Love Beside the Seaside

Excerpt

On a late April morning in 1816 the Gatwick family gathered around the breakfast table in the Small Dining Room of their vast Mayfair mansion. It seated twelve, but only six, the immediate family, were present.

It was obvious that the head of the household, Cuthbert, sixth Earl of Wittering, had something on his mind. He was a big man with greying brown hair, bushy eyebrows and a choleric disposition, and many things in life served to displease him, from the latest government idiocy to the price of port.

However, that morning Lucinda, Countess of Wittering, supposed it was only his digestion troubling him again. Like most of the upper classes his diet – heavy on meat and alcohol, low on fruit and vegetables – meant that his lordship frequently felt liverish, or to put it more bluntly, he was in need of a good dose of Seidlitz powders.

She made a mental note to send off another order to Savory & Moore, chemists (by Royal Appointment) in New Bond Street.

The Countess regarded her husband with a dutiful smile, although she would much prefer to finish her toast and return to her sitting room where she was putting the final touches to a highly imaginative, and exceedingly dramatic, sketch of an Alpine pass.

Whirling snow, fir trees bending in the high wind, rocky crags and a few desperate travellers certainly gave drama, but her ambition was to paint the sea, the tumultuous, rolling, ocean in all its awe-full magnificence. Ever since she read Edmund Burke’s tract On the Sublime and the Beautiful and learned that the ocean was “an object of no small terror” she had been fascinated by it. Surely it was the perfect subject to bring out her, so far, rather modest talents.

On either side of the table sat the Earl’s heir, Victor, the Viscount Ditherstone, who was coughing into the morning newspaper, as was his irritating habit at breakfast, and his wife Honoria. They were flanked by their children, seventeen year old Emily and twelve year old Arthur. After one particularly heavy sigh from the head of the table Ditherstone, ever tactless, enquired if there was anything on his father’s mind.

Porrett, the earl’s secretary had, his father informed him, been making enquiries about his lordship’s intentions for the summer so that he could begin to put in place the arrangements. For once, Lord Wittering was undecided, not that he admitted as much in so many words. He was not a man given to indecision, nor to an admission of any form of weakness, come to that.

Normally, after the London Season was over, the family would embark on a lengthy round of summer visits to the far-flung branches of the family, their travels greatly eased by the splendid condition of the network of turnpike roads across the country. Some things, the Earl was prepared grudgingly to admit, had improved since his youth.

Until that year the tour would have always culminated in two weeks spent toadying to his elderly, terrifying and exceedingly wealthy aunts in Leamington Spa. But the aunts had died that winter, their money left, as he had always desired, to their godson, Master Arthur Gatwick, the future earl.

Now his lordship wondered if he really wanted to spend three months travelling about before he could retire to his country estate for the autumn and set about slaughtering anything that moved that had fur, feathers or fins. Plus, of course, the occasional pestilential poacher.