Chapter 5
The morning sun crept over the eastern hills of Ashcombe, spilling golden light across the estate's long windows. Birds chirped politely outside Lady Amelia's chamber as maids moved briskly through the hall, lighting fires, shaking out linens, and whispering about the arrival of important guests.
Amelia sat before her dressing mirror, unmoving, as her lady's maid fussed with the final ribbon in her hair.
"Perfect, milady," the maid said. "You look radiant."
Amelia gave a tight smile. "Radiance is expected, I suppose."
She smoothed her pale lilac gown, modest but elegant, and stared at her own reflection. Today, another suitor would come. Another stranger who thought he was owed a bride because of the crest on his calling card.
The knock came at the same moment as the butler's voice from the corridor. "Earl Somerset and his son have arrived, milady."
"Of course they have," Amelia murmured, rising.
Downstairs, Baron Whitfield greeted the visitors with warm civility.
"Earl Somerset. Welcome."
"Baron Whitfield. The pleasure is mine." The Earl was a broad, florid man with a good coat and a better tailor. "May I present my son, Edward."
The young man bowed. He was dark, well made, half a head taller than his father, with an ease about him that money buys in the third generation rather than the first.
"It is an honor, my lord."
When Amelia entered the room, Edward rose at once, and his gaze settled on her with open appreciation.
"Lady Amelia. Your father did not tell me his daughter would put the morning to shame."
"You are early, Mr. Somerset," she said. "By a quarter of an hour, I am told."
"My father holds that a man who arrives at the appointed time has misjudged the roads." A flicker of a smile. "I have never once succeeded in arguing him out of it."
"You have tried?"
"Every journey of my adult life. I have begun to suspect he enjoys the waiting."
Amelia found, to her inconvenience, that she had almost laughed. He was not what she had braced herself for. He did not look at her the way the others had, as though totting up a column of figures. He looked at her as though she had recently said something worth hearing.
Well, she thought. Perhaps this one is different.
They were ushered into the breakfast room, where tea was poured and dishes brought out with formality, and for the better part of an hour Edward Somerset was very good indeed.
He asked after the estate and listened to the answers.
When the Earl embarked upon a long story about a horse, Edward waited for the end of it and then said something dry that made even the Baron laugh aloud.
He did not talk about himself, which Amelia noticed particularly, because ten of the eleven before him had.
"My father tells me you keep the gardens here," he said. "In part."
Amelia set down her cup with care. "In part."
"What do you grow?"
"Chamomile. Comfrey. Feverfew, meadowsweet. Yarrow, when I can persuade it to survive the feverfew." She watched his face as she said it, as she had watched eleven other faces. "I crush the leaves and make salves. Infusions, mostly."
"A pleasant hobby."
"It is not a hobby. I give them away. There is no doctor in this town, and when the winter is hard, the people here have what I can grow and nothing else."
"Then that is remarkable." He turned to her father. "Sir, you did not tell me your daughter was a chemist."
"She is not a chemist," said the Baron.
"Not formally, I imagine," said Edward, and the joke fell on the word rather than on her, and Amelia felt something in her chest give half an inch. She refilled her own cup and was surprised to find that she was not counting the minutes.
It came apart slowly, in the way these things do.
The first was so small she nearly let it pass.
A maid came round with the toast, and Edward, mid-sentence, put two fingers on the girl's wrist to halt her and moved the rack six inches down the cloth, and went on speaking without a break.
He was not rough. He was not unkind. He simply did not register that a person had been standing there.
The second came from his father.
"You will want to see the London house," the Earl said to Amelia, in the tone of a man conferring a favor.
"Edward has taken the whole of the first floor.
Very fine rooms. You will like the drawing room, I think — it faces the park, and my wife has the choosing of the flowers in it every week, which keeps her occupied. "
"That is kind."
"It is sensible." The Earl said. "A woman wants an occupation. Give her one small thing to have charge of and she is content as a cat. Fail to, and she will find one for herself, and then—" He made a short, amused noise. "Well. Then a man has a difficulty on his hands."
Amelia looked at Edward. She was quite certain, for a second and a half, that he was about to be embarrassed by his father.
He laughed instead. It was a warm laugh, with nothing sneering in it, and that was the part she remembered afterward.
"He states it badly," Edward said, "but he is not altogether mistaken. Idleness is the whole trouble with the way girls are brought up. Nobody gives them anything to do." He set his cup on the table. "A clever woman with an occupation is worth ten of the other sort. I have always said so."
"An occupation," Amelia repeated.
"Certainly. The household, principally — which is not a small thing, and I would not insult you by pretending it is. The correspondence. The tenants' charities, which want organizing and never get it."
"And the salves?"
"You would have no need to make them at Somerset.
" He said it kindly. "We have doctors out from London twice in the week, and they are quite excellent.
The tenants are far better served by men who have sat examinations than by—" He caught himself, and the correction was graceful.
"Than by anyone doing it out of kindness, however capable. "
"I see."
"And in any case." He sat back, comfortable, having said nothing he considered contentious. "It is not a thing that could go on. Not once there are children in the house."
"Because I should be occupied."
"Because you would not have five spare hours in a week.
And because a woman with her hands in the dirt at four in the afternoon is not where she is wanted.
" He smiled, and it was not a cruel smile, and that was the whole of the horror of it.
"You would not miss it as much as you imagine. Nobody ever does."
"My daughter has a great deal of sense," the Baron said, "when a thing is put to her reasonably."
"She has more than sense, sir." Edward turned his cup a quarter turn. "I have sat at a good many tables this season and not once been asked a question worth answering. I was asked one before the tea had gone round."
The Baron looked frankly pleased. Amelia watched him look pleased and said nothing at all.
A maid came in with the fresh pot, and Edward held up two fingers without looking at her, and she stopped where she was and waited to be released.
"Not that one. The silver." He went on speaking to the Baron. "And these eggs have gone cold. Have the cook send another dish."
The girl went out.
"Do you always speak to them so?" Amelia asked.
"Speak to whom?"
"The people who are doing honest work. She may not be a countess but she does not need a title to be respected."
Edward looked genuinely puzzled, as though she had asked him why he used a fork.
"That is what they are for," he said. "I am not unkind to them. I do not raise my voice. But a house does not run on affection, Lady Amelia, it runs on everyone knowing his place in it, and it is no kindness to a servant to leave her guessing what hers is."
"It is the whole of it," his father said comfortably.
"The whole of it, and nobody has the nerve to say it any longer.
There is an order to things and it did not arrive by accident — it was arrived at, over a great many generations, by men better than the ones complaining about it now.
We are bred to lead. They are bred to serve.
That is not cruelty, my dear, that is arrangement, and every one of them would tell you the same if you asked, because it is a good deal easier to be told what to do than to decide it. "
"Some of them would," Edward agreed. "Not all. But the ones who would not are precisely the ones who make trouble in a village, and there is a reason for that too."
"There is."
"My father puts it more bluntly than I would in company.
" Edward smiled at her, easy and untroubled.
"But he is not wrong, and I would rather you had it from me now than discovered it about me later.
Blood is not a superstition. It is the reason there is a Somerset at all, and the reason there is a Whitfield, and the reason your father has nine hundred people on his land who eat because he makes good decisions and they do not have to. "
"Well said," the Baron murmured.
"And a wife of mine will have charge of a household of forty," Edward went on.
"Which is a considerable thing, and I meant it when I said I would not insult you by pretending otherwise.
But she cannot have charge of forty people while she is on her knees among them with a jar in her hand.
They will not know where to look." He spread his hands.
"That is not me being hard on you. That is the plain mechanics of it. "
"And there is the talk besides," said the Earl.
"A lady who goes about with salves is charming in a girl of twenty.
It is not charming at thirty and it is not charming in a countess.
There is a difference between a lady with an interest and a lady who fancies herself a physician, and the second gets laughed at, and the laughter comes back on her husband.
" He reached for the marmalade. "That is the whole of it. That is why I say what I say."
Nobody spoke for a moment.
"I understand you both perfectly," Amelia said.