Rebel Heiress (13 page)

The rest of the drive was beautiful, the wind on her face refreshing, and she arrived at Sandhurst very ready to enjoy the review and her first near look at royalty. This proved, in truth, disillusioning enough. Her father had warned her what to expect, but just the same, it was hard to believe that these large, red-faced men, who showed every sign of having dined lavishly, were royal dukes, the dowdy ladies they escorted their sisters the princesses. It was true that there was something courtly in the Prince Regent's air, despite his corpulence, and something majestic about his bad-tempered-looking mother, but as for his blowsy daughter, who was romping about the parade ground like an overgrown schoolgirl, her petticoats too short under her ill-chosen violet satin, Henrietta found herself for the first time tempted to believe the rumours she had heard against her.

The ceremony was short, and Henrietta soon found herself walking about the newly laid-out grounds of the academy with Cedric, who had a passion for landscape gardening and architecture and became unusually interesting on the subject. When they returned to the marquee in which refreshments were being served they found Lady Marchmont standing by herself in a corner drinking a glass of iced punch and looking furious.

‘It is enough to provoke a saint,' she said. ‘Cannot he leave his affairs of state for half a day without being sent for like a truant schoolboy? I am out of patience entirely, and have a good mind to go back to London myself.'

Henrietta had been looking around for her father. ‘Why, what's the matter?'

‘Matter indeed! Your father has been summoned back to Whitehall. Your Yankee friends have declared war after all. They are rioting in Derbyshire. All's amiss and of course your father must set it to rights.' She took it as a personal affront. ‘Well enough for him to send us off to ruralise at Marchmont while he lives in comfort at White's — and Lady Allen's ball tomorrow too. I declare, I do not know when I have been so vexed. And he has taken the carriage without so much as a by your leave, as if I was to be jaunting about the countryside in a curricle at my time of life.'

Tired with journeying and champagne, she looked, for once, almost her age and Henrietta forgot in pity her own dismay at the American news. It was hard, she could see, for Lady Marchmont to find herself suddenly abandoned in this gathering of royalty. The situation was not eased by the Duke of York, who had taken a sudden fancy to Henrietta and now came up, greeted her enthusiastically as his Beautiful Savage, and carried her off to drink a glass of punch with him, talking all the way about Military training and the best uniforms for cadets. After twenty minutes of yeses and nos to this, Henrietta was relieved when he was peremptorily summoned to his mother's side and she was able to return to Lady Marchmont.

She found her amazingly back in spirits. Instead of receiving a setdown for abandoning her for such exalted company, she was greeted with wreathing smiles and rebuked lovingly as a ‘dear giddy creature'. She soon discovered why. Lady Marchmont had discovered that Mr. Croker of the Admiralty was planning to drive back to town that night with his wife and her sister and had prevailed upon them to come, instead, to Marchmont, and take her with them. They were to leave almost immediately. ‘But there is no need for you to be hurrying yourself, my dearest love, for Cedric will not be ready to leave for this hour or more, I am sure. He has met that creature Nash and is talking porticoes nineteen to the dozen.'

Henrietta began at once to protest. She had no mind to drive the ten miles to Marchmont in the gathering dusk alone with her stepbrother. But she found herself overruled. There was, it seemed, no help for it. Mr. Croker's barouche normally held two. It was only by stretching a considerable point that they were prepared to accommodate Lady Marchmont as well as Mrs. Croker's sister. As it was, she would be sitting bodkin. ‘Which you know, of all things, I detest.' Henrietta would be
much better off in the curricle. ‘Why, what could be more delightful than to drive though this delicious air? I do hope, my dear creature, that you are not going to play me one of your scenes of Boston prudery. I had thought we had contrived to rid you of those crotchets.'

This was a kind of attack that Henrietta always found it difficult to counter. And it was reinforced by Mr. Croker himself, who now joined them and apologised for being unable to offer Miss Marchmont a seat in his barouche. There was nothing for it but to submit with good grace, merely insisting that she and Cedric set off at the same time as the other party.

Her stepmother acquiesced at once. ‘Why, very well, my dear, if you wish it. I know Cedric too well to think he would dream of running counter to a lady's whim — and most particularly one of yours. It is but to find him and give him his orders.'

But this proved more easily said than done. Mr. Croker, who disliked driving in the dark on strange roads, had already sent for his carriage and had begun to grow restive at the delay when Cedric finally appeared. He agreed at once to drive Henrietta. They would start immediately. He would send for his curricle…

Here a slight hitch occurred. The Queen had chosen this moment to announce her intention of returning to Windsor, and the royal carriages had been summoned. Mr. Croker, whose carriage was already awaiting him, was politely requested to remove it from the sweep. Lady Marchmont shrugged and smiled apology at Henrietta, kissed her effusively in a waft of patchouli and got into the barouche, adjuring Cedric to take the greatest possible care of her.

It took a long time for the royal cortege to get itself formed up and ready to leave. Princess Mary had left her gloves behind in the marquee and Princess Charlotte had contrived to lose one of the many scarves that were wreathed untidily about her plump person. A great deal of abortive bowing and curtseying went on before they were all safely loaded into their carriages and driven away, and it was half an hour or more before Cedric's curricle was finally brought round and he handed Henrietta in.

‘Not much chance of catching them.' He gathered up the reins. ‘But I know a shortcut by which we can beat them to
Marchmont for all that. Croker is a deuced slow driver, I know. What do you say that we race them there?'

Delighted with this plan, Henrietta did her best to encourage Cedric in it by complimenting him on his skill as a whip. He had, indeed, a neat, firm pair of hands and was known to be a hopeful candidate for the Four in Hand Club. But today his skill was less marked than usual and as he whipped up his horses and took a sharp corner very much too fast for comfort, Henrietta began to wonder whether he, like the royal dukes, was not somewhat the worse for wear. She had suspected that something rather stronger than fruit punch was being served in one corner of the marquee, and it was only to be expected that Cedric would have found his way there. Well, all the more reason for getting to Marchmont Hall as quickly as possible. She certainly did not wish for a renewed proposal from Cedric in his present loud-voiced and fuddled state.

He seemed to pull himself together for a while and they tooled along comfortably enough through a pleasant country of rolling hills, high hedgerows and inconspicuous grey stone villages. Cedric was concentrating on his driving and Henrietta let herself relax. The shadows of the trees were growing longer and the fierceness had gone out of the sunshine, leaving the evening bland and pleasant, fragrant here and there with the scent of new-mown hay and many other country smells that were strange to her. Enjoying them to the full, she did not, for a while, notice that Cedric had begun to pause and consult milestones. But at last he drew up abruptly in the main street of a small village and shouted at a labourer who was making his dusty way home from work.

‘Hey, you there! What village is this and which is my road for Marchmont?'

‘Marchmont?' The man stopped and scratched his head with an earthy forefinger. ‘I reckon you's lost yoursells, mister and lady. This is Imber village and I did hear tell Marchmont is dunnamany miles thataway.' He gestured vaguely with his pitchfork back in the direction they had come. Pressed, he could add nothing to this unsatisfactory bit of information. He was sure that Marchmont was ‘back thataway', but when Cedric tried to cross-question him about the shortcut he had intended taking, the man disclaimed all knowledge of it. Henrietta had listened to this exchange with increasing alarm. So far as she could make out from the man's vague estimates, they
were now rather further from Marchmont than they had been when they left Sandhurst. And by now the brightness had quite gone out of the air.

The man summed up her fears: ‘Happen you'd best hurry yoursells if ‘e don't wish to be benighted. And no inn nearer than Swan at Cumber, neither.'

Henrietta wished to question him further, but Cedric threw him a coin and whipped up his horses into a graceful turn around the village green. ‘That will teach me,' he said cheerfully, ‘to believe in any shortcut of Alvanley's describing. He was always a shatterbrain. No man is to be trusted who puts out his night candle by shying a pillow at it.'

Henrietta was not to be distracted by this interesting bit of information. She was growing both anxious and angry. ‘Do you mean to tell me that this shortcut of yours is one you have never taken before?'

‘But of course, my dear creature. Where would be the sport in it if I knew the way? Alvanley bet me a pony I couldn't find it the first time, and deuce take it, unless you let me spring the horses, he'll win his money. Come, what do you say? Shall I let them out? If that lobby's to be trusted, we've more than twelve miles still to Marchmont, and I bet Alvanley we'd get there in two hours even.'

‘You have lost your bet then,' Henrietta said. ‘But let us by all means make haste. Your mother will be growing anxious.'

‘Not her,' Cedric said, comfortably ungrammatical. ‘She knows you're in good hands, don't she? Besides, she'll be too busy doing the pretty to those Crokers to notice whether we are alive or dead. Come, my dearest creature, relax and enjoy this beautiful evening, and trust me to get you to Marchmont as fast as I can.'

There was a change in his tone during this last speech that Henrietta did not at all like. She had never been his ‘dearest creature' before and did not wish to be so now. But this did not seem the moment to protest and bring in, perhaps, some further demonstration of the feeling he claimed to have for her. Instead, she did her best to distract him by keeping up a flow of talk about the events of the day, sounding, to her own ears, uncomfortably like the kind of babbling female she particularly despised. But at least, as she chattered on about Princess Charlotte's dress and the Duke of York's manners, the miles were rolling away behind them and she flattered herself
that the discovery that they were lost had had a sobering effect on Cedric. His driving had improved, and he was handling his horses to a point when they swept down a long hill into a slightly larger village whose church tower Henrietta had been able to see, over the woods, for the last few miles.

‘Cumber at last,' said Cedric with satisfaction as he coiled his whip neatly around the ears of the leading horse. ‘Now we are but ten miles from home, my love, and you may quiet your fears and that tongue of yours. If I did not value every syllable you utter, I vow I would have been praying for a merciful deafness this half hour past. Why, you have outdone Silence — my Lady Jersey — herself.'

This was too much. ‘Lord Beaufrage —' Henrietta began in her most quelling tone, when Cedric interrupted her with a sharp oath. His last flick of the whip had startled the lead horse, and now, as the light curricle bucketed from side to side of the increasingly steep hill, she realised that both the horses were out of control.

‘Hang on for your life, my love!' shouted Cedric above the rattling of the carriage, but the advice came too late. At the bottom of the hill the road turned sharply round a cottage. He wrenched hard at the reins, but without avail. The horses turned, but not enough to allow for the carriage behind them, which struck the cottage a glancing blow, reeled giddily, and fell on to its side. Henrietta was thrown clear and landed dazed but unhurt in a bed of strawberries. A noise of shouting from the road told her that Cedric, too, had survived, and was apparently being helped with the horses. She rose dizzily to her feet, removed an all too ripe strawberry from the back of her neck, and looked over the hedge. The horses had come to a shuddering stop just round the corner, and the curricle was still lying on its side, while Cedric and a couple of villagers were trying to disentangle the traces and right it.

He looked up. ‘Thank God you are unhurt. I was this instant coming to look for you.'

That seemed to Henrietta very much too late in the day. She might have been lying dead for all he seemed to have cared, but she forebore to comment and merely asked whether the curricle was badly damaged.

‘Oh, the merest triflle,' Cedric replied cheerfully. ‘A shattered splinter bar is the worst of it. You are my luck, my love, there is no doubt about it. Why, such a tossing and it might have been
a dead loss, but this is nothing that a morning's work will not repair.'

‘A morning's work!' said Henrietta in horror. ‘But what are we to do for tonight?'

‘Why, what but put up at the Swan Inn, which, if I remember rightly, is just around the corner.'

‘Put up at an inn? Have you taken leave of your senses, Cedric? How can I spend the night here with you?'

‘What else can we do, my dear creature? These good people tell me there is no carriage to be had this side of Farnborough, so we must make the best of a bad job and stay here. I'll have you home safe and sound in the morning, never fear, and no one a penny the wiser. Besides, you are shaken. He took her arm and guided her solicitously towards the inn, whose sign she now saw by the roadside. To her dismay, it was a tiny place, little more than a cottage, and the hopes she had been nourishing that there might after all prove to be a carriage they could hire died at sight of it. But it was just across the road from the church, and she looked eagerly for the vicarage. Surely help would be forthcoming from there?