The Horizons of Love

Chapter One ~ 1878-2

And now George had spoilt everything!

Not only was it infuriating to have to take another guest with her to Chale, but that it should be a young girl made it worse.

It was not a question of her being a rival. It was not that which Lucy feared.

It was that Ina would be completely out of place in what was to be her party.

And George, instead of paying attention to the attractive Mrs. Marshall, who she had chosen particularly for him, would be dribbling over his niece because she was ‘family’.

Lucy wanted to scream at the annoyance that the whole idea was causing her.

Then she remembered that was not the way to manage George.

With an effort she forced herself to walk across the room towards him, put both her hands on the lapels of his coat and look up at him appealingly.

“Please, George, let’s make other arrangements for your niece,” she begged. “You know how much I am looking forward to being at Chale and in a party that will consist of many of our dearest friends. A young girl would be so out of place.”

Because she looked so lovely when she was pleading with him, she thought for a moment from the expression in her husband’s eyes that he was going to give in to her.

Then he said,

“When we are at Chale, you will have your new admirer to run your errands. So tell him to invite someone young to keep Ina company.”

Now there was a note in his voice that told Lucy that George was jealous and she had been very stupid not to anticipate that he might be so where the Marquis was concerned.

She was aware that George had tolerated with a kind of amused contempt the other men who were quite obviously infatuated with her, but whom she had always kept at arm’s length.

She had never imagined that he would be perceptive enough to realise that the Marquis was different.

But now she knew that she had underestimated him and she would have to be very careful not to upset him so much that he made it difficult for her ever to be alone with the Marquis or even to see him.

She remembered uncomfortably that George had always been very intolerant of the affaires de coeur in which practically every one of their friends were deeply engaged.

“The whole palaver is damned undignified, if you ask me,” he had said once.

On another occasion when the scandal about the wife of one of his particular cronies had been the talk of his Club, he had said,

“If she was my wife, I would give her a damned good hiding, take her to the country and make her stay there!”

Lucy had laughed.

“You sound like a caveman, George. It is out of date to be so primitive.”

“A man must protect his good name,” George replied.

Looking down at her now, he said,

“I am not going to argue any further, Lucy. We will arrange for Ina to come to Chale with us or we will all go home. The garden will be looking beautiful at this time of the year.”

Lucy knew as he spoke that he was longing to be at their house in Sussex, which was partially closed up during the Season.

She had always known that George really disliked London, apart from being able to meet his friends at his Club or attend the horse sales at Tattersalls.

He always grew disagreeable when it was time to open their house in Park Lane and take up most of the servants from the country to augment the skeleton staff that was kept in London during the hunting and shooting seasons.

To Lucy London was her idea of Heaven and she felt in the country that she was wasting precious days, hours and minutes when there were few men to admire her beauty.

She was also well aware that for them a good day’s hunting or a bag of a thousand pheasants was more attractive than she was.

Because she would have been very foolish if she had not read the danger signals in George’s attitude, she said quickly,

“If it means so much to you, dearest, of course Ina must come to Chale. I am sure that you will look after her and see that she does not feel out of it.”

She saw the surprise in her husband’s eyes that she was being so amenable and she gave him a smile that one admirer described as being ‘like the sun coming through the clouds on a dark day’.

“I thought you would see sense,” Lord Wymonde said a little heavily.

He put his arms round his wife, drew her to him and kissed her cheek.

With an effort she prevented herself from telling him not to crease her gown and after a second stepped out of his reach.

“You must make all the arrangements about meeting this child,” she said, “but I think it is unlikely that we can provide her with any suitable clothes for the occasion, unless she is the same size as I am.”

As she spoke, Lucy was thinking of the wardrobes filled with gowns that reposed on the second floor.

She had meant for some time to send a great number of them away to her poorer relations who received a parcel or sometimes a trunk of Lucy’s discarded garments from time to time.

They all wrote enthusiastic letters of thanks, which made Lucy feel that she was being extremely charitable.

It never struck her for one moment that the cousins she patronised in this manner were either a good deal older than she was herself or lived in the wilds of Wales.

They therefore had little or no use for elaborate ball gowns, cut low and embroidered with diamanté or creations that had drawn everybody’s eyes at Ascot and which, because they had been so special, could not be worn again.

Thinking that that problem was disposed of Lucy went to her desk and sat down to write a letter to the Marquis.

In a secret drawer which only she had a key to, there lay a number of letters written to her over the years, sometimes imploring, sometimes angry and accusing, but so far there were regrettably few from the Marquis.

Because she wanted to see them, she took them out and realised as she read them that he had said nothing that George could not have read without suspicion or anyone else who might be interested.

For a moment she felt almost as if she had received a shock.

Then she remembered that the Marquis had not written to her since that long kiss that had left them both breathing a little quicker and Lucy’s heart thumping in her breast.

‘He loves me and he will love me a great deal more before I have finished,’ she told herself reassuringly and started her letter to him.

*

The Marquis opened it the following day at breakfast.

He noticed vaguely and without very much interest that Lucy’s writing paper was thick and creamy with the Wymonde crest engraved above the address and that her handwriting was extremely elegant and the capitals beautifully shaped.

The Marquis read what the letter contained and then when he had finished breakfast went upstairs to his mother’s suite.

There was a large Dower House on the estate waiting for the Marchioness when her son married and she relinquished her position as Mistress of Chale.

She always said that she would enjoy living in the smaller house and not having so many responsibilities.

Actually this was untrue.

The Marchioness had never liked the idea of being relegated to the position of Dowager. Having reigned as Queen, or rather as Empress, over the Kingdom that centred round such a magnificent Palace as Chale, she had no wish to retire.

What was more like Lucy the Marchioness wanted to remain young and for very much the same reason.

Alice Chale also had in her youth been a beauty, but unlike Lucy she was dark with perfect features and her dark slanting eyes gave her an air of mystery that Queen Victoria thought slightly reprehensible.

Men found her irresistible and the young Marchioness of Chale had broken hearts strewn around her, which had aroused envy, hatred and malice in the breasts of all her contemporaries.

She had swept through life, however, with an imperiousness that had made her ignore criticism and find those who disliked her as beneath her notice.

It was only when the Marquis died and her position at Court was not so important as it had been that she began to realise that she was growing old and there was not such a large circle of admirers as there had been in the past.

They had dispersed because of age and marriage and, although the Marchioness would not care to admit it, they preferred pursuing younger women.

It was also obvious that, where before she had had the choice of dozens of lovers, she would now have to concentrate on a chosen few.

These had gradually been whittled down to one man who was prepared to offer her his devotion and live a very comfortable life in the process.

The Marquis thought of them as his mother’s ‘tame cats’ and was quite prepared to tolerate them if it made her happy.

To him it was very much the same as her having a lapdog like a pug or a King Charles spaniel.

He thought that their impact on Chale was rather less than the sporting dogs that he always had at his heels.

The ;lapdog’ at the moment who kept the Marchioness company wherever she went was Harry Trevelyn.

A man of nearly forty he had been a hanger-on to the rich all his life, paying his way by being a near-perfect guest who would do anything asked of him.

He danced well, played a good game of bridge, was proficient at billiards and could always be relied on to make himself pleasant to the most disagreeable old Dowager or the plainest woman.

He was also someone to talk to, to rely on and who never failed to make the Marchioness feel that she was still beautiful.

Because she was determined to remain so, if only in Harry’s eyes, she took great care of herself.

For one thing she never appeared at Chale or at any of her son’s other houses until, as she said, ‘the day was well aired’.

At about noon exquisitely and expensively gowned, her hair arranged by a skilled lady’s maid and her face discreetly made up, she would come downstairs looking very like the portraits of her that were to be found in every room where she and her husband had habitually sat during his lifetime.

He had fallen in love with her because she was beautiful and to him she had always looked exactly the same as she had when she was seventeen.

She had been married before her eighteenth birthday, which was why she was able quite convincingly to declare that fifty was only the youth of old age.

The Marquis knocked on his mother’s door in the South wing, which contained the most comfortable and sunny rooms in the house.

It was opened by a lady’s maid who curtseyed at the sight of him.

“Good morning, Rose.”

“Good morning, my Lord.”

The Marquis walked past her into the large bedroom, where in the huge bed under a canopy decorated with cupids, the Marchioness was reading the newspapers.

She quickly took off her glasses because she hated to be seen in them, and smiled as her son crossed the room to kiss the hand she held out to him.

“Good morning, Mama.”

“Good morning, my dearest. You are early today.”

“I am riding out to Ponders End to see the houses I am building there,” the Marquis explained, “but that is not what I came to see you about.”

“What is it?”

The Marchioness was thinking as she asked the question how handsome her son was and how very like his father at the same age.

They were both tall and broad-shouldered and had clear-cut features that were unmistakably English.

Unusually perceptive, for she was not a very imaginative woman, the Marchioness thought that lately her son had been seeming bored and dissatisfied in a way that it was hard to describe.