Love is the Enemy

Chapter 1 ~ 1848-2

He had laughed often enough in the past when by sheer force of will she had discomfited those who had opposed her. And yet now, when it happened to him, he did not find it in the least humorous.

Sir Rupert stopped walking and saw where his feet had carried him. He found himself standing outside White’s Club. His foot was already on the first step when a faint burst of laughter came to his ears. He had no idea at what the members might be laughing, but it might be at himself. He pulled a watch from his pocket. It was barely ten o’clock. It was too early to go to bed and quite suddenly he decided what he must do.

He must see Clementine and tell her what had occurred. It was unthinkable that she should learn of his predicament from someone else.

The Talmadges were in the country, where they had been the whole of the summer.

Sir Rupert turned away impatiently from the door of the Club. He was tired of London, he would go to the country. He walked across Piccadilly and down Berkeley Square. As he went, a number of beggars and several women of easy virtue tried to attract his attention, but he neither heard nor saw them.

He was making his plans with that clear icy concentration which those who worked with him in the House of Commons knew only too well.

He was well aware that after what had occurred in The Palace this evening he must be careful. If he sought Clementine out too deliberately after what had happened, it would be playing into the hands of those who would be expecting him to do just this very thing and who would undoubtedly report it immediately to the Queen. Besides, being fastidious about such matters, Sir Rupert never, if it was possible, went to the Talmadges’ house. He and Lady Clementine met secretly and disguised as incognitos that they thought were impenetrable, when they were in London or in the glades and forests surrounding Wroth, where they were quite certain that no one would observe them.

But apparently they had been wrong in imagining themselves unseen and Sir Rupert knew now as never before that they must be careful and circumspect.

He would go at once to Wroth, he decided. There would be nothing wrong in that and the fact that the Talmadges’ estates matched with his could not be expected to deter him from returning to his own home.

Once there he must contrive in some clever unobvious way to see Clementine at once. If he left tonight, he should be at Wroth before breakfast and he could then make his plans.

He entered his house in Berkeley Square, handed his cape, hat and cane to the butler and in a calm unhurried voice gave orders for a carriage to be prepared immediately for the journey.

“I heard at The Palace this evening,” he added, “from an old friend of the family that my grandmother is far from well. I expect she has forbidden anyone to tell me of the deterioration in her health, thinking that I should be busy at the House of Commons, but naturally I shall leave for Wroth at once.”

“Very good, Sir Rupert,” the butler replied. “May I venture, sir, to express the hope that it is but a false alarm and that you will find her Ladyship well?”

“I hope so indeed,” Sir Rupert said and leaving the hall he walked into the library.

It was an excuse, he thought, that would serve well to ward off those who enquired the following day as to where he had gone. He walked across the room to a table set between the windows and poured himself a drink. He felt in need of one, yet when his lips touched the wine he knew that he was not thirsty. Instead, his mind was turning over and over again the thought of what lay ahead, marriage to some suitable girl. And where, he wondered, was he to find one?

For his very varied experience of lovely women had not brought to his notice many marriageable jeunes filles.

Sir Rupert gave a sigh and put down his wineglass. Perhaps Clementine would help him to find one, unless she was foolish enough to be jealous and inclined to advise him to flout the Queen’s instructions. But no, he was certain that she would not be as stupid as that. She knew as well as he did what lay at stake, the post of Foreign Secretary at the age of thirty-three. To find a parallel one would have to quote Pitt who had become Chancellor of the Exchequer when he was ten years younger.

Sir Rupert took up his glass again and drank off the wine before he turned to leave the room. As he did so, his eyes caught sight of the row of invitations propped on the mantelpiece beneath the great Chippendale mirror. There were dozens of them, but one in particular, a large white card, held his attention.

“The Earl and Countess of Cardon – At Home,” he read, “on July 16th at 3 o’clock at Rowanfield Manor, Rowan.”

Sir Rupert stared at it for some moments.

“Tomorrow at 3 o’clock,” he said aloud, “and Clementine will be there.”

Yes, Lady Clementine Talmadge would be there, as would most of the County, and it would be easy to meet each other quite casually and openly.

Sir Rupert Wroth left the library with the invitation card in his hand.

*

The drive to Rowanfield Manor was crowded with carriages of all sorts, sizes and designs, but the horses that drew them were almost uniformly finely bred. Tossing their well-combed manes and with their silver-crested harnesses jingling, they drew up when their turn came under the pillared portico of the mellow red-brick house where several liveried flunkeys with powdered hair were in attendance.

Nerina Graye, looking out of the mud-splashed unpolished window of the Hackney carriage which she had hired from the Railway Station, gave a little gasp at the sight of the other vehicles and then shrank back into the corner of the ancient musty-smelling cab with an expression of dismay on her face.

She had forgotten that it was the day of the garden party, indeed why should she have remembered it as she had not intended to be there?

Now she knew full well that she could not have returned to Rowanfield Manor on a more unfortunate day.

By the evening everyone would be tired and irritable. Her return, unheralded and unexpected, would be bad enough on any occasion, but today of all days it would be catastrophic! On an impulse she reached up and opened the tiny communicating window between herself and the driver.

“Cabby!” she called, “Cabby! Set me down at the back door please.”

He cupped his ear with dirty fingers swollen with arthritis.

“The back door, did you say? Very good, miss.”

Nerina sat down on the seat and watched a smart dogcart with yellow and black wheels flash by them. It was driven by a young gentleman with large well-curled side-whiskers and she recognised him for one of the most eligible bachelors in the County.

Everybody would be here today, she thought miserably, and she would be the only uninvited guest and indeed the most unwelcome one.

“I could not help it, I had to come away. There was nothing else for me to do.”

She said the words fiercely out loud to herself and, as though the very sound of them gave her the reassurance she was needing, her chin went up a little higher and her air of dismay and dejection was replaced by a more characteristic expression of defiance. And yet her hands were cold and she knew that inside herself she was frightened.

Her aunt had been angry the last time she had returned home, but Nerina was not afraid of her Aunt Anne. It was her uncle who made her tremble. She dreaded hearing his bullying voice raised to a shout as he forced her to explain her actions. She dreaded the heckling tones he would use as he tore her explanations to ribbons, deriding her fears and told her, as he had told her so often before, that she had to earn her own living and the sooner she stopped being fastidious and fanciful the better.

How she loathed those scoldings and how she shrank, although she pretended to herself she did not, from his anger, from his bullying and his jeering laughter at her efforts to preserve her chastity!

She remembered the last time when she had been forced to tell him why she had left the position of Governess to the two children of a middle-aged widower. She remembered how her uncle had insisted on every detail of the amorous advances made to her by her employer, and when, shamed and humiliated by what she had to recount, she had eventually subsided into an embarrassed silence, he had laughed mockingly and told her that she was making a mountain out of a molehill and that most of what she had resented had been nothing but the imaginings of her own love-sick mind.

This time it would be worse, much worse and, although she might resolve now to tell him as little as possible, she knew that when the moment came he would force admissions from her that she never intended to make. She knew, as she had known ever since she was a child, that he took an obscene pleasure in humiliating her. He had hated her ever since she had grown old enough to wince away from the very unpaternal kisses he had given her at bedtime.

He had hated her since she had run sobbing from his library one wet Saturday afternoon and he had hated her too ever since she had grown too old for him to be able to beat her, because he had a bestial pleasure from doing so.

Yet he was her uncle, her Guardian and her only relative. She wondered sometimes whether it was better to endure the humiliations and miseries that she encountered in the positions she had found as a Governess or wiser to return home and endure others almost as bad under the roof of her uncle.

The last time she left Rowanfield Manor she had told herself that she would stay away whatever she had to suffer, yet here she was, returning in three months. It had been impossible, utterly impossible to remain in the same house as the Marquis of Droxburgh.

She could see now his cruel dissolute eyes fixed on her face, his hands reached out towards her and his tongue wetting his thin lips. He had been evil beyond anything she had imagined possible in the whole world and she had stood it for three months, three whole months until she had known that breaking point had come and she could go on no longer.

She had not slept for weeks, she had been too frightened to do so, and all through the day when she was supposed to be teaching her charge in the schoolroom she was listening for that soft footfall outside the door. No, she could go on no longer. Flesh and blood could not stand it any further. Better to brave Uncle Herbert’s anger than that, better to acknowledge herself defeated than to collapse where she was.

Another carriage passed by the window, this time an open Victoria. Nerina had a glimpse of a pretty face framed with a bonnet trimmed with roses. There was a parasol to match of flounced lace caught with rosebuds and the girl, for she looked nothing more, was escorted by a gentleman with a curly brimmed top hat and a huge carnation buttonhole.

There was something elegant and romantic about the couple. As they flashed out of sight, Nerina looked instinctively down at her own dress. It was creased and dirty from the railway train. She had been travelling since dawn and she knew that her face and her hair were smutty and that she looked generally dishevelled and untidy. She smoothed her dress impatiently and realised that there was little she could do to improve it.