“Oh!”
There, past the sweep of the park, lay the house. The only reason she knew to call it a house and not a castle or palace was that the earl had called it a house.
She nearly pressed her nose against the window because this was like no house she had ever seen, even Sutton Hall. It was an enormous mass of gray stone, covered with windows that reflected the afternoon sun and festooned with spires and numerous towers with rounded tops.
Itwasmore intimidating than its owner.
“Elizabethan,” that owner was now saying. “Designed after the privy lodgings at Hampton Court.”
Now it was far too soon for the carriage to stop, but it did.
“What am I?” she asked frantically. “Please, what am I? What are you going to tell people?”
“You are Miss Susannah Beasley,” he said simply. “And you are my guest.”
I am Miss Susannah Beasley, and I am the earl’s guest.
He exited the carriage and handed her down. What followed then was a flurry of servants coming out to greet his lordship and unload the baggage from the carriage, including Susannah’s humble sack, and the earl was saying her name, and she was trying to smile at everyone, and then she was going through the immense doors and into a vast echoing hall lined with marble statuary and richly colored paintings the size of the village green.
“Here we are,” the earl said, and she realized he’d been holding her elbow the whole time. “There’ll be time to see the entire house at a later date, Miss Beasley, and I thought we’d sit in this drawing room while your room is made ready.”
She nodded, still struck dumb by her surroundings. He guided her to a sofa covered in red and gold damask and indicated she should sit. She sat.
“Mrs. Rumney likes things a certain way and is quite cross with me for not warning her there would be a guest. Tea,” he said to someone and then sat himself. “Mina is apparently having her afternoon nap.”
The wordnapcomforted Susannah more than anythingelse likely could have, although she had very much liked the idea of a woman somewhere in this house daring to be cross with the earl.
But anap. A nap was a common and ordinary thing. Every child, from princesses to paupers, took naps. Except her brothers.
She half laughed. “Little girls take naps.”
“Your brothers didn’t?”
She thrilled to his question mark.
“My brothers weren’t happy unless they were running riot from dawn to dusk and beyond. If they’d taken naps, I would have never gotten them to go to sleep at night.”
“Not even with the promise of a Tommy Treadwell story?”
“Tommy might get them to lie in their beds to listen, but as soon as I left, a rumpus would break out unless they had all fallen asleep. You may have noticed some of Tommy’s stories are long and far more complicated than most children’s stories. I had to keep inventing things until ten eyes closed.”
“Five boys in one room.”
There was a note of wonder in his voice, and she could see how the idea of having no rooms to spare must be very strange to him, a man who had been raised in this magnificent place.
“Mother needed her own bedchamber because she was sick. And Father needed his room. So all the boys had to be together in one.”
“And you had your own room.”
She felt her face get hot. “No. Not for a long time.”
“Where did you sleep?”
Now she wished the questions would stop.
“I made up a bed on the floor of my mother’s bedchamber. Then I could tend her in the middle of the night if she needed me. But when she died . . .”
“You got her room.”
