Page 2

The young valet put down the candelabrum and gazed at his master, who sat tired and thoughtful on the edge of his bed. The most fortunate of men and with the sunniest disposition, Mr Shilton was shaken by his unaccustomed melancholy. But Gordon was more concerned with the outward man and surveyed him, unashamedly admiring of the young master’s natural physical beauty. He thought him the most distinguished of dandies; how could any discerning gentleman’s gentleman, he wondered, not feel privileged to oversee the wardrobe and dressing of such a nonpareil? As he knelt to remove the dancing shoes from Mr Shilton’s elegant feet and roll his silk stockings down over his shapely calves, the muscles elongated and strengthened by years of fencing practice and swordsmanship, Gordon revelled in the fact that his master was a perfect specimen of refined masculinity. Of medium height, with a slender, perfectly proportioned form, he added distinction to everything he wore, cutting a dash wherever he went.

Ferdinand Shilton’s staff knew he was a stickler for proprieties, demanding everything was done well and seen to be so, but he did not use his power or wealth to lord it over those who had less. It was universally agreed among his servants and friends that he had the sweetest nature of anyone, sometimes to his own detriment.

Wearing a newly-laundered nightshirt, he thanked Gordon and climbed into his vast high bed, a slender figure sinking into the depths of its magnificence. Just as he was at last falling to sleep, he remembered he had made an appointment to take Miss Payton driving in Hyde Park the following afternoon. He considered it an advantage that his spirit was not perturbed by even the slightest shiver of excited anticipation. Marriage, after all, was a necessary merger of interests, not a tempest of unruly passion and desire.

* * *

On their return home, Madeleine Rose sat beside her cousin Henrietta in the coach. Opposite them, Lady Lockhart puffed out her powdered cheeks and said, ‘Well! That was not worth getting dressed for! I’ve seldom attended such a drab affair.’ Aunt Lucinda had long ago given up on the prevailing opinion that women ought to put themselves out to be agreeable. Once she had married Baron Lockhart, she had claimed the advantages of his modest title and moderate fortune and done her duty by producing an heir. But that was the end of her obligations as she saw it. Her good looks had hardened into a basilisk stare and a mouth that had grown tight-lipped with meanness and scorn.

Miss Lockhart had been cast from the same mould but was still in the apprentice stage, and had not come into her full disdainful power. Instead, she was sulky and tired, her voice petulant. ‘It was singularly dull. The orchestra was inferior and the most eligible men had fled to Brighton or their estates. Except for Mr Shilton, but he did not choose to dance with me.’ She jabbed her sharp elbow into her cousin’s ribs and cast her a baleful look.

Madeleine jumped with the pain. She had been lost in thought, gazing out on the dark streets gleaming under veils of drizzling rain. Unlike her cousin, she had enjoyed herself. Dancing with Lord Godston had been illuminating; shyer than she was and just as young, but a man with wayward feet who had trampled her twice while engaged in kind, inconsequential conversation. He had caught her imagination with his blushing cheek and untidy schoolboy hair and Madeleine had decided he would make a good character in her novel, the innocent curate who offers spiritual succour to the heroine: My dear, Heaven awaits us. Take my hand and entertain the harmless day with a religious book and a friend.

Madeleine was most delighted, though, to meet Mr Shilton. She had long followed his progress from the moment he’d caught her eye, riding one of his beautiful hunters down Grosvenor Street past the Lockhart mansion on his way to exercise his horse in Hyde Park. She had first seen him from the window and laughed out loud with disbelief. How could anyone be so handsome, except on the stucco walls of a Renaissance church? The sun had gleamed on his fine nose and emphasised the angle of his cheekbones under his curly brimmed hat. His fair hair seemed to be gilded in the morning light. All the improving texts of her childhood had taught her that beauty and goodness were united, and here in Mr Shilton was the embodiment of that ideal. He had to be her story’s hero.

From that point, Madeleine had looked out for him. He was known to spend his considerable income at his tailor, bootmaker and hatter, and on owning the best horses money could buy. Most frequently, he appeared on a magnificent, fine-boned bay, who seemed to be high-strung as it trotted keenly towards Grosvenor Gate, threatening to shy at any unexpected cart or child hollering in the street.

Madeleine had quickly filled in all the characteristics she did not know and wrote of her mysterious hero; galloping, galloping, the knight-like figure willing to risk his life for justice, his flying coat-tails and close-fitting breeches straining over the muscles of his thighs, boots shiny as glass and a hat pulled low over glittering eyes. Was this an avenging angel? Now she had met Mr Shilton, if fleetingly, he was no longer so wrapped in romance and mystery and his reality was more disconcerting. She was sure he found her not at all attractive but thought his amusement genuine. However, his light-heartedness and kindness were not what she had expected from a brooding gothic hero, hewn from granite and implacable as the night. Perhaps Mr Shilton belonged in a different, happier story?

She had been a lonely child, naturally watchful and full of fancies. From the moment she could write, Madeleine made up stories peopled with imaginary friends and a large family of siblings, dogs and marmosets. When she was just fourteen years old, both her parents had died in quick succession from a particularly virulent influenza outbreak that arrived at the London Docks when a Spanish galleon disembarked, rife with fever. The respiratory disease ran through the population and Madeleine too caught it, but survived. Within a week, she had been made an orphan.

She then went to live with her grandmother, the dowager Lady Lockhart, in Mayfair’s Davies Street. In the fierce grip of loneliness and grief, Madeleine found only her stories could help make sense of the incomprehensible. Her grandmother, troubled with failing health and bitterness at family losses and betrayals, had barely the energy to spare for the unhappy girl who had arrived at her door. Eventually, old age overcame her and as she became bedridden, Madeleine, at sixteen, was foisted upon her reluctant cousins.

They were nearing Grosvenor Street and Madeleine looked across at her Aunt Lockhart’s face, harsh in the shifting shadows of the coach, trying to conjure up the appropriate gratitude for the offer of a home. As the widowed daughter-in-law of the old Lady Lockhart, Aunt Lucinda lived in fading grandeur in the house her husband had inherited, sharing it with her twenty-year-old twins, Miss Henrietta who, cross and tired, sat sighing beside Madeleine, and Lord Edwin, the heir to the baronetcy that had been his father’s and grandfather’s before him. Since going up to Oxford, the spoiled young Lord Lockhart had almost run through his father’s inheritance with his reckless gambling and pursuit of pleasure. Living beyond his means, he staved off his creditors with the promise that in time, his grandmother’s estate would arrive to save his prodigal way of life.

Madeleine knew she was an unwelcome addition to this household, where wealth had been diminished through death and profligacy. She knew too that old Lady Lockhart had been prevailed upon to provide some payment for her granddaughter’s upkeep, but it did not run to visits to fashionable modistes for clothes. These she had to make herself, or remake from Miss Lockhart’s cast-offs. But she was grateful to be fed and have a bedroom of her own, even if it was what had once been the sewing-room, next to the servants’ parlour.

Madeleine occasionally accompanied Lady Lockhart and her daughter to a soirée or a ball, where her role as partial foil for Henrietta’s prettiness and fashionable charm was one she was happy enough to accept, but did not expect to lead to any advancement in her own life.

Tonight, Madeleine was afraid she had somehow stepped outside this prescribed role by having enjoyed herself more than either Lady Lockhart or her daughter. They climbed silently from the chaise and made their way into the house. Moss, the butler and general factotum, had waited up and handed mother and daughter a candlestick each as they mounted the stairs to bed. Their maids followed to help them undress.

Madeleine looked up. ‘Good night, Aunt Lucinda, Henrietta.’

‘Good night, my dear,’ Lady Lockhart said as she entered the main bedroom overlooking the garden.

Moss then lit a candle for Madeleine, his kindly old eyes smiling at her with a sympathy that touched her. Having her bedroom on the ground floor at the back of the house brought her into greater proximity with the servants and their activities, and this bred a familiar closeness, a kind of solidarity.

She thanked the old man, then headed quickly for her room. There was so much to write down; the character of her young curate had arrived at the ball, and having met Mr Shilton at last, she had to make her hero figure more complex and with a sense of humour. Madeleine closed the door, then extracted her precious notebook from beneath her mattress. She did not want anyone to ever find it, not just because what she wrote could be seen as defamatory or absurd but because, like a diary, this novel was her dearest friend to whom she could express herself entire.

By the very act of writing, she was resisting the Lockharts’ role marked out for her as sad, plain, orphaned cousin Maddie, her future prospects dolefully circumscribed. In these pages, she was whatever she wished to be. The power of the imagination excited her; she could be the heroine of her own story, perhaps even of her own life. By conjuring up a romance, could she bring it into being?

It struck Madeleine as odd that she had impulsively told Mr Shilton about the existence of her novel, the first person to know of something so precious to her.

She opened her book and wrote until her candle had burnt down to the socket.

* * *

Mr Shilton loved best his leaf-green riding coat but knew that Miss Payton did not enjoy colour the way he did, and preferred to see him more soberly dressed. Polite as ever, he aimed to please by asking Gordon to help him into his cloud-grey superfine coat, which still cut a dash with dark grey breeches. His polished top boots, made by the inimitable George Hoby to fit his foot and calf like a glove, and his charcoal-grey, curly-brimmed beaver hat, were the finishing touches to a vision of subdued sartorial splendour.

He ran light-footed down the stairs to find his very grand butler, Maltby, looking disapproving in the hall. In his gloved hand was a folded letter with a dramatic red seal: across the front was a black scrawl with the word Shrimp. Maltby handed it over to his master as if it smelled. ‘I think this is for you, Sir.’ He did not appreciate his master being treated with any lack of respect; after all, he was distinguished and rich with exquisite taste, a dandy even, and bore no resemblance to a small fishy crustacean. Ferdy Shilton was much less concerned. He knew immediately from whom this missive had come. ‘Shrimp’ was the nickname used for him by his friend since schooldays, Max Flambard.

Lord Flambard was tall and broad, an inveterate fighting cock who had been expelled from Eton for ‘aggravated brawling’. Theirs was an unlikely friendship and to see them together, one so big, dark and belligerent, the other so elegant, fair and charming, conjured up soubriquets like Satan and the Angel Gabriel. Neither were great scholars but both were skilled sportsmen; Lord Flambard excelled at boxing and the formalised free-for-all warfare of the Eton wall game, and Ferdinand Shilton, a skilled swordsman, led the fencing team at school. Being a fine horseman and rider to hounds, he was also rich and well-connected enough to stable his hunters and have his own pack of hounds accompany him to school. This startling extravagance added a certain éclat to Mr Shilton’s reputation as the nicest and most courteous of young men, impressing the flashier Flambard and bonding them as brothers-in-arms.

He walked into the library to read the letter from the friend who had been absent from his home shores for ten years. The scrawl elaborated:

Old Friend,

The Miracle has occurred. Old Prinny has decided to Pardon me. I think his loyalty to my wicked Pater helped, one of his Cronies in the old Profligate days. I can barely Comprehend that I will see again the White Cliffs and green Fields of my Native Land. Until I can Reclaim my Confiscated estates, may I stay with you for a Sennight or so?