Loretta Proctor Read online

  He looked up from shredding a large sycamore leaf into tiny pieces. Ellie could tell that his mind was far away just then and that this insistent question she put every time they managed to be alone always irritated him. He sighed and said in a sharp tone that offended her, ‘I don’t think we should mention it yet. I’ve told you enough times. Please say nothing about it. Promise me?’

  ‘I have promised, Alfie, a hundred times, but I can’t see why.’

  ‘You know what your father is like. He thinks you’re still his baby girl and would put a stop to our meeting together even with a dozen chaperones. It’s getting harder to elude your frightful Miss Perrin as it is. Thank God, the wretched woman is visiting her mother today.’

  ‘Oh, Alfie, Miss Perrin is a dear, kind lady! Don’t be so unkind.’

  ‘Unkind! You don’t know the half of it. I’d like to wring her neck when I see her watching us so closely these days and pursing her lips the way she does. As for your father, he wouldn’t even consider an engagement as yet. On top of that, Father as good as said Joshua Farnham had other plans for you. It quite troubled me, his saying that.’

  ‘Sometimes I think my parents never want me married at all,’ said Ellie gloomily.

  ‘That’s nonsense and you know it is, my love. The simple fact is that you’re still too young. Plus, I have to prove myself a little, you know, get myself a career, show your father what I’m made of and all that… mustn’t I?’

  ‘You don’t need to, Alfie. Papa knows you. He knows you’ll be Lord Dillinger one day and Oreton Hall will be yours. Why on earth would he expect you to prove anything to him as if you were some penniless fortune hunter?’

  Alfie took her hands in his and turning them over planted a kiss in each palm. He said solemnly, ‘I have to prove myself. Myself to myself. Myself to the world. Don’t you see that?’

  Ellie pouted and pulled her hands away.

  ‘No. I don’t see it. You’ve passed your exams beautifully; you always excel at everything you want to do. You’ll go into politics and probably end up being Prime Minister if you put your mind to it. You will always win, always. I certainly don’t want proof of anything you can do because I know full well you’re good, brave and clever. What I want is proof of your love.’

  ‘God, I’ve proved it enough times, haven’t I? Haven’t I proved I’m a man?’

  ‘Oh!’ She shook herself free of him and rose from the grassy knoll where they sat. ‘You think that’s proof! Well, a man might think so but you can do – that – with anyone. Prove your love by asking for my hand.’

  ‘I can “do that with anyone”!’ Alfie said, stung. He rose to face her. ‘Damn it, Ellie, that’s a terrible thing to say. As if I go whoring every other Sunday! We were both virgins and you’re the only girl I’ve ever lain with. I swear it. You believe me, don’t you? So don’t insult me like this. Isn’t the pleasure and joy we’ve known meaningful to you, then? Is it just that I’m one day to be Lord Dillinger that you care about?’

  ‘No! You know it isn’t! That’s not important to me, Alfie. I love you… ‘

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  She had offended him and reached out a hand to touch his arm. He turned away, looking hurt and angry. They understood one another so well. Why were they now at odds, squabbling over something that was surely important to them both? It was nothing less than their whole future together.

  ‘Alfie, don’t turn away from me, it makes me so miserable and sad when you do that,’ she pleaded. ‘You know I love you. You’re like my life-blood, my heart and soul. Of course, our loving has been beautiful, forgive me. But I’m always afraid of being caught. I want it to be right, to be legal, to be in… in the Crimson Bed!’

  He turned and laughed at this, taking her into his arms again, pressing her close to him and kissing her. ‘In that old monster,’ he murmured, ‘we’re not having that in our house.’

  ‘Why not? We must, it’s an inheritance in the female line. One day I’ll pass it to my daughter.’

  ‘Your daughter?’ he teased. ‘Won’t she be mine too?’

  ‘Oh, of course, you fool,’ she replied, blushing. ‘It’s a figure of speech.’

  ‘Still – an interesting one. I certainly won’t have that monstrous thing in our house once we’re married, Ellie. I never did like it very much. We’ve enough dusty heirlooms at Oreton Hall.’

  ‘It’s not a dusty heirloom!’

  ‘Well, we’ll see when the time comes, eh?’ he teased her, tweaking her curls. ‘You’ve been a good girl and so obedient already. What a splendid little wife you’ll make. All right, we’ll have it your way and get engaged if you like, but should we not wait a little while to marry? I feel quite restless after all that fearful study and need to do something active and maybe a little wild. Maybe go abroad.’

  ‘But don’t you want to take me with you?’ asked Ellie, vexed by this remark.

  He looked down at her and bent to kiss her again.

  ‘Sweetheart! Think carefully. Do you want all the responsibilities of a huge household and children and all the rest so soon? I’m sure not. As for me, I would rather like to see the world a little.’

  ‘And sow your wild oats?’ she said, drawing angrily away.

  He looked hurt.

  ‘Ellie, don’t doubt me. I love you madly, you know that. I will sow no oats whatsoever, I promise you upon my word. Merely explore places that would be far too dangerous and difficult for a young woman. India beckons, Africa, so many places that I long to explore. They are just not suitable for a young Englishwoman. Suppose you were expecting a child? You know it would be impossible and wrong to take an infant to such inhospitable places.’

  Ellie reddened with anger. Alfie began to kiss her again and tried to lift her skirts but she pushed him away.

  ‘You want adventure and danger! Well, have it then. I see you’ve never ever bothered your head about the danger I’ve been in, have you? Haven’t I proved myself adventurous enough and daring enough to allow you to make love to me? There has always been a danger that I might have a child. I was not brought up in ignorance of these matters. I think all you want now is to make love to me in the woods and then gallivant away. Just suppose I had a baby before we marry and you are away somewhere in the world, no one knows where?’

  Alfie stared at her and a flush came to his face also. She turned and began to walk back to the Hall, her heart beating wildly with anger and misery.

  ‘Don’t be angry with me, Ellie,’ he said following her and taking her arm.

  ‘Go away!’

  ‘Listen to me, just listen. Stop a minute, for Heaven’s sake! You know I love you. You’re right to remind me that you’re a brave little thing; I never doubted it. I’ve always taken care not to make you conceive – you know, not finish off in you. You were always safe. I’m not that much of a cad.’

  He turned her round to face him. They were still hidden by a copse of trees. He began to kiss her again and she felt herself melt as she always did. Then his previous words came back to her mind and she pushed him away once more.

  ‘It seems I shall have a lonely life if I marry you,’ she said sadly.

  ‘No, no, I shall settle down and be a regular paterfamilias. Wait and see. Just humour me a little while. I shall speak to my father and I will hint about our intended engagement to him. Then, when the proper time comes, I shall speak to your Papa. I see no reason why he shouldn’t be delighted at such a match, do you?’

  Despite his words, Ellie was troubled by the conversation. It felt unsatisfactory. Something was different and evasive about Alfie today. She could not quite fathom what it might mean.

  ‘Ellie, where are you?’ She heard her mother’s insistent voice calling her as they walked back into view of the house. Maria stood outside the French windows, looking around for them anxiously.

  ‘Your mother is beginning to be a regular martinet,’ muttered Alfie. ‘She spies on us all the time. When does one ever get any free
dom in life?’

  Ellie was left to ponder all this because a day or so after this conversation, Alfie returned to London with his father. She felt a peculiar sense of anxiety when he came to her the morning they departed. While no one was looking, he took her hand briefly and, with a swift gesture, gave her a kiss on the cheek. Then he looked deep and unsmiling into her eyes before obeying his father’s summons that their horses were awaiting them and it was time to go.

  One morning, a month later, the Farnham family were seated at home having breakfast. Ellie was quiet and pensive. Her mother, Maria, occupied in her mind with household matters, was drinking tea and scribbling some notes down on a piece of paper. Joshua Farnham was busy with the morning newspaper. Suddenly he looked up in surprise and said, ‘There is an announcement here that Captain Alfred Dillinger, eldest son of Lord Percival Dillinger of Oreton Hall, has left Herefordshire with his regiment. This is very sudden. Did you know about this decision, Maria?’

  His wife put down her tea cup, brushed her lips with a napkin, then replied, ‘I knew Alfred intended to join the cavalry and that Lord Dillinger had bought him a commission. But not that he was leaving so soon. That is a surprise, indeed, though not unexpected.’

  She looked over at her daughter with apprehension. Ellie was looking at them both, her face a deathly white.

  ‘He – Alfred– has left the county, Papa?’

  ‘Yes, my dear,’ said Joshua.

  ‘May I see the announcement?’

  ‘If you wish.’ He handed The Times to her.

  Ellie read the announcement and gave the newspaper back. She said nothing, but rose and left the table.

  Her father looked up, startled. ‘What’s the matter with our daughter?’

  Maria folded her napkin with care. She looked troubled. However when she spoke her voice was mild and calm. ‘Oh, she’s just upset. Alfred was her childhood playmate, after all. I expect she’s annoyed he didn’t tell her of his plans. You know how young girls are.’

  ‘Young girls will always be a mystery to me,’ said Joshua with feeling. ‘She should be pleased for her old playmate. It’s a very sought after commission.’

  Maria went upstairs later to find Ellie in her own room, sobbing into her pillow. She sat on the bed beside her and tried to touch her but Ellie shook her head fiercely and turned away.

  ‘Come, come, my darling. Dearest, don’t be so upset! It’s not the end of the world. Come now, you’re angry with your friend for his desertion of us all. He will write to you soon enough when he has settled.’

  Ellie turned a tear-stained face to her mother, her dark hair tumbling about her face. Maria handed her a handkerchief and Ellie blew her nose while her mother swept back the unruly locks and tidied them a little. It took a few moments for Ellie to control her sobs but she made an effort that Maria sensed was painful.

  ‘But Mama, why, why has he gone like this? It’s all so strange. Why has he left so suddenly? Why hasn’t he come to say goodbye to us?’

  ‘I believe that a very worthwhile commission came up that he was keen to take and… well, you know young men! You certainly know Alfred. He is always so impulsive and no doubt decided to go at once and join the regiment. He will do well. He has all the makings of a good soldier.’

  ‘But he never told me about it. He could at least have come to say goodbye.’

  Maria smiled and took her daughter’s hands in her own. ‘Don’t be troubled, dearest Ellie – he’ll write or call upon us some time when he’s on leave. I know you miss him but he’s a young man; he has to go his own way in the world. You can’t hold on to him and stay children forever.’

  ‘You really think we’re still children, Mama?’ said Ellie, looking up at her mother now, voice full of anguish.

  Maria looked at her with a strange expression.

  ‘No, I do not. I do not. Perhaps that’s the problem.’

  Something in her mother’s demeanour forbade further probing. Ellie lowered her eyes and dared say no more.

  She could draw only one conclusion from Alfie leaving like this, without a word, without a note or a whisper of his reasons and intentions. He hadn’t the courage to speak up, but it must be true: he no longer loved her.

  Chapter 3

  London Docklands: March 1853

  Frederic Ashton Thorpe walked towards Swan’s Pier, past Southwark Bridge, swinging a thin ivory-topped cane and looking his usual dapper self. He wondered, as he always did when he visited this area, what on earth had induced his good friend, Henry Winstone, to rent chambers here? It was a dismal, lowering sort of place in the day, half-lit, eerie and forbidding at night.

  He had left behind him the comforting rattle and clatter of home going vehicles from the City. Fleet Street still hummed with printing presses and the hurrying footsteps of the newspaper men who fed them with the nation’s foibles and gossip. The merry, raucous voices of a group of idlers could be heard, taking themselves off to the inns and chophouses and other evening amusements.

  It was now late afternoon and the sun had not set but Upper Thames Street was already cast in shadows. Dark warehouses hemmed around him. They stared at passers-by with a humourless aspect; blank, forbidding windows like the unclosed eyes of the dead. These tall, square, ugly buildings arose from the banks of the Thames, growing like fungi from the rotting timbers of the piles and wharves. Monuments to materialism, Fred thought scathingly.

  Once, he mused, this ancient riverside would have been open fields and marshes, banks full of reeds, the waters rippling and pure and filled with fish and wildlife of all kinds. In those days, flocks of swans graced the waters in abundance. Now the unhealthy pall that arose from it was foul. The river carried bodies, rubbish, debris, all manner of excreta. It moved along in a slow, sluggish manner, hardly able to flow at all in some places, snagging and catching at the piles with the strange angry gulping sound of a creature that was dying and gasping for air.

  He’d have to persuade Henry to move out of this place. It was unhealthy.

  The housekeeper let Fred in and he bounded up the stairs to the second floor. He knocked at the door to Henry’s chambers. It was opened by a tall stolid red-haired girl eating an apple.

  ‘Good evening, Miss Gamm.’

  The young woman gave a little laugh as if Fred’s formality amused her.

  ‘Evenin’, Mister Ashton Thorpe,’ she said, mimicking his precise manner. Her voice was mocking. She laughed again, flicking the apple core into the fireplace.

  ‘Who is it, Rosie?’ A voice called from the adjacent room and Henry Winstone came out rubbing his oily hands on his painting coat.

  ‘It’s your friend, Thorpe,’ she called back.

  ‘Fred, old fellow!’ As always Henry’s rich, melodious voice with its cheerful welcome lightened Fred’s heart. ‘Come on in at once, don’t stand there on ceremony. Rosie! Get the coffee pot nice and hot, there’s a good girl.’

  Fred laid down his hat, cane and gloves with tidy care upon a small table, making sure he set his topper down on the brim so as not to wear out the fabric. Rosie stood and watched him, halfamused as always at his fastidiousness.

  ‘Go and get the coffee, you lazy girl,’ repeated Henry giving her ample bottom a poke with a paintbrush. ‘Oh, she’s a slut, that girl,’ he added good-humouredly as, shrugging her shoulders, Rosie swirled away with a flourish of her skirt, armed with the boiling kettle from the hob.

  ‘Why d’you bother with her, then?’

  ‘Need you ask?’ Henry said with a grin. ‘Ain’t she a stunner –

  as Rossetti and his crowd would say? In bed, on canvas, a most obliging girl is Rosie. Most obliging. Besides, I’m fond of her. I feel comfortable with her. She don’t make any demands of me and she’s thrilled to be living somewhere better than the hole where I found her. This – as you well know – was down a Brixton lane where her father and her brothers made good use of her charms.’

  Fred made a face at this and Henry laughed as always at his frien
d’s prudery.

  ‘Come on, take a seat, Fred! Did you remember to bring the copal varnish by the way? I’m running out and need it to finish off that little scene for Atkins. I’m strapped for cash as always and the sooner I get it over to him, the better.’

  ‘Yes, I stopped at Roberson’s on the way. I’ve left it on the table out there in the passage,’ replied Fred as he made to sit in a sagging armchair by the fire.

  ‘Hang on, don’t sit there! You’ll park your arse on my wideawake!’

  Fred, startled, looked behind him to see a battered felt hat at the back of the chair.

  ‘If you took a little more care of your possessions…’ he grumbled as he handed it over.

  ‘Oh, I do!’ said Henry with a laugh as he tossed the hat over to the corner where it landed neatly on a bust of Wellington.

  ‘Like hell you do.’ Fred dusted the seat down now and cast a wary eye out for any other objects likely to be there.

  ‘C’mon, Rosie, what the dickens are you doing out there with that coffee?’ Henry yelled. His darling lady appeared at the door with arms akimbo and told him what she thought of him in a few choice words before disappearing back to her noisy efforts next door.

  Fred, who had a horror of profanities on a woman’s lips, blinked at the coarse language. ‘She’s a good deal cleaner than when you found her but I can’t say her manners have improved,’ he remarked. ‘I thought you were going to send her to some academy.’

  ‘What academy, eh? I’m not sending her back to some damned

  brothel, if that’s what you’re hinting.’ Henry looked a trifle peeved by this remark.

  ‘You know perfectly well what I mean. Not a pushing school, you idiot. Somewhere like Mrs Jessop’s in Kensington or wherever; an academy that’ll educate her into a ladylike disposition.’

  Henry smiled again, his temper seldom soured for long. ‘You always growl about Rosie. Will I never get you two to like one another? You act as if the poor girl was a bad smell under your nose. Yes, I am going to send her to a nice place I’ve heard of where she’ll be “made all proper” as Rosie puts it. Who knows? Then I might even marry her.’