Sharon Sobel (22 page)

“Have you been hiding there, my lord?” Emilia asked. “I do not believe we have ever met.”

Indeed he was hiding, Claire reflected, but that was no longer anyone’s business. And in any case, that was not the point of her old friend’s little flirtatious barb.

“I have the care of my younger sister and a good many things besides,” Max said politely. “And it is a more convenient ride to Edinburgh than to London. Of course, now that I am here, I see there is much I have missed.”

He certainly was learning, Claire reflected. When they were first introduced by his aunt, he could barely get out five words of polite conversation, and none of them nearly as generous as this.

“I have the care of my younger sister as well,” Emilia Stratfield said.

“Then perhaps she would like to meet Lady Camille. We expect to be in town for some time,” Max said.

“I think she would like to meet you, Lord Wentworth.” Emilia smiled and Claire remembered why the woman was so popular ten years ago. “We shall have to invite the two of you to dinner. And you too, Lady Glastonbury, if you can spare an evening in your exhausting schedule.”

“I might manage to beg off from a previous engagement,” Claire said tersely. She now wondered if she had ever really liked Emilia Stratfield and if so, why.

“Very well,” Mr. Stratfield said, sounding bored with the whole business. “You shall join us for dinner and the younger sisters shall have a grand time discussing whatever it is young ladies talk about.”

“Dearest Henry,” Mrs. Stratfield said, and patted his arm possessively. “You know very well what they talk about. There is only one thing to talk about. Lord Wentworth? You will be sure to come?”

Max nodded and watched the couple walk off towards Park Street.

“What an admirable couple,” he said.

“I despise her. And he is a dreadful bore,” Claire said, and turned him in the direction of the Serpentine.

“I thought you were friends,” Max said, innocently.

“I thought so, too,” Claire said under her breath. “But it appears I was much mistaken. You must not go to their home, for dinner or anything else.”

“Dearest, loveliest Claire. Do you not think I can manage this on my own? You have succeeded in getting me to this noisy, dirty city, when I would prefer nothing more than to read in my study at Brookside Cottage and take a daily walk through my woods. Now, I shall do just as you wish and meet everyone, no matter how forward or single-minded. Let us consider it a study of character. I expect it will be great fun.”

“Yes, great fun,” Claire repeated. She carefully steered him away from others of her acquaintance as they descended the gentle slope of the winding river that ran through Hyde Park, with its gentle falls and wild marsh. It was a lovely place, and one to which Claire used to escape when nursing her bruises and other injuries inflicted by her miserable husband. Ducks and swans quarreled over all the best places and people did something of the same, though less quacking was involved.

“When I first saw your woods and brook, I thought of this place, though truly it is nothing like,” she said. “But how quickly we are reminded of the landscapes of our past, and sometimes by nothing more than a fallen tree or the scent of jasmine or the wild cry of a peacock.”

As if to punctuate her words, a peacock came into view, and strutted about a bit to impress them with his great fan of feathers.

“I am reminded of my grandmother’s house when I see these fine birds,” Claire explained. “For they seemed to comfort her in her old age. She told me they reminded her of her own grandmother’s house in India.”

“It is odd you should speak of these things just now,” Max said. “For well after dinner last night, I was thinking about a prospect in Yorkshire, where a chestnut tree beckoned all small boys to climb it.”

Claire would have rather preferred to hear he thought of her, but the moment was too precious to shatter.

“And I suppose you were a small boy who was so beckoned?”

“Of course. The first time I broke my arm was when I fell from that tree.”

“The first time?”

“The second was on the night of the fire,” he said. “It did not heal well after that, but was much improved after the third break.”

“Dear heavens, but you have had your share of misadventures,” she said, reflecting that she could not have said such a thing to him even a few weeks ago. But they had come a long way.

Max held her elbow firmly as they walked down several rough stone stairs, as if to guarantee no mishaps on this outing.

“Tell me more about the tree,” she said.

He did not require further prompting. “The branches were spreading, and hung low, which is, of course, what tempted us to climb into its heights. We gathered the nuts and brought them to the poorer families in the neighborhood, for I recall my father saying it would serve them better than our family. But I often stayed while the chestnuts were roasted over the hearth and did not refuse my fill of them. I preferred them to the trout or pheasant on our own table.”

“Poor boy,” she murmured.

“And of course the chestnut was not alone, for it was in a fine stand of trees, rumored to have once been an encampment in the time of the Romans. We were likely to find coins and shards of pottery half buried in the ground, and there was a ruin of a Roman wall that we used for our own garrison. It was rough-built, of great stones. The rubble from the rest was scattered in a farmer’s field, where heather grew quite profusely.”

Claire closed her eyes, envisioning all he described, and thinking it exceedingly vivid. Suddenly, she realized she relied not on his habits of description, honed over years of caring for Camille. Rather, she had seen this place, and recently.

“Oddly enough, I was thinking about all this yesterday,” Max repeated, and sighed.

Claire opened her eyes, but she had already seen the light.

“And no wonder,” she said tartly. “A painting of this place hung in the Longreaves’ dining room, staring you in the face for at least two hours.”

She felt the muscles in his arm tighten and he suddenly stood taller, as one would when bracing for a blow. Claire looked up at him, but saw no fear, only the certainty of resolution. He glanced at her for a moment, and she realized she was very far from his thoughts.

“But it already was most familiar, you see,” he said slowly, his voice unsteady. “For it is my mother’s painting.”

“Your mother’s?” Claire gasped. “I did not realize she was so accomplished an artist. Are you quite certain? Might she have painted the scene for others who admired it?”

“Steady, my dear. My mother painted some very pretty china plates and sketched a portrait of my sister that hung near her bed, but I suspect the only one who admired her work was my devoted father.” He paused, remembering his mother’s thin fingers, dark with charcoal dust, and how she would playfully mark his cheeks when he interrupted her creative moments of solitude. “She was a collector of sorts, purchasing paintings and sculpture that pleased her, though they might not have been of any great value.”

“I do not know much about such things, but I daresay once it was known Lady Wentworth was interested in acquiring the works of an artist, the man’s stock would undoubtedly rise. If she had a discerning eye, her taste would be respected.”

Max glanced down at her, rather proud that the woman he loved owned good sense as well as beauty. It appeared she did know about such things, and would likely be a fair accomplice in this business as in other things. For now there was a mystery to solve; although it would probably be resolved with one or two well-placed questions, the answers might lead to the better understanding of another mystery.

They had come to the bottom of the wide granite steps, and stood in the park’s broad basin, facing the artfully designed lake. From this prospect, it was possible to believe the vast city disappeared around them, and they were back in the countryside with the birds and insects the only witnesses to their conversation. Max raised his face to the sky, trying to recall the events of more than twenty years before.

“Max, what happened to your mother’s collection of paintings after the fire?” Claire asked, as he knew she would.

“After the fire,” he echoed, reflecting how all of his life had been neatly ordered into what came before the fire, and what came after. But now such a division might not be nearly as much a touchstone as what came before and after he met Claire. He looked down at her, understanding how his story was now part of hers as well. “I wish I knew what happened, but no one ever told me and I never asked. Remember, I was not only a boy, but a very badly injured one. I spent months in bed, wrapped in linen like an Egyptian pharaoh, feeling dead skin slough off as raw red flesh emerged. I wanted to die a hundred times over.”

“But you survived as a boy so I might come to know you as a man,” she said simply. “It is no wonder you have no desire to relive that awful time, but you do have some matters to confront. I know you would not have been able to deal with the dispersal of the furnishings of Brook Hall, but surely someone was responsible for the business? Mr. Brooks, perhaps?”

“My aunt and uncle were travelers, spreading the wisdom of our God, and undoubtedly enjoying their adventures. I was long out of my sickbed, and Camille was already stumbling about the house by the time they returned from Africa.”

“And the steward?”

“John Mandeville has not been seen since that night and it is accepted that he also died in the fire. His body was never identified but the flames were . . . intense. There might not have been anything to find,” Max choked out. The fact that he endured years of waking nightmares imagining what was found of his parents did not ease this recounting of the story.

“So much loss and suffering to be borne on one boy’s shoulders,” Claire said softly.

Max pulled away a branch to allow them to pass unimpeded. He glanced about him and realized they strayed from the path, which is precisely what he preferred to do with this conversation. “And that boy has had many years to ponder all the possibilities. The boy might have preferred to believe that some managed to escape the flames, but the man he became has come to terms with the fact that such a thing is not possible, no matter his sister’s idle speculation. While Camille has developed very acute sensibilities, I assure you she is often wrong. Only last week she mistook chicken for duck on our dinner table.”

Claire pulled her arm from his. “I am not interested in domestic fowl, Max, but of people who lived and died before their time. I suppose I am a bit like Camille, and prefer to admit of some hope, however unlikely or unreasonable.

“It is impossible,” Max said firmly, though he knew he was indeed being perfectly unreasonable.

“Nothing is impossible unless we have proof it is so. Though Mr. Mandeville was not identified among the dead, it is presumed he was in the house at the time, though one wonders what business he had at that time of night.”

“It is not presumed. I saw him there, in the kitchen, eating with the cook, and no one has ever seen him since.”

“But why was he in the kitchen, where it is very possible the fire started? Do stewards usually dine with the staff? He had his own home, Brookside Cottage, where he presumably had his own cook. It all seems most peculiar,” Claire argued. Max supposed some of what she said made sense, but small irregularities did not usually create a discernable pattern.

“What you say makes for a good story, but reveals nothing of substance. It is not sufficient to believe my sister truly did sense Mandeville, a man she last saw when she was eight years of age, nor do we know the fire started in the kitchen. For all that, the kitchen was undoubtedly the site of many conflagrations in the past, and none of them harmful to anything but loaves of bread.” Max faltered for he realized he refuted theories as persuasive as any others he heard in the past twenty years. “And I have no idea where stewards ought to dine, or if Mandeville was doing nothing more than borrowing a tin of tea leaves from our cook, Mrs. Kent. If so, he paid for it dearly.”

“You also paid for it dearly, Maxwell Brooks, and undeservedly so. You have lived your life under a dark cloud. And worse, you never bothered to escape from under it, for you believed yourself culpable. But the whole thing dissipates once we shine the sun on the fact that you were blackmailed into doing a task for which you were ill-prepared, and by one who was wholly guilty and made you believe the fault was all yours. And then we must consider the unlikelihood that your carelessness had anything to do with the horrors of that night.” Claire stamped her foot, which was truly as angry a gesture as he ever saw her make. “I blame your aunt and uncle.”

This was beyond all else. “My aunt and uncle?” he said in disbelief. “They were not even in England at the time. They knew nothing about it.”

“But that is precisely the problem. They had the care of you and Camille once they returned to England, and did nothing to delve into the truth of the matter. Instead, they allowed rumor to vanquish reason.”

“Do not blame them, for they meant well. Their grief was as genuine as ours.”

Claire waved her hand dismissively. “But at last we have something substantial to consider.”

“The absence of a body is not substantial.”

“But the Longreaves’ painting most definitely is. We both saw it, and you recognized it. If the artist in fact made two such paintings, then I should like to know why the family so appreciated a scene from a Yorkshire village that they should hang it in their dining room.”

Max put a finger to her lips before she could say more. “But if there is only one copy, then they could not know from whence it came, for they would not have dared to display it before my eyes.”

Claire kissed his finger and put her hand to his jaw, drawing him closer.

“Then we must find out where they obtained it,” she whispered.

“That should not be too difficult. I will ask them,” Max said. “Your very good friend must know all about it.”

“As he is my very good friend, should I not ask him?”

“No,” Max said emphatically, and she pulled back.