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Page 65 of The Fortunes of Ashmore Castle

When the carriages had been waved off, Rose said to Mrs Webster, ‘I want to go down to the village. I need some elastic.’

‘All right. You can take a message for me to Trapper’s. I’d like to get the chimneys swept while they’re away.’

‘Mr Richard and Lady Alice are still here,’ Rose pointed out.

‘We can work around them. I can’t leave it any longer in case the weather changes. Oh, if you’re going to Poining’s, can you get me some plain shirt buttons? I’ll give you one to match.’

Rose went down the back way, round Mop End and Cherry Lane, as she always did now to avoid passing Hundon’s.

There was more shade that way, anyway, and it was a hot day.

The village basked in shimmering heat. None of the trees was yet turning: it was more like August than September.

As she passed the post office Michael Woodrow came out.

She would have walked on, but he stepped in front of her.

‘Please stop a moment and talk to me,’ he said.

She stopped, rather than make a scene. ‘How’s the shoulder?’ she asked coldly.

‘Better, thank you. Still a bit stiff, but I can use it all right. How are you?’

‘Me? I’m always well,’ she said, in a conversation-ending tone.

But he didn’t move aside, looking at her earnestly. ‘You look well,’ he said. He chewed his lip, then gestured towards the post office. ‘I was putting in an advertisement for a maid.’

‘I heard you were back at Hundon’s.’

‘I can’t really manage without someone there – being out all day, I don’t have time for—’

‘Women’s work.’

‘I didn’t mean—’

‘How’s your sister?’

He looked miserable. ‘Settling in, I think. She’s – she’s never come back, you see.’

‘Come back?’

‘To herself. She’s not really Martha any more. Not like she was. I can’t bring her home.’

Rose looked away. ‘I suppose not.’

He put his hand on her arm. ‘Rose – Miss Hawkins – please. Forgive me. Be friends again.’

‘Friends?’ she enquired, as though it were a foreign word.

‘I was upset and scared, and spoke hastily. You were right and I was wrong, but I didn’t know then and – well – I had to stand by her, didn’t I, my sister? Isn’t loyalty a good thing?’

‘I wouldn’t know.’

‘I mean, if you and I—’

She crushed the opening briskly. ‘I must be off. I hope you find a suitable maid.’

But he didn’t let her past. ‘I don’t want a maid. I want a wife.’

She gave him a mirthless grin. ‘Comes cheaper, don’t it, a wife? And you don’t have to give a wife a day off, ever.’

Now he seemed just a little riled, and she liked him better for it.

‘You’re deliberately misunderstanding me.

I spoke clumsily, but you know what I’m trying to say.

Let us go back to what we were before all this.

Let me court you. You deserve to be courted properly. Walk out with me, Rose – please!’

She considered him for a long moment. He was handsome and nice, and she had enjoyed talking to him.

But she knew what marriage meant. She’d seen enough of men and their nonsense over the years, and what it cost. You were better off without them, if you had a home and a job, and she did.

It had been pleasant to have a man admire her, but it all ended up the same, didn’t it?

You cleaned up their messes and waited on them hand and foot, and either you got paid to do it – or you married them.

‘I’m too busy to be walking out with anybody. Let me past, please.’

He stood back to let her go, but as she passed he said, low and urgent, ‘I won’t give up, you know.’

Good , she thought, heading down the street. It’ll be exercise for you .

Chaplin showed Richard into the drawing-room and announced him. Richard crossed the room to take his grandmother’s hands and kiss her cheek. She looked, he thought, somehow diminished, and it affected him: she had always been so robust.

‘You have only just caught me,’ she said, gesturing him to a chair. ‘I go away again tomorrow, to stay with the Levens.’

‘Yes, I know,’ said Richard. ‘Quite the gadabout you’ve become lately.’

The joke fell flat. She looked at him with real pain. ‘A great part of my life is over,’ she said. ‘I was still a young woman when I met him. What is there for me now?’

He became serious. ‘I understand. Believe me, I do.’

‘You?’ she queried, and her gaze sharpened. ‘Do not say it! You assured me you had no feelings for her.’

‘For Chloe? No.’

Her eyes widened. ‘ Bon dieu! ’ she said faintly. ‘The mother? O, mon pauvre petit! You must forgive me. I did not see it.’

He was uncomfortable with her sympathy. ‘You weren’t meant to.’ She was looking at him penetratingly, stripping away layers. ‘Please don’t pity me.’

‘I do not,’ she said at last. ‘One ought to feel a great love once, or one is not truly alive. Well, well. We are the wounded, we two, n’est-ce pas ? Life will go on, mon cher , but differently, and we will adapt.’

He shook his head. ‘I shall never love again.’

She did not argue with him, but continued with her own thoughts. Eventually she roused herself to say, ‘He came to see me, you know. At the end.’

‘ Vraiment? ’

‘Oh, yes,’ she said, with a spark of anger.

‘He came to say goodbye to me. Can you imagine it? To say goodbye – to me ! – as if it was merely a congé visit, a commonplace courtesy, like leaving one’s card when one quits Town.

After all we had been to each other!’ There was a colour of indignation now in her cheeks.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘She has changed him, that one. And not for the better.’ There was a silence, and then she roused herself to say, ‘Tell me some news to distract me. What of your mother?’

‘Still at the Usingerhof. She wrote to Aunt Vicky, who wrote to me. They were to have gone to Venice to see Uncle Fergus, but she is still convalescent.’

‘That does not surprise me,’ said Grandmère. ‘A baby, at her age? What of your sister?’

‘Which one?’

‘ N’importe .’

Richard smiled at that. ‘Well, Rachel is having a fine time, I believe.’

‘Yes, we heard something of her frolics, Caroline and I, when we were in France. Vicky means only to be kind, I believe, but Maud is hoping the silly child will fall in love and break her engagement to the unsatisfactory man.’

‘Is that a bad thing? Except for the unsatisfactory man, of course.’

‘But will she fall in love with someone suitable? And will he offer for her without a dowry? There are too many imponderables.’

‘Better the bird in the hand? Well, you may be right.’

‘I am always right. And you, what goes on with you? Why did you not go to Scotland?’

‘I have been looking for a house, and I have found one. I came to tell you. In Bolton Street, so I shall be handy to come and visit you. Just a little place, but neat and convenient.’

‘What need have you of a house?’

‘To stay in when I come to London, which will be more often in future. I don’t want to keep bothering Aunt Caroline.’ The rooms Molly had occupied had been given up. He had seen to that. There were too many memories there.

‘She does not mind being bothered. Which you know. So it must be that you wish for a house to be private in. Which means you are contemplating some grivoiserie .’

‘Grandmère! As if I would! There are other reasons for wanting to be private, you know.’

‘Such as nursing a broken heart – yes, I know. But that is not good for you. You are a young man, you must go out and attack life. Ever onwards and upwards!’

‘You exhaust me,’ Richard said, smiling. ‘Can a fellow not have a moment to lick his wounds?’

‘Certainly not,’ said Grandmère.

Nina arrived at the familiar house in Stafford Street to find everything in disarray, the air full of dust, the incontinent sound of hammering, and sundry extraneous persons blocking the passages and doing incomprehensible things to the walls.

‘Oh, my dear! Come in,’ said Isabel Morris, ‘but do be careful where you step. There are nails and snips of wire and I don’t know what underfoot.

We are having the electric light put in.

Mawes is upstairs somewhere, making a nuisance of himself.

It was all his idea, of course. He is such a one for new-fangled inventions! ’

‘Shall I be in the way?’ Nina said. ‘You know Lepida and I are going to the lecture later, and I thought we could have a comfortable chat beforehand. But I can go away and come back.’

‘No, no, do stay, if you don’t mind the mess.

But, my dear, Lepida won’t be going to the lecture.

She is laid down on the chaise longue in her room, quite prostrate.

I’m so angry with Mawes that the men have come today to do the electricity, when she’s so poorly, but he says they are quite booked up, and if they don’t come today it will be a month or six weeks until they can come again. ’

‘What’s wrong with Lepida?’ Nina asked anxiously. They were treading upstairs now.

‘It’s another of those turns she’s been having.

It starts with a fever, and pains in the joints, but then she becomes exhausted and can’t do more than lie on the sofa.

It goes away after a few days, but it worries me terribly.

The doctors can’t decide what’s wrong. Gillespie thought it was a kind of influenza because of the fever, but Conroy is now inclined to think it must be a disorder of the liver.

But Mawes says people with livers turn yellow, and poor Lepida is just as pale as milk. ’

‘I’m so sorry. I ought not to disturb her, perhaps.’

‘No, do come and see her and talk to her. It’s all she can bear, poor child, a little conversation. And I know she’s been longing to see you.’