The Shadow of Sin (Bantam Series No. 19) Read online

“Then it was undoubtedly a shock,” the Earl said.

  “How can you want the Priory?” Celesta asked without choosing her words. “You have your own house and from all I have read it is very grand. The Priory cannot be important to you.”

  “I think I might find it useful as it is so near London,” the Earl answered. “Meltham, as you so rightly say, is a very grand residence and I am very proud of it. But it takes me two days to get there and as this is within driving distance of St. James’s and on the road to Dover, it might at times prove a convenience.”

  Celesta pressed her lips together to prevent herself crying out at the lazy indifference in his voice.

  ‘It means nothing to him,’ she thought. ‘Nothing at all that he should break a tradition and inheritance that had been in existence for five hundred years.’

  There was a silence and then at length she said: “Do you wish me to ... leave?”

  “I think you must explain to me your exact circumstances,” the Earl answered. “As I have already told you, Miss Wroxley, your brother did not inform me that you were living here in what I understand is called the Garden Cottage, or indeed that you were dependent upon him, if you are.”

  “My circumstances can be of little interest to Your Lordship,” Celesta replied proudly.

  “On the contrary,” he replied, “as I understand your brother had very little, if any, money left, I must, if I have any sense of responsibility, find out how you are situated.”

  “My Nurse and I have enough to live on,” Celesta said in a low voice.

  “Exactly how much?” the Earl enquired.

  “Can that really concern you?” Celesta asked almost indistinctly.

  “Perhaps I am merely assessing how much rent you can afford to pay,” he answered.

  Celesta met his eyes and realised that for some reason of his own he was determined for her to tell the truth and there was nothing she could do but comply.

  “My grandmother,” she said quietly, “left me a small sum which brings in approximately fifty pounds a year.”

  “Is that all you have?”

  “It is enough.”

  “It would not be enough for most young women of your age and with your looks!”

  “Perhaps I am exceptional, My Lord.”

  “You must be,” he said tartly, “unless of course you have planned for an early marriage. Are you engaged?”

  “No.”

  “But you have a number of Beaux who are pressing you to make up your mind?”

  “There is no-one like that.”

  His lips curved in a smile.

  “You can hardly expect me to believe such a statement.”

  “You can believe it because it is true!”

  “What has happened to all the Gentlemen in Kent—are they blind?”

  Celesta did not answer and after a moment he said:

  “Why are you living like this, alone with your Nurse? Surely you are in need of chaperonage and there are friends with whom you could stay?”

  “Nana is very insistent that she is an extremely proper Chaperon.”

  “I hardly think that your Nurse’s contention would stand up to a social scrutiny,” the Earl said. “So please answer my question. Is there no-one with whom you could stay?”

  “No! No-one!”

  “Why?”

  “I think, My Lord, that is entirely my business.”

  “Come, Miss Wroxley. As I have already said, I have a sense of responsibility towards you. You are living here on my Estate and from what you have told me, you cannot afford to leave.”

  He paused to say slowly:

  “I cannot believe that you are so innocent as not to realise there must be a certain amount of gossip, to say the very least of it, if you continue living at the Garden Cottage while I am at the Priory!”

  Celesta looked at him wide-eyed for a moment, and then the colour crept up her cheeks.

  “You ... you mean...”

  “... exactly what you think I mean,” the Earl finished.

  “But it is absurd!” Celesta exclaimed and she rose to her feet.

  Without realising what she was doing she walked across the room to stand at the bow-window looking out into the garden.

  “You need not perturb yourself, My Lord,” she said. “I can assure you no-one in this part of the world will be surprised at anything I do ... if they so much as give it a thought!”

  There was a bitterness in her voice which was very obvious.

  After a moment the Earl said:

  “I think you will have to explain that statement to me.”

  “There is no reason for me to do so,” Celesta replied.

  Then she turned to look at him.

  “Please, My Lord, let Nana and me stay here! We will be no trouble and indeed there is no reason for you to remember our very existence. I admit I have no-where to go and I could not afford to pay rent elsewhere. So please, because you have so much, be ... generous.”

  There was a break in Celesta’s voice but the expression on the Earl’s face did not alter.

  His eyes were on her pleading eyes and on the movement of her lips.

  Then he said:

  “I may do what you ask of me, but naturally I wish first to know the full circumstances.”

  Celesta turned away again.

  “If I do not tell you, there are plenty of people who will!” she said. “Four years ago my ... mother ran away with a ... neighbour!”

  The Earl raised his eye-brows. It was obviously something he had not expected to be told.

  “May I know the neighbour’s name?” he asked.

  “The ... Marquis of Heron,” Celesta replied with her back to him.

  “Good Lord! And your mother’s name is Elaine?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then of course I have met her, but I had no idea that this was where she had lived or indeed that she had a daughter!”

  Celesta did not speak and after a moment he went on:

  “So local Society has ostracised you because of your mother!”

  “But of course,” Celesta answered in a hard little voice. “Can you not realise that I might contaminate the girls of my age or entice their brothers into nameless indiscretions?”

  “So I am to understand” the Earl asked, “that you are being made to suffer for something that is no fault of yours?”

  “Nana has always said,” Celesta replied, “ ‘Sin casts a long shadow’.”

  Chapter Two

  “Your mother is very lovely,” the Earl said after a moment’s pause.

  As Celesta did not speak he went on:

  “I remember the gossip when she ran away with the Marquis of Heron. They were, and still are, very much in love.”

  “We ... loved her ... too,” Celesta said.

  The words seemed to be forced from her and there was a pain in them that was unmistakable.

  “I can understand that,” the Earl remarked, “but I think your mother, like many women before her, felt the whole world was well lost for the man she loved.”

  Still Celesta did not speak and after a moment he said:

  “One day when you fall in love yourself, you will understand.”

  “That is something I shall never do!” Celesta’s voice was sharp.

  She walked back to the hearth to sit down opposite the Earl.

  “That is one of the reasons,” she said in a carefully controlled voice, “why I am begging Your Lordship to allow me to stay here with my Nurse.”

  “For the rest of your life?” the Earl asked with a smile that she felt had something of mockery in it.

  “For the rest of my life!” Celesta said firmly.

  “You cannot be serious!” the Earl exclaimed. “Surely when you realise this is only a temporary unhappiness—if that is what you call it—you will marry someone whom you love and will undoubtedly make him an admirable wife.”

  “There is no reason why I should argue with Your Lordship,” Celesta said, “but I ass
ure you that I will never marry and I will never fall in love!”

  There was something passionate in her voice and the expression in her eyes was hard.

  “I am sure you are far too intelligent to say anything which time will later disprove,” the Earl replied.

  Celesta made a little gesture of impatience and he went on:

  “I can understand it was hard for you as a child to understand your mother’s motives in creating a scandal and leaving your father. But as an outsider I can quite see there must have been extenuating circumstances.”

  “You need not explain them to me!” Celesta said firmly.

  “Perhaps I am anxious to explain them to myself,” the Earl said loftily. “For instance I have known the Marquis of Heron since I was a boy although he is older than I am. He has, as you very likely know, a wife who is incurably insane. That is the reason why your mother and he have not been able to marry following your father’s death.”

  Celesta turned her face towards the empty hearth as if she did not wish to hear what was being said.

  The Earl continued relentlessly:

  “I believe there was a wide difference between the ages of your father and mother. How old was your father when he died?”

  “He was ... sixty-seven,” Celesta answered reluctantly.

  “One should never ask a lady’s age,” the Earl said with a faint twist of his lips, “But I am sure I will not be far out in my calculations if I presume that your father was at least twenty-five years older than your mother.”

  “They were married and they were happy!”

  Celesta spoke almost like a child who has been goaded into an argument.

  “Happiness does not always mean that two people are passionately in love,” the Earl said, “and love, let me tell you, is for some people both a rapture and an over-whelming force which is irresistible.”

  “You are making excuses for Mama,” Celesta said. “I do not know why you should do so unless you are prepared to condone the behaviour of the man who enticed her away from her home.”

  “I can understand that you miss her,” the Earl said gently.

  “I do not miss her now,” Celesta replied, “but I want you to understand that I will never allow myself to be inveigled into behaving as Mama behaved, making other people unhappy, and allowing outsiders to sneer and laugh at me.”

  She spoke vehemently, then looked across the hearth at the Earl and finished:

  “That is why I want Your Lordship to believe me when I say that, if you allow me to stay here on your property, it will be for life!”

  “Under the circumstances it appears I have little alternative,” the Earl said.

  “Then Nana and I may stay?”

  “If it pleases you.”

  He rose to his feet.

  “As you know already, I never give without wishing to take. Therefore in return for my assurance that you may remain at the Garden Cottage, I ask one favour.”

  He saw Celesta’s eyes widen a little apprehensively.

  He waited a moment as if he wished her to be a little fearful before he went on:

  “It is simply that you dine with me tonight.”

  “Dine with ... you?” Celesta questioned.

  “There is a great deal of history about the Priory which I would wish to know. I feel you are the right person to recount to me the legends of the past and to tell me the whereabouts of the secret passages and Priests’ holes, of which I believe there are quite a number.”

  “How should you know there are any?” Celesta asked.

  “Because I have already been told that they are known only to each successive owner of the Priory and his immediate family.”

  “There have been Wroxleys at the Priory for the last five hundred years,” Celesta said proudly.

  “And now it belongs to me!” the Earl retorted.

  “To you it is only a play-thing ... a place where you can stay because it is convenient. It means nothing! It is not and never will be your ... home!”

  Even as she spoke Celesta felt that she sounded rude.

  The Earl merely appeared amused, but he struck back.

  “First you hate your mother, and now you hate me! And yet I think with a face like yours and with such soft, sweet lips, you were made for love!”

  He saw the anger in Celesta’s eyes and the colour which came into her cheeks, but before she could speak he turned towards the door.

  “I will send a carriage for you at seven o’clock,” he said and went from the room with the same lazy grace and air of languor with which he had entered it.

  He found Nurse waiting in the Hall.

  “I shall expect Miss Celesta to dine with me this evening,” he said. “It is important that I talk to her on various matters appertaining to her future.”

  “I’ll see she’s ready, M’Lord,” Nana said.

  She shut the front door behind him and went back into the Sitting-Room.

  Celesta was standing at the window looking out into the garden, her hands clenched.

  “I hate him, Nana!” she said, “I hate him, and yet we have to be beholden to him.”

  “He will let us stay?”

  “He says so, but he is insufferably arrogant, overbearing, and domineering! He has no right to speak to me as he has!”

  “What has he said to you?” Nana asked quickly.

  “He tried to excuse Mama.”

  She did not see the relief on the old Nurse’s face. “Why did you talk to him about Her Ladyship?” Nana asked after a moment. “You know it always upsets you.”

  “He said she is ... still very ... happy.”

  “And why not indeed?” Nana asked. “His Lordship was a fine Gentleman, even if what he did was wrong and a sin against the Commandments.”

  “Are you also excusing her?” Celesta asked. “Oh, Nana, how can you?”

  “I’m not making excuses for Her Ladyship,” Nana said stoutly. “What she did was wicked—a grievous sin. But it will do no good for you to go tearing your heart out and that’s a fact! What’s done is done!”

  Celesta drew a deep breath.

  “The Earl made me tell him why I have no friends and why there was no-one with whom I could stay.”

  “Much better know the truth from the very beginning,” Nana said in a practical voice. “If he wants to come and live in this bigotted neighbourhood, he’ll soon find out that people look down their noses at the goings-on in London. Still, like as not they’ll accept him because he’s a man!”

  “Just as after Mama ran away they accepted Giles,” Celesta said. “I was the one who was not good enough to enter their homes.”

  There was no bitterness in her voice now as there had been when she had spoken to the Earl, but rather the pain of someone who had been hurt almost intolerably.

  Even now, after four years, Celesta remembered all too vividly how bewildered and stunned she had been when the friends she had known since childhood deliberately ostracised her.

  Her father had been completely unaffected because he disliked Society anyway and had for some years refused all invitations.

  He had been in ill health since he had had a riding accident when he was fifty.

  It had affected the muscles in his back, and as the years went by he was almost continually in pain.

  It made him at times querulous and disagreeable, and it also made him dislike having to entertain or be entertained.

  They had therefore lived a very quiet life at the Priory, but Celesta had realised that her mother made a great effort where she and Giles were concerned to see that they had companions of their own age.

  She remembered children’s parties to which they had driven miles. There had been parties too at the Priory, with picnics in the summer and games and dancing in the winter.

  Now the Earl’s remark about the disparity between the ages of her parents made her realise as if for the first time that her mother might have found such an existence dull.

  The only interest
Lady Wroxley had besides looking after her husband and children was that she loved riding.

  Sometimes she would go hunting in the winter, but at all times of the year there was seldom a day when she did not ride in the morning for perhaps two hours and return, her face glowing with the exercise, a sparkle in her eyes.

  At first she had always been accompanied by a groom, but then she acquired a horse that was too fast and too spirited for anything else in the stable to keep up with it.

  “I do think you ought to take Hickman!” Celesta heard her father remark once.

  It was when her mother had come home to say she had fallen at a fence but had managed to catch her horse again and remount.

  “Hickman is getting old,” Lady Wroxley had replied with a laugh, “and you know that Merlin can out-ride, out-jump, and out-pace any of those old cart-horses you have in the stables!”

  “I am not buying any more horses,” Sir Norman said sharply.

  “Then I must ride alone,” his wife replied.

  She had laughed lightly and then bent down to kiss his cheek.

  “Do not worry about me,” she pleaded. “I promise you I am quite capable of looking after myself.”

  The Priory Estate marched with that of the Marquis of Heron.

  As Celesta grew older she heard whispers about the Marquis’s wife and her strange and uncontrollable behaviour.

  Then from the servants she learnt that the Marchioness of Heron had become completely insane and had been put in a private asylum.

  “It is a real shame,” she heard Nana say to the Head House-Maid. “A fine, upstanding man like that without even an heir to the title!”

  “They say that lunatics live for ever!” the House-Maid had replied. “It’s not right that those as is married to them can’t get free.”

  “That’s the law,” Nana said, “and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.”

  ‘If I had been older,’ Celesta thought afterwards, ‘I might have realised what was happening.’

  But at fourteen she was not particularly observant and in a way young for her age.

  An older person would have noticed that Lady Wroxley had never looked more beautiful.

  There was a tenderness and a light in her face that had never been there before.

  The daughter of an impoverished country Squire, she had been married off at seventeen to the first man who asked her.