Chapter 19
“Nine seconds,” Colin said.
“I’m sorry?”
“You told me your mother would snatch the child out of my arms within nine seconds of the carriage stopping.”
“I did.”
“I intend to time it.”
Leonora, sitting opposite him with Katherine on her lap and the baby’s fist wound into her necklace, gave him a look of such pity that he was briefly concerned for himself.
“Colin, you will not get to nine.”
He got to four.
The carriage had not stopped moving. There was a shriek from somewhere near the front steps at a pitch he associated with injured horses, and by the time the step was dropped, three women were hurrying across the gravel at a speed that gently bred no lady would have permitted herself in public, and his wife was out the door and gone.
Leonora had put Katherine into his arms without so much as looking at what she was doing, said, “Hold her, she likes the noise,” and was gone down the step before he had the child properly settled.
Colin watched the rest from inside the carriage, which he understood to be cowardice and did not care.
She went to her sisters first. The youngest one hit her about the middle at a dead run and hung there. Her twin grabbed her by both hands and spun her. The two of them stood forehead to forehead, saying something rapid and private that made them both laugh.
And Colin, who had been told a dozen times in a fortnight by a dozen different people that his wife was a wallflower, sat in a carriage twenty feet away with her stepdaughter on his arm and watched her light up like a bonfire.
That’s who she is when she’s not being careful. That’s what she has been damping down at my table for four days.
Then her brothers came out. Then her father, in his shirtsleeves, roaring about the gravel. Then her mother.
Then somebody said the word baby, and the entire family turned around and charged at the carriage.
Colin climbed down with his daughter and found himself, for the first time in his adult life, surrounded.
“Oh, the lamb!”
“Look at her hair, James. Look at it!”
“Is she always this serious? She’s terribly serious.”
“She has your eyes, Your Grace. Hasn’t she got your eyes?”
“Mama, let me, you’ve had her. Mama—”
Lady Huntington had snatched Katherine from him in four seconds flat and was carrying her back to the house.
And just like that, Colin found himself standing with his arms empty in the drive of a house full of shouting people.
His wife appeared at his elbow. “I warned you.”
“You said nine seconds.”
“I was being generous to my mother, who has never been generous to anybody about anything.” She was laughing at him. “Are you appalled?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Come and see the lawn.”
She took his hand. She did it without looking, without ceremony, the way a person took a hand they had taken a hundred times before, and she pulled him across the grass while talking about the sweep of the grounds and where the hoops went and what her father had done to the border in 1811.
Colin looked down at their joined hands and said nothing about it.
“You’ll join us, will you not?” said the humorous brother.
Colin looked at his wife. “I suppose I must,” he replied, with a scowl he had been building since the drive.
Leonora clapped. “Now, husband, I must confess that I am not very good at this, but I have great hopes that you might win for both of us.”
“Have you told him the rules?” Marina asked.
“I know how to play pall-mall.”
Evan snorted into his sleeve. “Not our pall-mall.”
The party arranged itself with a speed that suggested long practice.
The Marquess and Marchioness took two chairs at the top of the lawn with the baby between them, Augusta stationed herself beside them as the second judge, and a footman came out with a rack of mallets that had plainly been made for the family, since two of them had names carved into the handles.
“The hoops are for the look of the thing,” Marina explained, handing him one. “You may go through them if it pleases you.”
“Then what is the object?”
“The object,” Alexander said, “is everybody else’s ball.”
It took Colin four minutes to understand the game and another six to understand that he was going to lose it.
The rules, so far as he could reconstruct them, were the following:
You strike your own ball toward the hoops. If your ball touches another player’s ball, you take possession of that ball and carry it, and the winner is the player holding the most balls at the end.
Apparently, there was also no condition on how a ball might touch another ball. Alexander achieved it three times in the first ten minutes with a face of complete innocence. Marina achieved it by running. Augusta, who was not playing, achieved it once from the judges’ chairs and was warned.
“That is not pall-mall,” Colin protested.
“It is the Belmont version,” Evan said, taking his ball.
“It has no rules.”
“It has one rule, and you have just had it explained to you twice.”
Colin looked at the lawn. Then he looked at all of them, the shrieking, the Marchioness calling out scores she could not possibly have kept, the Marquess in his shirtsleeves arguing with his youngest daughter about a boundary, the baby being handed from lap to lap.
“Very well,” he said, and took his coat off.
He was, it turned out, extremely good at it.
He had spent fifteen years alone with a set of tools, so he could judge an angle across forty feet of uneven ground. By the third quarter of an hour, he had taken two balls off Alexander, one off Marina, and, in a stroke that elicited genuine outrage from three directions at once, Evan’s.
“That was a foul!”
“On what grounds?”
“On the grounds that you did it on purpose.”
“Doing it on purpose is the rule,” Colin pointed out. “You explained it to me. Twice.”
Alexander laughed so hard that he had to sit down on the grass.
The Marquess chose that moment to approach Colin with two glasses of something and the expression of a man who had been waiting all afternoon.
“You’ll take a glass.”
“I will.”
“Good.” The Marquess handed it over and drank half of his own. “Now, Your Grace, do you know what a fulling mill is?”
“I do.”
“Do you really, or do you only know the word?”
“I know that it is where the cloth is beaten and shrunk after weaving, that it needs a great deal of water and used to need a great deal of urine, and that you must have gone from one to twelve of them in about fifteen years.” Colin drank.
“I read your evidence to the committee three years ago. It was the only sensible thing in four hundred pages.”
The Marquess stared at him. “Nobody read that.”
“I read it.”
“Nobody in the Lords read it. I have sat with men who own half of Lancashire and have never in their lives seen a loom, and they will tell you across the mutton that the laboring man is idle.” His voice rose.
“Idle. I was fourteen. I did fourteen hours and thought myself fortunate, and a man whose grandfather stole an abbey tells me—”
“James, I’ve been meaning to tell you—”
The Marchioness had her husband by the elbow and away across the lawn before he could speak again.
Colin watched them go and understood that he had just seen a maneuver performed a thousand times.
“She does that about every eleven minutes,” Marina drawled at his shoulder. “You should hear him talk about the Corn Laws.”
“He wasn’t wrong.”
“He is never wrong. That is precisely the matter.” She swung her mallet up over her shoulder. “Are you going to tell my mother I ride astride?”
Colin studied her. “I have no idea what you mean.”
“Your carriage came up the drive at eleven this morning, and I was in the long meadow on Achilles with no saddle and my skirts round my knees. You looked straight at me out the window and then found something extremely interesting on the other side of the road.”
“I was looking at the hedge.”
“You were looking at the hedge,” Marina agreed gravely, and walked off to steal her brother’s ball.
I have somehow acquired an ally.
Somewhere in the middle of it, it stopped being an ordeal. His brothers-in-law stopped being careful with him. Evan told him, flatly and without apology, that the family had thought him a monster for six years. Colin said the family had been mostly correct.
Evan considered that, before saying that in this case he was a monster with a good eye, and asking whether he would consider coming again next Tuesday.
Alexander asked, with enormous delicacy, whether the story about the bishop was true.
Colin said that it was and that the man had been rude about the roses.
The whole while, his wife played dreadfully. She lost her first ball within two minutes and her second to her twin, and spent most of the game laughing too hard to strike anything at all.
Colin found that he had begun to position himself where he could see her without appearing to.
Then Marina sent the last ball into the lake.
It was an impressive stroke that elicited her siblings’ outrage. She maintained loudly that the lake had moved. The ball sat six feet out in flat brown water among the reeds, and the Belmont family stood along the bank and debated poles, rakes, dogs, and summoning a gardener.
Colin walked past them, down the bank, and into the lake. The shriek behind him came from the Marchioness. He waded into the cold water until it reached his thighs, grabbed the ball, and came back up the bank with his boots full of water and seven Belmonts staring at him in utter shock.
“Your ball,” he said to Marina.
“You’re drenched.”
“I’m aware.”
And then his wife was in front of him.
“You went into the lake.”
“It was in the lake.”
“You could have sent for a rake.”
“That would have taken twenty minutes, and your mother would have made everybody stop and have tea, and your sister would have claimed the lake moved for the rest of my life.”
Then he realized that he was standing in front of Leonora in a wet shirt, with his coat on the grass forty feet away, and every Belmont on that lawn watching him do it. Her mother had Katherine on her hip at the top of the slope and had stopped talking, which had not happened all afternoon.
“Hold out your hands.”
“Why?”
He put the wet ball in them. Then he put the two he had taken off Alexander on top of it. Then Marina’s. Then Evan’s, which elicited a noise behind him like a kettle boiling over.
“What are you doing?” Leonora asked.
“Conceding.”
“You cannot concede. You have won.”
“I had five, and you had none. If I finish this game, I will be obliged to come back next Tuesday and beat your brothers again, which will be tedious for everybody.” He closed her fingers around the lot of them. “You have five now. That is more than anybody. Congratulations, Duchess.”
There was silence for about a second and a half. Then Leonora dropped every one of them on the grass and threw both arms round his neck.
Colin went rigid.
She was soaking herself against his wet shirt and did not appear to notice. She was laughing into his collarbone and saying something about nine years, and behind her Alexander was applauding and Augusta was squealing and her mother was crying.
He had no idea where to put his hands.
Eventually, he put them on her back.
He stood there with water in his boots and his wife’s face in his neck, and thought, with the particular clarity that came just before the ground tilted: Oh, there it is.
“We should go,” he said into her hair. “You’re wet through. We’ll both catch our deaths.”
It took another forty minutes to get the baby back, which involved a great deal of protest from the Marchioness.
It took Augusta rather less time to go round the lawn on her hands and knees and collect five wet wooden balls out of the grass, and to present them to her sister at the carriage step with the air of a woman delivering the crown jewels, and to point out that Evan had tried to take one.
They were quiet in the carriage. Katherine slept the whole way with her fist round Leonora’s finger.
“Did you have a good time?” Leonora asked, somewhere past the tenth milestone.
“Yes.”
“Truthfully?”
“Yes.” Colin looked out the window at the hedgerows blurring past. “Thank you.”
She smiled and did not push it, which he was learning was a thing she did, and leaned her head back against the squabs.
It was only when they arrived at Thorton that he noticed she had not taken her hands out of her sleeves for the last six miles, and that her cheeks were far too bright, and that the baby, asleep on her shoulder, was breathing fast and hot against her neck.