Page 47 of Lessons for Marquesses
Farendon Estate
Nine Years.
Two Atlantic crossings.
Thousands of miles marched.
Countless escapes from death.
Scars never counted.
Scars that couldn’t be counted.
Nicholas was home.
He slowed Teague to a walk under the leafing, canopied drive. He was too overcome by the rush of memories to be happy, too surprised the emotion did not come naturally.
The worn path at the hedges where horses ran, where hooves dug in to jump the expanse, still there. The oak tree with the top left third ravaged by a lightning strike when he was in his ninth summer, still there.
Farendon was summer. His family’s seat, Epworth, a monstrosity of 160 rooms, was in Wiltshire but here, from the first of June until Michaelmas, he had spent every year of hislife. Once he had begun Eton, he had come home to Farendon, not Epworth. And at sixteen and done with Eton, his father had given it to him. Along with the desk from Epworth that King Henry had presided over on progress.
Farendon was tiny in comparison to Epworth. But it was, unequivocally, a jewel.
Atop a faint rise, facing southwest, his home appeared unchanged, as if William St. Clair had preserved the memory of stealing Farendon in portraiture, nine years ago.
The central block was three stories, eleven arched windows wide, the center expanse of glass below the spacious gable glittering like diamonds. There were the adjacent wings with the solarium, morning room, and a ballroom overlooking the garden. Grey stone glowed buttery gold in the late light in harmony with its surrounds.
Bordering the circular drive were white iron benches for one to rest and ruminate on the beauty of the lawns and the enormous yew topiaries. To the east were the gardens overlooking three lakes, wooded walkways, a walking maze, the immense park of deer and pheasant. North, the stable block’s clock tower peeked above a line of poplars. West, sprawled the enormous copper beech.
This was an idyllic place for children to roam, explore, dream. Where his children should have been running to greet him, from the back of the house, from beneath trees and shrubs, with grass-stained clothes and smiles as great as the sun.
Children seemed as unattainable to him as flying.
The grounds were oddly quiet. The portico door, which should have been opened at the sound of a coach and four, remained closed. Nicholas handed Teague off to his groom and climbed the steps. After knocking three times, the reason for the delay was evident in the stooped posture of the butler who cocked his head to hear Nicholas announce his name twice.
When he took Nicholas’s hat and coat, his bones creaked.
“Miss St. Clair’s been expecting you. Yer late.” The man hobbled away down the corridor crowned by a fan-vaulted ceiling.
Nicholas paused in the majesty of the reception hall: the carved doors and pediments leading to rooms off the hall, the imperial staircase carpeted in the lush blue of late afternoon.
It smelled like home. Polish and candles, the faint scent of grass and horses.
“Come along.” The butler, shoes shuffling across the marble floor, waved a bony hand. “I’ll put you in the parlor.”
Parlor?Farendon didn’t have aparlor.
An empty vase caught Nicholas’s attention. In May, there should have been flowers, but Georgiana obviously didn’t attend to those domestic details. Nor did she manage the staff’s neglect of their duties. A cobweb hung from a sconce, black scuffs marred a trail from the entry toward the stairs. The carpet, on closer inspection as he followed the old man substituting as a butler, required a good beating.
He went rigid as he passed the study and detouring, entered the room. The desk, as Oliver had relayed, was gone but the outline on the carpet, darker where the desk had presided, was painfully clear.
“Suit yourself. I’ll get the lord,” the butler said with a grumble. Something inaudible followed. Nicholas swore the old man called him a pirate.
He rubbed his unshaven jaw. Nicholas was a pirate if that man was a butler.
What could have been a kitchen table sat in the desk’s place with Oliver’s endless documents strewn about, a half-smoked cigar, and an empty wineglass. He opened a ledger perched at the corner. The last entry of 240 pounds, an addition recorded asMr. Christie, brought the balance to just over 681 pounds.
A household account?
