Dynasty 8: The Maiden: The Maiden (The Morland Dynasty)

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  It shook him out of his reverie, and he took a quick step towards her and put his arms round her, but she held herself stiffly, not yielding to him.

  ‘Sorry? Oh Aliena, it does not matter that we cannot marry. We can still be everything to each other. I love you, and we can—’

  She broke from him almost roughly.

  ‘No, Jemmy. It is impossible. You must put all this from your mind. You will marry Lady Mary, and lead a normal life, and be happy. To do what you suggest would be to torture both of us needlessly.’

  ‘I will not marry her,’ he said. She fixed him with a resolute eye.

  ‘You must. You shall – yes, and with a good heart, or you will be laying up sorrow for us all.’

  He met her stare obstinately for a moment, but then she saw his shoulders sink in a sigh, and he held out his hands to her.

  ‘Oh, Aliena,’ he said. She gave him her hands, and he looked down searchingly into her face, no longer a boy and a suppliant, but a man now, and a lover. ‘Is that what you want?’

  ‘It is what I want,’ she said steadily. ‘Jemmy, you must go now. I cannot bear any more.’

  ‘Very well. I will go, and I will not speak of this again. But before I do, please tell me, just once, that you love me.’

  ‘To what purpose?’ she said helplessly, but he held her gaze until at last she said quietly, ‘Yes, I do love you. You were right about that.’

  His eyes flickered closed for a moment, and then he lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it, and left her without another word. Long after he had gone, she stood there, with the print of his lips still on her hands. In that simple homage had been all his life and devotion.

  When she reached her mother’s room, she found the Countess alone, sitting before her looking-glass brushing her hair. Aliena met her eyes in the mirror and looked away again, and took the brush from her hand.

  ‘What is it?’ Annunciata asked. ‘You look pale.’

  ‘Jemmy. He had just heard of the proposed match with Lady Mary,’ Aliena said diffidently. ‘He did not like it.’

  Annunciata shrugged – his opinion was nothing to the point – but then seeing how upset her daughter was she bit back the retort she had been about to make and waited.

  At last, still looking down, Aliena said, ‘He asked me to marry him.’

  ‘Poor young man,’ Annunciata said carefully. ‘I had observed how he felt about you, but I thought it was a young man’s fancy, and would come to nothing.’

  ‘I told him why we could not marry,’ Aliena said abruptly. ‘I told him about my father.’

  Annunciata frowned. ‘Was that necessary?’

  ‘He would take no other argument.’

  ‘Could you not have told him that you did not care for him?’

  ‘He would not have believed it,’ Aliena said. Now she looked up and met her mother’s eyes again, and reading the message in them, Annunciata groped for and captured her daughter’s hand, and brought it to her cheek.

  ‘Oh my darling, I’m so sorry,’ she said. Aliena tried to smile.

  ‘I don’t blame you, mother. And if I ever had blamed you before, how could I do so now, knowing what you must have felt? The difference in age—’

  ‘It never seemed to matter,’ Annunciata said, and her dark eyes were distant as she looked deep into the past, beyond the grave, to the bright place where things that had been were still. ‘Nothing seemed to matter, except that we should be together. But there were consequences which neither of us could have forseen.’

  ‘Mother, I shall have to go away,’ Aliena said abruptly. Annunciata’s eyes filled with pain.

  ‘Away?’

  ‘Right away. Abroad.’

  At last Annunciata nodded, accepting the necessity. ‘We will all go. We’ll go together.’

  Aliena knew what it had cost her mother to make the offer, and she shook her head and said gently, ‘No, mother. I was born here, but I have lived all my life in France, and to me it would not be exile. But for you—’ Exile, the word which for Annunciata had spelled living death. ‘I am not like you. My pleasures in the world are many, but they are not binding, and I have nothing more to hope for. I shall go to France and rater a convent.’

  ‘A convent!’

  Aliena almost smiled at the shock in her mother’s voice. ‘It is what my heart longs for. I would not do it in a spirit of self-sacrifice. A little of me has always been homesick for Chaillot.’

  ‘And Marie-Louise?’

  ‘I should like to leave her here with you, to be brought up with her inheritance.’ There was a silence, and to ease it with movement, Aliena took up the brush and began to brush her mother’s hair, curling its harsh heaviness round her fingers. Her own hair was soft and fine, her father’s hair, she had been told. She wished she had known him. His influence came to her daily, here in Yorkshire. It was one of the reasons she wanted to leave, one of the reasons she could not ask her mother to leave.

  ‘Mother, what you did—’ she said hesitantly. Annunciata looked up. ‘What you did – tangled the thread. Someone must untie it.’

  ‘But why must it be you?’ Annunciata asked bitterly.

  ‘Because I can do it,’ Aliena said simply. She put down the brush, and laid her fingertips against her mother’s hair, wanting to comfort her somehow. ‘Let it end with me. Let my daughter grow up safe from it.’

  Annunciata stood up and turned to face her.

  ‘I love you so much,’ she said. ‘You look so like him. I wanted you, of all my children, to have everything, to be happy. Perhaps that is the greatest vanity of all, to think we can give our children anything.’

  She moved away to hide her face, and after a moment said briskly, without turning round, ‘You must do what is in you to do. But not yet. There will be much to arrange. And perhaps,’ her voice faltered, ‘it will turn out not to be necessary after all.’

  ‘Oh mother,’ said Aliena affectionately; and then Annunciata turned round, and Aliena ran to her, into her arms, and Annunciata held her close, one arm round her shoulders and one hand in her soft dark hair, as if they were lovers, and not mother and daughter.

  It was almost three o’clock when Jemmy walked up the stairs to his room to dress. He had deliberately left it as late as possible to avoid having to meet anyone in the hall or on the stairs, and had almost been put to the indignity of being searched for, for when he came into the great hall Clement was hovering looking anxious, and at once disappeared in the direction of the kitchen, no doubt to report that all was well after all.

  The hall was filled with flowers, and the niches on the stairs bore vases crowded with daffodils and sprays of young yellow-green beech leaves. That was partly because it was Easter, but mostly because there were house-guests: Lord Newcastle and his half-sister had come to visit, on their way north for the recess, so that Jemmy and his future bride could meet. There was to be a grand dinner, which had been put back to four o’clock, proof enough of the importance of the occasion, and Clement had borrowed the Countess’s cook, or chef de cuisine, as he liked to be called, Monsieur Barry, to help prepare the feast. Jemmy had been hiding at the stables all morning, where Davey had told him of the ructions the volatile Frenchman had caused in the kitchen. He had argued with the Morland Place cook, Jacob, over the proper way to make oyster loaves, and when Jacob insisted that there should be a sprinkle of ground cinnamon added, Monsieur Barry had screamed ‘Nutmeg! Nutmeg!’ and begun pelting the unfortunate cook with nutmegs, following them up with the grater.

  ‘They calmed him down in the end, and left him alone in the pantry making a riband-jelly in the shape of a castle,’ Davey said.

  ‘Why in the pantry?’ Jemmy asked, leaning on Auster’s rump.

  ‘So that he could be alone,’ Davey chuckled. ‘But God help the first poor kitchen maid who has to go in to fetch something. The poor man is brooding over his desserts like a robbed hen. I should hate to be around when he starts spinning sugar for the clouds.’

 
Jemmy reached the top of the stairs and went quietly along the passage towards the bachelor wing where he had his temporary quarters, and was almost knocked down when the door of the first room was flung open and Robert flew out clutching a wig in his hand.

  ‘Pard? Is that you? Oh—’ He stopped with a disagreeable frown when he saw it was Jemmy. ‘I thought it was Pard creeping past, hoping not to be heard. Look at this wig! I told him to have it dressed and he hasn’t touched it. How can I dine with the Duke wearing a draggled thing like this? I’ll have him whipped when I find him. Do you know where he is?’

  ‘No,’ Jemmy said, looking at his brother with distaste. Robert’s was not, in any case, an attractive face, since he had the kind of pale, freckled, wide-pored skin that tended to spots and blackheads, and his uncleanly habits did nothing to help the situation. His hair was wiry and red, and he grew it in long sideburns and little tufty whiskers on his cheeks and chin as if to hide as much of his face as possible, but it only drew attention to his bad skin and his rather protuberant, wide-spaced teeth. He had pale, bulging eyes like overripe gooseberries, and sandy eyelashes that looked almost white, like an aged horse’s. Jemmy could have forgiven him all these things, as being his misfortune rather than his fault, if it had not been for his disagreeable expression, which Jemmy felt was a true indicator of his disagreeable personality.

  ‘Oh, he’ll be skulking about in Edmund’s room, I warrant you!’ Robert went on. ‘What the devil does our father mean by making Edmund and me share a servant? It’s intolerable. I tell you, we are the laughing-stock of Christ Church. You cannot conceive how ludicrous and unpleasant it is.’ And then seeing the expression on Jemmy’s face he added, ‘Or perhaps you can. Perhaps you make good use of being the only one at home, and having father’s ear to yourself. I suppose one will never know what poison you drop into it, day by day. And Edmund is always encouraging Pard to skulk off, and slight me, and do his clothes before mine. Everyone is against me. Edmund wants me to appear at a disadvantage before the Duke, I know he does. He thinks he will get preferment and cut me out.’ Jemmy had watched his expression change from peevishness to self-pity, and knew what was coming next. ‘I am so plagued you cannot conceive. If I had not the patience of a saint—’

  Robert was intended for the Church, and one of the things Jemmy liked least about him was his self-satisfied piety and priggishness. He felt just for a moment the almost irresistible urge to hit Robert in the face and see what that could do to straighten his teeth.

  ‘I’ll find Pard and send him to you,’ Jemmy said tersely and walked on as fast as he could, and gained his own room like a haven. Jack was there waiting for him, his face as long as a Scottish mile, and the three little boys, Tom, Charles and Allen, sitting in a row on his bed like starlings, chattering.

  ‘Oh there you are, master,’ Jack intoned. ‘I made sure you met an accident, you did not come before. Well you will be late now, there’s no doubt. And I could not get the stain out of this cravat, do what I might—’

  Jemmy suddenly had a wonderful idea.

  ‘Jack, go to my brother Robert with my compliments, and help him to dress. His own servant is busy and cannot go.’

  ‘But, master—’

  ‘My brothers here will be my valets, won’t you, boys?’ The youngsters gave a cheer and jumped up.

  ‘Of course we will!’

  ‘Hurrah, what fun!’

  ‘Very good, master,’ Jack said, even more gloomily, and went away, his back eloquent of ill-usage, closing the door with ostentatious softness.

  ‘Now then, boys, bustle about,’ Jemmy said, and they turned to with a will. Tom and Charles, who were thirteen and twelve years old, had sometimes helped Jemmy dress before, though never for so important an occasion, and they were handy enough with laces and buttonhooks. Little Allen, a solemn, chubby child of six, with golden curls of the false, buttery yellow that would turn dark before too long, was a nimble fetcher and carrier, and used his wits to have a thing to hand the moment it was needed.

  ‘Four o’clock is so late for dinner,’ said Tom, who had had his hours since. ‘I hope the guests won’t get too terribly hungry.’

  ‘Perhaps they’ll have some bits of bread hidden under their mattresses,’ said Charles, giggling, thinking of the time their brother George had been beaten for that very crime. ‘And they’ll munch them and gobble them while their servants dress them.’

  ‘And get crumbs inside their shirts,’ Tom elaborated, ‘and they’ll wriggle about all through dinner because they’ll be too polite to scratch.’ He gave a realistic dumb-show of the action, and Allen gave a shout of laughter, and then hid his mouth behind his hand shyly. Jemmy ruffled his hair affectionately as he stepped into the stocking Charles was holding out.

  ‘No, no, you forget they are people of fashion. They are used to dining late.’

  ‘But how do they keep from rumbling?’ asked Charles, kneeling to roll the stocking up over the end of Jemmy’s breeches. He held out his hand ford the ribbon, which Allen had ready.

  ‘They don’t breakfast until noon,’ Jemmy said. ‘They don’t get out of bed until ten.’ Tom was examining the cravat, holding it up to his eyes.

  ‘I can’t see any stain on this,’ he said at last, passing it to Jemmy.

  ‘I don’t suppose there is one,’ Jemmy said. ‘That’s just Jack’s nature, to see bad where there is none.’

  ‘Gloomy old Jack,’ Charlie said carelessly, rolling the other stocking up Jemmy’s calf. ‘Maybe he ought to marry Lady Mary instead.’

  Jemmy looked at him sharply. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. Only Jack said – he said—’ Charlie looked up at his brother’s forbidding face and ended lamely, ‘he said she did not smile much.’

  ‘Jack has no right to say such things, and you have no right to repeat them,’ Jemmy said angrily. ‘Deuce take this cravat, it has a will of its own. Now where is my pin – oh, thank you, Allen.’ Allen’s pale, bright eyes looked into his with an unexpectedly mature sympathy. Jemmy felt it was time to pull himself together. ‘Now, Tom, my waistcoat. Did Jack put it out? That’s right, the one with the silver embroidery.’ Tom brought it, looking troubled. ‘What’s the matter, little brother?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Tom. ‘Only I was thinking – well, it’s because of you marrying Lady Mary that I’m to join the navy, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well, that has something to do with it,’ Jemmy said. ‘Lord Newcastle spoke to the Earl of Berkeley, and he spoke to the Elector, and there was a vacancy aboard the Agrippa for a King’s Letter Boy, and so it was decided it should be you. Why, Tommy, you aren’t afraid, are you?’ Tom looked surprised.

  ‘Oh no! The Agrippa’s the best thirty-six in the navy, and everyone knows that the West India station is the best to be on, and Captain Wentworth’s the most dashing captain on the list, and took a dozen prizes last year.’

  Jemmy smiled inwardly at all this. Two weeks ago, Tom had known nothing about the navy, and cared less; but a fortnight’s acquaintance with the Navy List had given him a multitude of firm opinions, vehemently aired.

  ‘Well, then you are high good luck, a’n’t you?’ Jemmy said, pulling the end of his Steinkirk through his buttonhole.

  ‘Yes, only,’ Tom said uncertainly, ‘Jemmy, you do want to marry Lady Mary, don’t you?’

  Ah, so that was it. Jemmy turned and put his hands on Tom’s shoulders and gave him the most earnest and cheerful smile he could muster.

  ‘Of course I do, Tom. There’s nothing I want more.’ Which in its way was true. ‘Now then, give me my hat and my gloves – oh, my handkerchief! That’s right. Now I must go downstairs. It would not do to be late.’

  ‘Be sure and remember every single dish on the table,’ Charles said. ‘I want to know everything you have.’

  ‘And taste them all,’ Tom added, quite happy again now. ‘Have a good time. You look like a prince.’

  Little Allen only smiled and waved, and Jemmy waved bac
k, and kept a smile stitched across his lips until he was round the corner of the corridor and out of sight.

  As well as the oyster loaves, there was white soup in the first course, and fricassee of rabbit, red cabbage and peas, roasted ducks with celery sauce, and boiled ham with caper sauce. As far as possible, Jemmy concentrated on the food, in order not to have to be aware of the presence of his bride-to-be beside him and Aliena at the far end of the table. There was no call for him to speak, at least, for the Duke led the conversation, encouraged by Annunciata, who sat beside him. He seemed much troubled by the ambitions of the Emperor of Russia, Peter the Great who, he said, was capturing seaports in the Baltic with the intention of dominating Europe. ‘It is but a short step from the Baltic across the North Sea to Scotland,’ said the Duke.

  ‘Why should the Emperor of Russia want to visit Scotland?’ Matt asked. The Countess’s eye grew wicked and merry at the question.

  ‘Why, sir, has not my lord Duke been talking about ambition? Julius Caesar, you remember, was assassinated for it.’

  Lord Newcastle attempted to ignore this, and addressed himself to Matt sternly. ‘Throughout our history, sir, would-be invaders of England have thought of Scotland as a convenient back-door. And it is no secret that the Emperor of Russia favours the Jacobite cause, and has offered aid and arms to the Pretender.’ Now he turned to Annunciata again, and asked blandly, ‘Did not your ladyship’s son Maurice visit Russia last year? Perhaps he may know something of the secrets of St Petersburg.’

  Was it Jemmy’s imagination, or did the room hold its breath? He found himself staring very hard at the delicate morsel of fricasseed rabbit impaled on the end of his fork, suspended halfway to his mouth. There was a crack, he noticed, in the ivory handle, running out from the hood of silver acanthus leaves that hid the rivet. Someone must have dropped it at some time – a careless servant, perhaps.

  But the Countess, who had once faced Titus Oates in court on trial for her life, met the Duke’s look with one of her own just as bland.

  ‘When I want news of my son, my dear Duke, I always apply to you, for I am sure you know everything that goes on within a hundred miles of London. And to tell you the truth, I have long since despaired of understanding Maurice’s movements. Musicians are a law unto themselves, don’t you agree? Musk knows no frontiers, that is what dear Master Handel always says.’