Rondo Allegro

by Sherwood Smith

  When they reached the Manor, Henry stirred. “I survived. A month ago I could scarcely sit up without reaching for a basin,” he said. “Riding in a coach throws me back to those evil days. Will you walk me upstairs?”

  Anna said, “Of course.” She nodded her thanks to John-Coachman, who shut the door and climbed up on the box to return to the Squire’s house, as Anna and Henry moved slowly inside.

  As soon as Perkins’s step was heard, Henry said, “I am in dire want of a dose.”

  “I shall fetch the tincture at once, my lord,” Perkins said.

  Henry sank into his chair. “Anna, are you still here?”

  “I am.”

  “I shall soon be asleep. I detest laudanum. It always seemed the nostrum for the weak, and it leaves my head foggier than this devilish crease in my skull. But I find I cannot sleep when this devilish ache is on me.” He leaned his head back. “I thought I was ready for such an entertainment. Nothing to do but sit! I would enjoy the musicians, at least, but I had counted without the noise. Everyone talks above the music, and every clink and clatter . . .” He pressed one hand to the side of his head.

  So that is what that odd smile is, Anna was thinking, as Perkins came in with a bottle and a tiny glass on a tray. Pain.

  “I mean to get these thoughts out before the laudanum renders me speechless,” Henry said after he swallowed his dose. “I had thought to talk to Caro and Blythe together, but I had forgotten that though my sisters would be invited, Penelope would refuse for them both. Perhaps it is as well. A public gathering is no place for such a conversation.”

  He thumbed his eyebrow ridge through his bandage, then dropped his hands. “Did you enjoy yourself?”

  “Very much.”

  The laudanum was beginning to dissipate the worst pain, but his tongue felt thick. “As well, because at week’s end you will be expected to preside here. The New Year’s ball is an old tradition. My mother enjoys it. I might put in my appearance, then retire. D’you object?”

  “Not at all,” Anna said. “You must do what suits your constitution best. I find I would very much like to learn how to arrange such a diversion, and I know your mother and Harriet will show me how to go on.” She spoke without thinking; she thought about saying something complimentary with regard to Emily, but the time had passed for it to sound natural. It would be too awkward, or worse, she might draw attention to an inadvertent lapse that she had not intended.

  So as Perkins helped his master to his feet, she wished Henry good night and withdrew, shutting the door noiselessly behind her.

  o0o

  The New Year’s Ball was accounted a great success by all who fought their way through snowdrifts to attend. Anna was aware that she could be enjoying herself, though she was too aware of a new situation to truly enjoy it. Instead she experienced the success of seeing people well amused.

  The dowager exerted herself to entertain the older guests. Emily presided with calm assurance over the ballroom—having privately resolved to permit no one to see her glancing once Henry’s way—and Harriet marshaled the younger people in an endless series of games that involved quick wits and a great deal of laughter.

  Anna moved about looking serene, safe in the knowledge that Henry had been seen to his rooms not long after welcoming the last guest.

  At midnight she stole upstairs, and finding Henry in the sitting room, awake and restless, she offered to read from Graineville’s Le Dernier Homme, a book Henry had been given as a parting gift by a French lieutenant who had been a patient in the hospital near Henry’s chamber. Both had had bandaged eyes; they had struck up an acquaintanceship, mutually agreeing to lay the war aside until the man was deemed well enough for a prisoner exchange.

  Some pages in, Henry laid two fingers on her wrist. “The sound of your voice is what I find most pleasing. But this story is devilish strange. Are you at all entertained?”

  She said slowly, “I have read about air balloons, but this vision of the last living man in some far-distant day traveling to Brazil to find the only woman, well, my preference is for stories about people in the world I know.”

  Henry let out a soft breath of laughter, and she studied the glint of gold in the tiny whiskers on his upper lip and along his strong chin, and suppressed the impulse to stroke them with her thumb. “You can lay that infernal book aside,” he said, and wished he knew how to court. How to flatter without sounding like a coxcomb, how to please.

  Whenever he thought about how much joy he found in her presence, his throat tightened, leaving him without any words at all. I am an idiot. “It is a relief that you and I are of the same mind,” he said hoarsely. I am a coward, an idiot, and a fool.

  What could he say, without seeing her face? How would he know it was right? “I thought it a fine gift, but I wonder now if he wanted to be rid of the thing. Have we something better?”

  Anna said, “Your mother recently bought The Lay of the Last Minstrel.”

  “I read that while on blockade. I could hear that again. I like to listen to your voice.”

  Anna said ruefully, “I try very hard to emulate my mother’s pure English, but I am afraid I fail.”

  “I wish you might never change,” he said earnestly.

  “You are very polite.” She laughed and went to fetch Sir Walter Scott’s poem, leaving him to sigh and castigate himself as a lackwit and a poltroon.

  o0o

  On Twelfth Night, it was Anna and Harriet’s turn to brave the elements.

  The party was hosted by the Rackhams. The oldest gentleman there, Grandfather Rackham, was chosen as king, and the youngest girl, Georgiana Colby, as queen. From their bough and ribbon-bedecked thrones the king and queen commanded the frivolities.

  Harriet had completely ignored Robert Colby at the Christmas ball, feeling that he had returned entirely too above himself. At the New Year’s ball, he expressed his penitence so adroitly, making her laugh when recollecting how much trouble they’d found themselves in as children, that she found herself relenting.

  “We found ourselves,” she corrected, mock-solemn. “You led us there, being an exalted two years older.”

  “And now I have learnt the wisdom of following you.” He bowed.

  There was no getting around such pretty compliments, and having Robert there, glancing her way from time to time over the younger children’s heads, somehow invested with new interest all the old games like Bullet Pudding, which got their clothes covered with flour as they poked their noses into their dishes in order to lip up the bullet, and Snap-Dragon, which involved raisins, parched almonds, and strong spirits.

  Mrs. Rackham offered to play her instrument and Robert begged Harriet’s hand first as they danced the Sir Roger de Coverley.

  But the first cloud on her happiness occurred when they all exchanged partners for the allemande, Harriet with Thomas Rackham.

  When they finished and looked about, Harriet caught a derisive glance from Robert’s eye, which puzzled Harriet.

  She shrugged. And Robert turned his shoulder in a deliberate manner, leaving Harriet looking both puzzled and a little hurt.

  Anna had seen the exchange. She caught a few words of a conversation between Cecily and Jane about French dances in England and France, and for the first time, deliberately set out to draw all eyes.

  “I can show you what they are dancing in France,” she said. “And even a few steps of the zarzuela, which they dance in Spain!”

  Attention switched to her. In the middle of the carpet, she danced a few measures of the zarzuela, which all the girls wanted instantly to try, Harriet leading them, and so the bad moment passed.

  During the carriage ride home, she thought back to how enjoyable it had been—almost perfect, except for that moment with Harriet and Robert Colby, and of course because Henry had not been there to enjoy it with them.

  Then Harriet said in a sleepy voice, “How fun it was, without Emily looking on and despising us all.”

  Anna felt like she ought
to demur, but she knew that Harriet had the right of it. For so calm and quiet a woman, Emily did have a constraining effect.

  She wondered if she ought to say something, but there came a slow breath from Harriet: she was asleep.

  o0o

  Over the next couple of weeks, Anna watched Henry carefully for signs of that peculiar grimace that she now understood as evidence that he was suffering the headache. She learned not to ask how he was feeling, as the others often did. Invariably he would reply shortly, “I am fine.”

  She knew he did not like admitting to weakness, and he hated being fussed over. He would sit silently, his lips thinned, as well-meaning persons offered him their favorite nostrums, or furnished unasked-for histories of other persons being cured of the head-ache, wounds, or other illnesses, no matter how unrelated.

  She could discern by how high the side of his mouth tightened the degree of pain he felt. When he looked so, she would come to his side, touch his arm, and if he groped for her hand, she knew he wished to get away.

  At those times he required silence. If he could get away before the pain reached unbearable levels, he liked to be read to out of The Naval Chronicle, books of travel, even plays and novels as long as they were humorous.

  In this benignant effort she had the full cooperation of the dowager, who watched her son anxiously. She, too, soon saw that he hated what he called “fuss,” that is, questions he did not wish to answer, and a stream of suggested cures, however well meant.

  “To admit to weakness is a failure,” the dowager said to Anna one morning when they found themselves alone at breakfast, while heavy clouds moved in slowly outside, low and threatening. “He was always that way. His father had no truck with his sons claiming illness, as he himself was rarely ill. Illness, my husband declared, was best left to women.”

  Anna exclaimed, “But women are not weak. That is, we do not possess the physical strength to do battle, or to build monuments, perhaps, but endurance?”

  “Endurance indeed,” the dowager said, with a rare flash of irony. “When it comes to enduring pain that is infinitely easier than childbirth, men are the veriest babes in arms.”

  Anna thought of those poor creatures lying so patiently in the orlop, of Sayers and the captain forcing their wounded selves back to duty until they dropped senseless to the deck. Men knew endurance. Perhaps they endured for different reasons, and each sex respected best what it knew.

  “If only I may know whether my playing to him is pleasing, or if he sits through it for my sake,” the dowager said worriedly, and in that Anna understood the real reason for the conversation.

  That, at least, she thought she might venture a question about, but as it happened, Henry had ideas of his own.

  He surprised his mother, pleased Anna, and disappointed Emily the next evening following dinner, when once again he asked if he might join them directly rather than sit alone.

  He found his way to the couch, and sat by Anna’s side. “Mother, will you object to digging out your old Bach? You will not have known this, but I am used to playing arrangements of some that I believe are familiar. I know I heard them growing up. I have been trying to recollect them, and I might venture to play by memory. Whoever is nearest, will you pull the bell? Send for my instrument, please.”

  32

  Emily woke after a restless night of angry dreams. Was she truly the only person of delicacy and taste in this house? Harriet racketed about the countryside without the least constraint, the dowager was as vague as her eyesight, and nobody expected true breeding from a foreigner.

  But she had expected better of Henry.

  His years at sea must have coarsened him to an intolerable degree. She could not believe how he had played duets with his mother for over an hour, as Harriet and the foreign woman danced a Sir Roger de Coverley back and forth over the rug.

  Emily looked out the window at the white sky. The weather could scarcely be called open, but the predicted snow storm was nowhere in sight. Refusing breakfast, she ordered her maid to put out her riding habit, and was soon venting her emotions in a gallop over the hard ground as the clouds pressed down, an endless gray wool blanket directly overhead.

  Much as she quarreled with her mother, she still sustained a driving need to talk to the only person who comprehended, and indeed shared, her ambitions.

  Before she reached the crossroad, flurries began to drift down, at first softly. Emily ignored it, rather liking more than not the squeak of snow under the horse’s hooves, and the pure and silent white world. But before she had advanced very far she became aware that the white world was closing around her.

  Soon, though she would claim to know the road home if blinded, she felt blind indeed, and fear began to pool within her as the tired animal struggled against a rising wind and the merciless whirl of great white clots that stuck to everything.

  She had begun to fight against terror when a brief flaw in the wind revealed the familiar chimneys of the Groves. Thankfully, she traveled the last distance, drifts reaching almost to her horse’s chest, until she and her mount shivered their way to the stable.

  “What sort of a foolish scrape is this?” her mother greeted her. “I warned you that Old Dobbin’s corns have been aching this three days at least, and laugh all you will about rationality, you have known from a child he is never wrong in the prediction of blizzards.”

  Emily did not heed a word. She glanced behind her mother, saw the door to the morning room closed, and heard the faint tinkle of her sister’s harp from the room beyond. “Mother,” she said in a low voice, “Henry’s taste is intolerable, his temper worse, and yet I am in love with him as much as I ever was. What am I to do?”

  Her mother also glanced back to check the door. She had meant to save her new discovery for some more propitious date, but her pleasure at having her daughter come to her for advice, instead of quarreling, prompted her to smile.

  “Well, now, things might not look as black as you supposed. The post has come through, after three days of nothing.” She tapped a sheaf of letters with a smug gesture. “I have finally received an answer to my inquiry from the Admiralty. What with one thing and another, the mails from Gibraltar have been slower than ever, but it was worth the wait. I have learned a thing or two about that Anna Ludovisi, or Anna Bernardo, as she called herself . . .”

  o0o

  By nightfall the winds howled, the snow so thick that nightfall was indistinguishable from day. After Parrette saw Anna dressed for dinner, she was free to make her way to the stable, which had gradually become the best part of her day.

  The storm was so relentless that she set aside her usual lantern, knowing that the flame would be snuffed within a couple of paces, and retreated to fetch a storm lantern.

  When she emerged from the closet where such things were stored, she spied Lady Emily Northcote’s maid, Miss Shaw, sitting alone in the old linen room. This being the room cleared at the baron’s request for the use of the servants, as it gained heat from the great kitchen chimney against its back wall. Presently the footmen would appear, playing cards or reading, and perhaps others.

  Parrette was going to turn away, but hesitated. The others might come, but she had noticed that they rarely spoke to Miss Shaw, who had been hired that summer, “the third in as many years,” Polly had said. Did they ignore her, or did she ignore them?

  “Miss Shaw, would you be glad of some company? You can bring your work basket and sit with us over the stable.”

  Miss Shaw, a colorless woman very much in the English style (that is, complexion, eyes, and hair color looking to Parrette like uncooked dough), turned her way, startled. “I dare not,” she said in a faint voice. “My mistress would turn me off for being familiar.” She glanced over a thin shoulder as she whispered these words.

  Parrette’s interest was roused. Was this why Miss Shaw did not consort with the staff? Polly had made a disparaging comment about Shaw being above her company.

  “Your mistress is not comi
ng back any time tonight,” Parrette said. “And the kitchen fire is going out, as tomorrow is Sunday.”

  Miss Shaw looked longingly at the French maid, who seemed so interesting, and whose fingers were quite clever. She struggled. Grateful as she was to have found a good place, she was lonely and miserable. If she refused, her choice was sitting there and smelling the vile tobacco of the footmen as they argued over their interminable card games, or retreating obediently to that freezing room. Both choices were so unappealing that temptation defeated her. “I will, then. Thank you.”

  “Good,” Parrette said. “Two lanterns is better than one. I do not want to be lost in this evil weather.”

  Bundled up, they struggled out into the snow. Parrette knew exactly where the stable lay, but even so, she nearly led them astray, buffeted as they were by the north wind; they blundered into the wall around the pump. Once she identified where she was, she corrected their steps. From the pump to the wall, and from the wall down the flagged path to the stable, and thence safety of the cozy stable house fire, and the quiet, steady good sense of John Cassidy.

  Parrette had another reason for bringing Miss Shaw, besides a care for a fellow creature who was so obviously unhappy. In spite of her own determination to permit no man beside her son into her life, she had begun anticipating every glimpse of that handsome profile.

  It had begun so innocently. Parrette had felt mildly vindicated that English speech by the local people left off that impossible ‘h’ sound, like she did. But the Yorkshire the flitted by as a barely articulated ‘t’, with other words blended together in a fashion that had at first made her feel she was learning another language.

  In contrast, John-Coachman’s slow, lilting Irish was easy to comprehend, and a pleasure to listen to. Gradually she found herself listening to what he said less than how he said it. She distrusted herself for looking ahead to what any man might say, and yet she would never think of denying herself the pleasure of these gatherings.