A Falling Star, page 16
part #3 of Wintercombe Series
‘I might,’ said Louise. ‘But for the present, I think I will just enjoy riding her.’
She debated what to call her new acquisition. The Longleaze horses had all been given descriptive names — Amber, Blackbird, Brown Bess, Whitefoot — and she supposed something similar would be most suitable for her yellow mare. And as Ben seemed to have christened most of them, she went in search of his advice.
He was in the stables with a mare, one of the grooms told her, and she found him gentling and soothing a young, nervous iron grey in the process of birthing her first foal.
There was no one to tell her what was and was not proper for a lady. Ben turned his big grin on her as she came to the door of the loosebox. ‘Louey! Come — come see! Almost there!’
She entered the box cautiously, her skirt snagging on the thick yellow straw. The mare lay, sweat-streaked and bulging, her ears laid back and her head low. A convulsive heave twisted her flanks. Ben stroked and soothed her as the pain passed, and then turned to Louise again. ‘Foal — see, Louey, foal hooves!’ And, sure enough, she could see them under the mare’s tail, small, dark, pointed. Another contraction shook the horse, and she grunted in pain. Ben left her head and came round to inspect. He looked thoughtful, and then glanced up at her as she stood, fascinated. ‘Louey hold her head — Ben pull.’
It was surprising how authoritative he sounded. She obeyed the instruction of an expert, and knelt by the mare’s head, whispering encouragement to her as she braced herself for another push. Ben undoubtedly knew what he was about — he had probably helped more foals into the world than most midwives had birthed babies — but she could not help but feel some anxiety. So often, matters went awry, and mother or foal, or both, were lost. She would have liked to watch the entire process, but Ben had given her a vital task to perform, and she would do it willingly.
With hand and voice, she tried to soothe away the pain and dumb bewilderment in the young mare’s soft dark eyes, and reminded herself that this sort of agony and danger was the likely outcome of indulgence in the feelings that Alex had aroused in her. The horse squealed in sudden pain, and she tightened her grip as the mare gave a final, shuddering convulsion. There was an exclamation of satisfaction from Ben, and Louise peered round the horse’s bulk. There was a dark, shapeless bundle huddled in the straw beside Ben, and she saw the sudden flash of his grin. ‘Louey — see, come see!’
She unwound her cramped fingers from the mare’s head collar, surprised that she seemed to have gripped the leather so tightly. The horse, freed, at once swung her head round towards her offspring. Ben was wiping and cleaning it with a hank of straw, and suddenly the amorphous shape resolved itself into the component parts of a foal, head and body and astonishingly long, crumpled legs. It shook its head, the large soft ears flapping, and uttered an experimental bleating cry. The mare whickered in response and tried to struggle to her feet. With Ben’s help, she managed it, and turned, narrowly avoiding Louise, to push her nose enquiringly at the foal.
‘Good,’ said Ben. ‘All well now — now stand, then drink.’ He got to his feet, wiping his hands on straw, and in the half-light his ugly, unformed face was soft, and almost beautiful with pride and happiness. ‘Colt foal. Thank you, Louey — thank you!’
‘It was my pleasure,’ Louise said warmly, smiling at him. ‘I was glad to help. I’ve never seen a foal born before.’
Ben’s mouth dropped in comical astonishment. ‘Never? Never, Louey? But…’ His voice trailed away into incoherency.
She was not sure what he meant to say, but could guess. ‘Yes, perhaps it is strange, but my mother and stepfather do not approve of such things. They think that ladies shouldn’t see — that it’s improper.’
Ben’s response was a derisory snort that entirely won her approval. She grinned at him, and he grinned back, the two of them remarkably united despite the unbridgeable gap in ability and experience. ‘Not a lady,’ said Ben, with rich scorn. ‘You much better — you Louey!’
It was a compliment which she would cherish for the rest of her days.
7
‘A fiery soul’
Their time at Longleaze expired, Louise and Silence and their maids packed their bags, said their farewells to the Wickham family, and rode southwards to Chard, the home of Silence and of her husband Nick Hellier, Louise’s grandfather, whom she had never met.
All her life she had wondered about the man who had, once, been her grandmother’s illicit and adulterous lover. Kate, their first child, had been born while Silence had still been the wife of Sir George St Barbe, and he, ignorant of his wife’s brief affair with a Cavalier captain, had unquestioningly accepted Kate as his own. It was only after Sir George’s death, when Silence and her lover had met again and married, that the truth about Kate’s parentage had been acknowledged. She herself had made no secret of it, either to the vicomte or to her daughter, and had spoken of her father and mother in the fond but rather distant tones of a woman who had far outgrown her background. Louise had always taken the whole tale — romantic or shameful, according to the morals of whoever heard it — very much for granted, a part of ancient family history that had happened long before her own arrival in the world. But then she had met her grandmother for the first time, and the ensuing weeks in her company had prompted her curiosity. It was so very difficult to imagine Silence, calm, wise, old-fashioned, as a young Puritan wife willing to risk reputation, home, husband and children for a penniless Cavalier adventurer.
But if she had not, long ago, indulged in a recklessness that her granddaughter could not possibly see in her now, then Kate would never have existed, and nor would Louise herself, a thought at once fascinating and appalling. The episode did not seem sordid, not as Kate had described it, with her admiration for Silence’s wild behaviour glowing in every word. But still Louise’s imagination failed to envisage her grandmother as a furtive adulteress.
The house at Chard was old, but had been very much refurbished in recent years. It was small, surrounded by a walled garden with an imposing gateway, and the farm buildings tucked well out of sight down the lane. Louise rode the dun mare, whom Ben had named Saffron, up to the gates, and saw that they had a welcome. The family that was closest to her, after her own, had all come to greet her.
The slight, brown-haired man with the soft smile must be her uncle, Richard, her mother’s brother. The blonde woman beside him, bulky in the last months of pregnancy, would be his wife Sarah, and the little boy, perhaps two years old, peeping round her skirts with a shy curious grin, was their son Nicholas.
And his grandfather, and hers, for whom he had been named, was this lean, brown-skinned, white-haired man in a countryman’s plain russets, coming forward with an amused, lazy smile on his mouth. She was as tall as he was, and could discern little resemblance to herself in his neat-featured face, the lines of laughter reassuringly pale around his mouth. Then she saw the colour of his eyes, the warm chestnut brown of her own and Kate’s, and of her five half-brothers and half-sisters.
‘So you’re Louise,’ he said, sizing her up with a shrewd expression. ‘My eldest grandchild — which makes me feel positively ancient. Welcome to Chard, dear girl — and I hope you won’t find us too quiet and provincial after Wintercombe.’ And he grinned suddenly and disarmingly, and she saw where Kate’s smile had come from.
For her, he had a friendly kiss on each cheek. For Silence, Louise noticed with affection, there was an embrace that would not have seemed out of place between a pair of betrothed lovers. Whatever the truth of their long-past adultery, there was no doubt that thirty years of marriage had not quenched their love for one another.
Silence had told her that the Chard house had once been a dark, unwelcoming place which she had heartily disliked. Sir George had left it to her for her widowhood, and she had not wanted to live there. But Nat had transformed it, as a wedding present to her and Nick, and now it was a delightful home, light and sunny, filled with the fragrance of dried flowers and beeswax, and even on this, the fourth day of March, the garden glowed with clumps of purple crocus, the rather battered pallor of snowdrops, now almost over, and the first splashes of daffodil yellow. The love and labour of more than thirty years showed plain in every neatly clipped hedge, the walks and arbours, the fruit trees trained bare and knobbly against the ancient stone walls, and in the immaculate tidiness of the gravel, with not a weed to be seen or a leaf out of place anywhere.
Her chamber was tiny, whitewashed, with a dormer window giving an excellent view of the garden. There was a half tester bed, cosily piled with quilts and blankets, an old-fashioned clothes press at its foot, a table with a jug and basin and a bowl of sweet-scented dried flower-petals, and two cane-seated chairs.
‘It’s not very big, I’m afraid,’ Sarah told her apologetically. ‘There’s little spare room here — your maid can have the closet next door, which is even smaller, if that is possible. But I’ve tried to make it comfortable.’
‘It’s lovely,’ Louise told her. ‘Thank you so much — I shall be very happy here.’ She looked at her uncle’s wife — it did not somehow seem right to call a girl only a few years older ‘Aunt’ — and saw the air of contentment, the smile in her eyes, her general appearance of health and fertility, and was surprised to find that she envied her. Sarah lived in a world very different from her sister-in-law Kate, an apparently narrow existence bounded by husband, home, children, but that limited life had given her, it was plain, great happiness and security. With a sudden flash of insight, Louise wondered if her mother, moving with bright gaiety in her fashionable and frivolous château, could really claim such bliss.
But Kate, whether happy or not, could certainly never be so in such a restricted environment: indeed, she had escaped from Chard at the age of seventeen, eloping with the Guernsey sea captain whom she had met at her half-sister Deb’s house in Bristol, and had never returned. And now her daughter, coming for the first time to the house where her mother had grown up, meeting her father and her brother, could not imagine Kate, with her reckless laughter and wild ways, ever being content in this sleepy little house.
And yet she herself had no sense of being trapped here, not yet: there was, in the simple, refreshing little room, only peace, and homecoming. She knew herself: she knew this feeling would not last and that, as at Wintercombe, she would soon crave difference, excitement and freedom once more, just as Kate had. But she could also see so clearly, as perhaps her mother had not, the grief Kate had caused when she ran away twenty-two years ago, without explanation or farewell, for love of a tall, olive-skinned sailor with dark greedy eyes, who knew so much more of the world than she did. And he had given her freedom, and Louise, and unhappiness and ecstasy in equal measures, until his death in a shipwreck off the rocky Guernsey coast when Louise was four.
She sat thoughtfully on the soft feather bed, one part of her mind pondering what to wear, the rest acutely conscious of her origins, her own past and that of her family, here in this small unassuming Somerset house.
And, she realised as she decided on her tawny-yellow silk, with the sable tippet, she had not thought of her cousin Alex for almost a day.
*
March slipped by, mild and full of birdsong. Louise lived quietly, enjoying the peace while her restless spirit would allow her, talking to her grandparents, helping Sarah, coming to know her Uncle Richard. He was not at all like Kate in character, being quiet, thoughtful and reserved, in contrast to his energetic wife and bouncing small boy: in fact, he was, Louise realised quite soon, rather shy. But she charmed him sufficiently for him to teach her backgammon and chess, and to take her out riding on her mare Saffron, and little Nicholas, a fair-haired imp of mischief just two years old, provided much amusement.
She found herself in sole charge of her small cousin when Sarah, rather earlier than had been expected, was delivered of her second child, a girl with a very loud and healthy-sounding pair of lungs. Louise held Nicholas as he peered in fascinated disgust at the red wrinkled scrap in the cradle and announced firmly, ‘That’s not a sister, that’s a prune.’
There was some discussion over the baby’s name. Sarah and Richard wanted to call her Silence, for her grandmother, but that lady reacted with horror to the suggestion. ‘Oh, no — you can’t in all conscience saddle the poor mite with my name! Why not Sarah?’
‘I think it would be too confusing,’ said her son’s wife, smiling up from the pillows: it had been a comparatively easy birth, and already the colour was back in her cheeks, despite her evident weariness. ‘Why do you not like your name? I think it’s quite lovely, and so unusual.’
‘And very inappropriate for that noisy infant,’ said Nick Hellier drily, gesturing at the cradle, which was at present quiet, though not likely to remain so for long.
‘The reason,’ Silence said briskly, ‘is that I would not want my grandchild to suffer the same teasing and taunting that I endured, all my childhood and after. When I had Kate and Richard, I deliberately chose good plain names for them, rather than make them ridiculous. Puritan names such as mine are no longer the fashion. It’s outlandish enough now — how peculiar will it seem when she’s reached my age?’
‘I doubt it will — instead, it will seem lovely and rare, just as your name is now,’ said Nick fondly.
Silence looked at him, and smiled and shook her head. ‘No, I forbid it, Sarah — please don’t call her after me, poor little thing.’
‘Well,’ said her daughter-in-law from the bed, ‘Richard and I wanted to do it to please you — and since it doesn’t, we won’t, don’t worry.’
‘It’ll make little difference anyway, I suspect,’ Nick pointed out, ‘since Nicholas will undoubtedly insist on referring to her as Prune.’
In the end, the baby was christened Rebecca, after Sarah’s mother, but her grandfather’s prediction proved quite correct, and soon everyone in the household called her Prune. But her birth heralded a change in Louise’s comfortable, quiet life. Sarah was almost entirely occupied with the baby, and Silence, of necessity, with managing the household. Richard was busy on the farm, where cows and sheep were producing their young with the usual frequency of springtime, and Louise found herself largely left to the company of her grandfather.
She was not disconcerted by this. He might be close on fifty years her senior, but he was neither distant nor censorious, unlike most men of his generation whom she had met in the past. Louise found him very easy to talk to, and he in turn had a large fund of stories, some exciting, others amusing, from his days as a Cavalier captain in the civil wars. And it was from Nick that she learned a great deal more about her other Somerset relations, both those she knew, and those she had not yet encountered.
It was certainly a diverse group, scattered like leaves across the West Country — Bristol, Taunton, Chard, Glastonbury and, of course, Wintercombe. She inferred, from Nick’s descriptions of them all, that, surprisingly, only one of Silence’s children or stepchildren had made a conventionally ‘good’ match, and that was her Aunt Deb, who had married the only son of a wealthy Bristol merchant. And she, it seemed from what Nick let slip, was perhaps the least fortunate in her choice. The moral in all this, Louise decided, was that a spouse with money and position alone was unlikely to provide happiness.
‘And you?’ Nick asked her, during one of their conversations. ‘I understand from Silence that you’re on the catch for a husband.’
‘Perhaps,’ Louise said, smiling. They were walking in the garden, warmer now as March had given way at last to April: the grass was growing, the sun shining, and there was blossom already on the plum and cherry trees. ‘But I’m in no particular hurry. And besides, I’m far too fastidious to seize on the first man I see.’
‘And have you seen any yet?’
She was holding a pale pheasant’s-eye narcissus to her nose, sniffing its delicate fragrance. ‘None that measure up to my exacting requirements, I regret to say.’
‘Which are?’
‘Wealth — health — youth — and tolerance,’ said Louise, ticking them off one by one on her long, elegant fingers. ‘Above all, tolerance of my foibles. My future husband must allow me to spend vast amounts of money on clothes, so I am quite à la mode — he must not throw up his hands in horror when I urge my horse into a gallop — and above all, he must indulge all my whims. If I could find a man who would do that, then I would marry him tomorrow.’
‘Unless he is married already,’ Nick pointed out. ‘So — you have found no one? Well, as you said, there is plenty of time, and two more sets of cousins to visit. Who knows — you may find the man of your dreams amongst them?’
‘I doubt it,’ Louise said drily. ‘I’m beginning to doubt that he exists.’ She glanced sideways at her grandfather, and flashed him that sudden, triangular grin that was so like her mother’s. ‘Perhaps I shall reject marriage altogether, and become a pampered fille de joie, kept in luxury by a succession of wealthy noblemen.’
She had read him right: he was not in the least shocked, but amused. ‘Hardly your style, Louise — you are much too independent-minded to follow such a servile path. Can you imagine yourself telling some fat marquis in his dotage what a wonderful lover he is, for the sake of his money and jewels?’
She laughed. ‘No, to be honest, I can’t. Besides, jewels have never really appealed to me. I would prefer a string of horses to a string of pearls. And since ladies of pleasure are not supposed to be interested in anything outside the boudoir, I think a husband is inevitable.’
‘Alex is interested in breeding horses, so your grandmother tells me.’
Louise felt a betraying flush seep up under her skin, and hoped that he had not noticed it. She was ashamed of herself, behaving like an infatuated schoolgirl. She was not sure of the exact nature of her feeling for her cousin — perhaps lust was the nearest word for something so dark, and overwhelmingly powerful, and based entirely upon his physical presence. But the strength of it did not go well, in her eyes, with her self-esteem. She should be able to play the game, to flirt and act the coquette as she had done so many times before, without revealing how deeply he affected her. And to have her grandfather, friendly and pleasant though he was, guess at her thoughts about Alex was to make herself vulnerable.
