Lady Susan Plays the Game Read online

  Mr Burnett stood before her. He had declined a seat.

  He drew out a sealed paper from an inside folder in his waistcoat, making much of the action. Then he put on the spectacles, which he took from a silver case, placed their arms carefully round his prominent ears, first one then the other, all the time holding the paper tightly in his free hand. Why doesn’t he put it down? thought Lady Susan. The desk is near enough.

  ‘I have taken the liberty, your ladyship, to ask two witnesses to be present.’

  Lady Susan gestured assent.

  He went to the door, opened it, and Mr Vernon’s manservant John entered. He stepped forward awkwardly, then stood fiddling with his buttons.

  ‘Yes, your honour,’ he said in a thick voice. Grief or catarrh, wondered Lady Susan. In this damp country they all seem to be drowning in phlegm.

  She expected Miss Davidson, the asthmatic housekeeper, but instead Mrs Baines entered. ‘Get on with it, man,’ Lady Susan said irritably. ‘We are all ready and present.’ She lowered her eyes, ‘Frederica needs me at such a time.’

  John turned his head slightly towards her; Mrs Baines sniffed and looked away.

  ‘Yes of course,’ said the lawyer, ‘only natural. I shall be as brief as I can, your ladyship.’

  He broke the seal and began reading from the beginning, emphasising the legal words and phrases: the ‘last will and testament’; the ‘sound mind’. He found them as comforting and alluring as he supposed the local vicar found the equally meaningless service he’d just read. Burnett was not a believer although punctilious in observance at church. He loved the ritual of all men’s professions. It was what separated men from women.

  So he read slowly, aware he was annoying Lady Susan. He knew this because she was staring fixedly at the portrait of herself, which Frederick had hung over his desk. It was rather lovely, he noted.

  There were a few bequests, something for the servants including John and Miss Davidson, less for Mrs Baines despite her years of service, then the rest to his beloved wife, as it should be. All seemed in order and John and Mrs Baines were asked to withdraw.

  When the door was shut, Burnett turned to Lady Susan. He cleared his throat slowly, a little fearful even as he relished what he had to say.

  ‘But your ladyship,’ he began, ‘there is really – and I say it in great sorrow here – no “rest”, or none to speak of, that is, when everything is, as it were, unravelled, there will not be what one might have anticipated in such an illustrious family.’

  ‘What can you mean, man?’ cried Lady Susan. ‘Do please speak plainly. What are you talking about? Of course there must be …’ She paused, then rushed on. ‘What about the sale of Vernon Castle? Sir Philip paid a considerable sum for it, I know very well. What of that? Don’t tell me the wretched brother of Frederick’s has got his hands on the fortune after all?’ Lady Susan usually avoided expressing herself so vulgarly, but she’d been taken aback. ‘What do you mean?’ she said again. ‘Do speak up, man.’

  She had now twice addressed him as ‘man’ and Burnett didn’t like it. ‘I mean,’ he said making no effort to increase his speed – he had rehearsed this moment many times, the last one only that morning before his shaving glass. ‘I mean that in lay terms – not that I imply that your ladyship would not understand the stricter terms of the law but in view of your ladyship’s desire for haste and absolute clarity, I speak in brief – I mean that the estate is so encumbered with debts, many to a Norwich money-lender called Mr Jacob King – I believe you know the man?’ he stressed the last word as he looked at Lady Susan before turning to gaze briefly through the window where the rain was now sliding down the pane. ‘I mean that there is a preponderance of debts over assets, or that at best they will be roughly equivalent.’

  He turned back to look Lady Susan in the eye. It was the first time that he had stared so directly at her. He took off his spectacles and held them in one hand, ‘Perhaps your ladyship knows better than I what these debts are.’

  Lady Susan rose from the chair. ‘If you are insinuating that I am responsible …’ She didn’t finish the sentence but simply expelled air while her eyes roamed the ceiling and distant wall.

  ‘No, no, your ladyship, of course not,’ cried Burnett. ‘How could—’

  He was interrupted. ‘I have had expenses of course – life in London – but I had assumed Mr Vernon understood what he was doing and was handling our affairs as he ought. A wife has so little to do with money.’

  ‘Do you mean you know nothing of these debts?’ asked Burnett a touch more sharply than intended.

  ‘I knew of some, naturally,’ replied Lady Susan with returning hauteur. ‘In the course of my stays in town I have had to apply to my husband on several occasions – a wife does – but he did not confide in me that there was any problem. He always told me that nothing was too much to do for me.’

  She studied the window pane and sliding rain for a moment while Burnett glanced at her face. He thought he caught a sudden contracting, a hardness unusual to her expression. ‘I never assumed he was beggaring us.’

  Burnett pressed the point. ‘I’m afraid, your ladyship, that the sums of money advanced are considerable and will need to be paid.’

  ‘But surely a lady cannot be held responsible for a husband’s debts. It would be a strange world if that were the case.’

  She looked levelly at Burnett. He is enjoying this, she saw. Let him. He will not see my thoughts.

  ‘Certainly not. But these are debts which’ – and he paused – ‘your ladyship has incurred through your husband’s name and which now fall to the estate. They must, I am afraid, be paid.’

  ‘You sound like the butcher and draper demanding their money.’

  ‘I may do so, your ladyship,’ responded Burnett who had come to the end of the rehearsed part of the encounter. ‘And I’ve no doubt that the butcher and draper will do as you surmise. But the truth remains that there are as many debts as assets.’

  ‘You repeat yourself,’ said Lady Susan. ‘I think we have done enough for today.’

  She rose and Burnett took a step back. He was a short, stocky man, only a little taller than Lady Susan, but it was rank rather than size that sometimes oppressed him. The woman before him was poor, ruined, in worse state than his own increasingly affluent family. But she was the daughter of an earl, if only of an Irish creation, and she had the assurance of birth. He bowed, not quite satisfied with his performance, although he couldn’t say quite where it had gone wrong.

  In the past he had made much of a very distant connection with the Burnetts of Crathies and had a woodcut of their Aberdeenshire castle and sumptuous pleasure gardens on his parlour wall. But, although always a well-bred gentleman and unfailingly polite, Mr Vernon had never followed up the subject, and it would certainly not impress his widow. Yet, when all is said and done, he mused then and now, a connection to a bona fide Scottish laird should count as something before a spendthrift English lady and her Irish title.

  ‘I will leave your ladyship at this difficult time,’ he said. ‘Perhaps she will call for me when the moment is more opportune. I may have some advice that might profit her.’

  The verb was ill chosen. Lady Susan gave him an icy smile, inclined her head and left the room. She rarely needed to be alone but she felt the need now.

  When she entered her dressing room Barton was waiting for her. Usually Lady Susan enjoyed her pert talk, but not today. She dismissed the maid and sat at her dressing table looking at the mottled swinging glass from which she’d pushed back the modest fabric covering. She must think.

  Of course she knew where the money had gone, but she’d assumed there was more to come. She’d thought that Frederick, for all his ineptness in other areas of life, would have managed things better. He’d always been over-scrupulous in paying minor tradesmen whom it was unnecessary to flatter in that way. They could only gain advantage in being known to supply the Vernons, whether they paid or not. If their custom were rem
oved from such people, surely other gentlemen’s families would follow suit? Frederick himself could have spent little. He was no high liver and he had clearly not kept up the house. And what did he and their daughter want with money in the country?

  Certainly they had been rich enough some years ago. They must have been, for she had persuaded her husband to sell Vernon Castle – rather advantageously – to a stranger instead of letting his brother have it for a lower price, so keeping it in the family. She’d assumed that this beneficial transaction would have kept them comfortably for the remainder of their lives. It had never occurred to her until now that the estate might already have been mortgaged. Why had he not told her?

  As an earl’s daughter, Lady Susan had brought rank to the match with Frederick, but her dowry had been modest. ‘Your fortune will have to be your face, Sue,’ her father had said drawing attention as he spoke to his own well-formed and useful body. He’d approved the marriage and written from France an elegantly phrased letter to say so. But privately he told Susan he thought she might have added a decent title to the wealth she’d married for. At the time she’d been satisfied enough with her choice. A willing adoring spouse and money to spend was not a bad bargain for a girl of seventeen who was sick and tired of a country boarding school and with nowhere very obvious to go.

  Lady Susan breathed in deeply and expelled the air. Then she sat up more erectly. She supposed the small legacies would have to be paid to the servants. She doubted a lawyer like Burnett would agree to them being cancelled. In any case they were too little to be significant.

  Well, there were only two routes out of her dilemma, two games that could be played with some chance of winning. She got up, then bent to study herself in her glass. Each must be tried, possibly both together. She exhaled, then smiled at her dim reflection: she anticipated some enjoyment.

  Chapter 2

  Late in the evening, in her corner bedroom with her drawings of spring and autumn leaves on the pink painted walls, Frederica sobbed without the elegance demanded by her mother or the self-control preached by Mrs Baines. Her gasps came irregularly and made her so tired she almost slept between them. When she was thoroughly exhausted she sat motionless, her head in her hands.

  Her anguish had increased once she understood they were to leave Someyton almost at once. All its seasons passed before her eyes as in a magic lantern, while the thought pounded through her that she and her papa had lived through their final spring together. His miniature in a little silver frame hung round her neck: she looked at it and imagined she saw the eyes gently close.

  Those eyes had seen the last blackthorn and hawthorn, the last apple and plum blossom, the last bluebells, daisies and scentless mayweed, the last ragwort, catsear and hawkwood, the last wild daffodils and primroses, the last buttercups in the water meadow, the last forget-me-nots.

  The wildflower names tumbled through her head as a mournful litany. She remembered how her father had smiled at her enthusiasm for plants that rarely struck other girls, the hedge woundwort with its furry or spiky leaves and purple patterned flowers, the marsh hawksbeard with its tight green bud that opened from the stem into the crinkling yellow flower. It was such a transformation that her papa said they should go each day to see if they could catch the very moment when it changed.

  She loved intricate plants, the welted thistle more than the spear thistle, the vetch and agrimony, even the brambles and nettles whose haphazard leaves, like the twigs of the hawthorn, she delighted to capture with her pencil. Her papa had pointed out how the broad-leaved dock opened to reveal itself, pretending it was fiercer than it was, that its spikes were hard when they were really soft.

  Mrs Baines had not joined in their expeditions to the water meadow or bridle paths: she cared little for uncultivated blooms. So the plant words became a secret language between Frederica and her father. He knew the Latin names for most of them and she had seen them in the books they pored over together, like Hill’s Vegetable System, but he never encouraged her to use them. She would be his companion, not his equal: it was a woman’s role.

  That last spring, like those before, they had looked together at a lark’s nest with eggs lodged in the grass, while keeping their distance from the swallows’ nest above one of the barn doors: Frederica had been afraid to enter in case she disturbed them. Years before, when they had nested there, a swallow had dived at her and she had run to find her father. He calmed her. ‘Do you know,’ he’d said, ‘that eggs laid later are more spotted than early ones.’

  The beauty of everything had struck her most strongly only in her last two years, especially the very last. She remembered Vernon Castle a little but it was Someyton that had entered her soul, its sturdy three storeys, the attic corridor where you had to walk bent over, the sloping outbuildings, the little paddock where she’d first ridden Spots with her papa holding the bridle, the lanes and path to the village she’d walked so often with Mrs Baines grumbling about the dirt, the garden seat near the apple trees where they’d taken their sewing for the poor on warm summer nights. It had been close to a small brook, more of a ditch really, that ran near the house with its banks of willows, some pollarded. She knew each separate tree.

  She tried to block out a few of these memories – they were too intense. She wished she could talk to someone. But Miss Davidson would be coughing her lungs out and Frederica knew better than to try to speak to her in these fits. For a moment she thought of going to old Nanny, crippled and largely keeping to her attic room. She’d nursed her papa too and, when little, Frederica had liked her soft lap and silky whiskers. But Nanny irritated Lady Susan and she wisely kept out of the way. Frederica sensed that just now Nanny did not want to talk.

  Mrs Baines, a courtesy title that lady had assumed when marriage seemed beyond her reach, had visited her charge in her room and tutted over her a little in sympathy; then she left. She was sorry for the girl in the hands of such a mother. But Mrs Baines had learned she was to be dismissed and there was six months owing to her, more than the value of the small legacy she was to receive. She had little comfort left for others.

  Having acted quickly with Mrs Baines, Lady Susan felt her daughter heavy on her hands. She would have to be put in a school, presumably in London. There were such places in Norwich but she would be criticised if she so clearly abandoned the girl so soon after her father’s death. Her own old school in Bury St Edmunds had long since collapsed, its proprietor being too fond of stimulants. In any case, London was a fitter place for Lady Susan’s schemes.

  Frederica was old enough to be a parlour boarder but it would be as well if she learnt a few tricks with the younger girls. Schools touted music and art in their advertisements: Lady Susan doubted their use. In any case, Frederica could draw, or so her father had said, and play the pianoforte a little, quite enough for most men – and enough to display the hand and arm, which, Lady Susan noticed with surprise, resembled her own. She needed dancing lessons and instruction in deportment: she slouched and crept into a room like a frightened rabbit.

  Lady Susan could not just now pay the fees a London establishment would expect, but would anyone want her to do so at once? By the end of the first quarter things might have improved. Mr King was taking so much of her estate that he might agree to be useful again. She’d never met him but he’d been courteous in the notes accompanying the bills of exchange. She could try to call on his services once more.

  ‘Barton,’ she said as she prepared for bed, ‘remind me of that establishment where Lady Clementina sent her granddaughters.’

  ‘I believe it was in Wigmore Street, your ladyship. Yes, I am sure it was since Deborah, that is Lady Clementina’s maid, has taken parcels there.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ she said, ‘I think you’re right. I will write directly to Lady Clementina. She will quite understand the case. I believe Frederica would be much benefited by—’

  She stopped, amused: she realised she was rehearsing an attitude. She knew Barton couldn’t stand the g
irl.

  The letter was dispatched and a few days later came a reply with condolences and information. The school was indeed in Wigmore Street and very expensive – eighty guineas without extras, a great deal more than had been spent on Lady Susan’s own education in Bury. But Madam Dacre’s Academy for gentlemen’s daughters had, according to Lady Clem, tamed one of her most unruly grandchildren, so might be worth the sum. The headmistress was obliging enough, wrote her ladyship, but a shrewd businesswoman.

  Lady Susan found the warning timely. Clearly part of the fees would need to be paid at the outset. Could she save them entirely by marrying off Frederica at once? The girl had birth and some appeal – and she was fresh. Manners might be improved in a few months, if never mastered; common social sense would always be wanting, but, if she could be married young, it would be some time before a husband would realise the lack.

  Her mind began to work on Frederica. She would have to seem ingenuous and sweet. When out of mourning she could go for the pastoral look: white frocks and blue sashes, straw hats, ribbons, artificial flowers, that sort of thing. This was fine: husbands and lovers were not caught with the same bait and, while the faux rustic look did not always appeal to the latter, it usually attracted the serious suitor. Collars could be turned on the few passable frocks in Frederica’s small wardrobe.

  What else was wrong? The face was too bland; it lacked contrasts except when she blushed. She must agree to a little rouge. At once Lady Susan abandoned the idea: Frederica would make a fuss and could probably not carry it off. If she would only suck in her cheeks, it would make for contours. Then the hair – it was too long and straight. Well, that could be improved with scissors and tongues and papers at night. It had looked almost passable when Barton frizzed it before the funeral.