A Falling Star, page 1
part #3 of Wintercombe Series
A Falling Star
Pamela Belle
© Pamela Belle 1990
Pamela Belle has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 1990 by Random Century Group.
This edition published in 2019 by Endeavour Media Ltd.
Table of Contents
PART ONE
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
PART TWO
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
PART THREE
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
Historical Note
For Hugh,
who grew with this book,
but entered the world much earlier.
PART ONE
‘Sagacious, bold, and turbulent of wit’
1
‘Harden’d in Impenitence’
It was so much smaller than he remembered.
Strange, that a place that had loomed so large in his life, that had driven him away, that had called him back, should be so insignificant. Low, gabled, built in the grey-gold stone that still thrust like bones through the earth in the surrounding fields, it seemed hardly more than a farmhouse. He had seen the palaces of Europe, he was familiar with great houses in four or five countries, and beside them, Wintercombe was nothing.
And yet…it had been the home of the St Barbes for nearly two centuries, and now it was his, possessed by right of inheritance. He had been born here, passed his childhood within and without the rough grey walls, had known a little of happiness, and rather more of its opposite. It had not been able to hold him, and as soon as he could, he had escaped.
Home. Home was here: not Amsterdam, nor Den Haag, nor Aunt Kate’s pretty château by the wild Loire. And after nearly fifteen years, he had come home for good.
Or had he? There was no one about, save a couple of men chopping up a wind-blown tree down by the Wellow Lane. He could still change his mind, deny his past and his destiny, and defy his father for the last and most decisive time. He could turn his horse about, and ride back to Bristol, to take ship for his old life, his regiment, and for Johanna and the careless debauchery of the other English exiles, voluntary and involuntary, who crowded the towns and cities of Holland. If he did…
If he did, Charles would have Wintercombe by default. And he was damned if he would make a gift of his inheritance to Cousin Charles.
The decision, after all, had already been taken, long since. He smiled rather grimly, and twitched the horse’s reins.
*
Henry Renolds, the most junior stable boy, had doubts, and expressed them nervously. Surely Mistress Louise should not be riding Shadow? If she must venture out on this chilly February afternoon, why not take Nance, her usual mount?
Louise Chevalier stood unmoved in the centre of the stable yard, tapping her whip gently against the thick dove-grey folds of her French riding habit, and let the boy’s thick Somerset dialect trail away into confusion. ‘I told you, Henry,’ she said calmly, ‘I wish to ride Shadow. Go saddle him at once, if you please.’
The boy, faced with vastly superior tactics and weaponry, gave up. ‘Aye, mistress,’ he muttered, and scuttled into the stables. Louise waited, now and then glancing at the sky, which was high and white today, threatening neither rain nor snow. If only the wretched child would hurry, before someone discovered what she was about.
But no one shouted from the windows looking down over the stable yard, no one came bustling officiously out to ask her what on earth she was doing, going riding alone and on the most notorious horse in the stables into the bargain. She knew that she should be sitting decorously indoors, stitching, or talking French to her cousin Amy, but today the prospect appalled her even more than usual. She had to break free, or suffocate, and once this wild mood was on her she would brook no opposition.
Shadow appeared, already frothy around the bit and under the girth. He was a big, well-made gelding, young and fast and hot-headed, and emphatically not a lady’s ride. Young Henry, who was only fourteen, struggled to hold the horse’s head as he danced and fretted, cooped up, like Louise, for too long, and desperate to run. She admired his looks, the dark, almost black hide, the white blaze on the proud head, the curving, well-muscled quarters and white-splashed legs. She loved all horses for their power and grace and beauty, but Shadow was the pick of Wintercombe’s stables.
With some difficulty, Henry persuaded Shadow to stand still by the block for the few vital moments necessary for Louise to mount him. She arranged her skirts, made sure that her small, dashing hat, in the latest French fashion, was perched securely on her head, and grinned at the boy, letting the wild bubbling excitement surge out of her at last. ‘All right, Henry — let him go!’
Shadow, released at last, found that he was not, after all, in control. His rider had a confident seat and a firm grasp of the reins. Moreover, she carried an efficient-looking whip, and would undoubtedly use it. He subsided with a wicked, rolling eye, and Louise, well aware that the slightest slackening of her hold would reap the whirlwind, steered him briskly out of the stable yard, with a smart tap to remind Shadow who was in charge.
There was another rider ahead, coming up the hill from the Wellow Lane. Curious, Louise narrowed her eyes. The horse, though obviously weary, was a magnificent animal, a big strong-boned dappled grey, its mane and tail a pure and flowing white. She tightened her grip on Shadow’s head, having no wish to be deposited ignominiously at the visitor’s feet, and urged him into a brisk trot, the quicker to investigate. Personable strangers were rare at Wintercombe.
And this man, she saw as she drew nearer, was rather more than personable. Like the horse, he was uncommonly tall and strongly made, with wide shoulders and a slouching, easy posture that betrayed the habitual horseman. He wore an unadorned dark suit and a hat decorated only with a single plume, and the black hair that drifted untidily in the gentle wind was plainly his own, and no periwig. And Louise, now close enough to have a good view of his face, knew his identity with a sudden jump of her heart.
She had not seen him since… Thirteen, she had been, a wild skinny hoyden with a passion for horses and a direct and belligerent manner that had been the despair of her governess, and now, nearly seven years later, made a more sophisticated Louise blush to recall it. He had seemed almost godlike, her splendid cousin, descending on her stepfather’s château and turning it upside down with a breath-taking ease that had delighted the rebellious child. And her wayward, mischievous mother had seemed to revel in the disruption of her usually well-ordered household, had laughed off her husband’s complaints and the outraged appeals of the senior servants, and entered into an unholy alliance with her disruptive nephew that had scandalised the district. Louise, in some ways more adult than her mother realised, had known that there was nothing improper in Kate’s behaviour, however much the neighbouring aristocracy might gossip and whisper. There had been no lingering glances, no touched hands, no secret assignations. Louise had seen such things before, when her stepfather had been her mother’s secret lover while his first wife, ailing and jealous, was still alive. No, it had simply been that Kate, still young and lively, had relished the arrival of a kindred spirit whose inventiveness, audacity and brilliance had dazzled almost everyone around him.
He had dazzled Louise too. Her vivid memories still had the power to make her giggle at inopportune moments. The time he had ridden his horse into the dining room…the day when the entire household had been smoked out of doors by his unauthorised alchemical experiments in the stillroom…the race, involving riding, swimming and running, that had ruined everyone’s clothes and nearly drowned her stepfather’s young cousin, although Alex, godlike in this as in all else, had brought him miraculously back from the dead.
That wonderful summer, seven years ago, had coloured her behaviour for months after his departure. She had wanted so desperately to look like him, to have the sapphire-blue eyes and lively, lazy features, the black hair which he wore thick and long, scorning a periwig, an affectation entirely characteristic and the subject of much adverse comment amongst people whom Louise thereafter despised. She was his cousin, his mother’s sister’s grandchild: why had she failed to inherit his beauty?
All that she saw in her mirror was the same Louise, with her narrow pointed face rather lifeless in repose, unfashionably olive-skinned and dominated by a nose, alas, that already threatened to become aquiline. Her eyes were good, being like her mother’s, large, and an unusual shade of chestnut brown. Louise, unaware of the sparkle that transformed her expression when she talked or laughed, had long ago decided that she would never, despite all her longing, look as glorious as her English cousin Alex, for she too greatly resembled her Guernsey father’s family.
She could ride like Alex, though, and she had set herself to excel in the saddle, bruising herself severely in the process, breaking her arm and acquiring a reputation for dare-devilry throughout the district. When he returned, as he surely would, she could dazzle and impress him with her skill and dash.
But he had not come back. Whispere
And now here he was in the flesh, riding towards his polished and sophisticated little cousin, and she was tolerably certain that, seeing her here in England, hundreds of miles from her mother’s family, he could have no idea of her identity.
She reined Shadow in with a flourish just in front of the grey’s nose, judging the distance to a nicety, and raised her eyes to Alex St Barbe’s face.
Amusement, Louise had expected, perhaps even interest: she might not be pretty, but she was confident of her attractions. What she had not thought to see was his hostile blue stare, nor to hear the hard voice full of malice. ‘What the devil do you think you’re doing, madam?’
Submission and decorum had never been amongst her long suits. Louise’s chin came up dangerously. ‘I might ask the same of you, sir. Whom do you wish to visit at Wintercombe?’
Shadow, balked of his extended gallop, was beginning to sidle and fret, chewing at his bit. Specks of froth splattered the ground, and she gave him a warning tap with the whip. The inimical eyes surveyed her and her restless mount. ‘Hardly a lady’s ride, is he?’ said her cousin, in the sort of contemptuous drawl that had always infuriated her when she heard it employed by aristocratic Englishmen.
‘Perhaps you think you can manage him better?’ she suggested, with a withering glare that indicated her thoughts as to the likely outcome of such a situation.
‘I intend to,’ said Sir Alexander St Barbe, ‘since he is, I assume, my horse.’
Louise gave him the haughty stare down her undoubtedly aquiline nose (it did have some uses, after all) that she had practised before her mirror for the quelling of an impertinent young vicomte. ‘Your horse, sir? How strange — I was under the impression that it belongs to Sir Alexander St Barbe, and you surely cannot presume to an acquaintance with him.’
For a moment their eyes met, mutually antagonistic, and it took every scrap of her bravado not to flinch from the unpleasantness in his gaze. All her expectations, and her disappointment, had crystallised into her swift-rising anger, and she would have given anything now to call those words back, instead of leaving her insult hanging between them like a cleaver.
‘I think you know very well who I am,’ he said softly. ‘As to who you are, madam, making free with my property —’
‘Moi?’ said Louise. She had annoyed him, the cousin she had once worshipped, with a few ill-chosen words fuelled by her quick temper, and she did not intend lingering to make matters worse. She gave him a brilliant smile, full of false mischief, and employed the French he must speak almost as well as she did. ‘Moi, Monsieur? Vous me connaissez bien — je suis une Guernesiaise!’
And she gave Shadow his head at last, and sent him flying down the hill towards the Wellow Lane, heedless of the mud that her mount’s hooves might scatter all over the man who had once, in another and more innocent lifetime, been her childhood hero.
*
‘M’lady! M’lady!’
She had been plain Mistress Hellier for more than thirty years, and there was no one now at Wintercombe, save Jem Coxe the gardener, who had served in her employ, but to the servants here she suspected that she would always be ‘M’lady St Barbe’, subject of legend and respect far beyond what she had always felt she deserved. The real Silence Hellier was a quiet, ordinary woman who had once been forced into the danger and terror of extraordinary events. Somehow, with good fortune and stalwart support, she had survived the horrors of war. But she had always felt that anyone in her position would have struggled, like her, for the safety of her home, her children and the household which was her responsibility. The whispered, admiring stories, the wide-eyed marvelling of the younger servants, she had always felt to be misplaced and rather embarrassing. She had only done her best, and her duty, after all: and besides, what would they think of her if they knew the entire and unvarnished truth?
But that was all forty years in the past, and Wintercombe was no longer her home. She was only a visitor here, an interloper, summoned from her husband and family in Chard, as so often before, to solve problems that were none of her making, to comfort where none could be given, to neglect her own concerns because once more the St Barbes had need of her wisdom, her common sense and her ability, honed over her long life by experience and trial and learning from so many mistakes, to soothe ruffled feathers, apply balm to injured feelings, and to suggest compromise and co-operation.
She had thought that she had succeeded. She had had to fight her own appalling grief at her beloved stepson’s sudden and untimely death — he had only been fifty-five — and her worry about her son’s wife, Sarah, suffering a difficult pregnancy at Chard, and negotiate with people who, if they had not been tied to her by blood or marriage, she would not have wished to help. And now, just as she was hoping that her task was done, and that she could make the long and tiring journey back to Chard and those she loved best, it seemed that another crisis was looming.
‘M’lady — oh, m’lady!’ The white-capped head of Betty Barnard, the Wintercombe housekeeper, appeared around the door. Silence Hellier, once Silence, Lady St Barbe, put down her sewing and pushed her spectacles to the end of her nose, the better to see her. She had accepted her deteriorating sight, as she had all the other gradually encroaching infirmities of age, with her characteristic wry resignation, and had even laughed at her stepson’s teasing comment that she looked like a wise but rather worried old owl…
He was dead, her dear Nat, laid in the cold vault of the church in Philip’s Norton, all that love and laughter and loyalty vanished, and she felt quite bereft, as if she had lost a part of herself.
And here was Betty, whom he, a widower, had chosen to keep house for him, a fussy hen of a woman, small and plump and plain, with bright red cheeks and thinning, greying hair. Silence suspected that she had been chosen because her unprepossessing manner and appearance would hardly invite scandal. And, to give her her due, she was a perfectly competent housekeeper, though the other servants did not seem to hold her in overmuch respect.
‘Yes, Betty? What is it?’
As an afterthought, the other woman bobbed a hasty curtsey. ‘M’lady — Sir Alexander has come home!’
An extraordinary feeling of delight, of relief, swept over Silence. At last, he had returned — Nat’s black sheep of a son, disgraced, exiled, trailing clouds of disruption and scandal wherever he went — at last he had realised the extent of his responsibilities, and had come back to take up his inheritance.
And at last, Wintercombe and its inhabitants would become someone else’s problem, and she could go home.
‘That’s wonderful news, Betty,’ she said. ‘Where is he now?’
‘Still in the courtyard, m’lady, when I came to tell you. He’s brought no servant with him, and no baggage either, by the look of it,’ said Betty, her face avidly curious. ‘Shall I instruct Twinney to bring him to you, m’lady?’
‘When he is warmed and refreshed after his journey,’ Silence said, finding a certain irony in the housekeeper’s attitude to the man who now owned Wintercombe, as if he were the visitor, and she the lady of the house. She added, feeling that the other woman should be reminded, ‘Remember, he is master here now, Betty.’
‘Of course, m’lady,’ said the housekeeper, a look of surprise on her round dumpling features. She ducked another curtsey, and withdrew.
At last, Silence thought, leaning back in her chair, her sewing forgotten on her lap. At last, Alex had come back. It should not have been a matter for such surprise and comment: any other heir in foreign parts, informed of his father’s unexpected death, would have hastened home at once to take charge. But her nephew had always been wayward, contrary, a law unto himself, and it was entirely in character for him to arrive now, unannounced, unceremoniously alone, and nearly two months after her sad letter telling him that he was now fourth baronet, and master of Wintercombe.
