The Sleeping Sword Read Free Page A

manner of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert she was marrying her first cousin and in true imperial fashion appeared to believe that her own role in the proceedings was simply to be looked at.
    For the past six months she had been ‘the fiancée’offering herself up tranquilly to the world’s admiration and envy while her harassed mother and her Aunt Caroline, who was soon to be her mother-in-law, arranged her wedding around her. Today she was ‘the bride’, offering herself once again with that air of cool serenity to a bridegroom who, by the untimely death of his father on the hunting field, had recently been transformed from a supercilious and, in my view, not entirely good-tempered young man into an extremely eligible if no better-humoured Sir Dominic Chard of Listonby.
    Without his lands and titles it would not have occurred to Blanche to marry him. Had she been obtainable to him in any other way he would not have married her, since a gentleman of only twenty-four summers with health and wealth and boundless opportunity on his side rarely feels the need to limit himself in matrimony so soon. But pale, silvery Blanche had her loveliness and her calm, infinitely challenging purity. Dominic had his baronetcy, his three thousand ancestral acres, his beautiful, quite famous ancestral mansion. There was no more to be said.
    â€˜I am to be married,’ Blanche had written to me in Switzerland. ‘I am to be Lady Chard of Listonby, just like Aunt Caroline—except, of course, that I am taking her title from her. You are to come home and be my bridesmaid.’ And so, feeling the moment opportune, I returned to Cullingford to divide my time, as I had so often done, between my Barforth cousins, Blanche who was to be splendidly married and Venetia who would quite like to be married but would much rather fall intensely, no matter how unwisely, in love.
    I had, of course, envied Blanche from time to time as most people did, not only for her looks, her composure and her placid, sometimes comic, belief that she could always get her way, but for the possession of so affectionate a mother as Aunt Faith, so generous a father as Uncle Blaize who was not, perhaps, the richer of the two Barforth brothers but certainly the more agreeable.
    â€˜That child is the image of her mother,’ they had been saying in Cullingford ever since the days when a fragile, fairy-tale Blanche had first taken her daily airings in the Barforth landau, her gown a miniature copy of Aunt Faith’s, each silver ringlet bound up with silver ribbon, exhibiting even then a certain cool graciousness far beyond her years which came, perhaps, from an inbred knowledge that her abundant pale silk hair and startling blue-green eyes would be quite enough to open any door she might be likely to choose in life.
    And what she chose at the tender age of seventeen was to be Lady Chard of Listonby Park, a decision which had disappointed her mother who believed ardently in love and was saddened to see that her only daughter did not, and which had infuriated the existing, dowager Lady Chard—Aunt Caroline—who, having been the absolute ruler of Listonby Park for the past twenty-five years did not feel at all inclined to abdicate her authority, her keys, her place at the head of the baronial table to lovely, lazy, self-indulgent Blanche.
    So strongly, in fact, did Aunt Caroline Chard feel that, at the merest hint of an engagement she had despatched her son Dominic to London, hoping at worst that he would find distraction, at best the earl’s or the cabinet minister’s daughter she believed his breeding and her ambition deserved. For although Lady Caroline Chard had once, long ago, been Miss Caroline Barforth, a mill-master’s daughter just like Blanche, she had shed that commercial identity and very nearly forgotten it. Barforth money, indeed, had enabled her to shine at Listonby, her own share of Barforth energy, tenacity, the