The Marlows Page 7

  Maybe the woman guessed part of Tansy’s train of thought and sought to turn her ponderings to advantage. With a shaky attempt at a conciliatory smile, her lashes left wet and glittering, she made one of her graceful, nervous little gestures toward a chair opposite her at the fireside.

  “Please sit down,” she urged coaxingly. “We cannot talk with you at one end of the room and myself at the other, and there is much that has to be said between us.”

  Tansy accepted the common sense of the woman’s remark and moved toward the chair indicated. As she sat down the fire cast its warmth over her set face and quiet hands, which she folded in her lap, but the feeling of having turned to solid ice within persisted, giving her a kind of rigid calmness, which she saw was having a disconcerting effect on Amelia, who showed that she felt herself at a disadvantage, having given way already to a display of emotion. When the woman had re-seated herself in her own chair Tansy spoke, combining a host of questions in a single word:

  “Why?”

  Amelia made no pretence about not understanding and replied in a rush with equal simplicity. “Oliver loved me.”

  “Did you love him?”

  “I did.”

  “Yet you knew he was married.”

  Under the pale lids the blue, shifting gaze steadied as though in complacent, prideful satisfaction before the sandy lashes quickly lowered. “I was more wife to him than Ruth Marlow ever was.”

  Tansy’s eyes were bewildered. “How could that be? It was she who wore his wedding ring and bore his children.”

  The sandy lashes remained lowered. “I repeat, I was more wife to him than she ever cared to be.”

  The significance of her words made Tansy’s cheeks dye crimson. Whether or not the situation between her parents had been as the woman had implied she did not know, nor did she want to, but there leaped unbidden into her mind her own remembrance of the way her mother’s cool reticence had ever contrasted with her father’s bombastic, demonstrative nature.

  Had the rift developed through her mother’s discovering that there were other women in his life, or had it come about through the opposite cause? She realized now in her own new, worldly attitude that her father, being the man he was, could never have lived like a monk on his travels and she guessed he had been no more faithful to Amelia than he had been to Ruth Marlow. Firmly Tansy changed the course that the conversation had been following. “Had my father prepared you for the loss of this house in the case of anything happening to him?”

  Now the lids lifted sharply and tears swam again. “He always wanted you to have Rushmere, I knew that. There was a clause in your grandmother’s will that the house should go to one of Oliver’s children. He promised to make provision for me.”

  Tansy gave a nod. Whatever private financial arrangement Oliver had made with his mistress was no concern of hers. Her glance flicked lightly toward the innumerable knickknacks on all sides. “I can see that many of the things in this house are your own personal property and you must tell me whatever else you wish to take with you—”

  “It’s all mine!” Amelia sprang to her feet, snatching up a silken cushion from the chair and clutching it to her as if to demonstrate her ownership. “Every stick of furniture in this house belongs to me!”

  Tansy, surprised by the unexpectedness and vehemence of the woman’s reply, rose too. “Rushmere and its contents were left entirely to me.”

  “The old stuff that was here in the past has all gone.” Amelia tossed down the cushion and darted across to run her palms possessively and almost sensually over a black table inlaid with mother-of-pearl, which was one of many dotted about the room. “I chose all these pretty things.” She moved on to touch one piece of furniture and then another. “They were all gifts to me from Oliver.”

  “Is there nothing left of the antique furniture that once was here?” Tansy asked, dismayed.

  Amelia made a little grimace. “There are one or two broken pieces in the stable loft, I believe. They weren’t worth selling. The rest of it Oliver disposed of from time to time when he’d had a run of bad luck and needed money. That’s when he sold off the land around Rushmere. It was only the keeping of the house that had been stipulated in the old lady’s will—nothing about the land having to be retained.” She reached a display cabinet and stood with her back to it, fingers of one hand looped on a rim of one of its glass doors. “It’s amazing how much gentlemen will pay for those ugly, antique chests and four-posters and uncomfortable chairs. I was glad to be rid of it all.”

  “Surely my father regretted the going of such heirlooms!” Tansy exclaimed.

  “He never said he did,” Amelia blustered. “In any case, why should he when I was able to refurnish in such an agreeable way?” Again the tears shone bright. “I made him happy. He was always happy here.”

  Tansy refrained from pointing out that her father’s huge capacity for enjoying life made him content wherever he was when things were not going seriously against him. “In that case, you will need time to get everything packed up and removed,” she said fairly, determined not to let her own personal antipathy toward the woman make her act unjustly or without due consideration. She was totally unprepared for Amelia’s reaction.

  “You can’t turn me out!” Amelia’s face was distorted with panic and her hands fluttered as though they had taken on a life of their own over which she had no control. “I’ve nowhere to go. No one to turn to.”

  Tansy looked incredulous. “That I cannot believe. You knew the house was to be mine and you must have given some thought to the future over the past few days, if not before. Did you not tell me yourself only minutes ago that my father had made provision for you?”

  “Not made it, only promised!” Amelia almost shrieked in her agitation, nuances of a coarser accent showing through the genteel veneer. “It was always going to be done when he had his next lucky streak, his next big win! He never came around to putting anything down on paper.”

  The truth rang in the woman’s words. Tansy could well imagine her father making promises to Amelia, which he would have had every intention of keeping, but always there would have been other demands on his resources, and with the confidence of the robustly healthy he had ever chosen to postpone setting aside some part of a good win for his mistress when he was convinced he would live to be a hundred and could indulge her extravagances for many years yet.

  “You surely had the foresight to put aside some portion of whatever my father allowed for yourself and the upkeep of this house,” Tansy replied levelly.

  “Nothing, I have nothing!” Amelia struck her bosom over the heart with a flattened hand to emphasize that her statement was no lie. “My jewellery is not lavish. Merely a few pieces that I treasure for sentimental value like the brooch I’m wearing now with a lock of dear Oliver’s hair set in it. He didn’t win at the races all the time. There were less prosperous periods when I made do with the same gown many times over for balls and parties, trimming it up with this and that. I had to see Oliver through the rough patches as well as the good. Never think that it was only at your home that he was loved. He was everything to me.” Whirling about, she collapsed sobbing in one half of a tete-a-tete chair, sprawling her elbows over the arm of it, her forehead resting on her wrist while the huge tears made dark blotches on the striped, purple silk upholstery. “Oh, Oliver! Why did you have to die? Why? Oh, oh, oh, why?”

  A lace-edged handkerchief protruded from a beaded reticule left on Amelia’s vacated chair by the fireside and Tansy pulled it out and handed it to her. The woman took it blindly and pressed it to her eyes, her shoulders continuing to shake with grief. Tansy stood momentarily at a loss. Even if the whole house was as stuffed with furniture as the room in which she was standing, the sale of it would never raise enough for Amelia to live on for more than three or four years at the most. Such pieces, solid and well made though they were, fell in value the second they left the shop in which they had been purchased and Tansy could see nothing that mig
ht fetch the original price paid for it. But she told herself that it was no concern of hers. There were limits as to what she could be expected to tolerate, and having her father’s mistress under the same roof for even the minimum length of time it would take the woman to pack up and depart was all she could endure.

  She turned, intending to leave Amelia alone to recover from her weeping while she returned to the others, who must be wondering what had happened to her, although what she was going to say to them she didn’t yet know, but she had taken no more than a couple of steps toward the double doors when she was halted by Amelia leaping up and hurling herself down at her feet in a billowing of silk and a trembling of frills and ribbons.

  “Don’t make me leave!” Amelia clutched two handfuls of Tansy’s skirt, gazing up into her face through reddened eyes and streaming tears. “I’d be destitute! Nobody would employ me! I don’t know how to cook or clean or sew. I’ve no qualifications to be a governess. I’d end up on the streets or in the workhouse. Is that what your father would have wished for me?”

  Tansy stared down at her in mingled pity and revulsion, her own face tight with a new knowledge that had come to her. Amelia wasn’t aware of it, but Oliver had made provision for her future — through a codicil to his will, through his own daughter. Perhaps a twinge of conscience or a sudden dip of mood had caused him to go on that particular day to his lawyer’s and have the fate of Rushmere set down. He had known that Amelia, weak, foolish, and as improvident as he was himself, would be unable to cope with life on her own should he lose out one day to death itself, and neatly and guilelessly he had put his last request on paper, knowing it would not be refused, a gentle imploring of his daughter to use her head and her heart and deal kindly with whatever she found at Rushmere. Amelia! That was the additional part of the legacy not bargained for. Tansy shuddered, and Amelia, taking it as a rejection to her plea, screeched out wildly and threw her arms about Tansy’s ankles, grovelling at her feet, cap askew, ringlets awry.

  In weary exasperation, not far from tears herself, Tansy wrenched herself free and leaned down to haul Amelia to a sitting position and give her a resounding slap across the cheek to silence the mounting display of hysteria. It had effect. Amelia looked at her in gulping silence.

  “I’ll not turn you out, Amelia. For as long as we’re able to live at Rushmere you shall have a home here, but more than that I cannot promise at the moment.” Tansy helped the woman to her feet and led her back to the fireside chair where she sat down obediently and dabbed her eyes with her soaked handkerchief. When Tansy asked if she kept any brandy in the house she nodded toward a small buffet. Tansy went to it and took out a decanter and a glass. When she had poured out some she handed the glass to Amelia, who took it with a shaking hand and sipped it with every evidence of appreciation.

  “How good you are, Tansy,” she said gratefully. “I thought when I saw you at the funeral how like your dear father you were —

  Tansy interrupted the unwanted flow of flattery. “You were there?”

  Amelia nodded. “A kindly neighbour, the very same who brought the news of Oliver’s death to me, took me in his carriage.”

  Instantly Tansy recalled Dominic Reade standing with an unknown, heavily veiled woman at some little distance from the graveside. “Was it Mr. Reade who escorted you?” she asked quickly.

  Amelia looked astonished. “Yes. Is he acquainted with you? Until Oliver took him into his confidence on the eve of his death Mr. Reade was as ignorant as anyone else of the true state of affairs, and believed me to be Oliver’s wife.”

  Tansy was frowning deeply. “It was a chance meeting I had with Mr. Reade. If he said nothing of it to you we can assume he is a man to keep his own counsel on all accounts.”

  “Oh, he is.”

  “What explanation did you give other people about my father’s death?”

  “I told the truth—that he had died of a seizure. They understood it was to be a quiet funeral some long distance away at his birthplace.”

  “But my father wasn’t born in the village.”

  “I know, but it was all I could think of to say in my distress. Everybody was so kind. I had no end of letters of sympathy . . .” Her voice trailed off as she saw the expression on Tansy’s face and hastily she took another sip of the brandy, knowing she had let her tongue run on too fast.

  “I must warn you,” Tansy said firmly, “that I can tell no lies to cover all your deceptions and never again must you refer to yourself as my father’s wife in my hearing, but neither will I answer any probing questions from outsiders. It is a private matter and must remain so. I know my father would have wished it.”

  “Yes, how right you are. How wise.” Amelia nodded her head vigorously, overeager to agree to anything at the present moment to please her youthful benefactress. “Nobody will be surprised at your presence here. They know the house was to be left to someone in the next generation. Now if you could just persuade your brother and the girls to address me as Aunt—”

  “No.” Tansy felt she had come to the end of her tether. “I’ll do no such thing. I don’t even know yet whether they will tolerate living in the house with you. It is to that end I must use my powers of persuasion.”

  Amelia’s small, pink mouth trembled moistly. “Don’t speak harshly to me. I know I deserve it for my thoughtlessness, but I’ve never been able to endure hard words. Oliver never talked crossly to me. I’ll try not to aggravate you, but you must be patient with me.”

  Taking little notice of the promise, Tansy spoke of another matter. “I’d like some supper served. My brother and sisters must be as hungry as they are tired. There is also our horse to be stabled.”

  “Rooms have been prepared for you. I’ll ring —”

  Amelia would have risen to go to the bellpull, but Tansy motioned that she should stay in her chair. “I’ll go myself to the kitchen. It’s best that you meet Nina, Judith, and Roger tomorrow when they’ve had time to think over all I shall say to them. Later in the day we must talk again most seriously of how this house is to be managed. Good night, Amelia.”

  “Sleep well, Tansy.”

  When the door closed after the girl Amelia gave a shuddering sigh and sank back against the cushion, exhausted by the strain of the interview, which she had dreaded for days, starting every time she had heard the clip-clop of horses’ hooves anywhere on the road or the drive. Stretching out her feet, exposing at the same time her slender ankles below the frills of her petticoats, she pushed off one shoe with the toe of the other and when the process was repeated she wriggled her stockinged feet in the fire’s glow.

  If only Oliver had been able to leave Rushmere to her the ordeal would never have had to take place, but he had told her at the start it could never be hers. Looking back over the years she realized she should have pressed harder for him to purchase a house where she would have owned the door key, but he had enjoyed his coming and going at Rushmere, being fond of the place, liking its proximity to Epsom, and enjoying the company of those in Cudlingham who had become their friends. Well, his friends more than hers. She had always felt herself to be accepted for his sake, Oliver being so obviously a gentleman of true birth and breeding, while she — although she played the lady to the manner born — always sensed that with the special recognition of their own kind inherent in the upper classes they saw through her and hid their arrogant smirks behind her back. Only in rare moments of complete honesty did she face up to this unpleasant fact and it caused her unbearable anguish, which in the past Oliver had always kissed and comforted away, making her believe she had imagined the small slight that had caused her distress. She had observed at the funeral that Tansy had the same air of aristocratic breeding that Oliver had had. Nina had it too, and Judith’s delicate frailness made her look like the princess in the fairy tale who had felt a single pea through the thickness of a stack of goose feather mattresses. Any one of them could wear sackcloth to a ball and none would doubt that they were gentlefolk. With the
boy it was difficult to tell. He was at that plain, spotty stage of early manhood, and although short and undersized for his age, his arms and legs appeared to be trying to grow independently of his body with its own new, problematic force and power.

  Amelia sighed again and drained the last drop of fortifying brandy. Reflecting over the interview with Tansy she supposed it had gone as well as could be expected. Everything she had told the girl had been true. Well, almost everything. If Tansy had turned her out she would have been incapable of earning any kind of honest living and she had been away from the theatrical world too long to return to it now; not that she believed she had lost the power to put on a good performance. Yet she hadn’t been acting this evening. A very real fear that Tansy was not to be swayed after all had turned her knees to jelly and made her heart pound. What she had she wanted to hang, on to, her comfortable home, friends among the well-to-do in the village, and a position of respectability that was all important to her. She felt she had a right to salvage anything she could now that Oliver had been cruelly taken from her. She had not lied when she said she had loved him. For him she had left her own actor-husband, which in truth had been no great sacrifice, but that was beside the point. For him she had led a life of lies. For him she had suffered torments of loneliness and jealousy. For him she would have gone through everything all over again.

  A great sense of loss swept over her once more and she put her hand across her eyes, but with it came a notion of bitter grievance that Oliver should have died more or less through his own folly, throwing his life away by allowing himself to get overly upset by the loss of his wife. He knew — had always known — how she needed him. But he had put Tansy first by giving her Rushmere. In the end it had been as she had always feared: he had loved Ruth Marlow and her children better than he had ever loved her.