Fleur could only turn from the bookshelf, which she could no longer pretend was still untidy.
“We will go there now,” he said. “I shall introduce you to my ancestors.”
She walked beside him in silence along the corridor, down the stairs, and through the great hall, past immobile footmen, except for the one who sprang forward at his nod, and through the doors into the long wing that was the gallery. It was flooded with afternoon sunlight.
“I love this room,” he said, pausing just beyond the doorway. “Even if there were not a single canvas here, I think I would love it.”
She followed his glance up to the ceiling with its intricately carved circles of plasterwork leaves and fruit.
“It is a good room to use during persistently rainy weather,” he said. “One can get at least some exercise promenading here. We used to spend hours in here as children, my brother and I. I believe there are still skipping ropes and spinning tops and games of spillikins and checkers in the lower cupboards. My wife and Nanny have always preferred to keep Pamela on the upper floor. Perhaps you will enjoy bringing her here occasionally.”
They walked to the far end of the gallery, and he spent the whole of the next hour describing the paintings, naming their painters, and giving her some history of each painted ancestor. He spoke with knowledge and pride and some humor.
“There is something,” he said, “some warmth, somesecurity, perhaps, in knowing that one is descended from such a line. There is something about being able to call oneself the eighth duke instead of the first. My nose was in existence even with the fourth duke, you see? So I certainly cannot blame my mother.”
But the fourth duke wore a long and curling wig.
His grace was looking at her. She could feel his eyes on her and she had to will herself through careful and steady breathing not to stiffen.
“What about your family?” he asked. “Does it have a long history?”
Her parents. Her grandparents, whom she had never known. A few old portraits at Heron House, whom no one seemed able to identify with any certainty. She had grown up with a sense of rootlessness, with a hunger for knowing. Surely, she had thought, if only Mama and Papa had realized how early they would leave her, they would have taught her young, told her something about themselves, about their childhood, about their own parents and grandparents. Or perhaps they had but she had been too young or too inattentive, not knowing that the time would come when she would be hungry for such knowledge.
“Where are you from?” he asked quietly. “Who was your father? Who are you?”
“Fleur Hamilton,” she said, wishing they would move on to the next portrait. But Hamilton had been her grandmother’s name, had it not? How did she know that? Someone must have told her once upon a time. “Your daughter’s governess, your grace.” And once your whore, of course.
“Did you have an unhappy childhood?” he asked, his eyes still on her. “Was your father unkind to you?”
“No!” Her eyes blazed at him for a moment. “I was very happy until they died when I was eight.”
“Your mother and father together?”
“Yes.” And she bit her lip. She had never been a good liar. Her father was supposed to have died in debt quite recently.
They moved on finally and he resumed his description of the portraits. She had scarcely noticed his own at the end of the line when she was with Mrs. Laycock. Perhaps the housekeeper had been talking of something else at the time.
Would she have known him even then, before his return, if she had looked closely enough? Would she have had prior warning? She looked closely now. A slim young man, very young, dressed in riding clothes, a riding crop in one hand, a spaniel at his side. A young and handsome and carefree man with proud, uplifted head and an unmarred face.
No, she would not have known.
For some reason that she could not begin to explain to herself, she felt like crying.
“My pre-Waterloo days,” he said. “When I thought the world my oyster with a priceless pearl within. I suppose we all believe that when we are very young. Did you?”
“No,” she said. And yet there had been Daniel and her love for him and his for her and the prospect of an endless future in which she would be wanted, in which she would feel needed. “Oh, perhaps once, a long time ago.” Was it only a few months? Not a lifetime ago?
“You had a late night and have had a busy afternoon,” he said abruptly. “You will want to return to your room to rest for a while.”
He opened the door and allowed her to precede him into the great hall. But they arrived there at the exact moment when the front doors were being opened to admit a large number of the guests returning from their walk.
Fleur would have stepped back into the gallery, but his grace was in the doorway directly behind her.
“Ah, Ridgeway,” the voice of Sir Philip Shaw said, “and the delectable Miss Hamilton.”
“Ridgeway, you dark horse,” a jovial, florid-faced gentlemansaid. “While the rest of us have been baking in the sun, you have been entertaining the governess indoors, where it is cool.”
“Sometimes,” Sir Hector Chesterton said, “I almost wish I had some daughters of my own.”
