The Arrangement (11 page)

We had never before met Aunt Margaret, and when we did, she was a definite shock. Older than my father by ten years, she had been a semi-recluse for years. The addition of two lively children to her home had probably been as difficult for her as adjusting to her had been for us.

It was not that she did not care about us. When she remembered us, she cared very much. But for the part of the day that Aunt Margaret spent in her garden, Deborah and I did not exist for her. And Aunt Margaret spent virtually her entire day in her garden.

The result of this situation was that Deborah and I had brought ourselves up. In childhood we had been allowed to roam freely about the countryside, but as we grew into young womanhood, this lack of adult restraint started to become scandalous. The rector’s wife, Mrs. Bridge, had spoken to Aunt Margaret about her duty to chaperon her nieces, but poor Aunt Margaret was utterly incapable of leaving Littleton Cottage. To give Mrs. Bridge her due, she tried to include us along with her own daughter in many of the activities organized by the local mamas in order to introduce young men and women to one another as prospective spouses.

I was fifteen when I first met Tommy, who was home from Eton for the summer. I was fishing at the pond that lay to the southeast of town when he came along, whistling and carrying his fishing pole. I liked him immediately because he did not patronize me the way so many of the older boys did.

It was not until the following year, however, when I had begun to develop a figure, that Tommy began to pay me the kind of attention a young man pays to a young woman.

The year after that, George made his appearance in neighborhood society. I remember very clearly the first occasion upon which I saw him. It was at a picnic given by Mrs. Bridge. George had come down from Cambridge for the summer and for some reason or another—boredom probably—he had decided to join Mrs. Bridge’s expedition to some local ruins.

All the girls except me instantly fell in love with him. He was very handsome as well as being the next Lord Devane.

From the day he’d first appeared at that benighted picnic, George had given me nothing but trouble. I devoutly hoped that tomorrow, when I declined his legacy, I would be able to say goodbye forever to George Melville, Lord Devane.

I awoke at my usual early hour the next morning, but as I was quite sure that none of the family would be stirring until much later, I decided to remain in bed. The only way I could keep myself from worrying about what might come out in George’s will that afternoon was by turning my brain to what seemed the eternal problem of my life: money.

The money that I was presently making from my business was not going to be enough to see me through the next few years. Consequently, I had to either (a.) spend less or (b.) earn more. Since I had already cut my expenses to the bone, the only solution was to earn more.

I would have to raise my rates.

This was a course of action I had been resisting for several years. For one thing, my present rates were not cheap. My particular business had a very high overhead: horses to stable and feed, plus rent to be paid on a house and property large enough to accommodate both horses and clients. As I rarely had more than one client at a time, I had to charge a fairly steep sum in order to cover my costs.

During the two years that Tommy and I had run Deepcote together, we had done quite well. Clients had been more plentiful in those days, with Tommy teaching the men and the boys while I taught the girls. After Tommy died, however, business had fallen off drastically. I had largely kept my female clients, but the men and boys had stopped coming, and my income had plummeted. I was beginning to regain some of the male business—parents who had been pleased with the job I had done with their daughters had started to send me their sons—but I was afraid that if I raised my rates, I would turn away some of the new clients whom I might otherwise attract.

I had learned that while men like Albert Cole might own a vast amount of money, they wouldn’t pay a penny higher than what they judged a product to be worth.

I had just come to the gloomy conclusion that I was going to have to take a chance and raise the rates anyway, when a housemaid came into the room bearing hot chocolate and a pitcher of hot water on a tray.

“Lady Regina has asked me to tell you that breakfast will be put out in the family dining room from nine until ten-thirty, ma’am,” she said as she put the tray down and went to pile more coals upon the fire.

“Thank you,” I said politely.

The maid lifted the tray, put it across my lap, and poured me a cup of chocolate; then she took the pitcher of hot water into the dressing room and poured its contents into the elegant porcelain basin. Next, she returned to the bedroom and asked, “Would you like me to help you get dressed, ma’am?”

“No, thank you,” I said as politely as before.

After a few minutes the maid went away, and I waited for the room to warm up a little more before I got up.

My green merino wool morning dress was plain and serviceable and not nearly as appropriate to the elegance of my surroundings as last night’s blue gown, but it was the best I owned and would have to suffice.

I washed my face in the basin of hot water, then sat before the elegant little dressing table to comb my hair. A little piece was sticking up at my crown where I had slept on it last night, and I dipped my comb in water and damped it down.

My stomach was in a knot, so I breathed deeply and slowly, trying to make myself relax. I shut my eyes.

Please, Dear God, please,
I prayed.
Don’t let there be anything in George’s will about Nicky’s parentage.

I opened my eyes, put down the comb, stood up, and smoothed the skirt of my dress with slightly trembling hands. Then I straightened my spine and my shoulders and went down the stairs to the family dining room to a breakfast that I knew I would not eat.

I saw immediately that the earl was not present; Lady Regina and Lord Devane were the only people in the dining room when I went in. She gave me a friendly smile and said, “My brother and Mr. Melville are out somewhere on the estate, Mrs. Saunders, and Harriet and her father are breakfasting in her dressing room. The food is set out on the sideboard. Please, help yourself to whatever you would like.”

My first thought was that I had been right about Savile being accustomed to having meat with his breakfast. The sideboard was laden with food; bacon and kidneys and even pork chops were set out along with cooked eggs and a great variety of breads and muffins. I took a muffin and went to sit next to Lady Regina. The footman who had been standing by the sideboard came to fill my cup with coffee.

“Surely that is not enough food, Mrs. Saunders!” Lady Regina exclaimed when she saw my plate.

“I am not very hungry,” I said. “This will be perfectly sufficient, I assure you.”

I took a bite of muffin and drank some coffee.

Lady Regina and Lord Devane were staring at me in a way that I thought was extremely rude. I put down my coffee cup and said evenly, “Is something wrong? Do I have a spot on my face?”

Lady Regina laughed gaily. “Of course not, Mrs. Saunders.”

“The fact is, we are dying of curiosity about you, ma’am,” Lord Devane admitted with a charming smile. “Savile has told us nothing, you see—just that you figure in George’s will and must be present to hear it read.”

“I too am curious about what can be in the will, my lord,” I said quietly.

They exchanged looks, clearly frustrated by their inability to pry any information out of me.

I sipped my coffee and took another small bite of muffin.

“Harriet ain’t happy about your being here,” Devane said, testing to see what my response would be to that.

She was going to be even less happy after the will was read, I thought.

I nodded.

Their frustrated looks deepened.

I have to admit that I might have enjoyed mystifying them had I not been so sick with worry about what would happen in a few hours’ time.

Lady Regina and Lord Devane were too well bred to pursue a subject that was clearly distasteful to me, so we fell back upon that most useful of English topics: the weather.

When I had finished eating, Lady Regina offered to show me the family portraits in the Long Gallery and I accepted her invitation with relief. I would have welcomed anything that would keep my mind from dwelling upon the reading of George’s will.

The Long Gallery was the room just to the south of the family dining room. It was well named, I thought, as I contemplated the three large Persian rugs placed one after the other on the polished parquet floor. The high arched ceiling was painted in richly colored murals. Portraits painted in oil and framed in ornate gilt marched up and down both sides of the lovely, delicate, chestnut-brown paneled walls.

“You see before you the history of the Melville family, their friends and their relations,” Lady Regina said, with a lavish gesture toward the walls. “I will give you the abridged tour since I am sure you don’t want to remain incarcerated in this room for another week.”

I laughed. “The abridged tour will be quite adequate.”

“We will begin, then, with the third baron, who built this castle,” Lady Regina said, leading me to the first picture on the left wall. “He was called Raoul, of course. The first son is always called Raoul. It is a tribute to our ancestor, the Raoul de Melville who came over with the Conqueror.”

I made a noise to indicate that I was impressed.

“He probably wasn’t anything more than an impoverished mercenary,” Lady Regina said candidly. “He made rather a good thing out of his trip to England, though.”

The most fascinating thing I found about our trip around the gallery was not the family history that Lady Regina rattled off so glibly, but the strong likeness that prevailed among the faces of most of the previous earls and that of the present one.

I commented upon this when we reached the portrait of Raoul the Eighth.

“The Melvilles have always bred true,” Lady Regina announced with undisguised pride, just as if she were talking of horses.

I stared at the face of Raoul the Eighth, who was standing before what was clearly the chimneypiece in the Great Hall here at Savile. The defined, dark gold eyebrows were exactly the same as the present Raoul’s, as were the elegant cheekbones and the long, almost sensual mouth. But Raoul the Eighth’s eyes were brown, like Lady Regina’s. I didn’t see a pair of eyes the color of the present earl’s until we stopped before the portrait of an extremely lovely woman.

“My mother,” said Lady Regina with a mixture of affection and pride.

One couldn’t tell what color hair the woman in the portrait had, as it was powdered in the style of the last century, but her eyes were amber-gold.

“She is very beautiful,” I said sincerely.

“And this is my father,” Lady Regina was saying, but my eyes had fastened themselves on the portrait of another lovely young woman. I walked over and stood before it. This woman was dark haired and green eyed, with a long, elegant neck and a slim, extraordinarily graceful body.

Lady Regina saw me looking. “That is Georgiana,” Lady Regina said, “my brother’s wife.”

I looked at that quintessential exquisite aristocrat and remembered how she had died.

“Savile told me she died in childbirth,” I said softly. “How very tragic it must have been for him.”

“It was, of course,” Lady Regina replied. “She was only twenty, and then, he lost the baby, too. He was devastated.”

I could understand. I knew what it was like to lose a spouse. But, unlike Savile, I had my boy.

Georgiana Melville looked down upon us with her cool green eyes.

“Poor girl,” I said, and meant it.

* * * *

Mr. Middleman, George’s solicitor, arrived in time for luncheon, which was a very subdued affair. Afterward, Savile invited us all into the library, a tremendously high-ceilinged room, with a gallery running around the top of it and the bottom walls filled with chestnut wood bookcases. I recognized the portrait over the fireplace as that of the Raoul who had built the house during the reign of King James.

Chairs had been set in a semicircle around a great library desk. The earl seated me at the end of the semicircle and then sat beside me, placing himself in such a way that his big body shielded me from the view of most of the others in the room.

Mr. Middleman was a small, rotund man with a face one wouldn’t remember ten minutes after one had met him. He had the room’s undivided attention, however, as he put on his spectacles and unrolled the official-looking document that was George’s will.

The small amount of luncheon I had eaten was lying like lead in my stomach and I hoped I would not disgrace myself by being sick.

The opening words of the will were ordinary enough. In the usual way, George assured us that he was of sound mind and that the dispositions he was about to make were done of his own free will.

George’s chief possession, of course, had been Devane Hall, but since Devane Hall was entailed, it was not within George’s power to dispose of it. The entail meant that it must go to George’s nearest male relative, and since George and Harriet had no son, that person was his cousin Roger Melville.

This information was briefly stated in the will, and then George bequeathed a sum of his personal money to Roger in order to help him “pay off whatever debts he may have incurred so that he may begin his tenure as Lord Devane with a free mind.”

“Decent of him,” the new Lord Devane said.

“You can be sure that that was Middleman’s idea,” Savile murmured in my ear.

Next came a series of small bequests to old servants.

Then Mr. Middleman glanced at me, and I knew my time had come. I think I might have stopped breathing. All motion stopped among the spectators and the room grew intensely quiet. The little solicitor deliberately pushed his spectacles higher on his nose, then began to read slowly and clearly: “To Nicholas Saunders, son of Abigail and Thomas Saunders, I bequeath the sum of twenty thousand pounds, to be administered for said Nicholas until he reaches his majority by my executor, Raoul Melville, Earl of Savile.”