Hirst Hall

Chapter 1 – I describe my life before my ill-fated marriage

My downfall has been so complete that it is hard to know what to write.  However I am minded that this tale must begin somewhere.  I was born Caroline Adamson, 36 years ago in London, the daughter of a merchant dealing in furs and wood from the Baltic. It was a comfortable if unexciting childhood marked by occasional fights with my older brother and the usual struggles that mark relationships between mothers and daughters.

I grew up to look very like my mother, perhaps even more attractive, with a mass of chestnut hair, matching eyes and a pale complexion together with a good womanly shape.  I have always known that my looks are my fortune, in the same way that my brother’s lie in his ability to calculate a profit and loss and to strike a good bargain.

In my seventeenth year I met and fell head over heels in love with a dashing and handsome captain in the Royal Artillery.  He came from a good family, the Devernes, in Shropshire, near Ludlow, but he, as the third son, had been packed off to serve the King and gain glory for the family in that fashion.  His parents hardly approved of a merchant’s daughter but, as there was little chance of his inheriting the family estates, he was allowed his way. We married as soon as we could in decency and for the first time in my life I was with a man. I know it is decorous to maintain that a woman is put upon by a man’s base urges but this is a foolishness.  It was enjoyable from the very first time and I would be a liar to pretend otherwise. Within two months I was pregnant.

My husband was stationed to the Indies to command a battery at Kingston in Jamaica.  It was as good a posting as we could have hoped for; we had at least avoided some of the worst places, though Canada would have been better.  I did not go with him immediately as I was pregnant.  The plan was that I should join him as soon as the baby and I could make the voyage.  Instead I was a widow, for he caught a fever on the crossing and was dead before he ever reached the Caribbean.

Without his pay I had no way of maintaining even a small house and had to accept the offer from his parents to live with them at their estate. The journey to Ludlow was gruelling as I was quite far gone by then and my welcome there was a little cool. But it was better than staying in London at my parents’ house. I named my daughter Georgina after the father she would never know.

Relations at the Devernes were never good, perhaps they would have been better had I delivered a male child. They could not in decency expel us but my Georgina and I would always be unwelcome guests. So when my mourning had been decently observed I accepted an offer of marriage from another local landowner, Mr Welbeck, who had a fine estate nearby at Deepwell Hall. 

My new husband was almost 40 years older than my then nineteen years.  His first wife had been unable to have children and I think he saw me as his last chance to have a son and heir. Otherwise the estate would pass to a distant cousin. I most obviously could have children. But maybe the problem was on his side for although we tried assiduously it never came to pass. Had I been more calculating I might have taken a lover and so got with child and passed it off as his. But by the time I considered this it would have been clear to one and all.  By then my husband knew where the fault lay.  Our always intermittent sexual relations had tailed away to nothing.

When he died on a cold November night I was once again without resources despite our near sixteen years of marriage. My daughter was away at a young ladies establishment in Dorchester so I did not even have her support when the Welbeck cousin came to take possession of Deepwell. He could not of course turn me out there and then as I was the grieving widow, but it was made clear that there was no question of my staying long.  Having agreed to move away by the end of January I had nowhere to turn except my brother in London.  He would have to take me in, though his wife cordially loathed me for having lived in a gentleman’s house in the country while she was a merchant’s wife in London. After a cheerless Christmas I was packing what few things were clearly mine and not the estate’s under the cousin’s watchful presence when I had a visitor: Sir Thomas Dalrymple.

Sir Thomas Dalrymple, Bart., had a large estate north and west of Ludlow, hard over on the Shropshire border, at the foot of the Welsh mountains. The estate had been in his family for centuries and they had fended of Welsh invaders when that country had been an independent principality. It comprised three valleys running down from the mountains; the northern and southern of these were narrow with poor land fit only for sheep, but the central one was broad and lush and the family had bred horses and cattle there for many years. However in that northern valley some forty years ago was found an entire mountain made of the ores of copper. This transformed the fortunes of the family from merely prosperous to distinctly wealthy. The water from the mountains powered the stamp mills and ore crushers. And the completion of the new canal ten years back now meant that the refined copper could be efficiently shipped to the coast where it is so much in demand for sheathing His Majesty’s ships in their struggles with Bonaparte.

Sir Thomas’ father completed the magnificent new mansion, Hirst Hall, in the style of Palladio a score years back and the family abandoned the fortified manor house that had been the family seat since the fifteenth century. My late husband and I had stayed at the new house once not long after Sir Thomas had inherited and it was truly impressive, both in scale and luxury as well as its setting with the Welsh mountains rising in the distance.

I had met Sir Thomas and his then wife as frequently as one might expect for other county families. She was small, elfin and pretty in a noticeably Welsh way and a little older than me.  They had stayed at Deepwell twice and we had met up at the Ludlow Assembly Rooms on occasion. Sir Thomas was tall, dark and handsome in a faintly lupine way. Now in his forties, he had the air of a man one should not cross. I knew he was also a widower, his wife having died in childbirth nearly two years back failing to bring his third son into the world.

And now he stood here in the drawing room at Deepwell and asked me quite forcefully to be his new wife. I was momentarily speechless.

“And do you have an answer for me?  It is after all a fairly simple question.” He sounded brusque but he was smiling in his wolfish way.

“I do not know what to say, Sir Thomas, you have caught me by surprise.” But of course I was dissembling; there was only one answer possible. ‘No’ would mean returning to my brother’s house and living on his charity.  It would also mean Georgina marrying some merchant’s son if she were lucky, far from the life she had led in her childhood. ‘Yes’ would make me mistress of Hirst Hall and I would be Lady Dalrymple. My daughter’s future would be assured.

“Let me explain my reasoning to you then, perhaps I will help you decide. You have always been a most beautiful woman and I believe you are lovelier now than ever. You have run Deepwell in an entirely competent manner and have a reputation as a fair and kind mistress. You are known to have never cheated on your late husband despite the great age difference and his growing infirmity. In short you are a most admirable lady and, despite the impropriety of asking so soon after your bereavement, I want you for my own.”

It was irresistible. “Yes, Sir Thomas, I will be your wife.”