“Yes,” he said.
It had indeed been an inspired idea to build the summerhouse to face this way. There was an impression of rural peace here. One could be happy here for days at a time, Estelle thought. She no longer wondered that the earl chose to spend time here despite the fact that he lived in that vast and magnificent mansion out of sight behind them.
“I started to spend a lot of time here after my mother’s death,” he told her.
“How old were you?” she asked.
“Ten,” he said. “One week shy of my eleventh birthday, actually. She was a superb horsewoman, but she had a fall that day and hit her head. She lived for another five days, but she never regained consciousness. The light went out of my life with her.”
Estelle felt her stomach muscles clench, for that one sentence spoke volumes. She carried the pain of never having consciously known her own mother. He had the pain of having known his for more than ten years. Which was worse? Or were there no degrees of pain in the loss of a mother? She wondered if the light had ever come back for him, and what it would say about him if it had not. She had worked out his age to be thirty-four. His mother had died twenty-four years ago, then. About the same time ashermother. Both by accident, the result of a fall.
“Come and see the upstairs,” he said, and his dog scrambled eagerly up ahead of them, though he had to wait on the top stair. There was a door, which the earl had to unlock with a key he drew from his pocket.
It was also one room. This one had two large windows, though not as large as the ones below. There was a big desk against the wall between them and reaching halfway across each. It was strewn rather untidily with paper and pencils and quill pens and an ink bottle. There were bookshelves here too, all of them filled, and two easy chairs and a bed pushed against the back wall, covered with a fawn-colored quilt and bright cushions and books. There was a book on the seat of one of the chairs too. Both sides of the ceiling sloped with the shape of the roof.
It was not a tidy space, but there was something very cozy about it. It looked lived in. Estelle wondered if he had ever spent a night in that bed. As a boy, perhaps, mourning his mother, wondering if his life would ever be the same again—and knowing at heart that it would not be.
“This was always just a storage space,” he told her. “I asked my father if I could clear it out, and he raised no objection. One of the grooms and a couple of gardeners helped me move the junk out and the furniture in, and it became my retreat. No one has ever been here but me. And Maria a few times when she was a child.”
And now her, Estelle thought. What was she to make of that?
She approached the desk and all the papers spread across it. “Do you write?” she asked.
“I do,” he said. He was standing in the middle of the room, where the ceiling was high enough to accommodate his height, his hands behind him, looking at her with a slight frown between his brows.
“What do you write?” she asked him. “Or is that an unpardonably intrusive question?”
“Hardly,” he said, “or I would not have brought you up here. I am trying my hand at a novel. If it can be called that. I am beginning to realize that a novel must have some...shape, some point, some meaning, something to bind beginning, middle, and end together in a unified whole. I do not even know the word to describe what I mean, if there is such a word. But whatever it is, I suspect my book may lack it. It is the picaresque story of a young man’s adventures as he travels about the country without any idea of where exactly he is going or why he is going there or what he will do when he gets there or how he will survive when he has no money in his pockets or friends upon whom to lean.”
The words were out of her mouth before she could stop them. “It is autobiographical, then?” she asked. She could feel her cheeks turn hot as his stillness seemed to intensify. She knew nothing about the years before his father’s death, though the gossips had made much of them even as far away as Elm Court. But even if she had known anything... Oh, her wretched mouth.
“I suppose,” he said after an uncomfortable pause, “I can identify with my main character sufficiently to make him convincing, Lady Estelle. But he is not me. He is far more heroic.Accidentallyheroic, I ought to add. He stumbles into adventures and challenges and dangers and often makes matters worse with his clumsy attempts to deal with them and help people who neither need nor wish for his help. Despite himself and against all odds, however, he invariably wins the day and comes out on top before moving on.”
She felt herself smiling. “He is a bit of a comic hero, then?” she asked. “A bit of a Don Quixote?”
He was still frowning. “Quite by accident,” he said. “Iwanted him to be a serious adventurer, someone who would vanquish all the demons at loose in the world and teach the reader a thing or two about courage and virtue and the truly important things in life. Someone epically heroic. But I have made a disturbing discovery about writing. My characters, especially my hero, are of course my creations. They have no existence outside my imagination. Yet no one seems to have toldthemthat. They will insist upon living their lives their way no matter how often I tap them on the shoulder with a timid sort of‘Excuse me?’They simply stare at me before continuing to carry on as they please.”
She smiled as she tipped her head to one side. Oh,thiswas a revelation. “Unlike Captain, who is obedient to your every command,” she said.
The dog, hearing his name as he lay in a very temporary shaft of sunlight from one of the windows, opened his eyes, thumped his tail twice on the floor, and returned to his somnolent state.
“Well,” the earl said. “Captain is not a figment of my imagination. I really believe the imagination is not even in the brain, you know, but is something far larger and more powerful that the brain has access to when one quiets the mind sufficiently to relinquish control. And if you believe this is the rambling of a madman, I would not necessarily disagree with you.”
He went abruptly to look out through the other window.
“Why did you bring me here, Lord Brandon?” Estelle asked.
“To Everleigh?” He turned his face toward her.
“Here,” she said. “To the summerhouse. You brought me toEverleighto keep Maria company. I was in her company when I left the house this morning. We were going to the lake together. Why did you ask me to come here instead?”
“When I stepped outside myself,” he said, “you looked like more of an observer of the lake party than a participant in it. And Maria had plenty of other company. It occurred to me that you might like the summerhouse.”
“I do,” she said. But she was feeling very uncomfortable. Why had he singled her out and asked no one else? And whyhere, to the upstairs, which he had admitted was very much his private domain? It even had a door that locked, though it was open now. And why, for that matter, had she agreed to come here with him when she had had a perfect excuse not to do so? No, it was not even anexcuse.She had had areason.She had been a part of that other group, and she had really wanted to see the lake and the bridge and waterfall.
“You would have come here eventually, of course,” the earl said. “Everyone will. We will arrange to have tea out here a time or two, preferably when the weather is at its best. I will enjoy being here with all my guests. Downstairs. I thought you might like to see this quiet retreat, however.”
Her and no one else?
