3

      Clementina Sutton’s heels tapped angrily across the floor. She had had enough, more than enough. This time Elliot had gone too far! She pulled on the bell handle, then pulled again. She was hurt and humiliated and near to tears. Debasing, it had been, and to hear it in such a way had been nothing less than mortifying.

      How often, in the hope of an invitation, had she left her card at the home of Mrs Mounteagle; how many times had she been ignored – snubbed – and by a lady related by blood or marriage to half the gentry in the Riding. Yet this morning Mrs Mounteagle had finally acknowledged the existence of the mistress of Pendenys Place and had called, actually called, to a joyful reception.

      Yet why had she come? Only to put her down; to humiliate Clementina Sutton. Not only to thrust in the knife of humiliation, but to turn it excruciatingly; to let it be known that Elliot was the subject of gossip of the worst possible kind and that his mother need only visit Creesby to learn the cause of it.

      Then Mrs Mounteagle had risen to her feet and left at once. The coveted visit was over in less than four minutes and the lady had indicated, with the absence of even the slightest departing nod from her carriage window, that Clementina Sutton could never again expect to receive another call.

      But this was the last time, the very last time she would brush Elliot’s affairs under the carpet. She would not be cheapened; not in Holdenby nor Creesby, nor anywhere! She began to pace the floor, eyes on the door, ears straining for the irritatingly unhurried step in the slateflagged corridor outside.

      Below stairs, in the long, draughty passage where the bellboy spent his days sitting on a stool, the third bell in a row of twenty began its ringing and he was on his feet in an instant, hurrying to the kitchen.

      ‘Three,’ he called. ‘Number three!’ and the under-housemaid sighed, then ran to fetch the butler who had just taken his newspaper to his sitting-room and would bite her head off when she told him the breakfast-room bell was ringing.

      It wasn’t as if, Clementina reasoned to her reflection in the wall mirror, there was any need for this kind of thing. Not hereabouts, anyway. Granted, young gentlemen always took their pleasures, and her own son was no exception. But not on their own doorstones; not where they were known. Elliot was a fool! Women in London were eager and willing, yet her son chose to pleasure himself not five miles away with the daughter of a butcher!

      Her hand hovered over the bell handle, then fell to her side. He was coming, his tread measured, and he would open the door sedately, turn slowly to close it behind him with annoying quietness, then look down his nose and say, as he was saying now, ‘Mrs Sutton?’

      ‘What kept you?’ she hissed.

      ‘Madam?’ Didn’t she know a butler walked slowly; must never, ever, lose the dignity that years of butling for the quality – the quality, mark you – had bred into him, the dignity that rich Americans would pay good wages for, were he to put himself on offer.

      ‘Fetch me Mr Elliot!’

      ‘I will try to find –’

      ‘Now. This instant!’

      He closed the door behind him, walking disdainfully, slowly, across the great hall – eighteen measured steps, it always took – to the door of the smoking-room, there to shatter the self-satisfaction of the young buck who would be filling it with the stink of Turkish tobacco.

      She’d heard, then, about the butcher’s daughter? Did she, he wondered with distinct pleasure, know that the talk had reached Holdenby, too? My, but he’d like to be a fly on the breakfast-room ceiling, though they’d hear, like as not. Mrs Sutton in a fury could be heard the length of the house. Pausing briefly to remove all traces of smugness from his face, he drew a deep breath then opened the double doors with the aplomb of long practice.

      ‘Mrs Sutton asks that you join her in the breakfast-room,’ he murmured.

      ‘Oh, God.’ Elliot Sutton removed a leg from the chair arm. ‘What does she want now?’

      ‘The mistress did not tell me.’ But if I were you, laddie, I’d shift myself. He opened the doors wider, inclining his head as the young man slouched through them. And I wouldn’t be in your shoes for all the port in the cellar. Oh my word no – not if they threw in the Madeira, too!

      ‘Well?’ demanded Clementina of her son.

      ‘Well what?’

      ‘You know damn well, and don’t light a cigarette in here,’ she warned as his hand strayed to his inside breastpocket. ‘Creesby, that’s what. And stand up. I didn’t give you permission to sit!’

      ‘Oh – Maudie.’ He remained seated.

      ‘Maudie! I got told it this morning, and it wouldn’t surprise me if half the Riding doesn’t know, an’ all!’

      ‘Mother!’ He sucked air through his teeth, wincing at her directness. ‘Keep your voice down. Do you want the servants to hear?’

      ‘Hear? I’ll wager they know already. Aye, and the best part of Holdenby, as well.’ Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes sparked outrage. ‘Why can’t you take yourself off to London or to Leeds, even? Why must you shame me? This is going to cost me – but you know that, don’t you? It cost me plenty for your last brat!’

      ‘Mother!’ He lifted his eyes to the ceiling. ‘Must you talk like a fishwife?’ But then, every time Mama got into a rage she reverted to type. ‘Or a washerwoman …’

      ‘Damn you, boy!’ It was the ultimate insult. She lifted her hand and slammed it into his face. ‘And where ‘ud you be today, eh, if it hadn’t been for a washerwoman? Well, you can get out of this one yourself, because I’ll take no more of your arrogance! Pay her off out of your own pocket; I’m done with you. Done, I say!’

      Tears spilled down her cheeks and not all Elliot’s sorries nor back-patting could stop the sobbing that could be heard all the way down the corridor and half-way across the great hall.

      In the library, which was so vast that it needed two fireplaces to heat it, Edward Sutton laid down his pen as sounds of the confrontation in the room next door reached him.

      Elliot, he sighed. Elliot upsetting his mother again so that the whole house would suffer for a week, at least. Why couldn’t Nathan have been their firstborn; that second son who would have made Pendenys a happier place, a home. Nathan was serious like himself, and in his final year at Cambridge; though what would be left for him afterwards but the Church, heaven only knew. But Nathan was a Sutton; Elliot was his mother’s son, and it would be to Elliot one day that Pendenys would pass, and Clementina’s influence would still be on him from far beyond the grave.

      He looked around the ornate room, longing for the library at Rowangarth and the homeliness that once had wrapped him round. Rowangarth was where he’d been born, was still home to him. Pendenys was where he lived out his days.

      A slamming door and hurrying footfalls caused him to close his eyes briefly. Elliot was in a rage, and soon Clementina would be here, pouring out her anger, pacing the floor, complaining about ‘your son’. Elliot was always his son, Edward smiled thinly, when he was in trouble, and his mother’s at all other times.

      Well, this morning he would not take the backlash of her temper, be the whipping-boy for Elliot. He would walk to Rowangarth and be invited, hopefully, to lunch with his sister-in-law. Helen would be missing Julia and be glad of his company.

      Julia. In London at his sister’s house and having the time of her young life, he shouldn’t wonder. Julia could have made a fine wife for Elliot, cousin or not, but she did nothing to hide her dislike of his elder son, and who could blame her? Julia, if she married into