Buch lesen: «Dear Lady Disdain»

Chapter One

‘What! my dear Lady Disdain, are you yet living?’

Shakespeare

‘So, Lord Axforde didn’t suit?’

Miss Louisa Landen’s question came out idly as she applied herself diligently to her canvaswork. It seemed almost to be an afterthought.

But was it? Stacy Blanchard, seated at her desk in the main office of Blanchard’s Bank, situated in the heart of London’s financial centre, raised her dark head suspiciously.

‘Was that a question, Louisa—or a statement?’

‘Whichever you please, my dear,’ Louisa returned placidly, without taking her eyes from the peacock she was stitching. ‘I must say that I wasn’t surprised that you refused him—you have refused all offers made to you so far—but…’ And she stopped, apparently lost in confusion over the important question as to whether the wool she now required was light or dark blue.

Stacy wrote down the date, October 24th, 1818, before flinging down her quill pen, fortunately now empty of ink. ‘But what, Louisa? Lately you seem to have developed the most distressing habit of not finishing your sentences.’

Louisa looked over the top of her work at her one-time pupil, now a handsome woman in her late twenties. Not pretty, or even conventionally beautiful perhaps, but something better. She possessed the oval ivory face of the Blanchards, their brilliant green eyes, and their dark, lightly curling hair, even if the curls were severely drawn back into a large knot at the nape of her neck—which merely served to enhance the pure lines of a classic profile.

‘But, my dear, Lord Axforde is, after all, such a tulip of fashion, seems to possess a considerable understanding, and is so rich in his own right that one could hardly claim that he was marrying you merely to get at the wealth of Blanchard’s Bank. All in all you could scarcely do better. A handsome, reasonably clever man, and a marchioness’s coronet—what more could you ask?’

It was no more—and no less—than the answer Stacy had expected. Louisa had, indeed, made something of a litany of lamentation of it, repeating it, with variations, over Stacy’s last six offers—except the one made by Beverley Fancourt, of course. Now he really had been an open fortune-hunter.

Louisa might be her oldest, indeed, if truth were told, her only friend, but that didn’t give her the licence to choose Stacy’s husband for her. She was perfectly capable of doing that for herself—if she wanted a husband, that was. She rose from the desk and crossed the beautiful room, more like a great house’s salon than an office, a room which her late father had created and which she had left unchanged.

She stopped before the window to pull back deep green velvet curtains, the colour of the dress which she wore, and to stare at the dome of St Paul’s, before saying a trifle satirically, ‘Really, Louisa, really? D’you know I gained the distinct impression from the manner of Lord Axforde’s proposal that it was to the Bank he was making it, and not to me as a woman?’ She gave a short laugh, and continued to inspect St Paul’s as though she had never seen it before.

‘Do not exaggerate, my dear.’ Louisa’s reply was coolly judicious. ‘I told you not to do that as long ago as the nursery. I am sure that Lord Axforde said everything that was proper.’

Stacy’s lips thinned, and, unseen by Louisa, her fists clenched. ‘Oh, quite proper, I assure you. A regular commercial transaction was taking place—no doubt about it. Why, I half expected that he would ask me whether the Bank’s interest rate would continue to remain high if we married!’ She shook her head at Louisa’s pained expression. ‘Worse, from his expression—that of a man taking medicine—I thought that he was prepared to pay any price to get at Blanchard’s money to buy himself a dukedom—even if that price included marrying someone as undesirable as myself!’

‘Oh, come!’ Miss Landen at last looked up from her stitchery. ‘You do not do yourself justice, my dear. You misunderstood him, I am sure. Few prospective brides are as handsome and as comme il faut as you are.’

‘And few lack as much pedigree as I do,’ retorted Stacy briskly, returning to her desk and sitting down again. The desk was another of her father’s innovations; previously the office had been furnished with an old-fashioned lectern at which one stood.

She looked across at a row of oil-paintings on the opposite wall. The older ones were hack-work, done by travelling colourmen for a few shillings; the last two were fine things, one by a pupil of Gainsborough and the other by Romney.

‘My great-grandfather began life as a Huguenot pedlar who turned himself into a prosperous back-alley moneylender.’ She waved her hand at the oldest painting. ‘My grandfather built up the business until he was able to found Blanchard’s Bank, and my father transformed it into the richest bank in England.’ Now she waved at the Romney. ‘His father sent him to Harrow, and he had the manners and tastes of a gentleman and married a lady of aristocratic birth, but that does not make us gentry. And they do not really accept us, however much they and the nobility fawn on Blanchard’s—when they need the Bank to lend them money to carry on their gambling and their follies.’

Opening a large red and gold ledger which stood on her desk, she said almost savagely, ‘Would you like me to read to you the loans we have made to the flowers of English society—and tell you how many have reneged on them? No, I am merely the cit’s daughter, who has the bad taste to behave as a young man might, and run Blanchard’s—successfully, too.’

She closed the ledger again. ‘Do you know what he said to me, Louisa, in the middle of his pretence of loving and admiring me? That he expected that once we were married I would give up the foolishness of running the Bank and put in a manager to do it for me, so that I could give my mind to being a wife fit for a person of his station.’

Miss Landen stitched for a moment in silence, before replying, ‘Most husbands would expect you to do that, my dear.’

‘Yes, I know that, Louisa, and that is why I promise never to marry. Father didn’t train me to run Blanchard’s in order to stop doing so once some handsome popinjay decides that he might like my money while consigning me permanently to the nursery or to talk nonsense to fine ladies.’

Louisa sighed, before saying gently, holding up her work to inspect it the better, ‘I thought you told me not long ago that you would like to have children of your own, my dear. You are leaving it rather late to marry—you are already twenty-eight years old—and husbands do not grow on trees.’ And she gave her one-time charge a sideways look.

So even Louisa was full of sententious piff-paff, it seemed, and she, Stacy, was condemned to live in a childless desert because in order to have children one must first have a husband. How much better if one were a plant, fertilised at a distance by a passing bee—with no idea where the pollen came from!

This ridiculous notion was enough to restore her good humour and bring a wry smile to her face. It was the kind of nonsensical idea which she could never share with kind Louisa but which would have amused her father. Tears pricked at the back of her eyes. Hardly a day passed but she missed him—her father, her tutor, her mentor, her friend, the parent with whom, improbably, she had shared her jokes.

It occurred to her that it was too long since she had made one, or heard one, and meantime Louisa deserved an answer. But she would not like it.

‘Oh,’ she said, the hint of unexpected laughter in her voice bringing Louisa’s head up, ‘never fear, my love. When one is as rich as the heiress who owns Blanchard’s Bank, husbands forsake the trees and spring out of the ground! There will be no shortage of offers for the richest prize in England! The shortage lies, Louisa, in men whom I might wish to accept. And that is enough of that. I have work to do.’ And she opened another ledger and began to write as briskly as she had spoken.

If Miss Landen was thinking sadly that her one-time charge was such a strong woman, both mentally and morally, that it would need a man of equal strength to contain and perhaps tame her, she did not say so. It was all her stupid father’s fault, she thought ruefully as she watched Stacy’s quill drive across the paper, bringing her up as he had done.

It had been the failure of Louis Blanchard’s wife to give him boy children who could survive birth which had done the damage. He had married Lady Rachel Beauchamp, of a poor and noble family, and he had loved her in his aloof fashion, but constant childbearing and miscarriages had made her sickly and ailing.

It had been a miracle that she had carried her one girl child to term—another miracle that the child had been born large and healthy—but the birth had killed her mother, and left her father, for a time, resentful of the child who had taken his wife from him.

And then, as she grew up, her bright intelligence had begun to impress him. The child was christened Anastasia, but he had early shortened her name to Stacy, not Anna, because Stacy sounded more like the boy he had wanted to continue the Blanchard dynasty. Louisa remembered the first time she had met Louis Blanchard and Stacy.

‘I’m not hiring you as a governess,’ he had told her bluntly in the rich study of his home in Piccadilly. ‘I want her to have the manners and appearance of a fine lady, even if she has the brains and mental accomplishment of a clever man. I have hired male tutors to educate her. Why,’ he boasted proudly, ‘she can calculate a percentage and draw up a bill better than any of my clerks, and she still but a child.’

Louisa had risen from her chair, said severely, ‘I do not wish to undertake this task, Mr Blanchard. You are doing the poor child no favour and I ought not to abet you.’

He had given her the smile which transformed his hard face, and which immediately won him Louisa Landen’s heart.

‘And that is exactly why I am hiring you,’ he had told her warmly, ‘to keep her still a woman, and a modest one, for all her accomplishments.’ He had seen Louisa hesitate. ‘I will send for her,’ he had said, and had rung the bell, ‘and you may see that I am not asking you to care for a hoyden or a female pedant.’

What Louisa had seen when a lady’s maid brought Stacy in was a shy, dark little girl, the image of her handsome father, who, for all her shyness, was thoroughly in command of herself, and who took one look at Louisa Landen and thoroughly approved of what she saw.

‘My dear,’ her father had told her, as coolly as though he were addressing an equal, ‘this is Miss Louisa Landen, who I hope will agree to become your companion and teach you the conduct and etiquette of a lady.’

Stacey had looked at the ladylike figure before her, and had seen through Miss Landen’s modest exterior to the kind heart beneath it. She had made a short bow and said in a pretty voice, quite unlike anything which Miss Landen might have expected of the child prodigy whom her father had described, ‘Oh, I do so hope, Miss Landen, that you will become my companion. I really do need someone to talk to and tell me exactly how a young lady should behave.’

Such composure in a ten-year-old Miss Landen had not met in her long career as a governess. She had bowed in her turn and murmured gently, ‘And I shall be pleased to do just that, my dear,’ and had begun her long association with Stacy and Louis Blanchard.

And if she had fallen a little in love with Louis Blanchard on the way, no one was ever to know. Occasionally she had remonstrated with him over his daughter’s odd education, telling him in no uncertain terms that it was quite improper and that he was doing her no favour by insisting on it.

He had smiled at her and announced, ‘I am not here to do her favours. I am here to secure for Blanchard’s someone of that name who can run it when I am gone, and if that someone is a woman, then I must make do with what the Creator of us all has sent me!’

And that had been that. Louisa had never raised the matter again and here was the end of it, Louis Blanchard having died suddenly at a comparatively early age, leaving Stacy, still unmarried, to run the Bank, and waiting now for her right-hand man Ephraim Blount to come in to discuss the day’s news and doings with her.

It grew increasingly likely, was Louisa’s last sad thought, that Stacy would never marry now, and her unlikely situation was the cause of it!

Stacy didn’t feel sad, however, and the arrival of Ephraim Blount, carrying a pile of papers and demanding some immediate decisions, served to invigorate rather than depress her.

He bowed to her, before he stood and presented each problem to her—he never consented to sit by her while they worked together, for Ephraim, although only in early middle age, was a man of the old school. Everything must be done exactly so, as Louis Blanchard had taught him, which was sometimes a disadvantage rather than an advantage, as Stacy had often found. Imagination was not his strong suit. He was often mournfully depressed, rather than happy, when some of her wilder innovations proved to be fruitful. ‘So daring for a young woman,’ he was given to murmuring to his own assistant, the young Thomas Telfer, who worshipped Stacy from afar, ‘but I have to admit that up to the present Miss Blanchard’s judgement has never let herself, or the Bank, down.’

Prim, starched, his thinning yellow hair brushed stiffly over his forehead, he was the perfect right-hand man. Now he was saying, his voice melancholy, as though announcing a death, ‘Things are not going well at the York house, madam. All seems to be at sixes and sevens since Poxon was appointed. I fear that he is not up to snuff. Something needs to be done, or Blanchard’s reputation will suffer. May I suggest that, given your agreement, of course, I myself go there to try to put matters straight?’

Stacy propped her chin in both hands—a gesture of her father’s which always brought that formidable thruster to Ephraim’s mind. She looked steadily past him at the opposite wall, to where, before the blazing fire, Louisa was now gently sleeping. She no longer took her chaperonage of Stacy, when the latter was entertaining the Bank’s employees—all male—seriously.

‘D’you know, Ephraim, I have my doubts about the wisdom of that? I think that one of the things which may be wrong at York is that no Blanchard has visited there since my father died. I wish to remedy that. My aunt and uncle Beauchamp have asked me to spend Christmas with them at Bramham Castle, which is only a few miles from York. We have not met since Father’s death, and to agree to their wishes would mean that I could combine business with pleasure—and leave you here in sole charge. You would like that, I think.’

If such a dry stick could be said to glow, Ephraim glowed. Stacy noted with amusement that he thought it politic to demur.

‘Are you sure, madam? Think of the time of year. To travel to Yorkshire in mid-winter—is it wise?’

‘Before the snows, I think,’ Stacy murmured gravely. ‘It is what my father would have done, I am sure.’

She had struck exactly the right note. Louis Blanchard had been Ephraim’s god, and he bowed down before his very name. ‘Oh, indeed, madam, yes, madam. Of all things the most suitable. You will take one of our senior clerks with you, I trust, to act as a secretary and aide?’

‘Greaves, I thought,’ murmured Stacy, happy to have got her own way so easily, ‘unless you have any objections?’

‘None at all, madam. The very man.’ He was trying to contain his pleasure at the prospect of taking sole charge of Blanchard’s for at least two months—something which he had longed to do since his late master’s death. ‘I will write at once and set all in train.’ And he bustled importantly out of the room.

Stacy lay back in her chair and contemplated the prospect of a few weeks’ freedom from the daily grind of running Blanchard’s. Lately she had begun to feel strangely restless, rewarding though her work was, and the power that came with it. A change of scene, the challenge of putting York straight would renew her spirits, she was sure. All that remained was to waken Louisa up and shock her with the news.

‘God rest you merry, gentlemen,’ she hummed to herself. Perhaps I may hear the waits singing in the northern snows, she thought, and perhaps…perhaps…I might meet someone more interesting, more to my taste, than Lord Axforde and his not so merry gentlemen-friends!

She walked across the room and bent to kiss Louisa gently on the cheek. She was sure that after her first shock was over Louisa would approve of what she was about to do—and would start to wonder what handsome and eligible young men, of whom her charge might approve, lived in and around York!

‘Damn my father,’ said Matthew Falconer violently to the lawyer who had been speaking of his parent’s wish to be reconciled with his long-estranged son. ‘I haven’t crossed the Atlantic in order to please him—simply to end my associations here by disposing of all that I own, including this estate which my great-aunt has thought fit to leave me.’

‘But, m’lord—’ the lawyer began, in a feeble attempt to pacify the massive man who stood opposite him. Matthew Falconer was over six feet tall, and gave the appearance of being nearly as broad. His harshly handsome face, leonine beneath tawny hair, with matching golden eyes, bore the marks of his having worked in the open. His hands, Lawyer Grimes had already noticed, were those of a man who did much physical work with them. His nails were cut short, and there were calluses on his long fingers and on his palms. He was dressed like a farmer—plainly—with nothing of the man of fashion he had once been remaining to hint of his lineage, or of his newly acquired title.

Which he didn’t want. He hadn’t come to England to be called by his detested brother’s name. He interrupted Grimes to say, ‘I will not be addressed as Lord Radley—nor will you call me m’lord or sir,’ he added as he saw the lawyer’s mouth shaping to say it. ‘You will address me as Matthew, Matt, Mr Falconer, or Falconer, as you please, or earn my instant displeasure.’

He saw Grimes close his eyes before he replied in a long-suffering voice, ‘I will do as you ask, Mr Falconer, but that does not make you less the Viscount Radley, your father, the Earl Falconer’s heir, now that your older brother has died so prematurely.’

The man standing by the window, staring sardonically at both Matt Falconer and the lawyer, gave a rolling chuckle before saying in a thick American accent, ‘Y’all better learn soon, Mr Lawyer, sir, that what Matt Falconer wants Matt Falconer usually gets. That so, Matt?’

Matt noted with grim amusement the lawyer’s wince away from them both, particularly from Jeb Priestly, who, in his determinedly Yankee garb of black and yellow checked trousers, tight at the knee, flaring at the ankle, his black frock-coat extravagantly cut, and his battered black top hat, which he had refused to remove in defiance of all English custom, stood for everything which Benjamin Grimes deplored. A mannerless rebel come to mock his late masters.

Worse, Matthew Falconer was allowing this creature, who was merely his valet-cum-secretary-cum-man-of-all-work, to address him as familiarly as though they were both of the same rank, and made no effort to check his rudeness to Grimes himself.

‘I say again, Mr Falconer, before we even begin to dispose of your late great-aunt, Lady Emily Falconer’s estate in Yorkshire, that you ought to consider the olive-branch which your father is holding out to you. You are, after all, his only remaining son…’

Matt found all this boring beyond belief. ‘Why, sir, do you persist in telling me things I know? I am well aware of my position vis-à-vis both my father and Lady Emily. So far as the Earl is concerned you may tell him, with my compliments, timeo Danaos et dona ferentis. I am sure that he will know what I mean.’ This last came out in a mocking drawl reminiscent of the young rattle-pate about town he had once been, so different from the large and sombre man he now was. He could see the lawyer registering shock again.

Priestley saw fit to put his oar in once more. ‘Well, your pa might know what you mean by that gibberish, Matt, but, sure God, I don’t. Try translating it into good American, would you?’

Matt knew that Priestley was, in his words, twisting the lawyer’s tail. Uncouth he might look and sound, but his knowledge of the Classics equalled Matt’s own, he being an alumnus of Harvard. Nevertheless, Matt decided to join in Jeb’s game.

‘It translates, Jeb, being said by a Trojan with whom the Greeks were fighting, into, “I fear the Greeks even when they bring gifts”, or, in other words, It is dangerous to accept presents from an enemy.’

‘Tro-jans,’ drawled Priestley. ‘An’ which are you, Matt?’

‘A Trojan, of course,’ smiled Matt, ‘ever since I was born to be my father’s curse. Isn’t that right, Mr Grimes? How many ultimatums had you the honour to face me with until the final one before I left England? No, don’t answer; it would tax your memory to recall them all.’

Grimes’ face flamed scarlet. He looked away at the shelves of law books on the wall behind his desk, and said in a low voice, ‘I suppose it is useless to tell you how much I regretted m’lord’s treatment of you, Mr Falconer, but I must also tell you that your father is a broken old man…’

‘Only that, I suppose,’ returned Matt, his eyes wicked, ‘could bring him to wish to see me again—and Rollo’s death, of course. That must have been the final facer.’

‘You are pleased to be heartless…’

‘My father cut my heart out long ago,’ returned Matt carelessly. He was suddenly regretful of his baiting of the old man who had been the scourge of his childhood, youth and young manhood, until he had finally left England nearly twelve years ago, and added, a trifle stiffly, ‘I am wrong to allow my dislike of my father to take the form of tormenting you. You were kind to me, I remember, when I was invalided out of the Navy after Trafalgar, and no one else was.’

‘You brought your own doom on you,’ Grimes could not help retorting, ‘when you ran off with your brother’s wife. My sympathy for you died on that day.’ He saw Priestly’s face change, and knew that here was something Matt Falconer’s impertinent shadow had not known.

Matt Falconer was not nonplussed. He was no longer the eager boy who had yearned for his father’s love and whom his father’s lawyer could patronise.

‘Leave that,’ he ordered in his quarterdeck voice. ‘It has nothing to do with you, or with the business I have come to settle.’

But Grimes must have thought he had found a chink in Matt’s armour, although Matt was not conscious of possessing one, for he continued, although in a lower tone, ‘And her death does not lie on your conscience, Mr Falconer?’

Oh, the old man did have weapons to fight with after all! Matt closed his eyes, only for a sad and beautiful long-dead face to swim before them. The memories that face recalled had him swinging away from both men. For the first time in the interview he was struggling for self-control.

‘I lost my conscience with my heart,’ he asserted stiffly. ‘And if you refer to my late sister-in-law again, I shall leave this office and England within the day, and you, my inheritance from Lady Emily and my father may all go to the devil. Is that plain enough for you, sir?’

Matt was himself again—cold, strong and unshakeable, the man whom Jeb Priestley had always known, and whom the lawyer had never met. After that they returned to the business at hand, Grimes recognising that the man before him would never agree to any of his father’s demands, and consequently now wishful to settle the matter of the inheritance as rapidly as possible.

Pontisford Hall, his late great-aunt’s home on the borders of Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire, was the last reminder of Matt’s childhood, and the only happy one. He had a sudden burning wish to see it. He remembered warmth and love, and a place where he, as well as his older brother, had been welcome. Before he had reached England, on the boat over, re-reading the letter which told him of his great-aunt’s death and his inheritance, he had resolved to sell the Hall and its contents, to raise capital to enlarge his Virginia plantation, and partly rebuild and beautify the stark house which he called home.

But stepping ashore in England, travelling to London, seeing that great city’s sights, smelling its unique smell, had reminded him agonisingly of his past, of his youth, before the world had fallen in on him. He had a sudden yearning to revisit the scenes of his childhood—if only to say goodbye to them before he parted from his homeland for the last time.

He said nothing of this to Grimes, merely, ‘I shall travel to Yorkshire, sir, to pay my respects to Lady Emily’s tomb in Pontisford church, and to visit the Hall for the last time. She was kind to me, and I must not let her go without a proper farewell. You will inform the staff there of my proposed arrival. I shall set out as soon as I have completed other urgent matters here.’

Matt could imagine Jeb’s raised and mocking eyebrows at this rare display of sentiment, and the silent cynicism of the old lawyer, but damn that for a tale. When he had reached his middle thirties a man had the right to say goodbye to his youth.

And so it was settled. Mr Grimes did not pry into his client’s life. He assumed that Matthew Falconer had not married while in the United States, for there was no talk of a wife. He assumed that he had had some success as a plantation owner, but made no move to discover how much of a success. If the grim man before him wished him to know these things he would have told him. Once or twice he sighed for the carefree young man he had once known, who had faced life with a smile despite his father’s displeasure, but it was plain that that man was long gone.

Business was done, and done quickly—after the fashion of Yankees, Grimes presumed. The old Matt Falconer had never been businesslike, or hard. Now he was both. He even kept his insolent man on a tight rein while he and the lawyer went through the necessary business of establishing identity, examining Lady Emily’s will, and signing and witnessing the necessary documentation.

It was soon all over, and Matt and his man were in the street, holding their top hats on, braving the keen wind of early November, before Jeb spoke again.

‘Well, there’s a fine tale, Matt. Did you really run off with your brother’s wife?’

‘Yes, but not for the reason you might think.’ For once he was short with Jeb. Revisiting England must have made his memories keen again. He thought he had been rid of that old pain long ago.

‘Why, what other reason is there?’

Which, of course, was what everyone had said at the time. Matt replied, in what Jeb always thought of as his ‘damn-your-eyes’ aristocrat’s voice, which he had rarely used in the good old United States, ‘Nothing to do with you, Jeb. You may have the rest of the day to yourself. I shall meet you for supper at Brown’s this evening. We shall set out for Yorkshire as soon as I can organise suitable travel arrangements.’

There was no brooking him in this mood. Jeb rearranged his face, pulled a servile forelock, bowed low, mumbled, ‘Yes, massa, certainly, massa,’ a ritual which usually drew an unwilling grin from Matt. But not today. Today he was unmoved, immovable, and his shadow, wondering where his master was going, would have been surprised to learn that he ended the afternoon in a church, before a marble memorial consisting of an urn held by a weeping Niobe whose inscription simply read, ‘To the memory of Camilla Falconer, Lady Radley, 1785-1806, cut down in her youth… “Cometh forth like a flower”.’