The Love Knot

by Charlotte Bingham

  But of course she could only guess at so much. What she could not witness was the scene in the library at Cordel Court when the sound of Lord Duffane’s icy, dismissive tones fell about his astounded second wife’s ears.

  If only he would be angry, if only he would shout, Lady Violet thought half-heartedly, herself white with the shock and anger of her return from London and the discovery, only minutes before, that the stables at Cordel Court were quite empty of her beloved hunters.

  ‘You ask where are your hunters – your hunters are sold.’

  Lady Violet clutched at the back of the library chair behind which she was standing.

  ‘Pease Blossom, and Misty, and – not my Joey?’

  ‘You are to hunt no more, Violet.’

  ‘Please, tell me this is not true.’

  ‘I can only tell you the truth. Your hunters are sold, on my orders. You are not to hunt again. If you wish to stay here as my wife you are to occupy yourself with the Church, with the Women’s Guilds, with the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings, with anything or anyone, but there is to be no more hunting. The horses will not miss you, they are too sensible, and besides, they have all been sold to your friends, who doubtless will greatly appreciate them – not to mention the reason why you are forbidden to hunt any more.’

  ‘Please, please tell me this is not true. If I don’t hunt, I shall die. I live for my hunting – you know that.’

  Her husband looked at her but where once he would have listened to her now his eyes were hard with the humiliation that the discovery of her behaviour with his son-in-law had caused him. Her self-indulgence could have caused a scandal that would have made the world laugh at him. Infidelity was one thing, a scandal quite another.

  ‘I have always known that I was not enough for you, Violet, but I did not know, until now, that you were prepared to cross those lines which no-one should cross just for the sake of your own self-gratification and conceit. I am afraid there is no more to be said on the matter. Good morning.’

  Lady Violet began to go, dismissed like a servant, but then rallied, for she would have one last word, whatever her husband said.

  ‘What you don’t understand – and why should you – is that I loved him. I really loved John Brancaster. We were twin souls.’

  ‘When a person marries, Lady Violet, his mistress surrenders all claims and finds another lover, or in your case returns to her husband and changes her life, or leaves.’

  For a few seconds Lady Violet contemplated leaving Cordel Court, the house in London, the carriages, the new motor car, her clothes from Monsieur Worth, the balls and the trips to Baden Baden for health cures. She contemplated love in a cottage with no servants, love with a bored John Brancaster, herself ageing daily. Finally and without much of a struggle she realized that not even her love for hunting or her obsession with Brancaster was worth such a sacrifice, and she turned, tears in her eyes, and left the library.

  Her husband watched her go with a cold smile. He had always known that she would come to heel, and this time it was his heel, not someone else’s, which, when all was said and done, was after all, satisfying, at least to him.

  Meanwhile John Brancaster had determined to try to find Mercy, and demand that she return to Brindells. Knowing as he did, from the servants, that she had made friends with Mrs Lawrence Leveen, he took it upon himself to go to London and call on Mercy’s new friend himself, realizing that by doing so he risked further humiliation, but judging that there was little other choice open to him.

  Of course Dorinda was expecting him. She had actually been expecting him for some weeks now, but perhaps Brancaster’s visit had been delayed by his knowledge of the Leveen ball, which, since it had been such a resounding success, she could now put out of her mind; at least until such time as Mrs Goodman brought her velvet-bound Commonplace Book in to her, in a few weeks’ time, when they would both pore over the menus carefully stuck in, the photographs taken by Bassano of Dorinda in her original dress. It was an excitement to which to look forward, just as Brancaster calling on her was another, quite different excitement to which she was looking forward.

  Although Dorinda fully sympathized with his wife for loving Brancaster, she herself could not like him. She did not mind a weak man, she did not mind a man who was on the outside of Society, nor did she mind a man who found it difficult to manage – as say Gervaise Lowther and Harry Montgomery had done – but she could not stand a hard man, and Brancaster, in Dorinda’s eyes, was a hard, seemingly heartless man.

  Whatever her judgement, the man himself was shown into her upstairs drawing room that afternoon looking every inch the gentleman, which of course he was not. He was impeccably dressed, and having placed his walking cane and hat on the floor he bowed over Dorinda’s hand in a way that hinted at having been to Court enough to know not to hold a hand too long or too hard.

  ‘Well, now, Mr Brancaster, how may I help you?’

  ‘You may help me, Mrs Leveen, by being kind enough to tell me where you think’ – he glanced round at the footmen, and lowered his voice – ‘where you think I might find my wife, and my son.’

  Dorinda paused for a moment.

  ‘Where you might find your wife and son? But Mr Brancaster, if you do not know where your wife and son might be I certainly can not be expected to help you! I have to tell you that people of my acquaintance are not in the habit of losing their wives and sons.’

  She was playing with him and he knew it, but it was ever Dorinda’s weakness to tease a man of whom she could not approve. And she could not approve of a husband who carried on an affair with his wife’s stepmother – whatever the temptation – nor of a father who had taken about as much interest in the birth of his son as a farmer might of a lamb born in one of his fields. She knew for a fact that Gabriel Chantry had taken more interest in the birth of John Edward than had John Brancaster, and more interest in his wife too, his feelings of chivalry dreadfully aroused by her bravery in the face of insensitivity. But all that was about to change, if Dorinda had her way.

  ‘Mrs Leveen ...’

  Dorinda looked awe-inspiring that afternoon, as she had indeed meant to do, for she knew, from having been poor, that even the most sophisticated persons could have their arrogance tempered by a beautiful woman fantastically dressed, so that the sunlight caught at the jewels in her ears, and at the scintillating silk of her dress, and showed up the rows and rows of tiny stitching on her bodice, not to mention the insets of handmade Florentine lace. Not even the Queen of England could have looked more beautiful than Dorinda that afternoon, and she could see from the way Brancaster was hesitating that the diamond ring on her finger, and the marvellous arrangement of her chestnut hair, were distractions even to such a man of the world as he must pride himself on being.

  ‘Mrs Leveen – I must find my wife, and my son, for without them, frankly, I am lost.’

  Dorinda would have liked to have looked at him with pity, but she could not. She looked at him instead with cool appraisal, and just a little wonderingly, for he must have taken her, as so many men took beautiful women, to be an awful fool, to think that she would blurt out where her friend was now living. That she would betray Mercy in such a way – that she might, with all that she knew of him, be so stupid as to let him inveigle his way back into his poor, heartbroken wife’s life.

  ‘I wish I could help you, Mr Brancaster, but I can not. I have no idea where your wife is living, no idea at all.’

  Dorinda looked at John Brancaster so sadly, and with such real regret in her voice, that, being an impatient person, he was at once prompted, as he was meant to be, to take his leave.

  As he did so he passed the large marble table in the great hall downstairs, and while waiting for the hall boy to bring him his coat he glanced momentarily down at a letter that was obviously waiting to be taken to the post. By a strange coincidence it was addressed to his wife, and by yet another coincidence it was written in Mrs Leveen’s hand. He could not bel
ieve the luck of it, and quickly memorizing the address on the envelope finally left Lawrence House triumphant.

  Upstairs, standing at her first floor drawing room window, and looking down at the street with great interest, Dorinda watched John Brancaster climb into a hackney before letting out a peal of laughter as Mrs Goodman came in to join her.

  ‘Oh, I do hope it has worked,’ she told her secretary. ‘I hope it so much. So naughty of me, really, but goodness, you must admit – so funny!’

  Gervaise Lowther was woken from his afternoon sleep by a considerable knocking at the door. It was such a knocking that for one horrible second he had the feeling that it must be someone dunning him, but then, remembering that Lawrence Leveen’s kindly financial advice had removed any fear of debtors, he relapsed back into his normal state of post-prandial drowsiness, hoping that Blanquette or one of her minions would take care of whatever it was in the hall, and leave him to carry on sleeping, as was his wont of an afternoon.

  But, it seemed, afternoon peace was not to be, for minutes later the maid announced John Brancaster, and Gervaise found himself scrambling to his feet and frowningly allowing him to be admitted.

  ‘Did we – do we – have some sort of an arrangement, my dear fellow?’ he asked Brancaster.

  Brancaster looked momentarily taken aback.

  ‘Well, yes, Lowther, as a matter of fact, I think we do. I understand that my wife and my son are residing here?’

  Gervaise’s expression could not have been more astonished.

  ‘Your wife and son, Brancaster? Have you taken leave of your senses, or are you as footled as me? Your wife and son in St John’s Wood with me. You go too far!’

  He knew John Brancaster from Leicestershire, but had never really liked him. A hard hunting man, he had been too much the huntsman and too little the courtier for Gervaise.

  ‘I was – given this address by Mrs Lawrence Leveen.’

  ‘Mrs Lawrence Leveen? Dorinda?’ Gervaise started to laugh. ‘She was just having you on – teasing you, Brancaster. She does that you know. Dorinda has always been a tease. I know, she teased me enough.’

  ‘Are you sure she would do such a thing?’

  Gervaise sighed. ‘I am as sure as can be. Good heavens, man, do I look like a man who would take in another man’s babies and wives, and whatnot?’

  He went to the drawing room door and called down the stairs. ‘Blanquette?’

  Blanquette, newly attired in a brilliant orange afternoon dress of such a hue that even Gervaise was forced to blink, appeared at the drawing room door.

  ‘Blanquette, Mr Brancaster here thinks we’re hiding his wife and children. Are we?’

  Blanquette shook her head. ‘We ‘ave no wife or bébés ’ere, Mr Blanchester.’

  With another nod Gervaise dismissed his newest mistress, for apart from anything else he really could not stand to look at that orange dress for too long. On the other hand, he realized, Brancaster was left staring after her, his mouth wide open.

  ‘I know – dreadful colour, isn’t it? But the dear woman loves orange and yellow, and what can you do, my dear fellow? No-one else to take care of me now all my children are married. The servants at my town house laugh at me. Served me a chicken with all the feathers on the other day. So I am here now. Blanquette makes an omelette which would send you to heaven.’

  As Gervaise was confiding his reasons for keeping Blanquette, Dorinda, having been careful to take a hackney cab, and not her magnificent coach, to see her friend Mercy Brancaster in Chelsea, alighted outside her friend’s house followed only by her new French maid.

  Mercy watched her arrival from her pretty, flowered first floor drawing room with its few pieces of eighteenth-century furniture sent to her by her father from Cordel Court. It amused Mercy to watch Dorinda trying to arrive at her house incognito, for albeit that she had arrived in a hackney cab, she had not bothered to change her afternoon clothes to a costume more appropriate to the dinginess of the cab. If anyone had been about at that teatime hour they would have gasped, for Dorinda presented such a beautiful picture of fashion, she suited her hackney cab as much as a brilliant butterfly suits the dry interior of a museum case.

  The two young women kissed either side of each other’s heads, more in sympathetic greeting than in cheerful acknowledgement. They both knew that Dorinda had sustained a visit from Brancaster. Dorinda did not of course tell Mercy of her little ruse, of her effective redirection of Mercy’s husband to St John’s Wood, a place so thankfully far away from bohemic Chelsea that it might be in another country.

  She did not tell her for many reasons, but most of all because she knew her own sex, and she shrewdly recognized that Mercy would not find such a humiliation of Brancaster as amusing as Dorinda herself. And, too, she feared that thinking of her husband chasing all over London after her on wild goose errands might make Mercy start to pity the scoundrel, and that would never do.

  ‘Mrs Blessington is also here,’ Mercy told Dorinda. ‘She is upstairs with Josephine in the nursery playing with the baby, but will be down

  shortly. She is staying with me for a number of weeks. It is somehow such a comfort to have her here, making it seem home from home in a way I can’t explain.’

  Dorinda liked Mrs Blessington the moment she appeared. She liked her affable round face, her still sparkling eyes, the rich laugh that shook her body when she found something amusing, which she seemed to do all the time. Dorinda also saw that, as with so many older and more ample people, she was independent-minded, and not to be fooled. It was as if in their whole-hearted enjoyment of life the rounder the person the more positive the personality that emerged.

  They none of them touched on the reasons why they were visiting Mercy in a small Chelsea house, in a bohemian neighbourhood more suited to the artistic personalities of the day than to a nicely brought up daughter of a peer of the realm.

  ‘Fortuitously,’ Mrs Blessington told Dorinda, as one ringed hand stroked the top of Twissy’s head, while the other was busy accepting a cup of tea in an aquamarine, flower painted cup, ‘I have been able to buy a small business. It has been run, as a tight ship, by the godmother of Miss Lynch, your friend.’

  ‘Ah, the worthy Mrs Dodd. Yes, I remember Miss Lynch did say that Mrs Dodd had retired, and was even thinking of leaving London.’

  ‘It is something in which I have always been interested, helping poor distressed young women, and since farming and the land have fallen into such disrepair, and it seems to me that I am farming for no-one but my children, I have handed over my properties to my eldest son and settled myself in a rented property near to London, in Richmond Park, not more than an hour or so from here. Meanwhile I am looking for someone to run the business for me, for of course, at my age, such a thing is not possible.’

  Mrs Blessington was all innocence and all satisfaction as she nibbled on a piece of cake and sipped at her tea, before setting the remains of both into the saucer and putting it on the floor for Twissy to enjoy, finally finishing by licking the old saucer, now bare of its tea, half way around the old wooden floor, until Mercy picked it up, and absentmindedly put it back on the tea tray.

  If Mrs Blessington was all innocence Dorinda was all admiration for the blessed woman – rightly named, she suddenly thought – seeing at once from her seemingly artless conversation, just how she was thinking, and perhaps hoped to plan. For Dorinda was well aware that Mrs Dodd’s ‘business’ had everything to do with the taking in and looking after unfortunate girls who were expecting ‘mistakes’. It was good work, and finally not unpleasant, primarily because most of the families who could afford to send the girls up to stay under her care were immensely wealthy. She also knew that Leonie was the result of just such a case, but that the poor wretched young mother had died, and that she had been fostered thereafter by her now entirely excellent lodge keepers, Ned Lynch and his wife.

  ‘Well, well, imagine,’ said Dorinda, now also all innocence, her diamond earrings flashing in the
firelight as she gave a delicate sigh. ‘What a thing it would be indeed, if you could only find someone suitable to run your business. Someone who felt compassion for these poor wretched girls, abandoned by their families, and sometimes even by their husbands.’

  ‘All too often by their husbands, Mrs Leveen, all too often, as I have come to realize in the last weeks.’ She looked at Dorinda and shook her head. ‘When all is said and done men take an awful lot of running, my dear, but then women taken an awful lot of satisfying!’

  She gave her rich laugh, and finished her tea with the same satisfaction that she would doubtless show in her own home.

  Dorinda replaced her own cup, delicately, on its saucer, and began again.

  ‘Since I have never been a mother, I can not imagine how much in need of loving attention these poor young girls must be, how much they must long for someone to take an interest in them. I would have thought that you must be looking for someone who perhaps might understand their situation, let us say, from the heart?’

  ‘Quite so. I am searching for someone loving and kind, someone who will understand their situation. It is a business, of course, but first and foremost it is about loving attention, about lack of censure, about kindness. If you hear of anyone, Mrs Leveen, you will let me know, will you not? Now, if you don’t mind, Mercy my dear, I will just take Twissy into the garden for a little trit for I am badly in need of some country air, and Chelsea is after all still country, isn’t it?’

  Mercy seemed hardly to hear a word of what her old friend and neighbour had said but was staring out of the window towards the river and the great barges going up and down, staring into a possible future, and at the same time remembering the past.

  ‘I know what it is like, Dorinda, you know that, don’t you?’ she said, after Mrs Blessington had eased herself out of the door.