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The front door opened as if by magic as he swept her up into his arms and carried her up the steps, but there was no one to be seen in the hall with its wide staircase. Giles carried on up to the first floor to where double doors stood open on to a room decorated all in palest grey and in blue silk with a wide Venetian window framing the landscape and, as he had promised her, a very big bed.
‘Lady Isobel Harker,’ Giles said as he set her on her feet. ‘There is something in the marriage service about worshipping you with my body and I take promises very seriously.’
‘I hope so, Mr Harker,’ she murmured as he began to unfasten her gown. Silk and lawn whispered to the ground, her stays followed with a facility that she would tease him about later. But now this felt too important for levity, only for deep happiness.
Giles carried her to the bed and stripped off his own clothing. ‘I have never seen you without all those bruises,’ she murmured, running her hands over the flat planes of his chest, the ridged muscle of his stomach. ‘I was too nervous to notice in the pool that they had gone.’
He lowered himself over her, his scarred cheek resting next to her smooth one and she twisted so she could kiss it, then his nose with its new bump.
‘I love you,’ he told her as his hands began to caress her. Every time he said the words it seemed to her that it was never just a phrase. Each time he seemed to find it wonderful and new, a surprise to love and be loved.
‘Show me,’ she whispered back, curling her legs around his waist, cradling him between her thighs where she had wanted him for so long.
‘Eight weeks of respectability is all very well,’ Giles said, his voice husky. ‘But it makes a man very, very impatient.’
‘So am I,’ Isobel told him, and lifted her hips to press against him, took his mouth and thrust with her tongue to tell him it was all right to be urgent, to take her. It had been a long time since Lucas, but for all his scarce-controlled desire Giles was gentle. She opened to him when he entered her, as he slid home deep and sure to make her his, and then she lost every trace of apprehension in the heat and the joy of their merging and the pleasure that he spun out of caresses and kisses to send her wild and desperate for release.
They cried out together and sank into sleep together. When she woke Giles was watching her and lifted his hand to trace where his eyes had been roaming, across her brow, down her cheek, softly over her lips.
‘You were meant for me,’ Isobel told him.
‘I know. I think I knew from the moment I caught your hand in the lake and feared I was too late. Mine,’ Giles said. ‘Mine for ever.’ And he began to prove it all over again.
Afterword
Sir John Soane and Sir Humphry Repton— the changing face of Wimpole Hall and its park
One of the main reasons I was so attracted to the early nineteenth century for my story set at Wimpole Hall was the discovery that Sir John Soane was deeply involved in the improvements made by the Hardwickes.
I became fascinated with Soane after my first visit to his home in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, now the Sir John Soane’s Museum (http://www.soane.org/). Soane (1753-1837) was a very active and ambitious architect who, amongst other commissions, designed the Bank of England.
He was also a passionate collector of art and antiquities, and he designed his home to accommodate his collections, his family and his architect’s office. The interior is perfectly preserved, and is not only an example of Regency taste at its most refined but also gives a vivid impression of the man himself. Where else could you find a ‘monk’s cell’ designed as a gentleman’s retreat in close proximity to one of the finest Egyptian sarcophagi in the country?
His two sons were a great disappointment to Soane and it seemed possible that he might make a protégé of an able young man from his office—which was my starting point for the character of Giles Harker.
When Philip Yorke, later to become the Third Earl of Hardwicke of this novel, was on the Grand Tour in Italy in 1779 he wrote, ‘An English architect by name Soane, who is an ingenious young man now studying in Rome, accompanied us [to Paestum] and measured the buildings.’
Philip Yorke remembered Soane and, after his return to England, commissioned the architect to work on his Hertfordshire house, Hamels. When he inherited the earldom from his uncle in 1790 he set Soane to transform Wimpole Hall. The architect—who was still plain Mr Soane at the time of this book—worked extensively on the house. Improvements by him which can be seen today include the Book Room, the spectacular Yellow Drawing Room, the alterations to the Great Staircase to allow for the building of the Bath House and considerable remodelling on the first floor. He was also responsible for the Home Farm.
At the time this book is set Soane’s work at the Hall was largely concluded, but I imagined he might have been called in for an opinion on the Hill House, which becomes so significant for Giles and Isobel.
Sir Humphry Repton (1752-1818), the great landscape architect, was also much involved at Wimpole Hall and he is mentioned in this novel, although he never makes an appearance. Many of his suggestions—floating boats on the lake so their masts can be seen from the house and changes to the Hill House amongst them—were not adopted, but he created one of his famous Red Books, showing his proposals for transforming the landscape of the park, and this still survives at the house. His design for the formal gardens at the North Front were used after his death.
Other gardens designed by Repton include the Royal Pavilion at Brighton, Longleat, Woburn Abbey and Tatton Park.
In the footsteps of Giles and Isobel at Wimpole Hall
Isobel enters Wimpole Hall through the western gates, past the Hardwicke Arms, which is still an inn to this day. In 1800 it was considered one of the best on the Old North Road, the route we will have taken from London. Although it dealt with the stage and mail coaches, it made most of its money from the wealthier post-chaise travellers and derived considerable benefit from being at the gates of Wimpole Hall.
These gates are closed to the public now so we must approach from the eastern side and leave our chaise—or car—behind the stables which were built in 1854, replacing the old ones closer to the house. The service area, with kitchens, wash house, larders and stores around the central yard where Giles brought the half-drowned Isobel and Lizzie, has also gone—it was attached to the eastern end of the house.
Like Isobel, we climb the steps to enter through the front door and find ourselves in the Entrance Hall. To our right is the AnteChapel, now separated by screens, but originally a separate room. The tour of the house takes us through the South Drawing Room, where Isobel overheard Giles’s scathing opinion of her looks and manners, to the Long Gallery, where the family put on their amateur plays, and into the Book Room, which leads to the Library.
Returning, we go through the northern rooms—the Red Room, the spectacular Yellow Drawing Room, the Breakfast Room and the Grand Dining Room (or Eating Room as it is labelled on Soane’s plans).
We climb the Grand Staircase and our tour takes us to the Lord Chancellor’s bedroom and dressing room—the chambers I appropriated for Giles’s use. As we pass through the lobby to reach the front of the house, look up. You will see the ‘snob boards’ that ensured that the servants moving around on the upper floor could not look down at the family and guests. The doors between the servants’ areas and the main house are all faced with studded baize on the staff side, to make certain that even in the dark no servant could stumble into the family side by accident.
I gave Isobel the room that is now known as Mrs Bainbridge’s Study as her sitting room, with the room beyond as her bedchamber and the Print Room as her dressing room. Only this small central part of the first floor is now open to the public. The western side of the house has the Earl and Countess’s suites, including her spectacular semicircular dressing and sitting room. The eastern wing holds more bedchambers.
