The Hidden Shore

Book 19: Morland Dynasty

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

Genres: Historical Fiction

Synopsis

1843: the early years of Queen Victoria's reign witness much high-level debate at the Palace of Westminster, but nothing can interfere with Society's enjoyment of the Season.

When Charlotte Meldon's father dies, she believes herself to be destitute, but a lawyer's letter reveals that she is not only part of the great Morland family, but wealthy and a countess in her own right. She is expected to make a great marriage, and with her vivacious cousin Fanny by her side, she is launched into her first Season. But it is Fanny, the hardened flint, who loses her heart first, while Charlotte catches the eye of Oliver Fleetwood, the most eligible man in London.

Then the Season ends in disillusion, and Charlotte rebels against a life of idle amusement. With calm courage she flouts convention and embarks on a new journey which will change her life in very unexpected ways.

Release date: August 25, 2011

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 592

Sample

April, 1843

The garden of Heath Cottage was small and dull, but at the bottom only a low bank and a hedge separated it from the marsh.
The hedge was threadbare and sometimes cattle broke into the garden, to the detriment of the few struggling plants it sported.
Through one of the gaps they had left, Charlotte escaped now and then to walk under the wide sky and ‘stretch her lungs’,
as Ellen said.


She felt guilty for thinking of it as escape. She knew that Aunt, if she were still alive, would say that a good daughter
would delight in service to her parent, particularly a father so grievously crippled as Papa. But the cottage was low-ceilinged,
cramped and dark, and she was a tall girl – ‘gawky’ and ‘clumsy’ had been Aunt’s preferred epithets. Even though she wore
fewer petticoats than Ellen said was fashionable, still she hardly seemed able to move without knocking something over, and
any loud or sudden noise taxed Papa’s nerves.


So she escaped out onto the marsh when she could, where there was a vastness of sky and the horizon was so distant it seemed
you could see forever. She walked briskly, swinging her arms, rejoicing in the freedom of movement: she would have run, but
it wouldn’t have been seemly for a person of twenty. Today there was a mildness in the air for the first time, which said
spring was coming at last. The great bowl of sky was filled with windy light, and between the loose, rushing clouds there were glimpses of a pale and rainwashed April blue. And there was
birdsong: the marsh did not quite rise to a skylark, but there were peewits, and a chaffinch throbbed and whirred in the blackthorn
like a wind-up bird on a musical box lid.


Despite its name the marsh was not marshy. It had been drained for grazing these hundred and fifty years by a network of narrow
ditches crossed by plank bridges, which the farmers moved from time to time to change the pastures. Here and there a more
solid, permanent structure with a gate at either end marked a sluice; lines of gorse, stunted thorn, willow and sedge marked
the cart tracks, and the wider canals were dense with rushes.


The willows were still bare, but a flush of palest green was softening the blackness of the thorns. Grey-green and brown the
marsh was, under a rushing sky; not alive yet, but coming alive, like the princess in the first instant after the kiss. She
hoped there might be daffodils today – the little, short-stemmed wild ones with the back-turned petals, like dogs with their
ears streaming in the wind. The local people called them ‘affadillies’. She wanted to bring some to Papa to cheer him.


In search of them she walked further than she meant, and did not notice the sky darkening. Then, suddenly, the clouds were
a seamless blanket, low and black. Rain was coming: the edge of a distant beam of light touching the far marsh was silvery
with it. Charlotte turned and hurried back; but even though she took a short cut through the village, the rain caught up with
her when she was still a good way from home.


At least in the village there was a tree, a lone horse chestnut so much prized in that naturally treeless corner of the country
that when the road had been widened, it had been preserved by common consent, and the traffic parted round it like a stream round a large rock. It was rather a public place to shelter, in the middle of the street, but
her mantle was thin, and Ellen got cross if presented with extra work like drying clothes.


‘You’d have been more use to me a few weeks later,’ Charlotte told the tree, squinting up against the silvery drops falling
fast through the branches. The leaves were still furled, only just breaking out of their sticky buds. She was soon very damp
and beginning to feel cold. She wondered if she ought to make a dash for it, but her mind wandered off into a calculation
of whether more drops would land on her if she were moving or still, and she stayed where she was, getting wetter by the moment.


She was not unobserved. The nearest house, just across the road, belonged to Doctor Silk, the physician who attended her father.
He had gone to the front window to look at the rain, and called to his wife, who was sitting by the fire knitting.


‘My dear Mrs Silk, do you see who is sheltering under the tree – for what shelter it affords at this time of year.’

‘No, my dear,’ his lady replied comfortably, without moving.

‘It’s the poor little Meldon girl – Mr Meldon’s daughter.’

‘No, is it? But I thought she never left the house.’ The interest of the idea was enough to rouse Mrs Silk from her chair.
She joined her husband at the window and stared. ‘So it is. Well, well! They say she is not right in the head, poor child.
That must prove it, to be sheltering under a bare tree.’


‘No, no,’ Doctor Silk said in wounded tone, ‘she’s not simple. Whoever said so?’

‘Everyone says so. Why else would they keep her shut up in the house like that? She never goes out, and never speaks to anyone.’
She peered with interest through the rain. ‘She must have escaped her keepers. They say lunatics are cunning.’


‘You must not repeat such tattle, Mrs Silk,’ the doctor said firmly. ‘I’ve hardly spoken ten words to her, but I can assure
you she is quite sensible. Mr Meldon is a recluse and his daughter keeps him company, that’s all.’


‘But Martha says the butcher told her that when he called one time and Miss Meldon opened the door to him, she looked frightened
to death and ran off into the house, and the next minute the servant came and spoke very sharply. They don’t want anyone to
find out that the girl is – you know.’ She tapped her muslin-bowered head significantly.


‘Martha is a romancer,’ the doctor said. ‘And the child will catch her death in that rain. She must come in.’

‘Ask a madwoman in, Doctor Silk?’ Mrs Silk said, opening her eyes very wide.

‘I assure you she is not mad,’ the doctor said testily, and strode to the door. ‘Martha! Martha! Miss Meldon is standing under
the chestnut tree soaked to the skin. Take the big umbrella and go and ask her to come in.’


Charlotte was startled out of her reverie to find a large black umbrella hurrying towards her, calling her name breathlessly.
Martha was middle-aged and comfortably stout, and in the way of house-servants she hated going out of doors except on the
balmiest of days. She picked her way past the puddles with the dainty distaste of a cat, the umbrella well down over her head
and shoulders. The hand that held up her skirts was red and wet, and her bare forearms were spangled with fish-scales: she
had been gutting herring when interrupted by this mission of of mercy, as Charlotte’s nose soon confirmed.


‘Doctor says come you in, my maiden, till that stops,’ Martha gasped, tilting back the umbrella to eye Charlotte with undisguised
fascination. The Meldons had long been a talking point in the village, with their mysterious, secretive ways.


Charlotte was embarrassed. Forbidden to speak to anyone, she was sure that to enter a strange house would be a serious offence.
Yet the servant had issued the invitation with the force of one who does not expect to be denied; and out of the corner of
her eye she could see the doctor himself at his front parlour window, beckoning and nodding to reinforce the imperative. It
would be rude to refuse – but how could she possibly accept?


‘Oh, no, thank you – you’re very kind – but I do very well here,’ Charlotte said unhappily. ‘Please thank the doctor for me.’
She met the servant’s obdurate gaze and looked away to add hopefully, ‘I think it’s stopping.’


Martha looked around at the increasingly lowering sky. ‘That hent,’ she contradicted flatly. ‘That’ll come down stair-rods
pren’ly. Come you in the house, miss, do. You’ll starve o’ cold.’


Charlotte struggled with the social dilemma. ‘No, really. I can’t. Thank you, but I mustn’t. Papa said—’

The servant laid a dank hand on Charlotte’s forearm. ‘Don’t you fret, my maiden. Your pa woo’n’t want you to catch a fever.
He know Doctor well enough, don’t he? So come you in and get dry.’


Charlotte felt she could resist no longer. The doctor came to the door as they made their dash, and with his own hands removed
Charlotte’s wet mantle, shook it, and handed it to the servant. ‘Take that to the kitchen fire, Martha.’ Then he ushered Charlotte
into the front parlour, where the fire, which he had just poked up to brightness, made the day outside look darker by comparison.
Mrs Silk had removed herself upstairs, her fear of lunatics stronger than her curiosity.


‘Treacherous, these April showers – and I’ll swear they’re wetter than any other time of year,’ he said comfortably. From treating children he knew the value of a gentle stream of conversation for soothing the fear of the unknown.
‘Come, sit ye down in this chair. Put your feet up on the fender, that’s right. We can’t have you catching cold, that would
never do. Are your stockings wet?’


‘No, sir, not at all. I have very stout boots,’ Charlotte said in a small, shy voice. ‘I was growing cold, though,’ she added,
not wishing to seem ungracious. ‘You are very kind.’


‘No, my dear, I’m a selfish old man who craves amusement, and I know the value of an unexpected visitor on a wet day at this
time of year.’ His voice, deep with a faint Scottish burr, was very soothing. Charlotte watched passively as he fetched two
tins from the chimney-cupboard and swung the kettle over the fire. ‘Now I’m going to make you some tea,’ he said, ‘and we’ll
have some of Martha’s plum-cake with it, for as we say in Scotland, “What’s tea wi-oot a piece?”’


Charlotte felt one last protest working its way up like an unwelcome hiccough. ‘Oh, but really, I mustn’t stay—’ But it was
so cosy here, and the predicted stair-rods were bouncing off the road outside, and she was in a permanent condition of pining
for company. Even to her own ears, the protest lacked conviction.


Doctor Silk straightened up and stood looking down at her, the stiff white commas of his eyebrows drawn down more in thought
than disapproval. It was not for him to countervene the legitimate authority of a father over his daughter, but he had been
a rebel all his life, and could never resist bending what he saw as foolish rules when he encountered them. Besides, he was
full of curiosity about Heath Cottage.


‘Why, I’m your father’s physician, lassie,’ he said. ‘Where’s the harm in setting with me a while, just until the rain passes? Don’t you see me often enough at your own house?’


Charlotte nodded doubtfully. It sounded perfectly reasonable, but still Papa’s rules weighted her spirits. A child accepts
its circumstances without question, until it has other experience to measure against, and Charlotte, lacking experience of
any sort, was a child in spite of her score of years. For as long as she could remember, she had been kept apart from all
people, living in seclusion at first with her aunt and Papa, and for the last three years since Aunt died, with Papa alone.
She did not know why contact with other people was forbidden, but Aunt had always hinted that it was Charlotte’s fault. Thus
a sense of guilt reinforced the obedience which was a child’s Christian duty towards her parent.


So Charlotte obeyed the rules, keeping to the unfrequented marsh when she went for her walks, and minding her tongue when
she spoke to the servants. But it was hard, for she had a sociable soul which longed for company and conversation; a mind
full of curiosity about the world; and a tongue primed with a thousand questions.


She was easy prey to the doctor, who was skilled at drawing out his subjects. At first he made all the running, chatting lightly
of the weather and the local farmers’ complaints, requiring no answers from her, until she was lulled into a sense of security.
Then when he finally did ask her a direct question, it was one she was able to answer comfortably.


‘And how is your good father? I assume, since I haven’t been called to see him, that he’s no worse since last week?’

‘No worse,’ Charlotte assented, ‘but no better. He always gets restless at this time of year, when the evenings begin to draw
out. It must be so dreadfully boring to be an invalid.’ Silk nodded sympathetically, and she was emboldened to add, ‘He so much enjoys playing piquet with you. It’s
kind of you to spare him the time.’


‘Not kind at all,’ Silk said. ‘I enjoy a game, and your father is the dickens of a player. I swear to myself that one day
I’ll beat him, but I know I never will.’


‘He doesn’t say anything, but I know he looks forward to Wednesday evenings,’ Charlotte said, eager to secure pleasure for
her father.


‘Do you not play cards with him?’

‘I’m not very good at piquet, though I almost always beat him when we play cribbage.’

‘If you think he would like it,’ Silk said, ‘I could come more often. Perhaps we could organise an exchange: you could come
and chat to Mrs Silk while I sit with your father. She pines for female company.’


Charlotte coloured and looked down, the social dilemma rearing its head again. ‘I’m afraid that wouldn’t be possible,’ she
said awkwardly.


‘Ah. I see. I’m sorry.’ He wanted to provoke a reaction. ‘It was presumptuous of me to suggest it. Of course a lively young
lady would find it dull work to chat to an old woman.’


Charlotte looked so stricken, he was almost sorry. ‘Oh, no! I didn’t mean that. I should like it very much. But – oh dear!
It’s so difficult.’


‘What’s difficult, my dear?’ Silk asked gently.

She hesitated, torn between loyalty to Papa and a dislike of hurting anyone’s feelings. ‘I’m afraid I’m not allowed to visit
anyone. I shouldn’t be here now. Oh please, when you see Papa next, don’t tell him I was here. It would vex him so much, and
you know he oughtn’t to be upset. I’m very sorry,’ she added dismally. Little as she knew about society, she was sure it was
not the done thing to oblige someone to conceal the fact that one had visited them.


The doctor looked at her with an ache of pity. ‘I won’t say anything. But my dear, why does he keep you from everybody, do
you know? Can you tell me?’ She shook her head. ‘I only ask because I am concerned about you both. Would it not be possible
for me to speak to him, to suggest that a change of society would do you both good?’


‘Oh no,’ she said in alarm. ‘Please, it would upset him and put him in a rage and then we’d have to—’

‘Yes? Have to what?’

Charlotte hesitated, but in the end felt it better to tell him than to risk his saying anything to Papa. ‘We’d have to go
away,’ she said in a low voice. ‘It’s happened before. If anything upsets Papa like that, we have to move away to a new place
where no-one knows us.’ Three times in the past she had grown too friendly with outsiders, and it had caused a hasty departure.
Leaving behind the servants she had grown used to grieved her, and she had endured months of silent reproach from Aunt; but
worst of all, she felt guilty about the suffering caused to Papa. ‘I don’t want to have to move again,’ she finished.


‘What made your father choose Chetton Farthing?’

‘The last time we moved was from Leicestershire. We lived in a valley by a stream, and Doctor Hopkins, who looked after Papa
then, said it was too damp and we should come to the east, because of the lower rainfall.’ She and the doctor looked as one
out of the window, and then at last she laughed. It was like the breaking of a barrier: he saw her shoulders relax from their
watchful tension.


‘Well, I’m glad you did, for without your good papa I should have nothing but labourers to doctor. Three cottages and an ale-house,
that’s all there is to Chetton – hardly a carriage-family in the district. But as I suppose you know, there’s not much to be done for him besides using common sense.’


‘I’m glad you think like that,’ Charlotte said quickly. ‘I’m sure some of the other doctors did more harm than good, with
their “sovereign cures”, and pretending to know more than they really did.’


Doctor Silk smiled as he said, ‘Whereas I always admit to knowing very little. It’s my greatest virtue!’ She smiled uncertainly,
and he added seriously, ‘Alas, when your poor aunt fell ill, I was pretty sure it was her liver, but beyond that—’ He shook
his head.


‘She didn’t like it here,’ Charlotte confided. ‘She started to get aches and pains as soon as we settled in, and she was never
really well that whole year.’


‘It has left you very alone,’ Silk suggested.

‘Oh, I have Papa; and Ellen and Steven, and Alice during the day—’ Charlotte said lightly. They were straying near forbidden
subjects.


‘Servants are not company,’ Silk said. ‘And your papa, I suspect, is not much company either, for a young lady. What do you
do with your hours of leisure?’


‘I don’t understand you,’ Charlotte said uncertainly, and the very question touched Silk painfully.

‘In the evenings, say, when you are not attending to your papa – what do you do to pass the time?’

‘I take up my work, generally,’ Charlotte answered. ‘I have all the fine sewing to do, because Ellen only does plain work.
And I play the piano, when Papa wants it.’


‘But for pleasure,’ Silk insisted. ‘What do you do for pleasure?’

‘Oh, I read. I love to read.’

‘So you should,’ Silk said cheerfully. ‘“Reading maketh a full man.”’

‘Sir Francis Bacon,’ Charlotte supplied.

‘Quite right. You are well taught, my dear. Have you finished with your governess now? I suppose you did not go to school?’


‘No, I had a governess at first, when we lived in Middlesex. But we left Miss Hendrop behind when we went to Huntingdon, and
Aunt taught me after that. But I’m too old for a governess now. I’ll be twenty-one in December.’


Silk shook his head. ‘You will think me an old fool, but I took you for about fifteen. You are a grown woman indeed! I beg
your pardon if I have not spoken to you with sufficient deference.’


Charlotte didn’t know how to respond, not having come across this kind of affectionate teasing before, so she went on, ‘Since
Aunt died, I’ve tried to improve myself with reading. Some of Papa’s books are very dull, but he has lots of military books,
and I enjoy them.’


‘Yes, there’s nothing like a great battle for proving what men are made of,’ Silk said, filling her cup again. ‘What are you
reading at the moment?’


‘General Mercer’s Journal of the Waterloo Campaign.’


‘It sounds most interesting,’ Silk said, and went on to draw her effortlessly out. Having access only to her father’s library,
she was well-read in history, philosophy and theology, medicine and physiology, military tactics and engineering, but she
had never had a novel in her hand. She talked intelligently, but she hardly seemed to know how to laugh. Silk was perplexed.
It was his opinion that the balance of Meldon’s mind must be disturbed to keep this gentle girl a virtual prisoner, but there
was nothing he could do about it. One could not interfere between a man and his daughter. But perhaps if he spent more time
with Meldon, he might be able to persuade him at least to include him and Mrs Silk in those she was allowed to speak to.


An increase in light showed the rain to be finally easing, and Charlotte suddenly discovered how long she had been sitting there, and grew flustered with apprehension and guilt. She
resisted the doctor’s blandishments, and shortly set off down the wet street under the lessening rain, her mind a turmoil
of new impressions, seasoned with fears and doubts.


Ellen was at the door. There was a smell of soup on the air. ‘Oh miss, where have you been? I was at my wits’ end. The master’s
wanting his dinner.’


‘I got caught in the rain,’ Charlotte said, taking off her mantle. ‘No, no, I’ll hang this up while you get the tray ready.
Go, hurry.’


‘Best do something to your hair before you go up,’ Ellen said over her shoulder as she hurried away. ‘That look like a rook’s
nest.’


Charlotte hurried into the parlour for the looking-glass over the fireplace. Usually she looked at herself without seeing
much, but today after her meeting with the doctor she wondered how she seemed to an outsider. The face in the looking-glass
was pale, with hazel eyes, strongly marked eyebrows, a wide, full-lipped mouth, fair hair with a good deal of red in it (strawberry-blonde,
Ellen called it) drawn back into a knot with the side-curls held by combs. Was it an attractive face? Would it be called pretty?
She thought not. Alice, the day-maid, was pretty – according to Alice – and she had a round, full face and a snub nose. Alice
had had lots of beaux, and a very good young man from the next village was saving up to marry her, so she ought to know.


Charlotte knew from scraps of overheard conversation between Ellen and Alice that they thought her life strange and unnatural.
She wondered what it would be like to go out to dinner, or to a ball, or to a theatre. What would it be like to have a beau?
What did one do with them? Alice, with a great deal of giggling, called it ‘walking out’, but Charlotte was not such a simpleton as to think there was nothing to it but walking. Still, someone to go for walks
with would be pleasant – though she thought she would sooner walk with someone like the doctor, someone sensible to talk to,
rather than a young man. The only young man she knew was Steven, and he—


He appeared in the doorway behind her, and met her reflected eyes in the glass with a silent stare.

‘Is the master calling for me?’ she asked, and he nodded, once each way, up, then down, like a bullock. Perhaps it was unfair
judging all young men by Steven. He was Papa’s nurse, his duties being to help Papa wash and dress, to carry him and push
him in his chair, and to run errands. Aunt had chosen him, perhaps as much for his tiny brain as his huge strength, for he
could be depended on not to stray or to gossip. Steven had no family and no friends, never wanted time off, never even left
the house except on errands for Papa. When he was not actually working he sat and stared at nothing. His only pleasure seemed
to be eating. He ate enormous amounts, but very slowly, which drove Ellen mad. She said it was purgatory to have to take her
meals with him, for he never spoke and never smiled, just filled his mouth and chewed endlessly.


All young men could not be like Steven, Charlotte thought as she started up the stairs, or what would the world come to? And
then, suddenly, a memory came back to her, something she had not thought of for years, and she stopped to consider it. She
had met a young man once, when she was just a little girl. That was when they lived in Middlesex, just before the first of
their sudden moves. She had been playing in the garden, and he had suddenly appeared up in a tree beyond the garden wall and
talked to her. Was it a memory or was it a dream? Young men did not really appear up in trees. But she remembered his face with extraordinary clarity, and his strange words. ‘I shall never be far away, even when you can’t see
me.’ And he had said that they would meet again one day. No, it must have been something she’d made up. It was so long ago—


‘Move along, miss, do,’ said Ellen peevishly from behind her with the laden tray.

‘Sorry, Ellen.’ She hurried on up, opened the door to Papa’s room for Ellen, and followed her in.

‘Ah, there you are! And where have you been?’ he greeted her crossly. He sat in his chair by the fire, covered from the waist
down by a rug of tartan wool: even in warm weather he always had his legs covered, unable to bear the sight of their mutilation.
His face was drawn, and Charlotte realised with sinking spirits that he was having a bad day, which always made him snappish.
She abandoned immediately any hope of introducing her meeting with the doctor into the conversation.


‘Just walking on the marsh, Papa,’ she said – which was true, if not all of the truth. ‘I wanted to get you some daffodils,
but I couldn’t find any.’


‘You would do better to observe punctuality. I’ve been kept waiting for my dinner.’

Charlotte said nothing, helping Ellen to arrange his meal as he liked it on the small table, which Steven then placed before
his chair. Charlotte’s was laid on the table in the window. She was ravenously hungry after her long walk and exciting adventure,
and the dinner before her, plain and meagre as it was, would have been wolfed down in minutes if she had been alone. But she
could not display such healthy appetite in front of her father, for whom eating was a pleasureless drudgery.


He was watching her over his spoon. The window framed her, and the setting sun, breaking through the clouds at last, illuminated her hair with a coppery light. ‘You’re a good girl,’ he said more kindly. ‘You look—’


She turned her head, knowing that he had been going to say, ‘You look like your mother,’ and knowing equally why he did not
finish the sentence. Her mother had died when she was a baby, and Papa never spoke of her. It was one of the many restrictions
which made conversation hazardous. Aunt’s taboos had been legion: there were things improper and things unladylike, things
a Christian would never even think, things a daughter would not say to her father, and things a child would not say to an
adult. When you added to that a whole series of specific prohibitions about their circumstances and Papa’s past, and anything
to do with her mother, it left very little. Commonplace chatter about the household or the weather was all that was definitely
safe to venture on.


‘I’m sorry, Papa,’ she said on an impulse.

‘For what?’ he asked.

There seemed a perilous moment of contact between them, and she wanted to say, for everything, for being the cause of all
your pain, for being the reason we have to live in this cramped cottage, miles from anywhere. But it was beyond her. In the
end she said, ‘For being late.’


But he looked as though he understood. He didn’t smile, but his expression softened a little. He said, ‘Eat your dinner,’
and that was acknowledgement enough.


She ate, unaware of the taste as she thought how little she knew about her own father. She knew his first name was Marcus,
for she had sometimes heard Aunt calling him by it. Marcus Meldon – a name. Of his family she knew nothing. He was an educated
man, that was obvious; she thought he had once been a soldier; and Aunt had hinted they had been wealthy, but now they lived
in a very small way, so she supposed all the money had gone. And he had been badly injured in what Aunt had always referred to as ‘the accident’. What sort of accident she did not know, and must not ask.


Successive doctors had marvelled that he had lived so long, and every winter gloomily predicted that he would not see another
spring. After the doctor in Huntingdon had cut off his leg, even Aunt had believed he would die. Charlotte hated to remember
that dreadful time – the hideous, dehumanising butchery of the operation, the appalling effects of the shock, which had left
him for weeks afterwards in a black despair that nothing could touch. But he had recovered, and in the end it was Aunt who
had gone. Poor Aunt had suffered ‘a disap