The Love Knot Read online

  Mercy felt herself stiffening, but continued sewing.

  ‘And that being so I have come to explain a little of your present situation to you, in a way that I know you will understand.’

  ‘You are here to discuss my marriage?’

  ‘In a way, yes. You see, you were very young and innocent before you were married, and it just would not have been possible, or indeed suitable, to explain to you certain mature attitudes which pertain to marriage. But now that you are older, a married woman and the mother of a son, and perhaps even beginning to be a woman of the world, I know you will perfectly understand what I have to say.’

  ‘I hope I shall.’ Mercy’s head remained bent over her tapestry.

  ‘My sister, Lady Violet, as you know, is a very beautiful woman, and when she married your father we were all delighted for her, of course. But your father, as you have no doubt noticed, is very much a countryman, and while Lady Violet enjoys her hunting she does not enjoy being in the country twelve months a year. No woman of spirit does, after all. So she and your father have over the years evolved a modus vivendi – a way of going on that is congenial to both of them.

  ‘Lady Violet performs all her marital duties as required, but during the months when she is away in town, or at the family hunting box, she has, shall we say, certain freedoms, freedoms which are consistent with her position in Society and with her status as a married woman. Over the years she has come to realize that her long association with a certain gentleman is a mainstay of her life. It is not something which either of them is, or ever was, willing to surrender – and so, my dear, as I am sure you have guessed, that is why your husband will not be returning until the last day of the hunting season. They have what you would call a hunting marriage and it would be as well, as I am sure you will agree, to accept this, and their hold on each other, while understanding that it will not in any way affect your marriage to John.’

  At that Mercy had looked up from her sewing. ‘Too late, Uncle Marcus. It already has!’

  Leonie breathed in and out, slowly and regularly as Dorinda finished relating the story as told to her that afternoon.

  ‘I was hoping that you would say she had thrown a glass of wine at the wretch.’

  ‘Would that she had,’ Dorinda agreed. ‘At any rate, she did tell him that her stepmother was not to come to Brindells ever again, and that while she was not able to do anything about her husband she could not be expected, any more than any other wife, to receive her husband’s mistress, even if she did happen to be her father’s second wife!’

  ‘How contemptible it all is! I simply can not believe that they expected her to go on entertaining her stepmother.’

  ‘I must agree, although my own life has been far from straightforward, as you know. But when I was living’ – Dorinda lowered her voice – ‘when I was living under the protection of Mr Lowther I would never have expected to be received by his wife, or any of her friends. Nor would he have wished it. Lord Marcus seems to have implied that Mr Brancaster was expecting to be able to bring Lady Violet to the house in the normal way, precisely because she is the poor young woman’s stepmother. But now it seems that Mercy Brancaster has put her foot down, and I, for my part, think that she was right.’

  Leonie shivered with a mixture of fear and a strange sort of excitement.

  When she had heard from Mrs Dodd that, shortly after the end of the London Season, Mercy had married John Brancaster, it had all seemed so very nice. Indeed all the best wishes of Society had gone to what other people always see as that most perfect of unions – a marriage between a rich older man and a young innocent bride.

  ‘I have absolutely no wish to be married,’ Leonie confessed, suddenly, and rather formally. ‘In fact the more I have seen of marriage the more it has seemed to me to be not so much a knot as a noose for women. What can possibly come of it that is good for them? Except this kind of unhappiness – when a man can put his wife aside on a whim, or take up with his mistress again on another, just as if nothing much has happened – just a wedding and a baby? While the burden of marriage is upon women, surely Society should insist that married men be made to behave as they ought?’

  Dorinda smiled. ‘You are right, marriage can be a noose for a woman, I agree, but it can also be the most pleasurable of, let us say, love knots! Sometimes one is tied to someone not from convention, or the rules of Society, or from religion or any other tie, but simply and solely of one’s own volition, because one loves.’

  She sighed suddenly, thinking of her darling Mr L. She did not love him, of course, that would be quite wrong and inappropriate, but she could not help missing him dreadfully and hoping that he would be back with her very soon.

  ‘But earlier you yourself indicated that it was not wise for a woman to go into marriage in a state of loving expectancy.’

  ‘Nor is it. What one should do is to go into it with one’s eyes wide open, and then afterwards be pleasurably surprised. Afterwards, one can suddenly realize that – one does perhaps love, after all.’

  Dorinda frowned as if she had suddenly puzzled herself, as well as Leonie.

  ‘Well, there we are. It is a conundrum, marriage. A bouquet of great differences that brings at once wonders and horrors, sometimes, it seems to me, all on the same day.’

  Since Leonie was not married there really was very little she could add to this, so she changed the subject.

  ‘I noticed that Mrs Brancaster has a ring in the shape of a love knot, a very beautiful ring.’

  ‘Exactly. Is it not ironical? You see, whatever she says, and whichever way she turns, the truth is that she loves John Brancaster. I could not, you could not, I know, but she does. And it is quite clear that despite everything that has happened, she still loves him. And when a woman loves a man there is nothing she will not do to win him back. But even if she succeeds in parting him from her

  stepmother, I am not sure that he will return to her.’

  Dorinda was pacing up and down now.

  ‘I do not have such a very great experience of men, but I sense that men like John Brancaster are never won back, believe me. Those hard hunting men simply do not understand the winning, or the losing, of a woman. They take each day, or each woman, or the events of each moment, and they react to them. You cannot win back that kind of man.’

  ‘So what would you do?’

  Dorinda looked down at Leonie, thinking that she was almost too beautiful, her turquoise eyes quite round with expectation, her perfectly blonde hair set off by an eau de Nil evening gown lent to her by Dorinda. The gown, although admittedly a little loose at certain points, because their measurements were not identical, nevertheless showed off Leonie’s girlish figure and matched complexion in the most charming way possible.

  ‘I would do nothing. It is always best when in doubt, particularly with the opposite sex, to do absolutely nothing.’

  Leonie looked up in admiration at her friend.

  ‘Of course. Do nothing. You are very clever, Dorinda.’

  ‘It seems to me that if you do nothing in such situations you find that someone else somewhere is somehow forced to do something, and that being so they will be more likely to make a mistake than you.’

  ‘Do you think that Mrs Brancaster will do nothing?’

  ‘No, my dear.’ Dorinda looked sorrowful. ‘I am dreadfully afraid that she will do something, and very soon.’

  Thirteen

  As Mercy alighted from the old fashioned carriage in which she had elected to make the journey from Sussex to Somerset, it occurred to her that her old family home was exactly the same as it had always been and that it was holding out its arms in welcome to her. Yet as she stared up at its old edifice she realized that she had absolutely no desire to be embraced by it because, quite simply, although the house might not have changed, she had.

  Torn between continuing to feed John Edward and settling the matter which now confronted her, Mercy had travelled not only with the baby but with Josephin
e to act as both nursemaid and lady’s maid.

  ‘We will not be gone long, but I cannot leave the baby,’ she told the ever patient Josephine, who far from minding the upheaval was in a state of excitement for some few days before they travelled.

  Realizing that of late she had not been looking her best, Mercy had gone to a great deal of trouble over her appearance. She could not of course become fatter in a matter of weeks, but she had packed the best of her new clothes, which would at least be as fashionable, although perhaps not as elegantly shown off, as those that would be worn by Lady Violet.

  The whole incongruity of the situation struck her forcibly as, closely followed by Josephine, she walked up the steps to the front doors to be greeted warmly by the housekeeper, the old servants and her father’s old dog – in short, by everyone and everything except the person she had actually come to see.

  ‘Papa.’

  At last she had tracked her father down, in the library as usual, reading and making notes, before doubtless riding his old bay hack round the estate, inspecting fences and talking to tenants, and performing all the other duties which he so enjoyed.

  Lord Duffane frowned at Mercy, as if he was not quite sure, this early in the day, who she might be exactly.

  ‘You have not brought a baby with you, have you?’ he asked, suddenly looking alarmed as the sound of John Edward’s crying came filtering through from the hall.

  ‘It is all right, Papa. I have brought his nurse and the servants are not at all put out – in fact they are spoiling him. And besides, you know how it is, one must take one’s babies with one or else they––’

  She was about to make a joke of still feeding John Edward herself and say starve, but remembering how horrified her father was by any natural process in humans – although, strangely, not in horses or dogs – she stopped, and started again.

  ‘They need their mothers so very much in the first few months, you know.’

  ‘Foal at foot, eh?’ Lord Duffane laughed suddenly. ‘Foal at foot. Well, well, and you hardly look old enough to have a horse of your own, let alone a child. Well, well, my dear, Step-maman is waiting for you in the drawing room. She tells me that you are only to stay the night, and then you are off to pastures new.’ He was unable to keep the look of relief from his face.

  ‘Yes, I am off again tomorrow morning, to see friends in Buckinghamshire, and then home after that.’

  Lord Duffane nodded briefly before his eyes began to stray back towards the library table.

  ‘So, there we are,’ he added, lamely.

  ‘Yes, Papa. Or rather,’ Mercy went on, over brightly, ‘here I am, and here you are.’

  There was a long silence, broken only by the sound of her father clearing his throat. He so obviously had nothing more to say to his only daughter that Mercy was forced to say, blushing with the realization of how little they knew each other, ‘Well, I’ll leave you to your work, Papa, and go…in search of Lady Violet.’

  ‘Yes, Step-maman will want to see you straight away, I am sure,’ he said, the look of relief now so speaking that had she not known her father as she did, Mercy felt she might well have been insulted.

  Looking around her old home, Mercy saw at once that Cordel Court was just like Brindells when she had first seen it. Had not this fact been such a threat, she would have laughed out loud as she turned each corner and observed yet another little artifice, yet another Venetian chandelier, yet another use of the same dark red set off by green. The same eye for colour, the same feeling for grandeur rather than simplicity, had been brought to bear on both houses. Both had been touched by the same hand, the same woman had commanded the gilt and the red, the tiger skins and the plush.

  As she pushed open the drawing room door, disdaining to be announced by anyone since she had, after all, been born and brought up in the house, Mercy thought back with grateful relief to the simple, elegant lines that could now be seen at Brindells. It was so important to allow the house to show off its graces uncluttered and unfussed. She thought with sudden pleasure too of the oak in her own little sitting room, the delicacy of the colours in the main rooms, the gravity of the dining hall now adorned only with oak settles and a long table, Brancaster ancestors and rush matting. She thought of all this to take her mind off how much she hated her stepmother now that she was in the same room as her.

  ‘My dear.’ Lady Violet’s dressed petticoats rustled silkily as she walked towards Mercy. ‘My dear, dear Mercy.’ Her voice suddenly sounded to Mercy as silky as her petticoats.

  As she looked up into her stepmother’s beautiful face Mercy thought of her own mother lying in the graveyard. She had not been beautiful as this woman was beautiful, but she had been good, and that, it seemed to Mercy, was to be better and more lovely than this woman with her perfect profile and her haughty demeanour, her worldliness and her false smile.

  For of course once belief in a personality crumbles, so much else disappears. And so it seemed now to her stepdaughter that Lady Violet was false in everything she did or said.

  Lady Violet’s smile, Mercy realized with shock, did not light up her eyes, and her laugh now seemed inappropriate, coming as it so often did after she had said something really rather unamusing. Her hair that had once seemed so lustrous and dark now looked too dark, her mouth too full and red. Her eyes were hard and her voice the same. Everything that had once seemed so lovely in both her appearance and her personality had gone. Worse than that, it seemed to Mercy now that all the beauty she had once thought to be her stepmother’s had never really been there.

  ‘May God forgive you,’ she said quietly.

  ‘I beg your pardon, Mercy. What did you say?’

  ‘I said, May God forgive you, because at this moment, Lady Violet, I can not.’

  ‘This is no way to greet your stepmother, madam.’

  ‘I am no longer your stepdaughter. As of today we are nothing to each other. Worse than nothing – we are each other’s enemies, as must always happen when a woman comes between a man and his wife.’

  ‘I am your stepmother, your father’s second wife, and there is nothing, my dear, I am afraid, that you can do about that.’ Lady Violet laughed humourlessly.

  ‘As far as I am concerned, Lady Violet, you are my husband’s mistress, and the ever present cause of my unhappiness. Do you think I can any longer love or respect you?’

  Lady Violet sat down, but not suddenly. She sat down most graciously, placing herself carefully in her favourite chair, taking time to rearrange her skirts, as if she was entertaining some cleric’s wife and they were about to discuss the arrangements for the carol service, or the harvest festival.

  ‘Do sit down, my dear. Oh, very well, stand if you must. You are not going to tell me that you have travelled, with your baby son and his nurse, all the way to Somerset to tell me all this? Why did you not write to me, if this is what you felt?’

  Looking at her with barely concealed dislike, Mercy replied, ‘Because, Lady Violet, I wanted to hear your reply in person. After all, if I wrote to you, and you wrote back, it would give you time to think about how you should reply, instead of which I hoped to have surprised you.’

  Lady Violet laughed, and for once there was a great deal of amusement reflected in the sound.

  ‘Oh, Mercy, you have always been so stupid! It has been something that I have always loved about you, that your father has always loved about you, and possibly your mother too. Didn’t you think that I would be expecting you? After all, John has been everywhere with me the whole hunting season, including staying here! I sent Lord Marcus to tell you. He did not ask himself to stay of his own accord. I thought it better to break the news to you through a third party. And you did not write because you wanted to surprise me. So amusing of you, my dear. Particularly since you chose to write to me and not your husband that you were enceinte! That was stupid of you, my dear.’

  ‘Please don’t keep calling me my dear. It sounds so – false and awkward. I wrote to you as a daug
hter might, confiding in you in my excitement, because I trusted you, and because – you are right, I am stupid. Only someone really extraordinarily stupid would trust a woman like you to keep a confidence. However, that is all in the past. I realize now what a mistake that was, laying me open as it did to who knows what innuendo, since I was at the same time urging my husband to stay away. I will not try to imagine what reason you gave to my husband for my not wanting him to return to Brindells at that time. It does not really matter now. One thing I must ask you – does my father know of your arrangement with John?’

  ‘Your father does not know anything that he does not want to know. He knows that I am happy, and he is happy. He is too intelligent to wish to know anything that might come between us. We are perfectly happy, and we always have been, and he knows that I intend that we shall remain so. That is your father’s way. Unlike you, dear Mercy, he is clever. He chooses not to fight the world and its ways, and I am quite sure that he will never do anything to hurt or upset me.’

  Mercy sat down, suddenly defeated. She had meant to stand up to this woman who had taken not just her husband from her, but his love, and yet here she was, her knees giving way, feeling faint and sick instead.

  Her mind had become a blank. The shock of being told that her own father accepted the situation in which his only daughter found herself, that she would not be able to turn to him, was more terrible than the shock of finding out that John had resumed his long standing love affair with Lady Violet.

  Mercy tried to marshal her thoughts, but for a minute found that she could not. It seemed that the complication of her situation had indeed rendered her momentarily mindless. At last, as the silence around her seemed to grow, and she felt her stepmother watching her with a mixture of amusement and contempt, thoughts began to form themselves again, and she took herself back to the beginning, to her step-uncle’s visit, and his revelation. While Lord Marcus had been under her roof she had felt so brave, so determined to right matters, to stand up to her stepmother, to bring John back to Brindells where he would become once more the old John, her darling friend and lover, the man who had been her whole universe.