Chapter Five
“The east wing study is mine,” he said. “I would ask that you not go into it.”
He said it as he said most things, without preamble or apology and without the smallest expectation that it would want explaining.
He had walked her up to her chambers himself, which she suspected was no habit of his, and Mrs Fenn, a few discreet paces behind, had marked the fact without a word and put it away for her own use.
“Of course,” Cecilia said. “Every house ought to have one door that stays shut. I shall take that and trouble myself no further about it.”
His eyes came to her a moment, as though that were not quite the answer he had braced for. “The rest of the house is yours, to manage however you see fit. Mrs Fenn will show you whatever you require.”
“Thank you. I expect she and I shall manage one another very well.”
He inclined his head, but for a moment, he stayed where he was.
“The children,” he said, to the middle distance rather than to her.
“When they come. I do not know what they might need. I have made a list, which Phelps assures me is not at all the same thing as knowing, and I am inclined to believe him.”
“It is not the same thing,” she agreed. “But it is a great deal more than most men trouble to begin with, and the rest of it can be learned. I have found that children forgive almost anything, except being misunderstood on purpose.”
He turned that over as though she had handed him something he meant to keep. “Then I shall endeavour not to misunderstand them on purpose.”
“That will do for a beginning, Your Grace. A surprising number of people never manage even so much.”
He inclined his head a second time, the matter discharged, and continued walking, his tread even and unhurried down the long corridor until the house had folded its silence back over the last of the sound of him.
Her chambers were considerable. The sitting room alone outsized the whole of her quarters at Lady Foskett’s, corridor and all, and the fire had been not merely lit but properly established, warm as the attic had never once been, made ready for a person rather than handed down to one.
She crossed to the windows and drew back the heavy gold curtains, both of them, then the third in the bedroom beyond, and stood in what remained of the grey evening light, which was thin, cold and emphatically light.
She would open every curtain in the house before she was done.
She had decided as much in the carriage and saw no reason now to revise it.
Mrs Fenn was waiting at the foot of the stairs, a short, neat woman of perhaps sixty whose composure had long since become simply her face.
She had kept Aldenmere, Vane had said in the carriage, through the late duke’s time and the whole of the present duke’s long retreat from the world, a great deal of silence to have managed with dignity, and she had plainly come through it undented.
“I will show you the house, Your Grace, if it suits you,” she said. “It is a great deal of house. You are to stop me the moment you have had your fill of it.”
“I have a long appetite for houses, Mrs Fenn. Show me the whole of it, and tell me the truth of each room as we go. I find the truth saves a great deal of time later on.”
Something almost like approval crossed the older woman’s face. “The truth, then. This way.”
The morning room, the breakfast room, the great dining room with its table laid for thirty and its chairs ranged at mathematical intervals.
“His Grace dines here?” Cecilia asked, looking down the long, polished length of it.
“His Grace dines wherever the tray finds him, which is most often the study. The table has not been filled in my time, saving once or twice that Lord Vane has stopped a night.” Mrs Fenn nudged a chair by half an inch, which it had not wanted.
“It is kept ready regardless. One keeps things ready. It is a habit that outlives the use a person had for it.”
“And when did the use go out of it?”
The housekeeper weighed her a moment, measuring how much truth had in fact been asked for.
“Ten years, near enough. The old duke died, the young one came into it all, and the house has been clean and quiet from that day to this. Clean is within my gift. Quiet was none of my doing, and none of his choosing either, whatever he has told himself since.”
“You are fond of him.”
“I knew him as a boy with a book too large for his lap and a face that had not yet been taught to expect the worst of a room. I will say no more than that, it not being my place to say it.” She opened the next door.
“The drawing rooms. Three of them, each one grander than the last, had the least earthly use for.”
“The old duke entertained, then.”
“The old duke entertained the whole of the county and the better half of London besides, and was not an easy man to any of them, his own sons least of all.” Mrs Fenn’s voice did not change, which was a statement in itself.
“I have served three dukes, Your Grace. I will say only that the present one is the best of the three, and the hardest by far on himself, and leave you to puzzle out how those two things come to sit together in the same man.”
“They sit together a good deal oftener than people like to admit.”
“Yes, they do,” said Mrs Fenn, and looked at her with something that had moved past approval into something warmer. “I rather thought they might, with you.”
“And this?” Cecilia had stopped at a pair of tall doors at the end of the east corridor. “I begin to suspect you of saving the best for the last.”
“The library. His Grace is accustomed to spending his evenings there. The mornings are quiet.” She said it plainly, neither warning Cecilia off nor inviting her in, and left the whole of the navigation to her, which Cecilia noted and liked. “Shall I open it?”
“If you please.”
The library was the first room in the house to stop her where she stood.
Two storeys of it, a wrought-iron stair winding to the upper gallery, every wall shelved to the ceiling, and over all of it the smell of old paper, leather and the lingering warmth a serious reader leaves behind, more alive in his absence than most people contrived to be in a room.
She ran her fingers along the spines, worn soft with handling, and among the other books she found a shelf of botanical plates with no business being half so beautiful, and three shelves of travel writing gone limp at the joints.
She stopped in the middle of it and breathed the books in, and something in her that had stood braced for eight years quietly let go.
She was, of all unlikely things, at home, as she was at home inside a language she loved or a piece of music known by heart, where for a moment she might simply be what she was and beg no one’s leave for it.
“I thought that you might be impressed,” Mrs Fenn said from the door, and there was something nearly satisfied in it.
“There is one more you will want to see tonight,” she added, “if you have the legs for the stairs. The nursery floor. His Grace gave the order a week since to have it opened and aired, and I have had the maids beating carpets and turning mattresses ever since, though not one of us has been told above half of what is coming to fill it.”
“Three girls,” Cecilia said, following her up. “The eldest twelve, the middle eight, the youngest four. They arrive on Thursday next.”
“Thursday, and no time at all to spare.” Mrs Fenn took it without a flicker, though her hand stilled a moment on the rail. “Children. On these stairs. I had nearly made up my mind I should go to my grave without hearing one of them again.”
“You sound almost as though the notion pleases you.”
“It terrifies me, Your Grace, which, at my age, comes to very nearly the same thing, and is a good deal harder to come by.”
The nursery floor was high, cold and smelled of fresh soap left over from long disuse. Cecilia went through the rooms while Mrs Fenn held the candle and found she had her arrangements made before they reached the end of the passage.
“The eldest will want a room to herself, and a lock on the door she may turn or leave alone as she chooses.
The middle one will need a room that is away from the stairs, where the noise of the house comes up worse at night, and the small one will go wherever the other two go and complain only if she is left out of anything, which she will let you know about directly and at length.”
Mrs Fenn had taken it all down with the grim approval of a woman finding her new mistress less ornamental than feared, and had gone off to see the rooms made ready.
Cecilia had stood a while at the nursery window, looking out at the black shapes of the grounds and thinking about three girls she had not yet met and a man pacing somewhere below her.
She heard him still when she had gone up to her own room, the slow tread of him passing and returning along the floor beneath, a man walking off something he could not set down.
She lay awake a long while listening to it, and chose not to look too closely at why she should mind the sound so much, or why, when it finally stopped, she found she missed it.