12 Dinner For Two
Cora returned to Staineybank in a glow of happiness.
To spend a whole day with Cal was paradise indeed!
To sit in the dappled sunshine of the glade and watch him wading through the sea of bluebells across the stream, or landing the one little fish caught by his line, or cooking it, sleeves rolled up, smiling up at her as he bent over his small fire…
these were memories she would treasure always.
This pleasant haze was punctured spectacularly as they drew up in the stable yard.
“Thank you for a delightful day,” she said, accepting his hand to help her down from the dog cart. “We had better hurry if we are not to hold up dinner. We have the entire vicarage party joining us tonight.”
“Not me,” he said with a rueful smile.
That was disappointing. “Oh? Are you dining out tonight?”
“In a manner of speaking. I’ll be taking my dinners at the hut from now on.”
For a moment, she feared she would swoon. Perhaps she swayed a little, for he put out a hand to steady her. “You knew that, didn’t you? And now that my meat safe is finished—”
She nodded miserably. “Yes. I remember. Every night except Sundays and sometimes Wednesdays, but I thought…” She stopped, uncomfortably aware of the groom unhitching the horse not three feet away. “Well…” She forced a smile. “Enjoy your solitary dinner.”
She turned away abruptly, trying to blink away the tears. Sunday… so many long, dreary evenings until Sunday. As she began to walk back to the house, she found him alongside her, matching his steps to hers.
“I’m sorry but I can’t bear to be in that great stone monstrosity,” he said. “It sucks out all my spirit, somehow.”
“I know. You need to be in the woods.” Her voice was low, but she could not yet manage to speak normally. “And you did tell me you would do this, but… I suppose I hoped it would not be just yet.”
“You can still come out to see me now and then… have a cup of tea… tell me all the news.”
“Yes.”
“And I’ll see you on Sunday.”
“Yes.”
Long pause. “And you could come for dinner.”
“When?”
“Day after tomorrow? If you want to, but if you don’t—”
“I should like that very much. What time?”
“Five… or thereabouts. No idea when we’ll eat, though. Cooking is an inexact science with me.”
She smiled then, although a little forlornly. “Until Thursday, then.”
Cora was not sure how she got through the evening.
The Templetons were not her favourite people, but then she supposed a parson was not there to be liked.
But Mrs Templeton had the misfortune to have a sister who had married into a dreadfully encroaching family.
The Underhill-Smythes were, so far as she could ascertain, at the lower end of the gentry scale, but they put themselves on so high a form, and showed so much familiarity towards the duke that he had forbidden them from entering Staineybank while he was in it.
Thus, as soon as he had decamped for London, they had descended on the parsonage, in full expectation of an appropriate number of invitations with which to boast to their acquaintances.
Fortunately for Cora, their attention was all on Richard and Rowena, as the future duke and duchess, and Cora was of very little account, so she was able to make an early escape and enjoy a cup of tea and a game of cribbage with Hester in her room.
“This picture is new,” she said, as she tidied away the cribbage board. The silver-framed portrait showed a handsome young man smiling at the painter with a merry expression. “A fine looking man. Who is he?”
“My father,” she said, with a lop-sided smile. “Oh yes, very fine looking, but handsome is as handsome does.”
“Lord Rupert Merrington. He must have been twenty-five or thirty when this likeness was taken.”
“Seven and twenty. The duke gave it to my mother, but she said she wanted no reminders of him, so he gave it to me, instead. I wanted no reminders of him, either, so for most of the year he languishes in the back of a drawer, but once a year I bring him out to show him that I am still alive, despite his best endeavours.”
Cora gasped. “Hester! You cannot mean—!”
“Oh, no, not literally. But he would have preferred it if I had not existed, all the same. These men! They take what they want and then they just walk away from it and go on with their lives.”
“Is that what happened to your mother?” Cora said, thrilled by this unexpected burst of revelation.
Hester nodded. “She was housekeeper here, and too quick-minded for such a position, if the truth were known. She read avidly, so she would often go into the library to find a book. Lord Rupert pursued her for years, and she was always clever enough to evade him… but one evening her luck ran out. She had finished one volume of her book and wanted to get the next. She thought he had already gone to bed, for it was close to midnight, so she took a chance and went down to the library, but he was still there and she could not escape him.”
“But that is dreadful!” Cora cried. “Whatever did she do? Surely the duke would have helped her?”
“He was no better. Both of them thought women were there solely to provide for their desires. Not that the duke ever interfered with the servants, so he was not quite as bad as his brother, but he was never faithful to his wives, not even Caroline, the first, and he was desperately in love with her, so it is said. But it never stopped him bedding other men’s wives as well.
So there was little help to be expected there.
My mother could not stay at Staineybank, not with Lord Rupert always there.
Her life would have been impossible. She fled to a friend in Oxford, but she was with child, she could get no work, she was in desperate straits. ”
“But Lord Rupert… he did nothing to help her? Surely he had an obligation to look after her?”
“One would think so, but he claimed he was drunk that night and remembered nothing of it. He sent her some money, but that does not go far.”
“But she is married now… so it all ended well, did it not?” Cora said.
“Yes, she is married. Some of Lord Rupert’s money bought a subscription to a library, and there she met Dr Brannon — although he was not a doctor then, just another young man studying for his degree.
He knew his family would not accept an illegitimate child, however, so he made my mother bring me to Staineybank and force Lord Rupert to do what is right by his child.
He assumed I would be handed over to a family on the estate, but the duke insisted I was to take the Merrington name and be brought up as his ward. ”
“The duke has a gruff exterior but his heart is gentle,” Cora said.
“Perhaps. He has had a difficult life, and losing all his children has been a devastating blow for him. He does not show it, but he feels it deeply. But he is a man, and like all men, he wants his own way in all matters. He can be generous when it suits him, when it costs him nothing, but he has always been a selfish creature. Men simply take what they want, and care nothing if women are trampled underfoot by their actions. My mother was ill-used by Lord Rupert and all but abandoned. Her husband forced her to give up her child, which she never wished to do, and then the duke had me brought up here, neither family nor servant. I would have been better placed with a farmer or labourer, for at least then I would have been respectable, instead of this strange, tainted being. And now I cannot even do my work for this stupid illness.”
“Oh, Hester, I had no idea you felt this way,” Cora said. “But you will be better by and by… indeed, you are already a great deal better than you were.”
“A little, yes, with the warmer weather, but when winter comes…” She shivered. “I feel so useless, Cora. At least I had a place here, work to do, enough to keep me busy, but now I have nothing to do but brood. You are lucky, having grandchildren to dote on.”
“Except that I find it very hard to dote on drooling, mewling infants,” Cora said, with a quick laugh.
“I will like them well enough when they can talk to me, but just at the moment I feel useless, too. None of my daughters need me any more, my son is entirely wrapped up in his new family, which is just as it should be, but it does make me feel rather redundant. I cannot even pass on the acquired wisdom of motherhood, for Rowena never listens to me and Sophia tells me my ideas are quite out of fashion now, and there is some brilliant new way of managing babies. So I feel… a little lost, too.”
Hester eyed her sideways. “Oh, not so very lost, I think, Cora. It seems to me that you have a very good reason to be happy just now. Does he return your affection?”
Cora pondered her answer carefully. “He has not said so, but… he seems to enjoy my company.”
Hester laughed. “Oh yes! That much is plain to see, and even if you have no intention of marrying him, if he puts a little colour in your cheeks, that is all to the good, is it not?”
This conversation made Cora very thoughtful.
Hester’s jaundiced view of men was one which, she could see, she had herself accepted — that men were in essence selfish beings.
It was not merely that they did as they pleased, but that they expected their women to fall in with every whim.
And women were obedient. The three men in her own life — her father, her husband, her son — had all had expectations of her that she had unthinkingly complied with.
Even the duke had decreed that she and her daughters should stay at Staineybank, and they had done as he asked.
It had never occurred to her to disobey.
Yet now she had met a man who had no expectations of her. Cal asked nothing of her except her company now and then, and even that she was free to refuse if she wished. Not that she did wish, but there was no pressure to accept. She was free to choose.