Chapter Four
Lucas
I have spent four hours trying to build a version of last night in which I behaved decently, but there isn’t a single one.
I put my mouth on my sister's closest friend in my own library while the house slept above us.
She came apart under my tongue with her head against the glass and her legs shaking around me, and she made a sound I will be hearing until the day I die.
And then, rather than carrying her upstairs and making her mine, rather than saying any of the things stacked up behind my teeth, I got off my knees, told her she should go up to bed, and walked out.
I said it in the voice I use for tenants' meetings. You should go up. Then I left her sitting on the window seat with her nightdress bunched at her thighs and her panties stuffed in my pocket.
Twice now. The same room, the same woman, the same insatiable urge to consume her.
Her panties are in my trouser pocket, which are now slung over the back of my bedroom chair.
I have thought about those panties roughly every ninety seconds since half past midnight, which tells me most of what I need to know about the state of myself.
Whatever lives in me where restraint is supposed to live has gotten loose.
It doesn't want to be reasoned with. It wants to go upstairs, put my hand around the back of her neck, and finish what my mouth started. It doesn’t care at all that there are eleven bedrooms of relatives arriving between now and Saturday.
By twenty to six I've given up on sleep and gone down to the estate office, where I read the same page of the woodland report four times without taking any of it in at all.
The kitchen at seven is warm and smells of eggs and bacon.
Rochelle is at the long table with the lever arch file open, hair damp, a pen behind her ear and another in her hand. She hears me come in. I know she does, because her shoulders change.
“Good morning, Your Grace.”
Two words. I have been called that by prime ministers and by children at village fetes and it has never felt like that, like a door slamming shut.
“Rochelle.”
She turns a page. “The chair company opens at eight.
They have us down for a hundred and twenty, Cassia wants a hundred and sixty, and I've got the original email with the number on it.
They'll move faster for you than for me because of the name, so if you'd call them at eight, I'd be grateful.” Another page.
“The quartet had us confused with Halverton, which I've fixed. The florist is coming Friday at two, and she needs the north door propped while she empties her van and transfers the flowers to the house for overnight storage.”
“Rochelle.”
She sighs. “And your uncle's van is back in the courtyard.”
“Will you look at me?”
She does. She lifts her chin and looks at me with a face so pleasant and so professionally blank that I would rather she threw something straight at my head.
There's flour on her cuff from wherever she's already been this morning, and she's got a smudge of it under one eye where she's rubbed her face without thinking.
“I'm working,” she says. “I'm very good at working. It's the one thing I've got going for me this week.”
“About last night.”
“There's nothing to say about last night that's going to make the correct number of chairs turn up.” She caps the pen.
“You made your position clear. Twice, actually. I'd rather we didn't do the part where you explain it to me kindly. I don’t need your pity, but I would also be grateful if you left me out of whatever this weird game is that you’re into.”
Cassia arrives in the doorway before I can answer, in a coat over pajamas, keys in her hand, shouting that the fitting is at nine and Halvern is forty minutes away.
That if Rochelle doesn't come now, she will drive there alone and cry in a changing room like an animal.
Rochelle stands, closes the file, tucks it under her arm, and thanks Mrs. Ivers for the coffee by her first name.
No one ever calls Mrs. Ivers Gloria.
She doesn't say goodbye to me, just hands me a slip of paper and leaves. I stand in the dining room and listen to her fading voice as she reassures Cassia that everything is going to be fine.
***
My mother finds me standing there still wondering what the hell is happening a few minutes later.
“Ah, Lucas,” she says, reaching up onto her toes to drop a kiss on my cheek. “Good to see you up and about and helping with things.”
She lifts my hand and looks at the piece of paper with the chair details on it.
“Ah, yes. That Rochelle really knows how to light a fire under people.”
She has moved her operation to the drawing room as instructed and has spread the seating plan across the card table, where it looks like the planning of a small war. Aunt Honora is already down, watching the workmen as they begin to arrive for their day.
“The marquee is up,” she says to no one in particular. “Cassia’s friend wouldn’t let them leave yesterday until it was done.” There’s the smallest hint of respect in her voice, which surprises me.
“Delphine lands tomorrow at noon,” my mother says, ignoring Honora. “Sanderson can collect her. You'll take her in to dinner at the rehearsal, and you'll sit with her at the breakfast, because Cassia's put you next to Theo's godfather, who is deaf in one ear and mad on the subject of trains.”
“Trains?”
“Don't be difficult.” She moves a card. “You're thirty-two, Lucas.
Your father was married at twenty-eight and you were born the following spring, and I am not saying that to wound you, I'm saying it because there will be four hundred photographs taken in this house on Saturday and every one of them will be looked at for the next hundred years.”
“By whom?”
“By everybody.” She says it the way other people say by God. “The Corvain’s have known us since before the war. Delphine is intelligent, she has been raised to it, she wouldn't have to be taught a single thing. You could do the whole business in eighteen months without one difficult conversation.”
“You make it sound like a boiler replacement. Like an arrangement.” I push the card with my name out of alignment while I search for Rochelle’s.
“A great many marriages are, darling, and they last considerably longer than the other sort.” She looks up at me then, and there is something under the enamel that I don't often get to see.
“I'm not asking you to be unhappy. I'm asking you to be sensible. I’m asking you to consider this because it doesn’t seem like you have an alternative option lined up.”
Honora speaks to the window. “Peregrine's dog has been waddling around the grounds.”
“Thank you, Honora,” my mother says.
I get as far as the hall before Gilbert calls.
He wants to talk about the settlement, and the trust, and the way the Fernwicke arrangement was drafted in 1”11 by men who assumed that any duke would obligingly produce a son by thirty.
He uses the word continuity five times. He uses the word contingency twice.
“There's no urgency, Your Grace,” Gilbert says, meaning the opposite.
I'm still holding the phone when Elsie comes down the east stairs with a small suitcase.
“What is that?” I ask.
Elsie goes pink to the ears. “Miss Gallacher’s suitcase, Your Grace. The Dowager Duchess said the blue room's wanted for Miss Corvain, so I'm to put Miss Gallacher in the yellow room for now.”
Something in my chest tightens and sends the message up my neck and into my jaw.
“Take it back upstairs, please. Unpack it exactly as she left it.
The blue room is Miss Gallacher's, this week and every week she is in this house.” Elsie hesitates, caught between two authorities, and I take pity on her.
“Tell my mother I gave the instruction. Tell her I was extremely rude about it.”
Elsie goes back up the stairs so fast the suitcase bangs the banister twice.
***
They come back at four. I'm on the south lawn with Barry, who is a good man with an unshakeable belief that every surface in the country has the potential to be a car park.
I hear the car and then Cassia's laugh and Rochelle's, low and warm, and the tightness in my chest I’ve been carrying all day finally loosens.
I don't see her again until after dinner, and only because I go looking, which I am no longer pretending I'm not doing.
She isn't in the morning room or the kitchen.
I find her, eventually, in the old laundry off the back passage, sitting cross-legged on the tiles in the dark with the door propped open and a lamp brought in from somewhere.
She's made a bed out of two folded blankets and an ancient eiderdown, put down a bowl of water, and Nester is stretched along her thigh with her enormous gray head in Rochelle's lap and her ribs going up and down like a bellows.
Rochelle is stroking one long ear between her thumb and finger, over and over, and murmuring something to the dog that I can't hear.
Everyone in this house today has wanted something from me.
My mother wants a photograph. Gilbert wants continuity.
Cassia wants the perfect wedding. And here is this woman, who has every reason to be upstairs with the door shut against me, sitting on a cold floor at nine at night looking after somebody else's dog because nobody else thought to.
She looks up. The professional face starts to arrange itself. I get down on the tiles before it can finish, my back against the whitewashed wall, close enough that our shoulders are nearly touching.
“You'll ruin your suit,” she says.
“I have others.” Nester's tail moves twice against the blanket. “Rochelle. I'm going to say the thing you told me not to say this morning, and then you can throw me out.”
She doesn't tell me to stop.
“I'm not sorry it happened,” I say. “I'm sorry I left.”