by Mary Balogh
The group of young people began to make its noisy, chattering way down the marble steps to the terrace, led by Maria. Bertrand went with them. He had offered his arm to Angela Ormsbury, one of Maria’s cousins on her father’s side, perhaps because she seemed shier than any of the others. He was smiling at her and drawing her into conversation. Estelle held back until last. She was here to give her support to Maria, it was true, but she did not want to stifle her friend’s ability to manage on her own. Mr. Ernest Sharpe, her brother’s cousin, had given her his arm and Maria was smiling at him, apparently pleased to have his escort. Mr. Sidney Sharpe was hovering in Estelle’s vicinity and would offer his arm in a moment, she supposed. His young sister had just plucked his sleeve, however, to point out something across the valley before turning away to run lightly down the steps in pursuit of the others.
At the same moment one of the main doors opened and someone else stepped outside. The dour earl himself, Estelle saw with a glance over her shoulder. He was coming too, was he? He drew to an abrupt halt.
“Ah, Lady Estelle,” he said just as Sidney Sharpe was turning back to her. “May I show you the summerhouse? I am on my way there.”
“Oh, I say, Justin,” his cousin protested. “Pulling rank, are you? Cutting the ground from under my feet?”
“Pulling the age advantage, Sid,” the earl said. “I always was two years older than you, if you will recall. I still am. But had you already asked the lady to walk to the lake with you?”
“I had not,” his cousin admitted. “But I was about to, as must have been glaringly obvious. Perhaps we ought—”
“Excuse me,” Estelle said, bringing the eyes of both gentlemen to her person. “The lady is standing right here. She has ears. She also has a tongue.”
“She is also a lady of some spirit,” Sidney Sharpe said, his eyes laughing into hers before he grinned more fully at his cousin. “Lady Estelle, the choice is yours. You may walk to the lake with my humble self, or you may admire the summerhouse with Justin. Or you may do something quite independent of both of us, I suppose, and go stalking off alone to walk the maze or explore the greenhouses. But before you decide, may I point out that if you reject my offer as an escort, I may be doomed to walk with my own sister?” He pulled a forlorn look.
Estelle laughed. The others, she could see, had crossed the terrace and were descending the wide stone steps to the formal garden and making their way to the fountain at its center, where Maria and Mr. Ernest Sharpe were awaiting them.
“That does sound like a sad fate, Mr. Sharpe,” she said. “However, when a lady has a choice of escort, good manners dictate that she accept the one who asked first.”
She heard the words that came out of her mouth rather as though someone else had spoken them. There was a measure of truth to them, but … She had agreed to walk to the lake before she had been asked to go in the opposite direction. So why …
“Run along, Sid,” the earl said.
And his cousin ran along, laughing and calling to the others to wait for him.
“You are on the way to the summerhouse, Lord Brandon?” Estelle asked, wheeling on him. “Alone?” When you have guests to entertain? She did not say it aloud, but her tone implied it.
“I often spend time there,” he told her. “I thought to steal a private hour or two there this morning while everyone else is happily occupied. Lady Maple informed me last night that she never leaves her room before noon. My aunt and uncle are in the nursery with Doris and Martin and their children.”
“You do not like children?” she asked him.
“Doris’s two are of that alarming breed of youngster that awakes at the crack of dawn every day, bursting with energy and demanding to be entertained,” he said. “I took them out to the stables this morning, where they made Captain’s acquaintance— I am not sure who was the more ecstatic, he or they— and then came riding with one of my grooms and me. After that they helped brush the horses down and chased Captain around the stable yard before feeding him. I brought them home in plenty of time for their nurse to make them look and smell respectable before the other children, who all slept until a decent hour, were ready for breakfast. I believe I have done my duty by them for one morning.”
Well. She had had her answer.
“Perhaps,” he said, “you will not mind if we collect Captain on our way to the summerhouse. He does not take kindly to being in residence at the stables and thus relegated to an inferior status, on a level with the horses. He usually occupies the house with me, but it occurred to me that some of my guests may not enjoy his company. You, for example?”
They descended the marble steps together and turned to walk along the terrace. He did not offer his arm.
“Oh, you will not make me responsible for your dog’s misery in being put out of his own home, Lord Brandon,” she said. “I believe I have already conceded that he is not the vicious hound I took him for at first.”
Why, she wondered, did he often spend time at the summerhouse when he had this vast and splendid mansion in which to live?
Eight
Captain was sitting out in the stable yard, watching one of the grooms exercise a horse in the paddock, but he scrambled to his feet and turned when he saw them approach. He did not come dashing toward them, however, until he was summoned by a single word from his master.
“Come,” the Earl of Brandon said.
The dog came at a run then, panted up at the earl when he arrived, and sat to offer a paw to Estelle. As she shook it and bade him a good morning, she found herself smiling and wanting for some inexplicable reason to hug the dog. His brown ears were soft and silky, his black jowls, nose, and eyes mournful looking. Fleshy folds curved above his eyes, like eyebrows, and extended down the sides of his face, making it seem as though his eyes slanted downward. He was not so terribly fierce after all. Perhaps he was not sad either. Looks could deceive.
“I can remember,” she said, smoothing one hand over the dog’s huge head and down along one ear, “that Bertrand desperately wanted a dog when we were seven or eight. There was a litter of collie pups at a neighbor’s house. He begged and pleaded and moped, but our aunt was immovable. Dogs were dirty, in her opinion, and they shed and jumped on furniture and beds and frightened visitors and servants. Worst of all, they were useless. Except, perhaps, to warm a little boy’s heart.”
“You did not want one of those puppies too?” the earl asked, and Estelle looked at him in some surprise— surprise at herself, that she had confided such a distant and personal memory to him of all people. Good heavens, she had probably not even thought of that incident for years.
“I was not desperate for one,” she said. “But we are twins. We feel each other’s pain. I can remember wrapping my arms about him and weeping on his shoulder when I found him huddled in a corner of the attic after he had finally understood that he was not going to have his dog.”
“Your aunt had great power in your home, did she?” he asked.
“She and my uncle raised us,” she explained. “Our mother died in an accident before we were even a year old, and her elder sister and her husband and their two children came to Elm Court to care for us. They stayed for the funeral, and then somehow they stayed for the rest of our childhood and youth.”
“Your father … ?” he asked.
“He went away,” she told him. “He came home a couple of times each year, but it was our aunt and uncle who raised us.”
“They did an excellent job,” he said.
She looked at him in surprise again.
“They are good people,” she told him. “I did not mean to imply by the dog story that my aunt was some sort of cruel and unfeeling tyrant. She was not and is not.”
“Shall we walk?” he suggested, and she fell into step beside him. What had he meant by that? They did an excellent job. He did not know either her or Bertrand. But even a slight acquaintance was often enough to give one a firm impression— just as she had formed one of him. She d
id not really know him, though, did she?
The dog loped along ahead of them.
The summerhouse was built on a steepish slope above the greenhouses and was largely hidden from them by a band of trees and bushes. It was slightly above the level of the house too and was angled to face away from it, toward the southeast.
“Someone was using his head when it was built,” the earl said as they approached it. “My great-grandfather again, I suspect. The lower level has windows from ceiling to floor, as you will see in a moment. The upper level too has large windows. Most people would choose to have the building face full south to get all the sunlight and then discover the heat of a summer day unbearable. This way the house gets all the gentle morning light, but more slanted rays in the afternoon.”
It was an attractive building. The lower level was all one room and furnished for relaxation with a number of comfortable-looking chairs and sofas and low tables to hold refreshments and books and newspapers. There was even a long, low bookcase against the back wall, its shelves filled with books. Two of the windows that made up the front wall could be slid back to open the room to the outdoors. They could also be kept closed to hold the warm air inside on a cool or rainy day. The view was unexpected and lovely. The summerhouse did not look over any part of the formal gardens or flower beds but rather over fields and meadows to the east and the low hedgerows that divided them and gave them the appearance of a patchwork quilt. There were sheep grazing in one large field. The view stretched into the distance over a widening valley and low, undulating hills. The river meandered through it.
“All your land?” Estelle asked.
“Yes,” he said.
It had indeed been an inspired idea to build the summerhouse to face this way. There was an impression of rural peace here. One could be happy here for days at a time, Estelle thought. She no longer wondered that the earl chose to spend time here despite the fact that he lived in that vast and magnificent mansion out of sight behind them.
“I started to spend a lot of time here after my mother’s death,” he told her.
“How old were you?” she asked.
“Ten,” he said. “One week shy of my eleventh birthday, actually. She was a superb horsewoman, but she had a fall that day and hit her head. She lived for another five days, but she never regained consciousness. The light went out of my life with her.”
Estelle felt her stomach muscles clench, for that one sentence spoke volumes. She carried the pain of never having consciously known her own mother. He had the pain of having known his for more than ten years. Which was worse? Or were there no degrees of pain in the loss of a mother? She wondered if the light had ever come back for him, and what it would say about him if it had not. She had worked out his age to be thirty-four. His mother had died twenty-four years ago, then. About the same time as her mother. Both by accident, the result of a fall.
“Come and see the upstairs,” he said, and his dog scrambled eagerly up ahead of them, though he had to wait on the top stair. There was a door, which the earl had to unlock with a key he drew from his pocket.
It was also one room. This one had two large windows, though not as large as the ones below. There was a big desk against the wall between them and reaching halfway across each. It was strewn rather untidily with paper and pencils and quill pens and an ink bottle. There were bookshelves here too, all of them filled, and two easy chairs and a bed pushed against the back wall, covered with a fawn-colored quilt and bright cushions and books. There was a book on the seat of one of the chairs too. Both sides of the ceiling sloped with the shape of the roof.
It was not a tidy space, but there was something very cozy about it. It looked lived in. Estelle wondered if he had ever spent a night in that bed. As a boy, perhaps, mourning his mother, wondering if his life would ever be the same again— and knowing at heart that it would not be.
“This was always just a storage space,” he told her. “I asked my father if I could clear it out, and he raised no objection. One of the grooms and a couple of gardeners helped me move the junk out and the furniture in, and it became my retreat. No one has ever been here but me. And Maria a few times when she was a child.”
And now her, Estelle thought. What was she to make of that?
She approached the desk and all the papers spread across it. “Do you write?” she asked.
“I do,” he said. He was standing in the middle of the room, where the ceiling was high enough to accommodate his height, his hands behind him, looking at her with a slight frown between his brows.
“What do you write?” she asked him. “Or is that an unpardonably intrusive question?”
“Hardly,” he said, “or I would not have brought you up here. I am trying my hand at a novel. If it can be called that. I am beginning to realize that a novel must have some … shape, some point, some meaning, something to bind beginning, middle, and end together in a unified whole. I do not even know the word to describe what I mean, if there is such a word. But whatever it is, I suspect my book may lack it. It is the picaresque story of a young man’s adventures as he travels about the country without any idea of where exactly he is going or why he is going there or what he will do when he gets there or how he will survive when he has no money in his pockets or friends upon whom to lean.”
The words were out of her mouth before she could stop them. “It is autobiographical, then?” she asked. She could feel her cheeks turn hot as his stillness seemed to intensify. She knew nothing about the years before his father’s death, though the gossips had made much of them even as far away as Elm Court. But even if she had known anything … Oh, her wretched mouth.
“I suppose,” he said after an uncomfortable pause, “I can identify with my main character sufficiently to make him convincing, Lady Estelle. But he is not me. He is far more heroic. Accidentally heroic, I ought to add. He stumbles into adventures and challenges and dangers and often makes matters worse with his clumsy attempts to deal with them and help people who neither need nor wish for his help. Despite himself and against all odds, however, he invariably wins the day and comes out on top before moving on.”
She felt herself smiling. “He is a bit of a comic hero, then?” she asked. “A bit of a Don Quixote?”
He was still frowning. “Quite by accident,” he said. “I wanted him to be a serious adventurer, someone who would vanquish all the demons at loose in the world and teach the reader a thing or two about courage and virtue and the truly important things in life. Someone epically heroic. But I have made a disturbing discovery about writing. My characters, especially my hero, are of course my creations. They have no existence outside my imagination. Yet no one seems to have told them that. They will insist upon living their lives their way no matter how often I tap them on the shoulder with a timid sort of ‘Excuse me?’ They simply stare at me before continuing to carry on as they please.”
She smiled as she tipped her head to one side. Oh, this was a revelation. “Unlike Captain, who is obedient to your every command,” she said.
The dog, hearing his name as he lay in a very temporary shaft of sunlight from one of the windows, opened his eyes, thumped his tail twice on the floor, and returned to his somnolent state.
“Well,” the earl said. “Captain is not a figment of my imagination. I really believe the imagination is not even in the brain, you know, but is something far larger and more powerful that the brain has access to when one quiets the mind sufficiently to relinquish control. And if you believe this is the rambling of a madman, I would not necessarily disagree with you.”
He went abruptly to look out through the other window.
“Why did you bring me here, Lord Brandon?” Estelle asked.
“To Everleigh?” He turned his face toward her.
“Here,” she said. “To the summerhouse. You brought me to Everleigh to keep Maria company. I was in her company when I left the house this morning. We were going to the lake together. Why did you ask me to come here instead?”
“When I stepped outside myself,” he said, “you looked like more of an observer of the lake party than a participant in it. And Maria had plenty of other company. It occurred to me that you might like the summerhouse.”
“I do,” she said. But she was feeling very uncomfortable. Why had he singled her out and asked no one else? And why here, to the upstairs, which he had admitted was very much his private domain? It even had a door that locked, though it was open now. And why, for that matter, had she agreed to come here with him when she had had a perfect excuse not to do so? No, it was not even an excuse. She had had a reason. She had been a part of that other group, and she had really wanted to see the lake and the bridge and waterfall.
“You would have come here eventually, of course,” the earl said. “Everyone will. We will arrange to have tea out here a time or two, preferably when the weather is at its best. I will enjoy being here with all my guests. Downstairs. I thought you might like to see this quiet retreat, however.”
Her and no one else?
“And to hear about your accidental hero?” she said.
“I did not intend for you to meet him,” he said. “I ought to have hidden all evidence of his existence before I brought you here. But then I did not expect to be bringing you. Perhaps I have more in common with my hero than I realized.”
“You write with a pencil rather than a pen?” she said. It was not really a question. She could see that he did. He had bold, sloping handwriting.
“When he embarrasses me too much or gets himself into a scrape I cannot think him out of or becomes tedious for more than one page in a row,” he told her, “I can simply erase what he said or did and send him off in a different direction to do better.”