Page 21 of The Book of Lost Stories

Just Returns

Her father looked troubled. ‘Cicely, I had thought better of you! It is no wonder that Lucius has withdrawn his request for your hand, and instead asked my permission to pay his addresses to Elizabetta.’

Cicely rose proudly to her feet. ‘Then let her have him, for I think they will suit each other very well!’

Ravish’d by Cruel Fate by ORLANDO brOWNE

You sent for me, sir?’ enquired Lord Rayven, looking down with some compassion on the pain-furrowed face of Titus Hartwood, confined to his chair by a rheumatic complaint.

‘Sit down!’ Mr Hartwood said testily. ‘Don’t loom over me like that. It gives me a crick in the neck. Wait – make yourself useful and pour the brandy first.’

‘It is too early in the day for me, but I will pour you a glass.’

‘Namby-pamby, that’s the younger generation all over. No fibre. Look at that heir of mine. My younger brother, William, was as weak as water and his son takes after him. Handsome, mind, and charming, but no backbone. Lives for pleasure.’

‘That is the same for many young men,’ Rayven pointed out.

‘Nat’s not much younger than you are, yet you have seen active service. And now you are a civilian again you seem to occupy yourself.’

‘I had a lot to learn, inheriting so unexpectedly and not having been bred to the management of a great estate. So many people depended on me for their daily bread that at first it was quite alarming. I found great want among those employed in agriculture, too, for while the value at market of their crops and animals continued to decrease, the price of the everyday staples they needed to keep their families alive rose rapidly. I find myself rather interested in farming improvements,’ he added.

‘Some of the new experiments are quite fascinating, don’t you think? ’

‘No, never had a turn to be a farmer,’ Mr Hartwood said dismissively.

‘Politics – governing the country, not grubbing about in it – that was my game. But at least you show interest in something , while that cub Nathaniel has none that I can discover other than gaming, wenching and hanging around with a damned good-for-nothing set!’

His gnarled hands clenched and unclenched on the carved arms of his chair.

‘There are even rumours of Bacchanalian orgies at Lord Chase’s house at Kew.

You may be surprised that I know of such things, tied to this damn’ house as I am most of the time, but an old friend thought to warn me.

They think themselves hell-born babes, I suppose, playing at secret societies like that fool Dashwood and his ilk. Pah! If only they knew!’

‘Yes, sir, the irony has not escaped me: your nephew play-acts, little knowing that members of his family have for generations belonged to a secret Order sharing the burden of a great secret.’

If it had come as a surprise to the new Lord Rayven that his predecessor’s rather mismatched band of old cronies should expect to continue to gather at Priory Chase on a certain date every year, then it had been as nothing to his discovery of the real reason for that meeting.

‘Seven families,’ said Mr Hartwood now, meditatively. ‘Seven members of the Order, one from each family, a line unbroken down the centuries. Keeping the secret; keeping the faith.’

‘A secret I am not yet privy to,’ remarked Rayven, who had found himself recruited to the Order’s ranks on his return to take up his inheritance.

‘You will learn it when you have served seven years faithfully and then you may find the knowledge a burden hard to bear.’ The old man sighed.

‘But who is to take my place as the representative of the Hartwoods when I am gone I do not know, for Nat has yet to prove himself anything other than a fashionable fribble.’

‘Many young men are wild in their youth, yet grow sober and responsible when they turn thirty.’

‘Yes, that is sometimes the case. Charles Rayven thought much the same about his son, and yet he had started to show signs of maturity shortly before his death, thinking of marriage and taking an interest in the estate.’

‘And so may your nephew settle down yet.’

‘I have long wanted to think so, but I grow old and infirm and there is no sign of it.’

‘Indeed, sir, I am amazed that you have managed to make the annual journey to Priory Chase every autumn these last few years.

‘I must, for who is to take my place? Three wives I have buried, and not a son to show for it!’

‘I believe in the past women have been admitted as members of the Order,’ Rayven suggested. ‘Do you not also have a niece?’

‘Yes, Arabella.’ Mr Hartwood’s face lightened.

‘She’s a pretty little thing, but just eighteen and with a head full of gewgaws, gowns and beaux.

Too much of a feather-head to be burdened with serious affairs, even if I agreed with women being privy to such a secret, which I do not, whatever others in the past may have thought! ’

Drumming his fingers on the arms of his chair, he frowned.

‘Perhaps, if I were to marry her to the right man …’ He shot a look at Rayven from deep-set eyes under bushy brows: ‘I suppose you are not hanging out for a wife? If so, then perhaps you could stand in the Order for both our houses … only then the Seven would be Six, so that would not do. This situation has not arisen before. I must give it further thought.’

‘I am sure Miss Hartwood is delightful,’ Rayven said politely, ‘but although I do intend to marry soon, I do not think giddy eighteen and sober twenty-nine go well together.’

‘Perhaps not, but she’s having a coming-out ball and I’ll get Lavinia – William’s widow, you know – to send you an invitation. Come and cast your eye over her.’

‘Thank you, I will look forward to it. But going back to your problem, perhaps there is a distant relative who might be suitable?’

‘Not that I know of. Of course, I’ve got a granddaughter, but she is out of the reckoning.’

‘A granddaughter ?’ Rayven raised a surprised dark brow. ‘I had no idea.’

‘My only daughter ran off with a fortune hunter when she was seventeen, a gambler who lived on his soldier’s pay and the throw of the dice.

Much good it did him, though, for I cast her off and she died soon after the child’s birth.

’ He uttered a harsh bark of laughter. ‘He wrote to me later, of course, wanting money, but I had nothing to say to him.’

‘But surely your granddaughter deserved your notice?’

‘She was half his, and bad blood. Of course, had she been a boy, that would have been different. Then I might have made a push to remove him from his father and have him brought up under my own eye, so I could see how he turned out.’

‘So you have never met your granddaughter, sir?’

‘No, but I have just this day received a letter from her, saying that since her father is dead she has come to Town, and wishes to restore the Poseidon jewel to me. I knew that my daughter must have taken it, even though the blackguard she married denied all knowledge of it.’

‘Well, that is good news, is it not?’ Rayven said.

He considered that the tokens the seven members of the Order assumed during their meetings were merely pointless embellishments to their purpose, but he kept his opinion to himself.

He had sworn eternal faith to the cause, even if he was still inclined to think that the secret he would one day learn would turn out to be of no very great moment: the location of yet another Grail or portion of the True Cross, perhaps?

‘Growing up under such a father’s influence, she cannot have escaped the taint,’ Hartwood said.

‘I suspect she has an ulterior motive in making the offer and expects to receive something equally valuable in return, if only a public acknowledgement of our relationship. She is staying with a friend for the season and, at three or four and twenty, with no money or prospects, must be scrambling after her last chance of a respectable marriage. But I will see her, if only to give her a set-down for her presumption.’

‘But she is your granddaughter, acknowledged or not,’ Rayven pointed out, ‘and she may be sincere.’

‘That cannot be, or why would she have waited so long to return the jewel?’

‘If her father is recently dead, perhaps she has only now learned of its existence.’

‘Perhaps. Well, we will see, but if Miss Alys Weston thinks to cozen an old man in his dotage, she will be very much mistaken.’

‘ Alys Weston! ’

‘Yes. Can it be that you have met her already?’

‘If it is the same person, which I suppose it must be, with such an unusual name, then yes, we are a little acquainted.’

‘My daughter was called Alysaun, an old Cornish name used in her mother’s family, but she was always called Alys.

It seems her daughter was named for her.

’ For the first time a faint flicker of some softer emotion crossed the old man’s severe countenance.

‘I do not suppose she bears any other resemblance to her mother. But how came you to meet her?’

‘It was in Harrogate, just after I first sold out. She was paying a visit there with her aunt, a Lady Basset.’

‘Yes, they were living in a grace-and-favour cottage on some relative’s estate, I heard.’

‘Our acquaintanceship at that time was brief,’ Rayven said. That it was also a comedy of errors ending in a damp denouement, he kept to himself. ‘Then recently, while on my way to Town, I again met her. Her coach had had an accident and overturned, although she and her companion were unharmed.’

‘Her companion?’

‘A dowdily respectable older lady, whose name I am afraid I have forgotten.’

‘Hmm … so at least she was not so lost to all sense of propriety as to jaunter about the country alone.’ He shot another hard look at Rayven. ‘And what do you think of her?’

Rayven, recalling a pair of large and indignant grey eyes and a determined chin, said with a sudden grin, ‘Oh, I think you will find Miss Weston quite out of the common way!’

Hartwood stared at him consideringly. ‘Will I so indeed? Yet her mother was a silly, headstrong little fool.’