The Young Pretender Read online

  As they stood on the porch waiting for the gig, Miss Bluestone said, "You were gracious to Cynthia Moore."

  "I slathered her with butter."

  The groom pulled up with the gig well in hand.

  "Do you feel that you overdid it?"

  "Yes. You see? I'm socially inept."

  Miss Bluestone climbed up into the gig and held the reins whilst the groom assisted Jean to the driver's seat. "You were just a trifle warm. Be prepared for consequences."

  On the way home Jean raised the issue of her sisters' cold-heartedness. "They're not mourning Fanny, not properly. Her death is just an inconvenience to them."

  Miss Bluestone sat still.

  Jean blinked back angry tears. "Well?"

  The silence continued. At last Miss Bluestone said, "My dear, they mourned Frances two years ago when you and Lady Clanross took her away to consult the Swiss doctors. I had to tell them of her consumption. I thought Caroline would make herself ill with weeping. Georgina, being younger, was bewildered."

  Jean turned the observation over in her mind. "I see. I've been a fool."

  "No, indeed. You stayed with Frances every step of the way. We honour you for it. For you, the end has just come. For them, it came two years ago. You mustn't think badly of your sisters. They are affectionate girls, if a bit heedless, and they can be a help to you."

  Jean drove on.

  Miss Bluestone gripped the edge of the seat as Jean took a turn too sharply. "Tell me one thing, if you will."

  "What is it?"

  "When Frances died, did you not feel a moment of relief?"

  Jean caught her breath, and the horse started. She fought for control.

  "Don't answer me. I was unkind to ask. Don't answer, Jean, but think about it."

  The drive to Brecon seemed to take forever.

  The consequence of Jean's excessive graciousness to Mrs. Robert took the form of an invitation to dinner at the Steward's House the coming Tuesday, which Jean dutifully accepted for herself, Miss Bluestone, and Georgy.

  Miss Mackey was not included and indeed had melted into the life of the Brecon staff, which was more interesting to her than the Moores. Miss Mackey and Mrs. Smollet were great friends.

  Caro begged to be excused from the dinner. William Barnet was calling that afternoon, and she meant to dine with him at Brecon tête à tête--very daring of her had Alice not volunteered for chaperone duty. It would not be many years, Jean reflected from the depths of her gloom, before she found herself locked into Alice's role of universal gooseberry. Perhaps there was something to be said for marriage.

  * * * *

  When one is in full mourning, the choice of dinner gowns is not wide. Black or black, the maid offered. Hopkins, the abigail who attended Jean's sisters, had volunteered to assist Jean too. Jean sent her off to see to Georgy.

  Ancient Aunt Whitby had died the year before, so Jean had not had to await dressmakers when her own maid packed for the drive north. She had blacks and had even brought a necklace of jet beads. Miss Bluestone always wore black in winter. That left Georgy. Now that the servants had access to the dower house clothes presses, Hopkins was able to rig the girl out in lavender with hastily inserted black ribbands. And black gloves.

  Durbin drove the barouche landau.

  Cynthia Moore was one of those women who anticipate the Christmas season. It was barely December--only ten days since the flood--but the house was now behung with greens, mostly holly. A cheerful wreath with a fat red bow adorned the door. It opened as Durbin helped his passengers descend from the carriage.

  There was no butler. A beaming parlour-maid curtseyed and took their wraps. Then she scrambled ahead and announced them correctly to the assembled company. The sitting room seemed crammed with strangers. Jean allowed herself to be hustled to a chair near the fire and waited for her hostess to make everyone known to her.

  As it turned out, she had met most of them at one time or another. The elder Mrs. Moore greeted her kindly, and the vicar, Mr. Tidmarsh, offered his condolences even though Jean had not gone to church on Sunday. Mr. and Mrs. Waring, who had leased one of Clanross's outlying manor houses, were not previously known to her but seemed pleasant enough. She had heard of them when they took the house.

  Once a mill owner, Mr. Waring had sold out to the Chactons. He invested heavily in canals, and now spent his time and money hunting. His well-bred wife was the daughter of a baronet. She had been acquainted with Jean's Aunt Whitby, though she was much younger than that formidable lady. The Warings were in their fifties, friends of the elder Mrs. Moore.

  Jean was surprised and not displeased to see Hugh Fremont. He had figured largely in her first two London Seasons. A fashionable man of thirty, a true Corinthian, he was still unmarried. He smiled at her and said something vague about her sister Anne.

  The political connexion. Of course. She recalled that Fremont had stood for a vacant seat in a bye-election about the time Fanny's health deteriorated. He had been defeated but had made a good showing, according to Clanross.

  It amused her to remember that her brother-in-law's Radical stance in the House of Lords had scandalized the family a mere decade before. Now Tom's views on Reform were almost fashionable. If they had not been, Hugh Fremont would never have espoused them. Even so, she was glad to see him again. His father's estate lay to the north of Brecon. Jean supposed he had come up from London early for the holidays.

  Mrs. Robert was making her known to a blushing young man named Hector Thorpe. He was, she said, articled to her husband's law firm. He looked younger than Georgy and blushed a deeper red when Georgy smiled at him. At that point, the parlour maid announced Mr. Sholto.

  Jean had seen the steward only in passing in the days since the bookroom encounter. She thought he was looking better. His arm still hung in a sling, this one rigged from what had to be a black silk neckcloth. Though he could not compete in sartorial elegance with Hugh Fremont, he was shaven and conformably dressed, and everyone greeted him with an air of unsurprised acceptance. The elder Mrs. Moore received a chaste salute on the cheek, the men shook hands, and Sholto executed a polite bow in the general direction of Jean and Georgy. He smiled at Miss Bluestone.

  Robert Moore looked at Sholto's Hessians. "I take it you walked?"

  "Och, aye."

  "Alexander!" said the elder Mrs. Moore.

  "Dear lady, I beg your pardon."

  The widow shook her finger in mock reproof. "You promised to speak English. Are you back in your cottage?"

  "As of this morning. 'Twas a moving experience."

  Hector Thorpe giggled. Mrs. Moore smiled at Sholto sympathetically. Her son snorted.

  "I'm back under my own roof, and I have only to thank the ladies for affording me shelter at Brecon, however involuntarily." He bowed again at a point between Georgy and Jean and turned to the mill owner. "Waring, well met. Now about those coverts…" He slipped into the cluster of men and might as well not have been there.

  Jean turned to Fremont. "Shall you stand for Parliament again?"

  He shuddered. "Only if Clanross has a rotten borough to spare. I'm no hand at dealing with drunken freeholders."

  Jean laughed as he had meant her to. When Tom had inherited the earldom of Clanross from Jean's father, he was horrified to find himself with two parliamentary seats at his disposal and one almost sure thing. He was now less naÏve and used his influence deftly enough, though everyone appreciated the irony of a man with three rotten boroughs agitating for the abolition of rotten boroughs.

  But Reform of Parliament was not the current issue. The problem now was Ireland, and that meant Catholic Emancipation, not a topic likely to cheer the forty-shilling freeholders of Lincolnshire.

  With something like relief, Jean engaged in the kind of political discussion she had left behind when she entered Fanny's sickroom.

  Dinner was announced, and she found herself seated between Fremont and Robert Moore in the chair of honour. It was easy enough to chat with two
men she had known, however slightly, her entire adult life. Across the table and down two, Georgy was being kind to Hector Thorpe.

  Jean was conscious of Mr. Sholto at the other end of the table--between Miss Bluestone and Cynthia Moore. Miss Bluestone was deep in conversation with her friend, the widow, and Mr. Sholto and Mrs. Robert were flirting up a storm.

  Or so it seemed.

  Jean was rusty, but she understood the game. Taking a mental breath, she fluttered her lashes and, mouth in a perfect O, gazed at Hugh Fremont as if he'd said something brilliant about Irish intransigence.

  "They cannot be trusted, Lady Jean. That is the long and the short of it. Those monster meetings--"

  "Is not monster a somewhat pejorative term? I believe the meetings have been peaceful."

  "Don't be deceived by that. O'Connell's election last July means war."

  Daniel O'Connell was a notable orator, so Fremont's alarm was well-advised. O'Connell had won election by an overwhelming majority of freeholders over Mr. Fitzgerald, the Government's Protestant candidate.

  "Won't O'Connell have to conform?" She meant conform to the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England, which included abjuring the Pope.

  Fremont said, grim. "He didn't have to conform to be elected. Just to be seated."

  Jean had heard her brother-in-law discussing that very point repeatedly since the bye election, so she was alert to it. She thought it clever of O'Connell. He meant to use the sanctity of free elections to force repeal of penal laws that kept Catholics outside the full political and economic life of the kingdom. Either the government had to admit an elected Catholic to Parliament or, horrors, nullify an election--and very probably plunge Ireland into religious war.

  There were relatively few Catholics in England, more in Scotland, and many in Ireland. It was Clanross's opinion--he had served with the army in Ireland--that the country would never be pacified unless the strictures against Catholics were removed. Although the House of Commons had passed bills for Catholic relief several times, the result was always nullified in the Lords, where Clanross sat. So long as the King remained opposed to Emancipation, the Lords would hold fast. Tom took the lead of his old chief, the Duke of Wellington, but his views on Emancipation were not shared by many of his peers. Nor, apparently, by Hugh Fremont.

  In spite of herself, Jean began to pay heed to what Fremont's words revealed of his character. She had known him as that priceless commodity, a young, well-connected, suave bachelor. He was not independently wealthy, but his father was, and he was the eldest son, the heir. He was good-looking in the semi-classical way that had appealed to Jean in the past. Had she said she wanted to marry Hugh Fremont, her friends and relatives would have been delighted. He was altogether eligible, but she had thought him uninteresting.

  She began to wonder about that judgment. He didn't agree with Clanross on Emancipation, but he cared about Reform and spoke to her as if her opinion mattered. Imperceptibly, between the soup and the fish, her faked interest became real.

  Then came the roast mutton. Time for her to turn to Robert Moore. With a moue of apology, she abandoned her conversation with Fremont.

  Mr. Robert was what one might expect a solicitor to be--dry and a bit fidgety. She wondered if he practiced the mannerisms of his trade in front of a mirror. A shy man might hide himself in the role, or a clever man. He had moved his family from Chacton for the clean air of Earl's Brecon. Jean thought of the coal fires in the cottages and wondered whether he had subscribed to Mr. Sholto's coal fund. So she asked. He had.

  "Must get the cottages dry," he muttered. "It's bound to snow soon. All those children--"

  So his sympathies could be aroused. Jean asked a gentle question about his own children, and he brightened at once. He told her more than she wanted to know about Daphne's weak chest and Bobby's emerging teeth, and how clever both children were. She was liking him very well, and wishing he'd change the subject, by the time the course was removed.

  The ladies withdrew soon after the cheese board appeared. To Jean's surprise, she had found the meal agreeable and the company as well. Mrs. Robert led the way to the withdrawing room.

  5.

  A seven o'clock dinner, country hours, meant everyone was still wide awake at half nine. Jean and Georgy were debarred from dancing or card-playing, so everyone else was too. That left conversation and music. The maid brought in coffee whilst the ladies talked of children and grandchildren and waited for the men. Miss Bluestone, who had dealt with more children than any of the mothers, entered into the discussion with every sign of eagerness.

  Georgy wandered to the spinet, sat, and began to ruffle the music sheets. She was the only Conway sister whose musical talent was more than dutiful. She played well and had a light, clear soprano. Jean was unsurprised when Georgy began to play softly and hesitated to reprove her. The other ladies could have tried for a more inclusive topic of conversation. And Fanny would have been the last to object to music.

  As Jean thought that, the discussion shifted. Miss Bluestone admired the Christmas greens, and Mrs. Waring admitted that, like Mrs. Robert, she wanted Christmas to last the whole month. Georgy had been playing Mozart. She slowed and moved imperceptibly to "Adeste Fidelis." Jean smiled at her. Georgy grinned. The companionable moment eased Jean's heart.

  By the time the gentlemen left their port and came in, the ladies had moved on to a discussion of pagan elements in the holiday celebration. Bringing in greenery was one. Miss Bluestone claimed that the Germans brought whole trees inside their houses, but that sounded improbable, and the governess had to admit she had never visited Germany.

  Georgy shifted to "Tannenbaum." "Wie treu sind deine Blätter." One of Miss Bluestone's pedagogical quirks was that she made her pupils memorize songs in whatever language they were studying. It helped with pronunciation and even with vocabulary. Neither Jean nor her sister had got far with German, but both of them remembered the song.

  When he heard what the ladies were talking about, Robert Moore said, "Many of the old customs must be pagan. Is "The Holly and the Ivy" one of the pre-Christian songs?"

  Georgy struck up the melancholy tune. To Jean's surprise, the second time she played it through, Mr. Moore sang in a clear tenor, "Of all the trees that are in the woods, the holly bears the crown." The ladies joined at "the rising of the sun and the running of the deer," and by "sweet singing in the quire" everyone was singing, or almost everyone. Jean didn't. She was busy revising her opinion of Mr. Robert's dryness. Hugh Fremont, like Moore, was a tenor. Mr. Thorpe moved his lips. Perhaps he was unsure of his voice. He was very young. If Mr. Sholto sang, Jean didn't hear him.

  Robert Moore remembered most of the words of the succeeding verses. Afterwards, Mr. Tidmarsh pointed out that the message seemed very Christian indeed, though he had to admit that the holly bush itself and perhaps the deer were alien. He seemed more interested in the discussion than offended and asked what they made of "The Boar's Head Carol," of which he had fond memories.

  Georgy didn't know the melody, so the elderly vicar opened his mouth and out came a resounding baritone that quavered only slightly with age. "'The boar's head in hand bear I, Bedecked with bays and rosemarye. I pray you, my masters, be merrye, Quod estes in convivio.'"

  At the Latin refrain, two voices joined him. "'Caput apri defero Redens laudet domino.'" Mr. Fremont, an octave above, and Mr. Sholto, who was baritone, in close harmony with Mr. Tidmarsh. There was a burst of spontaneous applause. Hugh Fremont smiled. Sholto looked sheepish.

  "Oh, you must sing it all," Georgy said. "It's lovely!"

  "My dear child, I can't remember the other verses." Mr. Tidmarsh looked disconsolate.

  "I know three," Fremont said.

  Sholto frowned. "I think there are four, but I can only recall three of them."

  "Let the vicar sing the first, do you the second, and I'll chime in with the third."

  "That sounds fair. Sir?" He cocked an eyebrow at Mr. Tidmarsh.

  "Yes,
very well, if Lady Jean and Lady Georgina have no objection."

  Jean smiled. It had not occurred to her to object.

  Georgy gave a small bounce. "Everyone must sing the refrain."

  "We don't know Latin!" Mrs. Robert sounded as if knowledge of Latin might reflect badly on the ladies. Mr. Tidmarsh sang the words for her. She looked doubtful.

  "You can do it, Cynthia," said her mother-in-law, palpably amused.

  So the men sang "The Boar's Head Carol," and Jean and Georgy joined in the chorus, Jean's alto in harmony. Mrs. Robert tried.

  Sholto stumbled on the words of the second stanza but came back strong with the Latin. Hugh Fremont smirked at him then launched into the third verse. "'Our steward hath provided this In honour of the King of Bliss.'" That had everyone laughing, and the trio sang the first verse again in harmony. They were all convinced that the vicar's choice of songs was pagan but not unchristian. Mr. Thorpe looked confused.

  "Tell me, Sholto, have you wren boys in Scotland?" Mr. Waring had plainly been wracking his memory for other examples of pagan frolicking. No one would agree that "The Twelve Days of Christmas" was unchristian, though Jean had a suspicion it was.

  "We do. The lads go singing from door to door and ask for treats or money, though more often on Hogmanay than on Boxing Day. Hogmanay," he added with a wry glance at Mrs. Moore, "is what you would call New Year's Eve. My father was a pillar of the kirk, so I had to, er, exercise stealth when I joined in."

  Everyone but Mr. Thorpe laughed. They had all encountered importunate wren boys on Boxing Day, though Jean had no memory of the song. Hereabouts they sang the wassail song, and she could not recall what was sung in Scotland on either holiday.

  "I'd sing the wren song, but I'd have to use a foreign tongue." Sholto meant Lallands. Jean wondered if Mrs. Moore's insistence that it wasn't English annoyed him. "Because of the rhymes, d'ye ken?"

  Mrs. Moore made a regal gesture, as if to say permission was granted.