Chapter 13 A Letter
Jamie looked round the familiar room with the oddest feeling that he was a child again.
The worn rug, the carving on the wooden mantel, the sideboard with the stiff drawer…
was it still stiff? It was. The ornaments had all gone off to the cottage when the family had moved out, but everything else was just as he remembered it, only smaller, darker, older.
“Well, this will need some work,” Hester said, gazing around with her hands on her hips, puffing a little from the long climb up the stairs. “I asked the maids to remove all the holland covers and do a bit of dusting, but those curtains are so faded, and this rug… what is that stain?”
“Blood,” Jamie said. “I bumped into the edge of the table and had a nosebleed. My mother spent hours on her knees scrubbing at it, but it never would come out.”
“How old were you?” Georgie said, with a smile that warmed him inside. What a lovely smile she had!
“Oh, six, seven, something like that.”
“Are you especially attached to that rug?” Hester asked, one eyebrow lifted.
He laughed. “Not especially, no. The whole place looks so shabby now.”
“Indeed it does,” Hester said, wrinkling her nose.
“The duke’s orders are that you can look through the eastern attics for anything you want.
That is where we put any furniture that is still usable.
We will have to make up new curtains, though, and you can choose new paper and paint for the walls if you like.
I shall send the girls in on Monday to give the place a thorough clean, and you can move in after that.
I shall leave you now, since you hardly need me to show you around.
Ask Charlotte if you want anything. I have no intention of struggling up here several times a day.
I just cannot catch my breath after so many stairs. Charlotte knows where everything is.”
Jamie wandered from room to room, remembering. Beyond the parlour, where he and his parents had spent most of their time, there was a dining room cum study, a small kitchen and scullery, and three bedrooms. Needing only two bedrooms, his mother had used the smallest bedroom as a sewing room.
“Happy memories?” Georgie said, as she followed him.
“Hmm?”
“You’re smiling, so I’d guess that you’re thinking back to happy times when you lived here before.”
“Oh… yes, they were happy times, just the three of us.”
“No brothers or sisters?”
“My mother was forty-two when she married — older than my father, so no, I was the only one, but I never felt the lack. I used to see the big families at church, the parents harassed, the younger ones unruly, always scrabbling for position. But here, all was calmness, and I always had my parents’ full attention.
I was glad when Mr Godley came and we attended the services in the chapel, instead of going to the church.
Do you think—?” He stopped, reached for his spectacles, then forcibly willed his hand down again.
“Shall you like living here, do you think?”
“I shall like it very much,” she said at once, with the wide smile that he was coming to love. “Why wouldn’t I? A home of our own, and the view is wonderful from up here. What else is on this floor?”
“The attics, some rooms where the maids sleep, a few smaller bedrooms for when there are too many guests to fit in on the main bedroom floor below us. But our bedrooms are above the chapel, which is two storeys high. We can get out onto the roof from here, too, which is lovely in hot weather.”
They wandered back to the little kitchen with its open fire. “I can cook on this, if ever we want to eat up here,” Georgie said.
“My mother used to do that, too. Sunday was always just us. Breakfast up here, as usual, then church or chapel, then dinner and a cold supper later. Mother would read a sermon or a passage from the Bible after dinner, but otherwise we could read whatever we wanted. My father would read the London newspapers, my mother wrote to her sisters or her friends. She used to be a housekeeper at one of the big houses in Brinchester, but every Wednesday, which was her half day off, she would go to the circulating library in Brinchester. When my father met her there once, he made a point of going every Wednesday, too. Mind you, it took him two years to persuade her to marry him.”
“Quite a romance,” Georgie said. “He must miss her dreadfully.”
“He never talks about it,” Jamie said. “I suppose he is reticent, too.”
“Like father, like son,” she said lightly. “Is he pleased you’ve married? I haven’t seen him since we got back.”
“I only saw him briefly yesterday, but he was more interested in Joe Ingleton’s charts. He gets so excited when he has a new family tree to pore over.”
“Will he want to move in here with us? It was his old home, after all.”
“I doubt it. I mentioned that the duke had offered us this place, and he seemed unconcerned.”
“Then if I cook dinner here on Sundays, we could invite your father, if it wouldn’t remind him of all he has lost.”
“What a lovely idea,” he said, surprised. “I am sure he would be thrilled. We can dine with the duke the rest of the time, but what about breakfast? Here or downstairs?”
“I think we should breakfast up here for a while, at least. It won’t be long before I reach the stage of feeling queasy in the mornings, and we don’t want people to jump to conclusions.”
“Ah, very true. We cannot tell anyone of your condition for at least… what, two months?”
“Preferably three or four, although it might become obvious by then.”
“Obvious?”
She patted her stomach. “Babies have a habit of announcing their existence, whether one likes it or not, and interested females have a habit of watching brides closely for signs. We shall need to be very careful.”
***
Christmas came and went at Staineybank, with the usual customs observed and services attended.
Small groups of relations of the duke and duchess arrived to increase the festive atmosphere, despite the poor state of the roads.
There was a little flurry of invitations to or from the neighbours, and Lance was invited to everything, to be eyed speculatively by the unmarried daughters.
Their mamas bravely asked after Lady Patience, to receive a bland response.
‘She was very well as at the last letter I received from her,’ he would say, taking care to add that they hoped to marry in the spring.
But in private, he now wondered whether they would marry at all, for not a single word had he received from her since that one, brief missive.
And what sort of wife would she make if she could not even write to her intended husband?
For himself, he had settled into a determined routine of writing once a week, relating all that he had done, and finishing with the words, ‘I trust you are well. Regards, Lance.’
He could not — would not — write again in more affectionate terms until he received some indication that such feelings were reciprocated.
He no longer begged her to write back, for there seemed little point in it.
Apart from altering the direction from Holtwell Abbey to Pentavon Castle, for she must surely have gone home by now, he made no other change.
He was not angry, merely curious as to whether she wished to marry him or not, and if she had changed her mind, what had happened to bring about the transformation.
He had begun work on painting the four Merrington sisters, seated side by side on a sofa, just as in Payne’s sketch of them which hung in the music room.
He had spent some time sketching them, watching the way they chattered together, individually yet as a group at the same time.
Payne’s sketch captured their closeness perfectly.
One day, he went to where Payne was at work in his study, and laid out all the architect’s sketches of the sisters, the preliminary efforts as well as the final version, alongside his own productions.
“What do you think?” Lance said to Payne. “Have I captured them, do you think?”
“If you view them as one being, a single creature with four heads and four bodies, but a single mind, you cannot go far wrong,” Payne said, amused. “This one… this captures something of it.”
“But I cannot see them as one creature,” Lance said. “To sketch them, in pencil or charcoal… yes, I can in some sense capture them all at once, as you have done so successfully. But to paint them… that is a different matter.”
“I cannot help you there,” Payne said, pulling a wry face. “I have never attempted oils or watercolours or pastels.”
“Hmm. It is a challenge,” Lance said. “Should you mind if I try to reproduce your sketch?”
“You mean, a painting that follows the same arrangement?”
“If I can. You have captured them so well… their heads together, the liveliness in their expressions, the way their hands move. One likes to capture a subject’s true nature, and your final sketch achieves it perfectly.
I should love to do as well in my own efforts, but I can only paint them separately, so it will be difficult. ”
“Having seen how well you captured Mrs Richard Merrington, I have no doubt that you will be successful,” Payne said.
Lance could not be so sure. He had only once before tried to paint a double portrait, and it had not gone well, but then it was a mother and her mischievous young son, and children never made good subjects.
Not these pampered sons and daughters of the aristocracy, anyway, who did just as they pleased and were kept far distant from the realities of life.