“So I was, but after three weeks I felt like a change of scene and Corland is…” She hesitated. What could she say of Corland that would not distress Lady Rennington?
But Aunt Caroline took up the idea at once. “Oh, indeed, Corland is a very dismal place just now. You are very sensible to stay away from there. Your poor mama is inconsolable, so even your presence could not bring her any comfort, those investigators are turning the place upside down, and then there is the Dowager Countess, still lingering. It is not a healthy atmosphere for a young girl. I just wish I could bring Olivia out of there, but she will not leave her father, the dear girl. Myrtle, is not this a delightful surprise?”
Her sister Myrtle, Lady Tarvin, agreed that Tess’s unexpected arrival was indeed a delightful surprise. The two ladies fussed over her until she almost felt guilty for her devious plan. Almost, but not quite.
The third lady present, Mrs Edward Harfield, merely nodded to Tess and made some commonplace remarks, without enthusiasm, but it was enough. Tess would not be thrown out on her ear. Satisfied, she retired to her room where a bath was already being filled for her. She had bathed and swaddled herself in a robe when there was a brisk knock on the door. Before Betty could reach it, the door opened and a head peeped round.
“Tess! How lovely!”
Tess’s cousin Josie was the eldest of the three daughters of Lord and Lady Rennington. She had taken her time to marry, settling eventually on Viscount Woodridge, the heir to an earldom, but hers was a love match and she exuded contentment. Tess wondered sometimes what it must be like to marry for love, when the loved one was also highly eligible. There would be no compromises needed in such an arrangement, no need to convince a reluctant father to agree to the match, no quibbling over a dowry. How pleasant that would be!
Josie came fully into the room, and pulled over a chair to sit beside Tess. “You look tired, cousin,” she said. “But then it is only six weeks since your father’s death, and you must feel it dreadfully, especially with that shocking will. Marry a gentleman, indeed! And to leave you a fortune, but only on such conditions! It is the outside of enough. I feel for you, Tess, truly I do.”
That was as neat a way of accounting for her tiredness as any other, and no need to mention five o’clock starts and scrubbing floors.
“Thank you, Josie. How are you? And the baby?”
Her face softened. “Gerard is a darling, and I love having him all to myself. However, my mother-in-law is to leave Throxfield in a day or two, and it will be safe for me to go home again.” She gurgled with laughter. “But until then, it will be delightfulto have you here. We are all still catching our breath after Izzy blew through — you know what Izzy is like. It will be charmingly peaceful with you here.”
The evening brought another opportunity to try to determine who was the real mistress of the Priory.
“Dinner is served, my lady,” the butler said.
“Thank you, Jeffries,” Mrs Harfield said, immediately assuming the position of hostess. “Shall we go through, ladies?”
Lady Tarvin merely smiled, while Lady Rennington and Josie exchanged amused glances.
Josie’s prediction that Harfield Priory would be peaceful was rather too true for Tess’s taste. Dull was another word for it. The five ladies struggled to manage a simple conversation at dinner. After asking in a desultory fashion after Tess’s stay at Helmsley, for clearly the information that she had not been there at all had not filtered through from Corland, there seemed no other safe topic of conversation. Everything at Corland was too dreadful for discussion in a civilised dining room, it seemed.
Happily for Mrs Harfield, there was the latest letter from her son in London to be shown off, for she carried it even at dinner. Edward, the 4th Lord Tarvin, was twenty-seven years old, and according to his mother, the most eligible bachelor in town. Apart from the Priory, he owned his father’s estate of Hunsworth Hall, as well as a highly desirable London house in Grosvenor Street, and had an income of twelve thousand pounds a year. Tess would even grudgingly admit that his mother’s description of him as‘the handsomest man one ever saw’was not entirely erroneous. But the perpetual scowl of disparagement that usually graced his features did nothing to improve his looks, and his manners were cold and unfriendly, as if he disapproved of the world and everything in it.
She was amused to discover, however, that he had successfully exiled both his mother and his aunt from town thisyear, by telling them that he would never attach a suitable young lady with the two of them constantly at his side. So here they sat, trying to pretend that they were not bitterly missing the whirl of society in town, while he wrote a weekly letter to report on his progress in the delicate business of finding the next Lady Tarvin.
“I do like the sound of Lady Henrietta,” Mrs Harfield said. “The daughter of a marquess! That would be a splendid match, indeed, and she sounds most attractive.‘Modest and well-mannered… most accomplished on the harp and pianoforte, and sings, too.’Does not she sound most agreeable?”
“What is her dowry?” Lady Tarvin said.
“He does not mention… oh, no, here it is. Ten thousand. Well, that is not very much, is it? He could do much better than that.”
“Miss Amsworth is the most well dowered, is she not? Was it fifty… no, sixty thousand.”
“Oh yes, but only a plain Miss, not even an Honourable. Edward is a baron, after all, and must marry into the nobility.”
“Has he seen Lady Anne this week?” Lady Tarvin said. “I liked the sound of her. A spirited rider, which would suit Edward better than all these modest, well-mannered girls.”
“Oh,no, dear!” Mrs Harfield said. “We must have a quiet girl, who will not disrupt our lives too badly. Let me see… the Honourable Miss Brock, Lady Susan, Miss Smith— What is he doing looking at a Miss Smith? She cannot be— Ah, here it is. He called upon Lady Anne and invited her for a drive in his curricle, but she had a prior engagement and was unable to accept. How disappointing for her! But perhaps next time, although she sounds a little too lively for Edward. He is not, in general, a lively boy himself.”
That was a sentiment with which Tess could entirely agree. Tiring of all this talk of eligible young ladies, she said, “Why does he need to marry just now — or at all? He is only twenty-seven,after all, and could easily wait a few more years. Many men do, after all. It is not as if the barony would become extinct, is it?”
Both Lady Tarvin and Mrs Harfield shuddered. The previous baron had been one of three brothers, and having no issue himself, the middle brother’s son, an only child, had inherited. But until he married and produced a son of his own, his heir was the son of the youngest brother, a thoroughly disreputable man, by all accounts.
“Allow Jack’s boy to inherit? Never!” Mrs Harfield said robustly. “He was ramshackle his whole life and even though he had the good grace to die young, he married a wife as bad as himself, and he has left behind an entirely ramshackle family.”
“It is just as well he died young,” Lady Tarvin said, smiling. “With seven children in nine years of marriage, who knows how many they would have ended up with, and Joanie not even forty yet. Still, given that Matthew and I had none at all, and you and Ted only the one, Alvira, perhaps it is just as well. As Tess says, at least Edward has an heir — three heirs, in point of fact.”
Mrs Harfield moaned slightly. “ButTostig, my dear sister! Whatever sort of name is that for a baron? And the younger ones no better — Oswin and Halbert. It is all very well for Joan to call that strange son of hers Ulric, for that was her first marriage and nothing to do with us. But when she married into a baron’s family, she should have taken thought for the future and given the boys, at least, sensible names. John, like their father, or other good, solid English names. Charles, Henry, William, Richard. Or from the Bible — Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.”
“Nebuchadnezzar,” Tess said. “Ichabod. Hezekiah. Mephibosheth.”
