A Yuletide Treasure

by Cynthia Bailey Pratt

  ‘Yes, yes, I do. But my mother thought it wisest for me not to go just now.” Camilla realized that they’d been standing together for some few minutes outside a pair of closed double doors. “Is this the drawing room?” she asked.

  Tinarose repressed a giggle. “Yes, it is. Oh, do I... Is my hair all right?”

  “Charming,” Camilla said. “I meant to compliment you upon it.” There was no point in lessening the girl’s confidence by saying anything less than positive about the confection now. “And what a lovely cameo.”

  Tinarose touched the carved red and white piece at her throat. The profile was that of a young man, his hair dressed in the Roman fashion now aped by au courant gentlemen, his cheeks chiseled and firm chin held high. “My father brought us each one,” she said, “I think he bought them in Naples.”

  “It’s sardonyx, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but how did you know? Most people think it’s made of carnelian.” Tinarose opened the doors.

  “I read a great deal,” Camilla said and noticed that everyone in the drawing room had turned at their entrance and therefore, they’d all heard her.

  “I’m glad to hear it,” Sir Philip said, putting down his glass. “I tell my nieces that knowledge becomes a woman just as much as her fair face.”

  Camilla shook hands with him. “That looks a little as if you were hoping for the best of both worlds, Sir Philip.”

  “And why not? I always take the best that I am offered. Sherry?”

  “Thank you.”

  He led her to a corner of one of the straw yellow sofas that framed the room. The whole of the drawing room was decorated in warm tones of amber, a spring-like contrast to the bitterness of the season. A large fire burned in the white marble fireplace not far from the sofas, but the heat was tempered by two hand-painted fire screens. She admired the pattern while Sir Philip brought her a glass.

  “Miss Twainsbury, may I present Dr. Evelyn March?”

  Camilla had already noticed him. No woman alive could have failed to notice him. In profile, he might have posed for Tinarose’s cameo head. But this Roman figure was alive, the black coat and white stock of the medical man encasing his broad shoulders and strong neck, the beautifully molded mouth smiling as he shook hands. So good looking a man must cause many maidenly hearts to flutter. She wondered how many of his female patients were truly ill, then reproved herself for the cattiness of the idea.

  “A pleasure to meet you, Miss Twainsbury. Nanny Mallow cannot sing your praises enough.”

  “It is she who was brave,” Camilla said, finding her voice. “I faced nothing worse than a little chill and some inconvenience. I cannot bear to think what she must have suffered before my appearance on the scene.”

  “We must thank Providence that she only wrenched her knee. These elderly ladies can be surprisingly fragile.”

  “And surprisingly resilient, too,” Sir Philip said. “I’ve seen them carry half their households on their backs and still make supper for a village.”

  “Where was that, Uncle Philip?” Tinarose asked.

  “Greece. Pennsylvania. St. Kitts. It’s the same story the world over.”

  “I had no notion you were so widely traveled, Sir Philip,” Camilla said.

  Tinarose answered for him. “Oh, yes. Uncle Philip has been everywhere.”

  “Not quite everywhere. But it’s a very interesting place, our world. I think it behooves a man to see as much of it as he can. My brother preferred to see it from the deck of a ship, but I always liked tramping around on my own two feet.”

  “Better your own two feet than on a horse’s four,” Dr. March said, giving Philip a rueful glance.

  “You did very well,” he answered. “The journey home will be easier yet.” The doctor gave a little groan.

  “Isn’t Dr. March staying here?” Tinarose asked. Camilla glanced at her curiously. Her tone was a trifle too artless to be true. She felt that Tinarose not only knew the doctor would be staying, but she was more than a little pleased by the notion.

  This undercurrent of feeling seemed to go unnoticed by the gentlemen.

  “I’m afraid I cannot, Miss LaCorte. My father is unwell. I must return tonight.”

  Sir Philip offered Camilla a glass of sherry. Since his guest could not dress for dinner, he had not done so either, merely changing his coat from the rough brown fustian he’d worn during the day to a more civilized blue superfine. His cravat was more a la mode than his other, carelessly knotted, one. He, like his niece, had evidently taken some care to arrange his dark hair, since the tracks of the comb were still visible in the dampened strands.

  Though not as jaw-droppingly handsome as the doctor, he looked even more like someone she’d like to know well than the man she’d met in the coach. Then, he’d been someone to ignore or even to snub in accordance with her mother’s imperatives. Now, since fate or Providence had thrown them into acquaintanceship, she wished to further it.

  Not merely, she told herself, because he was both attractive and pleasantly spoken, but because he’d seen things that she wished to see, had been places that she would like to go, and, undoubtedly, had experienced many adventures that would thrill her as well. Since it was exceedingly unlikely that she’d have any future chance to leave her mother, let alone England, Camilla thought that achieving these ambitions secondhand would be better than not achieving them at all.

  Seeing that Dr. March had gone on to regale Tinarose with the tale of his attempts to ride, Camilla smiled encouragingly at Sir Philip. “You must have enjoyed your opportunities to travel, sir. Is it only restiveness that has taken you to these far corners of the world? Or do you have some end in view?”

  “I wish I could fascinate you with my noble reasons for undertaking my journeys,” he said, seating himself beside her. “My brother had the excuse of his duty. I, on the other hand, had only what the Germans call wanderlust. I simply set out one morning from this front door and walked away.”

  “Just like that?”

  He chuckled. “There was some little preparation involved, of course. I didn’t run down the drive without so much as a florin or a clean shirt. Perhaps next time I shall try that.”

  “What did your parents think of your leaving home? How old were you?” She stopped. “I don’t mean to be inquisitive.”

  “Why not? If you don’t ask questions, how will you learn?”

  “Socrates?”

  “Perhaps. It only makes sense, but I can’t prove it.” He observed her in silence for a moment. “You know Socrates?”

  “Not firsthand. Very little of my knowledge comes firsthand. I don’t read Greek or Latin, so I only know the ancient philosophers through what others have written about them. Several of my friends at home know them well, however.”

  “Female friends?” he asked.

  Camilla shook her head slightly. “Several gentlemen of my neighborhood have formed the habit of stopping by several times a month at my mother’s house. They discuss lofty subjects.”

  “Sounds like the Royal Society.”

  “With this exception—women are not even permitted to listen at the Royal Society.”

  “Nor to speak?” He raised one eyebrow loftily.

  Camilla was forced to laugh. “Not very often, perhaps. They would be distressed to discover how little of their discourse I... I understand.”

  “Now, why do I believe,” he began, sitting back against the cushion, “that you intended to say not how little you understand but how little you agree with them.”

  “Perhaps, but it isn’t very grammatical or polite to say so.” Camilla turned her face toward Dr. March and Tinarose. Sir Philip saw entirely too much with his parti-colored eyes.

  “You say these young men come to your mother’s house several times a month. Why? Haven’t they any of their own to go to?”

  “Several.”

  “Yet they come to your mother’s house. There must be some powerful inducement there.”

  “Oh, th
ere is,” she said, turning her gaze upon him again. She smiled secretly to see him taken aback and was pleased to know that he had already a high enough opinion of her demureness to be surprised by her seeming immodesty. She let him hang upon his regret for a moment. “My mother bakes the most delicious beignet de pommes on earth. Not even you, widely traveled though you are, have ever tasted better.”

  “Can you make them?”

  “I haven’t her lightness of touch with the pastry.”

  “I think your touch is sufficiently light for anything.”

  The look that passed between them then was not measurable in anything but heartbeats, the oldest form of timekeeping and the most accurate when it came to gauging feelings. Sir Philip’s eyes were telling her that the physical admiration he’d known in the coach had already deepened into an acknowledgment of pleasure in her company and conversation. Camilla could not prevent a warmer feeling blossoming in her own breast. She felt that she’d met a friend.

  For all that, a chilly feeling arose with the consciousness that she had already cracked, if not broken, several of her mother’s most dearly held and most often reiterated rules. Perhaps it was “fast” to be too friendly even when every feeling encouraged her to ripen this friendship. Therefore, it was Camilla who looked away first

  Then Lady LaCorte came in, and the instant blackening of her face when she saw Sir Philip and Camilla tête-à-tête informed Camilla that she’d made an enemy.

  Chapter Six

  At dinner, Camilla saw several servants she’d not realized the manor house possessed. There was a frigidly correct butler whose name seemed, however unlikely, to be Samson. Mavis did not serve, but an older maid whose quiet urging to “take another chop, do,” proclaimed her to be one of Mrs. Duke’s children.

  Since the numbers were uneven and they only used half the large table, Camilla sat alone on one side, while Sir Philip and Lady LaCorte bracketed her at the head and foot. Tinarose sat next to the doctor on the other side.

  In the golden glow of the many-branched candelabra, Dr. March glowed like a highly polished bronze statue. His thoughts and words were those of a man of science while his appetite was that of a young man who’d taken unaccustomed exercise in winter.

  “I have been meaning to learn to ride, but there never seemed to be enough time now that I’m living here. There certainly was no time while I was training.”

  “Of course, you lived in town then, didn’t you?” Tinarose said, making excuses.

  “Edinburgh,” he said. “They have horses there, but they also have very hard streets.”

  “Hard streets?”

  “You know. Cobblestones and the like. I couldn’t see learning to ride there. All the falling off.”

  ‘You should learn to ride while the snow is still thick upon the ground. It will be safer for you.”

  “I found it no less distressing,” he said, glancing with a half laugh at Sir Philip.

  “Oh, come. It was only the once, and you landed in a large snowbank. Believe me, I didn’t get off nearly so gently when I learned. It was during the longest drought in years. The ground was like a sheet of iron. As I remember well,” he added with a reminiscent grimace.

  “Yes, but how old were you?”

  “Six, I think. It was the year before I went to school.”

  “Ah,” the doctor said. Turning to Tinarose, he leaned toward her confidentially. “The young, Miss LaCorte, being more flexible may take a toss without harm. We who are older cannot so easily recoup from such a shock.”

  At first, Tinarose’s eyes flickered in pained surprise when he seemed to refer to her as young. But the latter half of his comment, grouping her in the “older” category with him, made her smile hopefully and nod her complete agreement.

  Camilla glanced at the black and silent figure at the end of the table. Lady LaCorte showed animation only whenever Sir Philip spoke to Camilla. Her own daughter’s lively interest in the doctor seemed to escape her notice.

  As a good guest, Camilla tried to divide her attention evenly between her hostess and her host. She attempted to develop topics of interest to whichever of them she was speaking. Yet even while discussing the virulent weather with Sir Philip and praising the excellence of the dinner to Lady LaCorte, Camilla’s mind busied itself with the mystery of the Manor. It could not be that Lady LaCorte had transferred her affections so quickly from her husband to her brother-in-law.

  Not because such matters were beyond the scope of the human heart in even less time than the length of Lady LaCorte’s widowhood, but she gave no sign of even being fond of Sir Philip. She lapsed into silence more often than she spoke, staring off at the dark corners of the room where the candlelight could not quite reach.

  So if it was not love and its accompanying jealousy that plagued Lady LaCorte, what was the fount of her dislike for Camilla? Mere natural antipathy? The whim of a pregnant woman? All well and good, but what about the others? Surely the servants could not be so completely under her sway that they’d dislike someone on her orders?

  Having lived with her mother for her entire life with often no more service than that offered by one maid who obliged by the day and spent the nights at her parents’ farm, Camilla had not enough experience of master-servant relationships to know how far a mistress’s influence might extend. But considering that the servants had disliked her long before Lady LaCorte could have heard of her presence, Camilla was still confused. She resolved to watch and wait.

  “You said you like to read, Miss Twainsbury,” Dr. March said. “What is your field of study?”

  “No field, sir, or all of them.”

  “Ah, novels,” the doctor said, looking wise or, at any rate, arch. “A young woman’s Thousand and One Nights.”

  “My mother does not approve of novels.”

  A slight sound of malicious humor came from Lady LaCorte’s end of the table. “Wise creature, your mother. I don’t approve of them either. They pretend to be moral works, but they excite unnatural passions in young persons. Better to read a morally improving work.”

  Camilla caught the whisper of an undercurrent that she did not understand. Something in Sir Philip’s expression, seen uncertainly in the glow of the flickering candles, made her believe his sister-in-law was somehow twitting him.

  “At least so my mother believes,” Camilla said. “So to please her, I read a great deal of history.”

  “History?” Tinarose so far forgot herself as to groan.

  “That sounds safe enough,” young Dr. March pronounced.

  Sir Philip nodded, encouraging her to go on.

  “Is it any safer than novels?” she asked rhetorically. “I haven’t found it to be so. I took up history because my mother forbade me to read novels. Yet what did I find in history but the same passions that make novels so exciting.”

  “But it’s all so dry,” Tinarose said. “Our governess, Miss Grayle, makes us read all the most dreary things. Dates and battles and tonnage moved from the principle ports.”

  “You have to look past that,” her uncle said. “That’s only a kind of fog history wraps herself in. Once you make an effort to see more clearly, history begins to fascinate. Think of all the human passions found in history. Violence, ambition, a kind of lust that sends men mad at times. Not to mention arranged marriages, murders, and mysteries. Who killed the Princes in the Tower? Why was Darnley murdered ... or was it a royal execution? Was Lucrezia Borgia truly as black as she is painted?”

  Camilla laughed and added her own set of fascinations. “Why did Shakespeare leave Stratford? Is the Dauphin still alive somewhere? And as for our own times—was Byng guilty? How did Napoleon escape from Elba?”

  ‘There’s not much doubt about Byng,” Dr. March said. “But I’ve always wondered about Dr. Dee. And the Comte Saint-Germain. Were they charlatans? Or did they know things about the universe the rest of us can hardly guess.”

  Sir Philip seemed to have no doubts. “Definitely charlatans, if the kings of
their kind,” he said. “But how did they work their magic? They easily persuaded kings and queens that they had gifts of prophecy and could turn base metal into shining gold.”

  “It may be revolutionary to say it,” Camilla said, “but I’m not sure royalty is known for their intellectual gifts.”

  Even Lady LaCorte chuckled while the gentlemen laughed. Only Tinarose looked shocked and that only slightly. “You have studied history,” Sir Philip said, chuckling.

  When at home, through some excess of courage, she’d been tempted into making a comment during a philosophical discussion, her visitors would always agree with her. It left her feeling as if her comments were not worthy of argument. Eventually, on her mother’s advice, she’d learned to sit in silence, letting even the most crashing fallacies pass over her head. Mrs. Twainsbury was of the firm opinion that intellectual pursuits were not within a woman’s province and that no sensible man would wish them to become so.

  Certainly she never would have dared to comment in such a way that could be considered openly seditious. Yet among these strangers, she felt not only secure enough to do so, but encouraged to participate to the height of her abilities.

  “I make exceptions,” Camilla said. “Queen Elizabeth certainly had intellectual gifts.”

  “Greater than Mary, Queen of Scots, anyway,” Sir Philip said. “I know women tend to make her story out to be romantic—”

  “Not just women.” Even more daring, Camilla interrupted. “My father thought she was beyond reproach. I always felt she was a silly creature. Why didn’t she learn to be more moderate in her actions instead of continually stirring up trouble for herself?”

  The doctor nodded wisely. “That’s a question I can apply to half a dozen people I know very well.”

  “Which one is Mary, Queen of Scots?” Tinarose asked, with a shy glance at her mother. “There’ve been so many Marys.”

  The doctor began to explain the delicate relationship between Queen Elizabeth and her cousin, the once-Queen of France and mother of the man who united England and Scotland. Camilla somehow believed that Tinarose would not forget this history lesson anytime soon. She had not yet met the LaCorte’s governess, but the woman could not possibly compete with the words of a terribly attractive man.