Cut to the Quick (5 page)

She came around the table, smiling. “You’ve brought Mr. Kestrel to see the gun room—how nice.”

“Of course, I hadn’t expected to find you and my brother having a private conversation here.”

“It’s not so very private,” said Lady Fontclair. “And we hadn’t a great deal more to say, so you mustn’t be concerned about interrupting us.”

“I’m not in the least concerned!” Lady Tarleton snapped.

The colonel came to his feet with an effort. “Got a bit of a headache,” he muttered. “I think I’ll get along to bed.”

“Of course,” said Lady Fontclair. “Shall I say good night to the others for you?”

“That’s good of you. Thanks.”

She turned to Julian with her merry, sweet smile. “Mr. Kestrel, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve deserted my post in the drawing room for too long. I won’t say good night, since I’m sure I’ll see you again before we all retire for the evening. Catherine, until later.”

Lady Tarleton made a scornful sound through her nostrils. Geoffrey mumbled good night to her, without meeting her eyes. She did not speak to him at all.

The colonel and Lady Fontclair went out, walking arm in arm very gracefully in spite of Geoffrey's lameness. Lady Tarleton gazed after them, her lips twisting into a sneer. “Touching, isn't it,*’ she said, “how fond they are of one another?”

Julian changed the subject hastily. “This is a marvellous collection.”

“Yes it is, isn’t it? You must forgive me, Mr. Kestrel. That charming little tableau we just witnessed quite made me forget why I brought you here.”

What she wanted to show him, it turned out, was the original of the sword in the portrait of Sir Roland Fontclair. With Julian’s help, she took it down from the wall. “Isn’t it beautiful?” she breathed, turning the jewelled pommel this way and that, to catch the light. “Feel how heavy it is. Sir Roland must have been a very powerful man, to carry such a sword into battle.”

She let him hold it, hovering anxiously, like a mother putting her baby into the arms of a stranger. He cut a few swipes in the *air, and she seemed a little resentful, as though it offended her that any man but a Fontclair could manage Sir Roland’s sword. She took it back and brandished it herself, her hand trembling a little with its weight.

The character of a female warrior suited her, Julian thought. She was tall, like Isabelle, and strong—many women would not have been able to lift the sword at all. He thought she must have been handsome when she was young. Even now, she did not seem old so much as ravaged: her steel-blue eyes were glassy, her cheekbones sharp, her mouth marked off by frown lines. Her hair, instead of fading gradually with age, was dark red, shot with bolts of silver.

She gave him a tour of the gun room, dwelling with particular pride on her ancestors* military decorations. He noticed several that Geoffrey had won for his service under Wellington in Spain, but Lady Tarleton showed no interest in those. Apparently she only cared about heroics of the distant past.

“When I was a girl,” she said, “these weapons were displayed all over the house. But after Robert married Cecily, they were all gathered together in one room. She said she didn’t want her children growing up surrounded by dangerous objects. Dangerous! Why,

when I was their age, I used to play with daggers and dress swords all the time! It made me proud of my family's military tradition. She won’t even allow her daughters in this room alone. I’m surprised she doesn’t go so far as to put a lock on the door.”

Julian wondered fleetingly what Lady Tarleton’s children would have been like, if she had had any. Little girls running about like Amazons, with quivers on their shoulders and spears in their hands? Well, he was glad she had brought him to see this room. He could easily have whiled away hours here, trying out the grip of different swords or observing how guns had improved over the years, from seventeenth-century muskets to the newest Manton fowling pieces.

By the time they left the gun room, she was in charity with him enough to take his arm. They entered the drawing room—and she froze. She made a small, strangled sound in her throat, and her arm went stiff in his.

The company was grouped around Mark Craddock, who sat on a sofa beside Maud. Isabelle sat at a table across from them, sketching Craddock’s face. Hugh stood behind her, watching her pencil dart across the page, while Sir Robert and Lady Fontclair looked on from farther away.

Lady Tarleton rushed at Isabelle. Wrenching her sketchbook out of her hands, she tore off the drawing of Craddock, ripped it to shreds and flung the pieces away. Craddock leapt to his feet and stared at her. The others were too stunned to move.

Isabelle stood up, unhurried and unafraid. “Mr. Craddock has an interesting face, Aunt. He said I might draw it.”

“And I say you will do nothing of the kind! You’re treating this man as though—as though he were a member of our family, the same as one of us! And he will never be that! He may force his daughter on Hugh, but she’ll never really be a Fontclair. And he’ll never be anything but what he is—a cit, a little trumped-up tradesman, and before that—”

“Don’t say it!” Craddock thundered. “Don’t say it, I warn you! Another word, and I’ll take my daughter and leave this house, and that will be the end of everything. Of everything/” he ground out, his face close to hers.

She scared back, breathing hard, giving no ground, but she was silent.

Sir Robert’s face settled into a grim, inscrutable mask. Hugh was scarlet to the roots of his hair. Maud Craddock quietly and undra-matically dropped her head in her hands.

Isabelle gathered up the pieces of her drawing and tucked them away in her sketchbook. As always, her movements were graceful precise, and confident. Julian thought she made the most ordinary actions look like a ballet.

“Why don’t we all go to bed,’’ Lady Fontclair suggested quietly. She put an arm around Lady Tarleton’s shoulders and guided her toward the door. The others followed. Julian went over to Isabelle. “May I?’’ he said, indicating her sketching box.

“That’s kind of you, but it isn’t heavy. I carry it all the time.” “All the more reason I should ease the burden, this once.”

She shrugged slightly and handed him her sketching box and sketchbook. Trailing a little behind the others, they climbed the spiral staircase that formed the hub of the new wing.

“Would you show me your work some time?” he asked.

“If you like.”

“Do you ever paint?”

“No. I find line and shadow more interesting than colour, so I prefer to work in pencil or pen and ink. Perhaps you’d be good enough to sit for me while you’re here.”

“I can’t think of anything I should like more.”

She turned a cool, distancing gaze on him. “I sketch most people who visit Bellegarde for any length of time.”

“Lest the honour go to my head?”

“Lest you think I mean to flirt with you, Mr. Kestrel. I only want to try my hand at capturing your likeness.”

“But I’m not to try my hand at capturing your favour?”

“I should rather you didn’t. I mean that seriously.” She stopped outside a door. “This is my room.”

He gave her back her sketchbook and sketching box, at the same time catching and holding her gaze. “I think it only fair to warn you, I’m becoming rather fascinated.”

“If you’re in earnest, Mr, Kestrel, then I’m honoured by your attentions, but I appeal to you—don’t pursue me. Leave me to myself. If you’re merely amusing yourself, then I must tell you, there is nothing I find more tedious than gentlemen who regard me as a challenge. Good night, Mr. Kestrel.”

“So you see,” Julian said to Dipper later that night, “if there’s a rural uprising while we’re here, we’ll be able to defend ourselves with everything from medieval lances to duelling pistols. I’ve never seen a household so armed to the teeth. Now I come to think of it, this whole house is reminiscent of a fortress. Look how thick the outer walls are.”

He went to the window. It was a bay window, shaped like half an octagon. Some of the small leaded panes were brilliantly stained in crimson, green, and gold. On either side, where the wall was cut away to form the embrasure, were wood panels carved with all manner of animals and objects. Julian had earlier realized that all these carvings were sacred emblems: Mary Magdalen’s ointment jar, Anthony’s lily, Peter’s two crossed keys, Agnes’s lamb. Several years in Italy had taught him to know his saints. What their emblems were doing in a bedroom window, he had no idea. Perhaps in Elizabethan days England was more like Italy, where religious and secular decor were gaily intermixed.

The window gave a lovely view of the rear courtyard, which was planted with silver lime trees and bounded on the right side by the new wing, with its fluted columns and delicate balustrades. In the moonlight, the treetops stood out in silhouette against the new wing’s pale grey stone. Candlelight gleamed in windows here and there along the upper floor. The window at the far end, where a light shimmered faintly behind white curtains, would be Isabelle’s.

Julian left the window abruptly. “This whole place has something of the fortress about it. Nowadays people fill their houses with French windows, so that Nature comes flowing in on all sides, and every room seems to be trying to creep out into the garden. Here I haven’t seen any French windows except in the conservatory, and there are

hardly any outside doors. A morbid person could start to feel imprisoned in this house/*

Dipper stifled a yawn very artfully, but Julian was not deceived. "You’d best go to bed.”

"I don't mind sitting up, sir.”

“But I mind. You disturb my meditations. I keep wanting to look around suddenly, to see if I can catch you nodding off.” Dipper grinned. “When will you be getting up, sir?”

“Hugh Fontclair’s taking me to a horse fair in the morning, so you’d better wake me at some ungodly hour. Seven should be ungodly enough. If I won’t get up, bring a spear from that arsenal downstairs and prod me until I do.”

“Yes, sir. Good night, sir.” Dipper went out.

Julian explored his room more closely. It was a handsome apartment—the Fontclairs were justly proud of it. The walls were panelled from floor to ceiling in highly polished oak slabs, each panel divided lengthwise into three squares, and each square with a lozenge set inside it. Four marble maidens, the Seasons, held up the mantelpiece, while around them swarmed mermaids, satyrs, cupids, and mythical beasts. On the ceiling were vivid stucco reliefs of Elizabethan hunting scenes. The Fontclairs’ coat of arms, in painted and gilded wood, appeared at intervals along the cornice and even, to Julian’s amusement, on the door of the water closet.

Most of the furnishings were modern, but the massive bed, with its elephantine posts and crimson curtains, could only be Tudor. There were other Elizabethan touches: pewter candlesticks, a linenfold chest, and a portrait of a lady in a ramrod-straight bodice, with a ruff like a white platter round her neck. A pier looking glass hung near the door. The washstand, which had its own small mirror, was mahogany, with a white porcelain basin, a gilt soap dish, and two crystal glasses. There was a white towel draped over a rack at the side, and a gilt ewer on a shelf below.

The early June night was chilly, and the fire did not warm the room very much. None of Rumford’s improvements marred the quaint, hopelessly inefficient fireplace. The cold made Julian feel industrious, and he decided to write a letter. He sat down at a small

writing table in the window recess. In this little alcove, with the stained glass behind him, he felt like St. Augustine in some Renaissance painting.

He wrote for a while, but there was something disquieting about this night, this place. It was the silence, he realized—that awful silence of a country night that falls so hauntingly on a city-dweller’s ears. No carriage wheels on cobblestones, no clattering hoofbeats, no watchmen crying the hour, no revellers carousing in the streets. Of course, this room was bound to be especially quiet. As Philippa had pointed out, it was the only occupied room in this part of the house. Unless, of course, that ancestor who had taken part in the Babington Plot really did haunt the great chamber across the hall. Julian pictured him dancing there in some Elizabethan galliard, surrounded by ghostly companions in platter-shaped ruffs. Perhaps if he listened closely he would hear their minstrels playing—

What he heard was a rap on his own door. The sudden noise, more than the unexpected intrusion, made him start. He took an instant to collect his faculties, and called, "Come*in.”

The figure who appeared in the doorway, with his long hair, knotted red neckerchief, and boots, might have passed for an Elizabethan privateer, come to join the spectral masque in the great chamber. But it was Guy Fontclair, his face flushed and his gait a little wobbly. Julian did not know Guy very well, but he was not sorry to have someone to pass the time with, even if it meant having to look at the red neckerchief.

“Hello, Kestrel! Survived your first evening here, I see?”

"Did you think I might not?”

“I’m always surprised when anyone gets through dinner at Belle-garde without visible wounds. Mind you, it didn’t used to be like that. We weren’t always in charity with each other, but it’s only since the Craddocks came that we’ve all been set by the ears. I’ll wager there’ve already been some explosions since you arrived.”

“One or two.”

“What did I tell you?” Guy pulled a chair close to the fire and began toasting his wet boots. “Every night I’m in two minds about whether to dine here and see how the war goes on or escape to the village to avoid Aunt Catherine. Most of the time blind terror of Aunt Catherine keeps me away—that and all the temptations of the neighbourhood. Some of the local girls can be pretty agreeable, especially to anyone named Fontclair. Bless those old feudal traditions!”

“Lady Tarleton asked after you this evening.”

“The deuce! She only wants me at home so she can claw my head off whenever she’s in the mood. The one she’d really like to blow up is Mark Craddock, but she can’t, because everyone's under orders to get on with him, or pretend to. It's the damnedest thing, this marriage! I can't make head or tail of it. If all Uncle Robert wanted was for Hugh to bring a fat dowry into the family, there are plenty of other milch cows he could have lit on. Why Mark Craddock’s daughter?”