I’ll Bring You Buttercups. Elizabeth Elgin

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      ‘Not even when it’s true? They were talking about it in the stables. I heard them. The man’s a fool. Why can’t he do his carrying-on in London, though I suppose he’s at it there, too, when it gets too hot for him around here.’

      ‘I think you’re right. One of these days, Elliot will find himself in real trouble.’

      ‘Which he’ll be promptly bought out of with old Nathan’s money.’

      ‘I fear so.’ She stirred her tea reflectively. ‘What that young man needs is a good whipping, and more’s the pity his father doesn’t give him one before he’s beyond redemption.’

      ‘Don’t blame his father. Like me, Uncle Edward was born a second son.’

      ‘And second sons must shift for themselves – I know; though it seems that both you and your uncle would have been better suited to the academic life. For Edward it was a choice of the army or the Church – so the poor man chose Clementina.’

      ‘Aunt Clemmy chose him, don’t you mean?’ Giles laughed, making his mother wonder why this serious, bookish son of hers didn’t laugh more often, and why he didn’t marry and give her grandchildren; for it seemed that her other son, whose duty it was to provide an heir, had little intention of doing so in the foreseeable future.

      ‘Must go, dearest,’ Giles kissed his mother’s cheek with affection, ‘and give Morgan his outing. When will Hawthorn be back?’

      ‘Not for a while yet; and Giles,’ Helen murmured, eyeing his pocket with mock severity, ‘that animal will always be fat if you insist on spoiling him with titbits.’

      ‘Just a macaroon. He’s very fond of them.’ He grinned, boyishly disarming, which made his mother love him all the more and send up a small prayer of thanks that her younger son at least did not prefer India to the springtime greenness of Rowangarth.

      Rowangarth. So dear to her. Built more than three hundred years ago at the time of King James’s dissertation on witches and the evils of their craft. Small, by some standards, for the home of a gentleman of ancient title, but built square and solid against the northern weather, and with a rowan tree planted at all four aspects of the house, for witches feared the rowan tree and gave it a wide berth, their early ancestor had reasoned. And should a rowan tree die of age or be uprooted in a high wind, another was always planted in its place. It was still the custom, and thus far the Suttons had prospered, having had no generation without a male heir, so the descent was direct and ever would be, Helen Sutton fervently hoped. And above all else, Rowangarth was a happy place in which to live – which was more than could be said for her brother-in-law’s home, if one could call Pendenys Place a home.

      ‘Pendenys,’ she murmured, shaking her head. Completed little more than twenty-five years ago, the newness was still on it, with its carefully arranged trees little more than saplings still, and the house proud and cold and loveless. It made her feel sorry for her husband’s younger brother, and the need for him to love where money lay. Edward Sutton had not been cut out for clerical orders, and even to think of being a soldier had left him cold with apprehension. So he had married Clementina, daughter of Nathan Elliot, an Ironmaster of prodigious wealth, whose ambitions for his only child were boundless. Thus brass, so local talk insisted, had married breeding, as so often happened these days.

      Clementina had come to Edward Sutton possessed of a dowry that built Pendenys Place. The house had been named for Clementina’s grandmother, Cornish-born Mary Anne Pendennis who, talk had it, had scrimped and saved and even taken in washing to help fund that first, long-ago Elliot foundry.

      Yet Clementina had done her duty by her marriage contract, Helen admitted with scrupulous fairness, and had given Edward three sons in as many years, then straight away closed her bedroom door to him, enabling him to live his own life again, more or less, and return, duty done, to his beloved books. And his wife, secure in her loveless marriage, ruled Pendenys like the martinet she was, doing exactly as she pleased, for it was she who paid the piper.

      Helen clucked impatiently, wishing Clementina would mellow just a little, be less belligerent. Clemmy was so insular; could not forgive anyone she deemed better born than herself; still clung unconsciously to her roots and sheltered behind the power her father’s money gave her. Defiantly, she had called her first son Elliot, determined her maiden name should not be forgotten; her second-born she named for her father, Nathan, and her third child for her father’s father, Albert. Her eldest son wanted for nothing, and coveted only one thing: the knighthood his father had not received, despite the many and bountiful donations made by his mother to Queen Victoria’s favourite charities.

      Now Elliot secretly hoped that pestilence would strike down his Rowangarth cousins Robert and Giles, thus ensuring the baronetcy would pass, eventually, to him. Not, Helen frowned, that she could be sure that Elliot thought it, but she was as certain as she could be that he did.

      ‘And her servants,’ Helen confided to the vase of lilac reflected in the window-table. ‘She screams at her servants, too.’

      Clementina harangued her domestic staff as no lady would ever do. Reprimands to servants should be given to the housekeeper to pass on, for a lady never stooped to such behaviour. Not ever, Helen sighed. And now, she supposed, she must return Clementina’s kindness – if kindness the recent dinner invitation to Pendenys had been – and ask her to Rowangarth. And since her husband would find an excuse to decline, he being so embarrassed by his wife’s loud voice, and since it always left him pained to visit the home he had been born in; it would be Elliot Sutton who would accompany his mother to Rowangarth, and his braying laugh and doubtful jokes would be a discomfort to all, except to his doting mother.

      Helen set down her cup. The tea had gone cold and she decided against sending for a fresh pot. The servants would be taking their own tea now, and it wasn’t kind to send one of them hurrying to answer her ring.

      She sighed again, tears rising to her eyes. Instantly, she blinked them away. ‘Oh, John,’ she whispered to the empty room, ‘I do so miss you, my dearest.’

      Alice held the flat-iron an inch from her cheek, satisfying herself it was hot enough, then rubbed it in the tray of powdered bathbrick to clean and polish it, relieved that Miss Julia’s blue costume had travelled well, with hardly a crease in it to press out.

      She glanced around the kitchen, easily the largest room in the house, at the brown sinkstone and shining brass taps; at the wooden plate rack above it; the red-tiled floor and the white, bright paintwork. All this pretty little house was white. It was the new fashion, Julia said. There was white furniture, too, in the bedrooms, and pots and pots of ferns: aspidistras were completely out of favour, now. It was so different, this light, bright house compared to Rowangarth in the far-away north.

      To recall her home – for Rowangarth was her home now, and she wanted never to leave it, except with Tom – brought a pang of longing for the ages-old house that lay gently in a fold of the hills, sheltered and secure.

      Rowangarth had been built with mellow stone, pillaged from a roofless priory nearby. It was an early Jacobean house, with mullioned windows and twisted chimneys. Inside there was oak in plenty – wall panels, staircases and uneven floorboards – and rooms built smaller for warmth in winter yet with high, wide windows to let in the summer sun. Rowangarth smelled of wax polish and musty tapestries and wood fires, and of smoke, too, when the wind blew from the south – which wasn’t often – hitting Holdenby Pike and gusting down chimneys to send smoke and soot billowing. But mostly the wind blew from the north-east; a fire-whipping wind that sucked smoke from the ancient flues and reddened fires and heated ovens with no bother at all. Rowangarth СКАЧАТЬ