Sedwick Hall
Derbyshire
One morning in mid-May, the Honorable Harriet Mayfield was engaged in one of her favorite activities: entertaining and being entertained by her late sister Anne’s seven orphaned children. Since the tragic loss of their parents nearly three months earlier, Harriet had consciously put her own life aside in order to fill some of the void in the children’s lives. She often felt herself woefully inadequate to the task. Having lost her own parents fully two decades earlier, she remembered well how an orphaned child felt: lost, anchorless. Just as she had had Anne to cling to, Anne’s children had one another—and Harriet vowed to fight tooth and nail any attempt to tear them asunder.
The sixth Earl of Sedwick and his countess had not fit the “norm” of ton parents: they had actually enjoyed their children. Rather than consign the little people to the nursery and the impersonal care of servants, Sedwick and his wife planned family outings and made time for their children as individuals. Harriet had been forcibly reminded of this fact only the day before.
Passing by the music room, she heard desultory plunks of random piano notes. She opened the door to find twelve-year-old Phillip perched on the piano bench staring into space.
“Phillip, dear,” she said, noting his attire, “I thought you were out riding.”
“Changed my mind,” he muttered, not looking at her and hitting a loud note.
“Why? You have always enjoyed riding, have you not?” She gathered her skirt in hand and slid onto the bench beside him.
He moved over slightly and looked up at her, hazel eyes full of anguish. “Used to. It’s not the same without Papa.”
She put a comforting arm around his narrow shoulders. “I know, darling. Nothing is the same. But we must carry on, regardless.”
He shrugged her arm off. “I do not want to ‘carry on.’! I do not want to b-be S-Sedwick. Everyone calls me ‘Sedwick.’ That is Papa—not me! I am Ph-Phillip, Viscount Trailson. I hate being Sedwick!” His outburst ended on a sob.
Hesitating to touch him again, she sat quietly sharing his space, sharing his pain. Then she said softly, “I miss them too. Terribly. But, Phillip, you are the Earl of Sedwick now—and I think your papa would be very, very proud to know that you will take his place.”
He gazed up at her. “D-do y-you really th-think so, Aunt Harriet?”
“Yes, darling, I truly do. And it would break his heart to see you give up things you love. Things he loved and that you enjoyed with him.”
He drew in a deep, shuddering breath.
After a moment, she patted his shoulder. “How about you allow me a few minutes to change into a riding habit and I shall meet you at the stable? You and I will go riding. All right?”
“All right,” he agreed reluctantly.
He managed to rally to the point that before their ride was finished, he was regaling her with anecdotes of rides he and his father had enjoyed together.
Nor had that been the only instance of the children’s grief manifesting itself. The nursery servants had reported irritability and sleeplessness. Harriet herself had noted a certain clinginess—as though the children feared letting the adults in their lives out of their sight. Lately, though, she welcomed signs of improvement, of matters settling into a new normal.
She absolutely adored these younger members of her family—nor did she resent for a moment helping them cope with the cataclysmic changes in their lives. She remembered adjusting to such loss. She said a prayer of thanksgiving that at least Anne’s children had not lost their childhood home as well. For a moment an image flashed into her mind: two young girls, aged twelve and seven, uprooted from a comfortable home in the country and summarily shipped off to live in the largest city in the nation with grandparents they scarcely knew. The new Baron Ralston had been eager to take over the title and such entailed properties as accompanied it. He was quite content that guardianship of his predecessor’s daughters lay with their maternal grandparents.
Only as an adult had Harriet learned to appreciate the fact that, aside from the entailed properties, her father had been independently wealthy—and that his legacy, along with her mother’s marriage settlements, had made the orphaned Anne and Harriet acknowledged heiresses. That bit of information might well have been a factor in the Sixth Earl of Sedwick’s initial pursuit of the lovely Anne when she made her debut, but it quickly became apparent that his lordship was “absolutely besotted,” as the saying went.
Anne had been a social success during her coming out—a “diamond of the first water”—but a few years later, when Harriet made her own debut along with her friends Henrietta and Hero, Harriet had found herself decidedly on the sidelines: None of the “Hs” had “taken” that year—not that they had been overly concerned about that turn of affairs. In general, the three of them found the antics of the ton a source of amusement; they refused to take seriously a young woman’s primary mission in life—the hunt for a husband.
Even now, dangerously near to being “on the shelf,” none of the three greeted her unmarried status with more than a bit of a shrug. Lady Henrietta—Retta—devoted much of her time to a London charity for abused women and abandoned children. Hero had for several years been a true assistant in all but name to her respected physician father in Cornwall. And the truth was that Harriet also had a life of her own to which she felt pressed to return.
Taking a cool writer’s view of the current matter—for that is what she was: a writer—Harriet poured out her thoughts in letters to her erstwhile school friends Retta and Hero.
Even for adults, she wrote, mourning takes a deal out of one. Sadness and regret are understandable, but one is hardly prepared for the anger—the resentment—that accompanies grief! Adults manage to cope, but children flounder terribly with these emotions. Sometimes all you can do is hold the little ones close and murmur meaningless words of comfort, and hope that they do indeed offer comfort. On a positive note: children are resilient. And I am hoping a change of scene may hasten their healing…
So on that May morning, Harriet was once again devoting herself to her sister’s children. She sat on the floor of the nursery playing jackstraws with the blond, eight-year-old twins, Richard and Robert—“Ricky” and “Robby” to the nursery set—and their six-year-old sister, Sarah, whose hair was almost as dark as her Aunt Harriet’s, her eyes the same blue-gray.
This game, as usual, was marked by an abundance of giggles and merriment. Also as usual thirteen-year-old Maria sat on a couch nearby with her head in a book, one hand toying with a loose strand of light brown hair. Phillip, still seeming too young and too slight to wear the heavy title Earl of Sedwick with which he had been so suddenly burdened, was idly spinning a huge globe that was a permanent fixture in the nursery’s schoolroom-playroom. At a table nearby, one of the two servants regularly assigned to the nursery set was trying to feed the youngest, two-year-old Matilda. Tilly, determined to do the deed herself, kept grabbing the spoon, and thus ended up wearing as much of her porridge as she ingested.
As Harriet tried carefully to free one of the sticks of the game from the pile in front of her, she felt a pudgy little hand on her cheek. “It isn’t true, is it, Auntie Harry?”
She drew four-year-old Elinor into the circle of her arm and gave up her turn at the game. She nuzzled the little girl’s blonde curls. “What, Elly? Isn’t what true?”
“What Ricky says.”
“What does Ricky say?”
Elly emitted an exasperated sigh. “Ricky says we are goin’ to Lunnon.”
The room went quiet and Harriet could tell that this topic was not a surprise to the group.
“Ricky, did you say that?” Harriet asked, stalling for time. She was not surprised the cat was out of the bag, but she had thought to have matters more settled before informing the children of the possibility of a trip to London.
Ricky had jumped up from being on his knees on the floor. He looked down at his feet. “Uh—well—I—uh—heard the footman Tom talkin’ with Nurse Tavenner an’—”
“Oh, Miss Harriet, I never said—” the nurse called from the table where she was feeding the toddler.
Harriet held up a hand to forestall the maid’s explanation and looked at the little boy. “You eavesdropped on a private conversation, did you, Ricky?” She was careful to keep her tone gentle in admonishing him.
“I didn’t mean to. Really, I didn’t.”
“But then you repeated it?”
He nodded sadly. “Uh-huh.”
“But is it true?” Elly demanded with an insistent stamp of her foot, small hands on her hips.
Harriet sighed inwardly, but she refused to lie to them. “I—we—do not know yet. We may all go for a few weeks. It is not settled yet. Would you like to do that?”
Maria put down her book. “I should like that very much,” she said. “Could I go to Hatchard’s bookshop?”
“Can I take Muffin?” Elly picked up her kitten and held it close. Harriet smiled sadly at the thought of how very important that little ball of fur had become to Elly since the loss of her parents.
“If Muffin can go, can Sir Gawain go, too?” Ricky asked, brightening. On hearing its name, the mixed breed mutt—mostly black and white collie—thumped its tail against the marble hearth where it lay.
Phillip stopped whirling the globe walked and over nearer the rest of the group. “What about the ponies?”
“Muffin and Sir Gawain can surely accompany us. The ponies, probably not. But,” Harriet quickly added, “there are ponies to ride in London, too. But, really, children, you must not get your hearts set on going to London. It is by no means settled. It would be nice to have your grandmother’s agreement to such a scheme.”
This comment elicited pained expressions from the two oldest children. Maria got up from the couch and put her hand on Ricky’s shoulder. “But we may hope, may we not, Aunt Harriet? Going to London now will not be the same as it was with Mama and Papa, but…” Her voice trailed off wistfully.
“Yes. We may hope,” Harriet assured her and vowed to herself that she would make this happen, regardless of the objections of the Dowager Countess of Sedwick—or those of the dowager’s son, the children’s guardian.
* * * *
That afternoon Harriet was alone in the music room idly playing a new piece of music her own grandmother had sent her from London when the dowager swept into the room with what was clearly a letter in her hand.
“Ah, there you are,” she said brightly. “I wonder if I might have a word with you, Harriet.”
“Of course, my lady.” Harriet turned on the piano bench to face the older woman, who took a straight-backed chair nearby.
Lady Margaret was a well-preserved woman in her mid-fifties. Her once blonde hair was now more of a nondescript gray than gold, but it was always carefully coiffed, and her attire, if not in the first stare of fashion, was very close to being so. Of course, the black bombazine of a mourning dress could hardly be labeled ultra-stylish. She was tall; the word that always came to Harriet’s mind about her sister’s mother-in-law was stately.
“I have had a letter from my son Quinton, and I should like to share it with you.”
“By all means, my lady.”
The older woman read the letter without editing. Harriet winced inwardly at the line about a “mere godmother,” but she refused to acknowledge the hit, though she was sure Lady Margaret had relished the line. The nerve of that man! How dare he try to relegate me to the sidelines. Why, I have loved every one of Anne’s children from the moment they were born! Even before they were born.
“So you see, my dear,” the dowager said, “this trip to London that you have the children so churned up about is simply out of the question. Quinton is their guardian and he prefers that they remain here at Sedwick Hall. Besides, a pleasure trip such as you propose is not quite the thing, now is it? Even children are expected to mourn properly. Six months is customary for a parent—and these children are mourning two parents.”
Harriet gripped the piano bench on either side of her and steeled herself to respond. “First of all, it was not I who mentioned the possibility of a trip to London in front of servants so it could be repeated in front of the children. Yes, the colonel does have legal guardianship, but perhaps he did not read carefully those paragraphs of Winston’s will dealing with the children. My brother-in-law stated quite clearly that in the absence of Colonel Burnes or their mother, I should have final say on the children’s welfare. Moreover, he granted me full authority and means to carry out my decisions. Winston and Anne were quite, quite clear in that regard.”
The dowager emitted an almost unladylike snort. “I doubt my poor besotted son gave any thought to what he was agreeing to.”
“Nevertheless, he did agree—and he repeated his agreement in a codicil to his will just this last December. I am sure there is a copy among Winton’s papers in the library.…” Harriet allowed her voice to trail off. When the dowager did not respond, she added, “In any event, I would say that the colonel’s being confined to a bed in southern France constitutes an absence. Would you not agree?”
The dowager waved a dismissive hand. “That is beside the point. Perhaps you care so little about propriety that you would make my grandchildren the subject of gossip if they are seen to be so disrespectful of their parents, who loved them dearly, but I am not. And neither is my remaining son.”
“Lady Margaret, please try to understand. We—you and I—cannot disappoint the children now. Try to see it is an opportunity for education, not merely pleasure. Or as a chance for them to heal in spirit. It has been ten weeks already. They are children! They cannot go about dressed in black every day, all day with long faces. They are not forgetting their parents. They beg me constantly for stories of their mama and papa. They talk about them and pray for them every day. They miss their parents horribly. Here at Sedwick Hall, every time they turn a corner or see an object outdoors, they are reminded of their loss, of something they may no longer do with Mama or Papa.” She paused and then added, “I have not the heart to disappoint them now.”
The dowager’s lips thinned. “It is not proper. I heartily disapprove and I find it extraordinary that you consider my opinion to be irrelevant in a discussion about my grandchildren. I cannot sit back to see them the subject of gossip.”
“I think,” Harriet said softly, “that, unless we who are most concerned, make it a topic of general discourse, it will not be so.”
Lady Margaret tried a different tactic. “Surely you cannot mean to open Sedwick House in London for your little jaunt to the city. There is only caretaker staff there now, you know.”
“I do know. No, I will not open the house in Mayfair. We will stay with my grandparents in Bloomsbury. Their house is large and well-staffed—and they keep the nursery ready for their grandchildren and their great-grandchildren. I will take the Sedwick nursery maids and sufficient footmen for our travel.”
“You’ve thought of everything, haven’t you?” the dowager asked coldly.
“Not yet. But I would welcome your suggestions.”
Lady Margaret rose and stepped toward the door. “I have told you what I think.”
* * * *
For the next three days, Harriet saw little of Lady Margaret. When they chanced to meet at meals, both were too well-bred not to be civil, but there was little warmth in their conversations. Lady Margaret made a point of being away from home much of the time, paying calls in the local neighborhood. Harriet feared her own infractions might well be a central topic of discussion during those calls, but she chose to ignore that possibility.
Her own attention centered on preparing for the trip to London. Having never planned such an elaborate journey on her own before, she sought the advice of the Sedwick steward, Mr. Stevens, as well as the butler, Patterson, and the housekeeper, Mrs. Ames. Within the week, the entourage was on its way. Although it was expensive, travel by post chaise was most expedient. The entire group included the seven children, Harriet, two nursery maids, Harriet’s personal maid, and sufficient footmen to provide adequate protection along the way. Three days after departing Sedwick Hall, the party arrived in the early evening at the somewhat dated but elegant townhouse of the Earl of Hawthorne in the Bloomsbury district of London.