A Victory for Love Page 4

  Finally, to her relief, the lady on the Earl’s left rose a little unsteadily to her feet saying as she did so,

  “Now don’t go guzzling the port until you’re too ‘foxed’ to make sense. Join us in the drawing room in ten minutes or I’ll come and fetch you!”

  “To hear is to obey, my fair charmer,” the Earl replied mockingly.

  The lady then said sharply,

  “And mind you don’t forget.”

  Then she flounced towards the door.

  Farica followed her, but the rest of the ladies seemed to draw themselves somewhat reluctantly from their partners at the table.

  When they reached the drawing room, the lady with the rubies said,

  “We have been told you are to marry the Earl! I suppose you know what you are taking on?”

  “Nothing is decided – as yet,” Farica replied shyly.

  “Well, if you are as rich as he says you are,” another lady said, “Fergus won’t let you off the hook! You may be certain of that. He needs money, lots of it, and it’s something he has wanted for a long time.”

  They all laughed as if at some private joke that Farica did not understand.

  Then the lady with the rubies remarked,

  “I hope when you are the Countess you will be kind to us. We shall miss Fergus if you take him away from us. Although he’s always in trouble of some sort, he certainly keeps us amused!”

  “That’s true enough,” another lady agreed. “I have told him before now that he goes too far. One day he will find himself in a mess.”

  “Not if he can buy himself out of it,” someone else commented and they all laughed again.

  Farica felt as if she could not bear to listen to them, aware that they were all assuming that she could not escape and that the Earl was marrying her for her money and for no other reason.

  Quickly she said to the lady with the rubies who appeared to be playing the part of the hostess,

  “Do you think I could possibly wash my hands? They feel rather sticky.”

  “Of course you can,” the lady nodded. “Come along with me. I will take you up to my room.”

  They went into the hall and Farica then said,

  “Please don’t trouble to come upstairs. I have been here so often that I know the way. If you will tell me which room you are sleeping in, I can go there alone.”

  “You do that,” the Lady replied. “I am in the King Charles II room, which I am not likely to forget, am I, seeing as it’s the first time I have slept with a King!”

  She laughed at her own joke and then walked back towards the drawing room as Farica started up the stairs.

  It was then, as she glanced up at the ancestors of the Brooke family looking down from their gilt picture frames, that she wondered what they thought of what was happening.

  She knew if the old Earl was still alive that he would be shocked and appalled at the behaviour of the guests at dinner.

  She only hoped that it disgusted her father as much as it disgusted her.

  She felt that it was an insult to the house she loved as well as an insult to the Brookes, who all down the centuries had fought and died for their country as the old Earl’s son had done.

  ‘It would have been very different, I am sure, if he had lived,’ Farica mused and remembered how the old Earl had always spoken disparagingly of his nephew Fergus.

  She walked along the passage and into the King Charles II room where she found an old maid tidying up.

  When she saw Farica, she smiled.

  ‘Oh, it’s you, Miss Farica,” she exclaimed. “It’s a long time since we’ve seen you here!”

  “It is, Annie,” Farica agreed. “How have you been keeping?”

  “Not too bad, miss, but things’ve changed since the old Master died. You’d hardly know the place now.”

  “What has happened?” Farica asked, knowing the answer.

  “It’s the people that stays here, miss! I’ve seen nothin’ like them. The old Master’d turn over in his grave, that he would, if he saw the goin’s on!”

  As if she knew that Farica had come to wash her hands, she poured some warm water from a brass jug into the china basin and looked for a clean towel.

  “You’ve no idea what the work’s like, Miss Chalfont, since the old Earl passed on,” Annie went on. “No one gets to bed afore five in the morning when we should be a-gettin’ up. The young housemaids be so tired they falls asleep on their brooms! I’ve never known anythin’ like it.”

  “I am sorry, Annie,” Farica said.

  “We’re sorry for ourselves, and that’s the truth!” Annie answered sharply. “But you knows as well as I do, miss, jobs be hard to find and there’s quite enough bin sacked, as it is.”

  “Sacked? Why?” Farica asked.

  “I think it’s as his Lordship only wants people around him as be young,” Annie said as if she was working it out for herself. “He’s sent old Burrows away, who’s been here, as you knows, for nigh on forty years!”

  “I missed him when I arrived,” Farica remarked, “but I had no idea that he had been dismissed.”

  “Well, he has, miss. So have all the gardeners who were getting’ on for sixty, even though they were still capable of work, I can assure you of that.”

  “Of course,” Farica said, “and it’s their experience that is so valuable.”

  “You tell his Lordship that. He’s not interested in anythin’ except playin’ games that make the house in such a state that it’s impossible to keep it clean. And the destruction! You’d be shocked, miss, at the things as have bin broken since his late Lordship died.”

  Farica felt she could not bear to think about it and to change the subject she asked,

  “Does his Lordship sleep in his uncle’s room?”

  “Oh, yes, miss. That is the Master bedroom, isn’t it? And he says when he comes here, ‘I am the Master now and you’ll obey me or you’re all out’.”

  Almost without meaning to Annie imitated the Earl’s voice.

  Then she carried on,

  “And I’ll show you somethin’, miss, that’ll shock you!”

  Farica wanted to say that she did not wish to be shocked, but she did not like to hurt Annie’s feelings.

  She followed her from the King Charles II room a little way along the passage, where Annie opened the door of what was the sitting room connecting with the Master bedroom that the old Earl had used when he was too ill and decrepit to go downstairs.

  As Annie opened the door, Farica could see by the light of the candles, and there were a great number of them lit, that the pictures that she remembered hanging there had all been taken from the walls.

  She had not been in this room for a long time, but she could remember that one picture had been of the Earl’s wife, one of his son and two others of his father and mother.

  They had all been removed and in their places were what she thought were extremely vulgar paintings of women, some of them dancing.

  One was emerging from the sea, while another was lying naked except for her hair on a rock in the sunshine.

  They were crudely painted and yet they had an unpleasant fascination because in each case the woman’s body was accentuated into something lewd and sensual.

  After one quick glance Farica looked away and said,

  “I agree with you, Annie, it does not seem right that the original pictures should have been removed. Where have they been put?”

  “His Lordship told me to get rid of ’em, but I knew that was wrong, so I’ve put ’em in here.”

  As Annie spoke, she pressed a secret place in the panelling, which Farica knew the old Earl had always referred to as ‘my special safe’.

  It was actually a Priest’s Hole constructed during the persecution of the Jesuits in Queen Elizabeth’s reign, which had somehow survived the rebuilding of the house when it had been completely transformed at the end of the last century.

  It now made a large square cupboard and, lifting up one of the ca
ndelabra from a table, Annie walked into it followed by Farica.

  There, stacked against the walls, were all the pictures she remembered.

  There was the late Countess, looking sweet, gentle and very lovely in her Peeress’s robes and the old Earl’s father and mother, both having a dignity and a pride which she thought was apparent in all the portraits of their ancestors.

  Standing by itself at the far wall of the cupboard was a picture that she only vaguely remembered and, as she had never met the Earl’s only son, it had never particularly interested her.

  “That’s the Viscount. ‘Master Ivan’ we used to call him when he was a little boy and there wasn’t a person on the place who didn’t love him and look forward to servin’ him when he took his father’s place.”

  The emotion in Annie’s voice was very moving.

  Now Farica stared at the portrait, thinking that if that was how everybody had thought of him, it was very different from their feelings for his cousin.

  Then something in his face reminded her of somebody and she supposed that it was the Earl, his father.

  ‘Master Ivan’, as Annie called him, could not have been more than twenty when his portrait was painted, which was, of course, before he went to the War.

  He looked young and happy, his eyes were twinkling and his lips smiling as he stared out of the canvas with his dark hair was brushed back from his square forehead.

  Then, as Farica looked again, she was suddenly still.

  ‘It’s impossible,’ she said to herself and yet unmistakably there was something distinctive about his forehead that she had seen before.

  In fact she had seen it only today with a deep scar on it and the rest of his face, if what she was thinking was true, was thin and lined from illness.

  Yet still there was an unmistakable resemblance.

  “Is that – really the Viscount?” she heard herself enquire in a strange voice.

  “Course it is, miss! And a good likeness of him too. Of course, he’d be twenty-eight by this time and I expects that would make him look older.”

  “Y-yes – I am sure it would,” Farica murmured.

  “Things’d be ever so different if he were here now, very different,” Annie remarked. “But there’s nothin’ we can do about it except pray God’ll take care of him wherever he be.”

  The old maid turned away as she spoke to hide her tears, but Farica did not move.

  She stood gazing at the portrait, feeling that she must be mistaken in what she was thinking and that it must be only a part of her imagination.

  And yet the likeness was unmistakable.

  Then she knew that she had stumbled inadvertently onto a secret that could be very dangerous to John.

  Chapter Three

  As Farica came down the stairs feeling as if she had experienced a sudden shock and was not quite certain what to do about it, she saw her father waiting for her in the hall.

  As she reached him with a question in her eyes, he said,

  “I think, my dearest, that as it is getting late we should be on our way home. The Earl understands that I am getting too old for late nights.”

  It was the first time that Farica had ever heard her father say such a thing and she looked at him in surprise.

  At the same time she felt delighted that she did not have to go back to the drawing room.

  Even as she thought of it the door opened and a loud noise came from the room that echoed round the hall.

  In contrast to the classical statues, marble pillars and fine portraits, it seemed inexpressibly vulgar and unpleasant.

  It was the Earl who came from the drawing room and he said as he reached Sir Robert’s side,

  “I deeply regret that you must leave so early, but, of course, I understand. Quite frankly my house party, who arrived only this evening, are mostly just friends of friends and not at all the sort of people I expect to entertain after I am married.”

  As he spoke, although he sounded sincere, Farica knew that he was lying and she hugged her swansdown wrap closer to her, as if she would protect herself from him.

  “Your carriage is outside, Sir Robert,” the butler bowed respectfully.

  Her father held out his hand to the Earl and Farica dropped a curtsey.

  “Goodbye, Lydbrooke,” Sir Robert said. “You know that we shall be delighted to see you when you have the time to visit us.”

  “My party is leaving on Monday morning,” the Earl answered, “so perhaps I could persuade your daughter to honour me by driving round the estate in my phaeton. There is so much I am sure that she can tell me about my own property, since you both know it better than I do.”

  He spoke with disarming humility and Farica was certain that was all part of an act.

  She heard, however, her father say,

  “I feel sure that Farica will be delighted, but I suggest you come to luncheon first.”

  “I shall look forward to it,” the Earl replied.

  Farica walked down the red-carpeted steps and into the carriage that was waiting for them.

  Her father joined her, the footmen closed the doors and they drove off, the Earl still standing at the top of the steps waving them goodbye.

  For quite a long time she sat looking ahead of her, seeing not Fergus Brooke who had become the sixth Earl of Lydbrooke, but the face of the man who called himself ‘John’ and whom she had persuaded Abe Barnes to accommodate at The Fox and Goose.

  Her father settled back beside her on the soft cushioned seat.

  “I am sorry, my dearest,” he began. “I am afraid that the behaviour was not what I would expect of a party at The Castle.”

  “I am glad you have taken me away, Papa.”

  “I saw the expression on your face when you left the dining room,” Sir Robert replied. “But you must realise that most young men sow their wild oats at one time or another and I don’t suppose that Fergus has been able to afford to do so until now.”

  “On the contrary,” Farica asserted firmly, “I believe that the old Earl paid his debts over and over again.”

  “I cannot understand why you listen to servants’ gossip,” Sir Robert retorted sharply.

  “It is not only what the servants say,” Farica argued. “You must be aware that all our friends living around here talked about Fergus Brooke, even before he inherited, and naturally enough they are extremely interested in him.”

  There was a little pause before Sir Robert replied,

  “What he obviously needs is the guiding hand of a good woman who is also sensible enough to make allowances for a man who unexpectedly comes into a distinguished title and one of the most magnificent houses in the whole country.”

  Farica wanted to parry that, according to Annie, he was treating his inheritance very badly in entertaining his dubious friends there.

  But she knew that such a statement would only annoy her father and after a moment she said,

  “I am sure, Papa, that the Earl should grow up and become more responsible before he even thinks of marrying.”

  Her father turned his face as if he would look at her, but by now the sun had long sunk, dusk had been succeeded by night and the stars were out overhead.

  There was hardly enough light to penetrate inside the carriage and it was impossible for the occupants to see each other clearly.

  “The Earl is impatient to settle down,” Sir Robert said after a long pause, “and he feels it important that he should be married without a long engagement.”

  Farica thought to herself that the real reason was that he wanted the handling of her money and was finding it hard to live in the luxurious fashion he was doing now without the huge income the Earls of Lydbrooke had enjoyed before the War.

  Every landowner in the country was suffering in the same way, their tenants could not pay their rents, farmers were going bankrupt and labourers were almost starving on the wages, which had been ample previously.

  She also knew, because she was interested, that the last Earl had
been glad that he had not owned very much property in London.

  “It is the country that is important to the Brookes,” he had said to her once when she was looking at the maps of the estate that hung in what was known as the ‘Gun Room’.

  “I have always been glad that Papa wished to live in the country,” Farica answered.

  The old Earl had reached out and put his hand on her shoulder.

  “That is sensible of you, my dear,” he said, “and when you marry, choose a man who rides a horse as if he was part of it, whose dogs obey him and whose cattle are well fed.”

  He had smiled before he went on,

  “If he can look after them, he will look after the people under him and also his wife.”

  Farica had only been about fifteen at the time and she had laughed.

  But somehow what the Earl had said lingered in her mind and she thought now that the new Earl and his friends would never be comfortable or at ease in the country.

  They were part of the City and that was where they should stay.

  They now drove on in silence until they had passed the cottages that stood directly outside the magnificent gates of the estate and were nearing the village green where The Fox and Goose stood and where the man who called himself ‘John’ was staying.

  Impulsively Farica said to her father,

  “When the Viscount was killed at Waterloo, Papa, why was his body not brought home to be buried in the family vault?”

  She could not see his face in the darkness, but she had the impression that her father was surprised at the question.

  “The answer to that is, I don’t know,” he replied. “It is usual for any casualty who was as important as the Viscount to be brought home with full Military honours, but in this case, as the Earl was so ill, perhaps it was overlooked and doubtless they found it more convenient to bury him in France.”

  They drove on for a little way before he added,

  “I often thought that I should have brought Rupert back, but the Chaplain of his Regiment assured me that he was buried in a French churchyard with his fellow Officers and men and it seemed somehow wrong to disturb him.”

  Farica reached out to take her father’s hand. She had heard the pain in his voice and she knew how much it hurt him to talk about the loss of his only son.