‘My goodness! Well, I suppose that is more likely. I wonder what he set against them in the bet?’
‘You would not like it, so I never told you.’ Lady Damerham took a deep breath. ‘Sir Robert’s breastplate. He was, he told me afterwards, in his cups.’ She offered this in mediation of the enormity of the ‘crime’. Mary stared at her open-mouthed for a moment.
‘He … he cannot have.’ She was genuinely shocked. ‘That is … well, a sort of sacrilege.’ She had wondered if she ought to have removed the breastplate from the house with Sir Robert’s portrait, but it felt too much part of the fabric, as though some things were not ‘family’ possessions but belonged to the building itself. Perhaps that was why she had never liked those oak chairs; the house ‘tolerated’ them but never absorbed them into itself. This was not something she could say before her mama, who would have thought it fanciful, if not peculiar, and Mary herself was rather embarrassed at feeling it, for it went against her pragmatic attitude to life.
‘Sir Rowland and his brother do seem very nice.’ Lady Damerham changed the subject, and was watching Mary carefully as she continued. ‘When you said … I know you were funning of course but … And he is not married.’111
‘I was not funning, Mama, but I agree that I might have shied from it had he been an ogre.’
‘Mary, casting out lures for him would be …’
‘Difficult, yes. I am not entirely sure how one does so.’
‘I was going to say it was unseemly.’ It might be what she would have said, but Lady Damerham privately thought exactly as her daughter admitted. It would be hopeless.
‘I agree, Mama, but he has Tapley End and in the long term, forgive me, I have no home at all. The logic is inescapable.’
Logic did not feature heavily in Lady Damerham’s mind, so she could only look at her daughter and wonder at her.
‘I blame your Grandpapa,’ she said after a moment.
‘Grandpapa? For what?’
‘For giving you the idea that the Lounds and Tapley End are indivisible.’
‘But he believed it, and so do I, at least in heart. I feel exiled, Mama.’
Lady Damerham sighed. She had been very impressed with Sir Rowland, but could not see how he might form an attachment with her wilful and plain-speaking daughter.
Mary knew just how long it would take to get from the dower house to the main house, but found herself hurrying a little, since she had spent too long deciding112what to wear that would be suitable and show her off to best advantage. She might not know how to flirt but she was, she told herself, quite capable of making the best of whatever looks she had. She had chosen a gown of pomona green cambric, which was one of her favoured colours, though anyone with an eye to fashion would know it was so high-waisted as to show it five years out of date, but had looked at her reflection critically in both a deep cream kerseymere spencer with ‘rifleman green’ velvet-covered buttons, and an open pelisse in nutmeg-coloured twilled sarcenet. She finally opted for the spencer, and a chip straw hat with dark green ribands. She laughed at herself for taking so much trouble when in truth she was going to walk across the park and round the house.
‘If this is the trouble girls go through during the Season in London, I am mightily pleased I never had one. Such a fuss, and all to catch a husband. Goodness, I shall be late!’
Her pace across the park was brisk and her cheeks were healthily flushed when she rang the bell at the front door of Tapley End. It felt as odd as on the previous evening. Mrs Peplow, giving her a maternal smile, ushered her into the great hall as Sir Rowland entered from the west wing and came towards her.
‘You are but five minutes late, Miss Lound. That is very good timing.’
‘I am actually probably on time, sir, for that clock,’ she pointed to the timepiece upon a side cabinet, ‘is113notorious for gaining ten minutes a day. As a timekeeper it is poor, but it has a most pleasing face.’
‘Then I bow to your knowledge and commend you for arriving upon the hour, ma’am.’ He smiled as he took her hand and bowed over it. When he straightened the smile had faded. ‘Thank you … after last night.’
‘It is … forgotten. Besides, I owe it to the house to make a “formal introduction” between the pair of you.’ A dimple peeped. ‘You are, after all, now its new guardian, and it is in far safer and better hands than those of a Risley, of which the previous Lord Cradley was a classic example.’
‘I confess I never met the gentleman, and am intrigued, for there is clearly what must almost be termed a feud between the Lounds and the Risleys, of which I am therefore glad not to be a part, excepting through the marriage of my great aunt.’
‘It is a feud, which sounds silly in this day and age, for we are not mediaeval warlords, but it goes back to the Civil War and is in fact much connected to this house.’
‘Then please educate me as you take me about the place. I take it that this hall is the earliest part, from its height and the beams, though clearly altered.’ Sir Rowland was more than content to be ‘educated’ by Miss Lound, who looked, he thought, very pretty in that green dress.
‘Yes. I shall begin at the beginning.’ Mary began a little self-consciously, but soon relaxed as she told him114about the origins of the house, and how, in 1415, Sir William Lound, knighted by King Henry V after the storming of Harfleur, returned to England in poor health and came to recover with his uncle in Gloucestershire. He fell in love with the landscape and one day came upon this house, a little dilapidated, and offered to buy it from its yeoman owner. The man was unwilling to sell except upon the condition that Sir William marry his daughter. Sir William thus gained a house and a wife. ‘The newly married Sir William restored the main hall and had the chimney built instead of a hearth in the middle of the floor.’
‘It is certainly an impressive size. It must take several whole trees over a winter.’
‘Yes, but at Christmastide it comes into its own, and we still have a great yule log, which would be impractical in most houses. I remember very merry gatherings as a child. The Lound crest above it was a later addition. I am actually relieved it remains, for it would have been entirely in character for Lord Cradley to have had it defaced or indeed totally removed.’ Miss Lound looked thoughtful. ‘Now, follow me.’ She gave a little laugh. ‘I am sorry, Sir Rowland, that sounded peremptory. I ought to have said “If you would care to follow me”.’
Sir Rowland denied she sounded commanding, and followed obediently, enjoying listening to her as much as learning from what was said. She was not trying to impress him, at least not with her own person. She was focused upon the house and that alone, as though115introducing him, he thought, to a friend she was desperate that he like. She led him to where the dark oak stair ascended with broad, worn treads, and thence up to the first floor.
‘This wide passage, which later became known as The Long Gallery, leads to the chapel that Sir William built, but I am sure it needs no explanation, and we need not visit it now.’
