Читать книгу Vicar's Daughter to Viscount's Lady - Louise Allen - Страница 7

12 February 1814

If James truly loves you, means to marry you—then I’ll help, somehow. It was over five years since Arabella Shelley had said those words to her sister Meg and helped her to elope with her childhood sweetheart, James Halgate, the local squire’s son.

It was nine months since she had hugged her weeping younger sister Celina and assured her that, if she could, she would help her run away from home too, away from the oppression and tyranny of their puritanical father who was convinced that all women were the vessels of sin and must be controlled and guarded against the slightest temptation.

Dreamy Meg and sensitive Lina had wilted miserably under this treatment, pining for laughter and music, flowers and books. And love. Oh, yes, they had all pined for love, Bella thought, grounding the watering can she had been using to fill up the pewter jugs of greenery set around the font. Flowers were permitted only grudgingly in the Reverend Shelley’s Suffolk church, but ivy and sombre foliage would help remind the congregation of the graveyard that awaited them all, sinners that they were.

Bella sat down in the nearest pew, ignored the cold that soaked into her booted feet from the stone floor and wrestled with guilt once again over her failure to realise what Lina had intended. Without any help from Bella she had run away, leaving only a scrap of a letter from a sister of their dead mother, an aunt none of them had known existed until Lina had found her hidden letter.

The vicar blacked out Lina’s name in the family Bible, as he had Meg’s. If her sisters wrote, then their father intercepted the letters and destroyed them. Bella clung to the hope that if either of them had died, he would not have been able to conceal his knowledge of the bad end they had come to, but sometimes it was hard to hold on to the hope that they were still well and happy.

Bella rubbed her aching back and tried to push away the memory of Lina’s sobs after she had been reprimanded for speaking to the curate. He said I was a trollop, and wicked and leading Mr Perkins astray! How are we ever supposed to find husbands and get married if we may not even speak to Papa’s curate?

Goodness knows, had to be the answer to that question. But Bella knew that her own destiny was already ordained. At the age of twenty-five her fate was to be Papa’s support in his old age. He had told her that often enough, with the certainty that an elder daughter should expect nothing more than to do her duty to her parent.

A lovable parent would be one thing, a sanctimonious, aggressively puritanical vicar, which was what the Reverend Shelley was, quite another. She had cherished hopes that dull Mr Perkins the curate would find one of them attractive enough to offer for, but after the confrontation following Lina’s few words with him she did not deceive herself that he would risk alienating his vicar for the sake of either of them.

Her two younger sisters could not cope with the oppression, the carping, the sheer drabness of life at the vicarage. It was better that they had gone, for she, the sensible sister, was the one who could best cope with Papa who was becoming more suspicious and ill tempered as the years went by. Now she had no younger sisters to protect—only to worry about. It was time to accept finally that her life would be bound by the vicarage walls, and by her duty as the vicar’s plain spinster daughter.

Something tickled her lip and she licked it, tasting salt. Sitting here weeping would not accomplish anything, except to put her behind with her duties, and besides, she never cried. What was the point?

Bella wiped her eyes and looked at the note tablets suspended from the old-fashioned chatelaine that hung from her waist. Complain to butcher re: mutton; mend surplice; assemble sewing for Ladies’ Circle; turn sheets side to middle. Church greenery—that could be crossed off. Another tear trickled down and splashed on to the thin ivory. She dabbed it off, smudging the pencil marks, and bit down on her lower lip until she felt more under control.

Sometimes she did not think she could bear this any longer. She wanted her sisters—even a letter would do. She wanted a hug, a kiss, laughter, warmth. She wanted love.

Bella picked up the remains of the ivy fronds and then lugged the heavy watering can back to the vestry. Once upon a time she had dreamed of a lover coming for her. A knight in shining armour. A gallant nobleman who would sweep her away and cherish her.

Childishness, she told herself, buttoning her pelisse and pulling on her gloves. Fairy tales did not come true and it was not sensible to dream that they might, because waking up from the dream was always bitter disillusion. She locked the vestry and went out through the south door and down to the lych gate where she paused. Beyond it was the lane that led to the Ipswich road and freedom. The road she was never going to take.

She had forgotten her basket, Bella realised. Was it worth going back for it? She half-turned as a voice said, ‘Is this Lower Leaming, ma’am?’

‘No, this is Martinsdene,’ she began, looking back. A stranger got up from the bench sheltered in the shadows of the roofed gate. ‘Lower Leaming is that…way.’ Her voice trailed off.

Blue eyes regarded her with interest and a sensuous mouth curved into a smile that was—surely not?—appreciative. The man was tall, relaxed, elegant. His riding coat was so plain it had to be expensive and a cabochon ruby ring glowed with sullen fire on his ring finger. He raised the hand that was holding gloves and whip and lifted his hat and she saw brown hair that shone, styled in a fashionable crop, the like of which had never been seen in this rural backwater.

‘Thank you, Miss—?’ he said in a voice that sent warm shivers through her chilled body.

‘Shelley,’ she managed. ‘My father is vicar here.’ Even as she said it, she cast a harried look down the lane to the vicarage as though her father’s hawk eyes could see through the hedge from the study where he was engaged in writing next Sunday’s sermon.

‘Miss Shelley. I am Rafe Calne, Viscount Hadleigh.’ And he bowed, as though she were a fine lady and this was Hyde Park. Bella managed to produce an answering bob of a curtsy. ‘I am staying with my good friend Marcus Daunt at Long Fallow Hall and I must confess to being utterly lost.’

‘Yes, well, in that case you do need the Lower Leaming road,’ Bella said, thankful to be able to articulate something sensible. A viscount, for goodness’ sake! ‘It is past the Royal George inn and then you should take the left fork after the duck pond. If you come through the churchyard there is a bridleway that cuts off the corner—over there, by the holly bush.’

‘Will you not walk that way and show me, Miss Shelley? I seem to have the knack of getting lost.’

‘I—’

But he had already fetched a big bay horse from where it had been tethered out in the lane. He offered her his arm and Bella took it, lost for the words to refuse.

‘You know, Miss Shelley, I have to confess to being somewhat blue devilled. Here I am, supposed to be resting—I’ve been feeling a trifle off colour lately—but I have been so bored I have not been able to relax. Poor Marcus can’t work out what to do with me. So I came out for a ride, got lost and found this charming village and you. And I feel better already.’

Was she supposed to understand that she was making him feel better? No, of course not, Martinsdene was picturesque, artists had been known to stop to sketch it. Bella took a deep breath to steady her fluttering heart and tried not to notice how firm his arm felt under her hand and how warm he was, between her and the wind.

Oh dear, she thought. Now when I daydream I will have a real-life aristocratic hero to visualise. The bridleway was short and the pond soon reached. ‘That way, my lord.’ She pointed.

‘Rafe, please. You are, after all, my rescuer.’ He lifted her hand and kissed her fingertips. ‘May I know your first name?’

‘Arabella…Bella,’ she stammered.

‘Bella,’ he murmured. ‘Belle. Beautiful lady.’

‘Oh, no,’ Bella retorted, common sense coming to her rescue. ‘Now you are gammoning me, my lord.’

‘Rafe,’ he murmured.

‘Rafe…this is…’

‘I do not think you look in your mirror carefully enough, bellissima.’ Rafe Calne swung up on to the big horse with enviable ease and smiled down at her. ‘Until we meet again.’

Bella had walked to the butcher’s in a dream, forgot what she had come for until she consulted her tablets and then walked home feeling as though she had been hit on the head. A real viscount, flirting with her. With her. Because he had been flirting—she was not so innocent that she did not recognise that.

‘Arabella!’

‘Yes, Papa?’

‘Where have you been?’ The vicar did not trouble to come to the door to ask, she had to go to the study to account for her actions over the past two hours. She did not mention the viscount. It would not be sensible, Bella told herself as she went to the kitchen to make sure that Cook was doing all she should with dinner. Not that it was easy to spoil hotpot with dumplings, boiled cabbage and stewed apple.

On Saturday she went to the church to make sure the prayer books had been gathered up after a wedding and checked the vestry to see that all was in order. Another surplice with a torn hem—doubtless discarded by the curate. She might as well take it and mend it along with her father’s, she supposed, gathering it up and putting it in her basket.

Then, instead of going straight home, she wandered up the bridle path. There were the prints of Rafe’s booted feet, big and masculine next to her small ones. Bella set her foot in one and then the next, wondering at the length of his stride. Those long legs and broad shoulders had troubled her dreams a little.

‘Bella.’ He was there, sitting on his big horse, Farmer Rudge’s ducks wandering around its hooves.

‘My lord!’ He looked at her. ‘Rafe.’

Bella glanced around as he swung down from the horse, but no one was in sight. ‘Is something worrying you, Bella?’ he asked, reaching for her hand.

‘I—’ She should pull away, but she could not. ‘My father would not permit me to speak to a strange man. I should not be here with you.’

‘I am sorry for that.’ He looked sombre and the blue eyes were shadowed. ‘I felt the need to talk with someone and you seemed…But if you must not, then I will go away.’

‘Talk? About what?’ She left her hand in his.

‘Here, in the country, I am beginning to see my life for what it is. Futile, empty. Pleasure, money—I am a sinner, you know, Bella,’ he said earnestly, tucking her hand into the crook of his elbow and walking slowly off down the lane away from the village, the horse following.

‘You are?’

‘Oh, yes. And then I look at you—pure, innocent, devoting yourself to your duties—and I see myself for what I am. I wish some of that goodness would rub off on me, Bella.’

‘You just need to want to be good,’ she protested.

‘And you are satisfied with your life?’ he asked her. She could not answer, but she felt the guilty blush and saw him see it too. ‘Not entirely, I think?’

And so she had told him, all about how Papa had changed slowly over the years, how Mama had died on a visit to London, how Meg and Lina had run away, and he had brushed a tear from the corner of her eye and kissed her, just a fleeting, chaste kiss of comfort and her world had shifted on its axis.

He had come to church on Sunday, serious and attentive, head bowed. After that she had seen him every day. He was always careful, always discreet, but the long walks, when she told him about living in the country and confided how difficult Papa was, and sympathised with his stories of London life and how it was turning to dust in his mouth, were like shining jewels in the dull ashes of her existence.

And on the eighth day he had kissed her, not giving comfort, not seeking it, but with a lover’s passion, and she had clung to him, consumed with his heat and power and glamour.

‘I love you, Bella,’ he had murmured against her hair, their breath mingling in the crisp February air. ‘Be mine.’

‘You must talk to Papa,’ she had stammered, dizzily aware that her dream had come true. Her knight had come for her.

‘I must go back to London,’ Rafe said. ‘And speak to my lawyers. I will have them draw up a settlement so your father can see exactly what I will do for you. And I will bring back a housekeeper to look after him until he can choose one that best suits him.’

‘But should we not talk to him first? I do not like to deceive him,’ she protested.

‘My darling, he sounds a most difficult man and I, I will admit, am the kind of rake of whom he will have the deepest suspicions.’

‘But you are reformed now,’ Bella protested.

‘Yes, thanks to you.’ Rafe caressed her. ‘But he will believe it more when he sees the settlement, sees the ring I bring with me, knows his every interest—and yours—will be attended to. Then he might see the benefits of having the Viscount Hadleigh as his son-in-law. Would he like a better parish? I am sure I could influence something.’

‘Oh, Rafe, would you? Perhaps he feels he has failed, never getting preferment, and if he did, he would be happier and less difficult.’

‘For you, my love, I’ll bow to every bishop in the kingdom,’ he assured her. ‘And find your sisters too.’

‘Rafe.’ And she had kissed him, deeply, clumsily.

‘Lady Hadleigh.’ He smiled down, suddenly serious. ‘Will you really take me? I don’t deserve you. Perhaps you will change your mind once I have gone.’

‘No! Never. I love you.’

‘Then be mine, Bella. Show me you love me. Show me you trust me.’

‘But…before we are married?’ she queried, anxious and confused.

‘You don’t trust me, I knew it. But what could I expect?’ he said, turning away, his face stark. ‘I will leave, now. It is better. We cannot marry if you do not trust me. I thought—’

He made a gesture of hurt rejection and she clung to his arm. ‘Rafe. Of course I trust you. Of course I do.’ He swept her up, his mouth hot and urgent on hers, his arms so strong and sure, and strode towards the great tithe barn.