by Lara Blunte
The fact that Adrian never fully opened the castle and never brought back the servants worried her because it gave a character of impermanence to his stay. He lived only in his room, the library and the kitchen.
The rest of the rooms stayed closed and the furniture remained covered. There were no servants living there except for John, who made himself invisible, or was somewhere flirting with Henriette; then there were women who came and left food, cooked or uncooked, cleaned the rooms that Adrian used, and washed and ironed his linen.
They would spend as much time as they could outside when the weather was fair, and that summer was especially warm. In the woods, wearing a simple dress and flat shoes, her crinoline forgotten, Catherine remembered what it had been like to be a child, running free between Lytton Hall and Halford.
Adrian would strip to his drawers and get into the river to swim, and Faith would eagerly follow him.
Catherine sat on the banks, watching him with envy; he and Faith looked so happy in the water. One day she decided that they were more than sufficiently shielded by the trees, that no one ever went near them, and that she could also get in the water. She took off her dress and stood in her chemise, touching the water with her foot.
Adrian swam back toward her, smiling, "Come in!"
"I can't swim!"
"Jump in and I will catch you."
"I don't trust you!"
He moved an armful of water toward her, "You’re not a coward, jump!"
She shrieked and threw herself in. There was a moment of panic as her head sank under the water, but then she felt his hands around her waist as he brought her up. She coughed and he laughed.
"Don't move so much, or we'll both drown!"
"Might we?"
Faith had come to lick her face, but she hung onto Adrian's neck for dear life. He pulled her with him as he swam backwards.
"I think I like it," she told him after a moment.
"Of course you do. I shall have you swimming like a fish very soon."
Afterwards she lay on a large blanket to dry, and the sun felt good. She felt him lie down by her after a while, and he teased her lips with a fruit. She opened her mouth and bit into it.
"A plum!" she murmured. "So sweet..."
"Not as sweet as you," he said, and lowered his head to kiss her upside down.
"I never thought it could feel so wonderful to be a peasant," she sighed.
"Especially because we don't have to do all their work," he replied ironically.
"And we have all our teeth!" she added.
He roared with laughter.
"We should live like this all the time," he told her, putting his wet head on her lap to watch the river.
She felt elated for a moment, but only asked, "Here at Halford?"
"No, not at Halford."
"Where, then?"
He shrugged.
"Well, you must have a hundred houses. Don't you like any of them?"
"No."
"Well, if that isn't fastidious of you!"
"Would you kindly tell me why anyone, except an army, would need three hundred rooms?"
"I suppose one can be happy with less,” she reflected, not entirely convinced.
"One can most definitely be happier with a lot less," he corrected her.
"But then what will happen to all this?" She gestured towards the castle.
"I don't care," he said, not looking.
"So you'd give up your wealth, your position, your life?
"We will only have a life if we give up our position," he told her.
"But what about our duties? We employ people who need work. We are landowners, we have tenants."
"A capable steward would take care of everything. We could even give more money to people who need it. We wouldn't need it." He sat up and opened a parasol over her head, "And we don't want Aunt Helen to remark on your skin later."
He had said ‘we’ several times, but she didn't understand how they would live. He had also said that he would never marry her. She only felt that he seemed to know what he was doing. She liked that he dared her to do some things and shielded her from others: that he made her swim in the cold river, but then brought her plums and remembered her skin.
Catherine realized that she had been staring at him, and plucked a cornflower to disguise her confusion. He took it and put it behind his ear. "Young men used to wear one of these to see if the girl they liked loved them. If it wilted very quickly, then it was a bad business."
The flower matched his eyes at that moment. "It is wilting already," she teased him.
"Oh, carissima Lady Catherine," he expertly mimicked Jack Dalton's drawl, "How can you not love me? I have six thousand a year and the best kept mustache in Europe."
She laughed and he knocked her elbows away so that she lay on her back.
"Don't kiss me with Jack's face!" she screamed as he nibbled her neck. "No!"
He kissed her in earnest. Their skin felt cold from the water and warm from the sun, their mouths tasted like sweet plum and Catherine thought that surely this ─ not their wealth, nor their estates, nor the praise and envy of the world ─ this was happiness.
His room was large and tidy, but it was a boy's room, as if everything had remained untouched since the last time he had lived in it.
The massive desk was littered with things, music sheets with notes in his handwriting, drawings, books, objects. There was a small theater made of paper and metal featuring the cut out likeness of two boys, one wearing a crown and the other the hat of a Pope. She remembered that James had been named after a king, and Adrian after the only English Pope. She thought of how close the brothers must have been, and knew that in a drawer he kept daguerreotypes of him and James together, both looking mischievous, and of his mother and father. They were all in an envelope, pushed to the back of the drawer as if he could not yet bear to look at their image.
She went to a Greek bust wearing a Prussian helmet with a long black crest like the mane of a horse. She picked the helmet up and put it on, but was immediately distracted by the simple open coronet underneath it.
Adrian was watching her lazily from the bed, where he lounged only half covered by the sheet.
"Look!"
"I am looking," he said as he swept his eyes over her naked body appreciatively.
"I mean this!" She held up the coronet.
"So that's where it was..." he said without much interest.
She walked to the bed, setting the coronet on his head. He tipped it jauntily to one side and said, "I like your naked Prussian look better. Did you know that you have the most adorable dimples right above your buttocks? I should only ever drink what I could pour into them."
She twisted around to look at her own back. "You will be filling them up all day long to quench your thirst!"
"I won't complain!"
"So I shall be something like the Earl's cupbearer! How distinguished! People will write about my dimples for centuries..."
"So, my greedy little wretch, you are only interested in fame and fortune and wouldn't like me if I didn't have my little crown and my big castle, if I only had my big ─"
She threw herself at him, shrieking so that he wouldn't finish the sentence. The helmet swayed perilously. He put his head on the pillow and her face hovered above his.
"I was going to say my big heart!" he said.
"That poor leopard on your coat of arms..." she sighed. "You have no love for it at all..."
"...that poor silly leopard, going God knows where with a rose...We used to wonder, James and I, what on earth it was doing. We called it Hairy Cat ─ it looked like those crazy mangy cats you see in the streets in summer, with its hair all disheveled."
"Hairy Cat!" she laughed. "What little respect you have always had for your station."
He shrugged. "I was only the second son. I thought it was my brother who would have to wear this thing on his head at endless ceremonies during which he would sit hoping
to die, and marry a Catholic girl. You should have seen the girls my father used to invite to the house, there were so few Catholic girls who were noble, and all of them monstrous!"
"I am a Catholic girl!" she cried. "And I am not completely monstrous."
"No, except for your character."
She pinched him. He flipped her so that she was now lying down and he leaned on one elbow, smiling fondly at her. "James would have snatched you up in one second, weeping with gratitude. And you would have married him."
"No!"
"Yes, you would. He was the most charming man on earth. Everyone loved him."
"I am sure he was," she said. "But I would have liked his brother better."
"His brother?” He looked sad for a second. “What would you have wanted with that miserable bore?"
"True, he was quite miserable," she said, caressing his cheek. "But I would have liked him all the same..."
"Even if he only had his big heart?"
She gave a little secret smile. He kissed one corner of her mouth, then the other, then the center of her lips. They lay face to face, happy to do nothing, to say nothing, happy to just be together.
"So, wherever you were, did you not have servants?" she asked him in the kitchen. He was cooking their luncheon and had set her the task of making bread. She supposed she was doing it well and liked the feeling.
He smiled as if she had said something absurd and kept on cutting vegetables. "Not most of the time."
"So you were always doing this, cooking, cleaning..."
He widened his eyes in horror, "Dressing myself!"
"Do you embroider too?" she mocked him.
"That's what John is for. But I can darn my socks and sew a wound."
She grimaced, but went on, "I can see that you have cultivated this eccentric image to be able to do as you like. I could not get any freedom by being eccentric."
"You don't look the part. You would have to have warts, or a squint."
"You're nowhere near deformed and you manage, because you are a man."
He poured them each a glass of wine. Catherine liked how the fine crystal looked on the rustic wood table, among vegetables, pots and pans. It was almost like a painting.
"To be a nobleman, as they call us, is like being a woman," he said. "You are constantly told that the name of the family depends on you, that Hairy Cat depends on you, that you need to marry a Catholic girl..."
"Perhaps the Earl was a little too strict," she protested. She couldn't imagine her mother ─ or her father, for that matter ─ forcing her to marry someone she didn't like. "His sister made a bad marriage," Catherine continued, remembering the portrait that their nanny had shown her. "And he never forgave her."
He was silent for a moment. "Yes, Aunt Bianca," he said. "She ran away with a brute who wanted to get his hands on the family money. My grandfather disinherited her."
"And your father didn't forgive her after your grandfather died?"
"No... Her husband died as well, but she wasn't forgiven even then..."
"Why not?"
He made a motion that encompassed the castle. "Because of all this. I told you, it drives people mad. It makes them think that piles of stones are more important than people, even the people they love. My father wasn't a bad man, but he believed in...things."
He got up and went to get the chicken, which smelled good. Bringing it to the table, he started to carve it.
"If you don't believe in things and you don't want your position, what will you do?" she asked almost in a whisper.
"Something or another," he answered evasively. "But I will never live as if I couldn't open a door for myself or pull my own chair."
She almost sighed, admiring him for being so strange and so strong.
Instead, she shrugged, "Well, that only proves my point. I couldn't ever bite my thumb at society as you do."
"I don't bite my thumb at anything. I just don't pay any notice. What is it that society can do to me? What can it do to you, for that matter? You have enough money to do what you want, but you would have to not care what people say and you do care."
"Everyone cares what people say," she told him adamantly.
"Unless you have nothing to lose."
Catherine sat down, her arms on the table. "Is that how you feel? That you have nothing to lose?"
Adrian stared back at her for a long moment and then said, "The chicken is getting cold!"
She shrugged to herself. It wasn't going to be so easy to get him to admit she meant anything to him.
His food was quite good, and her bread inedible, which made both of them laugh. She vowed to him she would yet master the art of making bread. She wouldn't want to be a useless aristocrat in this new world of his.
When it rained, they played inside like children.
They raced each other in the long corridor upstairs, sliding in wool socks. Catherine grabbed Adrian by the sleeve so that he wouldn't win, but he escaped from his shirt and slid at great speed to the finish, crashing against the wall. She had fallen, clutching the shirt.
"That's not fair!" she cried indignantly, kneeling.
"I'm not going to let a girl beat me!" he taunted her, looking like a defiant school boy.
"You are no gentleman!"
"Whoever said I was?"
He ran into the library and she got up and ran after him, then he ran after her to get his shirt back. It was chilly within the stone walls, and he started to build a fire in the large hearth.
Catherine was looking at a huge globe of the Earth. She traced a line with her finger. He approached and sat on the arm of the sofa. "What are you doing?" he asked, pulling her to him.
Her finger was going from England through France and Austria to Italy and from there to the Crimea. "I'm following your travels," she said.
He took her finger and returned to Italy, then traced a line to India and from there through all the Near East and Arabia and finally down the coast of Africa till almost the middle of the large continent.
"All that?"
"As everyone keeps pointing out, I was gone a long time."
She stared at Africa. That must be very wild. "I have never left Europe. Is the world beautiful?"
"Yes... Beautiful and terrible."
She turned around, standing between his legs. She touched the scars on his face. "Did you get these from tribesmen?"
He closed one eye as he considered her with the other. "No, from men who didn't play fair," he told her. "Like you!"
"But I was the one who got hurt," she pouted, showing him her knee.
"Oh!" he cried in mock surprise, sitting her on his lap. He lowered his head and kissed the spot she had shown. "There!"
Then he stood up with her in his arms and moved towards the fire. He lay on the fur in front of the hearth and pulled her on top of him, so that her body covered his. "I'm cold," he told her. "Bloody castle..."
She put her cheek on his chest and spread her hair on either side of him. "You were born in January, a winter boy," she said. "That's why you can't shake the cold from your bones."
While the rain lashed the big windows and the fire warmed them, he caressed the small of her back and read from a small volume of Catullus: "Da mi basia mille, deinde centum, dein mille altera, dein secunda centum, deinde usque altera mille, deinde centum…”
Give me a thousand kisses, then another hundred, then another thousand, then a second hundred, then yet a thousand more, then another hundred…
"Blimey!" he said. "That's three thousand three hundred kisses...I think Catullus didn't step out with girls who had to get back to their mothers."
She giggled as he threw down the book.
"Give me one very long one," he requested. One that's worth a thousand."
Catherine obliged. They made love all afternoon and she gave no thought to time.
III. Three. A Birthday
The sixteenth of August was Catherine's birthday.
Her mother had been trying to convince her to invite the neighbors to a dinner and perhaps a ball. She was eager to see Catherine taking her place at Lytton Hall, which had been her family's estate for over three hundred years. She wanted her daughter to be a part of society there, to keep her heritage and her ancestors' connections alive.
Catherine, however, didn't show any enthusiasm for the idea.
The mere notion was completely discarded when she received a white nosegay bouquet with a note from Adrian on the 14th: "Dearest summer girl, I would like to request the honor of your presence at Halford, eight o'clock on your birthday. Look your very best in your tightest corset, hugest crinoline and a great number of petticoats. Spare no trinket, or you will regret it. Aunt Helen has a note too. PS: There will be food. PS: Not cooked by me."
"Is Adrian giving you a dinner? Who is coming? He never speaks to anybody except his farmers!" Lady Ware wondered, walking in with the note in her hand.
"I have nothing to wear!" Catherine cried in agony, running immediately to her room to rummage in wardrobes, drawers and boxes.
She tried on every suitable dress she had that afternoon.
"Madame, this one! This one is so lovely!" Henriette was holding up a stunning creation.
"He has seen me in that already!"
"Madame, the pink!"
"C'est affreux!"
"Madame, your eyes look so beautiful in this one..."
Catherine gasped, her eyes lighting up, "My feather dress! Tell me it’s here, and not in London!"
"Oh!" Henriette also gasped and widened her eyes, rushing to find the dress.
When she brought it and put it on the bed, Catherine smiled. How could she have forgotten it for a second? It was perfect! The bodice was simple, but it showed her décolletage to advantage, and the skirt was artfully covered in wispy white feathers, so that it seemed almost to breathe with every movement.
It was a lovely creation, conceived by one of the subtlest eyes in Paris, and hand sewn by exquisitely deft fingers.
On her birthday, she washed her long silky hair, then Henriette curled it and pinned it so that it shone, and attached flowers to it. She put on a pair of long diamond earrings that sparkled as she moved and two bracelets. When she was ready and looked at herself, she thought that he would find her beautiful, and the thought made her happy. Henriette was powdering her neck and her décolletage and giving her a shawl and the bouquet he had sent, which had been kept in fresh water.