Dear Lady Disdain

Louisa sighed, before saying gently, holding up her work to inspect it the better, ‘I thought you told me not long ago that you would like to have children of your own, my dear. You are leaving it rather late to marry—you are already twenty-eight years old—and husbands do not grow on trees.’ And she gave her one-time charge a sideways look.

So even Louisa was full of sententious piff-paff, it seemed, and she, Stacy, was condemned to live in a childless desert because in order to have children one must first have a husband. How much better if one were a plant, fertilised at a distance by a passing bee—with no idea where the pollen came from!

This ridiculous notion was enough to restore her good humour and bring a wry smile to her face. It was the kind of nonsensical idea which she could never share with kind Louisa but which would have amused her father. Tears pricked at the back of her eyes. Hardly a day passed but she missed him—her father, her tutor, her mentor, her friend, the parent with whom, improbably, she had shared her jokes.

It occurred to her that it was too long since she had made one, or heard one, and meantime Louisa deserved an answer. But she would not like it.

‘Oh,’ she said, the hint of unexpected laughter in her voice bringing Louisa’s head up, ‘never fear, my love. When one is as rich as the heiress who owns Blanchard’s Bank, husbands forsake the trees and spring out of the ground! There will be no shortage of offers for the richest prize in England! The shortage lies, Louisa, in men whom I might wish to accept. And that is enough of that. I have work to do.’ And she opened another ledger and began to write as briskly as she had spoken.

If Miss Landen was thinking sadly that her one-time charge was such a strong woman, both mentally and morally, that it would need a man of equal strength to contain and perhaps tame her, she did not say so. It was all her stupid father’s fault, she thought ruefully as she watched Stacy’s quill drive across the paper, bringing her up as he had done.

It had been the failure of Louis Blanchard’s wife to give him boy children who could survive birth which had done the damage. He had married Lady Rachel Beauchamp, of a poor and noble family, and he had loved her in his aloof fashion, but constant childbearing and miscarriages had made her sickly and ailing.

It had been a miracle that she had carried her one girl child to term—another miracle that the child had been born large and healthy—but the birth had killed her mother, and left her father, for a time, resentful of the child who had taken his wife from him.

And then, as she grew up, her bright intelligence had begun to impress him. The child was christened Anastasia, but he had early shortened her name to Stacy, not Anna, because Stacy sounded more like the boy he had wanted to continue the Blanchard dynasty. Louisa remembered the first time she had met Louis Blanchard and Stacy.

‘I’m not hiring you as a governess,’ he had told her bluntly in the rich study of his home in Piccadilly. ‘I want her to have the manners and appearance of a fine lady, even if she has the brains and mental accomplishment of a clever man. I have hired male tutors to educate her. Why,’ he boasted proudly, ‘she can calculate a percentage and draw up a bill better than any of my clerks, and she still but a child.’

Louisa had risen from her chair, said severely, ‘I do not wish to undertake this task, Mr Blanchard. You are doing the poor child no favour and I ought not to abet you.’

He had given her the smile which transformed his hard face, and which immediately won him Louisa Landen’s heart.

‘And that is exactly why I am hiring you,’ he had told her warmly, ‘to keep her still a woman, and a modest one, for all her accomplishments.’ He had seen Louisa hesitate. ‘I will send for her,’ he had said, and had rung the bell, ‘and you may see that I am not asking you to care for a hoyden or a female pedant.’

What Louisa had seen when a lady’s maid brought Stacy in was a shy, dark little girl, the image of her handsome father, who, for all her shyness, was thoroughly in command of herself, and who took one look at Louisa Landen and thoroughly approved of what she saw.

‘My dear,’ her father had told her, as coolly as though he were addressing an equal, ‘this is Miss Louisa Landen, who I hope will agree to become your companion and teach you the conduct and etiquette of a lady.’

Stacey had looked at the ladylike figure before her, and had seen through Miss Landen’s modest exterior to the kind heart beneath it. She had made a short bow and said in a pretty voice, quite unlike anything which Miss Landen might have expected of the child prodigy whom her father had described, ‘Oh, I do so hope, Miss Landen, that you will become my companion. I really do need someone to talk to and tell me exactly how a young lady should behave.’

Such composure in a ten-year-old Miss Landen had not met in her long career as a governess. She had bowed in her turn and murmured gently, ‘And I shall be pleased to do just that, my dear,’ and had begun her long association with Stacy and Louis Blanchard.

And if she had fallen a little in love with Louis Blanchard on the way, no one was ever to know. Occasionally she had remonstrated with him over his daughter’s odd education, telling him in no uncertain terms that it was quite improper and that he was doing her no favour by insisting on it.

He had smiled at her and announced, ‘I am not here to do her favours. I am here to secure for Blanchard’s someone of that name who can run it when I am gone, and if that someone is a woman, then I must make do with what the Creator of us all has sent me!’

And that had been that. Louisa had never raised the matter again and here was the end of it, Louis Blanchard having died suddenly at a comparatively early age, leaving Stacy, still unmarried, to run the Bank, and waiting now for her right-hand man Ephraim Blount to come in to discuss the day’s news and doings with her.

It grew increasingly likely, was Louisa’s last sad thought, that Stacy would never marry now, and her unlikely situation was the cause of it!

Stacy didn’t feel sad, however, and the arrival of Ephraim Blount, carrying a pile of papers and demanding some immediate decisions, served to invigorate rather than depress her.

He bowed to her, before he stood and presented each problem to her—he never consented to sit by her while they worked together, for Ephraim, although only in early middle age, was a man of the old school. Everything must be done exactly so, as Louis Blanchard had taught him, which was sometimes a disadvantage rather than an advantage, as Stacy had often found. Imagination was not his strong suit. He was often mournfully depressed, rather than happy, when some of her wilder innovations proved to be fruitful. ‘So daring for a young woman,’ he was given to murmuring to his own assistant, the young Thomas Telfer, who worshipped Stacy from afar, ‘but I have to admit that up to the present Miss Blanchard’s judgement has never let herself, or the Bank, down.’

Prim, starched, his thinning yellow hair brushed stiffly over his forehead, he was the perfect right-hand man. Now he was saying, his voice melancholy, as though announcing a death, ‘Things are not going well at the York house, madam. All seems to be at sixes and sevens since Poxon was appointed. I fear that he is not up to snuff. Something needs to be done, or Blanchard’s reputation will suffer. May I suggest that, given your agreement, of course, I myself go there to try to put matters straight?’

Stacy propped her chin in both hands—a gesture of her father’s which always brought that formidable thruster to Ephraim’s mind. She looked steadily past him at the opposite wall, to where, before the blazing fire, Louisa was now gently sleeping. She no longer took her chaperonage of Stacy, when the latter was entertaining the Bank’s employees—all male—seriously.

‘D’you know, Ephraim, I have my doubts about the wisdom of that? I think that one of the things which may be wrong at York is that no Blanchard has visited there since my father died. I wish to remedy that. My aunt and uncle Beauchamp have asked me to spend Christmas with them at Bramham Castle, which is only a few miles from York. We have not met since Father’s death, and to agree to their wishes would mean that I could combine business with pleasure—and leave you here in sole charge. You would like that, I think.’

If such a dry stick could be said to glow, Ephraim glowed. Stacy noted with amusement that he thought it politic to demur.

‘Are you sure, madam? Think of the time of year. To travel to Yorkshire in mid-winter—is it wise?’

‘Before the snows, I think,’ Stacy murmured gravely. ‘It is what my father would have done, I am sure.’

She had struck exactly the right note. Louis Blanchard had been Ephraim’s god, and he bowed down before his very name. ‘Oh, indeed, madam, yes, madam. Of all things the most suitable. You will take one of our senior clerks with you, I trust, to act as a secretary and aide?’

‘Greaves, I thought,’ murmured Stacy, happy to have got her own way so easily, ‘unless you have any objections?’

‘None at all, madam. The very man.’ He was trying to contain his pleasure at the prospect of taking sole charge of Blanchard’s for at least two months—something which he had longed to do since his late master’s death. ‘I will write at once and set all in train.’ And he bustled importantly out of the room.

Stacy lay back in her chair and contemplated the prospect of a few weeks’ freedom from the daily grind of running Blanchard’s. Lately she had begun to feel strangely restless, rewarding though her work was, and the power that came with it. A change of scene, the challenge of putting York straight would renew her spirits, she was sure. All that remained was to waken Louisa up and shock her with the news.

‘God rest you merry, gentlemen,’ she hummed to herself. Perhaps I may hear the waits singing in the northern snows, she thought, and perhaps…perhaps…I might meet someone more interesting, more to my taste, than Lord Axforde and his not so merry gentlemen-friends!

She walked across the room and bent to kiss Louisa gently on the cheek. She was sure that after her first shock was over Louisa would approve of what she was about to do—and would start to wonder what handsome and eligible young men, of whom her charge might approve, lived in and around York!

‘Damn my father,’ said Matthew Falconer violently to the lawyer who had been speaking of his parent’s wish to be reconciled with his long-estranged son. ‘I haven’t crossed the Atlantic in order to please him—simply to end my associations here by disposing of all that I own, including this estate which my great-aunt has thought fit to leave me.’

‘But, m’lord—’ the lawyer began, in a feeble attempt to pacify the massive man who stood opposite him. Matthew Falconer was over six feet tall, and gave the appearance of being nearly as broad. His harshly handsome face, leonine beneath tawny hair, with matching golden eyes, bore the marks of his having worked in the open. His hands, Lawyer Grimes had already noticed, were those of a man who did much physical work with them. His nails were cut short, and there were calluses on his long fingers and on his palms. He was dressed like a farmer—plainly—with nothing of the man of fashion he had once been remaining to hint of his lineage, or of his newly acquired title.

Which he didn’t want. He hadn’t come to England to be called by his detested brother’s name. He interrupted Grimes to say, ‘I will not be addressed as Lord Radley—nor will you call me m’lord or sir,’ he added as he saw the lawyer’s mouth shaping to say it. ‘You will address me as Matthew, Matt, Mr Falconer, or Falconer, as you please, or earn my instant displeasure.’

He saw Grimes close his eyes before he replied in a long-suffering voice, ‘I will do as you ask, Mr Falconer, but that does not make you less the Viscount Radley, your father, the Earl Falconer’s heir, now that your older brother has died so prematurely.’

The man standing by the window, staring sardonically at both Matt Falconer and the lawyer, gave a rolling chuckle before saying in a thick American accent, ‘Y’all better learn soon, Mr Lawyer, sir, that what Matt Falconer wants Matt Falconer usually gets. That so, Matt?’

Matt noted with grim amusement the lawyer’s wince away from them both, particularly from Jeb Priestly, who, in his determinedly Yankee garb of black and yellow checked trousers, tight at the knee, flaring at the ankle, his black frock-coat extravagantly cut, and his battered black top hat, which he had refused to remove in defiance of all English custom, stood for everything which Benjamin Grimes deplored. A mannerless rebel come to mock his late masters.

Worse, Matthew Falconer was allowing this creature, who was merely his valet-cum-secretary-cum-man-of-all-work, to address him as familiarly as though they were both of the same rank, and made no effort to check his rudeness to Grimes himself.

‘I say again, Mr Falconer, before we even begin to dispose of your late great-aunt, Lady Emily Falconer’s estate in Yorkshire, that you ought to consider the olive-branch which your father is holding out to you. You are, after all, his only remaining son…’

Matt found all this boring beyond belief. ‘Why, sir, do you persist in telling me things I know? I am well aware of my position vis-à-vis both my father and Lady Emily. So far as the Earl is concerned you may tell him, with my compliments, timeo Danaos et dona ferentis. I am sure that he will know what I mean.’ This last came out in a mocking drawl reminiscent of the young rattle-pate about town he had once been, so different from the large and sombre man he now was. He could see the lawyer registering shock again.

Priestley saw fit to put his oar in once more. ‘Well, your pa might know what you mean by that gibberish, Matt, but, sure God, I don’t. Try translating it into good American, would you?’

Matt knew that Priestley was, in his words, twisting the lawyer’s tail. Uncouth he might look and sound, but his knowledge of the Classics equalled Matt’s own, he being an alumnus of Harvard. Nevertheless, Matt decided to join in Jeb’s game.

‘It translates, Jeb, being said by a Trojan with whom the Greeks were fighting, into, “I fear the Greeks even when they bring gifts”, or, in other words, It is dangerous to accept presents from an enemy.’

‘Tro-jans,’ drawled Priestley. ‘An’ which are you, Matt?’

‘A Trojan, of course,’ smiled Matt, ‘ever since I was born to be my father’s curse. Isn’t that right, Mr Grimes? How many ultimatums had you the honour to face me with until the final one before I left England? No, don’t answer; it would tax your memory to recall them all.’

Grimes’ face flamed scarlet. He looked away at the shelves of law books on the wall behind his desk, and said in a low voice, ‘I suppose it is useless to tell you how much I regretted m’lord’s treatment of you, Mr Falconer, but I must also tell you that your father is a broken old man…’