Rondo Allegro

by Sherwood Smith

  They knew the regular routes and habits of hired post chaises. While not as regular as the Mail, these usually arrived during winter between two and four, so as to avoid darkness closing in.

  It was safe to say that everyone in Barford Magna awaited a glimpse of the mysterious wife of the new Lord Northcote.

  Several miles away, Henry Duncannon’s younger sister, Harriet, paced between the rooms in the new wing of the Manor, delighting in the expanse of shining floors, every bit of brass, silver, or gilding bravely shining in the watery afternoon light, the wood polished to a gleam. Signs of neglect had been judiciously hidden away. She herself had tended to the remains of the garden, as poor Pratt, the only gardener left, had not had the time, the rest of his men having been turned off.

  She paused to look out the windows toward the sweeping drive, which was still well graveled, though beginning to show what would probably be deep ruts come spring. Would the new Lady Northcote’s sharp eyes detect them?

  Harriet clasped her hands. Everything, everything depended upon this mysterious woman Henry seemed to have married, did she know that?

  Harriet moved away in an unsuccessful attempt to escape that sick inward sense of having made a terrible error. She hated not knowing if this lady had seen her letter to Henry—her letter that she knew her family would consider forward and impertinent to the worst degree—and if she had, would she betray her?

  A mellow gong resounded from the clock in the hall. One. Even if they arrived at the Boar and Eagle at two, there would be time wasted as John-Coachman got their traps (their dunnage, as Henry always said) into the gig. After that an ever-so-slow-drive, and then maybe arriving right before dinner.

  There might not be opportunity for private conversation even then. That would not do.

  Henry had told Harriet on his last visit that the great Nelson had always said never to dither, but to board ’em smoke and oakum, or smoke ’em and oak, which made a bit more sense; the only part she was certain of was that sea captains mustn’t dawdle.

  And whatever was good advice for the great and glorious Nelson’s own captains by reason ought to be good advice for anyone else, surely?

  She paused at the foot of the staircase. She knew her mother had retired to her room with her hymn book, and Emily was in the morning room, prosing away to Mary about what she thought she had detected in that stiff, formal letter the mysterious Lady Northcote had sent, written as if she had been alive in the First George’s time.

  Harriet must meet the lady first. If she got away without being seen, the others wouldn’t know until it was too late. After that, she trusted, she would have the protection of company manners.

  She flitted up to don her habit, her sturdiest hat, and a muffler, and then she let herself down the back way, through the old part of the house to the stable. She had her mare saddled in a trice. Then, avoiding the drive altogether, she rode through the paddock and the cow pasture, leaped the fence, and galloped cross country. Though there was a thin rain falling, it felt cool on her face, and she laughed aloud.

  As Harriet cantered down country lanes toward town, from the other direction, Anna and Parrette bowled along the last distance toward the town.

  Anna had been expecting to see the beautiful green England of her mother’s stories. Instead, the ground was iron hard where it wasn’t mud, the fields mere stubble, the trees barren. Even the rivers seemed to run brown under a low sky the color of steel. The sun, when it appeared, was so pale and low in the southern sky that it seemed a different sun altogether from the one she had always known.

  The chaise carried them through a last small village, the streets muddy, the austere buildings closed up tightly. Except for the glow of candlelight in a window here and there they would have looked empty of life.

  By then the sun had already begun its downward descent again, and it was too dark inside the chaise for Parrette to see her thread. She folded away her work and they sat in silence until they entered Barford Magna at last, and rolled into a paved square before a rambling inn.

  The windows at the ground floor glowed as the chaise came to its halt in the stable yard, the horses blowing and steaming. Stable hands ran to them, and others to hitch up the manor horses to the family carriage, which had been waiting these two hours.

  At that moment Harriet rode into the middle of the noise and movement. She reined her horse moments before John-Coachman handed a lady out of the chaise.

  Of course she would be beautiful. They had all expected that. If Henry were to marry so oddly out-of-hand it would not be to a plain pudding of a girl. This was a slender, graceful young lady who did not look all that much older than Harriet herself, but she was worlds beyond Harriet in the article of style. Her traveling clothes of sober dove gray looked like something in one of those illustrated magazines from Paris. Even her maid looked smart.

  Harriet gained an impression of curling dark hair and dark eyes inside the bonnet, and then she impulsively dismounted and splashed across the courtyard before John-Coachman could hand them up into the family carriage, waiting at the other end of the drive.

  “You must be Lady Northcote,” she said. “Please say you are! I am Harriet Duncannon,” she added belatedly, her face flooding with color. Oh, thank Heaven no one at home was present to hear that!

  A neat hand in pearl gray took hers in a light grip. “I am ’appy to meet you, Miss Duncannon.” She spoke with a French accent.

  Anna and Harriet looked at one another, liking what they saw. Anna descried a fleeting resemblance to the captain in this girl’s strong chin and proud nose, and the color of her tousled hair under her hat. Harriet’s smile was broad, reflected in the quirk of her wide-spaced eyes: there, the resemblance was pronounced, and Anna’s heart constricted.

  “I could not wait,” Harriet exclaimed, and as Noll loudly thunked one of their trunks onto the top of the carriage, she stepped near and whispered, “Did Henry receive a letter from me?”

  Her voice was low, her face anxious. Anna hesitated, sensing she was missing something, but what? “He was in a coma when I left,” she replied evasively. “The physician insisted I come ahead.”

  There was no mistaking the short sigh of relief. Anna mentally set aside all the questions that had formed around that letter as her words registered on Harriet.

  “Coma?” Harriet exclaimed in horror. “The papers said injured, they did not say what. Oh, pray, has he wakened?”

  “I do not know. The physician held out hope,” Anna said, and when Harriet dropped her gaze, clearly unconvinced, Anna murmured, “I was told that it was not to be expected, that I imagined it, but I believe I saw his head move. I felt his hand move under mine.” Now she could put forward her own question. “By chance, have any letters arrived for me?”

  “No post for you, I am sorry to say.” Harriet shook her head, her eyes filled with tears. But then she dashed them impatiently away and took a deep breath. “I had better ride back. They do not know I’m here, but I couldn’t wait. Thank you.”

  Without saying why she thanked her, Harriet turned to the ostler who waited at her horse’s head. He threw her expertly into the saddle. She guided the horse away with a practiced flick of her wrist and a smile over her shoulder, then she was gone.

  Anna found the liveried man waiting to hand her into a fine carriage; when she had climbed down, she was too weary and anxious to pay attention to details, but now she was startled to find herself gazing straight up into a pair of handsome blue eyes in a face like a marble carving. John-Coachman gazed back, used to these reactions, though he took no particular pride in it. God had made him what he was. What he chose to do with himself was what was important.

  He liked the way the pretty French lady dropped her gaze at once, gave a nod of thanks, and climbed straight into the carriage. He was secretly amused by the distrustful scowl sent his way by the tiny, beak-nosed woman who climbed in after her mistress, and reached for the door as if to shut it before he could. He closed the
door, tipped his hat, and mounted the box.

  “Here is a rug to put over your lap,” Parrette said.

  “I am fine as I am,” Anna said.

  “You do not look fine,” Parrette replied, eyeing her.

  Anna leaned her head back, careful not to crush her bonnet. She decided against explaining the increasing sense of fraud that she could not avoid feeling. As if she were not just encroaching, but stealing the captain’s home, and would she not be resented by his family? It seemed impossible that she should not be.

  “Nerves,” she said finally. “So much depends upon first appearances.”

  Parrette could see Anna’s uneasiness in her countenance. She said nothing—there was nothing new to say.

  The carriage was so smoothly sprung that the jouncing was scarcely noticeable as they rolled up High Street. Anna looked for the bookseller’s shop owned by Midshipman Bradshaw’s family. She spotted it, and had enough time to perceive leaded glass windowpanes glowing upstairs, then they were past.

  They turned alongside a small, beautifully built stone church in the English style, its steeple rising above surrounding bare trees. She did not recognize many of the types of trees she saw here, except that they were all drearily barren.

  Past the churchyard the road took another turn, and soon they were in the countryside again, as gray and brown as ever. How could her mother have ever thought this land green? The darkness slowly closing in seemed to settle in her heart. She tried to bolster her nerves by reflecting upon Miss Harriet Duncannon’s friendliness.

  She was not left long to brood. Over a bridge, down and up, then Parrette said, “Look this way.”

  Anna slid over to the opposite window, and beheld the place where she must live. The Manor lay on rising ground, a gentle, forested hill to the north sheltering it from the worst winds. The house was not symmetrical; it had two wings, built in different styles, but from the same stone so the effect was not unpleasing. She was relieved to see that it was not all built in that odd style she had seen in London, a style she later would learn was called Palladian, admired by high society. Accustomed to the arches, awnings, and flowerboxes of the south, and Paris’s charming variety (under the revolutionary damage), she had found London in November, preparing for winter, unrelievedly grim.

  Archways she saw, though no flowerboxes. The new wing, constructed in the New Gothic style, pleased her eye, and even more pleasing was the promise of golden light in the windows.

  Harriet arrived home, at a flying gallop. She had just enough time to throw off her habit and huddle back into her day gown, shivering as no one’s fire was freshened until it was time to change for dinner. She slipped out of her room then slowed when she saw her mother halfway down the steps to the entryway. So the carriage had been sighted on the hill already!

  “Oh, I hope and pray there is no bad news,” her mother said softly as Harriet joined her, then she sighed. “Harriet, child, how have you contrived to get your hair so untidy?”

  “Only you could get into a scrape just coming downstairs,” her elder sister Mary said fondly, reaching to twitch an errant lock and tuck it up.

  “Oh, bother,” Harriet muttered, and then added daringly, “No one will notice me.” With relief, she turned to watch Diggory open the front door as the carriage bowled along the last of the drive and drew up. Beyond the steps the servants had already gathered outside in a straight line.

  It was exactly right, but for Anna it was the worst possible introduction. She was intimidated to discover the line of servants on the gravel, ignoring the thin, chill rain, and at the great doors several ladies looking exactly alike at first glance. She did not want to get out of the carriage.

  However, here was a powdered footman in fine livery coming to the coach door, and letting down the steps. She could not sit inside forever. She must face the audience. She straightened her shoulders, chin high, ribs tight, and out she stepped.

  Rustle, rustle. The entire row of servants bowed and curtseyed.

  What was she supposed to do? At Naples, suspended between servants and royalty, she had known every degree of deference. In Paris, there had been no bowing. Shipboard life had had its own etiquette. She remembered what it was like to be ignored by those who considered themselves greater, and she nodded to each pair of eyes she met as she approached the wide, shallow front steps.

  Her heartbeat thundered in her ears. When she reached the top step, four women, two in black bombazine, gave slight curtseys. Harriet, now wearing an ugly gray gown, lurked behind a tall young woman in gray who looked somewhat like her.

  Anna responded with her own curtsey, and then the eldest and shortest of the women came forward, her curled hair beautifully powdered under a large, lacy widow’s cap in the style of a previous generation, her voice high and faint, “My dear Lady Northcote. Welcome to the Manor, to your home, that is. And how did you leave my son?”

  This had to be the captain’s mother. “I left him with his steward watching over him, as well as the physician appointed by the admiral,” Anna said. “Lady Northcote, I apprehend?”

  The elderly woman had a beaky nose, and pale blue eyes that squinted. The nose, at least, Anna recognized.

  “Oh, oh,” the dowager fluted tremulously. “I ought to have waited for a formal introduction, I know. Do forgive me, dear Lady Northcote, forgive a mother’s anxiousness for news.” She turned to the other woman in black, whose fair beauty was startlingly enhanced by those black clothes.

  “May I present Lady Emily Northcote?” the dowager said with even more of a tremor, and the beautiful one dipped her knee again as she held out her hand.

  Anna took that hand, meeting a searching gaze from thick-lashed blue eyes, even more striking in hue than those possessed by the coachman. This had to be the wife of the former baron. Emily?

  “My daughters,” the dowager Lady Northcote went on, first indicating the tall one in gray with the thin beaky nose, “Mrs. Elstead, and my younger daughter.”

  “Mrs. Elstead,” Anna murmured, and smiling as Harriet curtseyed as if they had never met, “Miss Duncannon.”

  Harriet strictly suppressed her own smile, but she was thrilled to the heart. The new wife had not betrayed her! That had to be a promising sign. Unless she was a designing minx, the way . . . no. She wouldn’t let herself even think it, because everybody said her thoughts were forever writ on her face.

  “. . . the drawing room,” the dowager was saying, “while your trunks are bringing in. You might wish for something hot to drink before we change for dinner. We keep country hours,” she explained, leading the way past the old-fashioned furnishings by Ince and Mayhew, ornate, yet formidably spiky to Anna’s eyes, to a large drawing room that overlooked a garden in the back, which framed a lake.

  This was the formal drawing room. Furnishings were grouped around a broad marble fireplace in which a good fire snapped and crackled. Covering most of the parquet floor was an exquisite Aubusson carpet of Renaissance floral designs in shades of blue and gold.

  The dowager led Anna to what she would come to recognize as the best seat, neither too close to the fire nor too far away, and as soon as the ladies had settled around her, the butler appeared again, a tall, stout middle-aged man who supervised the row of housemaids carrying in an elaborate tea service and a tray of tiny cakes.

  While a young maidservant handed around the tea and cakes (Anna, though ravenously hungry, did not know what to do with these, and so she declined, confining herself to the tea) the dowager put forth a series of polite questions about the post chaise, the roads, the weather, and the journey.

  Anna replied with polite nothings that she had already rehearsed to herself. She was unsettled by the manner in which her auditors paid much more heed to her inane words than they were worth. Was her English at fault? She began to reply with increasing brevity.

  On the floor below, Parrette was conducted to the housekeeper’s sitting room, where she sat down to tea and fresh scones.

 
Mrs. Diggory, the elderly housekeeper, enumerated the staff, beginning with her nephew Mr. Diggory, the butler. After she had named them all, she added that Parrette would meet them all at the servants’ meal, and then straight-away launched into the questions that the ladies upstairs wanted very badly to ask.

  This was the interrogation for which Parrette had prepared herself.

  She launched into her prepared speech. The Ludovisi duke got his due mention, and Parrette stressed the likelihood of Eugenia’s father having been on his Grand Tour before he chose to stay on the continent to take up his abode in Florence. She said nothing untrue, but she suppressed Eugenia’s mother’s origin, the dueling school, and the fact that Eugenia had had to go out as a governess to visiting English families.

  As she went on to Signor Ludovisi and the royal palace in Naples, she covertly watched these words impact her audience. These were English English, the people Eugenia had desired most for her daughter. She must not speak amiss.

  The housekeeper poured out more tea. Mrs. Diggory was a bony woman, with large gray eyes half-covered by thin eyelids in which the veins were prominent. Parrette found it impossible to descry her expression.

  “It came as quite a surprise, as you might expect, to them upstairs, to discover his lordship’s marriage in the newspapers,” Mrs. Diggory said as she passed the cup and saucer to Parrette. “A recent event, I take it?”

  “Not at all,” Parrette said, pretending she did not hear the insinuation. It was no more than she had expected.

  She took a sip of the vile concoction, longed futilely for coffee, then said, “It happened nearly six years ago. It was arranged by the English legation, but then the fleet was sent away. Her ladyship,” Parrette said these words with subdued enjoyment, “did not see him again until we were in Cadiz, and Admiral Gravina himself arranged for her to rejoin his lordship.”

  The housekeeper’s mouth pursed, and those veined eyelids rose a fraction. Parrette set down her cup, wondering if the news would get through the house faster than she would.