I’ll Bring You Buttercups. Elizabeth Elgin

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СКАЧАТЬ take life one hurdle at a time. Don’t put down your pretty head and charge in without thinking. Take things quietly and you’ll get there quicker, in the end. And will you stop your protesting so I can tell you how much I love you – because I do. Right from the start, I loved you.’

      ‘At first sight, you mean? Don’t tell me the dour doctor believes in such romantic nonsense?’

      ‘He didn’t, but he does now. You have turned him into a poor creature,’ he smiled. ‘Do you realize that I knelt beside you that night, picked up your wrist and thought, “This is the woman I will marry.” It was a shock; uncanny. I could hardly count your pulse beat. I still can’t believe it.’ He shook his head, bemused.

      ‘Darling. It was the same for me, too.’ Cupping his face in her hands, Julia was instantly serious, her eyes all at once luminous with need. ‘And if I promise not to rant and rave, will you kiss me? And tell me you’ll always love me? And will you please marry me as soon as we can manage it, because I have such feelings – such wonderful, wanton feelings – tearing through me, that I don’t know how I’m to put up with the waiting till I’m twenty-one, let alone for a whole year.’

      ‘Sweetheart.’ His lips found hers. ‘We will wait. We must. I can’t support you properly yet. Another year will make all the difference.’

      ‘But, Andrew – I’ve got money of my own, or I will have, when I’m of age. Father left it to me. And there’ll be jewellery to come from Grandmother Whitecliffe – on my mother’s side. I’m not sure how much, but it could help to buy you a practice – in Harrogate, if you’d like it. Please think about it? Seriously?’

      ‘Your generosity makes me feel very proud – humble, too – but I will support my wife. You call me dour, Julia – well it’s the way I am; though if you have money to spare you could settle some of it on our children.’

      ‘Our children,’ she murmured, eyes closed. ‘How many? Four?’

      ‘Three, I think. First we will have a daughter for you – and she must be beautiful, like her mother – and then you shall give me two sons.’

      ‘Happily,’ whispered the sensuous, wanting woman she had become. ‘I love you, Doctor MacMalcolm, and it is so wonderful being loved.’

      ‘I know.’ He took her hand, slowly, gently kissing the tips of the fingers curled possessively around his own. ‘My dearest girl, I know it.’

      ‘Then is there an explanation for the way I feel at times?’ Frowning, she raised her eyes to his. ‘Sometimes I think we are too lucky; that no one has the right to be this happy.’

      ‘I think,’ he said softly, ‘that we get what we deserve in life.’

      ‘So you don’t think the Fates will be jealous?’

      ‘Not a bit of it,’ he laughed. ‘How can they be when it was Fate, pure and simple, that brought us together in the first place? Stop your foolish blethering, woman,’ he said fondly.

      Foolish blethering? Of course – that’s all it was, she echoed, contentedly snuggling closer. And may it please those Fates, whispered a small voice inside her, to let them keep that love? For ever and ever?

      The mistress of Pendenys did not look up from her desk-top when the door opened and closed; nor when footsteps crossed the room and came to a halt behind her chair. Yet she knew that whoever stood there was either her son or her husband – no one else – for no other dare enter her sanctuary except to clean it. The room was hers alone; her one private place in this rambling, echoing, too-large house. Clementina’s little room held her precious, private things, and was dear to her. The tantrum room, her servants called it, for in truth that was really what it was; the room the mistress most often retreated into after an upset; when she had flung her final accusation, slammed her last door. It was where she went to pace and fume silently, to simmer down, perhaps even to weep. And the best of British good fortune to it, said the servants, for whilst madam was closeted away, they were safe from the suspicious workings of her mind, the stabs of her tongue.

      ‘Yes, Edward?’ Clementina turned to face her husband.

      ‘Please put down your pen, my dear. I wish to talk to you and I shall require your full attention.’

      ‘Very well. You have it.’ She knew better than to argue. Her husband was a mild, gentle person; a man who could be expected to have fathered the considerate, contented son who was Nathan; but sometimes there was harshness in his voice and anger in his eyes, and she knew, then, it would be to her cost to challenge the Sutton steel that ran the length of his backbone. ‘What can you have to say, I wonder, except to remind me yet again how indulgently I have reared my son?’

      ‘Our son, Clemmy. And the word is spoiled – ruined. Elliot has gone too far this time. London, Leeds, even Creesby we can hush over, but last night, on his own doorstep –’

      ‘On Rowangarth’s hallowed acres, you mean; on Helen’s land?’

      ‘Too near to home. Too near for comfort. And not a street woman this time, but a young girl.’

      ‘Last night, Edward, was different. Elliot had been drinking – perhaps a little too much,’ she murmured uneasily. ‘But how did you find out?’

      ‘Last night, tomorrow night, drunk or sober – where’s the difference? Is no woman safe from his brutish ways? And I got the truth of it from Giles. I met him, walking over to see me, and he told me what Helen told you this morning. Why didn’t you tell me she had visited?’

      ‘Because I didn’t believe what she said – about Elliot, I mean. Everyone is against him – even you, his father. You call him a brute, your own son,’ she gasped, rising in agitation to her feet. ‘But he’s yours! He’s a Sutton, remember; as much a Sutton as Nathan and Albert and that precious pair over at Rowangarth. But after this you’ll say he isn’t one of your breeding, but a throwback from Mary Anne. He isn’t fair, like a Sutton should be, but dark like a Cornishman. Well, you married me, Edward. You were eager enough to trade my fortune for your seed!’

      ‘Clementina! That is enough!’ God! Must her talk be so direct? ‘But if that is what you want, I’ll admit it. You married my name and I went along with it. I had little choice. But I will stand by no longer and see Elliot sink to the gutter and take the Sutton name with him. Enough is enough. Either Elliot goes, or I go! Elliot goes to America for at least a month, or I shall move out into one of the almshouses!’

      ‘Almshouses? You can’t mean it? The talk! The scandal.’

      ‘I mean it. There has been a Rowangarth almshouse empty for months, and it would be heaven to move in there, God only knows. And would a little more scandal make all that much difference? Scandal is nothing new to the Place Suttons. Our son has seen to that!’

      ‘You mean it, don’t you, Edward? This is your way of getting back at me. Well, Elliot shall not go to Kentucky, no matter what that woman of Albert’s says!’

      ‘Albert’s wife wrote you a perfectly civilized and kindly letter, once they had settled into a place of their own. I believe her when she says that any of Albert’s family will be welcome in their home.’

      ‘She’s nothing but a social climber! And can you imagine it – Elliot returning home with an ambitious American heiress on his arm!’

      ‘And СКАЧАТЬ