Maulever Hall (9 page)

Watching from the shadowed hall, Marianne saw a smart-looking maid alight first, to Mauleverer’s evident disappointment, and then turn and join him in helping her lady out. At last, Lady Heverdon herself appeared in the carriage doorway and paused there for a moment looking down at Mauleverer as he greeted her. The stories of her beauty had been no exaggeration, but no one had told
Ma
rianne
how exquisitely tiny she was. Now, watching as Mauleverer took both her hands and swung her lightly to the ground, Marianne thought she looked as rare, and as artificial as some piece of priceless china. The golden curls, the exquisite complexion set off by a traveling dress of palest blue-gray were worthy of Meissen or Dresden at least. She was talking eagerly to Mauleverer as he led her toward the house, and Marianne thought that there was something touching and childlike about the way she leaned on his arm and looked up at him. She looked, surely, more like a girl coming home from school than a widow with a reputation.

But it was time to come forward and greet her, and, doing so, Marianne was able to hear what the clear little voice was saying: “Quite shockingly late, my dear Mauleverer, but my darling Countess just would not let me go, and James never will hurry his precious horses. I know you will forgive me, because you are so good, but you must intercede for me with your dear mother, whom I quite love already.” She was in the hall now, blinking a little after the dazzle of sunshine outside, and moved toward Marianne with hands outstretched: “My dearest madam, a thousand apologies—oh!” She dropped her hands as she realized her mistake.

Mauleverer moved forward between them. “It is my mother who makes her apologies,” he said, “for not being here to greet you. She begs you will forgive her, and here, in her place, is our Miss Lamb to show you to your room.”

“Oh, yes. Of course. How stupid of me. How do you do, Miss Lamb.” No warmth in her voice now, and she did not offer her hand, but stood, instead, silent for a moment, still apparently dazed by the change from sunlight to the cool shadows of the hall.

“You are tired.” Mauleverer was all solicitude. “You look pale. Driving so far, and in this heat, has been too much for you. Miss Lamb will take you to your room directly.”

“Thank you.” Mechanically. And then, warmly, with eyes for
him
alone: “I am a little tired, it’s true. How quick you always are to notice. So like you. Yes, it has been a long day, and, besides, I am ashamed to be so monstrously behind your dinner hour, but I promise you will be amazed how soon I am ready.” She smiled up at him, the confiding child once more, then turned and followed Marianne up the wide stairway.

Arrived at the doorway of the blue bed chamber that would suit her so well, she dismissed Marianne with a cool nod of thanks. “Good night, Miss Lamb.”

Ridiculous to let the bland assumption that she would not be dining with them annoy her so, and yet Marianne, changing rapidly into her green dinner dress, found herself seething with unreasonable rage. But after all, she told herself, running the comb savagely through her curls, what right had she to complain? She was an object of charity, no more, no less: it was merely her good fortune that Mrs. Mauleverer and her son treated her so well. No, she pulled her hair on to the top of her head and twisted a ribbon through it, she would not hold herself so cheap. She earned her good treatment in this house
...
And, besides, Mauleverer himself had insisted that she join them for meals. If he did not choose to treat her as a servant, what right had guests to do so?

It was, however, with a becomingly high color that she hurried along, a few minutes later, to Mrs. Mauleverer’s room to be greeted with an enthusiastic volley of exclamation and question: “There you are at last, my dear. Tell me, what is she like? Is she really a beauty? See how well Martha has done my hair for me—there is no need to be troubling you after all—and you are in admirable looks too: I told you that dress would suit you to perfection. But come, quick, love, tell me what she is like before I go down to face her.”

“
Beautiful,
”
said Marianne tersely when Mrs. Mauleverer paused at last for breath. “And much younger-looking than I expected. She might be a girl—almost.”

“Is she very elegant? Does she paint do you think? What will she think of us?”

“
She cannot help but think you extremely handsome, ma’am. Yes, your hair is perfect tonight. I am glad you did not wait for me.” A scowl was all the thanks she got from Martha for this, and she hu
rri
ed on: “Yes, she is extremely elegant, and her color quite her own. You can see it come and go. She is a little tired tonight, she says.”

“And why, pray, was she so late?”

“I am really not sure—the Countess kept her, she says, but she is full of apologies and promises to make the greatest haste in changing her dress.”

“Good, then let us go downstairs. Will dinner be quite spoiled, do you think?”

“
I hope not, but Cook will be furious and give notice tomorrow, and I shall have to spend all morning telling her that her sauces are worthy of Wattier or Ude himself before she condescends to stay.”

Mrs. Mauleverer laughed. “What should we do without you, my love! But come, Mark will be ready and waiting already, if I know him. I wish I could persuade that boy to pay proper attention to his appearance. Half the time he does not even bother to have his man assist him, but throws on his evening dress himself. I do not know what his dear father would say to him. I have known
him
spoil a dozen cravats before he was satisfied, and as for his coats, why, it was physically impossible for him to put them on unaided.”

She seemed to think this was a great virtue in a husband, but Marianne, following her dutifully downstairs, told herself that she personally preferred Mauleverer’s less elaborate style of dressing. Better a gentleman than a dandy any day.

This once, however, Mauleverer was not awaiting them in the drawing room, and when he did appear, five minutes later, Marianne was amused to notice the signs that he had, for once, taken a good deal of trouble over his appearance. The plain set of studs he had so far worn night after night had been replaced by enameled ones, his cravat was, for him, elaborate, and his dark blue coat, she very much suspected, new for the occasion. It was really rather touching, she thought, to see the efforts he was making to please Lady Heverdon, but the quick, anxious glances she caught
him
giving her own and his mother’s appearance was
something
else again. He is afraid we shall disgrace him, she thought.
Well
...

Conversation limped. Mauleverer’s thoughts were obviously upstairs, while both his mother’s and Marianne’s were in the kitchen with the irate cook. The big grandfather clock in the hall struck half-past six, then quarter to seven
...
there was a rustling on the stairs and Mauleverer, hurrying to the door, led in Lady Heverdon, a shimmering vision in cascades of demure lavender-colored ruffles.

“My dear Mrs. Mauleverer, what must you think of me!” She was the well-behaved little girl again. “My idiot of a maid is all thumbs tonight. I thought I should never be ready. And nothing would satisfy her but that I should make a full toilette: she is a sad bully, I am afraid—she was my mother’s before me and thinks me a child still. I told her you would rather have me in my dirt and keep your cook—who is I have no doubt in a perfect tearer in the kitchen—but she would have it that this was an Occasion and I must be properly dressed for it.” A rueful but basically self-satisfied glance swept down from her bare shoulders to the rustling gown which was, indeed, more suited to a London ball than a quiet country dinner.

She had clasped Mrs. Mauleverer’s hands in her own as she spoke, in a pretty, impulsive gesture that Marianne, sardonic in the background, suspected of having been carefully rehearsed. Now she pressed them warmly and let them go. “You will forgive me, will you not?” she asked. “Your son has, I know, but that is nothing; it is you that I care about.” She had contrived, during all this flood of talk, absolutely not to see Marianne, who found herself in the curious position of being not only invisible but, she suspected, inaudible. There was no need, however, for the moment, to put this to the proof, since Mrs. Mauleverer and her son were both busy assuring their guest that she looked ravishing, which was true, and that her lateness had put the household to no inconvenience whatever, which was not.

But now Mauleverer was taking Lady Heverdon’s arm to lead her in to dinner. “Oh, no”—she colored in pretty confusion—“I cannot walk before your Mamma. You promised you would treat me quite like one of the family if I came to you, and is this how you begin?”

“Very well then.” He smiled down at her, obviously much pleased. “An arm of each; thus.”

And Marianne, meekly following, thought how lucky it
was that the two ladies were small inside their sweeping skirts of silk and satin, and the doorways wide.

The dinner went off rather better than she had expected. The cook, under her inspiration, had performed perfect prodigies of preservation and adaptation. The capons that should have been fresh roast had been allowed to cool and then served up in a delectable sauce. The leg of lamb, it was true, was dark brown and not so tender as it might have been, but the side dishes made up for any deficiency by their number and variety, while Lady Heverdon praised everything with indiscriminate enthusiasm. The food was delicious; the
dining
room just exactly the size she best liked; the flower arrangement in the center of the table beyond anything. “And then the flowers in my room! Pansies—so original. I cannot tell you how sick I get of dreary, expensive meaningless hothouse flowers. You are quite an original in your ideas, ma’am, I can see.”

“Oh, no.” Mrs. Mauleverer smilingly disclaimed the suggestion that she might ever do anything so like work as arranging flowers. “It is Miss Lamb that we have to thank for our decorations.”

“Of course: Miss Lamb. I should have known. Then, thank you, Miss Lamb, for my delicious pansies.” She contrived, while addressing Marianne, still not quite to see her, as if she was talking, perhaps, to some inanimate object, and Marianne, in her turn, merely bowed her thanks for the compliment—if such it could be called.

Mauleverer broke an awkward little silence by asking Lady Heverdon how she had enjoyed her visit to the Countess of Lashton.

“
Oh, immensely.” The pretty little face lit up with enthusiasm.
“
I have never been so entertained. Picnics, riding parties, dancing in the evening ... I declare I am quite worn out with it all. But you look grave, Mr. Mauleverer. You are thinking, I know, of the poor little boy, and so do I, every moment of the day, but I put a brave face on it, for my friends’ sake. The Countess read me quite a lecture when I first arrived at her house: ‘If grieving would bring him back,’ she said, ‘or depressing your friends with unrelieved black, I would be the first to urge it, but life must go on, my dear; we owe a duty to others.’ Of course, I took the hint and put my blacks away, though I confess it went hard with me to give them up even for half mourning like this—” A loving hand stroked her lavender-colored ruffles as she turned from Mauleverer
to
his mother. “I cannot tell you, dear madam, what a relief it is to me to have come here to live quietly like one of your family. I do hope you have arranged no entertainment for me.”

“Indeed I have not,” said Mrs. Mauleverer, “and to tell truth, my dear, I would be hard put to it to do so, so quietly do we live here among our country neighbors.”

“That is excellent,” said Lady Heverdon enthusiastically. “That is just what I shall like. We will read and embroider together, and perhaps visit the deserving poor in your village—or further afield, if it will be of assistance to Mr. Mauleverer in this election he is so concerned over. But I have not asked you yet, Mr. Mauleverer. Pray do tell me how it goes. They were sadly unpolitical at Lashton House and I am completely in the dark as to the news of the day.”

“I am afraid you will waste your philanthropic activities so far as this district is concerned,” said Mauleverer dryly, “for our election in Exton is as good as lost already, but I believe that it is a very different story elsewhere: the Reform party are sweeping the country. It is all the more shameful that we should do so poorly here.”

“But how can you help yourself?” said Lady Heverdon. “The seat is entirely in Lord Exton’s gift, is it not? Surely you have long been resigned to waiting until your Bill is passed before you can go to Parliament as Member for Exton. I only wish you would take what is rightfully yours and go at once to the Lords as Heverdon.”

“I may have no alternative.” Marianne, eagerly listening, told herself that this was a subject that they had discussed many times before. “I have had a most unpromising answer from the College of Arms, and even Lord Grey begins to be urgent that I go to the Lords.” The tone of his voice suggested to Marianne that this, even more than the Exton election, must be the reason for his black mood of the last few days.

“Do not be angry with me”—Lady Heverdon looked up at
him
with enormous, pleading blue eyes—“if I say how much I wish you would. Surely your Bill needs defending in the Lords too—more so than in the Commons, I am sure you have told me. I know how much you think of being Mauleverer of Maulever Hall—and that you have been here since the Conquest, and all that—but we Heverdons have our distinction too. Let your second son be Mauleverer
...
” She colored prettily. “A
n
d as for me, I cannot tell you how
gladly I will put on my dowager’s turban and become Miranda, Lady Heverdon.”

“You a dowager!” It was, Marianne thought, the inevitable response. “I can as readily imagine myself a lord. Though it is true what you say of the battle there; they are the Bill’s inveterate enemies; even the bishops vote against it, and I think Lord Grey will end by having to make lords enough to carry it, but you know well that my heart is in another place.”

“Your heart”—she made great kittens’ eyes at him—“you know perfectly well you have no such thing, but merely a thinking machine that serves you in its stead.”