Katherine and Helen turned to one side and then the other, hearing this bewildering array of reporting. Some of the more imaginative were certain that they heard the sound of artillery from across the channel.
Mr. Downey saw the sisters and came down the vicarage steps to join them. “I suppose you’ve heard the battle is joined?” he asked.
Katherine nodded. “That and much more, but what to believe?”
The vicar shook his head. “I think it is much too soon to call the battle won or lost, but it seems undeniable that Napoleon commenced battle before the Duke had managed to consolidate all his forces, which is worrisome. We must hope for the best.”
Julia Fordice joined them then, announcing importantly that her father had gone to London, there to await word of the battle, and would return with news just as soon as definitive news was to be had.
“Then we should await Sir Robert’s return,” Katherine said decisively, “and not allow ourselves to be alarmed by all this speculation.”
“That’s sense the young lady is speaking!” said Mr. Hinson the haberdasher. He was ably seconded by Mr. Ellis, since villagers gathered on the green exchanging rumors were neither shopping nor drinking.
This reminder sent some of the gossipers back indoors to their normal pursuits, and Katherine and Helen hurried through their shopping in order to return home to tell Aunt Alice the news.
That afternoon, Katherine returned to Papa’s study and investigated the Mrs. Wilson manuscript. First she turned to the last page, and saw that the story was unfinished. How much remained to be done?
After thinking about it for a moment, Katherine turned to the bottom drawer and removed the manuscript of Count Olpho. She placed the manuscript on the table and then placed the stack of the new story beside it. To her dismay, the stack of pages that comprised The Peculiar Staircase was only about half as high as the completed story. Obviously much more remained to be done.
Katherine lifted the top page of the manuscript and began to read.
Conversation over dinner that night was all about the battle, and after dinner, rather than reading, the conversation continued. Helen sat at the pianoforte, playing small snatches of music and then stopping to speculate once again on what was happening. She saw it all as it pertained to Lord Charles. Where was he now? What was he doing? Perhaps he was leading a charge at that very moment!
Katherine said practically, “While I’m not a military expert, I don’t believe that charging in the dark is something that armies typically do.”
“If night fell while they were fighting,” Helen argued, “surely they would continue.”
“I have no notion,” Katherine admitted.
Helen then imagined the affecting scene of Lord Charles dead, his lifeless body flung across the barrel of an enemy cannon, and so harrowed herself with this image that she burst into tears.
“Dearest, don’t do this to yourself!” Katherine exclaimed. “Don’t cry over a man that you don’t know is dead! He’s probably perfectly well.”
Face buried in her handkerchief, Helen’s muffled voice proclaimed Katherine the coldest creature that ever lived.
Stung, Katherine appealed to Aunt Alice. “Is it cold,” she asked, “not to weep for a man we’ve never met because he might possibly be dead, though we have no reason to believe that he is?”
Predictably, Aunt Alice could see both sides. “Weeping is perhaps premature, and you certainly shouldn’t do so if you feel no inclination,” she said. “Not but what Helen’s image was quite affecting, and I could see how that might make her want to cry.”
And with that, the ladies retired for the night.
Katherine’s sleep that night was troubled. She had read half of her father’s incomplete manuscript, and images from that fantastical tale clashed and combined with imagined scenes of battle and carnage. The creak of stairs and moan of ghostly visitations alternated with the loud boom of cannons and the screams of horses and wounded men. Innocent young maidens in gossamer gowns faded to be replaced by weary young men in brilliant scarlet coats. To each of these figures in turn, Katherine sought news. “What happens next?” she pled with them. “How does it all end?” But they took no notice of her as if she were the ghost here, and her questions went unanswered.
The arrival of morning tea brought a welcome end to these torments, and a morning visitor brought glad tidings. The breakfast table was just being cleared when Mister Downey arrived in the vicarage pony cart. As soon as he entered the parlor, he explained his errand. “Dear ladies, the squire has returned and the news is nothing but good. Wellington has achieved total victory. Napoleon has surrendered and is a prisoner.”
“Splendid!” Katherine exclaimed.
Aunt Alice snorted. “Just so long as that dratted man doesn’t slip through their fingers again.”
“No worries there,” the vicar said. “Last time they gave him free run of Elba. They won’t make that mistake again. No, Miss Alice, the war is over indeed.”
Katherine went about her duties that day with a light heart. With the end of this interminable war, suddenly everything seemed possible. All she had to do was to write an ending for this silly novel. How hard could it be?
FOUR
The servants at Winton Court called the small parlor the Dowager’s Drawing Room. A dainty, feminine space elegantly appointed in pink, white, and gold, it was a suitable setting for its usual occupant, as the Dowager Duchess was also small and dainty, and pink, white, and gold.
The room’s other occupant fit less well into his surroundings, being large and masculine, with scarlet regimentals that clashed horribly with his mother’s decorating scheme. Nonetheless, her eyes rested on this discordant element with an immense satisfaction that she tried hard to conceal.
“I won’t continue to berate you,” the Dowager told her second son inaccurately. “Though why you felt the need to go off to war again, having just returned from such a lengthy conflict, well, it baffles me, that’s all.”
“We thought the job was finished, Mama,” Lord Charles said, dwarfing the tiny gilt chair he lounged in. “Once we realized that it wasn’t, surely you see how necessary it was.”
“Necessary for the army, perhaps, but not for you,” his mother said. “You know if I hadn’t had you safely back last year, I never would have let your brother go off on that expedition of his to the far corners of the globe.”
Charles only smiled. “If you could have kept Arthur from doing exactly as he pleased, that would certainly have been an achievement.”
“Well,” said the Dowager, abandoning the topic of her gently stubborn eldest, “at least you are back again, and I will contrive to forget the sleepless nights, the palpitations and the worry I experienced.”
Lord Charles knew quite well that his tough little mother had never experienced a palpitation or a sleepless night in her life, but he allowed her this small fiction. Standing, he turned in a circle, arms spread wide. “And all for nothing, as you see. Not a scratch on me.”
“Sheer luck, that’s what it is!” his mother replied.
“Oh, not at all,” Charles said airily. “I was never in danger, not for a moment.” In later years, when drinking late with other veterans of the recent battle, Lord Charles would speak with fond regret of the two horses shot out from under him, and laugh about the three locks of hair he had lost to enemy bullets, but such memories were not for a soldier’s mother. His first act upon returning to home soil was to call for a barber and have his hair closely cropped, repairing the odd appearance the ‘French haircut’ had given. Now he looked as if he might never have left the Duchess of Richmond’s ball to take part in the battle at all.
Seeing him turn unscathed before her, the Dowager allowed herself to smile. Such a handsome young man he’d grown into! Last year, before this last outbreak of war, she had received a letter from an old friend in London, congratulating her on her youngest son’s modesty. “However did you contrive to raise such a pleasantly-beh
aved boy, my dear Phyllida? I swear I must prise my Oscar away from the mirror countless times in a day, but your Charles behaves as if sublimely indifferent to his own good looks. Such a well-bred air about him!”
The Dowager had accepted the compliment, but knew that Charles’ supposed modesty was no achievement of hers. The boy was genuinely unaware of his pleasing appearance. It had come to him late, and while he was away from society busy playing at war. Fondly, the Dowager recalled the gawky lad who had taken a commission and gone off to the Peninsula. Charles had shot up like a beanstalk at the age of fifteen, within six months reaching and surpassing by half a head the height of his elder brother. The growth spurt seemed to stretch him out, so that he was long and skinny, and his brain couldn’t seem to send signals to his newly distant feet quickly enough to keep him from tripping. Spots and an erratically breaking voice completed the dismal picture, and the young Ensign who left England at sixteen did so without causing a single female heart a pang, beyond, of course, that of his mother.
But somewhere in those seven long years of war, the skinny, clumsy, gawky boy had grown up and broadened out, with powerful muscles and a lithe grace the most sporting-mad Corinthian would envy. The planes of his face might be too angular for classical beauty, but they gave him a masculine dignity and a commanding presence. His outdoor activities had given his skin a shade perhaps too dark to be fashionable, but the Dowager thought that it became him so well that he might simply set a new fashion, while his light brown hair was now a burnished gold that many a young girl would envy.
Combine his appearance with his gentle courtesy and easy laugh, and he was just such a man to cause the young ladies of society to make perfect fools of themselves. The Dowager thought that it would be as well if he could be settled quickly, before female admiration went to his head and turned him into a complete flirt, if not an outright rake.
Pondering this, she said, “We must consider some form of entertainments, to introduce you to the local society.”
“But I won’t be here, Mama,” he protested. “Recall that I have my own property in Dorset.”
“You’re leaving?!” she wailed.
“Not right this moment,” he assured her. “But within several days, certainly. I’ve been an absentee landlord quite long enough. Consider that I’ve owned Greymere for five years now and have never so much as stepped foot on the property.”
His mother pouted. “I’d imagined that you would help me look after this dratted boy.”
“Boy? What boy?”
“Han. You know, dear Cleo’s brother.”
“I know Han. But why is he here?”
“Just for the long vacation, because he’s in school. But of course Cleo and Arthur are who knows where on their expedition, his aunt has gone with her husband to Saint Petersburg of all places, and then what must his old governess do but marry the Earl of Salford? Well, of course I said he could come here.”
Charles had met Han the previous year. Something odd had been going on that he’d never quite understood, involving gypsies and pigeons and a swindler. Han had tailed the swindler and wound up locked in a basement, but came through the ordeal without injury or any diminution of spirits. “He doesn’t seem like a troublesome lad,” he said.
“He doesn’t actually get into mischief,” his mother admitted. “But he’s such an unaccountable boy! Now, Charlie, I’ve raised boys. I understand boys. But this Han just baffles me! He doesn’t take a lot of tending, is perfectly content to roam around the estate during the day, but…”
Charlie grinned. “It’s what he brings back that troubles you, I’ll wager.”
“Yes, but it’s not what you think,” the Dowager said. “Not snakes or birds’ nests or that sort of thing. That would be quite understandable. No, he goes out with his sketch book and he brings back drawings. Some of them quite lovely, of course, but…”
“He is an artist, after all,” Charlie now recalled. “His father has become quite famous for his art, and young Han could well surpass him. Why do drawings trouble you?”
The Dowager leaned forward confidingly. “His nature sketches are wonderful. But he’s taken to doing portraits. Memory exercises, he called them. Says he and his father used to do them. The people don’t actually sit for the drawing, he just studies and remembers them and then draws them later. He let me look through his sketchbook, and oh Charlie! When I looked at them, I realized – Finch hates me!”
Charles raised his eyebrows and the Dowager hurried on. “Now, don’t tell me it’s my imagination, dear! I saw it in the drawing and once I saw it there, I couldn’t help seeing it in ‘real life’, don’t you know.”
“No,” Charles said slowly. “I won’t say you’re imagining it. But I think it more accurate to say that Finch hates everyone.” Finch was the Dowager’s dresser, and Charles had never taken to the sour little woman.
“I hadn’t realized it,” the Dowager said. “Fifteen years she’s looked after my clothes and my hair and my jewels and until that boy drew that picture… Well! Call me overly sensitive, but I just couldn’t feel comfortable with Finch anymore.”
“Did you dismiss her?” Charles asked.
“How could I?” the Dowager exclaimed. “She hadn’t done anything wrong! It’s not a requirement after all for servants to like their employers.”
“No,” Charles said. “I suspect a good proportion of them cordially despise their employers.”
“You’ll think me extravagant,” his mother confessed. “But I pensioned her off. I offered her an estate cottage as well, but she said she preferred to return to London. So she’s gone. And now I must find a new dresser, and Sally the parlor maid is filling in until the position is filled. And all because that Han had to draw a picture.”
“It sounds as if it’s all for the best,” Charles said optimistically. “You will surely find a dresser with a more pleasant way about her, and perhaps even Finch will find a situation she will feel is more suitable.”
At dinner that evening, the Dowager and her son were joined by young Hannibal Cooper, and also by Mister Jenkins, the estate’s librarian. Jenkins was a nervous young man who, due to his noble employer’s range of interests, was an accomplished astronomer as well as a librarian. Charles was surprised to see him at the dinner table.
“Why, good evening, Jenkins,” he said. “I think I would have expected you to go with my brother on his expedition. New stars, and all that?”
Jenkins gave a violent start, slopping a spoonful of soup onto his lap. “Go with the expedition?” he squeaked. “On a b-b-boat? Oh, no, your lordship, impossible, absolutely not to be thought of.”
“Ah,” said Charles with a nod. “Bad sailor, eh?”
“Bad doesn’t begin to describe it, sir,” Jenkins said with a shudder. “Just the thought of being on a boat, on the water, the motion of the waves… I feel queasy just thinking about it!”
“Sorry,” Charles said. “No more mention of boats or sailing. So how are you managing to pass the time?”
“Wonderfully well, sir!” Jenkins said, brightening. “And the departure of the expedition means there is much less competition for His Grace’s telescope. I’ve had some wonderful viewings, simple marvelous. I shouldn’t wonder if I might get a Royal Society paper out of it. And just last week, I was in London for the book sales. The incredibly generous budget His Grace provides enabled me to acquire some genuine treasures for the library. I will have to show you our latest books after dinner, you’ll be astonished, I promise you, astonished.”
“Of course,” Charles said politely. He was not particularly interested in old books, but didn’t object to humoring the little man.
As the soup was replaced by the first course, Han leaned around an epergne in the center of the table to address Charles. “You’re going to your estate soon?” he asked.
“That’s right,” Charles said.
“In Dorset?” Han asked.
“In Dorset on the Piddle River,” Charles conf
irmed.
“Is that near Piddledean?” Han asked.
Surprised, Charles nodded. “In fact, it’s just outside of Piddledean.”
Han sat back with a satisfied sigh. “Splendid!” he said. “I’ve a school chum in Piddledean, I think I shall come with you.”
Charles caught his mother’s eye – a slight nod and a pleading look. “Sounds grand!” he told Han. “We’ll find plenty to keep us busy, I’m sure.”
After dinner, Charles went along to the library and feigned a good-natured interest in the latest treasures Mister Jenkins had acquired for the ducal library. Jenkins became so interested in expounding on the excellences of the books, their beauty, rarity and great value, that he forgot his shyness and managed to speak at length without a single stutter.
Charles agreed that they were all quite fine, though in truth he found the older books to be rather homely when compared to a book printed by modern methods, attractively bound in marbled covers. The early printing looked clumsy to him, and the books rather shabby and worn. He was too polite to say so to Jenkins’ face, however. Finally the little man looked at the clock and gave a start of surprise. “But the time! I must go!”
“Go where?” asked Charles in some surprise. “It’s after ten. Rather late for visiting, surely?”
Jenkins tittered. “Not when you’re visiting the planets, my lord. Planetary moons! That’s the great thing! I’m making some marvelous observations, and when His Grace returns, he’ll learn I’ve not been idle in his absence!”
He scurried away, and Charles left the library more slowly, joining his mother in the drawing room just as the tea tray arrived. Han was on the floor sketching busily as Charles lounged in a comfortable arm chair, accepting a tea cup and saying, “I say, Mama, does Arthur really want those extraordinary old books Jenkins is finding?”
Katherine, When She Smiled Page 4
