The Westerby Inheritance (17 page)

Bella never stopped talking until Jane was ensconced in the traveling carriage. “And don’t forget your old Bella,” shouted the maid as the coachman cracked his whip.

Jane smiled stiffly and waved as the coach rambled deafeningly over the cobbles of Huggets Square and out into the hurly-burly of the streets.

Jane was blind and deaf to all sights and sounds, to the cries of the street venders, to the violence of the streets, to the terrible rotting bodies stuck up on the Temple Gate, to the creaking and groaning of the iron shop signs as they swung and rattled in the rising wind.

A squall of rain hit the carriage windows as they crossed through the houses on London Bridge, and ran down the glass like tears.

People and houses floated past Jane’s fixed stare like objects in a dream. By the time the carriage was out into the lanes of Surrey, the rain had changed to sleet, whipping savagely across the bare fields, where crows wheeled and turned against the rushing clouds.

Night began to fall, and one by one the firefly lights of candles began to twinkle in cottage windows. Then at last, in the gathering gloom, loomed Westerby church. Not very far to go.

Jane felt no quickening of her heart as the carriage with its outriders, their flambeaux crackling and flaming, swung into the narrow rutted lane that led to her home.

Hetty came running out at the sound of the carriage, her gown more frayed than usual and her hair like a bird’s nest. In a more normal state of mind, Jane would have wondered nervously what Lady Comfrey’s grand if aged servants made of her stepmama, but her very soul seemed to have died.

With hands like ice, she embraced Hetty as the servants unloaded her trunks and the large wicker hamper with goodies from Lady Comfrey’s kitchen. The servants haughtily declined Lady Hetty’s offer of refreshment. The coach swung round in the narrow courtyard and rumbled off down the road.

“Come in! Come in! You’re froze to death!” cried Hetty, tugging at Jane, who was standing very still, staring after the vanishing coach.

“Yes, Hetty,” said Jane with a little shiver. “Let us go inside.”

“Everyone’s in the kitchen,” chattered Hetty. “What a load of things you do have! Why are you home? Why did you leave? The old lady ha’n’t taken you in dislike?”

“Later, Hetty,” said Jane through stiff lips. “Not now.”

The Marquess of Westerby was at his usual place at the kitchen table, with his usual glass in front of him. He seemed to have grown considerably older and smaller, somehow, shrunk inside the tawdry grandeur of his frayed silks.

Jane walked forward and placed the Westerby documents on the table in front of him.

“What’s this, heh?” he slurred, pulling out his glass and polishing it on his cuff. He glanced idly at the papers and then looked up at Jane in a dazed kind of way. Then he looked at the papers again.

With a great cry, he sprang to his feet and rushed out into the yard and put his head under the pump. They waited in silence, Hetty and the girls wondering, and Jane tired and ill, until he appeared, grasping the doorjamb and staring at the kitchen table with eyes that were fever-bright.

He walked forward and picked up his glass and hurled it into the fire. “Demme,” he cried, “if I touch a drop of the stuff again! How did you manage this, Jane? It is a miracle! Hetty, my love, see what Jane has brought me. My clever puss of a daughter has brought back Eppington Chase, my lands and my fortune. Oh, Hetty, Hetty! You will be a fine lady yet!”

Hetty suddenly went as still and silent as Jane, her face very white. Betty and Sally had opened the hamper of goodies and were shouting and prancing with delight, tugging at their mother’s skirts and holding up sugarplums and cakes in front of her unseeing eyes.

“Jane, my love,” cried the Marquess. “Sit down by me, girl, and tell me all.”

“Later,” whispered Jane. “Pray forgive me, Papa. I must rest.”

The Marquess made a move to stop her, but caught his wife’s quick shake of the head and sank back into his chair, clutching the papers and staring down at them with glittering eyes.

Jane escaped quickly and climbed up the stairs to the old familiar bedroom. She pulled a hard chair up to the window and stared with unseeing eyes out at the windy darkness.

The door softly opened and Hetty came in, carrying a candle, which she placed on the mantelshelf. She walked over and stood behind Jane and placed her hands gently on the girl’s shoulders.

“Who is he, love?” she asked softly. “Tell old Hetty all about it. Who is he?”

Jane began to tremble under her strong hands, and then she stood up and turned round and buried her small head in Hetty’s generous bosom and cried as if her heart would break.

“There now, there now,” soothed Hetty, patting her shaking shoulders awkwardly. “You shall have your cry, and then you shall tell Hetty.”

And so Jane went on crying out the hurt and shame and lost love, while Hetty stared over her head and felt her heart cringe at the thought of being mistress of Eppington Chase.

“Damn that house,” thought Hetty fiercely. “It takes people, body and soul. But it shan’t get old Hetty. I’ll burn it first!”

Autumn passed into winter, and winter changed into spring, and the Marquess of Westerby was once more ensconced at Eppington Chase. He was as good as his word and had not drunk a drop since the night of Jane’s homecoming. He had put on a great deal of weight and had adopted a rather jovial, muscular brand of Christianity, riding around to his tenants’ homes with a large Bible under his arm. His tenants suffered his noisy preaching gladly, for at least he proved to be an exceptional landlord. Roofs were repaired and fences mended. He was a good man, despite his foibles, they said. It was a pity his lady had become so high in the instep.

For the Marquess was the only happy member of Eppington Chase. Hetty had changed overnight into a stiff clothes horse, a very model of propriety and
bon ton
. Her voice had lost a lot of its old vigor, although it kept its bad grammar.

Jane had tried to tease her out of this new role. She could not believe that she, Jane, had longed for Hetty to forsake her rough-and-ready manners. And despite her grand airs, Hetty appeared to have taken up drinking where her husband had left off, and sometimes her social mask would be cracked by noisy bouts of frenzied weeping. Sally and Betty fretted under the rigid tuition of a governess and longed for their old freedom.

James Bentley’s ghost seemed to walk the corridors and stairways of the Chase—a feeling aggravated by the real-life flesh-and-blood presence of his family.

Stricken with remorse, Jane had offered them a home, which, to Hetty’s horror, they had eagerly accepted. Although they were given a wing of their own and tacitly expected to live apart, they always seemed to materialize at mealtimes, heavily robed in black and staring at Jane with accusing eyes.

And Jane? She went quietly about her duties in the stillroom and the estates, trying to forget Lord Charles. Shortly after she had moved to the Chase, the carrier had arrived bearing the Westerby portraits, with a line from Lord Charles’s secretary. Jane had written an impassioned letter, begging his forgiveness and pathetically vowing her love for him. The letter was never opened. His lordship, hearing from the carrier whom it was from, had consigned it to the flames of his drawing-room fire.

Philadelphia was often a guest at the Chase, marveling at the good fortune of the Syms family, in that Mr. Bentley had taken his life before he had had time to remove Mr. Syms from the living, for Papa had not wanted to leave and it was such fun now that Jane was a wealthy lady. Philadelphia went so far as to see the hand of Providence in the affair and sulked when Jane called her heartless and then burst into tears—Jane suddenly remembering Lord Charles’s voice as
he
had called her heartless that terrible evening so long ago.

But as Jane began to emerge from her numb suffering, she became increasingly concerned over Hetty. She tried to speak to her father, but he robustly pooh-poohed the idea of anything being up with his wife, saying that she looked remarkably fine.

Then Mrs. Bentley began gradually to recover both her spirits and her malicious tongue. Her sly, tittering barbs made the sensitive Hetty wince and run to her bottle for solace the more.

Jane was at her wit’s end when she received a visit from Bella.

The old lady’s maid was ushered into the main saloon on the first floor of the new wing, which still boasted its chinoiserie, Jane having not had the heart to make any alterations. Jane rose to meet her. “Why, Bella!” she exclaimed. “What brings you to the country? Not bad news, I trust. Lady Comfrey…?”

Bella shook her large head mournfully. “Dead,” she said. “Dead as a doornail. Gone. Departed. Left her mortal body. Passed on. Dead.”

“What…?”

“Apoplexy,” said Bella with gloomy relish, “and all on account of that Mr. Braintree.”

“How…?”

“I told her. I warned her,” went on Bella with a monumental sniff. “But she would not listen to me, not her! ‘You’re jealous, Bella,’ she said. ‘Me, my lady!’ I says, says I. ‘Me! Jealous of that fop!’ ‘You may leave my employ, Bella,’ says she. ‘I am nourishing a viper in my drawing room,’ says she, not knowing her Bible that well, for she never was a one for going to church, and I hope the good Lord will pity her and forgive her, for she took care of you, my lady, ’fore she died.”

“
Bella
…?”

“You want to know how it all come about? That Mr. Braintree was always around akissing her hand till he was like to wear the skin away. So my lady decides he’s going to marry her, and so she makes a will. Didn’t leave me a penny in it, neither. ‘You’re an ungrateful wretch,’ she says, ‘and I don’t know why you stop here, seeing as how I told you to go.’ ‘I’m stopping here, my lady,’ says I, ‘to pick up the pieces.’ But she wouldn’t listen.

“Then one night she comes back from the opera with that Braintree, that man-milliner. I was sitting in the corner of the room with my sewing, both of ’em having forgot I was there. Well, my lady, she’s obviously decided that Braintree needs a bit o’ encouragement to put the question of marriage, so he’s arollin’ his eyes and kissing her hand,
you
know, and I swear to God, she puts her arms around his neck and kisses him on the mouth. Well, what a squawk he did let out to be sure. He scrubs his mouth with his handkerchief and says
’Faugh! Ugh! Pooh!
’ just like that. He looks at my poor lady like she’s some sort of a toad, and then he turns and he
runs
, runs as hard as his old stick legs will take him, still shouting, ‘Faugh! Pooh! Faugh! Pooh!’ all the way out of Huggets Square.

“Well, now my lady goes very strange, worse than she was afore. She starts ranting and raving to people that don’t exist. But one day the poor soul was bled by the physician, and her head clears enough to send for her lawyer. So she leaves everything to you, my lady—her house and her jewels and her fortune.”

“I hope she left you something, Bella,” said Jane.

“Not ’zactly,” said Bella, looking at the floor. “But she took care of me in a way. She left me to you, my lady.”

“What!”

“Yes, in her will she says as how she’s leaving her maid, Bella, to Lady Jane Lovelace.”

“But you cannot leave people in a will,” protested Jane. “You are not a
slave
, Bella.”

“I am in a ways, my lady. If your ladyship don’t take me on, I’ll starve, that’s for sure.”

“Of
course
I will employ you, Bella,” said Jane warmly, too angry at the late Lady Comfrey to mourn her. “What of the rest of the servants at Huggets Square?”

“Them too,” said Bella mournfully.

“Well, Bella, I do not know what I want with another town house, but I shall keep them all, and so I shall tell them.”

Bella’s eyes filled with tears of relief, and she tucked a wisp of gray hair under her cap with a shaking red hand.

“Well, now, my lady,” she said, blinking her eyes rapidly, “I’m that overcome with the relief of it all. It puts me in mind of that there Miss Agnes Livingstone, her what was affianced to the Honorable Mr. Jeremy Tring…”

Jane repressed a sigh. She had meant to engage a young lady’s maid, but she had not the heart to hurt Bella’s feelings. And then, Bella was very good at her job and one could always turn a deaf ear to her ramblings. “I shall be able to retire her quite soon,” thought Jane, “and give her a very good pension indeed. Dear me, I must be
very
rich.” She looked round the saloon with new eyes. The chinoiserie looked quite well, once one became used to it. “But this is my home,” thought Jane fiercely, “and oh! I can do so many things.” Then, as she felt the old fierce, possessive attachment to the Chase take hold of her, she shivered. This was how James Bentley had felt. But she would never exorcise his ghost unless she did some decorating. His tall figure seemed to shuffle along the empty rooms at night, and sometimes Jane could swear she could hear him mournfully cracking his knuckles and crying to get back to the material world.

Then, to her relief, she found she was mourning Lady Comfrey. Jane had begun to think herself devoid of normal feelings. With sadness she recalled Lady Comfrey’s many kindnesses, the way her eyes sparkled youthfully in her old face when she was excited, her extravagant bursts of generosity.

“… with her
garters!
” ended Bella triumphantly.

Jane did not know whether to smile sympathetically or frown sympathetically, since she had not been listening to the story of Miss Agnes Livingstone, so she simply said quietly, “I will tell the housekeeper to arrange a room for you, Bella. This is now your home.”

After Bella had left with the housekeeper—the old Westerby housekeeper, Mrs. Butterworth, the Marquess having rehired all his old servants—Jane sat back with a tired little sigh to enjoy the unaccustomed peace and isolation. But it did not last for long. As soon as she had any time to herself, her thoughts turned restlessly to Lord Charles Welbourne. Did he ever think of her? Had he forgiven her? If he saw her again, would he find her changed? And then she thought, “But how
can
he see me again if I do not go to London?”