Sophie was too much a realist to feel that she understood him, but his mystery was what she loved best; even the idea of vices and bad women attracted as well as revolted her. When she had been sixteen he had patiently helped her improve her riding and had sometimes ridden beside her when hunting to make sure that she kept up with the field. Her memories from these days were still like precious stones to be taken out, polished and admired, regardless of whether Clinton himself had any memory of them. For almost a year after his father’s suicide, Clinton had remained at Markenfield with a handful of servants living the life of a recluse. Then he had let the house, bought a cornetcy in the cavalry, and, almost immediately, gone abroad. The China War and then Lady Cawthrey had taken him out of Sophie’s life for almost four years. When he had later renewed his spasmodic attentions, Sophie had ignored her mother’s remarks about his mercenary motives but had welcomed him warmly without any pretence of anger or indifference. Spoiled from birth, she had never doubted that in the end her childhood passion for Clinton would be gratified. Though she could swoon in the most lady-like manner, when her mind was fixed upon a given object, Sophie could be as tenacious as any terrier. If Clinton did not love her when they married, she was confident that in time she could make him. A month ago her mother had threatened to refuse to receive Clinton unless he made his intentions clear. In the last letter Sophie had written to him in Ireland, she had told him this. For this reason alone, his imminent arrival had a significance far beyond that of any of his previous visits.

  When four o’clock came and Clinton had still not arrived, Sophie was feverish with anticipation. Time seemed to pass in fits and starts, as she waited on the verge of happiness or great sorrow. One moment she was aware of everything she did and every detail in the room around her, and the next, minutes slipped by unnoticed as she sat in a waking dream. If he did not come what could she do? How face the days and weeks to come? When she went downstairs and talked to her mother and father, she was amazed that she could speak normally. The next moment she could not remember what she had said. Her thoughts were as incoherent as a swirling mist. And still he did not come.

  As the phaeton drew up in the carriage sweep in front of the austere and elegant Palladian façade of Ammering Court, Clinton experienced the same conflicting emotions as a flank marker during a cavalry charge. Until almost the last moment they could still sheer away and pass to the side of the waiting infantry square. A few words to the driver and he could be speeding away again through the deer park towards the tall gates with their heraldic greyhounds. With bowed head he started resolutely up the broad steps, a small figure under the shadow of the lofty pediment.

  The proper order of events was very clear to him. Until he proposed to the girl nothing could be said about the purpose of his visit by either of her parents. If she accepted, she would tell her mother, who in turn would inform her father, who would then wait for Clinton to come to him to ask for his daughter’s hand. But courtesy demanded refreshment after his journey, and so he was shortly drinking tea with Mr and Mrs Lucas in a magnificently panelled room, decorated with elaborate festoons of fruit and flowers carved by Grinling Gibbons. Among cabinets of buhl and ormolu, seated on chairs worked in Gobelin needlework, Clinton talked about Ireland and listened to his host’s sparse theories on the subject. William Lucas, related by marriage to the Gurneys, Norfolk’s most famous banking family, was a stout white haired man, whose height enabled him to carry his corpulence with dignity. His nose was sharp and his eyebrows thick and bushy like little wigs. His wife, who had once been pretty, still retained a girl’s silvery voice and manners to match, though now her face was slack and puffy and her figure as solid as her husband’s. Both husband and wife were subdued and sad. Though Clinton was titled, his father had made the family notorious in the county and the Danvers’s poverty was widely known. Sophie could have been expected to have made a better match. But neither parent had been able to stand against the tears and tantrums which had greeted their earlier opposition.

  Since Mr Lucas had an idea that people should not talk unless having something worthwhile to say, he said little, and what he did say was so marvellously to the point that further comment was usually superfluous. This, coupled with Mrs Lucas’s excessive politeness, which conveyed her resentment more plainly than open hostility would have done, made conversation a difficult matter. In fact Sophie’s arrival, which Clinton had dreaded, actually came as a relief. Mrs Lucas’s sudden remarks about the pleasantness of the day and the beauties of the garden, would have made her purpose obvious to a man possessing a fraction of Clinton’s intelligence. He smiled at Sophie.

  ‘A turn in the garden, Miss Lucas?’

  The gardens on the south side of Ammering Court were laid out in a series of wide stone-walled terraces connected by balustraded steps. The upper terrace was a long lawn geometrically patterned with clipped box hedges, but below were rose gardens, and less formal walks between homely borders of delphiniums, columbine, and foxgloves. Down such a walk, flanked on one side by a pergola heavy with honeysuckle and climbing roses, Clinton and Sophie walked together. Looking at the pale drawn face of the girl beside him with her black hair and expectant eyes, Clinton felt a dream-like sense of unreality. Around them the fragrant air and the gentle humming of bees.

  ‘How lucky you are to be able to walk here every day,’ he murmured.

  ‘Perhaps I’ll take root like that Latin lady who turned into a tree.’

  Clinton’s lips felt very dry and light tremors of agitation made his breathing uneven. Ask her now? Or at that corner by the rustic bench? Or wait till they reached the gate to the rose garden?

  ‘I’ve become the leading light of the Ladies’ Sick Visitation Committee.’

  ‘Which you think a worthless activity?’ he asked, recognising her ironic tone.

  ‘Little better than my music or my drawing.’

  ‘You draw very well.’

  ‘I have a lot of time to practise.’

  Though the tension and sadness in her voice reproached him, he still could not say the words. Her red merino blouse with its dark braiding suited her perfectly, complementing her mass of black hair and showing off her pearl-like complexion. Pretty hands, a mouth with soft inviting lips, and her delightfully serious way of listening to whatever was said to her, however trivial, all pleased Clinton. But the untouched youthfulness of her face woke nothing in him.

  He stared as though in a trance at some butterflies fluttering around a flowering buddleia. Ever since he had seen Markenfield through the shimmering haze, everything happening to him had seemed like some inexplicable nightmare. Could he really marry, change his whole life, solely to avoid selling a house which now seemed more remote than his own boyhood? Even the memories which had given it clearest form were ephemeral: fire buckets, torn wallpaper, the pumping house in the woods where he had kept a tame owl. His father had once said, if a man owns land, the land owns him, and Clinton had accepted this as a fact needing no proof. What was an aristocrat without his acres?

  And yet today, looking across the valley at his childhood home, he had found out something else, at first without realising that he had done so. Markenfield had always been a region in his mind, as well as a physical place. And in ownership of such a house, that inner vision of it, a kind of intangible affinity, mattered as much as title deeds. Markenfield was not just a building but an idea, the sum of all the impressions of those who had lived in it—the servants too. The horses, the dogs, even the trees all played a part. One generation planted what another generation saw reach maturity; the animals overlapped the generations, just as individual servants might have first come in their teens to serve a father, and finally stayed on to serve his grandson. Stories of the family and the house were stored over the years in so many minds. This was the true meaning of being owned by what one held—to be inextricably part of the continuity it embodied.

  But when Markenfield had been let, the old servants had left, adding to the void left by Clinton’s father’s sudden death and his own departure. The chain had been broken. The idea, the real bond, was something remembered now; but no longer living. He had come to Norfolk, certain that there were no choices left—that Markenfield was sacrosanct and marriage inescapable. Only now, at the moment of decision, did he know consciously what he had half-sensed by the roadside an hour ago. His father was wrong; a nobleman’s land did not always outweigh all else. The choice was still there to be made: to sell his inheritance and not himself.

  And beside him, the girl still watched his every expression, waiting, hoping, making him ashamed that he had needed to be pushed to the very brink before knowing his mind. He longed in some way to make amends for the pain he was about to cause her. Perhaps if he could explain about the married lives of the officers at his club. But why should this sheltered girl ever believe him?

  When they reached the end of the border walk, he took Sophie’s arm and said gently:

  ‘Have you ever heard that cynical bachelors have a catch phrase about marrying for money and loving for pleasure?’

  She looked up at him with a brave attempt at light-heartedness.

  ‘I daresay they often come to love their rich wives in spite of their cynicism.’ She turned away as if about to cry, but when she met his gaze, her eyes were bright with anger. ‘Do you think I ever thought you loved me? I’m not a fool. If people only married for love, how many marriages would there be?’

  ‘I can’t marry you,’ he whispered, dreading that she would weep and scream at him for having allowed her to hope. Instead she said in an insistent voice:

  ‘Why can’t you?’

  ‘It would dishonour us.’

  ‘Only if you love someone else. Do you, Clinton?’

  He shook his head, amazed by her calmness.

  ‘If I gave you a dozen reasons,’ he murmured, ‘they’d only be poor attempts to justify what I want to do.’

  ‘So you reject me without a word?’

  He tried to take her hands, but she moved away at once.

  ‘Ask yourself,’ he said, ‘how long can any woman live without bitterness, when every day brings her fresh proofs that her love is not returned?’

  ‘Do you think I care about bitterness?’ she cried. ‘Would bitterness be worse than never to see your face or hear your voice? Is bitterness more cruel than the misery of life without the one person who makes it possible? I don’t care who you’ve loved or who you’ll love. If you’d be faithful even for a year, I’d pay any price. I’d barter my soul for it.’

  The hint of hysteria in her voice horrified him.

  ‘I’m not worth your devotion. I never was. I’m nothing like the person you think you love.’

  She stood rocking her weight from heel to toe with a faint twisted smile on her face; an absorbed introspective look.

  ‘All that time you used to spend with the farm people; how I hated you for that, preferring the company of those dolts to mine. Then going out with the fishermen at Overstrand, your fool of a father letting you in any weather. I used to pray for you.’ She suddenly touched his arm and looked into his eyes. ‘I could find the tree where you stripped off the bark in your embarrassment when I first told you I loved you … can say what you said when we watched the flocks of starlings over the village the week before you left Markenfield. I used to walk alone to the spot where you’d caught perch as a boy … sit where you’d sat.’ She fell silent and covered her face with her hands. ‘I shan’t give you up, Clinton. I’ll never do that. Never.’ She stifled a small choking sob and pressed his hands between hers. Before he could think of any words of comfort, she had swung away from him and was running down the long strip of green between the borders towards the terrace steps, her blouse a vivid splash of colour against the softer blues and whites of the flowers.

  6

  Sunday morning, church bells ringing, and in the wide squares and crescents between Brompton and Knightsbridge well-dressed families hurrying to church, some walking, others in carriages. Almost impossible to believe it, but a mere decade earlier the whole of this spacious suburb of South Kensington had been largely a district of farms and market gardens. As Clinton walked towards Esmond’s square, he watched the broughams, barouches and victorias carrying the church-goers to their various destinations, neo-classical, neo-gothic, the sun catching on wheel hubs, curb chains and carriage lamps. Under a pale blue sky stippled with light mackerel clouds, the white stucco of the houses and the recently watered streets looked as fresh and laundered as the white gloves and breeches of the coachmen and grooms. The slums and rookeries of Lambeth and Seven Dials were as remote as another continent, shut out from this Eden by the oramented gates and railings, which now closed off the best residential streets from the public highway. A hundred yards from Esmond’s house a uniformed gatekeeper with a cockaded hat kept away the street musicians, hawkers and beggars whose presence was prohibited by notices on the gates.

  Informed by the butler that Mr Danvers was at church, Clinton once more prepared to wait, this time at his own request in his brother’s library, among the leather chairs and the glass-fronted bookcases containing rows of creamy vellum, antique brown calf and dull red morocco. Through the half-open windows came the twitter of sparrows and the distant clamour of the bells; in the room the stately ticking of a Louis Quinze clock. Clinton was idly examining the spines of the books, quite expecting to see some rare Decameron or Caxton bible, when he heard the rustle of a dress. A soft low voice.

  ‘Lord Ardmore?’

  He turned and saw Theresa watching him.

  ‘Not at church, Miss Simmonds?’

  She passed through a square of sunlight on the polished floor and gestured vaguely with a hand.

  ‘Religion to me is more an aspiration than a matter of formal observance.’

  As at the theatre, he had no idea whether she was speaking sincerely. He nodded as if in agreement.

  ‘I’ve nothing against the deity myself; it’s some of his followers I find it harder to get along with.’

  She sat down on the chesterfield in the window, the sunlit panes haloing her auburn hair with wisps of smokey gold. Her dress was plain grey silk, tight-waisted with a high collar and a loose black velvet bow at the neck. Having himself decided against marriage, Clinton no longer had any interest in Theresa’s motives for keeping Esmond waiting. And with the urgent matter of the sale of Markenfield preoccupying him, he was not pleased by the prospect of making polite conversation while waiting to break to Esmond what would undoubtedly be most unwelcome news. But even in these circumstances, he could not help recognising the woman’s unusual beauty. Her face was composed and secretive, with a hint of a smile playing about her lips and eyes.

  ‘So we meet again after all, my lord.’

  ‘Indeed,’ he replied crisply, vexed by her smile; certain that she would have told Esmond about his visit to the theatre. Inevitably Esmond would have mentioned Sophie. If she thought she was going to have more fun at his expense, Clinton was determined to make her think again. He carried on blandly: ‘I daresay my brother told you why I’d be returning so soon?’

  ‘I know he advises your trustees.’

  ‘He said nothing about my business in the country?’

  ‘Nothing about business anywhere, Lord Ardmore.’

  ‘But that’s too bad, Miss Simmonds.’ He sounded both sympathetic and surprised. ‘You mean he never told you I went to Norfolk to get a wife? I was never half so secretive with my mistresses.’ He grinned at her. ‘Esmond’s going to be delighted with me. He gets a heap of money when I marry.’ He caught her look of bewilderment. ‘You don’t mean that’s something else he never mentioned?’ He clicked his tongue. ‘He can be a dark one, that brother of mine. There’s nothing very secret about it … We can carve up the trust as soon as I marry a lady of substance.’

  ‘Should I offer my congratulations?’

  Her unsmiling face pleased Clinton. Of course Esmond had never said a word about the money to her.

  ‘Certainly you should,’ he replied brightly. ‘Miss Lucas will have a dozen bridesmaids, six in white and six in blue. You’ve seen wax dolls at charity fairs? Just so. A mitred bishop to do the honours. St George’s Hanover Square has the right tone, and most conveniently placed. I shall insist that you’re invited, Miss Simmonds.’

  ‘Would that be quite proper, Lord Ardmore?’

  Clinton raised a hand to his brow.

  ‘I see what you mean. Awkward.’ He paused. ‘Perhaps it would be better if you and Esmond didn’t come in the same carriage. Absurd of course.’ He saw the slight tightening of her lips. ‘Actually;’ he went on reflectively, ‘I can’t help finding hypocrisy rather touching. It’s only a kind of modesty to set such store by other people’s opinions.’ He sat back in his chair and crossed his legs. His affable expression turned to listlessness. Stifling a yawn, he picked a hair from the sleeve of his dark green morning coat, and murmured: ‘Do you disapprove of me, Miss Simmonds?’

  ‘I hardly know you well enough to say.’

  He smiled at her knowingly.

  ‘Rather prim for an actress. Frankly I think we’ve a lot in common. The workhouse may be the gate of heaven for saints, but we sinners prefer an easier passage.’