Marrying the Mistress Page 4

  * * *

  That evening, however, my thoughts were in turmoil, for although my contacts with Lord Winterson had always been as brief as I could make them, this was the first time he and I had spoken about what had gone before, about his claim to Jamie, or about my feelings on the matter. As long as Linas lived, the subject had been studiously avoided, and now the impromptu unveiling had shaken me, if only because I had believed until then that he and Linas were alike in refusing to discuss things they found too uncomfortable. I had been proved wrong.

  Only a day after his brother’s funeral, Winterson had brought out our shameful secret for its first airing, along with the reason for it and the well-planned result of it. My Jamie. He was right: I was angry, not because I was mistaken about his motives—for those I knew by then—but because he had known how easily I would give myself to him that night, repeatedly, willingly, and with little conscience. He had known, and my pride was wounded to the quick that all our mutual antagonism had been so easily suspended in the face of a temptation like that. How shallow he must think me. How disloyal. How easy.

  What he would never know, though, was that I had fed off that experience since it happened, savouring it every night through each amazing phase, knowing that it would never be mine again. And since he had been unconvinced of my dislike of him before the event, I must of necessity try harder to convince him of it afterwards. His accusation about keeping Jamie at a distance from him was a part of my strategy but, with him now as Jamie’s guardian, I would find that more difficult, thanks to Linas.

  Chapter Two

  Thanks also to the weather, that part of my plan held up well when all the traffic in and out of the city was stopped for more than a week until men could shovel paths through the deep drifts, allowing access to the suburbs. We heard reports of farmers losing sheep, of snow burying hedges and cottages, trapping the mail-coach miles away with all its passengers, and the drowning of some young lads who had played upon frozen ponds. Fresh falls of snow added more depth to the fields each morning and broke branches off trees, the dropping temperatures killing everything that was too old, frail or poor to keep warm. The thermometer in Linas’s hall registered thirty degrees Fahrenheit, and a few days later we had twenty degrees of frost. I had never experienced such cold.

  All through the freeze, my daily visits to Stonegate continued, partly to check on the remaining servants and partly to mentally mop up what was left of the essence pervading each room. In one way I had to be thankful that his suffering had ended at last, for I had not found it easy to watch him die and know that there was no way of stopping it happening. Jamie’s birth had done more than anything to extend the reprieve, but Winterson had been right to suggest that, when his brother’s illness began to distress the little fellow, a move to Abbots Mere would be best.

  So I’d had a chance, at the end, to spend more time with Jamie, to begin some small rearrangements of our life in preparation for the future, to involve myself more with the thriving dressmaking business, to make another buying trip to Manchester and to pay an extended visit to my family without having to account for our absence.

  Even so, I felt the gaping hole in my life where my Linas had been for, although we had not been lovers in the true sense for years, we had shared a real need for each other that was not wholly material, but emotional and spiritual as well. We never actually spoke of it: he was not good at speaking of love, and any attempt on my part only embarrassed him. But we were aware of our need for each other, especially so since Jamie’s appearance, and I was not foolish enough to end that prematurely when I knew the end would come soon enough. Had I remained childless, I might have thought differently, but I could not take a gamble when there was the son of a noble house to care for.

  The River Ouse that brings boats up to the York warehouses froze all river traffic to a standstill, offering a quicker way to cross without using the bridge or the ferry. Those who could skate had a merry time of it, and Jamie’s nurse and I took him there, astonished by his pluck and persistence.

  While Linas was alive, the natural tendency had been for everyone to compare him to the one he called papa, but by three years old his sturdy little frame and bold wilful nature, dark eyes and thick curly hair indicated characteristics that I was able to identify only too easily. Fortunately, my own dark colouring disguised the truth, but then, that must also have been taken into account at the outset, I supposed. It was so clever of them.

  The nine seamstresses in the sewing room were loath to return home each evening during the freeze when the conditions at work were so much more comfortable than their own. Remembering how I too had been one of them, fourteen years old with only my clothes to my name, how Prue had sheltered and fed me, I tried to do the same for them, many of whom had worked there longer than me. Oh, she had worked me harder than hard to make it worth her while, being a canny Yorkshire woman, but I had not resented it, nor did the girls appear to resent me moving up the ladder rather faster, so to speak. Now, Prue Sanders and I were partners in the business, having expanded sideways into the house next door to the Assembly Rooms. A perfect situation, if ever there was one.

  My own house was placed diagonally across the road, so convenient for us both especially during those exceptionally cold weeks when the ice seemed to creep into our veins. All our stores of potatoes froze solid. Few people could reach the mill for flour, nor could the miller use his wheel, sending up the price of bread accordingly. Fish was locked under the ice and people had to delve earlier than usual into their reserves of dried and pickled foods, feeding cattle with precious hay.

  I did better than most in that respect, for as soon as a narrow passage was cut through the drifts, two pack-ponies and men arrived at my kitchen door having trekked from Abbots Mere at their master’s command. Into the kitchen were carried sacks of flour, oats and barley, chickens and geese, a brace each of pheasant and grouse, rabbits and a hare, baskets of apples, pears and plums, butter and cheeses, eggs and half-frozen milk, a half-carcass of lamb, hams, and trout packed in ice, all piled on to the table while cook stood with jaw dropping. I saw this gift as an answer to my refusal to accept a loan. For all our sakes, I was bound to accept this.

  Gulping down beakers of mulled ale and wedges of fruit cake, the men would give no more information than, ‘Compliments of Lord Winterson, ma’am. And ye’re to let him know when you want some more. He hunts most days.’

  ‘What, on horseback? In this snow?’

  ‘Usually on foot, ma’am.’

  Jamie jumped up and down at the end of my hand. ‘Oh, can I go too? I go on foot with Uncaburl?’

  ‘Nay, little ’un,’ said one of the men, replacing his woollen hood, ‘tha’d be mistekken fer a rabbit.’

  ‘Would I, Mama?’ said Jamie, looking worried.

  I lifted him into my arms. ‘No, sweetheart. Your ears are much too short to be mistaken for a rabbit. But the snow is too deep. Now we must say thank you to the men and let them go. It’s starting to snow again.’

  I sent my thanks to ‘Uncaburl’, thinking how ironic it was that food was more available to him out in the country than it was to me here in the town. Winterson’s revolutionary farming methods would see him through any crisis. According to Linas, Abbots Mere had never produced so much since his brother took it over. In truth, I had started to worry about what my own family would suffer if the freeze continued much longer, living several miles from York and completely cut off from supplies.

  Perhaps I exaggerate. No, they were not completely cut off, only in the sense that they were invisible to all intents and purposes, living in hiding in a deserted village between York and our old home town of Bridlington on the east coast. There, the North Sea hurls itself at the cliffs in easily provoked anger.

  For several years, my perceptive partner, Prue Sanders, withheld all questions about my family and why I was cut adrift from them. When the time was ripe, she knew I would take her into my confidence. So it was after I had borne Jamie
and gone into partnership with her, extending the shop to twice its size, that I felt she was owed some kind of explanation as to why a woman like me had had to look for work as a lowly seamstress in York.

  She was not the kind of woman to express astonishment; it was as if she had already guessed parts of the story, reversals of fortune being no new thing in those uncertain war years. When I told her my father had been mayor of Bridlington, she simply nodded and carried on pinning a gathered skirt on to a bodice. ‘Mm…m. Wealthy?’ she mumbled, without looking up.

  ‘He was a merchant. A ship owner, and Customs Collector.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said in the kind of voice that expects the Customs Collector to be up to some shady business, as a matter of course. ‘Smuggling, was he?’

  Her assumption was correct, of course, for every villager along the North Sea coastline had a hand in the ‘Free Trade’, and few could afford not to be involved in the carrying, the hiding, the converting of boats, the warning systems, not to mention the putting-up of money to buy the goods from northern France and Flanders. The new French aristocracy led European fashions, and all things French were much in demand, imports that were taxed so highly by the English government that smuggling became a kind of protest against the unaffordable import duties.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He got caught. Informed on by a so-called friend.’

  ‘Nothing new there, then,’ she said, pinning. ‘Good rewards.’

  ‘Yes, it was the Customs Controller who shopped him for half the value of the contraband and five hundred pounds extra. Father wouldn’t accept the man’s offer to marry me, so that was how he took his revenge.’

  ‘And did you want him?’

  ‘Lord, no, Prue. I was fourteen and he was thirty-something.’

  ‘So your father was arrested. He’d not be found guilty by a local jury. They never are.’ She was so matter of fact. So dispassionate.

  ‘No, but he used a firearm, Prue.’

  The pinning stopped as she straightened up to look at me. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘That’s serious. That’s a hanging offence. Confiscation of property. The works. Is that how you came to be…?’

  I remembered those weeks when the world turned upside down for our family, how my father was dragged off by the local militia to the gaol at York. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘More or less. But his friends from Brid rescued him and hustled him away to Foss Beck Common. My mother and the rest of us joined him there, but he died soon after.’

  ‘Foss Beck?’ Prue said, taking the last pin from between her lips. ‘Is that where they are? I always thought…’

  ‘Yes, I know you did. I’m sorry I deceived you, but it’s not a story to boast of, is it? It’s easier to call Brid home than a deserted village. Linas doesn’t know about what happened. No one does.’

  ‘Aye…lass!’ she said, sitting down at last. It was unusual for her hands to be idle. ‘Dear, oh dear! You lost your father too? And your home?’

  ‘He was wounded, but he kept it quiet. It seems so absurd that, only weeks earlier, he could have afforded the best attention in England. My mother has never quite recovered from the shock of it all, so it fell to me and my two brothers to survive on what we could find. We have a French relative who lives with us too, and he’s been very good. We have a few servants to help out, and friends from Brid brought us food and bedding and tools. Even hens and goats. We managed.’

  ‘I didn’t think any of the houses at Foss Beck were still habitable.’

  ‘The manor house has been half-ruined for centuries since the plague killed everyone off, but we manage to live in half of it.’

  ‘And there’s no chance of returning to Brid?’

  ‘My brothers were nine and eleven, and I was fourteen when we went into hiding, old enough to be arrested as substitutes for my father’s crimes. It’s a risk we daren’t take, Prue. Not even after all these years.’

  ‘So that’s when you came looking for work in York. I see.’

  ‘While I still looked half-respectable. Sewing was one of the things I could do to earn money. You must have seen in me something you could use.’

  ‘Yes. Your skills, and the fabrics you brought in each month.’ Picking up a bobbin of tacking-cotton, she pulled off a length and snipped it with her teeth. ‘I’ve never asked where it came from, Helene, and I don’t intend to ask now. If I don’t know, I can’t tell any lies, can I? Where did I put my needle?’

  ‘On your wrist.’ She wore a piece of padded velvet like a pincushion around her wrist. With Pierre, our French émigré relative acting as a go-between, and me not asking any questions about the source of his merchandise, everything he obtained for us was passed straight into the dressmaking business, the only one in York at that time to sell fabrics and designs too. The money from the bales of muslins and lace made it a lucrative trade that allowed me to supplement the poor wage I had earned and to take money and goods back to my family. Had it not been for Pierre and his French connections, we would certainly have starved. Prue must have known how the precious goods were obtained, and our customers must have guessed. My only thought was how to keep myself and my family alive.

  ‘Yes…well,’ she went on, threading her needle in one quick move and rolling a knot between finger and thumb, ‘you’ve been a godsend to me, Helene love. Not just the fabrics, though I’ll not deny they’ve done a lot to help things along. Your business ability, for one thing. Your looks, for another. Your style. Your knowledge of French too. And I know how hard it’s been for you, though I don’t know what your ma would say about how hard you’ve had to work. Does she know?’

  ‘That I’ve had to sell myself?’

  ‘Mmm,’ she said, rippling the needle through the gathers.

  ‘No, Prue. She doesn’t. The boys do, and Pierre. But beggars cannot be choosers, can they?’

  ‘No, love. You’ve had to grow up rather fast, haven’t you? But it’s not made you bitter, has it?’ The needle delved and pulled up, finding its own rhythm.

  ‘Yes, it has,’ I said.

  The needle stopped in mid-air as she looked up at me. ‘Then don’t let it,’ she said. ‘Regretting is a waste of time. What’s done is done. You have a man, and a child, and a partnership in this, and youth, beauty, and more common sense than most women of your age. So, you’ve got responsibilities.’ The needle began again. ‘Well, most of us have, one way or another. Nothing stays the same, Helene. Believe me.’

  ‘I do believe you,’ I whispered.

  Things would not stay the same. For one thing, I was determined that my infant would not suffer the same deprivations I’d suffered. Little did I know then how his future would pass out of my hands with such finality, nor did I fully appreciate the wisdom of Prue’s advice about my bitterness.

  Lowering Jamie to the ground, I took him by the hand and led him back to the warm kitchen where the piles of food were being sorted by cook’s eager hands. He stroked the hare’s soft fur and spoke into its huge reproachful eyes. ‘Sorry, hare,’ he whispered. I showed him the intricate pattern of the pheasant’s feathers and the long banded tail that I would save for the millinery girls. ‘I want to see Uncaburl,’ said Jamie, sadly.

  ‘Yes, love. But you saw Uncle Burl only last week, and the snow is very deep. I don’t think our horses would like it.’

  He barely understood. ‘We could go to see Nana Damzell, then?’

  Damzell Follethorpe was my mother, who had not seen him for over a month and Jamie now able to talk so well, I dared not take the risk, with Winterson being a Justice of the Peace and Jamie so willing to chatter about all he knew. ‘Soon, darling,’ I said.

  ‘She’d like some of this, wouldn’t she, Mama?’

  ‘Yes, love, she certainly would.’ The same thought had passed through my mind too, but I could not see how to get it there.

  Mrs Neape, my cook, understandably not wishing to see the supplies dwindle so soon, had the answer. ‘Don’t you worry, young man,’ she said. ‘This lot will stay frozen s
olid down in the cellar for weeks. Then you can take some of it to Bridlington to your Nana Damzell.’

  It was where all my household believed my family to be living, about forty miles away on the coast. Foss Beck was less than half that distance, and the only person ever to accompany us there was Jamie’s formidable nurse, Mrs Goode, who would not have disclosed the smallest detail of my secret. She had once been a man’s mistress, too. ‘As soon as the snow begins to melt,’ I promised, ‘we shall go. What shall we take her?’

  ‘Eggs. She likes duck eggs, Mama.’

  That would be like taking coals to Newcastle. They had hens, ducks and geese roaming freely, and no shortage of eggs. But bread would be a problem.

  ‘Tell me when you’re going and I’ll make you some of my meat pies,’ said Mrs Neape, hoisting the side of lamb on to her padded shoulder. She would not, however, see any need to send loaves of bread.

  * * *

  With little improvement in the weather, the reading of Linas’s will was delayed for almost three weeks and, even then, several of the family were missing, so Mr Brierley told me, owing to the impassable roads. It was he who called to say that he hoped I would not mind hearing at second hand what concerned me, since that was how several of the others would receive news of their endowments too.

  What they were endowed with I have no idea, never having shown much interest in what Linas owned, or whether he relied on his wealthy father for an allowance, as many sons did. Even when they were twins, second sons rarely prospered as well as their elder siblings in the property stakes, although I had no doubt that Linas would never have been left wanting. As his mistress, I was probably the most expensive of his few extravagances, albeit not as costly as some I’ve heard of. I had, after all, reorganised my own business after Jamie’s birth, and thank heaven for my foresight, Mr Brierley having no outstandingly good news to offer me that day.

  At first, I could hardly believe what I was hearing.

  That Linas wanted me to continue living on Blake Street came as a great relief, though no real surprise. Mr Brierley’s assurance was quite clear that the house would be made available to me for as long as I wanted it. But when he kept his balding head bent while unnecessarily sorting papers out across the polished table, I guessed that he was seeking not figures, but a kind way to break the news. It came very quietly and deliberately.