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I’m that excited I shall burst if I don’t tell someone …
She had almost gone on to tell them about Tom Dwerryhouse but had decided against it, though heaven only knew why. Tom and Alice. Even their names seemed to fit; sounded so right together that it sent a glow of contentment from the tip of her nose to the tips of her toes. Tom, the under-keeper with whom she was walking out – well, almost walking out. Tom who was tall and twenty-two and had fair hair and blue eyes and a smile that completely transformed a face inclined to seriousness.
She was glad he was clean-shaven, because when he kissed her – and one day very soon now he would – she didn’t want it to be spoiled. Cousin Reuben had a moustache and he’d kissed her cheek the day he visited Aunt Bella with whom she once lived. She couldn’t have been more than eight at the time, but the memory of that prickly kiss lived on through the years. Reuben wasn’t really her cousin, though she called him that out of politeness, and because he was old.
She smiled, closing her eyes. She’d been on her way to Reuben’s cottage the day she met Tom – and all because of a lovable, lolloping dog who’d caused more trouble in the few months he’d been at Rowangarth than two dogs in two lifetimes.
‘Off you go, boy,’ she had whispered, slipping his lead, smiling as he hurtled into the green deeps of the wood, and hardly had she placed a hand on Reuben’s garden gate when she heard a roar so enraged that the whole of Rowangarth must have heard it, too.
‘Drat you, dog, you great daft animal! There’ll not be a game-bird left in this wood!’ The man who strode towards her carried a shotgun over his right arm, his other hand firmly grasping the collar of a bewildered spaniel. ‘Does this creature belong to you?’
‘N-no, but he’s with me.’ Alice gazed up into eyes deep with anger. ‘He belongs to Mr Giles and he isn’t a creature. He’s called Morgan and what’s more he’s got every right to run where he pleases,’ she ended, breathlessly defiant.
This was him, it had to be: the new under-keeper whose coming not two weeks ago had sent housemaids and kitchenmaids for miles around into a tizzy of delight; the man who had been so oh’d and ah’d over at table that Mrs Shaw had been obliged to tell them to stop their foolish talk, and if he were as tall and broad and good to look at as they made out, didn’t it stand to reason he’d be married, or at the very least promised?
‘That animal runs where I say he can, and where I’ve got pheasants sitting on eggs, he isn’t welcome. There won’t be a bird to show for it come October if he frightens the hens off the nests. And Morgan? What sort of a name is that for a dog, will you tell me?’
‘It’s the name Mr Giles chose.’ Alice tilted her chin.
And this was Mr Giles’s wood, like all the woods on the estate, or his as made no matter with his elder brother away in India. ‘And what’s more, I think Morgan suits him!’
‘So it does. A daft name for a daft dog, and likely you aren’t responsible for an animal not your own. But I’ve bother enough with hawks and magpies taking chicks and eggs: I can do well without that animal adding to my troubles. Now do you understand me, miss?’
‘But I always walk him here.’ Her mouth drooped at the corners.
‘Not any more you can’t, so best keep him near the house; trees enough for him there. Or you could let him run in the big meadow – if he isn’t afraid of cows, that is.’
He threw back his head and his laugh showed white, even teeth, and made her want to laugh with him. But she refused to give him the pleasure, for even though there was no denying that all she had heard whispered about him was true – he was as handsome as the devil – she tilted her chin still higher, for the new keeper was bossy and full of his own importance. Taking the lead from her pocket she murmured, ‘Come on home, Morgan.’ They wouldn’t stay where they weren’t welcome. She would call on Reuben tomorrow and, anyway, it was almost time for tea.
Servants’ tea at Rowangarth, when the big brown pot was set beside the kitchen range to warm and Mrs Shaw presided over bread and jam and fruit cake, was a happy time; the kitchen a haven of laughter and warmth where Alice Hawthorn could forget this slight.
‘Bid you good day,’ she had murmured in her most ladylike voice, deliberately refraining from using his name, though she knew it to be Tom Dwerryhouse. Everyone had known it; even the servants over at the Place.
Now she poked her nose out of the blankets to let go a sigh of relief, grateful that her hoity-toity behaviour hadn’t frightened Tom off for good. And well it might have, she admitted, had it not been for Morgan and his disorderly ways, for to Tom a dog so undisciplined was a challenge, a creature to be taught its place. And she had to admit that no dog she’d ever known was as tiresome and unbiddable as a spaniel called Morgan – and no dog so lovable. She would miss him when she went to London.
‘London,’ she whispered into the darkness. So far away that the journey could take hours and hours and they would have to eat luncheon on the train from a picnic basket, Miss Julia said. And when they arrived at King’s Cross station it would be she, Alice, who would call a porter with a raising of her forefinger and the slightest inclination of her head and instruct him to procure a cab for them. He would place their luggage on his trolley – Miss Julia would have three cases at least, as well as a hatbox and a travelling bag – and wheel it to the cab rank. Already Alice had been well-schooled by Miss Clitherow, the tall, thin housekeeper whose back was as straight as a ramrod and who carried her head so high that when she looked at anyone it seemed she was looking down her nose at them. The housekeeper, if she consented to let a body get to know her, was a kind, lonely woman who was neither below stairs nor above and had long since learned that to keep herself to herself was by far the best solution.
Yet she had taken to Alice, right from the day the nervous girl of almost fourteen had presented herself in her ill-fitting clothes and too-big boots for the close scrutiny of Rowangarth’s housekeeper; had found the girl’s innocence and candour pleasant after some of the pert, badly spoken young women she had interviewed. Without hesitation she had given the position of under-housemaid to the brown-eyed child who came without references but with a glowing report of her docility from the aunt who had brought her up and from Reuben Pickering, head keeper at Rowangarth, related to the girl through a niece, once removed. And though she was never to know it, it had been on Miss Clitherow’s recommendation that she was accompanying her employer’s daughter to London, and the well-instructed Alice knew exactly how a lady’s maid behaved; exactly how much money she should carry in her coat pocket and how much to tip – if the service had been good, that was. Because a lady like Miss Julia never called a porter or a cab, or stooped to ask the cabman how much, Miss Clitherow stressed, let alone proffered a tip. It was why a lady never travelled without a maidservant or chaperon. It was why, Alice exulted, she was going to London in two days’ time and, even though it would part her from Tom for almost a fortnight, she wouldn’t have missed it for all the tea in China or, to be fair to Rowangarth, in India!
‘To the mews off Montpelier Place,’ she would tell the cab driver in a softly spoken, genteel way; to the Knightsbridge home of Miss Anne Lavinia Sutton, maiden aunt to Robert, Giles and Julia, elder sister of the late Sir John of Rowangarth, God rest him, who had gone to his Maker before his time and at great speed: at fifty-eight miles an hour, to be fatally exact.
Alice closed her eyes, willing herself to sleep. Tomorrow she must be up early, for there was unfinished work in the sewing-room; buttons to sew on Lady Helen’s tea gown – fifteen of them – and heaven only knew how many darts and tucks her dinner dress needed.
Poor Lady Helen. It would make her sad to wear that long, full gown in lavender slipper-satin. Alice was prepared to bet she would have gone anywhere at all in it rather than to Pendenys Place. After all the long months in mourning for her husband, must she not be dreading this first public engagement for three years, Alice brooded. Wouldn’t it have been better had she been able to accept some other, kinder ending to her years of black drapes and widow’s weeds, for Pendenys was not the friendliest of houses to visit, even at the best of times.
But