The Westerby Inheritance (2 page)

Sometimes, when he was in his cups, the Marquess would stare at Jane and say she grew more like her mother each day. And each time Jane would slip away and study her face in the old greenish looking-glass but fail to see any likeness. Her mother had been a brunette of magnificent and Junoesque proportions with creamy skin, large, liquid eyes, and a long, straight nose. Jane was very small, little over five feet in height. She had inherited her mother’s masses of thick brown hair, but her eyes were long and tilted and gray. Her face was white and thin, with a pointed chin and strange thin eyebrows which flew up to her hairline. Some gallant in the days of their wealth had said she looked exactly like a fairy, with her strange eyes like seawater on a winter’s day, and her strange brows. Jane often dreamed of a rich husband with all the fervor and passion of a
ton-nish
mama launching her daughter on the London Season.

“J
ANE
!” The voice sent the pigeons flying again, up round the fantastic chimneys of the house. Jane sighed and climbed down from her perch. There was no rich husband, and in any case, she, Jane, was not possessed of enough beauty to attract such a suitor. Perhaps she would marry Mr. Plumb with his fat red face and fat red hands, and beget fat red children.

Hetty, Marchioness of Westerby, spied Jane’s slight figure hurrying back across the fields and turned and went into the house. She was looking forward to her evening at the Bentleys’ with her usual insoucionce. She was in her thirty-second year, a brown-faced woman with flashing dark eyes and a mane of coarse black hair. She was content with her lot. A drunken husband was one of the realities of life, and Hetty, Marchioness of Westerby, certainly knew all about realities. She was happy that this charming and dissolute lord had taken her away from her brutal father and bullying brothers. She had never had any social life to speak of and so did not miss the almost total absence of it now.

The gentry had come to call in the first weeks of their marriage, and also a few members of the aristocracy. But in an age when moderation was all and when enthusiasm was considered a dirty word, Hetty was found lacking. Her blowsy looks and her wild swings of mood from elation to drunken bad temper had shocked them in the extreme, and to her relief they ceased to call. When her husband occasionally won a card game, she cheerfully spent the money on hiring help from the village of Westerby to clean the house, and ordered a bale of silk so that Jane could fashion gowns for the female members of the household. But the money never lasted long.

She walked into the kitchen and stood with her hands on her hips and stared at her husband. He was glaring at a cup of coffee, having been in the process of sobering himself up for the evening ahead.

He was still a handsome man, despite the marks of dissipation on his face. He had piercing blue eyes and an acquiline nose. His full-bottomed wig hung crazily from the knob of one of the kitchen chairs, and his blond hair was cropped close to his head. He was dressed in an old-fashioned silk coat with tarnished buttons and cuffs so large they stretched up to his elbows. The buckles of his knee breeches were unfastened, and his shoes were cracked and scuffed.

“’Fore George,” he groaned as he saw his wife. “A pint of ale would set me to rights.”

“No,” said Hetty firmly. “You ain’t getting naught but coffee. You made me promise on the childer’s heads not to let you touch nothing strong.”

Hetty beamed fondly at her two “childer,” who were sitting among the ashes of the uncleaned hearth, making dolls out of pieces of straw. Sally, the eldest, had inherited her mother’s gypsy good looks, but Betty, her sister, was blond and blue-eyed, causing the locals to hint that perhaps his lordship had savored Hetty’s favors while she was still wed to the blacksmith.

Both girls started whining for food, and Hetty looked at them impatiently. “Why can’t you be like Jane?” she complained. “She hardly eats nothing, she don’t.”

“But look how small and skinny she is, Ma,” pointed out Sally. “I h’an’t had nothing since berkerfest.”

“Stow that noise!” said the Marquess, clutching his head. “Damned whining, pesky brats.”

“There, there, love,” said his wife with a tolerant smile. “I’ll find something to make it better.”

She sidled along the table toward him and leaned her hip on the side of his arm. He looked up at her. Her eyes were glowing, and her heavy breasts were bursting from the bodice of her purple gown. She was not wearing a neckerchief, and her breasts were exposed almost to the nipples.

His wandering hand fumbled at the back of her skirt.

Jane entered and looked at the happy pair coldly. With all the chilly intolerance of her seventeen years, she considered their marital lust disgusting. It was something, she felt, that they should have grown out of. There was no sign of food on the table and, from the look on her stepmama’s face, cooking was the farthest thing from her thoughts. Jane seized a broom from the corner and made her escape, and shortly afterward she could be heard upstairs, noisily sweeping the bedrooms.

Hetty looked down at her two children and jerked her head. “Out!” she said.

“Oh, Ma!” wailed Betty. “We h’an’t had nothing to eat, and I’m ravishing.”

“Ravenous,” corrected her stepfather mechanically.

Hetty swung her hips into the larder and returned with a gingerbread cake and a pot of strawberry jam. “Take yourselves off,” she said with a grin, “and you can have all of that.”

Betty’s eyes glistened, but she hesitated. Unlike Sally, she was rather in awe of her stepsister. “Jane says as how I won’t have no teeth an I eat sweetmeats,” she said.

“Then say a prayer after you’ve eaten it, and the good Lord’ll see the devil don’t get your teeth,” said Hetty cheerfully, hustling them toward the door. Betty beamed her relief. Ma always had a reply to the most difficult and worrying of questions.

Hetty slammed the door and leaned against it. “Now, my lord,” she began, smiling slyly. But the Marquess was already unbuttoning his breeches. Hetty thought longingly of that feather bed in their room. But prim Jane would be busy with the broom, and prim Jane would not approve.

Jane shook the broom out of the upstairs window. A few flakes of snow were beginning to fall. Good! Perhaps they might not have to go. She longed all the same to see her old home, although she dreaded the Bentleys’ patronizing scorn.

Across the darkening fields, bordered on one side by the black line of the woods, lay the village of Westerby, a handful of thatched cottages and a square church. Lights were already beginning to twinkle in the windows.

Jane turned from the window and walked from her father’s bedroom to the sparsely furnished room she shared with her stepsisters. That had been one of the hardest things to endure—not having a room of her own. Betty had nightmares, and Sally was dirty and messy and refused to do anything to correct either fault. It was simply furnished with a large fourposter bed, which she shared with the two girls, an oval mirror above the chipped marble washstand, and two hard chairs. A large closet in the corner served as a wardrobe, and three old brassbound trunks as drawers for underclothes.

Papa’s last win at cards had fortunately been of recent date, so there were new dresses to wear and plenty of paint and pomatum and powder. Hetty always saw that the frivolities of life were attended to.

Although London was so near, it was hard to find out what the current fashions were. Jane’s only friend was Philadelphia Syms, the vicar’s daughter, whose mind was wholly bent on fashion. Philadelphia was a year older than Jane and longed to be able to see one of the “fashion babies” from Paris. The fashion babies were dolls dressed in the current Parisian mode, which were occasionally displayed in London by the French Queen’s dressmaker. Like Jane, Philadelphia was a clever needlewoman and had helped Jane make the gowns for the annual visit to the Bentleys. Like Jane, the worldly Philadelphia despised the Bentleys and fostered Jane’s dreams of revenge as they plied their needles in the vicar’s comfortable parlor. The vicar was a surprisingly devout man for his times, taking his religious duties seriously instead of neglecting them for the pleasures of the gun and rod like most of the other Anglican clergy. He was also a very innocent man and was unaware of the frivolous turn of mind of his only daughter.

Philadelphia had but one ambition: to somehow get invited to London on a visit and secure herself a rich husband who would be able to furnish her with a comfortable home and the latest in Parisian modes. She sometimes seemed to Jane a little mercenary in her outlook, but, on the other hand, Jane herself longed for a rich husband to restore her father’s estates, and the two girls’ somewhat parallel ambitions kept them close friends.

The vicar’s wife was a haughty lady who did not approve of Jane, and although she tolerated the girl’s visits, she made sure that Jane was never invited to any of the social functions at the vicarage. A social invitation to Jane meant that Jane’s stepmother might come too, and Mrs. Syms felt sure that the local gentry would shun the vicarage if they thought there was a chance they might have to socialize with the boisterous and vulgar Hetty.

The vicar was moderately wealthy, owning two farms as well as his large and spacious vicarage, and he kept his own carriage and pair.

Both Philadelphia and Jane were avid readers of novels, particularly the ones that dealt with gothic castles in unheard-of countries, haunted by impossible ghosts.

Jane and Philadelphia had been at school together for two whole blissful years before Jane’s father had gambled away his inheritance. They had been sent to Mistress Hampton’s boarding school in Tunbridge Wells, where they were furnished with textbooks and largely expected to tutor themselves. They had left after two years with a smattering of the Italian language, a vague knowledge of geography, and whole volumes of girlish gossip.

Jane had left in disgrace because her school fees had not been paid, but Philadelphia had left because she was tired of school and because she was mostly able to talk her parents into letting her have her way.

Jane thought Philadelphia was the prettiest girl she had ever seen, with her heavy ash-blond hair and creamy skin and wide blue eyes. Philadelphia thought so too.

“I wish she were going with me this evening,” mused Jane, crossing to the window and staring hopefully out. Only a few flakes were falling. There would be no moon, but since the distance to the Bentleys’ was short, there would be nothing to cancel the impending visit.

The noisy opening of the kitchen door downstairs and a shriek of laughter from Hetty heralded the end of the Marquess’s amorous afternoon. Jane’s lip curled in distaste. Her mind could not envisage what they had been up to, but she knew it was something to do with all that pawing and petting that went on between the married couple. The sighings and sobbings of the heroines in the novels she read seemed just as strange. Love, if it did exist, was all very well for those who could afford it. Jane could not.

It was time to prepare for the evening—the evening when once again she would see her home.

It was to be an evening that fired her ambitions as they never had been fired before.

The snow had stopped falling and the countryside stretched bleak and white all the way to Eppington Chase, former home of the Westerbys. The Bentleys had sent a carriage and outriders to escort their guests. The Marquess, an elegant figure in his antique finery, received the first shock of the evening.

For it was not the old Westerby coachman, Pomfret, up on the box, but a pasty-faced young fellow, who informed his lordship rather smugly that Mr. Bentley had hired new servants for the Chase.

“But there are families who have served the Westerbys for generations,” protested the Marquess, outraged.

The coachman gave him a cynical look but contented himself with folding his mouth in a thin line. This tawdry Marquess couldn’t even pay the wages of a scullery maid. Who was he to be so high and mighty about the servants at the Chase?

Jane noticed her father’s trembling fingers and turned her face to the snowy fields.

Jane and her stepmother were wearing pocket panniers under their dresses. The hoop was divided into two sections, and the panniers were formed by pulling drapery through the pocket holes, the pockets hanging on the inside in the form of bags.

Hetty had absolutely refused to allow Jane to wash her hair. What was the point of it, she had said reasonably, when one’s hair was going to be covered with pomatum and flour? Jane had, however, managed to arrange Hetty’s long, coarse hair into a fairly modish style, dressing it high over a small velvet cushion stuffed with straw and embellished with silk flowers made with her own nimble fingers. Her own hair was also powdered, but in a more modest style as became her years. It was dressed simply, with the ends set in curls and going over the head from ear to ear. She had not painted her face, but Hetty had liberally covered hers in white enamel and rouge and had placed a large black patch in the shape of a crescent moon next to her mouth.

Jane had fashioned her gowns well. Hetty was wearing a pink silk “flying gown”—that is, the material fell straight from shoulder to hem at the back—with an underskirt of the same, edged with gimp. It had a lingerie neck and sleeve ruffles, and Hetty’s slender, bony legs and feet were encased in green silk stockings and yellow embroidered slippers.

Jane herself was dressed in the same pink silk, but she had fashioned it with Watteau pleats at the front, and her underskirt had bowknots and lace frills.

Her two stepsisters were simply attired in straight gowns with ruffled yokes, in pink silk. For the Westerbys had only had the one bale of silk left over from Papa’s last gambling success, and so they were all in pink, with the exception of the Marquess, who was dressed in primrose-yellow brocade. His fine cadogan wig was looped under and tied at the back with a
solitaire
of black taffeta, with the ends brought around and tied in a bow under his chin over his white cravat.

In the dim light of the carriage, he looked quite young and handsome, and Jane felt a strange pain at her heart. She wished he could always look so. But shortly the blaze of candlelight would reveal the marks and lines and bags of dissipation and self-indulgence.