Joan Wolf (2 page)

Giles frowned. “But Uncle Adam takes care of Weston Hall and the farms.”

I nodded. “I imagine he will continue to do that.”

“Then why do we need Uncle Stephen?” my son asked.

“Papa named him to be your guardian,” I said.

Giles, who was as sensitive to my moods as a tuning fork to a note, shot me an alert look. “Don’t you like Uncle Stephen, Mama?”

I laughed. I stood up. I gave my son a hug. “Of course I like Uncle Stephen. You will like him, too. He is fun.”

We began to walk back toward the house. “Does he like to play?” Giles asked eagerly.

I drew in a deep breath of air, I could feel a headache coming on. “Yes,” I said. “He likes to play.” Something flashed by the edge of my vision. “Oh look, Giles,” I said enthusiastically. “I think I just saw a bunny.”

“Where?” he demanded, his attention, as I had hoped, neatly diverted from the subject of Uncle Stephen.

* * * *

When I walked into my dressing room some forty minutes later, my mother was waiting for me. The dressing room, which opened off the bedroom I had shared with Gerald, was supposed to be my private domain, but I could not seem to make my mother understand that. Of course, the room had belonged to Mama during all the years that she had been married to Gerald’s father, and I suppose she still felt a proprietary right to it.

She was seated in a chintz-covered chair in front of the fire, sipping tea, when I entered.

“I cannot understand why you did this room over,” she said, as she said every single time she came in here. “It was perfectly elegant when I had it. You have made it look so common, Annabelle.” Her exquisitely straight nose wrinkled as if it had been assailed by an unpleasant odor. “Flowered chintz,” she said in disgust.

When Mama had used the room it had been done in straw-colored silk. It had indeed been extremely elegant, but I had always been afraid I would dirty the upholstery when I sat down, and the dogs had rubbed mud on the silk draperies. For my purposes, the cheerful chintz was much better.

Mama’s green eyes moved to regard my person. “Really, Annabelle,” she said, her disgust deepening, “how can you allow yourself to be seen in such disgraceful garments?”

“I took Giles for a walk,” I said. I sat down on the chintz sofa that faced Mama’s chair, stretched out my legs, and contemplated my muddy boots. “We both needed to get outside. It has been a difficult time.”

In respect for my grief, my mother forbore to comment on (a) the mud, (b) my posture, and (c) the dogs, who had curled up in the pool of sunlight in front of the window. “Poor Gerald,” she said. “How could so young and healthy a man get an inflammation of the lungs severe enough to kill him?”

She made it sound as if it were Gerald’s fault that he had died.

“I don’t know, Mama,” I said wearily. The headache was now lodged securely behind my eyes. “The doctor said that these things happen.”

“Well, they shouldn’t,” she said.

I had no answer to that.

She took another sip of tea. The silence lengthened. I looked at my mother, and for the first time I noticed a few strands of silver in the pale gold perfection of her hair. “I cannot understand why Gerald would name Stephen to be Giles’s guardian,” she said.

I went back to looking at my boots and kept my voice carefully neutral. “Stephen was his only brother. I should think it was a natural choice.”

“Nonsense. Gerald and Stephen were never close.”

I shrugged and said something about blood relationships.

Finally Mama got to the point. “Did
you
have anything to do with this decision of Gerald’s, Annabelle?”

I looked up from my boots. I met her eyes. “No, Mama, I did not.”

After a moment she looked away. “Gerald must have been insane,” she said. “What does Stephen know about running an estate like Weston?”

“He has been running the Jamaica sugar plantation for five years now,” I pointed out. “He is not without experience, Mama.”

My mother gave me a pitying look. “His father sent him to Jamaica because the plantation was in such bad financial condition that even Stephen couldn’t do it any more damage.”

“I understood from Gerald that Stephen has actually done a good job, Mama. At any event, the plantation has not gone bankrupt, like so many others in Jamaica.”

I heard what I was saying and scowled as fiercely as Giles. Why was I defending Stephen?

“At any rate,” I went on coldly, “I am quite certain that Stephen will want Uncle Adam to continue to look after Weston as he has always done.”

“I certainly hope so,” my mother said. “Stephen has always been sadly unsteady. He couldn’t even stay in school; he was always fighting.”

I opened my mouth, then shut it again. I
was not
going to fall into the trap of defending Stephen to my mother.

“If Stephen does come home, he cannot live in this house with you,” my mother said.

I stared at her in bewilderment.

“Do
not play the innocent with me, Annabelle,” she snapped. “You cannot live here unchaperoned with Stephen.”

My
bewilderment turned abruptly to disgust. I said, “Mama, Gerald is not yet cold in his grave.”

My mother lifted her chin. She is an incredibly beautiful woman, but the beauty is all on the outside. I have never liked her.

“I am only thinking of your reputation,” she said.

I do not think I have ever been so angry with her. I stood up. “Mama,” I said, “please leave.”

She looked at my face and wisely decided it was time to retreat. She swept to the door and paused for a moment, looking back at me, clearly intent on having the last word. “You should be wearing black, Annabelle,” she said.

She closed the door firmly behind her, leaving me alone with my headache.

Chapter Two

Normally, in March I would be finishing up the hunting season and getting ready to remove to London for the social season, but Gerald was dead and nothing was normal anymore. The resulting empty feeling of being alone and adrift was all too achingly familiar, and I spent a great deal of time with Giles. I told myself that he needed me, but in truth I think I needed him more.

A welcome touch of normalcy returned to my life with the visit of Sir Matthew Stanhope, our local squire and master of the Sussex Hunt, who came to see me on March 29, two days after the hunt season officially closed. We met in the small room behind the staircase that some years ago I had turned into an unofficial office for myself. I offered him some refreshment. He had wine; I had tea.

“Fenton’s shrubbery got trampled the other day,” he said as he settled back into the old velvet-covered armchair and drained off half his hock. “Some damn fool cousin of Watson’s got run away with.”

Keeping the local farmers placated was usually my job. “Oh dear,” I said. Fenton was one of the Weston tenants, and I knew how proud he was of his new shrubbery. “Has someone told him that the hunt will replace the shrubbery?” I asked.

“Went to see him myself,” Sir Matthew informed me. “He ain’t happy, though. His wife says, what if the baby was out in the shrubbery? The baby would have been trampled, she says.”

Unfortunately, Mrs. Fenton was right. I put down my cup in irritation. “How the devil did that fellow get into Fenton’s shrubbery,
Sir Matthew? The hunt had to have been at least three fields away!”

“We were, Annabelle, we were. But the damn fool was riding a borrowed horse—a nervy Thoroughbred—and he couldn’t hold him. Horse took him right into the shrubbery.”

We regarded each other with shared disgust. Sir Matthew had the ascetic face of a medieval scholar, but he was a countryman and a horseman and the best damn master of foxhounds any hunt could hope for. He had known me since I was eight years old.

I said, “It won’t benefit the hunt if the local farmers begin to feel that they are not safe in their own gardens.”

“I know, I know.” Sir Matthew finished his hock, poured himself another glass, and got to the point of his visit. “Do you think you might go to see the Fentons, Annabelle? Get them to see that this was an accident, that it won’t happen again?” He cleared his throat. “Hate to ask it of you right now, my dear. I know you’re in mourning.” Sir Matthew’s thin, austere face looked appropriately grave. “But the Fentons are Weston tenants, and if Mrs. Fenton stirs up the other farmers’ wives ...”

“The Sussex Hunt will be in trouble,” I finished.

We looked at each other in silence.

The Sussex Hunt was our mutual passion. As I mentioned earlier, Sir Matthew was the master, and our pack of very expensive foxhounds was quartered at his home, Stanhope Manor. The cost of hunting a pack of foxhounds was enormous, however, and Sir Matthew could not be expected to bear the whole of it. That was why our hunt, like so many others, ran on subscriptions.

To be a member of the Sussex Hunt, you had to pay a certain
amount of money per year. Members were allowed to bring guests, and the guests, of course, also had to pay. We needed the money to run the hunt, but it was absolutely infuriating when people introduced riders who couldn’t be trusted to control their mounts. We had had another such disaster at the beginning of the hunt season in November, when a visitor’s horse had kicked a hound. I had thought Sir Matthew was going to have an apoplexy right on the field.

“I will speak to the Fentons, of course,” I said.

“Thank you, my dear. I can assure you that I have spoken quite sternly to Watson. Told him if he pulled such a damn fool trick again, he wouldn’t be welcome to ride out with us.”

I nodded agreement.

Silence fell. The sun chose that moment to come out from behind the layers of gray cloud that had filled the sky all morning, and the room brightened as if all the lamps had suddenly been lit. The office had always been the one room in the house that belonged solely to me, and I usually spent a part of each day working at the big library desk that was the room’s centerpiece. It was here that I kept the records of the household expenses as well as the expense records of my own hunter operation.

My eyes lifted now, as they so often did, to the oil painting by George Stubbs that hung upon the wall facing the desk. It was a picture of Thoroughbreds exercising on Newmarket Heath. Gerald had given it to me for my twenty-first birthday, and I loved it. Unaccountably, my eyes began to sting.

“How are you managing, Annabelle?” Sir Matthew said. “How is young Giles going on?”

I tried to smile. “We are doing as well as can be expected, Sir Matthew. It was such a shock. I don’t believe I have really comprehended yet that Gerald is gone.”

He shook his head. “A young man like that, so full of life. What was he ... twenty-nine? “

“He was twenty-eight,” I said.

“How many times has he hunted all day in the rain, got soaking wet, and never even come down with a sniffle?” Sir Matthew demanded. “How could he have contracted an inflammation of the lungs in
London?”

I rubbed my eyes tiredly. “I don’t know, Sir Matthew. He just did.”

“I’m sorry, my dear,” he said. “I’m a blundering old man to be prosing on at you like this. But you know that if you need anything from me—anything at all—you have only to ask.”

I gave him a real smile. “I do know that, and I am grateful. At times like this, one needs one’s friends.”

He gave me a shrewd look and asked, “Is the duchess still here?”

By “the duchess” he meant the Duchess of Saye, who also happened to be my mother. Two years after the death of the sixth Earl of Weston, Gerald’s father, Mama had snared the Duke of Saye for husband number three. She adored being addressed as “Your Grace.”

“She’s leaving this afternoon,” I said.

“Good.”

We smiled at each other with perfect comprehension.

“I heard from Adam that Weston’s will named Stephen as Giles’s guardian,” Sir Matthew remarked next.

“Yes.”

He nodded with approval. Stephen had once saved one of Sir Matthew’s prize bitches from being gored by a bull, and in Sir Matthew’s book Stephen would always be a hero. “Good thinking on Weston’s part,” he said now. “Adam is a great gun, but he’s too old to have charge of a young ‘un like Giles.” Sir Matthew ran his fingers through his short, graying black hair and said loyally, “You know, Annabelle, I always thought there was more to that story of Stephen being caught smuggling than ever came out.”

“Perhaps there was,” I returned indifferently. “But it all happened five years ago, Sir Matthew, and I don’t think it much matters anymore.”

“I suppose not.”

I changed the subject. “Is it true that Durham is selling his pack?” I asked.

His whole body snapped to attention. “They’re sold,” he said, and paused dramatically before adding, “For two thousand guineas, Annabelle.”

“What!”

Sir Matthew nodded solemnly, poured himself another glass of wine, and settled in to tell me all about it.

* * * *

The following morning I went to visit the Fentons. Their farm lay near the village of Weston, so I took one of the wide, grassy rides that crisscrossed Weston Park and eventually I reached the village road. It had rained before dawn, and the woods on either side of the ride were still wet and dripping. The world smelled fresh and new, the arched neck of my chestnut Thoroughbred mare was glossy with good grooming, and the springiness in her steps testified to her energy and her health. It was the kind of morning that makes one feel glad to be alive. I simply couldn’t bear to think of Gerald, so I touched Elf lightly with my heel and we galloped all the way to the Weston Road.

The Fentons’ farm was prosperous looking, with two large barns, a cart house, a granary, and a piggery. It would have looked even more prosperous if the small square of boxwood shrubbery that jutted out from the right side of the house had not looked as if it were the victim of a demented gardener. I surveyed it from Elf’s back, picturing in my mind what must have happened: the horse had come crashing in on one side and its momentum had carried it across the small square of grass and out through the shrubs on the other side.

The thought of a child playing in that small enclosed space, in the way of those murderous iron-shod hooves, turned my blood cold.