“Thank you.” Pip smiled. “Didyouknow about Aunt Eleanor’s…er, research activities?”
The duchess’s smile was delighted. “How do you think she wrote those wonderful gothic romances about smugglers?”
Pip laughed. “That is what I thought.”
Reaching the front portico, Pip stepped back and gave the duchess one last kiss on her cheek. “You have been so good to me,” she said, her voice perilously close to breaking.
The duchess cupped her cheek. “It was an easy thing to do, Pip. Now step into your new life.”
Pip almost told her. Shealmostconfessed the devil’s bargain she had made. But in the end, that was between Beau and her, no one else. So, with one more hug for the duchess, Lizzie, and the girls, she climbed up into the coach to leave the closest thing she had ever had to a home. The duchess was right, though. It was time to step into her new world.
She just wished her new world didn’t have to begin at Delamere.
15
It didn’t occur to Pip until they were halfway to Delamere that Beau had never told her exactly what to tell his Aunt and Uncle Drummond. Perhaps she was being overly suspicious, but she wasn’t sure she trusted the couple who had come into Delamere and replaced the comfortable décor Beau’s parents and grandparents had preferred, plump jade green couches and chairs little boys could curl up in, long galleries made for footraces, libraries for reading rather than ostentation. Instead, the last time Pip had been inside, it had been to find gilt lion’s feet on the table legs, Pharoahs on the wallpaper, and sterile square gilt and velvet furniture set at such a distance that one could barely hear the other people in the room much less easily converse with them. Sterile and uncomfortable, all of it.
Delamere had always seemed to her to have a friendly face, with soft golden stone and rows of windows and gables and chimneys arranged in no particular order. Hallways lifted and fell with the additions of from various generations, and the nursery had been blessed with the kind of windows from which you could see the world. Well-worn rugs on hardwood floors, children’s art on the walls alongside masters like Canaletto and Reynolds, banisters worn by little boys sliding down them.
The children’s art was gone now along with the fat pillows on the sofas and the comfort of footstools. But Beau’s aunt and uncle remained. Once this business with assassins was done with, Pip decided, she would do what a gentleman like Beau wouldn’t. She would see the Drummonds to the door and their furniture with them. And then she would hunt the attics for the old sofas.
At least she would gain that from marrying Beau, even if he never talked to her again. Delamere itself. The coach turned into the Delamere drive just as the setting sun lit rows of mullioned windows with scarlet and gold. She could reclaim Beau’s home for him. She would make an actual home for herself.
“I always forget how pretty this place is,” Joyful said, looking out the coach window. “Much nicer than your grandma’s.”
Her grandmother’s estate had come down her mother’s line, a square, precise, grim-natured kind of place her grandmother had survived rather than enjoyed. It had been the land she had loved, not the house that crouched on it. Pip felt the same way.
“It will be even prettier when we get through with it,” Pip promised.
Sullins, Beau’s valet, didn’t say anything, only nodded.
Pip knew that Beau’s aunt and uncle couldn’t have reached Delamere much before she did, but when the coach pulled up to the front, there was no one to meet it. Billings, who had insisted on accompanying them as guard, let the steps down and assisted Pip out. The house and grounds looked tidy. But something felt wrong. Soulless, perhaps. Empty, even with the precisely sculpted evergreens that marched across the front façade like riflemen keeping watch at the windows.
She would change that, too, she decided, shaking the wrinkles from her emerald circassian travelling suit. She would introduce a bit of whimsy, some disorder and surprise and color to exorcise the control of the couple who had tried to strip Beau of his joy and Theo of his dreams.
“Should I knock?” Billings asked, helping Joyful down.
“You should not,” Pip declared and climbed the few stairs to the great carved wooden door that had been there since Elizabeth had stopped by for a visit.
Without announcing her arrival, Pip pushed the door open onto the entryway and looked around. At least Aunt Maude hadn’t been able to rid the entryway of its black and white marble floor or the warm wood paneling and great staircase that swept up from the left of the entryway. Pip wrinkled her nose at the Egyptian entry table holding something that looked like a gold cat statue and the chair against the wall that had lion heads on the arms.
“That’s awful,” Joyful whispered behind her.
“Awful is a good word for it.”
She was about to head off in search of staff when a very starchy young man with ruthlessly groomed blond hair and precise black and white attire stepped into the entry and faced her, one eyebrow raised. Pip waited for him to speak.
“May I help you?” he finally asked, sounding affronted.
“Where is Gibbs?” she asked of Beau’s old butler.
“Why should you want to know?”
She raised her own eyebrow. Suddenly her elevation in rank became real to her. “Because I am the new Lady Drummond, and the staff is now my concern. Do you have questions?”
She almost felt sorry for the young man, who visibly paled as he dropped a belated bow. “My lady, we had no notice of your arrival. Gibbs is pensioned, milady. I am Foster.” He waved an arm toward the interior. “Please, please come in. May I tell Mr. and Mrs. Drummond you are here?”
Pip untied her bonnet and pulled it off. “No need. Just tell me where they are.”
