Chapter 6
An hour past dawn, Douglas found Chavensworth’s library.
Evidently, the Duke of Herridge had not been able to make his mark on this room to the degree he had his town house in London.
There was no clutter here, no ostentation.
The floors were whitewashed, the bookcases painted white, and the ceiling the same pleasant pale green as new grass.
Scattered throughout the room were pedestals topped with marble busts of philosophers, Romans, and no doubt past Dukes of Herridge.
At one end of the library were two heavily embroidered chairs with tall backs and deeply carved arms. Above them hung a portrait of a man, and beside him the painting of a woman, both dressed in outdated clothing.
The first Duke of Herridge and his duchess?
Chavensworth’s library boasted two levels, one accessible from the main corridor on the ground floor and the second only gained through a circular iron staircase in the middle of the room. He found himself exploring the books, amazed at the number of them.
Someone had gone to a great deal of effort to catalog all the volumes. Each bookcase was labeled by subject matter, and the books in the fiction section had been shelved by author.
I am a woman who strives to be knowledgeable. Lady Sarah’s words. Was this library so perfect because of her efforts? Or had she hired someone to care for Chavensworth’s volumes? Either way, she evidently thought highly enough of the room to devote some attention to it.
Douglas made his way to the windows on the other side of the room.
In front of them rested an enormous mahogany desk.
He sat back in the chair, pulled his notebook from inside his jacket, and opened it, beginning to write what he’d learned the night before: How Sarah was to be addressed, and the fact that the daughter of a duke never loses her title—she simply changed her last name.
When he was finished, he put the leather notebook back into the pocket of his jacket and stood, leaving the library and almost colliding with Thomas.
He’d evidently disturbed Thomas in his early-morning routine, because the young man wasn’t as sartorially perfect as he had been the day before. Instead, he wore a leather apron and smelled of something pungent and unpleasant.
“Cleaning the privies?” Douglas asked.
“Demonstrating how to make copper polish, sir,” Thomas said. “It’s Lady Sarah’s recipe, but I didn’t want to disturb her.”
Douglas tucked that knowledge away for later.
“Is there anything I can do for you, sir?”
“Nothing,” Douglas said. “I wake early as a habit.”
Thomas nodded and left him, but Douglas could see it was with some reluctance.
Did the young man think he was about to steal the silver?
Once, he might have considered it. Now, however, he could have purchased a dozen Chavensworths.
Perhaps he simply looked disreputable, the shadow of the alleys of Perth still clinging to him.
He brushed that thought aside and continued his exploration.
When Sarah awoke in the morning, it was to find that her husband had already left the Duke’s Suite.
She sat up on the edge of the cot with some difficulty, given that every muscle in her body had stiffened. She missed the clinging softness of her feather bed, with its sweet smell of lavender and heavenly smooth sheets.
It had taken her ages to fall asleep last night, and as tired as she felt right at the moment, she might not have slept at all.
Very well, if this was to be her married life, then she would make the very best of it.
She would have Chavensworth’s carpenter construct her a bed frame, and the second-floor maids could stitch together a mattress, slightly smaller in dimension than her own feather bed.
Nonetheless, it would be vastly more comfortable than the military cot on which she’d slept last night.
Mr. Eston—Douglas—had probably slept like a baby.
That thought immediately conjured up an image of a baby’s head against her bosom, his mouth against her breast. She pressed both hands to her chest as if to ward off the image itself.
She was left with the sound of his voice echoing in the chamber as if he had just spoken those shocking words.
It is not simply a place for a babe to suckle. A grown man likes to suckle as well.
She was too smart a woman to believe in conjurers’ tales or superstitions of any kind, but if she were given to such things, she would have thought that he had the power of magic in his voice.
The sound of his voice, the low timbre of it, the way he had of enunciating certain words, almost as if English wasn’t his native language, was fascinating.
Where had he been born? Only one of a dozen—or a hundred—questions she had about the man who was now her husband.
Sarah stood and walked to the dais, wrapping her arms around one of the four posts, staring at the rumpled bedclothes. She could almost see him lying there, naked and abandoned, his arm thrown over the extra pillow, his hand stretched out, fingers splayed and reaching for her.
She blinked the image away before turning and stepping down from the dais.
Moments later she was in her own chamber.
She dressed before Florie arrived, choosing one of a dozen day dresses she’d had sewn for her by the seamstresses employed at Chavensworth.
The design was one of her own making, and together with her corset, which could be laced from the front, allowed her to dress without having to wait on a servant.
She had saved endless hours with such garments.
Today, however, she waited for Florie for one reason only. She needed help with her hair.
“It’s an odd sign of vanity,” she said, watching as Florie brushed each tress before pinning it carefully into a curl at the back of her head. “It’s only hair. We should not care so very much about what our hair looks like.”
Florie’s gaze met hers in the mirror as she removed the hairpin from between her lips and spoke.
“Why should we not, Lady Sarah? You would care if your dress was spotted. You would care if your gloves were soiled. Why would you not care about the state of your hair? Women are supposed to care about such things. If we did not, God might as well have labeled us men.”
“Oh, but then we should have so much more power,” Sarah said. “We could stomp around like roosters, crow to our hearts’ content, and say and do almost anything we pleased.”
Florie did not comment to that observation, which was just as well.
Why had she spoken so intimately to her maid? Perhaps it was because her only confidante, her mother, could no longer converse. Perhaps it was simply that she was lonely.
How utterly absurd. She didn’t have time to be lonely. She especially didn’t have time to be lonely this morning. After having been gone from Chavensworth for three days, there were more than enough tasks to occupy her.
She thanked Florie and left the room armed with her journal and her pencil.
At the top of the stairs, she grabbed the banister with her right hand and slowly descended.
Her fingers registered that there was not sufficient wax on the wood to make the surface feel slippery and warm, and she made a mental note to discuss this with the housekeeper.
Dust had been allowed to accumulate on a few of the portrait frames on the wall above her, and she observed that as well.
There were so many places of beauty throughout Chavensworth, so many wondrous things to stop and admire during the day.
Her family’s history hung around her, was saved in the china cabinets, revealed in the linen-press.
The legacy she’d been born to was there in each successive portrait, in the pressed flowers, in the books arrayed in the library.
Sarah nodded to a young maid industriously brushing the treads at the bottom of the stairs.
“Good morning, Abigail. How is that tooth?”
The girl smiled, showing a gap where the offending tooth had been only a few days earlier. “The blacksmith, he took it out, Lady Sarah. It still hurts some, but not as much.”
She patted the girl on the shoulder. “See Mrs. Williams today, and tell her I said to give you some Oil of Cloves. Put that on your gums both morning and night, and you’ll soon feel better.”
The girl nodded and continued with her work.
Sarah entered the Yellow Dining Room, the small family room where she always ate breakfast, and nodded to one of Cook’s helpers. The girl bobbed a curtsy, entered the kitchen, and returned a moment later with a hot kettle that she put on the sideboard.
Arrayed before her, just as her mother had always decreed, was breakfast the way breakfast should be presented at Chavensworth.
A cloth, heavily embroidered in shades of purple—to complement the fields of lavender visible from the window, was draped across the sideboard.
Atop it, arranged in a pleasing pattern, was a sufficiency of knives, forks, saltcellars, butter dishes, and egg cups.
Twin pitchers held milk and cream. Three chafing dishes warmed sausages and other meat selections.
Toast, rolls, and breads laced with cinnamon were arrayed in a basket near the kettle.
How very odd that she wasn’t hungry.
She wanted to ask if anyone had seen her husband, but that was not a question she would venture to her servants.
She took a piece of toast and poured herself some tea before walking to the table arranged before the window.
This view had always epitomized the beauty of Chavensworth, the majesty of the estate.
Below her, in sloping fields that seemed to go on forever, were sixty acres of lavender.
Beyond them were the home woods, a thickly bearded forest now green with spring growth.
She should try to locate her husband. It was only too easy to get lost in Chavensworth’s two hundred rooms. Perhaps Mr. Eston—Douglas—was hungry. Her duties as a hostess, as the chatelaine of Chavensworth, supplanted any irritation she might feel with him.
A few nibbles of her toast, and she was done. She nodded to the footman stationed outside the dining room, a sign that she had completed her meal, and walked toward her mother’s room.
In the foyer, she straightened her bodice and adjusted her collar before pressing both hands against the front of her skirt in order to inspect her shoes.
Even though her mother had not awakened from her unnatural sleep, it would not do to appear in her presence slovenly.
The Duchess of Herridge was very conscious of appearances.
Slowly, Sarah pushed open the door, scanning the shadowy room for Hester.
Instead of Hester, however, her husband sat on a chair at the side of her mother’s bed. Her husband. Nor was he engaged in respectful silence. Instead, he was conversing with her mother as if they had been properly introduced.
“…didn’t speak a word for hours. I would think her shy, but the glint in her eyes makes me think that assumption is incorrect.”
“It isn’t at all proper for you to be at an invalid’s bedside,” Sarah said, entering the room and sliding the door closed quietly behind her. “Especially my mother’s.”
“It was proper enough when I came yesterday,” he said as if unsurprised at her sudden appearance. Did the man have eyes in the back of his head? “Why is it not today?”
She decided to ignore that question and ask one of her own. “What were you talking about?”
“I was telling your mother about our wedding.”
“She is not to be told,” she said hastily. “It would only disturb her.”
“You’re her only child,” he said, glancing at her. “She would want to know anything that happened to you. Good or ill.”
“She will not hear you,” Sarah said, arranging herself on Hester’s chair at the end of the bed.
“Perhaps she will. Perhaps she’s smiling in her sleep.”
She glanced at her mother, wondering if he were jesting. But there was no change. Yet neither was there a smile on Douglas Eston’s face, only a look of intensity that made her wonder at his thoughts.
“I do not know what I shall do without her,” Sarah said, a bit of honesty she’d not intended to reveal.
He didn’t respond.
For long moments they sat silent together. Ten minutes later, she stood, walked to the other side of the bed, and bent down to kiss her mother’s cool cheek.
“I will be back at noon, Mother,” she said in a low voice, just in case her mother could indeed hear her. She glanced at Douglas. “I have chores waiting.”
“Of course,” he said. A quite amiable answer, but one that didn’t quite match the expression in his eyes.
Was he irritated at her? Annoyed? Or simply curious? How very odd that she couldn’t decipher his mood. She was very good at reading people, but he remained annoyingly mysterious.
She took refuge in silence, leaving the room with undue haste, grateful that it was a sickroom after all, and that he couldn’t call after her.
Douglas sat with the duchess for another quarter hour, feeling a sense of peace in the dim room.
There were some of life’s blows that took a person unawares, some that were too difficult to survive alone. When those times came, as they would to each person, they were easier to endure when standing shoulder to shoulder with another human being.
He’d been eight when his parents had died of cholera, fourteen when Alano had rescued him.
A callow boy, not yet a man, but certainly believing himself one.
Sarah would have him to lean on, but would she accept him?
Or would she ignore his presence as much as she did the fact that her mother was dying?