Rondo Allegro (63 page)

He stirred, and let out a long breath. “I know something
about anger, how it motivates, how it convinces one that the subjective is
objective. On my coming home, without my seeing anyone, I must rely on voices.
And I discovered that I don’t above half like her voice.”

“Many people have not been trained well to hear pitch,” she
said. “But she speaks very well. Her voice is soft, and yet clear.”

“She does, but under that softness is anger. I couldn’t hear
it until now, yet I know it is not her voice that has changed. It’s always been
that way. She is very angry. And it frets at me, the same way discordancy does,
or a sharp clatter.”

Anna said, “This note that you call anger? It is also what I
hear in Mrs. Squire Elstead’s voice. Perhaps it is inherited? I think
I
might be angry, if I were to be raised
hearing continual scolding and sarcasm. Lady Emily Northcote has had a great
deal to bear.”

“Perhaps you’re right.” He uttered a short laugh. “I was so
bitter, and thought myself immune to the wiles of women, but oh, there are few
bigger coxcombs than boys my age suffering their first disappointment.”

“You had a loving heart,” she said. “Whatever age, that kind
of betrayal is a wound that takes time to heal, just as does a wound of flesh
or bone.”

He turned her way. His voice deepened. “
Damn
this bandage. I would give my soul to see you now. Anna, has
your heart been wounded?”

“I made my own foolish mistakes,” she admitted. “But the
worst wounds to my heart were the deaths of my parents. My father felt my
mother’s and little brother’s deaths as the worst betrayal. Not by her,
but . . .” She left the sentence unfinished, remembering her
father’s desperate fury against God, which at the end of his life he had
repented, before he, in turn, had left her alone.

Henry was silent, his head bent. Then he said, “I refused to
write home, and after a time they stopped writing to me. Even my mother,
finally, after my father died. I read about his death in the newspaper when we
next touched land, after the brush with the Danes. I was estranged from him. I
am not certain which of us despised the other the most, and I had just enough
sense to refrain from writing my mother the truth, but I refused to grant her
the small mercy of penning the usual things one says. So I sent her a single line.” His thumb traced a circle in the hollow of Anna’s hand, around and
around. “But mothers—most mothers—forgive their children anything. I regret
causing her sorrow.”

“If she felt it,” Anna said, “I can see that it is gone now.
She smiles when she sees you, and I never saw her take so much pleasure at
anything than when you played Bach duets with her.”

“Smiles,” he repeated reflectively, and then, “Is Emily
still beautiful?”

“Very,” Anna said, though it cost her a pang.

The gentle pressure of his thumb on her palm caressed the
heel of her hand, then moved leisurely up to rub the underside of her knuckles,
one by one. “As beautiful as I recollect you are?” he asked softly.

She uttered a low laugh. “How is one to answer that?” She
looked at his profile, bent away, yet she could see the somberness of his
expression, the tender curve of his mouth which could be so severe, then
smiling, then thoughtful, a thousand subtle varieties of expression in between.

Until now she had suppressed the impulse to brush back the
curling lock that fell forward over the bandage, but this time she did not
resist. Lifting her free hand, she smoothed back his hair, finding it
unexpectedly soft.

His breath hitched; his hand left her palm and slid up her
arm. His fingers found her face and cupped it. “I want to court you, Anna. You
deserve that, being married willy-nilly to a coxcomb and a fool. But I don’t
know how.”

And so she had her answer, she thought. She might never know
why he had uttered Emily’s name that night, but she understood that whatever
the cause, it no longer mattered.

“This is how,” she whispered back as his fingers traveled
over her face, reading her features. His touch was tender, tentative, coming at
last to her lips.

She kissed his fingers, one by one.

Again his breath hitched, and he uttered a little groan and
bent to kiss her. “Stop me,” he said raggedly after they broke apart to
breathe. “Say the word if . . .”

But after all he did not need sight, nor she words, to
understand the other.

She took his hand, and her bedroom door shut behind them.

Anna woke to happiness, reminding her of the first time
she saw dawn’s light pouring golden over the crown of Vesuvius.

She wanted to share it with everyone, but when she went up
to the schoolroom to give the girls their lessons, shrill voices met her ears,
the sound punctuated by Nurse trying to calm the wailing baby.

“No, there will be no lesson,” Nurse was saying as Anna
entered, her cheeks red with vexation. “Go to the night-nursery, Justina, and
you to your bedchamber, Eleanor. You may both reflect upon your bad tempers.
Look what you have done, upsetting your sister.”

Anna said, “Nurse, may I talk to them before they go?”

Nurse dropped a short curtsey, then went into night-nursery
with Amelia.

Anna approached the two tear-stained faces. “What is the
quarrel about?”

“She is always singing, and never on note, and no one stops
her, but she says I cannot go along for her dance lessons,” Eleanor stated in a
tone of ill-usage.

“I don’t want her,” Justina wailed. “I want my dance to be
my very own!”

Anna’s elation dimmed. “To see you two at odds with each
other makes me sorry I offered these lessons. I thought your singing, and your
dancing, Justina, would give you each joy, and also bring joy to others. But
there is no joy now. So perhaps I had better go away again.”

Eleanor ran after her. “But what about my lessons?”

“I will come when you and your sister make peace.”

The rest of the day was taxing in a different way as she and
Henry made further inroads into the tangle of estate affairs.

He tried not to be frustrated with his inability to see, to
remember the columns of numbers she had written down, and to understand yet
another aspect of farming that made little sense to someone who had spent so
many years at sea.

Finally he pressed the heels of his hands to his bandaged
eyes in a way she was beginning to recognize, and she said, “Shall I ring for
tea and something to eat?”

“Thank you, no. It seems to me that some of these numbers do
not add up. Here, let us set this aside for a time. I need to ask some questions
of Pratt, before I can puzzle out whether it is I or the steward at fault here.
I may as well get some fresh air while I’m at it, but Thomas can walk me out to
the gardener’s cottage.”

They parted, each to separate tasks. When they met again,
she looked to see when he was in a room, and so she saw when he lifted his head
as he listened for her step. Then he would smile, and she would smile, though
she knew he could not see her, and neither could resist a touch, a caress. In
that moment, the elation bloomed inside them both, bright as sunrise.

The next day, Nurse found her alone at breakfast, as Henry
was still being shaved. Nurse apologized for interrupting her, then said with
grim satisfaction, “The girls have ended their quarrel. Now they are resolved
to give your lessons to each other. It won’t last,” she added with the freedom
of one who has seen almost the entire family in her nursery, under her care.
“But it gives them a good start on civility.”

“Tell them I will be with them later this morning, after I
help their uncle in the book room,” Anna said. “Eleanor first, then Justina.”

o0o

The snow storm lasted the better part of a week, then it
took almost that long again for the roads to be cleared.

Emily knew within half a day after her return that something
material had changed, something more than the news that the Rackham governess
was all but engaged, if she concurred.

Her first reaction was wrath. How dare Henry consult that
woman about her own children! But she forced herself to listen to Henry’s
measured words, clearly rehearsed, as he told her in front of the others, over
dinner. Not even a private interview!

“A capital plan,” Harriet exclaimed the moment he paused to
draw breath. “At last! The girls will like her amazingly.”

“So comforting,” the dowager said, “to have someone come
into the family who is not a stranger.”

That
At Last!
was
justified, Emily knew, and so she forced herself to answer with composure. She
knew Miss Timothy as an excellent teacher, and even her mother had found out
nothing against her character.

The only thing Emily had against her was that though she was
at least forty, she was still a handsome woman. Emily had no desire to admit
that she had put off hiring a governess because she did not want any young
woman in the house for John to chase after, once she had got rid of that
designing Miss Porter who had taught Harriet so abominably. It was undignified
to advertise for one sufficiently qualified yet ugly and old.

Now it would be the adventuress’s problem if Henry formed a
tendre for Miss Timothy’s smiling ways. But no doubt the foreigner would have
some clever ruse to deal with that, too.

Emily retired to her rooms with a great deal to reflect on.
It was not a surprise that the mysterious ‘duke’s daughter’ had turned out to
be an adventuress after all, scarcely better than the opera dancer of Emily’s
fancy the night of the Christmas ball.

It was equally no surprise that she had ensnared Henry,
because all men were fools for a pretty face. And men made the laws. A duke might
marry a kitchen maid, and everyone accepted it, though a duke’s daughter who
married her footman could be disinherited, even forced into annulment. The only
recourse good society had was to refuse to receive low women raised above their
station. Emily cared for the opinion of good society only insofar as it served
her ambition, and acting precipitously would only lose Henry.

She could confront Henry about his wife, but she suspected
he would refuse to believe her, or worse, he would take the woman away, and
Emily would be left with nothing. Better to wait until the strength of
attachment had dwindled. As it always did.

She hugged her secret, confident that it was known only to
herself and her mother, but in this, she counted without the servants.

Over the next few days, Parrette and Harriet both noticed
Polly’s occasional absence, her demeanor unwontedly sober.

Harriet twitted her for her glum face, and though there
existed a certain amount of friendship between them, Polly had been dinned
never to forget her place, and claimed toothache.

But to Parrette she could speak the truth, especially one
night after they returned from their usual night at over stable, during which
Polly had not spoken a word.

Parrette stopped her in the courtyard, ignoring the snow piled
all around, and said tartly, “If you wish to go to London with Miss Harriet,
you must do better than this.” She pointed at Polly’s basket, which held the
unfinished work that Polly had been staring at rather than finishing.

Polly flushed, then to Parrette’s surprise, she clutched the
basket against her, turned around in a full circle to make certain they were
alone, and then leaned in and whispered, “It isn’t true, is it? That Lady
Northcote is a French spy?”

Parrette was so astonished she exclaimed in French, “
Quoi?
Eh, what say you?”

Polly sucked in a shuddering breath. “Rosa, you know, my
friend at the Groves. She was waiting outside the morning room when the widow
got there, before the big storm.”

Parrette had learned that certain of the servants called
Lady Emily Northcote ‘the widow’ among themselves.

“Mrs. Squire has a loud voice, everyone knows that, and Rosa
wasn’t
listening a-purpose, but she
had to wait there with her tray, and she could hear plain as plain, as Mrs.
Squire told her, the widow, I mean, not Rosa, that Lady Northcote was a French
spy caught by the Spaniards, in the guise of a company of low musical players,”
she finished in a breathless voice, having got all that out as quickly as
possible. “But she
isn’t
. Is she?”

“Naturally not.”

Polly sighed a cloud of vapor in relief. “I didn’t believe
it. Spies creep around looking in windows, do they not? And they carry knives,
and perhaps poisons, or they do in the plays put on by the players when we have
the fair. But Rosa said that Mrs. Squire got some letter from somebody
overseas.”

“Whoever it was got it wrong,” Parrette stated. “Listen,
Polly, I am very happy that you told me. But you must not repeat it to anyone
else. Understand? When lies are repeated, they cause nothing but trouble. You
must tell Rosa not to share it with anyone else. When was this she told you?”

“T’other day when Widow Emily returned, they sent Rosa
after, a-bringing of her dirty laundry. She said she daren’t tell anyone at the
Groves, it would be as much as her place was worth, so she got it out to me.”

“Well, you came to the right person. But it’s a lie, and
lies are wicked and a sin.”

Polly looked if possible even more terrified.

Parrette made an effort to speak less sharply. “We will say
no more, but get to our work. I will help you reset this sleeve.”

They went inside, and Polly sped upstairs, looking much
relieved.

But Parrette was aware of the burden of the widow’s spiteful
words having shifted from Polly’s shoulders to her own. She went slowly
upstairs, and went about lighting the candles in Anna’s dressing room, and
putting hot water on the hearth to heat.

She opened the outer door, and heard the sound of the
fortepiano drifting up the stairs, followed by male laughter from Frederick
Elstead and Lord Northcote. She had thought The Captain—though admirable in
every respect—incapable of laughter, but that had been proved wrong, ever since
he and Anna had begun to live truly as man and wife.