Loe raamatut: «Miss Jesmond's Heir»

Chapter One

‘Georgie, dear, have you heard the news? Louisa Manners came this morning whilst you were out and told me that the caretaker at Jesmond House had received word from the heir that he intends to take up residence there almost immediately. It seems that he is not aware of how derelict the place has become over the last few years. All in all, though, I don’t think that it would be wise for you to take the children to play in the grounds. Miss Jesmond was happy for you to do so, but perhaps the new owner might not be so accommodating. Best wait and see.’

Georgie—more properly Georgina—was busy stringing a guitar. She looked across at her widowed sister-in-law who was only a few years older than she was, but was a semi-invalid who spent her life on the sofa.

‘Who is the new owner?’ she asked. ‘Have you any notion when he is due to arrive?’

‘No to both questions.’ Caro Pomfret sighed. ‘Louisa asked me if I knew who the heir might be, but all I could say was that I had no knowledge of any of Miss Jesmond’s relatives—indeed, from what little she said of them, I thought that she had none. For that matter, I don’t even know that it’s a he. I thought that she might have said something to you—she was as friendly with you as anyone…which isn’t saying much.’

She looked disapprovingly at Georgie. ‘You said that you were taking the twins for a walk when you had finished repairing poor John’s guitar—do you really intend to show yourself in public in those unsuitable clothes?’

Georgie, her self-imposed task nearly over, smiled at her sister-in-law before looking down at herself. She was wearing jacket, shirt, breeches and boots, suitable for riding in, which had belonged to her half-brother John when he was a boy. Her russet-coloured hair was cut short after a fashion which had died out some years ago—but then Georgie and fashion had little to do with one another. She preferred to wear whatever was most suitable for the task in hand.

Her sister-in-law often sighed regretfully over the undeniable fact that Georgie did not use her best features—a pair of fine green eyes and a piquante, almost turned-up, nose—to more effect on the local gentlemen who had come courting as soon as they decently could after her husband’s death.

‘I shall not be in public, Caro,’ Georgie said, after playing a few testing chords on the guitar. ‘I thought of taking Gus and Annie to play at the far end of the Park where no one at all will see us, except the birds and the squirrels. The children like it there.’

‘I know they do. But you are forgetting two things. First of all, that part of the Park adjoins Miss Jesmond’s land, and secondly, you can never be quite sure that no one will come across you. Suppose it were some gentleman? What would he think of Miss Pomfret of Pomfret Hall, near Netherton, exhibiting herself in public dressed like a stable boy!’

‘Hardly a stable boy,’ returned Georgie, smiling. ‘When John wore these when he was a lad, no one ever thought he was other than John Pomfret of Pomfret Hall. And besides, you forget, I am a widow and no longer Miss Pomfret, but respectable Mrs Charles Herron of Church Norwood who chooses to live with you for the time being for our mutual convenience.’

This was not strictly true; the convenience was all on Caro Pomfret’s side. The Pomfrets had been as poor as church-mice and, when John had died after a hunting accident, Caro and his twin children had been left with little to live on. Georgie, on the other hand, had been left a comfortable sum of money by her mother, her father’s second wife. Her husband’s death had left her with even more, and a fine house to boot, which was at present let to an Indian nabob and his wife who needed a temporary home while they looked for one of their own.

Georgie’s decision to return to her old home to help Caro—who had taken to her bed after her husband’s sudden death and had left it only to live an idle and helpless life—had been for her nephew and niece’s sake rather than her sister-in-law’s. For a variety of reasons, she had no wish to marry again, even though she was only twenty-five.

‘All the same, no gentleman would think you respectable in those clothes,’ moaned Caro, as though Georgie had not spoken—a bad habit of Caro’s.

‘I have no interest in gentlemen, respectable or otherwise, so that is no matter,’ Georgie declared, beginning to sing one of Mr Tom Moore’s songs in a low contralto, satisfied that she had made the guitar playable again.

She rose. ‘Forgive me, Caro. Nurse will have the children ready by now and I have no wish to keep them waiting.’

‘And you will remember what I told you about not going on Miss Jesmond’s land. We really ought not to annoy our new neighbour by trespassing upon it.’

‘I always remember everything you say,’ returned Georgie untruthfully. ‘Try to rest, my dear, and then we can have a game of cards this evening. Gus and Annie would like that.’

‘If my poor head doesn’t persist in troubling me,’ wailed Caro, watching Georgie walk out of the room carrying the guitar, and thinking that it was fortunate that Georgie was something of a flat-chested beanpole who could certainly be mistaken for a boy in her brother’s old clothes. Which I never could, Caro congratulated herself complacently, since my nicely rounded figure has always been the subject of admiration.

Besides, I mustn’t be too unkind, for it is a most convenient thing for me that she takes the children off my hands when she visits so that I don’t have the trouble of caring for them. I’m not in the least surprised that she ended up by marrying an elderly scholar—for his money, presumably. Considering the way she dresses and carries on, no one else would have wanted her! One wonders why Charles Herron did, such a hoyden as she has always been.

With which ungracious thoughts—considering all that she owed to her sister-in-law, both in love and money—she drifted off to sleep.

Georgie, meanwhile, went her own sweet way, across the small park where no one was allowed to play cricket on the carefully tended grass. Gus and Annie ran happily behind her. They were making for the far end of Jesmond House’s land where there was a large stretch of flat green turf where she and the children could play cricket to their heart’s content, far from the disapproving glare of Caro and her gardeners.

‘You’re sure of this, Jess? You know what you are doing? This is not a mere whim wham, I hope—the result of a more brilliant spring than usual.’

The new owner of Jesmond House was standing before the glass doors of the drawing room, looking out over ruined gardens and the desolate park beyond which a small folly stood, crumbling into ruin. He could almost hear his former employer’s sardonic voice echoing in his ear after he had walked into his office to tell him that he had inherited his great-aunt’s estate and wished to be relieved of his duties in order to start a new life far from the City of London and the to-and-fro of the business world there.

‘No, not a whim wham,’ Jess Fitzroy had said, shaking his head. ‘And it’s not because I am tired of working for you—after all I owe you a debt of gratitude which I can never repay.’

Ben Wolfe made a dismissive motion with his hand. ‘Nothing to that,’ he said curtly. ‘You repaid me long ago. I only want to be sure that you have carefully weighed up what you are proposing to do. You know, of course, that if at any time you grow bored with country living and would wish to return, I shall always be ready to welcome you back—if only because I might have some difficulty in finding a lieutenant whom I can trust as completely as I trust you.’

Jess said simply, ‘I shall miss working with you’, and took the hand Ben held out in friendship. The two men could not have been more unalike. Both of them were tall and well built, but Ben was a great, grey-eyed, black-haired bear of a man, who looked more like a coalheaver or a pugilist than a wealthy man with an old name. Jess, on the other hand, was fair, blue-eyed and classically handsome, with the build and poise of an athlete.

Susanna, Ben’s wife, had once likened Ben to a broadsword and Jess to a rapier, so far as physique went, that was. In business and in life, however, both were equally devious—Jess, because Ben, slightly older, had trained him to be that way, Ben being devious by nature.

‘You will be easy financially, I hope,’ Ben said, eyebrows raised a little, ‘If not…?’

It was an offer of help, Jess knew. He said, carelessly, ‘Oh, my great-aunt has left me a competence, and I am not strapped for cash myself.’

This, he knew, was evasion rather than direct lying. Ben was not to know—indeed, Jess had concealed it from him—that he had made himself wealthy by following his employer’s example. Like Ben, he had made a financial killing in 1815 by buying rather than selling stocks because, old soldiers both, they believed that Waterloo would be a victory, not a defeat. The first news which had come from the Continent had wrongly reported that Napoleon had won.

Since then he had invested wisely and, although he would never be as inordinately wealthy as Ben Wolfe, he was rich in the way most people counted riches. It was not only Ben Wolfe from whom he wished to conceal his true financial position, but the people amongst whom he proposed to live. When a very young man, he had learned by bitter experience the wisdom of playing his cards close to his chest. Only Ben Wolfe’s friendship and advice had saved him from ruin.

Now Jess felt that he no longer needed Ben’s protection, that he could fend for himself, without needing someone powerful and daring to stand behind him, ready to rescue him if he failed. He was also beginning to believe that only if he left his familiar surroundings to strike out on his own would he ever find a wife as worthy of loving as Ben’s Susanna was.

He would have liked to marry Susanna, but she had only ever had eyes for Ben. Leaving London would mean leaving her shadow behind as well as Ben’s.

He had had no notion of what he might find when he reached journey’s end in the south Nottinghamshire countryside. He remembered Jesmond House from his days there as a small boy, when his great-aunt had always made him welcome. Days which he had almost forgotten, until the letter had arrived from her lawyers telling him that he had inherited the house which he had not seen since he had left for India as a very young man. And not only had she left him the house, but also her small fortune. His first reaction had been that he would sell the house, sight unseen.

Jess smiled wryly, wondering at the sudden impulse which had, instead, brought him back to this near ruin, which he could only just recognise as the well-run splendid mansion of his youth. He remembered it being a spotlessly tidy place with a warm kitchen where he was always welcome. Mrs Hammond, the cook, had fed him surreptitiously because his great-aunt had the appetite of a bird and thought that lively young Jess needed no more to eat than she did. She had baked the most appetising Sally Lunns and fed them to him on the sly in her kitchen.

Well, he would need to use some of his money, and all his aunt’s, to restore the house to its former glory, and fill it with the servants who would keep up its splendour. It was perhaps appropriate that at this point in his musings, Twells, his aunt’s aged butler-cum-footman, should walk deferentially in and murmur, ‘The mistress always used to ask for the tea board at this hour of the afternoon, sir. Would you care to follow her custom?’

He was about to say ‘No’ when he had a sudden brief memory of a much-younger great-aunt sitting at the small table beside the hearth serving tea to him on many of the long, golden, summer afternoons of his childhood, a younger Twells hovering beside her. That, together with the understanding that the old man found his presence bewildering and disturbing—although one of his first acts on arriving had been to tell his aunt’s remaining few servants that he had no intention of dismissing any of them—had him changing his mind.

‘Very thoughtful of you, Twells. Yes, indeed, and afterwards I’ll take a walk into the paddock beyond the Park. The servants used to play cricket there in their time off, I believe.’

The old man’s face filled with pleasure. ‘Fancy you remembering that, sir! You were naught but a young shaver when you last visited—and I was a deal spryer then than I am now. I’ll see that the tea board comes along instanter.’

He was as good as his word and departed, muttering, ‘Mrs Hammond will be that pleased.’

Once he had gone Jess half regretted his hasty decision to take a walk. He was still dressed for the town with fashionable trousers strapped inside light shoes, and a tight, elaborate cravat which he had tied himself. He sometimes wondered—frivolously—whether his valet Mason’s desertion of him, in order to take over his father’s inn in Devon, had been the real reason for his own sudden abandonment of London and his old life. In the country he would be able to dress more carelessly than in town where a man was judged by his clothing and deportment.

He drank his tea and ate the Sally Lunns which arrived with it. Astonishingly, Twells—or, more likely, Mrs. Hammond—had remembered his childhood love of them. Altogether it was an odd thing for Jess Fitzroy to be doing in the middle of a mild May afternoon.

Back in London he would either have been at his desk or engaged on some delicate—or indelicate—errand for Ben Wolfe. Now the day was his, but he scarcely knew what to do with it. He walked slowly through the glass doors, crossed the terrace, and strolled down a slight incline, passing by the neglected flower-beds which once had been so trim. Finally he came to a wooden gate, badly in need of rehanging, which he remembered led towards the paddock. On opening it he heard voices: high voices, children’s voices, and a cry of ‘Well caught’ came ringing through the mild summer air.

Jess grinned to himself. He had trespassers; village children, probably, who were using the paddock because no one else did. There used to be an elderly donkey grazing there, he remembered, who had most likely brayed and galloped off into the Shades long ago to eat grass in heaven instead of in Jesmond Park. There was a small stand of trees to pass through before he finally reached the spot where the trespassers were enjoying themselves.

For all the happy noise they were making, there were only three of them. A boy and a girl who looked to be about ten years old and, by their casual dress, were a tenant farmer’s children, and a russet-haired youth, similarly attired, who was bowling at the girl. They were playing single-wicket with a crude cricket bat. They were so intent on their game that they did not see him, until the girl, skying a ball, was caught by the boy.

Jess clapped his hands together and exclaimed, ‘Well bowled! May I have a go now?’

All three of them turned to look at him. The youth said in a clear, pleasant voice, ‘You must be the new owner of Jesmond House. We really ought to apologise for playing here—but it’s the only convenient piece of turf near to home. I suppose you’ll want us to leave.’

He was a handsome enough lad with a cheeky face, who held himself well for all his rough dress. The boy said reproachfully, ‘Oh, come on, Georgie, he said that he wanted a go. Give him your bat, Annie—unless you wish to bowl, sir.’

Another educated rustic. Jess said, stretching out a hand, ‘I was never much use as a bowler, but with the bat—that was different.’

Annie handed him the bat, saying confidentially, ‘Don’t judge Georgie’s bowling by what I was receiving—that’s all,’ she added, for Gus was putting his hand over his mouth to indicate that she was not to say too much.

So Georgie was a bit of a demon bowler, was he? And here he stood, scarcely dressed for a real game in his tight trousers and his fashionable cravat, which held his head stiff and high as it was intended to. On the other hand, Georgie was slight—although sometimes slight men were the most cunning and successful bowlers of all.

On yet another impulse—he was having a lot of them these days—Jess ripped off his cravat, tossed it aside and undid the top button of his shirt before taking guard.

The lad’s run up was short and the trundling ball was artfully pitched, spinning away from him; nevertheless, he hit it hard and high, but not too much so, because of the youth of the players. Gus gave a squeal of excitement, Annie put an awed finger in her mouth to watch the ball’s flight while Georgie ran towards where it was falling—only to miss it by inches when it hit the ground and ran into the scrub which bordered the paddock. The lad ran after it, his coat flying open to reveal his loose shirt which had fallen out of his breeches.

It also revealed something else which brought up Jess a little short, although he had half-suspected it. Georgie was plainly no lad, but a girl dressed in her brother’s clothes, and when she scrambled enthusiastically into the bushes to kneel down to rescue the ball from where it was hiding, it was quite plain that Miss Georgie was a veritable tomboy—a romp, no less.

A judgement which was borne out when she threw the ball, overarm, straight and accurately at Gus, shouting, ‘Catch, Gus—and now it’s your turn to bowl.’

Gus caught it, moaning reproachfully, ‘Oh, I say, Georgie, he’s a regular Corinthian, I shan’t stand a chance against him.’

Jess raised his bat in salute—amused that Gus should describe him with a word used of fashionable idlers who never did a hand’s turn. His camouflage—something which he had sometimes adopted in London when on one of Ben Wolfe’s missions—was obviously working well.

He was rewarded with a belligerent glare and a slow trundler from Gus which he treated with more respect than it deserved as he did the second and third he received. But he let fly at Gus’s fourth, only to be caught by the rampant lass, Georgie—or more accurately, perhaps, Georgina.

She smiled triumphantly at him before Gus exclaimed, ‘Oh, that was a gift, that was. He meant you to catch it, Georgie. He really knows how to play.’

Georgie’s triumph disappeared immediately. She said reproachfully to Jess as she held the ball high, ‘Was it, sir? Did you intend to be caught out?’

Before he could answer, she continued, her tone quite changed. ‘Oh, it’s very wrong of me to question you so rudely. You are most plainly the owner of this land, Miss Jesmond’s heir, for who else would be strolling in her grounds dressed like a refugee from Piccadilly? And we are equally plainly trespassers. You have every right to offer me a dolly drop and, now I think of it, you were almost certainly being kind to Gus to let him take your wicket. Allow me to apologise to you at once.’

Jess, who had handed his bat to Annie, smiled at Miss Georgie’s impulsive speech.

‘Not at all,’ he said, and walked towards her so that they stood face to face before he bowed elaborately to complete his portrayal of a Piccadilly lounger.

‘Allow me to apologise for doing it too brown. I should have known that Master Gus was fly enough to grasp when he was being patronised. I wonder if you would agree to let Gus and Annie play at single-wicket alone for a few moments while I have a quiet word with you.’

Georgie looked at him closely for the first time. At a distance he had been an impressive figure of a man, tall and broad-shouldered, quite unlike her late husband who had been a stooped scholar. Near to he was, as she was later to tell an interested Caro, quite impossibly handsome—no man in the neighbourhood of Netherton could hold a candle to him. Golden-haired, blue-eyed, straight-nosed, with a long amused mouth, and—she noted a trifle dazedly—with trim ears, set close to his head, he was, indeed, the very model of a Prince in a fairy tale.

His voice was pleasant, too. It was also, she thought, the voice of a man who was accustomed to be obeyed. She wondered what he had to say to her privately as she told Gus and Annie to continue their game without them for a few moments.

Jess regarded her levelly. Close to, no one could mistake her for a boy, even though she had buttoned her coat so that her clinging shirt no longer revealed the lines of the small breasts which had given her sex away to him. He considered carefully what he was about to say: principally, that it was dangerous for her to parade around the countryside dressed like a lad. Her father should have more sense than to allow it. Particularly someone as young as she appeared to be.

He was not yet to know that he had quite mistaken Georgina’s age, which he had guessed, wrongly, to be under twenty. Later, he was to think that it was her lack of artifice, her frank manner, and the lack also of any kind of fashionable face-paint which had combined to deceive him.

‘I am, as you have guessed, the new owner of Jesmond House. My name is Jesmond Fitzroy. Miss Jesmond was my great-aunt and this is my first inspection of my property. Now, whilst I am not angry that you and your brother and sister have trespassed on my land, I am a trifle worried that your mother and father should allow so young a woman to go abroad dressed like a boy.

‘It is, I would submit, highly dangerous for you to put yourself at the mercy of any rogue who wanders the countryside, of whom there are many these days, and I consider it to be one of my first duties, seeing that I am the owner of Jesmond House, to so inform them—if you will be so good as to tell me your name.’

The play of feeling on Georgie’s mobile face was revealing. She was smiling at him when he began to speak, but by the end of his well-meant—but unfortunate—words of advice her face turned black as thunder. She thinned her lips and said nothing, but she was thinking a lot.

Jess waited for her to reply but, seeing that she apparently had no such intention, he continued, a little less agreeably, ‘Your name please, Miss Georgina. If you would be so good.’

Georgie said, keeping her voice low, but plainly furious, ‘Has anyone ever told you how pompous you are, Mr Fitzroy—or do they expect it of you? In which case, everyone has ceased to remark upon it. Gus and Annie are not my brother and sister, and we shall certainly leave your land to you in future. I shall be careful not to sully it again either in skirts or breeches, so you may take your sermons elsewhere.’

Later, she was to regret the violence with which she had answered him, but he had touched a nerve by reproving her for wearing breeches. She had endured quite enough of that from Caro! Her anger was the greater precisely because for the first time she was beginning to think that Caro, foolish though she usually was, had some right on her side.

But, faced with this attractive stranger who was speaking to her as though she were a naughty child, her temper ran away with her. ‘For your information,’ she continued, her voice as cutting as she could make it, ‘my mother and father are both dead, and I am perfectly capable of looking after myself.’

She turned away from him before he could answer her, calling peremptorily, ‘Gus, Annie, please pull up the stump at once, and bring the bat and ball to me. We are leaving immediately.’

Jess said in his usual mild way, ‘One moment, if you please.’

‘No moments at all,’ she flung at him, incontinent, something which back at Pomfret Hall she was to recall with growing shame, ‘for we shall be gone in a moment.’

‘No,’ Jess said, stung at last into abandoning his normal equable manner. ‘You will tell me your name and where I may find you. Someone near to you may be pervious to sense and try to control you.’

‘Oh, indeed,’ she returned fiercely, thinking of Caro and her whining. ‘There certainly is someone, and you may find her—and the three of us—at Pomfret Hall. I bid you good day. I trust that you are sufficient of a gentleman not to try to detain me.’

He stepped back. She had breached his resolve always to conduct himself with quiet dignity, a resolve which dated back to his earliest days with Ben Wolfe.

‘Oh, indeed,’ he informed her through gritted teeth. ‘I have not the slightest wish to detain such a termagant in breeches. I bid you good day—and may the future invest you with a little more common sense.’

All the way back to the Hall, Georgie blushed with shame every time she thought of her recent encounter with Jesmond House’s new owner. What on earth could have possessed her to make her behave so badly, so completely outside the bounds of a young gentlewoman’s normal conduct?

She could find no useful answer to her own self-questioning, for what she did not wish to admit was that at first sight she had been bowled over by Miss Jesmond’s heir, only to have him treat her like a foolish child who needed advising and reprimanding! Her pride and her vanity were alike hurt. The second did not matter, but the first did.

And the worst thing of all was that, although he had been right to warn her, it was his refusal to see her as anything but a silly chit which hurt the most.