Paradise Found

Chapter 1 1814-2

He had been quite certain that, unless something had changed her considerably, she was waiting for him with a palpitating heart.

All women had palpitating hearts where the Earl was concerned and, while inevitably he was the one who tired first, it was not usual for there to be such a dramatic turnabout as seemed to be happening at the moment.

He was, however, too tactful to say this out loud and instead, as he spread a piece of toast thickly with Jersey butter from the Earl’s home farm, he said,

“I had better go and pack my things. I presume you will be driving your phaeton?”

“Of course,” the Earl said. “But there is no need for you to trouble yourself. Send a footman to tell your man to pack everything you require and to bring it round immediately in a Hackney carriage.”

He rang the gold bell that stood on the table beside him as he spoke and, as he did so, the door was opened immediately by the butler and Lord Charles gave his order.

“You can tell Danvers that I shall be leaving in an hour,” the Earl added.

“You’ll be going to Fleet Hall, my Lord?”

“Yes.”

“Very good, my Lord. I’ll see that everything is ready.”

The butler closed the door and Lord Charles laughed.

“I always wonder,” he said, “if the day will come when Danvers looks astonished at one of your commands or actually queries it.”

“Why should he?” the Earl asked.

“Because you are unpredictable, my dear Alaric, and at times you even leave me gasping.”

“You are talking nonsense!” the Earl said, rising as he spoke. “There is nothing unpredictable about preferring the country to London and the inane conversation that takes place at every party when inevitably one knows beforehand what everybody is going to say.”

He walked out of the dining room and Lord Charles knew that he was going to the library.

There his letters would have already been opened for him by his secretary and those that required a reply put in a neat pile awaiting his verdict.

Lord Charles took a quick sip from his cup of coffee and, taking a large apple out of the Sèvres bowl in the centre of the table, started to peel it as he followed the Earl.

When they reached the library, a pleasant room lined with books and overlooking the small courtyard at the back of the house, the Earl threw open the window as if he needed air.

Lord Charles, having eaten half the apple, threw the rest of it into one of the flowerbeds.

“If you were not in such a hurry to go to the country,” he said as the Earl did not speak, “I was going to suggest that you might meet an extremely attractive ‘bit of muslin’ who has during the last two days become the toast of St James’s.”

“I am not interested!” the Earl stipulated firmly. “What I want, Charles, is adventure. Some sort of excitement that does not smell of an exotic scent and can talk of nothing but love!”

“What else is there to talk about?”

“If only I had something to throw at you!” the Earl replied, sitting down at the desk. “As it is, I know you are only trying to provoke me and, since you will go on nagging like any shrewish wife until I tell you what you want to know, I have finished with Oline!”

“I guessed that,” Lord Charles said. “I suppose you have found out about Napier!”

“So that is who it is!” the Earl exclaimed.

“They have been very careful in case you got wind of it,” Lord Charles went on. “I only happened to see them by chance going into a private room at The White House.”

The White House was the most fashionable ‘Palace of Pleasure’ in the West End of London.

As the Earl well knew there were private rooms on the first floor, where two people who did not wish to be seen could dine very discreetly, and enter and leave by a side door.

“What were you doing at The White House?” he asked. “You know as well as I do that you cannot afford their ridiculously exorbitant charges.”

“That is something I have no intention of telling you,” Lord Charles replied.

“In other words she paid!”

Then he laughed.

“I can see you are being led into trouble, Charlie, and the sooner you come to the country with me the better!”

“Which means you are running away! But I am still interested as to how you learnt about Napier.”

“He left his ‘visiting card’ behind in the shape of a shirt button!” the Earl told him briefly.

Lord Charles threw himself back in his chair and went into peals of laughter.

“A shirt button!” he cried. “Only you, Alaric, would notice anything so insignificant and unimportant.”

“As a matter of fact, I stood on it barefooted!” the Earl remarked.

Lord Charles laughed until the tears came into his eyes.

Then he said,

“You are quite right, all this is beneath your dignity and your importance. There must be something better for us to do.”

“If there is, let’s go and find it,” the Earl replied.

Lord Charles now brought the expression of good temper back to his handsome face and his lips were no longer set in a hard line.

It was difficult when they were together not to behave as they always had and, when they first joined the Army, they had been known to the Officers and the men alike as ‘the Terrible Twins’.

They always seemed to be in trouble of some sort and yet they were envied because they appeared to enjoy life more than anybody else.

In spite of the rioting and drinking they had indulged in when they first left school everybody who knew them had to admit that they were both highly intelligent and well informed on many subjects that their contemporaries knew very little about.

But whatever escapades they thought up when they were in the Army, the men under them were better looked after, smarter and a great deal happier than any other troops in the whole of Portugal.

The Earl had lately been offered a Ministerial post in the Foreign Office, if he wished to take it.

But, while he felt honoured by such a suggestion, he could not help feeling that to be confined to a desk in the Ministry would make him feel frustrated.

He therefore thanked the Prime Minister, who had offered him the position, and made the excuse that he still had a great deal of work to do on his various estates.

As the Prime Minister knew that the Earl was contributing a great deal to the war effort by increasing the production of food that was so vitally needed, he had not pressed him further.

The Prince Regent, however, had very different ideas. He enjoyed the Earl’s company, as he enjoyed Lord Charles’s, and insisted on both of them being in attendance on him whenever possible.

It was the Earl who rebelled first.

“If I have to eat one more dinner of over twelve entrées,” he said, “I shall go on a hunger strike!”

“It’s not so much the food that I object to,” Lord Charles confided in him, “it’s the heat of the rooms at Carlton House. God knows why ‘Prinny’ will never open a window!”

“He feels the cold.”

“But he is so fat! His superfluous flesh should protect him from chills of every sort!”

There was no need to say any more and they both began to make excuses when the Prince Regent commanded their presence.

It was difficult to be evasive for long and only by going to the country could the Earl escape the long drawn-out meals and musical evenings or, worse still, the Fêtes which the Regent insisted on giving at Carlton House whenever he could think up an excuse for one.

The only consolation, Charles found, was that despite the Prince Regent’s preoccupation with older women, every beauty in London sooner or later found her way into the Chinese Room, the Conservatory, the Yellow Drawing Room or any of the other rooms that the Prince Regent continued to embellish day after day with new treasures that he could not afford to pay for.

As the Earl, having finished signing his letters, was about to rise from his desk, his secretary, Mr. Stevenson came into the library.

“Oh, there you are, Stevenson!” the Earl exclaimed. “Cancel all my engagements for the next few days and refuse all these invitations.”

“Has your Lordship forgotten that you are dining at Carlton House tomorrow evening?” Mr. Stevenson asked respectfully.

“I had, as it happens!” the Earl admitted.

“His Royal Highness will be as mad as fire if we chuck him again,” Lord Charles stated.

“I cannot help his troubles,” the Earl said. “Send a message, Stevenson, to say that urgent family affairs oblige me most regretfully to leave London immediately!”

“That is what you said last time, my Lord.”

“Well, say that the house had burnt down or I have a revolution on my hands. Anything you like! Nobody is going to stop me from going to the country!”

Mr. Stevenson looked worried, but Lord Charles merely laughed.

“As soon as you get there, you will want to come back!”

“Do you want to bet on it?” the Earl enquired.

“Certainly not! It would make you stay longer just to win, even if it was the last penny I have in my pocket!”

“Very well, no bets!” the Earl agreed. “But I assure you, I find the country very much more alluring than anything you can offer me here in London.”

Lord Charles was only half listening.

He walked to the desk that the Earl had just moved from and was now scribbling a few lines on a piece of crested writing paper.

He then put it in an envelope, addressed it and said to Mr. Stevenson,

“Will you have this sent round by hand?”

“Of course, my Lord!”

The Earl took a quick glance at the note as his secretary took it and there was a faint smile on his lips as he walked through the hall to where his high-perched phaeton was waiting outside.

It was a new acquisition that had only recently come from the coach-builders and was drawn by a team of four perfectly matched chestnuts that he had bought the previous year.

They were his favourites and he knew that he was going to enjoy driving them to Fleet Hall.

As he picked up the reins, he remembered that his record stood at two hours, five minutes.

Lord Charles climbed into the seat beside him, the groom in his cockaded hat jumped up behind and they drove off.

It was difficult to suppose that any man could drive more expertly than the Earl. He was, of course, known as a ‘Corinthian’, but he rather despised the title.

They had driven for some way in silence before he said,

“I am glad you are coming with me, Charles. It’s always fun when we are together. At the same time, as I have told you already, I have been feeling somewhat depressed of late.”

“It’s no use, Alaric,” Lord Charles replied in a more serious tone than he had used hitherto. “One cannot put back the clock and, whatever you may say, we will both of us be thirty-three by the end of the year and perhaps it is time we settled down.”

“How, may I ask?”

“Getting married for one thing!”

The Earl laughed.

“If I have met any marriageable young women in the last two years, I have not been aware of it.”

“They have been there, but you have chosen not to notice them,” Lord Charles said, “while their mothers are torn between a desire to capture you as a wealthy and desirable son-in-law and the fear that with your reputation you would ruin the wretched girl’s chances just by dancing with her!”

“Good God!” the Earl ejaculated. “You don’t mean to say it’s as bad as that!”

“It’s not far off it,” Lord Charles replied, “and who shall blame you? You have everything a man could desire and the women circle round you like hungry bees round a honeypot!”

The Earl laughed.

Then he said,

“I am not sure whether you are being poetical or just damned impertinent!”

“You can take your choice,” Lord Charles replied. “And now that I think about it, I am sure it’s time that we did something a bit more sensible and constructive. As far as I am concerned most of my energy and intelligence is spent just in keeping myself alive!”

“If that’s true then you are being very stupid,” the Earl said. “You know I am prepared to share everything I have with you, far more willingly than I would share it with some grasping female whom I am expected to ‘endow with all my worldly goods’.”