“If I ever met my aunts and uncles and cousins on Papa’s side,” she said, “I do not remember. I do remember Papa telling me about them, though, and recounting stories of his childhood with his sisters. He used to make me laugh. But they lived far away in Cornwall and could not come here easily, he always used to say. Mama did not want to go there when Papa suggested it once. The sea air did not agree with her, and they lived close to the sea. I thought I would have liked to go, but it did not happen.”
Justin remembered that. Maria would have been five or six and was excited at the possibility of a holiday at the seaside. He would have liked to go too. He had been there a couple of times when his mother was still alive and had had great fun with his cousins, running barefoot on the beach, building sand forts, climbing rocks, bathing in the sea and being bowled over by incoming waves. Swallowing salt water and pulling gargoyle faces. He remembered his aunts and uncles and cousins coming to Everleigh too, but only once after his father’s remarriage, before Maria was born. His stepmother had complained afterward that her sisters-in-law had treated her condescendingly, as though she were a child of no account, and had not liked her.
“I have not met any of Mama’s family,” Maria continued, running a finger along the handle of her spoon but not picking it up again. “They were estranged from Mama. They were unkind to her.”
“That was unfortunate,” Justin said. “For them and forher. Most of all for you, perhaps. As a child you missed the pleasure of being part of a larger family.”
“Family is not of primary importance,” she said, frowning. “That is what Mama always said. I have friends, and they are preferable to family. One canchooseone’s friends.”
“I think Miss Vane might express a different opinion if she were here,” he said. “She was really very happy to be returning home to her family, was she not?”
“Perhaps,” she said, picking up her spoon and finishing her soup, though it must have been almost cold.
Justin wondered how many happy family memories she had of her childhood. Some of them might include him, though no doubt they had been clouded by her later hatred of him.
He had been ten when his mother died. Perhaps childhood recollections were not always strong on detail or accuracy, but theywereon atmosphere and emotion. He remembered their little family—his father and mother and him—as an idyllically happy unit. He remembered sometimes when he was very young running down from the nursery floor in his bare feet while his nurse snored in her own room next to his, and letting himself into his mother’s bedchamber and climbing onto the big, soft bed to burrow safely between her and his father—his father was always there even though he had a room that was nominally his own. If the door was locked, as it occasionally was, Justin would call out and rattle the knob until he heard the murmur of their voices within and sometimes laughter before his father, all flushed and disheveled, would open the door and call him a mighty pest and sweep him up in his arms and cover his face with kisses before tossing him onto the bed and following him there to cuddle both him and Justin’s mother in his arms.
Ah, the innocence of childhood and his puzzlement over that locked door. It was a memory that could bring him to the brink of tears.
Whythe devilhad his father married Maria’s mother?
“Lady Maple, your great-aunt, will be coming to spend a couple of weeks here too,” he told Maria. “She will be arriving three days from now if there are no unexpected delays.”
Lady Maple had married above her station years ago, having caught the eye of the notoriously lecherous Sir Cuthbert Maple. She had insisted upon marriage rather than the carte blanche he had offered. Or so the story went. It might be wildly inaccurate. She had been a wealthy widow ever since the demise of her husband a mere year or so later. She had sponsored her niece’s fabulously successful debut into society when that niece was a mere seventeen years old and extraordinarily lovely. She had married the widowed Earl of Brandon, Justin’s father.
Maria looked consideringly at him before nodding to a footman to remove her soup bowl. “She hated my mother and quarreled with her,” she said. “I do not want to meet her, Brandon. Ilovedmy mother.”
“I know,” he said. “She will be coming nevertheless, to meet you. It is why they are all coming. I thought it might be good for you to meet them. I thought it might give you the sense that your family consists of more people than just me. Any quarrels that have kept you apart from them were your mother’s. You have never had a chance to decide for yourself if you want any of them to be a part of your life.”
Maria did not argue with him. She waited for the next course to be served before she spoke again.
“You have given me no choice but to be polite to your guests, Brandon,” she said then. “Unlike Estelle andViscount Watley, these...personsdid not insist that I approve of their invitations before they accepted them. I daresay they cannot be blamed for that, however. It is possible they have assumed that I am as eager to make their acquaintance as they would appear to be to make mine. I will be civil. You need not worry that I will behave like a child having the sulks or throwing a tantrum. I will not, however, stand for any disrespect to the memory of Mama.”
“Then we are in agreement upon something,” he said. “Neither will I, Maria.”
***
“Well,” Bertrand said, breaking a lengthy silence during which both he and Estelle had dozed on and off in their opposite corners of the carriage seat. “It looks spectacular, at least.”
It did indeed. They had just turned off the main road and driven through high wrought iron gates between massive stone gateposts. Two young children, presumably the gatekeeper’s, had been standing side by side outside a solidly square stone lodge, watching them pass. Bertrand had raised a hand and waved to them. Now the carriage was beginning the gradual descent of a long slope and would soon be swallowed up by a band of trees. But before that happened they had a panoramic view of the magnificence of Everleigh Park—of which this hill and the trees and the valley below were a part.
A river flowed through the wide valley floor, spanned by a grand Palladian bridge, a three-arched stone bridge with a roofed structure held aloft by stone pillars, like a Greek temple, built over it. On the near side a footpath followed the course of the river, bordered by rock gardens and low shrubs and flowers, all of them clearly intended to give theimpression of profuse wildness. Beyond the bridge, elms and oak trees shaded cultivated lawns to either side of formal gardens, the parterres filled with flowers and herbs and edged with low box hedges. Graveled walking paths separated them and radiated outward from a central fountain. Over to the west there was a lake and what looked like a long waterfall cascading down the steep hill on the far side of the valley. To the east there was a large square maze near long rows of greenhouses. A two-story structure that appeared to be a summerhouse was half hidden among the trees on the slope above them.
And straight across, in line with the road they were on and just where the valley was giving way to the rise of wooded hills, stood a square gray-stone mansion of massive proportions. There were four wings of equal size. But where one might expect a hollow center and a courtyard, there was instead a great dome rising above the crenellated balustrade that edged the flat roof. Before the main entrance at the front, marble steps led up to a pillared stone portico, which somehow echoed the bridge. On either side of it long windows of diminishing size caught the sunlight on all three stories of the house.
To the right of the house the road they were now on continued up into the hills until it disappeared from sight.
“Oh goodness,” Estelle said. “Magnificentdoes not seem quite superlative enough, does it? It almost robs one of breath. If we must feel duty bound to spend two weeks away from home, Bert, I daresay we could do worse than spend them here.”
She was wishing even so that theywereat home, though that was undoubtedly selfish of her. Maria needed them at least for a while until she had settled back into the home she had not seen since she was little more than a child. And untilsomeone could be employed to replace Melanie Vane as her companion. It would not be easy for her with a brother she disliked and an imminent visit from relatives who were Lord Brandon’s rather than hers and who she feared would judge her harshly because they had hated her mother. Though he had invited other relatives too. Would they come?
She and Bertrand could help, Estelle thought. They were adept at socializing with all sorts of people. The key was to be civil, to listen, to be interested, to smile, to look happy. She did wish, however, that she did not have to direct those skills at the Earl of Brandon himself. She found him... disturbing, not least because he had shown a human side of himself when he had walked home with her from Prospect Hall and told her how he had loved Maria after she was born and during her early childhood. Estelle had not wanted to know that about him. It had contradicted everything she had felt about him until then. And everything she had heard of him from local gossip—which she claimed to despise.It had contradicted Maria’s intense dislike of him. But... he still loved his sister. It was hard to deny that. He had gone in person to bring her home from Prospect Hall,not, Estelle had been forced to admit to herself, because he coveted the role of stern guardian, but because he cared about her well-being and her prospects for the future. Sometimes one’s prejudices and preconceptions were more enjoyable to cling to than inconvenient facts that pointed in a different direction.
What a horrible admission to have to make to herself. It made her dislike him even more and feel even more reluctant to be a guest at Everleigh Park. Oh, shewishedthey had not felt compelled to come.
“We will stayonlytwo weeks,” Bertrand said. “We will be quite firm about that, Stell, won’t we? Oh, I say. This is quite a contrast. How clever.”
The branches of huge ancient trees had closed in a canopy overhead, and the rays of sunlight that found their way through made a magical collage of light and shade over the drive and tree trunks on either side. But...clever? As though the trees had been grown for this specific purpose.
