‘Already looking,’ muttered Sir Henry. He kept a book of all the noble families with eligible sons and their addresses. ‘Here it is,’ he said at last. ‘Lord Frederick, eldest son of the Earl of Twitterton. They have a box between Shepherd’s Shore and Devizes. You have not met Lord Frederick, Penelope. He is returned from the Grand Tour this month. We shall strike while the iron is hot.’
The marquess, having started the decoration to get rid of the Jordans, decided to go ahead with it and stayed to supervise. Miss Earle would be at the inn close at hand for the next few days. Having made up his mind to see her again, caution set in and he decided he did not want to appear too eager. He did not know her very well, after all.
But, unknown to him, by the following morning the Bath coach was once more on the road. Belinda’s heart plummetted as the coach slowly rolled out of the inn yard. He had not come. He was probably engaged to chilly Penelope by now.
She was relieved that the odious Mr Biles at least had the merit of making Miss Wimple his concern. He fussed over her and handed her smelling-salts and read to her. She fluttered and tittered and thanked him profusely. She appeared to be in prime health and despite her fondness for spirits was evidently as strong as an ox.
Hannah passed the tedium of the journey by regaling Belinda with tales from the guidebook. When they reached Beckhampton, where the Bath roads converged, Belinda was disappointed that they were only to be allowed half an hour, for she had hoped to see the abbey nearby. Hannah had told her a most intriguing story about it. Evidently, in the sixteenth century, there lived a young lady called Miss Sheringham whose father owned the abbey. She had been refused permission to see her lover, one John Talbot. One night she was standing on the abbey battlements calling down to him. Then she said, ‘I will leap down to you,’ a rather unwise decision as the walls were thirty feet high. Nonetheless, she leaped. The wind came to her rescue and ‘got under her coates’ (no doubt, the ulster of the sixteenth century), and so assisted, she flopped down into the arms of Talbot and to all appearances killed him dead on the spot. She sat down and wept. But Talbot, who had only been temporarily winded, recovered and clasped her in his arms. And it was at that point that Miss Sheringham’s father, with a fine sense of the melodramatic, jumped out of a bush and observed, ‘as his daughter had made such a leap to him, she must e’en marry him.’ And so they were married and lived happily ever after.
Belinda could not share Hannah’s enthusiasm for coach travel. Despite the sunny weather, the coach was cold and damp. It had been vigorously hosed down inside after its repairs and did not seem to have dried out. The constant swaying was making her feel sick. She had started her journey hoping it would take as long as possible. Now she felt even Great-Aunt Harriet would be preferable. Every time she thought of the Marquess of Frenton, which was frequently, she felt so low in spirits that she believed there was nothing left anyone could do to lower them any further. At the inn at Beckhampton, there had been a party of bloods from another coach and they had been discoursing loudly and anatomically about the charms of a certain Sally until the horrified landlord had turned them out. Belinda shuddered as she wondered whether the marquess would tell his friends about her vulgar passions.
Bath was drawing even closer. The coachman was a good and steady man and the horses were fresh. But three and a half miles outside Beckhampton they crossed high, windy, unprotected ground. The temperature had been dropping rapidly, and to the dismay of the passengers, they found that snow had begun to fall.
They stopped at a tiny inn called Shepherd’s Shore and all crowded around the fire. The coachman said he thought they should all stay where they were until the storm had passed, but the Methodist minister, Mr Biles, had grown as brave as only half a bottle of good Nantes brandy can make a normally weak man and overrode the coachman and the others by saying this was the last stage before Bath and as soon as they descended to lower ground, the snow would turn to rain. The coachman demurred at first, but he knew the coach was already days late and so he reluctantly agreed to take them forward.
They only got a mile from Shepherd’s Shore when the full force of the storm struck. The coachman cursed himself for his folly in having listened to the drunken minister. He did not want to lose his job, as had the previous coachman, by causing more harm to befall the passengers. He saw dimly through the blinding snow a tall pair of iron gates. The guard blew on the horn and a lodge-keeper came out and swung the gates open.
‘Residence?’ called the coachman to the lodge-keeper.
‘Earl o’ Twitterton,’ replied the lodge-keeper.
‘His lordship’s in for some unexpected guests,’ muttered the coachman, and cracking the whip, he urged his team of horses up the long, wintry drive to the Earl of Twitterton’s home.
6
And Sylphs, like other pretty creatures,
Learn from their mammas to consider
Love as an auctioneer of features,
Who knocks them down to the best bidder.
Thomas Moore
Had Belinda still been at the inn, the marquess might have begun to wonder at the folly of calling on her. But by the time he arrived at the Queen Bess, it was to learn the stage-coach had left.
He was as annoyed as if Belinda had deliberately avoided him. He returned to the castle, ordered his travelling carriage, and set out in pursuit. He traced them as far as Beckhampton to find they had left an hour before and learned they would probably be stopping next at Shepherd’s Shore.
He drove on, and as the ground began to rise, so he found himself enveloped in the same snowstorm that had beset the passengers. They were not at Shepherd’s Shore and he wondered whether this stage coachman was as crazy as the last had been and had forged on to Bath. He began to worry, seeing in his mind’s eye Belinda lying in a snow-drift, calling for help.
He came to the lodge-gates and remembered that the Earl of Twitterton had a hunting-box there. He stopped and inquired at the lodge and was told that the stage-coach had gone up to the house.
He was driving the carriage himself. His valet was warmly ensconsed inside and one complaining tiger hung on the backstrap.
The marquess jumped down and told his tiger to take carriage and horses to the stables. The snow was still falling fast, but it had become wetter and the air was perceptibly warmer.
He presented his card to the butler, who answered the door. The earl himself came out to meet him. He was a bluff, soldierly man who had met the marquess before on several occasions and gave him a warm welcome, not asking the reason for the unexpected visit, assuming the marquess was taking shelter from the storm.
The earl said they had already dined and that the servants would prepare something for him, but the marquess had eaten a hasty meal at Beckhampton and so he said he would change out of his travelling clothes and then join the family. As his valet laid out his evening clothes and powdered his master’s hair, the marquess wondered how Belinda would look when she saw him again. Would she blush? Would she look angry? No doubt the stern Miss Pym had read her a lecture on the folly of her ways.
He found to his surprise that he was nervous. A footman led the way down to the first floor, saying the family and guests were in the drawing-room.
The double doors were thrown wide and the marquess’s name was announced. The marquess raised his quizzing-glass and studied the faces turned towards him. His heart sank.
The earl’s son, Lord Frederick, a brutish-looking young man, was standing by the fireplace. Seated beside the fire was Penelope Jordan. On a sofa, side by side, were her parents, both glaring at him. In a corner was some sort of poor relation, a faded lady netting a purse. The Countess of Twitterton rose to meet him. She was a thin, hard, horsy woman, wearing a row of false curls over her forehead. She should not have gained such a name by marriage as Twitterton, thought the earl. ‘Twitterton’ suggested a vague, dithering sort of female. The countess should have been called ‘Basher’ or ‘Floggem’. She looked like a man masquerading as a woman.