The Second Mrs Darcy

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Mr. Dixon had travelled to India as well, and on the very vessel that Octavia had just sailed back to England on, the Sir John Rokesby.

“A commodious, comfortable vessel, and with a good turn of speed under a good captain.”

Octavia was fascinated by what he had to say, and was soon questioning him eagerly about styles of architecture now in fashion—Mr. Dixon wasn’t enthusiastic about the Gothic, not much call for marble in those kind of houses, and who in their right mind would choose to set up home in a place that looked like it was out of the Middle Ages? “Give me a modern style any day, elegant lines, spacious, light, that’s the kind of house a gentleman and his family can live in.”

In no time at all, they had reached the first stage, at the Salisbury Arms in Barnet, and as soon as the coach turned into the yard, the passengers tumbled out to try to swallow a cup of coffee in the few minutes allowed to them while the horses were changed.

“I’ll see to that for you,” said Mr. Dixon, surging across the inn yard. “It’s no place for a young lady like yourself to be jostling and shoving just to get a cup of coffee.”

In fact they had a few minutes’ grace, time for him to return with a cup of dark, steaming coffee and for her to drink it without scalding her throat, for a handsome equipage arrived at the inn, and the ostlers and boys leapt to the horses’ heads. “A prime team,” observed Mr. Dixon, watching with keen eyes.

The innkeeper came running out in his leather apron. “Good morning, my lord,” he said to the tall man in a many-caped coat, who had swung himself to the ground from the curricle. A waiter hurried up with a pewter mug, which the driver of the curricle took with a smile.

He was a striking-looking man; Octavia, while trying not to stare, could hardly take her eyes off him. There was a vitality about him that almost seemed to crackle, and his lean face, with keen eyes set above a long, aristocratic nose and a mobile mouth, promised both intelligence and wit.

A new pair of horses were in the shafts, the man was back in the driving seat; he called to the ostler to let go of their heads, and with a swift manoeuvre he was out of the yard and bowling along the road.

Then the post boy was tootling his horn, the passengers scrambled back on board the stagecoach, the last of them only just making it before the powerful team of four fresh horses leapt forward, and they were on their way again.

“That was Lord Rutherford,” Mr. Dixon said, settling himself into his place and saying politely that he hoped he wasn’t taking up Octavia’s room. “He has a house near Meryton, not his principal seat, of course. That’s Rutherford Castle, up Richmond way, and a gloomy pile it is, to be sure. This house of his in Hertfordshire isn’t much better, his mother lives there mostly. It’s Elizabethan, all chimneys and fancy brickwork, and not worth the upkeep if you ask me. Still, his lordship is rarely there, spends most of his time in London. A Whig, you see, and the Whigs don’t go in for being country gents, not like the Tories, who take their landowning very seriously.”

“Does his wife also prefer to live in London, is she a political hostess?”

“He ain’t married, though it’s not for want of the young ladies and their mamas trying, from what I hear. He’s as rich as can be, but he don’t care for the married state too much. Likes the females, I beg your pardon, but not in the matrimonial way.” He paused and shook his head. “His mama’s not quite right in the head by all accounts, so perhaps he doesn’t take too cheerful a view of the married state.”

Mr. Dixon was going on to Grantham, and it was with real warmth that Octavia bid him good day as she jumped down from the steps of the coach at Meryton. He saw to her boxes, and looked about him with a worried air, even as the coachman was warning him to “Look lively there, if you don’t want to get left behind.”

“Where’s this person who’s meeting you?” he demanded, hesitating with his foot on the step.

“My cousins are sending a man and their carriage; look, I believe that is it over there. Thank you for your concern.”

“That’s all right, and remember, when you take it into your head to go building a fine new house, you just get in touch with Ebenezer Dixon of Grantham, you only have to mention my name, they all know me there, well, so do all the architects, and you’ll have such marble as will make you stretch your eyes!”

Chapter Nine (#u78706f8d-78f9-577c-954d-18fd65e6e97e)

Sholto Rutherford noticed Octavia as he swept in and out of the inn, but it was no more than a passing glance, his eye caught by her height and graceful carriage, rare for so tall a woman to hold herself with quite that pride, part of his mind noticed, but the rest of his mind was elsewhere, and the image of her was lost seconds later in the cloud of dust sent up behind his curricle as it sped on its way towards London, even as the slower stage was lengthening the distance between them, heading in the opposite direction.

Sholto was quite out of temper, unusual for him, but his mother, Lady Rutherford, was tiresome enough to try the patience of a man with twice as calm a temperament as his. The truth of it was that Sholto and his mother didn’t get on, and had been at outs ever since he was a small boy. There was affection there, but such a vastly different outlook that they puzzled one another extremely.

Sholto sometimes wondered why his father had ever married his mother, for there again, there seemed little similarity in their characters. Of course, his mother had been a beautiful woman; the portrait of her painted by Romney when she was at the height of her looks showed that well enough. And his father had been an easy-going man, not much irritated by the little things of life—but had his mother’s growing strangeness been such a little thing? Of course his father had the option of taking up his residence separately from his wife, which was what he had done, dividing his year between London, when the House was sitting, and Yorkshire, when it wasn’t, while she lived the year round in Chauntry, the Hertfordshire house that had been in the family since the time of Queen Bess; a sprawling, inconvenient place with, Lord Rutherford had been heard to remark, more chimneys than bedchambers.

Sholto had long suspected that Lady Rutherford had never wanted children, and that the strain of having a twin son and daughter had in some way set her apart from them and from their father. As he grew up, he saw her drifting further and further into a world of her own, a world that his sister, Sophronia, seemed able to take in her stride, but which continued to irk him.

He didn’t mind his mother being unconventional—his family came from that part of the aristocracy that never gave a moment’s attention to what anyone else thought of them—but he did mind her refusal, once his father had died, to take any interest either in the vast northern pile which was the seat of the earldom or in the other family houses. Excellent stewards and housekeepers ran the Rutherford houses with perfect competence, but it was not the same as having a proper mistress for at least one of them.

And there was Sophronia, his twin, thirty-five years old and still unmarried, who resolutely declined to take on her mother’s role. She lived in bickering amiability with Lady Rutherford at Chauntry, but was perfectly happy to leave all the details of looking after the house to the staff. “Running a house is nothing but a bore,” she said. “I have no more desire to attend all day long to household trivia than you have. Simply being born a woman does not mean that I am naturally domestic, all women are not that way inclined, however convenient it is for the male sex to believe it is the case.”

Sholto’s father had died when he was sixteen and still at school. He finished his education at Cambridge, and had since then spent most of his time in London, at his large house in Aubrey Square.

He had driven out of London the day before with the purpose of informing his mother that she must move out of Chauntry while necessary repairs were carried out on the house.

“It is essential, Mama,” he said for the tenth time, exasperation creeping into his deep voice, “that the hall chimney and several others be rebuilt.”

“It is out of the question,” she said, waving an airy hand at him. “I am not to be banished from my house on any whim of yours. I can see perfectly well what you are about, I am not so foolish as not to know what you want. You are attempting to edge me out of here, with this fanciful talk of brickwork and fire hazard. This house has stood perfectly well for more than two hundred years. I will not have the great hall pulled about and filled with workmen. I can imagine nothing more inconvenient than having a pack of stonemasons and carpenters in the house. They will upset the animals.”

“I would postpone the works until the summer if I could, when you might go to Brighton; however, Mr. Finlay informs me that the matter has now become a matter of urgency.”

“Mr. Finlay!” said Lady Rutherford, dismissing Sholto’s estate manager with another wave of her hand. “What does he know about anything? I am not to be moving on the word of that man. Besides, I dislike Brighton, it has become unspeakably vulgar ever since our fat prince—oh, I beg his pardon, fat King—constructed his monstrous pavilion.”

“You can go to Yorkshire if you prefer not to be here while the house is in the upheaval of building works, and if the Dower House—”

The mention of the Dower House seemed to bring her to the brink of a spasm, and her daughter, Sophronia, after exchanging a speaking glance with Sholto, waved a vinaigrette under her mother’s nose, and begged her, in a brisk voice, not to upset herself, it was bad for her system.

“And what does Sholto care for that. I am not upsetting myself, he is upsetting me. Summon Dr. Gibbons this instant, he will tell Sholto that I am not to be teased in this way, that I shall be out of sorts for days as a consequence of his coming here with his mad schemes.”

“If the chimneys are in danger of catching fire, Mama, you will possibly be more than out of sorts, you will be smoked out, kippered, I dare say,” Sophronia said. “Not all Dr. Gibbons’s medical care will help you then.”

Lady Rutherford gave her daughter a dark look. “How dare you use such language in my house, Sophronia, and to me.”