‘A feminine palace will not do for Lady Chelmsford,' Aldrich entered the discussion. 'Beauty, great beauty, wants a frame, a setting - not a rival beauty. Her palace must stand guardian over her, strong, serene, not sprawl like a courtesan.’
Annunciata threw Aldrich a look of amusement and interest and sympathy to which he replied with a slight bow and a dark glance of enquiry. Vanbrugh picked up the argument again, and the talk went on, ebbing and flowing like the candle-shadows, while the watchful servants came and went with wine and biscuits, tended the fires, trimmed the candles. At length they all retired again to the drawing-room, with the decision made that they would draw up their rival designs for the Countess's approval, one from Aldrich and Wren, one from Vanbrugh, Hawksmoor and Ballincrea. In either case, Henry Wise would lay out the gardens for her. The conversation turned to other matters, the war, Court gossip, such as it was, politics, horse-racing. At last Wren called for his coach and left, offering transport to Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor, and Wise called for a link-boy and walked across the park. Clovis, claiming to be, and looking, dead-tired, retired to bed, and Arthur, feeling de trop, made his bow too. As he left, he looked back, and saw the Countess and Aldrich standing by the fireside, both leaning on the chimney wall with one foot on the fender like mirror-images of each other. He closed the door and went to bed, his head whirling with new ideas. He had the feeling that something enormously important had happened to him that night, but he could not yet tell what it was.
*
Matters proceeded smoothly. Clovis rose from his bed the following day determined to go through with the giving away of his ward, and the lawyers were called in to draw up the marriage settlements. Annunciata, as promised, gave her Kendal property to Arthur and to his heirs got lawfully upon the body of Mary Celia Ailesbury. The contract was drawn up: the whole of Clover's property passed to Arthur as her dowry; an annual income from Arthur's newly-acquired property was settled on her in return; the contract was signed by Arthur, and by Clovis on Clover's behalf, and the thing was done.
Clovis then proposed to go back to Morland Place to acquaint Clover with her fate and to prepare for the wedding, which he said might as well take place in March since there was nothing to wait for. Arthur left at the same time for the Lake country to inspect his new property and determine whether there was a house suitable for the receiving of his bride, and Annunciata continued to pore over the plans for the new house. She would make her first visit to Morland Place for the wedding, and remain in Yorkshire for the rest of the spring and summer to see the building started — if she could get her architects to agree on something by the beginning of March.
Clovis wrote from Morland Place a week or so later to say that there was a very small hitch, in that India was suffering from the strain and worry of running the great household and had accepted Matt's advice to go away for a month. She was to stay at Emblehope for a complete rest, and the wedding would have to be postponed until she returned in April. Annunciata wrote back that April was by far a better month for a wedding, and that Wren and Vanbrugh were slowly finding a compromise for her house, and that Henry Aldrich had invited her to go and stay in Oxford for a week or two, and that she would be glad for the change to accept his invitation and would travel on to Morland Place from there.
‘I am sure he has an unspoken reason for asking me,' she added. 'He must have seen my name on the list of subscribers for Dean Fell's additions to the buildings, and since he will soon be collecting subscriptions for his own proposed improvements, he will no doubt want to make sure of my sympathy.’
But Chloris, as she packed Annunciata's trunks, shook her head doubtfully. Dean Aldrich was a charming and gentle man, she thought, but she had hoped that in the years since Martin's death, the Countess had learned better sense than to become involved with charming and gentle men. There was no doubt that the Countess was looking younger and happier since that dinner party, and that she had taken to singing in her bath, something she had not done for fifteen years.
*
India came back from Emblehope in radiant good health, and greeted Matt with such excitement and affection that he knew at once that his endurance of her absence was rewarded.
‘You enjoyed yourself then, my dearest?' he asked her wistfully. India put his hand to her lips and looked at him with shining eyes.
‘Enjoyed myself? Well, as much as I could enjoy myself, away from you. I missed you so terribly, dear husband, but I am feeling so much more rested and strong. I'm sure it was worth the loneliness. And I have had long talks with your aunt Sabine and all the ladies of her acquaintance about the wedding and the Countess's visit. You can't imagine how terrified I have been, husband, thinking of such an eminent visitor, and wondering what one was to do about it. But I have collected good advice, and some interesting receipts, and I think now I shall be able to do you credit.’
And to prove how well she was feeling, she plunged herself into a frenzy of preparation which flattened everyone in the house like the passing of a great wind. Her energy was boundless, for as well as preparing the house and the food, she had endless sessions with dressmakers, both on her own behalf and Clover's, harried the gardeners from corner to corner over the floral decorations and fresh fruit and vegetables, arranged for all manner of entertainers and singers to come up to the house to be interviewed by Matt with a view to providing the Countess with the kind of entertainment she would have come to expect in her stratum of society, and still had the time to go riding with Matt by day, and make passionate love to him by night. Matt became accustomed to the bemused expressions on everyone's faces, and knew that his own was just as bemused, if tempered by rapture. The only person who was not swept up by India's energy was Clover, who seemed miserable and withdrawn, and managed to disappear for the greater part of every day. When she was cornered and driven into the great bedchamber for a fitting of her wedding clothes, she went with no enthusiasm, and India had to provide for her the excitement she felt a bride ought to feel.
‘Lord Ballincrea - such a distinguished young man -such a fine old title - so handsome - such a wonderful dress - really you are the luckiest of girls!' she would cry, and construe Clover's silence as assent.
On the day before the Countess's arrival, the house was finally ready, and everyone sank into grateful immobility, like autumn leaves released by the wind to settle to earth again. After a few hours in the evening of sitting in silence, everyone drifted off to bed early. Clovis sat up alone in the steward's room, pretending to do some work and in fact merely staring into the fire, too weary even to think. He went through into the chapel for half an hour to make his devotions and to try to bring himself to a more peaceful state of mind, so that he would sleep, and when he returned he saw the steward's room door open, and went in to find Clover, with a wrapper over her night clothes, sitting in his chair, waiting for him.
The sight of her, looking just as she always had done, round childish face and golden head, bent over his desk as if she were going to write out his purchases for him - the familiar sight of her moved him almost to tears. She looked up as he appeared in the doorway, and for a moment they simply stared at each other; then he saw her lip begin to tremble, and he crossed the room in a swift stride to gather her in his arms, to sit in his own chair and draw her on to his lap as he had done so many times since she was a little, little girl. She put her arms round his neck and rested her face on his shoulder, and for a long time they sat in silence.
At last he pulled his handkerchief out of his sleeve and pushed it into her hand, and she straightened up and blew her nose and wiped her eyes carefully, and then rested her damp hot cheek against his and stared with him into the dying fire.
‘It won't be so bad, you know,' Clovis said after a while. ‘You will find you enjoy having a household to run. You'll have your own servants and horses and you will be able to have anything you like to eat, and go visiting your friends in a fine carriage.’
She didn't answer, and he knew tha
t was not it. It was having to marry Arthur - but what could he say to that? He had known women terrified of being married who had enjoyed it afterwards. Others had thought of it with distaste and come to accept it, though liking it no better. What could he say? In any case, there was nothing to be done about it. Blunderingly, he continued reassuring her.
‘You'll have children, of course, and that will be nice -'
‘Nice?' she said in what sounded like astonishment.
‘And once you have an heir, or perhaps two, you need not -' Impossible to go on. He held her tighter, and she turned her face to kiss his cheek. His little girl, his little, golden, grey-eyed girl.
Her lips pressed again and again to his cheek, as if she did not know how to leave off; she said, between kisses, with desperate passion, 'Oh, I wish I could marry you!’
He wished it too, but he said, 'That is how children talk, Clover; a child wants to marry her father -'
‘I love you,' she said with a child's clear simplicity. 'All I want is to be able to stay with you. Why can't I?’
It was not a question to which she expected any answer: it was the more heart-breaking because he knew she accepted the unkind fate as a child accepts the edicts of adults, not liking them, but not questioning them. In the end he could only rise up and walk upstairs with her in silence, and kiss her goodnight at the door to her room. He saw her in, and then went away to his own narrow bed, his shoulders stooped with more weariness than one day's.
*
It was a true April day when Annunciata came back at last to Morland Place; a high blue sky, filled with billowy white clouds with half-hidden dark edges; a day of hypocritical sunshine and sudden, capricious rain. She came by coach, for she had not yet a riding horse on which she would care to go two hundred miles, and despite the rain showers she kept the window down all the way so that her view was unimpeded. She knew the moment when she came on to Morland land; she would have known it, she felt, if her eyes had been closed. The very grass seemed to smell different; the bird calls and the sound of the running brooks, spring-swollen, seemed interspersed with the whispering voices of ghosts, human and animal, the ghosts of her childhood and young womanhood. Chloris and Birch and Dorcas sat in sympathetic silence, their eyes turned tactfully away. Annunciata longed to speak, or to sing, or to shout, to release the pressure inside her head, but the swelling silence was too great. She was dumb with feeling too much, remembering too much.
It looked the same, but different. The trees had all grown, yet many things seemed smaller than she remembered. The track was narrower and rougher, but it seemed further from the road to the house than her memory had told her.
When they were still out of sight of the house the coach bumped to a halt, and Chloris, leaning out of the window, said quietly, 'Someone has come to meet you, my lady. I'd say it was Master Matt. I'd know him anywhere.’
Annunciata nodded, and Chloris reached up to tap on the coach roof, and in a moment Daniel had opened the door and put down the step, and Gifford was there to hand her out on to the grass. The sunlight seemed dazzling after the coach, the air smelled too bright, and there a little way off was a manservant holding a handsome black colt with one white star - unmistakably a Morland horse, she thought, and her Morland heart craved such a horse for herself - and coming towards her was her grandson James Matthias - Martin's son.
She had prepared herself for the meeting, but found herself quite unprepared in the face of his reality. He was taller than Martin had been - Clovis had said he had taken to growing again - aid about two inches taller than herself. He had swept off his hat; he wore no wig, and she saw at once that the soft dark curls to his shoulders looked and would feel just like Martin's. He bowed low, and straightened up, and she had to force her fingers to uncurl from each other so that she could extend her hand to him. He came close and took it, and bowed over it, with the nicely adjusted manners Father St Maur would have taught him - courtly, but not flamboyant.
He was Martin's child; there was nothing, she saw with triumph, of Arabella in him, except perhaps for that extra height. Everything of his face was Martin's, except for the eyes, and they, though dark blue as Martin's had been, were like her own, like her own father's. Yes, there was Rupert's blood in this boy. He smiled a welcome at her and said something - she was too distracted to understand what - and continued to survey her with a frank and open satisfaction.
That was the puzzling thing - the expression of the eyes. There was in them a childlike innocence that did not go well with his manly size and bearing. Martin's eyes had been filled with humour, wisdom, and wit from the time he was fourteen. At fifteen he had taken over his father's business and run it with quiet power and discretion. But James Matthias was almost nineteen and twice-over a father, as well as Master of Morland Place, and yet his eyes were the eyes of a child.
The right things were said, Annunciata got back into her carriage, and they set off again, with James Matthias riding alongside on his handsome black gelding. Annunciata puzzled a little, and then dismissed it, with the thought that whatever it was, it did at least curb the power that Martin's son might have had to hurt her.
The servants were all lined up in the great hall to receive the Countess. Many of them were known to her, some old friends who had said goodbye to her fourteen years ago, others were new, strange faces with familiar names, the children of former servants and villagers. Clovis was there, and Arthur, and a pale, mouse-fair youth whom Annunciata had no difficulty in recognizing as Caroline's second son John Rathkeale. Father St Maur stood nearby, his eyes swimming with tears he did not bother to try to hide, and behind him nursery maids - could that really be little Flora? - holding the two lace-petticoated babies.
But those things could hardly be noticed, for the centre stage was taken by the three women, an older woman in a low widow's cap, evidently Mrs Neville - the 'pale, wispy thing' of Annunciata's memory - and Clover, looking suspiciously red-eyed, and the new mistress of Morland Place. Annunciata could not help staring. India was the epitome of fashion: her high-heeled shoes, whose rosetted toes peeped out from under her petticoat, made her taller than all the women and most of the men present; her petticoat was a mass of frills, as was the bodice of her over-gown, whose skirt was drawn back and tucked up with a cascade of ribbons; her sleeves drooped lace halfway to the floor; she had three patches on her handsome, high-coloured face; whose expression was fixed in a smile of welcome; and her hair was frizzed on top of her forehead in front of a lace fontage three stories high, with trailing lappets that fell to her waist, and a lace-and-ribbon decked cap behind with a huge butterfly bow. Such was India's self-confidence that for a moment as she bustled forward, Annunciata felt herself ridiculously under-dressed, and wanted to shrink under the shadow of the trembling lace tower that bore down on her.
‘My dear Lady Chelmsford,' India cried, 'do let me welcome you to Morland Place - and indeed, to England, where you have been much missed all these years, let me assure you!’
The impertinence of this young woman in welcoming her, not only to the house which she herself had ruled for so many years, but to her own native land, quite took Annunciata's breath away, and she had taken the offered hand automatically under the influence of the fulsome smile before she knew what she was doing.
‘You must look upon this house as your own, and stay here for just as long as you like. I promise you we shall be more than delighted to have you here. Indeed, we are quite hoping you will make it your home,' she added with a gay laugh and a glance at her husband. Annunciata, about to remark that it was her home, was arrested by the glance and the reception it received from Matt, who was watching his wife with an expression of almost lunatic adoration. So that was it! she thought. That was what kept this man a child. It was a situation that would bear watching, though she knew nothing against this young woman, by report or observation, except for self-conceit.
Her words were waited for in silence, and she said, ‘Thank you, mistress Morland. I am g
lad to be home.' It was enough for the moment, set loose another flood of words from the young woman, allowed Annunciata time to look about her. In this hall she had received guests, Ralph at her side, with his great hounds, Bran and Fern. Dogs ought to have longer lives, she thought painfully. Her own Fand had been one of Fern's progeny. Once she had rebuked her daughter Arabella with the words, 'While I live, I will be mistress of Morland Place.' Oh, how are the mighty fallen, she thought wryly. But she was being introduced to various people who deserved her attention, while the new mistress chattered on.
‘We have prepared the west bedroom for your ladyship, as some of the servants remembered that was the one you used to like when you were here - and now, here is Father St Maur, my sons' tutor, whom I am sure you remember.’
Now she simply had to say something. 'Father St Maur has been my chaplain, and tutor to my sons and grandsons, madam, since long before you were born.' No ceremony with her priest: his arms were round her like a father's loving embrace, and she rested her head against his shoulder for a moment, aware that his arms were trembling and that it was not just emotion that made them do so - it was age, too.
‘I'm sure your ladyship would like to go to your room at once,' India was saying, no whit abashed by the snub, 'and then we shall have tea in the long saloon. Shall I have hot water sent up to your ladyship?’
In the west bedroom, alone with Chloris, Birch and Dorcas having remained below to give direction to the menservants about the luggage, Annunciata said, 'Is that creature really mistress of Morland Place? When I think of myself, of Mary Esther before me - even Mary Moubray - - Chloris, can that deplorable young woman really have taken my place?'
‘No, madam,' Chloris said easily. 'She may be the master's wife, but she cannot take your place as mistress.’
Annunciata looked gloomy. 'I'm afraid in the modern climate of things, it may come to the same. Oh dear, I shan't like staying here. The sooner Shawes is rebuilt the better - but then she'll be my neighbour, and will be forever calling on me.’
The Chevalier Page 17