Regency Rumours/A Scandalous Mistress/Dishonour And Desire (52 page)

‘You wouldn’t,’ he said. ‘This place is barely on the map. I don’t think we’ve been through a toll-gate for miles.’

‘Another of your mama’s houses?’

‘Not this time. We’ll pay a visit to some old friends of mine, Thomas and Alice Tolby. He’s a Leicester merchant. A hosier.’

‘Ah, stockings. He’ll be successful, I suppose.’

‘Take a look for yourself, my lady.’

They had been travelling through wooded slopes and pasture land where cows stood in the shade or wallowed knee-deep in streams but, as the horses slowed to a walk, thatched cottages appeared on the fringe of the village, a mill and a pond with ducks, a small church and, through wrought-iron gates, a drive leading to an imposing early Georgian house, the home of one of Leicester’s wealthiest merchants dealing in the town’s main product. Northampton made shoes, Leicester made hosiery.

As a personal friend of Sir Chase, Thomas Tolby was delighted by the unexpected visit and by the chance to meet the new bride. A lively, eloquent man, he was tall and sandy-haired with every outward sign of prosperity in his well-cut sober dress, and if he was amazed by his friend’s plunge into wedlock after all the active bachelor years, he was too polite to let it show. His wife, a lady of generous nature and proportions, could not contain her excitement at the prospect of entertaining them, even though their stay was to be brief.

Theirs was a stylish three-storey house built of mellow brick topped with slates of a deeper lichen-covered orange, and it was only to be expected that, inside, the merchant and his jolly wife should have no inhibitions about displaying what they had earned. Restraint was not a concept they entertained, the high ceilings providing them with more space in which to cram their paintings, ormulu mirrors, urns and showcases, tables of every shape and size and dressers loaded with silverware and Sèvres china.

Naturally, for one so prosperous, there was no aspect of commerce about which Mr Tolby was unfamiliar. It was his duty, he told his guests, to know what was going on, even if it was not going on in his neck of the woods. ‘Dissent,’ he told them at dinner.

Caterina would rather have settled for a less controversial topic over a meal as sumptuous as the one prepared by Alice Tolby, but she was not in a position to object.

‘Yes, dissenters,’ he emphasised, shovelling into his mouth a forkful of slithery sweetbreads. ‘Luddites, they’re calling themselves. Terrible damage they’re doing. Fires, break-ins, wrecking machinery and riots. That’s what the Prime Minister’s assassination was all
about, you know, Chase. Protests against the high price of food and low wages. Oh, yes—’he gulped down another forkful ‘—the murderer may well have been insane, as they say, but perhaps the poor devil had had enough of such things, huge losses, factories and men’s livelihoods going down the pan.’

‘Thomas … please!’

‘Beg pardon, m’dear.’ He laid his fork down, glaring with menace at the last reprieved sweetbread. ‘It’s not happening to my business, I need hardly say. I pay the best prices and I don’t sell short, Chase. You know me.’

Sir Chase nodded.

‘But it’s happening all over the country. Ten years of bad harvests and food doubling in price, machines taking over from handworkers. What does the government expect when someone takes a shot at the man at the top? Up here in Leicestershire, the men are calling the murderer a martyr, and they’ve been rioting for years to get some help, as they have everywhere up north. Manchester alone has lost some of its biggest mills due to fires and riots in the past few months, not to mention all-out strikes. There are few mill owners who can survive that kind of punishment.’

‘Cotton mills, Mr Tolby?’

‘That’s right, Lady Boston. Somebody’s losing a lot of money up there.’ He looked round the table. ‘Signor Cantoni, sir. Will you try a little roast salmon from our own stretch of the river?’

Signor Cantoni dabbed gently at his lips with his napkin, smiling his refusal. He had known Caterina long enough to know that her aunt, Lady Elyot, was a daughter of the Manchester Carr dynasty, owners of one of the two largest cotton-printing mills. He knew what the next question would be.

‘The spinning mills, Mr Tolby? Or the printing mills?’

From the head of the table, Thomas Tolby leaned towards Caterina as if he were about to address a meeting of traders. ‘Well, you know, it makes very little difference whether they spin it, weave it or print it. If
one
goes out of action, they
all
do, you see? Raw cotton imported through Liverpool can’t be processed until the machines are repaired and the men get back to work. Ship owners can’t sell the stuff. It’ll sit in the warehouses until they can get rid of it, and let’s hope they’re insured.’

‘And if they’re not?’

He pulled a wry face. ‘If they’re not, Lady Boston, they’re fools that deserve all they get. Now, Alice, my love, is it time this cover was removed?’

If Stephen Chester had heard this damning opinion as he bumped and jolted wearily into the town of Leicester at about the same time as his daughter was eating her delicious pineapple flummery, he would probably have wondered why, after such apparent good fortune, things had begun to turn against him. He had, after all, just shipped the first of three valuable cargoes of raw cotton into Liverpool expecting to sell it to the highest bidder.

Having failed to hear any mention of Sir Chase Boston’s equipage at any of the coaching inns, he had given up all hope of finding them in that area. He would have to chase up to Buxton behind or ahead of them if he wanted to catch the man before he could do any harm with the stolen papers. He prayed that Sir Chase would not tell Caterina about what he’d discovered, for that would set her even more against him, her father.

***

Caterina’s feelings towards her father, however, were vacillating rather strangely between extreme disaffection and concern, for she had not needed to ask any more questions about cotton to understand that he was about to lose several cargoes of the stuff in a very short time unless he had a steady market unaffected by the troubles. Which did not seem likely when he was down in Surrey instead of up in Lancashire. He would have an agent and Harry, of course, up in Liverpool, but news travelled only at the speed of a mail coach.

Her first reaction to the impending catastrophe was to think that it served him right and that, whatever his losses, they could never be as severe as those of the poor wretches whose lives he had traded without a shred of conscience. Underlying this was a streak of sympathy for him, for he was still her father and she had once given and received his love as unconditionally as a child, with no questions asked.

That night, she and Chase were accommodated in the same bedroom, and it was he, when they were left alone, who asked if she wanted him to sleep on the chaise longue. Weary and abstracted, she shook her head, which he found difficult to interpret. ‘What is it, my beauty?’ he said. ‘Is it about the Manchester mills? You’re concerned for your aunt?’

‘She doesn’t own the cotton-printing mills,’ she replied, staring at herself in the dressing-table mirror. ‘They were inherited by her cousin. Her parents received a good income from them at one time, I believe.’

‘So what’s bothering you, sweetheart?’

She could not explain it to him. She was free now; free from her father and all the remaining responsibilities for Sara’s happiness, free of restrictions, free
to enjoy herself with a man who filled her dreams, but who still had much to answer for. She was too tired to explain, too afraid to ask, or to receive the answers. Instead, she turned to hold out her arms, knowing that he would immediately come to kneel by her side, to place his great head against her breast, clasp his arms around her hips and remain there as she caressed his hair. He might even have known what was tumbling through her mind.

‘Trust me,’ he whispered.

She smiled at that, having been warned years ago never to trust a man who said
trust me.
This time was different, and cynicism was not appropriate, and when he picked her up and carried her to the bed, she lay with her doubts and with him, unable to give herself, yet just as unable to deny him the comfort of her presence by his side.

But in the small hours of the night, she awoke from a disturbing part-remembered dream to find that tears were coursing down her cheeks, if not for herself then surely for the wonderful man whose loving she craved, whose arms she had only to touch to feel them wrapping her, whose body she was chastising for personal hurts that seemed daily to matter less and less.

She could not deny that she was already gaining everything she had ever wanted except the trust she had been asked for, which she could not find. She had once vowed never to shed another tear for a man, but now her dreaming had done it without her permission. Sleepily, she tried to excuse herself.

Even half-asleep, Chase was alert to her distress and, easing her into the warm haven of his arms, he smoothed her forehead and wiped her face with the sheet, telling her that she was his wonderful tender-hearted
woman, that he had paid a high price for her, half as much as the Prince Regent’s Royal Stables but then, she came without the domes and the fancy fretwork. Tomorrow, he told her, they would go on to the Duke of Devonshire’s place at Chatsworth instead of directly to Buxton, and they would ride on horseback over the moors. Could Buxton wait a few more days, he wanted to know?

Buxton could wait, she agreed, snuggling into his embrace.

Borrowing two strong hunters from his friend and with Caterina in possession of two pairs of white silk embroidered stockings, they left Wigston Magna rather later than intended with the two coaches. They would travel together as far as Derby before separating, the coaches to go directly to Chatsworth House by the easier route, the two riders to take a detour via Ashbourne over the hills and moors. It was time, Sir Chase remarked very quietly, that she filled her lungs with good Derbyshire air again, though his private smile made her blush.

The three occupants of the coach, however, were chattering too much to notice the dusty old carriage that was being repaired in the smithy at Belper, just beyond Derby. It had had a brief but disastrous encounter with an ox-team, and now its very disgruntled owner was sinking his problems in the taproom of the local inn.

Along the other route taken by the riders, the pleasant village of Ashbourne led them over the hills into the valley of the River Dove, passing some attractive Georgian houses and the Black’s Head Inn, which reminded Caterina yet again of her father’s disgraceful trade. She
wished he, too, could have been a hosier. But the lure of the rugged landscape, the magnificent views in every direction, brooding rocks, distant blue-greys changing to hazy mauve, the cry of curlews and the rattle of grasshoppers, clouds like soft veils dragged carelessly across hills to tear holes and let in shafts of brilliant sunlight, all this filtered through Caterina’s eyes and heart. Softening, and coming dangerously close to the kind of happiness she could ill afford with so many recent grievances to cling to, she nevertheless broke into a gentle humming, then to singing, then to rest the horses beside a stream to listen to its song through limestone rocks.

Pulling off his coat and cravat, Chase folded them into a bundle behind his saddle while Caterina watched admiringly as he rolled up his sleeves, baring his forearms to the buffeting wind and the sun’s warmth. His thick hair lifted and settled, transforming the suave drawing-room beau into a windswept local farmer viewing his stock from the hilltops, in harmony with the elements. A nibbling sheep cropped its way close to where they sat, and when Chase called to it, it replied with an identical baa-aa and a curious stare of amber slit with black. Laughing, they held hands and fell backwards into the wiry turf, covered by a canopy of scudding clouds.

Veering north-east towards the Duke of Devonshire’s villages, they reached a plateau well above the surrounding countryside that erupted into a large broken ring of high mounds, a ditch, and an inner raised circle where slabs of fallen stone lay on their sides, multicoloured with lichens and moss. It was a place Caterina knew well.

‘It’s known locally as Arbor Low,’ she said, dismounting.

‘I used to come here for picnics, and to play hide and seek. Sometimes I came out here on my own to sing and …’ Unsure of how she was sounding, she walked away through one of the gaps in the bank, passing between the rocks to stand in the centre, overcome by memories of her childhood.

‘And what?’ Chase called, dismounting and tying the reins together.

She remained with her back to him. ‘To dance,’ she said, diffidently. ‘But I was a child then. I had little else on my mind except how to be happy.’

The outer bank was higher than most men, but Chase loped up to the top to stand on its rim and view the rolling countryside below. ‘They certainly chose their places well, those people,’ he called to her.

‘What people?’

‘The people of the Bronze Age. This place is even earlier than Old Sarum. Remember?’ He went to meet her, smiling at the memory of that day. ‘Remember how you tried to appear not-interested while you tied yourself in knots to hear what I was saying at the same time? Remember reading it up with a guidebook from Donaldson’s Library in Brighton?’

‘You were not supposed to know that,’ she scolded, recalling so clearly the anger that would not allow even a hint of his magic to affect her. She was still trying to resist it, though they both knew he was winning, day by day, moment by moment. She felt his arm steal around her waist and pull her back against him, his hands spreading to hold her secure, the scent of his cool skin caressing her cheek.

‘So,’ he whispered, ‘now you can redeem yourself, proud woman. Dance for me the way you used to when you had so little else on your mind but happiness.’

‘No, I cannot.’

‘What shall it be, a minuet? The Dashing White Sergeant? A hornpipe?’

‘No,’ she scoffed. ‘Not that kind of dance.’

‘What kind? A wild pagan dance, was it? Come, I can do that, too. Come on … come!’ Taking her by the hand, he sat her on the nearest stone. ‘You must remove your shoes to feel the earth under your feet. Off with them.’ So saying, he pulled off his own boots and stockings and took her hand to lead her to the outer edge of the stones to begin a slowly swaying seductive measure, weaving like a ribbon through them, in and out, circling and moving on. ‘Did you sing, too?’ he said, drawing her on, waving his arms in a stately flow.