by Lisa Cach
“Did you want a bath this morning?”
“What? Oh, I don’t think so. Just some water for washing, that’ll do.” If twenty servants were doing the work that five times their number usually did, she could hardly justify asking them to bring her a bath each and every morning, tearing them away from their other duties.
“And breakfast, milady?”
“Lunch probably isn’t so very long from now.” She didn’t want to ask these people to wait on her, not when they had so much else to do. Her mind distracted by the servant question, she completely forgot her intention to tell Marianne to give her more private time.
An hour later and she was washed, dressed, her hair was arranged, and she was in a mood to explore the house. Henry had told her last night that he would be out inspecting the estate for most of the day, but intended to be back to eat lunch with her. He’d mentioned that she could ask Abigail Johnson, the housekeeper, to give her a tour of the house if she did not wish to wait for his return. She hadn’t bothered telling him, but she’d rather wander through the house alone. She could take her time investigating the unfamiliar, dawdling over details that would seem commonplace to others.
Tatiana nosed her way through the door, which had been standing slightly ajar. She had burrs in her fur and dirt on her nose.
“Looks like we’ll have to find you a proper brush, you naughty dog,” Elle scolded. “Want to go look around? Go for a walk?” Tatiana bounced and scrambled in response.
An hour and at least thirty rooms and several staircases later, Elle had lost both her enthusiasm and her way, and was regretting turning down the offer of a guide. She felt dusty and grimy, and was certain that from the dozens of cobwebs she had walked through, at least two or three spiders had hitched a ride in either her hair or dress. She’d seen small rooms, large rooms, bare rooms, jumbled rooms, rooms with windows and without, with fireplaces or without, rooms that seemed to have no purpose and led from one to another, and hallways and staircases that dead-ended in boarded-over doors, or no doors at all.
She knew next to nothing about architecture, but it appeared to even her untrained eye that the front of the house was the newest section, and that much of the rest of the building was a conglomeration of periods and styles. Some rooms and halls were mostly stone, while others were wood. Still others had walls of some sort of stucco or plaster.
She’d had to backtrack near the beginning of her exploration and get a rushlight from a servant. It was a rush that had been dried and soaked in oil, then clipped to a stand and dish. Unhappy experience taught her to trim it as it burned and advance the rush through the clip.
Many of the hallways were shut off from light, or had only one dim and far-off window to illuminate them. She had glimpsed one section of cellar, dark and dirty and filled with the mounded shapes of unknown objects, and found to her dismay that she lacked the courage to go in. God only knew what she’d find, or what creatures might be living there. In several rooms she had heard flurries and scrabblings of noise, some coming from the chimneys, others from the walls.
At the moment, all she wanted was to find her own section of the house and wash her hands and face. If she could find an exterior door, she could walk around the house to get back. In a pinch, she’d climb out a window, only the last few windows she’d seen looked out onto an interior courtyard, overgrown with weeds and with no visible exit.
She wandered back in a direction that seemed familiar, but soon proved itself not to be. The walls were paneled in dark wood, with brass sconces in need of candles every few feet. There were no cobwebs here, and the air smelled fresher than in other parts of the house, despite the narrower halls and the darkness.
“What’s this, Tatiana? Habitation?”
The dog panted.
A heavy wooden door stood ajar halfway down the hall, carved with a twining pattern of leaves and flowers at head height, the hinges and the door handle and plate an ornate swirl of twisting ironwork. A faint spicy, herbal scent drifted through the doorway. Curious, Elle pushed the door open a few more inches. She felt oddly tentative about entering. Tatiana had no such compunctions and shoved her way in, the door swinging wide on silent, oiled hinges.
The room revealed was rich in color and texture. There was wooden furniture darkened with age, and on the walls, tapestries of dark green and burgundy depicted scenes from a hunt. The cushions on chairs were of patterned, multicolored brocade, tassled at the corners, their colors matching the occasional painted detail on woodwork. She was so dazzled by the furnishings, and by the warm golden sunlight streaming through the diamond-paned windows, that it was several moments before she noticed that she was not alone in the room.
“Oh, excuse me!” she apologized quickly to the shrunken, white-haired woman hunched under a multitude of shawls, sitting in a chair near one of the windows. “I didn’t realize there was anyone living in this part of the house.”
The old woman tilted her head slightly. Elle could hardly make out her face, backlit as she was by the sunlight. When she spoke, her voice was weak and gravelly, and Elle took several steps farther into the room in order to hear. “Yes, still someone living here.” She lapsed into silence. Elle shifted from one foot to the other. Should she introduce herself? What should she say? “Hi, I’m the new countess. Who are you?”
“Hello, I’m Wilhelmina,” she said instead, and could have cut out her tongue the moment she said it. What on earth had possessed her to give her true name?
The old woman seemed not to have heard her. Seemed, almost, to be sleeping. Elle stepped closer, inching her way forward until she was only a few feet from her. She tilted her head to one side and bent down slightly, trying to see the woman’s face.
Cloudy eyes opened suddenly. Elle jerked back, a blush creeping up her cheeks. The woman’s head nodded up and down in silent laughter. “Sit, dear. Sit.”
Flustered, Elle pulled a decorative chair up to the window and sat down. Tatiana, at ease as ever, sat on the floor and leaned against the old woman’s legs, shoving her nose up under one of the woman’s limp and withered hands.
“Tatia, leave her alone,” Elle scolded.
The woman stopped Elle with a small, eloquent movement of her hand, then began to scratch the top of Tatiana’s head. She seemed absorbed in the task, and after a few minutes, Elle began to wonder if the woman had forgotten her presence.
“You have come a long way to us,” the woman finally said.
“Yes,” Elle replied, thinking the woman didn’t know the half of it. Her accent must have placed her as a person foreign to this region.
“Is my great-grandson treating you well?”
“Henry?” she asked, startled.
The woman gave another silent laugh. “Such an amusing boy.”
“Henry?” Elle asked again, even more uncertain, then recalled his chicken tale of the night before. Still, she had a hard time thinking of him as amusing. Self-assured, polite—whatever emotions he had buried deeply under his controlled demeanor—that’s what Henry was. But not, generally, amusing.
“You will make Henry a fine wife. You would not have been chosen otherwise, you know.” She gave Tatiana a final pat on the head. “Do come back and visit soon.” She put her hands in her lap and abruptly dozed off.
Elle stared at her for some moments, not quite believing the interview was already at an end. Well, the woman did claim to be Henry’s great-grandmother, and that would make her how old? A minimum of ninety, surely. Old enough to fall asleep at a moment’s notice.
Feeling slightly deflated, she got up to leave, Tatiana trailing along with canine reluctance at leaving a good head-scratcher. When she reached the door, the woman spoke again.
“I am glad they found you,” she rasped.
Elle looked back at her, bemused. “They?” she inquired. A soft snore was the only response she got from the huddled form. She must have misheard. The woman had probably said “he,” not “they.” What could this old woman know of her
life, and the fairy folk who brought her here?
It took less than five minutes to find her way back to the main part of the house. She seemed incapable of making a wrong turn, and opened with some astonishment a door into the front hall. From the hall side, the door was invisible, its outline following the creases of the linen-fold paneling. She was standing there on the checkered marble floor, dusting cobwebs from her skirts, when Marianne appeared, looking worried.
“My lady, I have been searching everywhere for you. You are late for luncheon.”
“I can’t be, I’ve been out of your sight for less than an hour.”
“I beg your pardon, my lady, but it is three hours you have been gone.”
“What?” She had a reliable internal clock and was almost never late. How could she have so seriously miscalculated? “His lordship, is he here?”
“In the breakfast parlour, my lady.”
Elle followed Marianne to that room, pausing outside the door to push a stray lock of hair back behind her ear. She could feel her heart beating in her chest, and scolded herself for her eagerness. He left her alone for half a day, and suddenly she couldn’t wait to see him again.
A servant was removing the plate from in front of Henry as she stepped into the room, and her heart sank as she realized she was not only late, she had entirely missed the meal.
“Ah, there you are, my dear,” Henry said, standing up. “Do sit down.” He gestured to the place that was set across the small table from him.
The servant pulled her seat out for her and she sat, taking in the pleasant little room. A mural of a beach scene on some tropical island covered the walls, the picture faded and damaged by time, but Elle could still make out the palm trees and the sails of a ship. Dark figures rolled barrels to waiting longboats, and jungle creatures peeped from leafy foliage, their faces distorted by the inaccurate artistry of the painter. “I’m terribly sorry, Henry. Somehow I lost all track of time. I was exploring and—”
“No apologies necessary, my dear,” he interrupted her, still standing.
“You’re not angry?”
“Of course not. I do regret, however, that I will be unable to stay to keep you company while you eat.”
She looked up at him, searching his face for some hint of his mood. He appeared blandly unconcerned. “Are you going out?”
“I have a veritable mountain of paperwork that I fear cannot be left another day.”
“Oh.” The sound was small and disappointed even to her own ears.
“You will excuse me, my dear?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Until dinner, then.”
“I won’t be late again.”
He smiled vaguely at her in response, and left.
Elle watched him go, feeling abandoned.
“My lady?” the servant asked, gesturing towards the cold meats and bread on the table. Elle nodded and he served her as she tried to look out the tall windows. There was an overgrown rhododendron just beyond the glass, and it cut off any view of the garden.
The servant bowed and withdrew, and she was left alone with her plate of chilled beef.
Chapter Twelve
After her lonely and unappetizing lunch, Elle took Tatiana for a walk through the overgrown gardens. Weeds shouldered their way past the few struggling flowers, and the paths had long since had their gravel devoured by mud. Fountains held stagnant pools of rainwater, leaves mouldering at the bottom, mosquito larvae squirming at the surface. The hedges were overgrown tangles of branches that grabbed at her as she walked between them.
She circled around the estate’s lake on a narrow footpath, noticing the hoofprints in the dirt. She had grown up in a small town surrounded by farms and open countryside, and recognized that the prints were those of deer. If not for the wild animals, the path would most likely have been impassable.
A break in the reeds along the lakeshore revealed a small wooden dock, and she walked out onto it, testing the silvered boards. They thunked with reassuring solidity beneath her shoes. A weathered rowboat drifted half under the planks, tethered to a post. Bits of snarled line and a bailing cup floated in the inch of water in its bottom. Perhaps one of the staff used it for fishing. Certainly she could not picture the formal Henry ever doing so.
A dragonfly zipped in front of her and stopped, its frantically beating wings holding it motionless in the air, and then another appeared and chased it out across the water. She watched them, a smile on her lips, remembering her summers growing up and playing with the neighbor kids in the fields and woods. They had never managed to catch a dragonfly, for all their chasing.
If—no—when she found a way home, she suddenly resolved, she was going to look for a job in a small town. The pay would not be as good, but the rent would be cheaper. She had forgotten how much she liked the quiet of the countryside.
Making her way back to the house, she passed a number of outbuildings, whose purposes she could only guess. Coming into a walled garden, she at last saw signs that some care was taken of the grounds. Forcing pots covered a number of plants, and there were glass-framed beds that acted like miniature greenhouses for a number of seedlings. New leaves covered the espaliered apple trees that crept across the brick walls.
She wandered into the nearest building and found herself in a room painted entirely blue. Many-drawered cabinets lined the walls, and as she came closer she saw that each drawer had the name of a vegetable or plant neatly painted across its front. A peek inside revealed what she already suspected—seeds.
A sound from another doorway drew her attention, and she followed it into the damp heat of a greenhouse. An old man was preparing a set of pots, a tray of seedlings waiting by his side for the replanting. She remembered his face from her introduction to the staff, but for the life of her she could not recall his name.
“Good afternoon,” she said. He didn’t appear to hear her. “Good afternoon!” she repeated more loudly. This time he stopped and turned, frowning slightly when he saw her, and he sketched a very short bow.
“Good afternoon, my lady. Have you come to inspect my gardens?”
“I was just wandering about the grounds.”
“Did you want a tour, then?” He sounded as if he hoped that were not the case.
“Oh, no, I wouldn’t want to interrupt your work. Have you no one to help you?”
“There be a boy.”
That hardly seemed like enough. She looked around her, at the trees growing down the center of the building, and the fruit that hung from their limbs. “These aren’t lemon trees, are they?” she asked, surprised.
“Aye.”
“But how do you keep them alive in this climate?”
“They have been growing here for one hundred and fifty years.” He gestured to a brazier that she had not noticed, heat coming from the coals in the bottom of the raised pan. “I give the trees what they need.”
He still had his trowel in his hand, looking as if he was waiting for her to finish her questions and go. She got the distinct feeling that she was intruding.
“Yes, well, and I see you do an excellent job of it. I won’t bother you further.”
“Thank you, my lady.”
Was that “thank you” for the compliment or “thank you” for leaving him alone? She slunk out the door, feeling very much that it had been the latter.
She checked the clock when she got back to the house. She wasn’t going to be late again, if she could help it, and the clock confirmed that there was no danger of that at the moment. She had at least two hours before she could even think about dressing for dinner. Two more hours alone, killing time. She checked on the staff who were busy emptying the trunks of Eleanor’s trousseau—linens, silver, even dishes—but they had everything well in hand. What was a countess supposed to do all day?
She went in search of the library she remembered from her exploration. She’d do what she did at home, and lose herself in a book.
Tatiana followed her into the dusty r
oom, and made herself comfortable on a ratty old sofa. Elle didn’t bother scolding her. The furniture in the room was more fit for a dog than for humans. Even her own fondness for a clean room was overwhelmed by the library. The place didn’t need to be cleaned so much as it needed to be stripped to bare floor and wall, and a bonfire made of the rubbish. Only then could a real cleaning begin.
But perhaps that would never be her problem. She wandered along the shelves, pulling out and replacing books. There were many empty spaces, and she imagined the late earl had sold those books that were in any shape to be sold. Certainly all that remained were books warped from damp, smelling of mildew, and in several unhappy cases, infested by small creatures that made a diet of paper. She shuddered, and wiped her hands on her skirts after one particularly unpleasant encounter with a half-eaten book.
And then, tucked behind a stack of mouldering Milton, she found a small book bound in stained green leather. Folklore of the British Isles was stamped across the front, the gold lettering all but rubbed away.
She sat down next to Tatiana, and opened the book to the table of contents. There, in between a chapter on ghosts and one on witches, was a chapter on fairies. She flipped quickly to the right page and read with greedy eyes.
Henry watched Elle pick at her dinner, poking the tip of her knife at the piece of fat that clung to the edge of her meat. Her nose was wrinkled. She had not touched the chopped liver in aspic, and the butter on her boiled vegetables was in danger of congealing, it had sat so long on her plate.
“If the food is not to your liking, you can talk to Abigail about it. I am sure she would welcome any direction you might offer. We do not have a proper cook as of yet, and she has been making do with what she knows.”
“I don’t know any woman who appreciates being given ‘direction’ in the kitchen,” she said, abandoning her meat and reaching for yet another roll. It was her third, if his counting was correct.
“Elle, you are a countess now, not the daughter of the house. The staff expects you to direct them, not to wait upon their pleasure.”