Mistress of Brown Furrows (10 page)

“I did,” Carol assured her. “Oh, I did! ”

Meg smiled rather mysteriously—inscrutably, Carol thought. “Good! ” she exclaimed. “And your bed was comfortable? You like your room?”

“I love it,” Carol told her.

“I hope Agatha saw that you had a good breakfast.”

“I haven’t eaten such a marvellous breakfast for a long time,” Carol confessed, with a youthful smile. “And real cream! Such wonderful real cream! I shall get fat! ”

“You’re not very fat at the moment,” Meg told her critically, looking once again at the slender hips made even more boyish-looking by the slim tailored slacks, and at the almost complete lack of a bosom as revealed by the close-fitting jersey. “Did they starve you at that school of yours in the south, or is it your nature to be so thin? We shall have to do something about it. I told Timothy you need fattening up.”

Carol wondered what else she had said to Timothy about her, but naturally she could not inquire.

“Timothy is going into matters connected with the running of the farm this morning, and he and his manager Lovegrove were down in the far potato field when I came in just now. It’s

just possible he may be in to lunch—”

“Oh, but here I am!” said Timothy’s voice cheerfully in the doorway, and he came in smiling at them both. “Good morning, Carol!” He went up to her and took her hands. “Have a good night?”

“Splendid, thanks! ”

She was so pleased at his sudden arrival that she could not keep some of the pleasure out of her voice.

He gave her rather a keen glance, she thought, and then looked round at his sister.

“What do you think of her, Meg?” he asked. “She confesses to being eighteen and a half years of age, but I think they made a mistake on her birth certificate. Shall we say sixteen and a half?—or perhaps just sixteen!” Carol noticed that Meg’s lips compressed themselves slightly together before she permitted herself one of her Mona Lisa-ish smiles.

“As women age so much more quickly than men it is always a good thing if a somewhat deceptive appearance of youth is on their side for a few years, or that is my opinion,” she remarked in her quiet, deliberate voice.

“You mean that when I’m fifty-five Carol will actually begin to look as if I haven’ t snatched her out of the cradle?” Timothy demanded, with a slight grin. He dropped Carol’s hands, after squeezing them gently. “Well, you may be right, but she’s got a lot of growing up to do before we get to that stage. And in the meantime I could do with a drink—and so, possibly, could both of you?”

“I’ ll have a lemon squash if you don’ t mind,” Meg said rather primly, when she had produced the drinks and glasses from a small corner cabinet and set them on top of the writing-table. “I never touch alcohol these days before dinner-time. I think it’s rather a good rule—for a woman, of course,” she added.

Timothy appeared faintly amused.

“And you, Carol?” he asked. “Are you joining the lemon-squash brigade, too?”

“Thank you, yes,” she replied, without looking at Meg. “I never touched alcohol at all until a few weeks ago! ”

“Until you made my depraved acquaintance, you mean! ” Timothy teased her.

Carol flashed him a smiling glance, but Meg said thoughtfully:

“If I remember correctly I was turned twenty-one before I so much as tasted a glass of sherry, even! And I have never been very much addicted to it. ” She set down her glass on the writing-table. “By the by, Timothy, met Viola Featherstone this morning, when I drove into Dulverton. She and everybody apparently are all agog about your marriage—though I can’t think how they’ve all heard about it quite so soon! —and very keen to meet your wife. Apparently Viola
has
met her, although she was under the impression, at that time, that she was your ward, not your fiancee!” She looked curiously at her brother’s face. “She asked you to her dance on the twenty-fifth; but as that is tomorrow night you naturally won’ t be able to attend. However, I have asked her and one or two others to dinner a week from tonight. Is that all right?”

“Perfectly all right so far as I am concerned,” Timothy replied casually.

“And you, Carol?” Meg asked formally. “You must realize that people are naturally rather curious about you! ”

“Oh, are they?” Carol looked rather frightened.

“Curious to meet you, I mean,” Meg amended. “All this has been so sudden, and—if you’ ll forgive me for saying so! — somewhat rushed and unexpected, especially amongst our very closest circle of friends, and a considerable amount of astonishment has been aroused. It has created a kind of nine days’ wonder in the district—’’

“Well, at least that’s something,” Timothy said amiably. “Something to relieve their boredom! ”

“But not altogether unnatural,” his sister went on, addressing the remark to Carol. “So long as you won’ t mind, Carol, and have no objection to meeting people rather soon—?”

“After all we
were
only married yesterday morning! ” Timothy murmured.

“Of course I won’t mind,” Carol assured her sister-in-law, realizing that there was no other course open to her. Timothy placed his hand on her shoulder.

“Don’t worry,” he said, with one of his comforting smiles. “They’ re quite a pleasant bunch really, despite their curiosity, and you’ve already met Viola. Nat may be back by that time, too, and we could ask him as well.”

“As you please,” said Meg, as if Nat was of no slightest importance to her. “I thought, too,” she added, “that if you hadn’ t planned to do anything else you might run over and introduce Carol to Aunt Harry this afternoon, Timothy? She was phoning me yesterday about you both, and she’s always so dreadfully impatient and anxious for details. She’s had rather a nasty attack of her arthritis, and she sounded a bit peeved because you haven’t written to her for so long.”

“It seems to me,” Timothy remarked, producing a pipe and beginning to light it, “that you’ve been very busy, my dear Meg, arranging our honeymoon for us! ”

Meg looked up at him with surprise in her eyes, and Carol’ s face flamed.

“Are you,” Meg asked, “on a honeymoon?”

Carol knelt down swiftly and started to fuss the dog.

Timothy puffed his pipe alight, and watched her and the dog for a few moments.

“Well,” he said, after a second or so, “there are honey-moons—and honeymoons!...” And then he took pity on Carol’s obvious confusion. “All right,” he said briefly, “we’ll go. As you well know, Meg, I’ m ridiculously fond of Aunt Harry, and Carol can do with a bit of a blow. The drive will do her good, and introduce her to some of our ‘marvellous lakeland scenery’ , as they say in the guide books. What do you say, Carol?”

“Of course,” Carol replied, rising at once, and wishing he didn’ t appear to be slightly amused by her flushed cheeks.

“O.K.,” Timothy murmured. He took his new wife by the arm and conducted her toward the door. “And now come outside and get a breath of fresh air before lunch,” he said. “We’ve been cooped in here long enough. ”

“Cooped in here long enough! ” echoed Captain, in his cage, and let out a furious squawk.

Timothy turned and shook a fist at him, and Carol laughed, but Meg did not even smile. Perhaps, thought Carol, she agreed with the bird, and considered that her own private sanctum had been invaded that morning.

In future, Carol decided, she would be most careful to avoid it, since Meg was so obviously touchy on some subjects. She believed in preserving her own rights at least!

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE wild and beautiful Dulverton Water was an enchanting spot on a languorous afternoon of high summer. Silver birch trees overhung it, and peered smilingly at themselves in the water, and the surface was as smooth and crystal clear as any mirror. It reflected the blue of the occasional little clouds which sailed across it; and the gentlest of breezes crept across from the opposite shore, laden with the scent of bog-myrtle and thyme and miles and miles of misty moorland. But on three sides the jagged hills encompassed it around, and they were not always as pleasingly remote and distant as on this warm afternoon, when the heat haze floated so persistently about their summits. Sometimes the hills stood out sharp and violently purple, and the color of the water was affected also. Then it was wild as well as beautiful. This afternoon it was merely beautiful, and Carol loved it.

She and Timothy had halted their car right beside the water’s edge, and they were sitting gazing at it in a bemused enchantment. At least, Carol was enchanted, for she had never seen country like this before. And when she turned her head and looked up at the white house, with its gardens running down to the very shore of the lake, she thought that Aunt Harry must have been enchanted, too, when she first came in contact with this spot.

Aunt Harry—or the Marchesa dei Conti Rienzi—had bought Dulverton House when she had been left a widow, over twenty years ago, because although she loved Italy the climate had never suited her health, and the climate of the north of England did. She had also been assured by the house agent who had sold the place to her that Wordsworth, before moving on to Grasmere, had lived there for a time, and the thought of him making up poetry in the woods adjoining, and strolling on the shores of the lake, had appealed to her well developed imagination. That she had since discovered that neither Wordsworth nor, indeed, any poet worth mentioning, had ever lived there had done nothing to diminish her liking for the place, for it was one of those naturally charming houses which everyone must love, and not a few covet. Not large—not even as large as Brown Furrows—but mellow and peaceful and ageless, and wreathed in torrents of jasmine and honeysuckle, wistaria and wild roses, all in their various seasons.

The gardens which ran down to the lake were a fairyland to wander in. And from her windows Aunt Harry always had that perfect view which she loved—the view across the lake to where the lonely miles of moorland began. Behind her the hills guarded her from the worst of the winds, and in summer they protected her from the tourists. So she was altogether happy, or would have been, had she not been so crippled by arthritis, or the possessor of a godson who had gone off quite happily to the ends of the earth and apparently forgotten all about her.

But Timothy had not forgotten her, although he was such a bad correspondent. He started to tell Carol all about her as they sat there in the sunshine, and Carol, liking the sound of his voice, and watching his brown hands lying quietly relaxed on the wheel of the car, felt happier and more at peace with the world than she had done for several days. Certainly the few’ days immediately preceding her marriage to Timothy had been somewhat hectic, and since she had arrived at Brown Furrows she had been so overwhelmingly conscious of the presence of Meg in the house that she had felt a kind of cloud of apprehension settling round her. But now, on this first occasion that they were outside the house together, she felt able to relax the tension that had held her for at least forty-eight hours, and to take a certain amount of pleasure in the scenery, as well as a certain not easily explained and rather shy pleasure in the near presence of the man on the seat beside her.

She kept saying to herself that he was her husband—but she could never actually believe that he was! She wondered whether he thought of her as his wife, and was secretly certain that the only way in which he thought about her was as a rather pathetic and unusually helpless schoolgirl who was alone in the world, and whom he had simply had to do something about.

But had he...? Had he really needed to marry her...?

Marriage was so final, even in these days when half the population made a kind of hobby of getting themselves divorced!...

“Aunt Harriet is something of a character,” Timothy told her. “She always says what she thinks, and she takes violent likings and equally violent dislikes to people. But don’t worry—she’ll like you all right! I don’t know why, but I’m quite certain of that. She adored her Italian husband, and he died when she was still quite young. She was also very fond of my mother, and that’s how she came to be my godmother.”

“Then she’s not really your aunt?” Carol questioned.

“Oh, no. But we’ve always called her Aunt Harry.” He paused. “She does
not
like Meg,” he added unexpectedly.

Carol endeavored to look really surprised.

“Why not?” she asked.

He glanced at her for an instant.

“Some people don’t, you know.”

Carol was silent.

“She’s too straightforward for some people, and, of course, she is a little bit on the managing side.” He smiled slightly. “She even tries to manage me sometimes.”

“I hope she doesn’t always succeed,” Carol said, very quietly.

“I hope not, too! ” One of his eyebrows rose a little quizzically as he glanced at her again. “Perhaps I’ m rather an obstinate person once I make up my mind, Carol,” he remarked, and she wondered for quite a long time afterwards precisely what he meant by that.

“And now I think we’d better go in,” he added. “It’s quite likely she’s already seen us sitting here by the lake, and will accuse us of wasting her time—or our own! ”

He turned the car in at the curly wrought-iron gates, and they proceeded up a smooth and beautifully kept drive to the house. The front door was opened to them by an elderly manservant in impeccable dark indoor dress, and he bowed and looked surprised at the sight of Timothy, and then radiated obvious pleasure.