Cecilia bobbed with a smile. “It was so good of you to come. And in this tiresome weather.”
The viscountess was sharp-faced and wore no less than seven strings of pearls over her elaborate gown. She answered in cool tones, “Our pleasure to be here, Lady Farndon. I do hope you are settling in well. I find servants can be so trying at times, don’t you?”
Cecilia recognised the look but she herself was a countess and had precedence over a mere viscountess.
“Farndon does not allow familiarity and will not brook insolence in any form,” she said sweetly, and allowed her gaze to slide to the next couple.
This was the neighbouring Earl Chervil, who seemed a jolly enough fellow, and Cecilia warmed to the prospect of a returned visit.
Her years with the Marquess of Bloomsbury, as companion to the marchioness, were paying off handsomely. She knew every bit of the code, all the artifices of snobbery and aspiration, and backstairs she had acquired a sound understanding of how things were actually contrived. She was thus perfectly able to cope, acting as hostess directly instead of at the bidding of others.
Beside her, Nicholas was performing his noble duty but she knew he took it too seriously for it to be a pleasure and it would be her mission to lighten his burden.
Chervil was earnestly holding forth to him about the soils of north Wiltshire. She fanned herself daintily, taking the opportunity for a discreet survey of the ballroom. It had been a good response to the invitations even if, she suspected, many had accepted only out of curiosity.
As her mother-in-law had predicted, the newspapers had seized on the occasion of a society wedding out of the ordinary and had speculated wildly. A young earl-in-waiting who had disappeared into the world, some said for eccentric scientifical pursuits, others for salacious wanderings in exotic parts, was recalled to his duties by his father’s demise. And had taken for bride a nameless country girl in defiance of society.
Their conclusions, however, were generally the same. It was not unknown for an ageing noble to marry a compromised milkmaid, but this could not be the case here, for in the peerage Lord Farndon was a most eligible catch. There was no other explanation possible than that it had been a truly romantic match, the noble lord smitten by an unknown beauty.
It had made splendid copy, with Cecilia an object of intense interest.
The reception line ended. She caught the eye of the orchestra leader and nodded discreetly.
The music faded and a loud chord was struck.
The Earl of Farndon turned and stood attentively.
The dear fool. “Nicholas!” she hissed. “Come on-it’s for us! They’re waiting for us to start the ball.”
She swept him out into the centre of the floor for the minuet and they danced together under the magnificent chandeliers.
The canopy of the four-poster great bed was prettily patterned with interlocked heraldic flowers, holding in the candlelight a soft mystery of time and ancestry. Cecilia lay looking up at it, still coming to terms with what she had become-and the man she had married.
He was next to her, reading from a volume of verse, which she now knew he invariably did before sleep. She had learned other things: he was serious and thoughtful, reflective and calm, and it were better she allow him to reach a conclusion by his chain of logic than to interrupt with a stab of practical intuition.
But there was so much she didn’t know about him, now, as they set out on their married life together.
She rolled over to face him. “Nicholas, my love.”
“Oh, yes, my darling?” But his eyes were still on his book.
“Can we talk?”
“Oh?” he said, in concern, laying down the book and turning to her.
“Yes, do you mind?”
“What is it, Cecilia, my very dearest?”
“Nicholas, don’t you agree that if we love each other and worry about things, we shouldn’t keep it to ourselves, we should share them?”
“Why, I suppose so.”
“Then we shouldn’t have secrets from each other?”
“Do we? What, then, should I tell you, dear?”
“Nicholas-one question only.”
“Certainly.”
“Who are you?”
“I … I beg your pardon?”
“I know nothing about you really, Nicholas. You’ve told me so little about yourself.”
“Oh.”
“Yes. I think you should tell me the story of your life so that I’ll know just who it is I’m now joined to.”
“All of it? I really don’t think-”
“All of it, Nicholas,” she said quietly.
“Well, I was born here at Eskdale Hall some many years ago and-”
“I’m serious, Nicholas. I want to know what in the past has made you … you.”
He looked at her with great tenderness, then turned and lay back, staring up into the blackness for so long she thought he was rebuffing her.
Finally he spoke. “Yes, my dear. You are right-there will be no secrets between us and you have every right to know who I am-although this is a question I’m not sure I can answer.
“There will be those who find strange my obedience to logic, my refuge in the moral certainties. Still more the profundity of my interest in the human condition … and, most of all, my contentment upon the bosom of the deep and wheresoever it takes me.”
Her hand found his and he squeezed it. “Please be prepared for a … strange and wistful tale.”
He began with his self-imposed exile for a compelling moral reason as a common seaman into the gun-deck of a man-of-war, there to meet a young press-gang victim called Tom Kydd. How they had formed a friendship so deep it had sustained them over the years to follow until they had both won through to the quarterdeck.
He spared her nothing, in a flood of release telling of the dangers and exhilarations of the war at sea, breath-stopping adventures across the South Seas, fighting against Napoleon Bonaparte himself at the gates of Acre, battles of conquest and betrayal, feats of heroism and defeat.
And he told her, too, of his being swept into the maelstrom of deceit and treachery that was the failed uprising and assassination attempt against Bonaparte, how later he had travelled into the very heart of Paris to woo the American inventor Fulton, with his crazy plans for a submarine boat.
Then finally, only that very year in the Caribbean, his near-disastrous but ultimately successful penetration of a plot to bring Britain to its knees with a privateer fleet, which had nearly cost him his life.
She clung to him, held him, loved him: what she had heard was thrilling, marvellous and, ultimately … heartbreaking.
This was the death-knell of his life of danger and excitement, of companionship and fulfilment. Whatever he had been before he could be no longer. He was now to know life arrayed only in velvet and silk, cosseted and fawned upon.
What, in the name of their love for each other, could she find for him that could even begin to match the thrill and drama of what had gone before?
“I’m surprised his lordship has not yet advised you, Mr Bardoe,” she said, to the hovering bursar. “He insists always that books of account should be rendered in proper form, double entry and traceable to the day-books. I see here that it’s frankly impossible to determine how your figure is arrived at without it is correctly entered.”
“Yes, my lady. I’ll see to the bookkeepers today.”
There were going to be changes at Eskdale.
“Do ask Mrs Grant to attend me, if you please.”
Cecilia now had her private sitting room, equipped with a desk and bookshelves, serving both for entertaining ladies to tea and as an interview room for the staff.
“Good morning, Mrs Grant. Do sit down. I wanted to speak to you about the condition of the public rooms in the east wing for which you have the charge. Do you not feel …”
The day wore on. At eleven she tiptoed to the door of the earl’s study and listened.
He was dutifully attending to the tenant roll on this the first Monday of the month.
Inside, a grizzled farmer was telling a tale of woe about the season and the crops in a practised moan, and her husband was hearing him out politely, the estate steward standing by with an ill-tempered scowl.