had pushed hard for The Towers, and Isabel had visibly wavered.
‘How delightful. Provisioned by Fortnum, of course. Their usual pies. They are most reasonably priced, I am told.’
‘Provisioned by ourselves, Lady Hunney, as our privilege and pleasure.’
Reggie had given her an approving pat as he and Daniel walked them home afterwards. The sky had been clear and the air still mild. The April evening touched them with the silken hopefulness of spring.
And still she could not sleep. Try as she would, she could not imagine Isabel sharing a bed with Robert. Caroline was fully aware of what this meant, not through any enlightenment from her mother but through the auspices of Patricia Swinford-Browne, who was by no means as repressed and demure as was generally believed – particularly by her own mother.
Isabel and Robert … Yet curiously enough it was not of them she was thinking as at last sleep came, but of Reggie’s new brown boots marching over the fresh green shoots aggressively pushing their way to the light in Five Hundred Acre Wood. How silly.
CHAPTER TWO
Even the cows seemed to be looking at Caroline reproachfully as she hurried along the footpath through Manor Farm, waving guiltily to Hilda Sharpe, the farmer’s wife, who was coming out of the dairy on Silly Lane for her milk round, bowed under the wooden yoke with its two buckets. She always looked the same, man’s cap on head, and cracked black boots on feet under the hitched-up serge skirt. The Sharpes did not welcome passers through, not even the Rector’s daughters, because generally it meant they were Manor-bound, and the Sharpes did not see eye to eye with their landlords, the Hunneys. But on a God-given day such as this, which shouted summer rather than late April, much should be forgiven, Caroline told herself.