It was difficult when they were together not to behave as they always had and, when they first joined the Army, they had been known to the Officers and the men alike as ‘the Terrible Twins’.
They always seemed to be in trouble of some sort and yet they were envied because they appeared to enjoy life more than anybody else.
In spite of the rioting and drinking they had indulged in when they first left school everybody who knew them had to admit that they were both highly intelligent and well informed on many subjects that their contemporaries knew very little about.
But whatever escapades they thought up when they were in the Army, the men under them were better looked after, smarter and a great deal happier than any other troops in the whole of Portugal.
The Earl had lately been offered a Ministerial post in the Foreign Office, if he wished to take it.
But, while he felt honoured by such a suggestion, he could not help feeling that to be confined to a desk in the Ministry would make him feel frustrated.
He therefore thanked the Prime Minister, who had offered him the position, and made the excuse that he still had a great deal of work to do on his various estates.
As the Prime Minister knew that the Earl was contributing a great deal to the war effort by increasing the production of food that was so vitally needed, he had not pressed him further.
The Prince Regent, however, had very different ideas. He enjoyed the Earl’s company, as he enjoyed Lord Charles’s, and insisted on both of them being in attendance on him whenever possible.
It was the Earl who rebelled first.
“If I have to eat one more dinner of over twelve entrées,” he said, “I shall go on a hunger strike!”
“It’s not so much the food that I object to,” Lord Charles confided in him, “it’s the heat of the rooms at Carlton House. God knows why ‘Prinny’ will never open a window!”
“He feels the cold.”
“But he is so fat! His superfluous flesh should protect him from chills of every sort!”
There was no need to say any more and they both began to make excuses when the Prince Regent commanded their presence.
It was difficult to be evasive for long and only by going to the country could the Earl escape the long drawn-out meals and musical evenings or, worse still, the Fêtes which the Regent insisted on giving at Carlton House whenever he could think up an excuse for one.
The only consolation, Charles found, was that despite the Prince Regent’s preoccupation with older women, every beauty in London sooner or later found her way into the Chinese Room, the Conservatory, the Yellow Drawing Room or any of the other rooms that the Prince Regent continued to embellish day after day with new treasures that he could not afford to pay for.
As the Earl, having finished signing his letters, was about to rise from his desk, his secretary, Mr. Stevenson came into the library.
“Oh, there you are, Stevenson!” the Earl exclaimed. “Cancel all my engagements for the next few days and refuse all these invitations.”
“Has your Lordship forgotten that you are dining at Carlton House tomorrow evening?” Mr. Stevenson asked respectfully.
“I had, as it happens!” the Earl admitted.
“His Royal Highness will be as mad as fire if we chuck him again,” Lord Charles stated.
“I cannot help his troubles,” the Earl said. “Send a message, Stevenson, to say that urgent family affairs oblige me most regretfully to leave London immediately!”
“That is what you said last time, my Lord.”
“Well, say that the house had burnt down or I have a revolution on my hands. Anything you like! Nobody is going to stop me from going to the country!”
Mr. Stevenson looked worried, but Lord Charles merely laughed.
“As soon as you get there, you will want to come back!”
“Do you want to bet on it?” the Earl enquired.
“Certainly not! It would make you stay longer just to win, even if it was the last penny I have in my pocket!”
“Very well, no bets!” the Earl agreed. “But I assure you, I find the country very much more alluring than anything you can offer me here in London.”
Lord Charles was only half listening.
He walked to the desk that the Earl had just moved from and was now scribbling a few lines on a piece of crested writing paper.
He then put it in an envelope, addressed it and said to Mr. Stevenson,
“Will you have this sent round by hand?”
“Of course, my Lord!”
The Earl took a quick glance at the note as his secretary took it and there was a faint smile on his lips as he walked through the hall to where his high-perched phaeton was waiting outside.
It was a new acquisition that had only recently come from the coach-builders and was drawn by a team of four perfectly matched chestnuts that he had bought the previous year.
They were his favourites and he knew that he was going to enjoy driving them to Fleet Hall.
As he picked up the reins, he remembered that his record stood at two hours, five minutes.
Lord Charles climbed into the seat beside him, the groom in his cockaded hat jumped up behind and they drove off.
It was difficult to suppose that any man could drive more expertly than the Earl. He was, of course, known as a ‘Corinthian’, but he rather despised the title.
They had driven for some way in silence before he said,
“I am glad you are coming with me, Charles. It’s always fun when we are together. At the same time, as I have told you already, I have been feeling somewhat depressed of late.”
“It’s no use, Alaric,” Lord Charles replied in a more serious tone than he had used hitherto. “One cannot put back the clock and, whatever you may say, we will both of us be thirty-three by the end of the year and perhaps it is time we settled down.”
“How, may I ask?”
“Getting married for one thing!”
The Earl laughed.
“If I have met any marriageable young women in the last two years, I have not been aware of it.”
“They have been there, but you have chosen not to notice them,” Lord Charles said, “while their mothers are torn between a desire to capture you as a wealthy and desirable son-in-law and the fear that with your reputation you would ruin the wretched girl’s chances just by dancing with her!”
“Good God!” the Earl ejaculated. “You don’t mean to say it’s as bad as that!”
“It’s not far off it,” Lord Charles replied, “and who shall blame you? You have everything a man could desire and the women circle round you like hungry bees round a honeypot!”
The Earl laughed.
Then he said,
“I am not sure whether you are being poetical or just damned impertinent!”
“You can take your choice,” Lord Charles replied. “And now that I think about it, I am sure it’s time that we did something a bit more sensible and constructive. As far as I am concerned most of my energy and intelligence is spent just in keeping myself alive!”
“If that’s true then you are being very stupid,” the Earl said. “You know I am prepared to share everything I have with you, far more willingly than I would share it with some grasping female whom I am expected to ‘endow with all my worldly goods’.”
“No one could be kinder,” Lord Charles said in a serious voice, “but at my age I should be able to look after myself, although it’s very difficult to know how.”
“I cannot think what happened to all the money your grandfather had when he was the Duke,” the Earl quizzed him.
“I can answer that in two words – drink and cards,” Lord Charles replied. “He was an inveterate gambler and one night at Wattier’s he lost three squares and fourteen streets in the middle of London and a thousand acres of our best farming land in the country!”
“Your father must have regretted that when he inherited.”
“What did he inherit?” Lord Charles ask
ed. “A house that was falling to pieces about our ears, land which is singularly unfertile and a multitude of debts which we are still paying off year after year with the pittance which was left of what was known as ‘a fortune’!”
He spoke bitterly.
Then he added,
“Well, I shall never come into it anyway because, as you know, I have two elder brothers. So why should I worry? It’s only that I hate to see my parents losing a battle they can never win and my mother growing increasingly tired and old because she cannot afford enough servants to run the house.”
“It’s a damnable situation!” the Earl agreed. “Surely you can find some way by which you can make some money?”
“Like what?” Lord Charles asked bitterly.
Then there was silence and the Earl realised that there was no answer to his question.
If he had not supported his friend in the Army, it would have been quite impossible for him to find the comparatively large income that was required by an Officer in a smart Cavalry Regiment.
It had therefore been inevitable that, when he bought himself out on his father’s death, he should pay for Charles to do so too.
Now, although it seemed ridiculous, the Earl thought that the future was somewhat grim for both of them, apart from the fact that he had everything that money could buy.
Something within him demanded more.
If he was honest, he knew that his talents, and they were quite considerable, were being wasted and, as his friend had told him, a life of pleasure and making love to one woman after another would never satisfy him.
‘What do I want? And how can I get it, if I don’t know what it is?’ he asked himself.
Because there was no easy reply the two men drove on almost in silence.
As the huge house, Fleet Hall, which was the Earl’s ancestral home, came in sight, he took out his watch and looked at it.
Then he crowed with an air of triumph,
“Two hours, three minutes! I believe that’s a new record!”
“It certainly is, “Lord Charles agreed, “and the only thing to do is to go back tomorrow and try to make it five minutes shorter!”
“I shall do nothing of the sort!”
The Earl looked ahead and thought with satisfaction that, with the sun glinting on its windows, Fleet Hall looked very beautiful.
Originally a Priory, every succeeding Earl had built on to it until in the middle of the last century the present Earl’s grandfather, when he was an old man, had completely changed the appearance of it.
Now there were Ionic pillars supporting a portico above the long flight of stone steps, which led to the front door.
The original Priory had now lost every vestige of its original appearance and instead was a Georgian gentleman’s house in the full sense of the word.
It stood in exquisite gardens laid out by the finest landscape gardener in England and in front of it was a huge lake on which glided swans both black and white.
The Earl’s Standard flew from the rooftop and along the parapet of the roof stood statues of Goddesses silhouetted against the blue of the sky.
‘It is a house of dreams,’ the Earl had often thought to himself and he never saw it without a little thrill because it was his and because in itself it was everything that he wanted his home to be.
He was thinking, however, that ever since he had inherited, his relations had begged him to be married and produce not one heir but half-a-dozen of them to make sure of the succession.
“Your father was bitterly disappointed that he had only one child,” his aunts would say to him as if it was something original. “You must make sure while you are still young that the nurseries on the top floor are filled so that we need not worry, as we did when you were in the Army, that the Earldom might come to an end.”
It seemed extraordinary, the Earl had often thought, that among his relations there was a great preponderance of daughters. It was as if the family had been cursed in not producing sons.
‘It is something that I shall have to see about sooner or later,’ he reflected.
Then he told himself that, despite his grumbles, he actually enjoyed being in London and found that, while there were beautiful women ready and willing to fall into his arms, there was no need for marriage until he was very much older.
He admitted to himself, however, that Charles was right and thirty-two was going to seem very old to a young woman of eighteen or nineteen.
He was aware that after that age a girl was either so plain that she was destined to become an old maid or, if she was pretty enough, already married to somebody else.
And yet the mere thought of marriage made him shiver.
He was man enough to accept the favours he was offered. It would have seemed very priggish to refuse the women who gave him their bodies and their hearts without apparently a thought for their husbands.
But the Earl always felt in a strange way that, when he humiliated a man by taking his wife into his arms, he was humiliated too.
It was as if, being complacent husbands, they insulted the whole of the male sex and yet it was indivisibly part of the world he lived in.
If he had so much as hinted at his real feelings, it would have caused a gale of laughter and scorn from everybody around him.
The Prince Regent as Prince of Wales had set the pace by pursuing a number of beautiful women one after another who inevitably were already married, with the exception of Mrs. Fitzherbert, who was a widow.
His marriage with Princess Caroline had proved disastrous and he had returned very quickly to the married women he preferred, whose husbands apparently thought it a privilege for His Royal Highness to desire what was legally theirs.
‘I am damned if I would allow my wife to behave in such a way!’ the Earl had said to himself a dozen times as he went up the stairs in another man’s house to his wife’s bed.
Because it had been easier to ‘swim with the tide’ than against it, he did not express such ideas to the women who either assured him that their husbands were no longer interested in them or were conveniently away for a few nights.
In the last year what had been just a casual thought had gradually become a distaste for the intrigue and the feeling when the fires of desire had died down a little that it was all rather cheap and sordid.
As he drew nearer to Fleet Hall, he had told himself that he would make sure that any woman he brought here bearing his name would behave herself.
If he ever found her philandering with a man like himself he would strangle her!
Then he thought that if he said such a thing out loud even Charles would not understand and would laugh at him.
Yet, as he drew his horses up outside the porticoed front door and the footmen in their smart livery rolled down the red carpet, he knew exactly what he wanted.
The only difficulty was that it might be impossible ever to find it.
*
The Earl and Lord Charles were welcomed by the butler, who was waiting in the hall and there were four footmen to take their hats and driving-coats from them.
“It’s good to see you back, my Lord!” the butler said respectfully. “Luncheon will be ready in ten minutes, if that’s your Lordship’s wish.”
Lord Charles was aware that, when the Earl had said that he was going to the country, a groom from Berkeley Square had been despatched to alert the household of his imminent arrival.
It always amused him to see how just like clockwork everything ran smoothly as soon as the Earl appeared.
Champagne on ice was cooled at exactly the right temperature, the sitting room had fresh flowers in the vases and the sun-blinds were lowered to exactly the right angle to rest the eyes.
They walked into luncheon in the small dining room, which the Earl preferred to use when there was not a party.
Each dish was an epicurean delight and the wine, which came from his very extensive cellars beneath the house, was superb.
The two friends talked of hor
ses for some time during the meal. Then they talked about the War situation.
Finally, when the servants had withdrawn, they sat back comfortably in their chairs, a glass of matured brandy at their sides and a feeling of comfort and satisfaction which Lord Charles was sure had swept away the irritation and depression that the Earl had shown earlier in the day.
“The first thing we will do,” the Earl said, “is to take out some of the horses I am trying to break in and drive the devil out of them.”
“A good idea,” Lord Charles agreed. “I expect my riding clothes will have been unpacked by now.”
“I will raise Hell if they have not!”
“I am only teasing,” Lord Charles confessed. “As you are well aware, everything at Fleet Hall is run to perfection and I cannot imagine that there could ever be anything amiss or that you could find fault with.”
“I hope you are right,” the Earl said, “but I expect my wife, if I ever have one, will find traces of dust somewhere or be ready to find fault even if it is only with the lowliest scullery maid!”
Lord Charles looked at him with a glint of interest in his eyes.
“Are you thinking of taking a wife?”
“I suppose it is something I shall have to do sooner or later!”
“That is not the right way to look at it – ” Charles began.
As he spoke, the door opened and the butler came into the room.
He walked to the Earl’s side and said in a low voice,
“Excuse me, my Lord, but there’s a young lady waiting to see you.”
“A young lady?”
It flashed through the Earl’s mind that Oline might have followed him, but quickly decided that it was impossible.
She had always said that she hated the country and what was more, however outrageously she might behave in London, she would not risk her social reputation by blatantly proclaiming her feelings in such a manner.
“What name did the young lady give, Newman?” he asked.
“She said, my Lord, that you would not know her, but she has to see you because it’s on a very important subject.”
The Earl looked surprised.
Then he asked,
“Is there any reason why she should be so secretive?”
“I don’t know, my Lord.”
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