“Hmm?”
“You’re smiling, so I’d guess that you’re thinking back to happy times when you lived here before.”
“Oh… yes, they were happy times, just the three of us.”
“No brothers or sisters?”
“My mother was forty-two when she married — older than my father, so no, I was the only one, but I never felt the lack. I used to see the big families at church, the parents harassed, the younger ones unruly, always scrabbling for position. But here, all was calmness, and I always had my parents’ full attention. I was glad when Mr Godley came and we attended the services in the chapel, instead of going to the church. Do you think—?” Hestopped, reached for his spectacles, then forcibly willed his hand down again. “Shall you like living here, do you think?”
“I shall like it very much,” she said at once, with the wide smile that he was coming to love. “Why wouldn’t I? A home of our own, and the view is wonderful from up here. What else is on this floor?”
“The attics, some rooms where the maids sleep, a few smaller bedrooms for when there are too many guests to fit in on the main bedroom floor below us. But our bedrooms are above the chapel, which is two storeys high. We can get out onto the roof from here, too, which is lovely in hot weather.”
They wandered back to the little kitchen with its open fire. “I can cook on this, if ever we want to eat up here,” Georgie said.
“My mother used to do that, too. Sunday was always just us. Breakfast up here, as usual, then church or chapel, then dinner and a cold supper later. Mother would read a sermon or a passage from the Bible after dinner, but otherwise we could read whatever we wanted. My father would read the London newspapers, my mother wrote to her sisters or her friends. She used to be a housekeeper at one of the big houses in Brinchester, but every Wednesday, which was her half day off, she would go to the circulating library in Brinchester. When my father met her there once, he made a point of going every Wednesday, too. Mind you, it took him two years to persuade her to marry him.”
“Quite a romance,” Georgie said. “He must miss her dreadfully.”
“He never talks about it,” Jamie said. “I suppose he is reticent, too.”
“Like father, like son,” she said lightly. “Is he pleased you’ve married? I haven’t seen him since we got back.”
“I only saw him briefly yesterday, but he was more interested in Joe Ingleton’s charts. He gets so excited when he has a new family tree to pore over.”
“Will he want to move in here with us? It was his old home, after all.”
“I doubt it. I mentioned that the duke had offered us this place, and he seemed unconcerned.”
“Then if I cook dinner here on Sundays, we could invite your father, if it wouldn’t remind him of all he has lost.”
“What a lovely idea,” he said, surprised. “I am sure he would be thrilled. We can dine with the duke the rest of the time, but what about breakfast? Here or downstairs?”
“I think we should breakfast up here for a while, at least. It won’t be long before I reach the stage of feeling queasy in the mornings, and we don’t want people to jump to conclusions.”
“Ah, very true. We cannot tell anyone of your condition for at least… what, two months?”
“Preferably three or four, although it might become obvious by then.”
“Obvious?”
She patted her stomach. “Babies have a habit of announcing their existence, whether one likes it or not, and interested females have a habit of watching brides closely for signs. We shall need to be very careful.”
***
Christmas came and went at Staineybank, with the usual customs observed and services attended. Small groups of relations of the duke and duchess arrived to increase the festive atmosphere, despite the poor state of the roads. There was a little flurry of invitations to or from the neighbours, and Lance was invited to everything, to be eyed speculatively by the unmarried daughters. Their mamas bravely asked after Lady Patience, to receive a bland response.‘She was very well as atthe last letter I received from her,’he would say, taking care to add that they hoped to marry in the spring.
But in private, he now wondered whether they would marry at all, for not a single word had he received from her since that one, brief missive. And what sort of wife would she make if she could not even write to her intended husband? For himself, he had settled into a determined routine of writing once a week, relating all that he had done, and finishing with the words,‘I trust you are well. Regards, Lance.’
He could not —wouldnot — write again in more affectionate terms until he received some indication that such feelings were reciprocated. He no longer begged her to write back, for there seemed little point in it. Apart from altering the direction from Holtwell Abbey to Pentavon Castle, for she must surely have gone home by now, he made no other change. He was not angry, merely curious as to whether she wished to marry him or not, and if she had changed her mind, what had happened to bring about the transformation.
He had begun work on painting the four Merrington sisters, seated side by side on a sofa, just as in Payne’s sketch of them which hung in the music room. He had spent some time sketching them, watching the way they chattered together, individually yet as a group at the same time. Payne’s sketch captured their closeness perfectly.
One day, he went to where Payne was at work in his study, and laid out all the architect’s sketches of the sisters, the preliminary efforts as well as the final version, alongside his own productions.
“What do you think?” Lance said to Payne. “Have I captured them, do you think?”
“If you view them as one being, a single creature with four heads and four bodies, but a single mind, you cannotgo far wrong,” Payne said, amused. “This one… this captures something of it.”
