“It’s surprising to me that she has her own personality, so young,” he whispered to Lady Jane. Miss Taylor was reading the Illustrated London News.
“What do you mean?”
“I had always thought of babies as being a pretty uniform lot, but Sophia seems different. Certain things make her happy, certain things make her unhappy — she’s almost a small human.”
“I should hope so,” said Jane and returned to her novel.
In Bath they switched platforms and got onto a tiny single-car train, largely empty, which traveled in no great haste across the western part of Somerset. Through the windows one could see vast unspoiled meadows and orchards — the local cider was famously strong and delicious — and at each small station, the platform often no longer than fifteen or twenty feet, a stationmaster popped his head through the window to make sure nobody had to come off. Then he went to the end of the train and collected an armful of mail from the engineer.
After ten or twelve of these stops Plumbley was close; Lenox knew because he remembered a certain pub by the side of the tracks, and his heart swelled up with happiness at the prospect of returning to a place he had so loved. He felt a fondness all out of proportion for the dusty farmer who had gotten on two stops before, and was now reading the local newspaper in the corner of the car. How different from London it was here!
“We’ve arrived!” he said, well before the train began to slow, and leaned his head through an open window, breathing in the rush of country air.
At the station there was a cart to meet them, driven by a young man Lenox didn’t recognize, but who was expecting them.
“To Everley?” he said.
“Yes, if you please. Our things are following behind.”
They went a mile or so along a small cart-path, with ancient stone walls on either side, before they saw the black gates of Everley. Leaning against them, smoking his pipe, was Uncle Frederick.
More properly he should have been denominated Cousin Frederick, for he was the beloved first cousin of Lenox’s late mother, but family tradition had claimed him as an uncle and so he remained. He was a small, friendly-looking, gray-haired man, just nearing sixty now, utterly unassuming — retiring, in fact — with a small belly pushing out at his tweed waistcoat and the healthy air of a country squire. In his lapel was a bright blue ribbon, given to him many years before by the Somerset Garden Society, in honor of his contributions to horticulture. That ribbon about measured the height of his ambitions.
He put up a hopeful hand when he saw them turn the bend. “There you are!” he called out to Charles.
“Hello!” Lenox cried back.
“Come along in, come along in! Hello, Jane! Hello, Sophia, wherever you are in that bundle of blankets! And you, you must be Miss Taylor, Charles said you were going to visit! Very pleased indeed to meet you, madam!”
He hopped nimbly up onto the cart with them, and they drove down the long avenue, past lime trees on either side, which led to the house.
“I couldn’t be happier to have you,” said the older man. He wasn’t smiling — he didn’t smile too often — but there was plain and simple affection in his face. “For starters you must play in the cricket match next weekend, Charles, and then you haven’t seen my garden — and in truth, you’re coming for the best of the season.”
This Frederick was the reigning squire of Plumbley, just as his forefathers had been since such a thing called a squire had first come to be in England and begun passing down the family name from father to son, from uncle to nephew, and occasionally from cousin to cousin. There was no unbroken line of male succession, yet each Ponsonby who abided at the great house, as the family called it, had viewed it in much the same light: There had been no profligate along the way who tore down the land’s timber to pay gambling debts or sold off the estate’s outlying acres for pony-money. Thus the estate — though it was legally unbound and therefore each new heir might have sold it on his first day of taking up the patrimony — had remained intact for many hundreds of years. Only tremendous good luck had held it all together. Or a peculiar, settled sort of inherited trait in all the Ponsonbys. As a group they were similar, all quiet, all bookish, all in love with home. The portraits that lined the front hall showed a long sequence of gentle gentlemen.
Frederick was no different. He was without aspiration to any greatness of personal achievement, was excessively modest, yet was a merry and genial soul, who took great pleasure in company and in other humans. The combination made people love him. Other than a stretch of time at school and then another at Cambridge he had spent all of his years at Everley. He left the estate twice annually and no more, once to visit for a week a small, warmthless, but colorful hovel in Ireland, where he shot birds with three very old friends, and once, for twenty-four hours every April, to the Chelsea Flower Show in London. The exertion of this latter sojourn, it was widely accepted among the people of Plumbley, nearly killed him, and his valiance in nevertheless going inspired in them a broad affection. (In this regard it didn’t hurt that he loved the village, shopped with its shopkeepers, gave generously at church, and sent a silver rattle along to every Plumbley child who was born.) Generally he kept to his books, his gardens, his pipe, and his meals.
As for the house, there were greater families than the Ponsonbys in Somerset — many, in fact — yet you could not say there was a finer house than Everley. As they turned the corner of the drive and came to view it, reflected perfectly in the still pond that lay before its front door, all of them but Uncle Frederick fell silent.
For his part, he was saying, “Here we are, then, fetch down, Miss Taylor — but then, she is having a look at the place.”
“It’s very beautiful,” the governess said soberly, gazing upon its littoral calm.
“Well, she’s not bad,” murmured Frederick, but his tight lips showed that the comment had pleased him.
Indeed Everley was famous in Somerset, famous even in England, among the people who knew of such things, for its serene loveliness. It had none of the grandeur of a palace, or of the great medieval castles — it was only two stories — yet it had a beauty all its own.
In color and build it looked something like an Oxford college, made of the same honey-colored stone, which looked beautiful no matter how the light struck it; it was in the shape of an open-ended square, with a medieval hall at one end, dating from 1220, and opposite that a matching Tudor hall. The front was more recent, dating to the reign of Queen Anne, and had two rows of four great windows and a large archway that led to a grassy inner courtyard. Ringed around it were small gardens with gravel paths, not grand but perfect in their beauty; Frederick tended them very carefully. The whole picture was one less of uniform imagination, like Chastworth or Castle Howard, than of a modest, gradually evolving, lived-in place. Yet the effect, between the pond and the quiet gardens and the house itself, was one of almost supernal beauty.
“It looks as if a nobler race than ours made it,” said Miss Taylor.