The Pretty Horse-Breakers Read online

  “There is only one thing I want to do.”

  “I know,” Lord Manville said, “but despite all your arguments you have not convinced me. I am sorry, the answer is still – no.”

  “What would you do,” Adrian asked slowly, “if Lucy and I eloped? It might not be hard to persuade her.”

  “If you were so foolish,” Lord Manville said, and now his voice was like ice, “as to do anything so unconventional and so detrimental to the good name of the young woman you pretend to love, then I should indeed be ashamed of you. But I think that even a Parson’s daughter, accustomed as the young lady must be to living in straitened circumstances, would find it hard to exist on an income of precisely nothing a year. That, Adrian, is what you would both have.”

  “You would stop my allowance?” Adrian asked incredulously.

  “Immediately. And let me say that is not an idle threat. The day you did anything so unconventional and indeed so despicable as to persuade a lady of gentle birth to accompany you to Gretna Green, you would no longer be worthy of my consideration. In fact, I should not think of you again until I handed over your estates, doubtless more enriched because there would be less spent, on the day you are twenty-five.”

  “There is nothing I can do, is there, in those circumstances?” Adrian said sullenly.

  “Nothing,” Lord Manville agreed.

  For a moment the young man stood staring at his Guardian as though he would plead with him. Then, with an inarticulate sound that was half an explosion of anger and half a hastily smothered sob, he strode from the morning room, slamming the door behind him.

  Lord Manville sighed and, picking up The Times newspaper, scanned the headlines.

  The morning sun coming in through the window enveloped him and it was hard to imagine a finer or more handsome looking man as he stood there in a dressing gown of oriental brocade, an azure-blue satin scarf round his neck and his legs encased in tight-fitting yellow pantaloons.

  Lord Manville had dark hair growing back from a square forehead. His features were almost classical in their perfection and, while he wore fashionable mutton chop side whiskers elegantly trimmed, the rest of his face was clean shaven.

  He had eyebrows which, when he was angry, nearly met across the bridge of his aristocratic nose. His eyes were sharp and penetrating, but when he was amused they could sparkle with a hint of mischief.

  It was a handsome face. At the same time, despite his assertion that he was a contented man, there was an air of cynicism in his lips, which could set themselves in a hard line and smile disdainfully as if he stood back from life and defied it to dominate him.

  Lord Manville was just in the process of putting down The Times and picking up The Morning Post when the butler entered.

  “Pardon me, my Lord, but the Dowager Duchess of Thorne has called on your Lordship. I have shown Her Grace into the salon.”

  “My grandmother at this hour of the morning?” Lord Manville glanced at the clock over the mantelpiece. “No indeed, ’tis I who am at fault. Mr. Adrian delayed me.”

  “You were a trifle later than usual in descending to breakfast, my Lord,” Gates said respectfully, “but it was five o’clock before you returned this morning, my Lord.”

  “I am well aware of it, Gates, my head feels as fogged as a November day. Tell Taylor I will ride in an hour. That should clear away the cobwebs.”

  “An assured remedy, my Lord,” Gates said.

  He was an old man who had served Lord Manville’s father and the present Baron since his inheritance. He watched his Lordship appreciatively now as he ran up the staircase and thought that there was not a more handsome Nobleman in the length and breadth of Great Britain.

  It was less than ten minutes later that Lord Manville walked into the salon to where his grandmother was waiting. Now he was elegantly arrayed in a cut-away riding coat of superfine cloth, his necktie sporting a pearl tiepin above a yellow waistcoat that matched the yellow carnation in his buttonhole.

  “Grandmama!” he exclaimed, walking towards the elderly lady seated on one of the satin sofas. “You must forgive me for keeping you waiting, but I had not anticipated such an unexpected pleasure.”

  The Dowager Duchess of Thorne let him raise her rheumaticky old hands in their black mittens to his lips. She looked him over appreciatively, as, lifting the tails of his coat, he sat down beside her on the sofa.

  “What brings you to London?” Lord Manville asked.

  “Her Majesty, who else?” the Dowager replied. “I can assure you, Silvanus, I would not make the arduous journey over muddy roads for any other reason.”

  As the Dowager Duchess was famed for turning up in London unexpectedly at all seasons of the year and was known to have what her children called an ‘itching foot’, Lord Manville merely smiled.

  “You know you adore coming to London, Grandmama,” he said. “How else would you know the latest scandal if you buried yourself in the country for too long?”

  “There is plenty for me to learn from all I hear,” the Dowager replied sharply. “Her Majesty asked me when you were to be married. It’s a pity I could not give her a proper answer.”

  “Don’t speak to me of marriage,” Lord Manville pleaded. “I have heard enough about that tiresome state this morning to wish the whole institution abandoned.”

  “Is that what Adrian came to see you about?” the Dowager enquired with a sudden light in her eyes. “I met him on the doorstep in a fit of the sullens and I thought perhaps you were responsible.”

  “Grandmama, I can see that you are dying with curiosity as to why Adrian is visiting me. Well, you are correct. He wants to marry some obscure Parson’s daughter he has met at Oxford.”

  “And you forbade him to do so?” the Dowager asked.

  “Naturally. Can you imagine a worse mésalliance when he is only twenty?”

  “Adrian has always been a sentimental romantic creature,” the Dowager said. “I expect you were right, although your forbidding him to marry would, I should have thought, have made him more determined to defy you.”

  “It is hard to defy anyone without money,” Lord Manville remarked.

  “So you threatened to cut off his allowance?”

  “What I love about you, Grandmama,” Lord Manville exclaimed, “is that no one ever has to dot their i’s and cross their t’s where you are concerned. You are always one jump ahead in the conversation. I wish there were more like you, it makes life so very much easier.”

  “The world is full of fools,” the Dowager said scathingly. “But having disposed of Adrian’s troubles, what about your own?”

  “Have I any?” Lord Manville asked innocently.

  “Now, don’t try to pull wool over my eyes, dear boy. You know as well as I do that you are the talk of the town. Even Her Majesty must have heard something and she took her mind off the Prince Consort long enough to enquire when you were to find yourself a wife.”

  “Her Majesty is so excessively happy in her marriage,” Lord Manville said, “that she wishes all her subjects to participate in the same blissful state of ‘one man for one woman’.”

  “Not much likelihood of that where you are concerned!” the Dowager ejaculated. “But you are right about the Queen. She can talk of nothing these days but the virtues of Prince Albert. If all men were like him, I should have remained a virgin!”

  “Now, Grandmama, be careful what you are saying,” Lord Manville admonished, his eyes twinkling with laughter.

  “I am never careful what I say,” the Dowager replied sharply. “I don’t belong to this hypocritical era, thank God. It is gloomy enough at Buckingham Palace to bring on the vapours. When I think of the gay times at Carlton House, when the Prince Regent was throwing money about like water, it makes me think that life must be very dull for the young people today.”

  “We still manage to amuse ourselves.”

  “Oh, you do, you are different,” his grandmother remarked. “Besides you are a man and your sex can always f
ind someone to titivate their fancy, like the ‘Pretty Horse-Breakers’, eh, Silvanus?”

  “Now, Grandmama, who has been telling you things like that? You should not even know the expression, let alone speak it.”

  “Don’t be so nonsensical,” the Dowager snapped. “Do you never read the newspapers? Why, The Times had an article about them the other day. I must say I was somewhat surprised. It was not the sort of report that one expected to find in The Times. And Lady Lynch sent me a cutting on the subject from The Saturday Review.”

  “What did that say?” Lord Manville asked curiously.

  “It said,” the Dowager replied, “that nowadays nobody used the phrase ‘prostitute’ or ‘streetwalker’. Pretty euphemisms are found which make, presumably, their profession sound more genteel. ‘Pretty Horse-Breakers’ indeed! In my day a strumpet was a strumpet.”

  Lord Manville laughed.

  “Grandmama, you are incorrigible!”

  “That’s as may be,” the old lady replied, “but let me hear about them – these ‘Pretty Horse-Breakers’.”

  “What do you know about them for a start?” Lord Manville asked.

  “Lady Lynch has three marriageable daughters,” the Dowager replied. “I admit they are an unprepossessing lot, but virtuous, of good blood and undoubtedly the type which, if they had the chance, would make a well-behaved wife and a good mother. But, her Ladyship tells me, they never get the chance.”

  “You mean no one proposes to them? And whose fault is that?”

  “Apparently it is the fault of the ‘Pretty Horse-Breakers’. The Lynch girls are taken to balls, bazaars, breakfasts, concerts, the opera, Ascot and the Crystal Palace, but all in vain. The eligible young men dance with them, even flirt with them, eat their parents’ food and drink their claret, but for amusement they return to the ‘Pretty Horse-Breakers’.”

  Lord Manville laughed until the tears came into his eyes.

  “Grandmama, you will be the death of me,” he declared. “Never have I heard such a sad story! But what can be done? If the girls are not attractive enough, whose fault is that?”

  “Yours and your friends’,” the Dowager retorted, “making fools of yourselves over a lot of common creatures with pretty faces. Do you suppose that anyone would think twice about them if you did not pay for their smart clothes and their dashing hats, their well-fitting habits and, of course, their fine horseflesh. If you doll them out in their furbelows and make them appear so alluring externally, then no one bothers if they do not have a brain the size of a peanut or an ounce of common sense.”

  “Dearest Grandmama. I assure you there have been Delilahs from the beginning of time. Nothing you or I can say will prevent men from finding their amusement amongst the little doves who flutter so alluringly, but who don’t insist that those who admire them must be shacked to their side for ever with a gold ring. Don’t tell me that you were not aware that such creatures existed in your day.”

  “Indeed they did,” the Dowager replied, “but they were either doxies or women of our own class, such as the ladies with whom the Prince Regent flirted. The doxies were creatures apart, unspoken of and kept out of sight. Why, Lady Lynch tells me that in the Park now if a man is talking to one of these well-mounted Amazons he will take off his hat and bow to his hostess of the night before, or indeed his mother, should she happen to be passing by. In my day we should have ignored his very existence.”

  “We must move with the times, Grandmama. Some of the young women in whom you are so interested are quite well born, many come from a far higher stratum of Society than the doxies of the beginning of the century.

  “What you have to realise is that the girls from Belgravia or wherever Lady Lynch lives with her unmarried and virtuous daughters, do little to attract modern man other than to imitate, quite ineffectively, the mistresses he chooses because they amuse and beguile him!

  “No man is such an idiot as to wish to pass his whole life with a woman who can do nothing but amuse. It would indeed be like dining endlessly on sugar candy. But I have yet to find in Society any girl who is not an incredible bore after a short dance, let alone after any length of time spent in her company.”

  The Dowager reached out and put her hand on her grandson’s arm.

  “Tell me, Silvanus,” she said in a very different tone of voice, “you are not still wearing the willow for that chit who treated you so ill when you first came to London?”

  Lord Manville rose to his feet.

  “No indeed, Grandmama, I had a lucky escape, did I not? I thought myself in love and found that in the matrimonial stakes a Marquis is several fences ahead of a mere Baron.”

  “I know you were hurt at the time, dear boy, but I could not have believed it would have lingered with you so long.”

  “I have forgotten the incident long ago,” Lord Manville protested, but his grandmother, giving a little sigh, knew that he lied.

  “There must be some nice and intelligent girls around who would interest you,” she suggested.

  “Don’t worry about me, Grandmama,” he replied, “I am perfectly content with my Anonymas, my Danaës and my Venuses. Call them ‘Pretty Horse-Breakers’ or harlots, they still contribute a great deal of amusement, a great deal of beauty to a man’s life.”

  “I would like to see you married before I die,” the Dowager said plaintively.

  “That gives me another twenty years, at least,” Lord Manville smiled. “Stop worrying about me, Grandmama, you are becoming a bore, like the Queen.”

  “I suppose all people who are in love are bores,” the Dowager said. “To concentrate on one person exclusively may be Heaven for oneself, but it makes those who have to listen to such tales of bliss yawn and yawn again.”

  “Then for the moment I will not make you yawn,” Lord Manville replied, crossing to the mantelpiece to ring the bell. “I am now going to ask you to drink a glass of port with me or would you prefer champagne? I know your doctor has forbidden you both, but I am convinced that you never heed his advice any more than you listen to mine.”

  “I will have a glass of champagne,” the Dowager cried. “You are right, Silvanus, never let people persuade you into doing something you don’t want to do. Life is short and you are a long time in the grave, you might as well enjoy yourself while you can.”

  “Which you have always done, Grandmama.”

  A footman appeared and his Master gave him an order and crossed the room to sit down again beside the old lady.

  “Tell me, Grandmama,” he enquired, “what really brought you to see me? I cannot believe that you really thought that you could persuade me into marriage! There must have been another reason.”

  “I wanted to see you,” his grandmother replied. “You may be a reprobate, but I have always liked you better than my other grandchildren. Well behaved creatures they may be, but I find it hard to stomach much of their company.”

  “And what else?” Lord Manville prompted.

  The Dowager hesitated a moment and then she said bluntly,

  “They are talking of you and Lady Brompton.”

  “‘They’ being the usual busybodies who stick their noses into everything!”

  “Exactly, and you cannot expect not to be talked about when you are a person of such consequence and Lady Brompton is an acknowledged beauty. Besides it is well known that she and her husband live separate lives.”

  “Then I will make you happy, Grandmama,” Lord Manville said, “by telling you the affair is finished. Just for a moment, but only for a moment, mark you, I was tempted to flout the conventions and ask her to come away with me. She is a wild irresponsible creature and life with her would be tempestuous, but entertaining. But I was never really serious and nor was she. Lady Brompton has now decided to live abroad. Rome Society appreciates her somewhat unusual personality.”

  The Dowager gave a sigh that seemed to come from the very depths of her body, a sigh of utter and deep relief. She put her hand on her grandson’s arm.
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  “I am glad, dear boy,” she said. “You belong to an old family and a proud one. I would not have let your mother marry your father had I not known that the Manvilles were worthy of being joined with the Thornes. There has never been a scandal all down the centuries, there has never been a traitor, a thief or a divorcee amongst us and I would not let it happen now.”

  “It will not happen as far as I am concerned,” Lord Manville told her seriously, “you can rest assured of that, Grandmama. It was just a midsummer madness.”

  “I think that was perhaps why Her Majesty sent for me,” the Dowager said. “She knew that if I came to London I would see you. But she could not bring herself to refer to such a scandalous ‘chit chat’, knowing there was nothing positive of which she could accuse you.”

  “There is nothing positive of which anyone can accuse me,” Lord Manville asserted. “I, too, am very conscious, Grandmama, of our family history and I promise you that when I eventually do get married, if I ever do, it will be to someone you will approve of.”

  “I suppose I should be very pleased by that filial speech,” the Dowager said, “but I would much rather hear you say that, when you do get married, it will be to someone you love.”

  “I think that is unlikely in the extreme,” Lord Manville replied.

  He rose as he spoke and walked across the room to ring the bell. The Dowager watched him with an expression of sadness in her old eyes. She knew, as no one else did, that the wound that title-seeking girl had inflicted so heartlessly over ten years ago still festered.

  “Her Grace’s carriage,” Lord Manville said to the footman who answered the bell. “I would rather go on talking to you, Grandmama, but my horse will be waiting and, as he is so excessively fresh, the grooms will be hard put to it to hold him.”

  “Thank God you like them spirited, as I did!” the Dowager replied. “I never could stand those perambulating rocking horses and four-legged mattresses on which the usual Society wench disports herself in the Park. Give me a horse that is a horse and a man that is a man, that was all I ever asked of life.”