Lace for Milady (3 page)

“Took a tumble, did you?” he asked, with a somewhat superior smile on his face. He did not dismount, having no manners, but remained in his saddle, holding Juliette’s reins.

“Certainly not. I merely decided to dismount, for Juliette was going faster than I liked.”

“Dismount? Ah, is that what the ladies call falling off a horse nowadays? Next time you wish to slacken the pace, I suggest you pull on the reins, slowly and evenly.” He smiled on me condescendingly from atop his horse.

“Next time you discover a lady stretched out on the ground, I suggest you dismount and help her up instead of delivering a quite unnecessary lecture,” I replied tartly, and picked myself up with no help from the man. I took a pace toward Juliette; my knee buckled under me, and I half fell.

That, finally, was sufficient to get him down from his animal. It was also sufficient to widen the grin on his face. “I’ll toss you up,” he offered, and went on to do precisely that.

Before I knew what he was about, he had placed his two hands around my waist and lifted me from the ground as though I were an elf, and I weigh nearly nine stone. By making a wild lunge at mane and reins, I managed somehow to get on Juliette’s back. The trouble, or part of it, was immediately made clear. The saddle was buckled on so loosely that the lurching movement drew it around one hundred and eighty degrees when I pulled on the pommel, and I was once again on the ground, holding in my temper at this stupid man.

“Thank you very much indeed!” I said, and arose, though my knee still ached.

“I take it this is your maiden ride?” he enquired, grinning wider and wider till I feared his face would split.

“As you so cleverly deduce, it is my maiden ride.”

“Lesson number one: Always check that the girth is buckled on tightly. And while we are about it, lesson number two: Don’t clutch at the reins as though they were the handle of your reticule. They are held thus.” He reached to his own reins and wound them through his fingers in a quite complicated and uncomfortable-looking manner. "Their purpose is
not
to hold you on, but merely to direct the animal.”

I feigned deafness, grabbing the reins. “I’ll bear it in mind,” I said, then began walking home. Not for fifty pounds would I have got on that animal’s back again in front of anyone.

“If you don’t do it now, you never will,” he said, apparently reading my mind. "Here, let me tighten her girth for you. You can’t walk back all the way with that game leg.”

“I am not a horse, sir. I do not have a
game leg,
or a swollen fetlock. I have wrenched my knee, and I shall walk home."

“Suit yourself,” he answered with the utmost indifference, then putting one toe in the stirrup, he threw the other leg over the horse’s back with the greatest of ease, and it was a huge beast, and a stallion at that, which seemed very vicious looking to me. He commenced walking along after me. I turned and tried to be rid of him.

“I don’t require an escort, thank you.”

“You will require further assistance before you’ve gone much farther.”

“I haven’t far to go."

“You have over a mile.”

I couldn’t believe it was so far till I had been walking—limping, really—ten minutes and still saw no end to the spinney. The man then got down and suggested rather forcefully that I try riding again. He tightened the beast’s saddle, and once again tossed me up. “I’ll hold her reins and walk if you’re afraid,” he offered.

This offer was spurned, but I took care to keep Juliette’s pace to a strict walk, which was very uncomfortable because it meant holding my feet well out from her sides. Before we had gone much farther, the back of the Dower House was visible over the thinning trees. I was never so glad to see a pile of rocks in my life.

“I’ll see you in,” the man said when we got to the stable.

“That is really not at all necessary.”

“I want to talk to you,” he said, in an authoritative voice that I suddenly realized spoke in cultured accents. I had been too upset before to remark it.

“Who are you?” I asked, rather bluntly, I’m afraid.

“Clavering. Your neighbour on the east.”

“The Duke of Clavering?” I asked, quite simply astonished. No elegance, no manners—a gypsy.

“At your service, whenever you care to take a tumble, ma’am,” he answered, and offered me his arm.

“I thought you were in London.”

“I was. I returned. Shall we go?”

I couldn’t think of a sensible word to say, so said nothing. Immediately we were in, I went to my room to clean up, asking Slack to get His Grace a glass of wine. When I returned belowstairs fifteen minutes later, he sat making himself quite at home with Slack. She, however, is never completely at home with any male over eight or ten, and was looking grim.

“What was it you wished to speak to me about?” I asked a little sharply. In the normal way I would have been friendlier with a neighbour, but having shown myself in so poor a light, I was angry.

“About Seaview,” he replied, equally bluntly.

“And what might Seaview be?” I asked.

“It’s here. The Dower House,” Slack informed me.

“Oh, you mean it already has a name. I had rather looked forward to naming it myself. I had thought of Hillcrest, for we are at the crest of the hill, you know.”

“Your neighbour a mile down the road had the same original notion. McCurdys call their place Hillcrest. The hill actually crests there. You have a view of the sea; we called it Seaview.”

“We?” I asked, with perhaps a touch of condescension, or so Slack told me later. Actually “as jealous as a cat of her new-born litter” is the simile she used.

“It was named by my great grandfather, since he built it,” Clavering informed me, in much the same possessive tone.

Lady Ing ought to have told me this. The impression given by her was that it was a part of the original Inglewood holding. I had wondered at the time that it was in her power to sell it, and not a word had she said of all this. Of course she had also implied it was three or four hundred years old, and that had proven untrue. So it was some Clavering, unless the man facing me lied, who had inscribed the telltale date on that keystone.

“I see. I hadn’t realized that,” I answered, pretending no more than a decent modicum of interest.

“Did Lady Inglewood not tell you so when she sold you the place?”

“No, she did not consider it of sufficient importance apparently.”

“But she told you about the leased land?”

This was the manner in which I made the horrendous discovery about my precious Gothic mansion. I have given a hint of double-dealing and treachery on my aunt’s part. This is it. My pen shakes in anger yet to write it. “What leased land?” I asked. Something in his triumphant, gloating expression made me expect trouble ahead.

“The land on which Seaview stands,” he answered, relishing his victory.

“No, no, I bought the land outright from her. It is a very small area, of course, only a couple of acres, but it is not leased.”

“It was not hers to sell.”

I was on my feet, and soon falling awkwardly to my chair again, for the twisted knee really hurt quite abominably. “What do you mean? What are you telling me?” I demanded, incredulous.

“What I can scarcely believe you do not know already. Seaview stands on land leased from me.”

“But—but I don’t understand. How can this be? She couldn’t sell me a house without land for it to stand on. It is ridiculous. I never heard of such a thing in my life. Slack, get the papers, the ownership papers.”

Slack was nearly as upset as I was myself, and bustled from the room in a swirl of black skirts. Slack never wore a thing but black.

While awaiting her return, I asked the Duke, “Just how did such a state of affairs come about? How did the Inglewoods come to build on your...“ Then I stopped. “But you said your ancestors built the place. How does it come to be out of your hands?”

He looked inordinately pleased at the tizzy into which he had thrown me, and I resolved to show less of my concern. He answered blandly, “My great-grandfather built the place for his sister-in-law, who was a Tilbridge. She was an invalid and required a place by the sea, right on the sea. The solarium was built for her convenience."

I believe I have neglected to mention elsewhere in this disjointed story that Seaview has a solarium, which is nothing other than a large, glassed-in porch that is too hot in summer and I am convinced will be uncomfortably draughty in winter. A useless thing, and not very attractive either since it ruins the lines of the place, sticking out between two sham flying buttresses as it does. Slack has put forward the idea of using it for a conservatory, but at the moment it holds no more than three geraniums, rapidly turning yellow since we don’t often remember to water them.

He continued, “Miss Tilbridge left the place to a niece, and after a few more changes of hands in various wills it fell into Lady Inglewood’s family. Our two families are connected slightly through marriage. But it is not the custom ever for any of my family to let land go irrecoverably out of our hands, and at the end of ninety-nine years the land is to revert to Claverings, whatever about the house.”

“How many years of the lease are up?” I asked. I thought from his wily smile he was about to say ninety-eight, but it wasn’t quite that desperate.

“Eighty,” he said.

It was a frightful blow. That my aunt would play such a low, underhanded trick was bad enough, that I who prided myself a little on my intelligence should be such an easy dupe was worse, but the most severe blow, of course, was that I didn’t own the land on which my house stood.

Before I was required to reply, Slack was back, puffing from a very fast dash to the strongbox where vital documents are kept. She waved them in her hands, pulling off the ribbons and opening them to read in detail what we should have read before. She read aloud the legal mumbojumbo of parties of the first part and parties of the second part, and with an impatient hand I grabbed them from her, to find myself, too, in a sea of heretofore’s and aforementioned’s.

“If you will permit me,” Clavering said, and held out a peremptory hand for the papers. He turned them over to the last page, and there in fine print, though no finer than the rest of the document, to be fair, were the accursed words. “The property held in lease by the Duke of Clavering till January 1,
AD.
1832, at which time it reverts to his sole ownership and discretion.”

He held the page in one hand and pointed out the relevant passage with a surprisingly well-shaped finger of the other. On his small finger of the pointing hand a heavy gold ring sat, catching the glow from the sun in a large emerald. Still when I think of my poor leased land, I think of that pointing finger, like a finger of fate, and the green stone winking somberly in the sun. I read it once, twice, a third time. The words did not change, and I could still not believe it.

“Do you mean to say that, that—
woman
sold me a house that has no land to go with it?” I stormed futilely.

“It certainly seems you made the error of buying a house that stands on land belonging to me,” he agreed with a truly hateful look. Not a smirk but a suppressed smirk, which is infinitely worse. “Tell me, was the purchase, like your ride, a first?”

“Yes, and like the ride, I took a fall, but this is not the end of it.”

He lifted the documents from my fingers. I had snatched them back from him, but he now scanned the papers casually. “Everything here is in order. What do you hope to do about it?”

“Wring her neck,” I said grimly.

"That will help cool your anger, but little else. I have a more practical suggestion to rectify your error."

I looked my question, too distraught to speak, but quite aware of that unnecessary “your error."

“Sell Seaview to me,” he said.

“No!” The response was instinctive. It came out without thought or effort on my part, but it was my feeling: I loved my old sham Gothic mansion. It was like a little fairy castle, a miniature castle on miniature grounds, but it was what I wanted. Inside it was well divided with a few large rooms. I liked the view of the sea, and in spite of her criminal tendencies, I liked dealing with Aunt Ethelberta, too. I had no desire to leave Sussex.

“I know you paid too much for the place, but I am willing to purchase it from you at the same price,” he said reasonably.

I suspected the price I had paid Lady Ing was a good one, though the estate agent in Pevensey assured me it was not exorbitant. Her good friend, no doubt.

“How do you know what I paid for it?” I asked. It seemed the Duke knew a great deal more about me than I knew about him. He knew where I lived when we had met in the spinney, and though I couldn’t remember having a name put to me, no doubt he knew that as well.

“I took the trouble to find out. Three thousand pounds, was it not?”

 
“Yes, it was, and I do not consider it excessive.”

“Considering the unusual circumstance of the leased land, I doubt she would have found many takers, but, of course, you know what it is worth to you to live for nineteen years in a draughty, uncomfortable, decrepit old house."

Every instinct demanded a rude reply to this speech, but it was my desire to ingratiate the Duke to get him to renew the lease for another ninety-nine years, so I held in my anger. “Surely another lease can be arranged..."
I began placatingly.

“I think not.”

“You have no need of it! Belview is
huge.”
Clavering’s home was a spot known to me only by reputation. So far as actual appearance went, I had seen no more than a tantalizing hint or two from behind the treed park. A branch of beech would sway to reveal a crenellated edge of roof standing against the sky, or a glimpse of a turret, or bartizan swelling out from a corner.

“I do not require it for myself, but I require it.”

“What for?”

The black brows rose perceptibly, and a spark of anger lit his dark eyes. He suddenly looked more duke than gypsy. His Grace was not accustomed to account to anyone for his whims. He hesitated long enough for me to realize the question was an impertinence. At length he replied unhelpfully, “For a relative.”