Caroline England Read online

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  Noel Streatfeild

  CAROLINE ENGLAND

  To

  Humbert

  To

  Hubert Meredith

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  Contents

  PART I

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  PART II

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  PART III

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

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  Also by Noel Streatfeild

  and available from Bello

  The Whicharts

  Parson’s Nine

  A Shepherdess of Sheep

  It Pays to be Good

  Caroline England

  Luke

  The Winter is Past

  I Ordered a Table for Six

  Myra Carrol

  Grass in Piccadilly

  Mothering Sunday

  Aunt Clara

  Judith

  The Silent Speaker

  PART I

  The Child

  Chapter I

  IN 1870, on a March day so mild it might have been May, Caroline was born.

  Caroline took such a time from start to finish of her journey, that the nice woman from the village (in the good black dress she kept for the labours of mothers of babies of the upper class) almost called in a doctor. Her knowledge of how much so nice a lady as Mrs. Torrys would resent, at such a time, the presence of a gentleman in her room prevented her. As a matter of fact towards the end of her confinement Selina Torrys would not have cared if an entire regiment of gentlemen had come into the room. Thirty-six hours of pain, which not only grew in intensity, but became more hard to bear as she grew weaker, made her incapable of any feeling beyond a wish to die. When finally the unpleasant sight, which was Caroline, did emerge into daylight, she lost consciousness and so was spared, for a time, the knowledge that she had given so much trouble over a girl, when dear James had set his heart on a boy.

  When exactly the Torrys had first owned a strip of England was doubtful, but certainly they had borne arms since the fifteenth century, for the newly created Heralds’ College stated so in their records.

  A queer family with a remarkable ability for remaining in the background. With the passing of the years the different branches acquired various houses, and these the elder sons inherited. The younger sons, and God knows there were enough of them, graced such professions as a gentleman might, but no matter whether it was the Army, the Navy, the Church, or subduing heathen in various outposts of the Empire, they never achieved the slightest distinction. Neither did the elder sons do anything to their properties that might have brought them riches. Even when Farmer George was on the throne and no Squire thought worse of himself for putting on smock and gaiters and working beside his men, no Torrys turned over a sod to make it pay. Taking them by and large, though there were of course exceptions, they were an upright lot, and had a reputation for good English honour in whatever they did. This was perhaps the reason why they remained in inconspicuous, for as a family they had an unshakable conviction that to be born a Torrys was as great a gift as God could bestow, and they therefore needed no further distinctions. This love of family naturally caused them to feel that a union with any of them was as great a bit of fortune as a woman could pray for; what more could she ask than to bear the name of Torrys. They did not bestow the gift of themselves for nothing as their coats of arms clearly showed. The quarterings of every branch of the family told the same tale. Surcharged and borne on escutcheons of pretence were the rose gules, annulets, saltires argent, and crosses moline of heiresses. Not one woman of them all might bear arms in her own right, but each bore them because of good solid money. So the family prospered.

  Caroline was born in Milston Manor in the County of Kent. James, her father, was the eldest son of the senior branch of the family. Odd place the manor. The Torrys had owned a house on the spot where it stood since the reign of Queen Elizabeth. There was proof that a house had stood there since the twelfth century, but nothing to show a Torrys had owned it. Partly due to fire, and partly to the fact that the average Torrys believed the architecture of his own day to be an improvement on that of any other, by the time Caroline was born only the knowledgeable could put even an approximate date to the house. Not that any owner had entirely rebuilt, but they had patched and added and not in keeping with the rest of the building. The original Manor, built by Richard Torrys in 1568, stood for over a hundred years; then while Charles the Second was eating his heart out in France it was almost entirely destroyed by fire. It is amusing to note that no chronicler suggests that the burning was a reprisal for some Royalist effort on the part of the owner Richard or of his sons. Presumably it was well known that the Torrys, provided they themselves were secure, did not make efforts. It is uncertain what kind of a new home was built onto the North wall, which was all that escaped the flames, but once it was rebuilt there is nothing to suggest it was touched until the reign of William and Mary, and then a particularly fortunate marriage of the eldest son Henry to the heiress of a tea merchant made it possible to enlarge the house, and a wing was added. Poor Henry only lived three years with his new wing and then was killed out hunting. This wing seems to have inspired his son Edward, for in 1717 in the diary of Anne Torrys, who before her marriage was the rich Miss Merryman, is written:

  “The house is now complete and it does seem fittingly shaped for this alliance of which we hear so much. I have named the west wing Holland, the old right wing France, and the main body for England.”

  In a further entry she says:

  “. . . dear Edward read my journal to-day and is displeased that I have named the house so, saying it is making light of a serious thing. Am resolved he shall not read what I have written again.”

  Whether dear Edward meant that the house was a serious thing or the Triple Alliance is not told. The son who many years later inherited the new two-winged building was fond of drink. One night when he was anything but sober he took a walk round the house in the small hours. Tottering unsteadily from room to room, with a silver candlestick swinging in one hand, he set fire to curtains or some such and gutted the entire middle of his house, that part in fact which his mother had christened England, and he and two servants were burned to death. His son George was a mere baby at the time of the accident and his mother, as his guardian, closed the house and took him and his sister Elizabeth to her old home, where they were brought up. Either being educated away from the Torrys atmosphere, or because the Danbeys, his mother’s family, were people of taste, this boy did better by the house than any of his ancestors, for when in the reign of George the Third he attained his majority, he not only rebuilt the burnt portion as nearly as possible in keeping with the two wings, but also did what he could to restore those fragments of the timbered Elizabethan north wall which had somehow escaped the flames. His grandson Henry, Caroline’s grandfather, probably loved the house more than any of his forefathers, but he did some dreadful things to it. He had a Gothic library with stained-glass windows built on to the 1704 wing, and to the back of the 1717 he attach
ed a kitchen wing which had large kitchens, and many dark little servants’ bedrooms. This wing, reached by long passages, caused all the food to be served half cold. Henry represented something new in the Torrys strain. What before had been an overwhelming love of family and name became a more immediate and personal love of his home and those in it. There is no doubt that in his own home and on his property he considered himself certainly higher than his Sovereign, who was, after all, only a woman; more in fact on a par with God, on whose behalf he spoke with authority whenever sin was, in his opinion, committed. This magnificent attitude could only be upheld under his own roof, and that probably was the reason for the kitchen wing and the library; it gave the family and household ample space, and so little excuse to go further afield. Henry died of a burst appendix at the age of fifty, with all his children round his bed and his hand clasped by his wife Rose. Actually his last thoughts were for Lily, the gay lady he had kept for years. Nobody knew that, except perhaps Rose, who might have guessed, for she had always known about Lily without her ever actually being mentioned. She had in fact used her in an oblique way in gentle arguments under the canopy of their double bed. Whatever Rose may privately have thought, the children considered themselves present at the passing of a saint. Curious how the boys achieved that attitude, because outside the sanctuary created by the presence of ladies, what their papa had said and taught them was of unbelievable coarseness. James the heir, who had been his father’s companion on frequent unsavoury occasions, took the most sentimental view of his death. He spoke of him only in a special hushed voice, and with the prefix ‘My dear.’ He would not allow his more personal possessions to be moved: riding crops, and a certain churchwarden pipe that he had smoked, together with the jacket and cap he wore when smoking. He considered the house quite perfect ‘As my dear old father left it,’ and had not meant to alter it. However, two years later, just before his marriage to Selina Ellison the daughter of a brewer, he decided a terrace would improve the place. To make this, he sunk a length of lawn and obliterated four flower-beds, and built a stone walk with steps at either end stretching right across the house. He decorated this atrocity with seats and urns to hold flowers. Selina, when she saw it, was charmed, and said a peacock ought to walk on it. A peacock and a pea hen were bought, and the lady made the mornings dismal with her cries and the gentleman the terrace, when he deigned to walk on it, beautiful with his feathers.

  In the best bedroom, the north side of which hid under its floral wall-paper a bit of Elizabethan timber, on the end of that same canopied double bed in which her grandfather died, the nice woman in the good black dress laid Caroline, when at last she agreed to come into the world.

  Chapter II

  SELINA did not see Caroline for eight days. Collapse from heart failure followed her fainting fit, and Thomas Felton, the doctor, was sent for. In spite of the fact that his fame, which was considerable, rested on his being a good man to hounds, a rare one to train a cock, and the memory of a New Year’s Eve party at which he had set fifteen dogs on to fight fifteen cats, Thomas Felton succeeded in preventing Selina from dying, which had seemed probable when he arrived. He was at his best in an emergency, not so much for his medical skill, but his scorn of the act of dying; it was to him the weakling’s way, looking for a gate rather than putting your horse at a nasty hedge. It was remembered of him that after a twenty-four hour fight for the life of a foul-mouthed, foul-lived, soured old farmer whom everybody hated, he came into the inn looking as though he had come back from the best day of the season.

  “He’s gone Puddick,” he said to the landlord, “but what a run. Gangrenous at the end, but still takin’ his fences. I could’ve cried me heart out when he came down.”

  His method with Selina was to pour quantities of neat spirits down her throat, while making the same soothing noises he made to his mare if she was tired. Then when he could feel her pulse and there was a tinge of colour in her cheeks, ordering the strongest broth, which he fed to her himself. Downstairs he told James to take a look at the midwife, as he wouldn’t expect a mare of his to foal with that pock-marked drab in the stable, and that it was a wonder Selina had not died. He added that she could not feed the child and he would send in a foster-mother. He sent Naomi, the daughter of a small farmer whose day-old boy had just died, leaving his mother, in spite of his illegitimacy, hysterical with grief. Naomi entered the Manor as a widow.

  When at last mother and daughter met, Caroline behaved atrociously. She had come into the bedroom smiling and contented, her head pillowed comfortably between the well-padded arm and soft mountainous breast of Naomi, and was at once handed to Selina, who might have been a tree in midwinter for all the warmth or softness there was to her. Caroline howled.

  When Naomi took Caroline away, Selina was exhausted but happy. The round, yellow-fluffed head, and the one glimpse she had of China-blue eyes before they were screwed up with indignation, gave her a stab of physical pleasure. Her baby! Here to do what she liked with. What fun to have it to play with, like a doll, only better. Selina was an only child, and the only girl of her generation on the Ellison side of the family. The result was she had spent a childhood being doted on, especially by her mother who could not bear her out of her sight. She had lived an existence companioned alternately by grown-up people and dolls. Her passion for dolls was considered very pretty and was pandered to by her rich Ellison uncles, so that her schoolroom was full of them, each with her own exquisitely made and laundered wardrobe. For lack of other companionship the child grew increasingly attached to these dolls, especially to her favourite, Margaret, confiding everything to her at an age when most girls were being taught to think about young men. Just after her seventeenth birthday she was taken to her first ball. James Torrys was there and was attracted to her at sight. Conscious, as always in his family, of the honour he was prepared to bestow, he got himself invited to houses where he would meet her, and allowed himself to fall in love, certain Selina would not refuse him. He was right; after many meetings, in an ignorant childish way Selina fell in love with him. She showed no sign of what she felt, and so amazed her father when he told her that Mr. Torrys had asked permission to address her, by bursting out, “I think he’s very nice Papa.” That same evening she told James she would marry him. Her family were quite tearful in the drawing-room at little Selina grown to a woman. None of them knew that at that moment Selina was sitting on her schoolroom floor in a most unladylike and childish attitude saying to Margaret, “But you must not be jealous, I do still love you best.”

  The marriage took place six months later. Selina came to it as unprepared as was possible. She had read nothing, and heard nothing of what marriage meant. She thought she was changing over from being Mama and Papa’s pet, to being Mr. Torrys’ pet. She did not want to leave her home, but she took it for granted Mama would be with her a great deal at the Manor, and she really was fond of James, what little she knew of him. That the marriage was a success was due to her dead father-in-law. Not for nothing had James been Henry’s companion, and the lessons he had learnt from gay and experienced ladies enabled him to turn his schoolgirl wife from a gawky little creature waiting to be petted into a woman deeply in love.

  Nevertheless, Selina cried quite a lot in the first year of her marriage. Henry had frequently told his son that mothers-in-law were a darned nuisance, and therefore James made it clear that for a time he expected his wife to himself. Henry had not, however, taken into account a daughter-in-law who was ill-trained to run a big house. Selina found that Mama had not taught her many things that she apparently ought to know. Naturally it was easier for Mama living in London, with all the shops to hand. If an order for a tradesman were forgotten it meant no more than sending a message by a servant, or taking it themselves when out driving. Here the Manor was many miles from the shops, and orders went only twice a week. Selina lived in dread of forgetting something of importance. James, loving husband though he was, expected his house to be we
ll run, and could be in a temper for hours if some trifle were missing. Then accounts. It appeared all Torrys women kept accounts. James took it for granted she would understand them, but never in her home had anyone even dreamed that Mama understood figures, and her governess had been told not to trouble her with them, as they were unnecessary for a gentlewoman. The result was that on Monday mornings when the tradesmen’s books were put on her bureau, James invariably came in for luncheon to find ink on her hands and her eyes red with crying. He tried to be patient and kind, but he did feel it a grievance that his wife should be inefficient, and he showed it.

  When Selina became pregnant, James planned, near the time of her labour, to send for her mother; but by the time Caroline was five months on the way Mrs. Ellison was ill and ordered to drink the waters at Buxton; so since obviously his own mother could not spare the time away from her family, he asked for his sister Agnes to come to them.

  Agnes influenced Selina’s life. She was highly-sexed, and this showed itself in her almost idolistic attitude to wifehood and motherhood. As the eldest girl she had been a good deal in her mother’s company, and though only twelve when her father died had retained a vivid memory, from things overheard and half-heard, of the difference between him and her brothers when on their own outside or in the smoking-room, and when in her mother’s presence. Childlike she had put this down entirely to her mother’s influence, and therefore came to have worship for her of an intensely sentimental type. Her mother believed in bringing up girls from their earliest days to make presentable figures in society and so acquire good husbands. Agnes had therefore been boned and laced out of shape, which, seeing she was a delicate adolescent, had caused her quite a lot of pain. This pain she enjoyed in an inverted way, because it was so feminine and resulted in intimate little talks with that adored object, her mother. During the first twelve years of her life her clearest picture was of her mother sitting very upright on the end of the drawing-room sofa stitching at small nameless bits of work, while the latest addition recalled her to the dignity of her position. She had been feeling excessively childish. It is impossible to be dignified while your baby is being born, and afterwards she had felt so ill that she had not given a thought to her home being a shrine, or the glory of Motherhood, or any of the things which Agnes had taught her to feel. She had indeed behaved as if she were ten, frequently crying into her pillow, and twice on the midwife’s shoulder. After her first ecstatic reaction to her baby as something to play with, she thought of her more soberly. “She shan’t be brought up like I was.” (She threw a pitying thought to the ignorant girl-wife who had first come to the Manor.) “My baby shall learn all the things from the beginning that Agnes was taught, not waste her time playing with dolls, and she shall learn proper arithmetic. She shall learn how to be a good wife—” At this point her resolutions were interrupted by James, who opened the door with caution, and seeing she was awake, came to her side. She looked up at him and smiled, and in a rush of tenderness he knelt by the bed.