To Dream of Love

  To Dream of Love

  M. C. Beaton/ Marion Chesney

  Copyright

  To Dream of Love

  Copyright ©1986 by Marion Chesney

  Cover art to the electronic edition copyright © 2011 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 2011 by RosettaBooks LLC, New York.

  ISBN e-Pub edition: 9780795321115

  For Tom and Eileen Kerr

  With love

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter One

  It was a very cold spring one that Harriet Clifton was to remember for the rest of her life. For that spring was to be the turning point in her young life.

  Harriet lived a life of genteel poverty in a large, rambling house on the outskirts of the village of Lower Maxton in the county of Brent. The house was all that was left of the once great Clifton fortune. Her father, Mr. James Clifton. had been an inveterate gambler, and when he had died of typhoid, he had left his wife only a small annuity to go with the great mansion. Mrs. Clifton. always weak and ailing, had followed her husband to the grave two short months later. Harriet and her elder sister, Cordelia, were left in the charge of an elderly spinster aunt, Miss Rebecca Clifton. their late father’s sister.

  At the time of their mother’s death, Cordelia was eighteen and Harriet eleven. Cordelia was a strong-willed beauty, impatient with the new regime of poverty. Cordelia had caught the attention of a rich neighbor, Charles, Lord Bentley. When she announced her engagement to him. Harriet and her aunt had felt sure that life would take a more comfortable turn.

  But Cordelia seemed to forget about them as soon as the ring was on her finger. Her lord died after only six months of marriage, leaving Cordelia everything. She shocked the county by selling the Bentley house and estates, lock, stock, and barrel. She then moved to London and continued to ignore the existence of her younger sister and elderly aunt.

  Harriet was now eighteen and, up until that cold spring of 1811, had philosophically accepted that Cordelia would continue to ignore them.

  The Clifton mansion was called Pringle House, retaining the name of a previous owner who had died the century before.

  Harriet’s aunt did not know how to make ends meet. One by one, the stately rooms were locked up after their contents had been sold.

  One after the other, the servants had been dismissed until there was only Harriet and her aunt living in a small portion of the house while dampness invaded the unheated rooms, and the gardens and grounds outside turned into a wilderness of thorns and weeds.

  Harriet had dug up a strip of the south lawn and planted vegetables and had turned another strip into a hen run. She tried to cheer Aunt Rebecca by pointing out that at least they had fresh eggs and vegetables, but it was hard to be grateful for anything when there was nothing they could do to alleviate the damp cold that seemed to creep into their very bones.

  Her hands were blistered and cracked with sawing and chopping of logs from fallen trees.

  Harriet longed passionately for summer as a cold wind continued to blow from the east, bringing flurries of snow to whiten the tangled mass of what had once been one of the most beautiful gardens in England.

  Pringle House had been badly built. The walls were cracked, and the floors sagged. The kitchen fire smoked abominably, and the drawing-room fire, before it had become blocked with soot, had sent all heat roaring straight up to the roof.

  March the twenty-fifth was a particularly vile day.

  Harriet knew the kitchen fire was almost completely blocked with soot. It was possible to live without the drawing-room fire, but the kitchen was another matter, since this past winter it had served as drawing room and dining room as well as kitchen. Harriet could not afford to pay a sweep, so that morning she scaled the roof and poked various brooms tied together with string down the old chimney. The resultant fall of soot blackened everything in the kitchen. Aunt Rebecca went into strong hysterics and retired to her chilly bedchamber, leaving Harriet to clear up the mess.

  Harriet worked grimly on throughout the morning until the kitchen was sparkling again.

  Looking at herself in the cracked glass on the kitchen wall, she saw to her dismay that she was as black as any sweep.

  The kitchen fire was blazing cheerfully for the first time in years, but the thought of boiling kettle after kettle of water to fill a bath seemed just too much of an effort to the exhausted Harriet. Besides, Aunt Rebecca would be horrified at the very idea of anyone taking a full bath for anything other than medicinal purposes.

  Harriet stared moodily at her soot-streaked face in the glass. Clear gray, heavy-lashed eyes stared back. Her black hair, dull black now with soot, hung in heavy tangled masses almost to her waist. She felt gritty and filthy all over.

  She trailed out to the pump in the yard and began to pump water energetically into a leather bucket.

  Then an idea came to her. There was no one for miles around, and Aunt Rebecca would not quit her room until she was sure the kitchen was clean. Why not strip everything off and scrub down under the pump? It would only take a few freezing minutes, and then she could run indoors and rub herself dry in front of the kitchen fire.

  She went back into the house and into the small maid’s room at the back of the kitchen where she slept—the large bedrooms on the upper floors being too vast to heat. She laid out clean underwear, yellowed and darned, a well-worn woolen round gown, coarse gray stockings, and a clean calico pinafore, then carried the lot into the kitchen and piled them on a chair in front of the fire to warm.

  Then she removed all of her dirty, sooty clothes and placed them in a basket in the corner, ready for washing.

  She took a deep breath. If she stayed much longer in front of the fire, she might lose her courage. Stark naked, clutching a bar of cheap laundry soap, she ran out of the kitchen and into the yard, seized the pump handle, and let out a yell as the first flood of icy water struck her bare skin.

  She soaped and scrubbed furiously until she was sure there was not a single particle of soot left in her hair or on her body.

  It was when she was turning away from the pump to make her dash back to the kitchen that she realized there was a man on horseback watching her.

  Frozen to the spot, not with cold but with shock, she stared up at him.

  He had a hard, high-nosed aristocratic face and a quantity of fashionably cut hair as black as hers. His hazel eyes raked over her body from head to foot, and an appreciative smile curved his lips. He held his hat in one hand, and as she stared at him, eyes wide with shock, he raised it in a salute.

  Harriet gave a little scream and then ran for the kitchen door, hurtling inside and then barring and bolting it behind her.

  She could feel herself turning scarlet with shame and embarrassment, blushing from the soles of her feet to the top of her head. She rubbed herself dry as quickly as possible and scrambled into her clean clothes, then twisted the damp masses of her black hair up into a knot.

  She crept to the kitchen window and looked out. There was no sign of the stranger. She had not heard him ride off, but the thick, shaggy grass was wet and spongy and had probably muffled the sounds of his departure.

  There were shuffling, coughing sounds that heralded the approach of Aunt Rebecca. Harriet decided to tell her nothing about the visit of t
he strange man. Aunt would dissolve into hysterics again, and Harriet felt she could not bear more than one attack of them a day. Besides, the gentleman had probably lost his way and would no doubt think her some servant girl.

  The kitchen door opened and Aunt Rebecca walked in. She was a large, amorphous lump of a woman whose weak, washed-out blue eyes gazed myopically out of a great, moonlike face. Her lank brown hair fell in wisps about her face from under a grayish white cap.

  Harriet was never quite sure which gown her aunt was wearing, because that lady was so set about with brooches and trinkets, shawls and scarves, it was hard to make out what was underneath. She smelled strongly of camphor and woodsmoke. She had an incipient mustache. She was silly, fussy, and complained constantly about the delicate state of her nerves.

  And Harriet loved her dearly.

  Underneath all her spasms and hysterics, Aunt Rebecca was warm and loving. She always declared that Harriet was much prettier than Cordelia, and although Harriet knew that no one could compete with Cordelia’s glorious, golden beauty, she found her aunt’s championship very comforting.

  “How pretty you have made things!” exclaimed Aunt Rebecca, blinking shortsightedly at the well-scrubbed kitchen. “And such a fire! It warms my heart. You are such a resolute girl, Harriet.”

  Harriet gave her a. shaky smile. She was still feeling upset and ashamed.

  Revived by the warmth, Aunt Rebecca picked up the heavy iron kettle, hung it on the idle-back, and swung it over the small, bright fire. The kitchen fire was in the center of a black range. It had an oven on one side, a boiler on the other, and a roasting spit set in front.

  “Do you think,” she asked, “that we might just have a little real tea?”

  “I do not see why we should deprive ourselves,” said Harriet. “We have been saving it for visitors, but no one ever calls now.” Then she remembered the stranger and turned her face away to hide a guilty blush.

  Aunt Rebecca brought down a japanned canister from a shelf and peered inside. “Just enough,” she murmured.

  Harriet and her aunt normally drank tea made from fennel leaves. China tea was kept for visitors. But no one had called for quite some time, and even the vicar seemed to have forgotten about them.

  Aunt Rebecca pulled a chair close to the fire and sat down, waiting for the kettle to boil. Harriet lifted the lid of the flour bin and debated whether to make some cakes to celebrate the unusual luxury of having “real” tea.

  The knocker on the front door began to sound loudly. Both stiffened in surprise and looked at each other.

  “Dear me,” said Aunt Rebecca. “Now, who can that be?”

  Harriet thought of the stranger. She carefully replaced the lid of the flour bin. “If we do not answer, Aunt, then whoever it is might go away.”

  “Go away!” exclaimed Aunt Rebecca, heaving her bulk out of the chair. “My precious child, we have not seen anyone these past two months. I will go.”

  “Let it be the vicar,” prayed Harriet aloud as her aunt waddled out of the kitchen. But Harriet had not really much hope that it would prove to be the vicar. The church of St. Edmund lay in the center of Lower Maxton, which was a good ten miles away. Harriet and her aunt had ceased to attend. Their last visit had been the previous year. They had been badly snubbed by the local county as usual, not because of the shabbiness of their clothes but because of their relationship to the wicked Cordelia, Lady Bentley, who had sold the Bentley estate to a Welsh ironmaster. Even old Lady Humphries had said loudly that she was surprised they did not look more prosperous, since they were noted for their success in encouraging the growth of mushrooms in the county, a cutting reference to the parvenu ironmaster.

  The ironmaster himself eagerly emulated the cruelty of the class to which he hoped to aspire and told his wife sharply to “come away” when it looked as if she might speak to Aunt Rebecca. Harriet had felt she could not bear to see any of them again, and Aunt Rebecca had sadly agreed.

  The vicar had dutifully called at Pringle House, but the man of society was obviously having such a struggle with the man of the cloth, and a painful one at that, that Harriet had told him tartly not to put himself out of his way by paying them any visits in the future.

  Harriet could now hear the sound of voices in the hall. She did not want to leave the security of the kitchen, in case she might find herself in the company of the hard-eyed stranger.

  But whoever had called had obviously been invited in. The drawing-room fire would need to be made up, and, alas, their precious little reserve of tea offered to this most unwelcome guest or guests.

  Harriet took off her apron and smoothed down her old gown with nervous fingers.

  Unlike the more modern houses in the county, the kitchen of Pringle House was not in the basement. She walked along a stone-flagged passage and entered the hall, trying not to notice the familiar bareness of it and the still-clean squares on the walls that showed where the pictures had been taken down and sold.

  She pushed open the door of the drawing room. A brooding, morose, Byronic-looking young man was lounging in an armchair. Apart from a colored Belcher neckerchief, he was dressed entirely in black. His hair was worn long and was of an indeterminate shade of brown, and his large brown eyes were sullen. Harriet judged him to be only a little older than she. Aunt Harriet had perched her bulk on a small chair facing him.

  Crouched in front of the fire and in the process of lighting it was a tall man. Harriet could only see the back of his head and his broad shoulders under a well-tailored blue coat.

  “My niece, Miss Harriet Clifton,” said Aunt Rebecca with simple pride. The morose young man jumped to his feet and executed a low bow.

  The man who was lighting the fire stood up and turned about. Mocking hazel eyes fastened on Harriet. She blushed painfully. The stranger from the kitchen garden!

  “Your servant, Miss Clifton,” he said. He raised an inquiring eyebrow at Aunt Rebecca, who was nodding and smiling in agreement, although no one had said anything to agree with.

  A flash of humor lit the hazel eyes. “I see I must make the introductions,” he said. “The tortured gentleman over there with a dark soul is my cousin, Mr. Bertram Hudson. I am Arden.”

  “The Marquess of Arden,” prompted Aunt Rebecca, who knew her peerage inside out.

  “The same, ma’am. Now, if you will excuse me, I will soon have a comfortable blaze.”

  Mr. Hudson slumped back down into his chair. Aunt Rebecca continued to nod and smile like a large clockwork doll, and Harriet stood where she was. nervously pleating a fold in her dress with her work-reddened fingers.

  The fire blazed up and then settled down into a depressingly smoky mass.

  “The fire does not draw very well,” said Harriet, her voice sounding strangely muffled and odd in her own ears.

  “You obviously do not use this room very much,” said the marquess, fastidiously dusting his long white fingers on a cambric handkerchief.

  He gazed thoughtfully about the room, from the threadbare brocade curtains to the damp-stained walls, and then at the bare boards of the floor.

  “No, my lord,” said Harriet. “I fear we are sadly short of comfortable rooms in which to entertain anyone.” Her eyes pleaded with him not to mention seeing her under the pump. He studied her thoughtfully and then nodded slightly in answer to her unspoken request.

  “Then where do you warm yourselves?” drawled Mr. Hudson.

  “It is of no consequence,” said Harriet, disliking the lounging young man. “I fear we are unable to offer you hospitality, gentleman. So if you will inform me of the reason for your call, I will do my best to be of assistance.”

  “But the tea,’“ said Aunt Rebecca in a stage whisper. “We have tea.”

  “We lost our way to the London road,” said the marquess. “I tried to pull the bell earlier, and when I did not get any reply, I rode around to the back of the house to see if I could see anyone.” He looked steadily at Harriet. “But there was no one in si
ght. I would have left without trying again, but something happened. I regret to tell you that my cousin, believing the estate to be abandoned, shot two of your hens.”

  Harriet bit her lip. She had been about to cry out in fury. She had only six hens, and the killing of two of them was a sore loss. She said aloud, “But I did not hear any shots. Did you, Aunt Rebecca?”

  “I was asleep, more like,” said Aunt Rebecca.

  “Perhaps you were so busy you did not hear, Miss Harriet,” said the marquess, a smile beginning to curl his lips.

  Harriet remembered how the water had gushed out of the pump, effectively drowning out any sound, and blushed painfully.

  “And so,” went on the marquess, “after I learned of the murder, I returned and tried the door knocker instead, feeling sure the bellpull was broken. Here we are to make amends. We have two hens, dead, I am afraid, and a hamper of delicacies that we beg you to accept to show our true remorse.”

  Mr. Hudson sat up. “But that hamper was a pre—”

  The marquess’s steely voice cut across his. “And you will be paid handsomely for the loss of your birds.”

  “There is no need, no need at all to pay anything,” said Harriet. “Mr. Hudson made an understandable mistake.”

  “I was only having a bit of sport,” grumbled Mr. Hudson. “Thought the place had been deserted this age.”

  “I insist,” said the marquess. “Bertram, go and tell John and Peter to carry in the hamper.”

  Bertram Hudson slouched out with a lowering look.

  “I think if I had some dry logs, I might yet be able to build a blaze,” said the marquess.

  “Certainly,” said Harriet with a quelling look at Aunt Rebecca. “I will tell our butler to arrange the matter.”

  Aunt Rebecca emitted faint noises of distress from among her shawls, but Harriet marched firmly from the room.

  She had used up the inside stock of logs for the kitchen fire. She threw a shawl over her shoulders, tied on the apron that she had removed before going into the drawing room, and went out of the kitchen door. The pump stood there in the chilly light, a mute reminder of her indecency.