The Rich Are with You Always (34 page)

  At the last moment she decided to take Sarah along too. It was a decision that almost completed their ruin.

An avenue of limes, dead straight and exactly half a statute mile in length, ran from the gates to the big house at Maran Hill. On either side there was open parkland grazed by a herd of red deer—or, now that it was December and the males were apart, two herds. Gideon's wood and Red wood, two large game coverts, blocked the view to the north of the park; they almost joined with Home wood, a coppice to the immediate north of the house.

  But on the south side, looking down and across one of the loveliest valleys in the county, all the views were open. There was no covert there larger than an acre or two and they had been placed as much for their scenic effect as for their game-preserving role. None of their trees had been coppiced, so that knolls of tall beeches and huge, spreading oaks delayed the eye as it swept over rolling pastures and ploughed fields. The winter sun reached through the bare branches of the limes, making bars of startling light and shade that flickered in the carriage like a pyrotechnic display.

  Sarah, who had leaned out of the window to see the house, sat down again, smiling and blinking at the water drawn into her eyes by the cold and the wind. "What a beautiful house!" she said.

"How would you like to live in such a place?" Nora asked.

  "Oh, I'd prefer a town house. There's the same amount of work and you have more interest for your time off."

  Nora laughed. "Silly Milly! I meant as mistress, not as maidservant."

  "Oh." Sarah looked out at the park, assessing it now with different eyes.

  Nora watched her fondly. "You'll never get used to it, will you? To being independent."

  "Not to
that
degree." She pointed at the park to stress the word.

  "You could rent a place like this, on a maintaining lease, for less than two hundred pounds a year."

  "Nora! It's unthinkable."

  Every now and then Nora took such opportunities to remind Sarah of her fortune; she tried not to think of it as a kind of hudsoning.

  Shallowness had saved Beador—that very shallowness which had enabled him to engage in such monstrous debts when he had nothing to meet them but his partner's money. His character was as bankrupt as his purse; he had nothing with which to meet his debt of obligation to John and Nora. And, as in business he knew no way of earning by his own labour, so in his relationship with them he knew no means of restoring himself by his own effort.

  True, at the start he had been filled with remorse. A broken man, pale and much given to outbursts of weeping, a man trembling on the threshold of self-murder. But it was the remorse of youth—intense, yet so shallow its depth is plumbed at a glance. By the time of Nora's visit he was his old, uncaring self again. It made Nora (who, at 26, was actually his junior by a year) feel vastly older.

  For it was she who told herself that nothing was to be gained at this moment by recrimination, that Sir George's land and influence at Stockton were still big assets (though nowhere near worth the price at which they had been bought), and that a moping Sir George—a sackcloth-and-ashes flagellant—could be all it needed to bring the whole structure of confidence tumbling down.

  Coldly she watched him pour out his careless charm, telling herself to be thankful he could sustain no deeper soul. Inwardly she longed for some sparkling revenge.

"Pretty woman, your friend," Sir George said, as they rode out into the cold.

"It is her nature," Nora agreed.

"Looks as if she might harbour quite a temper there."

"I wouldn't say that. She certainly has a mind of her own."

He said no more until after the hunt.

  There had been a sharp frost overnight and the ground was frozen hard. A poor day for scent. They drew three coverts blank, found at a fourth, but lost the line in less than a mile.

  "They'd need one nostril up the fox's arse today," Nora heard a farmer say to the first whipper-in, not knowing she was the other side of the hedge.

  She was disappointed. Beador had lent her a magnificent five-year-old mealy bay gelding, called Fontana. She was certain that if only they could get away, he'd go superbly over this country.

  Lord Wyatt, the Master, seemed to take every check and every lost line as a personal affront. He was a choleric, self-important little man. The cold wind and his own anger turned parts of his face as scarlet as the hunting "pink" he wore. At one point he grew so angry he failed to blow any kind of a note on his horn; he dashed it to the ground in a fury of petulance.

  Nora took care to stay on the fringe of the field. She did not think he noticed her.

  When the hounds checked for the fourth time and could not find again, no matter how the huntsman held them round, Nora and Sir George withdrew.

  "I'm sorry," he said. "It's more what you'd expect of Durham country than Hertfordshire."

  "I'm sorry not to have made better use of Fontana here," she answered.

  He brightened. "Care for a bit of a swish?" he asked.

  She smiled then, for an idea had just occurred to her. "Yes," she said. "Take me through Wyatt's place at Panshanger."

  Beador tried to dissuade her but she insisted.

  He led her at a good trot through the country lanes, by Bramfield and Tattle Hill, through Thieves Lane to Hertingfordbury. There they turned west, into the grounds of Panshanger, which stretched up the Maran valley for about three miles. It was park and pheasant covert and partridge manor all the way.

  "Ready?" he called. "Hold tight."

  She increased her grip.

  "Now!"

  The horses had been waiting for it. They went at once from walk to gallop. Nora felt the blood begin to race. Beador knew the ground well, for he led the way unhesitatingly through a maze of rides, some broad and straight, some narrow and zigzag. A brilliant sun shone through the trees. The frosted leaves crackled underhoof. And from somewhere came drifting the lazy smell of woodsmoke. All the fears and stresses of these last weeks deserted her on that gallop.

  Here and there the way opened into glades, in one of which the woodmen had left the trunk of a once-mighty beech. To her astonishment, Nora saw Beador's horse fly at it as if to clear it in one bound—which was impossible, surely. Then she began to feel anxious, for she could sense that Fontana was getting set to make the same impossible leap. In fact, she was on the point of reining in when she saw that Beador had come to rest on the top of the trunk; he stood there, poised like a trick rider in a circus.

  
Very well,
she thought, suddenly daring.
On you go!
And she touched Fontana forward.

  She leaned over the crupper, ready for the jump. At the last minute her courage failed. The height, which had before seemed merely daunting, now looked terrifying. No horse could do it, not even this great-muscled giant. But they were both committed and had to go forward. For a moment she thought it shared her doubts; there was a hint of a fumble as it doubled its hind legs under for the leap.

  "Haaaa!" she yelled. And she frightened it into the supreme effort that carried it up, soaring and stretching, reaching beyond any achievement it knew of, until, by a hairsbreadth, it gained the crest of the fallen trunk. It did not need the tug of her rein to stop; every ounce of its ability had gone into that leap. There was no momentum left to be checked. Their coming to rest seemed both magic and effortless.

  "Heigh!" she gave a cry of relief and delight and turned to Sir George.

  He was as pale as the bleached wood on which they were both now perched. "Magnificent!" He merely breathed the word, shaking his head in disbelief. "But mad!"

  "Why?" She laughed. "
You
did it."

  "Would you look behind us."

  She obeyed. "Oh!" she said.

  A ridge, perhaps the roots of an ancient wall, crossed the glade at an angle to the trunk, running under it. Sir George had made his impressive leap from the top of it; she had made hers from fully three feet lower. "That was stupid," she added, beginning to tremble at the thought of what she had done. "But what a hunter!" She patted Fontana's mane.

  "No one's going to believe me," he said, looking around. "Did anyone see?"

  Automatically she looked around too. And there, over the tops of the trees

that grew on falling ground to their north, there on the other side of the valley was one of the loveliest country houses she had ever seen.

  As big as a cathedral it stood, in red Midland brick and warm Oxford limestone, with the noon sun full upon it. The woodland, marching up the hill, vanished before it but reached an arm around to the west, fringing the road, and then ran behind it to the north, forming a long backdrop to the palm house and the terraces. Only the clock tower on the stables showed from behind the trees. With the sun shimmering on the glass of the palm house, and the frost turning every shadow pale blue, the whole place looked like a gem, set perfectly upon the hillside.

  "Pretty place, really," Sir George said.

  For her it was a citadel.

  "Hardly buzzing with activity," she said. Very few chimneys were smoking.

  "Only Wyatt himself is here at the moment. He can't stand his wife and children. They're at the family's main estate over Maidenhead way. To them this is just a huntin' lodge. There's only a handful of servants here on board wages."

  "Let's go closer then," she said.

  They galloped down the rest of the long gentle ride to the river, across a wooden bridge, and then up the grassy slopes to the terraces below the house. It was even lovelier at close quarters. Winter sweet, viburnum, and witch hazel were all in flower; the air was so still that they could hear the distant gurgle of the river from down in the valley. The smoke rose straight from the chimneys.

  "Home!" she said suddenly. The display of the Wyatts' wealth, so casually used ("just a huntin' lodge") was more than she could bear.

  Beador seemed relieved to be going. They went around the house by the gravel drive to the east. The gravel was a mixture of hard flintstone and sand. The two-mile ridge on which both Panshanger and Maran Hill stood was composed entirely of the same mixture, locally known as "hoggin." It makes an iron-hard road. Today, bound by the frost, it was as good as tarmacadam.

  They soon left the estate, crossed the highway, and entered the park around Maran Hill.

  "Now there's a happy couple," Sir George said, pointing to the gate lodge. "The Bagots."

  The Bagots were nowhere to be seen.

  "Yes." Sir George sighed. "I don't think there's a more contented little family anywhere. They adore each other and the children. They never fight. You never hear the children quarrel. They're all the picture of health. The house and garden's like a new pin. Yet I doubt they have meat more than once a week—and I doubt he thinks about money from one year's end to the other."

  Nora kept an amused silence. She remembered the laughter and the happy times they had enjoyed in her father's cottage, where "meat once a week" would have been luxury indeed. No doubt the Duke of Bridgewater's agent had thought them happy when he collected their rent each week. But she knew what a constant and life-deforming worry the money had been.

  "Yes," Sir George said, "you could base a book of sermons on the Bagots."

  "It would probably sell very well too," Nora said, unable to resist it.

  "We'll have one last gallop down to Lambs Dell and then up to home, what?" he said, his pastoral vision of the Bagots already forgotten.

  "I think I could ride to Wales today," she answered.