The LadyShip (4 page)

Allingham was in the end more than an hour later than
his announced and usually invariable time of arrival, a cir
cumstance that threw the household into a tizzy but af
forded Lord Vernon some small satisfaction.

“I stopped in Newbury,” Allingham explained briefly, as
he descended from the perch of his curricle to find his
mother awaiting him two steps inside the door and eager to
give him a welcoming kiss. Later, in the privacy of her salon, he confided that he had stopped to buy a “trinket”
for Miss Dudley, having neglected to do so earlier, and pro
duced this object for his mother’s admiration.

“Trinket, indeed!” said Lady Dorothea, shading her eyes
from the glare of an enormous diamond, set among smaller
stones on a gold ring. “One might do oneself an injury waving this about.” She tried the ring on her finger and waved her hand at Lord Vernon, who ducked.

Allingham smiled perfunctorily. “I know you are only
teasing, Mother, but kindly do not exaggerate, I beg
you.”

“She’s just jealous,” said Lord Vernon. “William never
bought her anything half so gaudy.”

“He
was
a little close,” Lady Dorothea conceded.

“Close! No Scotsman ever had a tighter grip on a five-
pound note. You should have married me, Dolly. I’d have
kept you in jewels and silk bonnets all right.”

“Would that have been a marriage of love, my dear, or of
convenience?” she asked, shooting a quizzing glance at
Lord Vernon.

“Love on my part, convenience on yours,” he replied
unhesitatingly. “But never suppose I could not have
brought you around to my way of thinking in the end.”

“Then it’s as well you married Sarah and did not waste
your time with me.”

“Aye,” Lord Vernon agreed, with a singularly smug
smile, “Sarah and I understood each other from the begin
ning.”

“All that aside,” Allingham interrupted, “do you think
Clarissa—Miss Dudley—will like the ring?”

“Knowing my gaudy niece,” Lord Vernon said dryly,
“she’ll be in transports over it. Not that it takes much to
cast Clarissa into paroxysms of delight.”

Allingham frowned, but Lady Dorothea returned the ring
to her son with a hug. “She’ll adore it, darling. How could
she not?”

“When are you going to
...
er, do the deed?” Lord Ver
non asked, watching Allingham carefully return the ring to
its velvet-lined box and snap it shut.

“I shall send a note over this afternoon and wait upon
Lord Alfred in the morning.”

“I shall set my watch.”

Allingham favoured his friend with a look that plainly
said he was flogging a dead horse, and excused himself to
clean off his travel dust and change his clothes for dinner,
which was set for the customary early country hour. In
deed, the pale sun had barely set when Lady Dorothea, insisting that Marcus take the carved oak chair at the head of
the table, seated herself to the right of it, with a footman be
hind her in addition to the two posted within instant reach
of her son and Lord Vernon. Two simply prepared but generous courses were served, buttressed (mainly for the benefit of Lord Vernon, who had no modesty about his appetite)
by side dishes of baked-ham slices, grouse in cream sauce,
and truffles.

Lady Dorothea kept up a steady stream of small talk
about estate matters that had come up during her son’s so
journ in the metropolis and about happenings on the estate
and in the village, which were numerous and insignificant.
She made no mention of any of the inhabitants of Oak
wood and thus afforded Lord Vernon no opportunity to
cast aspersions on them in an attempt to divert Allingham
from his proposed course of action in that quarter.

Lord Vernon therefore kept his silence, supposing ini
tially that Dolly was attempting to distract Marcus from a matter that must be causing him much concern. However,
with the second course (trout broiled with herbs, removed
with a remarkably fine sirloin of beef), it was borne in upon
his lordship that
l’affaire Clarissa
was not mentioned sim
ply because both Allingham and his mother were far less preoccupied with it than was their guest. In fact, they appeared to regard it as a settled thing, and—Lord Vernon
concluded with a fulminating look that went blithely unheeded—they were being deuced cool about it!

He then put down his fork with a clatter that caused
both mother and son to interrupt their conversation to
stare at him. Lord Vernon begged pardon and said to his
footman that on second thought he would have another
glass of wine after all. With enough of that in him, he told
himself, he could be as heartless and unconcerned as anyone else.

However, despite the subsequent reinforcement of two
large glasses of brandy, Lord Vernon found himself unac
countably sober after dinner. Long after Lady Dorothea had
retired to her bedchamber, he sat clear-headed and sleep
less in a winged chair next to the library fire, his long legs
propped up on the fender. He regarded Allingham, who
was meticulously trimming a cigar, with a sullen eye.

“I’m not keeping you up, am I?” he said. “I mean, you
aren’t tired after gadding about the countryside all day?”

“I never gad about,” Marcus reminded him, as he lighted
his cigar. “I came straight from London in a well-sprung vehicle, stopped to rest halfway here, and on my arrival had a
hot bath and a good dinner. Now I am sitting beside a com
fortable fire and feeling splendid.”

“Ready for any rump or ruckus.”

Allingham’s eyes were amused, but he asked gravely,
“What precisely did you have in mind?”

“Nothing,” his lordship admitted. “Didn’t think that far
ahead.” It was that amusement in his friend’s eyes that had
encouraged Lord Vernon over the years to believe Alling
ham capable of a greater enjoyment of life. His optimism
had not yet, however, met with such a setback as this latest
stubborn idiocy of Allingham’s.

“I don’t recall that you’ve ever thought very far ahead,”
Allingham said, blowing a cloud of smoke at the ceiling.
“Don’t you find your life a little...well, unsettled?”

“Better than knowing exactly what’s going to happen
every day of the week before you’re even out of bed—even to the cigar you’re going to smoke after dinner! Look here,
Marcus—how long have you been thinking about getting
married?”

“Not long. A month or two.”

Lord Vernon snorted impolitely into his brandy glass. “A
month or two!” he repeated witheringly. “Sarah and I
would have been married weeks before we’d made up our
minds to it, if we’d thought about it the way you do.”

Allingham laughed at the characteristic muddle Lord Ver
non made of his argument. “You must confess, old friend,
that you and Sarah were an exceptional case. You must
know that most marriages are
not
arranged in that manner.
Although...how precisely was it arranged, if I may ask? I
don’t recall that you ever told me.”

“That’s because, as you’ve correctly assumed, it wasn’t arranged at all. I mean, it was and it wasn’t. I met Sarah when her coach overturned on the road between Redding
and Grantham. I happened to be the next person along af
ter the accident, and I drove her to the George. She had to
wait there while her coach was repaired, so I waited with
her. We fell into conversation and...well, I can’t say we
fell in love then and there, because it wasn’t anything as
certain as that. It was as if we’d known each other before and had been separated, and then we were back together
again. We eloped to Gretna Green.”

“Why, in heaven’s name? She was a perfectly suitable girl, wasn’t she? Your families wouldn’t have objected to
the match.”

“No, they wouldn’t and they didn’t. We did it just for the
devil of it, I suppose—and in a way
because
of the families.
They would have made a monstrous to-do about it, made
us wait six months or a year just on principle, and then
have had the most elaborate wedding old Harrington could
afford. They did almost as much as it was—out of sheer
spite, I expect—when we got home. Made us go through the ceremony again. Not that Sarah didn’t look like an
earth-bound angel in that white gown, but she giggled all
the way through the wilt-thou-haves. Bishop was no end of
scandalised.”

“So I should imagine—although your family must have
been accustomed to your starts by then.”

“Oh, aye—I’d been at them since I was a nipper. They
were a bit shaken to discover there was a female lunatic in
the same mould, however. Sarah was barely seventeen
when I met her, but she had already started collecting waifs
and strays—there were no fewer than
six
kittens in that
coach with her! She didn’t stop at animals, either. Used to carry a purse full of pennies for any urchins she might run
into between Bond Street and Berkeley Square. They got to
know her, of course, and Richard finally insisted I get her
out of London before she ruined us. His theory was that there’d be fewer charity cases at Redding, but Sarah fer
reted them out. She was young St Clair’s greatest defender
when he married that girl...
”

Lord Vernon fell suddenly silent. He had touched on the
family scandal, a thing he rarely did. Viscount David St
Clair, heir to Vernon’s brother Richard, Marquess of Red
ding, had secretly married a young woman of gentle birth
but with neither name nor fortune to recommend her
to the arrogant marquess. Whereas the circumstances sur
rounding Lord Vernon’s unconventional marriage to Sarah
Harrington had occasioned more mirth than genuine con
cern, St Clair’s elopement with a girl scarcely higher than a
servant—in her father-in-law’s eyes—was the root of a trag
edy no one had expected or intended—not even Lord Red
ding. The marquess, though unable to actually disinherit
his son, refused to let any news of him or his bride into his
house, as if mere mention of their names would defile it.
Richard declared that St Clair could move back in when
Richard died, but he was damned if he’d see his son cross
the threshold before that day.

Only Sarah was brave enough to face Richard’s wrath.
She came to tell him everything she heard about St Clair—
until one day she was obliged to tell Richard that his son
was dead. Cut off from his old family and with limited
means to support his new one, St Clair had joined the navy and been killed in action off Cape St Vincent. His wife and
children had long since moved away from Redding by the
time this occurred, and Richard had obliterated all re
maining traces of them there. But he could never forget his
only son completely, and he lived a crabbed and unhappy recluse for the rest of his long life.

Richard had been even more conscious of family posi
tion than his sister-in-law Helena Dudley, but in his case
there was added a wide streak of intolerance that allowed
for no contact with what Richard regarded as the lower or
ders. Lord Vernon had never been close to his older
brother and did not miss him; what made him reluctant to
bring up the tragedy was that it was the one thing that had
made his beloved Sarah unhappy in all their years together.
She had loved her gay, handsome nephew and had cher
ished more hope for Richard himself than anyone else
could see in him; it wounded her deeply that she could do
nothing to heal the breach between father and son, al
though she never stopped trying while St Clair lived. After
the viscount’s death, Sarah had stopped bringing home
strays and taking up forlorn causes. At any rate, she had
ceased speaking to her husband about them.

Allingham had been a schoolboy when these events occurred, and thus knew little of them and was disinclined to
press his friend for details that did not concern him. He
knew that Lord Vernon, as Richard’s executor, had in the course of confirming David’s death discovered that he had
left a son and that Vernon had been searching for the unnamed boy through his solicitors and his own efforts ever since. Sarah, who had written down as much as she knew of the affair, had not known what happened to St
Clair’s family after the viscount’s death. His widow, Sarah had written in her last lines to her husband before her own
untimely death following a particularly severe bout with in
fluenza, had refused to accept further charity from St Clair’s
family and had deliberately disappeared from their sight.
Allingham, who remembered Sarah vividly, knew she must
have been unhappy over this but would have respected the widow’s wishes. She could not have guessed what a mud
dle it would leave Lord Vernon with when Richard finally died.