The LadyShip (3 page)

Allingham frowned at her for a moment but said only,
“Your brother is named Edward, did you not say? I seem to
recall that a Lieutenant Bennett was mentioned in the des
patches.”

“Yes, he was promoted in the field after the engagement
at Almaraz—it was an exceptional honour—and he was one
of those who held the chateau of Hougoumont at Water
loo.”

There was no mistaking the pride in her voice, despite a
sudden constraint in her manner that puzzled him.

“I daresay he will be so modest about it that you will not
even be allowed to mention the fact that there was a bat
tle,” he said. “They tend to be more uncomfortable under
family cross-fire than enemy cannonades, these young he
roes.”

“Why, yes—that is precisely how he is. We have tried not to put him to the blush through our letters, for fear he
will not come home because of them!”

Miss Bennett and Mr Allingham laughed together then,
but when Elinor glanced up finally to find his speculative—
but not unsympathetic—gaze on her, she suddenly remem
bered where she was and began to apologise for keeping
her guest from his errand. She would see to it that Evans
had a nuncheon waiting for him on his return, she said,
which he might enjoy in this parlour or in the coffee room,
if he preferred it. Thanking him rather breathlessly for his kindness to Lucinda and to herself, she withdrew much as
her sister had done a few minutes earlier, leaving Allingham
slightly mystified but much amused.

Elinor found (by dint of determined searching) a num
ber of tasks requiring her attention in another part of the
building until, some time later, she saw from a conve
nient window that Mr Allingham’s curricle was being led
into the yard and that the gentleman himself was waiting
there for it, his whip under one arm as he pulled on his
gloves. She ran downstairs, emerging into the sunny yard with most of her customary composure intact, to bid him farewell.

No sooner had he driven off, however, than Elinor found
herself unable to recall a word she had uttered to him, and
her mind in a disordered state quite foreign to it. She knew
what the matter was, of course, but she had a tendency to
forget the feeling between episodes of its occurrence, and
now again it seemed to strike her for the first time.

She had thought that she had forgotten about Marcus Al
lingham and his effect on her. But each time she saw him,
there came back to her all the other times, months and even
years before, when she had stood in a window or on her
doorstep like this and—she did not deny it—with a catch in
her throat watched the man she loved drive out of her life
again.

At Brookfield,
her son’s estate near Calne, Lady Dorothea
Allingham expressed her opinion that arranged marriages
generally turned out to be the most successful ones.

“Nonsense, Dolly!” Lord Vernon Dudley told her round
ly. “Arranged marriages are like arranged travel—one al
ways arrives at the right place at the right time, but there’s
no adventure in it.”

Lady Dorothea and her oldest friend were fated ever to disagree on this subject. Dorothea Allingham had married
for convenience. An earl’s daughter, she had brought to the
alliance a venerable blood line and extensive connexions;
William Allingham had no name or family but did possess a vast fortune amassed in foreign commerce—a source Doro
thea’s father and brothers had been delighted to overlook
in exchange for William’s extricating them from a consider
able collective debt. Dorothea had been hesitant but not
unwilling to enter into this union, and in time she had
grown to admire and respect her husband. She had a son
she was proud of and a home she was comfortable in, and
she could not imagine any greater contentment than that
which life had bestowed on her. Lord Vernon, on the other
hand, was a widower and childless, but he had been in love
with his wife, Sarah, from the moment he met her and still
was, although she had been dead for four years.

“There is no adventure in Marcus either,” Lady Doro
thea pointed out. “It is not to be wondered at that there
should not be,” she went on, not looking up from her nee
dlework. “He is an only child, and his father was over forty when he was born, as well as being a rather distant and for
bidding figure to a small boy. Not that William ever criti
cised Marcus, but I daresay he would have felt as if he were
being watched continually, and judged—William had such
a way about him.

“But Marcus has grown into neither a re
cluse nor a prig—I am certain you will find no one here or in London to complain of his being less than amiable, nor
that his manners are not all they should be. He has merely
chosen to execute his duties to his tenants rather than
fritter away his inheritance in foolish pursuit of amuse
ment.”

Lady Dorothea’s placid acceptance of her son’s—and
her own—unadventurous existence may have exasperated
Lord Vernon, but even he could not deny that peace of
mind—even when it came perilously close to complai
sance—was exceptionally becoming to its possessors. Lady
Dorothea was a small woman with fair hair not yet turned
to grey and a trim figure of which, at the age of fifty, she
had every right to be vain. Her eyes, like her son’s, were
nearer blue than grey, but unlike him she had learned to
school her emotions well enough to keep them from
leaping to view in those eyes; few beyond Lord Vernon were able to discern behind the confident set of her chin
and the cool blue gaze the very real affection she was ready
to lavish on the well-loved few.

Just now a pair of half-
spectacles rested on her long nose, and multi-coloured
yarns filled her silken lap and overflowed a tapestry bag
placed on the floor by her feet, but otherwise Dorothea Al
lingham’s person was as precise and orderly as her house
hold, whose amenities she was happy to share with his
lordship, whatever the subject of conversation.

The home she offered him was by no means palatial, not
being a nobleman’s seat, but what it lacked in pomp it am
ply made up in comfort. There were no draughts in the hall
ways, and the chimneys did not smoke; the kitchen (which
boasted an up-to-date closed stove) was close enough to
the dining-room so that food was still hot when it arrived
there, and the guest-rooms were well-lit and generously at
tended by servants. The most frequented apartments were
thickly carpeted and furnished with a view to utility as
much as fashion. Lord Vernon lounged at his ease in a chair
that, though of excellent craftsmanship, was sturdy enough
to support his large person. He drank a fine madeira from
Lady Dorothea’s cellars and nibbled at a tempting plateful
of cakes and sandwiches laid out on a small circular table
conveniently within his reach.

His lordship was a tall, loose-limbed man some four or
five years senior to Lady Dorothea, with a thick shock of
brown hair well along to white at the temples. He was
dressed expensively but carelessly in top-boots and buckskin breeches, with a spotted handkerchief tied around his neck. His brown eyes, which like his smile seemed to em
brace the whole world, twinkled at Lady Dorothea, al
though she refused to meet them.

Lord Vernon suspected
that Dolly secretly shared his point of view about marriage,
and he regularly steered the conversation into a direction
that would, he believed, inevitably bring her to admit this.
He could not help wondering what her reaction might have
been if Marcus had succumbed to a love match. Unlike Wil
liam Allingham, Dorothea rarely gave any outward sign of
anything but approval of whatever course her son chose to
take—even such a disastrous one as his threatened be
trothal to Clarissa Dudley, which had been the immediate
cause of Lord Vernon’s present visit to Brookfield.

Lord Vernon’s younger brother Alfred had been a neigh
bour of the Allinghams for the twenty-five years since Al
fred married Helena Towne and moved to Oakwood, one
of their father’s smaller estates, which bordered Brook
field’s more extensive acres. In that time, Lord Vernon had
grown frankly fonder of Marcus and his charming mother
—with whom he had carried on a friendly flirtation for
years, respective spouses notwithstanding—than of his
brother’s frequently irritating family, and it was for Marcus
and Dolly’s sake that he was more often to be found in Wilt
shire than at Redding, the rambling brick pile he occupied
near Nottingham. In any case, he was only a temporary ten
ant at Redding, his deceased older brother’s home, and
stayed there, apart from the necessity of settling Richard’s
tangled affairs, because he found his own more modest home becoming emptier every year.

Lord Vernon turned his gaze for a moment into the fire that warmed Lady Dorothea’s cosy salon, and forgot him
self briefly in bittersweet memories of his lost Sarah—until
the image of Marcus Allingham, staring fixedly down at him
from a gilt-edged portrait over the marble mantelpiece,
brought him back to the present with a sigh.

“How can you be so sure that Marcus cannot be stirred to
a little adventure?” he said. “Heaven knows he can’t have
picked Clarissa for her sobriety—she is the most notorious flirt in three counties. I hear she hasn’t broken above half a dozen hearts this week, but I can’t honestly attribute that to
Marcus’s calming influence.”

“Perhaps he simply didn’t want to go too far out of his way,” Lady Dorothea suggested.

Lord Vernon laughed, but he much feared there might be
some truth to this. For years the Dudleys and the Allinghams had shared their resources and their rights-of-way, and Marcus Allingham had obligingly squired Clarissa
Dudley to the local balls and assemblies that preceded her
triumphant debut in London the previous spring—after
which Clarissa had become too occupied with floods of
new admirers to spare her girlhood cavalier any further at
tention. To be sure, she had shown no especial partiality
for any of these suitors and did not contract any firm alliance either before or after her mother whisked her off to
Paris in the summer to look over the field of newly victori
ous officers and newly arrived English travellers to that
city. But Allingham had not appeared to miss her and cer
tainly had not seemed to be pining away for love of her.
Consequently, Lord Vernon had felt no apprehension that
his young friend was about to commit the folly of his life.

It was not that Lord Vernon actively disliked his own
family—although he found Clarissa capricious, her brother
Felix stuffy, and Alfred absent-minded. He tolerated Helena
—who had always felt her brother-in-law to have no proper
sense of his position in society—only because his manners
were less casual than they appeared to Helena. None of this, however, meant that Lord Vernon wished to welcome Mar
cus Allingham into the family circle.

Marcus possessed none of his prospective in-laws’ de
fects in lethal quantities, although one of them would
occasionally surface, to be ruthlessly suppressed by his pur
ported best friend, who did it only—Vernon explained to a sceptical Lady Dorothea—for the boy’s own good. Milord Allingham, as Vernon felt inclined to address him on these
occasions, had never displayed all these vices at one time,
however, and Vernon was uncertain on which front to at
tack first.

Marcus had, in his estimation, acted capriciously
in choosing Clarissa as the future Milady Allingham; he had
reacted in the most self-righteous manner possible to Lord
Vernon’s attempts by letter to talk sense into him; he had
been vague about his reasons for introducing such a hare
brained scheme in the first place; and finally, he had re
vealed an uncharacteristic toploftiness by intimating that
Clarissa ought to be grateful to make such a good match.

His lordship was prepared to concede that he may have
provoked this last from his friend because Vernon was
piqued at not having been consulted in advance, but in any
case something would have to be done about the situation
before it became irretrievable. Therefore, when Helena
Dudley wrote to him, in strictest confidence but with an
unmistakable note of triumph, that Marcus Allingham had asked to speak to Lord Alfred that very week, Vernon had
posted down from Redding as fast as he could, to be at
Brookfield when his paper-skulled young friend arrived
there from London.