by Sara Seale
“Doesn’t he know you’ve married again, then?”
“Not unless he’s a remote-controlled mind-reader, but when you meet, as you doubtless will, you can give him the glad tidings.”
“Hardly glad tidings, darling. Didn’t he hope to inherit?” she said softly, and his answering smile was a little cryptic as he stooped to caress the bitch, Delsa.
“He was next in the male line, certainly, but I don’t know that his hopes will exactly be blighted by my marriage,” he said. “Rory has the actor’s flair for seeing himself against a good theatrical backcloth, but I doubt if he’d enjoy the less spectacular responsibilities. That’s what Clooney means to Rory—a good backcloth, and a nice line of approach when he wants to impress strangers. He’s never really grown up.”
He gave Harriet a little smile as he spoke, and she, like Delsa, writhing contentedly under his fingers, felt pleasure in a small intimate moment of something shared. He was, she knew, reminding her obliquely of his young cousin’s inadvertent part in their subsequent meeting, but Samantha, too, was quick enough to catch a nuance of reserve.
“You’ll have to watch out when our gay cavalier does meet up with your little bride, darling,” she said, her eyes resting on Harriet with more attention than she had shown before. “Rory’s always liked his conquests young and impressionable.”
“And rich—so you’d better watch out for yourself, Samantha,” Duff said with a twinkle that Harriet thought did not altogether please the decorative Mrs. Dwight.
“I’m neither impressionable or so young that I’m still gullible,” she answered a trifle shortly. “Is the poor sweet still looking for his heiress?”
“Not very seriously, I imagine, but Rory’s one of the misfits of our age, enough money to make a job of work advisable but not essential, and not enough to live on comfortably without work at all. Incidentally, he and Harriet have already met. He was, if he but knew it, largely responsible for our introduction!”
This time Samantha’s attention was focused on Harriet with more than a passing interest.
“Really?” she said, and there was a mixture of curiosity and surprise in her voice. “You seem to be suggesting some sort of mystery. Where did you meet, Harriet? I understood you’d only been over here a week.”
“They met in England when Rory was over there touring, but as he doesn’t, as far as I am aware, yet know I’m married, that accounts for the mystery, doesn’t it?” Duff said smoothly before Harriet could think of a suitable answer, but she was becoming puzzled by the relationship between these two. It seemed at times as if there was an undercurrent of antagonism between them, but it was equally plain that they shared the privileges of long association.
“I see,” said Samantha, losing interest. “You haven’t offered the usual condolences, I notice, darling, but perhaps this isn’t a suitable occasion on which to commiserate with the newly bereaved.”
Harriet felt both awkward and sorry, but Duff replied with what she thought was rather heartless unconcern: “Well, I didn’t think commiseration was what you would expect in the circumstances!”
“Didn’t you? No, I suppose one can hardly shout one’s small triumphs from the rooftops. I should never have sent that cable, should I? Bad timing again.”
Harriet, who was beginning to feel that her own presence was passing unnoticed by either of them, had no idea what significance Samantha’s odd remark could possibly have, but Duff, seemingly, was not at all confused.
“On the contrary, it was most opportune,” he replied smoothly, and Samantha, looking suddenly angry, seemed on the verge of some impetuous retort, but catching Harriet’s perplexed and slightly embarrassed expression, turned to her, smiling, made charming apologies for tactlessly outstaying her welcome on such a very private occasion and begged the feminine solace of a cup of tea before setting out for home.
“And where is home for the moment?” Duff enquired.
“Anywhere—nowhere,” Samantha answered with a graceful shrug. “At the moment, with Aunt Alice, of course. She was always our port of call for country holidays, Kitty and I—remember?”
“I remember. And how is Miss Docherty? Is she still draining her small income on that unlucrative stable of hers?”
“If you’re hinting that my nice American dollars might well be employed easing Aunt Alice’s little lot you can save your breath. They’re no more to her liking than to yours, since you’re both as proud as the devil,” Samantha replied with lazy unconcern, and Duff, turning to Harriet, said, with a faint trace of impatience:
“Would you see about that tea, Harriet? You’re mistress here now, you know.”
Harriet jumped up quickly, made aware that not only was she failing in her first duties as hostess, but had been sitting on like an inquisitive child, listening to the half-understood talk of its elders. It was going to be difficult, she thought, to remember that she was no longer a guest at the Castle.
They resumed their conversation as she crossed the room, and she hurried to get out of earshot, for Samantha certainly had forgotten her presence or chose to ignore it, but as she reached the door and opened it, she heard Samantha say:
“You were afraid of me, weren’t you, darling? That’s why you rushed into marriage with an accommodating little girl nobody’s ever heard of! The old Adam dies hard, you know...”
The door closed on Duff’s reply, but Harriet stood leaning against it for a moment, shaken and shocked into unwelcome realisation. The reason for haste now seemed only too plain, though not the reason for preferring a come-by-chance stranger to this fascinating, intimidating enchantress who, it was painfully obvious, possessed all the natural and fitting qualities to reign here as mistress of Clooney.
CHAPTER FIVE
WHAT was left of Harriet’s wedding day passed with a sense of anti-climax. True, champagne was served again with dinner, after which mild sounds of celebration could be heard coming from the kitchen quarters, but in the dining-room there was no air of occasion and little conversation.
Harriet sat at her husband’s table feeling rather like an importunate guest whose welcome was outstayed, and she wondered whether Duff was finding it as difficult as she to introduce some neutral topic for discussion. Was it Kitty he thought of with that brooding air of abstraction, or the lovely Samantha?
“At your old tricks, Harriet?” he said suddenly from the other end of the table, and she jumped guiltily. “You’ve already made one false assumption from meddling with the past—don’t go dreaming up any more fairy-tales.”
He spoke quite casually, but she had the impression he was warning her, against what she could not for the moment imagine, but it was an uncomfortable sensation, being stripped so easily of one’s private thoughts.
“My mistake over the portrait was natural, I think, and I—I wasn’t meddling,” she said, refusing to be put in the wrong for the sake of a mood she could not share, and he gave her that rare, charming smile which could so redeem the ugliness of his face.
“No, of course you weren’t, and your mistake was perfectly natural,” he replied easily. “But don’t make any more, my dear, will you?”
“I shall probably make plenty as I’m new to housekeeping, let alone life in a castle. You will just have to be patient with me,” she said, deliberately misunderstanding to divert his thoughts to more mundane matters, and he got to his feet, terminating the meal abruptly as though their enforced solitude had irked him.
“I don’t entertain and Jimsy and Agnes between them run the house adequately, if somewhat imperfectly, so I shan’t expect too much of you,” he said a little dryly. “Come to the snug and get warm—this room gets like a perishing ice-box. We’ll take to having our meals in the little breakfast-room, I think, as I do when I’m alone.”
The warmth and friendliness of the snug was welcoming, Harriet thought, aware now that the chill of the lofty, inadequately heated dining-room had penetrated to her very bones. She curled up on the rug beside the dogs.
>
“Have you felt cheated?” Duff asked suddenly, and she looked up at him in surprise.
“How do you mean—cheated?” she temporised.
“Well, it’s a big day in a girl’s life, I’ve always understood, and you’ve had none of the traditional fripperies and fuss to mark the occasion.”
“It was scarcely that kind of occasion, was it?” she answered carefully, and saw him frown again.
“No. Still, I could, with a little forethought, have supplied a few extra trimmings to satisfy those day-dreams of yours.”
“Well,” she said, with a valiant attempt to meet him- on his own ground, “the right clothes might have boosted my morale and done you more credit, but I hadn’t allowed for a wedding when I bought them, so it’s just as well you didn’t plan the conventional rejoicings, isn’t it?”
Her reaction was new to him and his eyes were faintly troubled. She had seemed so incredibly naive with her absurd dreams and expectations, so eminently suitable to his needs because what he had to offer must surely compensate for those arid years in an orphanage, but he had not, perhaps, allowed for the natural hopes and dreams of any young girl.
“Harriet...” he began, feeling hesitantly for the-right words, “our marriage, though one of convenience, doesn’t have to stay that way always, you know. Should you ever come to think of me more kindly, I wouldn’t condemn you to a life of sterility.”
He knew at once, as he saw her eyes widen and her lips part like a surprised child, that he had merely confused her, but her reply was composed enough.
“But can one, without love, drift into that kind of relationship?”
“Well, a man certainly can,” he said with more harshness than he felt because he was beginning to wish he had never embarked on such dangerous topics with this mere child who had just become his wife with, apparently, no possible conceptions of the demands which, despite their agreement, he still had every right to make. “Few men are celibate by nature and I no less than others, so love, you see, isn’t as important as you think.”
She sat on the rug in silence for a minute or so, her head bent so that the long thick hair fell forward, hiding her face from him. He was, she supposed with a prosaic acceptance that might have surprised him, trying to warn her that for all his insistence on a platonic relationship, there might come a time when natural inclinations could get the better of him. Harriet had simple concepts of love and passion derived largely from sentimental novels, but she was not ignorant. The fact that Duff could divorce one emotion from the other might chill, but did not shock her, for orphanage training had insisted from the start that men’s needs were different from women’s, and should never be confused with more serious declarations.
Unaware of such composed reactions to his effort to reassure rather than to warn, he sat and watched her, observing the tender little hollow at the base of her neck and wishing quite suddenly to explore it. He experienced that same uncomfortable stirring of compunction he had felt on reflecting that he should have adopted her instead of marrying her. It was not, he realised immediately, a notion that could have been of any possible use to him in the circumstances, and it was too late now to have regrets.
“Does Mrs. Dwight live near here?” she asked suddenly.
“No. She’s staying with her aunt, Miss Docherty, the other side of the lough. She rather startled you, didn’t she, Harriet?”
“Only for the moment because I’d thought the portrait was of your wife. She’s very lovely, isn’t she?”
“Oh, yes—very lovely, and very dangerous.”
It might have been a warning, or it might have been a grudging tribute, for he spoke lightly enough, but Harriet remembered that casual taunt of Samantha’s and the implication that Duff’s hasty marriage had, in a sense, been complimentary to herself.
“Has she long been a widow?” she asked, more from idle curiosity than any wish to pry, but his answer was laconic.
“Not long,” he said, and afterwards she realised she should have been warned by his manner not to pursue the subject, but she was beginning to find the evening something of a strain, and the lovely Samantha was at least a mutual point of focus upon which to hang a polite exchange of small talk.
“Was your wife like her?” she asked, anxious to get things in perspective, since she had jumped to such false conclusions.
“There was a family resemblance, I suppose,” he answered, but did not elaborate, so she tried again.
“Your wife painted the portrait, I suppose. They must have been very fond of one another—so many books and things signed ‘Sam’—and the likeness was well caught, and—” she broke off abruptly as he got suddenly to his feet with an angry exclamation.
“For heaven’s sake stop chattering glibly about matters of which you know nothing,” he said. “Yes, my wife painted the portrait, no, the cousins were not particularly fond, and since you’d already dreamed up a lover for poor Kitty and been proved wrong, let that be a lesson to you not to jump to unwarrantable conclusions. Now, will you please desist in future from concerning yourself with affairs that happened when you were an inquisitive and doubtless tiresome child of ten, and curb that rather over-developed imagination. Well, eleven o’clock; time you were in bed. If you’ll go on up I’ll say goodnight here and let the dogs out.”
She scrambled awkwardly to her feet, for her weak ankle had become cramped from her position on the floor, and stood there indecisively, appalled by the sudden realisation that she did not know where she was to sleep.
“Well?” Duff said a shade impatiently, then seeing her crestfallen face, added kindly: “Sorry I barked at you. I’m a bit on edge, which is no fault of yours, so say goodnight with a nice forgiving smile, and run off to bed.”
“I—I don’t know where to go,” she stammered, and saw him frown.
“Good grief! Hasn’t someone shown you where the rooms are?” he exclaimed. “I should have thought with your inquisitive tendencies you would have ferreted that out for yourself. Well, come along and I’ll show you. The dogs will have to wait.”
As she followed him up the elegant staircase and into a strange wing of the house, she felt he was not pleased at being obliged to come up with her, and wondered if he was embarrassed at having to share what was, presumably, the bridal suite with a stranger who meant nothing to him, and she inspected her new quarters with slight apprehension.
Duff turned up the lamps, replenished the turf in one room, firmly shut and locked the intervening door to the other and threw the key on to the dressing-table.
“To allay any fears you may be harbouring, Miss Jones,” he said with a slight edge to his voice, and when she answered a little timidly, but with the polite insistence on exactitude he had already come to associate with her: “I’m not Miss Jones any more,” he turned to look at her, reflectively running a hand over his chin.
She stood in the middle of the big room looking lost and alien and very tired. Her thin shoulders drooped like a child who has just been scolded, and his face softened to a brief tenderness.
“Neither you are,” he said with gentle amusement. “You are Mrs. Duff Lonnegan for better or for worse, but not at the moment looking very happy with her married quarters. Don’t you like your room, Harriet? You can always change it—there are plenty of rooms going a’begging in this house.”
“Oh, no—no, really. I don’t want to change, besides—”
“Besides what?”
“Well, it would look rather odd, wouldn’t it? The servants, I mean.”
“Oh, I should have to come along to wherever you happened to pick just for the look of things,” he said, then burst out laughing. “It’s a shame to tease you when you’re so tired. Hurry into bed now, and I’ll see you in the morning. Goodnight again.”
She wished he would kiss her goodnight, just a token kiss like the one he had bestowed in the vestry, but he was already at the door before she remembered to return his courtesy and was gone without further comment.
If, after the momentous transformation from Harriet Jones, an undistinguished foundling from an orphanage, to Mrs. Duff Lonnegan of Castle Clooney, Harriet expected a general metamorphosis around her, she was to be disappointed. The house settled down again to its timeless air of gentle drifting, and she had the curious impression that her coming had made very little difference to anyone. The servants accepted her, but brooked no changes in the running of the house, even if she had dared to make any, and Duff, busy with the affairs of his small estate, although he enquired punctiliously for her well-being when they met at mealtimes, seemed to reflect his household’s assumption that nothing in their lives had altered.
Harriet thought it strange that no attempt seemed to have been made to break the news to the little girl of her father’s remarriage, since the school was so near at hand, but when she suggested that they might take the child out for the day and get acquainted, he replied that he thought it best to wait until she came home for the Christmas holidays.
Christmas ... The magic word at once restored and excited, and it was little more than six weeks away, despite the deceptive mildness of a wet November, Harriet realised, and her mind was immediately filled with the image she had associated with places like Castle Clooney; bustling preparations, fat cooks making endless puddings with everyone stirring and making a wish, a giant tree all lit up and hung with presents for the village children, laughter and secrets, tinsel and holly and carols, and open house for all.
Harriet thought Duff looked at her a little oddly, however, when she broached her plans to him.
“I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed, Harriet,” he said wryly. “There hasn’t been a Christmas like that at Clooney since I was a boy. In those days there were more servants and one’s relations far and near were gathered into the fold, I suppose, but now there’s not enough staff to cope with house-parties, and most of the relations have died off or have family house-warmings of their own.”