The Reckoning

Book 15: Morland Dynasty

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

Genres: Historical Fiction

Synopsis

1816: Napoleon has at last been defeateed, but victory brings no peace to the English.

The cost of war strikes deep into the country- there is a raging inflation, discharged soldiers join the ranks of the unemployed, wages tumble and the bread price soars- and hungry men are easily stirred to protest.

Amid this turbulence, Heloise and James stand guard over Morland Place- for its spirit as much as its fortunes- when a tragic accident strikes at the very heart of the family, taking one person on whom they all depend. On top of this, a devastating scandal brings the Morland name into the glare of public notoriety, so that Sophie and Rosamund are forced to learn the difference between real love and its enticing but dangerous illusion.

Release date: August 25, 2011

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 496

Sample

A cold and steady rain had been falling since dawn, but by nine o’clock the wind had gone round and it had eased to a drizzle.
Lord Theakston, waiting for his lady to appear for breakfast, stood at the window of the morning-room looking down into the
street. The spring of 1816 had been the wettest in memory, and London was never at its best in the rain. The wind gusted in
unpleasant flurries which caught under umbrellas and hurried their owners forward for an undignified pace or two. Pavements
glistened; puddles collected in ruts and potholes to trap the unwary; trees dripped and gutters overflowed.


The sweeping-boys were much in demand. It was a thankless sort of job, Theakston reflected, watching a skinny boy shove accumulated
dung and mud – the consistency of uncooked pudding – off the crossing at the corner of Park Street. A moment later the wheels
of a carrier’s cart dragged it all straight back again, as the horses clopped on down Upper Grosvenor Street soaked and rat-tailed,
flattening their ears against the rain.


Theakston craned his neck and looked the other way down the street. In Hyde Park the glorious blossom candles of the great
horse-chestnuts were now no more than a dismal carpet of brown, scattered petals. Rotten Row was deserted. He sighed. It didn’t
seem a bit like May, the poets’ smiling month.


The door opened at last and Lucy came in, her hay-coloured, curly head bent as she buttoned the cuff of her primrose muslin.
His heart lifted simply at the sight of her. He wondered if he’d ever get used to being married to her. It seemed such an
improbable, exotic sort of privilege – like having a lioness for a pet.


‘Still raining?’ she said. ‘I wonder if it ever means to let up?’

‘Startin’ to grow webs,’ Theakston said, spreading his fingers, and was rewarded by a flash of blue as Lucy looked up for
an instant from her troublesome button to smile at him. Hicks, the butler, walked in bearing the coffee-pot and newspapers,
followed by Ollett with the heavily-loaded tray. Her ladyship, much to the servants’ approval, liked an old-fashioned, hearty
breakfast. They had no patience with the fashionable notion of toying with a mere slice of toast or half a sweet roll.


Lucy took her place at the table and Theakston sat opposite her. ‘Well, I must say, it isn’t a bit the way I expected Peace
to be,’ she remarked as Hicks filled her cup. She glanced at the Times, lying folded beside her husband’s plate, and the Chronicle beside her own. ‘Nothing but gloomy news, until one hardly likes to open the papers. And everyone complaining about being
hard-up. If this is what we get for winning the war, I wonder why we bothered to fight the French at all.’


‘Habit,’ suggested her husband. He smiled at her. ‘I suppose after twenty-three years, one does sort of miss it.’

Lucy grinned. ‘My soldier hero!’

Last year, in glorious June sunshine, Lord Wellington had led his rag-bag Allied army to victory at Waterloo, and the Corsican
Tyrant had been defeated at last. Theakston had been there – Colonel Lord Theakston, gallantly leading his regiment of light
cavalry to the charge, and making Lucy realise precisely how much she’d miss him if he were killed.


Stripped of his regal titles, ‘General Bonaparte’ was now a prisoner on a tiny island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean,
from which, it was hoped, he would find it impossible to escape again. But after the euphoria of the victory, peace had brought
no plenty to the victors. Already 1816 was a year of bankruptcies, of unemployment, of soaring prices.


‘What did you think Peace would be like?’ Theakston asked, watching the dishes being placed in their meticulous order. Buttered
eggs here, cold beef there, the truckle of Cheddar just so, the mutton ham from Devon adjusted exactly thus. Hicks considered the arrangement, and tweaked a chafing-dish round three degrees to the south-west. A butler had his pride,
after all.


‘I don’t know,’ said Lucy, frowning. ‘That everything would be jolly, I suppose.’ She peered into a dish. ‘What’s this, Hicks?’


‘Lobster cutlets, my lady. Jacques was of the opinion the lobsters would not hold until tomorrow. The damp weather, my lady.’

‘Oh,’ said Lucy. She helped herself largely to sausages, added a handsome wedge of cheese, and after a moment’s thought, some
pickles. ‘All these breakdowns, for instance,’ she reverted to the conversation. ‘I don’t understand why suddenly nobody’s
got any money.’


‘Wars are expensive things to run,’ Theakston said, carving mutton ham to go with his eggs – each fragrant slice so thin he
could have read the Times through it, if he’d been wanton enough to try.


‘Exactly. So now we don’t have one to run, we ought to be better off, oughtn’t we?’ Lucy said.

Theakston shook his head, having very little understanding of the matter himself, too little to be able to enlighten her.
‘I don’t know. Better ask John Anstey,’ he suggested. ‘He understands these financial mysteries. Probably see him at the sale
today.’


‘Oh, did he say he was going?’

‘He’s after George’s Mantons.’

Lucy’s face sharpened with distress as she remembered the last time she had seen one of those guns, tucked under George ‘Beau’
Brummell’s arm as he strolled, immaculately attired, in the wake of the Duke of York at the Christmas shoot at Oatlands. Now
they were just another item on another sale list: ‘three capital double-barrelled Fowling Pieces by Manton’, part of the ‘genuine
property of a Man of Fashion, gone to the Continent’.


‘I still can’t believe it,’ she said, putting down her knife. ‘George, of all people! It’s like – it’s like the end of the
world.’


Theakston sympathised with her. It was the end of the world in a sense – the world of their youth, which had seemed to them
unchanging and unchangeable. He and Brummell had been at school together at Eton, and had joined the same regiment – the 10th
Dragoons, the Prince of Wales’s Own. As dashing young subalterns of nineteen they had met Lucy at a dinner party at Chelmsford
House, when she was the new bride of the Earl of Aylesbury, and out to set the Town by the ears.


The three of them had been friends ever since, for twenty years dominating, and to an extent, shaping London Society – Brummell
most of all, of course. And now the Beau – the ultimate arbiter of fashion, the original Dandy, the founder of the Bow Window
Set, and Perpetual President of Watier’s Club, the ‘Great Go’ itself – had cut and run. Last Thursday he had been obliged
to flee the country to escape his creditors. It was a devastating blow to them all, and especially to Theakston, who had no
dearer friend except Lucy. Things would never be the same again: with Brummell had departed a large piece of their lives.


Theakston sought to distract her a little. ‘Meant to say to you – I think we ought to go to the sale in the carriage.’

Lucy was a Morland of Morland Place by birth, and therefore not only a bruising rider but a tireless walker. She stared at
her husband. ‘Really, Danby! Chapel Street’s only a step away. I’m not going to have the horses put-to for that short distance.
Parslow would think I’d gone mad. A little rain won’t hurt us, but it would mean hours of grooming and tack-cleaning for him.’


‘I’ve spoken to him already. He entirely approves. It isn’t the rain, my love,’ he hurried on as Lucy’s brows drew down alarmingly,
‘it’s the crowds. Bound to be unpleasant. You’ve no idea. I went to Codrington’s sale last month, remember. You don’t want
to have to push through that sort of mêlée.’


Lucy sighed, picked up her knife, and returned her attention to the sausages. ‘Yes, poor Codrington! I’d forgotten. And there
was Henry Mildmay last year. It seems as though we’re to lose all our friends.’


Round-faced, sweet-voiced Mildmay had fled the country after £15,000 damages were awarded against him by the courts for ‘Criminal
Conversation’ with Lord Rosebery’s wife. He had no means of paying such a sum, and he and Harriet Rosebery, who were deeply
in love, had run to Stuttgart to avoid Sir Henry’s being arrested. They would never be able to return to England.


‘It makes you wonder who’ll be next,’ Lucy said. ‘I wish there was something we could have done to save George.’

‘Nothing for it. Gone altogether too far,’ Theakston said. He forbore to remind her that lately Brummell had worn out the
affection of all but his closest friends by borrowing money he had no hope of repaying. Only three weeks ago Lucy had made a sharp comment when Theakston had admitted parting with yet
another two hundred pounds, to cover the Beau’s losses one evening at Gordon’s, a disreputable gambling-hell in Jermyn Street.


Meyler, one of Brummell’s creditors, had finally denounced him publicly in White’s as a swindler, and with the prospect of
having all his many debts called in at once, the Beau had been forced to flee abroad to avoid arrest.


Brummell had confided only in Theakston and Tom Raikes, who had helped him with his plan of escape. He had slipped away from
a performance of the opera and hurried to an appointed spot where Raikes was waiting with a hired chaise. In this they had
driven out to Eltham Common, where Theakston had earlier taken Brummell’s own carriage, packed with a few of his most precious
possessions.


It was a strange place for three middle-aged, town-bred Dandies to find themselves, an unpromising site for an emotional farewell.
In rain and darkness, with the soaked grass of the common under their thin-soled, city boots, and nothing of comfort anywhere
but the small familiar sounds of the horses, they clasped hands briefly.


‘Good luck, old fellow,’ Raikes said gruffly. ‘It’s a damned shame.’

‘Tom. Danby. My dear friends. Thank you for everything! Can never repay you –’

‘God bless you, George,’ Theakston said unsteadily. He thrust his purse into Brummell’s departing grip. ‘For the journey.
Hush! Better hurry.’


A moment later Brummell was gone. The carriage lights shewed briefly, swaying through the murk, and then the rain came on
more heavily and blotted out sight and sound. Raikes and Theakston travelled back to London in the hired chaise and a gloomy
silence.


After that there remained only the outcry and scandal, the speculation and condemnation, and finally the announcement on the
back page of the Times that by order of the Sheriff of Middlesex, Mr Christie would hold an auction on Wednesday the 22nd of May at 13 Chapel Street
of the entire contents of the premises. The proceeds would be distrained for Brummell’s creditors.


That was where they were bound today – a sort of last rite for their departed friend. Lucy looked past her husband’s shoulder
at the dreary swathes of rain blowing past the window. ‘I hate this Peace,’ she said with passionate illogic.


He sought to comfort her. ‘It’s the start of a new era,’ he said. ‘A new world, I suppose. It’ll take some getting used to.’

‘I don’t want a new world,’ said Lucy, reaching for the lobster cutlets. ‘I want the old one back.’

Despite Danby’s warning, the scene in Chapel Street still took Lucy by surprise, and she looked a little pale as their carriage
drew up outside number thirteen just after ten o’clock. It wasn’t so much the size as the style of the crowd which brought
home to her forcibly that their friend had really gone, and gone for ever. The neat little house had its windows stuck all
over with sale bills advertising the more important items of furniture; and the once-white steps were muddy from the passage
of the kind of boots which never would have been tolerated there a week ago.


‘Oh, Danby, it’s awful!’ she said as the footman came round to open the carriage door. ‘All those horrible people staring –
and the upstairs windows left open! George would never have allowed that, on a day like this. He hated fresh air.’


‘You don’t have to come in,’ Danby said. ‘Let Parslow take you straight home again.’

The mere suggestion stiffened her resolve. ‘I’m not a funk,’ she said. ‘And I must have something to remember him by.’

Theakston stepped out and turned to hand her down. The crowd, gathered in spite of the rain simply for the pleasure of seeing
which famous people would turn up, parted to let them through, and a murmur of recognition rippled back through the ranks.
They mounted the steps and passed through the open front door, to be besieged by a crowd of shabbily-dressed ‘agents’, thrusting
out their business-cards and offering to save the lady and gentleman the disagreeable labour of bidding for themselves.


‘I’m your man, my lord!’ ‘Anything at all that you fancy, my lord – I’ll get the best price.’ ‘You want to be sure of securing
what you’re after, my lord – don’t risk losing it to another!’


Danby thrust them all away good-naturedly, and led Lucy through into the booklined parlour, where in the past callers who
were not intimates of the Beau had been kept drumming their heels until a suitable realisation of their inferiority had overtaken
them. Here there was a press of people of various ranks, uneasily jostled together in the quest for a bargain or a keepsake;
and here, almost immediately, they were accosted by Marcus Morland, who looked extremely relieved to see them.


‘Oh, thank heaven, a friendly face at last!’ he cried, making his bow to Lucy. ‘How do you do, ma’am – sir?’

‘Hullo, Marcus,’ Lucy said. He was a distant relative of hers, who had become Earl of Chelmsford last year on the unexpected
death of his cousin Bobbie. ‘I didn’t know you were in Town. I thought you were house-hunting with your mother.’


‘We were – we came back yesterday.’ The new earl’s pale hair was ruffled and he looked hot. ‘I say, there are some very queer
people here today! I was up in the bedroom just now, and there were two of the most vulgar cits you can imagine, not at all
the thing! There they sat on the dressing table smoking tuppenny cigars and talking about Trade, while their wives gave the
mattress and bolster a most tremendous shampo-ing!’

‘I’ll give you shampo, young Chelmsford,’ Theakston smiled. ‘None of your Peninsula slang here, if you please!’


‘Ah yes,’ Lucy eyed him critically, ‘you’ve shaved off your whiskers. I couldn’t think why you looked so different.’

‘Mama didn’t think they were becoming to an Earl,’ Marcus said, embarrassed. ‘I don’t think she likes to be reminded of the
army – you know, Papa being killed and everything. But I say, this is an awful business, isn’t it? Mr Brummell of all people!
I hate to think of all his things going to strangers.’


If he had hoped to ingratiate himself by sympathising he had chosen his words unwisely. Lucy didn’t like being reminded of
the horrid reality.


‘And have you come to acquire some of his “things” – or is it mere idle curiosity that brings you here?’ she asked coolly.

Marcus flushed. ‘Mama asked me to come. She’s after the Beau’s dinner-service – I mean, she thought it might go cheap – that is, she said if it should be a bargain –’ he stumbled.


‘I should stop before you get yourself even more involved,’ Lucy said unkindly. She glanced around her. ‘Every corpse has
its carrion-eaters, I suppose.’


With that she moved away. Danby lingered a moment to comfort the stricken young man. ‘Don’t mind it. Her ladyship’s upset.’

‘Yes, sir, of course, she’s bound to be,’ Marcus said gratefully. He eyed the older man hungrily. ‘Have you heard from Lady
Rosamund lately?’


‘Not since last week.’

‘I suppose she’ll be coming home from Morland Place soon?’

Theakston shook his head. ‘There’s no date set for it. Sophie hasn’t been quite well, and I suppose Rosamund will stay until
she sees her improve. I think there’s some talk of a visit to the seaside.’


Marcus liked Sophie Morland very much, and was sorry to hear that she was unwell, but he had hardly seen Rosamund since Christmas.
‘Surely she doesn’t mean to miss the whole Season?’ he asked wistfully.


‘I don’t think she cares much about the Season,’ said Lord Theakston. ‘She was never fond of balls and squeezes, you know.’

‘But she was so gay in Brussels last year,’ Marcus said. ‘She danced every dance.’

‘Things were very different in Brussels. We shouldn’t judge anything by Brussels, you know.’

‘I suppose not,’ Marcus said hesitantly. ‘And of course it must have been a shock for her when poor Tantony was killed, just
after they’d become engaged. But she ought to be over it by now,’ he went on with faint indignation. ‘It isn’t as if it was
a love-match, after all.’


Theakston hesitated, thinking of his enigmatical stepdaughter. Marcus had been her childhood champion. When she was still
in pigtails, ‘Marcus says’ and ‘Marcus thinks’ had punctuated all Rosamund’s conversation – none the less after he had gone
away, like a story-book hero, to the war, and she hadn’t seen him for two years.


Last year Lucy had taken her and her cousin Sophie to Brussels for their come-out. Marcus had been there too: a dashing staff officer at Headquarters, and making a fool of himself over that practised siren, Lady Annabel Robb. So Rosamund
had dedicated herself to becoming the toast of the Season: feverishly gay, she had danced every dance, flirted with all the
officers, and finally become engaged to handsome Philip Tantony, at the same time as Sophie had accepted a Major Larosse.


Well, poor Tantony, like Larosse, had died a hero at Waterloo. Bel Robb had dropped Marcus callously and married elsewhere,
and Marcus, his eyes opened, was now not only free and eligible, but as eager to marry Rosamund as she could ever have wanted.
Yet Rosamund seemed curiously unwilling to come to the point. No-one had thought her particularly attached to Tantony; assumed
she had accepted him because she couldn’t have Marcus; but Theakston wondered whether perhaps they had all mistaken the situation.
He had a notion that Marcus was deceiving himself, perhaps wilfully.


So now he diverted Marcus’s attention by asking, ‘How did you get on with your house-hunting?’

‘Not very well. We looked at half a dozen places, all very splendid, I thought, but Mama’s awfully particular, and nothing
seems to be just exactly what she’s looking for. For myself,’ he added in a burst of confidentiality, ‘I’d as soon live in
Town all the time, but Mama says we have to have a Seat. She wonders that none of the previous Earls have purchased before
now.’


‘You’ve chosen the right time to buy: everybody else is selling. But you have Shawes, in any case,’ said Danby –unguardedly,
since it was next door to Morland Place where Rosamund had been staying. ‘It’s small, but very handsome.’


‘Yes, but it won’t do for Mama. Yorkshire’s so far away,’ Marcus said wistfully. ‘I say, sir –’

Theakston cut him off hastily. ‘I must go to her ladyship. Good luck with your commission – the dinner-service is very fine.
I should get Abrams to bid for you – he’s the best of ’em,’ he added with a nod towards the throng in the hall.


‘Oh no, sir, I mean to bid for myself,’ Marcus said proudly, and Theakston shrugged and left him to it. Lady Barbara was unlikely
to get her dinner-service that way, he thought; but he had no brief for Lady Barbara, who was very nearly the most unpleasant
woman he knew.


He caught up with Lucy in the dining-room next door, talking to Lord John Anstey of York, a family friend of her childhood,
and patriarch of the vast Anstey coal empire.


‘I really am surprised at Brummell – running off like this and leaving Alvanley and Worcester to stand the row,’ Anstey was
saying. ‘I hear they’re damnably compromised – joined with him to raise a loan, which is bound to be called in now. And then
there’s the Manners brothers. He was involved in some sort of annuity scheme with them, so I hear – all very shaky. Tipping
the double to the duns is one thing, but to leave your friends –’


Lucy was looking ready to explode.

‘No, no – nothing else he could do,’ Danby said quickly. ‘If he hadn’t run, he’d have been taken up, and that’d be the end
of that. He’d never be able to pay anyone back from inside the King’s Bench, now would he?’


Anstey looked doubtful. ‘But surely he’s all to pieces? I hear his debts are frightful. What can he hope to do – even from
France?’


‘It’s much cheaper to live in France. He has some capital left – not much, but with the strictest economy, he might live on
the interest and pay back a little here and there,’ Danby said, aware of how futile it sounded. Brummell practise economy?
As well expect water to run uphill. ‘And then there’s a considerable sum still held up in Chancery, which must become his
sooner or later.’


‘In Chancery? Then it’ll be later rather than sooner. Men have grown old and died waiting for legacies to be released from
Chancery.’


‘I know. But it’s the best hope there is,’ Theakston said with a shrug.

Anstey looked at Lucy and sighed. ‘Well, I suppose he must feel the disgrace as heartily as anyone. He owed you quite a sum,
didn’t he?’


Lucy frowned. ‘Danby gave him a trifle from time to time, but he knows we’d never press him for repayment, not like that dreadful
Meyler creature. It’s all his fault George has had to run. He was the one who started all the fuss.’


‘I’m afraid it had to come sooner or later, Lucy,’ Anstey said gently. ‘Even Hobhouse was saying –’

‘Oh, Hobhouse! All his friends conveniently forget now that if positions had been reversed, he’d have given them anything,’
Lucy burst out. ‘He was the most generous man in the world.’


‘Well, he won’t be the last to come to grief, I’m afraid,’ Anstey said. ‘There are breakdowns everywhere, and bankruptcies,
and any number of small banks failing. That’s half the trouble, you know – this damned paper money! There’s no end to the
bills banks can issue, and with trade stagnant that can only lead to inflation. We must get back to gold currency, but we
daren’t do it too quickly, especially with prices rising so fast.’


Lucy understood nothing of such matters, but gold currency was a feature of her youth and it had a solid, reassuring sound
in a world suddenly grown unfamiliar. ‘Quite right,’ she said. ‘We should never have got away from gold. This paper money
was the start of all our troubles.’


Anstey almost smiled. ‘You may be right. But we can’t do it for a year or two – especially with the landowners pressing us
to abolish the income tax.’


‘Oh, income tax – I hate the very sound of it! As well be in the paws of the cent-per-cents, as pay income tax, I always say!’
Lucy exclaimed.


Anstey met Theakston’s eye and both burst out laughing. ‘Oh Lucy, what do you know about money-lenders?’ Anstey said.

‘Enough to know you might as well be dead,’ she retorted. ‘So will things be getting back to normal soon?’ she went on, looking
up at Anstey hopefully.


‘Not soon. I’m afraid it will get worse before it’s better.’

‘But why, John? What’s gone wrong? Now the war’s over –’

‘It’s very complicated,’ Anstey said patiently. ‘It’s not just us, you see, but all the rest of Europe, too. No-one can afford
to buy our goods, so the manufactories and workshops have to stop producing. They lay off the hands, and men out of work can’t
afford to buy the food the farms produce, so farmhands are laid off too. There’s unemployment everywhere.’


‘Even in the coal mines? I thought you were doing so well?’

‘We were, a couple of years ago. The increase in steam-engine machinery meant every machine needed coal. But now the manufactories
are idle, so I’ve had to turn off men as well. Everything’s connected, you see, Lucy. We’re all involved. I dare say even your returns have fallen.’


‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ Lucy said blankly. ‘My agent sees to all that. But in any case, we’ve always lived in a pretty
small way, so I daresay we keep ahead with the world.’


Anstey boggled at the idea of Lucy living ‘in a small way’, and even Danby coughed a little and hid a smile with his hand.

Lucy didn’t notice, pursuing thoughts of her own. ‘Are you in trouble, then, John?’

‘Good Lord no,’ he said quickly. ‘Things aren’t come to that pass yet.’

‘Well, I’m glad to hear it. Only so many people are going to the wall, it makes one nervous.’

‘Oh, I’m not completely to pieces yet,’ Anstey smiled. ‘I’ve enough to spare, at any rate, to bid for Brummell’s Mantons.
I’ve always coveted them.’


Theakston nodded. ‘They’re capital pieces; but Hobhouse is after ’em too, so be sure you don’t just bid each other up.’

‘Thanks for the warning. Are you after anything in particular?’

‘George’s cellar,’ Danby admitted. ‘Ten dozen of port, and sixteen dozen of burgundy, claret and champagne. I helped him lay
’em down, in happier days. Know he’d sooner I drank ’em than one of your Russell Square types.’


Anstey sighed. ‘It’s a bad business, but it can’t be helped. Ah, there’s Mr Christie going into the dining-room now. I think
we must be about to begin. Shall we go in? May I offer you my arm, Lucy? Hullo, isn’t that Harriette Wilson? Everyone seems
to be here, don’t they? And there’s Tom Raikes. And young Scrope Davies – I hear he’s almost as far up the River Tick as poor
Brummell was.’


By the hour of Promenade the rain had stopped, leaving the afternoon grey, cold and gusty. It was enough for Lucy, having
been confined indoors all day. She put on her driving-coat and, in memory of the departed Beau, one of her more dashing hats,
and went out for a drive in the Park.


The dreadful weather so far that year had evidently lowered many people’s expectations, for there was far more of a crowd
than might have been expected, most of them driving or riding. Lucy’s progress was slow, for everyone seemed to want to discuss Brummell’s downfall, who had guessed it was coming,
what it would mean for Society, and who had got what at the auction.


Lucy bore with the remarks of the genuinely concerned as patiently as possible; the merely impertinent got short shrift; but
at last she had had enough of it, and with the justification that her horses were getting cold, drove on at too smart a trot
for anyone else to accost her.


They were almost round at the Stanhope Gate again, when Parslow murmured discreetly, ‘Lady Greyshott, my lady, on your right,
if you should want to look the other way.’


‘No, it’s all right – Lady Greyshott I don’t mind,’ Lucy said, slowing her team.

Helena Greyshott was a distant cousin, and an exact contemporary of Lucy’s. Her career through Society had been even more
exciting and scandalous than Lucy’s, and many had been the duels fought over her, both before and after her marriage. Her
husband, a lazy and cynical dilettante considerably her senior, had made it known from the beginning that he did not mean
ever to go out on his wife’s behalf. The meetings had therefore taken place between rivals for her affections, which, coupled
with the fact that Lady Greyshott herself liked to be present, caused a number of the stickier hostesses to strike her from
their visiting-lists.