All he needed – really all he needed – was for some damn busybody of his acquaintance to appear here on this enormous and previously entirely deserted strand and decide to come over and bloody well talk to him. He was acquainted with the operation of malign fate, due to his recent life experiences, and so it was no great surprise when he looked up and saw a figure in the distance. Someone on a horse. A fast one, no farm nag this, coming directly his way, speeding towards him. No doubt it would be somebody he particularly disliked.
He recognised the horse before the rider – a showy black stallion. Honesty compelled him to admit that it was just the mount he’d have chosen for himself – if he’d been able to afford it – when he was one and twenty, which still did not prevent him from characterising its rider as a flashy young idiot. He stopped walking. Sebastian Pallant was just the sort of reckless nincompoop who’d love to ride him down as if by pure accident, see him topple into a puddle, and then apologise with an insincere smirk while storing up the amusing anecdote for later. Alistair leaned on his stick and waited. It wasn’t as though a good day was about to be ruined; he’d been out of sorts already. Foul temper was his new normality. He knew it, he knew he was unpleasant to be around, he knew he made his mother cry sometimes, but he didn’t seem able to stop.
‘Bartrum!’ the boy exclaimed when he was close enough. The disparity in age and experience between them meant that it would have been much more correct for the stripling to address him by his military rank, but all the Pallants disdained such petty courtesies; the sister seemed to be as bad as the brothers. They also shared a marked lack of respect for personal space. The beast was too close for safety and pirouetting on its hind legs as though it and its rider were on stage at Astley’s Amphitheatre. Was he supposed to be impressed? Frightened? Jealous? It was perfectly true; he did feel a pang of envy. Just now, he couldn’t have guaranteed to control an elderly donkey, let alone this glossy, wild-eyed creature.
‘Pallant,’ he replied shortly. He’d be damned if he furthered the conversation; the fellow had approached him, not the other way round. Presumably, he wanted something more than to exchange the time of day, and would eventually get around to mentioning it.
‘I wonder you should choose to walk so far on such a devilish blustery morning. But perhaps you can’t ride any more.’ This wasn’t something that a sensible human being, let alone a tactful one, would say to an ex-cavalry officer, gravely wounded in battle, but then young Mr Pallant wasn’t either of those things. ‘Are you heading for Albery Hall?’
This was idiocy of no uncommon order. ‘No. Why would I be?’
A malicious light came into the lad’s dark-blue eyes. ‘I thought you might be going to pay a call on our new neighbours.’
Alistair sighed. ‘Do you have something to tell me, Pallant? Because if you do, spit it out, man, before I catch my death of cold. I’m not as young as you, you know, and I don’t have a damn big horse to keep me warm.’ Major Bartrum found that the list of things and people that annoyed him was growing longer by the day, but right at the top of it, he now realised, were people who had something to say and would not come straight out and say it, but needed half an hour of tedious preliminaries before they got to the cursed point.
‘They’re arriving within the next few days,’ Mr Pallant said, his excitement at knowing something Alistair didn’t overriding his desire to appear dignified and adult. ‘Ellen Pritty has had a letter from the old fool of a lawyer, and it’s all confirmed. Their maidservant and one of ours are sisters, you know, so we were the first to hear. Just think of it. Three heiresses, ripe for plucking, accompanied by some damn desiccated old chaperon.’
‘Servants’ gossip,’ Alistair responded levelly. If he’d been interested in this piece of information – which he wasn’t – he’d have died rather than show it.
The fair, handsome features were disfigured by a sneer. ‘So you won’t be calling, then?’
‘On three young women, and their duenna? I shall not. Are you out of your senses?’
The boy waved a careless hand, and then returned it hastily to the reins when the horse curveted even more wildly in response. ‘Your mother, I mean. That sort of thing is women’s business. For our own part, my sister Vivienne is determined not to be behindhand in any civility. She will go as soon as we hear that they have definitely arrived, and it would be perfectly proper for me to go with her, if I wish it, Oliver says. Perhaps not on the very first visit, but soon afterwards.’
‘I’m sure Miss Pallant will pay the new arrivals every courtesy, and you will too. I suppose my mother will call at some point, or it would look odd, but it’s a matter of no interest to me. I won’t be accompanying her.’
‘Not throwing your hat in the ring?’ With the shameless cruelty of heedless youth, Sebastian Pallant’s dark gaze travelled slowly, insolently, up Alistair’s body – his stick, his lame leg, his torso where the scars lay hidden, his disfigured face.
‘I am not. No doubt you’ll be delighted to hear that I will leave that sort of thing to you and your brother. And your sister, of course. Is that really why you rode out of your way to speak to me: to see if I meant to make a play for one of these young women nobody here has even met yet?’
Pallant didn’t answer directly, only shrugging pettishly. ‘Well, I’m sure you would have put us all in the shade once, Major.’
‘You really are a little shit, aren’t you? Go away. Find someone else to irritate.’
No doubt Alistair’s expression was forbidding – it always was, these days – and the boy laughed to cover his uncertainty. Sebastian Pallant, all the Pallants, were supposed to be the ones to dole out incivility, so blithely arrogant were they; he didn’t seem to be very accustomed to receiving it in return. The young cockscomb wasn’t quite far gone enough in folly to make any sort of actual threat in response – he would have his more cautious older brother to answer to for that – and he clearly couldn’t think of a witty rejoinder either, so he settled for riding off with a careless, dismissive wave.
‘I hope you fall off and break your stupid fucking neck,’ Alistair said into the heedless wind, and then he sighed, and trudged on.
6
Everyone agreed that they had slept tolerably soundly in their unfamiliar surroundings, though Bea claimed that she had at one point been awoken by loud carousing in the streets outside the inn: shouting, rowdy singing, and breaking glass. ‘Some soldiers of all ranks,’ Miss Macintyre responded as she poured herself a second cup of coffee, ‘will always behave so. I expect they are especially agitated because they know that great events may be happening overseas, and they are not able to be a part of them. Men – a particular kind of men – view the prospect of death or serious injury in a most curious and irrational manner, I have observed: almost as a sport. I wonder if there are militia stationed near our destination? I expect there might be, since it is a vulnerable coastal region, and you must therefore be wary, girls.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Cecilia said drily. ‘I’m sure none of us has any ambition to copy Lydia Bennet.’
They breakfasted quickly, being anxious to complete the final fifty miles or so of their journey and reach Albery Hall in daylight. Mr Cotwin had written ahead to the housekeeper, Mrs Pritty, to advise her of their imminent arrival, and reassured them that the house had been reasonably well maintained – since he had paid all the bills when they arrived in recent years, and approved necessary repairs, he could at least be sure of that. ‘But Mrs Albery kept to her room during her last illness,’ he had told them, ‘and it is a long time since she employed a staff that most people would think adequate for a house of that size, so I am sorry to say that you cannot expect it to be as clean and ordered as you might wish, despite Mrs Pritty’s best efforts.’
They had told him that their expectations were not high, and that they were not above putting on aprons and taking up mops themselves. They would welcome the activity, in fact; Mr Cotwin did not understand, it seemed, their sheer excitement at having a place of their own at last, and being able to make their mark on it.
The roads were bad for the final part of the journey, with choking clouds of dust thrown up by their passage, and the going slow; the sisters were forced to temper their impatience, as they knew the postilion was doing his best. They had no coachman with their vehicle at any point in their journey, only a teenage boy or a wizened little horsey man, who came as a package with each hired vehicle and set of horses.
They took on their last postilion in the nearest large town to their destination, and he turned out to be a cheerful, talkative youth, well acquainted with the area and its inhabitants. ‘You’ll be Mrs Albery’s relatives, the Misses Constantine,’ he said promptly when he encountered them. ‘Pleased to meet you, ladies, I am sure. I’m Fred Wright, at your service, and horses is my business.’
‘Does everyone in the area know we’re coming, Fred?’ Bianca asked with some surprise.
The lad sniffed eloquently. ‘Well, Mother Pritty is close-mouthed enough in public, but it’s only natural she should need to talk to somebody, living in that big old place almost by herself. The old man who looks after the house and garden, Jacob Fisk, is her brother, so it’s him she opens her mind to. And he’s mortal deaf, as you will soon discover. Apart from them, there’s only the maid, Lucy, and to be plain with you, miss, she listens at doors and peeks in at keyholes every chance she gets. Powerful curious wench, she is. So yes, I think everyone does know. Lucy’s walking out with my cousin Tom, you see, and he’s a carter and goes all about the place. He was here with the barrels of ale only yesterday and told us then that you’d be arriving soon, all three of you with your companion. You’ll be needing Tom, I daresay, if you have goods to be delivered.’
‘I hadn’t thought,’ Cecilia said when they were back in the coach for the remainder of their journey. ‘The servants, of course – I expected that – but we now know that all the neighbours will be watching out for us, gossiping about us. And yet we don’t even know who they are. Isn’t that rather awkward and uncomfortable?’
