It was remarkable that after all these years of love ’em and leave ’em Thomasina should find herself bowled over, knocked for a loop by a pretty face and a sweet smile, but so it was. Maud Lincoln. Utter perfection. Quantities of fair fluffy hair, a china-doll complexion and a bed-post waist. And just seventeen. A delightful age for a girl, seventeen. Fresh, unspoiled. Ripe…The smile that very few people saw curved Thomasina’s lips as she considered Maud Lincoln’s unspoiled freshness. Rather a pity about the name, however. Gardens and black-bat nights, and a green sound to the surname. With a face like that she should be called something more lyrical: Imogen or Daphnis or Heloise. Still, what was in a name? And once the bedroom lights were out and you were in bed together with your clothes off, who cared? More importantly, how should she go about this latest seduction?
Gentlemen, when engaged in the pursuit of a lady, often plied the object of their desire with wine. In fact Thomasina’s cousin Simon had once told her that there was nothing like a judicious drop of wine to get rid of inhibitions. Thomasina had merely smiled and not commented, but she had thought to herself: I must remember that one, and had indeed remembered it to very good purpose on more than one occasion.
But she did not think Maud Lincoln was one who could be coaxed or tricked into bed by the use of alcohol. Maud would have to be seduced very gradually, almost without her realizing what was happening. That could mean a vastly frustrating few weeks for Thomasina, but if it went on for too long she could always make one of her discreet trips to London. There was that cat-faced child in Seven Dials, all of fifteen years old, who did not appear to differentiate overmuch between getting into the beds of gentlemen or ladies, and whose fingers and tongue were quite amazingly adept…
After some thought Thomasina decided to invite Maud to Sunday lunch at Quire House. When they had eaten she would ask Maud to play some music for her–there was a piano in Quire’s music room–and surely she could get through an hour or so of listening to some stuffy sonata.
The invitation would not be very remarkable, in fact it would be entirely in keeping with the Forrester tradition. Josiah Forrester had believed in showing consideration towards the people who worked for him, and he had taught his daughter to have the same sense of responsibility. Paternalism they called it nowadays, he had said, but it was still plain old-fashioned consideration for dependants. Thomasina smiled as she remembered her father had always been especially considerate to George Lincoln who had run the mill profitably and efficiently for so many years. The Miller of Twygrist, he used to say. Good faithful George. Pulled himself up by his bootstraps, of course, married money and learned how to be a gentleman as he went along but none the worse for that.
After lunch on Sunday, Thomasina would take the miller’s daughter for a walk in Quire’s park, and then accompany Maud to her home. It would all be entirely chaste and perfectly respectable, although there would be a secret pleasure in walking close to Maud along the dark lanes, and slipping an arm around her waist to make sure she did not turn her ankle on an uneven piece of ground.
It was unfortunate that the lane leading to the Lincolns’ house lay alongside Latchkill–she frowned briefly over that–but they could hurry past the gates.
When Maud was small, her mamma used to take her for walks along the lanes around their house, and the walks nearly always took them past Latchkill. You could not actually see Latchkill over the high walls surrounding it, but you could see the little lodge at the side of the big iron gates. If you looked through the bars of the gates you could see along the carriageway to where Latchkill itself stood, squat and dark and frowning on its upward-sloping ground. Maud was always frightened that one day the gates would be open and mamma would go inside and Maud would have to go inside as well. It would be the most frightening thing in the world to hear the iron gates clanging shut behind you, shutting you in.
One afternoon, as they went past Latchkill, mamma said in a voice that made Maud feel cold and fearful, ‘It’s almost spiderlight, isn’t it? So we’d better walk straight past Latchkill today. You must never be caught near Latchkill when it’s spider light time. That’s when the bad things can happen.’