by Sheila Walsh
‘Goodness!’ Aunt Addie exclaimed, when Lucia begged permission to use it. ‘Of course you may use it, child. Lud ‒ it has scarcely been used since Freddie left.’
She was always eager to talk of Freddie, the dear companion of her childhood. In the nursery, Freddie’s toy soldiers were still laid neatly in their boxes, side by side with her dolls.
‘I have always hoped that someday this room would be used again.’ She sighed. ‘I spend a lot of time keeping everything just so.’
Lucia felt desperately sorry for her. She was a simple, silly creature, and she must have led a lonely life all these years, shut up here with her father.
Lady Springhope had said Grandfather found her a trial and Lucia could quite see why, for even she found her irritating at times, but she was unfailingly kind and so embarrassingly proud of her new-found niece that Lucia felt disloyal even to think it.
Her grandfather had made no further attempt to communicate with her. He had taken to his bed on the evening of her arrival and, although the doctor could find no worsening in his condition, had declared himself unfit to rise.
By the middle of the second week Lucia decided that the time had come to break the deadlock. Accordingly, when her aunt announced, as she invariably did, that she must give Papa his physic and see if he had any commissions for her, Lucia said brightly: ‘Aunt Addie ‒ you are looking tired. I think you should lie down. I will attend to Grandfather.’
Aunt Addie gasped and turned pale. ‘B-but you can’t …’
‘Indeed, yes. I am very good in a sickroom.’
‘He wouldn’t stand for it … I beg you, think of the consequences …’ She saw the determined gleam in her niece’s eye and groped for her vinaigrette.
‘Dear child, you’ll ruin everything! Oh, I don’t feel at all well!’
‘Then you should certainly go and rest,’ Lucia said firmly. ‘And don’t worry, dear Aunt.’
A few moments later Lucia stood outside her grandfather’s bedchamber, appalled by her own temerity. But Lady Springhope’s words were echoing in her ears: ‘Don’t let Rupert brow-beat you!’ Well, ignoring her existence amounted to the same thing. She knocked firmly and went in.
It was very much the room of a retired colonel ‒ strictly utilitarian furniture and plain green curtains. At one end of the room was a huge four-poster bed and there, under a green tapestry quilt, banked by a mountain of pillows, Colonel Mannering sat with military erectness, wrapped in a crimson velvet robe.
‘You’re five minutes late!’ he barked. As Lucia approached the bed the beetle brows came together with alarming ferocity. ‘Who the devil permitted you to come in here?’
She flinched. ‘No-one, sir. But since you are unable to leave your room at present, I took it upon myself to come to you.’
‘Then dammit, you can take yourself off again and wait until you’re sent for. And tell your aunt I wish to see her.’
Lucia hoped her voice didn’t tremble. ‘I’m afraid I can’t do that, sir. Aunt Addie is lying down. She has the headache.’
‘Addie always has the headache!’ he growled. ‘Never knew such a woman for petty-fogging ailments.’
‘Well, I daresay it has been a trying time for her, your being ill for so long. That is why I suddenly saw how I might help ‒ by looking after you while she rests.’ She clasped her hands tight to stop them shaking.
‘Very commendable I’m sure, but I believe we need not trouble you. You may pull the bell for my man Henry on your way out.’
‘I am not leaving. I am to give you your physic.’
Lucia moved across to the table and poured the prescribed dose. The Colonel was marshalling his resources for a desperate last ditch stand. ‘I won’t have it! It’s rank insubordination!’ he roared.
Suddenly Lucia wasn’t afraid. He was exactly like a small boy wanting his own way. ‘Oh come, sir! I am not one of your cowering soldiers. I am your granddaughter ‒ or had you forgot?’ Her eyes were twinkling as she held out the medicine.
His voice dropped to a whisper. ‘No. I cannot forget. Not if I have to look at you.’
She sat on the edge of the bed, the glass clasped in her hand. ‘I know. I had not realized the likeness was so marked. It must have been a dreadful shock. But when you are more used to the idea, could we not be friends?’
He stared at her for a long time, his eyes hard and bright. Then his eyebrows quivered. ‘Oh, give me the physic, child. I shall have no peace if you don’t get your way. It was bad enough with only one woman to nag at me. Did your aunt not tell you I was not to be over-excited?’
‘Yes, sir …’
‘Well?’ he barked.
‘I think you use it quite shamefully to get your own way,’ she ventured. For a moment she thought she had gone too far. His face worked, his nostrils twitched, his mouth opened and shut. Oh God! She thought … He’s going to have an attack!
And then he let out a great shout of laughter. ‘You are a cheeky malapert! But at least you are no cringing milk and water miss.’ He cuffed her cheek with one hand. ‘Get along with you now … I wish to rest.’
Lucia got up slowly. ‘I haven’t tired you?’
‘No. I always rest at this time.’
‘Can I do nothing more? Make your pillows more comfortable perhaps?’
‘No, no! I can’t abide being messed about!’
‘Then I will leave you, sir.’
‘Lucy?’
She held her breath. It was the first time he had actually addressed her by name. ‘Yes, sir?’
‘You may return later and read to me.’
She was smiling as she closed the door.
Later that same week, she was able to write to Lady Springhope: ‘I now sit with Grandfather regularly and he gets stronger every day. We have come to understand one another tolerably well and I am learning that he is nothing like as fierce as he would have one believe.
‘He makes no mention of my parents and I have no wish to endanger the delicate fabric of our relationship by doing so. It is the one small cloud on my horizon.
‘There are some pleasant families in the neighbourhood …’
Lucia particularly liked Mrs Conrad, an amiable lady with a large family. Her eldest son Charles came on Tuesday evenings to play chess with her grandfather, and Mrs Conrad came twice a week to take tea with Aunt Addie and bring her all the latest gossip.
She had greeted Lucia warmly and said with a twinkle, ‘You will think us very shallow creatures, my dear child, but we are so quiet here, that the most trivial events assume a quite ridiculous importance. I am afraid you are bound to find yourself the centre of attention ‒ until something else comes along to distract us.’
Lucia laughed. ‘I shall strive to bear it with fortitude, ma-am.’
Mrs Conrad patted her hand. ‘Good girl.’ She selected a comfit from a large dish at her side and nibbled it. ‘My dear Addie, I must tell you at once … Charles has been appointed as second secretary to the Chancellor! What do you think of that? Mr Conrad is so proud of him. I am told that, to have reached such a position by the age of twenty-eight, is something quite out of the common!’
Lucia said warmly: ‘Your son must be very clever, ma-am.’
‘Why yes, I believe he is.’ She helped herself complacently to another comfit. ‘I could wish Jason was likely to follow him.’
‘Well, so he may, dear.’ Aunt Addie beamed encouragement. ‘He’s not much more than a baby.’
His mother sighed. ‘The height of his ambition at present seems centred upon becoming a fashionable Beau in the manner of Mr Brummell or Lord Mandersely.’
‘Is Lord Mandersely considered a Beau?’ chuckled Lucia.
‘Oh, my dear, if you could hear Jason, you would not doubt it. Lord Mandersely arrived at some horrid cockfight with Charles the other week ‒ and he actually spoke to Jason. Since then the boy has been impossible to live with.’
They laughed, and the conversation drifted on to other things, but L
ucia’s thoughts lingered with maddening persistence on a dark, intolerant face and a pair of sleepy eyes.
One morning at the beginning of her third week at Willow Park, Aunt Addie sought Lucia out to say that Ned was to drive her into the town if she should care to come. She found her niece looking peaky and abstracted. At once she began to fuss … was she sickening for something? Should Dr Weston be sent for? She would not dream of leaving her poor angel in such a way …
Lucia bore all this and more in similar vein, until finally her patience snapped. Poor Aunt Addie looked so hurt that she was instantly penitent.
‘Please Aunt!’ she pleaded. ‘Just go and do your shopping. I promise you I have nothing more than a fit of the blue devils; it will soon pass.’
To her relief, Aunt Addie believed her. When she had gone, Lucia wandered through to the music room. She sat at the pianoforte staring out at the willow trees, seeing them through a mist of tears. It was absurd, childish, she chided herself, but she was still young enough to mind that it was her nineteenth birthday ‒ and not a soul in all the world knew it!
Lucia longed for her lively, lovely Mama who had always made birthdays fun. She began to sing a haunting Neapolitan lament that poured out all her misery and all her longing.
As the last notes of the song died away she looked up through her tears to see the Colonel standing in the doorway leaning heavily on his ebony stick, staring at her with a fierce, unfathomable expression.
Lucia quickly brushed a hand across her eyes. ‘Oh, I have disturbed you! I am sorry. I thought you would not hear.’
‘Well, I did hear,’ he said gruffly. ‘You have a very beautiful voice, my child, but no-one so young should know unhappiness such as you have just expressed so movingly. For that unhappiness, I fear I am much to blame.’
‘Oh Grandfather! If I could just talk to you about them sometimes!’
He stared down into the passionate young face upturned to him, and for a moment his vision blurred and it was Marianne who seemed to stand there, her arms outstretched. And then he blinked rapidly and it was only Lucy, this child who had forced her way into his heart, a heart for so long fettered by bitterness and grief. He held out his free arm and with a sob she flew to him and the arm closed tightly round her. He patted her awkwardly as she clung to him.
‘Ah, child ‒ child! What a curse is pride! So much time ‒ all wasted!’
Lucia looked up, her eyes bright through her tears. ‘Oh, but we’ll make up for it, won’t we? It isn’t too late!’
For the very first time she saw him smile. ‘Let’s see if we can make a start,’ he said. ‘I had almost forgotten why I came to find you.’
Intrigued, she allowed herself to be led back through the house to the front door. At the foot of the front steps, a young groom was walking a beautiful young bay mare. Lucia looked from it to her grandfather.
Colonel Mannering said gruffly, ‘A birthday present from an old fool who is just beginning to discover what he has been missing all these years.’
He gave her a little push and she ran down the steps to fondle the lovely elegant creature as it nuzzled her hand.
‘Oh, but you are beautiful!’ she whispered, fondling the soft ears. ‘Does she have a name?’
‘I daresay, but name her what you will.’
‘Mignonne! For you are such a delicate creature.’ She cast an impish grin in the Colonel’s direction. ‘If Grandfather will permit you a fancy foreign name!’
She ran back up the steps, reaching on tiptoe to kiss his cheek.
‘Now, now ‒ enough of that!’ he protested, but there was a decided gleam in his eye.
‘But I don’t understand! How did you know? And how did you guess how much I have always longed for a horse of my own?’
He snorted. ‘Any child of Freddie’s was bound to love horses.’ His face clouded. ‘As to your birthday …’
He took her hand; slowly and painfully he climbed the stairs, pausing every few steps to rest.
‘You should not have come downstairs. You are tiring yourself,’ she chided.
‘Don’t fuss, child! You know I can’t abide fussing females.’
He led the way to his library where he sank wearily into the leather armchair and picked up the heavy family bible. On the flyleaf, immediately below her father’s name, was her own ‒ Lucia Marianne, 18th July, 1789.
The Colonel’s mind went back over the years. ‘I could not condone Freddie’s behaviour … I would not forgive! When his letter came, telling me of your birth, I tried to put it from my mind; but my conscience plagued me until it was properly registered. Every year since then, I have remembered you on this day.’
Lucia dropped to the floor beside him, her arms resting confidently now upon his knee. ‘Oh, what a lot of time we have to make up!’
Aunt Addie found them there upon her return. She was in transports over the birthday, and distressed that she had not known. ‘For we could have had a celebration!’ She brightened. ‘Perhaps it is not too late ‒ a small informal affair. Just one or two friends ‒ the Conrads and possibly the Mashams ‒ I could send word. Nothing formal, it would be too much to ask of cook, but a small supper party. I believe it might be managed, don’t you think so, Papa?’
Colonel Mannering informed her that she might do as she wished ‒ it was his intention to retire to his bed.
When she crept in to see him late in the evening, Lucia thought he looked tired, but he pooh-poohed the idea. She sat beside him and shyly slid her hand into his. ‘I just came in to thank you for a wonderful day.’
‘So ‒ you’ve enjoyed yourself? How was your aunt’s party?’
She chuckled. ‘Oh, I felt very important. It was a nice feeling, but this morning was nicer!’
The soft candlelight played over the bent head, turning it to pure silver. He put up a hand and touched it. It was unbelievably painful learning to love again and knowing he must lose her before long.
‘Charles Conrad came to say goodbye. He is returning to London in the next few days.’ The Colonel’s voice was abrupt. ‘He asked if he might call on you in town. D’you like the fellow?’
‘Mr Conrad? Why yes, he seems very nice.’
‘He is much taken with you. I suppose you could do a lot worse. He’s going a long way, that young man. But there, I imagine you’ll have ’em lining up for your favours if Aurelia has any say in it!’
‘Oh really, Grandfather! What nonsense you talk! I am only interested in one man.’ She leaned forward and kissed him. ‘And it’s high time he was asleep.’
She slid off the bed. ‘Goodnight, sir ‒ sleep well.’
Lucia was enchanted with the little mare and they were soon a familiar sight in the district. One morning she was within sight of the gates when two riders turned in, one of them in uniform. Visitors for Grandfather, she thought absently.
A moment later there was a great shout, a cocked hat was being waved madly in the air and Lucia glimpsed a familiar blond head as horse and rider came charging towards her.
‘Toby!’ They clasped hands, laughing and talking both at once. ‘Oh, Toby, it is good to see you! You are so grand, I thought you were someone important!’
‘Baggage!’
She gripped his hand hard. ‘Oh, but I have missed you, especially at the beginning.’
‘But not any more, eh?’ He raised an expressive eyebrow. ‘It’s all right, m’dear, anyone with half an eye can see that all goes well with you. What say you, Hugo ‒ don’t she positively glow?’
Lord Mandersely had ridden up to join them, viewing their youthful antics with the air of an indulgent uncle. He subjected Lucia to one of his lazy appraisals, a slight smile playing about his lips.
She at once became aware of the shabbiness of her old brown riding habit which she had not worn for more than a twelvemonth, and which had required much judicious alteration before it could be made to fit.
As always, under his scrutiny, her chin lifted and his smile widened. ‘Miss
Mannering, I am delighted to find you looking so much yourself. I infer your visit has been a complete success.’
‘It took a little time, sir. But, yes, all is now well.’
They all turned and rode slowly back up the drive. At the front steps Hugo dismounted and walked across to Lucia. He held up his hands to lift her down, holding her for just a fraction longer than was necessary.
Flustered, Lucia turned to Toby. ‘Let me look at you properly,’ she stood back to admire his distinctive uniform of Rifle green, tracing the frogging with a delicate finger. ‘Oh yes, you are very grand! Quite irresistible!’ She dropped the banter suddenly. ‘You’re going away, aren’t you.’
‘Friday.’ He grinned. ‘Things are happening in Spain, so we should be seeing some action.’
He sounded so like a small boy, that she smiled and took his hand. ‘You must meet Grandfather. He will want to know all about it.’
‘I am charged with messages from my aunt,’ said Hugo as they moved into the house. ‘She is to visit Mama the first week in September, on her way back from Maria’s in Gloucestershire. It is her intention to take Hetty back to town with her and, if you are agreeable, she will pick you up en route. It means but a small detour ‒ Mandersely is not above fifteen miles from here.’
‘That is kind of her.’
‘But you are not enthusiastic?’
‘Isn’t it silly? I was so reluctant to come and now I don’t in the least wish to leave.’
‘Not silly at all. It simply means you have come to regard this as your home.’
The presence of two such personable young men in the house set Aunt Addie a’flutter. They must take some refreshment … Bassett must fetch the Madeira and the best glasses. She hovered, anxious that it should be to their liking. Toby assured her solemnly that it was just as it should be, and Lord Mandersely raised one whimsical eyebrow and devoted himself to the task of putting her aunt at ease. Lucia presently bore them off to her grandfather’s room, and left them there to talk.
Walking with Toby in the garden before they left, Lucia found him full of enthusiasm for the Colonel.