The Country Gentleman (7 page)

Mr. Highet begged she would not trouble to return it. Miss Guilfoyle insisted she must and would. Mr. Highet, turning the topic, declared his attention of accompanying the ladies’ party to Linfield, with or without tea. “Though I’d much prefer it if you stopped here the night,” he added earnestly, with an excess of generosity calculated, it seemed to Anne, to make her feel small. “We have plenty of rooms. I’ll wake my mother—”

Miss Guilfoyle could not think of it, nor of his accompanying them to Linfield. “We have roused one inhabitant from his bed here this night,” she said, striving for dignity as another sneeze threatened to overset her. “That is sufficient.” And, taking up a candle, she began to walk out of the parlour and retrace, as best she could recall them, the steps they had taken from the hall to the parlour.

Mr. Highet, bowing Maria out, followed after them anxiously. “Do you mean me? I was not asleep. It don’t signify at all. I was reading in bed, Miss Guilfoyle, listening to the rain. Now you must— Excuse me, dear lady.” He caught up with her and gently guided her shoulders in the opposite direction to the one she had been turning. “That’s the way to my library,” he explained kindly. “The door—you are looking for the door you came in?—is along here…”

In the end, after many polite offers and many firm refusals, Maria intervened. She had had quite enough of wandering over the countryside for one night.

“I must say,” she broke in, softly but deliberately, “it
seems to me the height of foolishness to set forth again without a guide. Perhaps if Mr. Highet has a groom he could send, or…”

Anne cast her a dark, angry look; but Maria, content that she had both common sense and prudence on her side, received it with serene indifference. Since Anne knew she was right (and was even a little relieved by her interference) no objection was made aloud, and Mr. Highet was permitted to oblige his visitors at last.

“The very thing,” he said, ushering them into the front hall, then begging to leave them for a moment. He disappeared forthwith, ostensibly to rouse a groom, but actually, as it developed, to dress himself to go out. He returned looking much less risible in riding-breeches and a country coat. “Couldn’t bring myself to wake the lad,” he explained, though it was clear a minute later that he had waked someone, for a saddled chestnut mare was brought round to the door. “Your horses are tired.” He led the ladies out to the carriage sweep again. “I have taken the liberty of replacing them with mine—to be returned with the handkerchief,” he added gravely to Miss Guilfoyle, apparently intending no humour. John and James were already mounted on their respective boxes, and a moment later Anne realized the others were inside the curricle. Mr. Highet accepted a lantern from a tiger, handed the ladies into their carriage before they had an opportunity to protest, and mounted the mare. And so the party set off into the foggy night.

With a knowledgeable guide to keep them off the poorer roads and to steer them on course, they arrived at Linfield in a matter of forty-five minutes or so. In good weather, Mr. Highet informed the ladies as he handed them out onto the wooden portico of a decidedly smaller
house than Fevermere, the journey was twenty minutes to ride (across the land that joined the properties) and no more than thirty to drive. “It is a road I have often taken to visit Mr. Herbert Guilfoyle. He is gone and we regret him,” he went on, with a bow to Anne by way of condolence (they were waiting at the lighted door for someone to open it), “but now that you have come, I hope I may have the honour of continuing to travel it often.”

Anne skirted the question, muttering only, “You leave us much in your debt”; but Maria, a little shocked at her friend’s grudging manner, answered,

“Indeed, sir, we shall hope to see you again very soon,” and thanked him prettily.

She was still thanking him when the door opened at last and a very thin, very old lady looked out. Her grizzled hair was skinned back off her face and hidden in a scrap of lace at the top of her head. Seeing Mr. Highet, she curtsied, held the door open to admit them, then introduced herself as Miss Charlotte Veal.

“Franklin, run out to the coaches and show them where they must go,” she directed over her shoulder at a young boy who had been hovering in the hall behind. The boy departed on his errand and the ladies identified themselves. Miss Veal stared at them curiously with great, round grey eyes.

“But Mr. Highet, how do you come to be here?” Miss Veal inquired—rather impertinently, Anne thought, for a person she presumed to be the housekeeper.

“Mr. Highet discovered us lost and was kind enough to show us our way,” she interposed coldly, before he could answer. She was feeling almost light-headed with fatigue, and though she mechanically took note of her surroundings (square, wainscoted, tiled hall; plain glass lamps;
watercolour landscapes, wooden staircase beyond) all she could really think of was bed and sleep. “It was very good of him, and we are grateful,” she went on, “but my friend and I are both extremely weary, and I hope Mr. Highet will excuse us if I ask you to show us to our rooms. You might summon someone else to help him to any amenity…” Her words faded off as Henry Highet begged her not to trouble about him and Miss Veal simultaneously asked if he mightn’t like to stop the night at Linfield, now he was here.

The housekeeper having extended this invitation, the ladies had perforce to second and urge it upon him; but the gentleman declared repeatedly that he was not the least tired, neither the dark nor the rain distressed him, and he would not stop. Miss Veal, who had evidently a great liking for him, protested vigorously; but in the end he was allowed to depart. Bowing, he vanished into the night. Miss Veal, loudly tsk-tsking (“As if we had sent him away by force,” Anne indignantly commented to Maria the next morning), took a candle and led the ladies up two pairs of oaken stairs to their bed-chambers.

These were across a corridor from one another. Miss Guilfoyle doubted from their size and their furnishings if either was the one her great uncle had inhabited; but she was in no mind to quarrel, so long as there was a bed to climb into. As there was—a large four-postered one—she meekly thanked and dismisssed Miss Veal for the night, asked Lizzie to unbutton her dress and sent her off to bed, wriggled out of the rest of her damp clothes and crawled under the covers.

She slept a long time, and woke sneezing. The spiritual mortifications of the previous night, then the fleshly ones
of the day that preceded it, flooded painfully into her memory even before she could fumble for the handkerchief (Mr. Highet’s—she reminded herself to hand it to Lizzie directly she came) on the night-stand. She lay back upon the pillows and shut her eyes. Henry Highet’s stupidly smiling face appeared before her. A new sneeze welled from the back of her throat. “Devil fly away with you,” she muttered, whether to the face or the sneeze was not clear. She sat up, reopened her eyes, erupted explosively, then found a bell-pull over her head, rang it, and sat back.

The rain had stopped (“It would, now,” she thought) and strong sunlight brightly edged the heavy brocaded curtains hung over her windows. The chamber, now she could see it, was large and rather bare, with a plain wooden floor over which a few Turkey carpets had been scattered. A huge country cupboard stood in one corner, a deal wardrobe in another, and a small vanity table (too small for the seriously vain, she considered) in a third. A blue-and-white porcelain washbasin sat upon this table, with a white ceramic pitcher. The room was scrupulously clean, and when (Lizzie duly arrived, also sneezing) the curtains were opened, sunlight poured into it through three large, diamond-paned casement windows.

“Good morning, Lizzie. I see that you also kept a souvenir of last night?” Anne observed in heavily nasal tones.

“Yes, Miss. I’m afraid so, Miss.”

Exploding again, “You have my deepest commiseration,” Anne told her. “Are you well armed with handkerchiefs? Take some of mine, if not. And please see that this one is laundered and returned to Mr. Highet,” she finished, distastefully holding out the crumpled linen
square. “I think there is a pile of fresh ones in that portmanteau, if you wouldn’t mind.”

Lizzie opened the portmanteau, located the needed reinforcements, and supplied Miss Guilfoyle with them. “I’ve fetched your lap-desk up, ma’am,” she said, disappearing into the corridor momentarily, then returning with the desk. She set it on the bed and stood back.

Since it was Miss Guilfoyle’s habit to write three or four letters each morning from her bed, and since each morning Lizzie fetched her lap-desk to her for that purpose, it seemed no strange thing that the desk should be brought to her this morning. Yet Anne lay contemplating it as if it had been a meteor dropped from the sky. “Thank you, Lizzie, you may go. Keep warm to-day. Ask for my chocolate, if you please,” she added rather dreamily, her eyes still fixed and vacant.

Lizzie curtsied—she had a long-legged, loping gait and a curiously jaunty curtsy—and departed. Her mistress’ gaze did not shift. She lay many moments in silence, then said at last, “Do you feel as foolish as you look, I wonder?”

It was true the desk looked foolish. It was an ebony desk elaborately inlaid with brass scrollwork. Its clasps imitated the talons of a hawk, its hinges two fantastical birds in profile. Inside, the polished ebony writing surface was bordered with a vine of nacre, and a jade oak cluster embellished each corner. The compartments below, where pens and paper and ink were kept, were lined in green velvet embroidered with silken birds and flowers. It had been made to Miss Guilfoyle’s specifications in happier days. In this plain, light-swept, cheerful room, it looked
as ridiculous as a bishop in a donkey cart—or, thought Anne bitterly, a bluestocking at a farm.

There was a tap on the door. Maria, wearing a grey day dress, came in. Her eyes and nose were red, and in the draught made by the opening and closing of the door, both ladies sneezed mightily.

“You too?” was Anne’s greeting.

Mrs. Insel took the ladder-backed chair from the vanity table and sat down. “Yes. Minna also, and Mrs. Dolphim, from what I hear.”

“A flush,” said Anne, who despised cards but knew the rudiments of play. She blew her nose; at the same moment came a knock on the door. A young girl with ginger hair walked in, bearing a tray.

“Your chocolate, Miss. My name is Susannah. It’s a lovely day out. I feel quite cheerful after all that rain.”

“No one asked your name or your opinions,” thought Anne automatically, waving her to set the tray on the bed, but saying nothing. She gave a cool nod of dismissal. “What did my great uncle do, do you suppose, to encourage the servants to confide in one so?” she demanded of Maria as the door closed. “We have not been here fourteen hours, and already I know more of Miss Veal’s ideas, and Miss Susannah’s biography, than I feel the slightest need to know. Have you been out into the house at all?” she went on before the other could answer. “Is it this all over? Deal tables and chintz counterpanes and sunshine?”

Maria, understanding at once, gave a sorrowful, sympathetic nod. “I fear your lovely parcel-gilt suites will suit Linfield but ill. It is a comfortable house, only—”

“Painted shutters?” Anne broke in.

Maria nodded.

“Delft fireplaces? Cambric curtains?”

“I’m afraid so.”

Anne shook her head. “I shall not tell you,” she said, “for fear of breaking your heart, how much money exactly we spent to remove our eight Venetian chandeliers, my mother’s Chippendale settees, the Aubusson carpets, and the other three waggon-loads of furnishings from London to this place; but let me assure you, my dear, that if I did tell you, we should both be here weeping till Tuesday. Still”—she straightened and poured a cup of chocolate with an air of resolve—“it is done. And what is done, as Mrs. Macbeth so pithily and incontrovertibly observed, is done. I’m sure there is some barn or other where they can be kept. Now, what shall we do today? Mowing? Sowing? Rearing? Shearing? Till? Mill? Drill—”

“I believe Miss Veal wishes to speak with you,” Mrs. Insel interrupted, noticing the increasing asperity in Anne’s tone. “And I know Mrs. Dolphim will like to be told what her duties are. Then there is the steward, Mr. Rand. Surely he will wish to take you over the estate. And we ought to thank—”

“Stop, stop,” cried Anne, who heard Mr. Highet about to be mentioned. She gulped what remained of her chocolate in one swallow, flung off the bedclothes, and leapt up. “You persuade me: A day of adventure and obligation awaits. I shall make haste.” She rang the bell for Lizzie. Mrs. Insel stood to go.

“You will not forget—” she began hesitantly, from the doorsill.

“To thank Mr. Highet again,” Miss Guilfoyle finished. “No indeed. We shall send him a brace of cheeses, or a golden fleece, or whatever is best from Linfield—”

“An invitation to dine, I should have suggested.”

Anne flashed her a dark look but yielded. “Or an
invitation to dine.” She winced, as if the idea crushed her somewhat.

Maria smiled, opened the door, and was going out when she added over her shoulder, “And his mother, of course.”

Her look ever darker, “And, God bless us yes, his mother; a poor party we should make without his mother,” Anne said, suppressing a sneeze. “Now do go away before we are to invite little Joan as well.”

Maria went.

“Rand, Veal. Veal, Rand. Farm, household. Household, farm. Can’t decide,” Miss Guilfoyle muttered under her breath as, dressed and determined, she made her solitary way down the staircase some half hour later. “They both sound so utterly fascinating, that’s the deuce of it—Oh!” she suddenly broke into her own remarks as she rounded a corner and nearly collided with Charlotte Veal. “Forgive me, I did not see you. I was just hoping to find you. Is there an office where we might discuss the household?”

“There is the housekeeper’s room,” Miss Veal replied, with more emphasis on the penultimate word than Anne could quite account for. “But—are you alone, ma’am? I did hear you speaking to someone, I think?” She squinted on this side of the corner and that, as if there might be someone only faintly visible still lingering in the air.