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Earls Trip, day 1

As they drew closer to their destination, Archie perked up. Not that he had previously been un-perked, merely that Simon observed him jiggling with increasing intensity. Archie was, generally, a jiggler. He had trouble calming his nerves, and his hands. But this was something apart from that. It was more of a happy jiggling.

Listen to him: a happy jiggling. He sounded like Effie.

Simon knew the feeling, though, the happy-jiggling feeling. He was jiggling internally. There was nothing like an Earls Trip. The journey had helped him shake off that vague feeling of resistance that always accompanied the onset of their holidays.

As they turned up the drive, Effie caught Simon’s eye, glanced at Archie’s hands, which hovered over his lap as he pressed his fingertips together in rapid succession, and met Simon’s gaze again. They shared a bemused smile, Archie oblivious as he leaned his entire torso out the window.

“Here we are!” Archie sounded like he had when they were schoolboys anticipating something wonderful, and he hopped out of the coach before it fully stopped.

“I marvel that we’ve never been here before, Archie,” Effie said a few moments later as he and Simon alit. They stood and took in the redbrick house, modest compared to Mollybrook, but still handsome, shaded by graceful oaks.

“I hated coming here as a boy.” Archie eyed the house with curiosity, as if seeing it for the first time. “Father and I came on annual hunting trips, and from the moment I arrived, I began counting down the days—hours—until we were meant to leave.”

That accorded with the stories Simon and Effie had heard over the years.

“And yet …” Archie tilted his head as he continued to contemplate the house.

“You wanted his approval,” Effie said. Effie understood the often complex relationships between men and their fathers.

Simon was the odd man out here, for his bothersome parent was his mother. He hardly remembered his father. Not that he’d been so terribly young when the old earl died. Just that he and his sire had so rarely been in the same place at the same time. Simon had been shipped off to school as soon as he’d been old enough, and in the summers at Galecroft, he’d made himself scarce, running off to amuse himself in the chapel with books and drawing paper. His chief memory of Father was sitting at the table at Christmas or Easter or some such occasion that necessitated the entire family be in company, and listening to him talk. Or listening to Father and James and Michael talk. The adage about children being seen and not heard applied to Simon. Not that anyone told him that directly. More that he had been, initially, too young to meaningfully take part in the discussions, and by the time he was, the dye had been cast. No one needed to hear from the spare spare.

“Indeed,” Archie said. “I used to look forward to those trips with my father, at least in the early years. It always felt like a chance to clear the slate, so to speak.”

“Did it work?” Simon asked, though he was almost certain he knew the answer.

“No.”

“It never does,” Simon said, and it was only when the other two swung around with matching looks of mild alarm that he realized how bitter his tone had been. He tempered it. “I merely meant that people don’t change.”

“Don’t they?” Effie asked. “Perhaps not usually, but is it not possible? Did I not change?”

“No,” Simon said firmly. “You arranged the circumstances of your life such that your true self, which had previously been sublimated, could come to the fore.”

“Goodness, Simon! I adore you for saying that. That was equal parts poetical and logical.”

“It is also true,” Archie said. “Though you were not so sublimated that we didn’t know your true self.”

“Yes, but you were the only ones who did,” Effie said earnestly.

Archie clapped a hand on Effie’s back and said, in a jocular tone that signaled an end to the sentimental portion of the afternoon, “Come around back, and I’ll show you the pool.”

“Shall we carry our things inside first?” Simon asked, looking around. A groom had met the coach and was, together with Archie’s driver, leading the horses off. But no servant from inside had met them.

“I’ve given almost everyone a week off,” Archie said. “Except for the housekeeper, the cook, one maid, and one groom. Remember our year at Quintrell Castle?”

“Yes, indeed,” Simon said. “I think I still have the lump on my head from when a chunk of plaster fell from the ceiling and nearly took me out.” He eyed Effie, who’d been responsible for planning—or not planning—that year’s holiday.

“Yes,” said Effie, cheerfully absorbing the implied criticism, “but I think what Archie is getting at is that it was great fun to be on our own that year.”

“Yes, we discovered the joys of our evening meal being served all at once, in its entirety, instead of in a series of removes,” Archie said.

“You can eat the pudding first if you like,” Effie said. “Or exclusively.”

“And such an approach comes with a pleasant lack of hovering servants,” Archie said. “The ladies will arrive in a week, and the staff will have much more work than they’ve had in years, given that I’m almost never here, so I also thought an unexpected week’s holiday might have a bolstering effect.”

“So we are on our own,” Simon said. It was a comforting thought, when so much of the past month had been … not comforting. The image of Miss Brown, in her severe black dress, was as fresh and at the forefront of his memory as ever. He shook off his unease. “And presumably, the house won’t be literally falling to pieces, so our solitude won’t come with a side of grievous bodily harm.”