AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘It is not nonsense,’ Hebe averred stoutly. ‘I have just seen it happen before my very eyes. I think it is lovely, but I want you to ask Mr Glossop about Mr Thorne. It would be dreadful if he proved to have beaten his late wife, or has a fatal tendency to drink or some such thing.’
‘I will do as you ask, although I have a sinking feeling that if we do discover something to Thorne’s discredit, you are going to expect me to warn him off.’ There was something in Alex’s expression that chilled Hebe suddenly. He still appeared perfectly pleasant, yet when he asked, ‘So, love at first sight, a coup de foudre, is your ideal, is it?’ she felt she had erred very badly in blurting out her enthusiasm. Alex had always remarked sardonically on her desire for a love match: did he think now she was comparing her own marriage unfavourably with Anna’s new affection?
‘Good heavens, no!’ she said as lightly as she could, sliding down from the table. ‘Why, it is almost a fairy tale: one certainly could not wish for it.’
‘Not like an ordinary love match, then?’ she thought he said under his breath, but when she looked at him he showed no sign of having spoken. They began to walk back along the Gallery, stepping in and out of the checkers of sunlight cast by the lead-paned windows on the polished boards. Hebe racked her brains for some less sensitive subject of conversation.
‘Will that crack in the plaster be a problem?’ she asked at last.
‘I am not sure, I will get Glossop to have it investigated whilst I am away.’
‘You are going away?’
‘Yes, I must go up to London for a few days, I am sorry, I meant to mention it at breakfast.’
‘Oh, good,’ Hebe said, relieved that he would be able to visit his mistress, or some other lady of the night, and relieve his enforced celibacy.
‘Good?’ Understandably Alex sounded surprised.
‘Oh, I mean…that is, I am sure you will find the change is good for you,’ she babbled. ‘With no visitors at the moment, and so many memories in this house…oh, and you will be able to visit Aunt and Uncle Fulgrave, I would be glad if you could take letters…’ She ground to a halt in the face of his sceptical expression.
‘I do hope you too have not acquired a lover in the short time you have been here,’ he said lightly.
‘No! I wish you would not tease me, Alex,’ Hebe said vehemently. ‘What if someone had overheard and took you seriously?’
‘And what makes you think I am not serious?’ he asked with a lift of his dark brows that left her entirely at a loss to know whether he was teasing her or warning her. ‘You must excuse me, I have to talk to Glossop.’
Hebe was left at the end of the Long Gallery, staring after her husband with a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. That conversation had gone incredibly badly, she knew. It was as though the careful pretence of a normal life that they had constructed had suddenly cracked open: not wide enough to bring the structure tumbling down, but enough to make her deeply uneasy at what might lie beneath.
Just like that crack in the ceiling, she thought, wandering back down the Gallery for want of anything else to do. Then her attention was caught by the portraits on the walls and, more for something to think about at first, then with increasing absorption, she began to study them.
They had not been hung in any sort of chronological order, so it became a game to try and sort them out. There was a small, very dark charcoal sketch that she thought might be Tudor, some very stilted Jacobean ladies and gentlemen, none of whom looked as though they resembled real life and suddenly a number of what she felt were true portraits.
Living, breathing people stared out at her from the eighteenth-century canvases. In their best clothes, adopting postures of dignity and solemnity to be sure, but real faces for all that. She began to find resemblances to Alex, mainly in the line of the jaw and the shape of the eye. Then she found a more recent picture, a charming, almost informal family group, and she realised she had found the source of Alex’s incredible looks.
The scene was a picnic under a spreading tree. A gentleman stood leaning against the trunk. His wife, her wide brocade skirts flaring about her, sat on a rug on the grass, clasping a small boy—Alex—to her. His taller brother stood beside his mother, his father’s hand on his shoulder.
The woman was undoubtedly Alex’s mother—her raven head gleamed beside the identical locks of the little boy in her arms and two pairs of deep blue eyes regarded Hebe seriously across the years. The older boy was more like his father, lighter in colouring, stockier, with the same jawline as Alex, but with less refinement in his face.
Fascinated, Hebe stood studying the portrait group for a long time before she turned and walked slowly out of the Long Gallery. The import of those generations of silent Beresfords hit her with the force of a blow. Son had succeeded father down the years and the pride of that lineage showed on every face. What Alex had sworn to by promising never to touch her was to deny himself those heirs, those succeeding, unknown generations.
Had that occurred to him yet, or was he still too distressed by the deaths of his father and brother and by the revelation of what had happened between Hebe and himself to consider it? Or had being in the Gallery just now recalled it to him and was that why he had been so abrasive?
And what, in the face of his intransigence, should she do about it?
Chapter Twenty-Four
Dinner that night was a difficult meal. Anna, who still appeared to be in a daze, absently made her excuses and did not appear. Hebe felt she was in disgrace in some way, but could not account for it other than that Alex was still displeased by her unguarded enthusiasm for his trip to London.
She tried to think of ways to raise the subject, but realised that any mention of it would be protesting too much and could make him even more suspicious.
Alex was scrupulously polite, making conversation about the events of the day and ensuring she had exactly what she wanted to eat, that her glass was filled and that the salt cellar was instantly at her hand the moment she looked for it. Hebe would have been even more mortified if she realised what Starling was saying to the footman when he managed to draw him outside the dining room for a moment.
‘His lordship’s in a rare taking tonight, so just you be careful, my lad! No dropping plates, no slopping soup. Do nothing to draw his attention to you or aggravate his nerves.’
‘But he seems very pleasant tonight, Mr Starling,’ the young footman whispered back. ‘Never a cross word, so attentive to her ladyship.’
The butler rolled his eyes at such innocence. ‘Don’t you believe it, lad,’ he unbent so far as to advise. ‘Just watch his eyes.’
