Mr Bishop and the Actress Read online

  Mr Bishop and the Actress

  JANET MULLANY

  www.headline.co.uk

  Copyright © 2011 Janet Mullany

  The right of Janet Mullany to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2011

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  eISBN : 978 0 7553 8608 6

  This Ebook produced by Jouve Digitalisation des Informations

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  An Hachette UK Company

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1 - 1814, Norfolk

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  little black dress

  IT’S A GIRL THING.

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  Five interesting things about Janet Mullany:

  1. My favourite books are Wives and Daughters by Mrs Gaskell, because it is so lush and romantic; Vilette by Charlotte Brontë for its passion and subversiveness; and Emma by Jane Austen, for its perfect plotting.

  2. On the other hand, my commuter reading tends to be the same sort of stuff everyone reads, and my rating system for good reads includes missed stops (very good) and wrong lines (very, very good).

  3. Once, staying overnight in an old house, I woke up and heard someone breathing. I was alone in the room. I got out fast.

  4. I like tea. I mean, really like tea. I get mean if I don’t get enough.

  5. When I was five my brother pushed me into a tadpole pond. To this day he denies it.

  Fine out more about Janet at www.janetmullany.comandriskyregencies.blogspot.com

  To the Tarts

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to Lucienne and the Little Black Dress team; the staff at the Regency Town House, Brighton; Pam, Miranda, and all my other writing buddies; Alison, Steve, and all the usual suspects.

  Prologue

  Miss Lewisham’s Academy for Gentlewomen, 1799

  Sophie clung to the ladder, her face a pale oval in the dark as she looked up at the two girls peering out of the window. ‘Promise me we shall always be friends.’

  ‘Yes, yes. But hurry!’

  Captain Wallace’s cigar streaked through the air like a small comet as he tossed it aside and crushed it beneath a well-polished regimental boot. ‘Come along, Sophie my love, there’s a good girl.’

  ‘Sssh!’ Claire and Lizzie said together.

  They could hear sounds of activity from downstairs, the rattle of a poker in a grate and the scrape of a chair on a wooden floor.

  Claire pushed Lizzie aside, Sophie’s trunk in her arms. ‘Catch, Captain!’

  Sophie gave a small shriek as her possessions hit her beloved in the midriff. He sat down heavily, saying some words unfamiliar to the three young ladies.

  Sophie took a step up the ladder, one slender hand reached out.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Claire tried to push her back down. ‘You promised him! You can’t—’

  ‘My bonnet. You have forgotten my new bonnet.’

  Claire looked around the room, snatched up a hat box, and hurled it out of the window.

  Below, a spill of warm golden light on to the ground indicated that someone, probably Miss Lewisham herself, had lit a lamp to investigate the strange noises outside, which now included the audible swearing of the muddy and lovestruck Captain.

  ‘Always! Promise me!’ Sophie said.

  ‘Yes, we shall always be friends. But please hurry, Sophie.’

  She took a step down the ladder. ‘In five years?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Ten? Fifteen?’

  ‘Damnation,’ said Claire, a daring word used for special occasions only, then whispered out of the window, ‘Lewisham is coming upstairs. We’ll always love you, Sophie, we’ll always be best friends. Please go.’ She hissed to Lizzie, ‘Lady Macbeth!’

  The stair creaked as Miss Lewisham ascended.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘As we arranged! Lady Macbeth! Sleepwalk, Lizzie.’

  ‘I can’t! Why don’t you sleepwalk?’

  ‘We agreed, in dire emergency, if Lewisham awoke—’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Running outside the room and vomiting, then.’

  ‘Absolutely not.’

  ‘You promised’, Claire whispered, ‘that you would create a diversion if necessary. You were supposed to ask Skinny Letitia how to vomit at will. You—’

  From outside Sophie squealed and Lizzie and Claire rushed to the window to see the Captain toss her into his curricle, where she landed sprawled in a disorder of petticoats, clutching at her hat. He leaped aboard and whipped his team into a gallop.

  Lizzie took advantage of the commotion to pull the window shut and the curtains drawn. Outside Sophie’s hatbox lay deserted in a puddle, forgotten as Captain Wallace and his intended bride rushed off to Gretna Green.

  A door opened and closed as Miss Lewisham checked rooms.

  Claire and Lizzie jumped into bed and composed themselves into the semblance of maidenly slumber. An effigy lay in Sophie’s bed: a nightcap on the pillow, rolled-up cloaks beneath the sheets.

  Their door creaked open to reveal Miss Lewisham in her night-time glory, her hair tied in multicoloured rags to achieve the rigid curl of daytime. The two girls slowed their breathing until the light of Miss Lewisham’s candle faded as she closed the door behind her and continued down the corridor to find which of her chicks had flown the nest.

  ‘Fifteen years,’ Clair
e whispered. ‘We’ll be old. Thirty!’

  They both giggled in horror.

  ‘But we’ll still all be friends,’ Lizzie said.

  ‘Still friends.’ Claire yawned. ‘So long as Sophie keeps her promise to tell us about the wedding night.’

  They lay awake for a little, knowing they would be sent home in disgrace when Sophie’s elopement and their roles as conspirators were revealed.

  They entered the marriage mart armed with modest dowries, some prettiness, impeccable pedigrees, and the fragments of an imperfect education.

  Claire made a brilliant match and Lizzie a respectable but modest one.

  And Sophie . . . Sophie chose a different direction.

  1

  1814, Norfolk

  Mr Harry Bishop

  Viscount Shadderly’s household, in which I have accepted the position of steward, is in a shocking state.

  Three retired seamen who barely make a whole man between them, for one misses an eye, another a leg and the third an arm, are the footmen. I dread to think what will happen if they must carry soup. The upper footman, currently the most senior of the staff, is one Jeremiah whose lamentations about my departed predecessor centre chiefly on the gentleman’s abnormally large feet, for Jeremiah considered himself the natural heir to Mr Roberts’ cast-off boots. He regards my feet with dismay.

  ‘It would never have done, sir, never, but I wish you the best of luck, sir.’

  And so this is his last day in the house, for he and his new bride, formerly lady’s maid to Lady Shadderly, are on their way to join Roberts and his supply of footwear in another household.

  I agree with him that it certainly will not do, but for other reasons. Two small children in dresses sit on the kitchen table feeding raw pastry into their mouths; the elder, a child of four or so, is the heir to the Viscount Shadderly, or Lord Shad as he is referred to with great affection by the household staff. Since I have met his lordship only in an exchange of letters my impression is that his staff like him for the liberties he tolerates downstairs.

  I am not sure of the gender of the other child, a couple of years younger, who begins a slow, perilous descent down the table leg, a large wooden spoon clutched in one hand. I move forward to rescue the infant, who rewards me with a piercing shriek and a blow to the nose with the spoon.

  ‘Bless his heart!’ Mrs Dawson the cook exclaims, answering my unspoken question, and scoops the child into her arms. ‘Never you mind young Master Simon, Mr Bishop, he’s the sweetest of children.’

  Eyes watering, I nod in agreement. ‘Where is their nursemaid?’

  ‘Nursemaid? Oh, Lady Shad don’t believe in them. We’re always willing to help out with the little dears. Now, Master George, you are not to pull the cat’s tail so, you know she will scratch. They are to hire a governess for Miss Amelia, though, now she’s almost a young lady.’

  I pluck the cat from the table – a trail of footprints now adorn the pastry – and, as an afterthought, young Master George. He stares at me.

  ‘I want Mama,’ he announces as I plant him on the floor.

  ‘Lord Shad’s home,’ the one-armed footman announces, placing his mug of ale on the kitchen table and attaching a hook before hastening upstairs to open the front door. Master George reaches for the ale and spills it down himself.

  The kitchen lurches into action; the pastry is wiped off and placed into a pie dish, the boy at the spit wakes up and turns the meat, and one of the female staff takes the two dirty children upstairs to be presented to their parents. ‘And Miss Amelia is . . . ?’

  ‘Lord Shad’s ward,’ Mrs Dawson replies with a firmness that does not invite further questions. ‘A very clever young lady, almost seventeen.’ She turns away and bellows at the kitchen staff to fetch coals and cabbage. I make note of the cracked china, the tarnished silver, and the general dirt and disorder.

  ‘Does the family always dine this early?’ It’s scarcely three o’clock.

  ‘They keep country hours usually, but a troupe of dancing dogs and a talking horse perform on the village green this evening and Lord Shad has given us permission to attend.’

  ‘Indeed.’ I should not have let this slovenly household have a night off, and I do not care that it shows on my face.

  The footman returns with an order for tea upstairs and an invitation for me to dine with milord and milady. I’m somewhat taken aback at this egalitarianism, but this is the country after all.

  I shall advise my employer and his lady to avoid the pie.

  ‘Pie, Bishop?’ Lady Shad waves a tarnished silver spoonful in my direction.

  ‘Thank you, ma’am, I—’

  She drops the spoonful on to my plate. ‘Mrs Dawson has the lightest hand with pastry I have ever encountered.’

  And possibly the dirtiest, although cooking has transformed that grey slab of dough into a wondrous golden flaky crust.

  ‘Don’t force food upon the man, Char. So as I was saying, Bishop, things have pretty much gone to seed since Roberts left.’ Viscount Shadderly is a handsome man in his mid-thirties, some ten years older than me; his wife, an attractive, plain-spoken woman, is vastly pregnant. ‘Meanwhile I regret I must leave for London tomorrow.’

  ‘You must?’ Lady Shad lurches to her feet, one hand on the table.

  We both rise and watch her with some trepidation. Although she looks as though she is about to give birth at any moment, she has risen to spear another slice of ham from a platter.

  ‘Yes, my love. This matter with Charlie. My nephew experiences some financial difficulties,’ he explains to me as we sit.

  ‘He’s not your nephew. I believe he’s some sort of third cousin,’ Lady Shad comments. ‘And he’s become entangled with some elderly lightskirt who’s put him deeply in debt and he’s only twenty. But I don’t think you’ll go.’

  ‘Why’s that?’ He looks at her, eyes narrowed.

  She lays her hand upon her swollen belly. ‘Oh, no particular reason. Pass the claret, if you will, Bishop.’

  ‘What!’ Lord Shad leaps to his feet, knocking a plate on to the floor. ‘Are you in labour, ma’am?’

  She shrugs. ‘Don’t concern yourself.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Oh, since about eleven this morning.’

  ‘Ma’am, we have spent most of that time bumping along our abysmal country roads in a trap. Are you mad?’

  ‘I thought it might help things along. Besides, I wanted to see Hopkins’s new mare.’

  Lord Shad mutters something about Hopkins’s new mare be damned under his breath and I consider how best to extricate myself from this delicate situation. He turns to me and barks, ‘Fetch Mrs Simpkins directly!’

  ‘I beg your pardon, sir. Who is—’

  Lady Shadderly pours herself a glass of claret. ‘Of course he doesn’t know who Mrs Simpkins is, Shad. She’s the midwife.’

  ‘And every time, ma’am, I’ve told you we should be in town for your lyings-in with an accoucheur, not that toothless gossip—’

  Lady Shad stands and I wonder if she is about to throw something at her husband, but naturally we stand too. The lady lays a hand on her swollen abdomen and makes a sound I can only describe as a grunt. Her husband and I stand transfixed until she lets out her breath in a long sigh. ‘That was a good one . . . Last time I saw her, Mrs Simpkins had six teeth.’

  ‘Her teeth, ma’am, are immaterial. What is at stake now is whether Bishop can reach her in time. Well, man, off with you.’

  ‘I beg your pardon, my lord.’ I move towards the door. ‘Where exactly will I find Mrs Simpkins?’

  ‘Damnation. You take the road into the village but before you get there, when you come to the crossroads, there is a large elm tree on your right and—’

  ‘Send a footman,’ Lady Shad says.

  ‘Excellent idea,’ says Lord Shad.

  ‘I beg your pardon, my lord, they’re all at the village for the fair.’