Her sisters did no more than smile faintly in acknowledgement of her cleverness, though naturally, they had all read the novel to which she alluded and might easily have responded to her clever quip with more enthusiasm. She sniffed, momentarily annoyed, but could not be disconsolate for long. Life was suddenly too exciting.
‘I’ve been talking to our older sisters,’ Bianca was saying unexpectedly now. ‘I sent a note to Sabrina yesterday afternoon, since she’s the oldest, and by good fortune, Viola and Allegra were there visiting her when the boy delivered it, so they replied together. They agree that we should all contribute to a generous annuity for you, Mama, so that you can be completely independent. Laurence is going to look into it, if everyone is agreeable, and talk to Mr Cotwin, so that it can be set in hand almost immediately. You know that we wish to go into Suffolk as soon as it may be arranged, and see the house, perhaps stay there if it is at all habitable. Of course you are welcome to come with us, but do you want to? We all know you don’t care for the country. You’ve spent all these past years worrying about us and our sadly uncertain futures – if you were free to choose and could afford anything you might desire, what wouldyoudo next?’
Leontina seemed almost taken aback, and for a wonder, she showed no immediate signs of wishing to argue the point. ‘That’s very generous…’ she said slowly. ‘Thank you. I don’t know. I suppose… if I were at liberty to do so, I might wish to travel to Italy. It’s been almost fifty years since I left… That may not be possible at present, of course, with Europe in uproar. But you’re right – I have no great desire to immure myself in a crumbling house in Suffolk for several months, though I can see that you do. For myself, I can’t imagine anything more tedious. You can’t go alone, though – you need a proper chaperon: someone of sense and experience to accompany you. An unmarried woman of six and twenty, Beatrice Constantine, is not adequate to function as such, even if you do affect a pair of spectacles and try to make yourself look older. You will all be under scrutiny from everyone in the neighbourhood, I daresay. Matters will go uncomfortably for you if you aren’t accepted as respectable from the outset by the best local families and the reputable tradespeople. You can’t marry now, very well, but you may wish to later, you may all of you meet someone there, so I counsel you not to burn your boats.’
‘Miss Macintyre could come with us,’ Bea responded quickly; plainly, she had anticipated this objection. ‘We could ask her if she would care to, for a while, and obviously, we would pay her for her time. She’s respectable enough for anybody, or looks as though she is. For heaven’s sake, she’sScottish.’
Miss Macintyre was their former governess, and current friend. She had said often enough that attempting to instil academic knowledge and ladylike deportment in a succession of the sisters had utterly broken her spirit, and so when Bianca had left the schoolroom and there were no more Constantines to torment her with their wilful ignorance, she had retired to a small cottage in a village north of London, subsisting comfortably though thriftily upon her life’s savings and a small pension. But she loved to travel, and had spent a large part of the previous year on the Continent after Bonaparte’s temporary defeat. It seemed quite likely that she would agree to anything proposed to her, if only for the sake of a change of scene. A cottage in Middlesex could not long contain her. She had grown up in Edinburgh, was fearsomely well educated, corresponded on intimate terms with a formidable range of her compatriots, including the celebrated poet Mr Walter Scott, and was nowhere near as conventional as she appeared. As a suggestion, it was genius.
‘You have an answer for everything, between you,’ Leontina said wryly now.
‘Of course we do,’ Cecilia replied, rising and embracing her. ‘We’re your daughters. Now, when are we going to set about buying the best mourning dress that London’s modistes can supply? I understand that Allegra favours Madame Lisette, whose designs are always the very height of fashion. We can afford them now! Do you think she would see us this afternoon?’
4
It was well over a hundred miles from Bloomsbury to Albery Hall. This was too far to travel in a day even in the smartest of hired vehicles, since everyone – even Cecilia – agreed that arriving late in the evening in a place they’d never been before, to an uncertain reception and dubious comfort, would be a bad idea. The sisters and Miss Macintyre therefore broke their journey at Colchester at the end of the first day’s travel. It seemed a most interesting town, with many substantial Roman remains still visible, which they might have enjoyed visiting, but it was not necessarily a very comfortable place for a party of ladies, since it appeared almost under military occupation, with the streets full of soldiers in uniform going to and fro and making a great deal of noise as they did so.
‘I wonder if they fear invasion?’ Beatrice mused, watching the bustle from their private parlour on the first floor of the ancient coaching inn. ‘Should we, for that matter? We’re going to the coast. Is that a foolish thing to do just now?’
‘Colchester is the eastern headquarters of the army,’ Miss Macintyre told her comfortably. ‘There must always be a great number of soldiers here, even in peacetime. And I suppose they are obliged to take ordinary precautions, now that Bonaparte has escaped from Elba and is on the loose again. But if he didn’t manage to invade these islands in all the years when he had Europe at his feet, he’s hardly going to achieve that feat now, with a mere shadow of his former strength left to him, and Lord Wellington and the rest of the Allies poised ready to take him on in the Low Countries.’
Miss Macintyre was a person of radical sympathies, and as a young woman, had been an enthusiastic supporter of the French Revolution, but she had, like so many of her generation, been alarmed by the bloodthirsty direction matters had soon taken, and was certainly no admirer of the man who had declared himself Emperor a decade ago. He was a despot, she believed, far worse than any constitutional monarch, and must be stopped.
It was clearly inadvisable to go out into the streets that evening, even with Miss Macintyre’s formidable protection, so the ladies took a sedate dinner in their private parlour, enjoying the fact that they could for a novelty order as much as they wanted without counting the cost, and settled down for an early night. The three sisters were sharing a chamber with a huge feather bed in it, and their duenna, in deference to her age and her habit of reading till her candle guttered out, had an adjoining small, private dressing room in which a comfortable single bed had been made up for her. They locked the door that led to the passageway outside, as seemed prudent, and settled down for the night.
‘What do you hope for, Bea?’ Cecilia whispered sleepily. Bianca was one of those annoying persons who fell into deep slumber as soon as her head touched the pillow, and was already breathing softly and regularly in the darkness.
‘From… all this?’
‘Yes.’
‘An end to being pitied because I am just a poor, overlooked spinster nearing thirty, because being pitied makes me want tobitepeople. Independence. Freedom.’
‘Of course. We all want that, and it seems we have it. Now it is up to us to decide what to do with it. But what doyouwant for yourself?’
Bea was silent for a long time, and Cecilia wondered if she was asleep, or pretending to be. But at length, she said, very low, ‘It’s not that simple for me. You know that. It may well be that I desire things that no amount of money can give me, as society is currently arranged. And I could turn the question back on you, couldn’t I? Men have courted you before, but you’ve refused them all.’
‘There weren’t so very many of them. No, I’m very glad you and I weren’t placed in Viola’s position, obliged to take a suitor despite grave doubts. Especially you, of course – how horrible that would have been. An old man, maybe, like Edward… The fact that she, Sabrina and Allegra are married and comfortably off protected me from that harsh decision, as it protected you. And since I had the luxury of choice… I found I didn’t want any of them when they presented themselves. They did not appeal greatly to me; I could only see their defects and our incompatibility. I couldn’t even imagine singling out one of them, no matter how hard I tried, and I did try, even if you, understandably, did not. And as for spending the rest of my life with one…’ She shook her head vigorously on the pillow, even though Bea couldn’t see her. ‘Nobody I have met yet has tempted me enough. Maybe it’s the fault of the Season itself – of its artificiality. How can one get to know a person, if one is always chaperoned and watched and cannot behave naturally or express a genuine opinion? Dotheyeven want my genuine opinions? I’m not at all sure they do; none of them has ever shown any sign of such a thing. So I always said no, and I don’t regret it.Nowas the only power I had. Now things are different in ways I can’t yet imagine. Maybe I will find I have a little more power to influence events, rather than just having to wait for things to happen to me, and maybe that will be the case for you too. I hope so.’
Her sister sighed in the darkness. ‘You’re a romantic, Ceci. You have all sorts of notions in your head from the countless absurdly unrealistic novels you have read. And that makes me worry for you. There will be fortune hunters after us – maybe even in Suffolk, maybe especially in Suffolk, because people there will know exactly how wealthy Mrs Albery was. I feel I’m proof against that; I’m the oldest, I’m a virtual ape-leader at six and twenty, and they’re hardly likely to seek me out when they could more easily make a dead set for you or for Bianca. I am excessively glad they won’t pursue me – you know that. Butyouwill have to be very careful. I can see you’re excited. But don’t go getting silly ideas in your head about any of the neighbours.’
‘Nonsense,’ Cecilia murmured, snuggling deeper into the bed’s soft embrace. ‘I daresay the neighbours, if we even have any, are all elderly people or safely married. I’ve never heard that the countryside is overflowing with eligible men when Town is definitely not. I’m sure there won’t be a young gentleman for twenty miles, and you have nothing in the world to worry about.’
‘So why was Aunt Augusta so concerned that we could not tie ourselves up for a year?’ Bea asked fretfully. ‘She can’t have assumed we’d stay in London when she’d left us her house. Maybe she knew something about the gentlemen in the area; I wager that hadn’t occurred to you. It’s only just occurred tome, and I worry about everything!’
But Cecilia had slipped away into sleep and did not hear her.
5
Alistair winced as pain shot up his leg, a sudden jolt that made him stagger. His heavy overcoat flapped in the wind, and blown sand stung his eyes, making them water. At least it wasn’t raining, or particularly cold; it wanted only that to make him thoroughly miserable. It was counter to all common sense, to keep on walking when it hurt so much, but his doctor had told him that the only way he’d return to anything like his previous level of fitness and mobility was to exercise, no matter how much it pained him. ‘The wound has healed well,’ the fellow had told him, poking it disagreeably. ‘But the muscles have wasted during your long illness – you can see that yourself, Major – and you must bring them back into condition. Use your stick, of course, for balance, but if you don’t keep trying, if you give in to the temptation to sit by the fire like an old man, you’ll never be any better than this.’
Thiswas a pathetic, hobbling figure, lurching along the beach. Sand was particularly hard to walk on for one as unsteady as he, Major Bartrum had found, but on the other hand, if he fell over – which he knew from experience was more than likely – it would provide a soft landing, softer than grass or mud and less likely to stain his clothing and make unnecessary work for his mother’s maids. Sand could always be brushed off; humiliation was harder to disregard.
There was nobody about to see him today, and he was glad of it; the very last thing he needed was pity. Physical strength was something you took for granted, it seemed, until the moment after you lost it and found yourself face down in the sucking mud somewhere in north-eastern France. He’d been a heedless idiot for eight and twenty years, till last year, taking as a birthright and even a virtue something that was a matter of pure chance. That superb, unquestioned sense of well-being, even superiority, that came from being a healthy male animal in one’s prime – that was gone for good.
Alistair was still called Major by almost everybody, but that was merely a courtesy. He’d never lead men into battle again; that part of his life had ended last year at Saint-Dizier. And he hadn’t even been bloody well supposed to be there. He thought he might have the ridiculous distinction of being the only Englishman wounded in that significant engagement.
Now his regiment was somewhere across the narrow sea, not all that far away as the crow flew, preparing to beat Boney one last time. But he wasn’t with them; as his friend Will Lavenham wrote with wry mockery, it was a real puzzle to know how they’d manage. Willwas there, no doubt having the time of his life, invigorated by the approach of danger; meanwhile, Alistair was staggering along a beach in Suffolk feeling extremely sorry for himself, leaning on a stick like an old man, while invisible demons prodded wickedly sharp little weapons into various tender parts of him. He had a stitch in his side just from walking this distance, but he gritted his teeth and stumbled on.
