The Corn Maiden Read online

  Also by Barbara Cleverly

  Joe Sandilands Series:

  The Last Kashmiri Rose

  Ragtime in Simla

  The Damascened Blade

  The Palace Tiger

  The Bee’s Kiss

  Tug of War

  Folly Du Jour

  Strange Images of Death

  The Blood Royal

  Not My Blood

  The Spider in the Cup

  Enter Pale Death

  Diana’s Altar

  Laetitia Talbot Series:

  The Tomb of Zeus

  Bright Hair About the Bone

  A Darker God

  And stories:

  The New Cambridge Mysteries

  Praise for Barbara Cleverly’s Joe Sandilands series:

  Spectacular and dashing. Spellbinding. New York Times

  Smashing... marvellously evoked. Chicago Tribune

  A great blood and guts blockbuster. Guardian

  Stellar – as always. British author Cleverly out-Christies Agatha Christie. Publishers Weekly

  ‘’The Bee’s Kiss’. Cleverly’s research brings even the most exotic places and people to full credibility and she balances her ingredients – including a steamy dose of romance – with the skill and imagination of a master chef. Chicago Tribune.

  Tug of War’ is simply terrific... The plot, devious and brilliant, keeps this novel moving. All this densely plotted, beautifully written history builds into an excellent mystery with a murder and love story at its heart. A lot of fun! The Globe and Mail

  Intricate, erudite and witty. Cleverly is a terrific plotter and her prose highlights a keen sense of place, character and dialogue. Fans of P.D. James take note – here’s a worthy colleague. Seattle Times

  ‘’Ragtime in Simla’ contains enough scenes of smashing action in and around the marvellously invoked Simla to delight even Rudyard Kipling. Chicago Tribune

  The best mystery I have read in years! The denouement is so good, even the most experienced reader will not guess the ending. Mysterious Women

  And for the Laetitia Talbot series:

  ‘The Tomb of Zeus’. In the tradition of Agatha Christie, the characters are complex and varied. Amidst the picturesque history of the island of Crete, mystery and murder abound in this riveting novel. Romantic Times

  A spirited and intelligent heroine, a glorious exotic setting, a clever plot and a touch of romance. Denver Post

  The Corn Maiden

  A romantic historical mystery

  Barbara Cleverly

  Copyright © 2015 Barbara Cleverly

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 1517585414

  ISBN 13: 9781517585419

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  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

  1

  Park Lane, London. 1814.

  “I would rather marry one of the baboons at the Tower than Jemmie Fanshawe! No, Stepmama! I will not have him! And I beg you will not mention his name to me again!”

  Nell Somersham’s face was bright with anger as she rounded on her stepmother—an anger she had for months been struggling to conceal. Even Cecilia, Lady Hartismere—hardly the most sensitive of step-parents—was taken by surprise and flinched away from the unexpected outburst. Nell stood resolutely at the foot of her stepmother’s ornate bed and watched as Lady Hartismere chose to ignore her, feigning a deep interest in the morning’s post. From the pile of letters and invitation cards littering the coverlet, her Ladyship selected one by which she affected to be completely absorbed, holding it lightly between elegant fingers.

  Nell was used to these games. She sighed and remained silent, waiting for the next piece of sly manipulation. She breathed deeply and used the moment to prepare herself to make a stand and fight to the last ounce of her strength against her stepmother’s marriage plans for her.

  The older woman rallied and favoured her with a haughty stare, but after a moment her eyes slid guiltily away and back to the letters. Nell glanced at the pile with misgiving. This was likely to be her morning’s task—hours of sorting, discussing, and answering. She foresaw the messages on the cards leading to a series of overcrowded rooms in which she would be offered not-quite-cold champagne, a procession of dinner parties seated between men she hadn’t seen before and wouldn’t want to see again, drawing rooms where string quartets sawed their way through the works of Haydn and Mozart with not enough chairs and certainly no chair for anyone under twenty. Boring, tedious evenings, but fraught with danger.

  Worst of all her fears, she foresaw the seemingly unavoidable Sir James Fanshawe, her so assiduous suitor, at her elbow wherever she went.

  “Nell, my dear…” said Lady Hartismere in an attempt to be at once placatory and repressive, “do be seated.” She put down her letter and waved a mannered hand at a chair by her bedside. “You make me feel nervous, towering and lowering over me like that, looking every inch the Queen of the Amazons. I hope quite fervently that you are not about to make a habit of bursting into my room during breakfast. Why, it is not yet ten o’clock, my girl!”

  Nell remained standing, hand on hip. She was hanging onto all the advantages she could muster, and if appearing at this early hour fully dressed in her dark blue riding habit, booted and hatted, gave her a moral advantage over her indolent slugabed of a stepmother—well and good! She was not prepared to give that advantage away. Nell’s glower intensified. She looked down at the remains of her stepmother’s familiar morning routine, at the disordered piles of lace-trimmed pillows framing the petulant face, at the breakfast tray with its cargo of chocolate pot, cup and saucer, and rack of toast. She wrinkled her nose with distaste as a furry white face stirred in Lady Hartismere’s arms and snuffled its way onto the tray to steal a buttered crust.

  “Webster!” Nell called, greatly daring, to her stepmother’s maid who was standing nearby—ready to retrieve the scattered correspondence, pour out more chocolate, or butter another piece of toast. “Her Ladyship has finished breakfast. Kindly remove her tray and take Suzette downstairs. It is time for her morning toilette.”

  The maid stared in surprise and alarm, paralysed by indecision. Then, after a quick exchange of confirmatory glances with her mistress, she obeyed Nell’s orders and dragged the unwilling poodle away by its pink velvet collar. Nell turned and walked to the window, trying to hide her disgust. The air in the room was thick with her stepmother’s scent and the smell of the poodle. She hated the dog, and it hated her. Fluffy, beribboned, curled, overfed, and perfumed, it symbolised for her the hated artificiality of London life and made her long for her own dogs at home in the country, in the county of Suffolk. They lived outdoors and worked for their living—farm dogs and gun dogs, sometimes flea-infested and often muddy—Nell knew and loved them all and had, for the first eighteen years of her life, grown up surrounded by them. They knew their place and none had ever ventured above stairs.

  Nell pushed up the bottom sash, eager for fresh air. She knelt on the window seat, rested her elbows on the sill, and gazed out through the yellowing leaves of the crowding plane trees into the cool green distance of Hyde Park. The crisp morning air of early September was welcome on her flushed cheeks. She lingered there for a while, gaining the strength and resilience to go on with her struggle to be heard, determined to make her stepmother pay attention to her wishes…preparing, through desperation, as a last resort to p
lay her trump card.

  A crocodile of schoolgirls hand in hand in bonnet and shawl, small ones at the front, large ones at the back, a grim-faced maid on either side, and two pretty young teachers bringing up the rear, chirruped their way along Park Lane on their way to take their daily walk around the Achilles statue behind Apsley House and back to their select boarding establishment in the newly built houses beginning to line the Bayswater Road. A smart butcher’s trap rattled noisily to a halt below. A carriage, the necks of its two ponderously trotting horses strained to an arch by the cruel but fashionable bearing rein, clattered by, eliciting an exclamation of dismay from Nell and an exaggerated shudder from Lady Hartismere.

  “Do close the window, Nell,” she commanded, the ribbons of her lace cap aquiver with a pretended shiver. “You know I take a chill so easily these autumn mornings, and my nerves cannot bear the street noises.”

  “Then perhaps we should return home to Suffolk, Stepmama,” said Nell quickly. “It is very calm and peaceful there in September, you’d find. The harvest will be in by now, and the apple picking will have begun. Cook will have put away the jams and jellies, and she will be boiling up the puddings for Christmas. And Kenton—he will be needing me to go over the estate books with him. This is a busy time of year for the steward, and I should like to…”

  For a moment, her face came to life at the thought of her home, where she could be useful and happy. The bright eyes, the luminous alabaster skin and sweetly curving mouth, the strongly boned face framed by a shock of dark blond hair should have melted the hardest of hearts, but Lady Hartismere remained immune to and even irritated by Nell’s unconscious ability to charm. Nell broke off. She knew exactly what the response would be and had been every time she had made the suggestion of returning to Somersham since her father’s death a year before.

  “Kenton! Huh!” her stepmother exploded. “I declare, child, you spend too much of your time with your steward! What your papa was thinking of, allowing you to become so embroiled with the management of the estates, I cannot imagine! I know of no other girl who thinks it clever to know the price of a ram or a bushel of wheat! And the damage it does to your complexion, hacking about the farms and the fields in the summer! I was mortified to present you to the Duchess of Irchester at the start of the Season! She must have thought I was trailing a gypsy girl around behind me! And she was not at all pleased to see how you monopolised her husband, the Duke’s, attention with your inane chatter! The whole table heard you prattling on: ‘A diet suitable for ewes—to encourage them to give birth to twins.’ Indeed! Did you suppose the procreation of sheep to be an acceptable topic of conversation between a well-bred young girl and the nephew of the monarch?”

  Nell bit back a truculent comment that the Duke of Irchester had been a more than willing partner in the conversation. A countryman himself, he had been delighted to share his interests with a young woman. But logic and information were never welcomed by her stepmother. Speculation and prejudice were meat and drink to her. Nell did not reply. Cecilia knew perfectly well that her husband, Lord Hartismere, had been failing in health for a year before his death and had, with much relief, discovered that Nell already knew a great deal about the running of a large estate since she had spent most of her lonely childhood hours trailing around behind the steward, the cook, the housekeeper, in and out of the stables and kitchen, listening and learning. He had gradually handed the reins of management to Nell, aided by the elderly but efficient Kenton.

  Lady Hartismere, once started on one of her favourite topics, was flowing on, “And you know I cannot bear the country! What? Live again at Somersham Hall? That horrid, musty pile crumbling into its moat! How many times I begged Hartismere to fill in that vile sewer I don’t care to remember! ‘It can’t be healthy,’ I said. ‘Night vapours rising round a dwelling house,’ and Doctor Brewster quite agreed with me: ‘I can think of nothing more injurious to your ladyship’s constitution,’ he said. No, for the last time, Elinor, it would be death in life for me to immolate myself there!”

  “I think you mean immure, Stepmama,” muttered Nell, thinking that either fate would be an acceptable solution to her problems. She closed the window with a bang.

  Paying no attention, Lady Hartismere rattled on. “But there are matters much more important than my own comfort to be considered, I will allow, my dear, and I must have a thought for your future. I must abide, at whatever cost to myself, by your dear father’s wishes and see you settled, and only when I have seen you suitably married will I be at liberty to give any consideration to my own pitiable circumstances.’ Her eyes narrowed, and she added slyly, “And, of course, until you do marry, you remain my ward and must live in my household under my protection.”

  Nell had no answer.

  Cecilia’s gloating tone was replaced, to Nell’s surprise, by a genuinely thoughtful look as she ventured further: “I must avow, Nell, it has always been a puzzle to me too…why Hartismere, who listened to you, flattered and indulged you beyond reason in everything, should have—and almost with his last gasp—cheated you of what you most desired. That I should be one of your guardians is self-evident, but to choose as your second guardian a remote Scottish cousin of his, unknown both to him and to you, when he could have appointed any of a hundred friends or relations here in London? It is unaccountable…perhaps, at the last, his faculties?”

  “His faculties—as you choose to label my father’s fine brain and powers of reason—remained undimmed to the end!” Nell said sharply. “Or was Papa perhaps out of his mind to leave you your very generous jointure and this house?” She bit her lip, knowing that she had gone too far.

  Strangely, Lady Hartismere seemed gratified by the spurt of bad temper she had elicited from her ward and continued to torment her. “And as long as you are in my house, Miss,” she reminded her, “you will please mind your manners! If, as you never cease to tell me, you wish to achieve a state of independence from me and set up your own establishment, you know quite well what you have to do. When you are married, well, that will be a different matter—you may persuade your husband to live wherever you choose. With the wealth that will come to you on marriage, you will be able to settle anywhere in the kingdom. I’m sure Jemmie would indulge your odd whim to live in the country…for a while at any rate.”

  Nell almost laughed out loud at the picture of pale-faced, dissolute Sir James Fanshawe, who spent half his days in bed and half his nights in the candle-lit reek of gaming clubs, transplanted to the spacious cornfields and water meadows and the wide skies of Suffolk. One lungful of the fresh air off the North Sea risked felling him on the spot.

  “But, Stepmama, I am not yet one and twenty. There is no need to hurry into matrimony with the first man who offers for me!”

  “Lady Elinor!” snapped her stepmother. “You do not deceive by playing the innocent! You are not just out of the schoolroom! You are in your third season. You know perfectly well that Sir James is not the first man to offer for you. Your father in his last months rejected several suitors—and rejected them at your insistence, I do believe, Miss! And, of course, an heiress of your importance is able to take her pick of any of a score of eligible men. When I think of the titles and the fortunes that have been dangled before you! But—oh, no! None of them will take the fancy of Lady Elinor Somersham, spoilt daughter of Lord Hartismere! If your poor brother Rupert were still alive, you could not have afforded to be so nice about your choice, I can tell you!” And, choked by her spite, she burst into a fit of coughing.

  “Stepmama, I will not marry any man who values my fortune more than he values me,” began Nell with determination. The remark triggered a further scorching look from Lady Cecilia.

  “Fairy tales, my girl! This is the reasoning of fairy tales!” she screeched. “Silly chit! You’ll be going about barefoot and ragged in the street next to find a husband who loves you for your face and not for your fortune!”

  “My fortune makes it all the more imperative that I choose w
ith care…” Nell began wearily to repeat a well-worn formula. “I will not take a husband who gambles away my father’s fortune! I watched him build it by safe husbandry and clever dealing over the years—the money you are now enjoying, Stepmama, was hard-earned, and not by you. I will not let it fall into the careless hands of the likes of Jemmie Fanshawe. I would rather remain unmarried and run the estate myself with the aid of Kenton. You know I have proved myself perfectly competent to do that, and indeed, that is what I should be doing now, not frittering away my time in idle pursuits in London.”

  But, of a sudden, at the sight of the closed, impassive face before her, it came to her that she would never be free from the determination, on the part of her stepmother, that she should accept the despised James Fanshawe. Never, that is, unless she gathered the courage to reveal her knowledge of a very dark secret and make a ruthless end to this charade.

  “You may trust me to choose with care, my girl! I have a much wider understanding of society after all, and the ways of the world. Sir James is simply the most suitable husband for you. He is a good few years older than you, which is an advantage. He has sown his wild oats and is ready to settle. He is a man of the world—you are a headstrong girl, as all will allow, and it is my belief that you will benefit from his direction. He is of a good family and will, in the fullness of time, inherit when his grandfather dies; and you will become a Viscountess. The on dit is that old Blakenham is breaking up fast on the rocks and is not reckoned to live out the season. What better prospects could a girl have? Well, Miss? Well? Jemmie won’t wait forever, you know!”

  She took the letter she had selected from the pile before her on the bed and waved it at Nell. “See here! He is to call on us at eleven o’clock this morning and positively seeks my permission to address himself to you. May I have your assurance that you will at least hear him and respond sensibly?”

  Nell tugged nervously at a lock of hair hanging heavily onto her shoulders and replied in a tone of weary control, “Jemmie Fanshawe is old enough to be my father…”