Page 2 of To Catch a Husband
‘If you call me “Sir Henry”, even in jest, Mary, I am not sitting down but walking right out of that door.’
‘I am sorry, Harry. I should not tease you, especially now. It must be both strange and sad for you, coming back when the locality has perhaps come to terms with Sir John’s death, and yet here it is, made new again to you.’ She patted the sofa beside her, and he came to sit down. ‘It was a terrible shock, but at least the suddenness of it meant there was no suffering.’ Her voice softened. ‘He was very well thought of, and nobody doubts the estate is in good hands with you. You are selling out, yes?’
‘Put my papers in as soon as I got back to England.’ He sounded regretful. The army life had suited young Harry Penwood, and he had only had his company for six months. He felt it as work unfinished, especially with Wellington looking set to drive the French out of Spain entirely and back over the Pyrenees, after winning a victory only a few weeks past, and one which had given Captain Penwood his last taste of action.
‘At least you have your ancestral acres, and in a good13state, too. No fear of poor husbandry there. I …’ She paused as Atlow entered, and requested him to bring tea. When they were once again alone, she pulled a face. ‘You find us suffering from the result of the opposite. However much Papa had to retrench, he never contemplated selling the entire estate, and yet Edmund did not even retain his patrimony for a single whole year, and we are left impoverished, and almost destitute.’
‘But Lady Damerham has the dower house for life, surely?’ Harry frowned.
‘She does, but whether we can afford to live in it is another matter, and my portion is, would you credit it, only to be paid when I marry. So Papa failed to provide for me should I remain single, and thus most in need of financial support.’ Mary did not attempt to conceal her disgust at her sire’s lack of forethought. ‘At this rate I am facing my declining years in some gloomy cottage, with a single servant and mutton once a week, if fortunate.’
‘Put like that, you are in a difficult position, but you will marry, of course you will, and—’
‘I am five and twenty, Harry. I never had a Season to be trotted up and down in London, and I have no regrets about that, but I know everyone hereabouts, and if any gentleman had found me to his taste, or he to mine, I think we would have discovered it by now.’
‘Er …’ Harry looked a little uncomfortable. ‘You do not blame me for not … I mean … we are dashed good friends but …’14
‘Oh Harry,’ Mary laughed, and reached out her hand to his. ‘No. We are, as you say, the best of friends, and I daresay there are married couples out there who rub along far worse than we would do, but you and James were brothers to me, whilst Edmund … Do you know, I wondered, when I was a girl, if Edmund was a changeling. I did, really. I had read in some history book that King James the Second was meant to have had a baby boy smuggled into the chamber of his Catholic wife, in a warming pan of all ridiculous things, and a baby girl smuggled out. Well, I suppose that fired my imagination, and I wondered if Papa had smuggled in a changeling that was Edmund. He has always been so unlike James and myself. James would not have …’
Her smile twisted. She missed her brother James, would always miss him. The memorial in the village church was all there was, for he lay in a grave in Portugal, a grave perhaps already overgrown and forgotten. James would not have squandered the little inheritance that remained, would not have sold Tapley End, and never, ever, to the family with whom the Lounds had been at odds since the Civil War.
‘No, he would not.’ Harry understood, and it was one of the things that made him so much like a brother, when Edmund seemed unrelated. Edmund would have looked questioningly at her, frowned in incomprehension. ‘But it is done, Mary. There is nothing you can do about it. Old Cradley has bought the estate fair and square. If I could have afforded it … well, however wrong it15would have felt to own the place, I would have bought it rather than see it go to him. I could have made over Hassocks Farm to you, or sold it to you for a pittance, and the rent would have kept you in the dower house, at the very least.’
‘It would still be charity, Harry, though meant, and probably accepted, in friendship. It just feels …’ She shook her head. ‘I know Edmund is not solely to blame. We all know Papa was a gamester, and if he had not been so plagued with the gout of late years, we might have been in the suds even before Edmund inherited.’ She sighed. ‘But you would have thought that he, Edmund, would have made a push to come about, not simply carry on where Papa left off and then shrug and say it was not his fault.’
‘He did not say so?’ Harry looked suitably surprised.
‘Oh yes. He even had the impudence to say it was my fault, because if I had married well, then he could have sponged off my husband.’
Harry’s jaw dropped, and it was some moments before he could respond.
‘Well, if that don’t beat all! In all this sorry mess, Mary, at least he is going off to the other side of the Atlantic Ocean to trap beavers or whatever. He cannot do any more harm from there.’
‘True.’ She paused for a moment. ‘I do not suppose I should tell you, since you will no doubt sit as a magistrate as your father did, but I am a thief.’
‘You?’16
‘Yes. When I heard who was buying the house and its contents, please note, I had the writing table from the green saloon brought over here, and the portrait of Grandmama that hung in the morning room. And I also brought Sir Robert and the Lady Elizabeth. I thought if they had to see a Risley living in the house they might haunt it, and I was none too sure Lord Cradley would not have had them burnt, as final proof of victory. I replaced Sir Robert with a still life that had been in the attic for years.’
‘Well, then that is not theft but rescue.’
‘You may shortly be on the bench, Harry, but your grasp of law is …’
‘Tenuous? Not really. But look at it this way. Cradley is not going to use a lady’s writing table, loathed your grandmama, and might indeed have committed your ancestral portraits to the flames. He has not been deprived of anything he would miss, and they are your ancestors.’ He smiled.
‘Bless you,’ Mary smiled at him, but it wavered. ‘I keep thinking this is all just a nightmare, but it is not. I cannot forgive Edmund. He did not even bother to see if anyone else would offer for the estate, and took Lord Cradley’s frankly insulting offer as if it were manna from heaven. I would have been so ashamed if I had brought us to such a pass, that I would rather have drowned myself in the lake.’
‘Has Cradley strutted about the place yet?’
‘I believe he came over once it was all legal and final,17and sneered at everything before having it shut up. He even turned off most of the servants. That was about ten days ago. I cannot think what he would wish to do with the house, though it is far nicer than his own. For all that I complain of bad husbandry, his land is good, though no doubt he will increase the rents and take what he can from ours. He did send a very formal letter to Mama, expressly forbidding “trespass etc.”, by which he very clearly meant me walking the grounds, let alone fishing. It is not as though he fishes himself, either.’
‘You will miss that. Though it goes without saying that you can come over and try your luck on our beat of the river any time you wish.’
‘I warn you, Harry, if I do, I will be striving to catch our dinner. Just think of the economy if I could avoid us having to buy fish.’
Lady Damerham was quite surprised to re-enter the room to find them laughing, and looked from one to the other. Since she did not like seeing people unhappy she did not complain.
‘Here you are, Harry. It was just where I thought it was … at least the place where I thought it was after it was not where I first thought it was.’ She held out a piece of paper, upon which the recipe was written in her neat, rounded hand.
