“You do not need to be playing charades in the drawing room in order to become involved in high drama here,” Justin said. “I do beg your pardon for dragging you into it. It wasnotwhat you bargained for when you agreed to come here.”
“Sometimes,” she said, “days and even weeks go by and one has no memory afterward of what one did during them. And then there are days like today. You do not need to apologize. You could not have predicted any of this.”
“I must lack something of imagination,” he said. “I hoped that gathering our families would draw Maria into the fold and help her feel less alone in the world now that both our father and her mother are gone. I ought to have guessed that if that was to happen there would need to be a few confrontations or at least a bit of plain speaking and truth telling.”
“A writer admitting to a lack of imagination?” she said. “Your poor hero. Will he ever slay his final dragon? Will he ever find his way back home?”
“I really and truly do not know,” he said, wondering if she was asking about him or just his silly hero. “Do you want to return to the drawing room immediately? Or will you come and stroll in the gallery with me?”
She gazed at him for what felt like a long time. He had almost decided to walk away so that she would not have to reject him openly.
“The gallery,” she said. “I am not ready yet for more socializing.”
Sixteen
Justin was not sure he was ready to be alone with her again. He had given her due warning earlier—was it really just today, just a few hours ago?—that next week he would be asking her again to marry him. He had warned her that in the meanwhile he would be trying to change her answer from the no she had given in the summerhouse to the yes he hoped for in the end. But was he ready—was she?—for them to be alone together again today after their encounter down by the lake? And after everything that had happened since then?
He had rarely felt more out of control of his life. Which was saying something when he considered all he had lived through during the past twelve years.
They walked side by side and in silence to the north wing and the long gallery. He lit a taper from the wall sconce outside its doors and walked the whole length of the gallery and back, lighting all the candles in their sconceswhile Lady Estelle waited quietly just inside the door. Justin was very aware of the hollow sound of his heels on the wood floor, of the gradual lifting of the darkness, of their aloneness here. He blew out the taper and set it down on a brass tray on the bureau inside the door.
“I did not come here when Lady Crowther brought a group a few days ago,” she said. “It is quite breathtaking, even at night.”
“It stretches the full length of all the state apartments below us,” he said. “But with no intervening walls. I used to love coming here with my cousins—Ernie and Sid and Doris. Rosie had not yet been thought of in those days. And, less often, with the cousins from Cornwall—Bevin and Miriam, Angela and Frederick. Paulette came later. There was never anyone up here to tell us to slow down or be quiet, except when the occasional parent or nurse poked a head in to make sure we were all alive with no broken arms or bloody noses. My parents were of the firm belief that children ought to be allowed to be children, and there was nothing much here with which we could harm ourselves. Interestingly, they never seemed worried that we might damage the paintings. Even more interestingly, it never occurred to any of us to draw mustaches or horns or freckles on any of the ancestors.”
“This is not the best time to look at the paintings, is it?” she said. “I must come back when there is daylight. Is there a portrait of you? And of your father? And your mother?”
“Yes,” he said. “Close to this end. They are hung in chronological order, starting at the far end.”
He showed her first the painting of his grandparents with his father and his aunts. His father, aged about eighteen at the time, slender and smiling, stood at his seatedfather’s shoulder. Aunt Augusta, aged about twelve, stood gracefully beside her mother’s chair. Aunt Felicity, about six, stood on her mother’s other side, her elbows on her mother’s lap, her chin in her hands.
“My grandmother once explained to me the rather wide gap in their ages,” he explained. “The other children—four of them—did not survive infancy. Or even birth, in one of those cases.”
“Ah,” Lady Estelle said. “Life is sometimes cruel. But it is a charming painting.”
He led her to the next portrait, a solo one of himself, painted when he was nine years old. He was standing beside his pony, one arm draped over its neck, the other hand holding a riding crop like a cane, propped on the ground. His booted feet were crossed nonchalantly at the ankle. A child pretending to be a man, like his father.
“My mother had the painting hung in her bedchamber,” he said. “She said the moment she saw it that it was her favorite painting ever. Not that she was biased in any way.” It had been moved here to the gallery before his father’s second marriage.
“Oh,” Lady Estelle said. It was all she said for a while. But she stood directly in front of the painting and stayed there for some time.
And then the portrait of the three of them: his father seated on a chair with gilded back and curved gilded arms; his mother on a low stool beside him, her arm, bent at the elbow, resting across his lap; he, Justin, standing behind her, one hand on his father’s shoulder. All of them were smiling, which was unusual for a family portrait.
“I was ten,” he said.
She looked at the painting, and then turned her head to look at him. “Ten?”
“The painter delivered the finished portrait two weeks after my mother’s funeral,” he said.
His father had wept—for the first time since her death.
He could not see Lady Estelle’s face clearly. One of the candles was in his direct line of vision, behind her head. But he was aware of her eyes brightening—with tears?—before she dipped her head and brought her forehead against his chest.
“Oh, it is awful,awful,” she said, “to lose one’s mother. It is not right. It is notfair.I do not even have a portrait of mine. Or any conscious memory. But it hurts. It hurts more thananything.She was nothing like Aunt Jane. Both my aunt herself and my father have told me that. And she was nothing like my stepmother. She was nothing likeanyone.No one ever is. Everyone is unique. I never knew the unique person who was my mother. You did know yours. You have a portrait. You have memories. But it does not matter, does it? You lost her far too soon. You felt the immediate pain of her death, which must have been unbearable. I did not feel that with my mother because I wastoo young.And people assume that therefore there has been no pain at all, for either me or Bertrand. How can there be? We are twenty-five, and she died twenty-four years ago. Oh, I am sorry.”
She tried to raise her head, but he wrapped his arms about her and drew her close. Not tightly. She could have drawn free if she had wished. He heard her inhale deeply and exhale with a puff as she relaxed against him. He rested his chin on the top of her head.
“I do not spend my days moping and mourning for my mother, you know,” she said.
