by Jo Beverley
“No one’s used these rooms for some time,” Braydon said.
That didn’t explain the colors, unless some had changed over time. But she said, “It’s a pleasant size. Not too large to be cozy, especially with that fire.” She put down Sillikin, then discarded her muff and walked toward the hearth, even though she wasn’t cold. “After the snow palace, it’s a relief.”
“Snow that never thaws,” he said. “Your rooms have been cleaned but otherwise unchanged. You must alter or arrange them as you wish. The same applies to the whole house, of course.”
She wandered over to inspect a lovely table with a marquetry chessboard on the top. “Do you think the errant lady played?”
“I’ve no idea. I’ve hardly thought of her at all.” He came and opened a drawer. “Two packs of well-worn cards imply she enjoyed them, at least.” Another drawer contained fish-shaped counters, and a third, chess pieces.
“Surely they must have played games here in happier times,” Kitty said. “There must have been happy times.” But what if they’d married as strangers and never come to enjoy each other’s company? Was the unpleasant decor a violent protest against cruel fate? Would her fate be similar? “How would you feel if I had the walls in the hall painted a warmer color?”
“Relief,” he said, “but I advise you to pick your battles, especially on the first day.”
“He thinks I’m impetuous,” Kitty murmured to Sillikin, then winced. She must break herself of that habit.
He politely ignored her eccentricity. “Your dressing room is next door.”
Kitty went through the adjoining door into a smaller room, but that was by excellent design, as this was also a bathroom. The bath sat in the center, crowned with a rail from which hung curtains to keep off the draft. With a fire burning, as now, there’d be no shivering through a hasty bath.
“Delightful!” she said, and meant it.
“There’s a boiler in the basement, so hot water is always available. A stirrup pump brings water to my bath, but there was no Lady Dauntry when the system was installed, so buckets will be needed from there to here.”
“The dowager and Isabella have the piped water?”
“Of course, though they share a bathroom. Isabella’s room is on the other side of the house, alongside the dowager’s.”
“What of guests?”
“There are three additional bedrooms on this floor but no extra bathrooms. It seems there have been few guests in recent years.”
Shame over the errant viscountess, or a lack of interest in company? Kitty didn’t ask. Though they were alone, she felt as if they were being overheard. Lurking servants who were merely curious, or a lurking dowager?
The dressing room was lined with wooden cupboards and drawers, but her trunks were only half unpacked. Henry must have slipped out when she heard them approaching. Perhaps that was why she’d sensed someone.
They progressed on into the viscountess’s bedroom. She’d expected it to be grand, but again it was of a practical size. The bed made up for it, being tall with heavy, mustard-colored hangings trimmed with a long gold fringe, which again managed to clash. The coverlet and window curtains were in the same bilious color, and the flowered carpet was a dazzle of white and blue. The blue was picked up in the painted walls.
“That yellow could have changed with time,” Kitty said faintly.
“Or Diane Dauntry didn’t have a good eye.”
“Perhaps that’s why she and the dowager were at odds. If so, I have some sympathy for the dowager.”
“There is ground between snowy perfection and garish havoc.”
“Some people never choose the middle way.”
Sillikin began an exploration, and Kitty did the same, wandering idly from bedside stand to upright chair, absorbing the fact that this was the viscountess’s bedroom. Hers alone? She and Marcus had shared the one room and the one bed.
“You’re troubled?” he asked. It was as if he could read her mind.
“Merely warm.” She took off her cloak. He moved to help her, but it was already done. Was she going to have to learn to be less self-reliant? She shed her bonnet and gloves as well, laying all on the bed. She hadn’t worn a cap for her wedding and now felt underdressed.
“If the previous Lady Dauntry returned, how would people distinguish between her and me? She can’t be the dowager, can she?”
“No. There can only be one. She’d be Diane, Lady Dauntry. It’s unlikely to be an issue.”
“Does anyone know where she is?”
“Not that I’m aware.”
“If she’s heard that her husband and son are dead, she might return. She might be concerned for her daughter.”
“Somewhat late in the day.”
He was unsympathetic, but Kitty was increasingly curious about the previous occupant of these rooms. The decor suggested turmoil, and it couldn’t have been easy to abandon children.
“I wonder if she even knows she’s a widow.”
“A point,” he said. “I’ll ask my secretary to look for any correspondence. I have the impression there’s been none since she left, but the paperwork is not in good order.”
“Your predecessor was disorganized?” She was sure Braydon was the complete opposite.
“He didn’t employ a secretary and was often absent.”
“Perhaps not surprising,” she said. “This is not a comfortable house.”
“And yet he is presented as a devoted son and father.”
“Why didn’t he seek a divorce? He must have wanted to remarry.”
“Perhaps he didn’t. He had his son.”
“Or didn’t want to expose another wife to his mother.”
“Melodrama? He could have sought someone of sufficient steel.”
“As you have done?”
“Your steeliness is my good fortune, but the dowager isn’t my mother. I have no special duty of respect or care. I suspect that like most men, he simply didn’t want unpleasantness.”
“That’s not entirely my experience,” she said, but her mind was mostly on the bed. Perhaps he didn’t have his own. Perhaps this one was shared. There was one way to find out. “May I see your rooms?” she asked.
“Of course.”
He opened the door, and there was her answer—a bedroom similar to hers, but with a more comfortable atmosphere. Of course, it had been lived in until the fifth viscount’s death, and then by Braydon for the recent while. It was also more pleasantly decorated, despite a darkening use of brown. It seemed the fifth viscount hadn’t had a taste for winter, but not for summer, either.
“Did he spend most of his time away because of the house,” she asked, “or did it become as it was because of his neglect?”
“Perhaps he simply avoided the war between his women.”
“Then he shouldn’t have complained of the result.”
“I have no evidence that he did.”
The conversation was wandering because of her awareness of the bed.
A book lay open on a table by the chair. What did a man like this read on the night before his wedding? A riding crop lay on the chest at the foot of the bed. A sheathed cavalry saber hung from the raised escutcheon in the back of the bed. Marcus, too, had kept his sword on display. Did that indicate that Braydon felt some nostalgia for the war?
She’d given Marcus’s sword to his mother. Lady Cateril had been touched to tears, but it had been no sacrifice for Kitty. The sword and other war remnants reminded his mother of his glory days, but to Kitty they were symbols of his suffering.
The silence felt oppressive. “How long is it since you came here?” she asked.
“Five long weeks.”
She turned a look on him. “It can’t be so dreadful as that.”
“I’ve never had a taste for country living.”
“Poets have poured out praise of it.”
“Then they are welcome to it.”
She had to fight a smile at his hint of surliness. He must have seen it.
“I’m London born and bred,” he said. “I find fields and coppices pleasing enough to observe in passing, but severely lacking as a habitation for anything but cows and sheep.”
“This is hardly living in a field,” she pointed out.
“But if I walk outside, how far is it to civilization? You’re a town person, too. Do you not feel the same?”
“Perhaps living in Beecham Dab reduced the suffering. May I suggest that you suffer from lack of congenial company, sir, not from an excess of fields?”
“You may, but it would be discourteous of me to agree.”
She felt heat rise in her cheeks.
“I apologize,” he said. “That wasn’t meant as it sounded.”
“It takes time to discover congeniality,” she agreed, but they were walking on eggs here. Was he, too, unsure of marital-bed protocol? He’d never been married at all.
She strolled idly about the room, past a glossy wooden washstand that held shaving equipment. She’d shaved Marcus when his hands had been unsteady. Braydon would need no such service. Marcus had favored clove-scented soap, but the scent here was different. Rosemary, perhaps, but with other ingredients.
This was the bedroom of a different man. A different husband. Would he expect different behaviors? Was he waiting for her to initiate something?
“I have a dressing and bathing room next door,” he said, “but my office is downstairs, easily accessible from outside when people need to see me on estate matters. Would you like to see more of the house?”
If she’d failed to do the right thing, he should simply tell her! She wouldn’t mind consummating the marriage now. Her body had been simmering for hours, and she wished the first time over and done.
But all she said was, “Of course. Come, Sillikin. Sillikin? Where on earth has she gone to now?”
The dog wriggled out from under the bed, a woolen stocking in her mouth, and presented the prize with pride.
“Well done,” Kitty said as she took it and brushed a tuft of dust off one of the dog’s ears. “When did you lose this?” she asked, dangling the sturdy stocking in front of Braydon.
“It’s not one of mine.”
His disdain made her laugh. “I suppose your stockings are tailor-made by fairies.”
“Finely knitted by elves,” he responded.
Had he actually made a joke?
But then he said, “Shall we progress?”
Kitty dropped the stocking on the chest, making a mental note to check the quality of the cleaning everywhere in this house. Once in the corridor she realized she might have been wise to keep the cloak. The Dutch stove could do only so much. She was hardy, however. She’d survive.
He indicated the matching doors on the other side of the central open space. “The dowager’s suite and Isabella’s bedroom. There are guest bedrooms at the end of each gallery and another tucked in a rear corner. We’ll go that way.”
Kitty kept silent, aware that anything said up here could be heard by many. She hoped it wasn’t like St. Paul’s Cathedral, where a whisper on one side of the dome could be heard on the other.
The guest bedrooms seemed adequate, and Sillikin’s exploration revealed no more neglect. The style of decoration was along the middle line that Braydon had mentioned between snowy and garish, making the viscountess’s rooms even more peculiar.
Chapter 15
He took her next to a short gallery with windows looking over the rear of the estate. It would be a pleasant place to sit in summer, and was large enough for exercise in bad weather. One large fireplace provided warmth, but again Kitty regretted not having her cloak.
Paintings hung on the walls, and Braydon took her to one.
“My predecessor.”
The smoothly plump man sat by a desk on which documents were spread. That was common when the sitter was a landowner, but it seemed to Kitty that the papers were mere ornaments. He had thinning dark hair and a slightly anxious expression, as if he was thinking, Will she approve of this?
“Odd that a loving mother can make life particularly difficult.”
“You’re thinking of Lady Cateril as well?”
“She tried to force Marcus to live at Cateril Manor, where she’d have fussed over him all the time. As it was, she fretted over him in letters and sometimes dispatched doctors to torment him with pointless treatments.”
“It must be hard to accept that there’s no hope.”
“I see that, but she sought a miracle that would make him what he’d once been. I don’t think she truly loved him as he’d become. Oh, that’s unfair!”
He startled her by taking her hand. “You loved him as he was, and you did what you could to protect him.”
She looked into his cool blue eyes. “It was little enough.”
“Sometimes that’s all we can do.”
His touch and understanding were so unexpected that tears threatened. She twitched away to look at the portrait again.
“There’s an open locket on the table,” she said, looking closer, “with a picture of a woman. Mother or wife?”
“You’re observant.” He came close beside her. “Youngish, I’d say.”
“Wife, then. He must have loved her when this was painted.”
“Or done the conventional thing.”
Kitty was tilting her head to try to make out the features of the brown-haired woman in the miniature. “It might be of his mother when young. Is there a painting of the dowager here?”
“A family group over here.”
The large painting showed a seated young woman with a boy at her knee and an older man standing behind. Though they were dressed finely, they were presented outdoors, with the park and house behind them. Lady Dauntry was plump and pretty, with dark curls, but not at all like the woman in the miniature. Lord Dauntry had rather heavy features and wore an old-style gray wig.
“They look content,” she said.
“I see them as smug. Prosperous, satisfactorily married, and with a healthy young heir. Within three years,” he added, “the fourth viscount will be dead and she will raise the fifth alone.”
“In the midst of life we are in death,” Kitty murmured, quoting from the funeral service. She turned away from the disturbing painting. “Are there any later pictures of her?”
“One. She keeps it in her boudoir.”
“I assume she’s gray haired by now?”
“Somewhat. She wears ostentatious mourning caps, so it’s hard to tell.”
Kitty looked around at generations of Braydons. “I suppose you’ll have to have your portrait done.”
“And you. We could wait until we have a son and reproduce that one.”
“No.”
“No,” he agreed. “Portraits are odd things, aren’t they? They show sitters like flies in amber, oblivious of the fate stalking them.”
Kitty thought of the painting of Marcus. “Some people lead tranquil lives,” she argued. “Consider Ruth and Andrew. They could be captured in contentment now, and there’s every chance it could happen again in twenty years and then forty.”
“We’ll pray for that.”
“You doubt it?” Has he, too, detected trouble there?
“The future is a mystery to everyone. My father died when a wall fell on him.”
Surprised by a personal revelation, Kitty sat on a cushioned window seat, ready to hear more. “How?”
“Pure ill luck,” he said, strolling to sit beside her. “He was walking along a London street toward his Whitehall office. Some building work was being done, and an old wall crumbled down on top of him. A young lad nearby was killed at the same time.”
“In life we are in death, indeed. A lesson to enjoy the moment we have.”
“I agree. How did your parents die?”
“In a fire. A stove kept the chill off the bookshop in winter, and it somehow set fire to the books. They lived above. The smoke killed them. I was scarcely out of mourning when Marcus died. And now Princess Charlotte. Women do die in childbirth, but it was such a shock. Perhaps because she was a princess?” she asked.
“We believe that royalty are immune to cruel fate?” he asked. “History hardly bears that out.”
“We might at least believe that they receive the best medical attention. Many are blaming her doctors.”
“Perhaps with cause. But I suspect the universal grief is for a belief that innocents are safe. Whereas fate is a malign old crone.”
“Not for us.” She said it in instinctive reaction to his bitter tone. “Many people are fortunate, and we will be of that party.”
“By force of will?”
“If necessary. Consider this—how often have royal women died in childbirth?”
“I have no idea.” But he was thinking. “Not the queen, certainly, despite nearly twenty births. George the second’s queen died long after the birth of her last child. Queen Anne suffered endless unsuccessful pregnancies, which might have harmed her health, but none directly killed her. Queen Mary died of smallpox, and James the Second’s queen of cancer.”
“You’ve studied such matters?” she asked, astonished.
“I have a retentive memory. Elizabeth, of course, had no children, nor did Mary Tudor. Ah . . .”
“Jane Seymour!” Kitty said. “Henry the Eighth’s third wife. But that’s nearly three hundred years ago. So, we may all have taken as fact that queens and princesses don’t die in childbirth. Hence the shock at the affront to natural order.”
“You’re smiling.”
Kitty realized she was. “Such speculations are fun. Is there a natural order?”
“I’d like to think so, and to preserve it.”
“How?”
“In any way I can.”