Sea of Secrets: A Novel of Victorian Romantic Suspense (11 page)

Although my hosts did not fully guess the extent to which I felt out of place, Lord Claude at least showed that he had considered my strange position in the household. One afternoon he invited me into his study to talk. I sat on the edge of a chair, facing him over the massive desk at which he sat. When he saw my nervousness he smiled at me kindly.

“There’s no need to look so solemn, my dear, as if you were going to be scolded like one of the maids; I’m not going to accuse you of failing to dust under the bureau. I thought, though, that it might be best to discuss the terms of your stay here.”

In spite of his reassurance, this sounded very businesslike, and I waited apprehensively.

“I take it that my charming wife, who, between us, has been known to be slightly impulsive”—I could not help smiling at that—“invited you here without giving you a very clear idea of just what the nature of your visit would be. In which case I would imagine that you are in a somewhat uncomfortable position, with no certainty as to how long or under what conditions your stay will be.”

“That is true,” I said. “But, sir, if I am to be her new lady’s maid, I must confess that I have no aptitude for that sort of work.”

It was a feeble joke at best, but he leaned back in his chair and laughed, a relaxed, unconstrained sound. “My dear child, I have no intention of putting you to work. Indeed, I simply wanted to let you know that you should consider yourself truly one of our family. You are welcome here for as long as you choose to stay. Permanently, if you wish.”

“But, sir, I couldn’t possibly impose—”

“My dear, please do not think of such a thing. You are one of our family, and indeed I do believe Gwendolyn feels she has acquired a new daughter. Ellsmere is your home now, if you wish to claim it.” He reached across the desk for my hand. I placed it in his, shyly, for I was still not used to gestures of affection. “It’s settled, then?” he asked. “You’ll be content to acquire an eccentric, slightly scandalous, but nonetheless loving family?”

The mischievous light in his eyes encouraged me even more than his words. “Indeed, sir, I find a bit of eccentricity invigorating. In any case, I’ve already grown very fond of this family. It’s—very different from the one I knew before.”

Lord Claude glanced at me when I said that, but did not take me up on it. Instead he told me of his arrangements for a dress allowance for me—an amount that made me blink—and for the renovation of the room next to mine as a study for me. “Gwen said that you’re fond of languages,” he said as I rose to go. “The library here is rather a good one. You must feel free to avail yourself of it.”

When I found the library I realized how modest he had been in his praise of it. Two stories high, it was completely lined with books—even the doors had shelves built on to them—and I had to tip my head back to see the highest shelves. A gallery ran around the second level, and rolling ladders on both levels offered the means to reach the less accessible volumes. It would take a week simply to read all the titles. At random I chose a shelf and immediately found extensive sets of Virgil, Homer, and Cicero, as well as more recent works in different languages, some of which I had heard of but had not been allowed to read. I stood with a copy of
Mademoiselle de Maupin
in one hand and Apuleius’s
Metamorphoses
in the other, almost dizzy as I surveyed the riches surrounding me.

Soon my daily routine—what there had been of it—was enhanced by long stays in the library. From time to time Lord Claude or Charles would wander in, but for the most part the library was my domain. For the first time in my life I was able to freely indulge in my favorite pursuit, for as long as I wanted; if I missed lunch, it was brought in to me, and I was never chastised. Indeed, the others seemed impressed with my literary tendencies, and when Lord Claude persuaded me to read to them from my translation of Ovid, they all declared themselves in awe of my talent. It was a heady feeling to be admired for what I had once had to do in secret, as a vice.

There was another factor that kept me from boredom and loneliness in my new life. One brilliantly sunny day, when even an endless array of books could not keep me inside, I ventured down the cliff path again. I had been troubled by my craven reaction to my first sight of the sea, and today, when it felt physically impossible to stay indoors, I decided to make another trial.

As before, the sound met me before the sight itself, and the breeze immediately seized upon me to rumple my hair and skirts, but this time I was not overwhelmed: under the bright blue sky the sea was dazzling, winking with coins of sunlight all over its bobbing surface. Something in me seemed to rise up to meet its energy and buoyancy, and I lifted my face up to the sunlight, delighted by the wild sense of restless, excited activity. Exhilarated, I stood there for a moment, my chin to the breeze, letting the spray settle tingling on my skin. The wavelets flung themselves up as if trying to pat my feet and I darted back, laughing, and picked up my skirts to chase them back as they receded, in a game of tag more ancient than I then knew. It was much later when, disheveled, flushed, and well content, I decided to explore further and set off down the shore.

After perhaps a mile I climbed over a line of rough, enormous rocks to find myself at the edge of a small bay. In contrast with the rough energy of the shore I had left, this place held peace as in the palm of a hand. There was scarcely any beach here, since the massive rocks that bound it came almost to the water’s edge, and the water’s surface was more placid. This great cool cup of green might have been a completely different entity from the boisterous scene I had come from. The stillness of it was entrancing. I found a rock that reached out over the water’s surface and clambered up onto it. If I lay on my stomach and leaned over, I could trail my fingers in my reflection. Even the noise had receded, blocked by the high border of rocks that sealed this place off as with an enchantment.

These places became a refuge and a companion to me. Whenever I felt restless I would make my way down to the beach and let myself be buffeted by its roaring energy; when I wished for calm and quiet, however, I would climb over the rocks to the tiny bay and sit or lie on the lookout rock, letting myself be soothed by the tranquil, gently moving waters of that pocket of ocean.

One evening, almost a fortnight after I had arrived at Ellsmere, the duchess sent for me to come to her boudoir “for a surprise.” I told Mary, her maid, that I would be along as soon as I finished my page of Homer, and went to her room a few minutes later with a feeling of combined anticipation and dread. I knew enough to expect another manifestation of my hostess’s vast generosity, and while I could not help but be touched by her gifts to me, I was nonetheless a bit overwhelmed by them.

My hand was raised to knock when I heard Lord Claude’s voice. I kept still so that I would not intrude on them in a private moment, but then the subject of their conversation dawned on me and I stayed to listen.

“—scarcely bear my presence, and you’ve seen the way he looks at me: as if he was passing judgment.” His voice sounded far from that of the carefree bridegroom: I could hear weariness, and sadness as well.

I heard a sigh. “He behaves just the same toward me,” said the duchess in tones as tired and defeated as her husband’s. “It’s as though my very existence offends him.”

“And all this business of going off by himself. On my way to breakfast I saw him coming out of the door to the stable. Riding, and before dawn! Walking the cliffs at all hours! What can be the matter with him, Gwen?” His voice grew hushed. “Do you think there’s something—er—wrong with him?”

The slight pause before her answer robbed her words of their certainty. “No, my dear, I’m sure of it. I doubt it’s anything more than grief for his father’s death—and anger at us for marrying before the ‘proper’ interval had passed.”

A maid was coming down the hall toward me, and I knocked quickly, lest she realize I was eavesdropping. Without her presence to shame me into announcing myself, I own that I would gladly have stood listening as long as they spoke of Herron. Now the duchess’s voice, as bright and careless as it had been downcast a moment ago, bade me enter.

Lord Claude rose from her side on the pink-sprigged divan as I joined them. He, too, was making an effort to appear carefree, but his face was less schooled than the duchess’s, and there were signs of strain around his eyes. I felt a pang of sympathy for him: he seemed to want his stepson’s friendship so sincerely and to be so dismayed at the denial of it. As I made my curtsey I wondered if Herron realized how good a stepfather he was rejecting. He had his reasons, of course, but I wondered if there was a way I could help to reconcile the two.

Of course, considering that I was not even on speaking terms with the duke, it was probably unlikely.

“Ah, good evening, my dear,” he said with one of his kind, comfortable smiles. “My wife tells me that she is going to set about enlarging your wardrobe. I trust you will soon be needing to move to more capacious rooms.”

“Claude, really!” she laughed, shaking her head at him so that her ringlets bounced. Even at this hour, when she retired to her room to rest before dinner, she was still as exquisitely groomed as if she were expecting callers: not one of her curls was awry, and her dressing gown (a peignoir, she called it) was trimmed with lace and rosettes of pink satin ribbon. “You’re heartless. And now you’ve given away my surprise. I wanted to dazzle her with a brilliant display of treasures, like a storybook djinn, and now you reduce my role to that of a haberdasher!”

“From djinn to duchess—such a falling off!” he teased, giving a tug to one of the bobbing curls. They smiled at each other with an expression that made me all at once feel excluded. As far as they were concerned, I might not have been in the room. I should have been tactful and turned the other way, assuming a sudden interest in the fire screen or mantel ornaments, but I could not take my eyes away. I felt a stab of sheer envy at the adoration that blazed so nakedly in their faces. How fortunate they were—and how forlorn I suddenly felt, barred from the joy they knew.

As if my thoughts had spoken, the duchess’s first words after her husband left us were, “we must get you a husband, child.”

I laughed, instantly disgusted with my own foolishness. “Oh, never. I am one of nature’s old maids. When I am fifty you will come visit me with your seventeen grandchildren and I shall teach them all to conjugate Latin verbs. That is my true place in life.”

“Conjugation, rather than the conjugal?” She looked so pleased at her own witticism that I laughed again. “My dear, there is no reason you cannot have both.”

“I doubt very much than any man of sense will have
me
—and I will not have any man who isn’t sensible.”

“Well, you certainly have fixed on a persuasive rationalization for rejecting suitors. Your determination is quite formidable.”

“So far there have been none to test it.”

“You exaggerate, my dear. In any case, we shall soon change all that.” She was sweeping me toward the door to her dressing room, and when I started to reply she slapped me lightly on the wrist. “None of that! You are to enter the djinn’s treasure house in appropriately awed silence. Jane, Mary, if you please.”

As the door swung open, the maids each ran up with overflowing burdens of dress stuff: damasks, silks, muslin, mull, fabrics whose names I only learned later. More brilliant lengths spilled over chairs and from the shelves of the clothes press: pools of liquid topaz, dusky claret, shimmering silver. And on the bed, heaped like jewels in a casket, were finished gowns: one of a rose-colored wool, with belled sleeves and trim of grey velveteen; another of hyacinth blue, whose wide collar and cuffs were edged with snowy lace scalloping; and the third, unmistakably an evening dress, and the one that drew an involuntary “oh” of adoration from me: a heavy, gleaming satin that iridesced from blue to green like the sea, with the briefest of bodices but yards of billowing skirt. A wide, fringed hanging sash was its only trimming.

“I thought you’d like them,” said the duchess complacently, holding the sea-green gown up to me to assess the effect. “I had ordered them for myself, but I knew as soon as we met that they would look much better on you. Mrs. Prescott will fit them to you today and we shall have them altered at once.”

“But—” I stopped fondling the gleaming satin and looked anxiously up. “I can’t take your gowns. You’ll miss them.”

“Miss them! Hardly. I ordered more than a dozen, and three out of all those will scarcely be an insupportable loss. Besides, they truly do not suit me. Look.” She held the ball gown I coveted up to herself, and I saw that the bold hue eclipsed her fairness and made her look faded. “I do better in my ‘flower frocks’ as Claude calls them.”

It was true. The delicate shades of pink, blue, and yellow she favored suited her, while I would have felt foolish and juvenile in them. The gowns she had set aside for me were also markedly plainer in cut than those she wore, which were always flounced, ruffled, beribboned, and generally fashioned a great deal like many-petaled flowers. I was relieved that she had offered me only the simplest gowns: the furbelows that looked dainty on her would only heighten my plainness by contrast, I was certain. Better by far not to appear as if I wished to hide my shortcomings by dressing like a belle; at least I could look neat and trim, if not pretty.

Once again she seemed to sense my thoughts. “If these are too plain, we can have them trimmed,” she said, beckoning for Jane to unhook my dress. “But I had a feeling you wouldn’t wish to go about in such heavily weighted things. These uncluttered styles are so much more elegant, really.”

But this was tact; I saw the caressing glance she bestowed on her own new ball dress as she was hooked into it. Countless layers of frothy pink tulle, lavished with frills, it made no attempt to be “uncluttered.”

“These are perfect,” I sighed; then, my heart sinking as Mary approached with a corset, “must I be laced to wear them?”