Page 39 of Lady for a Season
“Won’t you join me for a ride?” she asked.
But he hung back, face uncertain. Meanwhile, she learnt to trot and canter, although she was too afraid to gallop as yet.
The drawing master who had been hired was a delicate young man, whose worn shoes and shabby clothes indicated he badly needed this work. He was clearly overwhelmed to have a Duchess’ family member to instruct, bowing and scraping to not just the Duchess but also Maggie.
“My niece’s education has been sadly neglected,” said the Duchess when he arrived. “She has not been given drawing lessons and yet she will need to demonstrate some basic accomplishments in polite society. There will not be time for her to learn everything she should already have mastered, so I would suggest that you limit your instruction to botany. Teach her to draw and paint flowers, that will be enough.”
“As Your Grace sees fit,” stammered the young man, flustered in her presence, dropping paper and paintbrushes onto the library floor.
Maggie knelt to help him collect them while the Duchess raisedher eyes to the heavens and swept out of the room, leaving Celine and Edward as chaperones.
Once she had gone, the drawing master grew in confidence, taking a few flowers from the ornate display on a nearby table and showing Maggie the shape and texture of the stems and leaves, how to consider where the light was coming from, and which part of the image should be shaded. By the end of their first hour together, Maggie had sketched a tolerably good iris. To make rapid progress, it had been decided that the drawing master should stay for three weeks, sleeping in the servants’ quarters, and that Maggie should receive three hours a day of instruction, exclusively focused on sketching and painting flowering plants. A large portfolio, bound in a patterned green paper, had been provided for her to keep her better works in.
“But who would ask to see them?” she asked the Duchess at breakfast the next day.
“All young ladies keep examples of their accomplishments near at hand,” said the Duchess. “When making calls to the house, ladies and gentlemen may ask how you have been entertaining yourself and that is your cue to indicate a sampler of embroidery or your drawing portfolio, which visitors may ask to examine. It is only civility on their part of course,” she added with a sniff. “Few people have any real interest, but it is part of polite conversation, and you cannot have nothing to show should they ask. That would look most peculiar.”
Edward watched as Maggie bent to her work. This absurd concoction of lies was part of everything he had disliked about life at Atherton Park and in London. Perhaps Maggie was being instructed in haste, but was she really unlike all the young ladies of theton, after all, who were no different except that they had been practising their accomplishments since they could walk? Were they not all engaged in the same falsehood? Edward doubted any of them were fascinated by netting or embroidery.Perhaps a few truly did enjoy drawing or music, but he remembered his father saying that young ladies only displayed their accomplishments until they were married and then forgot all about them, which hardly indicated a true interest on their part.
Later that day, before the evening meal was served, Joseph took Maggie into the dining room, where he explained the tableware, glassware, seating arrangements and where guests should be seated according to rank.
“I’ll never remember all that!”
“You won’t have to remember all of it, your hostess will already have thought of it, and the footmen will pour into the correct glass, but you must remember the silverware at least. Let’s begin. This is a sugar sifter, which you would use on your berries. Sugar tongs would be used for lumps of sugar in your tea.”
Maggie nodded.
“Now spoons. This is a berry spoon, this is a marrow scoop, that is a salt spoon and next to it a mustard spoon. This one is your soup spoon and this one a dessert spoon.”
And so it went on, while suppers continued to be the worst part of the day, stiffly formal, eaten mostly in silence, which at least allowed Maggie to silently practise her spoons and knives in her head, even while her earlobes throbbed painfully from Celine’s ruthless piercing of them with a needle so that she might wear earrings.
Prayers on a Sunday took place in Atherton Park’s chapel, a beautiful space where morning sunshine lit up the carved plasterwork of the arched ceiling. The tall columns were painted the same dark blue as the carriages, while the pews were adelicate pale shade of the same colour, with a beautifully tiled floor. At first Maggie found sitting in the front pew alongside the Duchess and Edward odd, but after a few weeks she grew used to it. After the sermon, they would leave first, to the bobs and bows of the entire staff who were gathered there for prayers, over two hundred each week, making the chapel seem like the church in a small village. As soon as the first Sunday was over, the Duchess had Maggie registered as an inhabitant of the local parish. Maggie had expected this to be difficult, but the vicar recorded her false name without question.
In all their morning walks Edward always led them to the left.
“If you leave the house and walk to the right,” Maggie asked Celine one morning, “what do you come to?”
Celine thought. “Gardens. Then the lake.”
“Nothing else?”
“The stable block is that way too.”
“Is it close by?”
“Yes, but hidden behind a copse by the house. Most stable blocks are set out of view, but they need to be close at hand for when a carriage or horse is sent for.”
Maggie nodded. She thought about Edward’s fear of horses, how he had helped her mount because she was struggling, but also how quickly he had retreated once she was safely in the saddle, his shaking hands. She remembered, too, how first the Duchess and then Joseph had been uncomfortable when discussing Edward’s need for a horse to ride.
Later that day, Joseph summoned her to review her table etiquette skills, but once alone in the dining room she grasped the opportunity to find out more.
“Why does Edward not like to ride?” she asked.
Joseph looked away. “Some gentlemen are not fond of the hunt,” he said.
“It is more than that,” she persisted.
Joseph sighed. “His Grace had… an experience when he was younger, which…”
