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“Perhaps not quite so many,” Stepmother said, “but twenty or twenty-five without crowding, the musicians just here, perhaps. Cards in the library and supper in the dining room and morning room. Perfect! We shall not need to hire a room for our balls after all. What is beyond this second drawing room…? Oh, another one! Goodness, we shall be quite spoilt for entertaining rooms.”
Will was gratified by so much praise, but also thrilled to see his family here, in the heart of Mayfair. Undoubtedly they looked the part. Stepmother was elegantly attired, the present fashion for long, narrow skirts flattering her still slim figure. And the girls were exquisite, Rosie with her ethereal beauty and Angie daintily graceful, the two looking like a pair of pixies, wandered in from a woodland glade. They would be a triumph in London society.
They took a full hour to exclaim over every room, to choose their bedrooms and to convene in the drawing room again. The ladies ordered tea, and Will poured brandy for his father and himself.
The tea had arrived and been poured, and Will was on his second glass of brandy when the door opened and a woman of middle years entered at a rush, a footman behind her laden with parcels.
“Oh, my goodness, you are here already! Such good time you have made, and I not here to greet you, but I had no notion that you would be here before five at the earliest. Yes, Thomas, take my purchases upstairs.” She was as thin and shapeless as a broom handle, with a worn-out face and a grovelling manner that Will disliked on sight.
“It’s not above forty miles,” Pa said irritably. “Hardly a long day.”
“Oh, but you must have left so early,” the woman said.
“Never mind, cousin,” Stepmother said. “You are here now, and that is all that matters. Cousin, this is my husband, Harry. This is Will, and here are Rosie and Angie. This is my cousin, Lady Failsworthy.”
Will made her a perfunctory bow, for she was not at all what he had expected. When his stepmother had spoken of her cousin, a relation of her first husband’s family and the widow of a baronet, she had made her sound very grand, but this poor dab of a female looked better suited to a rôle as housekeeper in some provincial squire’s household.
“How were they all at Berinsfield?” Stepmother said. “You left them well, I trust?”
“Oh… they are all very well. All in the best of health, to be sure.”
“Even Hugo’s eldest? Have the spots gone away already?”
“Spots?”
“He had the measles. You cannot have forgotten already, Pandora.”
“Oh… oh well, measles… is it so? I did not know. But I have not been at Berinsfield just lately. I have been staying with my… um, a friend, in Newcastle.”
“I did not know you had any friends in Newcastle, apart from our old governess, Miss Clark,” Stepmother said.
“Well, yes, Miss Clark is the very one. Such an old friend, and not in wonderful circumstances now, so she was glad of the company. It was a kindness to visit her. But I am not quite abreast of all the latest news from Berinsfield. The measles, and so forth.”
“I wonder you did not tell me so, for I have been addressing my letters to you at Berinsfield. I should have been glad for you to convey my regards to Miss Clark, and I could perhaps have put a guinea under the seal, if she is in financial distress. But no matter. You have been here for some days now. Have you found everything in the house satisfactory?”
“I have had to give a little hint to some of the new servants, naturally. When one hires from an agency, one never knows what sort of training they may have had. And the kitchen — I have paid particular attention to the kitchen, advising the cook, you know. A man in the kitchen! Whatever were you thinking, Elizabeth dear?”
“He is a French man-cook,” she said indignantly. “Highlyrecommended. I do hope you have not offended him, Pandora.”
Lady Failsworthy went rather pink. “Indeed, Elizabeth, I hope I am more diplomatic than that. I have merely informed him of the sort of dishes that a refined family might choose.”
“A refined family like the Haygarths of Berinsfield Manor, I suppose,” Will said, amused. “Do you think the Fletchers of Chadwell Park are not refined? What do you imagine we eat, nettle soup and turnips, with pigs’ trotters on Sundays?”
The pinkness deepened. “No, indeed I do not, Mr Fletcher, but the cook is very… um,French, and he would put such strange food on the table. Nothing anyone might recognize. You will not want to eat such hodgepodges, I am sure.”
“It is precisely because of his ability to put Frenchhodgepodgeson the table that I engaged him,” Stepmother said crisply. “What have you ordered for dinner tonight?”
With the descent into domestic trivia, Will and his father beat a hasty retreat to the office, where a couple of footmen were summoned to rearrange the room to his father’s satisfaction.
“This is a larger room than I have at Chadwell,” Pa said, spreading his arms expansively. “And I like to be overlooking the street again, just as at Fullers Road, although the view is better than the sight of old Mr Hagger’s house, and the mill wagons rumbling past. Look, that is a fine carriage going by, and a military man riding beside it. What sort of a soldier is he, would you say?”
“Hussar, I think, although I cannot tell you the regiment,” Will said. “This is the best part of town, Pa. You will see such sights all day and all evening, too.”
“Aye, you’ve done well to find this place. Mrs Fletcher likes it very well, I can tell, and that’s what counts, not whether I can watch Hussars passing by. Goodness, look at that carriage, with the old lady all in purple, even the feathers. What is the coat of arms on the door?”
“I cannot tell you precisely, but it means she has a title… or the owner of the carriage has.”
“Mrs Fletcher will like that, to have the nobs passing our very door. Ah, Enoch, there you are. Will you show these fellows how I like things? They’ve got the fire going very nicely, but I’d be glad to have this desk turned about, like so. And a table for backgammon, over there.”
