Dust of the Land Read online

  ‘Ask Miss Hunnicut to come here.’

  Within minutes: ‘I beg your pardon, my Lord. Has she been troubling you?’

  ‘On the contrary. I find her absolutely delightful. But she is in your charge, Miss Hunnicut. Why was she wandering around the castle unescorted?’

  ‘She slipped away while Madam was giving me her instructions, my Lord.’

  ‘I shall wish to see her every day from now on. Shall we say at eleven o’clock each morning?’

  Miss Hunnicut hesitated. ‘Perhaps I should speak to Madam –’

  ‘I am the master of this household, Miss Hunnicut. Not my daughter-in-law.’

  ‘Of course, sir. Sorry, sir.’

  ‘Please tell my son I wish to see him here. Immediately. And one final thing…’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘All these ain’ts and ’ims and ’ers… Teach her to speak the King’s English, for heaven’s sake.’

  ‘You have been home two days and not been to see your daughter,’ the earl said. ‘May one ask why?’

  ‘Charlotte felt that after Sunday chapel might be a better time.’

  ‘What does Charlotte have to do with it? She is your daughter, man, not Charlotte’s.’

  ‘Bella needs time to adjust. We both decided it would be better from her point of view –’

  ‘It didn’t occur to you she might welcome a familiar face? A visit from her father, perhaps?’

  From his expression Anthony Richmond felt himself wrongly accused. ‘Charlotte thought, and I agreed –’

  ‘Charlotte would have left her in London to rot. As you know very well.’

  ‘We believe a child’s place is with her mother,’ Anthony said.

  ‘I can arrange that, if you wish. Although what Charlotte would say if I brought the child’s mother to live here I can’t imagine.’

  ‘Frankly, Father, we both feel it was a mistake to have brought Bella here at all. The previous arrangement –’

  ‘Suited you very well, didn’t it? All the home comforts and none of the responsibilities.’

  ‘I hardly think you’re in a position to talk about that,’ said Anthony hotly. He might not be the man he’d been before the war but could still spark, if driven to it.

  ‘You may be right,’ the earl said. ‘But she is my grandchild. My only grandchild,’ he added spitefully.

  Anthony flushed. ‘That’s really your problem with Charlotte, isn’t it? That she hasn’t given you a grandson?’

  ‘She needs to produce an heir, damn it! Our family goes back to the fifteenth century. Do you want to be the last earl of Clapham?’

  ‘You think Charlotte doesn’t feel that too?’ Anthony demanded.

  ‘I don’t understand it,’ the earl grumbled. ‘Her family’s fertile. I had them checked out. Trust you to pick the only barren one.’

  ‘I didn’t pick her. You did.’

  ‘And who would you have chosen? A bait-digger’s daughter? Don’t be ridiculous!’

  ‘Charlotte may still have a son.’

  ‘After this time? I doubt it. In the meantime I intend to raise my grandchild under my own roof and you and Charlotte had best get used to the idea. And go and see your daughter, man. Or are you afraid,’ the earl asked sarcastically, ‘that Charlotte may not approve?’

  ‘Teach her to speak the King’s English?’ Charlotte said indignantly. ‘The fact is he’s as ashamed of her background as the rest of us. But it will do no use, Miss Hunnicut. You cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.’

  Charlotte, forgetful of the sows’ ears in her own lineage, prided herself on her originality of phrase.

  ‘Should I engage a tutor?’ ventured Miss Hunnicut.

  Charlotte set her lips. You would have thought that bringing one hundred thousand pounds to the marriage would have given her the right to make her own arrangements, but since apparently it did not…

  ‘Perhaps you should, Miss Hunnicut. If Lord Richmond is so set on the idea.’ However, she was unwilling to let the earl have it all his own way. ‘Make sure you teach her the catechism. Word-perfect, Miss Hunnicut! I shall examine her personally.’

  Later, on Mrs Richmond’s instructions, Mr Pearce, the local vicar, lectured Bella week after week on the unfailing power and love of God. As she grew older, Bella learnt to ask questions.

  ‘Why are we rich and others poor?’

  ‘Why did so many people die in the war?’

  ‘Why are so many people starving?’

  Although the most important questions she dared not ask.

  Why did my mother send me away? Why does she never write? Why did she never answer the letters I sent her?

  Because Bella had written as soon as she could and had waited weeks for replies that never came.

  Mr Pearce told her these things were God’s will, but surely a loving, all-powerful God would not have allowed them to happen? She began to doubt whether the words in her prayer book meant anything at all. She continued to recite them by rote, her mind busy with other matters. When Father and his wife were away she sang the hymns with full throat because she liked them, but when Madam was home there were none. Mrs Richmond did not approve of hymns. She had brought to Ripon Grange not only a fortune but a hard and glittering belief in a faith wedded to sin and retribution to which she demanded that all under her control must subscribe. So stern was she that burning at the stake might have been a possibility, had not that been associated with popery and therefore the work of Satan himself.

  Arabella, as her stepmother insisted on calling her, or Bella, as she remained obstinately in her own mind, went through the motions; the sun continued to rise and set; the seasons came and went; the years passed. Bella’s relations with her father remained uncomfortable, with her stepmother frosty, but with the earl she had become friends. She spent as much time with him as she could, learning from him the history of the family of which it seemed only he believed her a true member.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  On the twentieth of March 1936, when Bella was sixteen and a half, she drove with the earl to visit the Hardys at Branksome, an estate five miles from Ripon Grange.

  ‘Used to ride over,’ the earl grumbled. ‘Now have to use this wretched contraption instead.’

  The earl’s riding days were done; it was all he could do to climb into the back seat of the Delage.

  Bella sat beside him. She didn’t object to driving although she would have been happy to ride: something she had learnt to do very well during her years at Ripon Grange. She would have been happy to walk. She didn’t care how she got there as long as she went, because she’d been in love with Charles Hardy for eight years now, ever since she had first set eyes on him at a Christmas party.

  There were six months between them and their friendship had deepened with the passing years. As eight-year-olds they had played noisy games of hide-and-seek in the endless corridors of Ripon Grange until banned from doing so by Bella’s stepmother, who would have prohibited the friendship altogether if she’d been able; they made rude faces at Miss Hunnicut behind her back and stole pastries – Cook’s speciality – from the kitchen; they chased each other shrieking across the lawns of Branksome House.

  A year passed. They hunted for newts in King Harold’s Beck; Charles introduced her with limited success to cricket; they capsized Charles’s dinghy in the freezing waters of Worsley Mere. There were no other children in Bella’s life, nor did she feel the need for them.

  When Charles went away to boarding school Bella thought her life had ended, yet when he came home for the holidays only the nature of their activities changed. With heavy boots and a rucksack containing sandwiches prepared in the Branksome kitchen they explored the moors that extended for miles around the two properties. They dared each other into standing on the very edge of the chasm called Gaping Gill. Their friendship was as strong as ever. It was as though Charles had never been away at all.

  That changed when Bella was twelve and for the first time discovered wh
at it meant to be a woman. It took her a while to adjust to her new feelings, her new body, and at first she was uncomfortable in Charles’s presence. Then this, too, passed.

  When they were both fifteen Charles came home for Christmas, with the first snows reflecting the brilliance of the winter sun. The air was as sharp as honed steel and Bella, coming into the Branksome drawing room and seeing Charles after months of separation, felt her life change. Before, they had been the best of friends, as children are friends with one another, but now she was a woman, Charles a man, and the foundations of their relationship had shifted. A log fire blazed in the huge grate; in front of the multi-paned window an illuminated Christmas tree shone red, blue and gold. The combined light filled the room with a shifting radiance in which dark-haired Charles, walking forwards smiling to greet her, appeared to Bella as an enchanted being whose beauty kindled a wave of heat, as wonderful as it was unexpected, that stole the breath from her lungs.

  When they were two yards apart they both stopped, as though compelled by the same instinct. Bella saw his dark eyes watching her and felt the pressure of his gaze. She was conscious of his physical presence, despite the distance between them. This new Charles was a stranger to her yet still familiar, the friend she had known all her life yet totally changed.

  Bella’s heart was a thunder in her body. She was overwhelmed by a sense of inevitability to which she surrendered without hesitation or fear. This, then, was to be her life. When she had thought of love – and what fifteen-year-old girl had not? – it had been as an abstraction, warm and much to be desired, but as something outside herself, to be accepted or denied as she chose. Now she knew it was a song that filled every particle of her being and that she could control no more than she could prevent the beating of her heart. It was, and she was captured by singing she knew would end only with the end of life itself.

  ‘Welcome home,’ she said, and was surprised to hear her voice so unchanged. Her eyes remained captive to his unwavering gaze. ‘How was school?’

  ‘It was okay. I’m in the under-sixteens now.’

  Whatever that might mean. The words were useful only as a means to bridge the silence that engulfed them because Charles, she was convinced, was as aware of the change in their relationship as she was.

  ‘Rugby,’ he explained.

  ‘Oh I see.’

  Although she did not: rugby one of the masculine mysteries to which she accepted she would never be admitted. It was unimportant; what mattered was the harmony that love gave to the otherwise unchanging patterns of her normal life. The holidays, enriched by her new feelings, still followed the familiar routines, both of them aware of the change in their relationship yet unwilling, for the moment, to do anything about it.

  That changed during the long summer break, beside the cascading waters of a beck flowing out of the high moors, when Charles first touched her as a man touches a woman and Bella, trembling, felt for the first time her flesh melt as a woman melts when touched by the man she loves.

  The memory of that moment, when excitement had threatened to drown inhibition and was halted only by the unexpected passing of a man on horseback, now threatened to stifle her as the Delage sped along the road between hedgerows where the first spring flowers were beginning to appear.

  ‘Warm family, the Hardys,’ the earl said. ‘Provided he don’t fall out with his old man, young Charles stands to inherit three thousand acres when the time comes. No doubt a lot more besides; Will Hardy knows how to turn a penny even in this depression. Wish I could say the same, but I never could get my head around those damn shillings and pence.’

  The Delage turned into the long drive leading to Branksome Hall. The drive was flanked by oak trees that had been there as long as the house, which was protected on either side by hills threaded with streams that Charles claimed were full of trout. They had supposedly been fishing for trout when the passing rider had saved Bella from what Miss Hunnicut would no doubt have called a fate worse than death. Bella had been startled to discover what little control she’d had over her feelings; now, as the car drew up before the entrance, she thought it was as well that the March weather ruled out any possibility of a repeat performance.

  ‘Family’s farmed these parts since the Middle Ages,’ the earl said. ‘Among the most substantial landowners in the county, don’t you know. Not aristocrats, of course, but socially they’ll do.’

  And heaved himself laboriously out of the car’s opened door.

  Bella had brought a bag containing her riding breeches and later, while the earl settled down with William Hardy over a decanter of malt whisky to discuss the mess the recently defeated Macdonald government had left Mr Baldwin to sort out, and the rise of this feller Hitler whose troops had occupied the Rhineland two weeks before, Charles Hardy and Bella Richmond rode off into the hills side by side.

  It was a crisp day and not fit for any outdoor sexual explorations. Charles thought he would give it a go anyway but Bella, skin cringing, laughed and told him to forget it.

  ‘Don’t you want to?’ Charles said plaintively, that poor little boy.

  ‘With the temperature around freezing?’ Bella said. ‘You must be out of your mind. I’ll tell you what I will do, though. I’ll race you back to the house.’

  Because the shadows were already lengthening as the evening came down across the fells.

  ‘What’s the prize?’ Charles wondered aloud.

  ‘That would be telling,’ Bella said.

  She laughed joyously, dug her heels into the mare’s flanks and within seconds was racing away with Charles in hot pursuit.

  Across the tops she rode, blue eyes intent, black hair blowing in the wind. She leant forwards until her face was almost touching the mare’s straining neck, while all the time she whispered in her ear, urging her onwards. ‘Come on now, come on…’

  As though her very life were at stake, and not simply the winning or losing of a race started on impulse. But that was Bella all over: in everything she ventured, winning was all. As to the prize Charles was hoping for… That would be awarded, or not, as she decided at the time. So Bella flew, the devil at her heels, and came to the steep descent at the bottom of which the first lights of Branksome were pricking out of the gathering dusk.

  There were trees on the descent, hollows barely visible in the fading light, and juts of lichen-clad granite thrusting their way through the turf. Ahead of her, to the west, the first star hung above the horizon.

  It was madness to ride like this in the half-light, on a broken slope that in places was nearer vertical than horizontal, but Charles was somewhere close behind her and he knew the land better than she: if she eased up he would win.

  She was determined to prevent that.

  The lights of Branksome grew nearer. Now she was halfway down the slope. A startled bird rose suddenly from under the mare’s hooves. She swerved and Bella was hanging on by teeth and fingernails, but the moment passed and still she had not slowed down.

  Two-thirds of the slope was behind her now, a clump of trees dark with shadow ahead of her to the right. Still no sign of Charles and, although she dared not look over her shoulder, she had no sense of his being anywhere close behind her.

  She was winning, adrenaline like fire in every vein of her body, when Charles, going hell for leather, rode out of the trees thirty yards in front of her and went pounding down the slope towards the lights that were suddenly too close for comfort. Taking advantage of his better knowledge of the countryside, Charles had found a short cut that had brought him out ahead of her. The house could not be more than quarter of a mile away; she had no hope of catching him.

  Charles’s horse appeared to stumble over a jutting rock in the semi-darkness and Bella saw him fly heels over head out of the saddle to end up on the slope with a thud that sent a bolt of terror through her heart.

  The earl and William Hardy had finished putting the world to rights. Now they were discussing the subject that Mr Hardy suspected had been the rea
son for the earl’s visit.

  ‘I can’t praise her highly enough,’ the earl said. ‘And of course they’ve been great chums all their lives.’

  William had heard the old man eulogising his granddaughter before, but never so intensely. His nose, honed by years of negotiations with the most astute financiers in the City, sensed a deal. His first rule in such matters was to slow things down. Change the subject, if you had to. If they were keen, they would always come back to it. You learnt more that way.

  He leant forwards and freshened their glasses. ‘The Glenlivet has always been my favourite malt,’ he said.

  ‘It is excellent,’ the earl said.

  ‘I was able to pick up two dozen bottles when I was in London last week. Lassiters in Cheapside are selling up – victims of the times, I’m afraid, very sad – so I was able to do a deal at fourteen shillings a bottle. I could let you have half a dozen bottles, if you like. The same price I paid for them.’

  ‘That is most kind. But I believe my cellar is adequately stocked. About Bella…’

  ‘Oh yes?’ said Mr Hardy, as though this were the first time her name had entered the conversation.

  ‘I rather fancy she’s taken a shine to that boy of yours.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘I suspect he feels the same.’

  So that’s the way the wind is blowing, Mr Hardy thought. Well, a link between the families might be no bad thing, even if the girl was born on the wrong side of the blanket. Aloud he said: ‘At that age they fall in and out of love all the time. I set no store by it.’

  ‘My only grandchild,’ the earl said. ‘I daresay I’ll be able to put something aside for her when she does decide to get hitched.’

  ‘Land?’ Mr Hardy wondered.

  ‘Can’t do that. Whole estate’s entailed. But there’ll be something, I daresay. Not sure it’ll be needed, mind. Beautiful girl – have you seen her recently? – I don’t fancy she’ll be on the market long.’

  ‘Planning to have her come out, are you?’ asked Mr Hardy.

  That was cruel; there could be no question of a court presentation for illegitimate Bella.