Chapter 4
It was well over a hundred miles from Bloomsbury to Albery Hall.
This was too far to travel in a day even in the smartest of hired vehicles, since everyone – even Cecilia – agreed that arriving late in the evening in a place they’d never been before, to an uncertain reception and dubious comfort, would be a bad idea.
The sisters and Miss Macintyre therefore broke their journey at Colchester at the end of the first day’s travel.
It seemed a most interesting town, with many substantial Roman remains still visible, which they might have enjoyed visiting, but it was not necessarily a very comfortable place for a party of ladies, since it appeared almost under military occupation, with the streets full of soldiers in uniform going to and fro and making a great deal of noise as they did so.
‘I wonder if they fear invasion?’ Beatrice mused, watching the bustle from their private parlour on the first floor of the ancient coaching inn. ‘Should we, for that matter? We’re going to the coast. Is that a foolish thing to do just now?’
‘Colchester is the eastern headquarters of the army,’ Miss Macintyre told her comfortably.
‘There must always be a great number of soldiers here, even in peacetime. And I suppose they are obliged to take ordinary precautions, now that Bonaparte has escaped from Elba and is on the loose again. But if he didn’t manage to invade these islands in all the years when he had Europe at his feet, he’s hardly going to achieve that feat now, with a mere shadow of his former strength left to him, and Lord Wellington and the rest of the Allies poised ready to take him on in the Low Countries. ’
Miss Macintyre was a person of radical sympathies, and as a young woman, had been an enthusiastic supporter of the French Revolution, but she had, like so many of her generation, been alarmed by the bloodthirsty direction matters had soon taken, and was certainly no admirer of the man who had declared himself Emperor a decade ago.
He was a despot, she believed, far worse than any constitutional monarch, and must be stopped.
It was clearly inadvisable to go out into the streets that evening, even with Miss Macintyre’s formidable protection, so the ladies took a sedate dinner in their private parlour, enjoying the fact that they could for a novelty order as much as they wanted without counting the cost, and settled down for an early night.
The three sisters were sharing a chamber with a huge feather bed in it, and their duenna, in deference to her age and her habit of reading till her candle guttered out, had an adjoining small, private dressing room in which a comfortable single bed had been made up for her.
They locked the door that led to the passageway outside, as seemed prudent, and settled down for the night.
‘What do you hope for, Bea?’ Cecilia whispered sleepily. Bianca was one of those annoying persons who fell into deep slumber as soon as her head touched the pillow, and was already breathing softly and regularly in the darkness.
‘From… all this?’
‘Yes.’
‘An end to being pitied because I am just a poor, overlooked spinster nearing thirty, because being pitied makes me want to bite people. Independence. Freedom.’
‘Of course. We all want that, and it seems we have it. Now it is up to us to decide what to do with it. But what do you want for yourself?’
Bea was silent for a long time, and Cecilia wondered if she was asleep, or pretending to be.
But at length, she said, very low, ‘It’s not that simple for me.
You know that. It may well be that I desire things that no amount of money can give me, as society is currently arranged.
And I could turn the question back on you, couldn’t I?
Men have courted you before, but you’ve refused them all. ’
‘There weren’t so very many of them. No, I’m very glad you and I weren’t placed in Viola’s position, obliged to take a suitor despite grave doubts.
Especially you, of course – how horrible that would have been.
An old man, maybe, like Edward… The fact that she, Sabrina and Allegra are married and comfortably off protected me from that harsh decision, as it protected you.
And since I had the luxury of choice… I found I didn’t want any of them when they presented themselves.
They did not appeal greatly to me; I could only see their defects and our incompatibility.
I couldn’t even imagine singling out one of them, no matter how hard I tried, and I did try, even if you, understandably, did not.
And as for spending the rest of my life with one…
’ She shook her head vigorously on the pillow, even though Bea couldn’t see her.
‘Nobody I have met yet has tempted me enough. Maybe it’s the fault of the Season itself – of its artificiality.
How can one get to know a person, if one is always chaperoned and watched and cannot behave naturally or express a genuine opinion?
Do they even want my genuine opinions? I’m not at all sure they do; none of them has ever shown any sign of such a thing.
So I always said no, and I don’t regret it.
No was the only power I had. Now things are different in ways I can’t yet imagine.
Maybe I will find I have a little more power to influence events, rather than just having to wait for things to happen to me, and maybe that will be the case for you too. I hope so.’
Her sister sighed in the darkness. ‘You’re a romantic, Ceci.
You have all sorts of notions in your head from the countless absurdly unrealistic novels you have read.
And that makes me worry for you. There will be fortune hunters after us – maybe even in Suffolk, maybe especially in Suffolk, because people there will know exactly how wealthy Mrs Albery was.
I feel I’m proof against that; I’m the oldest, I’m a virtual ape-leader at six and twenty, and they’re hardly likely to seek me out when they could more easily make a dead set for you or for Bianca.
I am excessively glad they won’t pursue me – you know that.
But you will have to be very careful. I can see you’re excited.
But don’t go getting silly ideas in your head about any of the neighbours. ’
‘Nonsense,’ Cecilia murmured, snuggling deeper into the bed’s soft embrace.
‘I daresay the neighbours, if we even have any, are all elderly people or safely married. I’ve never heard that the countryside is overflowing with eligible men when Town is definitely not.
I’m sure there won’t be a young gentleman for twenty miles, and you have nothing in the world to worry about. ’
‘So why was Aunt Augusta so concerned that we could not tie ourselves up for a year?’ Bea asked fretfully.
‘She can’t have assumed we’d stay in London when she’d left us her house.
Maybe she knew something about the gentlemen in the area; I wager that hadn’t occurred to you.
It’s only just occurred to me, and I worry about everything! ’
But Cecilia had slipped away into sleep and did not hear her.