“Please do,” she replied with a teasing expression that seemed to indicate that she knew exactly what George was doing and why.
George stood and called for Rai, and then, bowing, swung a last look at Charlotte Chester, thinking that he would have pursued her too if she was to his taste, if he wanted a woman at all.
• • •
George went over to the rowboat and Rai followed, carrying two of the shotguns they’d brought for the pheasants and a sack of seeds. The valet hiked his tunic up as he manoeuvred the back end of the boat into the lake. Cato ambled after him to the waterline and then barked when Rai, without a backward glance, stepped into the water and hopped on board. Edmund and Sutton, long engaged in a discussion about efficiency in manufacturing, moved toward the rocky outcrop that jutted into the closed end of the lake for a better view, their forms blackening against a stand of fir trees. Charlotte turned back to her sketch and frowned, thinking it flat somehow. She remembered a criticism of Turner she’d read once, the critic arguing that without the human form, no landscape could ever be sublime.
Balancing her sketch pad on her knee she thought to try a bird, a swan perhaps, but when she glanced up for a model there were no swans in view, only the boat cutting across the lake, its oars knitting the water. Gathering resolve, Charlotte dipped her nib into the inkpot and attempted to add her husband and the insufferable Sutton into the scene. She would have liked to draw Celia, but the children, bored with the protracted nature of the photographic exercise, had taken off “on an expedition.” Bess, their governess, had been sick all morning, Charlotte feared to think with what, which meant that one of the Farrington maids had been charged with minding them. The girl was bright enough, and pleasing to little Celia because she’d taken her to investigate the chest of toys in the old schoolroom after they’d first arrived. When Charlotte had last seen them, Thomas was constructing a catapult out of a Y of wood and one of Celia’s ribbons. Charlotte had told him to stay close if they were going into the woods and to watch his younger brother and sister. She’d also allowed the maid, whose shoes were too soft-soled for the forest, to stay within earshot of them near the first clump of trees. This, Charlotte confirmed, was where she was presently stationed.
Before George’s first shot, Charlotte stood with her sketch pad and moved toward a flat-topped rock jutting out between the limestone crag and the picnic spot, trying to subdue the annoyance she felt at Mirabelle Sutton, who had hefted herself up to join their husbands, thus ruining the integrity of Charlotte’s composition. Norvill, seeing that Rai hadn’t done it, had taken it upon himself to pack up the lamb and was bent over his work a few feet away. He’d been growing restless since lunch, swatting at flies one minute and then brushing off the tufts of dog fur that had fastened to his trouser legs the next. His jerky gaze finally moved from his leg and boot to the cut of lamb that was drawing the insects, then on to the wicker basket where the food belonged. The maid, standing stupidly by the trees, appeared to be of no use, and his mother, reclining on a chaise a few feet away, was seemingly oblivious. Charlotte alone was following his actions, observing him in a way he could feel, so he turned to her and gazed brazenly at her figure, bound as it was in a dress he’d once said was becoming, a pleated and vested thing that was too heavy for the afternoon, her chest flushed and splotchy because of it.
Prudence Farrington coughed politely and Norvill swung around. He glanced at the needlework on her lap to assess the extent of her occupation. “Is anything the matter, Mother?”
“Of course not, darling.” She peered at him from under the straw of her hat and then gently tapped her chest under the pleated bow of her striped walking dress. “Do I seem unwell?”
“You appear both perfect and content.”
Prudence smiled up at him in the same polite way she probably smiled in rooms with no one else in them, the corners of her lips lifted tightly in feigned tolerance. Together they watched as a fly of considerable size landed on her skirt and began to inch over the silk of her knee, Norvill admiring its daring, its proximity and permission, envying it almost, until his mother adjusted her position on the folding chair to gain a more direct view of the rowboat and it flew off. Prudence would be fifty-five this year but she had kept both her figure and her quick turn to temper. As a boy, Norvill had never been sure what would set her off, though he was usually quite certain it was a direct consequence of an act that emanated from him. She’d been in great spirits, however, since the guests arrived — thinner and frailer than when he’d come at the start of summer, but more congenial.
Aware that his gaze was still on her, Prudence shifted again and stared sternly back at her son, puffing up slightly in her chair. The gesture reminded Norvill of George’s description of a hooded snake he’d once encountered in India; how it seemed to sit up and waver at its intruders, widen its body.
“Would you bring me some lemonade, Norvill?”
“Of course.” He poured and handed her a half glass and the tips of their fingers met briefly.
She took a drink from it and returned it to him. “It’s good to have you both home at once,” she said finally, but her eyes were on the boat by then, on George, as they’d always been.
Seeing that George was almost in position to shoot at the upper ledges of the rock face, Norvill crossed the divide to fetch Charlotte. She was well out of danger but it was within the realm of possibility that small stones or rubble could skitter down and reach her. He picked up the lap blanket she’d dropped earlier and placed it on the rock next to her, then, with more urgency than he intended, he said, “You should come back to the picnic area where it’s safe.”
“Am I in peril?”
He winced, unsure of the possible allusions. “It’s not for me to say.”
Charlotte breathed deeply, gave him a bemused expression, and returned to her sketch. Norvill remained where he was at her shoulder, taking in her scent under the pretense of admiring her drawing. In the dark coil of her hair he believed he could detect the same lavender notes he remembered finding on her pillow in the early years of the Chester when the house doubled as a museum and, sent on an errand for Edmund, he’d happened past their bedroom.
“The sketch is charming,” he said, leaning closer.
“It’s tedious,” she chided. “The lake is wanting, and there are no swans to fill the space.”
“Why not draw the boat?”
Charlotte flipped the page to show Norvill George’s caricature of a man with a shotgun in a skiff. “It’s already been drawn.”
“Are you afraid of repetition?”
Repositioning the inkwell she’d set beside her, Charlotte returned to her sketch. “One always ought to be wary of being unoriginal.”
Norvill studied the perfect line of untouched skin that marked the part in her hair; hair that, in this light, was the colour of the Arabian mare George had shipped from Spain last year. “Does my admiration for your accomplishments offend you?”
Charlotte laughed, perhaps at the huskiness of his voice — a mocking laugh that made his skin prickle. “And if I gave the sketch to you?” she asked, smiling clearly and easily up at him, “what would you do with it?”
“Have it mounted,” he said, anger welling in his throat.
11
After the first hour of driving, the motorway is mostly empty. It’s pitchblack outside and other than the ambient light from the dashboard we are tunnelling through darkness. Jane has yet to relax her grip on the steering wheel and she’s shivering, though we’re unsure whether that’s because she’s using the cold to stay awake, or because Lewis has yet to fix the Mercedes’ heater like he’d promised. Our thoughts are scattered; we retrace William’s lecture one minute, then circle back to our concern for Jane the next. Her thinking has been hard to follow — there’s a prickliness about her, a distance. She switches lanes to pass a car numbly thinking, Indicate, accelerate, then Breathe, slow down.