After tea, Aunt Em and Nanny escorted Caro and Lady Heard to their rooms. Though single young ladies were usually quartered on the third floor of the south wing, above the State Rooms, Caro was the only single young lady on the guest-list, and Aunt Em didn't want her to get lonely, so put her in one of the couples' rooms on the second floor, across the hall from Lady Heard.
I walked Claude up to the room I'd had Coldicott set aside for him when I wired ahead from the Beverborough station, which was on the first floor of the keep, one of the rooms just off the old chapel. I always thought it would be more poetic to keep the young ladies in the keep, separated from the rest of the house by a chapel, but it was on the north side of the house and tended to be a little chilly. Besides, the chapel had been converted into a combination billiards-room and smoking-room (though it was still called 'the old chapel'), a sort of gentlemen's recreation hall, during the 1850 renovation.
I had to stop a minute and think about where to go next: up until that week, I'd always stayed in my old nursery room on the third floor of the north wing; but when I came down in July to make arrangements for the autumn, I decided that it was time for me to move into a better room, a room suitable to a full-fledged adult, heir to the earldom and a rich man in his own right. There were plenty to choose from, of course, but for some perverse reason, I really wanted one of the State Bedrooms on the first floor of the central block.
The Queen's Bedchamber was too much of a museum-piece, having been kept almost exactly as it had been when Elizabeth came to stay in 1480, and again in 1487 and 1498, with only the addition of a bathroom and electricity marring the shrine-like antiquity. Then there was the West Bedchamber, which had been shared by my parents: Pater lived in the larger of the two dressing-rooms while Mummy lived in the main room that had been furnished to her taste in Art Nouveau and mauve watered silk: but it seemed somehow sacrilegious to sleep in there.
That left the East Bedchamber, which had been my grandmother's room before she died, but was surprisingly masculine for a woman's room (before my parents, the lord and lady of the house had always lived quite separately in the West and East Bedchambers, respectively). Grandmother had loved old tapestries, and aside from collecting some of the finest in the land for the house, for her own room she collected together every old moth-eaten rag that had been consigned to the attics, using the uneaten parts as upholstery on the chairs, bedstead, and mahogany wall-panels.
It was a delightful room, giving the illusion of being out in the forest, interrupted by little vignette views of distant towns and oddly-shaped castles, with startling little pieces of people and animals peeking out from unexpected corners.
Once I cleared out all the busy little occasional tables and spider-ridden palms (as no doubt Caro would have done), it required no further rearranging to suit me. The furniture was old-fashioned, but not yet antique, heavy and solid and very comfortable; the big bay window held my favorite view, over the broad terrace like the shore of an ocean of lawn, bordered by game-infested acres of old-growth forest, with an ornamental lake in the middle (my schoolroom had faced the same direction, so the view always inspired daydreams).
Aunt Em had dithered a bit when I demanded that room for my own use; it had been her mother's room, after all, and she had memories attached to it. She also worried what my father would think about me taking over one of the State Bedrooms instead of one of the north-wing family bedrooms, as was seemly for the heir. But since I did not intend to radically alter the room, and since Pater hadn't set foot in Foxbridge Castle for over a decade and wouldn't know unless she told him, she finally gave in to me.
When I got to my room, I found Pond deep in the wardrobe of the dressing-room, obviously enjoying having so much space to work in. I'd left him behind on my last visit, much to his annoyance, so it had all the delight of newness for him. And since the room was pretty much new to me, too, we were in the same boat--although he didn't seem to be at all intimidated by the grandeur of it all, while I was feeling just a tiny bit uncomfortable with it.
"Do I have any Norfolk suits?" I asked, peeking into the truly massive wardrobe that took up most of one wall, marveling at the neatness of it: each hanger was exactly the same distance apart, each suit facing the same direction, with like colours together.
"Yes, my lord," he answered in a somewhat incredulous tone, as if I'd asked whether or not the sky was blue.
"Where?" I pursued, examining the suits on the rack, none of which appeared to be a Norfolk suit.
"In the clothes-press, my lord," he smiled at my confusion, "I put all of our outdoor clothes, for hunting, riding, and the like in the clothes-press beside the door to the corridor; such clothing has to be cleaned frequently, I thought it best to keep it separate. The odour of cleaning-fluid might overpower the dressing-room, it's not very well-ventilated."
"Oh, I see," it was news to me that there was a clothes-press near the door to the corridor. The bedrooms in the main block of the house were really suites of rooms, each one with two smaller rooms attached, which could be used for dressing-rooms or secondary bedrooms for husbands or servants, with bathrooms and clothes-presses and miscellaneous little spaces tucked in here and there.
I didn't have any use for the second little room, which was a little bigger than my bedroom in London--and its emptiness rather annoyed me. It was furnished rather vaguely, with a narrow canopied bed against the wall like a couch and a large wardrobe, the basic furniture of all the dressing-rooms in the house; it had no access except through the bedroom, unless you count the door to the poky little box-room that I'd stuffed with Grandmother's bibelots, which in turn had a door into the corridor.
I often caught myself standing in the doorway, trying to think of something to do with it: maybe a laboratory in which I could conduct Holmesian chemical experiments on cigarette ash and finger-prints, or a study where I could pin butterflies to boards or paste foreign stamps into an album. But I had no training in chemistry, nor enough patience to collect things, so the little room just sat there, taunting me with unnamed possibilities.
Since I had a good deal of time before I needed to dress for dinner, I went over to the bureau and poured myself a drink (being a grown-up entailed having a drinks-tray in my room, an unexpected luxury) before heading in to the bath. Pond had already started the coal-burning water heater, so all I had to do was wait for the needle on the gauge to hit 100, turn the spigot, and watch the tub fill up with water the perfect temperature for bathing. This was deluxe technology in 1902, when my parents married, and was already amusingly quaint twenty-five years later.
I lay in the tub for a long time, sipping my drink and staring at the ventilator in the dropped tin ceiling as the steam from the bath and the smoke from my cigarette escaped through it. I'd locked the door when I went in, a not-so-subtle hint to Pond that I wanted my bath-time to myself again, and very happily made use of my privacy as had been my habit before going to stay at Castoris: the bath was my favorite place to have a 'ham' (as they say in Cockney, rhyming with ham-shank), warm and wet and no mess to clean up.
When I emerged, he was in the dressing-room waiting calmly, with my evening clothes laid out in readiness, betraying no particular dudgeon about having been locked out of the bathroom. I let out a relieved sigh, not realizing until I did so that I was holding my breath and bracing against him being cross with me; but he seemed perfectly happy to have let me scrub my own back and dry myself off.
"I rather miss the ghost," I said later, making conversation as Pond adjusted my braces, one of the more tedious moments in the ritual, "I always saw him when I came back from the bath to dress for dinner."
"Hmph," he snorted a little more forcefully than usual, almost angrily.
"You're not afraid of ghosts, are you?" I wondered. That might be a better explanation of why he always stuck close to me at Castoris, rather than the simple distance between bedroom and bathroom.
"Not afraid, my lord," he said quite angrily, though on the surface he was perfectly calm, finishing off the braces and turning to pick up the waistcoat, "But I found the thing very unpleasant. It was uncomfortable being alone in that wing, knowing it was about somewhere."
"Well, then, I advise you to stay away from the Great Stair at night," I thought it a good idea to arm him with the worst: though we don't have anywhere near as many ghosts as Castoris Castle, we have our share, "There's a fairly strong apparition of a lady in a Jacobean ruff and farthingale who comes down the stairs at a little after ten every night, though you can only see her clearly when it's raining. Otherwise she's just a moving cold spot in a very faint mist, but you don't want to walk through her. I stood in her path on a dare once when I was a child, and it took me hours to get warm again."
"I don't imagine I'll have much occasion to use that staircase, my lord," he said with a glimmer of a smile, which I chose to read as relief, though it might have been amusement. But he was right, the Victorian remodel supplied the house with a half-dozen turrets with corkscrew stairs inside, allowing servants to get from place to place without being seen.
I had learned through other conversations that the house Pond grew up in was fairly new, built in 1875 or so, and didn't have so much as a glimmer of a ghost yet; the baronet's house outside Oxford was older, late-Georgian I think, but just as bereft of spirits. The supposed Viking at Castoris Castle was the first ghost he'd ever seen, and before then he hadn't even believed they existed. He still wasn't convinced, either, which I think made him more uncomfortable. Having a ghost walk through you is unpleasant, but I imagine it would be worse if you weren't entirely confident of what it was.
I went on to tell him about Foxbridge's other ghosts as he finished dressing me, though none of them was as vivid and regular as the Lady on the Stair. There was a very weak poltergeist in the nursery wing, who quietly moved things around at night, and something that made a sort of whispering, moaning, scrabbling noise under the marble floor of the old chapel during full moons. And there was a very interesting but startlingly unpredictable thing in the old tower keep on the headland, which would appear as a plump, elderly man in medieval dress, just as real as you like, sitting in a chair or leaning against a table--but for only a moment, and then he was gone.
Though Saint-Clair children of every generation made up stories about the identities of our ghosts (the moaning thing in the old chapel being a favourite subject: I imagined it was a werewolf buried alive under the floor, though I later discovered there was nothing under the old chapel floor except cold-larders), none of them became generally accepted. We could guess the historical periods of the Tower Man and the Lady on the Stair based on what was visible of their attire, and naturally assumed that the nursery poltergeist had been a child, but had no idea (or interest in, really) who they'd been in life.
I finished my lecture just as he finished brushing me off, so he thanked me for the information and I thanked him for his usual stellar work in making me presentable, and we went our separate ways to dinner.
Being on the first floor of the main block meant that I would likely be the first one down for dinner every night, since I was closer to the great hall than anyone else. Coldicott was there with the drinks tray, conversing quietly with one of the new footmen (I don't remember which one, I never did learn all of their names properly that autumn, there were too many of them), though of course they cheesed it when I came into the room.
I asked Coldicott to mix me a martini, which I'd taught him when I was there last. He was suspicious of the concept of cocktails at first, with the very un-English ice and the specialized utensils, but he eventually found he enjoyed the shaking, and the precision required of pouring the ingredients just right. Minor details and exacting precision, I've learned, are catnip to butlers and valets.
I took my drink over to the big bay window and watched the sun setting behind the steeple of the village church, colouring the sky scarlet and gold for a few precious moments. In most English houses, the curtains would have been drawn against the sun to preserve the carpets and paneling, but three extravagant countesses in a row had decreed that seeing the sunset in summer was worth any amount of damage to the old family portraits, and none had hung curtains in the hall...though of course the better portraits had been moved. Extravagance is one thing, but letting a Holbein or a Van Dyck fade and spoil is just vandalism.
"That was gorgeous," Caro breathed out when the sky finally went from purple to soft violet and the Evening Star glimmered into view.
"Don't sneak up on me like that!" I scolded her: I'd almost spilt my drink.
"You're jumpy," she observed, amused, "I'd have thought you'd go all serene and complacent once you were home."
"I don't feel quite settled," I admitted, "Changing rooms, and taking on the housekeeping, has made everything feel different."
"Petterby said something very like that when he moved out of the nursery," she hooked her arm around my elbow and leaned against me (the Marquess of Petterby is her elder brother, the Duke of Buckland's heir), "He said it was then that he really understood the whole show would be his someday, to have and to hold unto death do you part."
"It's a weighty realization," I agreed. I was glad to hear I wasn't the only one to feel that way. I wondered if my father had felt the same--and considering the estate was very nearly bankrupt when he acceded, it must have been rather more harrowing. Mummy's dowry had put it back on its feet, and the rest of her fortune was now mine, so at least I knew I could take care of the place.
Our conversation was interrupted by the advent of Aunt Em, Nanny, and Lady Heard, who entered the room en masse, chattering as they came. I'd never before seen Lady Heard chatter, so I assumed that Aunt Em had already had the desired civilizing effect on her.
I realized with something of a start that Nanny was much older than I remembered her being, with wrinkles around her eyes and grey threads in her hair, and had become quite mannish in her middle age. When I was little, she was very severe-looking, but she was pretty in her own way, with a very motherly quality about her; a decade with no children to care for seemed to have changed her, and she struck me as being rather a fatherly type of person--not like my father, of course, but like one imagines a father to be, sternly reserved but kind. And though she was dressed in the same sort of dark and unadorned clothes as always, there was something sharper around the edges, something military about them.
Watching her and Aunt Em talking with Lady Heard, not touching but still speaking in tandem like two beings with one mind, I began to wonder if there were something more between them than friendship and a professional relationship. I knew that Nanny had moved into the room next door to Aunt Em's, when she left the nursery; but with my Lesbian fiancee at my side, I looked at them through her eyes and started wondering if Aunt Em and Nanny were Lesbians, too.
"Yes, they are," Caro answered my unasked question, before I could even open my mouth, "Typical old-fashioned gentlewoman couple. I spotted it right away."
"Do you read minds?" I wondered, thinking of several other times she'd said something aloud that I had only been thinking.
"Not that I know of," she laughed, pulling on my arm to encourage me to move towards the others, "But you have an incredibly expressive face, you're completely transparent."
"Am I really that easy to read? No wonder I never get away with fibbing."
"You'd make a fine film actor," she pecked me on the cheek, "Your eyes say what you're thinking as clearly as if they were flashing semaphores, they wouldn't even need to caption you."
"Who is capturing Bassie?" Aunt Em wondered, having caught and misunderstood only the last bit of the sentence.
"Lady Caroline was saying that Sebastian could be a film actor, Emily," Nanny explained. She'd always had ears like a bat: you could whisper a bad word halfway across the meadow and she'd have the switch ready when you came in for tea, "And that his face is so expressive, they wouldn't need captions."
"Oh, no, that would be quite unsuitable," Aunt Em frowned, "Though of course you're quite as good-looking as any film actor, and you did reasonably well in The Tempest when you were at Eton. But professional acting is simply not a reputable occupation, my dear."
"Oh, I don't know about that, Auntie," I sat down beside her and took her hand, fiddling with the ornate opal and moonstone rings on her fingers as I did in childhood, "So many Society people are marrying actors and actresses these days. It's much more respectable than it used to be."
"Society people, perhaps," she sniffed, "But not people like us. We can't go around marrying just anybody. That's why I am so happy you and Lady Caroline are marrying. She has quite the right blood."
"Does everyone know about that?" I complained, "We might as well announce it in the Times!"
"Just us, Bassie, love," she soothed me, "The Duchess naturally told me about it when she found out."
"But I wanted to tell you," I pouted.
"This is marriage, Bassie," she said in a rather scolding tone that surprised me, "not some little trifle to surprise and delight us. It can't matter who tells us."
"And what about Mummy?" I asked pettishly; that bit about 'the right blood' had annoyed me, considering I was half-American myself, "Was she the right blood?"
"Well, Charlotte had not as fine of blood as Lady Caroline, of course," she said as dispassionately as if we were talking about a horse or a dog, "But she wasn't just anybody, I can assure you. Her mother was from a good Boston family, with antecedents in a very old Berkshire family; and her father, believe it or not, was the great-grandson of the Earl of Rutherford. A very cadet branch of the family, of course, and he had a quite unfortunate Irish grandmother, and a German mother of no apparent family at all."
"Really! I had no idea," I was actually stunned by this intelligence. My parents' marriage had been the stuff of fairy-tales and novelettes, the pretty but determined little nobody from Cincinnati falling in love with the handsome nobleman of ancient pedigree. It rather annoyed me that she was nearly as blue-blooded as he. It robbed them of their romance, somehow.
"But, Lady Emily," Lady Heard inserted herself into the topic in her usual forthright way, "That sort of thing is part of our past, not our future. The aristocracy will never survive if it cannot adapt to the modern age."
"Perhaps so, dear Lady Heard," she smiled and fluttered her lace-edged handkerchief in a sort of conversational surrender, "But one does fall into habits of thinking. In my mother's day, and my grandmother's, indeed for the last several centuries, these things were considered of paramount importance."
"Such habits of thinking have resulted in a terrible degree of inbreeding," Lady Heard said earnestly; and though she hadn't changed volume, her tone became one of speech-making, and we all dutifully turned to listen, "The physical and mental weakness of our modern aristocracy is evidence of this. Not all noble families of course, the Saint-Clairs are surely an exception. But look at some of the weak, wispy creatures currently filling the House of Lords. Once the leaders of England were the tallest, the strongest, the most intelligent men in the land, more than capable of ruling over their subjects. But now it's the labourers and merchant classes who have all the strength, all the determination, all the intelligence. If the aristocracy refuses to breed with the other classes, the strength of the Norman blood will continue to dilute and thin."
"It was my understanding," Nanny said rather excitedly, smelling a good argument in the wind, "that it was the interbreeding of the aristocracy with the lower classes, generally the wrong side of the blanket, that produced the increased strength and intelligence of the peasantry, creating the labouring classes as they are today."
"Quite possibly, Miss Ingleby," Lady Heard rose to the challenge, "But the right side of the blanket, to play on your excellent phrase, has produced an unconscionable number of weaklings, who marry other weaklings and go on to create even more weaklings. Lord Foxbridge here is a fine specimen of young manhood, quite strong and fit; but I will lay you any odds that even he cannot lift one of the maces or broadswords that hang on the walls of this very room, much less use one in battle, as his ancestors once did."
"But isn't that itself an adaptation?" Nanny argued, "Bassie may not be as strong in brute strength as the first Sieurs de Saint-Clair that ruled here, but brute strength is no longer a useful tool in government, nor even in war. Cleverness, knowing the right people, the simple authority that comes of knowing one's ancestors and taking for granted the right to rule? Aren't these of greater value in leading England into the twentieth century than being able to swipe at a man with a flail from horseback?"
"Yes, indeed," Lady Heard returned, "but the cleverness of today..."
I have to admit that their conversation became very technical at this point, encompassing Darwin's theories, Mendelian genetics, and the Utilitarian movement; it rather undermined Nanny's argument about the cleverness of the aristocracy that I was completely unable to follow any of this, and I was vastly relieved when the dinner-gong went.
No comments:
Post a Comment