The Rebel’s Daughter (20 page)

“
What is
that?” Henry pointed to an oval dish that gave off a savory aroma
that made Helena’s mouth water.

“
I think it might
be
Boeuf à la Mode
, but I cannot be sure.”

“
Indeed
it is, my dear Helena,” Robert said, forking several thick slices
onto Hendry’s plate. “The finest English buttock beef, larded with
bacon and stewed in claret, cinnamon cloves, mace, and
pepper.”

“
The
dish is a favorite of my William’s.” Alyce sighed, stroking
Hendry’s cheek with undue familiarity. Helena stared, but Henry
didn’t seem to mind.

“
William
is my son.” Alyce twirled her spoon in the air, answering Helena’s
unspoken question. Despite encouraging them all to eat, Alyce
herself pushed her food round her plate after the first few
mouthfuls. “He’s not in London just now, but you’ll meet him one
day.”

Celia spent the entire meal with her arm
looped through Helena’s, as if she had decided they were to be
inseparable. Phebe imitated her mother in both lack of appetite and
flirtatiousness, fluttering between the men like a bright
butterfly, gazing at them from under her lashes or from behind a
coyly held fan. She issued any servant moving into her field of
vision with pointed, but needless instructions, establishing her
position as daughter of the house.

Helena found the talk lively, if superficial,
each testing the experience and opinions of the others.

Alyce probed for details of their family
life at Loxsbeare. “I’ve never been so far west.” Her inflection
intimated it was a foolhardy thing to do.

“
Why
should you wish to, Mama?” Phebe made a moue of disgust.

“
Have
you ever visited the theatre?” Celia asked.

Helena shook her head. “The only plays I
have seen were private performances at friend’s houses.”

“
In that
case, I shall personally correct that omission in your education.
Until one has seen the magnificent Anne Bracegirdle, one simply
hasn’t lived, my dear.”

Master Devereux quizzed Henry, probing for
details of what kind of life he saw for himself in the city. Their
father had planned that Henry would enter the army, but lately,
Henry refused to discuss soldiering; so Helena was curious as to
how he would answer Robert’s question.

Alice
’s husky voice distracted her. “I am
determined you shall see the New Exchange shops and stalls, my
dear, and there is of course Covent Garden and the Hungerford
Market to visit. I guarantee you’ll have seen nothing like them in
the provinces; you are in for a treat.”

When she turned back to her brother’s
conversation, Helena discovered they had moved on to horses and
dogs. Disappointed, she listened to Samuel telling Celia he planned
to stay in London for a week or so in order to oversee his
warehouse in Freemans Yard, before returning home to
Exeter.

Grateful he was not leaving too soon, Helena
suppressed a yawn. The warmth of the room and the good food
conspired to remind her she was exhausted.

“
I feel
it is time you retired for a rest, my dears,” Samuel clapped his
hands to summon Lubbock. “He will show you your rooms and we’ll
gather here again later this afternoon.”

At the top of the staircase, a footman led
Henry off down a hallway.

Helena followed Lubbock along a sumptuous
upper floor with wide corridors and walls covered with
richly-patterned wallpaper. One storey away from the lower rooms,
the mirrors and gilt paint diminished and the candles stabbed into
dark corners.

“
Your
chamber, Mistress,” he said, showing her into a cosy panelled room
that contained a four-poster bed with green and gold hangings
draped on either side. A thick piled rug in the same colours
covered most of the boarded floor. Helena braced her arms on the
black wooden sill of the leaded window that covered one side of the
room. “They have a garden!” she called to Chloe, who limped in
awkwardly behind her, red-faced, and her arms full of
bundles.

In a walled courtyard below, neat flowerbeds
arranged in geometrical patterns crisscrossed with pathways
bordered by dwarf shrubs; so different from the semi-wild expanse
of lawn bordered by tall, ancient trees at Loxsbeare.

While Chloe combed out Helena’s hair, she
propped her elbows on top of a spindly- legged bureau, her chin in
her hands, and stared into her reflection.

I
’m really here at last. I’m in
London.

Chapter
12

“
Mistress Devero” “as sent your breakfast mistress,” Chloe
declared the next morning, limping to the bed where she balanced a
tray on the coverlet.

Helena propped herself onto one elbow,
smiling as she examined her breakfast tray of tiny pastries, a
beautifully crafted silver pot containing hot chocolate, and a
plate of thinly sliced bread and butter.

“
They
sleeps late in this ‘ouse.” Chloe tutted disapprovingly, and opened
a door to the left of the bed. “Look at this, Mistress.” She
revealed a closet containing Helena’s clothes chest and bureau, the
heavy craftsmanship incongruous in the neat space, but achingly
familiar.

Helena slid from beneath the covers,
plucked a pastry from the tray and sipped the cup of hot chocolate
Chloe had poured out. For the first time since crossing the city
boundaries, Helena could not hear ironclad wheels or rough voices,
clattering buckets, braying animals, or noisy peddlers. She assumed
this was because her room stood at the back of the house, the
walled garden acting as a buffer from the street.

A light knock came at the door, but before
Chloe could respond, two maids entered bearing steaming buckets of
hot water in each hand. A third dragged in a hipbath and set it in
front of the fireplace while her companion set to laying the fire,
which bloomed into life and warmth with surprising speed.

While Helena observed from the sidelines, the
maids lined the bath with linen sheets that gave off a fragrance of
lavender and chamomile as they poured in the water.

“
Do all
Londoners bathe in the mornings?” Helena asked no one in
particular.

The maid who stood closest concealed a
snigger as if the idea was monstrous. “Not every day,
Mistress.”

“
Mistress Devereux’s instructions,” the maid kneeling on the
hearth responded.

The maids stepped back, two on either end of
the hip bath, waiting.

With a small shock, Helena realized they
expected her to disrobe while they were still in the room.
Unwilling to appear unworldly, she allowed her shift to fall to the
floor, though they barely glanced at her.

While Chloe stood sulkily to one side,
watching with resentful eyes, Helena climbed into the hot water and
slid beneath the surface. She trailed her hands under the water as
the fragrant heat worked instant miracles on her sore back and
stiff muscles. The water had begun to go cold before she stepped
reluctantly from its caress, into a towel warmed by the fire one of
the maids wrapped round her.

Another attempted to arrange Helena’s
clothes for the day, but Chloe nudged her sharply aside and tended
to the task herself.

Their jostling made Helena smile, and at that
moment, she knew this was how she wanted to live, how she ought to
live; with the entire magical city of London spread out on the
other side of her window. Removing the hipbath took a deal of
effort and some muffled cursing from the maids, but once they had
gone, Chloe helped Helena dress in a russet silk brocade gown. The
plain cut skirt, split down the front to reveal a cream silk
underskirt, accentuated her slender figure. Deep lace ruffles fell
from the sleeves, the bodice lined at the neck with an almost
transparent lace bertha. Satisfied she would not disgrace herself
in front of her hosts, Helena twirled before a long glass.

“
I
remember when Sir Jonathan brought this cloth, from right here in
London.” Chloe fingered the heavy material lovingly.

“
Do
you?” Helena’s voice was nonchalant, but at the same time she felt
an uncomfortable warmth creep up her neck.

“
He
intended it for your mother.” Chloe’s voice grew
wistful.

Helena remained silent. Of course she
remembered. The instant she had seen it lying on the carriage seat,
she was fully aware the silk was not for her. Determined to have
it, she had thrown herself into her father’s arms gabbling her
gratitude for his generous gift. The resigned smile on her mother’s
face in response to his dismayed shrug had confirmed she had
won.

Having to listen patiently while he
recounted the fate of the Huguenot silk makers from whom he had
obtained it had been a small price to pay.

French-made silk was very expensive and
heavily taxed, and its importation restricted. However, since the
arrival of the Huguenot émigrés, there was an abundance of
reasonably-priced silk available in London.

Her mother had taken her to the seamstress
on the morrow to have the gown made up, but despite her tantrums,
Helena had rarely worn it. Now as she looked down at herself that
morning, shame spread through her once again. Lady Elizabeth would
have looked beautiful in this colour.

My selfish bone
again
.

“
What’s
that you said, Mistress?” Chloe asked.

Her mother used to tell her she possessed
a tiny, misplaced bone that only surfaced when she made a choice
based entirely on self-interest. Helena’s “selfish bone” became a
family joke, and frequently got get her into trouble when she was
younger.

“
Nothing.”

Celia erupted into the room without
knocking.

“
How was
your first night at Lambtons Helena? Not too noisy I hope? London
must be so different for you than the wilds of Devon.”

“
Devon
isn’t so wild, Celia,” Helena said, protective of her childhood
home. “It’s a beautiful place.” A sudden nostalgia for the
sea-tinged wind and the call of seagulls over green wide open
spaces made her suddenly homesick.

Celia didn’t seem to notice, busy peering
into Helena’s jewel case, then jumped up again and trailed plump
fingers through the open trunk at the end of Helena’s
bed.

Helena suddenly felt her entire wardrobe
was drab beside the pastel silk Celia was wearing, but when she
said so, Celia was complimentary. “That colour suits your dramatic
coloring perfectly,” she said, from her supine position on the
unmade bed. Then she leapt to her feet, grabbing Helena’s hand. “I
must show you the Inn.”

Helena looked toward the door. “Where’s
Phebe?”

Celia rolled her eyes. “Sulking. Ignore
her. She always wants to be the pretty one, and your arrival was
something of a shock.”

Helena acknowledged the compliment,
recalling Phoebe’s reaction to her arrival. However, she had no
time to give it another thought, as Celia was pulling her down the
wide staircase for a tour of the inn.

“
We
serve the best wines here,” Celia called over her shoulder as she
led the way through the dining areas of the inn, each one more
luxurious than the last, their arched and curtained doorways
decorated with rich hangings in red and gold. One had booths for
diners, sectioned off with wood and glass partitions. Candles sat
in pewter and glass holders on walls and on tables, and as Samuel
had promised, rows of silver tankards were lined up in the taproom
where serving girls swept the floors and scrubbed the furniture to
shining brilliance.

“
The
duty on imported wine is ruinously high, which makes it expensive,
but our ale is also the best, and we steep fruit and herbs in it
for flavour.”

“
Is the
ale brewed here?” Helena asked, as was the custom in
Exeter.

“
Oh no.”
Celia”s bright curls bounced on her shoulders. “We buy it from
brewers in Norfolk. Father says it is a messy, smelly process, and
not worth the space required.”

The kitchens, located behind the rear
staircase, were the largest and busiest Helena had ever seen. Rows
of massive wooden dressers lined the walls, loaded with platters
and trays, pitchers and trenchers with silverware, jugs and bowls,
all ready for the diners who would fill the public rooms.

A long, low hallway led away from the main
kitchen, with storerooms, a dairy, meat lockers and storage areas
on both sides; opening out on a backyard where the stables and
coach house were located. The main cooking area was a steamy,
airless space where shouted instructions were hurled across the
room. Everyone seemed frantically occupied and the atmosphere was
strained, but it all fascinated Helena and the smell of onions,
herbs and cooked meat was compelling.

Henry had apparently been up for some
time. He chatted comfortably with the serving men, complimenting
the girls who bobbed curtseys to the handsome young gentleman,
welcoming him to Lambtons with shy smiles and blushes.