Dear Lady Disdain. Paula Marshall
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nearly twelve years ago, and added, a trifle stiffly, ‘I am wrong to allow my dislike of my father to take the form of tormenting you. You were kind to me, I remember, when I was invalided out of the Navy after Trafalgar, and no one else was.’
‘You brought your own doom on you,’ Grimes could not help retorting, ‘when you ran off with your brother’s wife. My sympathy for you died on that day.’ He saw Priestly’s face change, and knew that here was something Matt Falconer’s impertinent shadow had not known.
Matt Falconer was not nonplussed. He was no longer the eager boy who had yearned for his father’s love and whom his father’s lawyer could patronise.
‘Leave that,’ he ordered in his quarterdeck voice. ‘It has nothing to do with you, or with the business I have come to settle.’
But Grimes must have thought he had found a chink in Matt’s armour, although Matt was not conscious of possessing one, for he continued, although in a lower tone, ‘And her death does not lie on your conscience, Mr Falconer?’
Oh, the old man did have weapons to fight with after all! Matt closed his eyes, only for a sad and beautiful long-dead face to swim before them. The memories that face recalled had him swinging away from both men. For the first time in the interview he was struggling for self-control.
‘I lost my conscience with my heart,’ he asserted stiffly. ‘And if you refer to my late sister-in-law again, I shall leave this office and England within the day, and you, my inheritance from Lady Emily and my father may all go to the devil. Is that plain enough for you, sir?’
Matt was himself again—cold, strong and unshakeable, the man whom Jeb Priestley had always known, and whom the lawyer had never met. After that they returned to the business at hand, Grimes recognising that the man before him would never agree to any of his father’s demands, and consequently now wishful to settle the matter of the inheritance as rapidly as possible.
Pontisford Hall, his late great-aunt’s home on the borders of Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire, was the last reminder of Matt’s childhood, and the only happy one. He had a sudden burning wish to see it. He remembered warmth and love, and a place where he, as well as his older brother, had been welcome. Before he had reached England, on the boat over, re-reading the letter which told him of his great-aunt’s death and his inheritance, he had resolved to sell the Hall and its contents, to raise capital to enlarge his Virginia plantation, and partly rebuild and beautify the stark house which he called home.
But stepping ashore in England, travelling to London, seeing that great city’s sights, smelling its unique smell, had reminded him agonisingly of his past, of his youth, before the world had fallen in on him. He had a sudden yearning to revisit the scenes of his childhood—if only to say goodbye to them before he parted from his homeland for the last time.
He said nothing of this to Grimes, merely, ‘I shall travel to Yorkshire, sir, to pay my respects to Lady Emily’s tomb in Pontisford church, and to visit the Hall for the last time. She was kind to me, and I must not let her go without a proper farewell. You will inform the staff there of my proposed arrival. I shall set out as soon as I have completed other urgent matters here.’
Matt could imagine Jeb’s raised and mocking eyebrows at this rare display of sentiment, and the silent cynicism of the old lawyer, but damn that for a tale. When he had reached his middle thirties a man had the right to say goodbye to his youth.
And so it was settled. Mr Grimes did not pry into his client’s life. He assumed that Matthew Falconer had not married while in the United States, for there was no talk of a wife. He assumed that he had had some success as a plantation owner, but made no move to discover how much of a success. If the grim man before him wished him to know these things he would have told him. Once or twice he sighed for the carefree young man he had once known, who had faced life with a smile despite his father’s displeasure, but it was plain that that man was long gone.
Business was done, and done quickly—after the fashion of Yankees, Grimes presumed. The old Matt Falconer had never been businesslike, or hard. Now he was both. He even kept his insolent man on a tight rein while he and the lawyer went through the necessary business of establishing identity, examining Lady Emily’s will, and signing and witnessing the necessary documentation.
It was soon all over, and Matt and his man were in the street, holding their top hats on, braving the keen wind of early November, before Jeb spoke again.
‘Well, there’s a fine tale, Matt. Did you really run off with your brother’s wife?’
‘Yes, but not for the reason you might think.’ For once he was short with Jeb. Revisiting England must have made his memories keen again. He thought he had been rid of that old pain long ago.
‘Why, what other reason is there?’
Which, of course, was what everyone had said at the time. Matt replied, in what Jeb always thought of as his ‘damn-your-eyes’ aristocrat’s voice, which he had rarely used in the good old United States, ‘Nothing to do with you, Jeb. You may have the rest of the day to yourself. I shall meet you for supper at Brown’s this evening. We shall set out for Yorkshire as soon as I can organise suitable travel arrangements.’
There was no brooking him in this mood. Jeb rearranged his face, pulled a servile forelock, bowed low, mumbled, ‘Yes, massa, certainly, massa,’ a ritual which usually drew an unwilling grin from Matt. But not today. Today he was unmoved, immovable, and his shadow, wondering where his master was going, would have been surprised to learn that he ended the afternoon in a church, before a marble memorial consisting of an urn held by a weeping Niobe whose inscription simply read, ‘To the memory of Camilla Falconer, Lady Radley, 1785-1806, cut down in her youth… “Cometh forth like a flower”.’
Naturally there were no pious words chiselled into the marble about loving wives or grieving husbands, and she was buried far from her home and friends, forgotten, probably, by everyone except the grieving man who had come to pay her his last respects too.
Chapter Two
Everything, but everything, had gone wrong from the moment they had left the confines of the Home Counties. Stacy thought that there must be a curse on the journey, her first of any length since her father had died.
And it had all gone so beautifully right at first—inevitably, with Ephraim and herself arranging things. She was to travel incognito; it would not do to let possible men of the road know that the enormously rich owner of Blanchard’s Bank was travelling nearly the length of England in winter. Safety lay in anonymity. She was to be Miss Anna Berriman, to match the initials stamped on her luggage and entwined on the panels of her elegant travelling coach. Polly Clay, her personal maid, and the other servants had been carefully coached for the last fortnight before they set out to address her as, ‘Yes, Miss Berriman’, ‘Indeed, Miss Berriman’, ‘As you wish, Miss Berriman’, until Stacy had almost come to believe herself Miss Berriman in truth.
They were taking two coaches to accommodate Stacy, Miss Landen, Polly, James the footman, young Mr Greaves and his man, a coachman, and a spare footman, Hal, a big strong man, to act as yet another guardian to the party. It occurred to Stacy, as she watched the two post-chaises being loaded with luggage and impedimenta, that throughout her life she had rarely been alone, and for a moment she wondered what it would have been like truly to be not-so-rich Miss Berriman, who was no more and no less than an ordinary, unconsidered spinster. She decided that the uncomfortable truth was that on the whole she would not have liked it. She had grown used to being in command in exactly the same way as a man would have been.
It was while they were crossing from Lincolnshire into Nottinghamshire through heavy rain, after an unpleasant night in a dirty inn, that Greaves’ cold, which had been merely an inconvenience to him, became much more than that. From her seat opposite him Stacy watched his complexion turn from yellow to grey to ashen, tinged with the scarlet of heavy inflammation round his eyes, nostrils and mouth. Her concern grew with each mile that they jolted forward, until she ordered the coach to stop when they reached Newark.
‘Greaves,’