Chapter 8
Eight
The bath had been drawn by the time she returned from the ride, steaming faintly in the copper tub in her dressing room.
Two maids waited for her and had arranged everything accordingly.
Aurelia was beginning to understand how Evander ran Carrstone.
The rules of the house went unspoken, and everything…
fit nicely… in some strange middle space between formality and comfort.
She lowered herself into the water and felt the day go out of her shoulders. Her hands came around the sides of the tub as she sank beneath the bathwater and held her breath.
Later, working a lather into her hair, the younger maid Annie began asking about her day.
“Was it a good ride, Your Grace? They said you rode down to Carrstone village. The people there must have been very excited to see you. They were putting flowers up when they heard His Grace was returning sooner than planned. Did you see them?”
Annie was at most seventeen, and had a pleasant and broad face. She moved to let the other maid Liz rinse Aurelia’s hair, while she folded towels by the washbasin and Aurelia considered her answer.
“We rode mainly on the outskirts. His Grace wanted to first visit the tenants closest to the manor after winter. We went to that big farm, Booton’s farm, which he said didn’t even really belong to him,” Aurelia explained, sighing as the warm water rushed down her back.
“What I have seen of the countryside already has been extraordinary.”
“Is it very different from London?” Annie asked, and when she did, her Norfolk accent became more apparent.
“Oh, yes,” Aurelia replied, bringing her knees up to her chest. “Very different.”
“Well, His Grace knows every inch of it,” Annie said. “He rides out most mornings with Mr. Howes before breakfast, and sometimes Mr. Poole the estate manager. Even in January, if you can believe it. And the grounds are frozen solid at that time of the years. The rest of us can’t believe it.”
“He loves it here,” Aurelia surmised.
The two maids started chatting about business in the village, the upcoming May fair and their excitement about having a day off, and the bakehouse that sold custard tarts Aurelia had to order for breakfast. Aurelia’s thoughts were elsewhere, while Liz performed a rosewater rinse.
She thought about how restorative the pale sky and muddy boots were, about how Evander had known the owner of every field they passed through, more than just a landlord cataloguing his assets, but like something naming the rooms of a childhood home.
He spoke about ditches and rotations, about their main crops – which was, he had said, an unusual thing to tell a woman on their first morning in the country, but that he wanted her to know.
She had listened to all of it without even trying. He spoke about the estate with the same passion she practiced music. She had never known someone could become so attached to a piece of land like it was its own person.
And she found she liked this about him very much.
A while later, she came down with her hair still damp. Her aunt would have become apoplectic if she had done something like that at their home. But things moved differently at Carrstone, and the maids had not batted an eye.
Really, Aurelia had been looking for the library, which Mrs. Foulger had described as, “at the end of the long western passage, Your Grace. You can't miss it.” But somehow she must have missed it. Because now she was in some sort of art gallery.
The gallery ran the full length of the west wing, lit by long windows on one side.
On the other side were portraits with the accumulated faces of two hundred years of Battles.
She walked the length of it slowly, reading the small placards at the bottom of each frame.
There was the first duke, painted in the style of the 1600s with the stiff and flat formality of the era.
Next to him was his wife. The second duke came after that.
He had clearly been handsome and knew it.
And so on and so forth. There was a series of children across the generations, looking variously bored, suspicious, and in one case alarmed.
And sometimes, she noticed with joy, there were dogs as large as Titan and Nike, leading her to wonder just how long the Battles and their Great Danes had lived side by side at Carrstone Manor.
Eventually she stopped in front of a painting roughly two thirds of the way along.
It consisted of two young boys and had been painted in a style similar to Gainsborough.
The younger one… It was Frederick. She recognised him immediately even at what must have been nine or ten years old, already performing for the painter with a sideways smile and a hand on his hip.
He was seated front and center. An older boy stood behind him, one hand on the chair’s back.
He was perhaps twelve or thirteen, looking seriously to the side.
His dark hair was shorter than it was now.
His expression was different, one of a boy who had been asked to hold still for a long time and was getting tired.
She stood there a moment staring at the child, Evander, not certain what she was looking for exactly.
Only that there was something in the painting that moved her.
That boy, twelve years old, and not yet a duke responsible for anything, looking at something outside the frame like he wanted to be elsewhere.
“This was painted in the summer of 1804, I believe, if you were looking for a date.”
She turned quickly. Mrs. Foulger was at the far end of the gallery, having appeared from wherever Mrs. Foulger appeared from. She walked the length of the room with a smile, holding her chatelaine.
“I went into the library to ask if you wanted tea, Your Grace, but couldn’t find you there. I assumed you had walked too far. My apologies for the misleading directions.”
“Not at all, Mrs. Foulger. My sense of direction has always been abysmal.” She looked back up at the painting. It was about as tall as she was with a brass-coloured wooden frame. “It’s very beautiful.”
“Yes. The late Duke of Sandacre commissioned it after His Grace’s twelfth birthday.
I believe he wanted the children painted together before Lord Canterbury went to his first school.
” She stopped beside Aurelia and looked at the painting.
“The younger one was upset about going. His Grace,” she meant Evander; His Grace always meant Evander to her, “spent the whole of that summer taking his brother fishing, apparently because that was the only thing the young marquess wanted to do, having heard there were no fish in Oxford.”
“But that’s not true,” Aurelia said, laughing softly.
“No, of course not. And who knows where he got the idea from? But His Grace has always been like that, quiet about the good things and going along with the things that don’t matter.
There was a winter, oh, seven years ago now…
Well, that mattered. But more to the point – it was the first winter after their father died.
His Grace had been Duke of Sandacre for perhaps four months.
There was a cold snap in January that went on for three weeks.
It was the worst any of us could remember. ”
She nodded, listening as Mrs. Foulger looked wistfully up at the painting.
“His Grace had stores from the house and firewood delivered to every cottage on the estate.
His Grace never even told anyone he'd done it, but we all knew, of course. He would have been twenty years old. Can you imagine a gentleman that young, with all the wealth and opportunities in the world, spending his winter doing that?”
Aurelia said nothing. Because the truth was she could imagine it. Evander was not perfect – no one was. But out of everything, she never doubted his generosity and his appreciation for real people.
“Now, I hope you don’t think of the tenants as ungrateful for not doing something grand in return.
His Grace doesn't like to be thanked,” Mrs. Foulger added, which was not quite a warning but close.
“Their health and loyalty came as thanks enough. But I’ve disturbed you long enough, Your Grace. Shall I take you to the library now?”
“No…” Aurelia licked her lips, thinking. “I would like to stay here a moment more.”
Mrs. Foulger excused herself gracefully, and Aurelia was alone in the gallery again with the two boys and the sound of the wind off the park.
She stayed for a long time and made the rounds, reading the plaques carefully and returning to that portrait of the two boys twice. She was still standing there when she heard footsteps in the corridor and turned, and Evander appeared in the doorway of the gallery.
He had bathed too. His hair was damp like hers, darker at the ends, and he was wearing a more casual vest than she had seen in London, an olive green that made his skin look golden.
She swallowed hard at the sight, her hands and neck tingling.
As he approached, he smelled of soap and something resinous like pine or cedar.
She looked back at the painting as he settled beside her, wishing he had caught her anywhere other than standing before a monument of his younger self and his dishonourable brother.
“I did not intend to come here. I lost myself,” she said, which was true.
“Everyone gets lost here at least once the first few days,” he replied. “The stairs and corridors are like a puzzle.”
He came to stand beside her and looked at the painting, and he was quiet for a moment. She was aware of him beside her and tried to tame her breath.