Banishment (Daughters of Mannerling 1)

by M C Beaton

  Then her father, her very own father, had begun to compare her unfavourably to Isabella. ‘If you had some of her air and elegance, my dear,’ he would say sadly, ‘then you would be more of a social success.’

  On the outside of it, therefore, there was much to be pitied about Mary. But the hard core of devious selfishness and self-interest inside her kept her protected in a way. Nothing was or had ever been Mary’s fault. There was always something or someone to blame. And Mannerling itself was a great comfort. She thought of it as hers, rather than her husband’s, feeling the great house enfolding her, protecting her, calling her its own.

  She had been on another search for the Beverley jewelry. How often had she imagined herself wearing some of those sparkling gems, seeing the Beverleys at a ball or party recognizing what had once been theirs and being as jealous of her as she had always been of them. So she wandered from room to room, under the ornate cornices and painted ceilings, looking, always looking. Mrs Judd had retired early for the night and so, apart from the odd servant going about his or her duties, she and the house were alone together.

  And then she heard shouts outside and the sound of horses and carriage wheels. She ran to the window and looked down. Her husband was arriving with travelling carriage and outriders. The outriders extinguished their flaming torches, footmen rushed out to help the master down, John in the forefront, who had become the most obsequious of servants in case Mr Judd should ever change his mind and build that ruin and need a hermit.

  Mary went down to the hall. She was determined to ask him about those jewels, but when he strode into the hall and she saw his glittering eyes and noted the unsteady way he walked, she gathered he was the worse for drink. So she tripped forward and kissed him on the cheek.

  ‘Have you dined?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t need food and I don’t need you,’ he said curtly. He turned to the butler. ‘Fetch me the brandy decanter and bring it to the library and then leave me.’ He turned to Mary. ‘Go to bed, Mrs Judd, for your Friday face is the last thing I want to see.’

  Furious at the insult, Mary nonetheless went back upstairs, planning to attack him in the morning when he was fragile and sober.

  Mr Judd went into the library and slumped down in an armchair and slung his muddy boots onto a footstool. A footman came in and added logs to the fire, another brought in the brandy and a glass, supervised by the butler.

  ‘All of you go to bed,’ he barked, ‘and don’t let me see your faces this night. Stay. What’s that ladder doing in the hall?’

  ‘We are cleaning the chandelier, sir. I will have it removed.’

  ‘Leave it and leave me.’

  Mr Judd sat in front of the fire and drank steadily. From time to time he sighed and looked about him. Then he rose and made his way unsteadily to the window and jerked back the curtains.

  Snow was beginning to fall, great white flakes drifting down from the night sky, swirling and rising and falling hypnotically.

  All at once his brain felt miraculously clear, cold, and logical. He knew what he had to do.

  Mary’s first waking thought was about the jewels. She reached a hand out to summon the maid but then her eye fell on the clock and she groaned. It was only six in the morning. Mary would not admit to herself that she was cowed by the Mannerling servants. The bedroom was cold. She rose, shivering, and raked the fire, threw on some kindling from the basket beside the grate, lit it and waited, hugging her chest until the flames started rising up the chimney. She pulled back the curtains. Snow lay everywhere under the still dark sky, and snow was falling steadily. There was no sound at all. The whole countryside was wrapped in a blanket of winter silence.

  She dressed hurriedly, thinking of several places in the house where she had not yet looked for the jewels. That great Chinese vase in the hall. Now that was the very place where her secretive husband might have hidden some of them.

  All her worries forgotten, she made her way along the corridor from her apartment and down the stairs. Then, as she approached the main landing outside the chain of saloons, she realized that the silence was not absolute. There was a steady tinkling sound. Her face cleared. Some lazy servant must have left the main door open and the crystals in the great chandelier in the hall were tinkling in the draught.

  She leaned on the banister and looked.

  The chandelier with its Waterford crystals like white ice was just below her eye level. It was swinging gently because of a burden hanging from it. The long ladder lay on its side on the black and white tiles of the floor.

  As she stared, the chandelier slowly swung round and the grinning, dead, purple, hanged face of her husband looked up at her and then slowly swung away again.

  Mary’s screams rent the great house from end to end. Up to the painted ceilings they went, past the family portraits in the Long Gallery, down to the servants’ hall, where the sleepy chef started from his bed in the corner. It seemed they rushed out of the house, past the temple across the thin skin of ice on the ornamental lake and out over the fields.

  Over in Perival, Mrs Kennedy woke shivering. She thought she had heard a banshee. She climbed stiffly down from her high bed and went to the window. But there was nothing outside but snow and more snow and the frozen silence of winter.

  By rights Mr Judd, as a suicide, should have been buried at the crossroads with a stake through his heart to stop his ghost walking, but Mr Stoppard, the vicar, cried out that the owner of Mannerling should be buried in the churchyard and maintained the fiction that he had died of an apoplexy.

  The funeral was barely over when the lawyers and duns began to gather like carrion crows at Mannerling. Slowly the news spread out across the countryside. Mr Judd had gambled everything away. Mannerling and its contents must be sold to pay the debts.

  Isabella, despite her vow never to see Mannerling again, insisted that she and her sisters should call on Mary after the funeral and offer help and sympathy. But Mary sat there like a wounded animal surveying her with eyes full of such malevolence that Isabella wished she had not come.

  She was too wrapped up in her own happiness, too much looking forward to her own wedding, to the next kiss and caress to realize the effect the news of the ruin and death of Mr Judd would have on her family. She did not guess that the viscount knew what to expect and was prepared for it.

  Lizzie, who had returned to Brookfield House, nonetheless seized every opportunity to visit Perival and gladly agreed to accompany Isabella on a call, an Isabella who no longer sent Barry with a letter to announce her arrival, for a carriage from Perival arrived almost every day for her.

  They were sitting in the drawing room with Mrs Kennedy and the viscount when they heard the arrival of a carriage. Lizzie ran to the window and looked out.

  ‘It is Papa and the family,’ she cried. ‘What has caused them to hire a carriage and come calling when they could easily have come with us?’

  Isabella’s eyes flew to the viscount. He was looking grim.

  ‘This is not going to be very pleasant for you, my dear,’ he said to Isabella. ‘Would you like to retire?’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘anything my family has to say to you is for my ears as well.’

  ‘As you will. But it may distress you.’

  Sir William and his family were ushered in. Isabella noticed with a feeling of dread that her father was looking gleeful, animated, and he was rubbing his hands.

  After the initial pleasantries were over and everyone had been served with hot punch, Sir William leaned back in his chair and said expansively, ‘Our Isabella is a lucky girl.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said the viscount. ‘But I consider myself the most fortunate of men.’

  ‘Aye, think what would have happened had she married Judd, which is what we hoped at one time she would do.’

  Isabella winced.

  ‘Ruined and hanged, hey? Mannerling to be sold and Mary to return to the vicarage. Sad.’

  Sir William looked anything but sad.
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  ‘I am glad to see you,’ said the viscount evenly, ‘but is there any special reason for this visit?’

  ‘No, no,’ said Sir William hurriedly. ‘Just a friendly call on my future son-in-law.’ He looked about him. ‘Tidy property you have here.’

  ‘You have already remarked on it,’ said the viscount.

  Sir William leaned forward. Isabella studied her sisters, who all looked away, with the exception of Lizzie, who was looking as puzzled and apprehensive as she was herself.

  ‘It’s not very big, though,’ went on Sir William. ‘I mean, you’ll soon be married and setting up your nursery, and as Isabella is a healthy girl, bound to have lots of children, hey?’

  ‘I also possess a comfortable home and estates in Ireland,’ said the viscount, ‘to which Isabella and I will be travelling immediately after the wedding.’

  ‘Yes, yes, very fine, I’m sure, but both estates together cannot match Mannerling, and now it’s up for sale—’

  ‘Papa!’ wailed Isabella, horrified.

  ‘I am not buying Mannerling,’ said the viscount. ‘I will never buy Mannerling. I hope the place rots.’

  Sir William bridled. ‘It was only a suggestion. I thought if you loved Isabella, you would—’

  But Isabella had leaped to her feet, her face flaming. ‘How dare you humiliate me again, Papa. I never want to see Mannerling again. Oh, I went there to console Mary and that was a great mistake, but at least it showed me the madness of wanting the place. I suggest you all go home, please, before I lose my temper further.’

  Lady Beverley began to cry softly with disappointment. ‘You are a most unnatural daughter,’ she sobbed.

  Isabella stayed behind at Perival. The Beverleys, including Lizzie, sat sulkily in the carriage. When the gates of Mannerling came in sight, Sir William said suddenly, ‘We should call on Mary. She is to move to the vicarage soon. Only polite to offer help and sympathy.’

  And so the Beverleys, who all detested Mary, pinned smiles of sympathy on their faces as the rented carriage drew up outside their old home.

  Mary was savagely glad to see them, for ruined she might be, about to be banished to the vicarage she might be, but she knew it caused the Beverleys grief to see her still acting as mistress of Mannerling and ordering the servants around.

  Sir William, finally ignoring Mary’s digs about ‘We are all poor now,’ said, ‘I suppose you have not yet found a buyer for Mannerling.’

  ‘Oh, I have. A Mr and Mrs Devers of the Cornish family. Vastly rich, I believe.’ Sir William’s face fell.

  ‘Any family?’ asked Jessica suddenly.

  ‘There is a son, I believe, Harry.’

  ‘Will he be residing at Mannerling, too, with his wife?’

  ‘He is not married. Late twenties, I believe.’

  Mary bent over the tea-table and therefore did not see the darting little looks exchanged between the Beverleys.

  Jessica let out a long sigh. All was not lost. An unmarried son! Well, she would succeed where Isabella, that fallen angel, had so miserably failed.

  When they finally left, Lizzie trailed one slim hand along the mahogany banister. She had persuaded Mrs Kennedy and Isabella that she had been in the grip of a temporary madness, that never again would she even think about her old home. But she covertly studied Jessica, noticing her elder sister’s beauty. Jessica was made of steel, Jessica had all the determination and spirit which Isabella lacked, Jessica would never let mawkish love come between her and Isabella. Lizzie felt happier than she had felt for some time.

  Isabella longed for her wedding day. She had not heard anything about the new owners of Mannerling and therefore could not understand the cheerfulness of the other members of her family. She could not put it down to an acceptance of their new life, for her sisters always seemed to be huddled together talking intensely and then, when they saw her, they would suddenly stop talking.

  ‘They’re plotting something,’ she said to Barry one day, a Barry who had been more than forgiven for locking her in the hen-house with the viscount.

  ‘Perhaps it’s something to do with the new owners of Mannerling.’

  ‘I knew it had been sold. Who are the owners, Barry?’

  ‘A Mr and Mrs Devers. Accounted to be very rich. Old Cornish family.’

  ‘Well, my father can hardly hope for one of my sisters to marry Mr Devers unless he plans to murder Mrs Devers.’

  Barry leaned on the long axe he had been using to chop logs. ‘There is a son, miss, a Mr Harry Devers, unwed, twenty-eight.’

  ‘Oh, dear, what am I to do? The fools! They will humiliate themselves all over again.’

  ‘May I say, miss, it is nothing to do with you. You will soon be going to Ireland and you will be well out of it.’

  ‘How long will this madness last, Barry? Can you write?’

  ‘Yes, miss, I have a fair hand.’

  ‘Would you write to me from time to time to let me know how they go on?’

  ‘Gladly, miss, though perhaps it might be better not to know.’

  ‘Oh, I may be able to save them from their folly yet.’

  The scullery boy came running over to tell Isabella that the carriage from Perival had arrived for her.

  ‘I must go,’ said Isabella. ‘Thank you for everything, Barry.’ She suddenly leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek.

  Barry stood for a long time after she had left with a smile on his face.

  Upstairs, Jessica turned away from the window. ‘Isabella just kissed a servant. Ugh! The sooner I get the rest of you back to Mannerling, the better for you, or you might start kissing servants as well!’

  Isabella alighted at Perival with a glad feeling of coming home. The viscount came out to meet her. ‘Come in here,’ he said, pulling her into a small morning room. He took off her bonnet and threw it on a chair and then fell to kissing her breathless.

  ‘Oh, dear,’ she said when she could. ‘My dreadful family. You will never guess what they are plotting next.’

  ‘The Devers have a son, a marriageable son, am I right?’

  ‘Are they so transparent then?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘What should I do?’

  ‘Kiss me again.’

  After a long time, he said huskily, ‘Let your family learn by their mistakes, as learn they must. At least one brand has been saved from the burning. Little Lizzie has come to her senses.’

  ‘Yes, I think Lizzie will grow into a fine woman. She will be as happy as I am now. I know it.’

  He wound his arms tightly about her and would have spent the rest of the day in her arms had not Mrs Kennedy come in search of them and told them in forthright terms that it was customary to leave that sort of thing for the wedding night.

  Barry carefully raked dead leaves and debris and then lit a bonfire and watched the flames and smoke crackle up into the clear frosty air.

  And then he saw Lizzie, sitting on a fallen log at the far end of the garden. She was smiling all around. Her busy little hands served imaginary tea and offered imaginary cakes. Her mouth moved in soundless conversation.

  Barry’s heart smote him. All at once he was sure that Lizzie was dreaming herself back at Mannerling, acting as hostess. He felt he should tell Isabella, but Isabella would only fret.

  He had been considering asking the viscount for a post so that he might travel with them to Ireland. But he could better serve Isabella by staying where he was and trying to see that none of them came to any harm.

  He stirred the bonfire impatiently.

  And through the smoke he saw the imaginary mistress of Mannerling, still bowing and smiling and serving tea.

 

 

 
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