‘I suppose it must be his mother,’ Allegra mused, ignoring them with the ease of long practice. ‘He’s hardly likely to ask anyone else but a close relative to act as hostess. Unless he has a sister and has requested her help? That could be.’
‘In either case,’ Leontina responded, unruffled, ‘we will see inside his home, which we have not previously been able to do, and we will meet at least one of his female relations.’
Cecilia had obviously been reading the wrong sort of novels in her free time, with far greater attention than she paid to her textbooks. ‘He might have a sister or a mother as hostess, but keep his secret, shameful wife locked away in a room. Or maybe she’s dead, but still locked in a room, and he goes to visit her coffin,’ she persisted. ‘At night, naturally, when the house is quiet. Wrapped in a dark robe, hooded, and carrying a shaded lantern.’ She shivered at the deliciously sinister, if rather improbable, picture she had conjured up.
‘I honestly don’t think he’s the type,’ Allegra replied, trying to suppress a smile. ‘You haven’t met him. He’s very… tasteful. He’s not at all the sort of gentleman who’d have a hidden wife, living ordead. I’m sure he’d think it terribly bad ton.’ She could not help but recall what Mr Severin had said about men and their hidden lives. Despite his perfect facade, Milton could have fifty mistresses for all she knew, and a dozen natural children.
‘If you had said such a ridiculously Gothic thing of Mr Severin, though,’ Leontina added absently, still studying the invitation as though it held more information that it had not yet given up, ‘I might almost have believed you, Cicietta.’
Allegra was obliged to bite her lip in frustration, as her mother’s uncharacteristically careless remark could not fail to intrigue her younger sisters, who immediately clamoured for more details of this apparently fascinating and sinister gentleman. But she too was undeniably interested to see what Mama would think of to discourage them. She must undoubtedly wish to, unless she desired to hear his name on their lips twenty times a day, and find them before long devising schemes to insinuate themselves into his company. A gentleman who might be suspected of keeping coffins in his London house – occupied coffins – was just exactly to their taste, so they would not easily be put off. Leontina could not, after all, unless she was prepared to lie and risk contradiction from Allegra herself, say that he was ugly, or poor, or ineligible for any other reason than his bad reputation. And this was hardly likely to scare them away, girls being what they were – rather the reverse. If she were foolish enough to mention his mysterious and possibly foreign origins, they could all say goodbye to any peace in the house till the Season was over.
But she had underestimated her mother. ‘He is quite an elderly, unpleasantly rude sort of gentleman,’ she said lightly, ‘who for some reason has decided that he enjoys making mock of your sister, though she is barely acquainted with him. Is that not so, Allegra, dear?’
Beatrice might easily have decided to declare that thismockery was perfectly understandable, but with the flightiness of youth she chose to leap to her older sister’s defence for once. ‘How very disagreeable!’ she cried with some heat. ‘Poor Allie, I am sorry for you. Is he one of those old gentlemen who pinches your chin – if not worse – and says how big you are grown, in such an odious, oily voice that you want to kick him? Like Cousin Nigel?’
‘He is nothing like Cousin Nigel,’ Allegra said before she could stop herself. ‘And he isn’t old at all, you must admit, Mama – he can’t even be thirty, I shouldn’t think. If he is old, what then is Lord Milton?’
‘Well, thirtyisexcessively old,’ Beatrice rejoined. ‘I think Cicietta’s right; you should kick him. Hard. Probably since he’s so ancient that wouldkillhim, which I am sure is no more than he deserves, the nasty old man.’
This was getting rapidly out of hand, Allegra felt. ‘He doesn’t pinch my chin, or anything else.’ This was, so far, true, though there was no guarantee it would continue to be so. ‘I’ve barely exchanged two words with him.’ This was a lie, and she uttered it brazenly.
‘And he’s hardly likely to comment on how big you’ve grown, Allie,’ little Bianca, who had been so quiet that everyone had forgotten she was present, put in rather neatly. ‘Since you haven’t. I shall be taller than you soon, I daresay. And everyone else already is. You are practicallystunted,Iam sorry to say.’ She didn’t sound sorry in the least, and Allegra gasped in mock outrage, while her other sisters clapped and cheered and made a great deal of noise.
This egregious insult clearly could not be allowed to go unchallenged, and Bianca must be advanced upon in a menacing way and ruthlessly tickled till she shrieked with laughter and, at last, apologised and begged for mercy. Leontina watched all thismayhem with superb indifference. Allegra could only hope that the chaos, though it was not unusual for the Constantine home, might make her mother forget her own inappropriately heated remark, which could just possibly have revealed, if anyone had been paying close attention, a far greater interest in the mysterious Mr Severin than she had any wish to betray.
15
Maximilian sat in his comfortable, well-appointed study and looked about him, frowning unconsciously. Most people, he was well aware, would say that he had small cause to be discontented with life. He had no debts, and few obligations. He was almost six and twenty years old and strong as an ox; his health was good, almost as good as his credit. Here he was, a dozen well-trained servants at his beck and call, dressed in a fine silk banyan, sipping smuggled French brandy in a house he owned, though he had another larger one too, in Kent, and another, even grander library there. So many leather-bound and gilded books, so much wisdom, and none of it, in the present moment, of any particular use to him. He was suffering from an all too familiar sensation of inner dizziness and disorientation – it was a mental rather than a physical affliction – and he knew from long experience that all his precious volumes could not help him combat it. Nothing external could.
Sometimes, not often, he experienced this odd sort of dislocation from his life, as though it were all happening to someone else and he was merely observing through a thick pane of glass.When this happened, he’d found all that made any sort of difference was to take honest stock of his position, or at least to try: his history and his current situation, if not his future, which was more uncertain than anyone in England could know.
In his daily life, he tried very hard not to dwell on the past and all its burdens, let alone anticipate what might be to come, but this ostrich-like attitude could only be sustained for so long before something in him rebelled and set his head whirling, just as if he’d recently disembarked from a long sea voyage and could not find his feet, a sensation with which he was familiar. He’d often wondered if others felt anything even remotely similar, or if this sense of not really belonging in the moment was unique to those who, like him, had undergone enormous changes in the course of their existences, and as a result could never feel completely secure, no matter how promising their material circumstances might appear to be.
He had friends, tolerably close ones like Tom and Gil. They were good fellows, but this wasn’t the sort of thing he could talk to them about, so he didn’t know what they might have to say. Because he simply could not share them, they didn’t know any of his secrets. His companions, met at Oxford, were most of them English, and that was the least examined part of his complicated inheritance. He did not dwell on that, either, more than he could help; he might suspect what manner of man his unknown father’s father must have been, the long-dead Englishman who counted other living, breathing human beings among his assets, but he did notknowand did not want to.
Probably real English people, who knew exactly who they were, back to the Saxons and the Danes and the Normans, never felt like this, or if they did, they banished the feeling in an instant, driving it away with beef, or ale, or their endless bloody tea. They were sosolid. He envied them that, sometimes; sometimes hewanted to punch them for their unrelenting, unreflecting smugness.
He, Maximilian Severin, once a nameless, shoeless Caribbean brat, was – he reminded himself for the thousandth time – a proper English gentleman of property now, with a fine house in London and a small but profitable estate and grand mansion in Kent. He had a great deal of money in the bank and in the Funds; he’d gone to a deeply unpleasant English public school, and then on to the ancient university, which he’d liked much better. He was, more or less, accepted in society, though he knew people whispered about him still, just out of his hearing.
His memories of Martinique were few, he’d been so small when he’d left. Flashes of bright colour, strong scents of food or fruit or flowers that could stop him in his tracks even now, blindsided by some elusive childhood moment that he could not see but onlyfeel. The strongest scent of all, hot sugar as it was worked, thick as a blanket, overpowering everything else – the smell of money and of death. And above everything else, the sound of the language – Matinik Creole – which he had learned from Celestine, the woman who had loved and raised him, but who was most emphatically not the mother who had birthed him.
In his bleakest moments, he sometimes thought that Celestine had kept him alive with so much devotion when actually it would have been much easier for everybody if she hadn’t. They surely hadn’t expected it.Shehadn’t, his real mama.
But he had survived and grown, as inconvenient and unwanted children sometimes did, and had been sent to England without warning, with his beloved nurse, when he was rising seven. He still didn’t know what had prompted this enormous upheaval in his young life, though in his more cynical moods as an adult he had conjectured that his unknown mother mighthave come back to Martinique for a visit with her new family, her two legitimate children, and made absolutely sure he wouldn’t be there to embarrass her when they arrived. He hoped that wasn’t true; he feared it might be.
His own first voyage was a nightmare blur of rain and heaving seas, shouting men and sickness, but even now he recalled finding himself at the end of it in Mr Severin’s big, dark house on the windswept English coast. The ground had still moved up and down under his feet most disagreeably, and he had clung tightly to Celestine’s skirts in the grand panelled hall and wondered dully what fresh horrible, inexplicable things would next happen to him.
Nothing had. The change in his life had been an enormous shock, but he still had Celestine, for a few more years till the influenza carried her off. He could still speak Creole in secret, with her and some of the other homesick Severin servants, and French in public, with them and with Madame Severin. They had all, apart from Celestine, largely lost their island lilt, and trained him – gently, patiently, but insistently – to follow their example and speak as one spoke in Paris. To speak like a gentleman. And he learned English, too, which he’d known just a few scraps of before.
Celestine had always told him, rocking him in her strong arms, that of course he had a mama who loved him and prayed for him every day, as he must for her, but she lived far, far away across the ocean, which was why they could not be together. This didn’t really make sense – one did not leave a much-loved child behind like so much unwanted luggage, as he had been left – but as a small boy he’d accepted it without question, and found comfort in it.
So when he’d arrived in Kent, which was far enough away from Martinique for anybody, he’d naturally made the excitedassumption that Mrs Severin was that mysterious lady, his long-lost mother, and had claimed him as her own at last. That must be why he was here! She was very kind, and embraced him warmly on first meeting him, exclaiming over how tall and strong and handsome he was; he remembered that still. But when he asked her, in the most elegant French a shy, confused six-year-old could manage, she’d smiled sadly and told him that no, he was mistaken, but his mama was a connection of hers, who had assigned him into her care.
‘Rose cannot… My oldest friend will always be your true mama, and you must never forget her, but I could be your mama in England, if you wish it,’ she had said wistfully. It seemed that like Celestine she had no other children to love. Even at not quite seven years old, he knew he should not say that he could not really be expected to remember a woman he had no recollection of ever meeting. Instead he had said yes, he would like that very much, Maman, and Madame Severin had cried over him and kissed him again. Partly his words had been true, and partly he’d said it because he could see this kind, sad lady expected it of him. But what he’d really been hugging to himself was this new secret and important knowledge:My real mama’snameisRose.
16
Allegra looked about her with concealed curiosity as she entered Lord Milton’s home with Mrs Constantine. It was a tall, narrow house on a gloomy street not far from Berkeley Square, and its interior was decorated with a great deal of sober English good taste, as she might have expected. Lord Milton – or his mother – had not indulged in the current mode for extravagant gilded furniture supported by mythical creatures, or any other decorative details of foreign origin. Nobody was ever going to confuse this elegant, restrained interior with the Prince of Wales’s Marine Pavilion at Brighton, or Empress Josephine’s Chateau Malmaison near Paris. Somebody’s favourite colour was obviously grey. So much grey, set off with chilly white marble.
