London - Edward Rutherfurd [454]
Captain Jack Meredith. She pursed her lips. It was difficult to buy him; she wished she could. She wished it very much. To have him, for her very own . . .
Her thoughts were interrupted by a knock upon the door. When Pedro opened it, it was her husband who entered.
The third Earl of St James was not in a very good humour. With one hand he dismissed Pedro and Balthazar. In the other hand was a sheaf of bills.
He was neither good-looking nor bad-looking. Taking after his fair, conventionally pretty mother, you could only say that his looks were bland. Not that he was stupid: his investments, though cautious, had been shrewd; the Bocton estate was well run; he was an active member of the House of Lords in the Whig interest. (Hanover Square was much favoured by Whig politicians.) He had put on his powdered wig and was wearing a richly embroidered blue coat, in whose broad opening he exhibited the first beginnings of a respectable paunch. In his early forties now, Lord St James, in another decade, would probably look rather impressive. His hands, always beautifully manicured, were universally agreed to be fine. The wad of bills in his left hand, however, was large. He made only a brief bow to his wife before he began.
“I think you will agree, madam, that I satisfy most of your desires.”
Lady St James made no reply, but eyed him cautiously. She had to be careful what she said. She had wanted him, for instance, to tear down the old Jacobean manor house at Bocton. “Quite inadequate for an earl,” she would tell her friends. A Georgian mansion with a pillared portico, even half the size she recommended, would look imposing on the hill above the deer park. His cautious lordship was still thinking about it and, for all she knew, might decide to do it. He had steadfastly refused to allow her to make over the whole town house in the French rococo manner. “Though you see it is the highest fashion,” she had constantly reminded him. So far she had only been allowed a Chinese papered drawing room as consolation. Indeed, so much was she subject, nowadays, to his will, that she could only remember one complete success – and this was one which she would never publicly acknowledge. She had managed to change his family name.
To be Earl of St James was a fine thing. As plain Miss Barham, the prospect of becoming his countess had certainly been enticing. But Ducket: that was another matter. Why, half the memorial tablets in London proclaimed some Ducket or other to have been an alderman, guild member or merchant. Earls they might recently have become, but the family was rooted in trade. And here was the remarkable thing: fashionable young Miss Barham found this humiliating.
History is the servant of fashion. To the end of the Stuart age, the younger sons of the gentry were still becoming mercers and drapers, as they always had. Nowadays however, if they possibly could, they avoided it. Instead, they favoured the army – which had scarcely existed before – or the Church, which their grandfathers would certainly have looked down upon. They might also, at a pinch, become lawyers. History, obligingly, supplied the example of the feudal knight or Roman senator as model to back the fashion up; and so, from the middle part of the eighteenth century, the upper classes of England came genuinely to believe the adage: “Gentlemen do not engage in trade.” It was a piece of historical nonsense that continued to govern men’s lives for more than two centuries to come.
Their merchant forefathers were forgotten or suppressed. Gentility