The Fortunate Marriage

by Meriol Trevor

Genres: Historical Fiction; Sagas; Historical Romance

Synopsis

Poor, orphaned Louisa was only at Rosewell a short time when she realised that all was not well between her golden-haired cousin Caroline and Caroline's coolly handsome husband, Colonel Rowland Dynham. "Much too wild," the gossips said of Caroline. But everybody was ready to accuse the colonel when a terrible accident befell his wife. Louisa refused to believe that Rowland could have been responsible for what happened to Caroline and defended him tirelessly, even when his own children turned against him. She soon realised that it was not only her belief in Rowland that was unshakeable, but her love for him too. A gripping story of forbidden love, this is a stunning close-up of Regency life from the ballrooms and gaming dens of London to the rocky and beautiful Cornish countryside.

Release date: September 5, 2013

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 400

Sample

When her mother died, after a long decline, early in the year 1797, Louisa Pierce was only seventeen and had not a notion what she was going to do. Small as were their lodgings near the Hot Wells in Bristol, she did not know if she could afford to continue to live there beyond the month’s end, even had it been proper for a young woman to live alone. Besides, she had always hated those narrow rooms, which reminded her of the sick, tired woman who had hardly seemed the same person as the mother she wanted to remember, so full of gossip and reminiscence.

“Oh, Louie, it is a pity you cannot recall your grandmother,” she had often said. “Even after she left the stage she had the looks and manners of a queen. Well! My sister Emma certainly had the looks, but not the dramatic talent and I never had either. Nor have you, my love, except that perhaps that romantic fancy of yours comes down from her.”

Louie’s head was indeed filled with dreams and imaginations, and as her mother’s prolonged illness had cut her off from social entertainments she was shy and inexperienced in comparison with her late school friends, the only people she knew well there.

No relations had come to the funeral; in fact, Louie was uncertain if she had any, beyond one cousin. Her father, a merchant officer, had deserted them long since, and his own family had cast him off even before his brief excursion into matrimony, so that she knew nothing about them. He was the reason Louie was left so poor, for he had married Sarah Watson for her dowry, most of which he had squandered before taking himself off.

Poor Sarah never had much sense, said her elder sister Emma, who had done very well for herself, years ago, in catching a rich and noble widower when he was trying to cure, at Bath, the effects of a life devoted to pleasure. Lord Caynnes was an old rake, but when he died not long after his second marriage, he left his widow very well off, and with one child, a daughter, who, though she could not inherit his title, became the heiress of considerable estates. Emma sometimes brought this girl, who was ten years older than Louie, to stay in Bath, and Sarah and her daughter would drive from Bristol in a hired chaise, and stay grandly at the White Hart.

This cousin, the Honourable Caroline Caynnes, had seemed a kind of goddess to Louie, a princess from another world, who had everything she could possibly want, and was so beautiful and high spirited that no one could refuse her anything. Carelessly generous, she had enchanted her little cousin, but though there was sometimes talk of “going to stay” somehow it never happened—not until Caroline’s marriage, eight years ago.

Louie wrote to Caroline when her mother died, a conventional little letter, for since that summer of 1789 she had not seen her, and after Aunt Emma’s death had scarcely heard of her. No reply had come before the funeral, but about a month later a long scrawl arrived from north Cornwall, where the original home of the Caynnes family was situated. A much finer house in Hertfordshire had been sold to pay Lord Caynnes’s debts, at the time of his death; his brother, who inherited the barony, had refused to pay them, having quite enough of his own. When he too died, the title lapsed for lack of male heirs. It had been conferred at the Restoration by a grateful Charles II, who had borrowed considerably during his wanderings from the Caynnes of the day, and had found the son an amusing companion in the pleasures of the town. The family, notorious for charm and beauty, remained favourites at court so long as the court was gay; in staider times they found a place with the smartest set in town. None of them had ever done anything noteworthy, except to employ such good stewards that each generation enjoyed rich inheritance.

Caroline Caynnes apologised for her delay in writing; Louie’s letter had been sent on from London, down to Rosewall Abbey. “Indeed, I have been banished from town this long while, my dear Louie,” she wrote in her large, rapid hand. And after some regrets for her Aunt Sarah, and laments that she had not seen them for so long, came a paragraph which seemed to Louie to start from the page.

Dearest Cousin, I hope you will come and make a long stay with me here at Rosewell. Why should you not make your home with me, indeed? You could help to teach the children, for I abominate the whole tribe of governesses, and yet Mary Anne will soon be seven, though she is as stupid as possible. Adrian is sharp enough but he is a naughty fellow and will not do as he is told. Now do come, for I am dying of ennui here alone and Dynham is always in London, though he forbids me to go there. Come, Louie, come at once. I will send Hannah Colwill in the carriage next week, to assist in the packing and bring you here.

She assumed that Louie would not refuse her invitation; what orphaned girl could? To be offered a home, and with the cousin who had always represented for Louie the very image of beauty and womanly power—it was something she had never imagined possible, too good to be true. Certainly, since Aunt Emma’s death, which had happened suddenly, after the birth of Caroline’s first child, they had heard very little from herself, though an annuity had continued to be paid regularly, through a certain Mr Pendry, by the direction of the Honourable Mrs Dynham. Louie had wondered, when her mother died, whether she would still receive it. But to go and live with Caroline herself was an infinitely more exciting prospect.

She put the letter down, took it up, read it again. There was no mistake. But she had to talk to someone about it, so she hurriedly put on her black mourning cloak and ran across the street to the friend who lived nearest to her, and in Susie’s excitement and congratulations her own sense of good fortune was confirmed.

“Only think, Louie, your cousin will certainly take you up to town, you will meet men of fashion—why, you may marry a lord yourself!” said red-cheeked dark-eyed Susie, whose mind ran on love and marriage.

Louie’s imagination had not leapt off to London like that, and the thought of Town simply alarmed her; she was shy and unsure of herself and it was not her ambition to shine in society. It was Rosewell Abbey she was thinking of, as she told a disbelieving Susie.

“Oh, but it is the most beautiful place in the world, an old house and near to the sea.”

“And miles from anywhere else, I understand,” said Susie. “I don’t wonder your cousin suffers from ennui.” For of course Louie had showed her the letter from Caroline. “I wonder why her husband forbids her to go to London,” remarked inquisitive Susie.

“That is just Caroline’s manner of talking,” said Louie. “She expresses herself very forcibly. He may have sent her down there for her health. It is his own country too, for he was brought up at the Dynhams’ home there, Brentland House. They are a very old family too, but not well off. It was Caroline who had all the money, and estates.”

Louie had made only one visit to Rosewell Abbey, when she was a child between nine and ten, for her cousin’s wedding, but she had never forgotten it.

When her mother had heard of the engagement she had been disappointed. “I thought Caroline would marry a Duke at least” she had said. “But here’s this Captain Dynham, who seems to have nothing but good looks to recommend him. His brother will be a baronet, and has married a banker’s daughter, but this Rowland will not come in for anything, and I suspect him of making his fortune by turning Caroline’s head before she has come out into society. I told Emma it was mistaken to delay that event, but she was so much afraid of Caroline’s wilfulness—and now see what has happened! I wonder Lady Caynnes has not put her foot down and forbidden the match.”

Lady Caynnes was the widow of George, the brother of Caroline’s father Adrian, who had briefly held the barony, though the effects of a life as dissipated as his brother’s had carried him off a few years later. He had married late, and for money. Maria Warstowe, sister of a rich merchant banker of London, was no beauty, nor much endowed with wit or charm, but very substantially endowed with thousands in the Funds. The marriage proved childless, but Lady Caynnes held firmly to the position she had won and regarded her husband’s family as her own. She owned one great house in Mayfair where she lived, and another in Wiltshire, which she liked to say were destined for Caroline’s children—until Caroline’s choice of a husband had so annoyed her.

“Rowland Dynham has done very well for himself in securing Caroline,” she said to Mrs Pierce, when they met at Rosewell before the wedding. “Yes, for a younger son, of no means, it is a fortunate marriage indeed! He carries off an heiress who must be one of the most beautiful girls in the country. But I believe he has always been an ambitious young man, and jealous of his elder brother.”

It turned out that, much to her annoyance, Lady Caynnes had been instrumental in their meeting each other, for Rowland Dynham’s elder brother Mark had married her niece, Mary Warstowe, and Lady Caynnes had invited Caroline and her mother to stay for the wedding. She considered it quite proper for Mark Dynham, who would be a baronet, even if a poor one, to marry her niece on the banking side; far otherwise when it came to Rowland Dynham’s proposing to the Caynnes heiress.

“But Caroline is a most self-willed girl, she carried her weak mother quite with her,” said Lady Caynnes, not caring in the least that she was addressing the sister of the weak mother in question. “I declare, Mrs Pierce, your sister has always spoilt that girl. I am sorry I was not in a position to forbid the match.”

But when they met Captain Dynham Louie at least was not surprised that Caroline wanted to marry him. For he was a very tall, lean and handsome young man with aquiline features, active and energetic in his smart uniform, always impeccably turned out, and with a fine, if slightly formal courtesy of manner which soon won the admiration of Mrs Pierce.

“They certainly make a handsome couple,” she had said one day, looking from a window at the pair as they walked round the paths of the garden enclosed by three sides of the house, at the back.

In the middle of the paved place was a small fountain, and this had been set in order to play for the wedding of the heiress, but the jet was slightly crooked, so that the stream of water fell to one side. This disturbed Captain Dynham’s orderly mind; he walked up to the edge of the bowl and stood on the rim, stretching out a foot to try to push the jet straight. In spite of his long legs and excellent balance he could not reach it and Caroline, standing by in her white dress with its long tight sleeves, her beautiful glossy brown hair uncovered by any cap or bonnet, laughed at him.

“It is no use, Dynham, you would have to wade,” she said.

Captain Dynham was wearing very fine Hessian boots and did not choose to subject them to the water.

“I’ll get Beer to fix it,” he said.

“I beg you will not!” cried Caroline. “That would upset old Prust, who already feels his province has been invaded from Brentland. Keep your Beers in check, if you please!”

Louie, standing at the open window, watched them intently, and retained the memory long after, so that it was clear in her mind as she packed her belongings to leave Bristol.

Hannah Colwill proved to be a small wiry woman of indeterminate age, with dark, sloe eyes and a secretive look. She was not talkative and Louie thought she despised her mistress’s poor young relation.

“You are not the least like madam, in looks, miss,” she observed. She did not speak with a broad accent.

Louie was a slender girl with a small rounded face, softly brown in complexion, the mouth wide and thin lipped; her large brown eyes shy but watchful. Her dark hair was straight and she had trouble putting curls into it; curlpapers irritated her at night; curling irons, applied before going out, were a source of anxiety. Hannah Colwill seemed to divine all this at a glance.

On the long journey down to North Cornwall Louie was thinking much of the last time she had been there, for the wedding in 1789. A number of Dynhams had come for the occasion—the old General, stiff-backed, with a brisk, barking manner, and his tall, pale, composed wife: both had died since, and so had the eldest son, killed in the war which had begun with France in 1793, so that he had never become a baronet after all. The only child of his marriage to Mary Warstowe, who had not long survived the shock of his loss, was now Sir Miles Dynham; a child of seven, he lived with his banking uncle, Frederick Warstowe, in London, as Louie discovered from Hannah Colwill.

“And a poor sickly little creature he is,” said Hannah. “They say he won’t never live to grow up. I daresay that would suit Colonel Dynham all right, for then he’d be master of Brentland and Sir Rowland, and more the equal of madam.”

In the war in which Mark Dynham had died, his brother had reached the rank of Colonel.

“Why doesn’t the child live with his Dynham uncle, rather than the Warstowes?” asked Louie. “Especially as Brentland is not far from Rosewell.”

She remembered the Dynhams driving over from Brentland, which was high on the moor inland; remembered, too, Lady Caynnes remarking with a snort on “those old names they take, because there were Rowlands and Joscelins among the Dynhams of the middle ages, though everyone knows the principal family died out then, and these are descended from some obscure minor branch. Why, Brentland was hardly more than a farm till Sir Oliver gave up the Stuart cause and put a new front on it—not that it is much of a place now, nothing like Rosewell.”

Still, however scornful Lady Caynnes might be, Louie could not but feel impressed at the thought that the Dynhams’ ancestors were Norman, that their name came from “de Dinan” and that, for generations they had fought in the British army. The baronetcy had been conferred, again by Charles II, for military services, but unlike the Caynnes family, the Dynhams had never greatly prospered. Yet it seemed strange that the young heir should live with his banking relations in London, and not with his Dynham uncle.

Hannah Colwill sniffed. “Those London people don’t think our family suitable,” she said.

“Suitable!” repeated Louie, astonished that Caroline, the daughter of a Lord, could be considered unsuitable by London bankers. “What do you mean?”

“Well, miss, there’s been a deal of trouble since the Colonel came back from the war, and madam’s fine house in town has been given up. Some thought things would be better after Colonel Dynham left the army and went into the Foreign Office, but I doubt it it is—well, madam would hardly have come down to the country, would she, if all was right?”

Louie gathered that all was not well in her cousin’s affairs but she did not like to question the maid, and Hannah Colwill did not volunteer information; although she had been with her mistress in London she retained her secretive Cornish character.

Louie brooded on the hints she had received and at night she re-read Caroline’s letter, noticing her remark about her husband’s forbidding her to go to London, though he lived there himself. It certainly did not sound as if that marriage had turned out as well as it had started. Yet Louie could still hear her mother saying, as they drove away, “Well, that was the prettiest wedding I ever did see!”

It had been a very simple one, the whole party walking up a grass path from the garden to the little dumpy church. The youngest of the Dynham sons, an ungainly giant of a youth, had been much teased at the wedding breakfast because when he had sat down in church the old bench had given a loud crack in protest. Poor Joscelin jumped up in confusion and shambled to the back, standing with the bell ringers under the squat tower, and later taking part in ringing a peal for the bridal pair.

In Louie’s memory Rosewell Abbey lay perpetually bathed in bright June sunshine, with roses breathing sweetness, people laughing in the old house and Caroline, queen of it all, tall in her white dress, smiling and bountiful, loading her little cousin with presents.

But now, at the beginning of April, when she came there eight years later, the weather was cold. The sky was low and grey, the chill light made even the new growth of green in the hedgebanks look cold and pinched. The greyness took the life and colour out of the spring and made the old house itself look almost grim, when Louie had remembered it as mellow and golden.

Her childish memory had retained some images vividly, but she had not then seen the place in perspective. Now she noticed that the approach was by a mere lane, turning off the coastal road which was not itself either wide or well kept, and in fact ran a mile or two inland, away from the high cliffs. She saw how the valley opened out in flat meadow bottoms towards the sea, with a small full stream winding through, how the tiny village, merely a few cottages, clustered round the small church with its square tower, close by the house—so clearly once a religious house, now that she knew more of such things. The shape of it still stood in the three walls of a cloister, the fourth pulled down to leave the formal garden with a view of the country. The front had been rebuilt in the seventeenth century and nothing much had been done to it later, since the Caynnes family had lived so much in London and in their Hertfordshire house, now sold.

Rosewell Abbey was well placed, behind a shoulder of hill as the coombe turned seaward, sheltered from the Atlantic gales, but now Louie could observe—what she had forgotten—how near the sea was; the dull grey wall of it rose up between the headlands like a triangle, rimmed against the softer grey of the huge, hanging, cloudy sky.

Louie became aware, as she had not been eight years ago, of the isolation of the place, hidden away in this remote valley on the western edge of England—hardly England here, she reflected, but Britain, the ancient island of the Druids. Louie’s head was full of legend and story.

Yet once inside, all was civilised and comfortable; the rooms, many of them wainscoted with wooden panels, and with polished boarded floors, were not too big to keep warm, and any modern alterations had been to increase comfort. And the Caroline who came quickly and gracefully to greet her with a kiss was wearing a fashionable gown with her sash tied high and certainly did not look in the least countrified. In fact, Louie was a little overwhelmed by her cousin’s splendid manner, though her embrace was warm enough.

“Little Louie, a young lady!” she said, surveying her. “Yet not so very grown up, cousin, after all.”

Louie was indeed small beside her. Caroline was tall for a woman and carried herself with a proud grace, her superb figure at its best when she was in movement. Vivid energy seemed to infuse body and soul in a restless, impulsive way. Her colouring was brilliant, her eyes a dark bright grey, glancing with quick-changing moods. Louie was once more, and instantly, cast under the spell of Caroline.

They were still in the hall when a door upstairs opened and a little boy came rushing headlong down the staircase shouting, “How do you do, Cousin Louisah!”

It was Adrian Caynnes Dynham, five and a half years old, and behind him, slow and timid, came Mary Anne, soon to be seven. She was a solid child with a round rosy face, large blue eyes and fair straight hair fanning out on her shoulders. Adrian was charming, Louie thought, as she kissed him. He was alive with restless energy, his gray eyes, with dark flecks in them, bright and inquisitive, his soft dark hair falling in thick curling waves.

Louie had brought little presents with her from Bristol and it was fun unpacking them and watching the children’s delight. It was many months since they had been in London and to them their town life seemed already distant. They were still playing with their new toys when Louie came downstairs again, after changing out of her travelling dress. Black, which she wore in mourning for her mother, did not suit her, and she felt plain and dowdy beside Caroline.

Adrian was running round the hall, flying his paper bird behind him on its string, looking round at it, and dodging the table and heavy chairs that stood in the middle.

“Oh, Adrian!” Mary Anne was saying anxiously. “Mind the table! Oh, Adrian, look out, you’ll tread on Mop’s puppy.”

“Well, you pick him up then,” said Adrian impatiently, and the girl, blundering after the fat, wobbling puppy, collided with her brother, so that they ended in a heap on the floor, Adrian laughing and Mary Anne, for a moment, nearly crying. The puppy yapped excitedly.

“Heavens, w. . .