Manor of Secrets (4 page)

“Watch your language and your patois, Lawrence,” he said, pulling in his chair as he sat down. “Her Ladyship doesn’t appreciate dropped aitches.”

Janie caught Lawrence’s eye and recognized the thoughts behind them because she was thinking the same thing. Her Ladyship didn’t appreciate much at all, and dropped aitches seemed the least of them. Lawrence grinned at her and raised an eyebrow, and she suppressed a smile, knowing Her Ladyship also didn’t appreciate flirting between the servants.

“Why don’t you sit down, Janie?” Lawrence asked, reaching for the teapot and earning Janie a glare from Sarah, the head housemaid.

“I don’t have time to sit down with the likes of you,” Janie quipped and returned to the kitchen. Truth be told, after her first cup of tea and slice of bread with Harry, she didn’t have time to eat at all. Certainly not sitting down.

A bell rang in the corridor, and the noise from the servants’ hall stopped.

“Was that the front entrance bell?” Mollie asked.

Janie nodded, watching Mr. Foyle rush down the passageway, pulling at his cuffs, brushing his waistcoat, and muttering under his breath.

“Who on earth would be arriving at this hour?” Janie heard him say.

“Don’t stand there gawping, Janie,” Mrs. Seward said, stirring the three pans simmering on the stove and returning to her end of the kitchen table. She waved her little knife. “Get to work! The kedgeree needs to go up hot.”

Janie struggled to hide her frown, but not hard enough.

“None of that, my girl,” her mother said.

Janie made a face at the starched cap on the top of her mother’s head. Kedgeree, with its rice and eggs and smoked fish, seemed a disgusting thing to eat for breakfast, but the lord asked for it every Monday. Something about his time in India.

Her Ladyship hated it. She insisted that the baize on the doors didn’t block the reek of the fish from penetrating every floor of the house. But it was one of the few things His Lordship didn’t defer to her on. He requested it be served even when he was staying at his London club.

Lady Diane got what she wanted the rest of the time.

“Who do you think is at the door?” Janie asked her mother.

“Not the gardener nor the grocer nor any other delivery, my dear,” Mrs. Seward replied. “So it’s unlikely to alter our lives in any way.”

Mrs. Seward peered into the pot where Janie mixed the rice with the tomatoes and flaked fish.

“Unless they eat kedgeree,” the cook murmured. “No one else will, with His Lordship away. I will never in my life understand the rich.” She turned back to the kidneys and flipped them with a single movement.

Mr. Foyle reappeared at the kitchen door.

“One more for breakfast,” he said. “I hope it’s not an inconvenience. Her Ladyship’s sister has arrived unexpectedly.”

Mrs. Seward didn’t turn around, but Janie saw the back of her neck turn pink at the same time the skin of her cheeks turned pale.

“Not an inconvenience, Mr. Foyle.” Mrs. Seward’s voice was barely audible above the hissing of the kettle.

The kitchen was silent for a moment after the butler left.

“Her Ladyship has a sister?” Janie finally asked.

“Fifteen years younger.”

“You know her?”

“I
knew
her,” Janie’s mother answered after a moment. “And I was wrong before. She could alter our lives just by being here.”

C
harlotte lay in the middle of her bed, her chestnut-brown hair fanning out across her pillows, her hands palm up on the coverlet. She was trying to mimic Ophelia in the Millais painting, but knew she was getting the tragic expression completely wrong.

The head housemaid, Sarah, had already been up to help her dress, but Charlotte had taken her hair out of its plait to practice the pose. Trying to get the feeling right. Summoning the memory of the cool water of the lake the day before.

But all she could remember was the arch of Lawrence’s smile when he winked at her.

Charlotte rolled over to the end of her bed and lay on her stomach to open the cedar chest on the floor. She had to stretch as far as she could to get to the bottom of it. She
reached past last year’s outgrown clothes, shuddering at the touch of the white sateen gown her mother had made her wear to the Coronation in June.

Andrew Broadhurst had stood beside her as they watched the procession of all of Europe’s nobility go before them.

And he had yawned.

With a final dive, Charlotte touched the thing she was looking for. A small wooden box, the inlaid top starting to crack a little. That was the reason her mother had decided to get rid of it.

“It’s ugly,” Lady Diane had said.

But Charlotte loved it. The intricate inlay depicted a scene from China. Women gathered around a river, their clothes like long, satin robes, cinched at the waist. Their hair pulled up into implausibly full buns and pierced with sticks like pincushions. Charlotte’s hair would never hold a shape like that. Poker-straight and thick as November rainfall, it barely held its place in a chignon.

Charlotte dug the box out and lifted it onto the bed, opening it carefully. She breathed in the dry scent of paper and the ferrous tang of ink. She slipped off the bed and sat on the floor with the sheaves of paper and the inkpot, keeping the bed and its velvet curtains between herself and the door.

She curled over the pages, reading the words already written. Mostly descriptions of the people around her. Her silent father, her much-older brothers and each of their fetishes — boating or billiards or, in the case of David, girls. She had dozens of pages about the disapproval of her mother. How Charlotte knew she’d never live up to her mother’s expectations. How much she wanted to escape.

And then there were her stories. The adventures she imagined, but never got to experience. Sailing to distant lands and traveling by elephant and falling in love.

Pretending to be Ophelia this morning had given her an idea for a story about a girl who fakes her own death in order to run off with a raffish Italian count.

Charlotte smiled as the words spilled out of her imagination, barely giving her time to re-ink her pen. The description of the count was delicious fun. Tall, dark, dashing. With sapphire eyes and a teasing smile.

A quick knock at her door startled her so much she almost knocked over her inkpot. Charlotte blew on the paper to dry her writing and scrambled to put it all back in the little box, the nib of the pen smearing across several of the pages.

The knock came again. More urgently.

Charlotte slammed the lid of the box closed and stood.
Then she threw open the cedar chest and dug the old clothes out of it, shouting, “Come in!” at the same time.

Sarah stopped short at the sight of the gowns and gloves on the floor, and Charlotte thought she saw a flash of disbelief, followed by frustration. But these expressions then disappeared into a blank mask.

“Her Ladyship asked that you come downstairs, Lady Charlotte,” Sarah said with a brief curtsey.

“But … it’s not breakfast time yet.” Charlotte stood with her back to the cedar chest, hoping that she had dug the Chinese box deep enough. Hoping that Sarah wouldn’t find it. She knew her mother occasionally left coins in odd places to test the maids’ integrity — if the coins disappeared, a maid could be fired on the spot. But that didn’t mean Sarah wouldn’t read her writing if given the opportunity.

“And Mother doesn’t go down for breakfast,” Charlotte added helplessly.

Sarah moved swiftly through the room, picking things up and laying them across the bed to fold them later. She seemed nervous. Skittish.

“There’s a visitor.”

“Visitor?” Charlotte allowed herself one quick glance at the chest. She couldn’t see the box at all. It was covered by her embroidery. Hidden. “At eight o’clock in the morning?”

“Most unusual, I know,” Sarah said.

Charlotte could imagine the same tone amplified in her mother’s voice. Disapproving. Judgmental.

Sarah guided Charlotte over to the dressing table and ran a brush through Charlotte’s hair, snagging the ends and sending hair flying in the static before taming it into a hastily pinned knot.

“Whoever could it be?” Charlotte mused. The local constabulary come to investigate a murder? A dashing Italian count?

“Your aunt,” Sarah said. “Lady Beatrice Smythe.”

A long-lost relative.

Her father had no sisters and Lady Diane rarely spoke of hers, who had shocked the family by running off with a rich commoner. Charlotte knew Lady Beatrice had lived at The Manor until she married Mr. Smythe, and then on his plantations in India and Malaya. When he died of yellow fever, she moved to Italy.

As far as Charlotte knew, Lady Beatrice hadn’t set foot in England in sixteen years. It seemed strange she would return so suddenly, and without warning.

Charlotte tried to imagine having the courage and the means to make a life for herself somewhere else. But the reality seemed more fanciful than anything she could make up.

Charlotte smoothed the skirt of her pale pink linen visiting dress, suddenly nervous. It was better than the ecru she’d worn yesterday, but the pleated chiffon bodice made her feel horribly provincial. Her aunt would be cosmopolitan. Glamorous. Worldly.

No wonder Aunt Beatrice never wanted to come back to The Manor,
Charlotte thought as she opened her door.

Charlotte’s room was near the end of a long hall, and she had to pass the more elegant and impactful rooms her mother reserved for guests before she could get downstairs. It had always made her feel as if her mother wanted her out of the way.

The grand staircase, with its highly polished solid oak handrails and banks of windows, swept down to the marble hall. The stone floor was inlaid like a chessboard in black and white. Charlotte was surprised to find the hall empty. The very silence seemed to echo.

Then the servants’ door behind the staircase opened, and Lawrence stepped through, carrying a tray laden with silver-domed dishes. He looked flustered, and Charlotte clearly heard Mrs. Seward’s voice call, “Come back for the kidneys!” Lawrence nodded once, though there was no way Mrs. Seward could see him, then he looked up and saw Charlotte,
motionless in the center of the hall, both feet on the same black marble square.

Charlotte smiled. She meant it to be casual — a mistress politely acknowledging a servant. But she felt it stretch across her face. It even made her shoulders relax and her ribs crush against her corset.

Lawrence smiled back — a quick dimple and a light in his eyes. But he erased the smile immediately and replaced it with a mask of professional detachment.

“Lady Charlotte,” he said, his voice like a caress in the quiet of the hall. “The rest of the … family is in the dining room.”

As Charlotte preceded him across the hall, she wondered if she felt his eyes on her. Wondered if her hair had stayed in place, if he could see the curve of the back of her neck. Then she heard her mother’s voice, even through the thick oak of the door.

“But why are you
here
?”

Charlotte hesitated. Lady Diane hated family “nonsense,” as she called it. She must be unnerved by Aunt Beatrice’s arrival to be so vociferous. And so loud.

Charlotte glanced back at Lawrence, but his face remained impassive. Lady Diane hated even more for servants to know her business. She was always convinced they were gossiping about her.

But Charlotte knew Lawrence wouldn’t tell any secrets. He would understand. He would protect her, just as he had at the lake.

Charlotte couldn’t hear the reply, but heard the voice. Softer. Quieter. Like a remembered melody. She suddenly wanted to stand in the hall with her ear pressed against the door. To hear what her mother and aunt would say to each other in private — or what they thought was private. But Lawrence waited behind her with his tray, so she stepped forward and entered the dining room.

The morning light spilled across the hills in the distance and angled through the glass of the north-facing windows. Her mother stood, almost silhouetted against the green, her back more rigid than normal, her mouth turned down in a shadowed scowl.

“Charlotte,” she said briskly, and then waited while Lawrence laid out the dishes on the sideboard.

Charlotte looked to the opposite end of the room, where a huge framed painting of a seventeenth-century ancestor dominated the wall and dwarfed the woman standing beneath it. Aunt Beatrice didn’t look like the younger version of Lady Diane that Charlotte had expected. She had the same fine features, the same slender nose, but her hair was more honey than blonde and her hazel eyes held more warmth than Lady
Diane’s steely blue ones. And Aunt Beatrice’s mouth turned up into a smile. She wore a traveling dress in a fetching chartreuse that Lady Diane would surely classify as “vulgar” and didn’t appear to be wearing a corset — her posture was far too relaxed.

Charlotte heard the door click closed as Lawrence left the room.

“This is your aunt Beatrice,” Lady Diane said. “Beatrice, this is Charlotte.”

Aunt Beatrice stepped forward, her arms beginning to lift as if she would hug Charlotte or perhaps kiss her on both cheeks like the French. Something Continental and artistic and foreign.