Page 1 of The Affairs of Ashmore Castle

CHAPTER ONE

January 1903

Maud Stainton was feeling discontented. It was not something she was used to. She had no truck with feelings, her own or anyone else’s: they were a self-indulgence. Likewise with illness – admitting to feeling unwell showed a lack of character. There was no excuse for it.

She was the eldest child of the 8th Earl of Leake, brought up at Cawburn Castle, a crow-haunted, granite fastness in a windswept part of Northumberland where you had to be hardy to survive. Her father had been a distant and rather frightening figure. Her mother she remembered as always either pregnant or in childbed, a faded creature who had given up the struggle and died as soon as, after three daughters and several miscarriages, she had presented the earl with a live son. Maud, then aged eleven, had been forced into the position of mistress of the house and mother to her siblings. Responsibility had forged the iron at the centre of her character. There had been no room for softness.

Her father had never hidden his disgust at having three daughters before the required son, and Maud understood early that they could only redeem themselves by making good marriages. Victoria, the youngest and prettiest, had secured the Prince of Wittenstein-Glucksberg. Caroline, the sweetest-tempered, attracted Sir James Manningtree who, though only a knight, was one of the richest men in London. Maud was the plain one of the three, but a Forrest girl might look as high as she wished. She hoped for a duke; but when the time came there weren’t any dukes or marquesses of the right age.

Still, William Fairburn Louis Tallant, 5th Earl of Stainton, had a good pedigree, a fine country seat – Ashmore Castle – and a large estate. She had married him, run his house, borne his children, and occupied the position in society that was her due. Willie Stainton was everything an earl should be in public. Maud knew nothing of his profligacy, his mistresses and his gambling, and only when he died, suddenly, on the hunting field, did she learn he had left the estate near to bankruptcy.

Her elder son, Giles, had inherited the debts along with the title, and to recoup the fortunes of the estate he had married an heiress. Now that heiress was Countess of Stainton. Maud didn’t like it. There couldn’t be two Lady Staintons – but there were, and she was not the important one.

It was over the Christmas season, during two weeks with all the family gathered, that the discontent had crystallised. She had lost her place in the world. Willie Stainton, damn his eyes, had made her a dowager. She didn’t know what to do with herself.

This morning, just after New Year, she examined the faces around the breakfast table. Her eldest daughter Linda had come for the season with her husband and two children. Linda was tall and plain like her mother, and growing scrawny: she was shovelling away a second plate of kedgeree as if she hadn’t eaten for a week. Linda’s marriage to Viscount Cordwell had been arranged by her father, who had not asked enough questions: the extent of the Cordwell estate’s indebtedness had not come to light until it was too late. Gerald Cordwell was a pleasant, likeable man, but niceness buttered no parsnips. He had proved ineffectual in rescuing his fortunes, and Linda spent every waking moment scheming how to be anywhere but at Holme Manor, his dilapidated seat.

Maud despised them both.

At the far end of the table her second son, Richard, home from soldiering in South Africa, was chatting to his younger sisters, Rachel and Alice, and making them laugh. Everyone liked Richard. Even Maud had been known to smile at him. He had inherited his father’s good looks and easy charm.

Alice was not out yet, and therefore of no interest to Maud, but Rachel had turned seventeen last summer, and Maud had been intending to bring her out this season. But now her plan was threatened. She turned her eyes back to the other end of the table where Giles was reading the newspaper and Kitty was toying with a piece of toast and staring at nothing. Kitty was pregnant, and expecting the child in May. If she had wanted to annoy her mother-in-law she could not have timed it better. She looked like the sort of girl who would make hard work of carrying, and Maud had intended a lavish come-out for Rachel, to be followed in short order by a dazzling marriage; but now there was Kitty’s condition hanging over everything. She would be sure to go into labour at the very peak of Rachel’s debut. She would probably make such a piece of work of it that Rachel’s triumph would pale into insignificance beside Kitty’s drama, and all Maud’s hard work would be for nothing.

Maud seethed. After a lifetime of stoicism and doing her duty, it had come to this, that she was a mere dowager, tolerated in the house that had been hers; taking second place to a nobody, having her plans disrupted; and there was nothing she could do about it. Giles – Giles! – had taken her husband’s place, and was as indifferent to her wishes as she had always been to his. Damn Stainton for dying! Damn him!

Rachel had felt the eyes upon her. More timid than Alice, she was always afraid of being scolded, and as she looked apprehensively at her mother, a blush of automatic guilt coloured her cheeks. It was a pretty face, framed by long, fair ringlets, but Rachel had seemed out of sorts lately. Maud had noticed it, though it would not have occurred to her to ask the reason. But it gave her an idea. Suddenly the blood started rushing through her head as a plan came to her, with all its details slotting into place in a most satisfactory way.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Linda put down her fork, her plate temporarily empty, and Giles begin the awkward, elbow-flapping process of turning to the next page of the broadsheet. She must catch the tide of the moment.

‘I have decided,’ she said – and everyone immediately stopped what they were doing and looked at her: she still commanded to that extent – ‘that I shall go to Darmstadt next week, and Rachel shall come with me.’

The servants were assembled round their own breakfast table, waiting for Mr Moss, the butler, and William, the first footman, to come down from the dining-room. Ellen, one of the housemaids, who had been helping upstairs, scuttled to her seat, saying, ‘That’s put the cat among the pigeons! Guess what I heard?’

But she had sat down only in time to stand up again as Mr Moss entered and beat her to the news. ‘Well, quite a significant change of plans has been announced. I wonder you didn’t mention it, Miss Taylor.’

Miss Taylor, the dowager’s personal maid, didn’t know what he was talking about, and concealed the fact with a haughty look. ‘Grace, if you please, Mr Moss. We may at least begin the day in godliness, even if we can’t sustain it until evening.’

‘Oh – ah – hm!’ Moss looked annoyed at being caught out. In some great houses, religion featured strongly, with morning and evening prayers every day in the servants’ hall and a strict discipline kept over language and morals. The devotional temperature below stairs depended more on the leanings of the butler than the dictates of the mistress, and Moss regarded himself as a rationalist, so the Almighty didn’t feature strongly in his rule; but on the other hand, he was a great believer in tradition, and disliked having Miss Taylor trip him up. He glared sternly round the table until every head was bowed, and then pronounced the grace in suitably cathedral tones.

‘Amen.’

Chairs scraped, everyone sat, the bread plate went rapidly round. The kitchen-maids Aggie and Brigid came in and planked down the big teapot in front of Mrs Webster and the hot dishes by Mr Moss, then hurried off to their own breakfast in the kitchen.

‘Go on then, Ellen,’ said Tilda. ‘What did you hear?’

The family served themselves at breakfast, but the old earl had liked butler and first footman to be in attendance at the sideboard, and the new earl had not thought to rescind the order. Females didn’t wait at table, but Ellen had been in the serving-closet just off the dining-room, stacking dirties onto a tray to take down.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘you know her ladyship goes to Germany every year in January?’

‘Whyever does she do that?’ wondered Tilda, who was new since last summer.

‘Because her sister married a German prince,’ Ellen explained. ‘He’s got a palace, some funny name it’s got, like the Washtub—’

‘The Wachturm,’ Mrs Webster, the housekeeper, corrected. ‘Near Darmstadt.’

‘A palace!’ said pale, pretty Milly, who was also new. ‘Fancy!’

William gazed at her adoringly, as though she’d said something deeply significant. His loves burned bright and brief, and rarely got further than adoring glances.