In Sunshine Or In Shadow Page 31

  But more than that, far more than that, and to her shame, Artemis knew that the real reason she did not want to return to Ireland was because it meant she would have to leave Hugo. Since the moment Hugo had kissed her she had behaved in an exemplary fashion, minding that she was never left alone with him and keeping well within the limits of what had previously been, and as far as she was concerned still was, a strictly platonic friendship. For his part Hugo was as good as his word, loving and honouring Ellie as he had always done until that moment of brief betrayal, while keeping the proper distance between himself and Artemis. It was, to all intents and purposes, as if nothing had happened.

  Life therefore began inevitably to resume a pattern not totally dissimilar to the one they had all enjoyed in Cork. Once Emerald and her husband Anthony discovered Artemis was staying on, they gave her the run of their stables, and within no time word had spread through the county concerning her equestrian skills, so much so that many of her newly-made friends started to offer her rides in Ladies’ races point-to-point. Hugo and Ellie went to the meetings where Artemis rode, and as winter turned to spring, on most Saturdays the three of them went racing regularly, Hugo and Ellie picnicking on the grass or in the back of Hugo’s car, while Artemis rode a variety of horses, with varying degrees of success, or, as Artemis liked to joke, with varying degrees of failure, because although out of half a dozen rides she was second twice and third once, victory eluded her.

  Most happily, she was finally able to have Boot sent over from Ireland, and he arrived at Brougham personally escorted by Dan Sleator.

  ‘There was no need for you to travel with him, Mr Sleator,’ Artemis told him, grateful all the same for his care. ‘The horse would have been perfectly all right.’

  ‘’Twas just as well I was with him,’ Dan Sleator replied. ‘’Twas a terrible crossing and all manner of people were sick.’

  ‘Surely horses can’t be sick though, can they, Mr Sleator?’ Ellie asked.

  ‘My very point exactly, ma’am,’ said Dan Sleator.

  Dan Sleator had the horse fighting fit and once Boot had enjoyed a few days acclimatization at Brougham, and Artemis had entered him in a choice of races, it was decided to run him in the Ladies’ Open at the South and West Wilts. There were several good horses entered, winning horses ridden by winning women, so the unknown horse from Ireland started relatively unfancied.

  Once the race was under way, Artemis, who had done her homework, tracked the favourite, a horse called Someone Called and ridden by one of the best female judges of pace, Diana Powers. Four fences from home, with Diana Powers riding her horse astride, compared to Artemis who was riding side-saddle as always, the race looked a foregone conclusion once the favourite was asked to make his move. But Artemis was only biding her time, as she could feel that Boot was full of running, and with two fences left to jump Artemis asked her horse to make his effort. The response was immediate as Boot picked up and jumped past the favourite, taking two lengths off him in the air at the last, to gallop away an easy winner by six lengths.

  ‘Well done,’ said Hugo, helping Artemis down from her horse. ‘That was simply terrific.’

  ‘Yes well done!’ Ellie agreed, patting Boot on the neck. ‘He really is the most wonderful horse. And not only that, I’ve won some money!’

  Artemis smiled and having accepted a congratulatory kiss from Ellie, hurried off to weigh in.

  ‘What do you mean, Eleanor Tanner?’ Hugo asked. ‘You’ve won some money?’

  ‘I had twenty pounds on him,’ Ellie laughed, ’at twenty five to one! Oh my God, that means I’ve won five hundred pounds!’ she ended as the realization suddenly came to her.

  Hugo looked at her, at first astounded, and then suspiciously. ‘All right. Where did you get the money?’

  ‘From the housekeeping.’

  ‘The money you’re given for the housekeeping, Mrs Tanner, is to be spent keeping house, not on gambling.’

  ‘Are you eating badly? Are the servants walking out? Is the house falling round your head?’

  ‘No, but that’s not the point.’

  ‘The point is, Hugo, I budget. Some weeks I don’t have to spend as much, so it goes in the kitty. And today the kitty went on Artemis and Boot.’

  ‘And what would have happened if he’d lost?’

  Ellie smiled. ‘I guess I’d just have had to cut a few corners for a week or so.’

  Later, as Hugo and Ellie were enjoying their picnic tea, Artemis reappeared, looking preoccupied. Ellie poured her some tea and set down a plate of cucumber sandwiches in front of her. But Artemis didn’t touch them. Or drink her tea.

  ‘Someone wants to buy Boot,’ she suddenly announced. ‘A man with a monocle. He’s offered me five hundred pounds.’

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ Hugo said, munching a chocolate biscuit. ‘That was some performance.’

  ‘That’s what this chap who wants to buy him said,’ Artemis replied. ‘He thinks he might have quite a future.’

  ‘You’re not going to sell him though?’ Ellie asked. ‘You wouldn’t even think of selling him, surely?’

  ‘No I wouldn’t,’ Artemis agreed. ‘Never. Not under normal circumstances.’

  Both Hugo and Ellie stopped eating to stare at their friend.

  ‘I haven’t noticed circumstances becoming abnormal,’ Hugo said.

  ‘You didn’t get the last letter from my bank,’ Artemis replied. ‘I’m actually completely broke. Isn’t that silly?’

  ‘How much are you actually and completely broke, Tom?’ Hugo asked gently. ‘Because there’s no need to sell the horse. I can lend you the money.’

  ‘I couldn’t pay it back, Hugo.’

  ‘Very well, I can give you the money.’

  ‘Yes, Hugo, I’m sure you could,’ Artemis said after a moment, which to Ellie seemed like an hour. ‘The trouble is I wouldn’t take it. If I was a charity, you see, I’d have a flag day.’ She gave Hugo a brief but not unfriendly smile, and then started to haul herself up, leaning on Ellie’s shoulder.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Ellie asked her.

  ‘To talk to the man in the monocle,’ Artemis replied. ‘I might be able to bump him up a hundred.’

  ‘No,’ said Ellie, grabbing hold of Artemis by the hand. ‘If you want to sell the horse, fine. And if you want six hundred for him, fine. But you don’t sell him to the man in the monocle. You sell him to me.’

  Artemis opened her mouth to say something, but Hugo put up his hand. ‘You don’t have enough, Ellie. You only have five hundred.’

  ‘No, that’s right,’ Ellie agreed. ‘I do only have five hundred.’

  Artemis opened her mouth again, but once more Hugo silenced her.

  ‘However,’ he said, ‘if Artemis wants six hundred for him, I’m willing to lend you the extra hundred.’

  ‘Thank you, darling,’ Ellie smiled, putting her hand on his. ‘I’ll pay you back.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Out of the housekeeping.’

  ‘Do we have a deal, Tom?’ Hugo asked Artemis.

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘If we do,’ said Ellie, ‘and you sell me the horse, I shall give him straight back to you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I don’t want him.’

  Artemis looked at both of them, then putting a hand on both their shoulders, pulled herself to her feet.

  ‘Now where are you going?’ Hugo asked.

  ‘To tell the man with the monocle,’ Artemis replied, ‘that the horse is sold.’

  But the question of the occupancy of the Dower House remained unanswered.

  ‘It’s just standing there, empty. And please let’s hope it’ll be a good few years yet before I’m required to take up residence there.

  ‘It’s over half a mile from the main house, Hugo,’ Ellie continued. ‘It’s not as if she’ll be living with us, or on top of us. She’ll have her own life, an entirely separate existence. You know how independent Artemis is.’
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  ‘How can she be totally independent, Ellie?’ Hugo asked. ‘She has no money. To be independent you need to have money.’

  ‘The idea is for her to buy young horses and bring them on,’ Ellie explained. ‘We don’t use the stables, so there’s no reason why Artemis can’t keep her horses –’

  ‘What horses? She’s going to have to have money to buy horses, Ellie. And money to feed them. And keep them. May I remind you, your friend –’

  ‘Our friend –’

  ‘Artemis is broke, Ellie. Except for the five hundred pounds you gave her –’

  ‘That’s enough!’ Ellie insisted. ‘That’s quite enough to buy two or three cheap horses at about fifty pounds each, that’s all they’ll cost her, she told me.’

  ‘She’d have to furnish the place.’

  Ellie felt a little glow inside. She was winning. She was slowly but surely getting there.

  For his part Hugo couldn’t help hoping he wasn’t sounding too agreeable.

  ‘I don’t think she should furnish the house, Hugo,’ Ellie frowned. ‘I think we should. After all, it is ours. So we furnish it, and then rent it to Artemis furnished.’

  ‘We rent it.’ Hugo nodded and then shook his head. ‘What do we rent it for?’

  ‘As much as she can afford to pay, of course!’

  ‘She can’t afford to pay anything, Ellie. She has no money.’

  ‘OK!’

  ‘Can’t you even just try to stop saying OK?’

  ‘All right, Hugo! We’ll rent it to her for nothing initially, right?’

  ‘And don’t say right, either.’

  ‘We’ll rent it to her for a penny a week. Until she can afford to pay a proper rent. OK?’ Ellie bent over and put both arms on the chair in which Hugo was lounging, trapping him under her. He looked up at her. She grinned down at him. ‘OK?’ she asked again slowly.

  Hugo shrugged, as if the whole thing was against his better judgement. ‘OK,’ he replied. Then he put his hands on Ellie’s waist which immediately reduced her to a mass of helpless laughter, allowing Hugo to slip out from under her, lift her up over his shoulder and carry her laughing and struggling to the bed.

  ‘OK,’ he said, tearing off his tie and unbuttoning his shirt. ‘You want OK, you are going to get OK.’

  He didn’t even bother to remove her dress, but made love to her as she was, his mouth not leaving hers for a moment, until they lay back exhausted.

  ‘OK?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Ellie sighed, turning and putting an arm across Hugo’s chest. ‘OK. Sure thing. You bet. OK.’

  ‘It’s agreed!’ Ellie said to Artemis, looking into her bedroom on her way down before dinner. ‘You can have the Dower House! OK?’

  Artemis stopped applying a light coat of lipstick to her mouth and looked at Ellie in the dressing table mirror.

  ‘Is that all right?’ Hugo asked her, when they were alone for a moment, Ellie having gone with one of the staff to the kitchens to check a detail with Cook. ‘I mean if you think it’s going to be awkward –’

  ‘I don’t see why, Hugo,’ Artemis replied not looking at him, ‘You’ll probably never see me.’

  ‘I hope that’s not true.’

  Artemis ignored him, and in the ensuing silence carefully sipped her cocktail as if it were her life’s work.

  ‘Actually.’ Artemis put her half-full glass down carefully and then pushed a lock of blonde hair from her eyes. ‘I don’t really know quite how to thank you.’

  ‘By forgiving me.’

  ‘Whatever for, Hugo?’

  ‘You know what I mean.’ He stared intently at her.

  ‘Oh don’t be so wet, Hugo.’ Artemis laughed, with genuine astonishment. ‘You can be such a child, you know,’ she said. ‘Such a little boy.’

  ‘Have you forgiven me?’

  ‘There was nothing to forgive you for, Hugo,’ said Artemis, not laughing any more, just looking at him looking back at her, with anxious and expectant eyes, as Brutus did when waiting for a game. ‘If there was anything to forgive you for, Hugo,’ she concluded, lowering her voice as she heard Ellie returning, ‘I wouldn’t have accepted your offer of the Dower House.’

  That night, Hugo lay in bed trying to work out what Artemis had meant. Did she mean that she thought nothing of his indiscretion? That the kiss which had sent his senses spinning out of control was nothing but a moment of foolishness, an aberration she had now all but forgotten? Or did she mean that she did not have to forgive it, because it was something she had herself secretly desired?

  He turned on his side and punched his pillow up higher under his head in irritation. Why torture himself? He loved Ellie, Ellie was everything to him, his life, his love, his joy. What was he doing even thinking of someone else? Of someone who most probably thought nothing of him, nothing more or nothing less than she did of her Ellie, his wife, the girl so sound asleep by his side.

  She was only two, three doors down the dark and moonlit corridor. Ellie slept so soundly, as she always did after they had made love, so all Hugo had to do was get out of bed, tiptoe along the dark oak floor boards, and knock on Artemis’s door. He only had to knock on her door to find out.

  ‘Who’s that?’ Artemis called.

  And he whispered his name, ‘Hugo.’ There was a silence, while somewhere outside an owl called. Then he heard a whispered yes, a yes to tell him to come in, and as he heard that yes he knew then that the kiss had tasted the same to the girl in the moonlight, that it had also sent her senses spinning out of control, leaving her with no hold on herself or her heart.

  ‘What is it?’ she was whispering, ‘what do you want?’

  ‘I’ve bought you another kiss,’ he said, his hands closed as if over a butterfly. ‘Look I’ve bought you another kiss.’ And she smiled at him, sitting half-up in her bed, pushing her blonde hair which had fallen round that beautiful face away from those bright blue cornflower eyes, eyes open wide with wonder as he came to her side and naked slipped himself quietly into her bed.

  Hugo sat up with a gasp, half drowned in sweat, while Ellie stirred beside him, fumbling for the light.

  ‘Hugo? Hugo – what’s the matter?’ she asked him. ‘Hugo – my God you’re soaking! Have you a fever?’

  ‘No, Ellie,’ he sighed, lying back on his pillows. ‘I must have been dreaming. Yes. I was. I was having a nightmare.’

  While Ellie fetched Hugo a fresh pyjama jacket and a towel, along the corridor Artemis lay awake, her dog asleep at her feet. She too was wondering why she had said what she had. Their lives weren’t some sort of a game, a deliberately risqué after-dinner entertainment which would be forgotten as soon as the participants climbed wearily into their beds. There was nothing to forgive him for. If there was, she really wouldn’t have accepted his invitation.

  And yet there was everything to forgive him for. And herself. Artemis sat up angrily and reshaped her pillows. Brutus growled in his sleep, and Artemis pushed him crossly with her foot. Of course there was everything to forgive him for. Why otherwise was she staying?

  Ellie lay awake with the sleeping Hugo’s hand in hers and smiled to herself in the darkness. Artemis was staying. Not only was she staying, she was going to live at Brougham again. They were all going to be together once more, Hugo and she in the great house, and Artemis over the hill in the Dower House. And Artemis would be able to enjoy Brougham as she never had been able to before, and soon the misery of her brief and miserable marriage would be way behind her.

  Artemis was staying, Ellie sighed to herself as sleep began once more to overcome her. Artemis was staying and they were all going to be so happy. Now all Ellie had to do was find that girl.

  She found her, with no great difficulty, in a neighbouring village, married and working in a laundry in a nearby town. But her husband, an able bodied man, was at that moment without employment. Ellie immediately offered them both a job at Brougham and Mr and Mrs Kemp could hardly believe their luck.

  Not that Ellie ne
eded more help. She wanted Mrs Kemp for a specific purpose, although she would have to create a job for her husband, because Hugo had inherited the house from his father complete with staff, most of whom had been there since the Deverills’ day.

  Artemis, as Ellie well knew, had been openly curious to see how Ellie would cope with running such a large house and staff, but to her surprise found Ellie managing the task with ease.

  ‘Probably because back home I was a servant to my father and brothers,’ Ellie explained. ‘Which maybe helps when it comes to understanding your own servants’ needs and problems.’

  ‘Brougham is a bit larger, Eleanor,’ Artemis said. ‘Or maybe you haven’t noticed.’

  ‘I noticed,’ Ellie grinned. ‘But it’s only a question of degree. I just remember how it was back home and multiply the experience by about a hundred and twenty.’

  And Artemis was impressed. There was no doubt that the staff all liked Ellie and responded to her authority with good grace, whether they were old staff, or new. And there were several new faces around Brougham since Artemis had been forced to sell up. Porter, the butler, had remained, but Cook was new, and there was now no permanent chauffeur, Hugo preferring to drive himself. As yet, of course, there was no nursery staff and several of the kitchen and the house maids were new, the older ones having left when the house was sold probably to get married and raise families of their own. But Coombs the head gardener was still there, as was George Gates the gamekeeper, and Briggs and Hoskins, the two remaining footmen. But best of all, even though when Artemis first arrived back there were no horses as yet in the stables, to her great delight, living in the flat above the stable yard, and a great deal better than he had been when she had last left him, she found Jenkins.

  ‘Mrs Tanner insisted,’ he’d explained. ‘When her and her husband come here, I called to see if they’d be needin’ a groom, and when Mrs Tanner she found out who I was like, even though she’s no ’orsewoman, she insisted I come back here, sayin’ one day, who knows, she said, one day the stables may all be full again. If only of childun’s ponies.’