As Bryony entered, the duchess was seated by the fire. Her figure very stiff in its brown-and-white morning dress, her lips pressed tight with disapproval. “You’re late, missy.”
“I came as soon as I received word.”
“Indeed,” replied the duchess dryly. “Well, in future see that you improve your promptness.”
Bryony took a deep breath, determined not to give in to the anger which was already stirring in her heart. “Yes, your grace,” she said meekly.
“My son informs me that he has asked you to ride with him today.”
“He has, your grace.”
“Well, the weather may or may not permit such an expedition, but in any case you will only be permitted to go with him provided you have acquitted yourself satisfactorily this morning.”
“Yes, your grace.”
The duchess rose and went to the harpsichord, selecting a sheet of music and beckoning to Bryony. “We will commence by discovering how well you play, Miss St. Charles. This piece by Scarlatti will do well enough to find your faults.’’
With a sinking heart Bryony seated herself at the harpsichord, knowing full well that her playing would not please the duchess in the slightest. Her fingers trembled as they were poised above the black and white keys, and as she began to play she knew that she was right to be apprehensive, for she had seldom played worse. She touched many wrong keys and had to go over one part several times before she played it correctly. It was a dreadful performance, and as she finished she received the admonishment she fully expected.
“That
was the sum total of your talent? It was quite disgraceful. It seems that the services of a music master will be required, for you appear to be at a very elementary stage indeed. Your playing would hardly decorate a musical evening, would it?”
“No, your grace.”
“I am relieved that in this at least you know you are at fault.” The duchess returned to the chair by the fire. “Very well, now we will see how gracefully—or ungracefully—you can leave and enter a room. I noticed on your arrival that there was a certain clumsiness of style, which must be corrected. The woman who is to be Lady Sheringham cannot conduct herself like that creature known as a camel, which although I have never seen one, it would seem to me you most probably resemble.”
Bryony said nothing, and by her expression gave nothing away. This disagreeable old woman wanted to provoke her, wanted to be able to tell Sebastian that the wretched female he wished to marry was not making the slightest effort to improve herself. Well, Bryony St. Charles was not about to allow her that mean satisfaction.
The Duchess of Calborough had piously claimed that she would at all times deal fairly with her unwanted charge, but fairness did not come into it: she wanted to do all she could to prevent the marriage taking place, and this was the way she had chosen to do it. As Bryony rose to her feet to go to the door, she knew that the threat to her match with Sebastian Sheringham did not come only from his mistress but also from his aunt.
Knowing before she started that fault would be found, Bryony entered and left the room several times, and sure enough, the duchess criticized her on each occasion. She was then made to repeat the exercise many times more before this imagined fault was at last deemed to have been corrected. After this the duchess turned her attention to the business of sitting down and standing up again, making Bryony perform this simple movement on every chair in the room.
A raised eyebrow and a slight pursing of the lips greeted each exercise, and when all had been completed, the duchess proceeded to tell her that never in her life had she witnessed such clumsiness. Forced to repeat everything again, Bryony said nothing in protest, meekly obeying the duchess and being the model of willingness, and she had the considerable satisfaction of knowing that her polite cooperation was causing a great deal of irritation.
The morning went on in the same vein, with Bryony answering questions on etiquette, reading aloud, and singing. Nothing she did met with approval; fault was found with everything—even her singing, which she knew was beyond reproach. Her knowledge of general etiquette was pronounced so appalling that she was ordered to take a certain volume from the library and keep it with her at all times, so that if an idle moment should ever threaten, she would be able to read from its erudite pages and perhaps learn a little of how to go on in society.
Toward the end of the morning came an adjournment to the quadrangle, where the mist had now risen and the sun was shining. A carriage had been brought around for the purpose of discovering if Bryony St. Charles was capable of entering and alighting from such a vehicle without displaying her legs. Bryony’s cheeks flushed crimson as she emerged from the house, for there were several gardeners attending the plants in the conservatory, their view of the carriage unrestricted, and there were two more men repairing the guttering above the gallery windows. The carriage itself had a coachman, and the team was being soothed by a young groom. They all made little secret of their curiosity as the duchess instructed her pupil to commence getting into the carriage. The moment she sat on the soft upholstery she had to rise once more and alight.
The duchess criticized everything, and there was no one present who did not hear each unkind word. Bryony found the whole thing mortifying, but she tried not to give any hint of how she felt as she obediently did as she was told. It was very difficult, however, especially when she glanced over at the conservatory and saw Felix standing smiling in the doorway. Her cheeks flamed all the more and she looked swiftly away from him, trying to concentrate on what she was doing.
At last the dreadful morning was over and the duchess grudgingly satisfied that sufficient had been achieved for one day, although she warned Bryony that the following morning would see a repetition of all that had been done on this first occasion. She also grudgingly agreed that the ride with Felix could take place, although Bryony suspected that the woman did not have much choice in the matter, for if Felix wished her to accompany him, then that was what would be, for he was the master of the house and left his mother in no doubt of the fact. Having to give in to her son’s wish did not please the duchess, however, and she still managed to impose her will upon Bryony by insisting that before setting off she was to present herself for inspection.
After a late luncheon, therefore, Bryony went to her rooms to change into her riding habit. Anderson brought the stays which every lady was expected to wear on such occasions, but Bryony determinedly shook her head, for she loathed such restriction when riding. The maid had looked shocked at first, but then had once again given a hint that she was not as prim and reserved as the duchess had thought, for she grinned suddenly and removed the offending undergarment.
Before leaving, Bryony glanced at herself again in the mirror. Was it possible to tell she wore no stays? No, it wasn’t; she looked as prim and proper as any young lady was expected to be. She smiled a little, for it would be good to ride again. Riding was one of her great joys, and in Liskillen, where the secrecy of the woods kept out prying eyes, she had frequently dispensed not only with stays but also with a saddle, riding astride like a boy and making her horse gallop like the wind through the glades.
No doubt the duchess would throw a fit of the vapors if she learned of such improper conduct, conduct of which even Leon St. Charles had been kept strictly in the dark, but to Bryony it had been exhilarating and far, far better than the stiff, uncomfortable constraint of both stays and sidesaddle. Today she had no choice but to endure the sidesaddle, but the stays could go to the devil! She left her apartment to present herself to the duchess.
But she had reckoned without that lady’s eagle eye, which immediately perceived that all was not what it should be. A sudden sharp prod with her cane had revealed not whalebone but the softness of unrestricted flesh, and to her mortification, Bryony had been sent back to her rooms to put right the considerable wrong of which she was guilty. Anderson again produced the hated stays, and the business of dressing started from the beginning once more.
When Bryony presented herself to the duchess a second time, the probing cane discovered that all was now as it should be, and Bryony was allowed at last to go out to the quadrangle, where Felix was waiting; with the groom, who, again for propriety’s sake, would ride a little way behind them.
Felix smiled at her, and although he was so unlike Sebastian to look at, it was a smile which nevertheless reminded her of his cousin; but Sebastian’s smile set her at sixes and sevens, Felix’s did not.
He
assisted her up onto the chestnut mare that had been selected for her, and then mounted his own large thoroughbred. A moment later they were riding beneath the archway and down through the park in the direction of the folly, the groom following at a discreet distance.
As they neared the headland, they rode through tall woods of Scots pines, where rhododendrons seemed to bloom everywhere, and where cool, feathery ferns grew in every hollow. The promontory rose before them, bare of trees, and the tower seemed much taller now, its battlements soaring against the sky. As they left the trees behind, Bryony glanced back at the house. It gazed proudly seaward from its vantage point, and beside it she could see the cascade of fountains, the plumes of water very white against the dark green of the woods beyond.
They reached the folly and dismounted in its shadow. The tower rose from a rocky base where brambles and furze grew in tangled profusion, their thorny branches creeping down a shallow flight of steps leading to the heavy, studded door which was the only entrance. No one had been in for some time, for the branches were undisturbed, pressing against the weather-beaten wood as if trying to force it to open.
Brambles and furze were the only shrubs of any size to survive the winters in this unprotected place, for then gales swept mercilessly in from the open sea to strike this one point where the waters of the creek and the estuary converged. Then the water became a maelstrom, thundering against the rocks and surging along the quieter reaches inland. But it was peaceful now, the warm summer sun beating down from a clear sky as they left the horses and strolled to the edge of the cliff itself.
The tide was in, sighing softly against the jagged rocks at the foot of the precipice. Every narrow ledge was covered with gulls, fighting for a place among the trembling clumps of sea pinks, and on the very lip of the cliff there were the brilliant colors and star faces of mesembryanthemums.
There seemed to be color everywhere, thought Bryony, from the azure of the water and the sapphire of the sky to the tapestry of greens on the estuary’s far shore, where the woods swept right down to the water’s edge and the village of Helford spread brightly along the shore.
She gazed around, thinking that Polwithiel was surely the most beautiful place on earth and Felix the most fortunate of men to be its master.
He glanced at her. “You’re very quiet. Are you still miffed with me for my impertinence last night?”
“Should I be?”
He smiled. “Yes.”
“Then I am.”
“Which means I must once again beg your forgiveness. Shall I go on bended knee to implore you?”
She laughed. “That will not be necessary.”
“Good, for these white buckskins would not thank me for it, and Frederick would faint clear away if I presented them yet again with dirty knees.”
“Again? Are you always on your knees to ladies begging them to forgive your odiousness?”
“Sometimes,” he replied with amusement, “depending upon the situation.”
“By that I take it you mean how close you are to succeeding with them.”
“Dear me, how wretchedly talkative I was,” he murmured. “I shall have to leave the port alone in future.”
“Is that what it was? The port?”
He smiled. “No, but then, I believe I more than explained myself—or am I mistaken?”
“You explained yourself very well indeed. It was a salutary lesson, sir, and for that I will thank you.”
He smiled a little wryly. “I had not seen myself as a teacher, Miss St. Charles.”
“Nevertheless, that is what you were.”
“How very noble and decidedly dull of me.”
She eyed him for a moment. “You, sir, are neither of those things, as last night you went to considerable lengths to prove.”
He pretended to look hurt. “A fellow don’t mind being told he ain’t dull,” he protested in an affected tone, “but he ain’t so sure about being told he ain’t noble either!”
She smiled and looked away across the dazzling water. How good it would be to sit here with Sebastian....
Felix glanced at her pensive face. “It’s very lovely here, isn’t it?”
“Very.”
“And on a day like this, hard to imagine how treacherous the weather can be, summer and winter.”
“Treacherous? But isn’t the weather
everywhere
treacherous at one time or another?”
“Perhaps, but here, when the winters are so mild, it somehow seems particularly perfidious that the storms can be so violent that many ships have been lost on those rocks below where we stand right now. The
Falmouth Empress
was driven ashore at the beginning of this year.”
She gazed down at the rocks, so quiet now with the high tide lapping gently around them.
He smiled. “The local people regard such wrecks as God’s grace, of course.”
“God’s grace? What do you mean?”
“There’s a couplet, centuries old, which explains it exactly, the name of the ship concerned being changed on each occasion. ‘The
Falmouth Empress
here came ashore. She fed the hungry and clothed the poor.’ Before the excise men got to her, of course. That’s what is meant by God’s grace, Miss St. Charles.”
“And I suppose to them that is exactly what each wreck is,” she replied sympathetically.
“Don’t waste your pity on them, for they’re all thieves and looters, no matter how poor and hungry,” he replied a little coolly.