The Wedding Portrait Read online

  The Wedding Portrait

  Fiona Hill

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 1975 by Ellen Pall

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For more information, email [email protected]

  First Diversion Books edition November 2014

  ISBN: 978-1-62681-473-8

  More from Fiona Hill

  The Autumn Rose

  The Stanbroke Girls

  The Trellised Lane

  Sweet’s Folly

  The Practical Heart

  The Love Child

  Love in a Major Key

  The Country Gentleman

  To Nancy

  Chapter I

  “Laura!” cried Lady Eleanor, starting from her chair and rushing from her sitting room. “Laura!” she repeated, half-tumbling down the stairs and poking her head into the drawing room. “Oh do, somebody please, tell me where is Laura!”

  “Indeed, we have not seen her this hour, ma’am,” said Miss Elizabeth Shaw, looking up from the filigree she was working. “Have you looked in the breakfast parlour?”

  “The breakfast parlour,” parroted Lady Eleanor. “The very thing! I shall go and look for her there.”

  “I’ll lay blunt she’s nowhere in the abbey,” said Mr. Jacob Shaw idly after Lady Eleanor had gone, in her haste leaving the door to the drawing room ajar. “Five to one she’s walked out in the snow. I never saw such a girl for walking in the snow!”

  “I wish you will not be so absurd,” whined Miss Emily Shaw peevishly. “I protest, you must know by now that neither Elizabeth nor I will ever accept one of your stupid wagers. It would be vulgar in the extreme,” she concluded missishly.

  “And I wish you Will not be so cross, Emily,” said Miss Elizabeth, returning placidly to her filigree. “I cannot imagine what has occurred to put you out of humour, but I assure you it is quite disagreeable for Jake and me.”

  “I do not care what is disagreeable for you,” Emily retorted sulkily. “Mamma said you were to take care of me, Lizzy, and you do not take care of me. Mamma said you were to be responsible, and instead you have been odious. I am quite tempted to tell her when she and Papa arrive.”

  “I am all a-tremble,” countered Elizabeth, rather meanly.

  “I’ll lay a pony Emily’s bad temper has nothing to do with Lizzy at all,” Jacob remarked. “It is probably the result of her having been made to go to bed at eleven last night, while the rest of us supped.”

  “It is nothing at all to do with that,” Emily snapped. “I had rather be fourteen years old and be myself than be—than be fifty and be you! Besides, Mamma says there is nothing wrong with being fourteen,” she added, and flung herself from the room, slamming the door behind her.

  “Pity there’s no one to take me up on my bets,” said Jacob dryly, when she had gone. “I could make a fortune.”

  “I must say,” commented Elizabeth, ignoring her brother’s remarks, “that while I do feel a little sorry for Emily—for I clearly recall my days in the schoolroom, and it is wretched—something must be done about her manners. The Fieldons will regret they ever invited us for the wedding.”

  “But they had to invite us,” Jacob argued reasonably. “Laura is our cousin. It was a sure bet.”

  “Nonetheless,” said Elizabeth firmly, “one of us will have to speak with her.”

  The question of who was to be delegated this task was left unresolved as Laura burst into the room.

  “Elizabeth, the most famous thing!” she cried breathlessly. “You will never guess what my mother has just told me.”

  “Thaddeus has cried off,” hazarded Jacob, never one to allow a gamble to pass by unnoticed.

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake, Jacob,” said Laura, looking at him with mock disapprobation. “Of course he has not. No, what I wanted to tell you you could never guess, not in a thousand guesses, for it is too odd!”

  “What is it?” asked Elizabeth, her curiosity piqued.

  “Well,” Laura began, seating herself in a small velvet chair before the fire, “I fancy you are not acquainted with Baron Lowland—Baron Nathanial Lowland?”

  “No,” Elizabeth corroborated.

  “Well, to say truth, I am not either, but he is a very old friend of my father, and though I have never met with him since I am grown up—for he leads a retired life—he is my godfather. It seems that he wished to send me a wedding gift, but the usual sort of trinket struck him as being too impersonal, so—by the way,” she said, interrupting herself, “whatever is wrong with Emily? I bumped into her on my way downstairs, and she looked to be quite in a pet. Is she unhappy?”

  “She feels excluded because she is so young,” explained her elder sister. “It does not signify at all, for there is nothing to be done about it. We shall have to let her brood. But do tell us, what is your godfather’s gift?”

  “Oh! The gift! The baron wanted to send something extraordinary, and indeed he has,” resumed Laura. “He has sent us his son Ashley!”

  “To be your slave, I presume?” inquired Jacob, lifting an amused eyebrow.

  “Jake, you really are too silly,” responded his cousin. “Of course not to be a slave, but you see, Ashley is a great proficient at painting. He is coming to do my portrait.”

  “Oh, Laura, how lovely!” cried Elizabeth. “Only think, someday your children will ask what their mamma looked like when she married their papa, and you will show them this picture and say, ‘Here, here is your mamma on the eve of her wedding.’ What a beautiful thing to have! The Baron must be a wonderful man.”

  “Well, he is my father’s oldest friend,” mused Laura. “Anyway, Ashley will be here at any moment. The letter the Baron sent telling us he was coming ought to have arrived days ago, but the snow held it up, I suppose. You would not believe what a flutter it has sent my mother into, arranging a guest-chamber and an extra place setting for dinner—as if the Abbey were not already full of guests! I am sure you would laugh to see her.”

  “We did,” smiled Elizabeth, thinking of the agitated countenance that had appeared at the drawing-room door a few minutes earlier.

  “You know,” remarked Laura in consciously casual tones, “my mother says Ashley must be about Thaddeus’ age, and he is not married. And since the Baron is an excessively handsome man, she says she should not wonder at it if Ashley were to be exceedingly handsome, too. Perhaps,” she continued, looking intently into Elizabeth’s eyes, “you will like him.”

  “I protest,” said Elizabeth, smiling against her will and colouring a little, “you do have an imagination, Laura!” But she was inwardly pleased at the prospect of meeting Ashley Lowland.

  “I say, Laura, are we to see Thad again? Lizzy and I haven’t set eyes upon him since the last time we were down here—that’s almost two years ago, come to think of it—and it seems only civil that we should be reintroduced to him. After all,” Jacob continued, “we might not approve of your marrying him.”

  “Jacob, you are the most infamous tease!” cried Laura. “Naturally he will call on us soon—probably tonight, in fact—but Mamma thought that since you and your sisters arrived just yesterday she would restrict dinner last night to the family party. Except, of course, for the rector. On, you cannot
think what dinner has been like with only my parents and Mr. Chance. I was so happy to see you all, if only for relief from his eternal prosing. Of course,” she amended hastily, “I should have been happy to see you all under any circumstances, but with Mr. Chance in the house—well, I am sure you understand. I do not mean to say that I do not—do not esteem him, you know, but it—well, frankly, it is a little difficult to like him. He is so very peculiar!”

  “I have been meaning to ask you,” said Lizzy, “why are you not to be married by the parish rector? Not that, as you say, we do not all admire Mr. Chance, for I am sure we do,” she added, looking to heaven with an expression of exasperation that contradicted her words.

  “It is a fancy my mother took,” Laura explained. “Mr. Chance, you see, married my parents. In fact, it was the first marriage he performed. So for sentiment’s sake…”

  “Yes, I see,” Elizabeth answered. At this point their discourse was interrupted by the entrance of the Reverend himself.

  “I hope I do not intrude,” he said, with the nervous inflection that characterized all his statements. He seated himself on a small, very uncomfortable chair near Jacob and pushed his spectacles up onto the bridge of his narrow nose as he spoke. The Reverend Mr. Howard Chance, M.A. (Oxon.), was a middle-aged man, slightly inclined to corpulence. His complexion was rather pasty, a circumstance that was hardly relieved by his pale, sandy-lashed eyes. His conversation was always accompanied by a series of quick, complicated gestures; Laura had often thought, as she watched his small plump hands slice the air, that he seemed rather to be orchestrating his words than emphasising them. It could not be denied that he delivered a crashing good sermon when called upon to do so, and even, quite frequently, when not called upon.

  Sir Kenneth had warned his daughter that Mr. Chance was a man of great scholarship and genius, and therefore must be allowed his little oddities and not expected to join easily in trivial conversation and festivities, but Laura had found him quite as interested as any mortal being in the daily events of Harkness Abbey. He took great pains, usually fruitless, to communicate with the younger members of the family party, and Laura did indeed admire, at the same time as she was amused by, these efforts. They were plainly prompted by good will, a nervous wish to feel at one with the warm family round him—a wish that was difficult for the Reverend to fulfill, for his character was plagued by a very un-Christian and indecorous trait: a tendency to satire.

  At this time Mr. Chance was bent upon making another attempt to enter into the feelings of the lively young people before him. “I collect,” he observed to Laura, “that you are the recipient of a very generous and extraordinary gift.”

  “Indeed,” answered the lady, “Mr. Lowland will be here at any moment.”

  “You must find it a most flattering prospect; we all of us find it agreeable to be immortalized, at least, immortalized in an earthly sense. Perhaps you will become Mr. Lowland’s Laura, like the Laura of Petrarch.” He smiled benignly as he said this, but cried out after a few moments of reflection, “Oh dear, but that would be a disaster! What am I saying? Of course, Mr. Lowland, if he is a good artist, will perceive your love of Thaddeus—in your eyes, I mean; in the ‘windows of your soul’—and it is that which will be immortalized.”

  Laura was at a loss for an answer. Mr. Chance had touched upon a subject that had disturbed her some deal in the past few months. It was true, she felt, that she loved Thaddeus, but her love was not at all the kind that romantic young ladies hope to feel for their fiancés. She was quite certain, too, that Thaddeus did not feel for her as Petrarch had for Laura, or Dante for Beatrice. It was hardly to be expected, she reasoned with herself, for they had been children together and grown up as brother and sister. Besides the Simpson tribe—which, Laura realised with a disagreeable start, was invited to pass the evening at the Abbey—Thaddeus’ family was the only one in the neighbourhood whose rank was like that of the Fieldons. They had played together continually since birth; perhaps it seemed natural to their parents that they should be married, but it did not seem quite natural to Laura. It was not that she did not love Thaddeus; she did. However, she also loved her parents, and her cousins, and even Miss Lavinia Webb, who had been her governess and was now her mother’s companion. Somehow she felt that her love for her husband should be different from all these—but it was not.

  She did not find the prospect of being Mrs. Thaddeus Grey—and later, when Sir Philip should die, Lady Laura—unpleasant at all. On the contrary, it seemed that it would be great fun to share a house with Thad, who was both attractive and companionable. Certainly they would not be assailed by the quarrels that she knew sometimes beleaguered arranged matches, for they got along famously. There seemed nothing really to object to in their parents’ plan for the young couple, and when Lady Eleanor had first suggested it to Laura she had felt neither astonishment nor despair. Later, when Thaddeus (sent over by his father, as she knew) offered for her hand, she accepted without embarrassment. Still, she could not help but feel that something was amiss—lacking, perhaps; at times she even sensed that there was something vaguely immoral in the whole business, though why she should choose the word immoral to describe a perfectly straightforward affair she hardly knew. She had hoped, before Mr. Chance arrived at the Abbey, to be able to discuss her uneasiness with the rector, but now that she had become acquainted with him, she feared she could not. It would probably, Laura decided again and again, with the cheerful practicality that characterized her, be best to trust her parents and do just as they said. Surely they would never advise a course that would lead her to unhappiness.

  Laura was saved from having to answer the Reverend’s observation by the sounds of a carriage in the drive.

  “Perhaps that is Mr. Lowland!” she cried, glancing mischievously at Elizabeth, who could not restrain herself from putting a hand up to smooth her coiffure, though she did not, as did Laura, spring from her chair. “Never mind,” said Laura to her cousin; “you may be as unconcerned and serene as you like; I shall bring him in to meet you. You look very pretty with your filigree,” she added over her shoulder as she quitted the room.

  Mr. Jacob Shaw followed her out into the entrance hall. He had found the party at Harkness Abbey quite overwhelmingly feminine, and was in great hopes that Mr. Ashley Lowland might turn out to be a gamester like himself. He had plenty of leisure to observe him, as the Fieldons claimed his attention for several minutes, Sir Kenneth never ceasing to exclaim upon his likeness to his father.

  Mr. Ashley Lowland was quite tall, and very slender. His fine dark hair was arranged in longish curls that very handsomely framed his pale face. Though his features were not quite regular, they proclaimed a remarkably sweet and gentle temperament, which his long, delicate white hands served to confirm. His eyes were brown, warm, and friendly, and though there was something in his manner that might be interpreted as reserve, it was in fact the very understandable hesitancy of an introspective young man suddenly confronted with a family of strangers. Mr. Shaw liked him from the first, correctly setting down (in a rare flash of intuition) his seeming aloofness to the discomfort of the moment. Jacob’s calculation of Ashley’s character would have been approved by any of the young man’s intimates, though these were few, for he was indeed a kind and sensitive fellow, and a loyal friend. No one, indeed, who had known Ashley long could dislike him; though few people were in fact well acquainted with him, for he shared the retirement of his father’s life.

  Lady Eleanor strongly approved the muted elegance of his attire; Sir Kenneth was nearly in raptures over the boy’s resemblance to the Baron. Laura strove to make him comfortable by taking his arm and guiding him to the drawing room, where Elizabeth, looking quite unconscious, awaited him impatiently.

  She favoured him, during their introduction, with the very briefest of smiles, though one that was genuine enough. She looked up at him for a moment, and then returned calmly and correctly to her filigree, seeming to give it all her attention though i
n fact she was reviewing his features in her memory. Meanwhile, Mr. Lowland was being introduced to the rector, who inquired as to the state of the roads he had traversed during his journey.

  “I am afraid they were but barely passable,” replied Ashley. “If the snow continues to fall as it did this morning, travel will soon be impossible. I hope,” he went on, looking at Lady Eleanor, “that all your party is already arrived.”

  “I believe we are all here,” said Lady Eleanor, looking vaguely round her. “Except dear Thaddeus, of course. But Lindley Park is not above five miles from here; surely he will be able to come?”

  “I am certain he will,” said Ashley, though he was not certain. The snow that morning had been falling in great, thick flakes—the sort of snow that generally does not continue for long. Towards afternoon, however, the flakes had become smaller and harder, and had begun to fall more quickly. It did not look as though it would soon stop.

  “Pray, come and sit by the fire,” said Lady Eleanor, indicating a large, comfortable chair near the flames. “I am sure you must be quite frozen. You must be at your ease with us, you know, for we feel you are almost one of the family.”

  “I am honoured,” Ashley replied, smiling gently.

  “I am sure you need not be,” Lady Eleanor continued. “I fear you will very soon feel forgotten, for with the wedding, and so many guests, the household is not quite what it should be. But you will ask for anything you like, will not you?” she asked distractedly.

  “Indeed. I beg you will not go to any trouble for me; remember,” he added, smiling again, “I am a gift.”

  Laura laughed at this assertion and inquired, “Have you painted many portraits before, sir? May we see some of your work? Elizabeth—Miss Shaw, I mean—does wonderful water colours; perhaps she will show them to you.”

  “I am sure Mr. Lowland is too expert in his craft to wish to see the attempts of an amateur,” said Elizabeth. “No doubt he is constantly assailed by tiresome people who wish him to appraise their work. Besides, I am really without talent.”