by Mary Balogh
“I really and truly do not know,” he said, wondering if she was asking about him or just his silly hero. “Do you want to return to the drawing room immediately? Or will you come and stroll in the gallery with me?”
She gazed at him for what felt like a long time. He had almost decided to walk away so that she would not have to reject him openly.
“The gallery,” she said. “I am not ready yet for more socializing.”
Sixteen
Justin was not sure he was ready to be alone with her again. He had given her due warning earlier— was it really just today, just a few hours ago?— that next week he would be asking her again to marry him. He had warned her that in the meanwhile he would be trying to change her answer from the no she had given in the summerhouse to the yes he hoped for in the end. But was he ready— was she?— for them to be alone together again today after their encounter down by the lake? And after everything that had happened since then?
He had rarely felt more out of control of his life. Which was saying something when he considered all he had lived through during the past twelve years.
They walked side by side and in silence to the north wing and the long gallery. He lit a taper from the wall sconce outside its doors and walked the whole length of the gallery and back, lighting all the candles in their sconces while Lady Estelle waited quietly just inside the door. Justin was very aware of the hollow sound of his heels on the wood floor, of the gradual lifting of the darkness, of their aloneness here. He blew out the taper and set it down on a brass tray on the bureau inside the door.
“I did not come here when Lady Crowther brought a group a few days ago,” she said. “It is quite breathtaking, even at night.”
“It stretches the full length of all the state apartments below us,” he said. “But with no intervening walls. I used to love coming here with my cousins— Ernie and Sid and Doris. Rosie had not yet been thought of in those days. And, less often, with the cousins from Cornwall— Bevin and Miriam, Angela and Frederick. Paulette came later. There was never anyone up here to tell us to slow down or be quiet, except when the occasional parent or nurse poked a head in to make sure we were all alive with no broken arms or bloody noses. My parents were of the firm belief that children ought to be allowed to be children, and there was nothing much here with which we could harm ourselves. Interestingly, they never seemed worried that we might damage the paintings. Even more interestingly, it never occurred to any of us to draw mustaches or horns or freckles on any of the ancestors.”
“This is not the best time to look at the paintings, is it?” she said. “I must come back when there is daylight. Is there a portrait of you? And of your father? And your mother?”
“Yes,” he said. “Close to this end. They are hung in chronological order, starting at the far end.”
He showed her first the painting of his grandparents with his father and his aunts. His father, aged about eighteen at the time, slender and smiling, stood at his seated father’s shoulder. Aunt Augusta, aged about twelve, stood gracefully beside her mother’s chair. Aunt Felicity, about six, stood on her mother’s other side, her elbows on her mother’s lap, her chin in her hands.
“My grandmother once explained to me the rather wide gap in their ages,” he explained. “The other children— four of them— did not survive infancy. Or even birth, in one of those cases.”
“Ah,” Lady Estelle said. “Life is sometimes cruel. But it is a charming painting.”
He led her to the next portrait, a solo one of himself, painted when he was nine years old. He was standing beside his pony, one arm draped over its neck, the other hand holding a riding crop like a cane, propped on the ground. His booted feet were crossed nonchalantly at the ankle. A child pretending to be a man, like his father.
“My mother had the painting hung in her bedchamber,” he said. “She said the moment she saw it that it was her favorite painting ever. Not that she was biased in any way.” It had been moved here to the gallery before his father’s second marriage.
“Oh,” Lady Estelle said. It was all she said for a while. But she stood directly in front of the painting and stayed there for some time.
And then the portrait of the three of them: his father seated on a chair with gilded back and curved gilded arms; his mother on a low stool beside him, her arm, bent at the elbow, resting across his lap; he, Justin, standing behind her, one hand on his father’s shoulder. All of them were smiling, which was unusual for a family portrait.
“I was ten,” he said.
She looked at the painting, and then turned her head to look at him. “Ten?”
“The painter delivered the finished portrait two weeks after my mother’s funeral,” he said.
His father had wept— for the first time since her death.
He could not see Lady Estelle’s face clearly. One of the candles was in his direct line of vision, behind her head. But he was aware of her eyes brightening— with tears?— before she dipped her head and brought her forehead against his chest.
“Oh, it is awful, awful,” she said, “to lose one’s mother. It is not right. It is not fair. I do not even have a portrait of mine. Or any conscious memory. But it hurts. It hurts more than anything. She was nothing like Aunt Jane. Both my aunt herself and my father have told me that. And she was nothing like my stepmother. She was nothing like anyone. No one ever is. Everyone is unique. I never knew the unique person who was my mother. You did know yours. You have a portrait. You have memories. But it does not matter, does it? You lost her far too soon. You felt the immediate pain of her death, which must have been unbearable. I did not feel that with my mother because I was too young. And people assume that therefore there has been no pain at all, for either me or Bertrand. How can there be? We are twenty-five, and she died twenty-four years ago. Oh, I am sorry.”
She tried to raise her head, but he wrapped his arms about her and drew her close. Not tightly. She could have drawn free if she had wished. He heard her inhale deeply and exhale with a puff as she relaxed against him. He rested his chin on the top of her head.
“I do not spend my days moping and mourning for my mother, you know,” she said.
“I do know,” he said. “The people who have been central to our lives are always there in us and always will be, even when they are no longer alive and we are not actually thinking about them. We are fortunate if our memories of them, conscious or unconscious, are happy ones. If we know and can feel deep down inside ourselves that they loved us constantly and unconditionally.”
He looked at the portrait over her head. None of them had had any inkling of what was facing them so soon after they had posed thus for the painter and laughed at the absurdity of staying still for so long— laughter the painter had chosen to use in his painting. What a blessing it was that one could not see into the future. When they had laughed— he had started it by announcing in a frantic sort of agony that he had an itch— they had been utterly happy. If one discounted the agony of his itch.
“And then you lost your father,” she said.
“I was twenty-eight by then,” he said. And he did not want to pursue this point.
“Did you hate him?” she asked.
“No,” he said.
“Do you hate him?” she asked.
“No.”
She drew back her head to look into his face. She had the advantage over him that the closest candle was behind her. He had hated himself. For not asserting himself more forcefully after returning home to live full-time when he came down from university and declaring once and for all that he was absolutely not interested in … Well, that he was not interested. He hated himself for dashing unheeding into a room he had thought empty without ascertaining first that it was empty—that of all rooms. For not telling his father the truth. Though he would have hated himself more if he had. He hated himself for withholding the truth and putting that look of raw pain and barely leashed anger on his father’s face.
She raised one hand
and set her fingertips against his cheek.
“The only way I could retain my soul,” he said, “was to keep on loving him. To keep on knowing that he was an honorable man.”
She searched his eyes with her own and nodded slowly. Please do not ask, he begged her silently. Please do not ask what happened.
She did not. She turned her hand and brushed the backs of her fingers over his cheek before taking a step away.
“I will look at the other portrait another time,” she said, nodding toward the remaining painting at the end of the line. She must have realized that it was of his father’s second family, which had included him— until he was twenty-two. “In the daylight. Have you thought of having new portraits done? Of the adult you as Earl of Brandon? Of Maria? Perhaps of the two of you together?”
“I have not thought of it,” he said. “Perhaps I will wait until I have a countess. And children. Though I would like a portrait of Maria. She was four years old when that one was done.” He inclined his head toward the last painting.
“I know a portrait painter who would do a wonderful job of it,” she said. “He is my sort-of brother-in-law.”
“Is that a legal designation—sort-of brother-in-law?” he asked her.
She laughed and the breath caught in his throat. There was a great deal of joy in Lady Estelle Lamarr, even if she had not shown much of it directly to him. When she smiled or laughed, she seemed to be lit up from within.
“Camille is my stepsister,” she said. “We did not grow up together. She was already married with children when my father met her mother— or rather met her again. But we love each other. Joel Cunningham is her husband. He has been growing in renown as a portrait painter to a point at which I believe it is a matter of great distinction now to be able to boast that one has secured his services.”
“And you believe I might be one of the chosen few?” he asked her, feeling a bit amused.
“Well,” she said, “you would have his stepsister-in-law to speak up for you. And his stepbrother-in-law too. Joel is very talented. But that is not a strong enough word. He is—amazing. You would have to see for yourself. He always explains that he does not paint what he sees with his eyes. He points out that the eyes are such a small part of one’s entire being. He has to observe and converse with his subjects long before he starts to paint them. He has to find the core of their being and then paint from that deeply held knowledge.”
“It sounds like a slow process,” he said.
“I believe,” she said, “that is why he is so much in demand. He does not produce a dozen or so paintings every week. Or even one.”
“Has he painted you?” he asked.
“No.” She shook her head.
“Perhaps he will paint you,” he said, “when you are my countess.”
She smiled, though she did not laugh this time. “I do not believe he enjoys painting groups,” she said.
“I will commission him to paint my countess on her own, then,” he said.
She did laugh then. “You, Lord Brandon, are presumptuous,” she said.
“Persistent,” he said. “Consistent. An optimist. Do you want to stroll along the gallery and back? Or would you prefer to watch the charades?”
She thought about it. He expected that she would choose to return to the drawing room.
“The stroll,” she said, and when he offered his arm she took it. “Why specifically do you want a countess, Lord Brandon? You have had your title for six years. Why now?”
“Sometimes the stars align,” he said. “It was time to fetch Maria home. She has come without her longtime governess and companion. It makes sense to offer her a sister-in-law instead of a new companion. It is also time to consider the full responsibilities of my position— as I told you at the summerhouse. And I met you.”
“The perfect candidate,” she said. “Daughter of a marquess. Not too young for your thirty-four years, but not quite in her dotage either.”
“Yes,” he said. “But not just for those reasons.”
“You fell in love with me at first sight,” she said. “By the riverbank.”
“Hardly,” he told her. “If I did any falling on that afternoon, it was in lust.”
“Because my hair was loose down my back and my legs were dangling in the water?” she said. “And my skirts were up about my knees?”
“I am a man,” he told her.
“Yes,” she said. “I had noticed.”
Was she flirting with him? There was a lightness in her tone. Was he flirting with her? He had a feeling that he was smiling and discovered that yes, he was. But no, they were not flirting. They were teasing each other. Was it the same thing? Either way it was a bit astonishing and felt rather good.
“So you wish to marry me not just because you need a countess and I am eligible,” she said, “but because you are in lust with me. You are improving. That sounds a little less impersonal and offensive.”
“But only a little?” he asked.
“Is lust a good enough reason for marrying someone?” she asked.
“I believe sex is an important part of marriage,” he told her. “It would—it will— certainly be an important part of mine.”
“And lust will be good enough for that?” she asked.
He could not see her clearly. He had lit all the candles along both sides of the gallery, but their flames had to compete with vast expanses of darkness. Even so, he was almost sure she was blushing rosily. This, he thought, was not a very proper conversation for a lady to be having.
“It will be a start,” he said as they came to the end of the gallery and turned to walk back.
“Oh?” she said. “And what will come after it? Boredom? Duty?”
“Shall we wait and see?” he asked her.
“We?” She turned her head to look at him. “Are you assuming that I will say yes, Lord Brandon?”
“I am trying to think optimistically,” he said.
“And I am thinking of what a huge risk I would be taking if I married you for lust and hoped for some vague future that might not be boredom or dreary duty,” she said.
“You do lust after me, then?” he asked her.
She laughed again. “You are trying to discompose me,” she said. “You are expecting me to be shocked and deny that I feel any such unladylike thing. I beg to disappoint you. Yes, I lust after you, Lord Brandon. I have no idea why. I think … making love with you would be an interesting experience. Now I wish to return to the drawing room if you please.”
An interesting experience.
“Are there many new names and ideas on that list of your brother’s?” he asked as he led her from the gallery a couple of minutes or so later.
“Yes,” she said. “Mr. Chandler has suggested having posters printed and pinned up in all sorts of public places between here and Ricky’s home in Gloucestershire. He is willing to travel to the closest place where there is a printing press and use his influence as a Yorkshire bank owner to make a rush order. He insists that he will pay for it all himself.”
“Dash it all,” he said. “I wonder where Ricky is tonight. At this very moment. And I wonder how Wes and Hilda are feeling. He has to be found, Estelle. He must be terribly bewildered and frightened. He will not know how to cope …”
Her hand, which was linked through his arm, pressed his arm to her side for a moment. “He will be found,” she said. “Mr. Ernest Sharpe suggested the Bow Street Runners. Hiring them seems a bit of an extreme step to take, but it is a possibility. They have a great deal of experience in tracking people down.”
“Poor Ricky,” he said. “Ah, poor Ricky. He is the sweetest person I have ever known, Estelle. I hate the thought of his being tracked down. Like an animal.”
She pressed his arm to her side again and turned her head to smile at him while a footman opened the doors of the drawing room for them. Justin sent him to extinguish the candles in the gallery before they turned to enter.
When Estelle stopped to thi
nk about it the next day, she was amazed at how the plight of one simpleminded man of no social significance whatsoever could animate a whole gathering of both gently born and middle-class guests at an aristocratic home, as well as all the indoor and outdoor servants there.
Nobody lingered over breakfast— and no one was late for breakfast either except Lady Maple, who rarely put in an appearance before noon. Even she was up before half past ten, however. She wished to find Mr. Chandler, her niece’s husband, before he went off to have his posters printed and distributed. She wanted to make sure he worded them correctly and effectively, and she wanted to offer to help with the cost of them.
“He owns a bank,” Doris Haig murmured to Estelle before rolling her eyes. “He is probably as rich as Croesus. But it is good of her to offer, I suppose. The decision has already been made, however, to hold off for a couple of days before hanging up posters or sending out leaflets or dashing off to London to engage the services of the Bow Street Runners.”
The guests fanned out through the neighborhood, calling upon people who had paid their respects to them at church on Sunday and those who had called at Everleigh to welcome Maria back and greet the earl’s guests. Coachmen and footmen who conveyed them undertook to mingle with their fellow servants and engage in unrestrained gossip. Bertrand went with Mr. and Mrs. Peter Ormsbury to call upon the vicar and his wife. Several of the young people went off riding in a largish group, though they did intend to split off into smaller pairings as they stopped at inns and taverns to imbibe ale or lemonade or tea while talking with landlords and other patrons.
Estelle and a number of others settled at desks and tables in various rooms, writing letters to everyone of any significance from Hertfordshire whom the Earl of Brandon had been able to think of yesterday when Bertrand started the list in the library. That list grew during the day as other suggestions came from the vicar and a few of the neighbors, some of them people who lived farther west in bordering counties.
The earl went to call upon the local magistrate, who might have had something to suggest by way of help from law enforcement officers.