CHAPTER FIVE #2
The door opened, and Rosina looked round to find on the threshold the maid Joan, who had unpacked her belongings.
The girl curtsied, looking with surprise at Rosina’s habited state.
She had dressed herself in an old gown of blue kerseymere, made high to the throat, feeling the big house was likely to be chill despite the change in the weather.
“Good morning, my lady. I was waiting for you to ring.”
“Thank you, but I was quite able to manage.”
Joan looked hesitant, fidgeting with her apron. “Yes, my lady.”
Rosina eyed her. “What is the matter?”
The girl bobbed again. “Mrs Fawley said I was to wait upon you, my lady, according to his lordship’s orders. Until, that is, your ladyship should hire a proper lady’s maid.”
She had been somewhat out of charity with her spouse, but this mark of thoughtfulness touched her. She remembered that scrap of conversation they’d had in the antechamber. Rosina smiled at the maid.
“That will be helpful, Joan. For the moment, however, I don’t think there is anything —” She broke off. “Stay! Do you know how to iron?”
The maid became eager. “Oh, yes, my lady.”
“Then perhaps you might do what you can with my gown? It is of damask, and sadly crushed from the journey, I fear.”
It was clear that Joan was delighted to be given even this minor task.
Rosina, familiar as she was with the hierarchy of the servants’ hall, guessed that her promotion to lady’s maid, if only temporary, was a giant leap up the domestic social ladder.
She resolved to curb her own instincts to look after herself and allow the girl to enjoy the just employment of her new status.
“Perhaps you would first show me where I may be served with breakfast, Joan?”
With willing steps, the maid led her downstairs to the same vast dining room, where the butler supplied her needs.
She learned it was after eleven o’clock.
She discovered, upon enquiry, that her husband usually breakfasted at ten.
Rosina was tempted to use this information to make certain of not encountering him in the mornings.
Only she knew it would cause inconvenience to the servants — especially the cook, obliged to keep food warm — who must wait upon the pleasure of the gentry, when they might have been better employed elsewhere.
By the time she had eaten in solitary state in her single chair, with only the sight of Lord Raith’s empty place at the other end, Rosina was further tempted to make herself mistress of the house as her spouse had suggested.
She would give much to institute changes that might lessen the dreadful formality of Raith Manor.
Raith had recommended her to talk to Mrs Fawley, but Rosina chose rather to wander about the house by herself, forming her own impressions. They were not favourable.
The house was enormous, and as she wandered through interconnected rooms, the drab silence of the empty spaces depressed her.
There was everywhere dullness, an air of neglect and isolation.
Holland covers were laid over furnishings which had been pushed together in the centre of rooms. Those few paintings remaining upon the dun-coloured walls were inferior in execution.
The wood mantels were clean, but unpolished — she supposed no one had time to make them gleam — and entirely free of ornaments.
Chandeliers hung dully, their glass droplets long unwashed.
There were perhaps two timepieces in the whole house.
As for silver, bar that in the dining room and the various candelabra, there appeared to be none.
Walking around the first floor on the back face of the mansion, Rosina arrived in a long gallery populated by a number of ancestral portraits, presumably of former Raiths.
Her interest quickened, and she wandered slowly down the line, becoming wholly absorbed.
A gentleman in an Elizabethan ruff stared back at her.
The first Raith, perhaps? She had not seen any earlier style, though there were a number of later date, becoming indeed so recent that this last must be within a decade or two.
Then she came upon one so startling she almost jumped.
It was of a gentleman who bore an uncommon likeness to her husband.
His hair was of a similar brown hue, worn in a ragged cut that rested upon the shoulders.
He was older, she thought, but there was the same set jawline, the high cheekbone.
Here, in the dip below it, was a deeper cleft perhaps, and the lips more thinly carved.
Most striking of all, the grey eyes looked out upon the world with the exact air of cynicism that characterised Lord Raith. Only there was no scar.
“Is it like, do you think?”
Rosina jumped violently. Turning, she beheld her spouse standing behind her, near a window. Her heart jerked into life, and she was unable to speak for a moment for the turbulence in her chest.
For all he was booted, Rosina had not heard him approach.
He was in riding dress, a long frock of dark green over buckskin breeches, but he had discarded his gloves and hat.
His hair, though tied back, was dishevelled, accentuating the resemblance.
He was looking particularly bitter, glancing from her to the portrait, and back again.
Rosina found her tongue. “It — it is like, but it is not you,” she managed, as calmly as she could.
Raith turned his gaze to the portrait. “You are observant.” He strolled past her, and went to stand beside it, turning. “Pray continue your investigation.”
He spoke quite coolly, but Rosina felt the bile welling within him.
It caught at her curiosity, and she found herself less affected than usual.
Had this significance in his virulent self-hatred?
She looked from his face to the portrait, and saw at once that the resemblance was not nearly as strong as she had thought.
The unknown man on the wall had, she now saw, a look of — yes, dissipation — that had been drawn by the artist, perhaps without intent, in a swarthy shadow that edged the jaw and ran down in strong lines from nose to mouth and below the eyes.
It was only, she realised, looking back at Lord Raith whose far less mocking eyes were regarding her with concentrated attention, the addition of the ridged and ragged white lesion which gave him that sinister air.
It was that which increased the similarity.
The other, she decided, looked sinister without any adorning cut.
“Who is he?’
Raith came away from the portrait, and turned to look at it with her. “My brother.” His jaw tightened. “My half-brother, to be exact. My predecessor, the tenth Baron Raith. And to whose untimely demise you may count yourself indebted, for I would never otherwise have thought of marriage.”
Indebted! Was she not rather cursed? But to say so would be to provoke precisely the sort of contretemps she wished to avoid.
Besides, he had faced her without hiding the scar, and she guessed it had taken an effort for him to do so.
Moreover, when he moved back he was standing on her left, leaving it exposed.
From this side, and so close, it was indeed cruelly ugly.
A shaft of emotion seemed to crush her chest, and she wanted to weep for him.
“I am sorry if you were distressed by his death,” she ventured, faintly husky.
He glanced at her briefly, but his gaze returned to the portrait. “Only because it meant that I must inherit this doubtful windfall.”
“When did he die?”
“In the summer.”
Rosina felt suddenly desperate to ask more, but she was already too aware of the dangers of probing too far with her touchy spouse. His nearness was having an unsettling effect. Was it the sight of that graven cut?
To her surprise, Lord Raith appeared disposed to talk of the matter, though he continued to study the portrait.
“Ottery had written to me, warning me that Piers was travelling all too swiftly on the road to perdition. But I was in the midst of a campaign against the French, and paid no heed. Besides, I had no wish to watch him breathe his last. He would not have thanked me for it.”
His voice was even, but Rosina could read beneath it a wealth of unspoken emotion. Again she was swept with the oddest flood of feeling. It must be pity. Here must be the reason for his bitterness. She forgot caution.
“I am of the opinion that you did not care for your half-brother.”
Raith looked at her. “Astute of you.”
He noted emotion in her eyes and took it for reproach. He gave himself a mental kick. How could he have spoken to her in so curt a fashion? After all his good intentions. He sought to repair the damage.
“Pay no heed to me. It is not your fault that I was at enmity with Piers.”
Her eyes became questioning, and he avoided them, moving to the window.
Easier not to look at her. The effect upon him of her expressive countenance was his undoing.
Last night’s petty bungling had ruined his sleep.
He had tossed and turned, fighting the desire to go through to her chamber and beg her forgiveness for his ill-mannered departure.
Had he not feared she would think he had the intention of taking his pleasure of her, he would have done it.
She could not possibly trust him. Nor, for that matter, did he trust himself.
He had spent the entirety of that interminable dinner in a state of anguish, so badly did he want her.
On her departure from the table, he had gone across to the window and flung open the shutters, letting in the freeze of the night to cool his ardour.
He had tossed off his port, resolved to give her no cause for distress, and broken the resolve within minutes of being in the same room with her.