Chapter 4 #2
This was true, insofar as it went. The estate was in excellent order because I had already begun the process of bringing it into order, a process that Richard had neglected during the final years of his decline and that I had initiated within a week of his death.
The tenants would have no complaints because I had ensured that they would have no complaints, because the management of an estate is, at its core, a matter of managing expectations, and the expectations of tenant farmers are, in my experience, both modest and easily satisfied.
Lady Ashford received my correction with the particular expression of a woman who has been rebuffed but refuses to acknowledge it.
She took another sip of tea, and her eyes, moving with studied casualness around the drawing room, catalogued the furnishings, the paintings, the quality of the silver, with the expertise of a woman who has spent decades assessing the material possessions of others and comparing them unfavourably with her own.
"The drawing room is charming," she said. "Though I confess I always thought the Earl's taste in art was rather conservative. That landscape over the mantelpiece, for instance. It is very like something one might find in a hotel."
It was a Constable. A genuine Constable, one of the finest in private hands, and Lady Ashford knew it. The insult was deliberate, a small dart thrown to test my defences, and I parried it with the ease of long practice.
"Richard chose it for its sentimental value," I said, allowing a gentle sadness to enter my voice. "It reminded him of the Suffolk countryside where he spent his boyhood. I could not part with it, even if I wished to, which I do not."
The rebuke was flawless. It implied that Lady Ashford's criticism was not merely tasteless but cruel, an attack on a dead man's memory, and it positioned me as the devoted widow defending her husband's legacy against the carping of the unfeeling.
Lady Ashford's colour rose, just slightly, a flush of pink beneath the powder that told me the dart had landed closer to home than she had anticipated.
She opened her mouth to respond, and I moved to close the exchange before she could recover her footing.
"You are very kind to have come, Penelope," I said, rising from my chair in a manner that indicated the visit was at an end.
"Your sympathy means a great deal to me in this difficult time.
I am afraid I must ask you to excuse me; I have correspondence to attend to regarding the estate, and Edmund requires my attention before his evening meal. "
It was the social equivalent of a general ordering a retreat, and Lady Ashford, recognising that she had been outmanoeuvred, rose with whatever dignity she could muster.
Her exit was executed with reasonable composure, the condolences she offered at the door delivered with the mechanical smoothness of a gramophone reaching the end of its record.
I watched her carriage depart from the drawing room window, the brougham's lamps flickering in the December dusk, and I allowed my expression, which I had maintained at a pitch of dignified grief for the duration of the visit, to settle into its natural state, which is to say, into nothing at all.
The room felt different when I was alone in it.
The lilies, which had been a fitting backdrop for the performance of mourning, became merely flowers, their scent oppressive rather than appropriate, their white petals a reminder that nature has no interest in human sorrow.
The fire, which I had kept low for the benefit of the visit, now seemed merely inadequate, and I rang for Dorothea to build it up.
Dorothea came with the quiet efficiency that characterised all her movements.
She was a small woman, dark-haired and brown-eyed, with the kind of face that disappears into a crowd and the kind of hands that could manage any household task without apparent effort.
She had been in my service for four years, having come to me recommended by the agency that supplied ladies' maids to the better class of household, and she had proven herself useful in every respect except one: she was too observant.
Most servants learned, quickly and instinctively, to see nothing that was not intended for them to see.
Dorothea saw everything and remembered most of it, and the knowledge of this had been a source of low-grade unease since the early months of her employment.
She was, however, devoted to Edmund, and her devotion to him was the lever by which I controlled her, because Dorothea understood, as all servants understand, that the loss of a position in a household like mine would mean the loss of access to the person she cared for.
"Lady Ashford has gone," I said.
"Yes, my lady."
"She will report to at least six people before dinner this evening that the drawing room is poorly furnished, the art is mediocre, and I am bearing my loss with a composure that she finds unnatural."
Dorothea said nothing. She was too well-trained to comment on the social manoeuvrings of my acquaintance, and too intelligent to offer empty reassurance.
She built up the fire with quick, practised movements, the coals shifting and settling with small clinking sounds, and the room brightened and warmed, and the shadows that had gathered in the corners retreated toward the edges of the walls.
"Edmund is in the garden," Dorothea said, straightening. "He has been there since half past two. Miss Hale finished his lessons at two, and he asked to go outside. I thought the air would do him good."
I went to the window. The garden at the back of Blackwood House was small by the standards of a country estate but generous for Mayfair, a rectangle of clipped lawn bordered by formal hedgerows and punctuated by a stone fountain that Richard had installed at some expense and that I had always found aesthetically regrettable.
In the blue-grey light of early December, with the last of the afternoon fading from the sky, the garden had a stark, almost abandoned beauty, the bare branches of the trees etched against the sky like the veins in a leaf, the grass silvered with frost that had not yet melted despite the feeble warmth of the winter sun.
Edmund stood beside the fountain, his coat buttoned incorrectly, his hands buried in his pockets, his breath forming small clouds in the cold air.
He was looking at the water with the fixed, patient attention he brought to things that interested him, which was to say, to almost everything.
Edmund was interested in the world in a way that I had never been and could not simulate, not because I lacked the capacity for interest but because my interests were directed, always, toward utility, whereas his were drawn by simple wonder.
He could spend an hour watching water move in a fountain, or tracing the patterns in a carpet, or examining the way light fell through a window at different times of day.
The world, for Edmund, was an inexhaustible source of fascination, and his capacity for delight in it was, I suspected, the thing about him that I found most incomprehensible and most compelling.
I watched him for several minutes from the window, my reflection ghosting the glass between us, and I allowed myself the rare indulgence of observing him without purpose.
He was mine. Not in the way that a house or a title or a fortune is mine, those things being the products of strategy and effort, but in a way that preceded strategy and effort, a way that I could not explain and did not wish to examine.
He had been born when I was twelve, a small, sickly infant who had required constant attention, and my mother, who was already beginning to exhibit the more florid manifestations of her condition, had shown no interest in him whatever.
I had assumed the care of him by default, at first because there was no one else to do it and later because I discovered that the act of caring for him produced in me a sensation that was unlike any other I had experienced, a sensation that I did not recognise as emotion and did not wish to name.
It was, I had concluded after many years of reflection, a form of ownership.
Edmund was mine in the way that a painting is mine, or a garden, or a house, except that the attachment was more visceral and more absolute.
I had not acquired him through calculation.
He had arrived, unexpected and unplanned, and I had found, to my mild surprise, that I could not tolerate the thought of any harm coming to him.
This was not love. Love, as I understood it from my observation of those who claimed to feel it, was a volatile, irrational, self-denying condition that caused people to behave in ways contrary to their interests.
What I felt for Edmund was the opposite: it was a cool, controlled, self-preserving vigilance that aligned perfectly with my interests, because Edmund's wellbeing was, by any rational assessment, essential to my own.
And yet. And yet there were moments, standing at a window watching him stare at a fountain in the December dusk, when the distinction between ownership and something else became less clear than I would have liked.
I did not examine these moments. They were, I had decided, a minor inefficiency in an otherwise well-ordered system, and they posed no threat to my composure or my plans.
I turned from the window and returned to my study, where the ledgers waited.
I had work to do. The Ashworth estate required consolidation, the Suffolk tenants required reassuring, the London property required assessment, and the solicitor required a letter that would remind him, without saying so directly, that his continued employment depended on his discretion.