‘You are leaving America already, Mr Aubrey? You are returning to England quite soon?’ Emmaline asked, not yet willing to believe that this tall, handsome man with whom she had danced all of two dances could have the slightest interest in her.
‘Yes, I am leaving America, and travelling back to Europe, Miss Nesbitt. First I must visit the Loire valley on business, then I shall return to England and set myself to tidying up some unfinished affairs in London, after which I shall, er, repair to, er – Somerset,’ he told her, his smile widening, and an impish look in his eyes. ‘Do you know Somerset, Miss Nesbitt?’
‘Somerset? No, I don’t think I know Somerset. Is that a state?’
‘No, Somerset is what we call a county in England – our island is too small to have states. No, Somerset is a county. The county of Somerset, the place that the Romans christened the land of summer, where they built their villas and grew their vines, and daylight seems to last longer than anywhere else in the world.’ He looked down at her with accomplished charm. ‘It is indeed a wonderful place, as you may well imagine, for the Romans to have so christened it.’
‘It sounds beautiful.’
‘It is beautiful. It has every kind of landscape, and we who have lived there for generations believe there is nothing to match it. After the Romans came King Arthur and his knights, and it is said that King Arthur’s Avalon was near Glastonbury in Somerset.’
‘The land of summer,’ Emmaline repeated, staring ahead of her at some imagined Utopia filled with graceful villas where vines grew, bees hummed, and the countryside was green and fertile.
‘It is a place where a man, and a woman, can be happy, I do assure you,’ her companion insisted, giving Emmaline the kind of look that no man had ever given her before.
‘A man and a woman, if they love each other, can be happy anywhere, or at least that is what I have always understood,’ Emmaline told him.
‘Indeed, you are right. A man and a woman can make a paradise out of very little, for that paradise is in their own minds, is it not?’
Emmaline found Mr Aubrey’s look difficult to return. After all, they had only known each other for two dances, and a short walk. As she understood it, emotions … feelings … in particular those that led to a man’s making a declaration to one, took longer than that to develop, could not mature in a moment or two. And yet …
‘I have often wondered about the story of Adam and Eve, how it was that it all went so wrong, and why Eve was the reason that they were thrown from Paradise.’
‘And you are right, Miss Nesbitt. Why, now I come to think of it, it is most unfair! Adam, if he had been any kind of gentleman, would have shouldered the blame. He would not let a lady take the full complement of God’s wrath.’
Emmaline saw that he was amused by this fantasy that she had begun, and she continued on the theme with him, both of them finally agreeing that the first story in the Bible should be rewritten to show Adam in a better light.
‘And it’s hard on the snake too,’ Aubrey continued. ‘People have been hard on those gentle creatures ever since on account of that story.’
‘Mary, our old nurse, who is now our maid, says that if you leave snakes alone they’ll leave you alone, and I have never found any different. But then she is Irish, and there are no snakes in Ireland. She tells me Saint Patrick banished them.’
They laughed together, and then walked along in companionable silence, a silence which Emmaline finally broke.
‘So when exactly is it that you sail, Mr Aubrey?’ she asked.
‘Early tomorrow morning, Miss Nesbitt. We sail from Boston on the flood, and let us only hope the return journey is considerably calmer than the outward one, where very few of the passengers ever saw the light of day – outside their cabins, that is. Gracious, the sea can be masterful, can it not?’
‘I have never sailed the Atlantic,’ Emmaline confessed, ‘but I know from Mary that it can be as rough as anything.’
‘It can indeed. And now I am being called to brave it for a second time I have to tell you that I am feeling very cowardly. I wish you were coming on the journey to alleviate the tediousness. You have no idea how long a journey can be when everyone else is nowhere to be seen. Why, I didn’t even have anyone to play cards with, or share a drink with. I spent the outward journey playing patience in my cabin and walking the deck like some poor spinster sent to America by her family to become a housekeeper!’ He stopped, and began again, his voice light and persuasive. ‘Miss Nesbitt, I have no wish to be forward, but I was wondering if you have the slightest curiosity as to why I should wish to see you again, after our dances together?’
Emmaline stared ahead of her. It was strange to be asked such a direct question, particularly since she had been brought up to consider direct questions discourteous. More than that, to answer a direct question from a gentleman, and a foreign gentleman at that, was not at all the thing. She frowned, still looking anywhere except at Mr Aubrey.
‘I am sure you have your reasons, Mr Aubrey,’ she finally replied with a nod, walking on one pace ahead of him, ‘but as to what they might be, well, I am afraid I cannot guess. Yet I do realise that you must have your reasons.’
‘Indeed I do have my reasons, as you call them, Miss Nesbitt, and they are fine ones, too, the most potent of them being a wish that I might see you once more, before setting sail. You yourself must be glad to see again someone who is so entranced with you, surely?’
‘I see.’ Emmaline could not help glancing quickly at him in order to gauge what his expression might be, and whether or not he was smiling, which he was.
‘I wished most sincerely to see you again,’ he repeated.
‘That is very kind of you, Mr Aubrey, and indeed I am glad to see you before you set sail. Truly, I am glad.’
Her clear answer seemed to satisfy him.
‘Thank you, Miss Nesbitt,’ he said. ‘You have made me more than a happy man, you have made me a gloriously happy man. But that is not the last of my reasons. I am here to tell you, now, if perhaps I might elaborate without causing you any—’
But further explanation was curtailed by the sound of a voice calling Emmaline. They turned to see one of the housemaids running as fast as she could in their direction from the house, skirts held to the side in one hand, while the other was on top of her head to prevent her cap from being blown away.
‘Miss Emmaline! Miss Emmaline! Miss Emmaline, you’re to come back to the house at once, please! You have to return to the house at once!’
‘Forgive me.’ Emmaline turned quickly to her companion. ‘I am needed up at the house – my mother, you know. She suffers dreadfully from her nerves. Please forgive me. I will be back.’
As she hurried back towards the house in the company of the maid, Emmaline learned, as expected, that her valetudinarian mother had suffered another of her famous setbacks and was calling for her eldest daughter.
Another setback, Emmaline thought. Mother always has a setback just when it matters. She always does. It is as if somehow, heaven only knows how, she knows that I am happy, and wishes to spoil it – as if she wants to punish me for Papa’s being such a philanderer.
Emmaline flung off her outdoor clothes, handing them to the maid, and hurried upstairs. She found her mother as always in her bedroom, her devoted if aged maid Jean in attendance. Jean was a woman who liked to make it clear that any and every setback her mistress suffered was entirely due to the indifference of her family, most particularly her eldest daughter.
Of course, as Emmaline and everyone else knew, it would inevitably turn out that there was nothing really wrong with Anthea Nesbitt, certainly nothing that poor Dr Hill could ascertain. But then, according to his patient, the good, kind and long-suffering doctor was useless, and when not useless, on holiday, and when not absent inept. No different from all the rest of the doctors, some of them specialists, that Onslow Nesbitt was always being asked to call in. Anthea Nesbitt had been ill ever since her marriage to Onslow,
and possibly always would be, the reason being something to which no one in the household would ever dare to refer, although everyone knew that the faithful Jean guarded it jealously, administering the precious laudanum drops when she imagined no one else was around.
Mrs Nesbitt was not in fact in bed when Emmaline hurried into her room, but standing at the window overlooking the parkland. Emmaline realised immediately that her mother must have seen her walking with Mr Aubrey.
She turned as her eldest daughter came in, and smiled. It was a smile that Emmaline had seen all too often before. It was a smile that said, ‘Ruined that for you, did I not?’
‘Mother—’
‘Emmaline, it is simply not suitable for you to be seen alone in the park with a gentleman, without your maid. Just not suitable.’
‘Mother—’
‘No, Emmaline – no. You may be desperate, we may all be desperate for you, but that is one way to become worse than an old maid. That is a way to get yourself a reputation.’
Emmaline’s heart sank. She had left Mr Aubrey in such a hurry. He would surely not wait around for her. He would leave for England, and she would never see him again.
Chapter Two
THE ATLANTIC OCEAN was rougher than it had been in an age, according to all the experienced passengers, with winds so strong and seas so high that on the first day out from New York grab lines were put up in all the public rooms and the captain found himself forced to consider returning to the safety of the Hudson river rather than risk the lives of his passengers by continuing his journey.
By midday the gale had died down a little, sufficient for the captain to keep his ship headed east, but the momentary lull was followed by a full-scale blizzard that lasted all night and the following morning, coating the ship’s decks with nearly a foot of snow, and keeping the seas rough enough for the next forty-eight hours to cause the great liner to pitch, roll, toss and shudder as violently as any of the crew could recall. Yet the seasoned captain stuck to his guns and continued on his course, his only concession being to change shipping lanes to find better waters before continuing to plough on through the still tempestuous seas.
Emmaline had never before left her home state of Massachusetts, her greatest distance of travel having been the hundred or so miles from where her family lived, on the edge of a small but prosperous town, to the great city of Boston. Now, however, she found herself crossing one of the largest oceans in the world on one of the greatest steamships in the world, RMS Etruria, the latest holder of the Blue Riband for the fastest Atlantic crossing, heading towards a country which her father had told her was smaller than most American states. Moreover, she was travelling alone, without even a maid, since none could be engaged in such a short space of time. Instead of a maid it had been suggested that Charity, the eldest of her younger sisters, should make the journey as her companion, but this only posed the problem of what was to be done with the girl on the return journey, since Charity too would be without a maid, and was two years younger than Emmaline. As a compromise it was decided to find a chaperon from the passenger manifest with the help of a reliable contact in the shipping offices, someone personally known to the family. Finally, a middle-aged New York widow was approached, and discovered to be only too happy to agree to act in loco parentis in return for joining Emmaline in a first-class cabin.
In the event her services were hardly needed, since due to the violence of the crossing Emmaline spent most of her time in her cabin suffering from what her chaperon politely referred to as mal de mer, emerging for the first time only on the final day of the crossing when the sea subsided to a steady swell, allowing the great liner to regain its pomp and splendour and to steam all but undisturbed round the south coast of Ireland and on to Southampton, where she was due to dock mid-morning on the tide, the only time the waters of the port were able to accommodate such a vast ocean-going liner, and hardly more than seven days after the liner had been put astern and slowly edged out into the Hudson river by the cream of the shipping company’s tug boats.
‘As you know, my dear,’ Mrs Winfield said to her charge as they sat in the train waiting for it to begin the journey to London, ‘I am to accompany you only as far as the capital, where, as I understand it, you are to be met and escorted to your final resting place – I mean destination.’
‘I sincerely hope that Bamford in Somerset is not going to be quite that, Mrs Winfield,’ Emmaline smiled in return, happy to be on terra firma and not the violent, storm-tossed sea.
‘Oh, I see!’ Mrs Winfield laughed, putting one laced glove to her mouth. ‘No, of course not. I meant the place that is to be your new home. Tell me, is it really so, what you told me over breakfast this morning? That you have only met this gallant gentleman once?’
‘Twice, actually, Mrs Winfield. And yes, it does seem most unusual, I must agree.’
‘I am not being critical, my dear,’ her companion replied. ‘Just somewhat … somewhat wondrous. Such things I thought only happened in novels – yet here we are, in real life, with such a story being shown to be true. Pretty American miss meets handsome Englishman at a dance – is quite swept off her feet – and the next thing she knows she is travelling to England to be wed! My – that such a thing should be true.’
‘Yes, I know,’ Emmaline agreed, not knowing quite what else to say. Instead, she looked out of the train window at the last of the passengers hurrying from the great liner sheds on the docks to board the waiting train, which from the sound of it was now working up a preparatory head of steam. ‘It is all rather … rather unusual, I suppose.’
‘I think it is deeply romantic,’ Mrs Winfield sighed. ‘My own fatal collision, as the Greeks so like to call the meeting of two souls, was considerably more mundane. We were both schoolteachers, in a small town near Conway, New Hampshire.’
‘I am not very familiar with New Hampshire, Mrs Winfield.’
‘No matter. I meant it only as a reference. But as I was saying, we both taught at the same school in a very small community, so small in fact that finally I was the only eligible young woman of suitable age really, and that was that.’
‘I feel sure there is quite another side to the story. He had probably loved you for a very long time before he declared himself.’
‘I do so wish,’ Mrs Winfield sighed. ‘But alas, until the day he died I would swear my husband did not even know the colour of my eyes.’
Mrs Winfield fell to silence, her hands clasped on her lap as she too turned to look out of her window, seeing not the scurry and hustle of the passengers but rather the day just over a year ago when she had buried her late husband, a white-bearded mathematician twenty-six years her senior.
‘So,’ she said, coming out of her reverie as the guard blew a shrill whistle. ‘Off we go then, my dear, I to my valetudinarian sister in Greenwich, London, and you to your wonderful romance. And in case I fail to do so in the hustle and bustle of our arrival, I do wish you the very best luck in the world, and hope that you will enjoy a marriage as happy as the dreams from which it is so obviously spun.’
With the noise of the train’s departure – the clanking of the coach couplings, the sudden vigorous exhalations of steam, the shouts of the officials, the slamming of the doors and yet more shrill whistling – conversation understandably ceased for a while, allowing Emmaline to sink into her own thoughts. The speed of events back home, the exhausting preparations for her sudden departure from the family, and finally the initial excitement and subsequent woes of her first sea journey, had left her little time for reflection until now.
It had, as everyone kept saying, been just like a dream – the ball, held on her twenty-fifth birthday, her fateful meeting with the handsome and debonair Julius Aubrey, his waiting for her after their walk in the park to tell her that she would be hearing from him as soon as he reached England; and six weeks later the extraordinary summons to her father’s study, where she had been informed that Mr Aubrey had requested her hand in marriage and her father
had been only too pleased to give his consent.
Emmaline had found herself briefly wondering why her father should be so pleased to give his consent when she herself had not even been consulted, but since her own feelings for Julius Aubrey were already apparent to her, and she was really very frightened of her powerful and influential father, she had not dared pose the question. Besides, the more she thought about the prospect of marrying a man of such elegance and urbanity, so blessed with good looks, the more absurd it seemed to her to question the proposal. After all, as everyone, most of all herself, was all too aware, Emmaline might be clever, but she was certainly no beauty. She might have a fine pair of green eyes and a slim figure, she might have a pretty enough mouth and a nose that was not over-large, but the whole put together was not so much beautiful as pleasing. She considered that her only real asset was her thick, dark brown hair, over which she took much trouble, brushing it and dressing it with as much care as the grooms in her father’s stables bestowed on the Nesbitt horses.
Her unremarkable appearance was something that Emmaline had come to accept, telling herself, as she grew to maturity, that in place of looks she would just have to concentrate on cultivating beauty of character. Her sisters, on the other hand, were all beauties, and they knew it. The three younger Nesbitt sisters had only to look in the mirror to know that God had favoured them, because they were all as pretty as flowers.
‘I cannot believe he really wants to marry you!’ her second sister, Ambrosia, had kept saying, weeks earlier, as she followed Emmaline around their bedroom. ‘I am sure it is some sort of practical joke that will end with you falling on your face. You will reach England and there will be no husband-to-be, no handsome Mr Aubrey, only an old man with nasty ways come to meet you in his place. After all, no one has ever been to his house, no one here knows him, he is not an American—’
The Land of Summer Page 2