Rondo Allegro (45 page)

Rustle, rustle. The entire row of servants bowed and
curtseyed.

What was she supposed to do? At Naples, suspended between
servants and royalty, she had known every degree of deference. In Paris, there
had been no bowing. Shipboard life had had its own etiquette. She remembered
what it was like to be ignored by those who considered themselves greater, and
she nodded to each pair of eyes she met as she approached the wide, shallow
front steps.

Her heartbeat thundered in her ears. When she reached the
top step, four women, two in black bombazine, gave slight curtseys. Harriet,
now wearing an ugly gray gown, lurked behind a tall young woman in gray who
looked somewhat like her.

Anna responded with her own curtsey, and then the eldest and
shortest of the women came forward, her curled hair beautifully powdered under
a large, lacy widow’s cap in the style of a previous generation, her voice high
and faint, “My dear Lady Northcote. Welcome to the Manor, to your home, that
is. And how did you leave my son?”

This had to be the captain’s mother. “I left him with his
steward watching over him, as well as the physician appointed by the admiral,”
Anna said. “Lady Northcote, I apprehend?”

The elderly woman had a beaky nose, and pale blue eyes that
squinted. The nose, at least, Anna recognized.

“Oh, oh,” the dowager fluted tremulously. “I ought to have
waited for a formal introduction, I know. Do forgive me, dear Lady Northcote,
forgive a mother’s anxiousness for news.” She turned to the other woman in
black, whose fair beauty was startlingly enhanced by those black clothes.

“May I present Lady Emily Northcote?” the dowager said with
even more of a tremor, and the beautiful one dipped her knee again as she held
out her hand.

Anna took that hand, meeting a searching gaze from
thick-lashed blue eyes, even more striking in hue than those possessed by the
coachman. This had to be the wife of the former baron.
Emily?

“My daughters,” the dowager Lady Northcote went on, first
indicating the tall one in gray with the thin beaky nose, “Mrs. Elstead, and my
younger daughter.”

“Mrs. Elstead,” Anna murmured, and smiling as Harriet
curtseyed as if they had never met, “Miss Duncannon.”

Harriet strictly suppressed her own smile, but she was
thrilled to the heart. The new wife had not betrayed her! That had to be a
promising sign. Unless she was a designing minx, the way . . . no.
She wouldn’t let herself even think it, because everybody said her thoughts
were forever writ on her face.

“. . . the drawing room,” the dowager was
saying, “while your trunks are bringing in. You might wish for something hot to
drink before we change for dinner. We keep country hours,” she explained,
leading the way past the old-fashioned furnishings by Ince and Mayhew, ornate,
yet formidably spiky to Anna’s eyes, to a large drawing room that overlooked a
garden in the back, which framed a lake.

This was the formal drawing room. Furnishings were grouped
around a broad marble fireplace in which a good fire snapped and crackled.
Covering most of the parquet floor was an exquisite Aubusson carpet of
Renaissance floral designs in shades of blue and gold.

The dowager led Anna to what she would come to recognize as
the best seat, neither too close to the fire nor too far away, and as soon as
the ladies had settled around her, the butler appeared again, a tall, stout
middle-aged man who supervised the row of housemaids carrying in an elaborate
tea service and a tray of tiny cakes.

While a young maidservant handed around the tea and cakes
(Anna, though ravenously hungry, did not know what to do with these, and so she
declined, confining herself to the tea) the dowager put forth a series of
polite questions about the post chaise, the roads, the weather, and the
journey.

Anna replied with polite nothings that she had already
rehearsed to herself. She was unsettled by the manner in which her auditors
paid much more heed to her inane words than they were worth. Was her English at
fault? She began to reply with increasing brevity.

On the floor below, Parrette was conducted to the
housekeeper’s sitting room, where she sat down to tea and fresh scones.

Mrs. Diggory, the elderly housekeeper, enumerated the staff,
beginning with her nephew Mr. Diggory, the butler. After she had named them
all, she added that Parrette would meet them all at the servants’ meal, and
then straight-away launched into the questions that the ladies upstairs wanted
very badly to ask.

This was the interrogation for which Parrette had prepared
herself.

She launched into her prepared speech. The Ludovisi duke got
his due mention, and Parrette stressed the likelihood of Eugenia’s father
having been on his Grand Tour before he chose to stay on the continent to take
up his abode in Florence. She said nothing untrue, but she suppressed Eugenia’s
mother’s origin, the dueling school, and the fact that Eugenia had had to go
out as a governess to visiting English families.

As she went on to Signor Ludovisi and the royal palace in
Naples, she covertly watched these words impact her audience. These were
English
English, the people Eugenia had
desired most for her daughter. She must not speak amiss.

The housekeeper poured out more tea. Mrs. Diggory was a bony
woman, with large gray eyes half-covered by thin eyelids in which the veins
were prominent. Parrette found it impossible to descry her expression.

“It came as quite a surprise, as you might expect, to them
upstairs, to discover his lordship’s marriage in the newspapers,” Mrs. Diggory
said as she passed the cup and saucer to Parrette. “A recent event, I take it?”

“Not at all,” Parrette said, pretending she did not hear the
insinuation. It was no more than she had expected.

She took a sip of the vile concoction, longed futilely for
coffee, then said, “It happened nearly six years ago. It was arranged by the
English legation, but then the fleet was sent away. Her ladyship,” Parrette
said these words with subdued enjoyment, “did not see him again until we were
in Cadiz, and Admiral Gravina himself arranged for her to rejoin his lordship.”

The housekeeper’s mouth pursed, and those veined eyelids
rose a fraction. Parrette set down her cup, wondering if the news would get
through the house faster than she would.

Then it was time for the personal questions. She stated only
that she had worked at Naples’ royal palace for the Ludovisi family. That was
twice the royal palace had been mentioned. Anna would have hated such showing
away, Parrette knew, or at the least would have been embarrassed, but Michel
had told his mother that a foreign accent could be fatal with English servants.
“But if you’ve got the least connection to a duke or two, even better, a
prince, fling ’em into the ring,” he had advised.

She had done just that, and she measured her success by the
politeness of Mrs. Diggory’s tone as she offered to show ‘Mrs. Doofloo’ to her
room.

In the drawing room upstairs, the stilted conversation
labored on until a single chime from an ormolu clock on the mantel prompted
Lady Emily Northcote to venture on her own carefully rehearsed question.
“Should you care for more tea, or something else to eat, Lady Northcote?”

“No, thank you.”

“There is just time for a swift tour of the house, or should
you prefer to retire before dinner? That is,” she corrected herself with a
little smile that looked as rehearsed as it was, “forgive me,
you
may order dinner put forward, if you
wish. I am not to be giving orders anymore. This is now your house.”

There was that false note. Not musically. Her voice was
well-modulated; Anna’s practiced ear detected the result of careful lessons.
But her
tone
was a note off,
reminding Anna of Therese Rose. A quick glance at Harriet’s expressive face
reinforced this impression: Harriet gazed at her sister-in-law with lips
compressed.

Your house
. “I
shall be happy to sit down to dinner at the hour of custom,” Anna said with
polite deflection. “I am conditioned by the bells aboard ship. They are ab-so-lute!”
Anna tried to mimic their English speech, but her accent
would
come out, she could hear it in her own words.

She was disgusted, but the dowager found it fascinating,
recalling her to her young days when the glittering French court was the
epitome of
ton
; Mrs. Elstead wondered
where Henry had found her; Lady Emily Northcote suppressed a flash of
irritation that her rational mind knew was unjustified; and Harriet was
enchanted.

She bounced up. “Mama,
pray
permit me to take Lady Northcote over the house. I promise we shall be quick. There
will be plenty of time to dress.” She turned to Anna. “Would you care to see
the house now?”

“I would be grateful for a chance to walk about a little. I
have been sitting in that carriage, oh! Too long.”

More curtseys, and Harriet led her out of the drawing room,
pausing in the hallway to say impulsively, “I love your accent. Of course Henry
was
amazingly
ravished, though Mama
hates when I use that word. Oh, it’s been a
thousand
ages
since anything interesting has happened in this house. Come, should
you care to see the old wing first? Then we can come back to where it is warm.
We cannot heat the house as we once did, alas. I quite dread winter . . .”

Harriet spoke so quickly that Anna did not retain the half
of what she was told. Names and dates flew by as they walked downstairs again,
past a beautiful double staircase and through carved doors into a hall with
marble floor and vaulted ceilings. Harriet waved a hand this way and that, then
paused, one hand tucked into her armpit. “Do you know English history?”

“I was put to memorize all the Kings of England as a child,
but I cannot tell you much more than their dates,” Anna said. “And that puts me
in mind of a question, may I ask?”

Harriet smiled, fingers interlaced—liking very much to be
consulted, for she was usually suppressed. “Please do!”

“Lady Emily, she is the daughter of a duke or a marquis?” Anna remembered Lady Lydia.

“No, she is never Lady Emily, for that
would
be a duke’s daughter. She is
Lady Emily Northcote
, being the second widow in the family, when
there is a new baron and his wife. Three Lady Northcotes!” Harriet grinned, and
said confidingly, “Mama had to go and look it out in some old book about titles
and orders, when we first found out about you. And I must say it put Emily in
quite a—” She caught herself up, blushed, and turned to the pictures on the
wall.

“Our family is quite old. At one time,” Harriet went on, “we
had cousins on either side of the water due to peace treaties that ended with
marriages, during the time of the Edwards. Things are not nearly so wild now.
But this house was built before the Puritans ruined everything, and so it was
fairly stripped by them. With the Restoration, the family returned and had all
new furnishings. The old great hall was turned into a ballroom. Fancy how
horrid, the anterooms all opening into each other. That includes the
bedchambers!”

“It is that way in the older palaces,” Anna said.

“Palaces!” Harriet cast her a wide-eyed look. “You are not
what anyone expected at all, and I must say . . .” She clipped
her lips into a line, used both hands to fling open a carved and gilt door, and
waved a hand. “The ballroom. It can actually be very fine when it’s decorated,
and warm. But it really is dreadfully old-fashioned. When it’s like this you
half expect a ghost to come out of the shadows, wearing a Louis XIV wig.”

Up a carved stone stairway, to the state rooms, where she
said, “This is the Baron’s Bedchamber, though no baron has slept in it for at
least a hundred years. That fence before the bed! That horrid high canopy over the
bed, which incidentally is as hard as a plank. So high a canopy cannot possibly
have been able to keep any warmth in. But Charles II slept here on a visit, and
it is said that at least one of the Pretenders also stayed here, though we are
not
Catholics. My ancestors were friends
with the Aubignys, who
are,
and
connected to the Stuarts. Anyway no one has changed a thing. They just repair
everything and put it right back as it was.”

She let them out a side door into a long gallery with
fireplaces at either end.

“Those high-backed benches are beautiful,” Anna said,
pointing.

Harriet lifted her chin as she gazed at the lovingly
polished wood gleaming in the weak light, the unforgiving flat benches with the
backs carved with Biblical scenes. “Oh, they are beautiful, and I guess some
ancestor paid a lot. But have you actually ever sat in one? Those carvings
knock the back of your head unmercifully, and as for sitting . . .”

She half-shut her eyes. “I had a governess, Miss Porter,
before she was sent off two years ago, I do not know why. She told me that
women wore a great deal more clothes back then, and heavy things with their
hair piled in for hats. So maybe they carried their cushions around with them,
so to speak. But can you imagine sitting in here, the room full of smoke, for
the chimneys all smoked back then, trying to dance? I wonder what girls my age
danced to, especially if you were wearing a dress with sleeves dragging on the
floor.”

She hopped and twirled lightly in bouncing bourrées past windows
lining one wall, and stopped at the first of a succession of great, mostly
gloomy ancient paintings of ancestors on the opposite.

Harriet began naming each and adding a comment, most of them
saucy, which caused Anna to laugh. “. . . and there, Lady
Fortuna—isn’t that a dreadful name, Fortuna? It is no wonder she was quite
horrid. Infamous over the countryside, I assure you. My grandmother Dangeau once
confided to me that her brother said there was a general wish that she might be
sent abroad, to teach Frederick of Prussia and his dragoons a lesson in
manners.”