Keeping the Castle - By Patrice Kindl Page 0,68

to my hair as gently as my mother would have done. Meanwhile, I thought about her son. What would happen to him? Not for the first time I regretted the lack of an inquisitive and sophisticated male relation who could have enquired about the specifics of Mr. Fredericks’s financial standing in the world. If only he had even a small independence! In that case. . . Why, in that case, I believe I would have done everything in my power to make him love me. It was therefore best I did not know—no small independence would rescue my family now.

He had quarreled with Lord Boring because His Lordship had become betrothed to Charity. Most likely that meant that he had wanted and expected his cousin to marry Miss Vincy. I sighed. Certainly he was fond of her, and she of him.

Would he marry Miss Vincy, perhaps fulfilling the same post for her father that he had for Lord Boring? If so, I would not see him again, or not for a great many years, at least, as the Vincys lived in London.

Looking through the conservatory door, I could see him in the dark corner where he sat, moodily stabbing at a small hole in the Axminster carpet with the end of a walking stick.

Normally when we visited at the Park he was busy working, only to be seen striding towards his office in the rear portion of the house with untidy masses of paper protruding from his pockets, or else holed up in that chilly, cheerless cubbyhole, scribbling away, sending messenger boys with missives to the London post. Now he sat and did nothing, while we all studied him out of the corners of our eyes.

For I was not the only one stealing a look at him from time to time. When Mrs. Fredericks had finished braiding and putting up my hair we rejoined the party in the drawing room. I soon realized that with the exception of his mother and my mother the rest of the assembled company was watching him. Lord Boring did, with a worried frown. Mrs. Westing watched him also, and even Charity—yes, I was sure of it—even Charity cast nervous glances in his direction.

Yet he sat on, sublimely unaware of all this covert attention, poking away at the hole in the rug. At last, unable to bear it, I got up and took his stick away from him.

“This carpet at least is not a copy, unlike our tapestries,” I said to him in an undertone. “Pray do not destroy it.”

He looked startled, and his eye fell upon the mischief he had wrought. “You’re right,” he said. “I’m good for nothing today.” And he got up and asked his mother in a low voice to have some bread and cheese sent up to his room in lieu of dinner.

Once he had retired I gradually realized that the focus of attention in the room had shifted. I could not be mistaken. All through dinner, all through a lengthy game of faro, which we played for pennies, as Mrs. Westing declared herself unable to enjoy a game in which no money at all was hazarded, all through the long hours until we could excuse ourselves, clutching the few farthings that remained to us, and retire to our borrowed chambers, yes, all that long time, the entire household, both guests and hosts, was now watching me.

20

THE NEXT MORNING I escaped any further scrutiny by coming downstairs very early, leaving a note behind me on my pillow to explain that I had gone back to the castle to view how it had weathered the night. Then I crept out of doors without being seen by any of the servants. Fido and I walked swiftly down the drive.

As is often the case after a powerful, destructive storm, it was an achingly beautiful day. Even so late in the summer, I could still hear the occasional skylark singing, and the fields were speckled with red poppies. I saw as we walked along that ours was not the only family to have suffered damage, spying downed trees and once-tidy farmyards turned to boggy marshes. The farmers were hard at work already, sawing up limbs and adding to their woodpiles for the winter.

None of this beauty or industry lifted my spirits, however. I felt as tho’ I moved along in my own little dark cloud of despond, and when I arrived at the castle, the gloom only deepened.

The cliff face had crumbled still further,