The Passing Bells Read online

  “I should not enjoy mentioning this matter to your colonel, but you are so deeply in arrears that unless . . .”

  “Oh, go to the devil,” he muttered without passion.

  A ring-necked pheasant broke cover and whirled away toward the open fields beyond the wood. Fenton raised his riding crop and traced the bird’s erratic flight with the tip, leading it just the proper distance to have assured a clean kill with a shotgun.

  “Pity,” he murmured. The pheasant went to ground, and he lowered the crop and slapped it in a desultory fashion against his leg. The beauty of the morning, with the sun filtering through the leafy beech trees and the golden haze lying over the hedgerowed fields, mocked his mood. Something had to be done, but he couldn’t for the life of him figure out what it could be. A hundred pounds would clear his present debts—and he could probably borrow that amount easily enough from Lord Anthony, as he had done in the past—but a hundred quid wouldn’t solve the mathematical inevitability of his problems, merely delay it for a few months. His share of his late father’s estate came to an inflexible six hundred pounds a year. That and his captain’s pay were not enough to maintain himself in the Coldstream, a regiment—like others in the Foot Guards—that prided itself on the tone of its officers. All Guards officers must join the Guards’ Club, but it was almost mandatory that, as a captain, he join the Marlborough as well. An unmarried officer in a less socially eminent regiment might live in quarters at the barracks, but an officer in the Guards was expected to maintain, at his own expense naturally, suitable lodgings in Knightsbridge or Belgravia—the higher the rank the better the address. His promotion to captain had merely hastened his ruin. And on top of all the other expenditures, there was the matter of clothing. Only mufti could be worn when off duty, except for certain social functions, and mufti of the most stylish and expensive cut. His tailor’s bill had been outrageous, and only a lucky spell at cards had permitted him to pay it. That luck had not continued long enough for him to settle matters with Cox’s Bank and the Marlborough Club.

  “Dash it to hell,” he whispered to the trees. He gave his mount a gentle tap, and the graceful animal trotted briskly on, threading its way through the wood and out into a meadow thick with cornflower and buttercup. There Fenton reined in and sat stolidly in the saddle, gazing ahead. Far off across the rolling meadows, partially obscured by the willows of Swan Copse, rose the Gothic façade of Burgate House. There was a permanent solution to his monetary problems in that place, but at a cost that he had so far been reluctant to accept. He was still reluctant, but he couldn’t see that he had much choice. Archie Foxe lived in Burgate House with his daughter, Lydia. Archie Foxe of the bluff and hearty East End manner and the dropped aitches. The Foxe of Foxe’s Fancy Tinned Goods and the ubiquitous White Manor Tea Shops. Archie’s offer of a place in the firm was genuine and of long standing. One thousand pounds a year to start. Not a trifling sum, that. He slipped a silver cigarette case out of his jacket and lit a cork-tipped Woodbine. It would mean chucking in his commission, but there wasn’t much of a future in the army anyway. His promotion to a captaincy at twenty-five had been the blindest of luck, one of those once-in-every-century reorganizations of a battalion. It would be ten to fifteen years before they raised him to major.

  He blew a thin stream of smoke to the wind and watched the distant house through narrowed eyes, like a scout surveying the movements of the enemy. It was a hideous building, built by a duke in Queen Anne’s time. The duke’s only son had been killed, and the man had instructed his architects to alter the design of the place so as to create a monument to the boy’s memory. They had outdone themselves by erecting a structure that looked more like a cathedral than a house. No one had ever been happy living there, except Archie. Archie Foxe loved the place. “Like livin’ in Westminster Abbey,” Archie said.

  “Oh, damn.” The captain sighed. His personal Rubicon lay in front of him. A thousand quid a year. And Lydia? The answer to that little question eluded him the way a will-o’-the-wisp eludes a man’s grasp. Lydia Foxe would make up her own mind about that. She was beautiful, twenty-one years of age, and the daughter of the world’s most indulgent father. There were no restrictions placed upon her. She could flit over to Paris for a month or dash up to London for a weekend without fear of censure from Archie. It had been her suggestion in the first place that he turn in his commission and join “Daddy’s shop,” as she so quaintly understated the firm of Foxe, Ltd. That idea had been given to him when she had helped pick out the proper furnishings for his flat on Lower Belgrave Street, her taste far exceeding his budget. “You’re a man who should live among beautiful things,” she had said. “You’re quite wasted in the army.” Well, he could have told her the same thing, but then didn’t Archie see his role in the firm as a sort of military one? The stalwart ex-Guardsman, Archie’s adjutant, reviewing battalions of apple-cheeked, nubile White Manor Tea Shop girls in their sky-blue dresses, starched white aprons, and perky white caps? Of course he did. “Fenton,” he had said, “Fenton, lad, Lydia tells me you might be chuckin’ the army. Blimey, I could use your sort. ’Ow does a thousand quid per annum strike you?”

  Very well indeed, thank you very much. And yet . . . and yet . . .

  “Oh, damn,” he whispered fervently, tossing his cigarette into a weed-choked drainage ditch. It just wasn’t as simple as that. Six years with the colors. D Company’s captain, First Battalion. A man’s regiment became something a little sacred, whether one wanted to be seduced by the tradition or not. It was like a marriage . . . for better or worse . . . till death do us part. There were times when he despised the uselessness of his profession in an age when war was a virtual impossibility. And yet when the regimental band struck up the march from Figaro and the long scarlet-and-blue-clad column swung up Birdcage Walk from Wellington Barracks, with the wind whipping the King’s colors and the fifes shrilling, he felt an almost indescribable sense of pride. That was merely being boyish and he knew it. Echoes from childhood when he had sat spellbound in front of Uncle Julian, back home after fighting the Pathans on the Northwest Frontier or the cruel dervishes in the Sudan, Uncle Julian of the 24th Foot, the Warwickshires, with his VC pinned to his tunic, spinning his stories of bravery and battle and stalwart men.

  Fife and drum and the colors streaming. The Guards marching shoulder to shoulder over the icy mountains to Corunna, Sir John Moore watching them with tears in his eyes and knowing by the very sight of those ordered, unbroken ranks that Napoleon was doomed. Boyhood dreamings. Uncle Julian’s tales . . . Fortescue’s history of the British army . . . entwined inextricably with the social aspects of the game, for game it was, this playing at soldiering in London town. St. James’s, Buckingham Palace, the Tower . . . an officer in the Coldstream Guards, the King’s thin red line . . . a Guards officer and thus set apart in his own exclusive, distinctive class. To give that up, to be merely “Mr.” Fenton Wood-Lacy of Foxe, Ltd., purveyors of meat pies and sixpenny teas, cheap foods in tins, tea shops strategically placed on busy corners in major towns and cities—Brighton, Plymouth, Margate, Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, Liverpool, and the Greater London area—was to reduce himself to the level of the general herd. And if that be snobbery, make the most of it!

  He leaned sideways in the saddle and saber-cut a milkweed with his riding crop—a vicious, backhanded slash that reduced the tall, slender plant to stubble. On straightening up, he heard a distant hallooing and glanced idly over his left shoulder to see Lord Stanmore several fields back coming on at the gallop, the chestnut gliding over hedges and blackberry thickets with the grace of a swallow.

  The Earl of Stanmore in his proper element, Fenton mused. Coming on like the wind, horse and rider as smoothly integrated as a fine watch. It had been his initial view of the man when first visiting Abingdon Pryory at the age of nine with his younger brother Roger. The sight had impressed him then as it impressed him now. He rode just as smoothly himself, he supposed. And so he should, for it had been Lord Stanm
ore who had taught him the proper way to sit a horse, and how to take a jump without flinching. The summer of 1898, he reflected, the year his father had begun on the plans for the restoration of the great house. Abingdon Pryory had become a second home for the Wood-Lacy family, and his education as a horseman and huntsman had begun. A bond had been created between himself and the earl in that long-ago summer, and it had grown stronger with time. He watched the man galloping toward him and his spirits lifted, the gloom that had been so crushingly pervasive beginning to fade.

  “Dash it all, Fenton,” the earl cried out as he drew alongside, the two horses whinnying, rubbing necks, “you could have waited for me.”

  “Sorry, sir. Didn’t think you’d be up that early.”

  “Not up? What the deuce do you mean, not up? You know my habits as well as anybody.”

  The captain smiled and proffered the open cigarette case. The earl took one.

  “My apologies.”

  “Accepted.” He leaned toward Fenton for a light. “Well, now, caught up with you at last. Did you see how we took that last hedge?”

  “Yes, sir, I did. Like a champion.”

  “You wouldn’t think the old boy’d been laid up for two weeks, would you? I’ll be taking him to Colchester next month for the point-to-point. By the way, did Hargreaves speak to you about the Tetbury hunt?”

  “We discussed it over lunch at the Savoy. His treat.”

  “You said yes, of course.”

  “I did.”

  “Fine. You shan’t regret it. You can have your pick of mounts—except for Jupiter, of course.”

  “That’s very kind of you, sir.”

  “Nonsense, my dear chap, nonsense.” Lord Stanmore patted his horse on the neck the way another man might pat a well-loved dog. “Let me rest him for a bit and then I’ll race you to Hadwell Green. We’ll knock up the publican at the Swan and have a pint and a wedge of cheese.” He puffed on the cigarette, not inhaling. “Damn, but it’s a fine morning. That crowd at the house don’t know what they’re missing, lying abed to all hours. Anyway, at least you’re here. How long can you stay?”

  “A lengthy weekend. I have palace guard on Wednesday.”

  “I suppose you know your brother’s here.”

  “I assumed he would be. Roger wrote me that he and Charles had plans for the summer—in celebration of graduating.”

  “Dashed if I can understand the lads. In my day, chaps came down from Cambridge with a sense of purpose and a damn clear idea of where they were going in life. Neither Roger nor my son has the foggiest.”

  “It’s just a phase.”

  “Damned if I can see why your blessed mother had to sacrifice so much to keep Roger up there. Now you take what occurred during snooker last night. Roger and Charles were in some sort of conversation about prosody, and Roger said that in his opinion the Georgians were on the proper track . . . so I put in my oar after sinking the five ball with a perfect bank shot and agreed that Childe Harold was still a damn fine bit of poetry even if its author was a self-confessed bugger. ‘Oh,’ Roger said, ‘not those Georgians, sir, the New Georgians, Rupert Brooke et al.’ Rupert Brooke! Have you ever heard such nonsense in your life? The chap walks around with his hair down to his shoulders and no shoes on his feet. Well, later, after a glass or two of vintage, I asked Roger what he intended doing, and he said, ‘Oh, edit a poetry magazine in London starting in September.’ ‘Editor,’ I say. ‘Good for you. How much they paying you?’ And he says, ‘Pay? Oh, there’s no pay, one can’t expect to make money out of poetry.’ Now I ask you . . . !” His voice ended on a note of heartfelt exasperation. Four jackdaws rose from the top branches of a solitary oak and flew, cawing lustily, toward the granite towers of Burgate House. “Well, enough of that. Let’s spur off.”

  “Can you lend me another hundred pounds?” Fenton said, gazing stolidly ahead.

  Lord Stanmore tugged at his mustache. “Can I what?”

  “Lend me a hundred pounds. I know that I still owe you—”

  “Nonsense! No talk of that, my dear fellow. Of course, I’ll lend it to you—if you need it badly enough.”

  Fenton’s smile was faint. “I suppose I shall always need it badly enough. I’m in a rather awkward position.”

  “I quite understand. You’re in the worst possible regiment for a man of your means. I would like to make a suggestion, Fenton, and I hope you won’t take offense.”

  “I’m sure that I won’t.”

  “Well, then . . .” He took a final puff on his cigarette and then crushed it out against the handle of his crop. “It’s quite simple, really. So simple that I’m rather surprised you haven’t done it before this. The season is upon us again. London is simply overflowing with the marriageable daughters of substantial men, as well you know.”

  “Marry money,” Fenton said flatly.

  “Yes, and where’s the harm in it? By God, you’re a fine-looking fellow—positively gorgeous, I might add, when you’re wearing your scarlet jacket at one of those Mayfair balls. Be honest, lad, is it such a crime to rescue a Manchester mill owner’s daughter from marrying some pasty-faced solicitor?”

  The captain laughed for the first time in weeks. “I suppose it isn’t, not when you put it that way.”

  “Only way to look at it, old boy. As Archie Foxe might put it, you’re a marketable commodity.”

  “Like tinned beef.”

  “Precisely. Look, we’ll be opening the Park Lane house next week, and Hanna has half a dozen parties and balls in the works to get Alexandra launched. We could kill two birds with one stone: find my daughter the right husband and you the proper wife. Will you cooperate to the fullest?”

  “I have little choice.”

  “Why, dammit, man, you might enjoy it. Lord knows what pretty butterflies we may entangle in our net.” He pointed his crop toward Burgate House, where the jackdaws wheeled and cawed above the spires. “By Harry, there’s a pretty one in that place I’d like to see taken off the market—for reasons I shan’t go into, but I’m sure you understand.”

  “I believe so, yes,” Fenton said quietly.

  The ninth earl of Stanmore frowned and looked away from the great monstrosity of a house that, to his way of thinking, only a millionaire cockney with no sense of taste would consider grand.

  “Dash it, Fenton, I’ve been more than accommodating over the years, permitted Charles his puppy love attraction to the girl when he was sixteen, but by God he’s twenty-three now, time he got over it and faced reality. Then again, she may see the futility herself and give him the—What’s that slang word?”

  “Gate?”

  “Right, the gate—and opt for a more suitable mate. . . . The quicker the better.” He dug his heels into his horse’s flanks. “Let’s ride!”

  More suitable to him, Fenton was thinking as he kicked his own mount into a gallop and trailed the chestnut across the field, meaning, of course, that an earl’s son didn’t marry the daughter of a Shadwell greengrocer, even if that greengrocer could buy and sell most of the peers in England, Lord Stanmore included. Archie Foxe’s daughter, despite her Paris clothes and Benz run-about motorcar, was still Archie Foxe’s daughter. A friend of the family since her childhood, to be sure, but no more than that—ever. Lydia Foxe was fated by her class to wed in her class. Not the son of a greengrocer—Archie’s millions obviated that—but someone a good step below the peerage. The soldier son of an architect perhaps, and a knighted architect at that? The late, lamented Sir Harold Wood-Lacy, refurbisher of old buildings, a master of his craft and the delight of such clients as Queen Victoria, for his work at Balmoral and Sandringham House, and the present earl of Stanmore, for his painstaking restoration of Abingdon Pryory, work which Anthony had paid for with part of his wife’s dowry, the million dollars or more that Adolph Sebastian Rilke had gladly handed over to see his daughter wed to a nobleman, dollars that had been earned in Chicago and Milwaukee, USA, by the brewing of beer. No loss of social status in that union.
Money was the American peerage: beer barons, steel barons, coal barons, robber barons of Wall Street, an occasional prince of industry tossed in for good measure. An American heiress ranked with a Hapsburg. And even if someone had sneered at the idea of a Greville, an Earl of Stanmore, marrying the daughter of a brewer, it could be pointed out that the Rilkes of Milwaukee, Chicago, and St. Louis were simply a branch of the von Rilkes of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, and that Hanna Rilke had met the bachelor earl at a London garden party tossed in her honor by her fourth cousin, Princess Mary of Teck. Yes, one could so easily understand the difference between the Rilkes and the Foxes, even if one found the hypocrisy of it all slightly amusing.

  “Come on! Come on!” the earl shouted over his shoulder. “Catch me if you can!”

  “I’ll give it a try, sir,” Fenton yelled, spurring his horse, but keeping a politic half-length behind.

  2

  “Mr. Coatsworth informed me how satisfied he was with the way you conducted yourself this morning, Ivy. But you must remember what I told you about dawdling and staring.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Ivy Thaxton whispered.

  “You may go have your breakfast now and then give Mrs. Dalrymple a hand with the linens.”

  “Yes, ma’am . . . thank you, ma’am.”

  Mrs. Broome, for all her formidable size and regal bearing, was not unkind nor overly demanding. She prided herself on her ability to so train the household staff that reprimands were rare. There were some housekeepers who were veritable ogres and martinets, constantly bullying and punishing the help. She had only contempt for such creatures. She looked approvingly at the slender dark-haired girl and then reached out and touched her gently on the mouth.