“I shall endeavour to improve upon my preliminary assessment.”
“See that you do, Your Grace.”
She climbed the stairs. On the seventh step, she heard him exhale—a low sound, released like something he had been holding since the first course.
She did not look back. But she smiled.
And for the first time since she had walked into this house wearing a borrowed dress and a heart full of dread, the smile was not something she needed to catch, or suppress, or explain away.
It was simply there. Hers. And she let it stay.
CHAPTER 21
“Ihave brought your book.”
Eleanor stood on the front step of Rath House holding a slim volume in one hand and a purpose she had not bothered to disguise in the other. The book was real enough—a collection of Cowper’s verse that Rosamund had mentioned weeks ago and promptly forgotten—but the delivery could have been entrusted to any penny-post boy in London, and both women knew it.
“You could have sent it.”
“I could have. But then I would not have an excuse to drink your husband’s exceptional coffee, and I have been thinking about it since Tuesday.” Eleanor stepped past her into the entrance hall briskly, not waiting for an invitation “Besides, I wished to see Clara. She sent me a letter.”
“Clara cannot write.”
“She sent me a drawing of a horse with six legs and what I believe to be a crown. I have chosen to interpret it as correspondence.” Eleanor unbuttoned her pelisse and handed it to the footman with a nod. “Is she about?”
A shriek of delight answered from somewhere above. Footsteps—rapid, uneven, accompanied by the percussion of a rag doll being dragged along a banister—descended the staircase at a speed that would have given Mrs Alcott heart failure.
“Eleanor! Eleanor, come and see, I have taught Bess to curtsey!”
Clara arrived at the bottom of the stairs flushed and triumphant, her pinafore buttoned incorrectly and one stocking pooled around her ankle. She seized Eleanor’s hand and began hauling her toward the corridor.
“She curtseys very well. She is better than the footman. I showed him and he was not impressed but I think he was only pretending.”
“I am certain he was devastated by the competition,” Eleanor said, allowing herself to be towed.
The morning room had become Clara’s preferred stage for demonstrations, primarily because it contained a rug soft enough to cushion Bess’s more ambitious manoeuvres and a window seat wide enough to serve as an audience gallery. Eleanor was installed on the window seat. Rosamund took the chair nearest the door. Clara positioned herself and Bess inthe centre of the rug with the grave ceremony of a conductor preparing an orchestra.
“Watch. You must watch properly. No talking.”
“We are silenced,” Eleanor said.
Clara held Bess by both arms, bent the doll forward at what she apparently considered an elegant angle, and announced: “That is a curtsey. It is how duchesses greet the King.”
“The King may be somewhat startled by the execution.”
“He will be impressed. His Grace said so.”
Rosamund’s hand stilled on the arm of the chair. “His Grace told you that?”
“He said Bess has the finest curtsey in the household and that the King would be honoured to receive it. He said it yesterday during tea.” Clara straightened Bess with proprietorial care. “He also said that the Earl of Carrots is overdue for a promotion, but I told him promotions require a ceremony and he has not yet scheduled one.”
Eleanor turned to Rosamund. “The Earl of Carrots.”
“A velvet rabbit. It is a long story.”
“I suspect it is a very short story with a very tall duke in it.”
Clara, satisfied with the curtsey’s reception, had already abandoned ceremony in favour of her next objective. She crossed to the sideboard, stood on her toes, and peered at the biscuit tin with the focused intensity of a general surveying the field before battle.
