Chapter 10 #2
An elderly woman sat in a chair beside the fire, looking just as he had imagined a grandmother should look. Fluffs of white hair escaped from her neat lace cap and milky blue eyes looked up at him from a face that looked as fragile as tissue.
‘Lord Somerton, Ma,’ Peggy announced, unnecessarily.
‘You’ll have to come closer, boy,’ the old woman said. ‘My eyes aren’t that good.’
‘She’s all but blind and quite a bit deaf, so you’ll need to talk clear,’ Peggy whispered in his ear.
Sebastian went down on one knee at the woman’s feet and took her hand. He kissed it, the delicate skin like paper beneath his lips. When he looked up, she had tears in her eyes. Her hand went to his hair, caressing him as if he were a small child.
‘I never thought I’d see the day when Marjory’s boy would come to me,’ she said as her gnarled fingers moved to his face, lightly touching his eyes, his nose and his mouth as if the touch would in some way produce a picture in her mind.
‘You’ve a good strong face,’ she said and smiled, cuffing him lightly on the cheek.
‘And you have come out without shaving. That will never do!’
‘He’s as like his father as he could be,’ Peggy said.
‘Oh, he was a good boy, James,’ his grandmother said, ‘but headstrong like our girl.’
As he straightened, Sebastian found himself completely bereft of the well-rehearsed words. He coughed to disguise the unfamiliar prickling sensation at the back of his throat.
‘I ... I... have a brother and a sister. Your grandchildren, too.’
The old lady looked in the general direction of her daughter.
‘Oh, Peggy. All these years and we never knew.’ She turned back to Sebastian, her fingers found his and she squeezed them tightly as if afraid to let go.
‘Your grandfather, the Reverend, was undone by her eloping with the lord’s son.
He forbade letters from Marjory. If she ever sent them, he threw them unopened into the fire.
’ Her voice shook with emotion as she said, ‘We only heard she was dead by sheer chance. That good man, the Reverend Alder, passed a message by word of mouth to a friend, and he whispered it to me when he came to visit.’ She shook her head as if trying to vanquish the memory.
Sebastian lowered his head. If it hadn’t been for the kindness of the Reverend Alder, both he and his mother would have ended up in the workhouse—or dead. Such unspeakable cruelty by her own father beggared belief.
As if answering his unspoken words, his grandmother continued.
‘You mustn’t judge your grandfather, lad.
Marjory was promised to marry a young clergyman from over Grantham way.
He’s a bishop now. Her running off like that, jilting her intended, and with the lord’s son doing the same to his young lady, and him with not a penny to his name after his father cut him out.
’ She shook her head and lowered her eyes.
‘It brought terrible shame to this house.’
So that was how it had happened. His parents had both been betrothed to other people, facing two loveless marriages or the fleeting chance of happiness together, even with the approbation of family and society.
Whatever happiness they had enjoyed had been short lived.
He wondered if his mother had appealed to her father after James had died.
If she had, it sounded like her cry for help fell on stony ground. So much for Christian charity.
He glanced out of the window at the solid respectability of the church building and shook his head. These were matters that belonged in the past. His mother’s second marriage to the Reverend Alder had been a happy one and she had died greatly loved and greatly mourned.
His grandmother echoed his thoughts. ‘Those are sad memories we must leave in the past. You are here now, where you rightly belong, and I know your mother and father would be proud of you. A hero of Waterloo, Peggy tells me.’
Sebastian laughed. ‘Hardly a hero, grandmother. Merely lucky to still be alive.’
‘But you were hurt?’ She frowned. ‘Are you recovered?’
‘I am,’ he replied. ‘Lady Somerton ensured I had the best of care.’
‘Ah, Lady Somerton! She’s a good lady.’ His grandmother nodded with approval. ‘Not like that good-for-nothing husband of hers.’
‘Mother!’ Peggy reproved.
‘I’m too old not to speak my mind, Peggy, and you know it. The late lord did more to undo this estate in a few short years than his ancestors had spent in building it up. And the way he behaved after the baby died... Disgraceful.’
‘Baby?’ Sebastian asked, but his grandmother didn’t hear.
‘Edie!’ The old woman called, and a young maid appeared at the door, bobbing a quick curtsey and colouring when she saw the two ladies had a visitor.
‘Edie, some tea, and bring some freshly-baked bread and our strawberry jam. His lordship looks like he needs feeding up.’
Sebastian opened his mouth to protest that he had already had a large breakfast, but the maid had vanished. He was desperate to ask about the baby, but he had to curb his impatience until Edie reappeared with a tray of tea and bread and jam.
Only after his aunt had ensured that he had been served a doorstopper-sized slice of bread and had a hot cup of tea did he feel he could return to the subject.
‘Grandmother,’ he said, noting that she coloured with pleasure at the new mode of address, ‘what were you saying about a baby?’
Peggy answered for her mother. ‘You don’t know?
Well, I suppose you wouldn’t unless her ladyship has told you, which she obviously hasn’t.
’ She took a sip of her tea and settled in to impart the gossip.
‘After all those years of marriage, her ladyship had a baby boy. William, they called him. A bonny little lad he was, wasn’t he, Ma? ’
‘Oh, he was. All smiles and chuckles during his christening... His mother and father just doted on the boy. Never seen them really happy together, but the baby seemed to heal the rift. You go on, Peggy.’
‘It was so sad,’ Peggy continued. ‘When the babe was only six months old, the nursemaid found him dead in his cradle. Not a mark on his little body, she told me, just cold and dead.’
Sebastian set his empty cup down, recalling Isabel’s words. ‘As Anthony and I were not blessed with children, you are the heir to my husband’s estate ...’ She had been blessed, but for such a short time.
‘When was this?’
Peggy frowned. ‘It would be about a year ago now. They both took the death hard, in their own ways. Her ladyship became ... well ... as you see her now, and his lordship went back to his wild ways. Drinking and gambling, so they say ...’ Peggy continued.
‘Now, Peggy, that is gossip,’ her mother said.
‘It’s fact, Ma. We all know who he was visiting the night he died. That Lady Kendall—’
‘Peggy!’
That Lady Kendall again, thought Sebastian.
He would like to make the acquaintance of Harry’s scandalous sister.
As he took a bite of the still warm bread and the tastiest strawberry jam he had ever eaten, he thought about Isabel and her dowdy clothes and severe hairstyle and realised that she did not wear mourning for her husband but for her child, barely a year in the grave.
Peggy sniffed and glared at her mother. ‘I’m sorry Lord Somerton had to die like that but if it meant a good man, our Sebastian, came home, then that is God’s will,’ she concluded.
Sebastian brushed the crumbs from his breeches.
‘Are the Somerton family graves in the church?’ he asked.
‘Only the old ones. Your great-great-grandfather, had a mausoleum built on the hill looking over the Somerton lands. ’Tis that white building beyond the lake. ’Twas he that built the hall, earned his money trading in slaves,’ Peggy added with pursed lips that indicated her disapproval.
Sebastian agreed with her. His fortune, such of it as had been left to him by successive generations, had been built on the misfortune of others. It was indeed a tainted inheritance.
‘Enough dark talk,’ his grandmother said. ‘Tell me about your brother and sister while Peggy pours us another cup of tea.’
Sebastian told them about Matt and Connie and their life in the vicarage at Little Benning before his stepfather’s death.
His aunt and grandmother sat in silence, hanging on his every word.
Peggy, in her turn, told him about his aunts and the veritable tribes of cousins.
It was only when the clock on the shelf chimed ten that Sebastian jumped to his feet.
‘They’ll be wondering where I am,’ he said. ‘I must go. We will... we must... you must...’
He struggled to find some words to say that he wanted them to come to the hall, to visit, to live, to be with him. They were his real family. Not outsiders like Fanny and Freddy.
Peggy put a hand on his sleeve. ‘All in good time, my lord. We’re content, more so for knowing you are here. You will bring Matthew and Constance to see us, when they arrive?’
‘Of course, and I will visit again.’
As he walked away from the little cottage, a knot of emotion gathered in his chest and he found he had to choke back unaccustomed tears.