Page 48 of Lessons for Marquesses
Nicholas skimmed through the pages, noting the recent sale of a property in Edinburgh. There had to be more to support the upkeep of Farendon, Chedworth, the stables, and the monthly debt obligations.
“So you decided to come,” Oliver announced behind him.
His old friend looked like hell, and for a man who never cared for a stain or a wrinkle, it said volumes. “I did.”
“You’re five days late.” Oliver swiped the ledger away and shoved it on a shelf, piling papers on it as if to hide it. “She gave you the master’s room. I assume you know where it is.”
Nicholas halted at the second door he passed with a note tacked upon it.
2-Yellow Room.
After a knock went unanswered, he opened the door to nothing but a basin, chamber pot, mattress, and yellow drapery. The sun-bleached outline of a former carpet framed the floor. Back at the first door with the note,1-Red Room, the same scene greeted him with red chintz drapery. Dead center between rooms one and two, on the wainscot wall was another tacked paper.
Parson’s table. White vase. Horse at dawn, by copper beech. The portrait of his grandfather with Old Squire.
Grasping the nature of the ledger’s last entry and who Mr. Christie was, Nicholas continued through the hallway, up the stairs to the second floor and ending at the nursery. An auctioneer had provided a preliminary £240 for the furnishings in fourteen rooms and various pieces deemed inconsequential along the way.
At the master’s chamber, he paused, half of him fearing it had gone to auction and the other hoping it had.
Contentment hadn’t washed over him on his arrival at Farendon as he had imagined it would through marches and the nights where mosquitoes sucked at his blood. Those imaginings had dominated each step when he had limped away from Quebec, the bayonet wound at his shin still fresh. When he had let his shorn hair grow however it wished, waiting for the letters of credit from England, purchasing his horses.
Only the nightmares overshadowed Farendon. But each morning when he had awakened, Nicholas regained his sanity with dreams of Farendon. There was always a flood of happiness to match the outpouring of staff, family, friends rushing out to greet him. There was music. His father, sober, smiling with pride for his son, embraced him heartily. His father had never once embraced him. His mother wept with elation. His mother had never once wept in his presence. Nicholas doubted she ever had. And Caroline was there, sunlight transfixing her golden hair like a halo, falling into his arms. She was a widow and they would marry.
His vision had been joyous, specific, and wrong.
Nicholas grasped the brass knob and twisted. His hand unsteady, he nudged the door open with two fingers and remained outside as the future revealed itself.
His gaze landed immediately upon the facing window, tall and clad in swept-backed, green and gold silk. He would have continued right, to its twin except between the two windows hung a large portrait of a woman.
He grit his teeth at the interloper.
A magnificent woman draped in classical Grecian dress with windblown, fiery red hair and a quiver strapped to her back. She was barefoot, astride a formidable black horse, and held a bow. Though the resemblance to Georgiana was remarkable,this woman’s gaze was piercing, icy blue. And unlike Georgiana, Nicholas knew this woman didn’t smile, scrape or bow in the face of insults. This woman had steel in her backbone.
Was this Georgiana’s mother? The mother who had blessed Georgiana withlove? Whoever she was, he could almost hear her say,Get out.
So he walked in.
He cut through the shaft of western sunlight and his jaw unclamped. Nothing had changed except that woman. Maybe the bedcovers and drapery had been refurbished but they were the same colors, just as the carpet. The painting of Wild Squire still graced the wall over the writing desk.
He shook his head at the idea his clothing still filled the rosewood chest and in the bedside table, there would be his books and the odds and ends that always found their way to a drawer.
He entered the adjoining salon leading to the mistress’s chamber. There was a round dining table for the married couple to dine en privé, gilded settles of silk where mornings would begin, with children casting their toys about and climbing onto laps.
It hadn’t been his childhood, but he had pledged it to be his children’s, with his perfect bride by his side, a wife of beauty and, most important, a tender, maternal essence marking her every graceful move.
He knocked upon the cracked door of the mistress’s chamber, and when no answer came, eased it open. Though he expected it to be Georgiana’s room, he was nonetheless annoyed at the pair of discarded riding boots, a frock coat hanging from a chair back, a wig on its stand. On the tester bed, the curtains hung untied, the counterpane thrown over scattered pillows.
The hearth was swept clean, no evidence of a recent fire though the night air still warranted one. A cup of tea and half-eaten piece of toast lay on a side table next to a chair piled with books and topped by a discarded hose. The other hung from the washstand’s finial.
Swiping the hose aside, he examined the first book. A commonplace book with writings, some sideways trailing after a circle or an arrow. Clippings fromPond’s Sporting Kalendarhad been glued. Entries, attributed from other sources, one his grandfather had written on the breeding and selection of racing horses, had been copied. In another book, training times had been listed, a section for each horse, with the date, the time, the weather, the distance, the rider, and the going.
Returning the book to its place, he walked the room. There was no scent of perfume but a hint of horse from the riding boots. Dust swirled in the sunlight from windows of the same size and shape as the master’s. Her unkempt bed posed between them and opposite was another portrait.
Nicholas’s left hand, surprisingly agile, clenched.
The unknown woman, now in a sprigged gown, and William St. Clair, fucking handsome, young,happy, lounging beneath an enormous oak with sweeping branches. They gazed adoringly to a child in buff breeches, boots, and a smart blue coat. A smiling child with her mother’s lush, red hair trailing in springy ringlets down her back.
A St. Clair picnic.
