The Arrangement (19 page)

“A little,” I said. “It’s a difficult habit to break.”

He put his hands around my waist. They felt so warm and strong and right. I rested my hands on his shoulders, feeling the superfine cloth of his coat under my fingers, and he swung me up to the seat.

“I have no intention of trying to separate you from your son, Gail,” he said as he claimed the seat next to mine and picked up the reins and the whip. “I often take the boys on outings during the summer,” he smiled at me, “and you will always be welcome to join us.”

His smile was like sunshine.

“That would be nice,” I said gravely, my eyes on the dappled gray backs of the pair he was driving this afternoon.

Savile set his team in motion. “You will notice that Savile Castle does not have the sort of park you will see in many of the newer country houses,” he said, and I had to repress a smile at the note of faint hauteur in his voice when he said the words
newer country houses.

“Do you mean those newfangled seventeenth and eighteenth century edifices, my lord?” I asked.

He chuckled appreciatively. “Precisely.”

We passed through the immense gate in the medieval walls and came out onto the graveled drive. The thick green grass on either side of the drive sloped down to the clear water of the lake, and I could hear the water slapping gently against the shore. I said, “How large is this island, my lord?”

“It is only a mile square, and the outbuildings, such as the kitchen, take up a great deal of room. The more extensive grounds belonging to the castle are on the other side of the lake.”

“Your kitchen is still located in a separate building?” I said in surprise. “Your servants must find that excessively inconvenient.”

“There is an underground tunnel connecting the kitchen to the main house, so the food does not have to be carried through the weather,” came the serene reply.

It occurred to me that there were some definite advantages to living in a small house.

As we were heading over the causeway, I asked, “Are we going to the mill?”

“Yes,” Savile said. “The drive to the mill will take us through some of Savile Park, so you will be able to see it.”

I thought for a minute about the ramifications of the earl’s going to see the miller. “Does the mill actually
belong
to the castle, my lord?” I asked with what I hoped was concealed disapproval. Mills usually were at the service of a whole village, not merely one household.

“It has for centuries,” came the easy reply. When I made no answer he glanced at my face, then continued pleasantly, “It is not quite as extraordinary a thing as you may think, Gail. I employ well over a hundred people on a permanent basis, and when I have a special project under way, like the rebuilding of the stables, there might be double or even treble that number to feed. A working mill to grind wheat into flour for bread is essential to the running of a large estate such as Savile.”

I had never lived close enough to a large estate such as Savile to know such things. “I can see that it must be,” I said a little ironically.

A cloud covered the sun. Savile lifted his face to scan the sky, and it occurred to me that it was an incongruously countryman type of thing for a great earl to do. He continued, “The mill does not just work for the castle, of course. For a reasonable fee, it grinds wheat for my tenants and the local villagers.” A muscle tightened under the smoothly shaved skin at the corner of his jaw. “I have had trouble in the past with my present miller, Jarvis, producing less weight in flour than is brought to him in wheat, and John has spoken to him about it several times. Evidently John has received complaints again. It’s time, I think, for me to talk to Jarvis myself and make it clear that I will not tolerate having the local people cheated.”

I looked at Savile’s jawline and decided that I would not like to have him angry with me.

When we reached the other side of the causeway, instead of taking the main road westward, which I had done before, we turned onto a local path and followed the lake northward. I looked at the castle across the water and saw for the first time that in fact only three of the walls were close enough to the lake to be reflected in the water; the fourth wall was backed by what was probably a half a mile of gardens and estate buildings.

Several rowboats were bobbing in the water on the edge of the island across the lake from us. Aside from the causeway, the boats appeared to be the only way off the island, as no footbridge was within view.

High evergreen trees appeared to the right of the path, obscuring my view of the lake. Then the phaeton made a turn around them and the view of the lake and the castle reappeared, but now I was also looking at a topiary garden that formed a background to what looked like an extensive collection of Greek statues. There were garden benches placed at strategic intervals so that one could sit and contemplate the beauty of the statuary, and in the center of the garden was a marble fountain that was a statue of a nymph, with water trickling through her hands.

Savile stopped the phaeton so that I could take a closer look at this extraordinary spectacle. “The topiary garden has been here forever,” he said, “but my father added the Greek statues.”

“They are very nice,” I said faintly.

He shot me an amused look. “There’s a maze, too.” He gestured to the left side of the path and the high, immaculately trimmed boxwood. He added blandly, “I don’t know if it’s as up to snuff as the maze belonging to your friend Mr. Watson. You’ll have to try it one day and see if you get lost.”

“How did you know that I got lost in Mr. Watson’s maze?” I asked him in surprise.

“Nicky informed me,” he said.

“And you remembered?”

A flash of gold from his eyes made me remember vividly a certain intimate moment in the library at Rayleigh. “When it comes to you, Gail, I forget very little.”

“Oh,” I said nervously. “Ah.”

A smile quirked the corner of his mouth. He picked up the reins and drove on.

The shrubbery gave way to an attractive expanse of neatly scythed lawns and wide-spreading oak trees. Then my once-more astonished eyes beheld what looked like a Greek temple set on the shore of the lake, its white columns looking bizarrely out of place in this quintessentially English setting. Savile stopped the phaeton once more.

“It’s a bathhouse,” he informed me. “My father had it built when Palladianism was popular.”

“Goodness,” I murmured faintly. I looked from the Greek temple to the medieval English castle walls and tried not to smile.

“My mother used to have picnics here for her guests,” Savile said. “They would eat off china plates and sip champagne out of crystal glasses and imagine themselves to be nymphs on the banks of the Aegean, or some such nonsense.”

I could not help myself. I laughed. At the sound, he looked at me and grinned.

“My nephews sometimes use it for swimming,” he said. “It does actually have a Roman-style pool inside, but mostly the boys prefer to swim in the lake.”

His words instantly distracted me from his smile. “They swim in the lake?”

“Yes. All the Savile children swim. The lake is too close to our lives for us to take chances.”

“Nicky does not know how to swim,” I said tensely.

“Then we shall just have to teach him,” came the cheerful reply.

I folded my arms across my chest in speechless disagreement. I had no intention of risking my boy’s life in that lake.

“Gail,” he said quietly. Sincerely. “I promise you that Nicky will be well looked after while he is here. Can’t you take a few weeks to relax? For years you have been carrying burdens that no other woman I know could carry. Relax, sweetheart. Give yourself a holiday.”

I tried not to think about what that “sweetheart” did to my nervous system. Problems don’t go away because one decides to take a holiday, I thought resolutely. I didn’t say that to him, however, I just folded my hands in my lap and gazed straight ahead. We drove on in silence and I was glad to see the next building come into view on the right side of the path. It was a charming half-timbered cottage with a thatched roof, set off from the road by a hawthorn hedge and a painted white fence. It sparkled in the sun, and the flowers in the front garden were vibrant with color and lovingly cared for.

Once more Savile stopped the phaeton.

“What a charming cottage!” I said with overly enthusiastic approval. “Does it belong to one of your tenants?”

“Actually, it is part of the castle park,” Savile said quietly. “My grandfather had it built at a time when rustic cottages were all the crack. When I was a boy, John and I used to sleep out here on hot summer nights. It was always much cooler by the lake than in the nursery. Sometimes we would catch a fish for breakfast and cook it ourselves on the lakeshore.”

Somehow I had never envisioned the Earl of Savile catching and cooking his own breakfast.

I looked once more at the cottage. I knew whole families who would have been ecstatic at the thought of having that cottage to live in, and Savile had used it for a toy.

Not for the first time, I realized that I was out of my depth.

We started forward once again, the carriage passing under the hanging branch of a beautiful old oak.

I tried to reestablish our earlier rapport. “Your cousin told me that he spent many of the summers of his youth here at Savile,” I said pleasantly.

But Savile was looking up and frowning. “That branch has come down too far over the road. I shall have to tell John to send someone out here to cut it down.”

He returned his attention to me. “John’s father, who was my father’s younger brother, was killed in the American war, so John really grew up here at Savile.” His eyes were back on the road, which curved to follow the narrowing lake. “As I told you before, John is not an ordinary kind of steward, Gail. He is my cousin, my second-in-command, if you will. Most certainly he is not my servant.” He clucked to one of the horses. “As a matter of fact, at the moment he is also my heir.”

The wide expanse of the lake narrowed rapidly, and in a few minutes the road was following along the steadily flowing River Haver. The grassy verge on either side of the river was sprinkled with rocks, which increased in size as we drove along.

At one point the phaeton bumped over a rock and I was thrown against the earl’s shoulder. I righted myself hastily. The whole side of my body that was next to him was warm with awareness.

“At one time you could get a ship along the river all the way to the Thames,” Savile told me, “but it has dried to little more than a stream in places.”

“Well, it looks impressive enough,” I said.

“Yes, it still runs quite strongly here.” He frowned. “There is the mill up ahead of us.”

The stone building with its high waterwheel, its rushing waterfall, and its millpond did not look very different from thousands of other mills that dotted the English countryside.
Clack-clack-clack
went the mill wheel as it turned with the push of the water, and the ducks on the millpond looked the same as the ones that floated on the millpond at either Hatfield or Highgate.

Two carts were parked together in the shade of an elm tree and two men stood together at their horses’ heads, talking. Their lethargic postures changed dramatically as Savile drove in and they turned to watch him with intense interest.

The stout miller, whose clothes were covered with flour and dust and who looked like every other miller I had ever seen, came out the door of his mill. “My lord!” he cried with great geniality. “How glad we are to have you home once again!”

“Will you hold the horses for me, Gail?” Savile asked me.

“Of course,” I said, and held out my hand for the reins, careful that my fingers did not come into contact with his.

The earl swung down from the carriage and went to meet his employee on the steps in front of the mill.

They spoke for exactly two minutes, and even from where I sat I could see that after one minute the miller had gone pale and was sweating. He tried to say something and Savile cut him off. The earl then turned and beckoned to the two men who were standing in the shade of the elm. Both men jumped, then half walked, half ran to join Savile and the miller on the steps of the mill.

Two more minutes of conversation ensued, at the end of which time the two men were smiling and the miller looked even paler than he had before. Then Savile rejoined me at the phaeton.

“He was cheating?” I asked as I transferred the reins back to him and he started the horses up again.

He didn’t reply, just nodded. After we had driven for perhaps a minute he said with feeling, “God, Gail, I really believe that greed is responsible for more evil in this world than almost anything else.”

“You are probably right,” I replied.

“There is no need for Jarvis to cheat on the weights. I pay him a good salary. He has a house to live in, a wife and only one child to feed. He is much better off than many of the local farmers, who have suffered bitterly from the drop of the price of corn since the war. And these are the men he is cheating. His neighbors, for God’s sake.”

I sighed. “I have always had a strong belief in the doctrine of original sin, my lord. It seems to me that most of the time there doesn’t have to be a reason for people to be mean. Unfortunately, they just are. It’s why I have always valued people like Nicky and my late husband so much. They are the pure of heart to whom Christ promised the Kingdom of Heaven.”

“You sound as if you loved your husband very much,” he said, his eyes looking steadily between the ears of his grays.

Darling Tommy,
I thought.
He did have a heart of gold.
“Yes,” I said. “I did.”

Silence fell as we negotiated the wooden bridge over the rushing water of the Haver.

“There’s a grotto upstream from here,” Savile said in a brisk, informative kind of voice. “My grandfather was a crony of Horace Walpole’s and he put it in during the Gothic rage.”

We were driving through what seemed a wide-reaching expanse of woods. “There’s a hermit’s cave in the wood here, and a tree house,” Savile said in the same voice as before.