Rivals and Revels (A Regency Romance)

19. In London (1 of 2)

No amount of dreams and conversations—and there were plenty of both—could have prepared Mabel for London. At first clandestinely, then openly, she gazed from behind Harriette's carriage's curtains. Half-a-dozen times she remembered to close her mouth, only to forget her manners and let her mouth hang open in anticipation.

The thin veil of snow, that covered everything in the countryside, tore off like tarpaulin, to reveal the taupe-and-gray mass of London. Too many people gathered behind its grimy facades, then, overwhelmed by that excess of company, spilled out on the streets. Its buildings and lanes, the ropes of billowing laundry, the garbage and goods--everything shuffled continuously. The city's pulse, its very breath,left nothing for the snow to cling to. Instead a haze of ice crystals and arrested smoke thickened the air, smudging it to milky. A miasma that made stables at home feel as healthful as alpine air, but she stubbornly held on to her sense of wonder.

Past the somber outskirts, the fancier townhouses lined up for her pleasure. Their carriage slowed down in the press of the city's traffic, letting Mabel glimpse familiar names at the corners. Grosvenor and Park, and others, the names she had run across in books and conversations, came then went before her rapt eyes.

They pushed further. Chestertons' estate house was purchased not fifty years ago from an extinguished aristocratic line, to enjoy a proper place nearer to the city. Back then, it was almost desolate. Now the former fields around it were built over. As Harriette explained with a shrewd smile, this was not a happy accident. The family had planned to derive income from the house developments they could (and did) put on the (back then) empty land.

The ambitious and hungry energy of those older Chestertons made Mabel a bit sad about the bloodline dead-ending in two bachelors.

"That seems prudent of them to invest in the development."

"Oh, very much so, and great foresight!" Harriette replied. "At the time it was woefully isolated, with not another proper house next to it. And look at it now!"

Mabel obediently peeked out of the window. The carriage rattled down the busy Curzon. With a dizzying feeling, she imagined Radcliffe as a landlord for all these houses... everything she could see. "It's hard to believe. Hard to believe."

Amelia chuckled sleepily. "Are we there yet?"

***

The Chesterton's coachman met them as soon as they turned under the arch that led into the yard and stopped on the driveway of the Stanhope House. When he grabbed Mabel's luggage off the carriage to carry inside, his burly shoulders jerked, as if expecting a heavier load.

Harriette and Amelia were to continue on to the hotel where they took lodgings—unwilling to impose on her friends' hospitality, Harriette said, but Mabel suspected it had to do with her desire to keep Amelia closer to her, and with more discretion than a private home offered.

But Mabel came here to stay. More than that. She had arrived.

Yes, I am arrived!

Harriet's carriage was like an alchemist's cauldron, into which she entered as a girl in her father's care. Somehow, after days of rattling along the country roads, yawning and dozing off, she emerged from it as a woman who kept her own counsel and looked after herself.

I am my own woman.

Here, London, look at me. I am me.

She craned her neck to study the house where she would live from now on.

It was a handsome manor, not at all squished upward like the townhouses they had passed, but smaller than the Chesterton Manor in Lancashire. The houses stepped close on both sides of it, eating away the gardens, and a wing extended both stories, further encroaching on the lot; still, the grounds behind it must be massive compared to every other patch of green surviving between London's crowded streets. Remembering Radcliffe's passion for plants, it made Mabel glad that he had it despite London's insatiable appetite for stone and grime.