Then it was time for the personal questions. She stated only that she had worked at Naples’ royal palace for the Ludovisi family. That was twice the royal palace had been mentioned. Anna would have hated such showing away, Parrette knew, or at the least would have been embarrassed, but Michel had told his mother that a foreign accent could be fatal with English servants. “But if you’ve got the least connection to a duke or two, even better, a prince, fling ’em into the ring,” he had advised.
She had done just that, and she measured her success by the politeness of Mrs. Diggory’s tone as she offered to show ‘Mrs. Doofloo’ to her room.
In the drawing room upstairs, the stilted conversation labored on until a single chime from an ormolu clock on the mantel prompted Lady Emily Northcote to venture on her own carefully rehearsed question. “Should you care for more tea, or something else to eat, Lady Northcote?”
“No, thank you.”
“There is just time for a swift tour of the house, or should you prefer to retire before dinner? That is,” she corrected herself with a little smile that looked as rehearsed as it was, “forgive me, you may order dinner put forward, if you wish. I am not to be giving orders anymore. This is now your house.”
There was that false note. Not musically. Her voice was well-modulated; Anna’s practiced ear detected the result of careful lessons. But her tone was a note off, reminding Anna of Therese Rose. A quick glance at Harriet’s expressive face reinforced this impression: Harriet gazed at her sister-in-law with lips compressed.
Your house. “I shall be happy to sit down to dinner at the hour of custom,” Anna said with polite deflection. “I am conditioned by the bells aboard ship. They are ab-so-lute!” Anna tried to mimic their English speech, but her accent would come out, she could hear it in her own words.
She was disgusted, but the dowager found it fascinating, recalling her to her young days when the glittering French court was the epitome of ton; Mrs. Elstead wondered where Henry had found her; Lady Emily Northcote suppressed a flash of irritation that her rational mind knew was unjustified; and Harriet was enchanted.
She bounced up. “Mama, pray permit me to take Lady Northcote over the house. I promise we shall be quick. There will be plenty of time to dress.” She turned to Anna. “Would you care to see the house now?”
“I would be grateful for a chance to walk about a little. I have been sitting in that carriage, oh! Too long.”
More curtseys, and Harriet led her out of the drawing room, pausing in the hallway to say impulsively, “I love your accent. Of course Henry was amazingly ravished, though Mama hates when I use that word. Oh, it’s been a thousand ages since anything interesting has happened in this house. Come, should you care to see the old wing first? Then we can come back to where it is warm. We cannot heat the house as we once did, alas. I quite dread winter . . .”
Harriet spoke so quickly that Anna did not retain the half of what she was told. Names and dates flew by as they walked downstairs again, past a beautiful double staircase and through carved doors into a hall with marble floor and vaulted ceilings. Harriet waved a hand this way and that, then paused, one hand tucked into her armpit. “Do you know English history?”
“I was put to memorize all the Kings of England as a child, but I cannot tell you much more than their dates,” Anna said. “And that puts me in mind of a question, may I ask?”
Harriet smiled, fingers interlaced—liking very much to be consulted, for she was usually suppressed. “Please do!”
“Lady Emily, she is the daughter of a duke or a marquis?” Anna remembered Lady Lydia.
“No, she is never Lady Emily, for that would be a duke’s daughter. She is Lady Emily Northcote, being the second widow in the family, when there is a new baron and his wife. Three Lady Northcotes!” Harriet grinned, and said confidingly, “Mama had to go and look it out in some old book about titles and orders, when we first found out about you. And I must say it put Emily in quite a—” She caught herself up, blushed, and turned to the pictures on the wall.
“Our family is quite old. At one time,” Harriet went on, “we had cousins on either side of the water due to peace treaties that ended with marriages, during the time of the Edwards. Things are not nearly so wild now. But this house was built before the Puritans ruined everything, and so it was fairly stripped by them. With the Restoration, the family returned and had all new furnishings. The old great hall was turned into a ballroom. Fancy how horrid, the anterooms all opening into each other. That includes the bedchambers!”
“It is that way in the older palaces,” Anna said.
“Palaces!” Harriet cast her a wide-eyed look. “You are not what anyone expected at all, and I must say . . .” She clipped her lips into a line, used both hands to fling open a carved and gilt door, and waved a hand. “The ballroom. It can actually be very fine when it’s decorated, and warm. But it really is dreadfully old-fashioned. When it’s like this you half expect a ghost to come out of the shadows, wearing a Louis XIV wig.”
Up a carved stone stairway, to the state rooms, where she said, “This is the Baron’s Bedchamber, though no baron has slept in it for at least a hundred years. That fence before the bed! That horrid high canopy over the bed, which incidentally is as hard as a plank. So high a canopy cannot possibly have been able to keep any warmth in. But Charles II slept here on a visit, and it is said that at least one of the Pretenders also stayed here, though we are not Catholics. My ancestors were friends with the Aubignys, who are, and connected to the Stuarts. Anyway no one has changed a thing. They just repair everything and put it right back as it was.”
She let them out a side door into a long gallery with fireplaces at either end.
“Those high-backed benches are beautiful,” Anna said, pointing.
Harriet lifted her chin as she gazed at the lovingly polished wood gleaming in the weak light, the unforgiving flat benches with the backs carved with Biblical scenes. “Oh, they are beautiful, and I guess some ancestor paid a lot. But have you actually ever sat in one? Those carvings knock the back of your head unmercifully, and as for sitting . . .”
She half-shut her eyes. “I had a governess, Miss Porter, before she was sent off two years ago, I do not know why. She told me that women wore a great deal more clothes back then, and heavy things with their hair piled in for hats. So maybe they carried their cushions around with them, so to speak. But can you imagine sitting in here, the room full of smoke, for the chimneys all smoked back then, trying to dance? I wonder what girls my age danced to, especially if you were wearing a dress with sleeves dragging on the floor.”
She hopped and twirled lightly in bouncing bourrées past windows lining one wall, and stopped at the first of a succession of great, mostly gloomy ancient paintings of ancestors on the opposite.
Harriet began naming each and adding a comment, most of them saucy, which caused Anna to laugh. “. . . and there, Lady Fortuna—isn’t that a dreadful name, Fortuna? It is no wonder she was quite horrid. Infamous over the countryside, I assure you. My grandmother Dangeau once confided to me that her brother said there was a general wish that she might be sent abroad, to teach Frederick of Prussia and his dragoons a lesson in manners.”
And then on to a lady whose towering headdress seemed as large as her body in its beautifully painted satin and silk court gown. “Great-great Aunt Sarah, married three times. Her uncle was an earl, and her sister married another earl, which made her top the nob something dreadful. No one could sit in her presence unless she said they could, and she wouldn’t let them, so the stories go, if she was the least degree unhappy with someone, and so Caroline, her son’s wife, whom she loathed, fainted dead away once. She was seven months in child. It’s said that Great-great Aunt Sarah snubbed her three husbands into their graves. She was very beautiful, though.”
Harriet sighed, her head tipped to one side. Then smiled as she bounced farther down the gallery and lifted a hand toward a charming portrait of a lady painted as a shephe
rdess, as if shepherdesses ever wore silk, Anna thought to herself.
“That is great-grandmamma! She was wonderful. I was so very, very sorry when she died, though she lived to be well over ninety. She told me she had very fine ankles, which is why she loved the fashion for shepherdesses in paintings. Very bold, but you can see a painting of the first water. Mama leaves it up here, because my grandmother, who could be quite horrid, had it put here lest looking upon it would make her daughters turn out fast. Can you believe the absurdity? But Papa and John would not shift it, even after Penelope and Caroline moved to Whitstead.”
Who are Penelope and Caroline? Anna thought, but did not speak.
Harriet kicked out her slippered foot in its thick, warm stocking. “I think my ankles are just as fine, but I do not, at all, perceive how having ’em painted would make anyone fast. Though I must say, I am not quite certain what fast is, except bad manners in girls, for nobody ever says it of boys, no matter how abominably they act. But that,” she said blithely, “is neither here nor there, and it is quite cold. Let us go.”
“The rest of the family is not here, then?” Anna asked, wanting to see a portrait of the captain.
“Oh, no, they are all in the downstairs gallery. Beginning with my elder sisters Penelope and Caroline, by Papa’s first marriage,” Harriet explained as they ran downstairs to the first floor in the new wing. Anna had begun to feel the chill deep in her bones, and was glad even of a slight lessening of the astonishing cold that Harriet seemed not to feel.
On the opposite side of the ballroom they had first seen was the library, and more formal rooms; along the wall was another gallery, much shorter than that in the old wing, for the layout here was in the newer cross. These rooms opened off a central space, or a hall, rather than into one another.
“Penelope,” Harriet said, pointing up at the head and shoulders painting of a stern-faced young woman in an old-fashioned hat and square-necked gown. “I think she was born an old maid. She is every day of forty-five, and pretends to extreme poverty ever since Papa sent her and Caro away to Whitstead, which is a very pretty house, I assure you, though small. Penelope makes a virtue of penury, though she is very well to live. Better than we, ha ha!”
She caught Anna’s wide look, and flushed, knowing she was gossiping. But the beautiful Lady Northcote had said nothing crushing, so she went on, “Penelope is well content with single blessedness, though she professes to regrets, but the true regret is that she, and Papa both, would not permit Caro to marry unless the elder sister did, and so Caro, who loves children, teaches at the village school, and on Sundays, when they come here after first divine service, she creeps upstairs to visit little Amelia, and play with Eleanor and Justina.”
Next to Penelope’s portrait was one of a young woman with a round, charming smile. She, too, wore an enormous hat and the edge of her gown was square-necked. “You will meet the little girls on the morrow, perhaps. Emily only permits Nurse to bring them downstairs for an hour now and then.”
She whirled about, extending her hands to a gilt-framed family portrait. “Here is the family.” At either side of the nearly life-sized gathering were full length portraits of two gentlemen, the resemblance pronounced in the strong chins.
“On the one side is Papa, and the other is my late brother John.”
The elder wore the satin skirts and red heels and fashionable toupee of an earlier time. The younger was dressed in the modern mode, but in both portraits could be seen a similar erect posture, the haughty shoulders and elevated chin of one who knows what he is worth.
Anna looked past them to the other members of the family. The dowager was there, in a flowing gown of polonaised satin. A young girl leaned against her chair, and a taller girl stood behind her—the present Mrs. Elstead.
On the other side of the chair stood a thin boy who had to be Henry Duncannon, perhaps the age of his midshipmen. In spite of the smooth, rounded cheeks of youth, his chin and eyes were recognizable as Captain Duncannon’s. He smiled off in one direction, and Anna fancied he gazed off toward the sea, though the landscape behind the marble terrace on which the family was gathered overlooked the lake behind the manor.
She returned her gaze to the elder son. The former baron, a good-looking young man in a haughty pose, was dressed in the height of fashion some five years past.
“It was so very hot the day the painter sketched me,” Harriet said, staring up at her younger self leaning against the fine carved chair that in reality no one would ever leave on a terrace to be ruined by wind and weather. “And insects would buzz about my face while I was supposed to stand still. I thought it positively spooney at the time, but now I find I am glad it was painted,” she finished soberly. “Henry left not soon after, and I was so disappointed. We were always good friends—when I was four or five he promised he would not permit anyone to call me Harry, which he loathed because of the way John . . .”
She shrugged sharply, and turned away from the picture. “That is all we have of Henry, I am obliged to confess. Papa never liked the expense of having us sit to artists, so he confined himself to what he thought was due to the honor of the house. And that meant only John, the heir, to be painted on his coming of age. Henry, of course, was away, and, well, he stopped writing.”
She felt she had said too much, and mounted the stairs. They rapidly passed by a series of tall doors all alike behind which Harriet reeled off bedchambers and sitting rooms, and then at last Harriet opened a double door and looked back with a curious expression.
“This is the baron’s suite,” she said in a lower voice. She beckoned Anna in, shut the door, and glanced about the quiet sitting room, blessedly warm from a roaring fire. “I’m afraid you have all Papa’s old furnishings, as Emily insisted on taking all the new ones with her.”
To Anna she looked as if she were about to say more, then she turned away, stretching her hands to the fire, and then added, “However little Henry will want those, we can comfort ourselves with the reflection that he, at least, can do what he thinks best. I am certain, that is, it cannot come as a surprise, surely, that he and Papa did not agree.”
Anna had spoken little beyond what was polite. Each time Harriet caught herself up, Anna suspected she was curbing the impulse to blurt out what she ought not to say.
Thoroughly sympathetic, Anna pretended not to notice the pauses, the quick sideways glances beneath puckered brows. But now it was her turn for impulse.
“No,” she began, and halted.
Harriet turned around so quickly her skirt rustled over her slippers. “No? But they did not agree.” She wrung her fingers. “I am not telling tales. Everyone knew it.”
Anna said gently, “No, he did not tell me,” and at Harriet’s hurt expression, she could not stop herself. “He told me nothing at all about his family.”
At that moment the air stirred as the far door opened, and in came Parrette with a tall, thin woman in a housekeeper’s cap, neat gray hair beneath it.
Harriet said quickly, “Lady Northcote, this is Mrs. Diggory, the housekeeper. We thought you might prefer to meet the staff properly later, after you’ve had a chance to rest, but as she is here.”
Mrs. Diggory curtseyed. “Lady Northcote. If there is anything I can do, pray send directly.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Diggory,” Anna said. “At this moment perhaps I ought to set about readying for dinner, is it not so?”
Parrette stood against the far wall, her new cap on her head. She dropped a little curtsey.
Harriet was positively burgeoning with questions. She cast a wild glance at Anna, then said, “I ought to leave you to it, and get ready myself.” A quick bob and she let herself out the carved door at the same time Mrs. Diggory quietly vanished through the plain door at the back of the room.
“I’ve got water for washing through here,” Parrette said. “Everything is sens dessus dessous—what would you say in English?”
“At sevens and sixes,” Anna said, proud of remembering
this expression from her reading.
Parrette showed her into her new dressing room, which had been papered in patterns of pale blue irises on an ivory background. It was new paper, reminding her again that she had so recently displaced this Lady Emily Northcote.
The dressing room opened into a bedroom containing a heavy maplewood bed with silk swags that called Lady Hamilton’s rooms to mind.
Parrette, at her shoulder, said, “I’m told this was the bride gift of the old baron, for The Captain’s mother. It was put back here this past week.”
“I hope at least the bed is well aired,” Anna said, “even if it looks as if it’s been sitting there since my mother was a girl.”
Parrette uttered a laugh. “Trust me to see to that.”
“Where have they put you? I do not see a room. Is it adequate?”
Parrette clipped her lips closed. No, that attic was not adequate for anything but perhaps rats. The rooms were tiny, and of course not heated. But there was nothing Anna could do about that now. She must concentrate on putting her best foot forward, and Parrette thought to herself, I have endured much worse. “It will do. Now, come and wash your face and hands, put on the gown I’ve laid out, and I will dress your hair.”
While Anna divided her attention between the unfamiliar room and getting ready to face them all at dinner, Harriet had flitted to her bedchamber, where waited Polly, the upstairs maid who hoped to be promoted to lady’s maid once Harriet would be granted her own servant.
Polly was exactly Harriet’s age, granddaughter to Mrs. Diggory. The girls had known one another all their lives. “Oh, miss,” she said as she straightened up from stirring the fire. “Her lady’s maid is French, and did for royalty somewhere far foreign. And, she told grandmother, straight out, that the new la’ship is related to a duke.”
Harriet would no more snub Polly for presumption than she would fly, though she knew who would scold her for permitting unbecoming familiarity. “A duke? Ha, that’s capital,” Harriet said as she wrestled impatiently out of her ugly schoolgirl mourning gown and into her equally ugly schoolgirl dinner gown.
Rondo Allegro Page 34
