I’ll Bring You Buttercups. Elizabeth Elgin

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СКАЧАТЬ her cheek. ‘A smut?’

      ‘No, dearest. Whilst you were miles away, thinking, I was thinking how beautiful you are and wondering why I’m not in the least bit like you.’ Why she had not inherited the fineness of her mother’s bones, her clear blue eyes, her thick, corn-yellow hair.

      ‘Not like me? And you aren’t like your father, either. I think you favour your aunt Sutton, child. You have her independence and her courage. But don’t grow into an old maid like she is, because you have your own special beauty, though you won’t admit it.

      ‘Why do you freeze men out, Julia? Because you do, you know. Sometimes I think you go out of your way to do it.’

      ‘I know I do. But it’s only because the right man hasn’t come along yet, and you did say, you and Pa, that you’d never interfere and let me marry where I wished. And I shall know him, when we meet. I’ll know him at once, so don’t worry about me. Let’s talk about tonight, shall we, and Aunt Clemmy and her awful Elliot?’

      ‘Must we?’ Helen Sutton shuddered. She intensely disliked her brother-in-law’s elder son; wondered why a stop hadn’t been put to his extravagant ways, his drinking and his women. And especially to his whoring.

      Blushing, she checked herself at once. She had allowed herself to think a word no lady should even know. But whoring – and there was no other word for it – and Elliot Sutton were synonymous, and she would rather her daughter entered a convent than marry a man with so dreadful a reputation. ‘Must we talk about Clementina and her everlasting complaining about the cost of servants and the amount they eat?’

      ‘Perhaps not.’

      ‘Nor about her son who is no better than – than he ought to be.’

      ‘Elliot … I suppose you can’t entirely blame him for being as he is.’ Julia Sutton was nothing if not fair. ‘After all, his father spends his time buying books and reading books. I think Uncle Edward loves learning better than he loves his son, and you can’t, as Mrs Shaw is always saying, make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Elliot can’t ever be a gentleman with a mother like Aunt Clemmy. She’s common!’

      ‘That is unfair! And Mrs Shaw shouldn’t say things like that,’ Helen gasped, though her eyes were bright with mischief and her lips struggled against a smile. And hadn’t her John always said that a man could choose his friends, but his relations he was stuck with and must make the best of.

      So tonight she would try her best to be kind to Clemmy and her eldest son. She would wear her almost-out-of-mourning gown because it would be expected of her, and she would take the arm of her younger son for support and wear John’s orchids with love.

      Tomorrow it would be all over, and she could pick up the threads of her shattered life and face the world alone. And tomorrow, too, she would wave a smiling goodbye to Julia and Hawthorn and do nothing that would cast the least sadness on their great adventure.

      ‘Let’s talk about London,’ she smiled.

      ‘So what’s this, Alice Hawthorn? You dog-walking again tonight, an’ all?’ The young keeper’s face so reflected his pleasure that he even forgot to reprimand her for bringing a dog to the rearing field, where coops and runs for game chicks stood in orderly rows. ‘Thought Mr Giles usually gave him his late-night run?’ He bent to pat Morgan’s head and fondle his ears and the spaniel whimpered with delight and wagged his tail so furiously that his rump wagged with it. ‘Gone out, has he?’

      ‘Gone out with her ladyship, and Miss Julia’s away into Holdenby for supper at the vicarage, so Cook said staff could eat cold tonight and I wasn’t needed to help out.’ She finished, aware she was blushing furiously on account of her being here, because Reuben had told her when she passed his gate that Tom was in the rearing field shutting up the coops for the night, and that if she hurried she might just catch him there.

      ‘Don’t know what you mean,’ she’d said, all airy-fairy as she strolled past, but she had run like the wind the moment she was out of sight of the cottage, desperate to see him. They were leaving for London early tomorrow morning, and if she didn’t see him tonight, she had thought despairingly, she didn’t know how she would live out fourteen days away from him.

      ‘There now. That’s the last of them done.’ He placed a board against the slats of the coop, leaning a brick against it. ‘I’ll walk you back, if you’d like.’

      ‘You don’t have to, Tom …’

      ‘No trouble. It’s on my way to the bothy.’ He smiled again. ‘Come on now, Morgan. Keep to heel,’ he said in the stern voice he kept for the dog, nodding his satisfaction as the spaniel did exactly as it was told. ‘So Lady Helen is visiting? Gone to Pendenys, so the coachman told me’

      ‘Mm. Sad for her, isn’t it, without Sir John? And she looked so beautiful tonight. We all stood in the hall to see her go – and so she’d know we wished her well, poor lady.

      ‘There was Cook and Tilda from the kitchen, and Bess. And Mary who waits at table, and me. And Miss Clitherow gave her a hand downstairs. That frock has a bit of a train on it, so she had to walk very straight, and careful.’ And proud, Alice thought, with her lovely head held high. ‘She smiled when she saw us, Tom, and we all gave her a curtsey, though she don’t ever expect it.’ Not like one she could mention who – though she wasn’t a lady and never would be, Cook said – had her servants bobbing up and down like corks in a bucket.

      ‘Not a lot of staff at Rowangarth,’ Tom offered his hand at the woodland stile. ‘Not for a gentleman’s house, I mean.’

      ‘Happen not, but we manage. After all, Sir Robert’s in India, Miss Julia’s no trouble at all and Mr Giles is as often as not shut up in the library. And with her ladyship being so long in mourning and her not going out or receiving callers or giving parties – well, we haven’t been overworked, exactly.’

      ‘Do you remember what it was like at Rowangarth, Alice, before Sir John was killed? I reckon there’d be some fine old shoots, here on the estate?’

      Alice didn’t know about the shooting, she said, but she remembered one or two parties.

      ‘They’d just had their silver wedding when the master was taken. My, there was half the Riding at that do. But I’d only been here a couple of months, then the house went into mourning when Sir John was killed.’

      ‘A motor accident, wasn’t it?’

      ‘Aye, and all the fault of King Edward and his speeding.’ All because the King had driven at sixty miles an hour, would you believe, along the Brighton road. After that, every motor owner had donned cap and gloves and goggles and tried his damnedest to do the same. But the Prince of Wales – they’d hardly got used to calling him King when he died – had waited so long to get his throne, Cook said, that he lived life fast and furious as if he’d known he’d get less than ten years out of his crowning. ‘Sir John tried to drive faster than the King, you see, and skidded at a bend, and –’

      ‘And that’s why her ladyship won’t have a motor,’ Tom finished, matter-of-factly.

      ‘That’s why. And Mr Giles and Miss Julia both able to drive and desperate for motors of their own and not daring to buy one. Miss Sutton in London has a motor – it’s at Aunt Sutton’s house we’ll be staying when we’re in London. Oh, who’d have thought it? Someone like me maiding Miss Julia!’

      ‘And СКАЧАТЬ