The Flood-Tide (21 page)

‘I think he has found himself at school,' Allen said. 'I asked him how he was doing there, and though he said very little, he sounded content. He is making friends who will stand him in good stead all his life.’

Jemima smiled at that. 'I cannot see our Edward moving much in society once Morland Place is his. He will be a stay-at-home, if I know him at all.'

‘Nevertheless, he will be able to use his influence for his brothers and sister, and his own children, when he has them.'

‘Oh don't!' Jemima shook her head. 'I can't think of him married and a father! James, now - James is different.'

‘Father Ramsay says he is improving,' Allen said. 'I think that boy may well amount to something. He has a great many good qualities.'

‘And a great many bad ones,' Jemima said.

‘We must think what to do with him. The army perhaps, or the law. Not the Church, I think—' Allen mused.

‘My darling, he is only ten years old. Leave me some chick to brood over,' Jemima laughed.

‘You have Mary,' Allen pointed out.

‘Oh, Mary! I cannot take Mary seriously. Did you see her on Sunday, outside the Minster? She was positively flirting with young Tom Loveday, simply to make the Anstey boy miserable.'

‘She is as pretty a little jilt as ever broke hearts,' Allen said.

‘Where she gets it from I don't know,' Jemima said. ‘I'm sure I never gave her such an example. I cannot think about Mary - she is a changeling, not my child at all.'

‘All young women like to flirt,' Allen said serenely. 'It is their only pleasure, poor things, before they are married off, and spend the rest of their lives breeding and talking of ailments and clothes.'

‘What a startling picture you paint. I don't recognize it at all. My life has not been like that.'

‘Yours was not the common lot. Nor the common character.’

my poor Charlotte. I never could do what was seemly. I nearly broke my mother's heart with my wicked ways.'

‘No,' Jemima said. 'I was a most unnatural child, like

‘Do you remember when you ran away and fell off the orchard wall, and landed at my feet?' Allen said, drawing her closer.

‘And you bathed my cuts and gave me ginger cakes. I think I loved you from that moment.'

‘And I loved you too.'

‘Nonsense, I was only eight years old. You were in love with Marie-Louise, then and after,' Jemima retorted. It was a game they often played.

‘That was not love - that was fascination, like the rabbit with the snake. It was you I loved, but it took me fifteen years in exile to realize it. Oh, how I suffered when I learnt you had married.'

‘A pleasing fiction, sir,' Jemima said, smiling. 'But I am glad, so glad, that we have had some time together this year. It has been wonderful, having you to myself at last. We've been so much apart, one way and another, since we married.'

‘Yes - so busy with the estate in the early years, and then my missions for the King. It was time things changed. You haven't missed Flora, then?'

‘Not at all. I thought I should. More than that, I was worried about her going off to London, though she was so restless after her taste of society at Castle Howard there was no point in her staying here.'

‘It was kind of the Chelmsfords to invite her. She will enjoy the Season, and her being presented will help Thomas in his career. Your brother-in-law will make sure no harm comes to her.'

‘I just wish Rachel could have gone with her, as lady's maid. We know nothing at all about that girl she hired from York. She ought to have someone with her who will look after her.'

‘We have talked all this out before,' Allen said firmly. ‘Rachel is your servant, and even if she had been willing to go, and had not preferred staying with Flora's baby, you have to accept that Flora is a grown woman now, married, and in charge of her own life. She must hire her own servants, and beyond advising her there is nothing we can do.'

‘I know, but I suppose I have got used to treating her as my own daughter. The fact is, I haven't enough to worry about.'

‘You could worry about me,' he suggested. Jemima looked up at him with loving eyes.

‘I can't worry about you. I can only rejoice in having you near. I've hardly got used to it yet. Are you sure you shouldn't be off somewhere, attending to your duties as Justice of the Peace, or squire of the manor, or envoy of His Majesty? Is your time really your own?'

‘Really my own, to concentrate on you - and my potatoes.'

‘Oh, your potatoes!' Jemima cried indignantly at his teasing. 'Don't talk to me of them. Every time we begin a conversation, it comes round to potatoes.'

‘The first batch is encouraging,' Allen said, unperturbed. ‘Charles is doing his job well, in spite of the troubles over there. And he has sent me such clear instructions on how to cross-pollinate the flowers that I think I shall do a little experimenting myself with the new roots he has sent me.’

Jemima stopped and withdrew her arm, and turned to face him. 'The price of cloth is falling and the price of corn rising because of this American business. Our best pasture is worm sick, and we can't even take a crop of hay off it. We lost one of our best mares foaling,
and
the foal into the bargain, and the summer mastitis cut down our milk yield so far that we haven't enough cheese to last us until Christmas, let alone through the winter. We are so short of servants that the silver hasn't been cleaned for weeks and Abram is threatening to go and work for the Fussells - and you talk to me of potatoes?’

Allen regarded her steadily, the beginning of a smile turning up the corners of his lips. 'I have two things to say to you.'

‘Well?'

‘The first is that I love you.’

Jemima moved a little closer, and he put his arms round her waist.

‘And the second?' she asked suspiciously.

‘The second is that I have thought of a new way of dressing potatoes, and I have given Abram the receipt. We are having the dish for dinner today.’

Entirely against her will, Jemima began to smile, and then to laugh. 'You are an impossible man. There isn't an ounce of romance in you.’

He pulled her against him and kissed her brow, and after a moment she put her arms round his neck and said, ‘This is shameful behaviour in broad daylight for a married woman, but love makes me bold. And I will forgive you your potatoes, if you pay proper recompense. You must give me something, by way of a fine.'

‘What shall I give you? Name it, and it is yours,' he said, smiling broadly. She looked up at him with shining eyes.

‘Give me another baby,' she said.

*

Flora did not in the least regret her decision to accept the invitation of Lord and Lady Chelmsford, and could only wonder that she had been such a simpleton as to refuse before. When she looked back on her quiet days at Morland Place, with nothing to do but read and sew, or walk about the gardens, with no new sight to be seen and no new acquaintance to be made, she only wondered that she had survived so long without dying of boredom.

In London there was so much to do and see. There was the opera, the plays, the concerts at Ranelagh and Vauxhall; there were the tea gardens at Islington Spa, the wild-beast show at Exeter Exchange, the marionette theatre in St James's Street; there was the wonderful new circus of Philip Astley in the Westminster Bridge Road, where displays of equestrian skills were given, and the delights of Jenny's Whim in Chelsea, where there was a cockpit and a bowling green, and a pond from which mechanical mermaids and fishes arose at intervals to music. And all this quite apart from the balls and assemblies, dinner parties and supper parties and card parties, and the Court functions to which Flora, having been presented, was invited. Besides all the entertainments, there was the park to be walked in, formal calls to be made, shops to be visited, dressmakers to be consulted, and all the world of fashion to be observed, criticized, and imitated.

Flora was happy under the kindly patronage of Lord Chelmsford and the absent-minded chaperonage of Lady Chelmsford, and, despite the distance of Oxford from London, Lord Meldon was often with them, frequently bringing his young friend James Chetwyn with him. It was entirely proper, Flora decided, that she should notice the young man who had been so kind to her brother at Eton, and she discovered, too, that her married status gave her considerable freedom. She was at first a little wary of being in company with the young gentlemen unless an older woman was also there, but when Meldon begged her to chaperone Chetwyn's sister, she realized that, in social terms, she was an older woman herself.

At Christmas the Court moved to Windsor, and when the Chelmsfords said they were going with the Court Flora made the momentous decision not to go back to Morland Place but to spend Christmas in Windsor too. It was a Christmas she always remembered afterwards as the most pleasant of her life. Even the formal assemblies at Court were made enjoyable by the company of young people, and particularly young men who were flatteringly eager to dance with her or fetch her lemonade or advise her on her hand of cards. There were private parties too, where the pleasures were less formal and where Flora found that she was always the centre of a little group. She learnt to her surprise that she was not only a beauty, which she had become tolerably accustomed to, but a wit; and after the Boxing Day hunt she gained yet another character. Hounds had found in Datchet Woods and had run across Eton Wick and Dorney Common almost as far as Taplow without checking, and Flora, riding a horse lent to her by James Chetwyn, had been in at the kill, rosily flushed by the cold air but quite unruffled.

That afternoon, at dinner given in the house of Lord and Lady Prescott, when it was his turn to propose a toast, Lord Meldon raised his glass to 'Dashing Mrs Thomas Morland, wife of one of our sailor heroes; if he sails his ship as well as she rides her horse, our enemies will be confounded.’

Across the rim of his raised glass, he looked into Flora'seyes, and she felt herself burning with confusion. Further down the table, Chetwyn took up the toast with enthusiasm.

‘Dashing Mrs Tom!' he cheered, and the toast was drunk with applause and laughter, and Flora was 'dashing Mrs Tom' from then onwards.

*

The winter of 1776/77 found matters in America at a deadlock. The British army had not lost a battle that year, but had failed to take the initiative. Washington had been driven out of New York, but Howe had not followed up the victory and destroyed the army, so that Washington was now wintering comfortably in Morristown with the whole of Delaware and most of New Jersey safely his, while the British troops overwintered in New York and Rhode Island. Carleton had failed to make the breakthrough from Canada down the Hudson, and in the new year 'Gentleman Johnny' Burgoyne was sent out from England to take over; loyalist risings in Carolina had failed; but on the other hand, the Americans were desperately short of supplies, and the British navy was increasing its blockade to a stranglehold.

The war, for Charles, had a curious dual quality of being close up and far off. He knew that he and his new family were regarded with suspicion in Yorktown and St Mary's City, and that his dining on board the
Ariadne
had not gone unnoticed. But the doubts over his standpoint had been balanced by the fact that Philippe was certainly of French origin, and therefore had no cause to love the British. Philippe had been at pains to say nothing provocative on his visits to the cities, and indeed had managed to keep out of arguments altogether, while Charles remained for the most part on the plantation, busying himself with its affairs and his own project. But in such a struggle, neutrality could not be permitted for long. Sooner or later, they all knew, they would be required to state their views. Early in 1777, Eugenie announced that she was pregnant, and Charles's viewpoint changed once more. The child would be born in August, and if he had ever entertained thoughts that he might run away - or even, less dramatically, absent himself on some botanical mission - he now had to accept that his life was to be spent here, at York plantation. He was oddly excited at the thought of the child, and often, on his solitary rambles, he would stop at some place that commanded a view, and imagine himself showing his kingdom to his son and heir, as Eugenie had once shown it to him. She, poor soul, was very sick in the early stages of her pregnancy, and for the first time lost that ethereal poise that had so enraptured him. He felt guiltier than ever for his secret infidelity to her, and tried his best to be kind. He would have to spend the rest of his life protecting her and her child, he told himself, so he might as well get used to it.

Philippe was delighted, of course, at the prospect of an heir for the plantation, but more worried than ever about their neutral status. 'At all costs, we must see nothing happens to Eugenie and the baby. If the Patriots demand support, we must give it to them. But then, what if they are defeated? The British will punish us, I suppose. Oh, it is devilish! Thank God you are here, Charles. War is a young man's business.’

The crisis came in spring. Charles was at work in his succession houses, when Sam, one of the house slaves, came running in, filling the hothouse with the smell of his panic.

‘A boat's come, master, a sloop filled to the brim wid people from Yorktown. I believe it's trouble, master.'