The Misbegotten (2 page)

But Rachel had an argument ready for him, as well: she knew that Richard Weekes loved her. Thus she entered into the match on much the same footing as her parents had, and hoped to be as happy as they had been. Rachel hadn’t believed in love at first sight – not until she’d met Richard for the first time in June, and watched it hit him like a thunderbolt. He’d come to Hartford Hall with a selection of Bordeaux wines for Sir Arthur Trevelyan to sample, and was waiting for the gentleman in the small parlour when Rachel came into the room to find a deck of cards. Outside a summer storm gathered, brought on by a week of torpid heat; the sky had gone dark and odd flickers of lightning came and went like fireflies. Trapped indoors, her two younger charges were restless and bad tempered, and she’d hoped to distract them with whist. She hadn’t known that anybody was in the room so she entered with unladylike haste, and frowning. Richard leapt up from the chair and tugged his coat straight, and Rachel halted abruptly. They faced each other for a suspended, silent moment, and in the next second Rachel saw it happen.

Richard’s eyes widened, and words that had formed in his mouth were never spoken. He went rather pale at first, and then coloured a deep red. He stared at her with an intensity that seemed to border on awe. For her part, Rachel was too taken aback to say anything, and her murmured apology at intruding also died on her lips. Even in the wan light from outside, which made his burning face look a little sickly, Richard was arrestingly handsome. Tall and broad at the shoulder, even if he did not stand up as straight as he should. He had light brown hair the colour of umber, blue eyes and a square jaw. In spite of herself, in the face of such scrutiny, Rachel blushed. She knew she wasn’t beautiful enough to have caused such upset with her face or figure alone – she was too tall, her body too flat and narrow. Her hair was the palest of blonds, but it was fine and wouldn’t curl; her eyes were large, heavy-lidded, but her mouth was too small. So what else could it have been but realisation? The realisation that here was the person he’d been looking for, without even knowing it; here was his soul’s counterpoint, the one who would bring harmony.

There was a mist of sweat on Richard’s top lip when at last Sir Arthur’s footsteps were heard, and they were released from the spell. Rachel dipped him a graceless curtsy and turned to leave, without the deck of cards, and Richard called out:

‘Miss . . . forgive me,’ as she walked away. His voice was deep, and smooth, and it intrigued her. She went back upstairs to the children’s rooms feeling oddly breathless and distracted. Eliza, the eldest daughter of the house, was curled up in a window seat reading a book. She looked up and scowled.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ she said, loading the question with scorn. It was lucky for Eliza that she was dark and delicate and pretty. A plainer girl would not have got away with such a waspish personality, but at fifteen Eliza already had a great many admirers.

‘Nothing at all to concern you,’ Rachel replied coolly. There had been times during the six years that Rachel had been governess at Hartford Hall, more times than there ought to have been, when her fingers had itched to close Eliza’s mouth with the flat of her hand.

For a few weeks after that, Richard Weekes appeared here and there, unexpectedly, claiming to be on business in the area. Outside church; near the grocer’s shop in the village; on the green on a Sunday afternoon, where people gathered to gossip and plot. He came to Hartford a number of times, ostensibly to ask after the latest wines he’d delivered, and how they were drinking. He came so often that Sir Arthur grew irritable, and dealt with him brusquely. But still Richard Weekes came, and he lingered, and when he caught sight of Rachel he always found a way to speak to her. And then he asked for her permission to write to her, and Rachel’s stomach gave a peculiar little jolt, because there could be no mistaking his intentions from that moment on. He wrote in a crabbed hand, each character stubbornly refusing to join up with the next. The prose was coloured by quirks in spelling and grammar, but the messages within it were sweet and ardent.

She’d had only one proposal of marriage before, even though, in the days before their disgrace, her family had been wealthy and well respected. Rachel was never beautiful, but attractive and well spoken enough to arouse interest in more than one young gentleman. But she never gave them any cause to hope, or encouraged them at all, so only one ever plucked up the courage to ask for her hand – James Beale, the son of a close neighbour, on his way up to Oxford to read philosophy. She’d turned him down as kindly as she could, feeling that she ought to wait – wait for what, she couldn’t say. There was loss in her family already, by then, but it was not grief that stopped her; only the want of something she could hardly put her finger on – a degree of conviction, perhaps. She was not romantic by nature; she did not expect her soul to take flight when she met the man she would marry. But she did hope to feel
something
; something more. Some sense of completion, and certainty.

Richard Weekes fumbled his proposal when he came to it, tripping over the words with his cheeks flaming; and it might have been that sudden show of vulnerability that convinced Rachel, in the moment, to accept. They’d been out walking, with the children to chaperone them, on a warm afternoon in late July. The countryside around Hartford Hall, near the village of Marshfield to the north of Bath, was more golden than green, drowsy with warmth and light. It had been a hot year, the wheat ripening early and the hay fields rife with wild flowers – poppies and cornflowers and tufted vetch. They came to the top corner of a sloping cattle field, where the air was scented with earth and fresh dung, and stopped in the shade of a beech tree while the children ran ahead through the long grass, like little ships on a waterless sea – all but Eliza, who seated herself on the low stone wall some distance away, opened a book and turned her back to them conspicuously.

‘This is a beautiful spot, is it not?’ said Richard, standing beside her with his hands linked behind his back. He had stripped off his coat and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, and Rachel noticed the solid build of his arms, the scuffed and weathered look of his hands. A working man’s hands, not those of a gentleman. He wore long, well-worn leather boots over snuff-coloured breeches, and a blue waistcoat just slightly too big for him.
Bought second-hand and never altered. That does not make the man any less worthy
, Rachel thought.

‘This is one of my favourite views,’ Rachel agreed. Beyond a line of birches and willow pollards at the bottom of the slope, the land rose again, sweeping up, chequered with fields. High above them a young buzzard was calling to its parent across the cloudless sky, its voice still whistling and babyish, though it soared half a thousand feet over their heads. The skin felt tight over Rachel’s nose, and she hoped it wasn’t sunburned. Her straw hat was making her forehead itch.

‘You must never want to leave Hartford,’ said Richard.

‘There are plenty of places, I am sure, that I might come to love as much. And places left may always be visited again,’ said Rachel.

‘Yes. You might always return to visit.’ After this, Richard Weekes seemed to sense that he had assumed too much. He looked down at his feet, shifting them slightly. ‘You grew up near here, you said?’

‘Yes. My family lived in the By Brook valley, not six miles from here. And I spent three seasons in Bath before . . . before my mother was taken from us.’
Before everything fell into pieces
, she did not say.

‘Forgive me, I had no wish to summon sad memories.’

‘No, you did not – they are happy memories, Mr Weekes.’

After a pause, Richard cleared his throat quietly and continued.

‘I imagine you have some acquaintances then, in Bath and around? People you met during your seasons there?’

‘Some, I suppose,’ said Rachel awkwardly. He didn’t seem to understand that all such society had ceased with her father’s disgrace; she found that she had no particular wish to enlighten him. She had spoken of losing her parents, and he’d seemed to accept that as reason enough for her to have taken a post as governess, without any connotations of shame or penury. ‘But it has been a good many years since I was there.’

‘Oh, you will not have been forgotten, Miss Crofton. I am entirely convinced of that. It would not be possible to forget you,’ he said hurriedly.

‘A good many people come and go from the city,’ she demurred. ‘Did you grow up there yourself?’

‘No, indeed. I grew up out in the villages, as you did. My father was an ostler. But life in the city fits me far better. Bath suits me very well – I would not want to live anywhere else. Though there is sin and hardship there, of course, same as anywhere, and it’s more visible, perhaps, where so many people live in close quarters.’

‘Life can be cruel,’ Rachel murmured, unsure why he would mention such things.

‘Life, but also men. I once saw a man beating a small child – a starving, ragged boy no more than six years old. When I forestalled the man he told me that an apple had fallen from his cart, and that the child had filched it from the gutter. And for this he would beat the wretch with his stick.’ Richard shook his head, and gazed out into the sunshine, and Rachel waited. ‘In the end it came to blows. I fear I may have broken his jaw.’ He turned to look at her again. ‘Does that shock you? Are you appalled, Miss Crofton?’

‘Does what shock me? That a cruel man might beat a child over an apple, or that you might step in and punish him?’ she said severely.
He tries so hard to make me know he is brave, and just, and sensible
. Richard looked anxious, so she smiled. ‘The cruelty to the child was by far the worse evil, Mr Weekes.’

Richard took her hand then, and suddenly Rachel was all too aware of Eliza’s rigid back and listening ears, and the distant laughter of the other children. A breeze trembled through the beech leaves and fluttered a strand of hair against her cheek.
Now it comes.

‘I have already told you how much I . . . admire you, Miss Crofton. How much I love you, as I have never loved another. You
must
marry me.’ Richard’s voice was so tense that this proposal came out as a clipped command, and his cheeks blazed with colour. He looked at his feet again, though he kept hold of her hand. It was almost like a bow, like supplication. ‘It would be an advantageous match, I do believe, for both of us. Your gentility and your manners are . . . so admirable, Miss Crofton. Your acquaintances in Bath . . . our combined resources, I mean . . . can only . . . can only lead to a shared future of far greater – I mean to say, please marry me, I beg of you.’ He coughed, regrouped. ‘If you would do me the great honour of being my wife, then I swear that I will devote my life to your every comfort and care.’ He was breathing deeply, looking up as if he hardly dared to.
Two proposals, near a decade apart; this one somewhat the less graceful, but doubtless will be the last.
Rachel did not feel certain, but the sky was the most brilliant blue, and his hand was as warm as his flushed cheeks, and his eyes were frantic as he waited for her answer to his clumsy words. The sun glanced from the sloping lines of his cheekbones and jaw.
A beautiful face, and all coloured up for the love of me.
She felt her heart swell, then, and crack open just a little bit; a glimmer of feeling that was unexpected, long absent, and brought tears to her eyes.

‘Yes. I will marry you, Mr Weekes,’ she said.

Rachel and Richard were to marry in the chapel next to Hartford Hall and then travel at once to Bath, to Richard’s house, where they would live.

‘What street is the house upon?’ Eliza pounced, when she heard of this plan.

‘I forget. Kingsgate, perhaps?’ said Rachel, inventing the name evasively. The house was in fact in Abbeygate Street, and her heart had sunk when she’d told this to the head nurse, Mina Cooper, and watched that kind woman trying to find something good to say about the address.
I dare say it is much improved since I was there last
.

‘Kingsgate? There is no Kingsgate that I know of. It can’t be near any of the better streets, if I haven’t heard of it at all.’

‘It is possible that there are things in this world that you don’t yet know of, Eliza.’ There were things, for example, that Rachel now knew about Richard that few others did. That in spite of his youthful looks, he was already past thirty. That his favourite thing to eat was bread dipped in the hot butter where mushrooms had been sauteed. That he was afraid to ride, having been thrown badly as a child. That though his father had been a lowly ostler, Richard had raised himself up through hard work and good taste and self-education, to become one of Bath’s most successful wine and spirits merchants.

All these things he told her, without her asking him; like a man laying himself bare – letting her know the good and the bad at once, so that she might know him completely, and it made her trust him. He didn’t seem to notice that he’d asked her little in return, or that she’d volunteered scant information about herself. And for each thing he told her, a dozen further questions were asked in a distant recess of her mind. This curious observer was subtle as a shadow; it was like the echo of a voice, coming up from a deep place; a part of herself she had somehow become separated from, in the years of loss and grief that had followed her happy childhood. But it was a voice she cherished; which, when heard, gave her a pang of loss that went deeper than flesh, and of joy at hearing it again, however softly. On the subject of Richard Weekes it was almost childlike, full of fascination, shy pleasure, and fleeting doubt.

Sir Arthur and Lady Trevelyan dutifully declared that they would miss Rachel, when she told them she would be leaving. She suspected that what they most regretted was having to advertise for a new governess. Only Frederick, the youngest child, seemed to genuinely grieve at the thought of losing her. When he threw his arms around her waist and buried his face in her skirt to hide his tears, Rachel was stabbed with regret.