Regency Rumours/A Scandalous Mistress/Dishonour And Desire (57 page)

‘What? Confess it.’

‘That I’d more or less decided to accept you, in my dreams, far too soon for decency. I’ve never met a man like you before. I didn’t know such men existed, and I couldn’t let the rest of my life go without knowing what it was like to be yours. Truly yours. I have no more conditions, my love. I simply want to be with you, no one but you. Take me home, Chase, wherever home is.’

‘First thing in the morning, to freedom, to be my woman, my
prima donna,
my beautiful impulsive songbird.’

‘Is that going to be enough to keep you happy, Chase?’

Studying the question in her eyes, he saw how she trod upon shaky ground. She was referring, naturally, to his past. ‘I’m changed, too,’ he whispered. ‘I was searching for someone like you. Freedom is all very well, but I need someone special to share it with. You’ve seen me since we met. Have I given you the slightest reason to doubt me?’

‘Not once.’

‘Nor shall I ever. I have all I want.’

‘I have all I want, too, beloved, except … well … perhaps we should foist a family of wicked little Bostons upon the world, as wild as their father. Shall we?’

‘And as lovely and talented as their mother.’

The bolsters with the long silk tassels might have witnessed similarly loving scenes before, but these two were an exceptional pair with a love that had overcome some daunting obstacles, the narrowness of the settee being the least of them. As on the deserted moorland with only bird-calls and crickets for company, their spontaneous lovemaking was sweetened by the aroma of rain-washed earth that filled the room, banishing at last those doubts that had always kept something of her in reserve. Now, something deep within her soul opened like the last bright portal to her heart, and their union was joyful and laughing, teasing and talkative until the end, which was silent except for the breathless moans of pleasure.

As her body flew on its own soaring course, he was intense and fierce, and she was lifted and carried away into the breath-stopping vortex, clinging to him, crying for him not to let go of her.

‘Never, my love,’ he whispered. ‘You’re mine, and I love you, and I shall never let you go.’

In her overwhelming relief at having found answers
to her questions at last, it was only to be expected that there might be one which had been asked but not answered. What had he intended to do with the money he’d been so determined to win, one way or another, from her brother? Was that the way he earned his wealth? Was it put into a fund drawn on by abolitionists for the emancipation of slaves? Or was there something else?

In the room above them, Signor Cantoni had begun to pound out the exuberant rhythms of Handel’s
The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba,
reducing them to helpless laughter at its suitability as well as its galloping pace.

Caterina had never travelled further north than Derbyshire, so on the next day, their journey over the border into Yorkshire, the largest and most diverse of England’s counties, was for her all the more exciting because of its distance from home. So much for returning to Richmond, she thought, gleefully.

The southern part of the county harboured pockets of intense industry where valleys lay under palls of smoke punctuated by as many tall factory chimneys as church spires. Overlooking the town, they passed fields of cloth pegged onto tenter-frames, bright with new dyes. Beyond the sprawling mass below them, the hills beckoned, reminding them that there was much more to see than this. Even noisy bustling Leeds was no damper to Caterina’s spirits.

After an overnight stay there, the northern route took them across the River Aire through the tiny village of Chapel Allerton to the rural retreat of the Lascelles family at Harewood House, another little pile in the country that rivalled Chatsworth for sheer volume. The son of Baron Lascelles, another friend of Sir Chase’s, was
eager to offer them hospitality, to show them his art collection, his books, porcelain and rare furniture that must have taken care of many thousands of pounds. Their mutual friend, Mr William Turner, had been commissioned to paint views of the mansion in its idyllic setting, though Caterina thought these were more landscape than house. She was more interested in the ceilings painted by Angelica Kauffman.

From Harewood, the pleasant spa town of Harrogate was only about seven miles away, allowing them time to rest before travelling on past Ripley Castle to Fountain’s Abbey, which Mr Turner had told Caterina she must visit one day. She could hardly tear herself away from the ethereal beauty of the hallowed place, and there were tears in her eyes as she stood alone in the great ruined nave, listening to the haunting voices of unseen monks at prayer accompanied by the soft screech of pigeons’ wings. They stayed overnight at nearby Ripon, all five of them attending compline together in the glorious ancient cathedral, moved by the beauty of the choir, the stained glass, the vaulted ceilings.

It was a mere nine miles through wooded valleys and over dramatic hills to the market town of Masham where they had lunch before heading ever northwards through Newton-le-Willows and Scotton, by which time Caterina was wondering out loud if they might soon be in Scotland. She had not intended any sarcasm, but her geography had come unstuck by several hundred miles. They had been moving through the dales, valleys named after the rivers that flowed through them, Airedale, Nidderdale, Uredale and now Swaledale, and the day was far advanced as Sir Chase stopped their coaches, calling for them to look ahead.

There, rising on a hilltop above the horizon on the
far side of the River Swale, a castle towered into the sky like a giant fortress with the slate-roofed town clustered around its base, a water-wheel clattering on the river, a stone bridge, a sheer wooded cliff face dwarfing them.

‘Where are we?’ Caterina asked.

‘Home,’ said Sir Chase, taking her hand. ‘This is the original Richmond in the county of Richmondshire, the town after which the other Richmond in Surrey was named.’

‘Another Richmond?’ she breathed. ‘You have a home here, too?’

‘Aye. Bear with me a mile or so more, and I’ll show you. It’ll be hard work for the horses up the hill, so we’ll take it slowly. This is the Richmond Hill of the song. Do you remember it?
“On Richmond Hill there lives a lass, more bright than Mayday morn”.’
He began to sing in his rich bass, making her laugh as Signor Cantoni and Mr Pearson joined in, to the delight of the coachmen.

Leaving the picturesque limestone buildings and the castle of Richmond behind them, they saw glorious hillsides and valleys bathed in low golden sunshine that picked out, ahead of them, a white-gold mansion belonging to every architectural style from medieval to Georgian. It was a rambling stone-built place of two and three storeys with battlements, towers, pillars and porticoes, steps and balconies, lawns, terraces and a flash of glass from the kitchen hothouses, large enough to swallow Chester Hall several times over and still leave room for Number 18 Paradise Road. Further along the road, where a farmer drove his black-faced sheep, was a white stone wall with a gate between carved posts. ‘The gates to Boston Hall,’ he said.

‘But it’s so … so
huge,
’ said Caterina. ‘We might never meet from one day to the next. How will I ever find you?’

‘You won’t have to, sweetheart. I shall never be far away from you. Like it? Think you could live here in the summer months?’

‘Oh, Chase! I could live here all the year round. It’s so beautiful. I had no idea you had a place like this. This is paradise. Truly paradise.’

‘A fitting place, then, for Lady Boston. Come, my sweet. Let’s get home.’

Named in the fourteenth century when it was little more than a manor house with a hall, the present Boston Hall had expanded with every new generation who had come from the east coast of Yorkshire where, in the thriving port of that name, merchants had made their wealth. The Bostons had added to it ever since, partly owing to some exceedingly discriminating marriages to wealthy heiresses. Miss Caterina Chester was almost the only exception to that, and her husband could not have cared less at having chosen to turn his back on a debt of twenty-thousand guineas.

The question about what he had intended to do with it was overlooked in those early days while every moment was taken up with exploring the dozens of rooms from attic and turret to food-store and cellar, from stable to ice-house and hothouse. Here was enough space to spare for every activity, and the question of which room to re-decorate first and which to make into guest rooms, where to add extra bathrooms and how to modernise the kitchens took up all of those early days.

Shopping excursions into Richmond were fun and very productive, but best of all was to ride freely over the Boston acres and to talk with the estate workers and Sir Chase. Daily, he took her out in his high curricle to teach her to drive four-in-hand, each day making new
discoveries about her abilities and how to make her adored husband happier than ever.

Hours were spent with Signor Cantoni, too, for he had found a new lilt to her tone that beguiled him, and not for a moment did he regret having accepted the position of tutor when he had his own suite of rooms into which the sun flooded each morning. One morning, however, he found his beautiful pupil unusually preoccupied when they met for her daily practice. She stood by the tall window that looked out over a small Italianate lake, responding eventually to his third greeting with a stuttered one of her own, a lace handkerchief that was no longer square twisted around her fingers.

‘My lady?’ he said, softly. ‘You are not well? Shall we give the lesson a miss?’

‘Er … yes … what? Oh, I beg your pardon, signor. Miss it? No, all’s well,’ she said, brightly. A frown followed on, quite quickly.

‘You’ve seen something?’ he said, looking where her eyes led.

He was a close friend, an adviser, and caring. He would know what to do, or not to do. ‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘I have.’

‘Where?’ He continued to look.

‘No, not out there. Just now. Someone came in.’

‘In here? Who, my lady? Was it a servant?’

‘I don’t know … exactly … who she is. She is black-skinned, signor. A beautiful, striking young woman with the loveliest complexion like ebony, and large eyes, and she wore a bright turban to cover her hair.’

‘Yes? Did she speak to you?’

‘No, she didn’t expect me to be here. When she saw me she stepped back again, but her little child darted forward into the room and she had to run to catch him
and carry him out, wriggling. He was an adorable infant, but not as black as she.’

‘A mulatto, my lady? That’s what they call halfblack, half-white children born of mixed parentage. Coffee-coloured. Very attractive.’

‘That’s it. Mixed parentage. Yes.’

‘A … ah!’ The sound was drawn out like a voice exercise. ‘I see. And you are thinking that this lady ought to be having a white husband somewhere on the estate. Well, you could ask Sir Chase. He’ll know.’

‘No,
signor.
I cannot ask him.’

‘May I ask why?’

‘Because,’ she whispered, ‘he may tell me what I cannot bear to hear.’

The gentle Italian was silent, understanding her dilemma. Many men had liaisons before marriage to which wives were obliged to turn a blind eye. ‘Perhaps I can find out for you,’ he said, eventually. ‘If you would give me permission, I would do it discreetly.’

‘You are the most discreet of men,
signor.
Yes, you could do it. There would be no repercussions, but I need to know, you see.’

‘Leave it to me. It may not be what you fear.’

‘Thank you,
signor.
’

Later that same day, Signor Cantoni met her on the grand staircase as they went down to the dining-room and, by the absence of his usual smile, she could tell that his news was not what she had hoped to hear.

‘Signor?’
she said, leading him round the curve of the bannister to a seat made for two. ‘Will you sit?’

His enquiries, he told her, had revealed that there was no husband, white or otherwise, but that the woman, whose name was Mara, had come to live at Boston Hall almost two years ago and had given birth seven months
later to her half-caste child, Jack. No one had ever bothered to ask who the child’s father was because she had lived as the slave of someone in London, which concerned no one but Mara herself and, presumably, Sir Chase. More than that no one knew, or seemed to care. They all liked her and Jack, and she lived in a small cottage on the estate, coming to the hall every day with her child to fill the house with cut flowers and to decorate the dining table in the absence of a mistress. The
signor’s
informant assumed that Mara’s position would be redundant, and perhaps that’s why she had been seeking Sir Chase, to ask for some clarification.

The centrepieces on the dining table that evening came under closer scrutiny than ever before, and Caterina was bound to admit that whoever had arranged the assortment of flowers, fruit and leaves, shells and small ornaments from the house, had an outstanding creative flair. She could not bring herself to ask Sir Chase who was responsible, for she did not want to hear him speak the woman’s name.

The food, always so succulent, tasted of nothing, and the terrible hurt that weighed like lead in her heart made it difficult for her to swallow. Afterwards, when Sir Chase asked her what had happened to her appetite, she made the excuse that her period had begun, which she had once told herself she would never do. And that night, she lay alone in her beautiful white-and-blue room with cherubs painted on the ceiling and tears washing onto the cotton pillowcase. In spite of her vow, she
was
weeping for a man she loved more than life itself. The woman was a beauty. He would see the child Jack, and he would remember what it had taken to make such a beautiful child, and she, Caterina, would have to hold her tongue and pretend not to notice any of it, even while it broke her heart in two.

Her pretence to be unwell had not been believed, as she thought it had, but Sir Chase’s own observations had more to back them up when Signor Cantoni spoke some soft words to him as they wished each other a good-night on the first-floor landing after a game of billiards. What the tender-hearted and passionate Italian had to say was accepted with a frown, a nod of the head, and a word of thanks.