by Mary Balogh
“Mrs. Hunt.” He could feel Sophia dip into a curtsy.
“I would not believe it,” his mother was saying, “even when Elsie Parsons herself wrote to me. I expected that you would come to your senses before it was too late.”
“Mama,” he said sharply.
“Here come your grandmother and Amy,” she said. “Whatever will they think?”
Amy was the first to arrive.
“Vincent,” she cried, pulling him into a tight hug. “You wretched boy. Mama has been beside herself ever since you disappeared in the middle of the night like a naughty schoolboy, and she has been beside herself all over again since hearing about your newest escapade. Whatever were you thinking?”
Sophia always had been virtually invisible, according to her. The quiet mouse in its quiet corner.
“Vincent. Dearest boy.” It was his grandmother’s voice, warm with affection, and Amy relinquished her hold on him so that their grandmother could hug him in her turn.
“Grandmama,” he said, “and Amy. Allow me to present my wife, Sophia. My grandmother, Mrs. Pearl, Sophie, and my eldest sister, Amy Pendleton.”
“Oh, you have married, then,” Amy cried. “I would not believe it even though Anthony said you would if you had compromised her to the extent of taking her to London without a chaperon.”
He might have known that one at least of his sisters would be here, summoned, no doubt, to help deal with this new family crisis involving him. And Amy was the closest geographically. The other two were probably on their way.
The first one to recover her manners was his grandmother.
“Sophia, my dear,” she said, “you are looking pale enough to fall over. You are looking as I always feel when I have been compelled to take a long carriage journey. I daresay you need a nice hot cup of tea and something to eat, and we will find both for you up in the drawing room. That is a pretty little bonnet you are wearing. I suppose it is the very height of fashion, since you have been in London.”
“Mrs. Pearl,” Sophia said, her voice soft and a little trembly. “Yes, we went there to marry, and Vincent insisted that I have new clothes since … Well. Yes, a cup of tea would be lovely. Thank you.”
“Sophia,” Amy said in stiff greeting. “You are a niece of Lady March’s, we understand?”
“Yes,” Sophia said. “My father was her brother.”
“Well, what is done is done,” Vincent’s mother said briskly, “and we must all make the best of it. Sophia, do go inside with my mother. Amy and I will help Vincent in.”
One on each arm, no doubt, walking rather slowly, propelling him along, keeping him safe from any obstacle that might hurl itself into his path. He already felt the old slight irritation. Though that was unfair. They meant so well. They loved him.
“You must not trouble yourself, Mama,” he said. “Martin? My cane, if you please. Sophie?” He held out his arm, and he felt her hand slip through it. “I’ll take you up to the drawing room while our bags are being carried to our rooms. A cup of tea would indeed be just the thing, Grandmama. It has been a long journey. I am sorry I caused you such anxiety, Mama, though I did have Martin write to you a time or two. We were in the Lake District. I’ll tell you about my travels when we are sitting down, and about our wedding, though I daresay Sophia will do a better job of telling you about that. Have you arrived just recently, Amy? Are Anthony and the children with you?”
“They are,” she said. “We arrived late yesterday. We came as soon as we heard. Though I was convinced you would not actually get married in such haste. Indeed, I was sure you would not, especially when you ran from the mere prospect of matrimony such a short while ago.”
“That was Miss Dean, Amy,” he said, “and this is Sophia. Miss Dean was not my choice of bride, while Sophia was. And is.”
He was walking as he spoke. When Martin had set his cane in his hand, he had also by a slight touch turned him in the right direction. He felt the rise of the bottom step with his cane and counted as he climbed while talking at the same time.
“I believe the sun must be shining,” he said. “Is it?”
“It is,” Sophia said.
“I can feel its heat on my back,” he said. “I am glad about that. You will be seeing Middlebury Park at its finest, Sophie, though there is far more to see, of course, than just the parterres and the front façade of the house and the woods and the lake.”
He stopped when they were inside the hall. He knew it was impressive. The floor was tiled with black and white squares and there was a great deal of white marble with classical busts set in alcoves. The ceiling was painted with scenes from mythology, and the frieze was gilded. There was a large marble fireplace on either side so that when one entered the house on a chilly day, one was met with at least the illusion of warmth and the cozy crackle of logs and the smell of the wood.
“Well?” he said.
“Oh,” she said, almost in a whisper. “It is magnificent.”
Yes. It was also intended to inspire awe in lowly visitors. Not necessarily, though, in its own mistress.
“It is one of the finest halls in England, Sophia, or so I have been told,” his mother said.
He moved forward, counting his steps silently again—through the high arch at the back of the hall and to his right until his cane touched the bottom stair of the marble staircase. Sophia’s hand on his arm somehow assured him that she would correct any serious misstep, but it was a subtle, unobtrusive guide.
The drawing room was above the hall, at the front of the house, its three long windows looking out along the straight part of the driveway between the parterres to a small rose garden and trees in the distance. It was a magnificent view in a room that was flooded with light in the daytime.
Or so it had been described to him. He was glad he had once been able to see. At least he could imagine. And who knew? Perhaps the home he pictured in his mind was more magnificent than the reality.
“All the living quarters are here and in the west wing,” he explained as they climbed the stairs. “The east wing is seldom used. It houses the state apartments, the gallery, and the grand ballroom. There were once lavish entertainments there, and balls.”
A servant must have been waiting outside the drawing room doors. He heard them open and led his wife inside.
“Oh,” she said, stopping on the threshold, and he heard her inhale rather sharply.
“Vincent, my lad!” It was the hearty voice of Anthony Pendleton, his brother-in-law. Vincent could hear him striding across the room, and then his right hand was caught up in a firm clasp after his cane had been whisked away. “And what is all this we have been hearing? What mischief have you been up to when there were no mother and sisters to keep you under their wing and under control, eh? You have really done the deed, by the look of it, as I assured Amy you would. Or is this merely your betrothed or a casual acquaintance on your arm?”
“Anthony!” Amy sounded mortified.
“Sophie,” Vincent said, “this is Anthony Pendleton, Amy’s husband. My wife, Anthony. Yes, the deed is done—was done two days ago, in fact, in London, at St. George’s on Hanover Square. We are married.”
“And proud I am of you,” Anthony said, slapping him on the shoulder. “You really are a tiny little thing, aren’t you, Sophia, just as all those gossips said you were in their letters.” Vincent heard a smacking kiss.
“Mr. Pendleton,” Sophia said.
“You must call me Anthony since you are my sister-in-law,” he said.
“Anthony,” she said.
“St. George’s?” Vincent’s mother said. “It was not some clandestine affair, then, as we feared? But could you not have waited, Vincent? It is too late now, though.” Her voice had turned brisk again. “Sophia, go and sit by the fireplace. The tea tray will be here in a minute. Let me take your gloves and your bonnet. Anthony will set them down somewhere. Oh, goodness me, your hair is short. I was told it was. Well, at least it curls quite prettily. Mother, go and si
t beside Sophia. Vincent, come and sit in the wing chair by the window, where you can feel the heat of the sun. I know it is your favorite.”
She took a firm hold of his arm.
He almost went.
“Thank you, Mama,” he said instead, “but I have been sitting forever in the carriage and need to stretch my legs. I am going to stand in front of the fireplace, close to Sophia.”
He walked toward it on his own, without his cane. He hoped he was not about to make an idiot of himself and either miss it by a mile or crash into it, though he knew the room well enough. He reached out one hand when he thought he was close and was relieved to discover the mantelpiece only a little farther ahead of him than he had expected. He set one hand on it and half turned to face the chair where his wife sat.
“It is indeed short,” his grandmother was saying, presumably referring to Sophia’s hair. “But it is a beautiful color.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” Sophia said. “Lady Trentham, who is married to one of Vincent’s friends, took me to her own hairdresser and he tamed it for me. I have always cut it myself, but not very well. He advised me to grow it.”
“Then maybe you ought,” his grandmother said, “and so display its color to greater advantage.”
“I really think you ought,” Amy said. “I can see why they thought at Barton Coombs that you look like a boy.”
Anthony cleared his throat.
“Not that you do now,” Amy added. “But you look very … young. Have you always kept your hair short?”
“No,” Sophia said. “But it was hard to manage.”
“A good maid can manage any hair,” Vincent’s mother said. “You did not bring a maid?”
“No, ma’am,” she said. “I have never had one.”
“Well, neither had we,” his mother said, “until my girls married and then I moved here. Except for Mrs. Plunkett, that is, who was our housekeeper at Covington House and did duty also as cook, nurse, lady’s maid, finder of missing items, hider of guilty culprits from being caught—yes, Vincent!—and a number of other things.”
“She was always my closest ally,” Vincent said. She had lived with them all the time he could remember.
“I was quite sad that she decided to retire when I came here, and went to live with her sister,” his mother said. “One of the chambermaids here is my own maid’s sister, Sophia, and apparently it is her greatest ambition to be a lady’s maid too. She did my hair very nicely one evening when I had sent my own maid to bed with a cold. Perhaps you would care to give her a try and see if she suits you.”
Vincent looked in her direction with gratitude. She was recovering herself. She might be upset—undoubtedly she was—but she would follow her own advice and make the best of things as they were. His mother had always been good at that.
“Thank you, ma’am,” Sophia said.
“That had better be Mama,” his mother said.
“Yes, Mama.”
“Ah, here comes the tea tray,” Amy said as Vincent heard the drawing room door open. “Shall I pour, Mama? No, pardon me. Shall I pour, Sophia?”
“Oh,” Sophia said. “Yes, please do, Mrs. Pendleton.”
“Amy, if you please,” Amy said. “We are sisters-in-law. Oh, how strange that sounds. I have two brothers-in-law but no sister-in-law until now. Vincent, you wretch. I will never forgive you for running off to London to marry and depriving us of all the fuss and anguish of organizing a wedding. Ellen and Ursula will not be happy with you either. Just wait and see.”
“While Amy is pouring and Anthony is handing around the cakes,” Vincent’s mother said, “I want to hear about your wedding. Every single detail of it.”
“Starting with your wedding outfit, if you please, Sophia,” his grandmother said.
Sophia did most of the telling, her voice thin and breathless at first but settling to a greater steadiness. She told of her shopping trip with Lady Trentham and Lady Kilbourne, of her wedding outfit and his, the appearance of the church, the guests, the way he had signed the register and the astonished look on the clergyman’s face as he did so, the tears that had been sparkling in the eyes of Lord Trentham and the Duke of Stanbrook as they left the church, the small, cheering crowd outside, the sunshine, the rose petals and the gentlemen who threw them, the decorations on the barouche and din of the pots and pans, the wedding breakfast, the toasts. Vincent filled in the gaps, explaining the presence of his friends in town for Hugo’s wedding and their request to attend his and to put on a wedding breakfast for them.
“And I am so very sorry that you could not all be there too,” Sophia added, sounding breathless again. “But Lord Dar— But Vincent was very sensitive to the fact that I had no family of my own—or no family to speak of. And he was concerned that I had no decent clothes and looked like a scarecrow and was in no fit state to be brought here to be presented to you. And he did not want the long delay of inviting you all to come to London, for I had nowhere to stay, though as it turned out, I believe I could have stayed longer with Lord and Lady Trentham. They were very kind. But we did not know that ahead of time. I am very sorry.”
“I am sorry too, Sophia,” his mother said with a sigh. “And I am sorry the two of you did not take longer to become acquainted in order to be sure that you will suit each other for a lifetime. But it is too late to worry over those things now.”
“Sophia and I are not worried, Mama,” Vincent said as someone—Anthony, he believed—took his empty plate from his hand and replaced it with a cup and saucer. “We did what seemed best to us, and we have not known a moment’s regret since.”
He hoped he spoke the truth—for both of them.
“In two days of marriage, Vince?” Anthony chuckled. “That is good to hear.”
“I will try to make up for the fact that we did not come here to marry,” Sophia said, her voice noticeably shaking. “I suppose the neighbors would have been invited if we had? I will call on them, if I may. Is that the correct thing to do? And perhaps they will call here. Perhaps at some time in the future, we will invite a number of people here for a sort of reception. Perhaps even a ball, like the ones there used to be.”
There was a slight, stunned silence.
“Oh, my dear,” his mother said, “I will accompany you if you wish to pay some calls, but we do not encourage anyone to come here. Vincent does not … mingle. It is not easy for him. Any sort of lavish entertainment here is out of the question.”
He had been something of a recluse here at Middlebury. He had made no active move to mingle with local society, and that was entirely his own fault.
“And yet,” he said, “it happened at Barton Coombs less than two weeks ago. Half the citizens descended upon me there at home, and Martin served us all coffee and his mother’s cakes. There was an assembly at the Foaming Tankard in my honor, and I rather enjoyed it even though I could not dance.”
“But that was Barton Coombs,” his mother said. “You know everyone there.”
“And I ought to know everyone here,” he said. “I have lived here for three years, after all. My uncle was, I believe, a sociable man. I must be a disappointment to the people living near.”
“Oh, but they will understand, Vincent,” Amy said.
“Understand what?” he asked her. “That I am blind and therefore totally incapacitated and mentally feeble as well? I will call on our neighbors with you, Sophie. It is time I made myself known. And this is the perfect opportunity. Middlebury Park has a new viscountess—the first in eighteen years if I have been properly informed. We will even begin to think about the possibility of a reception and ball.”
“Good for you, Vince,” Anthony said. “I always suspected you had more in you than was apparent. There are all those stories from your boyhood, after all.”
“Everyone will be enchanted,” Vincent’s grandmother said. “Everyone feels the deepest sympathy for you, I know, especially since it was in battle that you were wounded. Nevertheless, I have heard whispers that many
people long for the good old days when the viscount was not locked away inside Middlebury Park and everyone else was locked outside.”
It was appalling. He had been appalling.
“Thank you, Grandmama,” he said. “I am going to have to change all that. We are. Sophia and I.”
He looked down in her direction and smiled. She had started this. Was she up to carrying it through? But she would not have to do it alone.
“Sophia,” Amy said, “are you too tired to meet my children? They have probably already heard that Uncle Vincent is home and will be bouncing with excitement, especially if they know he has brought a new aunt with him. William is four and Hazel three, and they are bundles of endless energy except when they are sleeping.”
“I am not too tired,” Sophia said.
“My love?” Amy said, presumably to Anthony. “Shall we go and fetch them down? Will you mind, Vincent?”
She was asking him? His female relatives usually told him. Though it had not always been so. He had been very much his own person once upon a time.
“It has always seemed strange to me,” he said, “that in great houses children are confined to the nursery most of the time. We were not, were we?”
“I might have fewer gray hairs now if you had been, particularly you, Vincent,” his mother said, and they all laughed.
And it struck Vincent that there had been very little laughter in his home during the past three years. There had used to be, surely, when they all lived at Covington House.
He drank his tea and waited for the onslaught of children.
Sophia sank down into the comfortable cushions of a sofa in Vincent’s private sitting room, now hers too. Their apartments were in the southwest tower, and no one else came here without an invitation, he had told her, except Martin Fisk and now Rosina, her new maid.
The first few hours after her arrival at Middlebury Park had been a dreadful ordeal. The house itself filled her with awe, and she felt uncomfortable with the family, even though they had been polite after the first few minutes and had even gone out of their way to be kind to her. If she had been ignored and allowed to retire into herself, she would have been far more comfortable, but of course that was out of the question—both for them and for her. She was Vincent’s wife and they loved him. They could not ignore her. And she was quite determined to do what she must to become mistress of Middlebury Park. She could not tell herself that she would do it tomorrow or next week or next month. If she did not assert herself from the start, she never would.