Sweethearts and Wives (The Regiment Family Saga Book 2)

by CL Skelton

  Naomi gathered Rebecca’s light travelling cloak over her arm and escorted the girl out into the corridor. ‘The odd thing, though,’ she said, as they descended the first flight of stairs in the tall narrow house, ‘is Tenny. After all, Tenny’s practically a scholar compared to all the rest of them. He did superbly at school, and he reads. Really reads, and writes a bit, poetry and such. I would have thought that would have been practically heresy in Old Culbrech, but no, he’s everyone’s hero. I suppose he’s just bold enough, and big enough, that he can do what he pleases, and no one dare cross him. Johnny Bruce tries from time to time, but he’s only a close second. They’re the best of friends, though, or so Ian says. Just as well, I imagine there’d be fur flying all the time if they were not.’

  ‘What’s Tenny short for?’ Rebecca said suddenly.

  ‘Alfred, Lord Tennyson, naturally.’

  ‘Surely they didn’t call him that.’

  ‘What, his parents? Oh, never. Henry, he was christened. Lord Tennyson was what they called him at school. For his reading habits. It was meant to be an insult, but on Tenny insults come out as compliments. He’s rather proud of it, I think. He’s always got Keats or Browning in his pocket, rather like a badge. Or a chip on his shoulder. Anyhow, no one tried to knock it off, and he’s never been anything but Tenny for years.’

  ‘He sounds a bit awesome,’ Rebecca said. ‘I think, even without any competition, I’m not likely to make much of an impression.’

  Naomi stopped short on the stairs and said, ‘Oh, never you mind. I don’t know the boy that well, but I rather knew his father. And I would say that Tenny, like any real Maclaren man, is likely to have one great weakness.’

  ‘And that?’

  ‘An absolute light-headed devotion to the prettiest face in the room, and an equivalently absolute inability to understand the mind behind it. Your looks will win his attention, and your wits are ample to hold it for ever. You’ll wrap him round your finger,’ she added with a satisfied sniff.

  ‘I rather doubt it,’ Rebecca said a little shyly.

  ‘But I didn’t say there was no competition,’ Naomi warned. ‘There is Susan Bruce.’ She looked worried. ‘I’d hate for her to have taken a fancy to Tenny, that would be a dreadful shame. You’d be such splendid friends otherwise. When last I saw her she had exhibited her feelings towards him by tripping him into the water-trough in the stables. But that was two years ago, when I was last at Cluanie. She may have grown up a bit. She was certainly a beauty, and a proper little devil. She got expelled from school some years ago for some perfectly unmentionable disgrace. Mother was in a positive flap, but Willie seemed to rather admire the girl. That was how he was with me, always,’ she smiled, recalling. ‘He always encouraged me to do my worst. I gather he’d been a holy terror in school himself, not that he went to school for long. He was in the regiment and under fire by his fifteenth birthday, I’m afraid,’ she smiled again. ‘In my case the whole thing rather went too far, even for Willie. Still, with Susan, it’s more likely to have been dramatics than anything else. She’s got a touch of the Sarah Bernhardt’s, I’m afraid. She’ll probably fall in love with you. So far Susan’s fallen irrevocably in love with all her schoolmistresses, both her governesses, three ponies and a cat. I dare say she’ll be moving on to men by now, though. She’s nearly twenty-one. They’ll have their hands full with that one. They’d probably have packed her off to a convent years since, if they weren’t all so utterly Presbyterian to the bone.’

  ‘I don’t think,’ Rebecca said, glancing nervously at her previously assured features in the second-floor landing mirror, ‘that I’m going to enjoy this at all. She sounds more formidable than any of them. Isn’t there anyone plain and simple?’

  ‘Oh yes, indeed there is. There’s always Philippa, Tenny’s younger sister. Now, it’s a pity it isn’t the other way round, and she isn’t Susan. She’ll be no competition to anyone. She would have made an excellent Maclaren man, actually. Pity she wasn’t. If she isn’t careful she’ll end up like her Great-Aunt Jean, all horses and religion. She’s got lovely hair but that’s all, I’m much afraid, and every time she meets a man she either flings herself all over him or runs like a scalded cat. A most peculiar girl. Victoria is really quite concerned. It’s hard to imagine her in the same family as Tenny, or Emma. Emma is so much a mistress of every situation. But then she is the oldest. Even Tenny looks up to Em, even if he won’t admit it. So that’s all of them then, Emma, Tenny, Philippa, and Albert. And of course little Jamie, but he’s just a boy. And then the Bruces, Harry and Johnny and Susan.’

  ‘Frankly,’ Rebecca shuddered, ‘they sound positively ghastly. Thank God they’re not my family. I don’t know how you bear them.’

  ‘By living in London, my dear.’ Naomi laughed, but then with a wry cynical smile added, ‘They’re hardly my family anyhow, are they?’

  Rebecca looked at the stair-carpet and blushed and Naomi said, ‘Oh don’t be coy, darling. I know you know the whole story. My friends leave little to chance. Do tell, what’s this year’s version?’ Rebecca paused and Naomi said, ‘Come, come, speak up girl.’

  ‘I try not to listen,’ she said.

  ‘Nonsense. You listen as if your ears were afire. Don’t apologize. I’d do the same at your age.’

  ‘Mr Leitner says you’re really an Indian princess,’ Rebecca whispered.

  Naomi let out an unladylike shriek of laughter. ‘Oh, he’d simply love that to be true. The dreadful old snob. A princess,’ she repeated with scorn. ‘No, dear, I am not a princess. No. Rather the opposite.’ She raised the girl’s chin with the fingers of her left hand, and their eyes met. ‘I am, I fear,’ she said, ‘our family’s little legacy of the Indian Mutiny. My unlamented father was a Sepoy mutineer. He raped my mother. Several times, I gather. It was not very pleasant for her, I imagine. But nature cares little for pleasure. She was young and very fertile, and I was the result.’ She smiled again briskly and made a little turnabout on the stairs, showing herself off. ‘The nuns in the Irish convent where I was born were quite convinced I was a changeling. Dear souls. The thought that a highborn English lady like my mother might produce a black child was quite beyond them.’

  ‘Black?’ Rebecca exclaimed.

  ‘Oh, brown. Whatever. Figuratively speaking, naturally. My dear, I am clearly not white, am I?’

  Rebecca gasped, amazed at so irreverent a concept. ‘But you’re beautiful,’ she blurted out at last.

  ‘Dear child,’ Naomi whispered, ‘do you honestly believe that beauty reigns only in England?’ She was teasing, but her smile was sad and gentle. It was replaced in a moment by her familiar look of wise cynicism and she said suddenly, ‘Tell me, girl, who’s Robert’s father meant to be?’

  Rebecca was wide-eyed and silent. She was well aware that Robert Bruce was illegitimate. Naomi had told her, blithely, early in their friendship, and told her too that the married prefix to her name was a device she had adopted in her first days in London, in an era when a single young woman living alone was unthinkable. But the details of the story Rebecca had never dared to ask. ‘Come on, child, they will have told you something.’

  ‘Charles de Vere-Smith,’ Rebecca mumbled, fumbling with her hat-brim.

  Naomi leant her head to one side and considered. ‘Logical,’ she said. ‘The dates aren’t right but who would notice?’ London would not have forgotten her liaison with Lord Charles, a companionship of many years. ‘Yes, quite logical. But not correct.’

  Rebecca blinked, awaiting more. Naomi was terribly good at that sort of stunning revelation, often followed by weeks, or months, of silence on whatever the subject. This time she only paused for a moment before she said, ‘I was only ever in love once in my life, only once, when I was very, very young. It was a charming but fruitless experience. I would not recommend it.’ She started down the stairs. ‘Still, you will enjoy Tenny. A delightful young man. Quite like his father in every way.’ She paused, smiling distantly, her unruf
fable oriental smile. ‘Oh, and do give Sir Ian my very best regards,’ she said.

  Continue reading Beloved Soldier by C. L. Skelton.

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  Promises by Catherine Gaskin

  The gripping story of a remarkable woman and the promises she must keep to those she loves.

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