Rondo Allegro (46 page)

And then on to a lady whose towering headdress seemed as
large as her body in its beautifully painted satin and silk court gown. “Great-great
Aunt Sarah, married three times. Her uncle was an earl, and her sister married
another earl, which made her top the nob something dreadful. No one could sit
in her presence unless she said they could, and she wouldn’t let them, so the
stories go, if she was the least degree unhappy with someone, and so Caroline,
her son’s wife, whom she loathed, fainted dead away once. She was seven months
in child. It’s said that Great-great Aunt Sarah snubbed her three husbands into
their graves. She was very beautiful, though.”

Harriet sighed, her head tipped to one side. Then smiled as
she bounced farther down the gallery and lifted a hand toward a charming
portrait of a lady painted as a shepherdess, as if shepherdesses ever wore silk,
Anna thought to herself.

“That is great-grandmamma! She was wonderful. I was so very,
very sorry when she died, though she lived to be well over ninety. She told me
she had very fine ankles, which is why she loved the fashion for shepherdesses
in paintings. Very bold, but you can see a painting of the first water. Mama
leaves it up here, because my grandmother, who could be quite horrid, had it
put here lest looking upon it would make her daughters turn out fast. Can you
believe the absurdity? But Papa and John would not shift it, even after
Penelope and Caroline moved to Whitstead.”

Who are Penelope and
Caroline?
Anna thought, but did not speak.

Harriet kicked out her slippered foot in its thick, warm
stocking. “I think my ankles are just as fine, but I do not, at all, perceive
how having ’em painted would make anyone
fast
.
Though I must say, I am not quite certain what fast
is
, except bad manners in girls, for nobody ever says it of boys,
no matter how abominably they act. But that,” she said blithely, “is neither
here nor there, and it is quite cold. Let us go.”

“The rest of the family is not here, then?” Anna asked,
wanting to see a portrait of the captain.

“Oh, no, they are all in the downstairs gallery. Beginning
with my elder sisters Penelope and Caroline, by Papa’s first marriage,” Harriet
explained as they ran downstairs to the first floor in the new wing. Anna had
begun to feel the chill deep in her bones, and was glad even of a slight
lessening of the astonishing cold that Harriet seemed not to feel.

On the opposite side of the ballroom they had first seen was
the library, and more formal rooms; along the wall was another gallery, much
shorter than that in the old wing, for the layout here was in the newer cross.
These rooms opened off a central space, or a hall, rather than into one
another.

“Penelope,” Harriet said, pointing up at the head and
shoulders painting of a stern-faced young woman in an old-fashioned hat and
square-necked gown. “I think she was born an old maid. She is every day of
forty-five, and pretends to extreme poverty ever since Papa sent her and Caro
away to Whitstead, which is a very pretty house, I assure you, though small.
Penelope makes a
virtue
of penury,
though she is very well to live. Better than we, ha ha!”

She caught Anna’s wide look, and flushed, knowing she was
gossiping. But the beautiful Lady Northcote had said nothing crushing, so she
went on, “Penelope is well content with single blessedness, though she
professes to regrets, but the
true
regret
is that she, and Papa both, would not permit Caro to marry unless the elder
sister did, and so Caro, who loves children, teaches at the village school, and
on Sundays, when they come here after first divine service, she creeps upstairs
to visit little Amelia, and play with Eleanor and Justina.”

Next to Penelope’s portrait was one of a young woman with a
round, charming smile. She, too, wore an enormous hat and the edge of her gown
was square-necked. “You will meet the little girls on the morrow, perhaps.
Emily only permits Nurse to bring them downstairs for an hour now and then.”

She whirled about, extending her hands to a gilt-framed
family portrait. “Here is the family.” At either side of the nearly life-sized
gathering were full length portraits of two gentlemen, the resemblance pronounced
in the strong chins.

“On the one side is Papa, and the other is my late brother
John.”

The elder wore the satin skirts and red heels and
fashionable toupee of an earlier time. The younger was dressed in the modern
mode, but in both portraits could be seen a similar erect posture, the haughty
shoulders and elevated chin of one who knows what he is worth.

Anna looked past them to the other members of the family.
The dowager was there, in a flowing gown of polonaised satin. A young girl
leaned against her chair, and a taller girl stood behind her—the present Mrs.
Elstead.

On the other side of the chair stood a thin boy who had to
be Henry Duncannon, perhaps the age of his midshipmen. In spite of the smooth,
rounded cheeks of youth, his chin and eyes were recognizable as Captain Duncannon’s.
He smiled off in one direction, and Anna fancied he gazed off toward the sea,
though the landscape behind the marble terrace on which the family was gathered
overlooked the lake behind the manor.

She returned her gaze to the elder son. The former baron, a good-looking
young man in a haughty pose, was dressed in the height of fashion some five
years past.

“It was so very hot the day the painter sketched me,”
Harriet said, staring up at her younger self leaning against the fine carved
chair that in reality no one would ever leave on a terrace to be ruined by wind
and weather. “And insects
would
buzz
about my face while I was supposed to stand still. I thought it positively
spooney
at the time, but now I find I am
glad it was painted,” she finished soberly. “Henry left not soon after, and I
was so disappointed. We were always good friends—when I was four or five he
promised he would not permit anyone to call me
Harry
, which he loathed because of the way John . . .”

She shrugged sharply, and turned away from the picture.
“That is all we have of Henry, I am obliged to confess. Papa never liked the
expense of having us sit to artists, so he confined himself to what he thought
was due to the honor of the house. And that meant only John, the heir, to be painted
on his coming of age. Henry, of course, was away, and, well, he stopped
writing.”

She felt she had said too much, and mounted the stairs. They
rapidly passed by a series of tall doors all alike behind which Harriet reeled
off bedchambers and sitting rooms, and then at last Harriet opened a double
door and looked back with a curious expression.

“This is the baron’s suite,” she said in a lower voice. She
beckoned Anna in, shut the door, and glanced about the quiet sitting room,
blessedly warm from a roaring fire. “I’m afraid you have all Papa’s old
furnishings, as Emily insisted on taking all the new ones with her.”

To Anna she looked as if she were about to say more, then
she turned away, stretching her hands to the fire, and then added, “However
little Henry will want those, we can comfort ourselves with the reflection that
he, at least, can do what he thinks best. I am certain, that is, it cannot come
as a surprise, surely, that he and Papa did not agree.”

Anna had spoken little beyond what was polite. Each time
Harriet caught herself up, Anna suspected she was curbing the impulse to blurt
out what she ought not to say.

Thoroughly sympathetic, Anna pretended not to notice the
pauses, the quick sideways glances beneath puckered brows. But now it was her
turn for impulse.

“No,” she began, and halted.

Harriet turned around so quickly her skirt rustled over her
slippers. “No? But they did not agree.” She wrung her fingers. “I am not
telling tales. Everyone knew it.”

Anna said gently, “No, he did not tell me,” and at Harriet’s
hurt expression, she could not stop herself. “He told me nothing at all about
his family.”

At that moment the air stirred as the far door opened, and
in came Parrette with a tall, thin woman in a housekeeper’s cap, neat gray hair
beneath it.

Harriet said quickly, “Lady Northcote, this is Mrs. Diggory,
the housekeeper. We thought you might prefer to meet the staff properly later,
after you’ve had a chance to rest, but as she is here.”

Mrs. Diggory curtseyed. “Lady Northcote. If there is anything
I can do, pray send directly.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Diggory,” Anna said. “At this moment
perhaps I ought to set about readying for dinner, is it not so?”

Parrette stood against the far wall, her new cap on her
head. She dropped a little curtsey.

Harriet was positively burgeoning with questions. She cast a
wild glance at Anna, then said, “I ought to leave you to it, and get ready
myself.” A quick bob and she let herself out the carved door at the same time
Mrs. Diggory quietly vanished through the plain door at the back of the room.

“I’ve got water for washing through here,” Parrette said.
“Everything is
sens dessus dessous
—what
would you say in English?”

“At sevens and sixes,” Anna said, proud of remembering this
expression from her reading.

Parrette showed her into her new dressing room, which had
been papered in patterns of pale blue irises on an ivory background. It was new
paper, reminding her again that she had so recently displaced this Lady Emily
Northcote.

The dressing room opened into a bedroom containing a heavy maplewood
bed with silk swags that called Lady Hamilton’s rooms to mind.

Parrette, at her shoulder, said, “I’m told this was the
bride gift of the old baron, for The Captain’s mother. It was put back here
this past week.”

“I hope at least the bed is well aired,” Anna said, “even if
it looks as if it’s been sitting there since my mother was a girl.”

Parrette uttered a laugh. “Trust me to see to that.”

“Where have they put you? I do not see a room. Is it
adequate?”

Parrette clipped her lips closed. No, that attic was not
adequate for anything but perhaps rats. The rooms were tiny, and of course not
heated. But there was nothing Anna could do about that now. She must
concentrate on putting her best foot forward, and Parrette thought to herself,
I have endured much worse
. “It will do.
Now, come and wash your face and hands, put on the gown I’ve laid out, and I
will dress your hair.”

While Anna divided her attention between the unfamiliar room
and getting ready to face them all at dinner, Harriet had flitted to her
bedchamber, where waited Polly, the upstairs maid who hoped to be promoted to
lady’s maid once Harriet would be granted her own servant.

Polly was exactly Harriet’s age, granddaughter to Mrs.
Diggory. The girls had known one another all their lives. “Oh, miss,” she said
as she straightened up from stirring the fire. “Her lady’s maid is French, and
did for royalty somewhere far foreign. And, she told grandmother, straight out,
that the new la’ship is related to a
duke
.”

Harriet would no more snub Polly for presumption than she
would fly, though she knew who would scold her for permitting unbecoming
familiarity. “A duke? Ha, that’s capital,” Harriet said as she wrestled
impatiently out of her ugly schoolgirl mourning gown and into her equally ugly
schoolgirl dinner gown.

For the first time she was actually glad she had been stuck
wearing her old mourning gowns for Papa, with the seams let out. Perhaps
Henry’s lady would take her to London for her come-out clothes, once mourning
was got over. A thousand times preferable to making them herself, as Emily had
insisted she must do—not that getting anything made up by old Miss Reed, the
local dressmaker, looked any better.

As she sat, controlling her impatience while Polly brushed
out her hair, she reflected that fun as it might have been if the new Lady
Northcote had been some low wretch, talking vulgar and flashing diamonds all
over, as Emily and Mrs. Squire Elstead and Penelope had expected, this lady was
infinitely preferable. Everything about her was beautiful.

So Henry had not only neglected to write home, he had not
told his bride about his family. “And I know who is to blame for that,” Harriet
muttered under her breath as she scowled into the mirror.

Polly nearly dropped a pin. “Did I prick you, miss?”

“No, no, I only had a disagreeable thought,” Harriet said.
“About a disagreeable person.”

Polly understood at once, and maintained a prudent silence.

One of the servants showed Anna where the family gathered
before dinner. There she found an attractive man dressed in the height of
fashion, his hair the color of wheat in the candle light. His smile was easy,
his manner friendly as he bowed over her hand when presented to her as “Mr.
Elstead.”

This must be Mrs. Elstead’s husband. When the butler
announced dinner, he offered Anna his arm. She remembered her lessons in rank.
“Should not Lady Northcote lead the way?” she asked, turning to the elderly
dowager.

The dowager pinked. “A bride always leads the way.”

Anna hesitated. She was not a bride in the sense that she
understood it, a woman newly married. But she would not keep dinner back.

They proceeded into a dining room done in the Egyptian style
popular a few years before. Anna took in the gleaming, glittering table
setting. She would learn that Mrs. Diggory had put out the finest Meissen Blue
Onion, and the crystal Waterford.

“If it is not too disagreeable,” the dowager said as soon as
they had been served, “may I ask how you left my son?”

Anna gave them an exact description of his wounds, and what
the physician had said, and finished with, “Lt. Sayers promised to write to me
if there was any change.”