Prologue.—Introducing the Reader to the Lady Katherine Fleet.
MY Lord Eastry belonged to the grand old race of East Kent squires, who brought up their sons to fear nothing and hate the French, aye, and brought up their daughters to be the wives and mothers of men who should sail the salt seas till too stiff with age or wounds to climb to their quarter-decks. For how could their sons help going to sea when they saw the boatmen of Deal from their open beach defying the guns of the French and the might of the fiercest storms that blew?
My Lord Eastry began his bold life as younger son of a squire, who bore the old Kent name of Fleet. But of John Fleet, the eldest, there is only an empty memorial in Eastry Church, which records that “his body lies in the great South Seas in the hope of a joyful resurrection.” His ship, full of honour and glory and prize-money, was spoken two days east of Trinidad in the great storm of 1759; and mariners maintain that fighting Jack Fleet’s black frigate sails there still, whenever the cyclone is coming down, with canvas enough on her to overset a hundred-gun ship. And Dick had his call on the glorious 1st of June—had the van-ship and sailed into the French with the grand air of his family, as if he never could have his belly full of fighting—laid alongside half a dozen of them at one time and another, and had a chain-shot through his middle just as he sent the Vengeur to the bottom with her colours in the act of striking. Once he was hard pressed, though; and Harry, the Lord Eastry that, as he lay dying, drank Wellington’s health when the news was brought of Waterloo, saw it and, leaving the line flat in neglect of signals, bore up to him. Lord! what a family they were to fight! When the tall Ramillies ran in between the Brunswick and the Achille to receive her fire, it was like an explosion of devils from hell. The men, men of the Cinque Ports that all had a dead father or a dead brother to charge to the French, would have followed Jack, Dick, or Harry into Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace.
Well, Harry Fleet—the Lord Harry, as they called him in the Channel—came safe out of the great battle; and not so many months afterwards fell upon a great convoy guarded by ships that should have blown his squadron of frigates out of the water, drove their escort under the guns of Martinique, and carried the convoy, with the army on board them that should have taken our Indies, safe into Antigua, from which he brought home more prize-money than ever. He was just too late to close the eyes of his father, the tough old squire of Eastry who lived his fourscore-and-odd years like his fathers before him, the few of them that did not die with their shoes on and the flag overhead.
They made him the Lord Eastry and a Knight of the Bath, but he had had so much lead through his leg by that time, that he could never fight a ship again, so he came to the old home at Eastry to find his fourteen-year old daughter the most wonderful bit of woman’s flesh in all the halls of Kent. Captain Jack and Captain Dick were never married. What children they may have had fell not into any list of the landed gentry, and so it came that the long-descended lands of the Fleets, and Admiral my Lord Eastry’s prodigious coffers of prize-money must all come to Katherine Fleet, now the Lady Katherine.
Now, no man that ever breathed was less of a coxcomb than Admiral Harry, but as the name of his ancient family was to pass out of the earth with his death, he looked to it that the son-in-law who succeeded to his honours and his great estate should be of such rank and fame that it might be no regret even for the Fleets of Eastry to be lost in their greater honours: some Duke it might be, or at least an Earl, whose belted ancestors had fought for the White or Red Rose; and Katherine Fleet, aged now eighteen, might have had any such an one as came within the magic of her moods.
There are some women who are not completely graceful, and yet give the onlooker a great sense of satisfaction. There is a sort of wild freedom, a declaration of strength and health, an evidence of courage and high spirits, which bespeak an animal perfection too intense for the gentle ease of grace. Katherine was one of those mettlesome women who make men’s blood tingle, and whose own red blood never runs cold in the direst peril. I suppose she was tall. She would have looked it had she been more than common short. She was such a noble creature, and she had the same blue eyes that were worth a dozen pikes to the Lord Eastry, when, in his old frigate days, he had jumped aboard a Frenchman and a wave had checked half his boarding party—gay blue eyes withal, that could laugh like her dimples and white teeth—gay blue eyes that could be as loving or reckless as the mobile mouth. And she had the pure curves of cheek and eyebrow which are almost necessary to beauty absolute like hers.
What follows, I, Thomas Trinder, Captain retired on half-pay in His Majesty’s Navy, and now of Beach Cottage, Walmer, who am writing this chronicle, had from Will the night before I led his sister to Ripple Church.
One March night of 1798 was Katherine’s coming-out ball. And her father’s hopes looked like fulfilment, for the greatest of Kentish peers, the young Marquis of Dover, had been spending week after week at his mansion of Pegwell, where never within the memory of the countryside, which noted all his doings, had he spent two days on end. And Katherine in a ball-room was a witch. She danced as such women do, light-footed and tireless, radiating health and high spirits, and with the unconscious smile of conquest on their lips, until the victor comes who makes them replace it with the most exquisite gentleness.
People looked to see that in Lady Katherine, before the night was dead, for Ralph, Marquis of Dover, Earl of River, Viscount Ripple, and Baron Waldershare, all in the Peerage of England, and Lord Lieutenant of the County of Kent. For he was a fine man, who rode straight to hounds, and had already climbed high in the Government, and Katherine had shown herself well inclined to him.