CHAPTER TWELVE
Whilst it could not be said that LordPinkney withdrew entirely, he certainly chose his times to approach Miss Tyneham with care, avoiding both her relatives and Lord Rothley. However, being a gambler, it did add an extra element of risk which he rather enjoyed, and he thought there might yet be spokes he might thrust in Lord Rothley’s particular wheel and leave him far behind, freeing Miss Tyneham for his seduction. When the letter from Vienna arrived, Lord Rothley was so absorbed in the situation that it took him by surprise. He took it to his bookroom and requested that he not be disturbed. For a minute or so held it in his hand, lost in thought. The handwriting was not unfamiliar to him.
My dear Rothley,
I read your letter, and my first reaction was to damn your impudence, demanded as it did, and yes, there is no better term for it, to know details of my past private life which ought to be no concern of yours. However, I do concede that if Tyneham knows, then a little clarification may be in order.
Of course it was all so very, very long ago, and to be honest I had forgotten the entire episode. Clarissa Tyneham was a very beautiful woman in her prime, and Tyneham was a boor, as it seems is his son. He neglected her shamefully, and made her unhappy. She was a woman who thrived upon affection, and it was a pleasure to show some towards her, but I never pretended that it was more than amusement; my reputation was well known, and I never mentioned her leaving Tyneham. She was the entertainment of a Season, no more. That she took things to heart showed she was a fool.
As for the child, Tyneham showed some sense at least, and kept quiet. After all, it only turned out to be a girl and there would be no problem with the title if anything happened to the heir. All in all, it seemed a very satisfactory conclusion to a pleasant interlude.
Rothley ground his teeth. Satisfactory, yes, to a man with no responsibility and seeking new amusements. He had no consideration for the life he had left to Clarissa Tyneham, or the embarrassed shame of his own wife, who must have known theon dits, even if not in Town. Some ‘kind friend’ would have been bound to tell her, as they had with the others.
I can see that the situation might be difficult for you with the chit residing with Lady Chelmarsh, but memories are very short, really. I had to think hard to recall the affair myself. There may be a few old tabbies who remember if, as you say, there are actually similarities, but of what consequence is that, since it is to Chelmarsh’s girl you are attracted with a view to being leg-shackled?
That the ‘Tyneham’chit is a beauty, knowing her mother, is not a surprise. That she shares characteristics with you in colouring is a compliment to me. Your mother always said you looked like me, but I think she was exaggerating. You are not a bad-looking fellow, but if you had seen me in my prime, my boy …
His lordship scoffed. Of course, there had been very little chance of seeing Viscount Rothley ‘in his prime’ since he rarely visited his estates, and took no more interest in his son than sending him money at school, along with the practical, if rather shocking advice to a thirteen-year-old, that he should always make sure the women he ‘played with’ were clean. As paternal advice it was limited. His grandsire had been his role model, and the old earl was of such different metal to his son that he could not comprehend what had gone awry in him. Restrictions upon his purse strings only worked when his gambling was unsuccessful, which in those days was rare, and the best the elderly Earl of Woodhall could do was stand by his son’s wife and heir.
Grandfather had died when Rothley was in his last year at Eton. The old man had left what he could to his daughter-in-law, the Dower House for her lifetime, and a good annuity, and as much as he could in Trust for the new Viscount Rothley, but that still left a considerable portion to the profligate, whose luck had eventually nose-dived, and the new earl had chosen to live, more economically, abroad. This may also have had something to do with the fact that there were gentlemen in England who had designs upon his health as a result of his peccadilloes with their wives. Not all men were as sanguine as old Tyneham.
I hope this clears the situation for you and wish you well of the Chelmarsh girl; about time you thought of setting up a nursery, and I do not disapprove of the family, good stock.
That was rich, coming from him! He simply could not see that it might be Lord Chelmarsh who did not think Woodhall’s son was ‘good enough stock’ to marry his eldest daughter?
Teresa sends her regards, though of course all her warmest are reserved for me. Just try to remember our Marston family motto, ‘Life is to be lived’ and stop thinking like a parson. Morality is for the weak. With which sound advice, Rothley,
I remain your affectionate parent,
Woodhall
If it was not so appalling it would be almost funny. There was his father, the aged Lothario in his foreign bolthole, with his latest, perhaps last, and none too young, inamorata, telling his son to be more like him. Well, Lord Rothley knew that his father was the aberration. The Marston heritage was of good management of their estates and decency regarding their own spouses and those of other men. Saints they might not be, but sinners of his father’s magnitude they were not either.
He thought of his mother. She had been a quiet, loving woman, with gentle eyes that were always haunted by sorrow. Her misfortune was never to have fallen totally out of love with her errant husband, and she had spent her life, as long as her son could remember, in a state of semi-widowhood. She had never displayed any public awareness that her spouse had ‘abandoned’ her. She had lived quietly, acting as chatelaine in her father-in-law’s house, doing every good work that might be expected of a lady of good breeding, so that when she died after two years of declining health, there had been crowds outside the church who could not get in to hear the service. He did not regret his father’s absences, but he did look upon those two years with sorrow. After all she had put up with, it seemed cruel that she should be afflicted as she had been. In those two years he had not come up to Town for more than the odd appointment with his tailor, nor been upon the circuit of house parties and visits. She had almost had to force him to spend a couple of weeks at his hunting box in Leicestershire, and make the occasional visit to a friend. She had always been there for him, and love and duty meant that he had felt the least he could do was be there for her.
It had been one of her last wishes that he re-establish more than written contact with his father, and so he had travelled to where his father had finally settled, in Vienna. There he found him ensconced in a baroque residence with rather too much peeling gilding, and a lady he described as ‘the Gräfin Teresa’, who appeared to be a middle-aged widow with enough money to cover his lack of it, and an eye to an aged rake.
His father was not, on the face of it, a bad-looking man for his age, and had an even greater sense of self-importance now that he had inherited his father’s title. He clearly felt ‘the Earl of Woodhall’ would be advanced more credit by tradesmen than a mere viscount. He had steely grey hair now, and a thickened figure, but still appeared ‘distinguished’ until you looked more closely, and noticed the marks of dissolution. Presumably Teresa was short-sighted, or he still had that magical ‘something’ which made women adore him. He had no scruples about living off her, indeed seemed to think he was doing her a service by ‘giving her his protection’. He was, in short, the same man he had always been.
His son tried, for his mother’s sake, to find something in him that he could like. The man was totally unrepentant, said nothing about his wife other than ‘pity the poor soul suffered so long’ and then brushed it away as unpleasantness he would rather not face. Rothley soon saw this was his father’s basic attitude to life. He did what he wanted, and if anything unpleasant intruded, he turned away and ignored it. That was how he had ignored the consequences of his actions. He did not gloat over the women he had used, he simply forgot them, as he did his debts, his mistakes and his failings. He was completely and utterly selfish.
The worrying thought occurred to Rothley that perhaps Susan Tyneham had inherited that as well as the glossy dark hair, and he hoped it was untrue.
He had stomached his sire’s company for four months, and then made his way back to England via Paris, of which his grandfather had spoken in the days before the French had removed the heads of their aristocrats. It was, he thought, a place still haunted in odd places by blood, though it had a bustlingjoie de vivreabout it. If he did not see his father again he would not be distraught. He had little thought that the sins of the father would influence the future chances of happiness for the son.
It sounded histrionic, but since meeting Lady Sophy Hadlow, he had felt different. That first time he had put it down to interest, in the sense of wanting to watch what happened with the unpredictable Miss Tyneham, and there was a peculiar draw to her, which he could now see as vaguely familial. It was the tall, so very tall for a lady, form of Lady Sophy, however, with her alert mind and willingness to spar light-heartedly, that had made him contemplate a permanent attachment for the very first time. There had been the odd liaison in the past, it was true, of a mutually advantageous nature and with ladies who understood business, but he was, by the standards of his peers, far from being a ladies’ man, unlike his disreputable parent. Certainly, there had never been a woman who appealed to mind and body as Sophy Hadlow did. He wondered at a fate which had meant that when she had been in London for the Season he had been absent. He must have noticed so statuesque a young lady, and yet a voice told him he would not have appreciated her then, and something in her demeanour spoke to him of expecting the world to ignore her. She found compliments difficult to accept, as if none could be true. Perhaps, at eighteen, she had not dared to stare the world in the face and defy its unkindnesses, since the unusual was always prey to them. He remembered her words, ‘I am too tall to “take”, and I have not my cousin’s … bravura.’ Yes, she was not in the common mould. Now, at twenty-three or four, as he guessed, she was past worrying what the world whispered. Sadly, this also meant that she listened to him with scepticism. Some of his words were pure jest, but if he as much as added a term of honest appreciation to a comment, she treated it as foolery. Persuading such a lady of his bona fides was not easy. At least he did not possess his father’s sullied reputation, but if Tyneham revealed his relationship to Susan, would the Chelmarsh household not hold him at a distance?
Suddenly a thought occurred to him. What if Lady Sophy assumed that his character must be akin to that of his sire? Everything made sense in that context, her comments, the way she pulled back from him.
He gazed down at the letter in his hands, and his lip curled. His father had so very much for which to answer.
Lord Tyneham did not jump to conclusions. In fact, jumping was a thing he never did. He prided himself on being methodical, organised. He had begun the Season intending to make an offer for his cousin Sophronia, an offer she would of course accept. These last few weeks, however, his certainty had been severely shaken, and from the most unwelcome of sources. Sophronia was not to know, how could she do so, that any form of ‘friendship’, and he put it no higher, with Rothley was out of the question. It irked him. Rothley had appeared to be in ignorance when he had encountered him, so very at ease with the ladies, in the Park. That might have been true then, but the meeting must have raised his suspicions, given him cause to find out. He must know how things stood, must know what lay between the two families, how unacceptable he was. When Tyneham had been unsure of this he had wondered if, by a quirk of perversity, Rothley had his eye on Susan. That, were it not offensive, would almost be funny. He had imagined, several times, the satisfaction of revealing the truth to the pair. However, more recently it had become obvious that Rothley wanted to fix his interest with Sophronia. Women were notoriously unreliable, and much inclined to prefer danger to reliability, until their fingers got burnt. For some reason, Sophronia’s efforts at repulsing Rothley were lacking in self-belief, and he showed absolutely no sign of doing the honourable thing and withdrawing from the lists. Instead, he was pursuing her. It was no use, Rothley must be warned off, once and for all. Sophronia must be saved from her own feminine weakness, and he would forgive her. With this view in mind, Lord Tyneham went in search of his ‘rival’.
Lord Tyneham ran his lordship to ground at White’s, where he found him perusing a periodical.
‘Ah, Rothley. Just the man I was looking for.’
‘Really, Tyneham?’ Lord Rothley lowered the newspaper with a soft rustle and looked at him without enthusiasm but with mild interest. ‘Forgive me for being surprised. I can think of no possible reason why you could be looking for me, not even to buy a horse, since nothing I have in my stable could be up to your weight.’
