The Victory

Book 12: Morland Dynasty

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

Genres: Historical Fiction

Synopsis

1803: Napoleon is poised to invade England, with only Nelson's weather-beaten ships in his way, but the French fleet are not the only threat to the fortunes of the Morland family.

In the North of England, Mary Ann's relationship with the missionary, Father Rathbone, introduces her to the stark realities of life in plague-torn Manchester. In the South, Lucy's lover, Weston, is assigned to the blockade of Brest, while her neglected husband, Chetwyn, finally finds love in an affair which threatens him with disgrace and ruin.

From the fashionable salons of Beau Brummell's London to the shot-torn docks at Trafalgar, the Morlands face danger and personal tragedy, as well as love and fulfilment.

Release date: August 25, 2011

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 448

Sample

Old Sam’l, the village hornblower, walking up from his outlying cottage at his accustomed time one morning in April 1803,
was mildly surprised to hear a horseman coming up behind him. From the lightness of the tread he could tell it was a gentleman’s
riding-horse, and it was an early hour for a gentleman to be abroad. He stepped off the path to let the rider by, and then
smiled to himself in sudden understanding as he recognised the distinctive long ears and square muzzle of Nez Carré, the bay
gelding belonging to Master James Morland of Morland Place.


‘Morning, master!’ Old Sam’l cried, baring his naked gums and tugging the disreputable brim of his ancient hat.

‘Morning, Sam’l’ James replied. ‘I have the start of you this morning, you see!’

Sam’l gave him a sly look. ‘Ah, but then I’d lay a shillin’ you’ve not been to bed yet.’

‘Quite right,’ James confessed. He was on his way home from the Maccabbees Club in York, where he had spent the whole night
playing whist and drinking brandy, as he did from time to time when the inner voice of his discontent grew too clamorous.
Drink and lack of sleep blunted his perceptions, and the unreliable light of an April morning only emphasised the strange,
detached feeling of unreality. ‘How’s your daughter?’ he asked with an effort. He knew Old Sam’l lived with an unmarried daughter,
but he couldn’t recall her name. His mother would have remembered, he thought: she remembered everything about every one of
her people, which was one of the reasons she had been so beloved.


‘Main well, thankee, master,’ Sam’l replied, pleased with the attention, ‘though troubled with the rheumatics, this damp weather.’

‘It doesn’t seem to bother you, at any rate,’ James said. ‘You look as fit as ever.’

‘I keep myself busy, master, and the Lord keeps me well,’ Sam’l nodded, touching his hat again as James rode on. With a further effort, James recalled that Sam’s only son had been killed
at Malta in the late conflict with the French. His father and grandfather had each been hornblower before him, and James spared
a thought to wonder who would call the villagers to their labours when old Sam’l was dead.


Well, that would be brother Ned’s problem, not his. Edward was the local squire, magistrate, Justice of the Peace, and guardian
of Morland Place into the bargain, for all that it was James’s daughter Fanny who would inherit the estate. James had not
been considered, in her grandparents’ opinion, responsible enough to be his daughter’s trustee; and perhaps, he reflected,
yawning, they had not been far wrong. Here he was, after all, coming home like an alley-cat in the early hours after a night
of debauchery. He would be going to bed just as dear old reliable Ned was getting up, and he would not rise again until half
his brother’s day’s work was done.


Nez Carré put in a little dancing step here and there, flicking his long ears back and forth with interest at every movement
and sound in the waking world around him. He was as fresh as his master was frowsy, having spent the night in what was becoming
his accustomed stall in the Bunch of Grapes.


‘Deep doings I had, too, my boy, while you were asleep,’ James said aloud, reaching forward to turn Nez Carré’s one wayward
lock of mane back to the proper side. ‘But I came out of it rather well — a hundred guineas up on the week’s play.’ Nez Carré
knuckered in response to the voice, and took it as permission to break into a trot, and James checked him gently with a smile
at the old horse’s sudden skittishness. ‘Must be spring,’ he remarked.


He turned into the village street, where already the houses were astir. Doors and windows were thrown open on the fine morning;
the smell of cooking issued from some of the houses, while at others the menfolk had brought out wooden stools to sit in the
early sunshine and break their fast with bread and beer. Hens and geese, just let out, were everywhere, ruffling their feathers
and stretching their necks in raucous contention as they re-established social order. A family of ducks crossed the road in
single file, heading flat-footed for the stream; a grey cat on a sunny window-ledge blinked and paused in the first serious wash of the day as Nez Carré’s shadow crossed her; a dog ran out and barked at him, and then grinned
foolishly and wagged its tail in self-congratulation.


Stone, the tailor, was already at his work, sitting on a stool in the doorway of his cottage, one foot up on the door-frame
to support the cloth he was stitching. His two little girls, identical twins, sat on a mounting stone outside eating cold
porrage with their fingers out of wooden bowls, the rhythm of their hands never faltering while their round eyes followed
James’s progress. At another house, weaver Batty’s young wife, suckling her baby, came to the door to shake out a cloth with
her free hand. She smiled and blushed as James passed, turning her shoulder not with embarrassment, but with the grace of
a simple modesty.


Most of the village folk worked for the Morland family in one way or another, some on the land, others in the various processes
of the manufacture of Morland Fancy. Half the houses he passed had a loom in the attic or in a back room, and most of the
women spun wool in between their other tasks, either on a wheel, or, increasingly, on a hand-jenny.


There was no sign here of the poverty that one heard about farther south. The enclosures carried out in his father’s time
had created not less but more — and more regular — work in the fields; the demand for woollen cloth had grown slowly but steadily;
and nearby York, a wealthy and sociable city, provided plenty of work for domestic servants, and a steady market for meat
and milk, bread and vegetables, shoes, clothes, furniture, and artifacts of all kinds.


It was a prosperous area, and the Morlands were well-respected landlords. Edward was esteemed as a fair master and a knowing
one with stock, and James’s indiscretions were forgiven him partly for the sake of his good looks and personal charm, but mostly because he was considered the best horseman in the Ridings. James’s wife Mary Ann, who was
nominally mistress of Morland Place, had not the knack of making herself liked, but their daughter Fanny would inherit all
when she was twenty-one, and those folk who mourned the old mistress, James’s mother Jemima, told themselves that Fanny would
be just like her.


James wondered if they deceived themselves. He could not help knowing that Fanny was horribly spoiled — Edward pointed it
out to him daily, and his own judgement could not deny that she did behave very badly sometimes. But she was not yet eight
years old, after all, and he trusted that she would grow out of it. James adored her, and found it impossible to deny her
anything. In his better moments he realised that it might well be his indulgence which made her so ungovernable.


James had a son, too, though he often forgot the fact, for Henry, two years old and unbreeched, was still the property of
nursery maids. Besides, as the boy owed his existence to purely financial considerations — the necessity for a male heir to
inherit Mary Ann’s father’s cotton mills — James found it difficult to think about him as part of his family. He seemed as
exclusively a Hobsbawn as Fanny was a Morland.


Thinking about his wife depressed James. He had married her for family reasons, and would have found it difficult to love
her even had her existence not separated him from the woman of his heart, his cousin Héloïse. Once, when his mother was still
alive, James had run away from wife, home and family to live with Héloïse for a few painfully ecstatic months, until conscience
and social pressure had driven him to return, leaving Héloïse pregnant — that was Sophie, the child he had never seen. The
wrong he had done his wife, the suffering he had caused her, only made it harder for him to like her. We must all, he thought
wryly, hate those we hurt, because the shame of their suffering wounds our self-esteem.


At the end of the village street was Abley’s, the baker’s shop, and the delicious smell of hot bread drifted out to him and
made him realise how hungry he was. Abley himself came red-faced to the door for a breath of air, and nodded to James civilly.


‘Now then, Maister Morland.’

‘Fine day, Abley.’ James reined Nez Carré, who stretched his nose with interest towards the source of the agreeable smell.

‘Too bright,’ Abley dissented succinctly, peering up at the sky. ‘Too bright in April likes to turn off, you mark my words. We s’l have a storm before day’s out. Now then, ’oss, keep thy nose to thyself! Any news from London, maister? Shall we have war soon, dosta think?’


‘I’ve heard nothing certain,’ James replied, ‘though my sister in London says it’s only a matter of time. If Boney won’t give
us satisfaction, we shall have to fight him.’


‘The sooner the better, to my mind,’ Abley said severely. ‘By, if I were ten years younger, I’d tek the shillin’ maself, for
the sake of givin’ yon Boney Party a right good drubbin’.’ His expression softened. ‘But how is Miss Lucy — her ladyship,
I should say?’


‘Just exactly as she always was. She never changes,’ James said.

‘By, she were a right plucked one when she were a little lass, and that clever wi’ animals an’ doctorin’ an’ such! I’ll never
forget how she ’tended a sore on ma prize pig Caesar’s back, an’ cushed an’ petted him so soft, he nigh on fell asleep while
she did it — an’ him that fierce i’ the normal way, I never went into his pen wi’out a pitchfork.’


James had no desire to spoil Abley’s image of Lucy by telling him that she was at present scandalising London by living openly
with her lover, Captain Weston, while her husband, James Chetwyn, Earl of Aylesbury, lived a bachelor life in an apartment
in Ryder Street. Instead he said, ‘They say the Prince of Wales always asks her advice before buying a horse.’


Abley shook his head admiringly. ‘To think of our Miss Lucy hob-nobbin’ wi’ the Prince himself! Well, to my mind, it’s the
Prince as gets the honour by it, for there’s not another like her i’ th’ world, since your sainted mother passed away. Maister
James. Willta tek a bit o’ ma fresh bread, now, an’ a sup of ale? Likely tha’s had nowt sin’ supper?’


‘I should love some of your fresh rolls to take home and share with Miss Fanny for breakfast,’ James said. ‘You know she always
says your rolls are better than ours at home.’


Abley looked pleased. ‘Well, I won’t say she’s wrong! Tek ’em, an’ welcome, maister. She went past ma door yesterday, on her
little pony, an’ called out to me, right friendly. Rides like a cyclops an’ all! Near as good as Miss Lucy when she were that
age.’


As James dismounted in the yard at Morland Place, Edward appeared from the stable.


‘Hullo, Ned You’re out early!’ James called.

Edward came across to him. ‘One of the carriage-horses is lame,’ he said, fending off Nez Carré as the old horse shoved him
affectionately in the chest.


‘Oh — which one?’

‘One of the greys, Sparta. A touch of thrush. Hoskins will over-feed ’em when they’re not working.’ Edward looked more closely at his brother. ‘Have you been out all night?’


‘Guilty! But don’t ’rate me — it means I can have breakfast with you before I go to bed. Look,’ said James, holding up the
bag of rolls as a peace-offering.


‘A rare pleasure,’ Edward said, but his frown dissolved before his brother’s charming smile. James handed Nez Carré to his
groom and linked arms with Edward as they turned towards the house.


‘I suppose,’ Edward went on, ‘from this display of affection that you’ve outrun your allowance again. I wish you wouldn’t
gamble, Jamie. Not that you aren’t entitled to your share of the estate’s income — you work hard enough — but I hate to see
good Morland money passing into other men’s pockets for no return.’


‘Don’t be such a puritan, old dry-bones,’ James said affectionately. ‘I must have my little bit of pleasure now and then.
Besides, you’re wrong on this occasion: I’ve come home with my pockets freighted with gold — a hundred guineas to the good,
dear brother, so I’m in a clinking good humour! Fortunately,’ he added with a chuckle, ‘Arthur Fussell is as rich as he is
fatuous. He plays cards even worse than he rides.’


They crossed the great hall, heading for the steward’s room, where Ned always took his early bite to stave off the pangs of
hunger until breakfast proper at nine o’clock. A tray was waiting for him, with new bread and cold beef, and a jug of home-brewed,
since Edward did not care for coffee so early in the day.


‘The thing is,’ he reverted when they were sitting either side of the fireplace with the tray between them, ‘I don’t believe
you do enjoy it. You’d get far more pleasure out of a day’s hunting, which costs nothing.’


‘I can’t hunt at night, can I? Come, Ned, leave me be. I only go to the Maccabbees once a week now. A fellow must have something
to keep his mind occupied,’ Edward looked as though he would continue the argument, so James added quickly, ‘Besides, how
else would we get the news so quickly? Crosby Shawe was in the club last night, just down from London, and he says the Government’s
told Lord Whitworth that if Boney don’t agree to our terms within seven days he’s to leave Paris. An you know that if the
British Ambassador leaves Paris, it can only be war.’


‘Seven days?’ Edward said, brightening. ‘Come, that’s more like it! I don’t know why we’ve shilly-shallied so long, anyway.
It’s as plain as bread that Bonaparte doesn’t mean to give up Malta —’


‘Or to withdraw his troops from Switzerland and Holland.’

‘— and the longer we wait, the more time it gives him to raise troops and make his preparations.’

‘It gives us the same time for the same purpose,’ James pointed out.

‘If we used the time properly,’ Edward said, ‘but what has our Government done? Brother William says the Frogs have got better
than fifty ships in Santo Domingo, all ready to sail home, while most of ours are still laid up, and our best captains are
sitting around in Fladong’s waiting to be commissioned. And the army’s no better off. The Government’s done nothing there.’


‘Fifty thousand militiamen balloted back in March is hardly nothing,’ James reminded him.

‘Militiamen aren’t the same as a trained army,’ Edward said with a harassed frown. ‘Besides, who’s to clothe them? Where are
the guns and ammunition to come from? The Government leaves it all for us to do, as usual. Enrolling the men was a nightmare:
I swear nine out of every ten claimed exemption. Substitutes are asking twenty, even twenty-five pounds now — aye, and getting
it! And how do you think that’s going to affect the recruitment of regulars, when their bounty’s only seven pound twelve-and-six?
Rustics armed with pikes is all we shall have to fight with — against French veterans, and the best artillery in Europe.’


James patted his arm. ‘Eat your bread and meat, old fellow. You’ll feel better when your belly’s full. Have one of Abley’s rolls. I perjured myself to get them.’


‘You don’t take anything seriously,’ Ned complained. ‘But you’ll change your tune when the French come marching up the Dover
road and hoist the tricolor over St James’s Palace.’


James grinned. ‘Oh yes, I’ll start worrying then, I promise you. It’s about as likely as my becoming the next king of England
We’ll beat ’em when the time comes, Ned, never fear.’


‘It can’t come too soon for me,’ Edward said, cutting another slice of beef and dabbing it with mustard. ‘Damn Addington and
his conciliation! We need a Pitt to bring this cursed peace to an end.’


‘How bloodthirsty you are,’ James remarked mildly, breaking a roll and reaching for the butter.

‘Nothing to do with being bloodthirsty,’ Ned answered quickly. ‘Don’t you realise what a good thing the war is for us? The
price of wool is bound to go up, with the demand for cloth for uniforms. And don’t tell me you’ve forgotten how many more
horses we sold up until that wretched Peace? I don’t see,’ he went on, warming to his subject, ‘why we shouldn’t get a government
contract for horses this time. After all, it isn’t as though we haven’t got influential friends. There’s John Anstey a Member
of Parliament to begin with, and cousin Horatio a bosom-bow of the Prince; and Chetwyn’s always been well-liked in Court circles,
if he’d stir himself.’


‘The name of Morland is much better known at the Admiralty than at the War Office,’ James reminded him lazily.

‘Well then,’ Ned countered, ‘what about a contract for supplying provisions for the fleet?’

‘Surely the commissioners at Portsmouth must get all their beef and mutton from the southern counties? I can’t see them wanting
our cattle, all skin and bone after a two-hundred-mile drive.’


‘I wasn’t talking about cattle,’ Ned said impatiently, ‘I was talking about corn. They’re going to need tons of it, for ship’s
bread. We could turn over all our arable fields to it, and then there’s that piece of land on the edge of the moor that only
wants draining…’


James yawned. ‘Whatever you say, old fellow. You don’t need to ask my permission. It’s no concern of mine.’


‘The estate is held in trust for Fanny,’ Edward pointed out. ‘Of course it’s your concern. You’re her father.’

‘The merest accident,’ James said, taking a bite of buttered roll. ‘The more I think of it, the more I feel it would have been
better all round if you had married Mary Ann, rather than me — inherited her from Chetwyn, you might say, when he decided to marry Lucy instead.
You and he being so close, it would have kept it in the family, so to speak.’


Edward reddened a little. James’s assumed carelessness always irritated him. ‘I don’t suppose I could have made a worse husband
than you, anyway,’ he retorted. ‘I wouldn’t have run off and broken Mother’s heart.’


‘But then your sense of duty to the family wasn’t strong enough to persuade you to marry at all, was it?’ James said, nettled
into retaliation. ‘It was left to me to provide an heir, since you wouldn’t.’


There was a tap at the door at that moment, and Father Aislaby, the chaplain, came in most timely. ‘Ah, I thought I heard your
voice,’ he said to James. ‘I thought perhaps you ought to know that Fanny has gone out.’


‘Gone out where?’ Edward asked before James could speak.

‘That I can’t tell you,’ Aislaby said. ‘But she’s taken her pony and that young stable-lad, the red-haired one — ’

‘Foster,’ James supplied with a smile. ‘Yes, she would — he’s a thorough reprobate. Fanny’s taste is consistent, at least
I suspect they’ve gone off to steal pheasant’s eggs. She did seem to take an unusual interest in the clutches yesterday, when
we were riding in Harewood Whin.’


‘How can you take it so lightly?’ Edward exclaimed. ‘Really, Jamie, that child goes beyond all bounds! You should never have
given her a pony. She careers about the countryside like a little savage, completely unrestrained — and as ignorant, as far
as I can see, as the day she was born. I doubt whether she can even read and write.’


‘That’s an aspersion on you, Father,’ James said. ‘What have you been teaching my daughter all these years?’

‘Precious little, I’m afraid,’ Aislaby admitted, unperturbed. ‘If I can keep her in the schoolroom at all, it’s as much as
I compound for. As for teaching her anything, I fear it’s beyond me.’


‘How poor-spirited of you,’ James murmured.

‘The lessons I teach the choristers are not suitable for a girl, in any case,’ the chaplain went on. ‘I’ve said before, many
times, that Fanny ought to have a governess; but even that will do no good unless you, her father, discipline her. As long
as she knows she can appeal to you to countermand anyone else’s orders, there will be no doing anything with her.’


‘Just what I’ve always said,’ Edward exclaimed triumphantly. ‘If you go on like this, Jamie —’

‘Yes, yes, spare me the reiteration,’ James cried, ruffled. ‘Lord, what a pair of Methodists you are! Let the poor child have
a little fun! She’s only seven years old. There’ll be time enough for simpering and sitting when she’s older. She likes to
romp and play, and what harm can there be in that? Lucy was just the same at her age, and she grew up to marry an earl.’


‘Lucy was never as wild as Fanny, and she was very good at her lessons,’ Ned said. ‘She was a romp, true enough, but Mother
saw to it that she kept within bounds. Even so, I doubt whether any earl but Chetwyn, who was practically a brother to her,
would have taken her, after she ran away to sea.’


‘Well, Fanny won’t run away to sea, anyway,’ James said, tired of the argument.

‘She’s run away this morning,’ Edward pointed out, ‘and not for the first time. Someone ought to be sent after her. How you
can just sit there, while —’


Aislaby interposed himself between the brothers soothingly. ‘I expect she’ll be back by breakfast time. Hunger is a stern
imperative at that age. And now I must get ready for the early celebration,’ he added, and withdrew.


Mary Ann, only daughter of Joseph Hobsbawn of Hobsbawn Mills, wife of James Morland and mother of Fanny and Henry, led a
well-regulated life divided, though unequally, between duty and pleasure. Duty, that morning as every morning, was represented by her private and public devotions before breakfast, her presiding over the coffee-pot at breakfast,
and a long interview with the housekeeper and the cook immediately afterwards. Pleasure then had its turn, as she mounted
the stairs to the nursery to visit her son.


‘How is he this morning?’ she asked Sarah, the under-nurserymaid, who tweaked Henry’s lace petticoats into position and propelled
him gently towards his mother. ‘Has he coughed much?’


‘Not so much, today,’ Sarah replied nervously. She evidently had something on her mind, and began, ‘I beg your pardon, madam
—’


Mary Ann was not listening. She lifted Henry in her arms and set him against her shoulder. ‘My little dear,’ she murmured.
‘My pigeon!’


Henry’s solemn face regarded her for a moment consideringly, and then broke into a smile, and Mary Ann felt the rush of love
like hot blood through her heart. ‘That’s my little man,’ she said. ‘Has the nasty cough gone away, then?’ Henry, though
healthy enough upon the whole, had never been quite as robust as Fanny, who had never ailed a thing since the moment she was
born. It was Mary Ann’s deep and unspoken fear that something would happen to her son, who was the one joy of her life. She
turned to Sarah again. ‘I think we had better continue with the syrup, at least for a day or two.’


‘Madam,’ Sarah tried again, ‘if you please —’

‘Has he had his pap?’

‘No, madam. But —’

‘Then I shall give it to him. Run and fetch it, Sarah. Quickly, girl, don’t stand and gawp like that. God loves those who
do their duty with a light tread and a glad heart.’


‘Yes, madam,’ Sarah said resignedly, and trotted away. Mary Ann took her child to the window-seat and sat with him. The window
looked out over the orchard towards the track which branched one way to York and the other to the moors and the open country.
In the nine years, almost, that she had lived here, she had never managed to grow used to the views from the windows. Born
and brought up, as she was, on the edge of a town, with streets and gardens and noises all about her, the country around Morland Place still often seemed very desolate and lonely to her.


‘Though perhaps,’ she said aloud to the baby, with a short sigh, ‘it may be in me, and not in the place.’ Henry had nothing
to dissent to the proposition. He had hold of her hand, and was engaged in the pleasant game of folding and unfolding her
fingers. A movement took her attention, and she turned her head to watch a groom with a pair of horses, riding one and leading
one along the track at the slow trot thought proper for a gentleman’s carriage-horses. She had given no orders for the carriage
that day, so of course the horses must be led out for exercise.


‘Routine,’ she said aloud, ‘is a beautiful thing.’ A saving thing, that kept man from the chaos all around him. And woman,
of course.


Henry examined her forefinger carefully and then carried it experimentally to his mouth, in the way of very young creatures.

But there were good routines and bad routines. Her husband, for instance, had developed a routine of visiting his club and
staying all night. From her window she had seen his return early that morning; and that was all she was likely to see of him
until dinner. It wasn’t even, she thought with another sigh, that he avoided her. ‘He doesn’t know we exist, you and I,’ she
said, gathering Henry into her arms again. Henry smiled and put a fat hand up to tug her ear, and she pressed him to her in
a sudden and painful access of love which startled him enough to make him cry.


‘There now, madam, let me take him!’ It was Jenny the senior nurserymaid, entering as if on cue, with Sarah behind her carrying
the tray with Henry’s bowl of pap. ‘Hush now, my dear.’


‘No,’ said Mary Ann to the reaching hands. ‘I wish to feed him myself.’

‘Of course, madam,’ Jenny said, too good a servant to argue, though her eye was rebellious. ‘Sarah, the bowl and spoon.’ She
waited until her mistress was settled and Henry’s wails had ceased in favour of a more contented sound, and then said, ‘One
of the gardeners was in the kitchen just a while back, madam. He’d been talking to a chap from the village, seemingly.’


‘Yes,’ Mary Ann said with a lack of encouragement which would have quelled a lesser mortal.


‘It’s about Miss Fanny, madam,’ Jenny went on. This chap was out in the north field this morning, and saw Miss Fanny go by
with young Forster and the carpenter’s lad from Hessay, heading for the Lord knows where.’


Mary Ann raised her eyes from Henry’s face and regarded Jenny blankly, ‘what of it?’

‘Well, madam, it isn’t right. Really it isn’t. It’s not so much that she might come to harm, for God knows everyone hereabouts
would lie down and die sooner than let anything hurt a hair of Miss Fanny’s head, but —’


‘Enough, Jenny.’

‘But it’s the scandal, madam,’ Jenny continued stubbornly, ‘and the talk. It reflects on us to have her wander about so unseemly,
and without so much as a kitchen-maid to attend her. And then, she’s a girl, when all’s said and done, for all that she’s
only a child; and when girls are suffered to grow wild, the trouble they get into is always worse than anything anyone expects,
and that’s the truth, madam, if I was to die for it.’


Mary Ann’s eye was flinty. ‘I really cannot listen to any more nonsense about Miss Fanny,’ she said coolly.

‘It isn’t nonsense, madam,’ Jenny protested.

‘Miss Fanny’s behaviour is none of my concern,’ Mary Ann went on. ‘I won’t be troubled with it, do you understand?’

‘Someone’s got to be troubled with it,’ Jenny muttered angrily.

‘If you have any compla