A Most Unusual Lady

by Janet Grace

  ‘Any nonsense in there and we abandon you on the roadside for the wolves to eat, understand? Now sit tight, and hold on to your sun-bonnets. We have some fire-breathing cattle here to whisk us away!’

  Miss Stapely chuckled.

  ‘Poor Bonny and Duchess. They always pull this carriage. You must speak to them encouragingly or they will stop automatically at the lych-gate and promptly fall asleep. They do it every Sunday.’

  ‘Then today’s jaunt will do them a power of good. Come on up, my fat and aged beauties!’

  With a snorting, puffing, creaking and groaning the entire contraption broke into an ambling motion, and they set off in the bright summer sunlight, down the drive to the road. A cuckoo was shouting his call from the woods across the meadows, and to Louisa’s astonishment Robert suddenly burst into song.

  ‘Summer is icumen in,’ he warbled, flinging back his head with happy abandon.

  ‘Groweth seed and bloweth mead,

  And springeth the wood anew!

  Sing cuckoo!’

  He broke off. ‘Do you know that song? It’s very old. My mother used to sing it to us when we were children.’

  ‘Yes, indeed.’ She thought back, her eyes full of memories. ‘My father would sing it out whenever he heard a cuckoo, wherever we were, and my mother would whisper “Oh, hush now, Charles,” in case anybody should hear and think him odd! Of course, we children would delight in encouraging him by joining in. It’s a good song.’

  They broke into rousing chorus together,

  ‘Sing cuckoo!

  Loudly sing cuckoo!’

  The children inside the coach, catching the atmosphere of unrestrained merriment, joined in raucously, while Robert beat time elaborately with his whip over the dreamingly oblivious heads of Duchess and Bonny.

  Mr. James Blane, sauntering past the end of the drive, shook his head in outraged disapproval, and experienced profound relief that he was not associated with this vulgar escapade. He managed to avoid responding to Louisa’s cheery wave of greeting by flicking an imaginary speck of dust from one of his outsized coat-buttons and straightening a non-existence crease in his spotless cravat. Assuming Georgiana to be within the carriage with the children, for he had missed the curricle’s departure, he smiled to think how relieved she would be to enjoy his sophisticated conversation again after such a tediously rowdy day. It appeared that these newcomers would not affect his chances, even though Miss Lyntrell’s responses had been cooler of late.

  The quarry was as romantically secluded as even Mrs. Addiscombe could have wished. A narrow track led into it, luxuriantly overgrown with the generous flowers of summer. A bend in the track led them to emerge into a hidden valley, seeming utterly remote from civilisation. Every harsh man-made scar was softened by the passage of time. The open stone floor of the quarry was now covered with a fine short turf, the jumbled hillocks of unwanted stone were now a tumbled mass of wild flowers. Saplings had taken root around the perimeter of the quarry, some now sizeable trees, and old man’s beard and ivy fell in tangled meshes down the cliff-faces that surrounded them. Huge blocks of stone still lay scattered like the dice of giants who, disturbed at their game, had left them abandoned in the heat of the sun.

  John and Fitton had already unloaded the hampers and put them in the shade of a young ash tree, and Fitton had taken the curricle back down the track to where there was shade and a stream for the horses. He ran back to take the big carriage, once it had disgorged its noisy cargo.

  Expressing her delight at their destination, Louisa chased the children off to explore and went to tackle the food.

  ‘Dear Miss Stapely, go away!’ John steeped forward firmly. ‘You are not allowed to manage things today. Go and take a relaxing perambulation with Robert, while Georgiana and I prepare this delectable repast. I had to be stern or she would have opened the hampers on the way here; I can’t restrain her much longer!’

  ‘Yes, do go away, Louisa. I can’t wait to open them, and I want it all to be a surprise for the rest of you. Go away! We will call you when it’s ready.’

  She turned her back firmly and began to wrestle with the leather straps bulging round the first hamper.

  ‘For all the world like Jane and Isabel playing dolls’ tea-parties,’ Louisa remarked quietly to Alnstrop as they wandered away.

  ‘She is a very pleasant, unaffected girl,’ he replied, ‘for all her wealth and beauty. I like her, and John is smitten beyond anything I have ever seen, and he has certainly not lacked the company of beautiful young girls. She seems to care as much for him. What do you think? Would it do? Would her parents approve of the match? I can see no reason for them not to, unless they are hoping for a great title on the London marriage mart.’

  Louisa pondered over how to answer this, then decided to confide all her worries over the insidious Mr. Blane.

  To her immense relief, Alnstrop laughed.

  ‘I don’t think John will find much to deter him there. I am certain he can talk reason to the Addiscombes. If they can approve that apology for a man, how much more should they approve John’s suit? I believe I have heard something about this Mr. Blane, and something not to his credit. I wish I could remember what it was. I will write to Henrietta. She is in town, and always up to the latest gossip. She can find out for me if I am right. Don’t worry, my dear, we will confound the opposition!’

  The children were chasing each other through the young trees at the far end of the quarry. Louisa could hear Isabel calling out orders to organise their game, and spotted a flash of white as Jane emerged into view before plunging out of sight behind a tangle of bramble-bush.

  Robert took her hand and placed it on his arm.

  ‘They don’t need you just now, Miss Stapely, they are very well occupied smearing their smart white clothes with grass stains! Come and take your compulsory perambulation with me, and we will try to find a fossil before we eat. John and I picked up several in the loose stones at the base of the old cliff-face.’

  They wandered amicably together, peering at the fallen rubble. Louisa could distinguish nothing but dirt and pebbles. She gazed with fascinated admiration as Alnstrop plucked up tiny fossils and rubbed them clean for her—coiled shells like snails, long cone shapes, clasped pairs like cockles, all forever petrified. They lay on his open palm for her to see. His hands were strong, but fine, the fingers long and tapering. She watched the delicate precision of his touch as he picked up a certain shell and talked about it, showing her some minute detail. Deftly, he selected another from his palm, turning it about for her to appreciate. The urge to touch his hand was almost uncontrollable.

  ‘Here, take them. Look for yourself.’

  Unbidden, her hand rose up and she watched his strong fingers place the tiny fossils on to her own palm. Where his fingertips touched her, her skin seemed charged with a sudden shock. Her knees felt weak and she sat back on a large boulder, head bent over the stones in her hand to hide her sudden rapid breathing. Fighting for composure, she managed a few interested comments, but he was already moving away, peering at the cliff-face.

  After a few moments she moved after him, staring at the pebbles as he had earlier. Without warning the muddle of dirt and stone resolved itself into detailed shapes, and bits of those shapes as recognisably possible fossils. With an exclamation of excitement she crouched down and, taking a piece of stick, prised up these remnants of long-forgotten sea-bed.

  ‘Oh, look!’ she called with delight. ‘I have found some, too!’

  He strode back to share her excitement, his low laugh gently mocking her as she squatted, grubbing in the mud like any child.

  ‘I rather suspected you might enjoy a fossil-hunting picnic quite as much as those children will!’

  His surprised delight at her unconventional enthusiasm increased with every meeting, and his mind flew with fleeting distaste to the simpering misses who dogged his eligible heels on his visits to town. Their looks, all aping the same fashions, seemed almost interchangeabl
e, their ideas, if indeed they had any, uniformly dull. Unlike his unusual Louisa! He watched her rubbing at her finds, face hidden by the faded bonnet bravely decorated with its new green bow, and his fierce possessiveness startled him.

  She held her hand up to him. Her wide brown eyes, alight with pleasure, met his, and with a start she saw her own delight reflected in his face.

  ‘Suddenly I could see them,’ she laughed. ‘They are everywhere. We must show the children.’

  He took her hand and raised her to her feet just as John sent out a rock-shattering ‘halloo’ to call them to eat.

  Georgiana was standing guard like a mother-hen with her brood over the gargantuan feast, which was lavishly spread over the crisp white clothes. She beamed at Louisa and spread her hands in expansive pride towards the food. Louisa was quick with her admiration.

  ‘It looks superb, Georgiana. Most tastefully arranged. A magnificent feast. You gentlemen must think we have the appetites of elephants!’

  John laughed. He was helping Fitton supervise the children’s ablutions, the indispensable Fitton having brought a large bowl of water up from the stream.

  ‘And if we do, I have seen nothing to alter that opinion! This young lady has felt an obligation to sample so many of the delicacies while arranging them that, if I had not called you when I did, there would have been nothing left!’ He grinned teasingly at Georgiana’s instant outrage.

  ‘Mr. Ferdinand!’ At his outright laugh her indignation slipped into schoolgirl vengeance. ‘Who ate three of these pasties?’ Picking up a luscious crisp pasty flaking crumbs of browned pastry, she flung it at him.

  ‘Georgiana!’ Louisa was shocked, but John, having neatly fielded the flying pasty, munched into it unperturbed.

  ‘Behave yourself, baggage,’ he commanded casually, ‘and feed these brothers and sisters of yours.’

  She dropped him a deep curtsy, with a limpid look from her great blue eyes.

  ‘Yes, sir! At once, sir!’ she said demurely, then, the twinkle breaking through, she whisked away from him round the food and busied herself seating and feeding the children.

  Alnstrop and Louisa, who had watched this domestic interlude with raised eyebrows, caught each other’s expressions and smiled.

  ‘Wash your hands if you wish,’ Alnstrop said. ‘May I make you up a plate of food?’

  He could and he did. There were pasties and pies of goose and duck, and game, a vast cold turkey, a mound of cold jointed chicken pieces, great slices of red lean beef, and a rich liver pate, redolent with herbs. There were cheeses, crisp new baked bread-rolls, and a huge pat of butter, with a full-bellied cow stamped on the top of it and nestling in cool leaves in a bowl of cold water, occupied another corner of the cloth. There were cakes with fancy icing and decorated biscuits, even some gingerbread men for the children. There were bunches of huge green sweet grapes and bowls of apricots. Great stone jars of lemonade had been kept cool in the stream until Fitton brought them up. ‘A recipe we have always had at Alnstrop. As children we were always begging cook to make us lemonade and let us squeeze the lemons.’

  And kept cool with them were bottles of a light, sparkling white wine. Its fragrance seemed to Louisa, as she sat on a stone in the shade and surveyed them all, to embody the very essence of summer and all its delights. She watched Robert pour more wine for his brother, the sunlight glancing and sparkling on the glass held between them as they spoke briefly. The bubbles in her own glass crowded to the brim, their whispered explosions just heard as she raised the glass to her lips to sip. The men laughed together, and Louisa caught her breath again at the dramatic similarity between their flamboyant good looks. Robert seemed to feel her gaze upon him, and looked up for her to share his joy. The warmth of his smile enfolded her and dissolved her heart.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  It was some time later before Lord Alnstrop bestirred himself to instruct the four children in the science of finding fossils. He led them away through the trees, and Louisa, ashamed of her idleness but too contented to stir, watched the competent Fitton quietly pack away the remains of the picnic. Georgiana and John had vanished, and Louisa wondered half-heartedly whether she was doing all that a chaperon should, but decided that she lacked the energy to worry. John’s escapades might be unorthodox, as she herself could bear witness, but she was certain she could safely entrust Georgiana to his care. One day she would tell Georgiana about the smuggling. It was a story she would enjoy. Louisa smiled drowsily to herself.

  Lord Alnstrop, having sent the children off on their own explorations as speedily as he could, hastened back to find her. He approached unheard over the springy turf, only to discover that she was sleeping as gently as a child, her head rested in the curve of her hand as she lay on the sun-speckled bank. Loath to disturb her, he sat beside her, then, as she did not stir, stretched his length on the soft grass and lay, propped on one elbow, idly chewing at a grass stalk and studying her face.

  He felt his breathing quicken as he gazed, allowing his eyes to trace the soft curving lines his fingers longed to touch, the round of her cheek, and down to the warm hollow of her throat, and the half-seen curves below it in the shadow of her dress. Her lips, softly vulnerable, rested gently apart, and he could hear the quiet sigh of her breath. Suddenly conscious of the blood pulsing through his veins, the throbbing of desire, he turned away, ashamed, and sat up to gaze instead across the quarry, mastering his thoughts.

  Some time later—Louisa was never quite sure how long she slept—she stirred, stretched with a little yawn, then her eyes flew guiltily open to find Lord Alnstrop regarding her with quizzical amusement.

  ‘You are quite right, of course,’ he observed gravely. ‘In such an enchanted spot, surrounded by entangled briars and ivy, all we lacked was Sleeping Beauty. And she did look very beautiful indeed.’

  Panicked by a sudden recollection of what followed in the fairy-tale, Louisa struggled to her feet, flushing, and straightening her bonnet. Her hair, in its unaccustomed loose waves, was straggling free, and in despair at the sight she must present she began to push the strands back under the straw bonnet with little flustered gestures.

  He touched her hand.

  ‘Leave it,’ he said abruptly. ‘You are still half-asleep, and I like to see your hair. It is a beautiful colour, and much abused by these “governessy” styles you affect.’

  He seemed about to say more, but checked himself. ‘The children are happily hunting and have each found several pieces already. But I have a feeling I might have spotted something rather special in the cliff-face. Would you like to see? We will need to chip it free.’ He turned to John’s tiger, who had reappeared up the track.

  ‘Fitton, where are the hammer and chisels you brought along?’

  ‘In a leather pouch by the hamper, my lord. Will you be needing any help?’

  ‘No, thank you, Fitton.’

  Leaving that good man shaking his head at the very odd whims of his lordship, Louisa followed Alnstrop to the cliff-face. It was at the far side of the quarry, behind some dense clumps of bushes, away from where they had searched that morning, and where, from the noise, the children were searching now.

  ‘It seems to be a much larger shell,’ Alnstrop was saying, picking his way past a clump of foxgloves as high as his shoulder, and holding aside some rambling wild raspberry shoots for her to pass. ‘But it is still embedded in the cliff. If we are careful, perhaps we can free it intact. Look. Here.’

  Following where his finger traced on the cliff-face, Louisa could just make out a shape that could be part of a much larger coiled shell.

  ‘Why, if you are right it will be more than a foot across. I had no idea they could be so large.’

  Louisa was amazed.

  ‘Nor I, if truth be told. It is easy enough to relate those others to the shells we find on the beach, but this will be something much greater.’ He grinned like a schoolboy, and brandished his hammer and chisel. ‘Shall I try to free it?’

  �
�Why, yes, my lord, please. I should be intrigued to see such a thing.’

  She had been touching the strange shape, feeling its outline, hard and distinct, in the sun-warmed stone under her hand, trying to imagine the living creature. Now she sat on a bank of grass-covered stone waste to watch him, a drift of heady-scented elder flowers floating down upon her from trees which sprawled tipsily over the cliff-top above them. Idly, she plucked petals from a daisy so that they lay strewn, white-speckled, across her skirt.

  Alnstrop removed his jacket and laid it on to the grass beside her. With a smile he picked a daisy and tossed it into her lap.

  ‘Pluck this one for me,’ he said lightly.

  He turned and rolled back his shirt-sleeves. He raised the hammer and chisel cautiously, assessing the rock-face, unwilling to make a first wrong move.

  Did he know, Louisa wondered, that girls counted their love in daisy petals? She cupped the flower like a treasure in her hands. He loves me, he loves me not. She would never dare to pluck it. Quietly, she tucked the little flower into the front of her dress.

  The sinews of his forearm moved tautly under the scattering of fine dark hairs as he angled the tools to his satisfaction and began to tap at the stone. Small chips of stone flew about as he worked with steady concentration, whittling away the entombing cliff. His eyes were narrowed against the flying splinters, the laughter-crinkles now tight with tension. The black, close-cropped hair gave the bent head an aggressive determination. Small beads of sweat stood along his forehead.

  The shape of the great shell was beginning to show more plainly, and Alnstrop shifted his stance to find a better angle. Louisa watched the flex of muscle in his thigh under the fine-cut buckskin breeches. Her half-formal thoughts confused her, and she bent her head to the destruction of yet another daisy, acutely aware of his nearness, his masculinity.

  In response to a neatly placed tap a plate of stone suddenly fell away, and the great, coiled sea-beast lay revealed, its blankets of a million years stripped back.