In This Quiet Earth (Part Three of The People of this Parish Saga)

by Nicola Thorne

  Small wonder, then, that when Victoria died shortly after they had settled in Venice, Connie took stock of her life and found it wanting. Being alone, far from home, friends or family, she had only her own resources to fall back on.

  At first she was terrified, but then she discovered a sense of freedom, the ability to choose and make her own decisions. If she was to remain a dreary spinster all her life, singing in the church choir and scuttling around the narrow alleyways of Venice, keeping out of sight, it seemed that the choice was up to her.

  Luckily at that stage, before she had time to settle once again in a rut, she was taken in hand by a worldly Venetian woman, the wife of the Italian lawyer who was the administrator of Victoria’s estate. Francesca Valenti was only a little older than Connie and she took an interest in her, especially when she discovered the extent of her wealth. However the Valentis were not poor and there was nothing mercenary or self-seeking in Francesca’s altruism. She had seen the potential Connie offered, so to transform her was a challenge.

  She took her shopping and to the couture houses which flourished even in wartime. She encouraged her to take a pride, not only in what she wore, but how she looked. For instance it was possible to see without her spectacles, except for reading. Connie realised that she had worn them as much to protect herself from the world as anything else. They were a shield.

  Francesca taught her what exciting things she could do with her money. How it enhanced life. In no time she had transformed the ugly duckling into a swan.

  Connie was still only thirty-three, and if she regretted the wasted years of her former life she made up for it in enjoyment of what she had discovered, and the prospect of the years that lay ahead when she returned to Venice, to the companionship of the Valentis and all the wealthy, talented, cultured and exciting people they had introduced her to.

  She passed the open gates leading to Pelham’s Oak and drove up the drive conscious only of a tiny qualm. She had not been as indifferent to Carson Woodville as she had pretended in the churchyard. Her heart had actually performed a somersault when she saw him again and mentally she had reverted to being the shy spinster, seeking a way of escape. But none offered itself and when she confronted him at last – the man she once thought had ruined her life – it was to test the woman she had become, and throw aside the naive person that she used to be for ever.

  ***

  Eliza had always felt a special affection for Connie. She had held her in her arms after her difficult birth, thinking that the child was dead and the mother dying. She had baptised and willed life into her and she always thought that God had answered her prayer, though He had taken her mother to Himself. Eliza was not formally religious. She seldom went to church, but now that she was older she was convinced that mankind was not alone in this cosmos, but governed by some form of superior intelligence or being.

  From the day of her birth, and ever after, Eliza felt a deep bond which was reciprocated by Connie, who never failed to keep in touch with her, even during the war.

  When Connie had been engaged to Carson Eliza looked forward to having her as an even closer relation, but at the same time she was deeply apprehensive about the wedding, and the reason for it, even though she had connived to bring it about with her brother, to persuade Carson to ask Connie to marry him.

  It was an event of which Eliza had not been proud, but now, watching Connie energetically playing croquet on the lawn with the rest of the lunch guests, she felt that what had happened had happened for the best. Connie had indeed developed in a way that no one could possibly have expected. It was almost like knowing two completely different people.

  The big lunch party at Pelham’s Oak had been a happy occasion. Not only Connie, Eliza and her children, and Dora’s friend May, had been there but also Sophie and Hubert Turner, Deborah (the young boys had been left behind with the nursemaid) and Mr Parterre.

  Eliza shifted restlessly in her chair, shielding her eyes from the sun. She was the only one to opt out of croquet, preferring to take her ease in a chair on the terrace which overlooked the lawn and the tree that Pelham had planted, now a mighty oak, and beyond that the town of Wenham shimmering in the afternoon haze.

  Eliza experienced a sensation of ease at the beauty of the day, the pleasure of the occasion with all the family gathered together, including Connie, all related to one another in some way except for May, Dora’s seemingly inseparable companion, and Mr Parterre, now nowhere to be seen.

  The game was coming to an exciting conclusion. There was much running about, punctuated with laughter, as a mallet cracked against the ball which slid through the hoops in the ground. Hubert, overweight and perspiring profusely, partnered with his wife, seemed to be losing, while Connie and Carson, partnered together, were winning.

  Eliza noted that Carson was never very far from Connie and kept on glancing at her; but Connie was intent on her game bending eagerly forward, her eyes on the ball as it was chased round the lawn, scarcely looking at him.

  Eliza sighed and leaned back in her chair trying to banish a slight, curious feeling of unease. She couldn’t understand the reason for it and, besides, wasn’t it lovely to have all the family together in the home where she was born and which she had loved all her life?

  Then, from the corner of her eye Eliza was aware of a movement up the drive and, by slightly turning her head, she saw a stately car travelling slowly along it.

  They had all gawped in fascination at the Pierce-Arrow in which Connie had arrived, a magnificent car she’d bought in Paris and in which she’d driven over to England. Now here was something equally grand, if not grander. In the front was a chauffeur with a peaked cap and in the back two shadowy figures.

  Eliza sat up and leaned forward but the car swept round a bend and out of sight in order, presumably, to pull up by the front door.

  “Carson,” she called.

  “Hush, Aunt.” He made a gesture of annoyance with his hands. “This is a very tense part of the game.”

  “You’ve got some visitors.” She gestured towards the drive. “Important ones too, by the look of it. Are you expecting anyone?”

  Carson halted the game and looked up. “Visitors? No.”

  “Well I saw a very grand car.”

  “Maybe Uncle Julius has come to collect you?” Julius had preferred his greenhouses to the family party at Pelham’s Oak.

  “Of course he hasn’t! I’m going back with Dora.” Dora had a small Ford of which she was immensely proud.

  At that moment Arthur appeared, looking flustered, doing up the collar of his shirt as though he’d been caught having forty winks.

  “Sir Carson ...” he called, a tremor in his voice. “Sir Carson!”

  “Pray, Arthur, don’t trouble to announce us,” a loud, haughty voice interjected behind him. “Give us the pleasure of announcing ourselves.”

  Everyone on the lawn seemed simultaneously to stop the game, heads raised, some mouths agape as, as if making a stage entrance, Agnes, in a long silk afternoon dress and huge picture hat, half veiled, swept through the French doors on to the veranda followed by a moustached gentleman in a sporty check suit, a colourful bow tie, yellow spats, and clasping a cane in his hand.

  Carson rapidly crossed the lawn and ran up the few steps to the terrace.

  “Aunt Agnes!” he gasped. “Why didn’t you tell us you were coming?”

  Agnes appeared at first to ignore him, intent on gazing at the concourse of people on the lawn. “How delightful,” she cried, looking around, “to find a family party in progress. Carson, dear!” She then turned her attention to him and, in a gesture worthy of the stage, threw her arms round him and planted a robust kiss on his cheeks. “I wanted to surprise you.”

  She sprang apart from Carson and gestured dramatically towards the man who stood diffidently, apparently ill at ease, a few paces behind her. “And to introduce you to my husband, Sir Owen Wentworth. Owen dear,” she said placing an arm proprietorially round his shoulder, �
��behold, in front of you, most of my family assembled to greet us.”

  The silence from the onlookers was every bit as tense, as explosive, as if there had been a loud thunderclap.

  Chapter Seven

  Agnes yawned and looked restlessly about. The air was perfectly still, the silence complete. They were sitting on the terrace after dinner and she was bored. Owen, quietly smoking a cigarette, gazed in front of him, replete, almost asleep. He was not a hard man to please.

  But it was very hard to please Agnes, as he had quickly discovered. No sooner in one place than she wanted to be in another. She was a restless, dissatisfied woman yet she mesmerised him, captivated, frightened him. She tied him to her with a bond of terror. Like many men in thrall to powerful women, he perversely enjoyed, nay thrived, on being dominated.

  The effect of Agnes’s arrival in Wenham had been rather like that of a stone which, thrown into a calm pond, sends ripples spreading out towards its edges. No member of her family had remained unaffected by her arrival, and none seemed the better for seeing her again.

  “I think it’s time we went back to London, Owen,” Agnes said in that flat resolute tone of voice he knew so much and dreaded.

  “But dearest we have only just arrived,” he timidly reached out to take her hand.

  “We have been here a week,” she said truculently not bothering to stifle a fresh yawn. “I never remember being so bored. Wenham is such a boring place.”

  “But I thought you wanted to spend the summer here, my dear?” That wheedling tremor in his voice.

  She pouted disagreeably.

  “That was the idea, but as soon as I got here I realised my mistake. I’d forgotten what a bore it was living here and what drove me to London in the first place. I so miss my friends. Dorothy, Emily, Clara.”

  “I find it a heavenly spot.” Owen sighed and looked up into the night sky. They had dined with Carson and Jean after which, as always, the two men found something to occupy them. The barrage of criticism they each endured during the course of the meal was more than either could bear. It went on night after night, and day after day when she got the opportunity, ever since Agnes’s arrival. She picked at the state the house was in, its sheer lack of comfort, the time taken to carry out the repairs, the poor quality of those repairs, the sparsity of servants, the quality of the food. It was very hard for the men to take and Owen, who secretly sympathised with them, thought they bore up well even though at times Carson seemed close to boiling point.

  “It is a heavenly spot,” Agnes agreed, “for a day or two, but I much prefer the city.” Suddenly her attitude changed and placing a hand on Owen’s arm her tone became kittenish. He was used to these swift, and somewhat disconcerting, changes of mood when she wanted anything which she thought might be hard to get. Over the months since he’d known her, and particularly since he’d been married to her, he had come to dread them almost as much as her rages and unprovoked personal attacks.

  “Owen, dearest, Carson talks again about selling the London house. Why don’t we buy it?”

  “Buy it?” Owen stammered.

  “Then we needn’t ever come back here again except for a brief visit. That will also give us some security, dear. We can’t go from hand to mouth living in hotels.”

  “No, we certainly can’t.”

  “Well, what do you think?”

  “I think it’s very pleasant here.” Owen nervously cleared his throat. “It’s a lovely spot, it’s a beautiful house ...”

  “A beautiful house!” Agnes exclaimed. “It’s falling apart, and you call it beautiful?”

  “Yes I do. It’s a lovely place. Besides, the countryside is so delightful, and I think ...” He shifted in his chair and nervously cleared his throat again. “I think we could be very happy here, Agnes, surrounded by your family and friends.”

  “Oh you think that, do you?” The kittenish tone had been replaced by one of sarcasm. “Did you notice how swiftly my ‘beloved’ family cleared off as soon as we arrived? They stayed long enough to gawp at you and satisfy their curiosity; then off they went, never to be seen or heard of again. Eliza I could never stand! Sophie is a prig. The children I hardly know, and don’t much care for what I see. Dora is so mannish and as for that woman who hangs about her ... if you ask me it’s an unnatural relationship.”

  “Agnes!”

  “It is my dear, don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean.”

  “I know what you mean, but I can’t agree. I thought Dora charming. I mean you don’t know.”

  “I do know,” Agnes nodded her head emphatically. “I am wise enough to the ways of the world to know a Sapphist when I see one. As for that little mouse, Connie ...”

  “I thought her charming too, and not in the least a ‘little mouse’.”

  Agnes gave him a forbidding look. “Please don’t argue with me, Owen. I know what I’m talking about. You don’t know Connie as I do; after all she is related to me. We had the same father but, thank God, that is the only thing we have in common. I’ll grant you she has slightly improved,” Agnes added grudgingly. “She’s done something about her looks, discarded those awful spectacles, tidied up her hair. She used to look dreadful, frumpish. Appearances might have changed, but once a mouse always a mouse. She nearly married Carson. What a misalliance that would have been!”

  “Why did she not marry Carson?” Owen asked, puzzled.

  “I think it was because I came along,” Agnes gave a chortle. “They were after her money to restore Pelham’s Oak – she’s a very wealthy girl, and even wealthier now that her dreadful old spinster of a guardian has died; she left her everything.”

  Owen felt a cold shiver trickle down his spine.

  “And ...” he began and stopped.

  “And what?” She looked enquiringly at him.

  “Why should that have affected their marriage?”

  “Because they thought I had a lot of money. That I was the one who was going to restore Pelham’s Oak. I tell you I had far better things to do with my money than waste it on this old heap.”

  So, still he didn’t know the position of her finances. Had he been taken in by appearances – the title, the London town house, the mansion in the country? The jewels, the clothes, the ostentatious atmosphere of wealth?

  The object of his anxieties fast asleep beside him, Owen tossed and turned, wrestling with his doubts and uncertainties about the woman he had married so hastily in Rome in the spring. He had emptied his own pockets, blown the lot, to lull her into a sense of security about his own situation in the hope that there would ultimately be rich rewards. He was virtually penniless, and there had been the bait of the London house with its beautiful, expensive furnishings and artefacts, and now this veritable palace in the country to help him regain the vestiges of his solvency with the help of his few meagre investments.

  And now she suggested buying the London house! That ‘we’ buy it. All Owen Wentworth wanted to do was settle down somewhere and, for the foreseeable future, live in the greatest comfort while spending as little money of his own as he could. Of course he had never thought through the consequences of marrying Agnes, a formidable woman with a fierce and, occasionally, uncontrollable temper, at times insatiable demands. He had been swept along on the magic of her personality, her charm and, most important of all, what he took to be her wealth. Here was the woman of fortune, the rich widow he had been looking for.

  Gradually, little by little, he was beginning to realise that all was not what it had at first seemed, appearances had been deceptive. Guy Woodville, though the thirteenth baronet, had been a veritable pauper, the ancestral home was in a state of terminal disrepair and required thousands of pounds being spent on it. Why had Agnes’s money not been forthcoming if she, in turn, really had been the widow of an American railroad millionaire?

  He had noticed she was close, but in his experience rich people invariably were tight-fisted. Besides, a woman liked to be pampered, fêted, bought flowers and jewels,
lodged in the best hotels. In exchange she gave certain favours and in this regard Agnes had not failed him. Her plump, perfumed body was eminently desirable and during her lifetime’s experience she had learned the art of pleasing a man, even at the expense of her own enjoyment.

  But there was a lot about Agnes he did not know. She seemed to tell him the essentials and keep the rest to herself. He knew she was born in Wenham, had hated the place, had gone to America and married Wendell Gregg, a multimillionaire some years her senior who had died and left her his fortune.

  With this she had returned to Wenham to meet up again with Sir Guy, also now a widower, and there had been a happy but comparatively brief marriage, only six years.

  He knew she didn’t like her stepson; indeed the undercurrent of mutual hostility between them was palpable, but things like this happened in the best regulated families. She thought her own family provincial and they were; but they were also charming, at least Owen thought so. He had considered Eliza delightful, a person for whom Agnes reserved most of her rancour. He had thought all the young people quite charming. He would have been utterly happy to have stayed in this delightful, if dilapidated, place pottering about, not doing very much, certainly not spending very much, in the company of his Agnes, feared but adored, for the rest of his life.

  Agnes turned and moaned in her sleep as if she were having a bad dream. In the light of the moon that shone through the window Owen looked at her in concern.

  Maybe she was and, maybe, for them both the bad dream would be the reckoning that at the moment they were only postponing. Somehow now over him he felt there loomed a dark shadow.

  ***

  Carson had begun to experience a sensation of happiness that had been absent from his life for some time, until the sudden and unexpected return of Agnes complete with new husband. His father’s debts had been cleared through the generosity of Uncle Julius; the repairs to Pelham’s Oak were in hand due to the timely arrival of his old comrade Jean Parterre, also unexpected but, in this case, delightful.