“If her ladyship does not wish to review your menus, bring them to me,” said Gabrielle. “Marie is right, however, in that you must not send up any cakes that her ladyship does not specifically ask for.” She knew all to well that Madame’s good resolutions vanished at the sight of food. “As for the tarts, you need not fear that they will not be appreciated, for I see that my brother has demolished every one!”
“Very light hand with the pastry,” mumbled Gerard, wiping sticky crumbs off his chin.
Both antagonists seemed to think they had won the battle. Mrs Tombaugh beamed, and Marie, casting her a glance of mingled triumph and enmity, picked up the tea-tray and stalked out.
“Pig!” said Gabrielle. “You might have left me one.”
“I was being diplomatic,” explained Gerard unconvincingly. “Look how I helped your argument.”
“There’s more in the oven, miss,” said Mrs Tombaugh. “I’ll have ‘em out in a jiffy, and another pot of tea on the table.”
When Gabrielle, full of raspberry tarts, went upstairs, she found Madame in her dressing room reclining on a gilt and brocade chaise longue.
“You will have a cup of tea, chérie?” she asked. “A barbarous English custom but one to which I have grown used. Marie, fetch a cup for mademoiselle.”
“No, thank you, madame. I have just had tea in the kitchen. I should like to talk to you for a minute, if you please.”
Marie discreetly retired into the bedchamber, and Gabrielle sat down on a stool at the dressing table.
“Qu’est-ce que c’est?” asked Lady Harrison. “You have the air of worry that I do not like to see on the face of a pretty girl.”
“It’s Papa, madame. He has been gone for ten months, without a word. Do you think he. . . he might be dead?”
“Anything is possible, my poor child, but I do not think it likely. Maurice is
un homme très adroit
.”
"He is clever, isn’t he? I expect you are right and he will turn up one day, with never an explanation as to where he went or what he’s been doing. But if he does not, Gerard and I will have to seek positions where we can keep ourselves, unless you can help us to contact Papa’s family.”
Her ladyship jumped to her feet, swooped on Gabrielle and enveloped her in a scented embrace. “
Jamais
!” she cried. “Never while I live shall Maurice’s children work for a living!”
“Even if Sir Oswald is forced to give you your full allowance, we cannot let you keep us, madame. We are agreed on that.”
“I shall tell you of your family, but not yet. It is plain that le bon papa does not want you to know until he is here, so we will allow him a little more time, n’est-ce pas? If he does not come by the end of the summer, when we must return to London, than I will tell you all I know.
Ça va, chérie
? In the meantime, you will enjoy the little vacation in the country and not worry.”
“Very well, madame. But I shall hold you to it. Come September, I intend to know just who we are!”
Gabrielle kissed Lady Harrison and went to her chamber. All her clothes had been put away already. Unlike the grand chambers below, the room was simply furnished with sturdy Jacobean furniture, the walls whitewashed and a white rag rug on the well-polished floor. It might seem cold in winter, but at this time of year it was refreshing.
She sat down on the bed. Feeling suddenly weary, she leaned back against the pillows and swung her legs up. The window was directly before her, framed by flowered chintz curtains. Through a gap in the trees she could see all the way up the grassy slope to the Great House.
Did one of the windows belong to Mr Everett’s room? Was he in it, changing for dinner perhaps, looking down the hill and wondering what she was doing?
With a sigh, she decided that it was unlikely. Mrs Tombaugh had said that his lordship didn’t hold with country hours. They dined at eight at the Great House, and if miss didn’t mind they’d do the same here, for otherwise there’d be no end of confusion. And besides, she’d enough to do without hurrying to get dinner on the table by five or six.
Gabrielle did not say that she had no expectation of being invited to dine at the Great House. Eight o’clock would be fine, she agreed.
* * * *
“Oh dear!” said Lady Harrison at breakfast the next morning. “You are perfectly correct, Gabrielle, that we must pay a courtesy call this morning, but how am I to get there? We have no carriage, and this is not London where one can simply send a servant out for a hackney or a chair!”
“You will have to walk, madame,” said Gerard, grinning. “Come, did we not hear you saying that you plan to exercise regularly while in the country?”
“I intend to take a gentle stroll in the shrubbery. It must be a good mile to the Great House!” she wailed.
“Not much more than half a mile,” soothed Gabrielle, “and we will go slowly.”
“Uphill all the way!”
“Think how pleasant it will be on the way back.”
“I have not the proper shoes.”
“I distinctly remember that you had a pair made especially before we left London. Let us send for Marie and ask her.”
“No,” sighed Lady Harrison. “You are quite right. But I refuse to turn around and come home after a polite quarter hour. It will take me much longer to get my breath!”
By the time they reached the Great House, she was indeed panting and very pink in the face. While Gerard rang the bell, Gabrielle folded her parasol for her and fanned her vigorously. When the butler admitted them, she sank into a chair in the spacious entrance hall, looking as if she would never move again. Gabrielle continued to fan her.
“I will see if her ladyship is at home,” pronounced the butler, and left with measured tread, no whit disconcerted at the arrival of a plump and breathless lady on foot.
“If Lady Cecilia is not at home,” gasped Lady Harrison, “I shall have died for nothing!”
Fortunately, the butler returned to announce that Lady Cecilia would receive them in the morning room. It proved to be a small sunny parlour looking out over the rose garden. Gerard was dismayed to find that the three Misses Everett were also present.
"Devil take it!” he whispered to his sister. “A house full of females!”
To his relief, after an exchange of courtesies Lady Cecilia suggested that he should go and look for her eldest son.
“He will be in the gun room or the stables,” she added. “Just ask one of the servants.”
“The gun room or the stables!” repeated Gerard joyfully. “Thank you, ma’am, I shall certainly find him!”
“Rolf is up at Cambridge,” Lady Cecillia explained to Lady Harrison, “but he is no scholar. He spends all his time at home in sporting pursuits.”
“Our brothers are certain to become friends, Miss Everett,” said Gabrielle to Dorothea, “if yours is indeed as mad for horses and guns as is mine!”
“Rolf thinks of nothing else, I vow.” Dorothea set a careful stitch in her embroidery. “Except the army, that is. Now that we are at war with France again, I expect Papa will let him leave the university and join the cavalry.”
“Gerard also wishes to become a soldier.” Gabrielle did not feel inclined to add that he himself had made this course impossible by gambling away all their money.
“Men are all the same, I vow,” said one of the younger girls scornfully. Sturdy, good-natured schoolroom misses, with none of Dorothea’s delicate beauty, they sat at a table looking through some fashion magazines their sister had brought them from her season in London.
“Luke is not,” said the other. “I have never heard him express the least desire to join the army.
“No, but he likes to ride and shoot and hunt when he is at home.”
“You like to ride yourself.”
“Do stop squabbling!” begged Dorothea. “What will Miss Darcy think of you?”
“Only that I wish I had had a sister. Though brothers are all very well in their way. I expect Mr Everett spends as much time here as he can spare?”
“He usually comes quite often in the summer. But when he left this morning, he said he should be particularly busy for the next month or two and that we must not expect him.”
“He is gone already? I had thought he meant to stay at least a day or two. And he will not be back this summer!”
The sun shone as bright as ever through the wide windows, but to Gabrielle the day seemed suddenly grey.
Chapter 15
Gerard was not seen again until five minutes before dinner, when he burst into the Dower House’s resplendent drawing room with muddy breeches and a rip in his jacket.
“Rolf Everett is a very good fellow,” he announced. “I bagged five rabbits.”
“Go and change at once!” ordered his sister firmly. “That is no way to appear before madame, and dinner will be ready any minute.”
“Good! We had no luncheon and I am starving. All right, all night, I’m going! Don’t wait for me.”
“We shan’t,” Gabrielle assured his departing back.
Ten minutes later he appeared in the dining room, reasonably clean and tidy, though a London dandy would have stared at his neckcloth. He helped himself to a large slice of pigeon pie, surrounded it with well-buttered potatoes, permitted Gabrielle to add a few mushroom fritters, and set to.
“We are invited to dine at the Great House the day after tomorrow,” said Lady Harrison.
“Mph.”
“Lady Cecilia kindly sent me home in a gig.”
“Mph.”
“She says we may borrow any carriage we wish whenever it is not in use.”
“Mph.”
“You are a great conversationalist,” said his sister. “It may interest you to know that I walked home, with Dorothea, and that we are on first-name terms.”
“Dashed unnecessary fuss you females make about such things.” Gerard took another mouthful, disposed of it, and added, “Have you had some of this pie? Best crust I ever tasted. Rolf and I are going riding early tomorrow. He says he is certain his father can have no objection if I borrow a hack. So I shall not have to ask Lord Everett after all.”
“You must still ask his permission, when we go to dine. No, do not rip up at me! I did not say you may not ride tomorrow. I am heartily glad that you and Rolf are become friends so quickly, and I do not mean to meddle, I assure you.”
“Good,” said Gerard, and reached for a bowl of cherries.
He was disgusted, two days later, to discover that he was expected to don knee-breeches for dinner at the Great House.
“What is the use of living in the country,” he complained bitterly, “if you have to dress as though you were in town?”
Gabrielle had no patience with him.
“Don’t be a clunch,” she said. “If Rolf says knee breeches are customary, then you will wear them. Do you want to seem an underbred hayseed? Be thankful that at least you can get into them with ease.”
A piercing groan from Lady Harrison’s chamber lent meaning to her words. However, when her ladyship appeared, she announced with pride that Marie thought she had already lost an inch or two. Gerard rose to the occasion.
“If I am to escort two such beautiful ladies,” he said, “then I do not mind so much that I have to wear knee breeches.”
The Everetts sent a carriage to fetch them, a propitious beginning to a thoroughly enjoyable evening. Gabrielle was disconcerted to note that Lord Everett again kept glancing at her with a puzzled look, but she was soon won over by his charm and kindness.
Without the least condescension, he satisfied her curiosity about the multifarious crops growing on the Wrotham lands, and even offered to show her about the estate and the farms if she should like it. Whatever persuasion it had taken to force him to retire to the country, it was plain that he now took great pride in his once-neglected land.
By the time the ladies retired from the table, Gabrielle was perfectly able to understand why Lady Cecilia had chosen to wed a gentleman so many years her senior.
When the schoolroom party joined them in the drawing room later, she was pleased to note that his lordship extended his polite consideration to the governess. Since she might one day have to seek such a situation for herself, it was good to know that such employers could be found. Lord Everett also showed himself to be a benign, even indulgent, parent. It was Lady Cecilia who hushed the children when the game of lottery tickets grew noisy, and she who sent them up to bed before the tea tray was carried in.
All in all, thought Gabrielle sleepily, lying in bed and gazing out of the open window at the moonlit park, it had been the most delightful evening she had ever spent. Only one thing had made it less than perfect: Luke’s absence.
And Papa’s, she added guiltily.
At that very moment, Lord Everett was entering his wife’s dressing room, clad in a dragon-embroidered dressing gown of Chinese silk. He dismissed her maid, kissed the back of her neck, and sat down in the comfortable wing chair which was set there for just that purpose.
“You don’t need that,” he said indulgently, watching her splash her face with Distilled Water of Green Pineapples. “You have the best complexion I’ve ever seen. Tell me, where did Luke come by the Darcys?”
“Do you like them?”
“Yes. They made a good first impression when I met them in London, and they improve upon acquaintance. Especially the girl. But I should like to know who they are and what they are doing in my Dower House. And do not tell me that story about consulting Lady Harrison about redecorating the place. You have never shown the least inclination toward doing the place over before, and it has been in its present state these thirty years and more!”
“Lady Harrison does have exquisite taste.”
“Cut line, my lady!”
Lady Cecilia went to sit on the arm of his chair, and ran her fingers through his silver hair.
“I have hopes that Luke may marry the young lady,” she confessed.
“Ha, so that’s it! What makes you think that this one is any different from the dozens of eligible maidens you have cast in his way any time these ten years? He has not so much as risen to a one of them.”
“It’s true he has never taken the bait, but Miss Darcy is not of my choosing. He positively insisted that I presume upon an exceeding slight acquaintance with Lady Harrison in order to obtain an introduction to the Darcys. However, I cannot get it out of my head that he had met her before. Since she is but recently come from France, it may be that she is in some way connected with his work at the Foreign Office.”