Chapter 10
Louisa was vaguely aware of the thunderstorm that took place at some point in the night. She pulled the bedcover tighter around her person and let the percussion of the rain lull her into a deeper sleep.
She woke up to a sunlit morning. A few seconds of disorientation followed as she stared first at the unfamiliar canopy, and then around to the unfamiliar everything.
It was the morning after her wedding. And she had been most suitably ravished, if she did say so herself. She covered her mouth and giggled.
The man had such a nefarious influence on her. First he turned her into a nymphomaniac—that was the scientific term for a sexually insatiable young lady, wasn’t it?—now he turned her into a giggler.
She had never been a giggler. She had always been the girl who looked to the consequences, the one who minded the budget and gave admonishments when Cecilia or Julia overspent their allowance.
The boring one—according to Cecilia, at least—like the middle Bennet sister, except without the mediocre piano playing and the constant sermonizing.
She imagined saying to Cecilia, At least I am really good in bed, and giggled anew.
She stopped only when Betsey, her new maid, entered with a cup of hot cocoa on a tray.
Then the two of them giggled together at the sight of all the clothes strewn about the room.
Then yet again when she had to put on her dressing robe under the covers, so that she didn’t emerge from her bed stark naked.
As she lowered herself into a hot bath, the place between her legs stung rather potently for a moment. But then she was quite all right.
Ready for more.
She was going to need two of him, she thought to herself, which, of course, led to even more giggling.
When she was properly coiffed and gowned, a footman respectfully showed her the way to the breakfast room.
She envisioned her husband looking up over the top of his newspaper with a slight leer on his face.
She would, of course, leer right back at him.
And provided there was privacy, she would tell him her new theory that he would perhaps prove not quite man enough for her.
He was not there in the breakfast room.
The scoundrel. She would bet that it was intentional. It would be just like the man who’d waited an entire hour to come to her last night to tease her with his absence the next day.
But since this was her first day at Huntington, there was much to occupy her.
She spent her morning doing her best to stop her jaw from dropping repeatedly: The estate was beyond anything she had known in scope.
There were fifty indoor servants, forty gardeners, thirty men in the stables, and a gamekeeper’s staff that took care of the pheasant population—which was somewhere in the vicinity of forty-five hundred, she was told.
It was a good thing she did not have to lead this army of servants directly, her only experience with staff being regularly pleading with Sally, the Cantwell cookmaid, to not abandon them, and taking on some of Sally’s chores—behind Mrs. Cantwell’s back, of course—to lighten the maid’s load, since they couldn’t afford to pay her more.
Here the much more detailed taxonomy of duties and positions gave rise to a pyramid of authorities.
Situated at its very top, Louisa needed only to consult the housekeeper, Mrs. Pratt, the butler, Sturgess, and the chef, Monsieur Boulanger, all of whom seemed frightfully competent in their respective domains.
A tour of the domestic offices dazzled her; the belowstairs operation of a great country estate was a thing of military efficiency.
The kitchen in itself was bigger than the house she had lived in with her mother and sisters.
The laundry department consisted of a washhouse, a drying room, a mangling room, an ironing room, a folding room, and a laundry maids’ room arranged in a smart sequence so that dirty clothes went in at one end and clean clothes came out at the other.
Louisa blushed, realizing that her love-soiled sheets were about to make quite a public trip through the facilities.
Mrs. Pratt, after briskly showing off her storeroom, china closet, and stillroom, took Louisa to see the rest of the great mansion.
Louisa had been forewarned that Huntington was open to the public, but still it was rather startling to see tourists craning their necks round and round to take in all the architectural details and fine furnishings of the immaculately kept state apartments, whose ornately draped beds had once received crowned heads.
The room she had spent the night in, however, was shielded from curious eyes, being situated in the private family wing.
The long gallery was empty of tourists when she came to it. As she viewed the portraits of her husband’s ancestors, she remembered what he’d said to her the evening before, that sometimes the master of Huntington did look like the Hunchback of Notre Dame.
The thirteen Marquesses of Wrenworth who had preceded him—and a number of viscounts before the family was elevated to a marquessate—were indeed a plain bunch.
The way Mrs. Pratt explained it, though not in exactly so many words, was that the men of the line had more often than not been pragmatic in marriage, and preferred to choose wives with great fortunes over those with beautiful eyes.
“But you can see, my lady, that was not the case with his lordship’s father,” said Mrs. Pratt, stopping before the late marchioness’s portrait.
Louisa could see that indeed. Portraits, in her opinion, rarely did great beauties justice. Even so, one could see that her late mother-in-law must have been quite stunning. “My goodness. Did you ever see her in person, Mrs. Pratt?”
“No, ma’am. I came to Huntington in 1880 as an underhousekeeper, several years after her ladyship had passed away.”
Louisa was surprised—for some reason she thought Mrs. Pratt had spent most of her life in the family’s employ. Was not such more or less the case at the great houses, that the upper servants, with the sometime exception of the French cook, rose up the ranks?
“His lordship asked that I show you the library last, ma’am,” said Mrs. Pratt.
Because he knows it would be my favorite?
But that was not the reason. She had been wondering where exactly was the conservatory, the fabled location of her new telescope. As it turned out, the conservatory was accessed via the library.
And there, the wedding present for which her entire family had begged—very prettily, no doubt. It was worth any amount of begging, standing serenely at a corner of the conservatory and gleaming with perfect craftsmanship.
“This particular panel can be swiveled open,” said Mrs. Pratt, pointing at the sheet of glass directly before the telescope.
Louisa walked around the telescope, agog at its beauty and, at the same time, confused as to why he had chosen to have it placed in the conservatory.
The telescope had an equatorial mount, which allowed the instrument to remain fixed on any celestial object that had a diurnal motion, by driving one axis at a constant speed.
That lovely feature would be quite wasted at this particular location, given that once the telescope had turned a few degrees, it would be looking at the fronds of a palm tree.
Next to the telescope was a small bench. On the bench was an envelope marked, To Lady Wrenworth. She picked it up and turned it around—it had been sealed with her husband’s signet ring. Inside, a piece of stationery that bore the same crest.
I hope you like what you see. W.
He certainly possessed much prettier penmanship than hers. And more cryptic intentions. What could she see from here?
She looked at the note again. It was dated three days ago. So he had been here, personally supervising the setup of the telescope, knowing full well it would be completely underutilized.
And the angle the telescope had been set at was also too low. What could she see, so close to the horizon, except perhaps Venus and a rising moon?
She removed the covers from the eyepiece and the lens and looked—and gasped.
The telescope pointed straight at the Roman folly.
At first she thought there were two people on the belvedere, but they were only dress dummies, one covered in a large swath of pink fabric, the other in something that resembled a man’s evening jacket—the way she and Lord Wrenworth had been dressed when they first discussed being naked and up to no good upon that particular belvedere.
She barely restrained herself from laughing aloud. The man’s villainy was adorable.
She walked into the dining room hoping to thank him, only to learn that she would have to take luncheon by herself, too, as his lordship was out inspecting roofs that had been damaged by the storm during the night.
She sighed. Adorable villainy and responsible stewardship—could a woman ask for any more in a husband?
After luncheon, she made a dent in the mountain of thank-you notes that she must write, approved menus for the next week, then spent an enjoyable hour in the library, where she discovered an entire dossier of older issues of Astronomical Register: A Medium of Communication for Amateur Observers and All Others Interested in the Science of Astronomy.
A most pleasant start to married life, she must admit.
Which would only become pleasanter as day turned into night.
* * *
Felix stared at the billiard table.
In his mind his wife was stretched out on the green baize, naked. Take me, she would murmur. I have been waiting all day.
He struck the cue ball with great violence, scattering the fifteen red balls on the table.