It all fascinated her and she too wanted to learn how to fight if it was necessary and Chang was only too willing to teach her.
Eventually they found a way to do this without anybody being aware of it.
Because the house was so large, the Earl and Countess had fifteen years ago closed the top floor.
It consisted of small and uncomfortable attics where previously the servants had slept and it was quite easy to bring the housemaids down one floor, the nurseries a floor lower and the menservants were accommodated on the ground near to the pantry.
No one ever went up to the top attic now and it was therefore easy for Chang to sweep out one of the largest rooms and bring up there a number of old mattresses on which, when she fell, Elmina would not hurt herself.
Elmina found in a forgotten cupboard a pair of long black hosepipe pantaloons her father had worn when he was young.
They had been invented by George IV when he was Prince Regent and made of some close-fitting woollen material that clung to her legs and hips.
She made herself a tunic like Chang’s from a piece of black satin her mother had thrown away.
The wearing of these two garments made it easy for her to execute all the movements of Karate, although the Countess would have been horrified if she had seen her.
Elmina and Chang spent many hours alone with nobody having the least idea what they were doing, until he could say with satisfaction that she was now a more than proficient pupil. She was now able to take care of herself and it would be difficult for anybody to attack her successfully.
She was also just as interested now as she had been at the beginning in what lay behind one of the most interesting and fascinating ways of thought known only to the East.
From Chang she learnt a great deal about Buddhism and followed it up by reading books on the subject that she either found in the library at Warne Park or else had sent from London.
From Chang she learnt to understand Zen and also the philosophy of Confucius.
It was from Chang too that she learnt to believe in her Karma as he had always believed in his.
It was a strange study for a girl not yet eighteen.
As she went up the unused backstairs to the attic, carrying her black pantaloons and tunic in her arms, she was thinking that everything she learned from Chang was undoubtedly a part of her Karma.
It too was connected in some way that she could not understand with her marriage to the Marquis of Falcon.
Chapter Three
The Marquis arrived back at Falcon in an extremely good mood.
He had been appointed Master of the Horse and the Queen had congratulated him on his forthcoming marriage.
He had also been promised quite a large sum of money towards renovating the Royal Mews and had already decided which horses could be dispensed with when he brought in his intended new stock.
These would be animals that he felt would be worthy of the part that they would play both in carrying the Queen when she rode out and appearing at State functions.
It had taken up a great deal of his time and his interest and Sapphire Carstairs had complained that he was neglecting her.
“I am not doing that,” he replied. “But I have so much to do and you must understand that, when there is work to be done, a woman must take second place.”
Lady Carstairs could have cried out in fury at so blunt a statement and managed just to ask,
“How can you say anything so unkind and so hateful, when I think of you from first thing in the morning. And of course all night, when you are not with me?”
Her voice was soft and beguiling and, as it was exactly what the Marquis had expected her to say, he did not consider it to be of any momentous importance.
Instead, as her husband was away for another night, he made her rapturously happy until he left her just as dawn was breaking.
She would have been extremely piqued if she had known that walking back to his own house, which was only two streets away, the Marquis was not thinking of her, but once again of his horses.
He was remembering that tomorrow or rather today, he was going down to Falcon to see those he had recently bought for himself.
He did not recall until he was actually passing his lodgings that he was dining that evening with the Earl of Warnborough to meet his future wife.
When he recalled it, it struck him as being a bore, for he would rather be at home where he had a great many plans to make.
It had, however, been arranged by a number of notes passed backwards and forwards between the Earl and himself.
Now he felt that, as soon as the whole matter was settled and the date for the wedding arranged, he could put that behind him and concentrate on the Royal Mews, which was far more important.
The Marquis would not have been surprised if he had known of the flutter and agitation that was taking place at Warne Park because of his arrival.
The Countess had seen the cook a dozen times and changed the menu every time she talked to her.
Mrs. Oliver had been in the kitchen for over twenty years and had already decided what the party would eat for dinner, so she merely agreed with her Mistress each time she was approached.
She then continued to prepare what she had decided was right in the first place.
The Countess had sent to London for several gowns for Elmina, saying that she would have to make do with them until they knew the date of the wedding, when she would take her to London to buy her trousseau.
She did not say so, but the way she fussed told Elmina all too clearly that she was aware her daughter would have to compete in appearance with the beautiful women with whom the Marquis had spent his time up until now.
Elmina had already faced this problem herself and knew far more about the Marquis’s normal feminine company than her father or her mother realised.
In the countryside, as the Marquis was the most consequential as well as the most exciting man in the entire neighbourhood, it was inevitable that everybody would discuss him.
Not only their neighbours but also the villagers and the people who worked on the estate talked incessantly about him and everything he said or did flew as if on wings from ear to ear.
As it happened, the Countess’s lady’s maid, who had been with her for some years, was related to the butler at Falcon.
On her days off she regularly visited the butler’s mother who lived in one of the Earl’s lodges, and who was, as Elmina knew, the greatest gossip in the village.
She therefore learnt a great deal from her mother’s lady’s maid and more when she visited Falcon, as she did immediately after she learnt that the Marquis had left for London.
Because it was impossible for anything to take place without the servants being aware of it, Elmina knew by the expression on Hogson’s face as soon as she walked into the stables that he was aware that the Marquis was to marry her.
He might have overheard a conversation that the Marquis had with somebody else or else his valet who travelled with him brought back titbits of what was happening in London.
Alternatively he may have thought it strange that the grooms were continually taking notes to Warne Park and simply put two and two together.
As she went as usual from stall to stall, admiring the new horses and making a fuss of those she was already friends with, she sensed for the first time that there was a barrier between her and Hogson which had never been there before.
She hoped that this was not a portent of the future, because she valued the friendships she had made with those who worked at Falcon and had no wish to lose them.
Somehow, with a charm and an instinct she felt that she had learned from Chang, she managed to get back on the same easy footing they had been on before he began to think of her as his future Mistress.
The same applied to the housekeeper and the curator.
The butler was in her debt because she had brought him some special herbs for his rheumatism that her mother had distilled from an old recipe
used by her famous grandmother.
At the same time, apart from the servants, the house itself seemed somehow different.
Now she found herself looking at it not only with admiration but knowing in the future that it would be her home and she would belong here.
She could imagine nothing more wonderful than the joy of having all the books in the library at her disposal and being able to enjoy the pictures and the other treasures in the house whenever she wished.
At the same time they belonged to the man who would be her husband.
The more she thought about the Marquis, the more she realised that magnificent though he was, he was definitely a problem that she had to face and it was not going to be an easy one.
Finally she put her pride on one side and after a strenuous Karate lesson with Chang sat down cross-legged on the mattress and began,
“I want to talk to you!”
He sat as she did in the Yogi position, his back straight, his feet crossed under him. He too, of course, was now in the secret and looked at her with an understanding expression in his slanting eyes.
Before she could speak, he said,
“No need to be worried, my Lady. You think right, things come right! Everything fall in place!”
Elmina gave a little sigh.
“That sounds too easy, but of course, I am worried. You know how overwhelming he is, Chang. Could he ever be interested in me as a person?”
It was a question that seemed to repeat itself over and over in her mind when she was alone at night.
She was intelligent enough to realise that, as she had always taken third place to her beautiful sisters Mirabel and Deirdre, she had very little confidence in herself as a woman.
She had grown up knowing that her birth had been a terrible disappointment to her father and she was aware that, as it were in compensation, he treated her as if she was a boy.
He took her out riding with him, talked to her about the problems of running the estate and even allowed her to shoot beside him when he was alone, trying to make the best of a very bad job.
But he did not love her and furthermore he did not admire her as he admired Mirabel.
He just put up with her because there was no alternative.
When Desmond was born and she saw the expression in her father’s eyes when he looked at his son, it had hurt her almost unbearably.
She had wanted to beg him to love her just a little because he meant so much in her life.
Then she faced the unpalatable truth that no one, however willing, could turn on love like a tap or for that matter turn if off when it was no longer wanted.
She therefore tried to tell herself that she was lucky to have had so much time with her father and there were still a few years left before Desmond would take her place and then she would be completely unwanted.
Now, almost like a meteor streaking through the sky, the Marquis had suddenly appeared and because neither Mirabel nor Deirdre wanted him, she was to bear his name and be his wife.
Yet her intelligence and all that Chang had taught her told her that it was not enough just to be the Marchioness of Falcon.
She wanted more, much more from the man she married.
She knew, to put it simply, that what she longed for and what she had never had was love.
When she thought about it, she realised that she knew very little about love as between a man and a woman.
She had seen the way Robert looked at Mirabel and how Christopher Bardsley’s voice deepened when he spoke to Deirdre.
She was aware these were outward signs of something that they felt deeply within themselves and what she supposed the novelists referred to as ‘the passion of love’.
‘Perhaps I shall never know that myself,’ she thought wistfully.
*
On the evening that the Marquis was expected to dine with them when she was dressed in her new gown, she stared at her reflection in the mirror.
The dressmakers had sent three gowns down from London and they were each very different from the others.
One was of stiff white satin trimmed with pink roses in which Mirabel would have looked like a Goddess.
Elmina thought it took away the slimness of her figure and in some way did not enhance her skin or her hair.
It had always been a matter for conjecture as to why she had different coloured hair from her sisters.
Mirabel’s was the gold of ripe corn, Deirdre’s had the warmth of the sun late in the day, but Elmina’s hair for some reason nobody could explain was so pale that her sisters had often said jokingly,
“If you had had pink eyes you would have been an albino!”
At times it even seemed to have silver lights in it and strangely even in the sunshine there was not that glint of red that appeared in Deirdre’s or the shine of gold in Mirabel’s.
Because nobody seemed to take any interest in her appearance and, as Elmina told herself resignedly, the horses did not care, she had merely twisted the long strands of it, which reached to her waist, into a bun when she was riding.
At other times of the day she arranged it in a chignon then forgot about it.
Now she wondered if the Marquis would think it ugly and her eyes, as she looked at herself, were extremely worried.
They too were not like her sisters’ eyes, but seemed grey in some lights and in others had an undoubtedly green tint, which made Deirdre say teasingly that they were cat’s eyes and she must be able to see in the dark.
What was more surprising was the fact that she had eyelashes that curved upwards like a child’s and, while pale at the roots, darkened at the tips.
They made her eyes seem enormous because her face was by nature small and pointed.
Because of the amount of exercise she took either riding every possible moment of the day or else battling energetically with Chang, there was not a superfluous ounce of flesh on her body.
In fact, she was too thin to be fashionable in the style set by the plump little Queen Victoria, who had grown progressively stouter every year since she married.
Although nobody at Warne Park was aware of it, Elmina had a unique beauty that was not as obvious as that of her sisters and had been hidden for years owing to the clothes she wore and her lack of interest in herself.
Now, because she was aware that her first meeting with the Marquis was an important one, she had taken a great deal of trouble.
Whilst she had liked one of the other gowns that had come from London on approval, the one she decided to wear was the one her mother had said at first sight was quite unsuitable and should be sent back immediately.
It was made of a blue material shot with silver and reminded Elmina of the darkening sky when the first stars brought a glimmer of light – interspersed amongst the blue were silver ribbons.
They caught the light every time she moved and seemed, tonight at any rate, to echo a touch of silver that appeared in her hair in the light from the candles.
The Queen had set the fashion for large skirts with a multitude of petticoats underneath them and a very small waist.
Above it the sloping shoulders were bare and a bertha fell gracefully over the bosom.
The bertha of Elmina’s gown was embroidered with silver sequins to match the ribbons on the skirt and was transparent enough to reveal the curves of her breasts outlined by the blue material of the gown.
“I must say that gown looks better than I expected!” the Countess remarked. “But I think you would have been wiser to wear white.”
“White does not suit me, Mama,” Elmina said firmly, “but I like the other gown.”
That was the soft pink of the musk roses that she had always loved in the garden.
But when she tried it on she thought it made her look almost too young to be married.
She had therefore decided to wear tonight the more sophisticated gown of blue and silver.
However, now as she stared at her reflection in the mirror, she thought that she did not look
her eighteen years, which she had reached the previous week, but very much as she had done three or four years earlier.
But there was nothing she could do about it and she was only sure as she walked down the stairs that the Marquis would compare her very unfavourably to the beautiful Lady Carstairs, who she was well aware was his fancy at the moment.
She had lingered so long in her bedroom that to her consternation she was only halfway down the stairs when she heard a carriage draw up outside the front door and realised that the Marquis had arrived.
Barton was already at the top of the steps and two footmen had run a rather worn piece of red carpet that had been used for some years from the front door down to the carriage.
Elmina stopped, not knowing whether to go down or return the way she had come and, by hesitating, was lost.
The Marquis, moving quickly as she might have expected, came in through the front door and, while she was still being indecisive, he looked up and saw her.
There was therefore nothing she could do except walk on down the stairs towards him.
As she reached the hall, he held out his hand.
“Good evening!” he said as she curtseyed. “I think you must be one of my host’s daughters. I understand that he has three.”
“I am the youngest, my Lord.”
“I am delighted to meet you,” the Marquis remarked.
“My father and mother are waiting for you in the drawing room,” Elmina managed to say. “Will you come this way?”
The Marquis allowed his evening cloak that was lined with red to be taken from his shoulders by Barton and handed a footman his high hat and gold-tipped cane.
Then he said to Elmina,
“I am ready!”
She was wondering frantically how she could tell him that she was his prospective bride.
Then she thought that it would be far too embarrassing and it would be better to leave it to her mother and father.
She was, however, vividly aware of how overpowering he seemed, much more so than when she had seen him from a distance in the hunting field or on the Racecourse.
She had also felt that when his hand, from which he had now removed his gloves, touched hers that his vibrations were so strong that they seemed to prick her skin.
A Very Unusual Wife Page 5