When they reached the adjoining master bedrooms, they stood in the one meant for the lady of the manor. Here, Henrietta felt the significance of her new position. The room was outfitted in a light blue and gold theme. On the side of the room opposite the bed, a small sitting area was staged with furniture in the more ornate style of thirty years ago—although it was still tasteful and pretty. Along another wall stood a beautiful vanity. When she went to study the vanity, she noticed a miniature and leaned closer. She recognized the man immediately as Trem as he was now and yet the portrait itself looked like it could be thirty years old.
“Is this you?” she asked, confused as to the jarring contrast.
“My father,” Trem said, clearing his throat.
“Oh,” she said, not wanting to touch on a subject that may make both steward and lord uncomfortable.
“They look just alike,” Mr. Foxcroft broke in. “One day, years ago, when his lordship had just come home from Eton, at that age when boys turn into men, I met him in the hall. It had been six months since I’d seen him. When he turned towards me, I felt the breath leave me. I swore it was his father come back from the dead.”
“I never knew you looked so similar to your father,” Henrietta said, somehow disturbed that she could not know something that felt so fundamental.
Trem smiled wryly. “Yes, I have had more than one older fellow come up to me over the years in London and swear that I hadn’t aged a day. I, of course, would then have to remind them that my father died years ago—and that I never knew him.”
“How awful.” Henrietta struggled to reconcile such eeriness with Trem’s habitual cheerfulness. Perhaps, she thought, experiences like that one explained the air of melancholy that had always hung around him, despite his good humor.
“Yes,” Trem said. “And rather comic.”
She rolled her eyes. As usual, he refused any sentiment regarding his parents and their deaths. It was strange how, in this one way, he was resolute upon being incurious and hardened.
“You knew her lordship and her ladyship?” Henrietta turned to Mr. Foxcroft. She couldn’t help it. She knew she shouldn’t pry—but she was so interested to know more of his parents.
“Aye,” Mr. Foxcroft said, “I worked for his lordship for five years before his death. Her ladyship was one of the kindest ladies that I have ever had the honor of knowing. I’ve never had the heart to alter this room. It is still in the same style that she had it in. Now that we will have a new viscountess, we finally have a good reason to change it.”
“No, I couldn’t.” Henrietta hated the idea of unsettling the choices of a woman who had clearly decorated the room with love—and who had died so soon after doing so.
“It can’t be a mausoleum, Henrietta,” Trem broke in. “And it means nothing to me. I don’t remember her in it.”
“How could it mean nothing to you?”
“Not nothing—but not what it would mean otherwise.”
Henrietta looked around the room. It was true that certain items were faded.
“Perhaps a few updates.” She turned to him. “I wish I knew what she had been like. So I could make changes that she would have enjoyed herself.”
Trem took her hand, the look in his eyes somewhere between tender and blazing. Then, he turned to the steward.
“Tell her, Mr. Foxcroft,” he said. “What my parents were like.”
Henrietta nearly protested—how could Mr. Foxcroft possibly answer a question on the spot like that?
But, to her surprise, Mr. Foxcroft did not even pause.
“His lordship was a good man,” he began, in a slow, particular manner that Henrietta did not understand. “He grew up at the manor as the only child of his parents. He then went to Eton and next to Oxford. He enjoyed riding horses, visiting his tenants, and had a distaste for London. He met her ladyship at a country house party. She was beautiful and kind. She was the only daughter of a country vicar and many said it was a good marriage for her—but those who did say such things hadn’t seen her fine eyes. She also liked horses and visiting tenants. Together, they were happy, although sometimes they quarreled about his lordship having an extra glass of port in the evenings—”
“—or who got the last slice of Mrs. Harold’s special spice cake before bedtime,” Trem took over, as if reciting the words from a school primer. “They had a son, a happy boy, who they doted upon and spoilt terribly. He was allowed sugar plums when he was only a year old. His lordship used to put him on his shoulders and ride with him down the hallways—”
“—and her ladyship,” Mr. Foxcroft interrupted, picking up the narrative with solemnity, “would tell him stories so that he could fall asleep. His lordship and her ladyship aren’t here now. We can’t understand the ways of God. But they will always be at Tremberley Manor and with their son, whom they loved very much.”
Henrietta’s throat clogged with emotion, even though she knew she didn’t fully understand the nature of this strange recital. Her vision clouded with tears.
“You see, my love,” Trem said, his face soft and a little embarrassed, “Mr. Foxcroft has much practice describing my parents.”
“His lordship used to ask me as a boy what his parents were like,” Mr. Foxcroft said, with a shrug, but Henrietta could tell it was anything but casual to him. “He asked me so much that I realized I needed to find an answer. I told him what I knew—and what others said. Eventually, he found a version of my answer that he liked so much that he had me repeat it over and over to him. If I tried to vary it or add new details, he would get very cross with me. By the time he went to Eton, we both had memorized it.”
“Even still,” Trem said. “You wrote it down for me before I went to school.”
“You were afraid you would forget,” Mr. Foxcroft said, his voice catching. Abruptly, he turned to examine a tapestry on the wall.
