Julian Fellowes's Belgravia Read online

  It was hardly an unfamiliar story. Bellasis had professed his love and persuaded Sophia that he wished to marry her before he went back into action. At the news of Napoleon’s march on Brussels, he had come to her, begging her to let him arrange a marriage that would be clandestine at first, but which he promised he would reveal to his parents when he felt the time was right. Either way, she would have proof of the ceremony if anything happened to him, and she could claim the protection of the Brockenhursts if she needed it.

  “But didn’t you know you should have had your father’s permission for it to be legal? You’re eighteen.” She said this to provoke more self-flagellation from Sophia, but instead the girl just looked at her for a moment.

  “Papa gave his permission.”

  That brought a second pony kick. Her husband had helped a man to seduce his own daughter? She felt so angry that if James had walked through the door at that moment, she would have scratched his eyeballs out of their sockets. “Your father knew?”

  “He knew that Edmund wanted to marry me before he went back to the fighting, and he gave his permission.” Sophia took another deep breath. In a way it was a relief to reveal it. She was tired of carrying the burden alone. “Edmund said he’d found a parson to marry us, which he did, in one of the army chapels they had erected. Afterward the man wrote out a letter certifying it and… that’s when it happened.”

  “I assume the marriage was false?”

  Sophia nodded. “I never suspected it, not for a moment. Edmund spoke of his love and our future, right up until the moment we were leaving his aunt’s ball on the night of the battle.”

  “So when did you find out?”

  The girl got up and walked over to the window. Below, her father was climbing into a carriage. She was glad he would be out of the house, giving her mother some time to calm down and think up a plan. “As we came out of the Richmonds’ house into the street, there was a group of officers on horseback, all in the uniforms of the Fifty-second Light Infantry, the Oxfordshires, Edmund’s own regiment…”

  “And?”

  “One of them was the ‘churchman’ who married us. So there you have it.” She sighed wearily. “He was a soldier, a friend of Edmund’s, who had turned his collar around to deceive me.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “He never saw me. Or if he did, he pretended he had not. I wasn’t close and, of course, once I’d recognized him I shrank back.”

  Anne nodded. The scene when they had left the ball together suddenly made sense. “Now I understand what put you in such a state that night. I thought it was simply Lord Bellasis leaving for the battle.”

  “The moment I saw the man I knew I’d been taken in. I was not loved. I was not heading for a golden future. I was a stupid young woman who had been treated as a streetwalker, tricked and used, and no doubt I would have been thrown aside into the gutter where Edmund thought I belonged, if he had lived.” Her face seemed so mature in the daylight, the bitterness in her speech adding ten years to her age.

  “When did you know you were carrying a child?”

  “Hard to say. I suspected it a month later, but I wouldn’t admit it until any further denial was pointless. Edmund was dead, and for a time, like a madwoman, I pretended nothing had changed. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was at my wit’s end. I confess I have taken some foolish remedies, and paid a gypsy five pounds for what I am quite sure was sugar water. But they all failed. I am still enceinte.”

  “What have you told your father?”

  “He knows I was deceived. I told him that morning in Brussels when he brought me the news of Edmund’s death. But he thinks I got away with it.”

  “We must make a plan.” Anne Trenchard was a practical woman, and one of her chief virtues was that she did not linger over a disaster but sought, almost immediately, to remedy what could be remedied and to accept what could not. Her daughter must be spirited away from London. She would have an illness or a relation in the north who needed caring for. They would have a story ready before the day was finished. Sophia must be four months gone at least, and now that Anne concentrated on it, the girl’s figure was thickening. Not noticeably so, yet, but it wouldn’t be long. They had no time to lose.

  Anne was not kind to James when he returned that evening and found himself alone with his wife in his study. “And you never thought to consult me? When a rich viscount proposed a secret marriage that no one must know of, performed by a parson no one could vouch for, with a beautiful eighteen-year-old from an entirely unsuitable background, you never thought to talk to anyone about what his motives might possibly be?” She was trying hard not to shout.

  James nodded. He had gone over it often enough in his own mind. “It sounds so obvious when you say it, but Bellasis seemed a nice young man and genuinely fond of her—”

  “You think he would have confided in you that he was hoping to seduce your daughter if it could possibly be managed?”

  “I suppose not.”

  She almost spat at him. “When you gave your permission, she was ruined.”

  He winced. “Please, Anne. Do you think I don’t regret it?”

  “I assume you regret it even more now.”

  In time, Anne came to be sorry she had blamed her husband so entirely for Sophia’s fall. Because when the girl died in childbirth, he remembered the charge and saw her death as his own fault, his punishment for his vanity and ambition and self-importance. It didn’t seem to cure him of any of these failings, but the guilt never left him, nonetheless.

  There had been no indication of what was coming, but then, as the doctor said at the time, there seldom was. Anne and Sophia had gone up to Derbyshire and taken a modest house on the edge of Bakewell, as Mrs. Casson and her married daughter, Mrs. Blake, a Waterloo widow. They had no friends or acquaintances in the area, but anyway they saw no one. And they lived simply. Neither of them took their maids with them, and Ellis and Croft went on to board wages until their mistresses returned. If they were curious, Anne never knew. At any rate, they were too professional to show it.

  It wasn’t an unhappy time. Their life up there was pleasant enough, reading, taking walks in the park at Chatsworth. They made inquiries and enlisted the help of a highly regarded physician, Doctor Smiley, and he’d been pleased with Sophia’s progress. Anne came to suspect that he knew the truth, or at least that they were not who they pretended to be, but he was too well mannered to be openly curious.

  Before they left London, they had arranged that James would find the child a suitable home. Even Sophia knew she couldn’t hope to keep it. The baby must be properly looked after, given a name, educated, but brought up with no awareness of his or her real identity. None of them wanted Sophia’s name to be dragged through the mud, and Anne knew her husband also feared that his own attempts at self-betterment would be dashed by a public scandal. If it had been their son who had fathered a bastard, it might be different, but for a daughter it was a crime with no possible forgiveness. James had acted swiftly, and with the help of the company spies found a clergyman, Benjamin Pope, who lived in Surrey. He was born a gentleman but the living was a poor one and so the extra money would be welcome. More to the point, the couple was childless and sad to be so. Sophia accepted the situation, when it was explained to her—not without a pang, but she accepted it. Armed with this, James made the final arrangements, and Mr. Pope agreed to adopt the baby as the “child of his late cousin.” The Popes would get a generous additional income, which would allow them to live reasonably well, while the child would be educated and a progress report would be sent regularly to Mr. Trenchard’s office for his private perusal.

  Meanwhile, Dr. Smiley enrolled an experienced midwife, made every preparation, and came to the house to supervise the birth. And it should have been fine. Except when it was done and the boy was safely born, the doctor simply could not stop the bleeding. Anne had never seen so much blood, and there was nothing for her to do but hold Sophia’s hand and assure
her that everything would soon be mended and that nothing was wrong. She never forgot how she had just sat there, lying and lying, on and on, until her little girl was dead.

  She couldn’t look at the baby for weeks, this boy who had killed her daughter. Dr. Smiley found a wet nurse and a nursemaid and between them they made sure he survived, but still Anne could not look at him. She’d employed a cook and a housemaid when they first arrived, so life went on, with empty days parsed by uneaten meals, but still she could not set eyes on the child. Until one evening Dr. Smiley came to her in the little parlor where she sat by the fire, staring blankly at the book in her hands, and said gently that all she had left of Sophia was her son. Then Anne did allow herself to be coaxed into holding the baby, and having held him, she could hardly bear to let him go.

  Anne often wondered if she had only learned to love the boy sooner, would she have tried to change the plan and insisted on bringing him up herself? But she doubted James would have allowed it, and since the arrangements were fixed, it would have been hard to renege on them. At last the house in Bakewell was closed and Anne traveled south with the nurse, who traveled on to Surrey to deliver the baby to his new home. The nurse was paid off and life returned to normal. Normal, that is, without Sophia. There was a tearful good-bye to Croft, whose services were no longer needed. Anne gave her a bonus as a farewell, but she was interested that the maid never showed any curiosity as to why her young mistress had died. Maybe she had guessed the truth. It would be hard to hide a pregnancy from a lady’s maid.

  So the years passed. The original plan had been for Charles to be trained for the cloth, and this had continued as a goal while he grew through his teens, but he had early displayed a talent for mathematics, and as he neared the end of boyhood he announced that he wanted to try his luck in the City. It was impossible for James not to feel flattered by this development, as he reasoned it must be his own blood coming out in the lad, but still they had not met him. They could only judge the young man by the reports sent from the Reverend Mr. Pope. In truth, James longed to help his grandson, but he was unsure how to do so without opening the Pandora’s box that a revelation of his origins was bound to prove. And so they hung back, paying him a modest allowance that Mr. Pope explained to Charles was a gift from well-wishers, living for the letters that Pope would send, four times a year, as regularly as clockwork. The boy had been happy. They were sure of that. At least, they had no reason to think otherwise. On their instruction, he had been told that his father had died in battle and his mother in childbirth and that therefore he was adopted, but that was all. He seemed to have accepted it, and the Popes had grown fond of him so there was no cause for concern, but still, as Anne would say to herself night after night as she lay in the dark, he was their grandchild and yet they did not know him.

  And now Lady Brockenhurst had entered the picture and complicated things further. Anne might not know Charles Pope, but at least she knew of his existence. She knew that her daughter had not vanished from the earth leaving no trace behind. Lady Brockenhurst had almost wept when she talked of their having no heir, while she, Anne, could have told her that her child had fathered a healthy and promising son. She had known James would forbid it, of course. Partly for motives she did not respect, but partly to protect the good name of their dead daughter, and that she could not simply dismiss. Hour after hour she lay with James snoring beside her, unable to resolve what she should do, until at last she slipped into a fretful sleep, waking early and unrefreshed.

  It took a month of uneasy rest and sorrow before Anne decided on a course of action. She did not like Lady Brockenhurst. She did not even know her, but she couldn’t bear the responsibility of the secret. She was only too aware that, had their positions been reversed and she’d discovered Lady Brockenhurst had kept such a story from her she would never have forgiven her. So, one day, she sat at the pretty desk in her little sitting room on the second floor and wrote: “Dear Lady Brockenhurst, I should like to call on you at a time that is convenient. I would be grateful if you could find a moment when we might be alone.” It wasn’t hard to learn which house in Belgrave Square they occupied, since her husband had built it. She folded the paper, sealed it with a wafer, wrote the address, and went out herself to give it to the carrier. It would have taken her maid ten minutes to deliver her message to the door, but Anne was not anxious to have all her business discussed below stairs.

  She did not have long to wait. The following morning there was a note on the breakfast tray that Ellis laid across her lap. She picked it up.

  “It was brought by hand, ma’am. A footman delivered it this morning.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “No. Just handed it in and left.” Naturally the question only whetted Ellis’s appetite, but Anne had no intention of giving any clues. She took up the little silver paper knife that had been laid on the tray and opened the envelope. A small sheet of thick, cream paper, embossed with a capital B under an earl’s coronet, contained a short message. “Come at four o’clock today. We will be alone for half an hour. CB”

  Anne did not order a carriage. Lady Brockenhurst probably would not approve but she wanted no witnesses. It was a nice enough day, and the walk would be a short one. More tellingly, she did not even ring for help with her cape and bonnet, but simply went up to her room at twenty minutes to the hour and slipped them on herself. Then she descended the stairs and left. The footman in the hall held the door for her, so the excursion could not be a complete secret, but what could be in her life these days? With prying eyes upon them from the moment they woke?

  Outside, she regretted for a moment not bringing Agnes for the walk, but then she decided it would only complicate matters, and she set off. The sky was looking a little darker than in the morning, but she turned left and walked until she came to Belgrave Place, then left again, and in less than a quarter of an hour since she had quit her own front door she was standing before Brockenhurst House. It was a large building, straddling the corner between Upper Belgrave Street and Chapel Street, one of the three freestanding palaces at the corners of the square. She hesitated but then she saw that a footman, lounging near the gate at the entrance, was watching her. She straightened her back and walked up to the front door. Before she could pull the bell, the door swung open and another liveried footman invited her in.

  “Mrs. James Trenchard,” she said.

  “Her ladyship is expecting you,” replied the man in the curious neutral tone, implying neither approval nor disapproval, that the experienced servant always masters. “Her ladyship is in the drawing room. If you would like to follow me.” Anne removed her cape and gave it over for him to lay on one of the gilded sofas in the hall, and then followed the man up the broad green marble staircase. They reached the top, and the servant opened one of the double doors and announced, “Mrs. Trenchard,” before closing it and leaving Anne to negotiate her way across the wide expanse of colorful Savonnerie carpet to where the Countess sat by the fire. She nodded.

  “Come in, Mrs. Trenchard, and sit by me. I hope you do not mind a fire in summer. I’m afraid I am always cold.” It was as near to a friendly greeting as Anne suspected she was capable of. She took a seat on a damask-covered Louis XV bergère opposite her hostess. There was a portrait over the chimneypiece of a beauty in the style of the century before, with high-piled, powdered hair, lace décolleté, and panniers. With a slight surprise, she realized the picture was of Lady Brockenhurst. “It was painted by Beechey,” said her hostess with a chuckle. “On my marriage in 1792. I was seventeen. They said it was quite a good likeness at the time, but no one could tell that now.”

  “I knew it was you.”

  “You surprise me.” She sat, patiently waiting. After all, it was Anne who had requested the interview.

  There was no getting around it. The moment had arrived. “Lady Brockenhurst, it seems that I am in possession of a secret that I have sworn to my husband never to reveal, and indeed he would be very angry if he
knew that I was here today…” She paused. Somehow she could not make herself frame the words.

  Lady Brockenhurst had no desire to be drawn into the complexities of the Trenchard marriage. Instead she said simply, “Yes?” Despite herself, Anne was impressed. There was something very powerful in her hostess’s composure. She must by now have deduced that something momentous was about to be revealed, but she could have been entertaining the vicar’s wife for all that it showed on her face.

  “The other day, you said that when you and your husband go, there will be nothing left of you.”

  “I did.”

  “Well, that’s not quite true.”

  Lady Brockenhurst stiffened almost imperceptibly. At least Anne had her full attention.

  “Before she died, Sophia was delivered of a child, a boy, Lord Bellasis’s son.” At that moment, the large double doors of the drawing room flew open and two footmen arrived bearing trays of tea. They proceeded to put up a table, cover it with a cloth, and lay out everything, much as the Duchess of Bedford’s servants had done.

  Lady Brockenhurst smiled. “I liked it more than I knew at the time, and I have taken to staging an imitation of my own every day at some point after four. I’m sure it will catch on.” Anne acknowledged this, and together they chatted about the merits of eating as well as drinking tea until the men had completed their work. “Thank you, Peter. We will manage by ourselves today.” To Anne it felt as if an age had passed, as if she were physically older by the time the men left.

  Lady Brockenhurst poured them both a cup and handed one to Anne. “Where is he now, this boy?” She betrayed neither excitement nor revulsion. In fact, she gave away nothing. As was her habit.

  “In London, and the ‘boy’ is a man. He was twenty-five last February. He works in the City.”

  “What is he like? Do you know him well?”

  “We don’t know him at all. My husband placed him, soon after his birth, in the care of a clergyman named Pope. He goes under the name of Charles Pope now. We have never thought it would be useful to make his origins public knowledge. He himself knows nothing.”