Louise Allen - Regency Surrender - Passion And Rebellion

She went to the study while Adams made his stately way in the other direction to see to the tea things. There was quite a pile of correspondence piled up on her desk. Hours’ worth of work.

She sighed and went to the window, which looked out over her garden. She hadn’t come in here because she was keen to put her nose back to the grindstone. It was just that she’d made this room her own, since Aunt Georgie’s death. She’d moved the desk so she could see out over the gardens by merely lifting her head. She’d had the walls painted a light, creamy colour, pretty new curtains hung and even put up some watercolours she’d purchased herself, whereas she hadn’t got round to doing anything about the gloom that pervaded the morning room. And she’d got the strangest feeling that the room would disapprove of her jaunt to the Continent. That it would gloat at her, too. What good had it done her to go abroad? The solid, heavy furniture would imply. Or buying new clothes, and going dancing and taking a lover? She’d still ended up having to come back alone. More alone than before, since even Fenella had abandoned her. Fenella, the nearest thing to a friend she’d ever had.

And yet...all those ledgers lining the shelves and the correspondence stacked neatly on the desk reminded her that her life still had some purpose. Within those reports lay the livelihood of hundreds of workers. The decisions she made regarding them would affect the prosperity of swathes of Lancashire and the Midlands.

It was probably coincidence that at that moment the sun managed to break through the heavy pall of cloud hanging over the scenery, making the damp shrubbery glisten as though covered with hundreds of tiny jewels. At that exact same moment Amethyst saw a ray of light of her own.

Towards the end of her aunt’s life she’d begun to liken her to a dragon, zealously guarding her hoard. She’d accumulated great piles of money simply for the sake of having it. But it had never made her happy. On the contrary, she’d grown increasingly fearful that someone would find out about it, then try to steal it from her, one way or another.

She turned round and stared at the piles of paperwork lying on her desk. She didn’t need to follow blindly in Aunt Georgie’s footsteps. She didn’t need to carry on amassing more and more wealth, for its own sake. She might remain a spinster, secretly running a vast financial empire, but she could do it in her own way. She’d already made a start, she realised, by expanding into France, which would mean increasing output in the manufactories she had, rather than extracting as much profit from one, in order to raise capital to buy the next one, the way her aunt had. Which meant she could start looking after the workers a bit better. She could found schools for the workers’ children and organise some kind of welfare fund for the sick, and—

Adams interrupted her train of thought by knocking on the door and informing her that she had a visitor.

‘Already?’

‘Mrs Podmore,’ he said as though that explained it.

‘Oh, dear lord,’ she groaned, laying her forehead against the window.

‘Shall I tell her you are too tired to receive anyone just yet,’ ventured Adams, ‘having so recently returned from such a long journey?’

‘It is tempting, but, no.’ She sighed. ‘The wretched woman will only call back, again and again, until she’s said whatever it is she wants to say. Or ambush me in the high street, or on the way back from church. So I may as well get it over with by taking the tea you were going to bring me, with her.’

If Adams was surprised to be on the receiving end of such a frank speech, he betrayed no sign of it. Merely nodded his head and offered to take the tray she’d been awaiting into the front parlour.

Into which she had not wanted to go, not just yet.

Two birds with one stone, Amethyst muttered to herself as she opened the door to the formal gloom of the parlour and walked in.

‘My dear, is it true?’

Trust Mrs Podmore to ignore the convention of commencing a visit with polite enquiries after her health, and so on, and launch straight into the matter that really interested her.

‘I heard that dreadful Mountsorrel woman has run off and left you. After all you have done for her. The ingrate!’

‘How on earth has such a rumour managed to reach your ears?’ Amethyst went to the chair opposite Mrs Podmore and reached for the teapot. ‘I have only been back five minutes!’

‘But she hasn’t come back with you, has she? I had it from...the most impeccable source that it was quite another person who alighted from the carriage with you outside your doorstep earlier. A quite inferior-looking person—yes, thank you, I will have one of these cherry slices—who promptly got on the very next stage back to London. You simply must have your cook give me the receipt for my cook. Not that she will make them half so moist, I dare swear. She will leave everything baking until it’s done to a crisp. But is it true?’

Though Amethyst was sorely tempted to say she could not possibly know if it was true that her cook burned everything to a crisp, she refrained. She knew exactly what Mrs Podmore wanted to find out.

Which was what had happened to Fenella.

‘The rumour that Mrs Mountsorrel has run off? Absolutely not.’

‘But she is not here, is she?’ Mrs Podmore looked round the room as though she might spy Fenella lurking in some shadowy corner, the way she’d always done when one of the doyennes of Stanton Basset had come calling.

‘Indeed not,’ replied Amethyst calmly, adding a dash of milk to both their cups.

‘Well, where is she, then? Not—’ Mrs Podmore sat forward, her eyes brightening ‘—not suffered some terrible accident, I hope?’

‘Oh, no,’ replied Amethyst, dashing Mrs Podmore’s hopes. ‘In fact, quite the reverse.’

‘The reverse?’

Amethyst took a sip of tea, deliberately leaving her visitor trying to work out what could be the reverse of a terrible accident. Only when Mrs Podmore’s face betrayed a state of complete bewilderment did she relent.

‘She has remarried.’

‘No!’

‘Yes. The Comte de Quatre Terres de...’ She wrinkled her brow in concentration. How irritating. The one time his titles might have come in useful, she could only recall a small part of one of them. ‘Well, I forget quite where. A French count, anyway.’

‘Well, I never.’ Mrs Podmore set her cup down in its saucer with a snap. ‘However did a person like her come to rub shoulders with a French count?’

‘Oh, didn’t you know?’ She widened her eyes in mock surprise. ‘Fenella is very well born.’ Though she hadn’t welcomed Mrs Podmore’s visit, now the wretched woman was here, she might as well put her to good use. To set the record straight.

‘She made a poor choice of husband the first time round, it is true. A man who left her destitute and estranged from her family. But she is exactly the kind of person who should be rubbing shoulders with a French count. Not that we knew he was anything of the sort when we met him. I...’

She’d been about to say she’d hired Monsieur Le Brun as their courier. But once Mrs Podmore knew of it, it would be all over Stanton Basset, and from there the county, and who knew where else, within days. And he hadn’t wanted anyone to know about his mission. He’d taken her into his confidence. And she didn’t, she realised, want to break faith with him. It would be...well, a perfectly horrid thing to do. He’d probably exaggerated the danger he might be in, should anyone know who he really was, but she couldn’t contemplate exposing him to even the possibility of coming to harm. And it wasn’t just because she couldn’t bear to think of Fenella being widowed a second time. Especially not through something she’d said, or done.