The Accidental Marriage (20 page)

* * * *

When she did not ride out with Sir Carey, Julia spent the afternoons rambling about the gardens and the home park with his sisters. Caroline was a great talker, and only too eager to relate everything she knew about her brother. Both she and Susan clearly adored him.

‘Except that he won’t agree to my having my come out next year,’ Caroline complained when Julia commented on this.

Julia laughed. Caroline was very persistent, and she heard this complaint almost every day. ‘You are very young,’ she said. ‘You would really enjoy it all the more when you are a year older. Do you go the Assemblies locally?’

‘Not yet, but Carey has promised to take me soon. Julia, you could persuade him, you’re his wife, and from what people say, new wives can persuade their husbands to do anything! Julia,’ she added more slowly, ‘what is marriage really like?’

I wish I knew, Julia thought wistfully, for her marriage was not a normal one. Before she could find an acceptable way of answering Caroline’s question, Susan interrupted them.

‘Look,’ she said, pointing, ‘there are some of the village boys down by the river. Are they fishing?’

‘Carey allows them to,’ Caroline said. ‘Let’s go and see who they are. The bigger one looks like the Rector’s son. I expect he’s home from Harrow.’

The boys both turned out to be sons of the Rector. Julia had seen them at the village church on Sunday, but they had not been introduced. There had been so many people who wanted to greet Sir Carey and his new wife, the Rector had shooed them away. They stood up and eyed Julia with interest when Caroline, assuming the air of a grand lady, introduced them.

‘Have you caught much?’ Julia asked. ‘I used to love tickling trout when I was a girl.’

‘They aren’t being cooperative today, my lady,’ the older boy, Robert, said. ‘We did better the other day.’

Peter broke in. ‘Is that roan mare yours?’ he demanded. ‘The one with two white socks? I saw her before.’

‘When did you see her?’

‘Last Wednesday, when we were here. She was tied up in that clump of trees near the old castle.’

‘It was Thursday,’ Robert contradicted.

‘Wednesday.’

‘Thursday. We had the trout for supper.’

Julia looked across at the square keep. The steps up to the entrance were visible. Thursday was the day of the accident there. This must have been the first attempt on her life. Julia was now convinced the falling rock had been deliberate. Samuel had been out, ostensibly exercising the mare, but if he had left her, so close to the castle, he could easily have seen them going into it and followed, to take that sudden opportunity.

She shivered, and Caroline asked if she were cold.

‘A little. The sun’s gone in, and there’s a heavy cloud coming. I think we’d best go back to the house. Good luck with your fishing, boys.’

* * * *

That evening, after dinner, Sir Carey and Julia sat in the library, a room both preferred to the more formal drawing room. Susan was playing on the parlour pianoforte, and Caroline, who had a good singing voice, was with her, practising a new song.

When Julia reported what the boys had said Sir Carey agreed this proved Samuel’s guilt. ‘I’ve done what I can to trace him. The constable is making enquiries in the villages round about, but so far no one knows anything. What Samuel said about relatives in the district was clearly a lie. Apparently he didn’t frequent any of the taverns, so none of the men other than the servants here knew much about him. That in itself seems unusual. I’ve never before known a groom who didn’t enjoy himself at an inn when work was done.’

‘I doubt we’ll ever find him. He must be many miles away now.’

‘I’m having enquiries made in the villages round about too. I could ask for a Bow Street Runner, but the man seems to have left no trace. I’m sending a man who knows him to Lincolnshire. If he’s a tool of Daniel’s, perhaps he will return there, to report his failure.’

‘He left before he could have known the last attempt failed,’ Julia pointed out. ‘He hadn’t been seen in the village that day, so how would he discover what happened? None of the other servants are likely to have had any contact with him.’

‘I imagine the news of your death or injury would have been known all over the county within a day or so,’ Sir Carey said. ‘He could have lingered a few miles away and listened to the gossip where he wouldn’t be known.’

On the following morning he was closeted in the estate room with his steward, when there was a sudden commotion in the hallway. A girl’s shrill voice was demanding to see Sir Carey immediately.

‘You will be sorry if you don’t tell me where he is,’ she said, and burst into tears.

‘What the devil?’ Sir Carey leapt to his feet and almost ran from the room. Julia was emerging from the morning room where she had been making lists of what she would need to buy when they went back to London. Standing in the centre of the entrance hall, gesticulating with her riding whip to keep a bemused footman well away from her, was an enchantingly pretty girl. She was petite and slender, and the sapphire blue riding habit enhanced her blonde loveliness and perfectly matched her eyes, made more brilliant by the tears which filled them,

She turned when she heard Sir Carey’s footsteps, and ran across the hall to throw herself into his arms. Short of letting her fall to the floor Sir Carey had no option but to catch her. He tried to set her down, but she wound her arms round his neck and clung to him, bursting into a renewed bout of sobbing.

‘Carey! Carey, my dearest love! Why didn’t you wait for me?’ she asked, her voice tremulous.

‘Let us all go into the library,’ Julia broke in. ‘Ask Molly to bring some smelling salts and laudanum,’ she ordered the footman, who scuttled away with less than his normal dignity.

Sir Carey carried the clinging damsel into the library, where she consented at last to release him and collapse into one of the deepest armchairs.

‘What on earth are you doing here, Angelica?’

‘I came to see you, of course!’ she replied, and burst into a renewed bout of weeping.

Sir Carey cast a harassed look at Julia, who was standing calmly near the door.

‘You rode here alone?’

‘Yes, of course! If I’d ordered the carriage Mama would have forbidden it. But I had to see you! Why did you marry her?’

She threw a venomous glance at Julia, who returned the look impassively.

‘This is my wife,’ Sir Carey said. ‘Julia, this is Angelica. I am afraid I cannot furnish you with her real name, since I never heard who she married.’

Angelica swallowed her sobs. She turned her face up to him, and Sir Carey saw with a shock that she could, unlike most girls, cry without her eyes reddening. She had never cried before, in his presence, and though he had been accustomed to the childish tantrums of Caroline and Susan in the past, this was different. She looked as lovely as he remembered, even in her obvious distress.

Molly came in at that moment with smelling salts and a small glass bottle of laudanum. She looked curiously at the weeping Angelica, but was soon hustled out of the room by Julia.

When Julia proffered the smelling salts, Angelica gave her a glance of dislike and waved her away. ‘I don’t want that disgusting stuff!’ she said.

‘What is it you do want?’ Sir Carey asked.

‘You!’ she wailed. ‘I want you, I always have!’

‘Then why did you break our engagement and marry someone else? I still haven’t any idea who it is,’ he added.

‘It isn’t anybody! Oh, Carey, don’t you understand? It was all a dreadful mistake! Your cousin Daniel told me such awful things about you, and Mama persuaded me that you were not suitable, and he was so very attentive! They kept on at me until I didn’t know what I was doing, and eventually I agreed to write to you. But I didn’t mean it. Later, when I knew what I’d done, I planned to wait until you came home from Vienna and tell you what a mistake it all was. But you didn’t wait! You got married instead! Oh Carey, how could you? It’s destroyed my life!’

Angelica stayed for a nuncheon of fruit and cold meat. She had calmed down, wiped her eyes, smiled tentatively at Julia and apologized for her outburst.

‘I am so ashamed, my lady,’ she whispered. ‘I love - loved Carey so dearly, and it was such a shock to hear he had forgotten me so soon. I must have been mad at Christmas, but I was missing him so much, and people kept telling me how he was betraying me with other women in Vienna.’

Was that an insinuation that Sir Carey had been making up to her in Vienna, Julia wondered. But she kept her thoughts to herself, and calmly invited Angelica to eat with them before riding back to her home.

‘How far away is it?’ she asked. ‘Won’t your parents worry that you are out all day with just a groom?’

‘It takes about two hours to ride here, but I am often out all day. I have so many friends, I often call on them and we spend the day together. But I haven’t ridden here before, when Carey was at home. I used to come sometimes, before I even met him, to visit Caroline or Penelope. We were at school together. Did she tell you?’

‘Yes. She will be delighted to see you, no doubt.’

Caroline was, to judge by the gush of chatter the two girls indulged in during the meal. Angelica asked numerous questions about mutual school friends, and Caroline, indefatigable correspondent, seemed to know about all their doings. After they had eaten, the two girls wandered outside, and Julia could see their heads bent together as they walked round the rose garden, where the bushes were just beginning to sprout tender new leaves.

Sir Carey came up behind her as she stood in the morning room window watching.

‘I’m so sorry for that exhibition,’ he said softly. ‘I had no idea she was even at her home, let alone that she would force her way in here.’

‘Or that she was not married?’ Julia asked, turning to look at him.

‘That too. I wonder what really happened? She was a trifle vague.’

‘She’s remarkably pretty.’ Julia was frowning slightly. Sir Carey had a reminiscent smile on his lips, and her heart sank. He had, after the first shock, appeared pleased to see Angelica. Was he regretting their impulsive marriage? If it had not happened, would Carey and Angelica now be having a grand reconciliation, and planning their wedding?

‘I hadn’t realized her family home was so close to Courtlands,’ she said.

‘It is, I suppose, but on the other side of the hills people tend to look westwards for entertainment. They’re near enough to Cheltenham to attend assemblies and theatres there. Here we look to Oxford. I never met her in the country, only in London. I’ve met her parents before, occasionally, but Angelica was at school then.’

He’s explaining too much, Julia thought, and her heart sank. He still loves her. She walked to the table and sat down, toying with her pencil as she looked at the lists she had been making. She began to speak, then checked herself. It was too soon. Later they might talk about what could be done.

* * * *

‘Angelica says she had three offers when she was in Yorkshire,’ Caroline said the following day. Sir Carey had ridden out early, and Julia was eating breakfast with the two girls.

‘Did she say who it was she accepted?’ Julia asked. She was aware Sir Carey did not know, and she confessed to herself she was curious to know which man had, if only temporarily, taken Angelica’s affections away from him.

‘No, she wouldn’t tell me. But if I were in London and saw how she behaved towards them all, I could guess,’ Caroline said. ‘Julia, will you ask Carey if I can have my come out next year? Please!’

‘He won’t agree,’ Julia said, prevaricating.

‘He would if you asked him. Julia,’ she paused.

‘What is it?’ Julia asked, resigned, knowing she was unlikely to want to hear more of Caroline’s requests.

‘I can’t dance,’ Caroline confessed. ‘We learned some country dances at school, and I’ve danced here in the village at harvest and Christmas, but I don’t know any of the dances they do at Almack’s. I can’t waltz, and they allow it there now. Will you teach me?’

‘You can’t waltz at Almack’s until you are approved by one of the patronesses,’ Julia warned. ‘But I could teach you to waltz.’

‘I’ll play the pianoforte for you,’ Susan offered. ‘But how can you teach Caroline the minuet or cotillion, with just the two of you?’

‘Angelica says they have morning dancing classes,’ Caroline said eagerly. ‘If we could find a few other girls we could do that. Penelope would come.’

‘No,’ Julia said in haste. ‘I’ll teach you to waltz, but I cannot teach a whole lot of girls anything more complicated!’

Caroline had to be content, and during the next two weeks, whenever they had time, Julia taught Caroline the steps of the waltz. The girl had a good sense of rhythm, but whatever Julia said could not cure her of excessive swaying of the hips.

‘It’s fun,’ she laughed.

‘It makes you look too provincial,’ Julia said, but even this did not matter to Caroline.

‘Well, I am a provincial, and I won’t be otherwise until Carey lets me have my come out!’

* * * *

In London Fanny was in a fever of excitement. When Elizabeth came to ask how she was, Fanny thrust the letter she had been reading towards her.

‘Oh, dearest Elizabeth, read that! It’s from Frederick, and he’s coming home!’

Elizabeth took the letter and read it slowly. ‘He’s left that wretched Tania, it seems. Will you forgive him?’

Fanny frowned. ‘I have no other choice, do I?’

‘You need not return to live with him. He could be forced to provide a separate home for you and the children.’

‘But if this child,’ and she patted her rounded stomach, ‘is a boy, he would want to have him brought up at Greystones. He will be Frederick’s heir, and it’s only right he should be brought up there. Besides, I don’t think I would enjoy living on my own.’

Elizabeth nodded. ‘I don’t think you would, my dear.’

Fanny was twisting the ribbons of her gown round her fingers. ‘I keep thinking of Eleonore Metternich. He positively flaunted his affairs in Vienna, and from what I heard there has had mistresses all his life. Yet she endures it, lives with him, shares him with them. At least I’d have the satisfaction of knowing Tania was safely thousands of miles away in Russia. I wouldn’t have to share him.’