by Stella Riley
Mischievous amusement dispelled the languor and, tossing aside his book, Francis Langley came lightly to his feet.
‘Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later. There’s precious little he hasn’t hit at some time or other … but never more than once, you’ll have noticed.’
‘Oh come, now!’ protested the archer laughingly. ‘It’s an antiquated sport and I’ve little patience with it – but I’m no worse at it than you are at siege-craft or Ralph at mathematics. And then, of course, you both have longer arms.’
Ralph Cochrane - second son of a baron, six feet two inches in his stockinged feet and invariably untidy - bent a laughing brown gaze on his friend.
‘Excuses, my midget. You’ll be telling us next that your lack of effort at the butts is just a kindness to those of us who struggle to keep up with you at everything else.’
‘Oh no.’ The hazel eyes held a gleam oddly at variance with the meek tone. ‘I wouldn’t dare.’
‘Very wise,’ observed Francis, gently relieving him of the bow. He fitted an arrow, nocked and released it. ‘Very wise.’
Eden Maxwell’s gaze followed the arrow’s flight and watched it split his own in two.
‘Ah well,’ he sighed. ‘That puts me in my place, doesn’t it?’
‘It’s our function,’ retorted Francis amicably. ‘But why the sudden interest in archery?’
Eden smiled and picked up his coat.
‘I’m just wasting time while I may.’
A deep laugh shook Ralph’s chest.
‘Anyone would think it was you who was off to the wars. As it is, in a couple of weeks from now – while you’ve no more to worry you than whether to tumble the dairy-maid or the laundress – I’ll be sitting in a filthy foreign ditch, trying to remember how to set a damned mine. Think of that, children – and be glad neither of you is the younger son of a church-mouse peer!’
Francis raised faintly supercilious brows and flicked an imaginary speck from his satin sleeve.
‘It has yet to be announced,’ he remarked lightly, ‘but His Majesty is honouring my father with a viscountcy.’
Eden’s eyes widened a trifle but, before he could speak, Ralph said trenchantly, ‘I hope your family can afford it, then. It’s all very well for the King to hand out titles as if they were pea-pods – he don’t have the problem of maintaining ’em. And it’s an expensive business, Francis, I can tell you. My father’s so deep in debt to some scurvy Italian in the City that he don’t even own his own breeches any more. Ship-money, feudal dues, piffling fines for so-called infringements – there don’t seem any end to it.’
‘Firstly,’ responded Francis sweetly, ‘there has been a peerage in my family since the time of Elizabeth – so none of this is new to us. And secondly, the fines and dues you mention are necessary. His Majesty has the Scots rebels to deal with – and that requires money.’
‘Then he ought to call a Parliament,’ came the swift retort. ‘And who wants to fight the Scots, anyway? Over a parcel of weaselly bishops and the Lambeth Pope’s new prayer book? Not me!’
‘Dear me! Turning Calvinist, Ralph?’
‘No. Nor Papist neither!’
‘Then I suggest you refer to Archbishop Laud by his proper title,’ returned Francis coolly. ‘As for the prayer book, if the King wishes the Scots to use it they have no --’
‘The King and the Scots signed a treaty more than a month ago and I wish that the two of you could do the same.’ Apparently absorbed in fastening his coat, Eden spoke with quiet finality. ‘If you care to find me when you’re done bickering, I’ll be in the rose garden with the girls.’ And he turned away towards the shrubbery.
He was quite prepared to leave them and, because they knew that he was, Ralph and Francis exchanged a glance of mutual resignation and abandoned their argument to follow him. Eden was the magnet which had begun their not always easy friendship and he was the thread by which it held - so where he led, they usually followed.
They were very different, these three. Even in the mixed bag of Angers where Danes, Swedes, French, Germans and Scots all went to study the profession of arms, it had been hard to find a more dissimilar trio. Their only visible bond had been that of nationality and their other friendships overlapped scarcely at all. But Francis and Eden had taken with them the bond of long, childhood years – and this, in time, Ralph Cochrane had come to share.
Without ever quite recognising the fact, Francis regarded Ralph as an interloper – and the fact that he was totally lacking the refinements of speech and manner befitting his estate was not calculated to help matters. Tall, dark and gracefully built, Francis had gone to Angers merely as a matter of form before joining his father at Court; and, inclined by temperament towards literature and art, he had an in-built distaste for those whose blunt-tongued cheerfulness, careless apparel and loud laughter all grated on his finer feelings. Ralph, Francis was convinced, had no finer feelings. And the army – where coarse jokes and ungentlemanly effort were doubtless appreciated – was the perfect setting for him.
Ralph would have been surprised had he known how much Francis thought about him – for he thought of Francis hardly at all; and though he was aware of that gentleman’s strictures on his person, he inevitably digested them with tolerant amusement. Ralph might tease Francis about his wish to succeed without appearing to try, but he never pointed out that a good officer did not regard his men as so much dirt beneath his feet. By choice, Ralph would have tramped his father’s fields rather than those of battle; but since he must earn his living some other way, a soldier’s life was probably as good as any – and at least offered prospects of amusement and good company.
Alone of the three, Eden Maxwell had gone to Angers with no preconceived plans for his future and unexpectedly found the perfect, undreamed-of answer. The School of Arms offered instruction in every branch of modern warfare and Eden absorbed it all like a sponge. From the physical skills of horsemanship and weaponry to the intricacies of tactics and strategy, it was all meat and drink to him. He pored over charts and battle-plans, spent hour upon hour dismantling and reassembling pieces of artillery and fell in love with mathematical calculation and the art of making and breaking ciphers. In these things where effort was pure pleasure, he shone; and even though languages did not come easily to him, he doggedly acquired a working knowledge of German and French. But dancing was a chore and archery had little practical use so he escaped them whenever he could and reserved his energies for other things.
Fortunately, he never minded being a target for amusement and this was just as well for, between Ralph - who was quite simply massive - and Francis whose lean elegance reached almost six feet, he was made constantly aware of his shortcomings. Five feet nine inches in his boots and built in compact proportion, he had philosophically accepted that at the age of nineteen he was unlikely to grow any taller. He had also, rather less philosophically, come to the conclusion that dark red hair and hazel eyes were never going to exercise any immense fascination over the opposite sex. And this was a pity because, in the last two years, Celia Langley had at some point ceased being merely Francis’s plump and rather tiresome little sister and changed into the loveliest creature that Eden had ever seen.
Just now, their game of quoits apparently forgotten, she was engaged in demonstrating the latest dance-steps for his sister, Amy … pivoting in a swirl of blood-red taffeta and talking all the time. Amy looked entranced and Eden, pausing in the shadow of the box-hedge, didn’t blame her.
‘Oh bravo!’ applauded Amy, as the full skirts swept the grass in a deep curtsy. ‘I wish Mother would engage a dancing-master for us – don’t you, Kate?’
Lying full length and face down, her weight resting ungenteelly on her elbows, Kate continued to peruse the litter of strange charts and diagrams in front of her.
‘No.’
Celia gave her charming, silvery laugh and, tossing her dark curls, touched Amy’s cheek with one careless finger.
‘Well, per
haps I can teach you a little myself. Only you must promise not to grow any prettier – or you’ll be stealing all my admirers.’
And that, reflected Eden, was generous. Amy might be the accredited Beauty of the Family but she couldn’t hold a candle to Celia. No one could.
Aware that Francis and Ralph were behind him, he strolled forward saying lightly, ‘Grass-stains, Kate. Flossie will be after you again.’
Kate turned her head and peered at him out of wide cat’s eyes.
‘Your sash is twisted,’ she informed him kindly. And returned to her charts.
Laughing a little, Ralph bent to look over her shoulder.
‘Is that my birth-chart?’
‘It will be.’
‘It looks decidedly complicated.’
‘It is.’
‘Ah. And will it be finished before I leave tomorrow?’
‘Only,’ sighed Kate, ‘if I’m allowed to get on with it.’
Rising from her bench, Amy laid a coaxing hand on Ralph’s sleeve.
‘Leave her alone before she gets cross. She did mine last week and wouldn’t even let me peep till it was finished.’
Ralph smiled indulgently. ‘And was it worth waiting for?’
‘Oh yes. I’m to marry young and be quite rich and maybe even go to Court.’
Looking down into her provocative face, Ralph could not help thinking that an early marriage was something Amy’s parents might do well to arrange. Unlike Kate – who, at sixteen, was still flat as a board and about as coquettish as a hedgehog – Amy had already blossomed into a very tempting armful indeed and was eagerly testing the power of her dimples and long-lashed, dark grey eyes. In short, she was walking gunpowder and would need some watching if a match were not to be put to her outside wedlock.
Just now she was pouting up at him and asking, ‘Must you really leave us tomorrow?’
‘I really must. But I’ll come back one day when you’re a smart married lady and I’m a colonel with a hundred foreign orders on my chest.’
‘And a romantic scar or two,’ grinned Eden. ‘But where will the rest of us be by then, I wonder?’
‘That’s easy.’ Francis kicked a quoit aside and disposed himself on the grass. ‘I’ll be an acknowledged poet and you’ll be a major in the King’s own guards. Celia will be a duchess and Kate …’ He looked across with a hint of mischief at Kate’s ferociously red and seemingly oblivious head. ‘Kate will be so well-known for her wit that she’ll be able to be as rude as she likes to everyone. Voilà!’
‘Voilà, indeed,’ agreed Kate in the husky-sweet tone that usually heralded her more acid remarks. ‘What a good thing the Scots war didn’t amount to much. Berwick-on-Tweed hasn’t quite the same cachet as Whitehall, has it?’
‘Father says it’s positively barbarous.’ Celia rose and shook out her skirts. ‘But luckily he should be home quite soon now. No later, he hopes, than the beginning of next month.’
‘Oh?’ Eden’s brows rose. ‘Does he return before the King, then?’
‘Not at all!’ laughed Celia. ‘He comes with the King – which is why he can’t say exactly when he’ll --’
‘But I thought the King was to attend the opening of the Estates in Edinburgh,’ exclaimed Ralph. ‘It was one of the terms of the peace. Is it in session already?’
Celia’s periwinkle gaze dwelt on him with a mixture of astonishment and affront. It was therefore left to Francis to say curtly, ‘No. It’s not.’
‘Then what’s the King coming home for? If he said he’d stay, he ought to do it.’
‘Possibly. But after the Scottish Church Assembly was ordered to withdraw its illegal abolition of the episcopacy, there were riots – during which the King’s representative received some rather rough treatment. Therefore --’
‘Therefore,’ interposed Ralph dryly, ‘His Majesty ain’t about to chance his own dignity in like manner. I might have guessed.’
‘And I,’ snapped Francis, ‘might have saved my breath.’
‘Oh do stop arguing!’ cried Celia. ‘It’s all so tedious – and nothing whatever to do with us here. For my part, I’m delighted that the King’s leaving Scotland for it means that, with Father coming home, Mother will be able to hold her house-party after all. I’ve been terrified it would all come to nothing – for the Great Tew set are to come, you know.’
Eden smiled at her. ‘The Great Tew set of what?’
‘Why Lord and Lady Falkland, of course – and William Davenant and John Suckling and …’ She stopped, staring at him in disbelief. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of the gatherings at Great Tew!’
‘I’m afraid not,’ said Eden meekly. ‘Or, it seems, any of the people who attend them.’
‘Philistine,’ mourned Francis, his flash of temper gone. ‘Great Tew is the home of Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland – and Will Davenant is the Poet Laureate. He is also, possibly, the son of Shakespeare. I take it you have heard of Shakespeare?’
‘Oh yes. Wasn’t he the fellow who wrote that piece we saw at Oxford about the philosopher’s stone?’
Francis groaned and shut his eyes.
Quite slowly, Kate turned her head and impaled her brother with a jade green stare.
‘You mean The Alchemist, of course. But I suppose some people will believe anything.’
Eden grinned at her. ‘Exactly. Well done, Kate.’ And then, turning to Celia, ‘That was Shakespeare, wasn’t it?’
‘No!’ said Celia and her brother in unison.
‘Oh.’ Apparently crestfallen, Eden picked up a quoit and measured it in his hand. ‘Then it must have been Ben Jonson,’ he said. And sent the ring spinning to encircle the pin.
* * *
Despite its high trussed roof, the Great Hall of Thorne Ash was well-proportioned rather than vast and presented a comfortable, lived-in appearance. There were large pots of hollyhocks in the fireplace, bright cushions on the high-backed settles and a gleaming array of fine but serviceable silver and pewter on the massive oak dresser. A long table, pitted from years of wear and flanked by benches, ran lengthways between the oriel window at the north end and the screened gallery at the south and was covered, except at meal times, by a glowing Turkey carpet; and the long opposing walls boasted a pair of richly vibrant tapestries which Richard had commissioned from Mortlake only the year before.
Here, together with Goodwife Flossing, the housekeeper [who had been born at Thorne Ash and was therefore much more than a servant] and Nathan Cresswell [a distant connection of Richard’s who had been engaged at the children’s tutor], the family gathered thrice daily – for breakfast at eight, dinner at two in the afternoon and evening prayers immediately followed by supper. The latter was always a simple meal and consisted on this, the last evening of young Mr Cochrane’s visit, of little more than boiled capon, marrow-bone pie and rice pudding. But it conformed to Cook’s creed of ‘good, wholesome and plentiful’; and the pudding – made with cream, eggs, dates and fine sugar and served a day old, made such a deep impression on Ralph that he ate three helpings and then insisted on taking the recipe home to his mother.
This seemingly harmless request produced a mild furore as Amy, still determined to attract her God-like hero’s attention, offered to write out the recipe herself and thus gave the twelve-year-old twins the opportunity they had been waiting for. Tobias and Tabitha had spent the greater part of the meal in mimicry of Amy’s languishing airs and their swift denunciation of her handwriting was delivered with both flair and merciless truth. It also earned Tobias a well-placed kick under the table.
‘Ow!’ He made a great show of rubbing his ankle. ‘What did I do?’
Amy avoided Kate’s eyes and smiled angelically.
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Peace, brats.’ Richard rose and frowned with apparent severity on his three youngest offspring. ‘Toby, Tabitha – take yourselves off and get your horrible menagerie fed. And latch the cages properly this time. The ferret got out again last n
ight and rampaged its way through the laundry. The next escape will result in dire reprisals. Now go.’
They went, unsuccessfully stifling their laughter.
Richard looked meditatively across at his wife.
‘And they,’ he said, ‘definitely do not take after me. Now … the recipe. Perhaps, for the sake of Ralph’s stomach, we ought to play safe and let Kate write it.’
‘Oh Father!’ Amy’s greatest talent was an ability to summon tears at will. ‘I want to do it!’
‘And I,’ said Kate, ‘have a birth-chart to finish before morning. If I may be excused?’ Waiting only for her mother’s reluctant nod, she crossed to the door and then, with a wicked smile, turned to say, ‘I’m sure Ralph won’t mind being poisoned in a good cause.’ And was gone.
Eden laughed and then, looking at his mother said, ‘Forget it. You might as well wish for the moon.’
Dorothy eyed him calmly. She had been wishing that her two elder daughters could somehow modify each other to make Amy less forward and Kate less retiring – and the expression on Eden’s face told her that he knew it.
Smiling a little, she said, ‘You should do that for money. Otherwise you’ll end up at the stake like great-grandfather Henry.’ And then, ‘Very well, Amy. Go with Flossie and see if you can coax Cook into parting with her secrets – and do try to write legibly for once.’
Belatedly aware of a strategic error, Amy hovered irresolutely for a moment before quitting the room with something approaching a flounce. Ralph heaved a discreet sigh of relief.
But he had enjoyed his stay at Thorne Ash and later, sitting in the pleasant parlour where the last rays of evening sunshine still lingered, he found himself regretting that the future would offer him scant opportunity to repeat it. No special effort had been made to entertain him; just now, for example, Dorothy was busy with her embroidery and Richard was reviewing the farm accounts with Nathan Cresswell. But the Maxwells had succeeded in making him feel one of the family, and he much preferred their unpretentious cheerfulness to the stiff formality of the Langley household.
He had visited Francis’s home at Far Flamstead only once – and that had been enough. The house might be elegantly built, tastefully furnished and equipped with every modern convenience, but Ralph had thought it about as cosy as a mausoleum. Worse still, its pristine neatness coupled with its mistress’s chilly eye had made him nervous of sitting down and caused him to wonder if he shouldn’t have left his boots at the door.