The Governor's House

by J. H. Fletcher

  He smiled modestly. ‘Think nothing of it.’

  While his hand resumed its play.

  Very much on her best behaviour, Catherine met the formidable Lady Duffield two days later. Without ever knowing how she managed it, she succeeded in winning over the old lady by showing interest in her stories of life in the colony’s earliest days.

  ‘Conditions were very hard,’ Lady Harriet said. ‘You young people don’t know how lucky you are. There were cannibals. Alexander Pearce was a cannibal. They hanged him in twenty-four. Disease, too: they said the water was bad but it never affected me. Mary Lyneham died of it, you know. The Hon Mary Lyneham. I daresay you remember her?’

  ‘No,’ Catherine said.

  ‘Probably before your time. How old are you, child?’

  ‘Twenty-five.’

  But Lady Harriet’s mind had moved on. ‘I met the king once, you know. King William that was. The one before that girl they’ve got on the throne now.’ She cackled unexpectedly, a harsh sound that made Catherine jump. ‘He was a fine man, oh yes.’ Catherine could not be sure but thought the old lady might have licked her lips, which were chapped and creased with age but full and plump with memories. Then Lady Harriet looked at her knowingly and Catherine thought with astonishment, Why, she knows what this is all about. It’s about money and not having to sacrifice her pride. She’s known all along.

  ‘I shall arrange a tea party,’ Lady Harriet said. ‘I shall invite Lady Black. I know she will love to meet you.’

  ‘Lady Black?’

  ‘That is right, my dear. The governor’s wife.’

  FIFTY

  In February, the evening of a summer’s day of stifling heat, Catherine Haggard and Mungo Jackson attended a reception at the Governor’s House.

  When she had first received the invitation Catherine had not believed it. ‘There’s been a mistake.’

  ‘No mistake,’ Mungo said. He had received one too.

  ‘I can’t believe it.’

  ‘You should. For years you’ve wanted society to accept you. Now – thanks to Lady Duffield – it has.’

  ‘Thanks to Mr Jackson, more like.’

  ‘As you please. Either way, I have arranged an appointment for you tomorrow morning with Miss Jillibel Atkins.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘To measure you for the dress you will need for the reception.’

  ‘She doesn’t need to measure me. I’m no different from the last time she did it.’

  ‘But you still have to choose the style and materials.’

  She remembered how Dr Morgan had tried to take over. ‘Don’t you want to do it?’

  ‘Heaven forbid. I shall keep well away.’

  ‘I won’t know what to choose.’

  ‘I am sure Miss Atkins will advise you.’

  ‘Why have you done this for me? Thanks to you, I am capable of paying for my own dresses nowadays.’

  ‘Of course you are. And I have no wish to interfere. But it would please me to give you a present of a welcome-into-society gown.’

  There was wonder on her face as she thought about it. ‘Is that what it will be?’

  ‘What else?’

  It was the day of the reception. They had received separate invitations but Mungo had thought there would be no harm in arriving together.

  ‘Then people will know we are together,’ Catherine said.

  ‘They know that already,’ Mungo said. ‘But can pretend they don’t: that makes all the difference.’

  He had ridden up from Jackson’s Landing that afternoon. Catherine was renting Aberystwyth from the doctor’s brother and it was still home to her and the three servants. They were due to set out in half an hour and Catherine, wearing her new dress – two-tiered skirts very full and embroidered with tiny roses, the bodice once again lower cut than Catherine thought decent, her hair dressed in two looped plaits and bound with pink ribbon – stood in the middle of the drawing room. She was destroyed by nervousness.

  ‘Do I really have to go?’

  ‘After all Miss Atkins’s hard work in producing that magnificent dress? Of course you have to go.’

  ‘I’m that nervous.’

  ‘My dear,’ Mungo said. ‘You’ve told me enough times it was your greatest ambition to see the inside of the Governor’s House. Now you’ll be doing it. I thought you would be wild with excitement.’

  ‘Oh I am, Mungo. I really am. Only there are times when I want to go and hide down that old well again.’

  ‘You’ll be fine.’

  She craned her neck to inspect her dress. ‘Do you really think it’s magnificent?’

  ‘Have you not heard the saying that beauty honours the dress? Anything you wear will look magnificent.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have said that when they brought us off the St Vincent.’

  ‘Was it worse than when those whalers dropped you at my jetty?’

  ‘Far worse.’

  ‘Then you must have looked terrible indeed. But we shall never know what I would have said, shall we?’

  ‘I know,’ Catherine said.

  She took refuge in the kitchen. Mrs Amos had told her more than once that she would never see the inside of the Governor’s House. Now it was a different story.

  Mr Moffatt and Mrs Amos were philosophical about the arrangement Cat had with Mungo Jackson. He had been born gentry, and by an extraordinary series of events she had become gentry also, and people like them had never been unduly concerned about the formalities of marriage, that institution of the middle classes.

  ‘If they fits together,’ Mrs Amos said, ‘I’m happy for the pair of them.’

  ‘Oh they fit together, Mrs A, I don’t think you need have anxiety on that score.’

  Now Mrs Amos found herself having to console the kitchen maid who had become her mistress.

  ‘I feel sick,’ Catherine said.

  The cook held out her arms. ‘Come here.’ The two women clung to each other, with tears. ‘You’ll be just fine, my darling,’ she said. ‘And me and Mr Moffatt will be thinking of you. And that proud too.’

  It made Catherine feel better, if not by much.

  Twenty minutes later Mungo handed her up into the carriage and they set out, her stomach turning cartwheels all the way. Cat Haggard, she thought. Convicted felon, not a letter to her name or shoes to her feet, now sitting in a carriage, rich and respected at least by some (she was still nervous about that), a guest of the governor and accompanied by the most eligible and dangerous bachelor in the colony, the son of an earl and the man she loved above all others. She smiled at Mungo, at the passing trees and river, at all the smiling day, but inside she was terrified. She was entangled in a dream from which, surely, she must soon wake to find herself once again in her serge dress in the women’s factory, or blacking Mrs Byfield’s grate, or having Mrs Byfield’s son put his hand up her dress… It was too much to hope that nothing would go wrong.

  Mungo felt her trembling and placed his hand on her thigh. ‘You’ll be fine.’

  ‘Of course I shall,’ Catherine said. ‘Will Lady Duffield be there?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ Mungo said. ‘These days she wouldn’t come out in the evening for anyone less than the queen.’

  Catherine felt more scared than ever; she had been hoping for some female support for her first venture into society. Mungo was wonderful, of course, but he was a man. You couldn’t expect him to understand her feelings.

  As the carriage drew to a halt at the entrance of the Governor’s House she remembered watching the guests arriving at the first reception the previous governor had given shortly after he moved into his new residence, the carriages rolling up the long drive. Now it was her turn. A liveried footman was waiting to hand her down. She smiled at him. ‘Thank you. Thank you very much.’

  ‘There is no need to thank him,’ Mungo said as they went in. ‘It’s his job.’

  ‘It’s only polite. I’ll never be Lady Frooty-Tooty, so don’t start hoping.’
/>   ‘Thank God for that,’ Mungo said.

  An impressive man greeted them just inside the entrance. Mungo spoke to him in a low voice. To Catherine’s amazement the man stood back and bellowed, ‘The Honourable Mungo Jackson and Miss Catherine Haggard.’

  They walked on.

  ‘Who was that?’ whispered Catherine.

  ‘The Master of Ceremonies. It’s his job to announce the guests as they arrive.’

  ‘My dear life,’ said Catherine, Somerset emerging as always in moments of stress, ‘I thought he was the governor.’

  He had certainly been a fine figure of a man. By contrast, the governor was less impressive but with Mungo Jackson at her side what did she need with impressive men?

  ‘We are honoured to receive you, Miss Haggard,’ the governor said. ‘I understand your little problem will soon be sorted out.’

  And gave her a winsome smile.

  My dear life, Catherine thought again. Little problem? Is that what he calls it?

  ‘I am glad to hear you say so, Your Excellency.’

  Otherwise we have wasted our money. But Mungo had assured her all would be well. He had also coached her in the right things to say but fortunately there was no need to say them as the governor had turned to his next guest.

  A waiter offered a glass of wine. She took it and threw it back, grabbing a second glass from his tray before he could move on. It followed the first. That was better.

  ‘There is a man I have to speak to,’ Mungo said. ‘Will you be all right by yourself for a minute?’

  She wasn’t at all sure of that but smiled at him bravely. ‘Of course.’

  He moved away through the crush of people. Catherine turned and saw Ruth Talbot in the same instant that Ruth Talbot saw her. A look of outrage before Mrs Talbot turned her back. It seemed she had not been informed of Catherine’s newly discovered respectability.

  A man she did not know approached her. He was tall and slim – a rapier to Mungo Jackson’s cutlass – but with a taut face that looked as though it had seen some weather in its time. She judged him to be about ten years older than she. He said his name was Roger Mortimer.

  He smiled. ‘Whether my family is descended from the original is unclear,’ he said. ‘But my father would like to believe it, which I daresay is why he gave me the name.’

  She had read about someone called Roger Mortimer and the affair with a queen of England hundreds of years earlier that had brought him to his death. Was that the Roger Mortimer he meant? Be careful how you answer him, she warned herself.

  ‘It would be interesting to know, wouldn’t it? Imagine if you found out Queen Isabella was your ancestor as well.’

  ‘I would say that is extremely unlikely. They had an affair, certainly, but there is no record of any children.’

  ‘It would be quite something, though, wouldn’t it? Didn’t they call her Isabella the Fair?’

  He smiled. ‘Also the She-Wolf of France, I believe.’

  ‘My goodness,’ Catherine said. ‘I can see how you might not want that in your family tree.’

  Get men talking about themselves, Mrs Amos had told her before the dinner party, you’ll be fine.

  ‘And what do you do in the colony, Mr Mortimer?’

  ‘I am private secretary to the governor,’ Roger Mortimer said.

  Catherine was suitably impressed. A grand job and a grand pedigree to go with it… Yet he wasn’t arrogant. Far from it; he seemed nice. And with a glint in his eye that hinted not only at a sense of humour but at the notion, as exciting as it was remarkable, that he did not find her totally unattractive, either.

  She wasn’t sure how you were supposed to address the private secretary to the governor, who might be descended from someone who had slept with a queen of England five hundred years back.

  ‘How do you do?’ she said. At least that was safe.

  ‘A pleasure to meet you,’ he said and gave her a formal bow.

  Another first in Catherine’s life. Not so long ago the idea of the governor’s secretary giving her any sort of bow would have seemed absurd. Nor had Mr Mortimer finished with his surprises.

  ‘And you, if I am not mistaken, are Miss Catherine Haggard.’

  She looked at him wide-eyed. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘The lady whose courage saved us from bankruptcy? Your name is on everybody’s lips, I assure you. Particularly after the way you recovered the silver from the pirates. Mr Jackson has told us all about it. Such gallantry from a lady is unheard of. And if I may say so profoundly gratifying.’

  Catherine couldn’t think what to say. What lies had Mungo been telling them? He might at least have warned me, she thought rebelliously.

  ‘But are you unescorted?’ Mr Mortimer was saying. ‘Surely you have not come here alone?’

  ‘I came with Mr Jackson.’ She had wondered whether she should call him the Honourable Mr Jackson since that was what he was, but since Mr Mortimer had not done so she thought it safer to follow his example. She saw that moving into society was likely to present more problems than she had anticipated.

  ‘And he has abandoned you?’ He smiled whimsically as he said it so she would know he was not serious, but he had said it all the same. In truth Catherine was not pleased with Mungo. He knew what a challenge this evening was to her and to leave her in the lurch like this was a cruel thing. She therefore welcomed Mr Mortimer’s attentions – not that she was about to say so. ‘There was someone he had to talk to. I am sure he will be back directly.’

  ‘In the meantime his loss is my gain. May I get you another drink?’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘A glass of canary? A cordial?’

  ‘Canary, I think.’ Wine would give her just the kick she needed.

  Roger snapped his fingers; a waiter came at once, with a tray. He took a glass and handed it to her ceremoniously.

  ‘Thank you.’

  They were surrounded by people jabbering to one another. Everyone seemed to know everyone else whereas she knew no one. She might have moved up from where she had been but was more than ever the outsider looking in. She did not mind. Time had already changed so much; in a little while, with Lady Duffield’s support, it would change that too. For the moment she was content within the circle of silence surrounding Roger Mortimer and herself and was grateful to him for keeping her company.

  ‘This is such a big house,’ she said. ‘I am sure I would get lost within minutes. It must take people a long time to find their way around.’

  ‘When I first arrived I was always getting lost but I am used to it now. I have rooms at the rear of the house, you see. Sir Harry likes me to be on the spot.’

  ‘So this is your home?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking.’

  Servants were bringing vast dishes of food and arranging them on tables at the side of the room: whole poached salmon and oysters and massive cuts of beef and pork and mutton and dressed chickens and plain chickens and pork pies and smoked hams and cabbages cooked in fat and…

  Once again Catherine remembered her Porlock days and how it had felt to go hungry. Many on this island still did. Mungo was trying to help them by stealing from the rich and giving it to the poor but she had already begun to wonder whether there might not be a better way.

  ‘So much to eat,’ she said. ‘And so many poor people with nothing. I wish more could be done to help them.’

  ‘You are right, of course,’ Roger Mortimer said. ‘But for the moment let us enjoy what we have.’

  They strolled towards the tables, already besieged by many of the guests, and Catherine noticed that he walked stiffly, swinging his leg. Mortimer nodded to the servants standing behind the table, carving knives in hand.

  ‘What is your fancy, Miss Haggard?’

  A voice spoke behind their backs.

  ‘My fancy is to help Miss Haggard to whatever food she may fancy.’

  Mungo Jackson was back.

  Catherine turned. Displeased with him for lea
ving her so long, she also did not like the way he was speaking now. She gave him her most gracious smile.

  ‘I was beginning to think you’d abandoned me, my dear. Fortunately Mr Mortimer took pity on me.’

  ‘I am sure I am very grateful to Mr Mortimer.’

  The two men looked at each other. Catherine saw they did not like each other at all but after Mr Mortimer’s kindness she was not prepared to see him pushed aside. ‘I am most grateful, Mr Mor timer. I trust we shall see more of you in future.’

  ‘It will be my pleasure, ma’am.’

  A stiff bow; he was gone.

  ‘I wonder you didn’t kiss him while you were about it,’ Mungo said.

  She saw that he was jealous and thought it gave her a certain advantage. ‘He kept me company while you were busy. That was all.’

  ‘I turn my back for five minutes –’

  ‘Maybe you think I should have stood in a corner and waited until you chose to come back? Or given a hand serving the drinks, maybe? I know nobody here. Nobody! The first time I’ve been in society and you abandon me as soon as we are through the door. I was grateful to Mr Mortimer for keeping me company. He was a perfect gentleman. Then you come back growling like a bear…’

  ‘Perhaps you prefer the company of a gentleman to a bear?’

  It was their first quarrel but he had hurt her feelings and she saw no reason to apologise. ‘Are you hungry?’ she said. ‘What food does a bear eat?’

  They took their plates to a spare table.

  ‘I hear the governor thinks highly of him,’ Mungo said.

  ‘Who?’ She knew very well whom he meant.

  ‘Mortimer. In years to come he might even become Sir Roger.’

  ‘That should matter to me?’

  ‘I thought you might like to know. Since you seem so taken with him.’

  She put her gloved hand on his arm. ‘I am not taken with him. He was being polite, that was all.’

  She picked at her salmon with little appetite. It was all so silly…

  He rubbed his hand across his face. ‘I am sorry,’ he said.

  ‘Oh my dear,’ she said. ‘You surely know how I feel for you. Mr Mortimer saw me alone and was kind enough to keep me company. He was nice and I was grateful to him but that was all it was.’