Riding to the Moon

Chapter 1-2

Charles laughed.

“Not a chance! He spends his time, I am told, with a new charmer – Lady Sinclair, although I doubt if she will hold him for long.”

“The Countess of Martindale is one of the prettiest women I have ever seen,” Jimmy said. “Ardsley dropped her in a month, so how are you going to find a ‘guttersnipe’ to compete with her?”

“I will find someone,” Charles said confidently. “But not a ‘guttersnipe’. I think she will have to be an actress.”

“That’ll cost you a pretty penny.”

“I shall have your hundred guineas towards expenses!”

“I have never before made a bet I have been so certain of winning,” Jimmy answered provocatively.

“I think it only fair that just for once he should be in the wrong,” Charles said as if he was speaking to himself.

He was frowning as he spoke and Jimmy knew that he was still feeling angry at the way in which the Marquis had swept Clarice away from him in a high-handed manner that would have annoyed anybody, especially Charles Frodham.

Very good looking, wealthy because his father had died while he was still a minor and the owner of a very charming if not particularly impressive estate in Huntingdonshire, Charles was run after by the most attractive women in the Beau Monde and courted by ambitious mothers for their young daughters.

He had good grounds for being conceited and proud of himself, but it was no use pretending that he was not eclipsed by the Marquis of Ardsley.

Jimmy Overton was not ambitious and was quite content to be only comparatively well off. Yet he had enough money to enjoy himself in London and to keep up the delightful seventeenth century manor he owned in Essex.

As his mother ran it very competently and was in no hurry to move to the Dower House, he was not pestered as his friend was to settle down and get married.

He had therefore every intention of enjoying himself and remaining free for a great number of years before he asked any woman, however attractive or suitable, to be his wife.

Because he and Charles had been close friends at Eton and at Oxford, they enjoyed life together, hunting as a couple, being welcomed not only by the great hostesses at every ball, reception and assembly, but also by the madams in the ‘houses of pleasure’ and the dance halls, where the prettiest ‘Cyprians’ ran towards them with open arms.

Jimmy knew that Charles’s pride had certainly been bruised if not defeated by the way in which the Marquis had taken the lovely Clarice from him at the very moment when he was considering setting her up in a small house in Chelsea and taking her officially under his protection.

“What are you thinking about?” Jimmy asked now.

“The pleasure I shall enjoy at seeing Ardsley discomfited.”

“You cannot say that until you have found this paragon who I am convinced does not exist,” Jimmy said practically.

“I will prove him wrong if It is the last thing I do!”

Charles said aggressively.

Jimmy laughed as he said,

“Actually, I would willingly pay five hundred guineas to see Ardsley ‘bite the dust’, which is strange when you think about it, because he has never done me any harm.”

“It is insufferable that any man should walk about as if he was God!”

“That is rather a good description,” Jimmy said. “At the same time the sort of God you really mean is the fellow we read about at Oxford – what was he called? – the one who drives his chariot across the sky by day.”

“Apollo.”

“That is right.”

“We saw a statue of him when we were in Rome and Ardsley does look like him,” Charles remarked.

“That is the answer, then,” Jimmy said. “He is Apollo, a God, and we poor devils are just humans.”

“Even Gods, if my mythology is not at fault,” Charles said, “were susceptible to pretty women, but I have the uncomfortable feeling that it was the male Gods who disguised themselves, rather than the Goddesses.”

“Oh, well, you can rewrite the whole lot of Greek – or was it Roman – mythology to suit yourself,” Jimmy said with a smile, “but Apollo or no Apollo, I am hungry.”

*

It was a week later when Lord Frodham and Sir James Overton set off from Charles’s house in the country to drive to Ardsley Hall.

Their horses had left two days earlier, both gentlemen having given their grooms strict instructions to take them easily and to make sure that they were in perfect condition for the steeplechase on Saturday.

Besides thinking of his horses, Charles had given a great deal of his time to searching for a young actress with whom he intended to deceive the Marquis into believing that she was as blue blooded as he was.

“If you are going to give her a fictitious name,” Jimmy said, “you will have to be careful to choose one of which the Marquis will not be suspicious. I am quite certain he knows the genealogical tree of every family in the country.”

“That is the least of our worries,” Charles said after the third day and night of searching the theatres and dance halls and even the ‘houses of pleasure’ for a likely candidate.

Once or twice they had seen a face that was so attractive and so pretty that Charles had thought his search was at an end.

But the beauty in question had only to open her mouth to betray an accent that no possible amount of tuition could disguise from anybody as astute as the Marquis.

“Of course, we may have to teach her how to speak,” Charles conceded, “but perhaps if she was a foreigner it would be easier.”

“I have always been told that the Marquis of Ardsley is very good at languages,” Jimmy said. “In fact I remember hearing that he has helped Lord Hawkesley at the Foreign Office on various occasions.”

Charles’s lips tightened, but he made no comment and they moved on to look elsewhere for a creature who Jimmy was already convinced was as rare as a dodo bird.

Jimmy actually had found the chase most enjoyable, although he was sorry for his friend and now, as they drove through the countryside at a spanking pace behind Charles’s team of bays, he said,

“I ought to have insisted that we have a time limit on our wager, otherwise I can see us spending the rest of our summer searching for the unobtainable with you growing more and more grumpy in the process.”

“I am not grumpy,” Charles replied, “and I have not given up hope! But I have begun to think that we are looking in the wrong places.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“The sort of woman we want is more likely to be found in the country than in London. You know as well as I do that, if she was beautiful enough for our requirements, she would have been snapped up the moment she set foot in one of those overcrowded dance halls. And if she was on the stage, her dressing room would be full of followers.”

“You certainly have something there,” Jimmy replied, “and I was just thinking that, when I was young, the Vicar of the family Church to which I was taken every Sunday had an extremely pretty daughter.”

Charles turned from his contemplation of the road ahead to look at his friend and ask,

“Where is she now?”

Jimmy laughed as he replied,

“Married – with a large family!”

“Then why the hell are you talking about her?”

“I was only agreeing with you that pretty girls are not the prerogative of London.”

“If they are pretty enough, it is the one place they want to go.”

“That is true,” Jimmy agreed. “So what you have to do, Charles, is to trap ’em before they get there!”

“You are laughing at me,” Charles said, “and so damned sure of taking my hundred guineas off me that you are getting as bad as Ardsley himself!”

Jimmy sighed as he said,

“I want to topple him off his perch! At the same time I am quite prepared to eat his superlative food, stay in the most comfortable house in England and applaud him as he wins the first prize at his own steeplechase.”

“If you say one more word,” Charles threatened, “I will turn you out of the phaeton and make you walk.”

“In these hessians?” Jimmy exclaimed. “For God’s sake, Charles, it would be a Chinese torture!”

They both laughed as they drove on.

The sunshine, which had been somewhat fitful earlier in the day, had now disappeared behind dark clouds.

Then, after luncheon at a comfortable inn, where Charles changed his team of bays for four perfectly matched chestnuts, the sky was not only overcast but there were rumbles of thunder in the distance.

“Damn!” Charles said irritably. “We are going to get wet. I should have thought of travelling in my fastest chariot so that we could put the hood up.”

“It will be very unpleasant to arrive looking like a drowned rat,” Jimmy said reflectively. “I am quite certain that the Marquis, if he was in our place, would manage to control the elements.”

“I agree with you, but there seems to be nothing we can do about it and we still have at least another hour’s driving before we get there.”

Ardsley Hall was in Hampshire and now, too late, Charles thought that, if they had started earlier in the morning, they might have reached their destination before the storm broke.

A sudden flash of forked lightning made the horses nervous and, as he was not certain that if the lightning grew worse, the comparatively young team would not panic, he said,

“There is an inn about half a mile from here. I have never been there and I expect it’s rather scruffy, but it might be wise to take shelter. I don’t believe the storm will last long. “

“I think you are wise,” Jimmy said. “I have heard of nasty accidents taking place in thunderstorms.”

As he spoke, he was thinking that four horses were difficult to control at the best of times and although Charles was an extremely good and experienced driver, he was not a Corinthian like the Marquis.

However, it was something he was far too tactful to say aloud and, as the lightning flashed again and the crash that followed it seemed nearer than it had been before, he was thankful when Charles drove into the courtyard of an attractive old black and white inn with diamond paned windows.

The groom clambered down from the back seat and began to give orders to the ostlers who came running from the stables.

Charles put down the reins and climbed from the phaeton while Jimmy descended on the other side of it.

They walked into the very low-ceilinged inn and a large fat man who was obviously the landlord came hurrying towards them, wiping his hands on his apron.

“Good evening, sirs, you’re very welcome!”

“I am Lord Frodham,” Charles replied, “and I and my friend will be staying for the duration of the storm. We would like a private parlour.”

“I’m afraid its small, my Lord, but it’s all we’ve got,” the Landlord replied.

He led the way through an open lounge, in which a large log fire was burning, to where at the far end it had obviously been divided by a somewhat makeshift wall of panelling that did not match the rest of the room.

The parlour was small, as he had said, but there was a fireplace, two armchairs and a table on which fastidious guests who did not wish to mix with the hoi polloi could eat in private.

The landlord bent down to light the fire, and Charles said,

“Bring me a bottle of your best claret. I presume you have no champagne?”

“Afraid not, my Lord,” the landlord replied, “but the claret’s good and the brandy, which be French, be very good indeed!”

The way he spoke made it quite clear that the brandy had come across the Channel and no duty had been paid on it.

“Bring a bottle of both,” Charles ordered.

Bowing, with a gratified expression on his face, the landlord left the room.

There was a small window which looked onto an untidy piece of ground that could hardly be described as a garden and Jimmy walked towards it.

As he did so, there was a flash of lightning that illuminated both the outside and the inside of the inn, followed by a resounding crash of thunder and he started back almost as if he had been struck.

“Thank God we are out of this!” Charles exclaimed.

“The horses would go mad!”

“We were only just in time,” Jimmy agreed. “Another few minutes and we would have been drenched.”