“Of course you have! We came as soon as Varian arrived; we set out that afternoon, without even packing up a proper supper for Tony,” Claudia said.
“Varian?”
“Yes; he’s brought Tony and me to you, dearest, to stay for a while until you are better; Clytie is going to stay with Cleo during her lying-in next month, but I think that— Claire?”
For she had drawn in her breath painfully; she trembled slightly and cast down her eyes, and caught her lower lip between her teeth.
“I’m sorry, Claire,” said Claudia quietly. “You are feeling very much the loss of your baby, and I shan’t mention it any more.”
“No; that’s foolish.” She swallowed with determination, and looked up. “I am— I am mourning my little unborn child, for I had already grown to love him, you know,” she said quietly.
Claudia stared at her face and then embraced her tightly. “Yes, I know; and we shall try to go on as before, in spite of the hurt, and you shall have another son soon to help you feel this one’s passing a little less. I— ”
“Has Tony come with you?”
Claudia started to finish her sentence, and then realized that her sister had changed the conversation to suit herself, and that in this small act of cheerful inquiry was a great deal of strength. “Yes, of course; I cannot imagine that I should have left him behind,” she said, and smiled faintly. “And Varian has been so eager to be home to you that I have expected every morning while we were on our way that he would have left ahead, and ridden on a little faster. You shan’t mind if he comes in for a while after supper, shall you?”
“No, of course not,” Claire said in surprise.
“First we shall have you a hot bath, and wash your hair, and find you something pretty to put on,” said Claudia wisely.
“I don’t— ”
“And we may,” Claudia continued firmly, “even rob the rouge-pot a little tonight. You will feel better, and perhaps if you look like you are better, Varian will cease wearing out the carpet downstairs. He is not,” she added, with a hint of her calm good-humor, “at all a calm person.”
“No,” said Claire, nodding and smiling faintly. “He is not.”
She did indeed feel better after her bath. She insisted that she should sit up for a little while, and it was very pleasant to put on a clean gown and have Elena brush out her hair for her. And when Varian came inside, quietly, standing for a long moment at the doorway before he entered, she managed that calm smile that she had learned from Claudia, and said, “Good evening, Varian.”
“Good evening, darling,” he said, with a sigh, and a reassuring smile, and came across the carpets to where she sat by the west windows, dark now, and took her hand and kissed it. “You’re feeling better?”
“Yes, I am,” she said truthfully. “I must thank you for bringing Claudia to me. It was the very best thing you could have done.”
Drew smiled as he sat down beside her, retaining her hand. “I thought that perhaps you would need her,” he said, “and I knew that she would wish to be here.”
“There are some things that I must ask you,” she said, withdrawing her hand from his and staring for a moment at the ring on her finger, and then clasping her hands together.
“Of course,” he nodded.
“About— Consuela, and John-coachman; they are already buried?”
“It was impossible that either of us attend, although I arranged for their funerals before I left,” he said quietly. “We shall have a service on Sunday beside their graves, if you feel well enough to go. I have buried them here by the village church.”
“It is very good of you, Varian,” she said, nodding. “I should like to go on Sunday.” A small hesitation. “And— and my baby? What— ”
He tensed; she felt him stiffen, although they did not touch, beside her. “He is buried beside my mother in the Drew family crypt,” he said in a moment, in a low, painful voice. “I have sent for the stonemason, and I wished to know what name you care to give him.”
“I— ” She drew in a breath, blinking at the ring on her finger. “I have not thought of— Varian?”
“Yes, Claire— ”
She raised her face to his. “I’m sorry; would you excuse me for a moment?”
He took her hand instead. “No; I won’t leave. If you wish to cry I shan’t mind,” he said gently.
She attempted a smile. “I have lost my baby, Varian,” she said, faintly disbelieving, blinking through her tears at his face. “I— I loved him, though he was not yet born, and he is— dead. I don’t know— ” she began, shaking her head vaguely, and then she closed her eyes painfully. “I wish you will go— I— ”
“Go?” he said, in a low, shaking voice. “He was my child, too, Claire; am I not allowed to weep with you?”
He laid her head on his shoulder as she began to cry, and they clung together for a long while, his hand lying lightly on her hair, until she sighed tiredly, and wiped her eyes with her handkerchief.
“I should like to call him Halsey,” she said, in a quiet voice, her head turned toward his rather damp cravat on his shoulder. “It was my mother’s family name; I think she would have liked it.”
Varian held her a little more tightly; “He shall be Halsey Drew, then,” he said, and felt that exhausted sinking against him, as though she had no energy left. “Let me put you in bed; you’re tired. We shall speak again of it tomorrow, if you wish to, when you are feeling a little stronger,” he said quietly, and beneath his chin she nodded. He helped her up, and then, as though he had seen her cast her gaze over that endless expanse of carpet between the windowseat and the bed, he picked her up and carried her over and laid her down.
“Thank you, Varian,” she said, the lashes brushing tired against the blue shadows beneath her eyes. She was paler; he gazed down at her for a moment, his mouth grim, and then told her he would send up her maid to help her undress, and that he would come in again, and sit with her until she went to sleep.
“You will?” she asked, her eyes fluttering open in surprise.
“Yes, if you want,” he said, raising her hand and kissing it briefly.
“Where is your room?”
After a second of startled surprise, he glanced up and pointed to a doorway on the other side of the bed. “Just as it was in London,” he said reassuringly. “We share a dressing room, just through that door.” He saw her turn her gaze and glance over at it. “Shall you mind if I leave the doors open tonight? If you call me, I shall hear you and come in to see about you,” he offered gently.
Her gazed came slowly back to his face. “Yes,” she said quietly, some small surprise in her eyes, “I would like that,” and then he released her hand and went to find her maid.
chapter fifteen
A Gradual Advancement
In the end the Merrills stayed only until the middle of November after all, and, bearing a mound of Yule gifts for friends and family from Claire, Claudia was home in time for Cleo’s baby girl’s arrival on the twenty-sixth. The reason the Merrills left was a very pleasant one, indeed, and Claudia and Tony shared an occasional placid smile over it: Claire, however much she may have needed her sister in those first few days after her calamity, had very little need for her from then on, and although they enjoyed their weeks together, as sisters who have become particularly close do, it was not, after the first few days, a matter of necessity that Claudia be there.
For Claire, it seemed, had Varian.
The familiar nightmare of the accident invaded Claire’s sleep sometime early in the morning a few days after Varian had come home. Dreaming of that endless falling and of that white, searing pain inside her, of Consuela’s dying scream, Claire fought a horrible monster clawing at her baby, taking it from her. In her bedchamber, the line between sleep and wakefulness was vague in the middle of the night, just as dark as the crushing emptiness of her nightmare. Uncertain where she was as she awoke, she sat straight up in bed, shaking violently, her hands clammy, and called
out automatically, “Varian?” without really thinking.
Almost instantly he appeared in the doorway, wrapping his dressing gown around him, and went straight to her bed and took her into a tight embrace. “Claire, darling, what is it?”
“I— ” She shook uncontrollably, pressing her chin against her fists to stifle that incapacitating trembling. “A dream— the accident. I thought for a moment— ”
“Shh,” he said, stroking her hair and holding her. “It is all in the past now, Claire; it is over, my dear. Shall I call Elena for you? Find you some warm milk?”
“No— Don’t leave me, please,” she said, clutching suddenly at the brocade of his dressing gown. “I mean— Not for a little while; you don’t mind?”
“Mind?” Varian smiled at nothing in particular over her head in the darkness. “Of course not.” His strong brown fingers stroked her curling hair gently, comforting, soothing. “Shall we walk downstairs ourselves? Are you strong enough?”
“To the kitchens?” she asked. “Varian— I haven’t been outside this room,” she said, suddenly realizing that she knew nothing at all about Banningwood. “I wouldn’t know how to find the stairway.”
“Well, I spent the better part of seventeen years here, if you discount school; I think I can manage a trip to the kitchens and back,” he said, with a touch of teasing in his voice, and released her to take up her dressing gown from the end of the bed. “Here you are,” he said, and held it out for her as she threw off the coverlet and climbed out of bed and found her slippers. It was chilly already, the wind sometimes blowing in off the North Sea on infrequent days to herald November’s arrival. Claire wrapped her dressing gown around her tightly and looked up to find him smiling down at her.
“This way,” he said, and casually put his arm about her waist and guided her down the wide upstairs hallway that broadened at front of the house into a gallery overlooking a magnificent, grand staircase. They went softly down the carpeted stairs, and he led her, as he had promised, through the dining room, past the linen press and the breakfast parlor, the china hall, the silver keep, and the warming room, to the kitchens at the back of the grand house.
It seemed that he even had a rather intimate knowledge of the old stove and how to build up the fire a little, and that he knew precisely where he might find a pan and the location of the cold-keep in the pantry where Cook kept the milk. Ten minutes later he poured her out a cup of warm, creamy milk and presented it to her with a flourish, and laughed when Sully appeared, like magic, to gaze up at his mistress in hopes of a small offering. She very obligingly left a little in the cup for him, with a stern warning that he had better remember this, and then they went back upstairs, whispering as they came inside the house once again, and he took her back to her bed and tucked her in.
“Better?”
“Much better, thank you, Varian,” Claire said, smiling up at him in the darkness. She hardly noticed the quick kiss that he left on the tip of her nose.
“You shan’t care if I go back to bed?”
“No; I am very sorry to have kept you up for an hour, in fact,” she said honestly.
“I didn’t mind it,” he replied, smiling as he tucked the coverlet a little more securely around her. “Shall you call me again if you are frightened?”
“Yes,” she said, nodding, and lay there in the dark after he had left, wishing that it were morning, and that she dared to close her eyes again; finally, the warm milk accomplished its office, and she drifted uneasily back to sleep.
The next time there was no scream. Claire’s eyes flew open in the darkness as she tried to stifle the terror inside her, to apply her reason to what she knew was nothing more than a bad dream, that this darkness was no more intimidating than her small, familiar chamber at Finchingfield where she had slept for eighteen years.
She would not call him again; she was not so fainthearted as that. But instead of feeling better as she came fully awake, suddenly the darkness was heavy. In spite of holding her hands over her ears, her head was full of Consuela’s panicked ave marias, her screams. Claire closed her eyes against the oppressive shadows, thick and black like Consuela’s black dress, smothering her, suffocating her—
She flew out of her bed and through the open door toward a patch of moonlight visible on the other side of the large dressing room. When she saw Varian asleep, his bare shoulder gray-brown above the coverlet in the silver light, she halted; after a moment of indecision she came slowly, silently to the great bed and climbed up on it, with as little movement as she could, and curled herself up on the other side, away from him. On a sigh, Claire closed her eyes and tucked her feet beneath her nightdress.
“Claire?” A sleepy low voice.
She froze. “Yes?”
“Another dream?”
“Yes,” she replied, a little breathlessly, after a moment.
He moved, turned over toward her and put his hand out on her arm. “I shan’t mind if— Claire, darling, you’re freezing. Come here.” He raised up the covers and she crawled beneath them thankfully.
“Do you leave your window open in this sort of weather, Varian?”
A chuckle in the darkness. “Old habit; you shall just have to get used to it. Here, it’s warm enough over here.” She had meant to stay securely on the far side of the bed, and she found herself suddenly being pulled toward him, into the pervasive warmth around him, and then his strong, unthreatening embrace brought her head beneath his chin to lie comfortably on his shoulder. “I shan’t mind if you want to sleep with me,” he added, in an amused voice at her stiffness beside him.
She relaxed gradually into the luxurious closeness of him. After a long while, she sighed deeply in contentment, listening to his breathing lengthen as he went back to sleep. His arms relaxed around her but did not release her; she felt herself drifting off into some peaceful and protected slumber, and instead of terror she dreamt of Varian, and Balaghat, and of their four sons.
Claire was changed the next day, and Claudia knew then that someday soon she would be fully recovered, not just from the loss of her child and the carriage accident, but from all the misunderstandings that had wreaked so much havoc in her life the last year. It was that day that Claudia noticed, with a faintly raised eyebrow and a small smile shared with her large and placid husband across the upstairs parlor after lunch, that Varian Drew made his wife blush with some small reference to Sully, who had just sauntered inside to view the room; some teasing comment Varian made about warm milk made no sense to her at all, but Claire colored up in the most promising fashion that put Claudia quite in charity with her brother-in-law again, after he had driven her distracted with his worrying during their trip north.
And in the next few days nothing was so apparent as Varian Drew’s constant attendance on his wife. He was very seldom out of her company for more than ten or fifteen minutes, and would not even leave her to ride into the village for the post, but sent Rajat instead. And of course Claudia could know nothing about those hours that the four of them were not together; she could guess, but she was not precisely certain, although, she thought to herself with a smile, Tony had taught her a great deal about divining others’ feelings.
In fact, the only person who was ignorant of Varian Drew’s feelings was the most intuitive of them all: his wife Claire.
After she had wakened in his bed that first morning, with him already dressed and gone downstairs, and with the sun bright through the south windows of his chamber, she had dressed quickly and met him in the breakfast parlor, to surprise him. Claire had not yet been downstairs for anything other than a glass of warm milk, and she wished to explore this morning in the daylight, and that required more nourishment than a cup of tea in her chambers, as she had been used to.
At the familiar rustle of his newspaper, she had halted beside the doorway, pleased with herself for having found the breakfast parlor unassisted. When she turned and went inside, he was watching, as if he had known she was there.
“Goo
d morning, darling,” he said, and with a sudden rush of feeling Claire realized how much she had missed that simple greeting each morning.
“Good morning, Varian,” she said, and smiled at him in pleasure as he poured her out a cup of tea.
“It’s a little chilly for the terrace, although I am certain the table shall be out there at the first hint of spring,” he said casually and pushed the toast toward her, and went back to his paper.
She consumed two pieces in a trice and was buttering her third, when the paper disappeared, and she met his amused and slightly raised eyebrows as they appeared from behind it. “Are you by chance gardening this morning?” he asked, watching as she spied a bowl of marmalade and spread it thickly over her toast.
“No, exploring,” she said, and took a large bite.
“Are you quite well enough?”
“Of course!” Claire said instantly, turning one of her rosy smiles on him, of which she could not know the effect, of course, although had she been a little less intent on her toast, she might have seen that brief fire in his eyes as he lowered his gaze.
“Well, suppose we begin with the first floor; I’ll show you around, if you like,” Varian offered negligently. “Perhaps when we arrive in the library, you might sit for a while and rest,” he added.
“You’re very kind to do so; I shan’t mind the housekeeper, you know, if you’ve more important things, Varian,” she said frankly.
“No, nothing more important,” he said, with a slight shrug that disguised his meaning from her.
So after covering the large salons and the exquisitely appointed dining room and a number of other various chambers and delightful alcoves and corners, they rested for a while downstairs in the library. Claire took up half a well-worn and very comfortable sofa, and Varian, his long legs crossed over his boots, stretched out behind his grandfather’s lovely old carved oak desk and read to her from a collection of amusing political satires that he had found last summer in London.
Claire Page 29
