by May Woodward
‘Oh dear, dear me, Sir Richard!’ Amathia said. ‘And who might Jenny… I’m sorry, I didn’t catch the name… be, pray?’
‘Jenny Greenteeth. An aquatic damsel who dwells in the Eardingstowe mere, Lady Amathia. The Somerlees are her mortal foes. So, none us cares to take a cooling dip on a summer day.’
Amathia gave a shrill laugh, her face upturned to the speckles of grey light flickering in the overarching branches.
‘Have you ever seen this strange creature?’
‘Not personally, no. But I’ve heard many-an odd account from those who claim they have. Pater used to say his favourite hound would never walk the mere path, and would stop there, howling, hackles up.’
‘What, pray, does the Eardingstowe estate consist of, Sir Richard?’
‘Eighteen thousand acres of grounds and farming land in and around the Quantock hills. There’s the house – eighteenth century mostly, but with a medieval wing attached. A chapel – very old, indeed. Some land elsewhere, too – quite a large estate in Ireland. Although that’s more trouble than it’s worth! I spend most of my time evicting the lazy, grubby tenants when they fall in arrears with their rent!’
‘How tiresome!’ said Amathia.
‘And there’s a mill…’ his voice wavered just a little; but she had to know sometime that much of his lucre came from the cotton trade. ‘Very far away – in some ghastly town in the north. We never go there – just reap the rewards.’
She was still smiling, and he added: ‘It makes cotton, does our mill.’ Still she smiled, and he felt braver. ‘It came to the family through my parents’ marriage. My maternal grandfather was a cotton-master by the name of Joshua Carswell. My mater brought more to the Somerlees, my father used to say, than just the Carswells’ insipid looks. We’re all blond, you see, apart from Aubrey.’
‘Pays for your silk cravats though, doesn’t it, that little venture in charming Lancashire?’ Amathia said. ‘You should be proud of it, Sir Richard. All cousin Brandon has on the Fanshawe estate is sheep – lots of them. I see no objection to dipping a finger or two in the steak and ale pie of trade, you know.’
‘Yes, but you didn’t get called “barrow-boy” and other trade-related epithets at Winchester College I don’t suppose, my lady! But you’re right… the smog that mill chimney belches out paid for two sisters presented at court, and my brother’s commission in a dashed expensive regiment.’
The pair headed deeper into the woodland, away from the sound of the gunshots and keening of the feathered fallen. Richard made out the mounds of badger setts. The soil was only lately overturned, and barely damp from the current rain – had the inhabitants fled from the smell of humans?
‘Well, I must say it’s all very stirring stuff, this war-fever,’ Richard said. ‘Fills one with such pride that our brave boys are to be doing God’s will – freeing the world from tyrant Nicholas’s enslavement.’
‘Ah, then pity the poor, weaker sex, Sir Richard,’ said Amathia, ‘who may only follow the drum from afar!’
‘Some women will be travelling with the army, Lady Amathia. My aunt and sister among them. Clemence, of course, accompanies her fiancé.’
‘So I heard.’ Amathia lifted the hem of her dress. She hopped over a leaf pile. Her look was thoughtful. ‘Your aunt… ’ she went on. ‘She has been three years widowed… no children of her own I understand?’
‘Yes, that’s right. Lizzy’s my most dear aunt and godmother.’
‘Her late husband was the Juncker von Schwangli – a Swiss aristocrat, yes? He left Lysithea well-provided for I believe?’
Aha, the reason behind her interest in his relation was becoming plain. Richard smothered his unflattering smile.
‘As a matter of fact, Schwangli was one of the richest men in Europe. Owned palaces in Geneva, Vienna, Budapest, Pressburg and a castle in Galicia. As you surmise, all these are Lysithea’s now.’
‘Well, indeed.’ A smile lit Amathia’s face. That smug, fair, angel face. How could he resist it?
‘Lysithea and Clemmie are particularly close. Ever since Mater died they’ve been bosom bows. Lizzy has been her chaperone, of course, for her début season. In fact,’ he scratched his ear as if talking of an unimportant matter, ‘I believe Clemmie is to be the main benefactor from Aunt Lizzy’s will. Oh, I’m sure I’ll get her husband’s rosewood cabinet I’ve always admired. And there might be a jewel or two for my wife should I have the good fortune to find a lady to win my heart. But the bulk of the legacy will be Clemence’s.’
Well, he’d shot down two birds after all. This one’s face fell with a plunk into the sodden grass.
Richard invited her to take his arm.
‘Shall we return to the clearing and sample Mowbray’s hospitality, Lady Amathia?’
‘Thank you, Sir Richard.’ They resumed their walk. She had something very visibly on her mind. Like – how might Amathia remove Clemence from the scene and divert the Schwangli fortune to other channels?
TWO
‘Perhaps you might consider the asylum, Sir Richard?’
Who had said that, long, long ago? Was it that horrid governess, Miss Honeywell? Clemence hadn’t been meant to hear, of course. Yet she had.
How had it come about? The girl frowned as she tried to remember.
A summer day. She had been alone. Screaming – stumbling through the bracken. She must have been only six or seven. Up in the loneliest reaches of the Quantocks. Nothing but racing clouds and dizzy heights to be seen all the way to the telescopic yonder. Nanny Jude had warned her not to wander far from their picnic, but Clemence had been a little rebel…
Eventually, she’d heard her brothers Dickon and Aubrey calling her across the hillside.
They’d marched her back to Eardingstowe. Everyone angry with her. She’d been imprisoned in the nursery for days as a punishment.
But when her confinement was up…
‘Come now and play, Clemmie! It’s a lovely day,’ Aubrey had been calling to her through the drawing-room windows which overlooked the Crystal Garden.
Yet when she’d tried to…
…it had seemed the heavens had come swooping down. Smothering her. All the horizons tilting on their orbits. She could not keep her balance… as if a sirocco was fuming in from the Quantocks, whirling her round and round and round… Like the world outside was an airless vacuum… sucking… sucking… choking… The girl had found herself gasping for breath – and passing out.
She hadn’t been able to step out of doors. The walls of Eardingstowe themselves had become a gaol. As if bolts now barred the great front door.
For almost two years Clemence had lived that hermit existence, a wraith-like face at her bedchamber casement which the estate workers sometimes glimpsed.
During that time, often she would peep at the terrifying gardens, woodland and hills, and would drop the curtain from a trembling hand. What was out there? Why was she afraid of the outdoors?
Oh, they’d tried to cajole her with offers of jellies, ices, whatever she fancied… but she daren’t go out. They’d threatened to lock her in an attic where there were spiders and mice… still she couldn’t step across that threshold into the fresh air.
The Somerlees kept quiet about it. An aunt, Cassandra – Lysithea’s younger sister – was shut away in an asylum. A great-uncle had died there too – he’d tried to shoot the gardener because he’d thought he was Napoleon.
Captain Swynton had not been told any of this. All Clemence had confided to her husband-to-be was that she was not fond of the great outdoors or tight, pressing crowds of people.
She was thinking over these things now as she stood on the shore of the Eardingstowe mere one November evening. Wet leaves blew her way from the parkland trees.
You could make out little below the darkling water. A few waving fronds of weed. Quiet bubbles popping on the surfac
e. How ancient the tarn must be she thought, older than the hall: on the brow above the further bank stood a stone circle and cursus which Clemence’s ancestors had raised before the Romans marched the Somerset hills.
Somewhere in the curling mist, sedge and foxtail grasses of the mere, haunted with marsh-lights and calls of moorhens, it was said Jenny Greenteeth lurked. For centuries, the watery creature had been waiting to snatch the Somerlees – her deadly enemies – to their doom in the deep. Who she had been in life no-one now remembered. Some witch one of Clemence’s forbears had burned perhaps. Clemence felt rather sorry for Jenny and wished she could reach out a hand of friendship.
Her musings turned to her lost aunt, Cassandra. Clemence recalled that it had been here at the mere-side that Cassie had believed she’d heard the voices of spirits.
There had been no harm in Cassie. Poor old dear. Clemence had even thrilled to hear of the fair folk who Cassandra had claimed she’d ridden about the Eardingstowe lands with while everyone slept.
‘One day, Jenny let me into her lair,’ Cassandra had once told Clemence. ‘I said to her “Aren’t you going to keep me, like all the other Somerlees down in your murky halls?” But Jenny said no, she’d let me go, as long as I told you all where I’d been and what I’d seen.’
The household had suffered Cassandra’s eccentricities for years.
But then she had prophesied that an elf-prince was coming to destroy the Somerlees. The old baronet, Clemence’s father, had finally had enough, and put his sister away in the nuthouse.
But who was mad, really, and who sane? Clemence remembered her father scoring his way through his Irish tenants: ‘O’Briens? Not paid rent for six months – out! Flanagans? Not paid for four – out! McFarlands… they’re the worst of the lot, damn their hides! Turf them out, out, out! And get tenants in their place who can pay, damn it! What’s that you say? Well, I don’t believe they are starving! Just their excuse to swindle their landlord, that’s all it is!’
Clemence clutched her cloak tight against the wind. Twilight was descending. Rain beginning to fall. She trod the path homeward.
Through the trees ahead of her, the mansion’s windows could be made out glowing dusky-gold as the evening lamps were lit. Chimney smoke mingled with the mist. Jackdaws flit and croaked around the stacks, pale Corinthian colonnade and portico.
The first baronet had not had the heart to consign the Norman manor-house and its Tudor lanthorn-tower to dust when he’d built the new house; the one now grew from the other – a gallimaufry of rolling history. And to the west of the house rose the ancient yew which legend said would stand as long as the Somerlees; when it fell, so would the family.
Suddenly, it struck Clemence that in just a few months this would be home no longer.
Not leaving, she told herself. Rather, she was going – by her own choice – to the man she loved. Norfolk would be just as nice, wouldn’t it – no wild hills where she could be lost again? And a future filled with James. James’s loving embraces. James growing stout and gouty and cantankerous when his infatuation dimmed as she began to grow grey? James’s children making her get as plump as Amathia Consett? Daughters growing up to marry Swyntons-to-come? Sons treading the death-soil of some future Waterloo?
The girl gasped and walked faster. She bypassed the house, and continued along the path to St Laurey’s, the estate church.
She pushed open the mossy little lichgate and passed into the churchyard.
The small chapel was at least as old as the dwelling which had always stood on the site of the present house. Possibly older. In the legend, St Laurey had lived here as an anchoress.
Clemence stood and stared at the yew whose branches were bowing and creaking in the wind. Around its trunk, men had worshipped before Christ had walked the earth. The tree stood within the yard but had likely grown before the church was raised. The upstart faith attempted to contain the old which it had supplanted. In a storm, the saturnine boughs battered the chapel’s south window. In places, the wall was suffering subsidence from the pressure of its antediluvian roots.
The girl stepped through the time-blackened church door.
Clemence had always found comfort in the chapel – the quiet, cool, musty presence of God. She walked the nave without making a sound. Ahead – the plain altar and, above, the Calvary window where was pictured a man lying stretched in agony. On this spot for aeons voices had prayed for deliverance from the Norsemen, the Black Death, Bonaparte.
To the right of the altar, set into a niche in the wall, was the curtained reliquary where were kept certain Somerlee treasures. One was the medallion which St Louis had presented to Rosselin de Somelay. Engraved on it was the earliest depiction of the Somerlee device – the Yew and Quatrefoils. It recalled the miraculous quatrefoils which Rosselin had seen in the sky above the Nile that day in 1250, foretelling a crusader victory. Then there was Father Roland Somerlee’s ring – found undamaged among his ashes after Bloody Mary had burned him at the stake.
‘I do love James. I do. I do.’ Clemence knelt at the altar rail. She fixed her eyes on the altar cross. ‘Who could not love a man who thinks she’s the prettiest girl he’s seen?’ And who isn’t the one Dickon insisted you should marry. The nasty little voice seemed real, sneering in her ear.
She sprang up from her knees, turned her back on the sanctuary, and hurried back along the nave.
Outside, the rain was growing heavier.
Clemence slipped into the house through the garden door. She scurried up the north stairs, along the picture gallery, and into the library. There she sat at the piano, plucking away.
Just getting into her stride she was when she realised she had an unwanted audience. Her fingers clattered on the keys in a chord which sounded like a ship’s horn.
‘I’m rather glad Beethoven was deaf. You’d have broken his heart.’
Lord Brandon Fanshawe was leaning against the door, arms folded, an amused smile on his face.
‘Captain Swynton, I’m glad to say, looks as if he cares more for food than music. How long before they discreetly transfer your betrothed from the Light to the Heavy Brigade, eh, Miss Somerlee?’
Clemence glared, at a loss for anything cutting to say in return. She began to blush.
‘James is a finer man than you, Fanny Fanshawe!’
‘Oh, absolutely-dootly, Miss Somerlee! How could a dullard like me compare with a dashing hussar?’ The young lord put his head on one side, grinning. ‘Czar Nicholas is even now trembling, so I hear, in his Winter Palace, knowing the doughty Captain Swynton is soon to face him.’
‘While you, Lord Brandon Fanshawe, censure from the soft benches of the Lords! Oh, mea culpa,’ went on Clemence. ‘You’d not know the way to Westminster if you were asked directions, would you, my lord, since you attend the House so infrequently!’
Lord Fanshawe hid his laughter behind a hand.
‘I was in the House only this week, Miss Clemence. And I assure you you’ll get your war which you crave so. Bloodshed and gore galore if the mood at Westminster is aught to go by. They’ll be hanging Nicholas’s carcass from London Bridge by next Christmas. But I’ll be going to war, too. Though not, as you surmise, in the field.’
‘You’ll… be going to the war?’
‘Yes, Miss Somerlee, as a war tourist,’ he said. ‘My uncle the duke has loaned me his yacht, The Oriflamme.’
‘Well! Journeying all the way to Russia just to watch a fight?’ said Clemence. ‘Why not visit a boxing booth and save yourself the sea-malaise?’
‘Ah, ma’am,’ Lord Fanshawe sighed. ‘There’s naught can compare with charging steeds, flash of steel, blood in your nostrils… We haven’t seen a battle since… well, Waterloo I suppose, before you or I was born, my dear. Why – one has to be over fifty to remember a good tussle! And by the time the next comes along I’ll as likely be in me bathchair! It should be a mar
vellous lark. And do you know what, Miss Clemence Somerlee? The hussars will fight all the more bravely for seeing your pretty face cheering them on.’
He waved her out of the piano seat.
‘Come, my dear! Let me show you how Beethoven wanted his beautiful melodies to be played.’
‘All right, then, arrogant toad! But I don’t believe you can play better than me.’
He settled, set aside the sheet-music for the Moonlight Sonata, and took up that for the Waldstein instead.
Clemence seethed as his fingers zoomed over the most difficult bits. His copper-gold hair shone in the candlelight from the ormolu candelabrum which stood on the bureau in the corner.
‘I hate you, Fanny Fanshawe!’
She flounced out, his bright laughter following her.
The dressing-room door banged open.
Clemence jumped.
She was seated at her toilet-table. Her maid was uncoiling Clemence’s ringlets before bed. Both startled women turned around.
The baronet stood in the doorway, looking thunderous. He got rid of the curtseying servant with a jerk of the head meaning ‘be off.’
When she’d gone, Richard slammed shut the door leaving him alone with Clemence. It must be serious. Hardly ever did he come to a female family member’s bedchamber.
He advanced a few steps across the rug. Arms folded, he stood before her.
‘Just what was the matter with you tonight?’ he said. He wasn’t angry often. But when he was his fair complexion glowed pink and eyes narrowed to slits.
‘I don’t know what you mean.’ Clemence turned back to the dressing-table. She took up where the abigail had left off. Not easy to wield a brush when you were unaccustomed to doing what maids usually did, and your hand was shaking. In the brief quiet, rain could be heard pattering the window pane.
‘You know damn well what I mean!’ Richard marched the remaining space between them, seized her shoulder, and forced her to face him. ‘You were rude to Fanny all through dinner! If you weren’t ignoring him, you were catty. No wonder he retired early in discomfort. I shall apologise to him tomorrow. And I’d like an explanation from you.’