As Shadows Haunting

by Deryn Lake

  “Sarah,” he shouted frantically to her rigid profile, “I cannot believe that your guardian has sent you from town. Oh, my darling, how could he do such a cruel thing?”

  “How could you, more like?” she answered, without turning her head. “When I read your letter you may believe I was only too willing to go.”

  “My father threatened to cut me off without a penny if I didn’t break with you. My parents stood over me while I wrote the accursed thing. But it was all lies. I love you —”

  His voice trailed away as Tannes, Sarah’s coachman, realising that she was being courted by a jackanapes, put on speed and shot ahead, only for John to thrash up behind them, gasping for breath.

  “Sarah, I —”

  This time she turned to look at him, her deep eyes wide. “Do you mean it? Do you really love me? Was your hand truly forced?”

  “Yes, to all three, my own dear —”

  He was gone again as Tannes, grim-lipped now, applied the whip to his team. Sarah suppressed a wild desire to giggle as John, looking thoroughly exhausted, hastened to catch her up once more.

  “Do you unsay all you put in the letter?” she demanded of the flagging young man as he yet again came into her line of vision.

  “I unsay it,” he panted. “I unsay it.”

  “So you still want to marry me?”

  “Be damned!” swore Tannes audibly and roared his horses ahead as if it were a chariot race.

  “Yes,” came Newbattle’s distant voice and, leaning out of the window, Sarah saw that the pretty lordling had finally given up the chase and was doffing his hat in farewell.

  “Write to me,” she shouted. “I’m to my brother’s at Goodwood.”

  He nodded and waved and Sarah sat down again, a smile of triumph on her face. So there were two men in love with her after all and both of them had made a proposal of marriage. By anyone’s reckoning this was a most satisfactory state of affairs for someone still two days off her sixteenth birthday. It seemed to Sarah Lennox as the post chaise went on its way that a bright and beautiful future was undeniably opening up before her.

  *

  When the second Duke of Richmond, grandson of Charles II, died, he had left behind him a large family. Caroline had been the eldest and Cecilia the youngest, while between them lay Emily, Lady Kildare; Charles, Duke of Richmond; Lord George, Lady Louisa and Lady Sarah. The new Duke Charles — all the heirs carried that name in order to remind them of their kingly, if bastardly, descent — had been seventeen when he succeeded to the title and was at that time undoubtedly one of the wildest young rips in London. The handsome boy had not only inherited his great-grandfather’s dark and gleaming looks but also his love of pleasure.

  At the age of fifteen he had written to Henry Fox, one of his guardians, much beloved of the naughty youth, “I was at Vaux Hall tother night with Miss Townsend, when she began to tell me I was troublesome; but I told Her I knew it and would be so and persisted, as she calld it, teasing her the whole night especialy after I Drunk her health in six half-pint bumpers in Champagnne, beside some super numeral bumpers which made me damnably drunk, but not stupidly so.” In the same letter Charles had described another visit to Vaux Hall during which “… after supper I diverted myself with Patty Rigby in the dark walks as well as I could wish. Very well, I think, for the second time I ever saw her. I was again last night at Ranelagh, where I could do nothing but kiss Miss Rigby in the box, as there were no dark walks there. The Devil take it for having no dark walks. For God’s sake never mention Miss Rigby’s name to any mortal, nott even to Lord Kildare. For one should never kiss and tell. Besides you know, if it was known, what would be the consequence. Hi! Ho! But all my jollity is over. For the day after tomorrow I march off to Goodwood for the rest of the hollyday. However I shall divert myself as well as I can.”

  Henry Fox had chuckled at his young brother-in-law’s mischief but had to admit to a sense of relief when, in 1757, the Duke had married Lady Mary Bruce, only child of Charles, Earl of Elgin and Ailesbury. Walpole had gushed over the union, “It is the perfectest match in the world; youth, beauty, riches, alliances, and all the blood of all the Kings from Robert the Bruce to Charles II. They are the prettiest couple in England, except the father-in-law and mother!” Charles’s bride had in truth been excessively beautiful and was known in the family as the Lovely. But, tragically, the Lovely had so far been unable to produce a child and rumour had it that her naughty husband had already taken a mistress.

  Now, though, neither of them were thinking of themselves or the state of their marriage but rather were agog as Sarah’s chaise came into view down the long drive and they prepared to receive her in the entrance hall. Correspondence between Fox and his brother-in-law had been flying and Richmond, for all his own erring ways, could cheerfully have strangled his younger sister.

  “To turn down a lover is one thing,” he had said to the Lovely that morning. “But to turn down a King for the sake of a Pimple is another!”

  “But you are to be the soul of tact,” his wife had replied.

  “I shall do my utter best.”

  And with that not very reassuring statement the Duchess had had to be content.

  Sarah, she thought, as the girl made her way into the entrance hall was looking unusually bright on all her troubles. In fact there was almost something suspicious about the way her eyes sparkled and her cheeks bloomed peonies.

  “Greetings, my dear,” said Richmond, his saturnine features lit by the entire situation. “I hear you have caused a sensation this season. What larks!”

  “I’ve been sent from town as a result,” Sarah answered ruefully.

  “So was I — many times!” the Duke replied, then added. “Mind you, that is something of an accolade in the case of a man.”

  “And why not in the case of a woman?”

  “For obvious reasons. Lest she lose her good character,” Richmond replied primly, then threw his arms round his sister in a great hug.

  “We’ll be dining soon,” said the Lovely, smiling at the new arrival. “Would you like to go to your room straightaway?”

  “Yes, please. I must get rid of the confusions of the journey,” Sarah said significantly, though neither of the two other young people understood what she meant. “But tell me first when you will be sending back the chaise?”

  “Not till tomorrow. Why?”

  “I would like to pen a note to Caroline to go with it. And also one for Susan Fox-Strangeways.”

  “Has she returned to town?”

  “Yes. She is to go to Court with her parents, I believe.”

  “Ah, an ambassador,” said Richmond, and stroked his chin.

  “He’s plotting something,” said his wife, laughing. “Sarah beware.”

  “Nonsense,” retorted the Duke, though his wicked face was creasing into a grin.

  And he grinned on throughout dinner served punctually at four o’clock, until in the end several glasses of good claret loosened Charles’s tongue and he conveyed the source of his amusement to the two ladies.

  “Damme, Sal, I cannot recover from the fact that His Majesty has taken a fancy to you. He seems such a sensible dull fellow I can scarcely comprehend it.”

  His sister looked, at him with twinkling eyes. “He is dull and sensible. Far too much so for me.”

  “Then you’re all kinds of an ass,” Richmond answered sharply, his grin vanishing abruptly. “For is it not known that the right woman can make even a dolt turn bright? You’ve no spirit of adventure, I fear.”

  She flushed. “My affections have been engaged by another.”

  Richmond stared at her swiftly. “Have been? I thought were would have been more appropriate. Did not Newbattle write to break off your association?”

  Sarah looked at her plate. “Yes, he did.”

  “Umm,” said the Duke, and thought his thoughts. Eventually he ended the silence by saying, “And how was His Majesty when you left him?”

  “Angry.”
<
br />   “I see. I wonder is he still?”

  “There’s no way of knowing that.”

  “Why not ask Lady Susan to find out,” put in the Lovely.

  “A splendid notion; well done, my dear,” Richmond replied, beaming at her as if he had not already thought of it himself. “When you send your letters back with the chaise be so good as to ask Lady Susan to speak with the King and gauge his mood.”

  “Very well, Charles,” Sarah answered with just a hint of asperity. “If that would please you.”

  She considered that her brother, a reckless scamp if ever there was one, had grown pompous. And the fact that even he did not approve of her love affair made Sarah more determined than ever to have John Newbattle for husband, even at the cost of an elopement and a split within the family. Yet there was one great worry that she had to deal with immediately. Tannes, the coachman, was a loyal creature of both Fox and Caroline and sure as fate would be bound to tell them of her encounter on the highway. The only thing to do was to make a clean breast of the meeting to Caroline and beg her not to tell Mr Fox and instruct the coachman likewise.

  In the early hours of her sixteenth birthday, 25th February 1761, Sarah Lennox rose from her bed and went to the writing desk by the window. There, sitting in the pale light, she gave Caroline an honest account of all that had taken place on the journey to Goodwood, though omitting to say that John Newbattle had once again asked her to marry him. This done, Sarah wrote to Susan.

  “I have but just time to tell you that my sister Caroline will tell you, if you ask her, what has passed between Lord Newbattle and I upon the road. Adieu, yrs, S. Lennox.”

  She was just about to seal the letter when Sarah remembered what the Duke had said at dinner and added a hasty postscript. “My brother begs you’ll go to Court, and let me know what he says to you.”

  This done, Sarah rang for her maid and told her to give both pieces of correspondence to Tannes to take back to Kensington with him. Then she went to the window again and stood gazing out over the spring parkland wondering what her seventeenth year would bring and whether she would be a bride by the time it came to its end.

  Unbidden, His Majesty’s honest face flashed before her, rather than that of her pretty lover, and Sarah felt a stirring of the heart.

  “I mustn’t feel sorry for him,” she said. “It truly is a most dangerous emotion.”

  But was it pity that brought a flush to her cheeks and made her whirl round the room in a merry dance?

  ‘I wonder what he’ll say to Susan,’ Sarah thought, and all at once felt she could hardly wait for her friend to answer what suddenly seemed an all-important question.

  Chapter Ten

  Sarah Lennox was dreaming a sad evocative dream in which she relived her secret meeting with Lord Newbattle in the grounds of Holland House. It was strange. For, unlike what had really happened, this time both the King and the unknown woman turned to look at her rather than hurrying away with their backs turned. Sarah gazed incredulously on their beautiful smiles, His Majesty’s so loving and tender with much pure kindness in its depths, the woman’s humorous but friendly, as if she understood Sarah’s plight and would help if she knew but how.

  In the dream, John Newbattle was a vague figure, almost indistinct, but the King and the woman were crystal clear. Feelings stirred again, of love and friendship, of harmony and accord, of sorrow and loss, and when Sarah woke in the dawning, in painful discomfort, she found she had wept as she slept and her cheeks were moist with the dew of her sadness.

  The high and elegant ceiling at which her damp eyes gazed was not that of her bedroom at Holland House, nor indeed the one at Goodwood. Sarah was looking at her room in Redlynch House, near Bruton in Somerset, home of Mr Fox’s elder brother, Lord Ilchester. The girl sighed, thinking of the events that had brought her here and how one simple fall from a horse had changed the course of her entire life.

  Within a few days of her arrival at the Duke of Richmond’s Sussex home who should appear there to join her but Lord and Lady George, the latter buzzing with secrets, rolling her eyes and whispering behind her fan that her brother still loved Sarah, that she was playing Dan Cupid and was there to help the thwarted couple. Lovers’ meetings were arranged and Sarah and John had exchanged kisses and declared undying passion. It had all been highly romantic and the secrecy extremely exciting but, of course, they had reckoned without the arch cynic, Sarah’s brother.

  Having been totally untrustworthy himself and not greatly reformed by his marriage to the Lovely, Richmond had suspected his sister from the start. Rather than order a groom to follow her when she rode out on the Downs, simpering Lady George dubiously acting as chaperone, the Duke had done so himself, an escapade he had greatly enjoyed. Slipping like a shadow through the beechwood trees, he had spied Sarah locked in an embrace with a vacuous youth, pretty but also pretty stupid, as Richmond had thought at the time. The fact that Lady George remained at a studied distance from the couple proved that this ardent young man could be none other than the beastly boy, Newbattle himself. The Duke of Richmond had slipped quietly away and written a letter to Fox.

  “Lady George is carrying on the love in Richmond’s very house,” the Paymaster had exploded to Caroline. “What’s to be done?”

  His wife had gone white. “I thought something like this might happen. I knew the wretched fellow had not given up. Let Sarah be sent to Susan’s immediately. Goodwood is only two days’ ride away but he’ll think twice about journeying to Somerset to do his courting.”

  “You’ve been found out,” the Duke had said laconically to his sister. “And on your guardian’s instructions you are to go to Redlynch at once. How sad for you. But then, Sal, if you intend to misbehave you must make certain never to be discovered.”

  “Who did discover me?”

  “Myself of course. By the way, Newbattle’s a waster. Written all over him. The sooner you forget him and concentrate on someone else, preferably someone who wears a crown, the better it will be for all of us.”

  Furious with her brother, feeling betrayed and bitter, Sarah had had little choice but to accept her fate. By the middle of March she had been removed from Sussex and had taken up residence in Somersetshire.

  “What did His Majesty say, by the way?” Sarah had asked as soon as she and Susan were alone in their adjoining bedrooms in the older girl’s home.

  “He said he hoped you liked your birthday present but I replied that you had not been home to see it. The King looked disappointed at that.”

  “But I wrote to thank him after Caroline told me of it, explaining that I had not yet received the gift.”

  “He did not refer to your letter.”

  “Oh.”

  “It was almost as if he had not seen it.”

  Sarah shook her head. “Did he say anything else?”

  “No, nothing.”

  And that had been the end of a somewhat disappointing conversation. Yet, in a way, Sarah had felt happier at Redlynch than she had at Goodwood, despite the absence of her admirer. Susan’s company was always good and there was so much riding to do and visits to make. Remote from London though she might be, country life was not dull, and Sarah was just beginning really to enjoy herself when disaster had struck.

  Returning from a visit to Longleat, she had fallen from her horse in the town of Maiden Bradley. The accident had been simple enough, her mount treading on a cobble which had broken beneath him, causing the animal to fall. Sarah had gone tumbling down too, but as the horse had risen he had pressed his shoulder against her leg and broken it against the stones. A coach had been sent for which had taken the girl, experiencing considerable pain, to Sir Henry Hoare’s house at Stourton where her leg had been set by Mr Clark, a surgeon from Bruton. The next day the invalid had been carried upon men’s shoulders, in a very pretty bed made for the purpose, home to Redlynch. With pain now dulled, Sarah had sung most of the way and Mr Clark had been so impressed by her cheerfulness that he had declared she
was the most agreeable and merry patient he had ever had!

  And then had come the long weeks of confinement, relieved by a stream of visitors to help pass the time. By day, Sarah rested on a couch in a spacious room overlooking the woodland, by night she had the adjoining bedroom to Susan. And now in the light of dawning, the sixteen-year-old lay in her bed, the power of the dream only just fading, and thought how the fall had changed everything.

  The message coming from her family, most of whom had hastened to see her, had been abundantly clear. The King had trembled when he had heard of her accident, had barely been restrained from leaving town and hurrying to her side, had wondered aloud whether she should stay in the care of a country surgeon or whether he should send Mr Hawkins of London to attend her, had actually grimaced and winced in sympathy when Henry Fox had described her initial pain. By contrast, if her brother and sisters were to be believed — and Sarah felt that they would hardly dare lie on such an important issue — Lord Newbattle had tittered when he had heard the news and said that the accident would do no great harm as Sarah’s legs had been ugly enough before.

  It had been such a terrible remark to make, hinting as it did that he had seen her legs, that they had been physically intimate, then adding the insult of ugliness.

  “I know you hate him but I beg you, Sir, please tell me the truth,” Sarah had asked Fox when they had been alone together in her day room. “Did Lord Newbattle really say that?”

  “He did, Sal. He’s back under his father’s thumb and furthermore up to his old tricks, flirting with the girls. I do earnestly enjoin you to forget him. There is another who loves you far better. Take my word for it.”

  “You mean His Majesty?”