Minerva Read online

  Minerva

  The Six Sisters: 1

  M. C. Beaton/ Marion Chesney

  Copyright

  Minerva

  Copyright ©1982 by Marion Chesney

  Cover art to the electronic edition copyright © 2010 by RosettaBooks, LLC

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  First electronic edition published 2010 by RosettaBooks LLC, New York.

  ISBN ePub edition: 9780795311109

  For Barbara Lowenstein

  With love

  TO MINERVA

  (from the Greek)

  My temples throb, my pulses boil,

  I’m sick of Song, and Ode, and Ballad —

  So, Thyrsis, take the Midnight Oil,

  And pour it on a lobster salad.

  My brain is dull, my sight is foul,

  I cannot write a verse, or read —

  Then, Pallas, take away thine Owl,

  And let us have a lark instead.

  Thomas Hood

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  CHAPTER ONE

  Up until the winter of 1811, anyone would have described the vicar of St Charles and St Jude, the Reverend Charles Armitage, as a very happy man.

  He had six beautiful daughters and two fine sons. He had a pallid, ailing wife whom he largely ignored, and above all, he had his hunters and his hounds. He was a jolly, robust, shovel-hatted man who rode to hounds in a pepper and salt coat and was welcome at the dinner tables of almost every house of note in the county of Berham.

  Admittedly, Sundays were apt to be a bit of a trial when he took his sore head and heartburn into the pulpit to read the sermon his eldest daughter, Minerva, had dutifully prepared for him.

  But the other days were splendid, taken up with the chase, the gun and the rod.

  His parishioners were used to the vagaries of their vicar, and only a few of the more devout occasionally longed for a vicar who cared more for the word of God than for the word of the Sporting Chronicle and Bailey’s Guide to the Turf.

  He owned two farms from which he derived much of his income. He had turned a deaf ear to any suggestions of using modern methods of agriculture, and that, combined with a succession of quite dreadful harvests, had left the vicar in a difficult financial situation by the winter of 1811. Added to that, his two sons, the twins, Peregrine and James, were shortly to celebrate their ninth year. They were largely untutored, and the vicar was overcome with a burning desire to send them to Eton, which would involve a year for both at Dr Brown’s crammer in the King’s Road, London, first, to ensure that they passed their entrance exams.

  His money seemed to have melted like fairy gold. Had his concern for the boys’ education been motivated by any altruistic thoughts, then perhaps he might not have hit on an idea to raise himself out of the mire of debt into which he had fallen. But he was a totally self-centred man, and he saw the boys as an extension of himself, young bear cubs to be licked into the Armitage image. And so he set about schemes for raising money with all the single-minded zeal of the true egotist.

  His first thought was to pay a visit on his brother, the baronet, at the Hall.

  Sir Edwin Armitage, Bart, looked down his long nose at his brother, the vicar, considering him boorish and uncouth. Social intercourse between the two families was somewhat strained. Sir Edwin had a great deal of money and two proud daughters and a proud wife. He would have severed all connection with the vicar had not his wife pointed out to him that it was their Christian duty to be kind to ‘those poor Armitages’, which, being translated, meant that Lady Edwin and her daughters gained much pleasure from dressing in their best and contrasting their finery with the plain, shabby frocks of the Armitage girls.

  But the Reverend Charles Armitage was determined to get money from his brother, and so he knew he would have to toady quite dreadfully.

  ‘Edwin is a put, Edwin is a snob, Edwin is a chaw-bacon,’ he muttered to the tune of his hunter’s hooves as he rode through Hopeworth towards the Hall, the entrance of which was situated at the far end of the village.

  There was a hard, sparkling frost on the ground. It would have cut the hounds’ paws which is why the reverend was not out hunting. It also accounted for his morose temper.

  A pale, thin disc of a sun, not enough to warm the frigid air, swam through a haze of cloud. ‘I must have the money, I must have the money,’ went the vicar’s litany. ‘Oh, my hounds and horses. Oh, Bellsire and Thunderer, oh, Rambler and Daphne,’ he went on, going over the names of his hounds to comfort him.

  Hopeworth was a pretty village with trim cottages and neat gardens. A sheet of ice like a looking glass covered the village pond on the green, and women in shawls were huddled around the well. From the Six Jolly Beggarmen, Hopeworth’s public house, floated an aroma of beer and brandy and rhubarb. He contemplated dropping in for a glass of shrub to fortify himself, and then decided against it. Better to get the distasteful business over as soon as possible.

  The Hall was a handsome, Baroque, red-brick mansion, built in 1725. To the north and east of it stretched well-wooded parkland. The Saloon into which the vicar was ushered held an agreeable mixture of English, French and Dutch furniture. There were Louis XVI armchairs covered in Beauvais tapestry, and some fine lattice-backed Chippendale chairs. The walls were covered with hand-painted Chinese wallpaper.

  ‘I will h’ascertain whether the master is at ’ome,’ said the fat footman.

  ‘Cockney popinjay,’ said the vicar, but he did not say it aloud. He had no wish to waste time putting his brother’s servants in their place.

  He fought with his temper as the minutes ticked away and his brother did not come. The vicar strode up to the mantelpiece and straightened his stock. He suddenly felt that it might have been better to don morning dress for this money-eliciting occasion instead of an old-plush game coat with many pockets, gosling-green cords and very dark tops.

  A genteel cough from behind made him swing around. Sir Edwin and Lady Edwin had entered the room.

  Both were tall and stately and impeccably dressed. Sir Edwin followed the Brummell fashion, the skirts of his blue coat being cut back to form a square-cut tail coat with pockets in the pleats. The sleeves were gathered and padded to give the ‘kick-up’ effect. His shirt collar was so high and so starched he had difficulty in turning his head.

  He wore high-waisted, canary-yellow, stockinette trousers and thin slippers trimmed with small buckles. His gray hair was back-combed into a high mass on top of his head with curls over the temples. He was as thin as the vicar was stocky. Where the vicar’s face was round and ruddy, the baronet’s was thin and pale. The vicar had twinkling little shoe-button eyes embedded in pads of fat. The baronet’s were a washed out blue colour with a peculiarly blue iris which gave him the blind look of some classical statues of the eighteenth century.

  Lady Edwin was also tall. Her face would have been thin had she not transformed it with wax pads worn inside the cheeks to give the Dutch doll effect which was going out of fashion. This also gave her speech a muffled, strangled sound, which was the envy of every woman in the village with aspirations to gentility.

  She was wearing a high-waisted, vertical gown with a high neck and deep muslin ruff. The hem, which was untrained and fashionably short to expose most of the foot, was trimmed with Sp
anish embroidery. She wore her brown hair short and frizzled on the front.

  ‘Well, well,’ said the vicar heartily. ‘It’s nice to see you, brother … ma’am.’ He jerked a bow in Lady Edwin’s direction.

  Sir Edwin looked out of the window to where the ornamental lake glittered palely under its coating of ice.

  ‘Too hard to go hunting, Charles,’ he said in his dry, precise voice. ‘You must be at loose ends. I gather that is the reason for your visit.’

  ‘Not at all! Not at all!’ said the vicar, nervously, rubbing his large, square hands. ‘I wondered how you went on. How are Josephine and Emily?’ Josephine and Emily were the baronet’s daughters.

  ‘Blooming, quite blooming,’ said Lady Edwin with a doting smile. ‘Squire Radford was saying only the other day that they are the most beautiful girls in the county.’

  ‘Eyesight still as bad, heh?’ said the vicar sympathetically. He did not pay much attention to his own daughters, leaving the eldest, Minerva, to look after the welfare of the other five. But he knew, for everyone had told him, that they far surpassed any female for miles around in looks. Even little eleven-year-old Frederica!

  The bluff vicar did not mean to insult Lady Edwin. Josephine and Emily were whey-faced, long-nosed, giggling nonentities. Therefore, it followed that the Squire’s eyesight must be worse.

  Lady Edwin bridled and would have said something had not her husband motioned her to silence.

  ‘I’ve got a terrible thirst on me,’ said the vicar hopefully.

  ‘Sit down, Charles,’ said Sir Edwin. The vicar sat in a French armchair which groaned under his weight. The Baronet and his wife arranged themselves in chairs opposite. Sir Edwin rang the bell and ordered champagne.

  ‘I say,’ said the vicar anxiously, ‘you ain’t got any of that wine with the yellow seal?’ The vicar detested champagne which he considered a drink fit only for the ladies.

  ‘Very well,’ said Sir Edwin, folding his thin lips into an even thinner line. ‘A bottle of the best burgundy, James. Now Charles …’

  Charles Armitage wriggled in his chair like a guilty schoolboy before the headmaster. ‘I’ll come straight to the point,’ he said, taking out a large Belcher handkerchief and mopping his brow.

  ‘It’s like this. The harvests have been mortal bad …’

  ‘I know,’ said the baronet with a superior smile. ‘But wheat is still fetching high prices. You should have put more of your land under wheat. The little you would have reaped last year would have fetched you more than these acres of Swedish turnips. Then I believe you were experimenting with Indian corn. Not a suitable crop for an Englishman.’

  ‘Be that as it may,’ said the vicar, ‘I’ve been hit hard and am in need of money.’

  ‘Then you must retrench,’ said the baronet severely. ‘A glass of wine, brother. I trust you will find it to your liking. Yes, retrench, that is the answer. May I point out that a sale of your hunters and hounds would considerably alleviate …?’

  ‘No, you may not,’ growled the vicar. ‘I am prepared to do without luxuries. But necessities must remain. I have spent my life line-breeding those hounds and now they’re reckoned the best working hounds in England. They’re fast but they’re not massively boned, very stout, and very sorty.’

  ‘You are a parson,’ said Sir Edwin coldly. ‘You’re supposed to have your mind fixed on higher things.’

  The vicar looked at him with the puzzled innocence of a child. What could be higher, what could be more spiritual, than the sound of a tally-ho! and the sight of the hounds straining after the scent on a wet November morning?

  But he said, ‘I’ve got the boys to send to school, Edwin, and that’s a mort o’ money.’

  ‘I cannot find myself in sympathy with you at all,’ said Sir Edwin severely.

  ‘Ho, you don’t, do you?’ muttered the vicar, pouring himself another glass of burgundy, knocking it back in one gulp, and giving a discreet belch.

  ‘No, because you should have made provision for your family. Have you heard of Aesop?’

  ‘Milksop?’

  ‘No. Aesop. A-E-S-O-P,’ spelled the baronet crossly.

  ‘Oh, some Greek ivory turner.’

  ‘Really, brother, I am not talking about a card sharp. I swear you learned nothing at Oxford.’

  ‘I pulled stroke-oar in the Christchurch boat,’ said the vicar hotly. And then, adding in a milder tone, for he still had hopes of wringing some money from his brother, ‘Go on about this here Greek.’

  ‘Aesop wrote a fable about the ant and the grasshopper,’ said Sir Edwin. ‘Fetch me that book over there, my dear. Listen and learn, Charles. Listen and learn.’

  He proceeded to read the fable of the grasshopper who had danced and sung all summer and then starved in the winter because it had neglected to pile up provisions, while the hard-working ant survived the winter by having the foresight to prepare for it.

  ‘And the moral of that is,’ said Sir Edwin sententiously, “‘it is thrifty to prepare today for the wants of tomorrow.’”

  The vicar listened in bewilderment. He was a true countryman. Insects were insects, birds were birds, animals were animals. They didn’t go around chatting and prosing on. But one thing did strike him.

  ‘This here ant,’ he said cautiously. ‘It told that there grasshopper to go and sing and dance when the poor b …, saving your presence, ma’am, I mean insect, asked for a bit o’ help?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sir Edwin smugly.

  The vicar shook his head in amazement and fortified himself with another glass of wine.

  Then he thought he had it and his face cleared.

  ‘Oh, it’s them Greek ants,’ he said triumphantly. ‘They’re not British. You wouldn’t get your British ant being so clutch-fisted.’

  ‘This is absolutely absurd,’ said Lady Edwin.

  ‘I quite agree,’ said the vicar. ‘So to get back to the matter in hand …’

  ‘What I am trying to point out to you, brother, is that we have made provision for our daughters. They both have excellent dowries and will marry well, and the fortunes that they marry will be added to our fortune. I think I must leave you to face the consequences of your own folly. If, however, you should consider selling your pack …?’

  ‘Never!’ said the vicar.

  ‘In that case, brother, if you have quite finished …?’

  The vicar rose and gathered his dignity about him.

  ‘“And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”’

  ‘My dear Charles …’

  ‘Matthew, chapter seven, verse three,’ said the vicar, cramming on his hat. ‘Good day to you.’

  Lady Edwin’s strangulated voice followed him out into the hall. ‘The only time that wretched man remembers any of his Bible is when he’s trying to be nasty.’

  The vicar rode gloomily out of the grounds of the Hall and turned his horse in the direction of The Six Jolly Beggarmen. He did not feel like company, and so he took his pint of shrub out to the bench in front of the inn, which was empty of occupants because of the cold weather.

  He felt he ought to pray but found he could not. If he prayed anywhere off the hunting field, he had a picture of an anthropomorphic God with a long beard and shaggy eyebrows who was simply waiting up in the clouds for His attention to be attracted to the sinner so that He could send down some more shame and blame.

  So the vicar thought instead about his large brood of children. Apart from the aforementioned twins and eleven-year-old Frederica, there was Diana, twelve, Daphne, thirteen, Deirdre, fourteen, Annabelle, sixteen, and Minerva, nineteen.

  Minerva was the ‘mother’ of the vicar’s household. Mrs Armitage was a professional invalid, lying all day long on the sofa in the vicarage parlour, surrounded by medicines and powders.

  He thought angrily of Josephine and Emily. They would need to have a considerable fortune before anyone married one of them, he though
t sourly. Now, take Minerva for instance. She was a small, dainty beauty. A bit strict. A bit severe. But a beauty for all that. Why, she could get married without a dowry!

  The sun glinted palely on the ice of the pond. The vicar had the feeling that he was about to hit on a solution.

  He was not an inveterate gambler. He had once tried putting a monkey on a horse at Newmarket which had fallen three yards down the course, and since then, he had carefully placed only small sums of money from time to time on those infuriating racehorses.

  He sat drinking his shrub and waiting for that idea which was germinating somewhere in his brain to blossom into full glory. A black cloud blotted out the sun and with it the vicar’s hopes of a solution faded.

  His stomach rumbled. Minerva handled the household budget which meant the meals at the vicarage were sustaining, but hardly exciting.

  It was three o’clock and dinner called. But dinner was to be neck of mutton.

  Then he suddenly decided to call on the Squire and invite himself to the Radford table.

  He should really call home first and tell them. But Mrs Armitage knew of his mission and would learn of its failure and would promptly have a Spasm.

  ‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,’ quoted the Reverend Charles Armitage. He mounted his horse and rode in the direction of Squire Radford’s cottage ornée whose thatched roofs could be seen peeping above the trees on the other side of the village pond.

  The following day was Sunday and the vicar was suffering from having drunk long and deep the night before.

  He stood in the pulpit, hanging onto the wings of the brass eagle, and summoned up the strength to read the sermon Minerva had prepared for him. His mouth felt like the bottom of a parrot’s birdcage and there was a dull pounding behind his temples.

  His daughter had based the sermon on a text from Proverbs which struck her father as being wickedly apt.

  ‘“Look not upon the wine when it is red, when it giveth his colour in the cup, when it moveth itself aright.