Chapter Five
“Does your house have ghosts?” Sophy asked after the third turning, when the silence had gone on long enough to make a child brave.
“Several,” Elias said mildly, as though it were a point of household pride. “But they are exceedingly lazy and seldom come downstairs.”
Sophy laughed, a real laugh, startled out of her, and the sound loosened something in the close air of the carriage. Victoria did not join her, but the corner of the day turned, as weather turns, and she allowed it.
“What do the ghosts do if they will not come downstairs?”
“They complain, mostly. There is a great deal to complain of in an old house. Draughts. Damp. The declining quality of modern hauntings, which they consider a national disgrace. One of them was a bishop in life and remains disappointed in every one of us, but he keeps to the east attic, where the disappointment carries less far.”
“Ruth is not afraid of bishops.”
“Ruth has plainly led a fuller life than the rest of us. She may tell him so herself, should she care to. He receives very few callers, and I fear the solitude has soured his temper.”
“Does he rattle chains?”
“He attempted it once, some years ago, and pulled a muscle. He has done nothing but sulk over the matter since. I should not mention it if you meet him upon the stairs. He is sensitive on the point.”
“I shall not meet him upon the stairs. I shall stay close to Mama.”
“That is precisely what I should do in your place. Mothers frighten away a great many more ghosts than bishops ever managed. It is well known below stairs. The ghosts hold mothers in the deepest respect and give them a very wide berth.”
“May I bring Ruth into every room? Even the ones with ghosts in them?”
“Ruth may go wherever she pleases. She has the freedom of the house, having survived a gutter, which is more than my aunt can claim, and my aunt visits constantly.”
“You have an aunt?”
“I have. She is not a ghost, though she has cultivated something of the manner, and she will adore you on sight. It will be very trying for the rest of us.”
Sophy settled back to consider the arrangement, satisfied. Victoria watched her daughter forget, for whole minutes together, to be afraid. The Earl was doing it deliberately, she understood, and doing it well, while taking considerable care to appear not to be doing anything at all.
“You are good at this,” Victoria said quietly, before she had quite decided to speak.
“At talking of ghosts? I have had no practice. I am improvising, and rather enjoying it, which is very likely a fault.”
“At speaking to her as though she were a person.”
“She is a person. A short one, with decided views on bishops, but a person nevertheless. I have never understood the other way of managing it. One would not talk nonsense to a magistrate. I see no reason to begin with children.”
“Most people talk nonsense to children precisely because they are small.”
“Most people are wrong about a great many things. Children are merely the first, being the least able to argue and the least often believed when they do.”
“Are there real flowers, though?” Sophy asked. “Not only ghosts? There were primroses beneath my window at the old house. I could see them from my bed when I woke.”
“I confess I have never once looked at what grows beneath my own windows,” Elias said. “But a house may be made to grow primroses, if it is asked firmly enough. What colour were they?”
“The palest yellow. Like butter left out on a warm day.”
“Then we shall require the palest yellow, like butter left out. I shall make a note of it, so that I do not disgrace myself with the wrong shade and have you looking at me as your mother does.”
“How does Mama look at you?”
“As though I were a sum she had added twice and found two different answers to, and as though she suspects the fault lies in the arithmetic rather than in herself. It offends her because she is very good at sums.”
Sophy turned to inspect her mother’s face for evidence.
Victoria arranged it into a mask that offered none and filed the exchange away against the day it might be used against her, a habit nine years in the making that she could not yet know had come to a house where it might slowly become unnecessary.
“Your servants,” Victoria said. “What have you told them?”
“That my wife and her daughter are coming and are to be received exactly as though they had always belonged there.”
“That will make them curious.”
“They would have been curious in any event.”
“And if they resent me?”
“They will not be permitted to show it. Beyond that, I expect you will settle the matter yourself. I watched you carry yourself through a room determined to make you uncomfortable. My household should prove easier company.”
“You have a great deal of confidence in a woman you met on Tuesday.”
“I have a great deal of confidence in general. It is considerably cheaper than being right, and it wears much the same coat. By the time anyone troubles to distinguish between them, the thing is usually done.”
“And what am I to do in this house all day, with my own door and my own key?” Victoria asked. “I have been a wife who was needed and a wife who was ignored, and I cared for neither. I do not know how to be a wife who is simply left in peace.”
“You are to do precisely as you please, which I grant is the most alarming instruction a person may be given. Run the house or ignore it. Concern yourself with the tenants, the pianoforte, or the wallpaper in the yellow saloon, which I have disliked for years and lacked the resolve to remove.”
He looked at her.
“The one thing I ask is that you do not arrange your days around me. I am not worth arranging around, and you have arranged enough of your life around men already to last you.”
“That is a great deal of liberty to place in the hands of a stranger.”
“It was never mine to place there,” Elias said. “I am merely declining to mistake it for mine.”
The carriage struck a rut. The world tipped, and Victoria was thrown sideways against him before she could catch herself.
His hand closed around her elbow, steadied her, and released her the instant she had recovered her balance.
That was the whole of it. He made no attempt to draw her nearer beneath cover of the jolt, nor to let his hand linger where it might have lingered and been excused by the road.
He set her upright, returned his hands to his knees, and looked through the window as though nothing had passed between them.
Later, she would think it the most disarming thing a man had done to her in a decade.
Gerald had touched her constantly in company, a hand at her waist or wrist, each touch a little claim of ownership.
She had taught herself to stand still beneath it and to want nothing.
Elias had touched her once, by accident, to steady her, and withdrawn the moment the touch had served its purpose.
The restraint reached a place in her that possession never had.
“Forgive the road,” Elias said mildly, still looking through the glass. “It has been in that condition since the war, and no two parishes will agree whose fault it is. Thus it remains nobody’s fault and everybody’s misery.”
“You need not apologise for a rut, my lord.”
“I would rather apologise for the rut than for catching you. One of the two may require it, and I have not yet determined which.”
“The catching was not unwelcome,” Victoria said, surprising herself.
“Then I shall apologise for the rut, and we shall agree that was what I intended.”
“You are a strange man, Lord Harwood.”
“I am a plain one who has been called strange by people expecting considerably worse. I have merely decided not to be the thing you are braced for. It confuses everyone, myself included, but on the whole I prefer it to the alternative.”
Sophy looked from one adult to the other with the frank interest of a child who suspects grown people of saying two things at once and means to discover the trick of it. Neither enlightened her.
***
Harwood House stood behind a quiet square, tall and pale and considerably older than its neighbours, the sort of house that did not announce itself because it had never been required to.
The door opened before the carriage had fully stopped. A woman descended the steps who could only be the housekeeper, grey-haired, upright, and carrying a heavy ring of keys.
Victoria braced herself for the particular chill of a good servant confronted with a new mistress.
It did not come.
“My lady.” Mrs Whitlock curtsied, exact in form and warm beneath it. “Welcome to Harwood House. And welcome, Miss Sophy. Your rooms are prepared, and there is bread and warm milk waiting upstairs. His lordship thought the young lady might arrive tired and hungry.”
“His lordship said that,” Victoria said drily.
“His lordship left very careful instructions for your arrival, my lady.” Mrs Whitlock’s glance passed over Sophy with swift, practical kindness. “We are glad to have you both.”
“You are very kind.”
“We mean to be useful.” Mrs Whitlock stood aside. “Come in from the cold, if you please. Miss Sophy has had a long day.”
She led them upstairs herself, carrying a candle against the early darkness of the staircase.
“The young lady’s room is here,” she said, opening a door upon a small, bright chamber, “beside your own, my lady. There is a communicating door between them, so that Miss Sophy may come to you in the night without crossing the passage. His lordship was most particular about the arrangement.”
“Particular how?”
“He said Miss Sophy did not care to sleep far from her mother, and that I was not to put her in the old nursery in the east wing, whatever the custom of the house might be.” Mrs Whitlock moved towards the next door.
“I did point out that the east nursery has served the family for a hundred years. His lordship heard me, as he always does, and said the custom might remain in the east wing while the child slept beside her mother. That settled the matter.”
“And my own rooms?”
“Through here. His lordship’s apartments lie beyond, with a sitting room between them, so that you are near without being crowded.”
Mrs Whitlock placed a small key in Victoria’s palm.
“He was equally particular about this. The door is yours, my lady, and this is its only key. There is no copy upon my ring.”
“And if I lock it?” Victoria asked.
“Then it remains locked, and no one in this house will question it.”
Mrs Whitlock’s expression softened.
“His lordship said that a door a woman cannot lock is no door at all, and that his wife was not to depend upon courtesy where a key would serve better.”
Victoria closed her hand around the key. It was cold, small, and ordinary in her palm, yet it seemed to weigh considerably more than iron ought.
“Thank you, Mrs Whitlock,” she said, suddenly weary. “That will be all tonight.”
“Your lady’s maid, Pruett, arrived some hours ago with your trunks, my lady.
His lordship directed that your things should be sent on ahead, so that you would not come to an unsettled room.
” Mrs Whitlock paused at the doorway. “Ring if you require anything. The hour does not signify. Good night, my lady. Good night, Miss Sophy.”
Pruett was shaking out a gown when Victoria entered her own room. She kept her back turned as she spoke, which was her habit whenever she had something to say that she preferred not to have observed in the saying.
“They have arranged the rooms sensibly,” she said. “Miss Sophy beside you, the door between, and your own apartments far enough from his lordship’s to give you some peace.”
“So Mrs Whitlock has explained.”
“She also told me that the key to your door is the only one in the house.” Pruett laid the gown across the bed and smoothed it. “I have unpacked for you a great many times, my lady, and I have not often found privacy provided before it was requested.”
“It may be no more than good management.”
“It may,” Pruett agreed. “But good management is not the poorest quality to discover in a husband.”
“You are becoming remarkably favourable towards a gentleman you had not met this morning.”
“I remain cautious, my lady. I merely see no reason to overlook what has been done well.” She adjusted the fold of the gown.
“Your things were sent ahead, Miss Sophy’s supper was waiting, and no one has expected either of you to be grateful for the ordinary comforts of the house.
Those are modest matters, but they are not nothing. ”
“You sound almost reassured.”
“Almost,” Pruett said. “I should not advise more than that upon a first evening.”
“And what am I to do with almost?”
“Sleep, if you can. Observe him tomorrow. A gentleman may order a room properly for one night. It takes rather longer to discover whether he can conduct a household, and still longer to learn whether he can conduct himself.”
Victoria did not respond to that.
When Pruett had gone, she remained a while in the quiet of the room, turning the key once between her fingers. Elias Fernwood had anticipated more than she had expected and less than she yet knew how to trust. The distinction mattered.
On the other side of the wall, Sophy was close. For that alone, Victoria found herself less guarded than she had been when she entered the house.
She set the key beside the bed and left tomorrow to prove what tonight could not.