A Falling Star, page 6
part #3 of Wintercombe Series
Whatever happened this supper was unlikely to be boring. Like her bewitching, mischievous mother Kate, Louise thrived on argument and excitement. Even the frequent quarrels of her mother and stepfather, as noisy and crackling as a thunderstorm, had never frightened her, for somehow their fury, with the vivid ferocity of a lightning bolt, seemed to fuel their undoubted passion. They had been seven years illicit lovers, then for nine years happily married, with two sons and three daughters, and yet their ardour for each other seemed undimmed. Louise, realistically, knew well enough that she was most unlikely to find such a match for herself, and certainly she had met no one in all France — save one — who could spark her into flame, as the Vicomte de St Clair had set her mother ablaze. From what she had heard, and seen, of English men, she would undoubtedly be even less lucky in Somerset.
The meal progressed in uneasy quiet. Bab was too busy eating, and Amy too shy and bashful, for either to indulge in casual chatter. Charles, pointedly offended by Louise’s earlier remarks, ignored everyone. It was as if they were all too frightened of Alex to say anything, Louise thought impatiently, looking round the table as the cheese and tarts were brought in by Twinney and Abigail, both of them distinctly uneasy. Even her grandmother had not spoken, beyond requests to pass various dishes, and the salt.
‘Another bottle of wine, Twinney,’ Alex said suddenly, and the butler bowed and turned to leave the room. The servant’s face remained impassive. ‘Very good, sir. The sack, or the claret?’
‘Is there any other choice?’
Louise, aware of a movement to her right, concentrated on cutting herself a piece of cheese, and did not dare to catch Phoebe’s eye.
‘There is some Malaga, sir, and beer and cider, of course.’
‘Something of a Hobson’s choice,’ said Alex, leaning back in his chair and surveying his butler through half-closed eyes. ‘Another thing I’ll have to change. A bottle of the Malaga, Twinney, and if you can avoid taking all night over it, I’d be grateful.’
Silence waited until the unfortunate servant had hurried from the room, before she spoke. ‘Alex, do you not consider that you’ve had enough?’
Up and down the table, movement froze. At each end, only Silence and her nephew seemed unaffected by the sudden, palpable tension. For a long moment, hazel eyes stared into blue, and neither gave way. Then, suddenly, Alex smiled. ‘Your memory must be failing, Aunt. I am no longer fifteen, and I think I’m capable of judging my own capacity — I’ve had enough practice, after all. And besides, have you not forgotten something else? This is my house, and in it I may do as I wish, and direct the servants as I please, without interference. And you’d all of you do well to remember it.’
His gaze swept around the table. Louise met his eyes boldly, wished she had not, and from pride and anger would not look away. For what seemed like an eternity, she suffered his unspoken malice, and then said, spuriously innocent, ‘But what if we forget, Cousin?’
‘Then you can go elsewhere,’ said Alex shortly. ‘Do I need to say it again? Wintercombe is mine. If I have a fancy to tear it down, or keep a brothel here, then I will. I do not intend to alter my habits or desires to suit any of you. If you do not like it, you can go back to France, and good riddance.’
‘And if I do like it?’ said Louise coolly, looking down her long nose with what her six-year-old half-brother Philippe had called her ‘expression de duchesse’.
Alex laughed. ‘Then you, my sweet and deceptive cousin, can warm my bed with pleasure.’
‘Alex!’ It was Phoebe, not Silence, who spoke. Her face white with anger, she had never looked more like her brother. ‘Alex, you’re drunk.’
‘It makes no difference — the truth will out, so they say. And as for you —’ He swung his attention abruptly to the other side of the table, to the considerable alarm of the three St Barbes sitting there. ‘As for you, dear Aunt Bab, you can go too.’
‘Go?’ Bab stared at him in horror, her several chins quivering. Scattered across them, a trickle of gravy and several crumbs bore witness to her greed. ‘Go? Where?’
‘Anywhere but here. You’ve lived your ease off our charity too long, and it’s plain that Wintercombe has fed you more than adequately. I suggest you take yourself off to Bath, and indulge your hypochondria there.’
Bab had no idea what the word meant, but the venom in his voice was quite unambiguous. She stared at him for a moment longer, and then dissolved into wailing tears.
‘Alex!’ said Silence sharply, from the other end of the table. She had risen to her feet, but her face seemed deceptively calm still. ‘For shame — did you have to air your views quite so unpleasantly?’
‘Certainly I did — she’s so witless, she wouldn’t understand me, else.’
Bab had sunk her head in her hands, and was rocking to and fro. Disjointed phrases — ‘Our home…can’t go…sick woman…so cruel…heartless!’ — emerged between her sobs. Amy, in tears herself, was attempting to comfort her, while Charles, speechless with impotent rage, stared at his cousin. Alex smiled evilly back. ‘What’s the matter? Wondering if you can muster the courage to protest? Or are you too frightened that I’ll throw you out as well, so you won’t be able to feather your own nest any more?’
‘I —’ Charles, faced with his childhood tormenter, swallowed and then said, his voice hoarse with the effort to keep calm. ‘I do not wish to bandy abuse with a drunkard. There’d be no point in defending myself or insulting you, for you’d only have forgotten it, come morning.’
‘I didn’t think it was possible to insult me. Ah, there you are, Twinney. Bring the bottle over here.’
The unfortunate butler had been hovering, aghast, for some minutes in the doorway. Louise felt rather sorry for him, but at least he would be able to regale the servants’ hall with the details of this latest example of their new master’s depravity. He had been well trained, however, and stepped forward, past the weeping Bab, to place the bottle of Malaga at Alex’s elbow. ‘Is that to your liking, sir?’
Slowly, with excessive deliberation, Alex poured a trickle of the pale sweet wine into his glass, inhaled, and then drank. Save for Bab’s sobs, there was utter quiet. Louise risked a glance at Phoebe, to her right, and surprised a look of cold and profound contempt on the girl’s thin face. She is Alex’s sister, Louise thought. Surely she cannot dislike him so much?
Louise, intelligent and unashamedly curious, had made a study of the strangely assorted people with whom her mother and stepfather consorted, and learned early to distinguish the flatterer and the depraved, the honest and the virtuous, and to keep Kate’s healthy sense of the absurd and the ridiculous. She had turned the same clear eye upon the denizens of Wintercombe, until liking, or irritation, had clouded her view and her judgement.
But then Alex — Alex had, in a few short hours, turned everything upside down. And if it had not been for her regard for Charles, and for Phoebe and her grandmother, she might have relished his arrival still more.
However, Louise thought wryly, attraction in this case is entirely separate from liking — for I have never yet encountered a man so intent upon alienating everyone around him. The Alex she remembered from her childhood, mischievous and inventive, might have been a different person altogether from this arrogant and offensive man who seemed to take a perverse delight in hurting his own family. But why had he changed so much?
‘Tolerable,’ he remarked, having finished the glass of Malaga. ‘But the contents of the buttery will have to be extended a trifle, Twinney. One of a long list of things to be discussed in the morning. Meanwhile, you may go.’
‘Very good, sir,’ said the butler, bowing with an expression perilously close to relief on his face, and beat a hasty retreat.
‘There are other things that will be better discussed in the morning,’ said Silence, rising abruptly to her feet. ‘When you are in a condition to think clearly —’
‘I hate to disappoint you, Aunt, but my thoughts are perfectly clear, and a tun of Malaga would make little difference to them. Besides, I am acquainted with gentlemen whose habits make mine seem positively moderate. Perhaps I should invite them here to enliven you all — what else is there to do in this godforsaken little backwater but to eat, drink and be merry?’
‘If you dislike it so much, why in God’s name did you ever come back to plague us?’ It was Charles, goaded into an uncharacteristic rage, his voice cracking with sudden anguish.
Alex leaned back in his chair, one hand curled round the graceful stem of his wine glass, the lax line of his body utterly at odds with his cousin’s tense, fraught posture. ‘Shall I tell you why, dear Charles? Because Wintercombe is mine. Mine, and not yours. Now do you understand?’
‘I think it is best if we leave,’ said Silence. She glanced at Amy, caught the girl’s eye, and motioned to her to rise. ‘If you want to drink yourself into a stupor, Alex, you may, but I for one do not particularly wish to witness such an unedifying spectacle, and I doubt anyone else does either. Charles, perhaps if you would assist your mother? She is still very distressed.’
‘You could always stay and drink with me,’ Alex suggested, grinning suddenly. ‘Or are you still too much the milksop to risk it?’
Louise, watching, wondered for a moment if he had at last achieved his obvious aim and provoked the younger man to lose control. She saw Charles’s hands clench into fists, and his jaw tighten, and felt suddenly ashamed of herself. She had promised her support, and she had failed him. She got to her feet with a rustle of silk, and said pointedly, ‘It is not the action of a milksop to refuse to behave like a repellent boor. He probably finds you quite as disgusting as I do.’
Bab, still sobbing, had already waddled out of the room on her daughter’s arm. Silence waited by the door, and Phoebe, awkward but determined, had struggled to her feet and was hobbling doggedly towards her. Louise walked round behind Alex, taking good care to stay well out of his reach, and stood beside Charles. To her distress, she saw that he was trembling, and touched his arm. ‘Come, Cousin. Let’s go, and leave him to pickle in his own wine fumes.’
Alex laughed, a brutally contemptuous sound that seemed to bring Charles back from a very great distance. He started, and stared at Louise as if she had appeared beside him by magic. ‘Lou?’
‘Let’s leave,’ she said and, taking his arm, led him from the dining parlour. Silence, her usually serene face almost unrecognisably grim, shut the door behind them, and the sound of Alex’s derisive, mocking laughter followed them all the way up the stairs to the safety of their own chambers.
It had, indeed, been a most memorable evening.
3
‘Who from faults is free?’
‘I won’t go — I won’t! This is my home!’
Louise and Silence exchanged glances over the top of Bab’s lace-capped, quivering head. For an hour or more, they had attempted to calm her, but all their efforts, the soothing words, the cup of hot sweet chocolate, the sedative limeflower cordial, had been to no avail. And despite her dislike for her aunt, Louise could not help but feel pity for the broken, distraught woman sobbing in her bed. Away from Alex’s charismatic presence, the scene in the dining parlour seemed neither amusing nor exciting, but left a sour and bitter taste in the mouth. I hope his head hurts tomorrow, she thought savagely. I hope he feels like death.
‘I’ll speak to him,’ Silence said softly, Bab’s soft, plump white hands encased within her own, wrinkled and veined with age and long labour in garden and stillroom. ‘Bab, he may listen to me. I can’t promise anything, but he may listen. And even if he doesn’t, is it so bad? A house in Bath, perhaps, convenient and cosy, you’ll have Amy and Charles with you, and Beck too — think of it, Bab, your own little house!’
‘I don’t want it — I want to stay here!’
Silence looked down at her daughter-in-law and shook her head sadly. ‘Oh, Bab — we’ll do our best for you. But in the end, you know, it is his decision, and his alone.’
‘So cruel!’ A fresh convulsion of sobbing rippled along the massive rolls of fat. ‘Cruel and heartless!’
‘Well, yes, I think we’d all agree with you there,’ said Silence drily. She gently removed her hands, and got stiffly to her feet. ‘In this damp weather, I’ll swear my joints creak. Beck?
Bab’s maid came forward, her face tense with concern. ‘Yes, m’lady?’
‘Have you mixed up the poppy draught?’
‘Here it be, m’lady.’
At last, Bab was persuaded to drink the bitter potion, and gradually her sobs died away into the regular snores of a deep and apparently peaceful slumber. Silence watched over her until she was sure that her daughter-in-law slept, and then ushered Louise from the large, pleasant chamber above the library which Bab had occupied for many years.
The house around them was dark and hushed. Silence stood listening for a moment, her face, in the soft flattering light of the candle, lent a deceptive illusion of youth, so that Louise saw how she might have looked forty years ago, when this house had been garrisoned by enemy soldiers, and she alone had stood between Wintercombe and destruction. It was hard to connect this gentle, serene old woman, with her aching joints and spectacles and silver hair, with that Lady St Barbe whose heroism was still legend in Philip’s Norton, and who had saved her home, her servants and her children from the evil Colonel Ridgeley. But Louise, who over the past two months had come to love and admire her grandmother very much, had also discerned the core of steel beneath that apparently soft exterior.
‘Goodnight, Gran’mère,’ she said, but Silence put out a hand to detain her ‘No. not yet, Louise. I want to talk to you. Come to my chamber.’
Their eyes met: the older woman’s a warm, greenish hazel, not yet faded, and the girl’s the same unusual chestnut brown possessed by her mother Kate, and also by the man who had once, forty years ago, been Silence’s secret lover, and was now her husband. Louise smiled, bright with mischief and exactly like Kate. ‘Are you going to take me to task, Gran’mère?’
‘Of course I am,’ said Silence, smiling in response, and steered her wayward granddaughter briskly within her chamber
It was a large and comfortable room, with an old-fashioned steeply pitched ceiling, heavily beamed, and a grandiose fireplace surmounted by the St Barbe arms. At this late hour, the coals were smouldering quietly in the grate, and Silence’s maid, Fan Howard, had placed a warming pan in the bed and a pot of spiced chocolate on a trivet in the hot ashes of the hearth, before retiring to her closet.
Louise took the cup of chocolate that her grandmother handed to her, and sat down in one of the chairs by the fire. This chamber had belonged to her Uncle Nat, and he had died in that bed, with his grieving stepmother and beloved daughter by his side. She had felt almost excluded by their sorrow, as if she herself had had no right to mourn him. Yet in her brief months at Wintercombe, she too had come to value and to love him. She had thought it a little strange at the time that Silence had moved into this chamber only a week or so after Nat’s death. Now she wondered suddenly if, by so doing, her grandmother had sought to become closer to her stepson’s departed spirit.
With the cup of chocolate warm between her hands and the rich thick taste of it on her lips, she said, ‘Are you intending to warn me about Alex?’
Silence gave her a startled glance, then laughed rather ruefully. ‘Yes. Am I becoming so easy to read, then, in my old age?’
‘It was the obvious thing for you to do,’ Louise pointed out. ‘And I know exactly what you have in mind to say, Gran’mère. He is dangerous and dissolute, a libertine who is ruthless and selfish and will quite probably attempt to seduce me. Am I right?’
‘Well,’ said Silence, surveying her forthright granddaughter in some surprise, ‘yes, you are — though I doubt I’d have spoken so bluntly.’
Louise grinned at her. She did not much resemble Kate, save in those chestnut eyes, and more brilliantly in her wide, three-cornered, mischievous smile. The long, brown-skinned face, the aquiline nose and thin spiky brows had looked very handsome on her seafaring father, less so upon Louise. Silence found herself wondering afresh why Amy should be so much lovelier, and yet could appear so bland and insipid beside her lively cousin.
‘I feel I can be blunt with you, Gran’mère,’ Louise said, in explanation. ‘You are like my mother — the truth does not shock you.’
‘Unlike your poor stepfather,’ said Silence drily. ‘Let us hope that his own daughters do not have half your capacity for mischief, or they’ll drive him into an early grave.’
‘I doubt it — Felice was thinking about becoming a nun when I left.’ Louise shook her head, smiling. ‘I am glad that Maman insisted that I did not turn Papist — even though life is being made so difficult now in France for Protestant people. I don’t think I would enjoy life in a convent very much.’
Silence, looking at her granddaughter, thought that something of an understatement. She forced her mind sternly back to the task she had set herself, and said quietly, ‘I doubt that you would. But, Louise, I am serious. You cannot flirt with Alex, or bandy words with him, as if he were some callow boy. He isn’t like Charles — I have seen his sort before, and he is dangerous, Louise — he is quite capable of ruining you.’
‘Gran’mère, listen. I realise that I may seem very young to you — I am only nineteen, after all. But my life in France was nothing like this. Here it is very quiet and rural, and even though Amy is only a little younger than I am, she has done nothing, seen nothing, been nowhere, save to Bath. I have been presented to King Louis, I have danced at the French court and welcomed my parents’ friends in their absence — and,’ Louise added, with that sudden, delightful grin, ‘I have been rude to more importunate sprigs of nobility than either you or Amy have ever met in your life. I’m not a green girl, Gran’mère — I can look after myself.’
