Love Holds The Cards

Chapter one ~ 1784-3

“It’s quite simple.” Lord Wynchingham said. “I am completely and absolutely broke. I have no money and I have a debt of honour, a gambling debt of one hundred thousand pounds that has to be met in a month’s time.”

Tina put her hand up to her mouth to stifle an exclamation of horror.

“One hundred thousand pounds!”

She hardly breathed the words.

“My father was always in debt, but never for a sum like that!”

“Well, now you know the truth,” Lord Wynchingham said harshly. “Now you understand why you could not have arrived at a more inopportune moment. Although I have paid your school fees in the past, I am very unlikely to be able to do so in the future.”

“Do you mean that everything you own will have to be sold?” Tina enquired.

“Practically everything,” Lord Wynchingham answered. “I might be able to keep my house in the country, because large houses are not fetching very good prices at the moment. This house will have to go, my property in London, my horses at Newmarket, they ought to bring in a bit. But there’s always a great deal of crookery over horse sales. The person who is selling seldom receives what he expects and those who are interested in what he has to sell get together beforehand and decide what they will buy, so that they don’t bid against each other.”

“That is mean, is it not?” Tina asked.

“I have done it myself,” Lord Wynchingham replied.

He remembered a pair of chestnuts he had persuaded two of his friends not to bid for because he had wanted to buy them at a reasonable price.

“You have no other assets?” Tina asked.

“I have some pictures,” Lord Wynchingham answered, “but they are merely family ones and who wants other people’s ancestors? There’s my mother’s jewellery, of course.” He sighed even as he said it. “I had hoped that it would have been heirloomed to my children when I had any.”

Tina sat bolt upright in her chair.

He could see that she was thinking and it struck him suddenly what an extraordinary situation it was. Here he was talking to this child, quite frankly and openly as he had been afraid to speak to anyone else.

He knew that he had gone to see Cleo simply because he dared not face his Solicitor. He had put off sending for the man when he returned home for the same reason.

He could not bear to face up to the fact and could not tell anybody what a damned fool he had made of himself. And yet here he was confessing quite easily to this chit of a girl whom he had never seen before and who bore no resemblance whatsoever to the rather rough, good-natured, not particularly handsome man whom he remembered as her father.

It was a pity, he thought, that he could not give her the money to dress herself well and let her burst upon the Beau Monde. She might have been a success.

She had, he felt sure from long experience, the makings of a beauty about her. No, she would have to suffer, as a great many other people would have to suffer, for his foolhardiness.

It was too late to remember now the tenants at Wynch, the old pensioners who relied on him for their houses and the pensions that kept them alive.

Too late to remember those who had served Wynch all their lives, the old gardener he had known as a boy, the Head Groom who had been there nearly forty years, the butler who had come there first as a pantry boy. How could he face them, how could he tell them that they, like everything else, had got to go?

For the first time in his life Lord Wynchingham was aware of his responsibilities and saw them for what they were, a heritage handed down to him from generations that were past.

But, although he could now see them all too clearly, it was too late.

Suddenly he walked across to the window where he stood gazing out with unseeing eyes at the daffodils stirring in the breeze, the lilacs just coming into bud and the crocuses mauve and white surrounding the sundial in a fairy circle.

“It’s all got to be sold,” he said harshly. “All of it. And I will not stay here to creep around the haunts that I used to patronise to be laughed at or commiserated with by my friends.”

“Have you any real friends?” Tina asked in that soft voice which somehow was strangely penetrating.

Lord Wynchingham was silent for a moment.

“If you had asked me that question yesterday, I would have told you that I have dozens, no, hundreds of friends. Today I am not sure. In fact, I am not sure of anything.”

He heard Tina give a little sigh and then she said in a voice that had a sudden note of excitement,

“I have an idea!”

“What is it?” he asked, not because he was interested, but simply because he thought that it was expected of him.

“Come back here, my Lord,” she said. “I cannot talk to the back of your head. There is something very disconcerting about talking to someone without seeing their face.”

He turned immediately and walked back to the fireplace. She was sitting in the big high-backed armchair and the sunshine coming through the window illuminated her, the little pointed chin, the big eyes and the fair hair.

‘Yes, she will be a beauty,’ he thought.

It was indeed a pity that she was not going to have the chance. She was a casualty of his carelessness, something else that had been run over by the wheels of his selfishness and stupidity.

“What are you going to do with yourself?” he asked, “now that I can no longer help you? Will you become a Governess or a companion?”

They were the only two positions he could think of.

Vaguely at the back of his mind he recalled that they were in fact the only employment open to young gentlewomen.

“I am going to do neither of those things,” Tina said.

“Then what?” he asked.

“I am going to get married,” she said, “and you are going to help me.”

Lord Wynchingham raised his eyebrows.

“I thought I had explained,” he said gently, “that I can give you no help. There will not be enough money for one person, let alone two. It’s hard, I know, but you are going to have to manage on your own.”

Tina shook her head.

“You don’t understand,” she said. “I have an idea and I know it is the only possible one. I am your Ward, remember? You can present me in Society, just as you might have done if all this had not occurred, and we have a month – one whole month in which you can find me a really rich husband.”

“What on earth are you talking about?” Lord Wynchingham asked in a bewildered voice.

“Can you not see it is the only way?” Tina asked. “There are many, many rich men in London. Everyone says so. One hundred thousand pounds would matter little to one of them. It could be my marriage dowry. You, as my Guardian, will arrange the terms and then I can give it to you.”

Lord Wynchingham stared at her.

“Are you seriously suggesting this as a sensible proposition?” he asked.

“Can you think of anything better?” Tina enquired.

“I can think of nothing worse,” Lord Wynchingham retorted. “Do you really believe that I would take your money, your dowry?”

“Pray don’t be stupid!” Tina exclaimed almost sharply. “I know all the arguments you are going to put forward. But you cannot at this moment afford to be high-souled and, if you think that you are doing something wrong to me or something that is not gentlemanlike, look at it from this point of view. If you refuse, I shall become a Governess or companion.”

She paused for a moment and then he saw an expression almost of horror on her face.

“I should hate it,” she said passionately. “I have dreamed about many things, but never of becoming the paid servant of people who would despise me. And yet that is what you will be forcing me into unless you agree to my suggestion. If you say ‘yes’, everything will be so different.”

“But it’s impossible,” Lord Wynchingham asserted.

“Why?” she asked. “If I had come to you earlier, you would, I think, have been prepared to sponsor my debut and to arrange a Season in London, and I promise you that I had already made up my mind to find a husband and get married so that I could have a home of my own.”

She closed her eyes for a moment.

“I cannot tell you what it would mean to me to belong to someone I love and who loves me.”

“It would be very different if I could have done that,” Lord Wynchingham said.

“Why would it be any different?” Tina queried. “You would have introduced me to your friends and I might have found somebody to offer for me within a week, two weeks or perhaps two or three months. In the circumstances I suspect that I would have prevaricated a little and looked round! That is the only difference. Now there will be no time to prevaricate and the suitor for my hand must be a very rich man.”

“Even so, I could not take the money that was yours,” Lord Wynchingham said firmly.

“Of course you could,” Tina contradicted him. “How can you be so bird-witted? If you can pay this debt in the time agreed, then you will have the opportunity to retrench, to save a little here, to save a little there, to put your affairs in order so that this disaster will never happen again. In time you could pay me back. What you have not, at this moment, is time.”

Lord Wynchingham stared at her.

“In a crazed sort of way you are making sense,” he muttered.

“But, of course, I am,” she answered. “Do you suppose that I have not dealt with my father’s debts before he died without understanding how the most important thing is to play for time? Oh, we had no money, we were not rich like you, but in our own little way our debts were just as pressing and just as frightening.”

“I think ‘frightening’ is the right word,” Lord Wynchingham said.

“That is why you have to accept my plan,” Tina insisted.

“Can you not see it means everything to me? At least I will have a chance to meet Society, to be in London and to be married. If you refuse, then I become a Governess. I will never meet anyone who is in the least eligible, my whole life will be ruined.”

Lord Wynchingham brought his clenched fist down with a bang on the mantelshelf.

“Stop!” he cried. “You are trying to coerce me into this. It is wrong and you know it is wrong. Even supposing a rich man did offer you his hand, how could I possibly think of behaving like a cad and outsider?”

Tina bent down and picked up her bonnet from the floor.

“Very well,” she said with a little sigh, “I see that your Lordship is determined to make yourself and everybody else unhappy and uncomfortable.”

She walked towards the door.

“Where are you going?” Lord Wynchingham enquired.

She had reached the centre of the room and turned to face him.

“To look for a post as a Governess, my Lord,” she said, “and to hate you for the rest of my life.”

Lord Wynchingham stared after her.

For a moment nothing was said. Their eyes met across the intervening space.

It seemed as though it was a battle of wills and then quite suddenly Lord Wynchingham capitulated.

“Come here, you little fool,” he said sharply. “It’s a mad crazy, impossible idea and I must still be foxed even to consider it, but God knows, there is no alternative.”