The Love Knot Read online

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  CORONET AMONG THE WEEDS

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  (adaptation from the novel by Rosamunde Pilcher)

  BELOW STAIRS

  For more information on Charlotte Bingham and her books,

  see her website at www.charlottebingham.com

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Charlotte Bingham

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Love Knot

  Prologue

  Part One: Stepping Stones

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Part Two: In the Swim

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Part Three: Crossing Paths

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Epilogue

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

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  Published 2000 by Doubleday a division of Transworld Publishers

  Copyright © 2000 Charlotte Bingham

  The right of Charlotte Bingham to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0 385 410565

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  In loving memory of Mopsy, whose gaiety, beauty and charm lightened many a dark creative hour, and who will always be remembered by the author of this book.

  CHARLOTTE

  BINGHAM

  THE LOVE KNOT

  Prologue

  The awful truth was that it had happened, and it was real. And the worst of it was that it could not be given to the servants, or locked away in an attic as a piece of outdated furniture might be. It was there, and strangely immoveable. It. The baby.

  As she stared at her grandchild, the woman thought with some relief that at least ‘it’ was a girl, and as such did not really matter. It might have been a little more difficult to give away a boy, a grandson, but to give away a girl presented really very little difficulty.

  ‘See that it is given a good home. Make sure that it is looked after properly. I have decided that my daughter will be buried here in London. Normally she would be taken back to the family estate, but her father wants nothing to do with her. He has cut her out of his life entirely.’

  ‘You cannot cut people out of your life when they are already dead, surely?’ Lady Angela could feel herself burning with a kind of biblical indignation, yet only her blue eyes reflected her inner fury. ‘We are all deserving of forgiveness. Let him who is without sin cast the stone, and so on and so forth?’

  But this pious reference was lost on her listener who continued as if she had not heard a word.

  ‘Your friend has paid the price of her own foolish misbehaviour, and that is all that can be said on the matter, Lady Angela.’

  ‘Had she been a boy her behaviour would have merely been called sowing wild oats. Had she been a boy Society would have easily forgiven her, if not condoned her.’

  ‘But she was not a boy, Lady Angela, and nor is this poor creature here. You must be not just very young but also very foolish if you expect justice in this world for women, my dear.’

  Whereupon the older woman swept out, while Lady Angela clenched her elegantly gloved fist and raised her eyes to heaven as if she could see her friend somewhere beyond the ceiling, as if she was calling silently to her that, though everyone else might have disowned her in her misery, she at least had not.

  Moreover, Lady Angela did not care how very young or how very foolish she was: she did expect justice, and what was more she was determined to see that at least a little bit of it was shown to her poor friend’s baby.

  Part One

  Stepping Stones

  When you have gone away

  No flowers more, methinks will be ...

 
Yanagiwara Yasu-Ko

  One

  1900

  All the time she was growing up in one of the poorer districts of London, Leonie had no real need to fuel her deep desire to better herself. She had only to pass the door of the women’s workhouse at St Pancras and feel the shiver that ran down her foster mother’s arm into her own small, plump hand to know that not to better herself would be more terrible than she could imagine.

  Once, when Mrs Lynch had cause to actually go into the workhouse on some errand for the vicar – Leonie could not now recall exactly what it was – just the sight of those rows and rows of women seated on hard benches, their plates of stale food in front of them, the look of despair in their eyes, was enough to scare the living daylights out of her. Had they been swinging from the gallows their fate could not, to Leonie’s lively mind anyway, have seemed more terrible, and her foster mother’s murmur of ‘They’re dying a slow sort of death’ was not just a muttered remark to Leonie, it was, without any doubt, a dire warning.

  So much so that there was actually no need for her mother to add, ‘Mark my words, that is a place you do not want to end up, dear.’

  Leonie was the last of the Lynches’ ten children, and quite different from the rest, being tall, and blonde, with unusually bright turquoise eyes. She had been fostered by Mrs Aisleen Lynch when she was only a few days old. The money her arrival had brought into the Lynch household – where not even Ned Lynch’s regular Covent Garden porter’s wage was quite sufficient to keep them all – was most gratefully received. It was not only gratefully received, it was well spent, for Mrs Lynch was a good woman. She might be poor, but she was clean. Indeed her front doorstep positively glowed with the scrubbing that she gave it shortly after her husband left for work in the early hours of each morning, not to mention the whitening that she gave it with chalk. And the nets at her window were washed as regularly as the steps, just as the geranium that sat behind them was watered daily and its bronze pot polished.

  To be clean, to see her children clean, her house polished and food on the table was all that Mrs Lynch desired of her life. Her cleanliness, her freshly chalked step, and her whites, were her pride.

  No-one is so poor that they cannot be clean, was an often repeated maxim among the residents of Eastgate Street, where chalk-white steps were respected and doors had no locks. So were Ned Lynch’s words to his children, said just before he carved their precious Sunday roast: To be poor and be seen to be poor, is the devil all over – a saying which Aisleen herself always only just tolerated, secretly thinking that, for some reason that she could not name, it did not sound entirely nice.

  What Aisleen Lynch had never told Leonie, however, was that as a baby she had arrived at number fifty-three quite out of the blue on a dark rainy night, through the auspices of Aisleen’s friend Mrs Dodd, a nursing sister, who ran a private home very near to, although not in, London’s Harley Street.

  Mrs Dodd and Aisleen had become friends while attending the same convent school in Streatham. Aisleen had married a good man who, through no fault of his own, had been robbed of his business, but who fortunately, by dint of his great height and knowledge of the Covent Garden markets, had eventually been able to find work as a porter, his days spent not in adding up columns of figures and noting sales, but carrying great weights on a tray placed on the top of his massive head.

  Aisleen’s friend Mrs Dodd, on the other hand, had married a man who was the right-hand man of a particular kind of doctor. It had not been long after her marriage that Mary Dodd, with one eye on the housekeeping accounts, had suddenly, and wisely, appreciated the need for a certain kind of nursing home for the daughters of the nobility and gentry who had not made a timely visit to that selfsame doctor for whom her husband worked.

  Upon this realization she had persuaded her husband to invest his already considerable savings in a large house where such unfortunate young girls could come, for a fee, and in the most discreet circumstances deliver themselves of their ‘mistakes’ – those same small ‘mistakes’ to be farmed out by Mrs Dodd herself to families willing and able to bring them up. Naturally this would be in return for a regular and much needed stipend provided by the girls’ families, or the fathers of the infant mistakes, that stipend being well above the cost of the child’s keep and therefore very profitable to the foster parents. Thus was the unfortunate babies’ survival ensured.

  This particular night, and Aisleen would always remember it, Mrs Dodd had arrived with a young lady whom Aisleen had immediately taken to be the young mother in question, until her friend had made it clear that the unfortunate young mother had in fact died in childbirth, and that Mrs Dodd’s companion, as she was discreetly referred to, was none other than the dead girl’s best friend, determined on seeing for herself that the baby was delivered into a properly respectable home, where the poor child might be supposed to have some sort of chance in life.

  It was obvious from the first that the young lady, so extremely fashionable in her bustle caged high at the back, her bonnet ribbons glistening with the raindrops from which her coachman had been unable to shield her, had been from the highest circles, for she moved and spoke with a delicacy and tact not usually to be found in Eastgate Street, where good humour and a need for survival jostled with the kind of insecurity and directness that this young lady could never have known.

  It was not only her manners that had remained in Mrs Lynch’s memory. Used as she was to seeing only drab stuffs and black dresses in Eastgate Street, she would always remember how the light had shown up the beauty of the material of that grand young lady’s dress, with its particular combination of stripes down the side, and spots on the elaborate panniers, not to mention a great spotted bow placed atop the cage to the back of her. And of course her hat had been an exquisite confection of flowers and ribbons, those same ribbons tied beneath her pretty, delicately moulded, if rounded, chin.

  At once, on entering the Lynches’ front room, she had commented most appreciatively on its furnishings.

  ‘Mrs Lynch, you have a very pretty room here. I can see for myself that you cherish your home and your family.’

  At the time the young lady’s voice, to an ear all too used to the sharper voices of Eastgate Street, had sounded exquisite to Aisleen Lynch; as exquisite as her fingers had looked as, having carefully removed one of her gloves, she shook Mrs Lynch’s hand (a most unusual gesture in one so gently bred, to say the least) and smiled at her, sadly, solemnly, her eyes once or twice straying to the baby in the shawl that Mrs Dodd held only a few steps away from them both.

  ‘This is my friend’s baby, Mrs Lynch, but my friend is now, alas, dead. It is a baby girl, and as such would have been completely unwanted by either her father or her grandfather, a man who, believe me, although he is titled is no gentleman. There are very few girl babies from the wrong side of any patrician blanket that are wanted, I fear. Sons are different, they are needed for the Empire, but not girls. Girls do not count.’

  Aisleen had always remembered this particular statement, first for the firm, proud, almost disdainful look that had accompanied it, and second for the astonishment that she herself had felt that any young woman coming from such a privileged background should have taken it upon herself to bother to ensure that the future foster home of her poor friend’s baby was all that it should be. And then that she should have been so readily prepared to acknowledge an illegitimate baby as such, when most young ladies, even should they have found the courage to visit Eastgate Street as she had done, would have evaded the issue, was extraordinary to say the least. But, as Aisleen was to find out, Lady Angela Bentick was a very unusual person.

  ‘I promised her, I promised my dearest friend – I gave her my word that in the event of her not surviving her terrible ordeal I would make sure of a good home for her unborn child. And I asked to come and meet you so that I could be assured that the poor baby will be brought up in a loving home. And now, on meeting you, I am reassured. You are a good woman, Mrs
Lynch, and will take care of her.’ She turned to the baby for a second and gave it a long, loving look before turning back again. ‘She does need a name, though, does she not?’ she said, as if the thought had only just occurred. ‘When I think about it, I rather think her mother was favouring Leonie.’ Again she had turned aside to dab her eyes with a handkerchief, the reality of what had happened obviously suddenly overcoming her, but she continued after a minute: ‘Mrs Dodd, here, is to take care of the rest. Goodbye, darling little baby.’

  She had kissed the top of the baby’s head most tenderly, and then she had fled back to her carriage, and to her very different life.

  The vicar had duly christened the baby Leonie, for her dead mother’s sake, and Mary for Mrs Dodd’s sake, and that had been that, until just this last week, when Aisleen Lynch had suddenly become aware that it was no longer at all suitable for Leonie, being now seventeen and quite finished at the convent where she had, courtesy of an old friend of Aisleen’s, received a free education, to stay sitting around in Eastgate Street doing nothing but embroidering blouses and running errands for her foster mother. With this realization upon her, Aisleen had sat down to write to her old friend at the private nursing home, and then awaited a reply with her usual patience, knowing that such was Mary Dodd’s character, and indeed her supreme sense of duty, that it would not be long before she responded.

  In the event, the reply was followed by a visit from Mrs Dodd herself, grown stoutly fat and wheezing just a little as she sat down in the Lynch front room. Having accepted a cup of Aisleen’s best tea, she gazed appreciatively at the plate of home-made seed cake that her friend was offering her.

  ‘I don’t know that I should, not really. But if you insist.’

  Which of course Aisleen did.

  Tea and cake over, there was a slight pause, during which time Mrs Dodd’s eyes took in the furnishings of the room, Aisleen’s new shawl, and the canary in a quite elaborate cage on a stand.