Chapter 13 A Letter #2
He made a beginning, anyway, lightly sketching out the required positions of his subjects onto the canvas, and starting first with Charlotte.
Sometimes one of her sisters was with her as chaperon, and they chattered together happily, and sometimes Charlotte was alone and talked instead to Lance, and he could not decide which was worse.
If she talked to her sister, she was constantly moving, her expression changing by the moment, and if she talked to him, he could not concentrate on his work. It made progress very slow.
One day, Hester Merrington entered the library in great excitement, waving a letter.
“Look! Look, Mr Chamberlain!" She paused to catch her breath. “It has come at last, a letter from Lady Patience. Well, a lady’s hand and franked by Lord Pentavon, so it must be. I brought it straight away, for I knew you would want it at once.”
“Thank you, leave it on the table there.”
“Of course. I did not mean to disrupt your work. So exciting, is it not, Charlotte?” she added, with a little wave as she passed by, leaving the room again with swift steps, her breathing still laboured from rushing.
For perhaps five minutes, the room was quiet, the only sound the ticking of the long-case clock and the occasional shifting of coals on the fire.
Charlotte sat motionless, her eyes fixed on Lance, not even pretending to hold the pose he had set for her.
Fortunately, that was not a problem, for he had long ago given up trying to fix her ever-changing expression in paint, and was working on her hair, perfecting the shade of brown that would do equally well for all her sisters.
For five minutes, therefore, relishing the quietude, he got on very well.
Eventually, she could bear the suspense no more. “Are you not going to read it?”
“Later,” he said absently. Yes, that curl above her ear was coming out perfectly!
“Surely you want to know what she says. It does not look like more than one sheet — perhaps she has jilted you.”
He made no response to that.
“If I had received a letter from my betrothed, I should want to open it at once,” she said, as persistent as a bluebottle.
“But I am not you,” he said. “Whether she jilts me or not, the words will be the same whenever I break the seal.”
“I think you are afraid to read it,” she said, her face serious. “Or else you do not love her at all.”
That raised a sardonic smile from him. “It is not necessary to be violently in love with a lady to want to marry her.”
“But what other reason can there be?” she cried. “Oh, there must be some equivalence of rank and fortune and character, that is understood. But there must be a thousand young ladies you could have chosen, so why this one in particular?”
“Because she is the daughter of a marquess,” he shot back, amused to see the shock on her face.
“Oh, did you expect me to describe her beauty, her accomplishments, her charming manners? She has all of those, but that is not why I chose her. She is a peer’s daughter who will bring to the marriage twenty thousand pounds and a house in Gloucestershire.
The question you should be asking, Lottie, is why she chose me. ”
“Anyone could see that!” she snapped. “Every unattached female in Brinshire can see your attractions, but I shall not flatter you by reciting them.”
“Oh, I know them very well,” he said at once.
“I am the son of a baronet — a younger son, I grant you, but the blood line is impeccable — and I have an income of three thousand a year. I am a gentleman of unimpaired respectability, and what more does anyone need to know? For Patience, it is undoubtedly coming down in the world, but then she is a younger daughter, so—”
“Oh, you—!” Then she laughed. “How did you meet your daughter of a marquess, anyway? In London, I suppose.”
“No, no. We hardly move in the same circles. I was invited to Pentavon Castle to paint her this summer. I spent a full month there, long enough to know she was precisely what I had been looking for.”
“The daughter of a marquess,” she said, laughing.
“And all her other attributes, which are manifold. She was, I thought, sufficiently encouraging to persuade me to approach her father, who promptly sent me away with a flea in my ear. Then, two months ago, she came up to town with her parents, I was invited to dinner and generally made welcome. The marquess told me she had been pining for me. We were engaged within a fortnight.”
“Pining for you!” She sighed gustily. “How romantic! Yet now that she has caught you firmly in her net, she is most reluctant to put pen to paper. I could not be so careless of a man I loved.”
“Patience is not you,” he said, smiling a little.
There was no deterring a young lady determined to see romance everywhere.
Seeing that she was not prepared to let the matter drop, he laid down his palette and brush, and stepped across to the table where the letter lay.
Charlotte leaned forward expectantly. Breaking the seal, he unfolded the single sheet, scanned the contents quickly, then folded the page away.
“She does not jilt me. Now may I return to my work?”
“But what does she say? Is there nothing of interest — that you may make public, that is, for I am not asking about her expressions of love. Is she well? Is she missing you? Oh, you need not purse up your mouth like that, for I hardly expect you to answer me, but you cannot blame me for being curious.”
He laughed, for her enthusiasm was infectious. Recklessly, for he knew he was heading into dangerous waters, he said, “What would you expect her to say?”
“That she loves you, and is half demented to be kept from your side for so long. At least… that is what I should say in such a situation. But then…” She frowned and he could see her working it out. “She has not written to you for several weeks, so—”
“Eight weeks,” Lance said tersely.
“Eight? Goodness! Yet she does not jilt you. That is strange behaviour in a betrothed woman. It takes no more than half an hour to pen a few lines. ‘We are all well, the weather is appalling, we had dinner with the new parson who is obnoxious.’ That sort of thing. I write my duty letters on Sundays when there is nothing else to do apart from reading sermons. How hard can that be? Yet she has not.”
“Not even a duty letter,” Lance said musingly. Then, throwing caution entirely to the winds, he picked up the letter. “So tell me, as a woman, Lottie, what you make of that. No — wait! You should read the other one first, then tell me what you think.”
He lifted his smock to reach the waistcoat pocket where he kept Patience’s first letter, so prim and formal, and handed it to Charlotte, who read it silently. Then she read the second letter, then both of them again, more carefully.
“Well!” she said at last, her expression troubled. “These are strikingly different. The first, so dry and bland, nothing personal at all.”
“My valet says it is like a schoolroom letter.”
Her face creased into a smile. “You show letters from your betrothed to your valet? But then, he is a most unusual valet, is he not? But this second letter! ‘You have been every day in my thoughts…’ But not enough to write to you, apparently. Oh, she longs for your presence. Ooh! ‘My dearest darling.’ Now that is more like it! ‘Do not delay so much as a day. Take a post chaise and four and come at once to the loving arms of your Patience.’ Goodness! She sounds very heated! Why are you not rushing off to pack?”
He smiled. “Because I am in the middle of a portrait and if I abandon it now, I shall never be able to pick up the threads again and shall have to start over.”
“Hmm, what a pair you are! She sends you one brief letter — a schoolroom letter, as your valet so aptly has it — then nothing for eight weeks, and when the impassioned love letter arrives, you merely shrug. ‘I am in the middle of a portrait.’ But I think… you asked me what I think, so I shall tell you. I think that she does love you, but she does not yet realise that love is not something unchanging which may be taken up and set down whenever convenient, like a piece of embroidery, but must be carefully nurtured. She is only eighteen, after all.”
He considered that. “It is possible, I suppose. I have been more inclined to think that I was merely a passing fancy, and that the high ranking beaux she has been mingling with at Holtwell Abbey and Pentavon have reminded her how lowly I am.”
“Do not underestimate yourself, Lance Chamberlain! Any young lady, even the daughter of a marquess, would be happy to secure your affections.”
“Do you think so?” He recalled his proposal and the subdued manner in which it had been received and accepted. Only when he kissed her had she shown some spark of animation. What a strange girl Patience was!
Charlotte handed back the letters. “You need not fear I will tell the world what you have so honoured me by revealing today,” she said in serious tones.
“You have not asked me what you should do, but I am going to offer you my advice anyway. You should go to her, if only because the business is eating you up inside. At least if you are with her, you will know how you stand with her — the love of her life or a passing fancy or something in between. It may be that she has been so bedazzled by the social whirl of engagements that she has forgotten her real engagement. Now she realises guiltily that she has neglected you shamefully and is terrified she will lose you, so she writes in impassioned terms. She could not write so if she did not truly feel that way, Lance.”
He agreed with it, and let the subject drop.
There was no hope of picking up the thread of his painting, so he abandoned it for the day, and filled in the time before dinner with a lengthy bout with the rapiers with Denny.
But as he sat in the bath that afternoon, while Denny toiled to keep the water warm, he pondered the mystery of the Lady Patience Torbuck and her two letters, the one so calm, the other so agitated, and tried in vain to make sense of them.