The Blue Eyed Witch Read online

  “That is where she keeps the older, well-trained, and more experienced girls,” Hester explained.

  The Marquis looked bored.

  He had heard his friends in White’s extolling the virtues of the latest brothel, which at least had some semblance of imagination about it.

  The Temple of Aurora offered very young girls. The Temple of Flora, those that were older, and the Temple of Mystery was supposed to be exotic or what the Marquis thought of as unpleasantly debauched.

  It was a place that would never interest him. But now, because he was thinking of visiting Ridge Castle, he remembered that someone in the Club had told him that Caspar Trydell was an habitué of the Temple of Mystery.

  As he sipped his champagne, he was aware that the dining room smelt even more pungently unpleasant than the hall.

  He looked at what Hester and her companion were eating and realised it was pigs’ trotters, a dish for which he had always had an aversion.

  As if she realised what he was thinking, Hester said,

  “Forgive me, my Lord, if my choice of menu offends you, but Frank and I found it was a taste we had in common, just as we both like eel soup with which we started our supper.”

  This was another dish the Marquis found disgusting.

  He had seen the eels all too often after they had been caught in the Thames and were for sale on the winkle stalls along the embankment and down by the docks.

  They reminded him of snakes, of which he had been frightened as a child when an adder had bitten a gamekeeper with whom he was out shooting.

  He had never forgotten the man’s consternation, which later had turned to agony, and for a week his life had hung by a thread.

  Snakes and eels were connected in his mind with everything that was unpleasant and to be avoided. He decided suddenly that he had no wish to stay any longer with Hester.

  Frank Merridon had already realised this was his cue to leave and, hastily finishing his glass of champagne, he rose to his feet.

  “I must be getting off home,” he said. “I have an early rehearsal tomorrow.”

  Hester gave him an apologetic glance.

  He was important in the theatre and she did not wish to offend him. At the same time it was quite obvious that he was de trop once the Marquis had appeared.

  The Marquis too had risen.

  “I also have an early start in the morning,” he said, “and so I beg you to finish your supper and I will leave you in peace to do so.”

  “No, no! You must not go!” Hester said quickly.

  The Marquis walked towards the door and she followed him, putting her hand on his arm to look up at him.

  “Please stay,” she pleaded.

  “I merely came to tell you, Hester, that I have to leave London early tomorrow morning,” the Marquis said. “I may not be back for a week or so.”

  “You are going away? This is very unexpected!”

  “I have some essential business to attend to on one of my properties,” the Marquis said. “Forgive me for interrupting such a delightful supper party. It was inconsiderate of me, but I hope you understand.”

  He raised her hand to his lips as he spoke and those who knew the Marquis well could have warned Hester that, when he was at his most polite, he was also at his most dangerous.

  He walked down the narrow hall and she fluttered after him.

  “Can you not stay just for a little while?” she asked when they were out of earshot of the dining room. “I want you, as you well know! I want you to be with me!”

  “Another time,” the Marquis said firmly.

  As he opened the front door, the warm night air was a relief from the odour of pork.

  He drew in his breath.

  “Goodbye, Hester!” he said and walked across the pavement to his carriage.

  She did not realise as she waved to him that it was indeed goodbye!

  Chapter Two

  The Marquis set off from Berkeley Square the following morning in a good humour.

  He had slept well. It did not concern him that most of the members of his household had been up all night.

  The coachman in particular had sent ahead a team in charge of four grooms at the first light of dawn so that they would be ready for the Marquis to change horses at Chelmsford.

  He ate a hearty breakfast, not drinking, as so many of his contemporaries did, brandy or beer, but coffee.

  Coffee had become very popular in London and new coffee shops were continually opening to supply the demand for it.

  It was also superseding tea as the fashionable drink among the Ladies of Quality, which made many of the older men stick to their contention that ale or brandy was the proper drink for a gentleman first thing in the morning.

  The Marquis, however, had always been concerned with keeping himself athletically fit.

  He fenced at least three or four times a week with the masters of the art, he boxed at Gentleman Jackson’s Rooms in Piccadilly and the abnormal amount of riding he did kept his body so strong that he was the despair of his tailors.

  While he was undoubtedly one of the smartest and best-dressed of the bucks who surrounded the Prince of Wales – in fact Beau Brummel had often quoted him as an example – only his tailor knew how difficult it was to dress with close-fitting elegance a body which rippled with muscles.

  It was fashionable to appear languid and clothes must, according to Brummel’s edicts, fit to perfection without appearing conspicuous.

  That the Marquis achieved this to a notable degree was due to the fact that while he wished all the accoutrements to be as near perfect as possible, his mind was concerned with a great many more important issues than his personal appearance.

  Nevertheless, as he stepped out of Aldridge House, it would have been difficult to imagine that a man could look smarter, more handsome and indeed more irresistibly attractive.

  Below the white breeches and cutaway coat, his hessians polished with champagne reflected the phaeton and his cravat was tied in one of the difficult and complicated patterns that was the despair of most dandies.

  The Marquis set his hat slightly on one side of his dark head and picked up the reins.

  “Goodbye, Graham,” he said to his secretary. “Don’t fail to carry out my instructions.”

  “They will be put into operation immediately, my Lord!” Mr. Graham replied with just a note of rebuke in his voice.

  The Marquis was well aware that his secretary had an utterly reliable memory, which was instrumental in keeping the whole machinery of Aldridge House and his other properties working smoothly with seldom a hitch.

  He was, however, referring to his instructions to Mr. Graham to have a note containing a large cheque carried to Hester Delfine in Chelsea and to make sure that she vacated the property as soon as possible.

  The Marquis was not a vindictive man and, although he suspected that Hester would spend the night in Frank Merridon’s arms, that was not the real reason why he wished to be rid of her.

  It was partly, he admitted to himself, the smell of pork which he disliked and partly that the two of them, sitting in his dining room drinking his wine, had seemed to be guzzling their food in a somewhat vulgar manner.

  To him the whole scene had seemed degradingly coarse.

  It was too reminiscent of a Restoration drama. The favourite mistress entertaining the man of her choice, the arrival of the rich protector, the almost over-controlled manner in which they faced the situation, all made the Marquis remember the evening with a sense of disgust.

  He had told himself often enough that he was over-fastidious.

  But just as his own surroundings were redolent with good taste and ornamented with precious treasures to delight the eye of a connoisseur, so he expected all other details in his life to conform to the same pattern.

  His mistresses were always beautiful, intelligent and with certain qualities which were out of the ordinary.

  Similarly in his love affairs with members of the Beau Monde, he
sought out those who were described as ‘Incomparables’ and were acknowledged queens of their own set.

  But Hester last night had proclaimed all too obviously that her humble origin and commonplace tastes were very different from the impression she created behind the footlights.

  There she had an aura and a glamour about her that had made the Marquis seek her out in the first place and her acting ability had made him on closer acquaintance overlook many blemishes which, he told himself now, might have cooled his interest sooner.

  Nevertheless, as he had informed Mr. Graham, the affair was finished.

  He had been generous, as he always was, in writing the cheque that had accompanied his letter of farewell.

  He had also most politely thanked her for the pleasure she had given him, but he had known as he signed his name that it was for the last time.

  As he drove away, he felt he was also escaping skilfully from Lady Brampton.

  He had not opened the note she had sent him last night, but instead he had instructed Mr. Graham to return it to her with the information that ‘his Lordship has left London for an indefinite period’.

  It would give Nadine Brampton food for thought, but he was quite certain she would not find him at Ridge Castle.

  With his passion for detail, he had made it clear to Mr. Graham that the whole household was to be instructed that, however closely they were questioned, none of them, from the butler to the lowest pantry boy, had the slightest idea where he might be.

  Those who served at Aldridge House knew when they were engaged that to give away information of any sort about their Master was to make certain of instant dismissal without a reference.

  At the same time the Marquis was well aware how skilful Nadine Brampton and other women like her could be when they wanted information.

  He had known in the past of very large bribes which his servants had been offered, of occasions when they had been taken to an inn and plied with drink to make them talk more freely, and others when they had actually been threatened unless they disclosed certain details of his itinerary.

  “You will be quite safe from interruption, my Lord,” Mr. Graham had told him. “Only the stables and the pantry will be aware of your destination and you can trust Rigby to control the stable lads and Bowden the footmen.”

  “If there is anything really urgent,” the Marquis said, “you can send me a message by a groom, but otherwise deal with everything yourself. I have already written to His Royal Highness telling him that I have been called to the country on urgent family matters. That will keep him quiet for a little while at any rate.”

  “His Royal Highness will miss you, my Lord,” Mr. Graham said respectfully.

  “He has plenty of people to take my place,” the Marquis replied lightly.

  He thought that George had been right – he certainly should not spend any more time mopping up the Royal tears.

  As the Marquis tooled his horses through the traffic of the City with a skill that made a great many people turn to watch him pass, he thought that for the first time for months he felt as free as a schoolboy starting off on his holidays.

  Although selfish and extremely egotistical where his own affairs were concerned, nevertheless, the Marquis had a patriotism which no one who knew him well would deny.

  He realised, as few other people seemed to do, that the Prince of Wales’s attitude and feelings towards Britain were of the utmost importance to the stability of the country, not only at the moment but into the future.

  If he did not soon inherit the throne, there was every likelihood of his being appointed Regent before his father’s death.

  The King was growing more and more unpredictable in his behaviour and there were rumours that he was displaying again all the symptoms that had characterised his serious illness in 1788.

  His physical condition had weakened and his conduct became at times what his doctors called ‘very extravagant’.

  This meant that he became violent to the extent that the number of keepers required for him had to be doubled.

  It also meant that it was important for the Prince to take a greater interest in politics.

  Thanks to the Marquis’s influence, he had grown close once more to the opposition, giving dinners at Carlton House for Charles Fox, Sheridan, the Duke of Norfolk and other leading opponents of the Government.

  At one time it had seemed possible, although the Marquis had never really credited it, that a new Government might be formed by some of the opposition and various disgruntled members of the present administration under the auspices of the Prince.

  But unfortunately the Prince’s widespread unpopularity after his marriage had stood immovably in the way.

  However, the dinner parties renewed His Royal Highness’s partiality to politics, despite the fact that one of the guests remarked cynically,

  “At four o’clock in the morning, the Prince’s oratorial powers decline with each bottle of wine consumed!”

  That might have been true, but another privileged guest said firmly that he had never heard ‘worse reasoning in better or more brilliant language’.

  This confirmed the Marquis’s own ideas that the Prince had an excellent brain and a quickness of intellect which only needed channelling in the right direction.

  ‘I have certainly done my best,’ he thought with a sigh, ‘but I am entitled to my ‘time off’ like everyone else.’

  The team of four thoroughbred and extremely expensive chestnuts he was driving was soon clear of the London traffic.

  Now they were out in the open country driving into Essex, which the Marquis had always thought was one of the wildest as well as the most backward of the Counties surrounding London.

  The reason for this, he felt, might be the fact that in that County were few great aristocratic landlords, but rather the land was held by yeomen farmers and Squires, Essex born and bred, who for generations had seldom travelled outside the boundaries of their own lands.

  He had often wondered what had possessed his great-grandfather to buy the Ridge estate in such an isolated area.

  The Castle, although it must always have been attractive, had little to recommend it until his father spent very large sums of money restoring and redecorating it.

  He had done this principally, as far as the Marquis could make out, so that he could send his only son there to be out of the way during, as he had always proclaimed publically, ‘those tiresome and quite unnecessary holidays’.

  But to the Marquis The Castle had held an enchantment which compensated for what a less intelligent boy might have found an almost alarming loneliness.

  There had been only a number of servants and an elderly Tutor to keep him company.

  But he had grown to know the tenant farmers and found at last a kind friend and a hero to worship in John Trydell, whose father’s estates marched with those of The Castle.

  When he was older, the Marquis often wondered what had prompted John Trydell, who was eight years his senior, to show such kindness to a small boy.

  The answer, he decided, lay in the fact that John was also lonely and unhappy at home.

  It was John who taught him to shoot, who took him coursing and otter hunting.

  It was John who taught him about the countryside, showed him the badgers’ lair, a fox’s den and where the rare birds nested.

  In the summer, although the Marquis had never been the brilliant swimmer John was, they had raced each other across the Blackwater River and swum quite alarming distances out to sea.

  The Marquis had almost forgotten the enjoyment of those carefree days.

  But now the scenery of Essex, the smell of the countryside and the small fields enclosed with high hedgerows brought it all back to him.

  The bluebells growing in the woods, the blossoms on the fruit trees and the profusion of wild birds caused him to remember it was nesting time.

  He drove on, reaching Chelmsford in record time.

  The travelling chariot carrying h
is luggage, his valets and an under-secretary trained by Mr. Graham to take over the smooth running of The Castle while he was in residence had long been left behind.

  Three outriders escorted the chariot while three others rode just behind, keeping the Marquis within sight, but on his instructions well clear of the dust thrown up from the narrow roads by the wheels of his phaeton. At Chelmsford there was an excellent meal awaiting him in the private parlour of the coaching inn.

  It had been ordered by Mr. Graham, who had sent a note of instructions with the grooms who had arrived early in the morning with the horses.

  These had since been resting in comfortable stables awaiting his Lordship’s arrival.

  Mr. Graham was well aware that a Posting inn could not supply dishes like those prepared for his Master by the French chef at Aldridge House.

  Cooking at inns was usually deplorable, just as in many gentlemen’s houses the ingredients despite being fresh and of excellent quality were badly prepared and usually served lukewarm.

  All the aristocrats who could afford it employed a French chef, following the example of His Royal Highness, whose chef at Carlton House was the envy of his guests.

  It had been the Marquis who impressed upon the heir to the throne that it was not only wine that was important, but also the food that went with it.

  Dinners held at Aldridge House were a gastronomic treat and had awakened such a competitive spirit in the Prince that those who habitually accepted his hospitality thanked the Marquis for the vast improvement in food served at Carlton House.

  But while the Marquis had an epicurean taste when in London, he was quite prepared when in the country to accept English fare as long as it was the best.

  Mr. Graham had arranged that that was what he was provided with at The Dog and Duck when he stopped there at midday.

  The steak and kidney pie was cooked to a turn, the pastry crisp and brown and the roast mutton with caper sauce was tender and not overcooked.

  The pigeons had been turning on a spit until the very moment when the Marquis drove into the yard and there was a ham so well cured by the innkeeper’s wife that, although it had not been on Mr. Graham’s menu, the Marquis pronounced it excellent!