Elisabeth Kidd (32 page)

“It is very good of you to call, Mrs Wilmot,” she said, advancing
toward Julia with her hand outstretched.

“Yes, it is,” Julia agreed, ignoring the hand. Antonia withdrew it. “I
nearly caused Webster a fit of apoplexy by doing so.”

This tart reply was so absurdly like what Kedrington would have said
in the circumstances that Antonia could not help but smile, and since
her visitor declined to shake hands, Antonia bent to kiss her dry cheek instead. Julia seemed to approve of this liberty, and a little of the starch
went out of her. She watched Antonia carefully as she sat down in
another chair and rather deliberately spread her lavender skirts neatly
around her and folded her hands primly in her lap.

“May I offer you some refreshment, ma’am?”

“Thank you, I never take spirits.”

Antonia was tempted to offer a glass of milk but confined herself to
asking, “How am I deserving of the pleasure of your call, ma’am?”

Julia was silent for a moment, gazing thoughtfully at Antonia. “My nephew...,” she began uncertainly, and stopped. Her gaze shifted to the
bowl of yellow roses on the mantel.

“Kedrington is a hopeless romantic,” she remarked, apropos of nothing.
“You wouldn’t think so to listen to him, I grant you, and Lord knows
where he gets it from. Not from my line. In my day, a young man ran off to foreign parts when he’d done something disgraceful at home, not from
some misplaced longing for adventure. Nevertheless, he went, and I’d
have thought age and experience would have cured him by now, but no.
He is stubborn as well, and finally having exhausted his bent for
the exotic, he must needs involve himself in other people’s quixotic adventures—encouraged, unfortunately, by that flibbertigibbet Hester.
You have only to mention a case of injustice or ingratitude or unrequited love to either of them, and they’re off to set all to rights. Kedrington lacks only a white horse and a suit of armour to complete the farce. Not
that he’d care two pins to be laughed at, but he may one day be rebuffed,
and he’d find that less easy to stomach. I know I should.” Julia sighed.

Antonia, against her volition feeling sympathy toward her, leaned
forward to touch her hand. But Julia’s mind was elsewhere; for a moment
she seemed unaware of Antonia’s presence or of her surroundings.
Antonia sat back to await her return.

She had not entirely comprehended Julia’s meaning, but her words had
shed new light on a matter Antonia had deliberately locked into the dark
of her mind. She had long ago observed Kedrington’s indifference to the
pinpricks of the workaday world and his amused acceptance of its follies.
Since this attitude was the apparent if not the ultimate source of his disastrous charm, she had not hitherto looked for any other. Now she
wondered how much Julia knew about her relationship with Kedrington,
if she might be warning her that she could not live up to his expectations—
not knowing that so far as Antonia was concerned, he could have none.

Presently, Julia came to herself and fixed her eagle stare on her
hostess. “Well, madam, as you may have gathered, I do not approve of this particular streak of madness in my nephew —but there it is, and it
will not be overcome as long as he remains incapable of letting the world
turn without giving it a push now and then. His only hope is to marry
some romantic fool as hopeless as he is, but he will not help himself as he
is so eager to help others.”

She paused to study Antonia’s expression—which that lady schooled
only by digging her nails into the hands she kept clenched in her lap.
What did Julia want of her? Even if she did not know about Charles, why
should she think, as apparently she did, that Antonia had anything to say to the matter? It was soon revealed, however, that Julia knew more than
Antonia imagined.

“The fact is,” Julia said, “that a certain rumour has reached my
ears—no, not a rumour, for I lend no credence to those, but a piece of news which has the ring of truth. Will you tell me, please, if you are
indeed engaged to be married to Mr Charles Kenyon?”

Antonia replied coolly, “I am indeed so, ma’am. May I ask how you
came by the information? It is not yet generally known.”

“Then you have not yet sent an announcement to the newspapers?”
Julia countered, disregarding Antonia’s question.

“Not as yet.”

Antonia would have stopped at that, but Julia’s look was compelling,
and she found herself, much to her annoyance, explaining, “This was
meant to be Isabel’s season, not my own. I’m sure Charles and I are both too old to indulge in such nonsense in any case.”

“Very commendable,” Julia remarked dryly. She studied the handle of
her parasol intently for a moment, then abruptly stood up and, with the
air of one washing her hands of the matter, said, “Well, madam, it is your
error, if you choose to make it.”

Antonia flared up. “Pardon me, Mrs Wilmot, but what I choose to do,
in error or not, is hardly your affair!”

Julia glanced sharply at her and changed her tack. “Are you in love with him?” she demanded.

“Our...our affection is of long standing.”

Inexplicably, Julia unbent again, and sighed. “My dear, you are per
fectly right to wish me and my meddling ways at Jericho—as my grace
less grandson would say. I apologise for my manners. My only excuse is
that there is someone very dear to me who does have an interest in the
matter—no, do not look like that. He knows nothing of my visit here,
and I have no intention of telling him of it. Understand only that my
concern must be with his happiness, and I would never forgive myself if I
did not seize every opportunity to do what I may to forward that happiness.
However, I see that there is nothing further I nee
...
I may do here. I
am certain I wish you very happy, my dear. Good day.”

She departed as abruptly as she had come, and Mrs Curtiz, who met
her in the hall and saw her out, brought a puzzled expression into the drawing room a moment later.

“What did she want?”

“I am not perfectly sure,” Antonia said, upon consideration. “She
asked me if it were true that Charles and I are to be married, and wished
me happy.”

Mrs Curtiz raised an eyebrow at this intelligence, but made only a noncommittal response and seemed to dismiss the matter. “Is there
anything you would like from Grafton House, my dear? I am just on my
way there. Or would you care to accompany me?”

“Thank you, no, Imogen. I think I will stay and finish that new collar for Isabel’s blue morning dress. She may want to wear it tomorrow. Did
you know about this expedition to Richmond Park, by the way? Apparently
it has been planned for some weeks, but I don’t remember anyone
mentioning it before.”

“I daresay it was simply forgotten, what with one thing and another,” Mrs Curtiz replied in what Antonia could not help feeling was an
uncharacteristically inconsiderate way. “They’ve asked me to go along. It will be just Clory and Harley Chatham-Hill and Isabel and myself—oh, and Oliver as well. Quite unexceptional, you see—and more than likely
supremely uninspiring.”

Somewhat mollified by the notion that she would be spared the romps
of a crowd of bumptious youngsters, Antonia remarked only that if
Imogen were going, there would be no need for her also to play gooseberry.
She repressed her initial absurdly childish feeling of having been left out
of a treat and bade Imogen as cheery a good-day as she could contrive.

Really, she reflected later as she sat dutifully stitching, she could not
imagine why she had become so easily overset lately by the least little
thing. She and Charles had patched up their quarrel—at least, she
thought they had done so, but now she came to think of it she realised that she had been the one to do the patching, overcome by a distinct
feeling of guilt over her unladylike conduct in the park.

Dinner that night was a decided setback, however. Charles was in high
good humour, expatiating over the boiled turnips—Antonia wondered if
he had always had such pedestrian preferences in food—and on the new
“subterranean farms.” Charles and his father were going off in the
morning to inspect one of these deposits of surface coal which had report
edly been discovered under a parsonage in Kent, and Charles had waxed
enthusiastic over the fortunes being made by the men who had bought
up such properties during the war and developed them. He quoted
output quantities and annual profits, not to mention the rents and
royalties taken in by the owners of the land, who had nothing to do now but sit back and count them.

“That is how fortunes are being made now,” he said, punctuating his discourse with a slice of glazed ham on a fork. “Not in farming—that is
as uncertain nowadays as speculating on ‘change. Wasted effort, too,
when there are so many more secure ways—not just in mining either—to invest money.”

“I’m sure you are not alone in thinking so, Charles,” Antonia said.
“But a good many modern minds are turning back to agriculture as well.
Ned Fletcher says—”

“Ned’s idea—pardon me, my dear—of good management is to wrest every possible penny out of the land and then to plough every one right
back in again. Very conscientious of him, I don’t doubt, but that leaves
no room for options, no alternatives in case of—God forbid—another war, or even a drop in the price of wool.”

“Ned is the first man in the county to hear of every modern improve
ment, every economy!”

“Yes, yes—and he practises them. But don’t you see, my dear, that is like painting a corpse. You still see life on the surface, but everything
underneath is decaying. Have at least a part of your land surveyed for
possible mineral deposits. That’s the way to ensure your keeping it.”

“It isn’t my land,” Antonia reminded him, thanking the heavens that
Carey would no more think of tearing up one of his fields in search of coal or copper than she would, but not saying so to Charles.

She looked to Carey, seeking confirmation of her faith in him, but her brother appeared not to have been attending to Charles at all—and, as sometimes in the past, not even according him the courtesy to listen
before disagreeing. Rather, he had been attempting to make Isabel lose
her countenance by twisting his own into a variety of absurd positions—a
game they had often played when Isabel was a child.

Just as Antonia
glanced their way, Isabel succumbed to the giggles she had been holding
in. Charles glowered at Carey without interrupting himself to point out
the sin Carey seemed so blissfully unaware of, and indeed compounded
by imitating perfectly Charles’s glower—at which point Antonia herself
choked back a laugh. Then she, too, broke into open merriment when Carey began digging into his turnips with a technique remarkably similar
to shovelling aside earth to get at a seam of coal.

In another minute, all
three Fairfaxes had fallen into the kind of uncontrolled whoops they had
been used to indulge at Wyckham, where Anthony had been the one to feel obliged to disapprove their juvenile behaviour.

Anthony, however, had always ended by joining in the laughter. Charles
did no such thing. Instead, he rose with great dignity, begged their
pardons with the excuse of some pressing work to attend to, and took himself off without his sweet or his port. Antonia took him this latter to
the study an hour later and found herself once again apologising and Charles once again sweeping aside her contrition and saying that there was no need whatever for an apology. How could he be offended at anything his lovely Antonia found amusement in? He kissed her gently
on the forehead and suggested that she had doubtless overtired herself
and would feel more like herself after a good night’s rest. Antonia could not help thinking that “more like herself” was what she had felt giggling
over the dinner table. It was a lowering thought.

She needn’t expect them back before three days, Philip informed her
on taking leave of her the next morning; they would more than likely look in on a family friend in Tunbridge Wells. Antonia could not help
but feel a little relieved to hear it, for she had slept poorly after all and
knew that nothing would be more likely to result from her weariness
than another quarrel with Charles. She would have enjoyed a day in the
country herself; London had never seemed noisier than last night, when
she had been jerked from her fitful dozing regularly on every hour by the
cry of the watchman. But since this whim was not to be granted her, she must
settle for a restful day at home alone.

Even Carey had deserted her for some masculine pursuit typical of
those he had plunged into on his return, apparently to make up in a few
weeks the deprivations of years. Not that anyone could accuse Carey of neglecting his duty, of course. Like a fresh breeze through the house, his return had caused Antonia to wake up to what she had not realised had
become a routine. Her brother’s manner had not changed in six years,
but he was more accustomed to discipline now, so that between sparring
contests at the Fives Court, and frequent visits to the Cockpit Royal, he was quietly but effectively taking over his duties as head of the family.