Banishment (Daughters of Mannerling 1) (7 page)

And so, having effectively reminded Isabella of her failure to secure a husband at the Season and Lady Beverley of her changed circumstances, Mary smiled benignly all round.

‘Thank you for those books you lent me, Mr Judd,’ said the vicar. ‘Very interesting.’ He was a small, round, plump man with a white face and those black eyes his daughter had inherited from him.

‘What books?’ asked Isabella before she could stop herself. ‘Bailey’s
Guide to the Tuif?
’

Her sisters gave her reproachful looks. ‘Not at all,’ said the vicar. ‘You do Mr Judd an injustice.’

‘An injustice,’ echoed Mary faintly.

‘I was joking,’ said Isabella. ‘I am anxious to see any changes you have made to Mannerling, Mr Judd.’

‘Come,’ said that gentleman, ‘I will be delighted to show you.’ He led Isabella from the room. The sisters exchanged covert, triumphant little glances.

In the Long Gallery, she gave an exclamation of dismay. ‘Where are the Beverley ancestors, Mr Judd?’

‘Got fine pictures of my own, Miss Isabella, and they ain’t my ancestors, after all. Put them in the attics.’

Isabella looked up at the ‘fine’ pictures, which were mostly of horses: horses racing, horses hunting, horses just standing staring straight ahead. She wanted to say to him that if he did not want the Beverley ancestors, why did he not give them to Sir William, but pride kept her quiet. ‘What very fine animals,’ she said instead.

‘Prime bits of blood, Miss Isabella. Come, I have more in the Blue Saloon.’ And so he had, paintings of dogs and slaughtered game being added to paintings of more horses. The pretty landscapes, seascapes, and rural scenes had all gone.

‘Where are the pictures that were here?’ asked Isabella. ‘In the attics as well?’

‘No, I sent those up to London for sale.’

Isabella bit back an exclamation of dismay. But she must charm this man. Mannerling must belong to them again. She fanned herself and said, ‘Mannerling is indeed fortunate to have a new owner of such taste and distinction.’

‘You think so? Coming from a beauty like yourself, Miss Isabella, I am flattered. You would be an ornament to any great house.’

She forced herself to give him an intimate smile and then lowered those long eyelashes of hers. He seized her hand and raised it to his lips. ‘Oh, Mr Judd,’ said Isabella, copying the fluttering manner of the debutantes of London, to whom she had only so recently considered herself infinitely superior.

‘Tell you what,’ said Mr Judd, who appeared highly pleased with her, ‘come over next Tuesday on your own and I’ll give you a tour of the grounds. Plan some improvements there.’

‘I am most honoured. May I beg you to send a carriage for me?’

He laughed as if the idea of the Beverleys being carriageless amused him. ‘I’ll come and get you myself.’ He squeezed her hand again and then led her back to the Green Saloon.

‘Now not a word of this to Mrs Kennedy,’ cautioned Isabella on the road home after she had regaled them with a description of Mr Judd’s advances.

‘And what is anything we may say or do or plan to do the concern of that burly-burly Irishwoman?’ demanded Lady Beverley. There was colour in her cheeks for the first time since disaster had struck them.

Isabella had an impulse to cry out that such as Mrs Kennedy were above vulgar machinations. Instead she said, ‘If I am to practise on Lord Fitzpatrick; he would not be so available, nor his aunt, were they to know of my pursuit of Mr Judd. Besides, they are the only friends we have. No one else in the county has shown any compassion for our plight.’

‘I hate that Mary Stoppard,’ said Jessica. ‘How she used to creep around us! Now she is acting as if she were the mistress of Mannerling. You do not think Mr Judd will marry
her
?’

But the others laughed at the very idea of any man preferring a dumpy vicar’s daughter to the beauty of the county.

Isabella sent Barry over to Perival the next day with a letter to Mrs Kennedy in which she said she hoped that lady’s cold was improving. Barry returned with a letter from the viscount. He wrote that he would ride over later that day and bring Satan with him in the hope that she might find time to go for a ride with him.

Finding to her surprise that she was really looking forward to seeing him again, and that it was as good a way as any to pass the time until she should see Mannerling again, Isabella was in high good humour by the time he arrived.

The viscount privately thought that the removal to Brookfield House had improved the Beverleys. There was an easygoing family atmosphere in the square house, and Sir William was looking much improved and seemed to have become reconciled to his new life.

Isabella and the viscount rode out along the road and then turned off down a bridle-path. The viscount was content to let his horse amble as he talked. He said his aunt’s coughs and sneezes could be heard all over Perival. He said he was looking forward to the transformation of the gardens.

‘Mr Judd is to take me on a tour of improvements he has made to the gardens at Mannerling,’ said Isabella, forgetting her good resolutions in his easy company.

He reined in his horses and she did the same. ‘You have met him?’

‘Yes, myself and the family went there yesterday for tea.’

‘That must have been very distressing for you.’

‘Why?’

‘I saw Judd at the tables in London. Now, I would describe him as weak and devious and thoroughly nasty.’

But Isabella did not want to listen to any criticism of her future husband, for, most of the time now, she was back at Mannerling, the pictures of the ancestors hung once more in the Long Gallery, and she and her sisters, calm, rich, and elegant, strolling in the grounds.

‘I found him interesting and good company,’ she said.

His blue eyes, which a moment before had been merry, were now filled with contempt. ‘Oho, I see your plan. You would marry this creature. You would throw away any chance of life and love for a pile of bricks and glass. You weary me suddenly, Miss Isabella.’

‘I never said anything about marriage!’ Isabella’s face flamed.

‘Any family with any dignity and self-respect would keep away from a shallow gamester who robbed them of lands, home, and inheritance. I hope for your sake that the idiot burns Mannerling to the ground and sets you all free!’

He spurred his horse and rode away through the trees down the bridle-path. Isabella urged her mount after him. This was all wrong. How could she practise flirting with one man if she had made her preference for another so plain? When she eventually caught up with him he had reined in again at the edge of the woods and was staring out across the countryside.

‘My lord,’ said Isabella, ‘you must not think that just because we paid a visit to Mannerling that we have any deep plot in mind. Do realize that my old home meant a great deal to me. Come, let us be friends again.’

He turned and studied her. Her beautiful face looked pleadingly up into his. A light breeze blew an errant brown curl against her cheek. His face softened. ‘I have seen houses take over people before, Miss Isabella. I have also seen men accept their losses stoically at the tables and then go away and blow their brains out.’

‘My father . . .’ she began in alarm.

Lord Fitzpatrick privately thought that Sir William was too selfish to ever dream of taking his own life.

‘I do not think your father will do himself any harm whatsoever,’ he said.

‘I just hope he never gambles again.’ Isabella was anxious now to turn the conversation away from Mr Judd and Mannerling.

The viscount wanted to point out cynically that he had never yet met a reformed gambler. Was Sir William now gambling in his mind on the hope that this eldest daughter would get his home back for him? But Isabella and Judd! It could not be possible. She was too young, too fresh, too beautiful to ever contemplate an alliance with such a man.

But the viscount, who was thirty, had forgotten the difference between his age and that of such as nineteen-year-old Isabella. He did not know that Isabella had never thought of love, that she was unawakened and innocent and thought, if she thought at all, of marriage as a sort of business partnership and had not the slightest idea of how one conceived children.

And so he was quickly restored to good humour. He told her a story of how one of his Irish servants had been found shaking all over and the other servants had diagnosed whirligigitis and had pushed him in the pond, water being supposed to be the best cure, and how Mrs Kennedy had practically had to rescue the poor man from drowning for he could not swim, and had offered the correct diagnosis: that he was shaking all over because he had drunk a considerable amount of the viscount’s brandy in the servants’ hall the night before.

They rode on amicably. ‘What a wonderful summer,’ sighed Isabella.

He looked at the sky. ‘Not for long, I think,’ he remarked. ‘The wind has changed.’

‘Oh, dear,’ she said, thinking that her promised tour of the Mannerling gardens was only two days away.

‘But the countryside needs rain,’ he said, wondering at her obvious anxiety.

She gave a little shrug, suddenly hoping he would not call on her on Tuesday and find she had gone to Mannerling.

So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury and make sharper the contrast between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent.

HENRY GEORGE

Isabella set out for Mannerling on the Tuesday, and her mother, father, and sisters stood outside Brookfield House to wave her goodbye as if she were going off to the wars.

She was sharply aware that the coachman on the box and the footmen on the backstrap had once worked for the Beverleys and might remark on this odd send-off.

She found herself anxiously awaiting the first sight of Mannerling, knowing somehow that the magic spell her old home cast on her would stiffen her resolve, because without it, a nasty little voice of common sense was telling her that she was pursuing a gentleman in whom she had no interest whatsoever except as a means of returning to her beloved home.

Betty, the small maid, elevated to lady’s-maid for the occasion and wearing one of Lizzie’s old gowns, sat looking as solemn as a well-behaved child. Isabella was wearing one of her more dashing hats, a straw embellished with silk roses of different colours around the crown. She was dressed in a light muslin gown in shades of delicate lilac, darkening towards the hem to near purple. The sun no longer shone, a bad omen, and a blustery wind from the west rustled the parched leaves of the trees on either side of the road.

It was when the carriage was turning in at the gates of Mannerling that she began to wonder whether this visit were not too unconventional. Mr Judd had no lady in residence, and although she, Isabella, had a maid with her, it was surely not correct to visit a single man in his home.

Therefore she experienced a surge of gladness and relief to be initially received in the drawing room by Mrs Judd, Mr Judd’s mother, a tall, thin widow with a perpetual air of disapproval.

After the introductions and pleasantries were over, Mrs Judd said, ‘This was your home, was it not?’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ said Isabella, stealing a look around and noticing several very pretty ornaments which had decorated the mantelpiece were no longer there.

Mrs Judd was dressed in black, as befitted her widowed status, shiny black decorated with jet, which gave her a reptilian look. She folded lace-mittened hands in her lap and commented, ‘I have told Ajax time and again that gamblers always ruin themselves sooner or later.’

At first Isabella was too surprised to learn that Mr Judd was called Ajax to take offence, but then the full import of Mrs Judd’s words sank into her brain. She rose and said with quiet dignity to Mr Judd, ‘I am anxious to see the gardens, sir, and perhaps we should begin now because it looks like rain.’

‘Gladly,’ he said with that foxy smile of his. When they were outside, he pointed his stick in the direction of a stand of trees. ‘I’m getting those cut down for a start,’ he said. ‘Block the view.’

‘Oh, no, Mr Judd,’ said Isabella, shaken. ‘Capability Brown himself designed those vistas. Do you not see how those trees are part of the harmonious plan?’

‘Well, well,
I
don’t like ’em and it’s my place now. Hey, now, though, if it troubles you so much, I’ll leave the trees for the moment. But you’ll like what I’ve got planned round the back. Come.’

A damp breeze blew against Isabella’s cheek. The rain could not be far off. They walked around the side of the house to the back. ‘Now, see that temple thing over there,’ he commanded.

The Greek temple stood on a mound overlooking the ornamental lake, its slender columns whiter than ever against the darkening sky.

‘Oh, yes,’ sighed Isabella, thinking of how on sunny days she and her sisters would get the servants to carry a picnic hamper to the temple. Then they would take a boat out on the lake. She closed her eyes for a second, remembering happy, peaceful, innocent days gone forever.

‘Going to knock it down,’ said Mr Judd with satisfaction.

‘Why?’ asked Isabella faintly.

‘Having a ruin is all the crack, one of those Gothic things, all moss, and with a hermit. Have that instead. Got to have a hermit.’

‘And do you know a hermit?’

‘Don’t need to be a real one. One of the servants will do it. That footman, John, now he’s a trifle too uppity for my taste. If he wants to continue to collect his wages, he can be a hermit and put on some rags instead of that plush uniform.’

Raindrops rattled down on Isabella’s bonnet. ‘We must return to shelter,’ he said. ‘Poxy rain.’

Isabella felt like crying. If he was prepared to smash down the beautiful temple, what other horrors had he in store for Mannerling?

When they were back in the drawing room, Mrs Judd presiding over the teacups, Mr Judd said, ‘I’m thinking of giving a ball here, get to know the neighbours. Is that secretary still about?’

‘Until the end of the week,’ said Isabella.