Chapter 14
Colin heard them from the treehouse.
That was the remarkable part. He was thirty feet up in a beech at the far end of the garden, with a chisel in his hand, and at about eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning a sound drifted across the lawn that he had not heard at Thorton in his lifetime.
Women. Several of them. Laughing at once.
He put the chisel down.
A carriage. There has been a carriage on that drive, and I did not hear it because I have been up here since six, and my wife has not sent word because my wife does not send word to this tree.
He gave it a quarter of an hour with great determination, and got precisely nothing done. At the end, he climbed down the ladder.
The hall was worse than the lawn. There were four bonnets on the side table, along with a pair of very small gloves. Somewhere on the stairs above his head, a young voice was demanding to know whether there were secret passages, followed by Bess’s firm voice stating that there were not.
The green baize door swung, and Mrs. Pike came up out of the kitchen passage with a tray she had no business carrying.
“Your Grace,” she said.
“Give me that.”
“I will not.”
“Mrs. Pike.”
“They’re in the drawing room; they’ve been there for an hour. That is the young one on the stairs and she has been told twice. Her Grace did not send for you because she has got it into her head that you’d rather be left alone.” Mrs. Pike looked at him over the tray. “Which you would.”
“Which I would.”
“Well, there it is, then.” And she went past him and through the drawing room door with her shoulder.
Colin stood in his own hall, with his coat off and sawdust on his arms, and realized that he had two options.
He could go up the back stairs and change, come down in twenty minutes, and be introduced properly to four women who had ridden twenty-two miles to look at the man in the newspapers. Or he could go in.
He went in.
The furniture had been pushed back.
That was the first thing he noticed, and it did something to him he was not prepared for. Because the last time the furniture in that room had been pushed back, his mother had been alive to order it.
There were four women on the floor and on the sofa in various states of disarray, and there was a twelve-year-old lying full length on the hearthrug with her chin in her hands. In the middle of the carpet, holding court like a very small magistrate, was Katherine.
Every face turned toward him.
Colin had spent fifteen years watching what happened to faces when they turned toward him. He was used to the shock, the glances at his eyepatch, the enormous effort of not looking, the bright voices coming a second too late.
The bespectacled, red-haired lady gave him a look of pure undisguised interest, which was new. His wife’s twin nodded to him like a man at a horse fair. The twelve-year-old on the hearthrug stared at him with her entire soul and asked, “Are you my brother now?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Nora says you can’t play pall-mall.”
“Nora is correct. I am told there are no rules.”
“There are loads of rules,” Augusta gasped, scandalized. “There are seven rules.”
“Name one.”
“You may not use a mallet on a person.”
“That is a rule about a person, not a rule about pall-mall.”
“It became a rule about pall-mall,” Augusta said darkly, “in the summer I was eight.”
“I shall want them in writing.”
“I shall write them down for you,” she declared, entirely delighted, and went off to find paper as though a duke had asked her to draft a treaty.
Then the small dark head in the middle of the carpet turned round.
Colin stopped breathing. He knew this part.
He had done it every day for a fortnight, and he knew the sequence to the second: the stillness, the chin coming down, the eyes finding the black silk eyepatch and staying there, and then the cries.
He had learned to get through the whole of it without moving, because moving made it worse.
Katherine went still. Her chin came down. Then she extended both hands toward him and made a sound like an outraged duck.
Nobody in the room said anything at all.
“She wants you,” said the fair-haired lady, who he was certain was the Duchess of Huxley.
“She does not.”
“Duke, I have three nephews, and I know that noise. She wants you, and she is furious about the delay.”
Colin crossed the carpet, which took too long, bent down, and picked up the baby.
He did it badly. He always did it badly.
She came up crooked and hung there for a moment like a parcel.
But then she curled her fist into his collar, rearranged herself against his shoulder with a great deal of purpose, put her cheek down, and glared at the assembled company as though daring any one of them to make a comment.
Not one of them spoke. The four ladies found four separate things to look at at the same moment.
Colin stood in the middle of the room with his niece breathing on his neck and understood that he had just been handled by experts.
He looked up. His wife was standing by the window with her hands folded in front of her, not looking at the baby. Rather, she was looking at him, her expression unreadable.
Colin immediately looked down at the carpet.
“You’ll stay for dinner,” he said.
“Your Grace—”
“My cook trained in Bath under a Frenchman and does a turbot that your friend can vouch for, since she ate one at this table on Thursday.” He shifted the child to the other arm.
“She has also been sending up the same eleven dishes in rotation for six years, because nobody in this house has ever once told her to do anything else. My wife has discovered it. My wife has done something about it, and I am told there is to be another turbot on Thursday, and nobody has consulted me about any of it.”
There was a silence of a very particular quality.
“We would be delighted,” the Duchess of Huxley said.
Colin nodded, put Katherine back down on the carpet, and stepped out. He got as far as the corridor before he heard the noise start up again behind the door.
He stood there for a moment with his hand flat against the wall.
That is what this house sounds like with people in it. I had forgotten. I was nine when I last heard it, and I had entirely forgotten.
Leonora had gotten the tour out of the way before he came down, which was as well, because Emily asked twice as many questions as she could answer.
“How many bedchambers?”
“I don’t know.”
“Nora.”
“Twenty-two, Mrs. Pike says, and eleven of them have not been opened since the old Duke died. I have decided not to think about it until Michaelmas.”
Emily gasped as they stepped into the ballroom. She walked to the middle of four hundred square yards of shrouded floor and turned around twice with her head tipped back, looking up at the painted clouds.
“Nora. Nora. You could put four hundred people in here.”
“I could put four hundred people in here, and every one of them would come to look at my husband’s face and not speak to him. So, no, thank you.”
“That is exactly why you should do it. Not this Season.” Emily crossed back to her.
“One day. When you’re both ready, and it’s on your terms and not theirs.
You march four hundred of them through that door, and you stand beside him in the middle and force every one of them to be polite to his face.
By midnight, the story will have changed, because the ton will believe anything if it happens at a good enough party. ”
Leonora had considered that for a while.
“I shall write it down,” she said.
Sybella found the improper book behind the Herodotus within six minutes, which Leonora considered an outrage, and wrote down its title.
In the gallery, she strolled to the north wall with her hands behind her back, stopped in front of the covered canvas, looked at it, looked at the empty wall above it, and moved on without a word, which Leonora would think about for a fortnight.
“Well…” Emily began.
“Don’t.”
“I have not said anything.”
“You are about to say something.”
“I am about to say,” Emily said, sitting back down in the middle of a drawing room with its furniture shoved against the walls, and arranging her skirts with enormous care, “that a man who has not been in a room with four women in six years has just been rude about his own cook, invited us all to dinner, and told us at some length about turbot. And that he did it while looking at the carpet, which I found very interesting.”
“He looked at Nora,” Sybella piped up from the window seat, without raising her eyes from her notebook.
“He did. Once. When he thought nobody would catch him at it.”
“Twice,” Sybella said. “The second time was when Augusta asked if he was her brother.”
Leonora put her hands over her face.