A Soul of Steel (48 page)

The black-painted double door bowed away from us at Quentin’s knock, revealing the austere butler. I paused, wondering if he would recognize Quentin, but apparently he had not been in service until after Quentin’s departure.

“Whom shall I announce?” this personage asked in disapproving tones, his eyes pausing respectfully on my borrowed brooch.

“Quentin Stanhope of Afghanistan and Miss Penelope Huxleigh of Paris,” Quentin said, a twinge of humor in his voice.

I found my fingers curling into his coat sleeve. His hand briefly covered mine. Even through kid leather I could feel its warmth. We followed the butler across the marble-floored hall as vast as a ballroom, past a dining room where linen lay like melting snow and candles gleamed like stars. Our footsteps reverberated with the same soft patter the rain makes in autumn on fallen leaves.

We were announced at the open double doors of a drawing room, in which the family had gathered before dinner. After passing through the spreading dusk outside and the inner shadows of the hall, we crossed that threshold into a room that exploded with blinding light.

The family sat as frozen as in the Sargent portrait I had imagined, dressed for dinner, the men in regulation black and white, the women a blurred watercolor swirl of gowns and skin tones and startled blue-gray eyes.

“Uncle Quentin!” cried one vague pastel pool. Then Allegra Turnpenny was tripping across the Aubusson carpet and over the marble floors like a child on Christmas Eve. She flew at him, throwing her arms around his neck while he repeated, “Allegra? Allegra—is it you, really?”

And those calm, composed Stanhope women deserted their places in the portrait and came flowing over in clouds of silk and satin, followed at a more sedate pace by the puzzled men in evening dress.

Introductions were made, of myself, of course, of the two married sisters’ husbands. Even Quentin required a formal greeting from each member of his family, as if to place them once again in his current landscape.

I watched Quentin sink into his family as one might ease onto a down-upholstered sofa, talking with first one, then another, pausing to embrace a sister who only now had overcome the strangeness of this reunion. The men, the brothers-in-law, kept circling back to him with hand pumpings and astounded looks.

Then came a pilgrimage to the upstairs domain of his elderly mother. If I had any tendency to smile after the travesty of Irene’s impersonation, old Mrs. Stanhope’s condition crushed it in an instant. She was a frail, silent lady in a wheeled chair attended by a capped nurse.

Her memory was a gray hummock of ashes from which no phoenix would arise. While she smiled her tremulous pathetically polite pleasure at the hubbub, she clearly had no recall of her son whatsoever, and virtually none of the older siblings who cooed around him.

Sobered, we went downstairs again, the family keeping up a gay repartee as if to drown out the old woman’s utter silence of voice and mind.

Dinner, needless to say, was delayed. By the time we all migrated into the long dining chamber, the butler’s expression had hardened into an icily polite, harried fury.

At table Allegra quite literally took me in hand and plied me with questions, all the while admiring her favorite uncle from afar.

“He doesn’t look a bit different. Not really,” she added. “Not even older.”

“That is because as a child you considered every adult as ancient as Egypt.”

Her giggle implied guilt, but she denied my charge with newly adult dignity. “That is not true; I have never considered you at all Egyptian, Miss Huxleigh. Or may I call you ‘Nell,’ as Quentin does?” she added mischievously.

“It remains to be seen whether we two will associate enough in future that such issues will require settling.”

“You are not leaving London?”

“My home is in France now, near Paris.”

“Near Paris, how divine!” Allegra’s eyes sparkled like star sapphires, soft and fugitive with youthful illusion. “Oh, the couturiers, the courtiers, the utterly romantic French gentlemen—!”

“I see that you have not seen much of Paris.”

“Oh, but I may come and visit you! Do say I may! I have never known anyone who lived in Paris.”

“Near Paris,” I corrected, “and you must ask Mr. and Mrs. Norton, at whose cottage I reside.”

“A cottage. How picturesque. What else have you there?”

“A rather fiendish black cat named Lucifer. He is of the breed called Persian, but Quentin informs me that the animals are actually Afghan in origin. We also are endowed with a parrot I inherited from one of Godfrey’s—Mr. Norton’s— clients, a nasty gaudy prattlewit named, er, Casanova.”

“It all sounds such fun,” Allegra said wistfully with the optimism of the very young. “Not dull and stuffy and dark like London. And I think your friend Godfrey must be as charming and handsome as real Frenchmen.”

I omitted pointing out that her experience of Frenchmen vied only with her experience of Paris. “Godfrey is also married.”

“Oh, yes, you said so.” She was young enough to sound disappointed.

“His wife is my friend Irene, who used to be my chambermate in Saffron Hill years ago.”

“Saffron Hill? You really lived there? How Bohemian.”

“Yes, Irene and I are devout Bohemians,” I said. “We always seem to be poking around the more colorful quarters of great cities.”

“You know, Miss Huxleigh,” Allegra said as she leaned back in her chair to accept a bowl of exceedingly thin soup in which floated several unidentifiable objects sliced unbearably fine, “I am sure that Uncle Quentin’s war stories will be quite interesting, as well as his life in the East, but I am also convinced that your adventures since we last saw you in Berkeley Square are much more enthralling.”

“Such delusions apparently run in the family,” I muttered as the serving man presented me with my own pallid pool of soup. The lusty bouillabaisse of Provence began to look edible in comparison. “I doubt that your uncle will speak of his war days. His work was secret and he has suffered much since then.”

“Secret?” She looked down the glittering tabletop to Quentin, who was speaking with her mother. “He is always so amusing and I adored him, but I can’t imagine Uncle Quentin doing anything actually important, can you?”

So much for the adoration of nieces. It required biting my tongue, which fortunately rendered sampling the soup impossible, but I refrained from telling her in detail just how exciting and vital a life her uncle had led of late.

The tall-case hall clock had rung half-past ten before we took our leave of Grosvenor Square. After dinner the gentlemen had slipped away to the study for cognac and cigars. I did not much miss the miasma of smoke such masculine pursuits engendered, but found my time in the drawing room with the ladies almost as stifling.

Save for Allegra, they had little to say to a governess turned acquaintance of the family Lost Sheep. I had even less to say to them. The London scandals and sensations that struck them as cataclysmic seemed trivial matters indeed compared to the international plots and attempted assassinations of the past few days. As I listened, I realized that Quentin had been right. However low-born and obscure, I led a more adventuresome life than most women.

Once again Allegra escorted me and a gentleman out, but on this occasion she hung upon her uncle and myself a trifle desperately.

“Please do come again to call, Miss Huxleigh,” she begged, “or at least invite me to Paris. And Uncle Quentin, say that I shall be seeing more of you. I have missed you dreadfully!”

He sighed and gently untangled her arm from his. “It seems like yesterday, dear Allegra. I was the youngest of my family. Miss Huxleigh can tell you how deeply I was impressed by you and your schoolroom friends when I was... mislaid in Afghanistan. It was for you I fought, the new and vibrant generation. I am delighted to see what a charming and lively young lady you have become. Whatever you do, never surrender your spirit.”

She clung to his arm as if afraid of losing him to another decade-long exile. He patted her hand and kissed her cheek and finally extricated himself.

Mrs. Turnpenny had offered the Stanhope family carriage for our return to the hotel in the Strand, but Quentin had expressed a polite wish to stroll into the square before seeking a hansom.

“I hope you do not mind, Nell,” he commented after we had traversed the walkway to the square.

I had indeed been anticipating a ride in the family’s undoubtedly first-rate carriage after a lifetime spent on public transportation, but I said only, “It has been a busy day.”

“Busy indeed,” he answered. “My head is spinning.”

“No doubt that is the cognac.”

He laughed and led me down one of the diagonal walks crisscrossing the square’s central garden. It was quite dark, yet the gaslights circling the square, if such a contradiction is possible, glowed like multiple moons in the misty distance.

“Ah, smell that cool, London summer air, Nell. It was growing close inside.”

“Was it?”

He paused to take my gloved hand. “I wonder if you know what you have escaped, what you would have been like after ten years more in a household like that.”

There seemed no answer to such a question, to such a mood. Certainly 1 recognized that this reunion had been a crucial one for Quentin and that his emotions must be at a high pitch.

Yet I had been privileged to witness him encompassed by his own kind, and to see how separate I stood from that kind, as did my friends, Irene and Godfrey, however gloriously they improvised their lives.

Chapter Thirty-two

FALLEN ANGELS

“Will we
find a hansom?” I asked timidly after we had been walking for some few minutes. While I applauded Quentin’s optimism, I was certain that no cabs could be had at this late hour.

He laughed again. “Hansoms hover about the squares looking for fares. They like such fares even better when they are tipsy, for the tips will match the condition of the riders.”

“We are not tipsy.”

“No.” He sounded sorry.

Yet once we had crossed the square we heard the crisp clop of a single horse’s hooves. They seemed to be pacing us.

“It could be a resident carriage,” I suggested.

“Resident carriages invariably sport at least two steeds. That is a hansom.”

“You are right.”

Yet there was something ominous about that invisible equipage gaining on us in the cool mist of a midsummer evening, about the tick-tock rhythm of the unseen horse’s hooves. It seemed ordinary life was bearing down upon us both after a sojourn in fairyland. It seemed the past was grinding closer on its steady orbit toward the future. It seemed a time had ended, and with it an understanding between ourselves that was unsaid and would ever be so.

“You see!” Quentin announced as the vehicle came into view. “A cab. Soon we will be regaling Irene with the details of our outing.”

“You believe that she’ll wait up for us?”

“Can you doubt it?” Quentin nodded to the cabman at the back of the shiny black vehicle that loomed from the darkness, its twin lamps shining like beast eyes at midnight.

“The Strand,” he called up to the driver, who in his top hat and muffler seemed a Christmas pantomime figure rather than a humble London cabbie.

Quentin helped me inside, his hand resting for a moment on my waist. How intimate a hansom cab is at night! One sits side by side with another, bound for a common destination. The way was unexpectedly deserted, so alone we seemed to be journeying. I reflected that Irene and Godfrey and I would leave Quentin behind, as he and I should leave this vehicle behind once our goal was reached. Quentin had come home at last.

“You do not have any family,” he said of a sudden.

“No.” I was surprised. I had not thought of it that way, but it was true. “Father was a widower who died more than a decade ago. I had no siblings, no known cousins. Except for—”

“Irene and Godfrey. They do not have much family either.”

“No, you are right. Godfrey’s mother died long ago, and he is estranged from his brothers. He despised his late father, rightfully so. As for Irene, who knows?”

“It is apt that Irene sprang unaccounted, like Athena, the goddess of wisdom, from her father Zeus’s forehead. She invents herself and does not require antecedents.”

“I am sure,” I said, “that Irene would have given any father a gruesome headache. She has done sufficiently well with me, and I am not even related. You are fortunate to have found your kin again.”

“Am I? Forgive me, but I feel crowded among them. I have lived among... clans, tribes, in which there were more individuals and more individual freedom. They all expect something of me.”

“I thought you would... rejoin them, live with them. What else does one do with a family?”

“Fight them, escape them.” Amusement salted his voice. “Explain to them.”

“If civilization wears upon you, you’re welcome to visit us in Neuilly again. And bring Allegra as well. She seems in need of a change. I am certain that Irene can provide something provocative in that area.”

“I do not doubt it!” He was silent, the dreary beat of the horse’s hooves marking time to his discontent, to the exhausted evening.