The Master Of Calverley Hall. Lucy Ashford

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СКАЧАТЬ Connor. The way he’d looked at her today. He’d heard everything. Believed everything. And it hurt, more than she’d believed possible.

      ‘Look,’ she was saying now to Joseph. ‘Look what I found for you.’ And soon she was proudly showing him the sticks of charcoal and hog’s-hair brushes she’d bought for him from a pedlar at the fair. ‘I enjoyed the fair immensely,’ she went on, forcing a merry smile, ‘but you should have been there, too, Joseph. It wasn’t the same without you.’

      ‘Did you find anything of interest?’

      ‘Yes, indeed.’ She laid out the new brushes with care. ‘For instance, I found an adorable stray puppy—together with some stray children. Oh, and I met a little girl. A rich and rather sad little girl.’

      ‘Perhaps she reminded you of yourself, Isobel? When you were young?’

      She lost her smile. ‘Perhaps, yes. But the girl, Joseph! She was very sweet. I gave her the puppy and that made her happy.’

      It had made her happy, too, Isobel realised—at least for a little while. Until she’d seen Connor Hamilton’s face and the way he’d looked at her. Something had wrenched the breath from her lungs at that look of his and she still felt bruised—agonised—from it.

      Forcing the memory down, she went to examine the painting on Molina’s easel.

      ‘This is beautiful!’ she exclaimed. ‘It’s the sunset over the woods on Calverley Hill, isn’t it?’

      ‘It’s showing promise,’ he admitted grudgingly. ‘But the greens I’ve used aren’t quite right. Will you help me to mix the colours, Isobel? I need aquamarine, I think, and yellow ochre. Also a touch of cadmium, though I don’t know where the cadmium has got to...’

      How quickly she settled into her usual routine. Within minutes, she’d found his precious phials of pigment amidst the clutter, as she always did, and the time flew by, until a middle-aged lady in a grey dress and pinafore—his sister, Agnes—came bustling in and scolded mildly, ‘Now, Joseph, it’s time for you to be putting away those brushes of yours and getting yourself ready for your tea.’

      ‘Agnes is quite right,’ Isobel told him, ‘so off you go and I’ll put these things away for you.’

      ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you, my dear.’

      ‘Nor I you,’ Isobel replied. She smiled again, though the minute he’d gone she felt despair washing through her.

      She’d been stupidly rash to visit the fair today. To pretend she didn’t care about the whispers she heard everywhere.

       ‘That’s Sir George Blake’s daughter there. Remember her? Just to think, she was once an heiress! But her father died a bankrupt and she went to live with a London rake when she was eighteen—yes, only eighteen! Then, when he died, she took up with this artist fellow—yes, they live just up the valley...’

      Whenever she heard the talk, Isobel reminded herself she was content with her new life. The Molinas couldn’t have been kinder; she had this home in the countryside she’d always loved and indeed she could almost call herself happy—until something happened, like at the fair today, when Connor Hamilton appeared.

      * * *

      She told the Molinas all about the fair while they ate their supper, describing the livestock tents and the entertainers, and the crowds who enjoyed it all so thoroughly. She told them just a little about the Plass Valley children, at which Agnes broke in, ‘Do you mean the children of those travellers, who arrive every summer to gather in the hay?’

      ‘Yes, I do,’ Isobel answered. ‘And they’re lovely, but a little high-spirited.’

      She went on to explain to Agnes about the runaway puppy—they both loved the story of the lively creature shaking mud all over the Reverend Malpass. At around nine she washed up the dishes and tidied everything away, then she took a candle to her upstairs room under the thatched eaves. She closed her door and leaned against it.

      Then, and only then, did she allow the smile she’d put on for her kind friends to fade away.

      She closed the curtains on the fast-gathering darkness outside, then by the light of the candle she gazed at herself in the mirror hung on a nail in the wall. Her dress was made of cheap cotton, the kind any country girl might wear, but she realised now that it was too tight around the bodice. Although her figure was slim, her breasts were full and the way the often-washed fabric of the gown clung to them made her look cheap. And that wasn’t all.

      Her skin was tinted unfashionably gold from the sun, in a way no lady would permit, and her long, obstinately curling fair hair had tumbled as usual from its pins. Try as she might, her efforts to tidy it never lasted long. All in all, she looked like a girl out for fun—a certain kind of fun. Once she’d been the heiress to Calverley Hall—but now her position in society was lowly indeed. Here she was, twenty-three years old and completely without prospects, yet she’d always told herself she was content. But today, at the fair, her safe little world had been rocked to its foundations.

      Over the last few years she’d heard all the gossip about Connor Hamilton. In fact, she often suspected the locals took great delight in repeating it in her hearing, loudly, in the town or the market place. She’d heard what must be every single detail of how Connor had risen in the world—the news had filtered back, month after month, year after year.

       ‘He’s living in London—yes, the big city. He’s proving himself mighty skilled. He’s become partner in a major iron manufactory and he’s making himself extremely rich into the bargain...’

      When someone told her—with more than a little satisfaction—that Connor was buying Calverley Hall, she started hearing fresh flurries of speculation. ‘He’s weary of London,’ people said. Or: ‘Now that he has that little girl and her grandmother to look after, he must feel that a country residence would do them both good.’

      He was returning to the neighbourhood he grew up in—only instead of a blacksmith’s forge, he would be living in a mansion. But hadn’t he realised that she still lived nearby?

      She would never forget the coldness in his blue eyes today at the fair as he registered her presence. She felt branded by it. Let him think the worst of me, she thought, like everyone else! She was happy here, with the Molinas; she loved helping Joseph with his paintings, she enjoyed his and Agnes’s gentle company.

      But Connor Hamilton was back. And a chill of fear caught at her heart, because he had become quite formidable in a way that made her pulse pound faster and her lungs ache with the sudden need for air.

      How she’d first met him, she couldn’t even really remember. It was as though he’d always been there and whenever she could she used to ride over to the forge and watch him as he mended ploughshares or shoed horses. She used to ask him question after question about his work and he didn’t seem to mind. She felt safe with Connor and, although he said little, she felt that he liked her. Even on that awful night when she’d got Connor into so much trouble seven years ago, he’d told her it wasn’t her fault.

      Since then, he’d become a rich man. An iron master. They said that to keep his hand in he still forged iron himself in the vast foundries that belonged to him—and, looking at him, she could well believe it, because СКАЧАТЬ