Dark Season (16 page)

“Nothing, my lord.” His valet recovered quickly. “Very lovely. Shall I put them in the breakfast room?”

He wanted to snap, “You can put them on the refuse heap,” but instead he responded with a curt, “As you please,” handing over the irises and hawthorn, and silently resolved to take his breakfast in his study for the rest of the season.

Saturday he dedicated entirely to business. He had plenty to keep him occupied. He’d made strategic investments in Egypt and gotten involved with several commercial houses in Alexandria. Cotton cultivation. He’d done well, and he’d needed to. His father hadn’t been happy when he left England. In fact, he’d lunged across his desk with a dagger and tried to cut off his ear. The left one. The one he hadn’t sliced when he was a boy. That was a prelude to cutting off his income.

He was lucky Michael Trombly had drilled the basics of business into his head, and he’d prospered. Now he was in the process of selling. Exports were bound to go down with the War Between the States over and America poised to reenter the market.

There was also this continuing issue of what to do about his hereditary landholdings. The Blackwood estate required radical restructuring, not only of the land use and terms of tenancy, but also of the relationships between the Blackwoods and the families who lived and worked on their properties. He would not follow in his father’s footsteps. He would not run the viscountcy as though nothing had changed since the Restoration.

Technological innovations and political reforms
were
slowly disintegrating the calcified hierarchical system, freeing men of all classes to move from their ancestral homes, to find new occupations. England would see the day when all men met on equal footing. Of that he had no doubt, even if the majority of his cohort of lords insisted on denying it. The act of trade, not the fact of birth, would define social relations. And feudal ties … they would fall away. The estate had to become economically viable and socially satisfying for everyone involved, or it would crumble.

Paternalism had always struck Isidore as a rather bad model for running affairs. The well-being of the group depended entirely on the benignity of the father.

And sometimes the father was a brute. A perverted, pitiless fiend.

Yes, there was plenty to do. He moved his breakfast tray from the desk to a chair and spread out his papers, arranging them into stacks. He picked up a pen. He could develop plans for farm organization, brainstorm methods, sketch out the balance of inputs and outputs. He shifted his papers again to make room for a writing pad. He put the tip of the pen to the paper.

He had the capital to invest in machinery; he would take advantage of innovations in agricultural science. He would counteract years of inertia, implement improved drainage systems, educate the farmers on crop rotation and fertilizers, and shift the distribution of profits so they realized more income from their labors and felt more responsibility for, and pride in, their achievements.

It would be a monumental task. The Blackwood estate had stagnated for generations; the changes would have to happen in stages. Every decision presented a challenge and an opportunity. Focus was essential.

He looked down at the writing pad. He’d scrawled a zigzag line, a series of peaks and troughs. Not unlike the repeating shape of a finely molded upper lip, with a deep valley and two crests … He dropped the pen. It was too soon to draft a plan anyway. Before he could educate farmers, he needed to educate himself. He stalked to his library, returned with a copy of Morton’s
Agricultural
Cyclopaedia,
and settled back at his desk. He read for what felt like a decade then checked his watch. Definitely broken. He let the
Agricultural
Cyclopaedia
bang shut and picked up a copy of
The Journal of the Agricultural Society of England.
He leaned on his elbows over the journal, furrowing his brow, aping concentration in the hopes that the posture would penetrate to his brain.
Concentrate.
Ah, soil complexity. Fascinating. As he blinked at tables listing crop yields in trial plots fertilized with different quantities of superphosphate of lime, he found that his knee was vibrating. His eyes kept wandering up to fix on a wall sconce, and he had to push back his chair again and again to stand and stretch the bunched muscles in his thighs.

His chair had grown remarkably uncomfortable. His study smelled stale. A bit of fresh air … a walk to … Berkeley Square.
No.
It was imperative that he remain in his study, that he persevere. His estate manager had arrived in London the previous evening; they had an appointment for three that afternoon. He needed to be ready with questions, proposals …

He checked his watch. Still eleven a.m. Maybe more coffee. He could ring, or better yet, go down to the kitchen for it himself.
No. No coffee. Soil complexity.
He leaned again over
The Journal of the Agricultural Society of England.

Soil. Who would have thought it was so goddamn complicated? Wasn’t anything simple?

He pitched
The Journal of the Agricultural Society of England
across the desk and watched it sail through the air. The edges flopped against the mantle as the journal fell, making one of his carvings—a basswood donkey, braying, big eared—skip closer to the mantel’s edge. He should give the thing to Clement. But it was crudely done. The donkey’s ears were a little
too
big. Clement himself was a perfectionist; he should give him a better example of his craft. He tried to turn a dispassionate eye on his woodwork. His gaze lingered on the carving of the deer—its slender legs rising from a hunk of unfinished wood as though it stood on rough forest ground. It was his finest piece, his finest animal, at any rate. Anyone with knowledge of both woodcarving and instrument-making would judge the clumsiest of his violins finer than the best of his figurines. He had a calling as a luthier.

He loved to make violins, loved every aspect of the process: plotting the curves on paper, selecting the wood, planning the top and bottom plates, cutting and bending the ribs, shaping the neck. He sometimes fancied he could
hear
the particular sound the violin would make even before it was completely assembled. Rocco, the violinmaker he lived with in Agerola, shared that fancy. One day, while they sat together varnishing instruments so they shone a rich red-brown, Rocco described harvesting the wood.

He wandered the Alps, he said, pressing his ear to the spruces in search of the perfect tone; only when he heard that tone singing out through the bark would he chop down the tree. Rocco was a dark, short, bandy-legged man with a crooked spine and bright blue eyes—Norman eyes—strange to see in that most Neapolitan of faces. He always had a tale on his lips. He said he never lied, which was true, if you accepted, as he did, that reality was something you could invent. His optimism was staggering.

“The first fifty years of my life,” he told Isidore, “I carried spruce trees down the mountain on my right shoulder. You see how my back is bent to the right. The next fifty years of my life I will carry spruce trees down the mountain on my left shoulder. That will straighten me out again.”

Isidore had looked at Rocco’s twisted shoulders, then at his battered hands, fingernails cracked, skin stained with varnish. Rocco’s hands were so different from his father’s, so different from the hands of any man he’d ever known.

“I understand.” Isidore had met Rocco’s twinkling eyes. Sometimes the Italian offered wisdom in parables. “It’s not too late to change the direction I’m heading.” He shook his head. “But I need to have patience. It will take a hundred years for me to find the right path.”

“I don’t know,” Rocco had replied. “I was talking about me. You, it might take two hundred years.”

And he had laughed so hard he fell off his bench.

If Giuseppe Pietro Rocco, cobbler, vintner, violinmaker, had been his father instead of Gore Morbury Blackwood, tenth Viscount Blackwood, maybe he wouldn’t need centuries to find his way. Everything would be different. Simpler. More wholesome. He often thought that those months he spent with Rocco and his family had given him the strength to stay alive.

The donkey he’d carved was in the likeness of Rocco’s donkey, Geppetto. Quite possibly the loudest donkey that ever lived. His alternately deep and squeaky brays carried for miles. Rocco seemed proud of this when he wasn’t threatening to walk behind him with a stick and beat him until he jumped into the volcano.

Isidore had taken a liberty with the story he’d told to Clement. Rocco only slept in the same room as Geppetto when his wife got angry and sent him to the barn.

He would keep the donkey carving. Miss Reed, though, might appreciate the deer. He could give it to her when her month with Mrs. Trombly was over. To make whatever tiny garret she occupied as a governess seem more like the wilds of West Somerset.

Well. He was certainly making progress. Discharging his lordly duties. He dug his ledger out from beneath a stack of folded letters and glared at the numbers.

His neck felt stiff. He had to look up, tilt his head from side to side. His neck cracked as he pressed his chin to his chest
. Getting old.
Amusing thought for a man not yet thirty. He was in the prime of life. At this point, the
ton
diagnosed his bachelorhood as a persistent but not yet incurable condition. Clement was his age and remained one of society’s most enticing prospects. But Clement was unmarried because he was still looking for the right woman. Whereas
he
was unmarried because … well, the Blackwoods had destroyed enough. He would not pick a bride and watch while proximity to his blighted heart withered her hopes and ate away at her dreams of happiness. Blight her he surely would. He could not take a young woman into the dark circle of his confidence. Intimacy with him could bring only misery.

Come with me; the marriage bed is in the ossuary. You don’t mind, my love, that we sleep with skeletons between us?

Miss Reed had looked at him with eyes like black wells, wells so deep no ray of the sun could ever reach the bottom. They were eyes that reflected the night sky, even at noon. They stripped the sky of its mask of blue and showed eternity: endless black spangled by stars.

She had looked at him as though she too carried a great burden. She did not bow beneath the weight, even though it made itself known in every step she took. He could almost imagine that together they could bear both their burdens more easily.

He checked his watch. Eleven a.m. He went to check the clock in the hall. Eleven a.m. Had
all
the timepieces broken? He breathed easier once he was in the hall. So much easier that he continued on down the stairs. A short walk would do him good. He donned his overcoat and waved off Brinkley as the man tried to present him with a heavy, old-fashioned top hat of felted beaver fur. The other option was a hat of silk plush with a towering crown and a broad, swooping brim that tilted up at a dramatic angle. He tried it on gingerly.

“You could empty an entire water glass into this brim,” he said, running his fingers down the brim’s steep slope. “Was it made to hold liquid?”

“I doubt expressly for the purpose, my lord.” Brinkley too was eying the hat critically. “But the shape does put one in mind of a rain gutter.”

That settled it. He snatched the hat off his head.

“Thank you, Brinkley. I’ll go without.”

The day wasn’t dreadful. He turned his collar up against the damp as he walked through a pocket of brown fog. Not absolutely dreadful, no. The sun was struggling to burn through the mist, and it wasn’t out and out raining. A few suspended water droplets never hurt anyone. After the confinement of his study, he felt downright giddy with the circulating air. Perhaps, though, a hat was in order. Something similar to the hat he’d lost, nothing made of pelt or with a brim like a trough. With that mission in mind, he decided that his short walk in Pimlico would have to become a cab ride to Mayfair followed by a stroll along Bond Street.

Once he had purchased a hat at a gentleman’s shop—tasteful, black silk, the crown high but not vying with the chimneys, the brim nearly straight—he found himself too close to Mount Street not to drop in on Louisa and show her his acquisition.

As he waited for Rutherford to open the door, he imagined tipping his hat to Louisa.

“I tried to purchase a turban,” he’d tell her. “But they’d sold out, so a topper it was.”

He would ask after Miss Reed, but he wouldn’t ask to see her. Of course, if she happened to be in the sitting room …

Rutherford opened the door.

“Good afternoon, my lord,” he said, and Isidore grinned at him.

“It
is
afternoon, isn’t it?” He stepped into the hallway, handing Rutherford his hat. “Not eleven?”

“No, my lord.” Rutherford regarded him evenly. “It is not eleven.”

“Heaven be praised. I could have sworn the day got stuck somewhere in the forenoon.” He nodded at the hat. “Do you approve?”

Rutherford did not so much as glance at it. “A great gain for civilization, my lord.” The deep creases alongside his mouth deepened as though a smile were being sternly suppressed. Isidore listened for the sound of feminine voices: Louisa’s high and thin, Miss Reed’s low and breathy … the kind of voice a man wanted to hear close to his ear. Her little moans had sounded such sweet, low notes.

He grimaced. “Is Mrs. Trombly at home?”

“No, my lord. She should return shortly.”

“Ah.” He flicked his cuffs. Really, he was a master of nonchalance. He ran a hand through his hair. “Well then,” he said. “Is Miss Reed at home?”

“No, my lord.” If Rutherford had divined the question before it was asked, he tactfully gave no sign. “She accompanied Mrs. Trombly.”

“Well,” said Isidore again. “I suppose I’ll wait.”

“Yes, my lord,” said Rutherford.

“I’d leave my card, but I seem to have forgotten them.” Isidore smiled weakly. “I’ll wait for just a few minutes. They’ll return shortly, you said?”

And before he knew it, he was in the sitting room again. He hadn’t expected to find himself back in that room until late April. May, even. His will was not made of iron. Aspic, perhaps. He rubbed at an ache above his left eyebrow.
Well done.