Miss Jesmond's Heir. Paula Marshall

poor head doesn’t persist in troubling me,’ wailed Caro, watching Georgie walk out of the room carrying the guitar, and thinking that it was fortunate that Georgie was something of a flat-chested beanpole who could certainly be mistaken for a boy in her brother’s old clothes. Which I never could, Caro congratulated herself complacently, since my nicely rounded figure has always been the subject of admiration.

      Besides, I mustn’t be too unkind, for it is a most convenient thing for me that she takes the children off my hands when she visits so that I don’t have the trouble of caring for them. I’m not in the least surprised that she ended up by marrying an elderly scholar—for his money, presumably. Considering the way she dresses and carries on, no one else would have wanted her! One wonders why Charles Herron did, such a hoyden as she has always been.

      With which ungracious thoughts—considering all that she owed to her sister-in-law, both in love and money—she drifted off to sleep.

      Georgie, meanwhile, went her own sweet way, across the small park where no one was allowed to play cricket on the carefully tended grass. Gus and Annie ran happily behind her. They were making for the far end of Jesmond House’s land where there was a large stretch of flat green turf where she and the children could play cricket to their heart’s content, far from the disapproving glare of Caro and her gardeners.

      ‘You’re sure of this, Jess? You know what you are doing? This is not a mere whim wham, I hope—the result of a more brilliant spring than usual.’

      The new owner of Jesmond House was standing before the glass doors of the drawing room, looking out over ruined gardens and the desolate park beyond which a small folly stood, crumbling into ruin. He could almost hear his former employer’s sardonic voice echoing in his ear after he had walked into his office to tell him that he had inherited his great-aunt’s estate and wished to be relieved of his duties in order to start a new life far from the City of London and the to-and-fro of the business world there.

      ‘No, not a whim wham,’ Jess Fitzroy had said, shaking his head. ‘And it’s not because I am tired of working for you—after all I owe you a debt of gratitude which I can never repay.’

      Ben Wolfe made a dismissive motion with his hand. ‘Nothing to that,’ he said curtly. ‘You repaid me long ago. I only want to be sure that you have carefully weighed up what you are proposing to do. You know, of course, that if at any time you grow bored with country living and would wish to return, I shall always be ready to welcome you back—if only because I might have some difficulty in finding a lieutenant whom I can trust as completely as I trust you.’

      Jess said simply, ‘I shall miss working with you’, and took the hand Ben held out in friendship. The two men could not have been more unalike. Both of them were tall and well built, but Ben was a great, grey-eyed, black-haired bear of a man, who looked more like a coalheaver or a pugilist than a wealthy man with an old name. Jess, on the other hand, was fair, blue-eyed and classically handsome, with the build and poise of an athlete.

      Susanna, Ben’s wife, had once likened Ben to a broadsword and Jess to a rapier, so far as physique went, that was. In business and in life, however, both were equally devious—Jess, because Ben, slightly older, had trained him to be that way, Ben being devious by nature.

      ‘You will be easy financially, I hope,’ Ben said, eyebrows raised a little, ‘If not…?’

      It was an offer of help, Jess knew. He said, carelessly, ‘Oh, my great-aunt has left me a competence, and I am not strapped for cash myself.’

      This, he knew, was evasion rather than direct lying. Ben was not to know—indeed, Jess had concealed it from him—that he had made himself wealthy by following his employer’s example. Like Ben, he had made a financial killing in 1815 by buying rather than selling stocks because, old soldiers both, they believed that Waterloo would be a victory, not a defeat. The first news which had come from the Continent had wrongly reported that Napoleon had won.

      Since then he had invested wisely and, although he would never be as inordinately wealthy as Ben Wolfe, he was rich in the way most people counted riches. It was not only Ben Wolfe from whom he wished to conceal his true financial position, but the people amongst whom he proposed to live. When a very young man, he had learned by bitter experience the wisdom of playing his cards close to his chest. Only Ben Wolfe’s friendship and advice had saved him from ruin.

      Now Jess felt that he no longer needed Ben’s protection, that he could fend for himself, without needing someone powerful and daring to stand behind him, ready to rescue him if he failed. He was also beginning to believe that only if he left his familiar surroundings to strike out on his own would he ever find a wife as worthy of loving as Ben’s Susanna was.

      He would have liked to marry Susanna, but she had only ever had eyes for Ben. Leaving London would mean leaving her shadow behind as well as Ben’s.

      He had had no notion of what he might find when he reached journey’s end in the south Nottinghamshire countryside. He remembered Jesmond House from his days there as a small boy, when his great-aunt had always made him welcome. Days which he had almost forgotten, until the letter had arrived from her lawyers telling him that he had inherited the house which he had not seen since he had left for India as a very young man. And not only had she left him the house, but also her small fortune. His first reaction had been that he would sell the house, sight unseen.

      Jess smiled wryly, wondering at the sudden impulse which had, instead, brought him back to this near ruin, which he could only just recognise as the well-run splendid mansion of his youth. He remembered it being a spotlessly tidy place with a warm kitchen where he was always welcome. Mrs Hammond, the cook, had fed him surreptitiously because his great-aunt had the appetite of a bird and thought that lively young Jess needed no more to eat than she did. She had baked the most appetising Sally Lunns and fed them to him on the sly in her kitchen.

      Well, he would need to use some of his money, and all his aunt’s, to restore the house to its former glory, and fill it with the servants who would keep up its splendour. It was perhaps appropriate that at this point in his musings, Twells, his aunt’s aged butler-cum-footman, should walk deferentially in and murmur, ‘The mistress always used to ask for the tea board at this hour of the afternoon, sir. Would you care to follow her custom?’

      He was about to say ‘No’ when he had a sudden brief memory of a much-younger great-aunt sitting at the small table beside the hearth serving tea to him on many of the long, golden, summer afternoons of his childhood, a younger Twells hovering beside her. That, together with the understanding that the old man found his presence bewildering and disturbing—although one of his first acts on arriving had been to tell his aunt’s remaining few servants that he had no intention of dismissing any of them—had him changing his mind.

      ‘Very thoughtful of you, Twells. Yes, indeed, and afterwards I’ll take a walk into the paddock beyond the Park. The servants used to play cricket there in their time off, I believe.’

      The old man’s face filled with pleasure. ‘Fancy you remembering that, sir! You were naught but a young shaver when you last visited—and I was a deal spryer then than I am now. I’ll see that the tea board comes along instanter.’

      He was as good as his word and departed, muttering, ‘Mrs Hammond will be that pleased.’

      Once he had gone Jess half regretted his hasty decision to take a walk. He was still dressed for the town with fashionable trousers strapped inside light shoes, and a tight, elaborate cravat which he had tied himself. He sometimes wondered—frivolously—whether his valet Mason’s desertion of him, in order to take over his father’s inn in Devon, had been the real reason for his own sudden abandonment of London and his old life. In the country he would be able to dress more carelessly than in town where a man was judged by his clothing and deportment.

      He drank his tea and ate the Sally Lunns which arrived with it. Astonishingly, Twells—or, more likely, Mrs. Hammond—had remembered his childhood love of them. Altogether it was an odd thing for Jess Fitzroy to be doing in the middle of a mild May afternoon.

      Back in London he would either have been at his desk or engaged