Chapter 6
Six
The coach pulled away from Aunt Violet’s house at five in the morning.
London was still dark and the streets smelled of coal smoke.
Aurelia had not slept a minute the entire night.
She had lain in her childhood bed for the last time with its pink jacquard coverlet, stared at the roses on the ceiling and listened to the wind.
Her skin prickled all over and her eyes burned from lack of sleep.
She knew wives traditionally spent the first night of marriage with their husbands – but Evander had not wanted to bother her, he had said.
It was better if she got a good night’s sleep before the journey in the morning.
At four o'clock, she had given up and dressed herself in her traveling clothes, descending in the parlour until the Sandacre coach arrived.
Evander had been inside it already. She hadn't expected that.
She had imagined someone handing her over in some brief exchange on the pavement.
But instead the footman opened the door and there he was, in a visibly well-worn brown travelling coat, looking no different in the face than when she had seen him twelve hours before.
“You're early,” he said.
“Am I?”
He smiled. “I didn’t even have a chance to knock on the door.”
“I didn’t want to wake Violet. We said our goodbyes yesterday. She is a very light sleeper.”
“And so are you, by the looks of it. Good. I for one am always early.” He moved a leather satchel from the seat across from him to make room for her. “My mother used to call it the most useful defect of my character.”
Aurelia hid a smile as she sat. The footman closed the door, and the coach shook with the inevitable force of the gesture before pulling gently into a drive.
For the first hour, what she thought was the first hour with no real way to tell the time, she read.
Or rather, she held her book open at the same page and looked at the words without absorbing them, comprehensively aware of every small thing Evander did across from her.
The unhurried way he turned pages, always at the bottom of the right-hand page, with his thumb stroking the edge.
It was a wonder he did not cut himself. She also noticed the way he occasionally shifted his position, one arm resting on the window ledge, and the morning light moving across his face as London disappeared around them.
And the way he did not speak much but seemed completely at ease in the silence – unlike her.
Aurelia gulped quietly, pressing her lips together.
She was used to salons and recital rooms, being with gentlemen in the presence of other young ladies and their chaperons.
Any trip she had taken had been with Violet.
She had not been trained for this and did not know where to begin, now that it was just the two of them.
Behind the glass, the city transitioned slowly into the brown edges of the East London countryside.
There was suddenly more space between the buildings, less buildings between the flat, tilled fields, until eventually there was nothing but wide stretches of land and brush.
She had not been north of London in two years. The world looked different here.
“How large is Carrstone Manor?” she asked. The question had been sitting in her throat for an hour, and it felt like it was time to talk.
Evander looked up. She was still not accustomed to his looks and promptly returned to her– Well, she thought, she would not call it reading. Her observation of the page.
“The estate runs to a little over four thousand acres,” he said.
“Quite frankly the house is larger than it needs to be. My great-aunt, duchess in her time, had the east wing extended in 1764 to accommodate a collection she was amassing. She died before it was finished.” He paused.
“The wing was completed anyway. It seemed discourteous not to go through with it. Even my father had a hand in its completion, and he hated disturbing the property.”
Aurelia lowered her book slightly. “What sort of collection?”
He looked at her for a moment, and something in his expression changed. “Have patience. You will see.”
She waited for more than what he had given her. But he returned to his book. She looked back at her own page and found herself reading the same paragraph three times without progress.
“Were you close to her?” she tried, not realising the stupidity of her question before she asked it. “The duchess you mentioned.”
Evander arched a brow, and it tugged his mouth into a side-smile. “She died nearly forty years ago. I was not born yet.”
“Ah, yes. Of course. I meant… were you familiar with the idea of her? People are, sometimes, close to relations they never met.”
He considered this seriously, and Aurelia felt her cheeks grow hot. He was too kind. She was making a fool of herself.
“I know her through her collection and the occasional portrait. She sat for local artists often,” he said finally.
“And then I know of her through what the older tenants say about her, which is generally more reliable than family accounts.
She was, by all available evidence, stubborn and greedy.
But we are all a bit like that – another defect, as Mother would have said.
" A pause. "Did that answer your question?”
Aurelia looked back at him and nodded. He had already gone back to his book.
“What are you reading?” she asked.
He turned the cover toward her without looking up. It seemed to be a volume on travel from a writer she had never heard of, which she found simultaneously unpredictable and endearing.
“And is it good?”
“Good enough to keep a man occupied,” he said, sighing lightly. “Not good enough to make me want to travel to Kolkata though.”
She settled back against the bench. Outside the window, a village passed. There was a church town, the central green, geese who were unconcerned by the coach as it passed.
“You might try,” he said, without looking up, “reading the page you are on, unless you want to exchange books with me.”
“What?” she asked.
“I assumed that was why you were interrogating me.”
“I was not–” She cut herself off. He was grinning, playing with her.
“It was not an interrogation. I was reading my book, thank you. But I was bored of it. And even if that were not true, I read slowly anyway.” Aurelia titled her head to the side.
“There. That can be the first thing you learn about me now that we are married.”
“I assure you,” he said quietly, “that I have learned a lot about you already.”
She felt herself blush. “Oh?”
“Things I will not tell you while there is a risk of offending you and many hours of our journey left.” He tugged at his cravat.
“But in what concerns your book,” he turned a page, "the heroine survives.
I won't tell you how, but you will want to find out.
That should convince you to keep reading for a little while at least."
Aurelia stared at him. “You have read this novel?”
“Good Lord, no. But I know someone who…” He paused, his eyes darting briefly before returning to his book. “I knew someone who liked that type of literature, in which everything is not what he appears to be and at the same time painstakingly obvious.”
“Ah…” Aurelia replied, hands tightening around the novel.
She did not have to ask to know who this mysterious reader had been. This was a novel for women, and there was only one woman who shared a devilishly similar taste to Aurelia.
Aurelia kept the realisation to herself, abandoning the book altogether after another thirty minutes.
Her lack of sleep soon caught up with her.
When she opened her eyes again, it was noon and they were at a coaching inn.
There was another stop a few hours later, and by the time the light began to change – that low amber of a Norfolk afternoon that she would come to associate with home in time, flatter and wider than London light – her anxiety had mostly settled about runaway brides.
But not about her new husband.
He felt it before he saw it. It was a vain, romantic thing for him to think. But that was the truth. It was the only way Evander could have explained it, if anyone had asked.
The air and the smell of it. The thickness of the sunlight on the horizon. And something else altogether he had read about. A way people felt sometimes about places that made no sense. It happened in his chest every time the coach crossed into Norfolk, something blooming and changing.
He sat forward slightly, waking Aurelia from a daydream. “There,” he said almost breathlessly, and pointed through her window.
Aurelia followed the line of his finger. It was a row of pines on the edge of a ridge, nothing remarkable to her, he wagered. But the way they stood against the evening sky, that dark and jagged silhouette, meant everything to him.
He lowered his hand. Aurelia was still looking at the trees. Then she looked at him, and whatever was in her pale-from-sleep face gave him pause.
“We are getting closer,” he said, leaning back now.
“Yes,” she said, smiling sleepily. “I can tell.”
A quarter of an hour later, Carrstone Manor came into view.
It was the gatehouse first, then the long avenue of beeches his grandfather had planted, now intertwined.
Then there was the house at the end of it, appearing gradually, different shades of bricks side by side – a true red, maroon, a light beige.
Stones from different eras with different dukes as they made their own adjustments to the manor.
He watched Aurelia watch it, dangerously curious about what she thought. She was sitting correctly, like always, but her hands had gone still in her lap. His heart sank with the thought that Carrstone was too small, eclectic, or isolated for her. He hoped against hope that would not be the case.