During the Dissolution, they had been faithful papists, and following the rise of Bloody Mary, they had somehow become staunch Protestants. After the War of the Roses, most of their land had been seized. In a reign pockmarked by avariciousness, arrogance, and atheism, the Sands family had been one of the few Saxon dynasties that had not only survived but also prospered in the Norman yoke.Īnd that circumstance had, so far as Lady Walrafen could determine, been the last bit of fortuity to befall her ancestors. Indeed, the first Earl of Sands had been ennobled by old William the Red himself. What good was a coronet, she often asked herself, when the generations of Markham-Sands men had been - and still were - such a luckless and clueless lot? Her stepson Giles, two years her senior, lived there alone now and was very welcome to do so.įor her part, the Countess of Walrafen was the unpretentious descendant of a title even older than that of her late husband, a fact which had always needled him a bit, and for no good reason that her ladyship could see. The official London address of the earldom was situated deep in the heart of Mayfair, in an imposing brick town house in Hill Street, from which her ladyship had taken her congé as soon as her elderly husband had breathed his last at the ripe old age of seven-and-fifty.
She could smell the musty self-righteousness drifting all the way across Marylebone. In fact, to her ladyship's way of thinking, the Walrafen title was so old and stuffy it was well nigh to moldering. There was nothing of the old or the venerated about Park Crescent, though the earldom of Walrafen was both. Nash's latest spurt of architectural genious boasted every modern convenience, including flushing lavatories, an elegantly stuccoed facade, and pale yellow paint so sumptuously applied it looked like butter running down the walls. The Countess of Walrafen - who in a long-ago life had been known as Cecilia Markham-Sands - was newly possessed of a most fashionable villa in Park Crescent. Chapter One: The incorrigible Henrietta Healy
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