Regency Rumours/A Scandalous Mistress/Dishonour And Desire (53 page)

‘Yes, vaguely. No one heard me.’

‘Then sing vaguely with me, and only the wild things will hear us.’

It seemed to be the most natural thing to do with him, to sing no particular song that arose from the occasion and to hear the echo of his deep harmonising hum, to feel the magical sounds caught up by the hilltop breeze, to follow the flight of sunbathing butterflies into the sky. In and out of the stones they wreathed in a graceful pattern, hidden behind the great outer mound that had once witnessed other dancers long ago. She had not known such freedom for years, had almost forgotten how it felt to curl her toes into the short grass, to sing to nature, timeless and unselfconscious. Never had she thought to do it with a man like this by her side who not only encouraged her, but understood it, too, joining in, undaunted by anything.

Leading her up to leap upon one of the fallen stones, he then lifted her down in a soaring waist-held flight with arms like wings, whirling her, laughing and singing
to the ground. Breathless and exhilarated, Caterina sank down between two of the larger stones to lay spread-eagled, drunk with the recaptured carefree silliness of youth.

Chase fell down beside her, taking her tousled head in his hands, taking her kisses, too, pausing for breath only to extend their primitive ritual into the natural urge to make love. Caterina had not thought about it, but knew immediately that this was what her body required to bond with the one who was so much a part of her. What other man but Chase Boston would so easily have ignored the conventions?

It had been days since their last loving, and neither of them could delay by a single moment what was already brimming over into every thought, every deed, every touch of the hand. Without a word between them to speak of reasons, their bodies entwined like dancers while Caterina, as usual, urged him past the leisured preliminaries with the urgency of a wild creature eager for consummation. Chase was not inclined to hold her back while his own need was as great and, at her first signal of surrender, he took her with the tender force that she so clearly wanted, towering over her with the domination that was one of the hallmarks of his lovemaking, powerful, yet aware of her smallest response.

There, on that almost ancient place on the lone moors, no one was near to hear their cries, nor did Caterina feel any shame at her impulsive change of mind, for this was as much a part of her as her previous reservations. There was no need for words: it had happened, and the release shattered them both with a power that reached them through the earth, sating them with its life-force.

Sensitive to her unstable emotions, Chase did not
tease her about her sudden change of heart, loving her for her immediate response to both their needs. Full of contradictions and impulses, courageous, talented, sometimes volatile, yet as fragile as a moth, she was the kind of woman he admired above all others. So the short ride across the Duke’s land was more contemplative than usual, and they rode holding hands, containing their thoughts for the time being.

With typical understatement, the English are used to describing large estates as ‘a little pile in the country’. Their first full view of the Duke’s ‘little pile’ was from the village of Edensor that straggled down to the bridge over the Derwent, set in a gloriously wide landscape softened by trees against a dramatic backcloth of hills, the glowing honey-coloured stone settled like a solid golden box. Further up the hillside to the left was another large stone building with a clock tower on the roof.

‘The stables,’ Sir Chase told her.

‘I’ve seen the house often,’ said Caterina, ‘but never as close as this. It’s huge, isn’t it?’

‘Not quite huge enough for Hart. He’s already planning on extensions to make it about twice the size. The gardens, too.’

‘There … over there …’ she pointed ‘… that’s the long cascade. Do you think he’ll allow us to paddle in it?’ Higher up the hill to the other side of the house was a long flight of steps that sparkled with water.

‘We’ll be allowed to do whatever we wish. Come on. The coaches should be there by now.’ He laughed, recognising the change in her with each mile of their journey, wondering if Signor Cantoni and Millie would notice it, too.

They had been seen from the house riding through
herds of deer in the parkland and, by the time they had arrived at the foot of the terrace in the West Garden, the lanky young sixth Duke was striding out to meet them, his long boyish face beaming with pleasure, his arms ready to lift Caterina down from the saddle, greeting her with a brotherly kiss to both cheeks. Animated and eager, he took his friend’s hand in both his own, asking questions, but not waiting for an answer before telling them how their coaches had arrived and how sensible they were to come cross-country.

He had given Caterina the red-velvet bedroom, which had a wash-basin and a commode of polished mahogany. Sir Chase was in the room next door but, in a house the size of Chatsworth, a guide might have been useful when it was necessary to walk through so many other rooms to reach his Grace, and it was soon obvious why he was planning so many changes. Their journey took them through vast rooms with painted ceilings, gilded cornices and dowdy wallpapers, over marble floors and shabby carpets, past monstrous bookcases, old slabs of alabaster and furniture chipped with the countless knocks of generations, up staircases and along passageways lined with columns, plaster casts of feet and heads, malachite pedestals and clocks, urns made of the local Blue John stone and tapestries from the now-dismantled Mortlake factory showing faded biblical scenes.

‘But things are in the wrong place,’ said the Duke, airily. ‘And there’s too much gilding everywhere. Some of it will have to go.’

With a resident orchestra and the Duke’s Hungarian pianist friend, Edouard Schulz, with Sir Chase, Signor Cantoni and Caterina, it was not surprising when, after dinner, they resorted to the music room where the
guests willingly ‘sang for their supper’ to the delight of the Duke who, although slightly deaf, loved music. When it grew late, they abandoned the piano, the harp-sicord and harp for a supper in the Sitting Room, all white, grey and gold, which Caterina found restful, but which the Duke wanted for his library. ‘After I’ve enlarged the stables,’ he told her. ‘I can only get eighty in there at the moment, and there’s nowhere for the carriages.’

Caterina’s red-velvet room was connected to Sir Chase’s by a small door cut into the wall that disappeared from view when it was closed. While they prepared for bed, they propped it open so they could talk and, when Millie and Mr Pearson had been dismissed, they came together only because they could no longer keep away from each other for the space of a night.

The events of the day had assembled in her mind, helping to relieve her of the cares that had dogged her for so long, replacing them with companionship, music-making and loving, peace and freedom. A heady mixture that was sure to affect her.

He had waited at the door in the wall with his head almost touching the frame, his arms folded as he took note of the last fussing delaying tactics that he knew were signs of her uncertainty. There were still doubts in her mind and now her resolutions wavered, too, but her body’s messages were strident, insistent.

She turned, as if surprised to see him standing there, and he could see the conflict raging within her, reminding her of the passionate encounter on the moors and the ecstasy they had shared there, literally, on her home ground.

‘Chase,’ she whispered.

He neither spoke nor moved, but his look told her that she must come to him, not the other way round.

‘Chase … I think … I think I want you.’ Her eyes were wide and dark with desire, her fine lawn nightgown like a halo around the darker outline of her body, her hair glowing like burnished copper in the candlelight.

He could see that she was trembling. Moving at last, he held out one hand to her and she flew to him like a bird with a cry of joy at the sudden soft impact of their bodies, at the warm welcome of his lips, as hungry as hers. She melted into him and he lifted her, carrying her through to his own bed where the loving began even before they fell, sprawling them across it, rolling to the edge and back again.

This time, Caterina’s need was for every tenderness he could offer, the slow, seductive, secretive caresses that he had rarely been given a chance to give, or to teach her how to give in return. In those rapturous hours, she learned about waiting and about giving pleasure as well as receiving it, about the sensitive parts of a man’s body and about the joys of delay which, ultimately, heightened the sublime ascent that kept them both at the peak for longer than before, crying out with the suspense of it.

His head lay on the pillow with his nose almost touching hers, their eyes laughing, wondering, their lips playing together.

‘I’m in bed with Chase Boston,’ she said, impishly.

‘So you are, my lady. Regretting it, are you?’

‘Not yet. No, certainly not yet. But Chase, there’s something I think I ought to tell you.’

‘Shh!’ he commanded, lapping at her top lip. ‘Sleep now. You can tell me tomorrow.’

***

The chance to tell him did not present itself the next day nor indeed on any of the following days or nights, and by the end of their five-day visit to Chatsworth, the need to speak about her secret theft was fading, partly as a result of Chase’s contriving to keep the topic of conversation well clear of contentious issues. The other reasons were to do with the increase of guests at Chatsworth and their days spent tirelessly visiting all the places Caterina had known when she had lived in the nearby town of Buxton. For her, these days were the beginning of a new life in which everything she enjoyed most was hers to do without restriction. The hours spent with her personal singing tutor and all the other music-makers were like the fulfilment of a dream that seemed unlikely to end.

Using the Duke’s horses, they galloped freely over his acres, taught Signor Cantoni how to ride, splashed like children in the cascade fountain on the hillside, played games of croquet and boated on the lake. On tours of the palatial house, they were shown the fifth Duke’s collection of
objets d’art
and all the curiosities he’d not bothered to catalogue, for he had been no connoisseur of the arts like his son.

One of the extra guests to appear was a certain Mr Turner, an artist who disappeared each morning to sketch the local beauty spots, reappearing each evening looking just as scruffy as when he’d set out. Though no one could have called him charming, he kept them in hoots of laughter with stories of his adventures in pursuit of his art, but if any of them had assumed that his finished paintings might be easily affordable, they were soon to find out that, for all his air of shabbiness, he had been a Royal Academician since the age of twenty who
knew his own worth. His charges included not only the painting but also the cost of transporting it to the buyer and even, when he felt like it, the paper and string it was parcelled in. He did not come cheap by any standards.

Politely, Caterina agreed with Mr Turner that this was only common sense, but the controversial subject of earnings and entitlements was soon pounced on by other guests, some of whom were local landowners, and the conversation swung inevitably to the price of land and the Derbyshire’s valuable lead mines. Several of these were owned by the Duke himself, as well as others further north on the moors of Yorkshire.

‘Mark you,’ the Duke said between mouthfuls of Wensleydale cheese and apple chutney, ‘I don’t need to go all the way up to Yorkshire to understand what my agent is telling me. He’s always on the spot, but I have the model of the mines that my father had made for him. I’ll show it to you after dinner, if I can find it.’

He found it behind a bronze bust of Admiral Lord Nelson that stood on top of a large lump of lead known, he told them, as a pig, probably because no one could lift it. The model was beautifully constructed of wood showing how the seams containing lead-ore ran vertically down into the ground connected by man-made sloping tunnels where tiny figures of men crawled on all fours to pick away at the rock, inch by inch. Caterina knew that lead mining was a highly dangerous occupation and that the miners’ families lived only on what their menfolk could find and bring to the surface. They were always desperately poor and, as usual, the largest share went to the owners. But until then, she had given little thought to the appalling conditions in which the men worked, rain or shine, winter and summer. Most of the workers would have to walk miles across
the open moor in all weathers just to reach the mine, with no change of clothes either before or afterwards.

With only the Duke and her husband to hear her questions about the Chester mines inherited by her father, she was surprised to see the sudden frown followed by a fleeting expression of concern cross the Duke’s face. Clearly, he was perturbed. ‘Good heavens!’ he whispered, looking to Sir Chase for support. ‘Heavens above. Of course, you’re
related,
are you not? How could I have forgotten it?’

‘Is there a problem, Hart?’ said Sir Chase.

‘Well, er … yes, there is indeed, but …’ his eyes wavered uncertainly between Caterina and Sir Chase ‘… but perhaps this is not the time.’

‘Please tell me,’ Caterina said. ‘Has something happened?’

‘Oh, dear. Chester’s mine is on neighbouring land, as I’m sure you must know. That’s how I heard the news so soon, only this morning, but it didn’t occur to me to mention it. Your father won’t have heard yet, down in Richmond. I suppose that’s one of the problems of not keeping a close eye on the place. Your father visits so rarely, I believe.’

‘Never at all, your Grace. But please tell me what’s wrong.’

‘The worst. I’m sorry to say that his one remaining mine collapsed last night and killed seven men. He’s supposed to keep them supplied with good timbers, you see, so that they’re shored up as safely as possible. Your father’s mine reached the water-table only last year,’ he said, pointing to the underground lake on the model, ‘down here, so they’d almost worked that seam out. Since then they’d been looking for parallel seams, and I believe they were sinking deeper shafts to search for
more veins. But if the water that collects isn’t pumped out properly, the shafts will flood and collapse. If your father had granted leases for them to look elsewhere on his land, they’d not have needed to go deeper, but this takes time to discover, and I believe he’s always refused to do that. Folly, really. It may be an expensive undertaking, but seven men is a lot to lose in one go. He’ll have to close it down completely now, with all his miners gone. A very sad business. Every owner’s nightmare.’