Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
“You have such a wonderful home here, Frances,” sighed Lady Scovell happily, walking arm-in-arm with her eldest daughter around the upper gardens at Westall Park. “I am so happy to see it at last, and to meet your stepdaughter too.”
The June roses were in bloom, the sun was shining and a warm breeze stirred the air around them pleasantly. Bees buzzed, birds sang, and Beatrice hummed a tune as she walked behind them with Lord Scovell. At least for a few moments, it was a perfect English summer day.
“Winifred is a little darling, isn't she?” Frances agreed. “She is very shy, however. Do not be offended that she hid behind me every time you spoke. It is usual for her the first time she meets anyone.”
“I am not offended in the slightest,” Frances’ mother assured her. "Once little Winnie knows us better, all will be well, I’m sure.”
“What horses do you have here, Frances?” Beatrice probed. “Lydia asked me the other day but I could not tell her anything useful. I think it’s only a riding stable here, isn’t it? Ambrose doesn’t breed horses, I don’t think.”
“We shall visit the stables on our way back to the house so that you can see for yourself and make a full report,” replied Frances, smiling.
“You can interrogate the chief groom, if it pleases you. We might even take Winnie for a ride later, if Mother would like to take tea with the Duke of Westall while we’re out. ”
“What do you think, dear?” Helen Harcourt asked her husband, looking back over her shoulder. “You don’t want to ride out with the girls, do you?”
Frances looked back too with a face like thunder, daring him to even suggest it.
“My place is at your side, Helen,” Edmund Harcourt said instead, smiling at his wife. “We shall take tea with the duke if that is what Frances and Ambrose prefer.”
Relieved not to have to fend off her father’s company but as riled as usual to hear him speak to her mother in such affectionate terms, Frances had to work hard to keep a smile on her face.
“The orchards are down this way,” she stated, repeating much of what the Westall Park staff had told her only a few weeks earlier.
"It looks like there will be a good crop of plums and damsons this year and apparently the apples and pears always grow well, according to Mrs. Betsworth. The strawberries and other soft fruits come from one of the estate farms.”
“How nice,” commented Lady Scovell appreciatively. “It is always better to be able to eat ones own fruit than buy it in, I always think. You will have all your own preserves in winter too.”
“What a lovely day to see these gardens,” added Beatrice. “It’s a shame that Ambrose couldn’t join us for this walk. I do like him, Frances.”
“Ambrose has some business to attend to,” responded Frances evasively, hoping that this would be explanation enough until dinner when the duke would join them again.
“Do you and the duke do everything separately, Frances?” asked her father mildly and much to her irritation.
“I am perfectly capable of conducting my family around the grounds alone, Father,” she responded coldly. “There is no need for me to disturb my husband.”
“Of course you are,” Lord Scovell said quickly. “I did not mean anything like that at all. I only wondered at a couple who have been married for barely a month spending any time together. Everything you mention, whether walking, riding, estate business and so on, you do separately.”
“I have no idea what you mean,” Frances responded, trying to fight down her crossness at this unwanted intervention.
“At luncheon, you barely even made eye contact, and he apologized for touching your shoulder when he pushed your chair in.”
“Why am I being watched?” Frances snapped at her father. “I do not care for it, and nor am I going to justify anything in my marriage to you, of all people.”
Lord Scovell’s good-natured bearded face fell as though she had slapped it and her mother rounded on her.
“Frances! That was unnecessarily rude,” Helen Harcourt rebuked her in an unusually angry tone. “Your father has been so looking forward to seeing you again, as have we all. I would like you to apologize to him.”
Beatrice’s eyes also regarded Frances unhappily, her younger sister keeping an almost protective hold of their father, as though he was an entirely innocent party in all their family drama.
Panic rose in Frances’ chest, suddenly feeling herself under attack from her whole family. Was she in the wrong? Ought she to apologize? She could not, but nor could she stand there under such accusatory glances and with such turmoil in her heart.
Turning on her heel, she broke away from them and raced back up the path, the skirts of her pale blue summer dress in her hands as she fled like a scolded child. It wasn’t until Frances reached the house that she realized she was crying.
The wedding preparations, the strain of her incomprehensible physical attraction to Ambrose Clarke, her unprecedented ecstasy at his hands, that vile letter from Oswald Keeton and all the awful old memories that had stirred up…
Good or bad, Frances yet again had the sense that it was all too much in too short a space of time.
Stopping and leaning against the wall of the house, Frances felt unable to go inside in case she met Ambrose, but unequal to rejoining her family and finding some way to smooth over this latest row.
“Frances!” called Beatrice’s voice then, and to Frances’ dismay, she saw her younger sister racing over to her.
Briefly, she was tempted to run once more but the younger woman reached out a hand and looked at her pleadingly.
“Please don’t run off again, Frances. I ate too much at luncheon to want to do so much exercise this afternoon. The roast chicken was far too good and my second helping was a definite mistake.”
Despite her misery, Frances smiled at the expression on Beatrice’s face as she touched her stomach. If she thought this meant that Beatrice had come to make peace, however, Frances was wrong.
“Why must you always treat Father so badly?” her younger sister demanded once she was sure that Frances would stay to hear her out. “I have never seen Father be anything but kind and good and honorable. Yet you speak to him as I would not speak to our dog.”
“Kind, good and honorable? You do not know him as I do, Beatrice,” Frances flared back at her sister.
“I know Father just as well as you do, Frances,” Beatrice objected. “I might be younger than you but I still have eyes and ears and have lived under the same roof. I see nothing but a loving husband and a devoted father who loves his daughters too. Why can’t you see that?”
“He is a faithless husband, Beatrice,” Frances finally burst out, goaded beyond bearing by this naive portrayal of their family life. “He betrayed Mother with another woman for years when she was ill.”
“How can you even say such things?” exclaimed Beatrice, hands on her hips. “That’s a terrible accusation to make without any proof.”
“I have proof, Beatrice,” Frances shouted. "I saw them with my own eyes when I was thirteen. It had been going on for years by then. After he was caught, Father told me that he had ended it but I had no way of knowing if he spoke the truth. He might have taken any number of other lovers besides.”
Beatrice’s hand flew to her mouth at this news, her face shaken and disconcerted.
“My God, I had no idea. I don’t want to believe it…”
“Why would I lie about something like this, Beatrice? I have never told Mother because it would break her heart. You know how much she loves Father and believes in him. Every time he speaks of love to Mother, he lies. He has never deserved her.”
For a long time, Beatrice stood there in silent dismay, struggling to reconcile this story with the affectionate and dependable family man she had always believed her father to be.
“Who was she, this other woman?” her sister finally asked in a shaky voice, coming to lean against the wall close to Frances.
“Penelope Keeton, Lady Mulford, our former neighbor who died six or seven years go. She had other lovers too, as did her husband Maurice, but I think Father…”
“You were friends with their son, Oswald,” Beatrice remembered, screwing up her face with the effort of remembering these figures from her very early childhood. “She had long red hair, didn’t she, and was always very glamorously dressed?”
“Yes, that’s her. Was I friends with Oswald? Or did Father only make me Oswald’s friend so that he and Lady Mulford could be alone together? I believed for years that he took me over there to play, when he was really going to visit his lover and using me to cover his tracks.”
“Oh! Did Oswald know about his mother? Did he tell his father?”
“He was with me on the day we stumbled across the two of them,” said Frances bleakly. “Oswald, Lord Mulford now, saw exactly what I saw, although I have no idea what story Lady Mulford may have concocted later.”
“You never saw him again?”
“We saw one another, but after that day, we were never friends again. It changed both of us. Oswald seemed to blame me for Father’s behavior, and then as he grew up, he seemed to… fixate on me in some way and blame me for that too.”
“What do you mean, Frances?” asked Beatrice, not yet quite out in society and more innocent of the world in general than Frances had been at the same age.
“Oswald Keeton has grown into the most awful man, Beatrice,” Frances tried to explain. “You are still young and I cannot describe the way he torments and harasses me, but when you come out, you must never be alone with him. He can be most inappropriate, in his words and actions.”
Beatrice looked horrified by this, her eyes growing wide and unblinking.
“If Lord Mulford… harasses you like that, you must tell Mother and Father, surely,” the girl responded, still possessing that naive faith in her parents, even after Frances’ shocking revelations.