“Oh, company, certainly,” Izzy said. “Sophie? Shall we?” Company at last! And the house was full of guests. How she longed to walk into a crowded room again!
“Of course!” Mrs Davenport said brightly. “Sophie, you will find some old friends within. Leave your bonnets on the table there. Mrs Rumble will see to them. This way.”
It was not far to the saloon but the butler was there before them. A promising hum of conversation could be heard as he threw open the door.
“Lady Farramont, and Mrs Martin Hearle,” he announced.
Izzy had been announced many times since she had first come out, but never before had her name startled an entire room into shocked silence. Someone gave a little squeal, and two or three gasped. It was not a comfortable feeling, but Izzy was not one to be intimidated. Casting her gaze over the assembled throng, she saw the elder Mr Davenport at once, his mane of white hair distinctive, and she recognised two of Sydney’ssisters, but not Sydney himself. Ah, there he was, unfolding himself from a chair on the far side of the room.
But she had excellent manners, so she allowed Mrs Davenport to lead her first towards her husband. How old he had grown in the intervening years! Illness would do that to a man… or a woman, she thought, looking at Mrs Davenport, still breathless from a short walk from the hall. Izzy sat beside him and focused all her attention on the old man, chattering away to him as if he were still the fine man she had known five years ago. He had appeared sunk into himself at first, but he brightened considerably as she talked, and even laughed once or twice. Good! She had not lost her touch, then.
Gradually the murmur of voices around them resumed, but Izzy, always sensitive to the atmosphere in a room, was aware of the tension, even as she never once looked away from Mr Davenport. It was only a familiar voice that drew her attention.
“Lady Farramont?”
She looked up at him, so well-remembered and yet… different. “Sydney! How delightful this is. How are you?”
He made the usual responses — perfectly well, could see she was in the bloom of health and how was Farramont? Sydney was still handsome, of course, but his finely chiselled features had grown a little coarse. He was not the lithe young man she remembered, and in another ten years or perhaps even five, he would be unquestionably stout. Nor was his smile as wide as before. His brow was slightly furrowed, as if bewildered.
“You are on your way to Lochmaben, I suppose?” he said.
So she was, in a way, so she answered in the affirmative.
“I thought you must be, since Lady Rennington is there.”
“Mama? Is she?”
“You did not know?”
“I have been travelling, Sydney, not stopping anywhere long enough to receive mail.”
His smile softened into something more genuine. “You were always a restless soul. If Father will not mind me taking you away, allow me to introduce you to everyone. There are some here you will not know.”
There were two more sisters, who had married northerners and not ventured to town, so Izzy had never met them. There were hordes of cousins, including the famous Jonathan, looking none the worse for his brush with death eight years earlier. There were several neighbours, worthy squires and their wives, who rose to bow deferentially to her. Prominently situated in the centre of the room, and making laboured conversation with Sophie, were‘Mr Hearle, and Mr and Mrs Matthew Hearle of Bayton House’.Izzy gave them the smallest of nods and passed swiftly on.
At the far side of the room, a little family that Izzy identified immediately as of the merchant class, father and mother, a son who had tried very hard to be fashionable and failed, and two daughters who had not tried very hard at all. Some rising merchants acquired a degree of style as they moved into a better class of society, but these five had neither beauty nor fashion. In fact the two girls were as plain a pair as Izzy had seen anywhere. They sat stiffly in their Sunday best, looking as out of place as if the butler and his wife were to mingle with their betters.
“Mr and Mrs Plowman, Miss Plowman and Miss Marion Plowman, Mr John Plowman,” Sydney intoned expressionlessly. “Our neighbours to the east.” After the slightest of pauses, he went on. “Miss Plowman has done me the very great honour to consent to be my wife, and thus we will at least partially unite the two estates, as my father has long wished. You will recall him talking about the eastern meadow that used to belong to Harringdon? Mr Plowman has graciously agreed that it will be a part of Ruth’s dowry.”
Izzy was so astonished that she laughed out loud. “Sydney Davenport, you are a poet, a dreamer, a man of romantic ideals! Do you truly tell me that you intend to marry for the sake of afield?”
He glared at her and would have responded angrily, had Ruth Plowman not laughed herself, and said in a strong accent that Izzy could not quite identify, “Oh no, my lady, not for a field — fortwofields and a stand of woodland.”
That made Izzy laugh even harder.
“That is not the only reason, naturally,” Sydney muttered. “Ruth’s own charms—”
“Nonsense!” that lady said robustly. “I have no charms, apart from a lot of money, and a field.”
“Two fields and some trees,” Izzy said, still laughing. “Really, Sydney, how worldly of you! You should be swept by passion, and willing to die if your love is denied you, not measuring a lady’s worth by the size of her dowry and the number of cattle that may be pastured on it. I am ashamed of you.”
“Not cattle, sheep,” Ruth said, her eyes twinkling. “And pigs in the woodland. He could’ve had an orchard as well, for it seems to need a lot of work and Pa would’ve thrown it in, if anyone asked, but no one did.”
“Do you know, Miss Plowman,” Izzy said appreciatively, “you deserve better than a blockhead like Sydney. I think you should throw him over at once, and find someone who will value your wit more than your fields. He is handsome enough, I grant you, but fair-haired men fade with time, and I see signs of incipient stoutness in him, do not you?”
“Oh yes, but I plan to put him on a reducing diet when we’re wed.”
The two laughed together, while Ruth’s parents gently remonstrated with her, and Sydney went red in the face.
