Time Squared, page 8
“‘Night is generally my time for walking,’” the colonel read, still sounding conversational, as if he were the one who liked walking. “‘In the summer I often leave home early in the morning, and roam about fields and lanes all day, or even escape for days or weeks together, but saving in the country I seldom go out until after dark, though, Heaven be thanked, I love its light and feel the cheerfulness it sheds upon the earth, as much as any creature living.
“‘I have fallen insensibly into this habit both because it favours my infirmity’”—and here Eleanor felt jolted, for rather than having any infirmity, Colonel Denholm seemed as fit as a much younger man. Then she remembered that this was Mr. Dickens speaking—or rather, his narrator—and felt fooled and foolish and amused at herself.
“‘Because it favours my infirmity,’” the colonel repeated, as if he’d caught her mistake, “‘and because it affords me greater opportunity of speculating on the characters and occupations of those who fill the streets. The glare and hurry of broad noon are not adapted to idle pursuits like mine; a glimpse of passing faces caught by the light of a street lamp or a shop window is often better for my purpose than their full revelation in the daylight.’”
Perhaps this wasn’t the narrator, then, but Mr. Dickens himself describing the way he found his stories. This time, he or his narrator encountered a pretty little girl named Nell out very late on an errand. She’d lost her road and needed help getting home, although what she was doing out so late, she said, “‘I must not tell.’”
A mystery. Eleanor sighed with pleasure.
“Are you called Nell?” the colonel asked, looking up from the magazine.
“My father did sometimes,” Eleanor replied, wishing he would continue.
“And is the reading up to his standard?”
“Yes. Conversational. Thank you, sir. Telling a story rather than indulging in the melodrama of bad actors. I dislike that sort of reading, although some find it clever.”
“So you have good taste, Miss Crosby.”
“Because I enjoy your reading, sir?” she asked.
“Perhaps because I want you to have it. Knowing that, like Little Nell, you hope to inherit a fortune.”
“Leave it, Father,” Mr. Denholm said.
“I beg your pardon.”
“Don’t tease her, sir, on top of everything else. She’s asked for none of this.”
Mr. Denholm got up abruptly and left the room. Eleanor caught a quiet mutter: “Making her feel like a pawn.” She blushed heartily to find that the brothers talked to one another (of course they did), having never meant Mr. Denholm to hear what she’d said.
“Please go on, Colonel,” her aunt told him imperturbably.
“I think not,” Colonel Denholm replied, making to flip the magazine aside before controlling himself and putting it carefully onto the mantle.
“I think so,” her aunt said, to Eleanor’s surprise.
The colonel glanced at her with shocking dislike, then picked up the maga and read on.
* * *
As the colonel finished the story, his wife wheeled into the library. Once again she didn’t apologize, but wanted, she said, to bid them farewell. Deeply relieved at their dismissal, Eleanor stood quickly, having to restrain herself from running for the door. Instead she was forced to keep pace with the lady’s slow-moving chair. Mrs. Denholm spoke to her pleasantly, failing to mention her elder son’s absence as they retreated through the extravagant rooms, each lit now by candelabra. Housemaids held them high, their faces turned to the walls, one a little scrubs whose tired arms shook, making her candles cast unreliable shadows. The resonant art appeared even bloodier in the flickering light, and the hulking ancient furniture looked as if Mr. Dickens had written it into reality.
The tower felt barbaric. It was lit by rush torches, and in the hissing circle of light, Eleanor pictured the coats of armour awakening from their long slumber. Spectral knights would creak and groan, sensing their weapons and leaping, flying high onto the castle walls to grasp the ancient swords. Skeletal horses would burst through the doors, and the ghostly party gallop off into the night, crying out hoarsely for Might and Right and the Holy Grail.
In fact, it was the colonel who spoke, stepping behind Eleanor to say, “You’ll do,” in a voice so low she scarcely heard it.
Did she hear it? Certainly, outside, she heard her aunt’s coachman apologizing for a delay. The traces had snapped and were being mended. Behind her, she could also hear the older ladies disagree politely about whether Mrs. Denholm should step inside (hastily corrected) go inside to avoid the night air, and whether Mrs. Crosby ought join her. Eleanor had no intention of going back inside the castle. She drifted away, heading for a chestnut tree just coming into bloom. Even from a distance, its flowers smelled ecstatic.
A man stepped out from under the tree. Eleanor’s hand went to her throat.
“I mean you no harm,” Mr. Denholm said.
She couldn’t see him: nothing more than a man’s form, no moon to light his face.
“You startled me!”
She couldn’t go on.
“I owe you an apology,” Mr. Denholm said.
“You’ll do,” his father had said. You’ll do. Eleanor could feel inexorable wheels bearing her forward and wanted nothing more in the world than to run away.
Yet an unexplored corner of her mind lit up with the knowledge that it would be wise to appease the man she was bound to marry. She never used to have secrets, nor had she ever been calculating. Now she knew she needed to charm Mr. Denholm if she was going to live her life with him. Unless, Hope chattered inside her, Edward Denholm ran off like his cousin Mrs. Julia Holmes, mistress of whomever.
He was no more likely to run off than she was. At least, not very far. It was surprising how well she knew Mr. Denholm after such a short time.
“Since no one can hear us,” Eleanor said, “I’ll agree the evening was awful. I do feel a pawn. One wishes to have at least the pretence of a choice. I’m sure you must feel that, too.”
“I know something about it,” Mr. Denholm said wryly, before his voice changed. “But you see, I care for you, and I would like it if you’d marry me. Even though I’m afraid you don’t like me very much. In fact, I’ve grown really rather certain that you don’t.”
“But I do,” Eleanor said, her voice a scratch. “Like you.”
She felt rather than saw or heard his delight. But the carriage was arriving. Her aunt called her, and without saying anything else, Eleanor turned and ran back to the entrance, telling them she was here.
* * *
Afterwards, in the carriage, her aunt asked, “What were you saying to Mr. Denholm?”
Eleanor was surprised she’d seen them and didn’t know what to say.
“Perhaps I should ask instead what he said to you,” her aunt persisted.
There was no way to avoid it. “I think he asked me to marry him.”
Her aunt waited.
“And I think I said yes. But aunt,” Eleanor added hastily, “from what I know—from reading novels, not Mr. Dickens’s novels, bad novels that Kitty and I laugh at”—because how could she take this entirely seriously, or completely tamp down her hysteria?—“he didn’t say enough that you can have a breach of promise suit if he withdraws. I couldn’t testify to that. Nor did anyone hear us. And nothing was put in writing. Obviously.”
“It shall be,” her aunt said comfortably, as the carriage wheeled them home.
6
The next morning, Mrs. Crosby set off again for Ackley Castle, saying she was going to pay a morning call on Mrs. Denholm. Eleanor had no idea why her aunt insisted on the fiction. It was so obvious what was happening that the words might well have been written on the walls, clipped into the hedge outside, painted on the front door.
“The colonel and I shall be negotiating the terms of your marriage to Mr. Denholm. (And, by the way, the captain is lost to you forever, since even if you’re widowed by a Kentish carriage accident or the shipyard cholera, widows are forbidden to marry their brothers-in-law by statute and by God.)”
Eleanor couldn’t stay inside. The sky was clouded over but the air felt dry and likely to stay so. She didn’t burden herself with an umbrella as she left the Hall, setting off quickly for the fields, climbing over a wooden stile and punishing herself on the worn uneven pathway beside the grain, avoiding the road and its prying eyes.
At first she headed west, not consciously aiming for Ackley Castle and surprising herself when she glimpsed it through the trees. Her feet had chosen to go there on their own. Almost on their own, since her heart wanted nothing more than to chance upon the captain the way she’d done at the lookout bench in Yorkshire.
Meeting Robert Denholm would be a disaster and Eleanor knew it. Her heart would burst and she would tell him what she felt. She wouldn’t be able to help it and he wouldn’t be happy. He was a fond brother and a good and sensible man. Speaking would put him in a terrible position, her words like rocks thrown in a pond, the ripples lapping toward a future in which he would be her brother. With a wrenching exercise of will, Eleanor swivelled away from the castle, heading for a public footpath leading north toward the Medway.
The river was many leagues distant. Eleanor wouldn’t walk anywhere near that far, but she kept to the path, needing the release of exercise even while disliking the low rolling farmland she’d thought gentle only yesterday. Now it seemed monotonous, one field after another tamed and lamed by its hedges, all so different from the free high moors of Yorkshire. The gods still walked the moors, she was certain. While they buried their goddesses in Kent.
Eventually Eleanor reached a spiked ha-ha at the bottom of a hill that left her no choice but to take the path left toward a nearby road. Clambering over the final stile, she jumped onto a potholed roadway that must have jarred the farmers’ carts as it led up what couldn’t be called a hill. A rise, perhaps. As she walked up it, the air was dusty and the poppies in the hedgerows had no scent. She didn’t want to be here anymore than she wanted to be at the Hall, but she didn’t know what else to do.
Reaching the top of the rise, Eleanor stopped for a moment to orient herself. In the distance she spied a moving figure, a horseman taking the high road to London. Telling herself it must be Captain Denholm, Eleanor felt grateful for the opportunity to bid a silent farewell to his amused grey eyes, to his sympathy, his solidity and depth, and to her hopes of happiness.
She also knew very well that it wasn’t the captain, the horse not a fine brisk buckskin stallion but a farmer’s workaday nag. Of the rider, she could tell only that he was young, meaning he was probably a farmer’s son out on an errand so unimportant he would be unlikely to remember it tomorrow, and probably didn’t want to be doing it now.
Feeling as sardonic as her soon-to-be husband, Eleanor reminded herself that most people spent much of their lives doing what they didn’t want to do. Rather than being a tragic heroine crying farewell to her knight, she was an ordinary girl who would soon join in the common fate, dutifully—pragmatically—trying to make the best of it, just like everybody else.
Feeling deflated and ironic, her feet aching, Eleanor turned back toward Preston Hall.
* * *
She found it in a bustle. A kitchen maid hurried across the narrow entrance, a basket of sandwiches in her hand. Crossing her path was the steward, Mr. Stickley, who carried one of her aunt’s boxes. When Eleanor walked inside, both moved past her like water flowing around an obstacle, keeping their eyes averted. They were packing for a journey, although Eleanor couldn’t imagine why.
Quick steps, and she turned to see her aunt’s housekeeper hurry out of the sitting room, carrying a vase of flowers.
“Mrs. McBee. What on earth?”
“Your aunt is in her bedroom,” the housekeeper said, casting a searching glance at her before continuing on her way.
Puzzled, not knowing what to expect, Eleanor went upstairs and knocked on her aunt’s door, opening it without waiting for an answer.
“We’re leaving?” she asked.
Mrs. Crosby stood by the bed, an open case on a bench at its foot, her shifts and stockings already packed and a lacy chemise in her hand. She looked as if she’d been working quickly, but now she stopped and deliberately folded the chemise before placing it gently in the box.
“Mademoiselle is packing your trunk,” she said.
“But why?”
“Because Colonel Denholm is an impossible man, and vulgar,” Mrs. Crosby said, picking up another dainty. She looked at it blankly, then balled it into her fist and threw it at the floor, where it fell limply.
“So there’s no marriage?” Eleanor asked.
“If I thought you had any feeling for Mr. Denholm, I should be very sorry.”
With an angry hiss, her aunt resumed packing, hurrying back and forth to the wardrobe as she spoke, bundling up clothes and shoving them any which way into the trunk.
“The colonel is absurd,” she said. “Starting out by asking a ridiculous sum as dowry on top, eventually, of Goodwood. Which of course I expected, and he did bargain down, although perhaps not as much as I would have preferred. However, Ackley is a rich property, fair is fair, and he understood without too much pushing that Preston Hall is for my daughter.”
Mrs. Crosby paused, nodding abstractly at her trunk as she thought back through the negotiations. Then she remembered her anger and resumed packing.
“Yet after we reached a bargain, the impossible man had the gall to announce himself head of the family and begin to dictate my actions. My steward Mr. Stickley sent away . . .”
“Mr. Stickley?” Eleanor asked.
“. . . when I’ve been entirely discreet, and am, besides, demonstrably a widow—who by-the-by earned my money, especially this Hall. Anyone who knew Mr. Preston could tell you that, including the colonel. Should I therefore happen to divert myself . . .”
“Mr. Stickley?” Eleanor asked.
“. . . it’s nobody’s business, not when we’ve been so discreet. And how the colonel found out without bribing the servants I have no idea. Nor should the man encourage gossip, considering his relations with Mrs. Ormsby. That great friend of his niece, Julia Holmes.”
“But Aunt,” Eleanor said. “You’re saying he wished you to end an affair de coeur . . .”
“Plainly. When it has nothing to do with anything. But you don’t like Mr. Denholm, so it’s of no matter, really.”
Her aunt sat down abruptly, and Eleanor sat next to her on the bed. The room felt unstable, even as its furniture stayed stolidly in its place, although it was true the open wardrobe gaped at them.
“It’s too bad about Captain Denholm,” her aunt said, taking her hand. Eleanor was so unmoored she couldn’t even blush. “I talked with him over dinner last night. He’s a good young man, intelligent and modest, with a far easier temper than his brother. It will be a great joke if he comes back from India so rich a nabob that he can marry whomever he pleases. Of course he’s head over heels in love with you. As you very well know.”
Eleanor felt helpless. “I don’t seem to know anything.”
“However, he’ll be gone for years. He rode off this morning, and I’m sorry to say, we really can’t expect him back.”
“Aunt . . .”
But Mrs. Crosby only gave herself a shake, standing up and adjusting her cap in the mirror. After a series of gentle, nearly imperceptible tugs, she paused and smiled happily at what she saw.
“Of course,” she said, meeting Eleanor’s eyes in the mirror, “having two young men fall so rapidly in love with you does rather suggest it won’t be any trouble finding you a husband.”
“Oh, please, Aunt,” Eleanor said. “Surely it proves the opposite. I’m no more engaged than I was six months ago.”
Mrs. Crosby ignored her, walking over to the wardrobe and taking out a dress.
“We’ll go back to Goodwood and prepare your clothes,” she said, putting the dress on the bed and folding it expertly. “You needn’t worry about Stansfield Mowbray; we can do better. There’s still time to go to London for the end of the Season. I’d forgotten about the eldest son of the Earl of Grimsby.”
“No!” Eleanor said, leaping to her feet. “Aunt? Really? Please stop!”
Her aunt turned around and gave her a nod. “I know. Too early. Go help Mademoiselle pack your things. Or rather”—looking at the trunk—“send her to me. I’ve made a hash.”
Eleanor walked to the door, reaching for the knob. But she couldn’t help walking back toward her aunt.
“Mr. Stickley? My entire life turns on a steward?”
“Don’t be a snob, Eleanor. He has attributes.” Her aunt smiled privately. “I did consider taking him back with me to Goodwood, but I think I’ll leave him here to rub the colonel’s nose in it.”
“But if you were so keen on the match, couldn’t you have stopped . . . I mean, for a while.”
“You are practical-minded,” her aunt said, with some satisfaction, brushing back Eleanor’s hair. “However, it was far from just Stickley. The colonel seems caught up in this wretched modern morality and self-righteousness. Evangelism. Methodism, for all his supposed allegiance to the established church. One hopes it’s a short-lived fad, and that we return to the much more forgiving manners of my youth.”
Her aunt paused to smile back at the ramshackle Regency.
“But I doubt it,” she said, giving herself a shake. “If you’d married his son, that dreadful colonel would have been after me for the rest of my days. Do this. Don’t do that. I wouldn’t have been able to lift an eyebrow without him interfering, complaining, ordering. Did he honestly think I was going to give him Goodwood for that?”
