“Everything is magnificent in America,” he said. “The view I have at the moment is particularly fine.”

And he leaned forward and, looking deep into Marietta’s beautiful eyes, he kissed her on the lips, oh, so gently.

“You will forgive me, I am sure,” he murmured, “but the temptation was too great for me.”

Still silent, Marietta put her hands to her lips as though to seal his kiss there. So entranced was she, so wonder-struck, that Jack was tempted again—and fell. This time he took her in his arms and the kiss he gave her was deeper, more passionate, and, more to the point, she returned it, opening her lips a little and putting her arms around his neck. She was already learning the wordless grammar of love.

Dear Reader

Some years ago I did a great deal of research on the lives of those men and women who, for a variety of reasons, lived on the frontiers. Re-reading recently about life in Australia in the early nineteenth century, it struck me that an interesting story about them was only waiting to be told. Having written Hester Waring’s Marriage, it was a short step for me to wonder what happened to the children and the grandchildren.

Hence The Dilhorne Dynasty, each book of which deals with a member of the family who sets out to conquer the new world in which he finds himself. The Dilhornes, men and women, are at home wherever they settle, be it Australia, England or the United States of America, and because of their zest for life become involved in interesting adventures.

Paula

His One Woman
Paula Marshall

www.millsandboon.co.uk

PAULA MARSHALL,

married with three children, has had a varied life. She began her career in a large library and ended it as a senior academic in charge of history in a polytechnic. She has traveled widely and has been a swimming coach. She has always wanted to write, and likes her novels to be full of adventure and humor.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter One

Washington, April 1861

‘A re you still working, my dear? I thought that you had promised to escort your cousin Sophie to the Clays this afternoon. I do not like to see you constantly at your desk. You deserve a little pleasure in your life; it should not be all hard grind.’

Marietta looked affectionately up at her father, Senator Jacobus Hope.

‘Visiting the Clays with Sophie is not my idea of pleasure,’ she told him, ‘and I needed to catch up with your correspondence—which I have now done. Aunt Percival has gone with her in my place.’

Her father sighed and sat down opposite to her. Marietta thought sadly that he was beginning to look his age. For the last seven years she had been his faithful assistant, ever since she had decided that she would never marry after four years of being pursued by every fortune hunter in America’s northern states.

Now, at twenty-seven, she was her father’s mainstay: no man could have been more useful to him, and, had she been one herself, he thought that she would have made a superb senator—but, being a woman, all such doors were closed to her.

Knowing this, the Senator felt the most bitter regret at having to tell her his unwelcome news, but in fairness to her he must. He ought not to delay any longer.

‘Marie, my dear child, I am sure that you are aware that age is beginning to affect my ability to perform the duties of my office efficiently, and only your invaluable assistance has kept me on course for the last few years. I have been wrong to lean on you so much, but you are the beloved child of my old age, my last memory of your mother. I was sorry when you refused Avory Grant seven years ago. I know that you thought him a flighty boy, but the years and marriage seem to have sobered him, as they sober most of us.

‘Knowing this, it grieves me to tell you that I shall not seek office again when this term ends in 1864. Had I not been certain that war was coming, I would not have stood for the Senate in 1860, but, since I had long warned that war was inevitable, I decided that I must play my part in it when it did arrive.

‘I have no regrets, I have had a long and fulfilling life, but what does trouble me is that you have given your life and your youth in service to me and before my term is over I wish to see you married. I do not want to think of you as a lonely spinster when I am gone.’

Marietta put up a protesting hand at this. ‘Oh, Father, you have many years yet, I am sure.’

Her father shook his head. ‘The doctors do not think so, my dear. It is even possible that I shall not live out my term. I repeat, I would wish to see you married.’

Marietta answered him as lightly as she could. ‘But who would marry me, Father? I am twenty-seven now, past my first youth, and I am not even pretty.’

‘Marie,’ he said, ‘you must know that there are many who would want you for a wife—’

She interrupted him for once. ‘Fortune hunters to a man, Father. I know that.’

Indeed, all the world was aware that, as the Senator’s heiress, Marietta stood to inherit a vast fortune in dollars, land, property and investments.

‘Yes, Marie, but not all men are fortune hunters, and you are a clever woman—I would trust to your judgement to choose the right husband. I blame myself for not encouraging you to marry after you refused Avory, but you were adamant and I was selfish. Go more into society, my dear, and the suitors will come running.’

‘You mean when I am available for sale in the market again,’ she said bitterly. ‘I don’t want that, Father.’

‘It would be preferable to a lonely old age. Do you wish to be like Aunt Percival, Marie? Even your dollars would not sweeten that fate.’

He could see that she was rejecting his advice, well-meant though it was—but he could also see that he had touched an unwelcome chord. He sighed, and turned to go, but before he left her to attend a Congressional committee, he murmured, as gently as he could, ‘I beg that you will consider most carefully what I have just told you, Marie.’

The door closed behind him.

Marietta rose, and sank into an armchair beside the empty hearth. Unwelcome thoughts raced through her brain. Had she been foolish, not clever, when she had rejected Avory Grant? He had seemed so young and callow, and she had wanted someone to whom she could talk, who would share her inmost thoughts, and Avory had certainly not been that ideal man. Had she been too discriminating, too certain that he had been marrying her for her money and not because he had felt any real desire or affection for her?

Alas, she had no illusions about herself. She was Marietta Hope, the only plain member of a bevy of beautiful Hope cousins, all of whom sported the blonde ringlets, pink and white faces, and hour-glass figures which mid-century Americans considered to be the acme of female desirability. Instead, she possessed a face which was clever rather than pretty, glossy chestnut-coloured hair, and a body which was athletic rather than curvaceous.

But what she lacked in beauty she made up for in intellect and commonsense, which she dismally knew was not what young men looked for in their future wives.

‘Good God, never say she’s cousin to the Hope beauties,’ had been the first remark she had heard when she had attended her come-out ball at the age of eighteen—whispered behind her back, of course. ‘What a sad disappointment she must be for her poor papa.’

‘Oh, never mind that,’ had been the unkind answer. ‘All his lovely dollars will make her plain face seem pretty.’

Useless for her father to tell her that she was pretty—after a fashion which, alas, was not now in style. After two years of misery in ballrooms where her cousins were enjoying themselves, she had retired from frivolous society in order to be her father’s companion and, until now, she had never regretted doing so, for his political career had given her life meaning and point.

In three years, perhaps sooner, that life would be over, and what would be left for her then? She would become Aunt Hope, the spinster sent for when needed or, if not that, she might become one more of the wealthy and eccentric old Yankee women who toured Europe, bullying their servants.

No, she would not think of the future—other than to contemplate what the evening’s duties held for her. She was due to attend yet another White House reception in company with her father and her young cousin Sophie, to whom she was acting as temporary chaperon. Well, at least she had avoided this afternoon’s tedium at the Clays, and that was something for which to be grateful.

She pulled out her watch. Time for tea—and not in the study. The room suddenly seemed oppressive. She would go downstairs and play at being an idle lady, a role she would have to take up when her father retired. She would sit on her own, and Asia, the new black maid, would bring in tea and cakes, English fashion as Aunt Percival liked. She would indulge herself for once and not think of maintaining her admirably firm figure. Perhaps becoming plump might make her fashionable!

But her desire to be alone was destined not to be fulfilled—an omen, perhaps—for when she entered the front parlour there was a strange man standing before the window, his back to the room, until he turned to see her as she came through the door.

They faced one another, both surprised. Marietta walked towards him, her face a question mark—a polite one, to be sure, but still a question mark.

‘I see that we have a visitor, sir. You came to see me—or my father? If so, you were not announced.’

He bowed.

‘I believe that there must have been some mistake, madam. I came to visit Miss Sophie Hope, but the little maid who admitted me left me here some time ago, and has quite abandoned me.’

Marietta sighed. ‘Asia,’ she said cryptically; as one of his eyebrows rose, she added, ‘Our new maid: she is only half-trained, I fear. Alas, I must disappoint you. My cousin is out for the afternoon, and so Asia should have informed you.’

He had moved from the window and she saw him plainly now. He was tall, but not remarkably so, being barely six feet in height, she guessed, and well built. He was, after a strange fashion, handsome, with laughter lines deep around his mouth and eyes. His eyes were remarkable, an intense blue. His hair was ordinary, being sandy and straight. His carriage was as good as his clothes, but his accent was strange. He appeared to be in his late twenties or early thirties. She was a little intrigued by him. What was he doing, this unknown man, calling on Sophie at tea time?

He seemed to read her thoughts. ‘I am, perhaps, a little beforehand,’ he explained cheerfully. ‘I have met Sophie on several occasions in the last fortnight, the latest being last night when she asked me to call, but gave me no fixed date. Since I had no engagements this afternoon, I decided to accept her invitation.

‘My name is John Dilhorne, madam, and I will take myself off with my apologies,’ and he bowed again.

Marietta surveyed him, and his undoubted self-possession, coolly. ‘The apologies are due from us for wasting your time.’

She made a sudden surprising decision: a decision which was to alter her life and his. ‘Since my cousin Sophie is out calling, with our Aunt Percival, and you are here, and I was contemplating afternoon tea on my own, then I would take it as a favour if you would join me.’

It was his turn to assess her. This must be the plain cousin, the bluestocking, of whom Sophie had spoken last night. Senator Jacobus Hope’s daughter, secretary and good right hand, now almost a recluse, Sophie had said, forswearing normal social life. She had left Aunt Percival to escort her last night, which was a blessing, Sophie had remarked with a laugh, since her aunt was not as severe as Cousin Marietta.

He had first met Sophie at a grand ball given by the Lanceys and, attracted by her looks and vivacity, he had pursued her with some assiduity. He was now a little disappointed that he was to be entertained by the only plain Miss Hope, for so he had heard her called.

Not, he thought, that she was remarkably plain. She made little of her striking hair, and her expensive but dark clothes did her no favour, being more suitable for a woman of fifty rather than one of not yet thirty.

Where women were concerned Jack Dilhorne was both fastidious and discriminating, and the thing which he valued most in a woman was a good body. Unfortunately, the fashions of the day often denied him the opportunity to discover whether those he met possessed one. On more than one occasion he had found that a pretty face was allied to a lumpy or flaccid figure.

His assessment of Miss Marietta Hope told him that—despite her severely classic face—by her carriage and walk she possessed this valuable attribute. On the other hand, by her expression, manner and reputation, however, it was plain that no gentleman was ever going to have the privilege of seeing her unclothed!

At the moment she was busy making him welcome with extremely cool formality, pulling the bell to summon the servant, ordering tea for them, and recommending him to a large armchair.

‘My father’s,’ she told him. ‘But he is out, attending a committee on the Hill.’

When his eyebrows rose at this remarkable statement, she told him that the Hill was shorthand for Congress where the Senators worked. ‘He will not be back until late. It is the coming war which exercises us, Mr Dilhorne, as you have doubtless noticed. You are from abroad, are you not?’

‘From Sydney, Australia, Miss Hope. I have business here.’ He did not explain what it was. ‘I am staying at Willard’s Hotel until I find suitable rooms. So, you are sure that there will be a war?’

‘No doubt of it all,’ she told him firmly. ‘Now that Mr Lincoln is President, and the two sides being so intractably opposed to the degree that seven Southern states have already seceded from the Union, how can we doubt it?’

‘How, indeed?’ said Jack, amused. Yes, she was a bluestocking, and doubtless as well informed as any man. She was quite the opposite of little Miss Sophie with her ardent seeking of his opinion on everything. Miss Marietta Hope was used to speaking her mind—but it was as though she were able to read his.

‘Come, Mr Dilhorne, you did not visit my cousin to talk politics with her. Pray speak to me as you would have done to Sophie.’ Her face was alight with amusement when she came out with this.

‘Oh, I do not think that would be wise, Miss Hope. You would not be entertained by it.’

‘Now, why should you suppose that, Mr Dilhorne,’ she parried, ‘seeing that you have only just met me? Sophie and I might well be intellectual twins.’

So saying, she briskly wielded the heavy tea-pot which a repentant Asia had just brought in, handed him a cup brimful of tea, and offered him English muffins, and sandwiches, as well as Aunt Percival’s best pound cake. None of which he declined, and it was surprising how slimly athletic he was if this were his usual appetite.

Seeing her eye on him while he was eating, he grinned at her a little. ‘But you are mind-reading, too, Miss Hope. Yes, I like my food. I was taught to.’

Perhaps food had been short in his childhood, Marietta concluded—but he looked as though he had been well fed from birth.

‘You have not answered my last question, Mr Dilhorne, nor carried out my express wish for idle conversation.’

Marietta was overcome by surprise to find that she was flirting with an attractive man whom she had only just met.

‘Do call me Jack,’ he said through his muffin, which exploded ungracefully, splashing him with melted butter. ‘Sophie does.’

‘Most incorrect of her,’ said Marietta severely, ‘since I deduce that you have not been formally introduced.’

‘For that matter, neither have we,’ said Jack, elegantly retrieving the remains of the muffin and depositing them on his plate.

‘No more we have,’ returned Marietta, who was beginning to enjoy herself. ‘So licence reigns supreme.’ She further added, after watching him struggle, ‘As your way with muffins would seem to suggest.’

‘They call them English,’ said Jack, cleaning his sticky fingers on his expensive lawn handkerchief rather than on the Hopes’ equally expensive damask napkin, ‘but I have not seen an English muffin like this one. Ours do not explode.’

‘Oh, you have mannerly muffins, like the English themselves, I suppose. But a bit weighty, perhaps?’

‘I own that I was wrong,’ said Jack, accepting a sandwich and warily inspecting it before taking a bite, lest that, too, should cascade about him. ‘You are even more adept at light raillery than Sophie, but you do have the advantage of the muffins. Ballrooms and receptions have fewer diversions; conversation there must be sustained without such useful props.’

‘Try the pound cake,’ suggested Marietta, waving the plate at him, her face alight with an amusement she had not felt for years. ‘Or do you call pound cake something exotic in…New South Wales, is it not?’

‘Bravo!’ exclaimed Jack as he took a piece. ‘You are the first bona fide US citizen I have met who knows where Sydney is situated. No, unless our aborigines bake this delicacy, I have not met it before. It is well named, a most filling concoction. You may help me to another slice.’

‘And your cup needs refilling,’ said Marietta, putting out a hand for it.

Jack watched her concentrate on pouring out the tea—aware of his gaze on her and that she was a little entertained by him.

‘Since you will not engage in froth and fun with me, Jack—you see, I take you at your word—we may be serious. Pray, what is the business which brings you to Washington? That is, if you wish to inform me.’

He stirred his tea vigorously. ‘No reason why not, Miss Hope—’

‘Oh, Marietta, please,’ she said softly.

‘Marietta,’ he continued, ‘but ladies are not usually interested in my speciality. I will not say that it is dry, since it concerns the sea, but one might call it heavy. I ran the shipping side of our family firm until recently. Now my situation has changed and I may pursue my engineering bent. Among other things I am interested in such remote matters as the design of metal warships or iron-clads—hardly tea-party entertainment, I fear—but the States is the place to be these days for matters of invention.’

‘Indeed,’ she said, her eyes mocking him a little. ‘And screw-propelled ships, too. You are interested in those as well as iron-clads, I presume? I can see that Mr Ericsson is your man.’

Jack put down his delicate cup with exaggerated care. ‘Lest it, too, explode,’ he offered when he saw her smile. ‘Well, now, Marietta, you do surprise me. Most gentlemen around here do not know of such arcane matters, let alone pretty ladies at tea.’

‘Pray do not flatter me, Jack. A gentleman of such profound knowledge about design will know how lacking I am in it, even in a different line,’ she flashed back at him, for daring to describe her as pretty. ‘But there is a simple explanation for my surprising expertise. I am my father’s secretary and he is on a Congressional committee which deals with shipping of all kinds. What shall we discuss, sir? I am ready for you. Explosive shells, not muffins, and their effect on wooden ships?’

Jack’s laughter was unforced. ‘If you like,’ he said. ‘I warn you, once you start me going, you will not be able to stop me. On these matters I am a very bore.’

‘Oh, I doubt that, Jack. I doubt it very much. I am sure that Sophie does not think you are a bore.’

‘Oh, but I do not discuss iron-clads, and their future peaceful use, with Sophie,’ he said, waving away further proffered cake. ‘I see that you are determined to sink me, Marietta, with your broadsides.’

‘Difficult to achieve, I think,’ said Marietta, who had not enjoyed herself so much for years. He undoubtedly knew how attractive he was, but he displayed little conceit. He had a wicked look now and then, and she was subtly flattered that he was favouring her with it. He reminded her, while he talked with great enthusiasm of his passion, of a small boy, excited among his toys.

Marietta was surprised to find herself disappointed when he suddenly looked at the clock, and said, ‘I am remiss, Marietta, I have talked the afternoon away. I must not strain your patience.’

‘No, indeed,’ she told him. ‘You could not do that, Jack. You must come again for tea, and soon. I promise to serve you no exploding muffins next time.’

He rose. ‘Perhaps we shall meet this evening. Sophie said that you would be attending the White House reception. I am working with Ezra Butler, and he is taking me with him.’

‘I shall look forward to that,’ she replied, meaning her words for once, and they parted with more warmth than either could earlier have deemed possible.

An intelligent and amusing man, was Marietta’s verdict, while Jack thought that Marietta might not be conventionally pretty, but she had a good mind and an engaging manner. Nothing like Sophie, of course, whom he had been sorry to miss, but he had spent a pleasant hour all the same. Miss Hope was not quite the dragon of report.

Not long after he had gone, Sophie came rushing into the room, her pretty face aglow. ‘Oh, Marietta, was that Jack Dilhorne I saw leaving as we came home?’

On Marietta nodding assent, she gave a great pout. ‘Oh, how annoying. I knew that it was a mistake to go duty calling with Aunt Percival. And now I have missed him. Did he stay long?’

‘We had tea together,’ said Marietta quietly.

‘Oh, even more annoying,’ exclaimed Sophie disgustedly. ‘Jack is such fun. What on earth did you find to talk about with him?’

‘Explosives and marine engineering,’ said Marietta repressively.

‘Explosives and marine engineering! How exquisitely dull for the poor man. I might have guessed that you would bore him stiff.’

‘I don’t think that Jack…Mr Dilhorne, that is…found explosives boring,’ said Marietta, remembering the muffins. ‘On the contrary.’

‘Oh, he has splendid manners for a backwoods-man,’ said Sophie. ‘It’s only his clothes which are a little odd, but I don’t suppose that you noticed that. All the girls are wild for him,’ she added, and then said proudly, ‘but I am the one that he is interested in.’

‘Apart from his passion for marine architecture, that is,’ said Marietta unkindly. She had had enough of Sophie’s open patronage of her lack of attractions.

‘Oh, Marietta, you have no sense of humour at all,’ said Sophie, dismissively, ‘you are so solemn. Now Jack has the most enormous sense of the ridiculous.’

‘Then he should get along with me, should he not?’ said Marietta savagely. ‘Seeing that you all consider me to be the most ridiculous thing in Washington.’

She swept out of the room, leaving Sophie behind with her mouth open, since Marietta rarely bit back, however much she was provoked. It was one of her collection of amazing and boring virtues.

Goodness me, she thought, whatever had caused that? Well, she would tease Jack about his misfortune in being exposed to Marietta’s earnest and learned conversation at tea.

Explosives and marine engineering at four o’clock in the afternoon. What next?

Marietta thought that her father looked tired when he came in later. He was overwhelmed, he said, with work and with place-men. His senses, however, were as acute as ever, and while they waited in the hall for Sophie, before leaving for the reception, he said, ‘I shall be glad when my brother and sister-in-law arrive in Washington to take her over, even if I have to endure their presence here. She really is most excessively spoiled. Whatever can have caused her tantrums this evening?’

Sophie had been making her displeasure at missing Jack quite plain to all and sundry, and so Marietta explained to the Senator.

‘Hmm, Dilhorne. An odd name, and the second time that I have encountered it today. An Australian, you said, so they can scarcely be related.’

This was cryptic, even for the Senator, who frequently left out the connections in his chains of thought, expecting his daughter to pick them up, which she usually did—as today.

‘You mean that you have met another Dilhorne?’

‘Yes, an English MP and his aide. Alan Dilhorne and Charles Stanton. Dilhorne says that he does not represent the British Government, but you may be sure that he does. A handsome and devious fellow: one must listen carefully to what he says, or be misled.’

‘A little like mine,’ said Marietta.

‘His friend, though, is quite different,’ pursued her father. ‘A quiet dark man, a marine engineer, but a gentleman, patently.’

‘And that is another coincidence,’ said Marietta. ‘For my Dilhorne is a marine engineer.’

‘I do not like coincidences,’ said her father peevishly. ‘Coincidences make life difficult to control.’

‘But exciting,’ said Marietta, who had lately found this ingredient sadly lacking in her life. ‘Will they be at President Lincoln’s reception tonight?’

‘Of course,’ said her father, ‘and yours?’

‘Mine, too. Ezra Butler is taking him.’

‘That figures,’ said her father. ‘Butler has shipping interests in Australia. It will be stimulating to meet your man, and you must meet mine—although he is happily married, I understand.’

So her father was determined to matchmake. But she would not be pushed into anything, and, if she married, it must be someone whom she respected. Plain and twenty-seven as she was, love was too much to ask for.

Chapter Two

T he drive outside the White House was thronged with carriages and bobbing flambeaux there to light the way for Mr Lincoln’s guests. Marietta, who was used to such events to the point that they bored her, was handed down from the Hopes’ carriage, Sophie following her. Sophie was looking particularly charming in young girl’s white. A wealth of gauze rosebuds decorated her hair and her pink sash emphasised her tiny waist. She was carrying a bouquet of crimson and white hothouse carnations from which trailed filmy lace.

Marietta, for once not in a dark dress, was wearing lavender and was becoming increasingly conscious that it did even less for her than her usual colours, whatever her maid had said when she had helped her into it. She looked extinguished and knew it. The pale mauve gave her creamy complexion, one of her better points, a bilious cast.

Sophie, coming into the hall just before they had left, and still resentful of Marietta for having entertained Jack that afternoon, had said, sweetly unpleasant, ‘Are you well, Marietta? Your colour is poor tonight.’

Even the Senator—usually unaware of Sophie’s frequent brutality towards her cousin, whose lack of looks she thought was a good foil for her own delicate beauty—was alert to the insult, so pointed had it been.

‘I think that you look very well, my dear,’ he’d said, frowning at Sophie whom he disliked. His praise had done little to comfort Marietta. Her glass had told her only too clearly the truth about her appearance.

Before her father’s words that morning she would have shrugged off Sophie’s unkind remarks, but the armour which she had worn for the seven years since Avory Grant’s proposal had suddenly disappeared, and she was as vulnerable as she had been as a girl. Yesterday she would have ignored, or even been amused by, Sophie’s spite. Today, though, the words had stung—but she did not allow her distress to be visible.

Once inside the White House, Sophie was less interested in her short meeting with the President and Mrs Lincoln than in looking around her for Jack Dilhorne. Marietta thought that Mr Lincoln looked tired, which was not surprising in view of his country’s desperate situation: civil war was almost upon them.

Mary Todd Lincoln was, as usual, overdressed, and Marietta wondered how he had come to marry her: they seemed a most unlikely pair. This thought worried her, for she suddenly seemed to have marriage on the brain, and before tonight such a thing would not have occurred to her.

Senator Hope’s party walked on through the crowds of eagerly chattering people, most of whom Marietta knew through her father’s work—but she was suddenly aware that none of them knew her because she was Marietta Hope, but only because she was her father’s daughter. This was another new thought, and not a pleasant one.

A long mirror presented her with her ill-dressed self. I look forty, she thought, I really must take more interest in dress. No wonder Sophie laughs at me. I hope that she finds Jack soon; I cannot bear much more of her tantrums. I shall slap her, or scream, if she complains again.

Marietta betrayed none of this while bowing and smiling at those around her. The foreign diplomats who filled Washington were all present and she spoke pleasantly to them in her schoolgirl French. The elegant representative from Paris inwardly regretted that Miss Hope’s looks and general appearance were not so good as her brains.

A subdued scream from Sophie suddenly announced that she had seen Jack Dilhorne, and she began wildly semaphoring in his direction.

‘A little more decorum would be fitting, Sophie,’ said Marietta repressively, unable to resist, for once, the temptation to pay her cousin back for her earlier unkind remark, ‘or the world will think you a hoyden.’

‘Oh, pooh, we are not all old maids,’ said Sophie spitefully. ‘I particularly wish to speak to Jack, having missed him this afternoon.’ She waved her little bouquet again, narrowly missing a footman who was carrying a tray of drinks.

Jack had seen her and was threading his way through the packed room to her side. He looked even more handsome in his elegant evening dress, and even more in command of himself, if that were possible, than he had done that afternoon. He bowed to both Marietta and Sophie and was presented to the Senator.

Before the Senator could speak to him about his unusual name, twice encountered that day, Sophie took command of the situation.

‘Oh, Jack, what a bore that I was out this afternoon. I do hope that you were suitably distressed by my absence!’

What could the poor man say but ‘Oh, yes, indeed, Miss Sophie,’ thought Marietta satirically, as Jack promptly did so, with an apologetic smile at the Senator for their interrupted conversation. Unluckily he then added, ‘But Marietta looked after me most efficiently.’

‘Marietta…’ pouted Sophie prettily, ‘…but you call me Miss Sophie.’

‘Then that must be remedied immediately, Sophie,’ said Jack, quite the gallant.

Really, thought Marietta, he is too ready. Such charm is almost offensive. He even wasted it on me. For practice, one supposes. To have her own unkind thoughts immediately rebutted by Jack carrying tactlessly on by saying, ‘You see, Sophie, having the misfortune to miss you, I found another Hope cousin ready to give a poor stranger comfort and cheer.’

This was not what Sophie wanted at all. He should have been devastated at missing her, not congratulating himself on having his afternoon rescued for him by a plain Jane. She was provoked into being more publicly unkind to Marietta than was wise.

‘By discoursing to you of weighty matters, I hear. But then, Marietta is always so solemn. I hope that it did not sink the tea,’ she said, sarcasm plain in her voice.

Jack was no fool, and the false notes he could hear reverberated in his head. It was flattering that Sophie was jealous, but he did not care for such open spite. It presented a different picture of her from the pretty kitten Sophie usually showed to the world. A slight set-down might be in order.

‘On the contrary,’ he said cheerfully, directing his winning smile at Marietta, and noticing while he did so that the Senator disliked his niece, for Jack, like his father, was always keenly aware of such nuances of behaviour, ‘matters were most unusually light. So much so that even our muffins nearly flew away. Was not that so, Marietta?’

Marietta gratefully returned his smile with one of her own, and Jack wished that she would do it more often. It quite transformed her.

‘Indeed, Jack, although I must admit that your muffins were more affected than mine.’

Such banter from Marietta did not surprise Jack after taking tea with her, but it surprised the Senator and Sophie. Jack did not miss the surprise, either, nor that Sophie was annoyed by Marietta’s response to him. For the first time he thought that she was a little spoiled.

Sophie, suddenly aware that she was not presenting herself to Jack in a favourable light, first tried to remedy this by being as charming as possible, and then by allowing him to resume his interrupted conversation with the Senator. He had been joined by several of his colleagues and they were busy discussing the latest news from the South, which seemed to indicate that the Confederates, as they were known, were on the verge of attacking Fort Sumter. If they did, it would almost certainly plunge the Union into war.

Standing by Marietta, Jack listened with interest, and even joined in the lively discussion himself. On the Senator informing his friends that Mr John Dilhorne was something of an expert in the current revolution in shipping, his advice was sought on its implications for naval warfare.

Marietta saw by the expression on Sophie’s face that this was by no means what she had hoped for from the evening, but the prospect of war occupied everybody’s minds these days and Sophie, like everyone else, must learn to live with it.

Jack had hardly finished speaking when his attention was drawn by the entry into the room of two men: one was a large fair gentleman, impeccably dressed, and the other was smaller and dark. A look of the utmost surprise crossed his face. He turned towards the Senator, saying, ‘I must beg you to excuse me, sir, but I do believe that…no, no, it cannot be possible…’

The Senator followed Jack’s gaze and smiled a little.

‘I deduce, sir, that you have just seen Mr Alan Dilhorne enter. I deduce, too, that you must be related. You have the distinct look of one another.’

‘By all that’s holy,’ said Jack eagerly, ‘it is Alan! What an astonishing thing to meet one’s big brother in another country’s capital city. You will excuse me, sir, if I go to him. We rarely have the opportunity to meet, he being settled in England and I until recently in New South Wales.’

‘You have my permission, young man,’ replied the Senator, amused. He had already decided that he liked Mr Jack Dilhorne, not least because he seemed to have a proper appreciation of Marietta. He watched him cross the room and clap the large gentleman on the shoulder before engulfing him in a bear hug. The Dilhorne brothers were reunited. Marietta, watching them from a distance, found their evident affection for one another touching.

‘Let me look at you,’ said Alan, standing back. ‘Good God, little brother has grown up! How like the Patriarch you are—you have his look exactly.’

He turned to his companion. ‘Charles, this is my little brother, Jack, of whom you have heard me speak. Jack, this is Charles Stanton, who is in your line of work. He is a famous engineer back home who has come to see what’s happening here so that we may do it better.’

Charles smiled and put out his hand. He was a silent man, quite unlike the articulate and jovial Alan, who was indeed very like Jack, only bigger in every direction. Now in his late forties, he looked younger than his age, and was, everyone who met him in Washington agreed, an extraordinarily handsome man.

‘And what are you doing here?’ asked Jack when they had both finished exclaiming over the odd coincidence of their meeting and Charles had discreetly retired to leave the brothers together.

‘Oh, I am on a kind of mission for the Foreign Office,’ said Alan easily. ‘No one in England quite knows what our policy ought to be when war starts. If it weren’t for slavery, all Europe would support the South. But slavery sticks in most people’s throats,’ and he shrugged. ‘Despite that, most in England do favour the South a little—apart from the working classes, that is. I’m supposed to look about me, talk to everyone and then report back home. Vague, isn’t it?’

Vague it might be, thought Jack, but if Big Brother was involved in it, something very real and to the point would be taken back home to England. Alan suddenly became serious, took his brother’s arm and walked him off down a corridor, away from the noise of the room.

‘I must speak to you, Jack, even here. It cannot wait,’ he said suddenly. ‘I find it difficult to believe that the Patriarch has gone. I know that he was very old, but it was a great shock when I received Mother’s letter. He seemed immortal somehow.’

‘Yes,’ said Jack simply. ‘I know. Did Mother tell you how he died?’

‘No details,’ said Alan, ‘only that he went quite suddenly at the end.’

‘He was very frail for the last eighteen months of his life. He’d never really been ill before. He had a bad chest complaint in the winter and he never quite recovered from it completely. Oh, his mind was as sharp as ever, but his body had gone. He hated that, as you might guess. Mother said that he was over eighty and wanted to be thirty. He was confined to the Villa and the gardens, and, much though he loved them, he hated to lose his freedom of movement.

‘One day he persuaded Mother to let him be driven into Sydney. On the way back he asked for the carriage to be stopped at The Point, overlooking the Harbour. They sat silent together for some time, she said, until he kissed her cheek, took her hand and gave a great sigh, and when she looked at him he had gone—just like that. Typical of him, wasn’t it?’

The two brothers were silent, thinking of the Patriarch, their father, whose last sight on this earth had been of the vast ocean across which he had been transported from penury and great hardship to unimagined wealth and happiness. Who had died with his hand in that of the wife who had brought him his greatest joy.

‘He was in his mid-eighties,’ said Alan. ‘I found that out in England, but he never cared to know. And Mother, how did she take it?’

‘Well,’ said Jack simply, ‘very well. She just said that he’d had a long and happy life after a dreadful beginning and that in the end he had decided to let go, and she could not grudge him that. She knew that he could not bear to become helpless and mindless. Father always said that she was a strong woman.

‘It was Thomas—now known as Fred—who took it badly. Before he went to the gold fields he was never close to the Patriarch, but afterwards they were inseparable. Mother feared that Fred was going the way he did when his first wife died—but Kirsteen soon stopped that!’

‘She would,’ said Alan. ‘Another strong woman.’

‘She and the Patriarch got on famously together. Mother said that she dealt firmly with him just before the funeral. She reverted to type—you know what a fine lady she became. “You can just behave yourself, Fred Waring,” she shouted at him. “You’re not going to put us through all that again. We’re not having stupid Thomas Dilhorne back, I can tell you. And if you haven’t the wit to see that it was the way your pa wanted to go, you aren’t fit to be his son.” That did the trick, Mother said. It brought him to his senses immediately.’

Alan laughed heartily. ‘She’s been so good for him. She washed out his starch and God knows where that came from. None of the rest of us have it. The girls don’t—lively pieces all.’ He paused. ‘I’ve learned what I wanted to, and I respect the Patriarch more than ever now I’ve learned exactly how he died.’

‘He set me free, too,’ said Jack confidentially. ‘He left it so that I could go my own way or stay with Dilhorne’s as a roving representative. He said that I needed a holiday—I’d never had one. So, here I am. I’m working for the firm with Ezra Butler and looking out for what’s new in my line.’

‘American know-how.’ Alan grinned. ‘They keep talking to me of it. Now let us go to pay our respects to the Senator. I hear that the daughter is plain, but that his niece is pretty and reasonably rich. I suppose you’re after her, you dog. Going to settle down with the one woman soon, are you?’

Alan was referring to the joke about the Dilhorne men, beginning with the Patriarch: however rowdy each one’s early life, once he was married to the one woman he settled down and was faithful to her. It had certainly been true of their father and the twins, Thomas and Alan, thought Jack. He wondered whether it would be true of himself.

He and Alan made their way back to the Hopes, to find that Sophie had temporarily departed with another admirer, and so Alan had to be presented to the Senator’s strong-minded, if witty, daughter. Sophie would have to wait for another time.

Alan Dilhorne fascinated Marietta. He was so undoubtedly Jack’s brother, and there was so much of him, all of it overpoweringly handsome. He was, as her father had told her, devious, and the four of them engaged in a lively conversation about all the matters which were engrossing Congress at the moment.

He was tactful, too, over such issues as slavery, but showed plainly that he thought that it was the main cause of the coming war— ‘After the economic divisions between North and South,’ he said, ‘although old English gentlemen such as myself aren’t supposed to know about such things.’

Later, it was plain that Senator Hope had been greatly impressed by him. ‘Those fools on the Hill,’ he said, ‘are taken in by his manner and think him another effete English gentleman. My colleagues think that I am wrong about him. Time will show which of us is right.’

He asked both the brothers and Charles Stanton to dinner before they left Washington.

‘But before then,’ said Marietta who was enjoying herself hugely, and who had seen approval of her in Alan Dilhorne’s bright blue eyes, so like Jack’s, ‘you must come to tea. I believe that Jack here is in a position to recommend it.’

Jack looked solemnly at his brother. ‘Most certainly—and I promise you that the conversation is better than the food, good though that is. Muffins again, Marietta, and pound cake, I trust.’

‘Yes, indeed, and I promise you Sophie as well. She will be sorry to have missed your brother and Charles.’

The entire party were now on Christian name terms and the Senator was delighted to see his daughter sparkle and blossom in the company of three attractive and handsome men who appeared to have no female appurtenances to get in the way.

After they had paid their respects to Marietta and the Senator, the Dilhorne party left to spend the rest of the evening at Willard’s Hotel. Alan was staying with the British Envoy and Charles with a cousin who worked in the Envoy’s office and had a small villa outside the capital.

Predictably Sophie was furious when she discovered that she had missed Jack’s return. ‘But I have invited them all to tea,’ said Marietta. ‘His brother and his friend as well as Jack.’

‘Oh, I don’t care about them,’ said Sophie inelegantly. ‘It’s Jack I mind missing. I trust that you won’t monopolise him when he next visits us.’

Marietta’s hand itched to slap her, and she was greatly relieved when Sophie’s wounded feelings were soothed by the arrival of yet another beau, a naval officer this time. Indeed, on looking around the room Marietta saw that more uniformed men were present than ever before, and she hoped that they would assuage Sophie’s greed for attention and admiration.

Unfortunately, the Senator soon tired and decided to leave early. Sophie complained all the way home at her evening being cut short, until even his courtesy was frayed to the point where he was ready to reprimand her.

Marietta put a gentle hand on his arm to restrain him and said to her cousin, ‘Sophie, if you say one more word I promise you that I shall not escort you to another function, never mind give tea parties for your admirers. Your uncle is tired and needs to rest.’

This silenced Sophie, but added another to the long list of wrongs which Marietta had committed against her, and for which one day, Sophie promised herself, she would be paid back in full.

Two days later Jack, his brother and Charles Stanton came for afternoon tea at the Hopes’. Sophie had thought that she would enjoy herself in the company of three attractive men, but she didn’t. They appeared to direct their conversation almost exclusively at Marietta.

This wasn’t true, but appeared so to Sophie. They spoke first of what occupied the minds of all Washington—except Sophie’s, of course: the coming war. They were all quite certain that it was coming—only the question of when it would arrive remained. In other circumstances Sophie would have found Alan Dilhorne attractive, but not when he droned on about such boring subjects. Marietta was hanging on his every word—but then she would, wouldn’t she? Goodness, politics was all she had to talk about, poor thing, but did she need to monopolise three…well, two attractive men so determinedly?

Charles Stanton seemed to be irreparably dull. He was even more solemn than Marietta, if that were possible. He was only interested in subjects of such profound boredom that Sophie found it difficult not to yawn in his face.

For once, even Jack was dull. He certainly cracked his usual quota of jokes, but, most uncharacteristically, they were incomprehensible. What in the world was amusing about muffins and iron-clad ships? Iron-clad ships? What drearier topic of conversation could be found than that? But they all pounded away about them as though they were men-of-war themselves. Marietta even had the face to be amused by Jack’s silly jokes, and to look enthralled when the conversation moved on to screw-propellers and Charles’s and Jack’s interest in them.

Give the large and handsome Mr Alan Dilhorne his due—he did come to Sophie’s rescue. He talked about more interesting things, such as the nature of Washington’s social life, but, after all, he was in his forties, already married to some Englishwoman across the Atlantic—horse-faced, no doubt—so there was little point in talking to him. Even then, in the middle of it, he broke in on Jack and Charles, who were talking to Marietta about walking and riding.

Walking and riding! They were two things which Sophie particularly hated. Horses were such tricky creatures and she was too frightened when on them to be able to look alluring. As for walking! Sophie never walked when she could ride in a carriage, and one of the reasons for her intense dislike of Marietta was all the exercise that she was compelled to take with her.

‘You’ll get fat if you sit about so much and eat so many sweet things,’ Marietta had had the gall to say to her severely at least once a week. Fat! Well, she would rather risk that than be a beanpole like Marietta.

To make matters worse, Alan Dilhorne now began to talk of the difficulty he had found in obtaining enough exercise in Washington.

‘We must go riding together,’ he said to Marietta. ‘I am sure that Miss Sophie and yourself can advise me on how to go about finding suitable stables and some useful mounts. I shall get fat if I sit about all day on the Hill, eating and drinking,’ and he made a comical face.

The Dilhorne brothers were good at comical faces, thought Sophie resentfully, unlike Charles Stanton who seemed to possess a permanently glum one. Not that she found either of them very comical on this particular afternoon.

‘Are you missing your sparring, Alan?’ Jack asked his brother, adding to Sophie and Marietta, ‘Big Brother here was quite a bruiser in his time. He could have made a name for himself in the ring.’

Could he, indeed? thought Sophie nastily. I thought that he was supposed to be a fine gentleman with a big house in Yorkshire. Some fine gentleman he must be if he were almost a bruiser once!

Charles Stanton, who, for all his quietness, was no fool, read Sophie’s slightly shrugging manner correctly.

‘Gentlemen box in England, you know,’ he said, trying to be helpful.

‘No, I don’t,’ said Sophie off-puttingly. She thought nothing of Charles. He was apparently only some secretary dragged along by Big Brother in order to prose about dull matters and take Jack’s attention away from her.

Jack was now engaged in discussing railway lines with Marietta, and their importance in the coming war. Railway lines! Who cared about them?

She gave poor Charles her shoulder, ignorant of the fact that he had felt sorry for the pretty young girl who was so patently bored by the conversation of her elders and had tried to include her in it.

Marietta was well aware that, for once, she was not considering Sophie before herself by bringing her out and turning the conversation towards matters that would interest her. She was finding her male guests both interesting and amusing—and was enjoying herself for a change, rather than always thinking of others. Sophie was the third of her cousins whom she had introduced to Washington life.

She decided that Jack and Alan were more alike than she had originally thought, both in looks and intellect. Alan might, at first, give off the impression of being a bluff and open Englishman, but her father’s appreciation of him as a devious and clever man was an accurate one. Jack resembled him in that for, when first met, he gave off the impression of being a charming idler, and this was what had caused Sophie to be attracted to him. But this impression was not a correct one. He was both knowledgeable and shrewd, reminding her of some of the men she had met on Capitol Hill who concealed their ability beneath charm and good manners.

She liked Charles, too, and was sorry that Sophie was being so openly rude to him in her disappointment at the turn which the tea party had taken, which was giving her little opportunity to display her kittenish charm.

Fearful that Sophie might be provoked into displaying even more bad manners, she steered Jack’s and Alan’s interest adroitly towards her and began to talk to Charles herself. She found him as interesting a man as Jack and his brother. Unlike them, his manner was diffident, but he was well informed, and even a little surprised to discover how knowledgeable Marietta was. It was also evident that he hero-worshipped the large Mr Dilhorne, who was plainly fond of him.

Everyone enjoyed the promised tea and Jack’s jokes while they ate it. Everyone that was, but Sophie, who, seeing Marietta’s eye on her, ungraciously refused a third muffin. ‘Marietta will threaten me with growing fat if I eat another.’

‘Quite right, too,’ said Alan cheerfully. ‘I have to watch my weight, alas,’ and he, too, waved a muffin away. ‘We are fellow sufferers, Miss Sophie, and must comfort one another.’

Despite this offered sympathy, Alan had decided that he did not like Miss Sophie, and wondered a little at Jack for pursuing her. The cousin, though not the prettiest of women, was a much better bet. She had a good mind and possessed an excellent body beneath all the clothing which women were forced to wear. Must be the exercise she takes, he decided. It would pay Miss Sophie to take more.

Sophie would have been horrified if she had been privy to Alan’s thoughts, but, devious man that he was, he gave her the false impression that he found her as charming as Jack did and had quite won her over before the visit ended.

‘We shall certainly abuse your hospitality by coming again soon,’ Alan told Marietta before they left. ‘Where else should we find two such charming ladies, such an excellent tea and such entertaining conversation? Pray pay our respects to the Senator when he returns.’

Marietta and Sophie watched them go.

‘I’m sorry that I couldn’t return all the large gentleman’s compliments,’ said Sophie harshly once they were safely away. ‘And why in the world did he bring such a dull stick as his office boy along with him? Surely Charles Stanton has enough pen-pushing to do at the British Envoy’s office without inflicting his boring opinions on us.’

Marietta looked at Sophie. She had learned something during her conversation with Alan which was going to upset her cousin more than a little.

‘I’m sorry that you disliked Charles,’ she said quietly. ‘But Alan could hardly leave him behind when he came to visit us. Besides, I doubt whether he does much pen-pushing. Charles does not use his title in private life, but he is here as the representative of the British House of Lords, and is properly Viscount Stanton. He is also an expert in his line of engineering and is a cousin of Alan Dilhorne’s wife.’

Sophie blushed an unbecoming red. A real live lord! A viscount, no less! Sophie over-estimated this—her knowledge of the British peerage, her knowledge of everything, was small—and she thought that a viscount was even grander than he was. Alas, she had snubbed him so mercilessly that, however kind Charles was, there could be no chance of her ever retrieving her position with him.

‘How dare you keep that from me?’ she burst out. ‘I suppose that you wanted me to make a fool of myself. How was I to know that such an inconsequential little man was even grander than Jack’s brother?’

‘Since I only found out who he was a few moments ago, and purely by accident,’ returned Marietta quietly, ‘I could hardly have informed you before their arrival. May I remind you that your own good manners required you to be civil to him, and from what I saw you were sadly lacking in them.’

‘I will not be prosed at by a plain old maid,’ said Sophie, disgusted by the whole wretched business, what with hardly speaking to Jack, and being bored witless. ‘If you’re so all-fired clever, Miss Marietta Hope, how come you’re on the shelf, and like to remain there for all your fine conversation about ships and submersibles?’

Marietta looked steadily at her cousin. She had always known that Sophie disliked and despised her—the first of her cousins whom she had helped through their début in Washington society to do so. She thought that she knew what had brought this outburst on, but she had as much right to enjoy herself as Sophie did. She had found their guests to be out of the common run, and their patent admiration of her knowledge and her intellect had been most flattering. Englishmen were not supposed to like clever women, so they must be exceptions.

Of course, Jack was not English, and his brother little more so, and it was plain that Charles was also a remarkable man behind his quiet exterior, so she could not take them as true representatives of the English tribe. She could only hope that they would visit her again. She could not resist indulging in a small smile at the sight of Sophie flouncing upstairs in disgust.

A real live English lord and she had been rude to him!

Marietta, on the other hand, had not enjoyed herself so much in years. She refused to admit to herself that it was Mr Jack Dilhorne whom she particularly wished to see again.

The brothers and Charles walked back to the British Envoy’s office along Washington’s filthy and unpaved streets. There had been a fall of rain earlier in the day and the three of them were amused to see the heavy wagons, drawn by mules, struggling in the thick mud. However magnificent Washington was going to be in the future, when its buildings and boulevards were finally completed, at the moment it was a ramshackle and sketchy town. The Capitol, high upon the Hill, dominated everything, as it dominated Washington’s social and political life.

The dirty streets were crowded with people. Alan had been told that all the Southerners and Southern sympathisers had earlier left in droves once war seemed to be imminent. They had been replaced by a mass of office seekers and entrepreneurs determined to make a good thing out of the coming conflict.

‘To say nothing of the military and naval presence,’ Charles said. ‘I like the plain Miss Hope,’ he added reflectively, ‘but I think little of the pretty cousin. She has no regard for others’ feelings.’

Jack had been thinking this himself, and was saddened by it. He had met Sophie on a number of occasions without Marietta being present, and had been greatly attracted by her looks and charm. She had spoken often and dismissively of Marietta, so he had assumed that she must be an unpleasant, middle-aged harridan, there to guard a high-spirited girl and carrying out her duties with a heavy hand.

On meeting Marietta, however, he had been surprised to find that the older Miss Hope was comparatively young, and had proved to be a lively and amusing companion. He thought that Sophie’s manner to her verged on the unpleasant, particularly since it seemed to be quite unjustified. He felt, however, duty-bound to defend Sophie, of whom he had previously spoken warmly, when Alan supported Charles in deploring Sophie’s conduct.

‘I thought that you liked her,’ he told Alan. ‘She’s usually a charming little thing, and one cannot expect her to be interested in the weighty topics which engage her elders.’

‘No, indeed,’ said his brother. ‘But one might expect her not to show her displeasure quite so plainly. She was openly rude to Charles, and to Marietta, more than once. My regard for Miss Marietta led me to try to placate the young miss, even at the expense of losing some good conversation. It is not for me to advise you, Jack, but I should go easy in that direction if I were you. Spoilt young beauties are likely to turn into shrewish women when their looks begin to fade.’

Charles nodded at this in his thoughtful way, while Jack said easily, ‘I think that you’re both making heavy weather of the poor little thing,’ but when they mounted the steps to the Envoy’s office, he was thoughtful himself.

It was a good thing for Sophie, he decided, that Marietta was so patient with her. It might encourage her to improve her company manners if she were to follow the sterling example her cousin set.

He looked forward to seeing them again in the near future. He had promised to support the stall which they were running at the coming Bazaar to raise money for an orphans’ home. He would try to persuade Charles and Alan to accompany him. Hardworking Marietta deserved all the support she could get, what with being the Senator’s right hand and Sophie’s duenna as well.

He would make sure that he provoked that attractive smile again: when offering it to him, she no longer seemed to be at all plain.

Chapter Three

‘J ack says he’s bound and determined to support me at the Bazaar this afternoon,’ Sophie told Marietta in as patronising a manner as she could. ‘I don’t suppose that you will want to come, will you? Not your sort of thing at all. Aunt Percival and I are perfectly capable of running the stall without you.’

‘On the contrary,’ said Marietta coolly. ‘Seeing that I have done the lion’s share of the work needed to gather together enough bric à brac, needlework, bibelots and trinkets to make a good show, I have no intention of being deprived of the pleasure of selling them. Besides, I should like to meet Jack again— I found him a most interesting companion.’

Sophie’s pout was a minor masterpiece of displeasure.

‘Oh, I’m sure that he would like an afternoon when he didn’t have to waste time discussing boring topics with you,’ she said sharply. ‘Besides, if you do come, you will have so much work cut out making change for our customers to spend much time talking to anyone. You know that Aunt Percival and I aren’t very good at sums.’

‘In that case, you really will wish me to accompany you—seeing that I will be useful after all.’ Marietta smiled.

She was beginning to enjoy wrong-footing Sophie, whose spite was becoming unendurable. Aunt Percival had berated her the other evening for ‘allowing Sophie to walk all over you’ and had advised her to stand up for herself a little more. ‘You are doing her no favour by letting her use you as a doormat,’ she had ended, trenchantly for her.

Well, I wasn’t a doormat this morning, far from it, thought Marietta, looking around the crowded church hall to see whether Jack was present. He had apparently told Sophie that he would arrive early, but it was already four o’clock and there was no sign of him.

Nor was there any sign of Sophie, either. After two hours of waiting for Jack, she had flounced off to take tea in a back room, telling Aunt Percival to be sure to fetch her if he should suddenly arrive. Aunt Percival’s answer to that, once she had gone, was to remember a sudden necessary errand which she needed to run, leaving Marietta alone in blessed peace at the stall.

She had just sold an embroidered pocket book to Mrs Senator Clay when she saw Sophie returning with a man in tow. She was chattering animatedly to him, even though he was not the missing Jack. He was someone whom Marietta had once known very well and whom she was surprised to see at this unassuming event.

‘Guess who I found?’ bubbled Sophie at Marietta. ‘He says that he knew you long ago when you were young.’

Marietta looked at the handsome blond man who was bowing to her before offering her a faint smile. ‘I don’t need to guess,’ she said quietly. ‘It’s Avory Grant, isn’t it? I would have known you anywhere.’

Marietta had not seen him for seven years and those years had changed them both. There were grey streaks in his fair curls and lines on his classically handsome face, even though he was still only in his early thirties. She wondered what he saw when he looked at her.

‘You haven’t forgotten me, I see,’ he said quietly, bowing to her.

‘No, of course not,’ she told him, smiling at him. He might once have proposed to her and been refused, but that was no reason for them to be uneasy with one another.

He smiled. ‘And I would have known you, even though you have become handsome after a fashion which must cause heads to turn in your direction these days.’

‘Now, Avory, you must not flatter me. You know as well as I that I am past my first youth.’

He shook his head. ‘I meant what I said. I am delighted to see you again, and to find you looking so well.’

She did not tell him that he had not changed, for he had, even though he was essentially still the young man who had asked to marry her—something which Sophie did not know.

‘I arrived in Washington yesterday and my aunt told me that I would find you here this afternoon—and so Miss Sophie confirmed when I encountered her.’

Sophie slipped a proprietorial arm through Avory’s, and her smile for Marietta was that of a crocodile hanging on to its prey. ‘Avory and I first met when Pa invited him to dinner this time last year,’ she announced sweetly.

Avory nodded agreement, adding, ‘I am having a short holiday in Washington, renewing old friendships, before I join the Army of the Potomac—’

He was not allowed to finish. Sophie exclaimed, ‘Oh, no—do not say so. It is not even certain that there will be a war.’

‘Would that that were so,’ he told her indulgently, ‘but I am afraid that war is now inevitable.’ He turned to Marietta. ‘I am sure that the Senator would agree with me. May I compliment you again on your appearance, Marietta—it is as though no years at all have passed since we last had the good fortune to meet.’

Marietta’s thanks for this compliment were coolly polite but genuine. For the first time in months, nettled by Sophie’s constant criticism of her, and a little on her high ropes because of the Dilhorne party’s open admiration of her, she had dressed herself with some care.

She was wearing a fashionable green velvet gown decorated with gold buttons and a certain quantity of discreetly placed gilt lace which showed off her glossy chestnut hair to advantage. More to the point, she had abandoned her normally severe coiffure in favour of one which allowed her glorious locks to hang loose a little before they were confined by a black velvet bandeau round her forehead. In the centre of it she had pinned a small topaz brooch. Her mirror had told her how much this unwonted care had improved her appearance.

Sophie tossed her head a little. Plain Jane had no business to be receiving praise—that was for her. ‘Oh, Marietta always looks the same,’ she said, as though that were some major fault. ‘I suppose that your wife is still recovering from your journey from Grantsville and would find a visit to a Bazaar too exhausting.’

Marietta threw Sophie a glance so withering that even that careless kitten quailed before it, while Avory, his face shuttered, said in a low voice, ‘My wife died suddenly six months ago—the news has possibly not yet reached you.’

To save her cousin at least a little face for having forgotten what she must have been told, Marietta said, ‘Sophie has been living in the country until she came to Washington early this spring and consequently would not have been informed of your sad loss.’

‘Oh, yes, indeed,’ stammered Sophie. ‘May I offer you my belated condolences, Avory?’

Despite Marietta’s kind intervention, she shot her a look which was poisonous—but which Avory did not see. He inclined his head towards her and said, ‘You may, indeed. I thank you.’

He addressed his next remark to Marietta. ‘I should wish to pay you a more formal visit before I leave Washington. I take it that you are still at your old address.’

‘Yes, we shall be pleased to see you.’

Sophie announced in a distracted voice, ‘Oh, look—Charles Stanton has just come in, but Jack isn’t with him. Wherever can he be?’

Her brief moment of remorse for her thoughtlessness was over, and she was ready to resume her exciting social life. As on the night of the reception at the White House, she waved her hand above her head to attract attention, only this time it was holding her fan, not a bouquet.

She had already forgiven Charles for having caused her to insult him by not using his proper name, and when he arrived at the stall her pleasure at seeing him was unfeigned because it allowed her to forget her recent gaffe and repair a previous one.

‘Oh, m’lord,’ she exclaimed, startling Avory who was about to leave them. ‘How delightful to see you again. But where are your companions? I trust that they have not deserted us.’

‘Not at all,’ said Charles gravely, including Avory in his bow to her and Marietta. ‘Alan was summoned at short notice to a committee on the Hill and took Jack with him. Since my specialist knowledge was not wanted today, Jack suggested that I come along and assure you that he and his brother would join us before the afternoon is over.’

‘We are being remiss,’ said Marietta, trying not to sound as though she were reproaching Sophie, even though she would have liked to. ‘I ought to introduce our new guest to our old one. Mr Stanton, may I present Mr Avory Grant of Grantsville to you? He is one of our most prominent landowners and a strong supporter of the Union cause.’

‘Oh, pooh, Marietta,’ said Sophie when the courtesies were over. ‘You might as well explain to Avory that Charles is really Viscount Stanton, or else he will think that my calling him m’lord was a silly mistake.’

Marietta thought furiously that the only silly mistake was to insist on calling Charles Stanton m’lord when he expressly did not wish to use his title in either his public or private life! Her eyes met Charles’s and she signalled him a rueful apology for Sophie’s bêtise. He smiled and shrugged his shoulders.

What Avory made of this by-play was unknown, especially since in order to impress Charles with her image as a universal charmer, Sophie had re-engaged Avory in animated conversation about his home and was assuring him how much she was looking forward to seeing it again.

Aunt Percival’s arrival back from her errand, and a sudden influx of would-be buyers, ended this ploy. She took one brisk look at the situation, said hail and farewell to Avory, and sent Marietta and Charles to the tea-room, all while bidding an annoyed Sophie to stay behind and do some work for a change.

Charles’s perfect manners prevented him from making any comment on Sophie’s less-than-perfect ones to Marietta, other than by saying, ‘One has to hope that Jack will have Alan with him if they arrive at the Bazaar while you are busy taking tea with me.’

This cryptic remark amused Marietta more than a little. She said, as casually as she could, ‘I gather from Jack that you are something of a protégé of his brother.’

Charles picked up a large muffin and said before attacking it, ‘Yes, indeed. He rescued me from being a backwoods country nobleman, or a soldier, when I wanted to be that odd creature a working engineer. I had a passion for all things mechanical and Alan’s charm and power, working together, were such that he persuaded my father to allow me to indulge that passion.

‘Alan Dilhorne is a most remarkable man. How remarkable I did not completely understand until I began to work for him a few years ago. His brother Jack is very like him, but not, I suspect, so severe. Alan can be ruthless—should he so wish—which is not very often. I suspect Jack does not share that with him.’

Marietta could well believe that Alan was ruthless as well as severe. He had chosen to deceive Mr Lincoln and the officials he had met by presenting them with a picture of an idle and somewhat stupid English gentleman and she was sure that that had been done with a purpose.

It was pleasant to forget her duty for once and delay returning to the stall in order to talk to a clever and attractive man who seemed to like her company. He was not Jack, but she had to admit that if she had met Charles first… But that was to flatter herself.

‘How long do you propose to stay in Washington? I take it that you will be returning to London with Alan.’

Charles shook his head. ‘No, indeed. I shall send my report on our talks back with him when he leaves, and then I shall travel South to see what new inventions in the shipping line the Confederates are developing. I trust you will not take offence at my visiting your enemy. Great Britain is, I believe, unlikely to become an ally of either side in the coming war, so I shall have carte blanche to travel where I please.’

Marietta shivered. ‘I have always hoped that civil war would never come, particularly since our family has relatives in the Deep South. It is dreadful to face the fact that friends, brothers and cousins might find themselves on opposite sides—perhaps to meet in battle.’

‘Civil wars are the worst of wars,’ said Charles. He pulled out his watch. ‘My patron should be arriving any time now. Do you wish to remain here, or return to the stall?’

‘If we all had our druthers—which is Deep South dialect for what we would rather do than what we ought to do—then I would prefer to stay here. But duty says that I ought to be helping Aunt Percival and Sophie to raise as much money as possible for poor children by selling baubles to rich women—an odd thought, that.’

‘Ah, yes, duty,’ murmured Charles. ‘I can see why Alan likes you. He’s great on duty.’

‘So, I suspect, is Jack. Is it an Australian trait, I wonder?’

‘Perhaps. Many Yankees seem to share it, too. I must do mine and return you to your worthy Aunt Percival.’

Marietta noticed that he did not mention Sophie although, once they were with her again, Charles’s manners to her were those of the perfect gentleman—which he obviously was, even though Sophie greeted Marietta with, ‘Whatever have you been doing to be away for so long? I have had a wretched time of it. Aunt Percival has left me to sell things and make change while she gossiped with all her old friends—and Jack still hasn’t turned up. If he doesn’t come, it will have been a totally wasted afternoon—I shouldn’t have allowed you and Aunt to persuade me to attend.’

‘Now, Sophie, that’s no way to speak to Marietta—even if you are disappointed,’ said Aunt Percival. ‘Console yourself by knowing you have been doing your duty.’

‘Oh, that!’ exclaimed Sophie, shrugging her shoulders and rolling her eyes at Charles. ‘Who cares about that? That’s for servants.’

‘And English viscounts apparently, by what he said to me in the tea-room,’ Marietta was to tell Aunt Percival later that evening. ‘It’s a good thing that Sophie hasn’t set her sights on Charles—he thoroughly approves of people who do their duty.’

Now she said nothing, other than, ‘Well, we can all console ourselves with the thought of duty well done, and have our immediate reward for, if I do not mistake matters, Jack and Alan have just arrived.’

Sophie responded by jumping up and down again and beginning to semaphore in their direction—this time laughing and waving Aunt Percival’s tolled-up sunshade to be sure of attracting them to her side immediately.

Both men responded by smiling at them before making their careful way through the crowd of women—few men were present—to Marietta’s now three-quarters-empty stall.

‘I warned Alan,’ remarked Jack when the formalities were over, ‘that by the time we arrived we should find all the best bargains will have gone—and so they have. But that stern goddess Duty called us. Even if I might have frivolously declined to obey her on the grounds that I had a previous engagement, Alan, who is made of sterner stuff, would never have allowed such a consideration to move him.’

Duty again—and from Jack this time! Sophie pouted at him, and it was left to Marietta to say to him, ‘I see that you think of duty as a woman, Jack. Do you have any authority for assuming any such thing?’

Jack put on a puzzled face, and it was left to Aunt Percival to inform them, ‘Mr Jack, even if he does not know it, has the best authority for what he said—was it not Wordsworth who called duty, “stern daughter of the voice of God”?’

‘Bravo!’ said the three men together, while Sophie stared at Aunt Percival. One might have guessed that she would remember such a useless piece of knowledge—and by boring old Wordsworth, too. She had unhappy memories of being asked to learn his Lucy poems by heart.

She was about to say something when Alan leaned forward, looked into her eyes, and half-whispered to her, ‘I’m sure that Miss Sophie likes poetry which has a softer touch. For example…’ And he began to quote Byron to her in a voice which was so soulfully melodious that even Jack stared at him.

She walks in beauty like the night;

Of cloudless climes and starry skies

And all that’s best of dark and light

Meets in her aspect and her eyes…

The admiring look which he sent her on ending gave Sophie the notion—totally unfounded—that, smitten by her charms, he had been left with no alternative but to celebrate them.

‘Oh, Mr Dilhorne,’ she simpered at him. ‘You flatter me.’

‘Oh, no,’ he returned. ‘Most apt, wouldn’t you agree, Charles?’

‘Yes, indeed,’ said that gentleman, trying to keep his face straight.

Jack said nothing, but smiled a lot. Aunt Percival looked bemused. She detected a false note somewhere but, since no one said anything, she thought that she must be mistaken. Unlike Charles Stanton, she was not aware of how ruthless the handsome Mr Dilhorne could be.

‘When we have all finished showing off our learning,’ Jack said, ‘I should like to enjoy some bodily, rather than mental, sustenance—it must be hours since I last ate or drank. Miss Percival spoke a moment ago of a tea-room. I wonder if you would like to accompany me there, Marietta?’

‘Oh, no,’ wailed Sophie. ‘Why can’t I take you? Marietta has only just returned from it.’

‘Splendid,’ said Jack. ‘Then she’ll be sure to know how to find it, won’t she?’

He had decided earlier on that day that he wanted to see more of Marietta Hope without having to share her with either Alan and Charles or with Sophie and Aunt Percival. This seemed an ideal occasion to discover whether she was quite as remarkable as he was beginning to suspect she was.

So far he had no sexual interest in her, or so he told himself. In the past his taste in women had always run in the direction of either pretty young blondes who looked adoringly at him and talked of nothing, or their more experienced sisters with whom he could have a jolly good time with no fear of any unwanted consequences.

His father, the Patriarch, as all his descendants called him, had despaired of Jack ever finding anyone sensible with whom he could settle down for life. ‘Feather-headed and feather-brained, the lot of them,’ he had once grumbled to Jack’s mother, Hester, about the women Jack fancied. ‘Will he never take up with anyone I might like to have for a daughter-in-law? Someone like Eleanor or Kirsteen?’

‘You’re not in a position to complain about him, Tom Dilhorne,’ Hester had said. ‘It took you long enough to sow your wild oats and settle down.’

Now what could a man say to that? Other than, resignedly, ‘I might have hoped he’d be more sensible than his old father—although perhaps I ought to remember that if I’d settled down earlier we should never have married!’

On hearing Marietta’s immediate offer to stand down in Sophie’s favour, Alan, who was well aware of his brother’s wish to be alone with the plain Miss Hope rather than the pretty one, answered for him.

‘Now, Miss Sophie,’ he said. ‘Later on you may have the honour of taking tea with me—but only after you have sold me that pretty brooch whose price seems to have been above most buyers’ touch. I should like to take it home to give to my wife as a memory of a happy afternoon. I should be sure not to tell her of the charming young thing whose stall I bought it from.’

Since this came out in Alan’s most seductive voice, Sophie tossed her head, saying, ‘Very well,’ although she jealously watched Marietta take Jack away, leaving her with a middle-aged married man and Charles Stanton, whose manner to her was cool in the extreme—and Aunt Percival, who didn’t count.

‘I should really have let Sophie take over,’ Marietta told Jack in a worried voice. ‘I’ve just had a cup of tea with Charles.’

‘Ah, but did you have anything to eat?’ asked Jack, who could be as cunning as his brother. ‘I really can’t be expected to partake of a solitary meal. Besides, after the waitress has taken our order, you can enlighten me on the current situation in the States vis-à-vis the proper conduct for a young unmarried gentleman who wishes to get to know an unmarried lady better.’

So all this gallant attention to her, Marietta thought glumly, was simply to discover how best to approach Sophie! How could she have expected that Jack might be any different from all the other young men who had fluttered around the beautiful Hope cousins while ignoring the plain one—or using her to get to know the prettier ones better?

‘It’s very much as I expect it is in England. You may not be alone with an eligible young woman—other than in the kind of situation we find ourselves in at the moment—in an acceptable semi-public place. You may go anywhere with her so long as a chaperon accompanies you—although I believe that we allow a freer life for our young gentlewomen than is allowed to yours.’

‘As I thought,’ said Jack. ‘In a ballroom at home I am allowed to escort the favoured fair one to a table where refreshments are laid out—which I suppose equates to this. So, I suppose that if I asked you and Sophie to go riding with me—I ought, perhaps, to say us, for Alan and Charles would be sure to wish to accompany me—I might safely invite you?’

So that I can act as chaperon for Sophie, I suppose, and that was another dismal thought.

‘Yes, or, on occasions where riding is not required, then Aunt Percival can act as chaperon.’

‘And having got that out of the way,’ said Jack, ‘we can now talk of graver things. We in England think that Mrs Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel about slavery, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, has been a great cause of friction between North and South. It has even been suggested that if there is a war it will have been a major cause of it. What, I wonder, is your opinion?’

One good thing, perhaps, thought Marietta, while giving him a reasoned answer, was that Jack would not have been likely to ask Sophie such a serious question. On the other hand, did she, Marietta, secretly wish him to talk to her in the same flighty way in which all the men who met her talked to Sophie? After all, wasn’t he behaving with her in exactly the same way in which young men conducted themselves with the duennas of pretty young things, hoping to get them to favour their suit over everyone else’s. Another dismal thought.

The only surprising thing was that Jack appeared to be genuinely interested in what she was saying to him. They went on to discuss Mr John Brown’s failed insurrection at Harper’s Ferry in 1859 and all the other incidents which had brought the United States to the verge of war. She couldn’t believe he would have wished to discuss any of that with Sophie, either.

In return she asked him about his interests, and learned that he was shortly to visit New York with a letter from Ezra Butler to John Ericsson, who was busily engaged in trying to build an effective iron man-of-war.

Tea and cake over, Marietta pulled out her little fob watch and insisted that it was time that they returned to the stall.

‘I am sure that your brother would wish to take tea with Sophie and Aunt Percival. You could assist me in selling whatever remains there—if anything does.’

‘Surely,’ said Jack enthusiastically. ‘I should have informed you that my late father was a great man for selling things as well as buying them and we all seem to have inherited those talents—in varying degrees, of course.’

If Sophie resented losing Jack again by having to do the pretty to Alan and Aunt Percival in the tearoom she did not let it show, but went off with them meekly enough. Charles had found a clerical gentleman with whom to converse about the coming war, so Marietta had Jack to herself again.

She was coming to know him so well: to know that a certain quirk of his mouth and a sparkle in his bright blue eyes always preceded some comic aside; that he possessed a good and shrewd mind, and that he had great respect for his parents and his elder brother. She had to be honest, though, and admit that merely to be with him was enough to set her all pulses throbbing.

His tall and muscular body and his face which, unlike his brother’s, was not orthodoxly handsome, but a little irregular, though full of character, attracted her as no other man’s physical attributes had ever done before. More than that, when with him she was full of a strange excitement even while they were discussing the most banal topics.

Did he feel the same about her? Marietta very much doubted it. He was plainly a man who attracted women and could have his pick of them, so why should he be drawn to her? Except that this afternoon he could easily have arranged matters so that he spent it with Sophie, but instead he had whisked her away and left Sophie behind.

That might simply mean, however, that for some reason he felt a need to discuss serious matters for once and so he had monopolised her. When it came to a ballroom or a rendezvous, it would most likely be Sophie whom he would choose for a companion—and perhaps for a wife.

Marietta shook herself. What in the world was she doing to be thinking of Jack marrying, and after a fashion that meant that she was thinking of him as a husband? She returned for a moment to being sensible Miss Hope again and, with Jack’s help, sold most of the few remaining trinkets on the stall, after watching him charm and cajole passers-by into buying them. He had a nice line in patter and so she told him.

‘You are wasted as an engineer, Jack. You should have been a barker at a fair. You would have made a fortune.’

He was not offended, but instead rolled his eyes and said solemnly, ‘You flatter me, Marietta. My father was a master of the art, and Alan also. I am not of their calibre, believe me.’

He offered her a conspiratorial wink before hailing a passing matron with the words, ‘Madam, I have to tell you that you are missing some of the greatest bargains in Washington today if you do not stay a moment at our stall.’

Marietta laughed up at him after he had successfully wheedled one of society’s most miserly women into buying a vase which she didn’t want.

‘You are a rogue, Jack Dilhorne, a very rogue.’

He leaned forward to whisper conspiratorially to her, ‘You should do that more often, Marietta, it becomes you.’

She was so unused to such compliments that she said abruptly, ‘What…what did I do?’

‘Laugh,’ he told her, solemn now. ‘You should laugh more often. I must think up some jokes.’

‘Oh, Jack,’ she riposted, ‘you are a living joke.’

‘In that case,’ he shot back, ‘you should be favouring me with a laugh all the time instead of rationing me so severely.’

Marietta did something which she had seen Sophie do quite often, but had never done herself. She slapped him gently on the wrist in playful reproof. ‘Come, Jack, you must not tease me.’ Which was another favourite phrase of Sophie’s when she was flirting with an admirer.

Goodness, that’s what I’m doing, flirting! How did he make me flirt? I ought to stop, I’m too old, too solemn, too plain, too serious… The litany unrolled itself in Marietta’s head, but it didn’t stop her from laughing again, or Jack from admiring her and trying to provoke her a little more.

He put out a gentle hand and loosened a strand of her glossy chestnut hair which had escaped its imprisoning bandeau. ‘That’s better,’ he said. ‘It goes with the laugh.’

Well, Jack Dilhorne knew how to flirt and no mistake! Which was perhaps why she was suddenly doing all those flighty things which she had never done as a young girl. It was all his fault, of course. How does it happen that he’s making me think, behave and talk like a green girl of fourteen with her first beau?

Marietta tucked the errant lock of hair back. He promptly loosened it again.

‘No,’ she murmured at him. ‘No, you will make a spectacle of me if you carry on like this. What will people think?’

‘Nothing,’ he told her. ‘They’re too busy with their own affairs to trouble about yours. Besides, why should you not be entertained by your gentleman companion? They think nothing when Sophie is.’

‘Is that what you are, Mr Jack Dilhorne? My gentleman companion? How much of a gentleman are you?’ But she was smiling when she teased him, and there was no sting in her words.

‘As much as any other man whom you allow to help you at a charity bazaar.’ He smiled at old Mrs Nuttall who had come up to the stall, her busy, curious eyes on Miss Marietta Hope, who was dallying with that handsome young stranger in a manner quite unlike her usual dignified restraint.

‘Ah, madam,’ he asked her cheerfully, ‘what may I sell you this afternoon? I regret that Miss Hope has been so successful that there is little left for you to choose from.’

‘Not Miss Hope,’ cackled Mrs Nuttall. ‘She’s not been selling much this fine afternoon. You’ve been far too busy chaffering with each other for her to find time to sell anything to outsiders. Not that I blame you for showing an interest in her, young man—she’s worth ten of that cousin of hers. She’d always have your dinner on the table when you came home after a hard day’s work, which is more than I could say for Miss Flighty Hope if you were silly enough to settle for her—but then, you young men always go for show rather than quality!’

Marietta’s face was one vast blush, but Jack, as befitted the true son of his father, was quite unruffled.

‘Dear lady, I can see that, were I considering marriage, you would have much useful advice to offer me. But since, this afternoon, my life is dedicated to selling each last bibelot on Miss Hope’s stall before the day is over, then I must beg you to turn your undoubted talents to inspecting what is left—and choosing the best.’

Mrs Nuttall’s answering cackle was so loud it had every head in the room turning and staring at them, including those of Alan, Sophie and Miss Percival, who had just finished their tea and were returning.

‘Land sakes, young man, with that silver tongue you should be a preacher, like Mrs Beecher Stowe’s rascally brother. Why should I want any of this trumpery rubbish?’

Jack’s smile was a masterpiece. ‘The poor children, madam: it is for their sake that you should buy something and offer up a tribute to charity.’

‘Don’t madam me, young man. I’m Ida Nuttall, Mrs Ida Nuttall, and rather than take home something I don’t want, I’ll gladly give you a few dollars for the young ’uns.’

She pulled out a battered leather purse and extracted several dollars from it before pouring them into Jack’s extended hand.

‘Thank you, Mrs Nuttall,’ he told her gravely. ‘Great will be your reward in heaven.’

‘Oh, pish,’ she threw at him. ‘I’d rather have my reward on earth by seeing Miss Marietta here married to a good man. Are you a good man, sir? By the look of you, I beg leave to doubt it.’

She gave another murderous cackle and strolled away.

Jack’s answering laugh was rueful. He looked at Marietta and shook his head at her. Alan, who had arrived in time to hear Mrs Nuttall’s last remark, said, with a grin, ‘And that’s you pinned down, little brother. How did she come to that conclusion so rapidly?’

‘His silver tongue,’ said Marietta, before Jack could speak. ‘She compared it to that of Mrs Beecher Stowe’s brother, whom she thinks to be a rogue.’

‘Since I know nothing of the gentleman,’ said Jack, as grave as a judge, or someone trying to solve a problem in logic, ‘you might tell me something of him so that I may know how apt the comparison is.’

‘That,’ Marietta told him, ‘is easy. He’s a reverend gentleman who has made a name for himself as a great preacher, full of morality and pious advice. But, and I hate to report this, there have been suggestions that the good reverend is one of those who preach Do as I say, not do as I do.’

‘Exactly like Jack, then,’ offered Alan, at which the whole party burst out laughing, not least Jack himself.

‘It’s a good thing I’m not a conceited fellow,’ he volunteered at last, ‘or else I should be thoroughly downcast after all this criticism, but since I’m not—’

He was not allowed to finish. Even Sophie, who had found all this banter difficult to follow and was furious that Marietta was once again the subject of interest and not herself, joined in the laughter.

Marietta had not enjoyed herself so much in years—for that matter, neither had Jack. The States—or rather their lively women—were providing him with more entertainment than he could have expected.

So he told his brother and Charles on the way back to their various lodgings. Alan took this somewhat unexpected news gravely.

‘In which of the two Hope cousins are you more interested, Jack?’ he asked. ‘Either, both or neither? I should like to think that you were aware that although Miss Sophie Hope does not possess a heart to break, her cousin is quite another case. She could most easily be hurt by someone who ignored how vulnerable she is behind her collected exterior.’

‘Now, Alan,’ said Jack, his easy smile moderating the sting of his reply. ‘You are only my big brother, not my father confessor. I’m only trying to bring a little gaiety into what seems to me to be Miss Marietta’s rather arduous life—and I am well aware of the different nature of the two cousins.’

‘Excellent,’ said Alan. ‘I am glad to hear it—big brothers are traditionally allowed to act as advisers to little brothers, you know.’

‘Agreed,’ said Jack, ‘so long as they don’t overdo it. Now, let us tell Charles that he has a busy day ahead of him tomorrow. In the morning you are compelling us both to accompany you to the gymnasium you have discovered not too far from your lodgings, and in the afternoon we have all been invited to attend a Congressional committee which is meeting in the Capitol itself. That should make for an interesting day, should it not? Physical work in the morning and mental in the afternoon. It will be our duty to see that Her Majesty’s unofficial envoy to the United States government doesn’t arrive at the Capitol too heavily marked after his morning’s exertions.’

Charles laughed. One of the pleasures of meeting his patron’s brother had been to discover that what Lord Knaresborough, who was Alan’s mentor, had once said was true: that, judging by what Alan had told him, all the Dilhorne family were as remarkable as he was. Charles could not help wondering what the other members of it were like, particularly Thomas, who had become Fred. Was it because the Patriarch had been transported, and had spent his life away from England and its formal society, that they had turned out so strikingly original?

Like Alan, Charles was beginning to wonder which of the Hope cousins was engaging Jack’s attention. He had thought at first that it was Sophie, which would have left the field open for him to pay court to Marietta, to whom he was becoming increasingly drawn. Lately, however, it seemed to be Marietta on whom Jack was fixed and that, sadly for his own wishes, she was attracted to Jack—indeed, had eyes for no one else.

Marietta herself, once the Dilhorne party had left, was confessing the same thing to herself. Her feelings for Jack had become such that in his presence every other man he was with seemed extinguished by him. Jealous Sophie, watching them, seethed inwardly.

It wasn’t fair! She had met Jack first and she could have sworn that he had instantly been powerfully attracted to her; and then he had met Marietta on the afternoon she had been wasting her time on silly duty calls, and everything had changed.

How in the world could such a plain elderly stick as Marietta charm someone so lively and amusing as Jack? Was it his nasty brother—for Sophie had begun to suspect that Alan was not as charmed by her as he appeared to be—who had turned him against her? Yes, that was it—and Charles Stanton was no better: he had eyes only for Marietta and treated her, Sophie, as though she were his troublesome little sister.

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