“Good day! Enjoy your picnic!” Delacorte said, making haste for the door.
Neither of them heard him.
Hugh found his voice.
“Good morning. Seems a fine day for a picnic.” He said this only a little ironically.
“Indeed,” she said. Suddenly seeming a bit shy.
He lowered his voice. “Was your waltz with Giles illuminating?”
She cleared her throat. “I feel it’s accurate to say he is quite shaken by our engagement and is awakened to... possibilities.”
“Poor Giles, to be so shaken,” Hugh said, after a moment. “The first time is always the hardest.”
They were studying each other as though it was yet another new light, like the night on the roof or by firelight or in the full light of the garden. This one was a bit like the aftermath of a storm. A good deal had taken place the night before. The air had not yet cleared enough to see how the landscape had changed. But it was of a certainty changed.
“I look forward to shaking him even more,” Hugh said almost lightly.
And then the Earl and Countess of Vaughn appeared, as did their carriage, and they were off to Richmond.
Giles and his father and mother, the Earl and Countess of Bankham, were waiting for them in front of the house in a circular courtyard. They were arrayed about a fountain involving what appeared to be a tangle of frolicking cupids, all spitting water.
Hugh stood back and gazed up at the mythical Heatherfield.
Marbled, gilded, balconied, studded with row upon row of windows glinting like diamonds in the cooperatively brilliant sun, unhampered by clouds today. Against the blue sky it resembled nothing so much as a stone crown sitting on top of the hill. It was built to last forever, intimidate, and overwhelm. It succeeded on every count.
He hated it.
He’d beenpreparedto out of principle, and he was rather glad to find that he truly did, out of a sense of personal aesthetics.
And as it turned out, he hated the inside, too.
The harmonious, uniform proportion of the rooms called to mind, incongruously, a livery stable. The ceilings were quite high, boxed and painted. The rooms were cavernous and full of fussy things, objects chosen in order to induce awe or envy in other people with lots of money—or in people with hardly any—and to keep a regiment of servants employed in dusting, polishing, sweeping, and laundering. In this Hugh supposed they at least served a purpose. Miles of curtains pouredfrom the tops of enormous windows; satin-backed spindly-legged chairs faced each other before marble fireplaces in which one could have roasted a bull on a spit. All the shiny surfaces reflected the other shiny surfaces, as though the house was in love with itself and couldn’t stop winking and preening. Voices and footsteps echoed and lent the place the ambiance of a dungeon. Although of a certainty it smelled better.
This is what people usually meant when they used the word “grandeur.” He recognized and appreciated the quality of the craftsmanship; he surreptitiously touched the carved banister, imagining the brotherhood of craftsmen who had come together to build it, the pride and care they’d taken.
But that didn’t make it feel like a home.
Hugh pondered again the charm of The Grand Palace on the Thames—everything lovingly chosen, refurbished, and arranged in such a way that one felt embraced from the moment one walked through the door. Nothing quite matched and yet for that reason everything did, and that seemed to include all of the people who lived there. And while Hugh did indeed aspire to a certain luxury, and had very specific notions of what that meant, for the rest of his life, when he walked into a room, The Grand Palace on the Thames would forever be the standard he held it to.
The Earl and Countess of Vaughn had gone up the long marble staircase to freshen up after their journey, leaving Hugh, Lillias, and Giles with the Earl and Countess of Bankham at the foot of the stairs, awaiting, they were told, footmen with a picnic hamper.
The Earl and Countess of Bankham had not met Hugh at the ball. They inspected him, and while it was clear he was a surprise and a curiosity and maybe even a bit of an affront, given he was neither English nor titled, it was also clear they struggled to find him truly wanting. Lady Bankham’s eyes lingered on his face, traveled to his shoulders, then back to his face, purely for the pleasure of that journey.
The earl’s eyes were large and brown like his son’s; his jowls were a thing of majesty, like the ruff on an Elizabethan. His wife was petite and dark-eyed; her son owed his symmetrical features to her.
Lillias was standing a little apart from all of them, her expression pensive, as her eyes flitted from one object to another in that grand room.
She looked as though she belonged here. But in a way that troubled him. Softly illuminated by sunlight easing in through partially opened curtains, she might have been a beautiful statue, another ornament meant to contribute to the air of wealth, her personality subsumed by the house.
The thought made Hugh restless again.
And Giles, for his part, was clearly more at ease, relaxed, scrupulously groomed, quite glowingly handsome. It was clear to Hugh that he thought Heatherfield spoke for itself, and that it answered any question of perceived superiority.
They would just see about that.
“A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Cassidy,” the Earl of Bankham said to him after introductions and bows. “Congratulations on the extraordinary good fortune of your engagement. Lillias is almost like a daughter to us.”
