It was strange how one could forget huge chunks of one’s life. Those haunts…
The tea tray and a plate of cakes had followed them into the drawing room. Katherine poured their tea but did not take any of the cakes.
“I do hope,” she said, “I will remember at least some of their names and that I will learn them all soon. There are so many of them.”
“There is no need,” he said. “They will not expect it of you.”
And yet, he thought, he knew almost all the servants by name without ever having made a determined effort to do so. And he believed he might remember the names of those who were new-but only because there were not many of them and most of them bore a family resemblance to former or current servants.
“But I expect it of myself,” she said. “Servants are people.”
He was always amused rather than irritated by her occasional lapses into primness-a product of her upbringing in a country vicarage, he suspected.
After going back down the steps outside the house while talking with the menservants, she had stood on the terrace, looking up at them all and laughing. The breeze had been wafting the brim of her hat, and the sunlight had caught the gold highlights in her hair. And she had addressed them all with similar words to the ones she had just spoken to him.
“Please forgive me,” she had said, “if I do not remember all your names the next time I see you. But if I still cannot remember one month from now, then I will neither deserve nor expect your forgiveness.”
There had been a ripple of laughter, and Jasper’s guess was that his whole large staff had fallen instantly in love with the new baroness.
He had been rather charmed himself.
She did not sit down in the drawing room. She walked over to one of the long windows and stood looking out, sipping her tea as she did so.
He went to stand a little way behind her.
“I think,” she said, “that is the loveliest garden I have ever seen.”
She was looking down at the parterres.
He closed his eyes briefly, and some of the tension that had been tightening his shoulders and neck since they had turned onto Cedarhurst property eased out of him.
“Is it?” he said.
For a moment he thought she had nothing else to say about it, that she had just been making a polite observation couched in rather lavish praise.
“It is so perfectly constructed,” she said, “with such geometrical precision. Is it exactly square? Do you know? It must be.”
“Down to the last quarter of an inch,” he said.
She laughed softly, thinking that he joked.
“Something so very man-made ought not to be beautiful too, ought it?” she said. “Such a ruthless taming of nature? But it is. Perhaps it says much about human-kind’s place in the world. We can impose order and precision upon nature, but we cannot destroy any of its loveliness or enthusiasm.”
“Enthusiasm?” he said.
“Look at the banks of wallflowers spilling down over the walls,” she said. “They are exuberant even though they have been confined to the perimeter of the garden. They give notice that they can be tamed but not destroyed, that they are in no way less powerful than the men who put them there and who see to it that they remain there without encroaching upon the parterres.”
He laughed softly, and she turned her head to look at him.
“Oh, very well,” she said. “Laugh at me. I do not mind.”
“The rest of the park,” he said, “has been laid out according to the theories of Capability Brown and his ilk. There are rolling, tree-dotted lawns and a lake, and a wilderness walk winding through the trees on the far side of it and up through the wooded hills behind the house. All carefully constructed to look artfully natural or naturally artful-I am not sure which is more appropriate. The object, of course, is to make the park look like a piece of wild, unspoiled nature when in reality it is no such thing. The lawns came almost to the very doors until a few years ago.”
“Just a few years?” She turned her head to look back outside.
“The terraces are newly constructed,” he said. “So is the parterre garden. Last year it looked better than the year before, and this year it looks better than last year.”
She was looking at him again, and this time he felt that all her attention was on him.
“Is this that first tentative step you spoke of in the carriage earlier?” she said. “The first step to making Cedarhurst your own?”
“It is one very tiny step, is it not?” he said, raising one eyebrow. “And it took so much energy that I doubt I will ever take another.”
“This is your work,” she said.
“I did not heft a shovel,” he said. “At least, I did, but my contribution to the actual manual labor was minuscule, Katherine. I might have damaged my manicure.”
“And I suppose,” she said, “the design was yours too.”
“Not at all,” he said. “I lay no claim to artistic vision-or mathematical genius for that matter.”
Though he had insisted that the square be exact, even down to the final quarter of an inch.
“Come,” he said, “I will show you something-if you have finished your tea, that is.”
She drained off the last mouthful and crossed the room to set her cup and saucer on the tray-to save a servant from having to retrieve it from the window ledge, he supposed. Another relic of the vicarage, where presumably there were no servants, or very few?
He led her from the room and into the east wing of the house, where their apartments were-the two east-facing bedchambers, large and square, the dressing rooms on the far side of each, and the private sitting room between.
He ought perhaps to have taken her to her own bedchamber first since she had not even seen it yet. Or at least to the sitting room, where she could be comfortable and quiet during the morning hours whenever she wished. But he took her straight into his own bedchamber.
He had had it completely redecorated and refurnished after his mother’s death-though it had not been used for years before that. He would have gutted the room with fire if he could, but actually the changes he had made had obliterated the presence of his mother’s second husband. Everything was dark blue and gray and silver now.
“This is my room,” he said. “Not yours too, you will be relieved to know. And there is a whole spacious sitting room between us and probably a lock on your bedchamber door to keep out the wolf.”
“You have made a wager with me,” she said. “I will trust to your honor. Even if there is a key, I will not turn it.”
“Something,” he said, “you may live to regret.”
It was going to be devilishly difficult living up to that condition of celibacy she had added to the wager last night and he had agreed to in a moment of madness-just because it had added another element of the seemingly impossible to the challenge.
“This is what I brought you here to see,” he said, indicating the large painting that hung over the mantel in its gilded, old-fashioned frame.
“Oh, yes,” she said, and she moved closer to it.
“In a fit of desperate boredom a few years ago,” he said, “after it had rained steadily for days on end, I made a foray into the attic storage rooms and discovered this, its face to the wall. It is a view from the house a century or more ago. Before the parterres were destroyed in the name of modernity and the artfully natural look. I fell in love.”
She whisked around, her eyes alight with merriment.
“Did you, indeed?” she said.
He shrugged.
“As you so eloquently explained earlier,” he said, “many words merely symbolize what cannot be expressed verbally. Cliches do the same thing when one is too lazy even to try to find original words. I knew immediately when I looked at this painting that if I were ever going to live at Cedarhurst, this is what I must look out upon from the drawing room or from the front steps of the house. And so I gave the necessary orders. Sometimes it is a great advantage to have both power and wealth.”