Читать книгу Jack Compton's Luck - Paula Marshall - Страница 11

‘I hope that you didn’t rush home for my sake,’ said Will anxiously.

Jack’s answer was robust. He always did his elder brother the honour of speaking to him as though he were still the hearty athlete he had once been and not a man paralysed from the waist down and confined to a wheelchair. ‘I came home for mine. I’ve too damned much to do here without wasting my time in London.’

‘Did you meet anyone interesting?’

‘Cousin Rupert—who is apparently in hock to the money-lenders. He always was a bit of an ass. Richard Chancellor—he asked to be remembered to you. The Chancellors are now even more enormously rich than ever, I gather, with interests in oil in the States. Oh, and Darcey, his cousin. A more sensible chap than our cousin Rupert from the sound of it. Rupert was behaving very badly, up one minute, down the next.’

He deliberately didn’t mention Lacey. If nothing came of their sudden romance then, so far as Will was concerned, what the heart doesn’t know, the heart can’t grieve. Good God, that was yet another ghastly saying of his old nurse’s which had popped into his head after many years’ absence! He was so busy lamenting its reappearance that he only just heard Will’s next question.

‘No interesting young women, then?’

‘Come, come, Will, by interesting do you mean, beautiful, glamorous or rich?’

‘All three rolled into one gorgeous package would be useful,’ sighed Will, ‘but rare, one supposes. You must admit that if you found one and married her all our money troubles would be over.’

Lacey Chancellor certainly fitted that bill, was Jack’s inward and clichéd response, but fortune hunting was not his game, and so he told Will.

This brought on another attack of sighing from his brother. Jack thought that Will looked frailer than ever. He was leaning back in his chair, a blanket over his knees and a scarf round his neck even though the day was a warm one.

They were seated on the terrace which looked out over the neglected park where a few sheep were grazing. The folly at the end looked more broken down than he had remembered it, while the state of the ha-ha was even more disastrous. On the whole, though, it was probably better to be sitting in the open rather than in the house whose every room reminded the brothers of the splendour which had vanished and which was beginning to look increasingly unlikely to be restored.

‘I’m not in the market for fortune hunting.’ Jack was short.

‘Pity,’ sighed Will. ‘I had the local bank manager round the other day about our account there. He was surprised to find you in London.’

‘Was he, indeed? I suppose that we ought to be grateful that rather than summon us brusquely to his parlour he still cares to visit us. What did he have to say?’

‘That we ought to sell some more land to help our finances and improve our living conditions.’

Jack frowned. ‘I don’t like the thought of selling any more land. We have little enough left to farm profitably as it is. Besides, our main account is at Coutts, as he knows.’

‘I don’t exactly like the thought of selling it myself,’ admitted Will, ‘but do I have the right to tie you to this sinking ship? Things might yet take a turn for the worse. You’ve sacrificed enough already—and to what end?’

Jack tried to reassure him. ‘That we are not quite in such a desperate state as we were when the war was over. A little more than a hundred years ago we were in a similar predicament when young Sir Jack inherited and pulled us round again.’

Will was sighing again and looking worried. Jack wondered why. ‘It was easier for him,’ he said ruefully. ‘Now we live in an age which sees something wrong with inherited land and titles. Consequently the kind of deference which young Jack almost certainly received, and which helped us to survive and prosper until the damned War came along, has almost disappeared.’

‘You mean that bank managers didn’t descend on us with ultimatums—or should it be ultimata?—we sent for them at our leisure.’

‘Something like that,’ said Will.

‘Is this why you wished me to come home as soon as possible?’

‘Not quite. There is something else, just as worrying. In fact, to be honest, much more so. It’s my fault as well.’

He looked away from Jack, his fingers plucking at his blanket. When he spoke his voice was low and ashamed.

‘I did a damned foolish thing before you came back from Palestine. I had a lot of debts of honour incurred in my Army days. I contacted a London money-lender and took out a loan to enable me to pay them—and some other, larger ones, which I had run up by unsuccessfully gambling on the Stock Exchange in an effort to mend matters.’

He paused. Jack stared at him. ‘Come on, Will, that’s not the end. Finish what you have begun. What did you use for security?’

‘Compton Place—and the remaining lands. What else was there?’ He stopped again.

Aghast, Jack exclaimed, ‘Why did you never tell me of this? Did our solicitors know? Did our former land agent, old Baines?’

Will shook his head. ‘Not the solicitors. At first I conducted most of the business through Baines. As you know, he died just after you took over here.’

‘And without saying a word to me about this.’ Jack was grim. ‘I take it that you paid interest to this shark—how did you do that?’

Will looked away. ‘He wasn’t really a shark. To begin with I paid him out the money cousin Alfred left me. The interest wasn’t exorbitant. He didn’t want to ruin me. He said that in the long run he would make more money that way. I used some of young Robbie’s inheritance from his maternal grandfather after I had adopted him. His mother, as you know, couldn’t wait to hand him over to us once she remarried. Said her husband didn’t want another man’s brat.’

‘And now Robbie’s money has gone as well?’

There was a quiet desperation in Jack’s voice since Will, despite his brave words earlier, had behaved as badly as Sir Jack’s predecessor, another William. Worse. Not only had he gambled a fortune away, he had also pillaged Robbie’s inheritance, and then he had said nothing of this to the brother who was trying to rescue him until he had been compelled to.

Will hung his head. ‘That’s not the end of the problem. The money-lender died recently and his son had no interest in running the business. He sold my loan to Bernard Montague, who is a different cup of tea altogether. He has recently been combing Sussex for a suitable mansion—he wants to become a country squire, of all things. He’s one of those financiers who did well out of the War and have filled Parliament, I’m told.

‘I had a letter from him while you were away. He has immediately upped the interest to an impossible sum—the debt had been running for far too long, he said and he wants to end it. He thought a visit to me might prove profitable to us both. He came to see me without warning while you were in London and…’

He faltered and stopped.

Jack’s expression was grimmer than ever. ‘Go on, I can give a guess as to what is coming.’

‘Can you? I couldn’t. I told him that his demand was impossible. He just grinned at me and said that that was the point. If I couldn’t pay the next instalment he would foreclose and ruin me by keeping the deeds and claim Compton Place in lieu of payment. On the other hand I could sell it to him for a moderate sum and he wouldn’t trouble me about the debt any more. He said that he preferred the latter option since he didn’t want to make enemies of the people among whom he intended to live. Either way we lose everything.’

‘So that’s why you’ve been encouraging me to marry an heiress,’ Jack said, beginning to stride restlessly about the terrace. ‘How long has he given you to make up your mind?’

‘He suggested a month for me to think it over. I asked for three. He said that he didn’t want to be unreasonable and therefore he agreed to three months. Of course, if we could clear the debt before then—’ Will stopped, sighed, and handed his brother all the documents which were the witness of his folly.

‘And pigs might fly!’ The words flew out of Jack’s mouth when he had finished reading them. He looked across at his brother. Will was slumped in his chair, a picture of dejection as ruin stared him in the face—stared them both in the face, for that matter.

‘Why didn’t you tell me of this before I left the Army?’ Jack could not stop himself from asking. ‘Were you afraid that I might refuse to retire and run the estate if saving that and the house was never a true option?’

‘I didn’t think that the original money-lender would die, so that consideration never came up. After Baines died, Judson ran all errands for me. I fobbed him off with some apparently reasonable explanation.’

He should have remembered that Will had always been an incurable optimist. More than that, since he had suffered the injuries that had incapacitated him so severely his grasp on reality, which had never been strong, had become even less so.

Jack turned away from his brother and looked out across the ruined parkland. If Montague acquired the Compton estates, by whatever means, it would not remain ruined, nor would the house—but at what a price for the Compton family which had built it and had lived there for so long?

Will, worried that Jack remained silent, said, ‘I know that I’ve been an absolute rotter, but at the time I couldn’t think of anything better to do. You were with Allenby in Palestine so I couldn’t ask you for your advice.’

He added, somewhat pathetically to Jack’s back, ‘You know that I was never a strong character like you, Jack, even before this wretched business laid me low.’

Well, that was true enough, and now he could see where Will’s obsession with wealthy heiresses came from. By all accounts Lacey Chancellor was so rich that the money required to save Compton Place would be a mere fleabite, not capable of harming the Golconda she possessed.

Temptation roared through Jack. Why not? Why should he not sink his principles and ask Lacey to marry him, just for the money—and save them all? He knew that the pull between them was strong, but he was repelled by the thought of changing the something precious which was beginning to flower between them into a mere commercial transaction. She might not know that the urgency of his pursuit of her was because of the time limit Montague had set, but he would.

The devil of it was that now he was beginning to feel unable to pursue her at all since it would mean that he would be branded fortune hunter even if there were no truth in the accusation. In the face of this, he glumly felt that it would be wrong to write to her as he had promised.

He turned round to face his brother. ‘I won’t fortune hunt. If I ask a girl to marry me it will be because I love her and for no other reason. In the meantime, I will try to think of some way out of this impasse.’

Will lifted his head. ‘I cannot ask you to forgive me, but I hope that you will feel able to do so.’

What did you say to a man who had lost everything by his own folly? Even the possibility of ever being a man again in the true sense had gone from Will. Judgement was impossible. He might both regret and deplore what his brother had done, but it was done and would have to be lived with.

He opened his mouth to say something but, perhaps fortunately, he was interrupted. The glass door to the terrace opened and young Robbie came through it. He had been spending the afternoon being tutored by the Vicar of Old Compton before he went to University.

‘There you both are,’ he exclaimed. ‘Judson said that you were out on the terrace. He asked if you would like a cup of tea carried through. I said that I preferred lemonade. Tea is for old ladies.’

‘Well, that puts us in our places,’ said Jack, a remark which helped to break the tension which the afternoon’s revelations had created.

‘Not that I think that you are old ladies,’ said Robbie magnanimously.

‘Old gentlemen, then,’ said Jack, ‘or old something, anyway.’

‘I’d prefer a stronger drink than tea,’ said Will. ‘A pint of ale, if Judson would be so good.’

Since Judson was Will’s former batman who looked after him and acted as a man of all work as well, this somewhat deferential request might have sounded unnecessary, but Judson played the tyrant with his master to some effect.

So it proved. Shortly after Robbie had delivered Will’s message, Judson arrived with a glass of lemonade for Robbie, tea for Jack, no ale for Will, and a disapproving look.

‘Ale is bad for you in this weather,’ he announced, shortly, slapping two cups of tea down on the round iron table he had pushed in front of Will. ‘I see that Mr Jack’s got more sense than you. As usual.’

Will’s head hung even lower on hearing this blunt judgement. Judson, unaware of his recent conversation with Jack, could not know how tactless, or how truthful, he was being.

‘Cook’s gone to bed sick,’ Judson announced, grimly cheerful. ‘Makes dinner a little problematic seeing as how Lottie has the megrims, too.’

Jack looked up. ‘Not to worry. We can eat the cold stuff left over from lunch with a salad and the remains of the treacle tart for dessert. I suppose we have enough in the pantry for breakfast. If Cook is still ill tomorrow, we can ask Mrs Jarvis to come and help us out until she recovers.’

Mrs Jarvis was their previous cook who had retired some years before after marrying the village cobbler.

‘I don’t like salad,’ said Robbie dismally.

‘You’ll like what you’re given,’ Judson told him. ‘Can’t have you pampered.’

Jack choked over his tea. A less pampered life than Robbie was having he couldn’t imagine.

‘It’s a good thing Mrs Vicar gave me some sandwiches and jam tarts for tea, else I should starve on the short commons we have here.’ Robbie was determined not to be placated.

His uncle winced at the knowledge that the Vicar’s wife was feeding Robbie because she knew of the hardships of life at Compton Place. It was a far cry from the days when the Vicar’s family were delighted to dine there in order to enjoy the fleshpots of the Compton family’s table.

At least thinking about that, and the other problems he faced, didn’t leave Jack much time to muse about Lacey. He wondered wistfully what she was doing in London and whether she had found another man to charm and enjoy life with. Her one letter to him so far had not suggested that might have happened, but then she wouldn’t write about that to him, would she?

Lacey was feeling bored. Nearly a month had gone by since Jack had left London. She had written to him, only to receive no reply, which was strange after all his apparent eagerness to correspond with her frequently. Perhaps there was a young woman in Sussex to whom he was attracted and his attentions to her during his London visit had been nothing more than a careless way of passing the time.

Besides that, the attraction of a London season had begun to pall. At first everything being so different from home had interested and intrigued her, but the novelty of it all had soon worn off. She had become used to a busy intellectual life back in the States and found the conversation of most of those whom she met—particularly the young men—increasingly empty. One of the reasons why Jack had attracted her was his lively mind and his open interest in everything.

Everyone seemed to have such perfect manners, which somehow made it worse. Aunt Sue was plainly disappointed by what she called Lacey’s lacklustreness. She had been annoyed when Lacey had asked her politely if there was such a word, and had snapped back, brusquely for her, ‘If there isn’t, then there should be.’

Lacey was mooning after Jack Compton, Aunt Sue supposed, which, when every young man of wealth and title in society was interested in her, seemed an awful waste.

Richard said to Lacey one evening when they were waiting to go into dinner at yet another great London house, ‘This bores you, doesn’t it?’

‘If I’m honest, yes.’

‘Hankering after him?’

Lacey knew who him was. She tried to deflect her half-brother’s shrewdness by saying, apparently idly, ‘A little, I suppose.’

‘More than a little, I think. I’ve a suggestion for you. Why don’t you go down to Sussex and begin the task at Ashdown that we discussed when you first came over? You might enjoy that more than you seem to be enjoying the season. If you don’t, you can always come back again and have another go here.’

‘Aunt Sue would throw a conniption fit if I proposed any such thing!’

‘It’s your life, not Aunt Sue’s. I’ll try to soap her down for you. I’ll write letters of introduction for you to some of the families there who are my good friends. Come on, lass, I don’t intend my London home to become your prison. Give me a few days to write to Mason, my agent at Ashdown, asking him to make the place ready for you, and then you can be off. How about it?’

Why not? She would almost certainly meet Jack again and discover whether he had simply been trifling with her. She would be able to enjoy herself, not only in examining and cataloguing the house’s contents, but also in arranging the furniture, pictures and other treasures there to their best advantage.

So she simply said, ‘Yes, I’ll do what you propose—and soon, please.’

‘Good girl. Now, leave Aunt Sue to me.’

Consequently here she was in seely Sussex—whatever that meant—sitting in the drawing room of one of Richard’s friends, waiting for dinner at the home of Sir Burton and Lady Barrington. Aunt Sue, not completely mollified, was sitting opposite to her, neither of them sure whether Lacey had done the right thing by adopting Richard’s suggestion.

Interestingly enough, the idle conversation around her was about the Comptons and their dire situation. No financial details were given—it would not have been proper—simply that the brothers and their nephew were living a Spartan life in the house with very few servants to look after them or it.

‘Apparently,’ said one middle-aged man, ‘Jack has decided that so far as staff is concerned, the needs of the farm comes first.’

‘A bit hard on Will,’ said another.

The first man shrugged. ‘Oh, he’s well cared for, I believe, and the boy. The hard part is Jack’s.’

After that the next topic of conversation was about a financier called Bernard Montague, one of the hard-faced men who had done well out of the war, as the yellow press had it.

‘He’s on the look-out for a country house,’ said speaker number one who obviously knew all the County’s gossip. ‘Wouldn’t be surprised if he made a bid for Compton Place.’

Their hostess put in a word. ‘Oh, I’m sure that neither Will nor Jack would ever sell it. The Comptons have been there almost since the Conquest.’

‘Wouldn’t be the first,’ said one old fellow gravely, and all the wiser heads nodded agreement.

What to Lacey was surprising was that, a few minutes after the Comptons had disappeared from the conversation, the door opened, the butler entered, and announced, ‘Mr Jack Compton, m’lady.’

At first Jack had wished to refuse the invitation from the Barringtons, which had arrived one morning when he had been busy birthing a calf without the help of a vet.

Will, however, would not allow any such thing.

‘Good God, Jack, you live the life of a monk. Go and enjoy yourself for a change.’

Jack didn’t wish to say that he was so busy that all he wanted to do at the day’s end was to retire to bed and go to sleep. It sounded such odd behaviour for a healthy man in his early thirties to indulge in. It was true, though.

‘My dinner jacket is barely fit to stand another outing.’

‘Oh, damn that for a tale. Judson!’ he bellowed. Judson, who was engaged in the entrance hall in mending a doorknob which had gone wrong—his description—put his head round the drawing-room door.

‘You rang, sir?’ he asked in an exquisite parody of a butler.

‘I called for you, yes. Tell Jack that he must accept this invitation to the Barringtons’ dinner.’

‘Only too happy. Accept the invitation to the Barringtons, Jack, and on the double. Will that do?’ Judson bawled, now imitating a Regimental Sergeant-Major.

‘It had better,’ snarled Will. ‘You heard that, Jack?’

‘I should think that half the county heard it,’ retorted Jack, ‘but since you have both asked me so nicely, I’ll go.’

So go he did, and the first person he saw when he walked into the Barringtons’ drawing room was Lacey Chancellor, staring at him and his antique dinner jacket as though she had never seen it, or him, before.

Thank God for bullying brothers and batmen, was his first instinctive reaction, without them I shouldn’t have met her quite so soon. Even so, he thought it his salvation that he immediately had to do his duty to his host and hostess before he was able to speak to her.

They, and he, said all the proper things. They asked after Will and Robbie, and assured him how pleased they were that he had accepted their invitation to dinner. He congratulated them on Sir Burton having been appointed one of the Deputy Lord Lieutenants of the county. All the time he was keenly aware of Lacey’s presence even though he now had his back to her.

Lady Barrington took him over to her, saying on the way, ‘Did you meet Miss Chancellor while you were in London, Jack? If not, I will introduce you to her.’

‘Fortunately, yes,’ he replied, hoping that he did not sound as stiff as he felt, ‘I had that honour.’

‘Excellent,’ said his hostess. ‘You will be taking her into dinner. The bell will ring as soon as the Wickhams arrive. They are famous for being late.’

Lacey and Aunt Sue rose, to be effusively greeted by Lady Barrington.

‘I understand that you and Jack have already met, which, since I had decided that he would make you an excellent dinner partner, was very providential. Miss Hoyt, I have arranged for you to be taken in by Charles Jackman—he’s recently been travelling in the States.’

Both Lacey and Jack had been stricken dumb by their unexpected meeting. Jack was the worst afflicted since he had had no notion that Lacey was other than miles away in London, enjoying the season to the full, whereas Lacey did at least know that Jack lived somewhere nearby.

What Lacey wanted to say, but could not in this company was, ‘Why did you not answer any of my letters?’ What she did say was, ‘I had no idea that Sussex was such a lovely county,’ and all that Jack could find to answer her with was,

‘Yes, it is, isn’t it.’

The good thing was that after this exchange of banalities, so different from their previous lively conversations, they both began to laugh at themselves at the same time. Surprised heads turned a little at their amusement. They were saved from further embarrassment by the ringing of the dinner bell.

‘You know,’ Lacey whispered to him, after they had sat down, ‘if all our meetings had been productive of such horrendous social clichés I don’t think that I would have been so cross with you for not answering my letters. Rather, I should have been relieved!’

‘There was a reason for my not replying,’ Jack whispered back to her.

‘It had better be a good one. The only happy thing about it was that Aunt Sue was very pleased that you didn’t write because she hoped that it would mean the end of the affair.’

‘Hardly an affair,’ was Jack’s murmuring answer.

‘In action, not, but in spirit I rather think that it was.’

She could have said nothing more calculated to make Jack wish that he could kiss her on the spot. He was not used to such charming frankness and its effect on him was to make him forget his determination to have nothing more to do with her.

He could not give her up, he could not. She was offering earth, fire and water to his soul, which had been starved for so long of such essentials of the spiritual, as well as the physical, life. They had early passed the boundary where lust turned to love and he could no more deny the bond that had been forged between them in their few short meetings than he could have denied the basic tenets of honour and duty by which he ruled his life.

Dinner passed like a dream. All they ate tasted the same: it was either manna or nothing. They compelled themselves, out of sheer good manners, to talk to their other dinner companions, but the pretty girl on Jack’s left remained as anonymous to him as the sturdily handsome young sportsman on Lacey’s right was to her.

Both of them were deeply grateful for the discipline of formal etiquette and correct social behaviour which had been ingrained in them from birth since it made them function almost mechanically, their hidden being remaining focused on each other and on no one else.

Jack thought later that only the cynically pragmatic Judson would have twigged the double mental life they were leading and that as a consequence of his instinct rather than his intellect. It was that instinct which caused both Will and himself to offer him their respect.