‘Thank you, Mary.’ Helen Sutton smiled as the parlourmaid set down a tray bearing afternoon tea.
‘Is it muffins?’ Her son lifted the plate cover.
‘No, it is not. Muffins are consolation for winter, Giles. It’s May, now, so it’s egg-and-cress sandwiches, I hope. Now pour my tea, won’t you? I feel like being spoiled today.’
‘What did my sister say in her letter?’ Giles Sutton demanded, passing the cup.
‘Julia seems to be having a grand time and says that Hawthorn is, too.’
‘Dear little Hawthorn. I miss her.’
‘Don’t you mean that you miss her looking after your dog?’
‘Well, I’ve got to admit that Morgan misses her too, but giving him his outings does get me out, once in a while.’
‘I don’t know why you spend so much time in that dull old library.’
‘I like it there.’ He liked the library better than any room in the house: the smell of old books and wax-polished furniture, the slow, soothing tick of the clock, and dust-motes hanging sunlit on the still air. Peace, there, and words for the reading. It was all he ever wanted, come to think of it, except to go to his father’s old college at Cambridge. ‘But how do you feel, Mother, now that it’s all behind you?’ He referred, hesitantly, to her period of mourning. ‘It’s good to see you out of that dreary black.’
‘That dreary black was necessary. I wore it for your father, Giles. Not because society demanded I should, but because it suited my mood.’
‘You still miss him, don’t you, dearest?
‘I miss him.’ And not so old, yet, that she didn’t want him, too, and the comfort of his nearness. ‘And I don’t know what your father would have thought to both his sons still being unmarried. One son interested only in tea-growing, and the other never so happy as when he’s got his nose in a book!’
But they were men, both of them, for all that. It was just that neither had yet decided upon a suitable wife. And at least they didn’t flaunt their masculinity like some not so far from this very house. Why, even the other night at Clementina Sutton’s dinner party, Elliot hadn’t been able to keep his eyes – or his hands, if she hadn’t been mistaken – off the parlourmaid who helped at table. She could almost feel sorry for her brother-in-law’s wife and the embarrassment their eldest son must cause her.
‘Why the sigh, Mother?’
‘Nothing, really. Just a sigh. A coincidence, I suppose, that I happened to be thinking about your cousin.’
‘Elliot? It’s a butcher’s daughter now, I believe. And trouble, so I heard.’
‘Giles! You mustn’t listen to kitchen gossip!’
‘Not even when it’s true? They were talking about it in the stables. I heard them. The man’s a fool. Why can’t he do his carrying-on in London, though I suppose he’s at it there, too, when it gets too hot for him around here.’
‘I think you’re right. One of these days, Elliot will find himself in real trouble.’
‘Which he’ll be promptly bought out of with old Nathan’s money.’
‘I fear so.’ She stirred her tea reflectively. ‘What that young man needs is a good whipping, and more’s the pity his father doesn’t give him one before he’s beyond redemption.’
‘Don’t blame his father. Like me, Uncle Edward was born a second son.’
‘And second sons must shift for themselves – I know; though it seems that both you and your uncle would have been better suited to the academic life. For Edward it was a choice of the army or the Church – so the poor man chose Clementina.’
‘Aunt Clemmy chose him, don’t you mean?’ Giles laughed, making his mother wonder why this serious, bookish son of hers didn’t laugh more often, and why he didn’t marry and give her grandchildren; for it seemed that her other son, whose duty it was to provide an heir, had little intention of doing so in the foreseeable future.
‘Must go, dearest,’ Giles kissed his mother’s cheek with affection, ‘and give Morgan his outing. When will Hawthorn be back?’
‘Not for a while yet; and Giles,’ Helen murmured, eyeing his pocket with mock severity, ‘that animal will always be fat if you insist on spoiling him with titbits.’
‘Just a macaroon. He’s very fond of them.’ He grinned, boyishly disarming, which made his mother love him all the more and send up a small prayer of thanks that her younger son at least did not prefer India to the springtime greenness of Rowangarth.
Rowangarth. So dear to her. Built more than three hundred years ago at the time of King James’s dissertation on witches and the evils of their craft. Small, by some standards, for the home of a gentleman of ancient title, but built square and solid against the northern weather, and with a rowan tree planted at all four aspects of the house, for witches feared the rowan tree and gave it a wide berth, their early ancestor had reasoned. And should a rowan tree die of age or be uprooted in a high wind, another was always planted in its place. It was still the custom, and thus far the Suttons had prospered, having had no generation without a male heir, so the descent was direct and ever would be, Helen Sutton fervently hoped. And above all else, Rowangarth was a happy place in which to live – which was more than could be said for her brother-in-law’s home, if one could call Pendenys Place a home.
‘Pendenys,’ she murmured, shaking her head. Completed little more than twenty-five years ago, the newness was still on it, with its carefully arranged trees little more than saplings still, and the house proud and cold and loveless. It made her feel sorry for her husband’s younger brother, and the need for him to love where money lay. Edward Sutton had not been cut out for clerical orders, and even to think of being a soldier had left him cold with apprehension. So he had married Clementina, daughter of Nathan Elliot, an Ironmaster of prodigious wealth, whose ambitions for his only child were boundless. Thus brass, so local talk insisted, had married breeding, as so often happened these days.
Clementina had come to Edward Sutton possessed of a dowry that built Pendenys Place. The house had been named for Clementina’s grandmother, Cornish-born Mary Anne Pendennis who, talk had it, had scrimped and saved and even taken in washing to help fund that first, long-ago Elliot foundry.
Yet Clementina had done her duty by her marriage contract, Helen admitted with scrupulous fairness, and had given Edward three sons in as many years, then straight away closed her bedroom door to him, enabling him to live his own life again, more or less, and return, duty done, to his beloved books. And his wife, secure in her loveless marriage, ruled Pendenys like the martinet she was, doing exactly as she pleased, for it was she who paid the piper.
Helen clucked impatiently, wishing Clementina would mellow just a little, be less belligerent. Clemmy was so insular; could not forgive anyone she deemed better born than herself; still clung unconsciously to her roots and sheltered behind the power her father’s money gave her. Defiantly, she had called her first son Elliot, determined her maiden name should not be forgotten; her second-born she named for her father, Nathan, and her third child for her father’s father, Albert. Her eldest son wanted for nothing, and coveted only one thing: the knighthood his father had not received, despite the many and bountiful donations made by his mother to Queen Victoria’s favourite charities.
Now Elliot secretly hoped that pestilence would strike down his Rowangarth cousins Robert and Giles, thus ensuring the baronetcy would pass, eventually, to him. Not, Helen frowned, that she could be sure that Elliot thought it, but she was as certain as she could be that he did.
‘And her servants,’ Helen confided to the vase of lilac reflected in the window-table. ‘She screams at her servants, too.’
Clementina harangued her domestic staff as no lady would ever do. Reprimands to servants should be given to the housekeeper