The Changeling Bride (15 page)

She could hear the omnipresent Marianne rustling around in the dressing room, and rolled her eyes at the draperies overhead. She missed the perfect privacy of her own bedroom and bathroom, where she could make rude noises or pick at her skin, if she felt like it. Perhaps it was just as well that she couldn’t.

Still, she was a countess now. That ought to be good for something.

“Marianne?” she called.

The maid bounced out of the dressing room, stays and stockings in hand. “Yes milady? Did you sleep well, milady?”

“Yes, very. Are you settling in all right yourself?”

“Mostly. I have my own room, did you know? I have never had my own room before; always had to share, either with sisters or other servants.”

“That’s a nice change for you, then.”

“I appreciate it and all, but it is kind of lonesome, and in an unfamiliar house, when you do not know the noises, and you hear the floorboards creak like there is someone outside your door, and you lie there in the dark waiting to see if the knob turns, only you cannot quite make it out in the dark, so you do not know if it is your imagination saying it is moving—”

“Yes, I see,” Elle interrupted. She did not want a reminder of her own lonely night, and the disappointment she should not be feeling. “I suppose you could always ask to share a room with someone, if it would make you more comfortable.” It was a good thing the maid did not know about the Dreadful Chicken that haunted the house. She smothered a giggle.

“They would think me a fool, milady, that they would, what with all the spare rooms in this place. Not that I have one of the fine rooms meant for guests, of course. I just have one of the servant rooms. All the servants have one. No one sleeps in the long attic rooms, the ones with all the beds.”

“Who are all those extra beds for, if there are enough rooms?”

Marianne laughed a bit at that. “Well, there are not all that many rooms for servants, milady. If his lordship hires on the proper number, those attic rooms will be plenty full.”

“I thought we had more than enough people to take care of things,” Elle said, perplexed. “I must have met twenty servants. Surely that is sufficient?”

“For the house as it is now, yes. Many more will be needed if the house is to be returned to a livable state.”

“Forgive my ignorance, Marianne. About how many
servants would you estimate are the normal number for a place like Brookhaven?”

“For just the house, or for the stables and gardens and livestock, the dairy, the laundry, all of that?”

“Everyone.”

“Oh, well, I would not really know. Maybe a hundred? Maybe more?”

Elle’s lips parted in shock. “A
hundred?
”

“It is only a guess, milady,” Marianne backtracked quickly. “I know your home only had about thirty, if that, but Brookhaven is much larger.”

“And we’ve only twenty employees at present . . . oh, my God.” As mistress of the house, would she be expected to oversee the hiring? Was she expected to manage them? What did they all do? She had no idea.

“Did you want a bath this morning?”

“What? Oh, I don’t think so. Just some water for washing, that’ll do.” If twenty servants were doing the work that five times their number usually did, she could hardly justify asking them to bring her a bath each and every morning, tearing them away from their other duties.

“And breakfast, milady?”

“Lunch probably isn’t so very long from now.” She didn’t want to ask these people to wait on her, not when they had so much else to do. Her mind distracted by the servant question, she completely forgot her intention to tell Marianne to give her more private time.

An hour later and she was washed, dressed, her hair was arranged, and she was in a mood to explore the house. Henry had told her last night that he would be out inspecting the estate for most of the day, but intended to be back to eat lunch with her. He’d mentioned that she could ask Abigail Johnson, the housekeeper, to give her a tour of the house if she did not wish to wait for his return. She hadn’t bothered telling him, but she’d rather wander through the house alone. She could take her time
investigating the unfamiliar, dawdling over details that would seem commonplace to others.

Tatiana nosed her way through the door, which had been standing slightly ajar. She had burrs in her fur and dirt on her nose.

“Looks like we’ll have to find you a proper brush, you naughty dog,” Elle scolded. “Want to go look around? Go for a walk?” Tatiana bounced and scrambled in response.

An hour and at least thirty rooms and several staircases later, Elle had lost both her enthusiasm and her way, and was regretting turning down the offer of a guide. She felt dusty and grimy, and was certain that from the dozens of cobwebs she had walked through, at least two or three spiders had hitched a ride in either her hair or dress. She’d seen small rooms, large rooms, bare rooms, jumbled rooms, rooms with windows and without, with fireplaces or without, rooms that seemed to have no purpose and led from one to another, and hallways and staircases that dead-ended in boarded-over doors, or no doors at all.

She knew next to nothing about architecture, but it appeared to even her untrained eye that the front of the house was the newest section, and that much of the rest of the building was a conglomeration of periods and styles. Some rooms and halls were mostly stone, while others were wood. Still others had walls of some sort of stucco or plaster.

She’d had to backtrack near the beginning of her exploration and get a rushlight from a servant. It was a rush that had been dried and soaked in oil, then clipped to a stand and dish. Unhappy experience taught her to trim it as it burned and advance the rush through the clip.

Many of the hallways were shut off from light, or had only one dim and far-off window to illuminate them. She had glimpsed one section of cellar, dark and dirty and filled with the mounded shapes of unknown objects, and found to her dismay that she lacked the courage to go in.
God only knew what she’d find, or what creatures might be living there. In several rooms she had heard flurries and scrabblings of noise, some coming from the chimneys, others from the walls.

At the moment, all she wanted was to find her own section of the house and wash her hands and face. If she could find an exterior door, she could walk around the house to get back. In a pinch, she’d climb out a window, only the last few windows she’d seen looked out onto an interior courtyard, overgrown with weeds and with no visible exit.

She wandered back in a direction that seemed familiar, but soon proved itself not to be. The walls were paneled in dark wood, with brass sconces in need of candles every few feet. There were no cobwebs here, and the air smelled fresher than in other parts of the house, despite the narrower halls and the darkness.

“What’s this, Tatiana? Habitation?”

The dog panted.

A heavy wooden door stood ajar halfway down the hall, carved with a twining pattern of leaves and flowers at head height, the hinges and the door handle and plate an ornate swirl of twisting ironwork. A faint spicy, herbal scent drifted through the doorway. Curious, Elle pushed the door open a few more inches. She felt oddly tentative about entering. Tatiana had no such compunctions and shoved her way in, the door swinging wide on silent, oiled hinges.

The room revealed was rich in color and texture. There was wooden furniture darkened with age, and on the walls, tapestries of dark green and burgundy depicted scenes from a hunt. The cushions on chairs were of patterned, multicolored brocade, tassled at the corners, their colors matching the occasional painted detail on woodwork. She was so dazzled by the furnishings, and by the warm golden sunlight streaming through the diamond-paned windows, that it was several moments before she
noticed that she was not alone in the room.

“Oh, excuse me!” she apologized quickly to the shrunken, white-haired woman hunched under a multitude of shawls, sitting in a chair near one of the windows. “I didn’t realize there was anyone living in this part of the house.”

The old woman tilted her head slightly. Elle could hardly make out her face, backlit as she was by the sunlight. When she spoke, her voice was weak and gravelly, and Elle took several steps farther into the room in order to hear. “Yes, still someone living here.” She lapsed into silence. Elle shifted from one foot to the other. Should she introduce herself? What should she say? “Hi, I’m the new countess. Who are you?”

“Hello, I’m Wilhelmina,” she said instead, and could have cut out her tongue the moment she said it. What on earth had possessed her to give her true name?

The old woman seemed not to have heard her. Seemed, almost, to be sleeping. Elle stepped closer, inching her way forward until she was only a few feet from her. She tilted her head to one side and bent down slightly, trying to see the woman’s face.

Cloudy eyes opened suddenly. Elle jerked back, a blush creeping up her cheeks. The woman’s head nodded up and down in silent laughter. “Sit, dear. Sit.”

Flustered, Elle pulled a decorative chair up to the window and sat down. Tatiana, at ease as ever, sat on the floor and leaned against the old woman’s legs, shoving her nose up under one of the woman’s limp and withered hands.

“Tatia, leave her alone,” Elle scolded.

The woman stopped Elle with a small, eloquent movement of her hand, then began to scratch the top of Tatiana’s head. She seemed absorbed in the task, and after a few minutes, Elle began to wonder if the woman had forgotten her presence.

“You have come a long way to us,” the woman finally said.

“Yes,” Elle replied, thinking the woman didn’t know the half of it. Her accent must have placed her as a person foreign to this region.

“Is my great-grandson treating you well?”

“Henry?” she asked, startled.

The woman gave another silent laugh. “Such an amusing boy.”

“
Henry?
” Elle asked again, even more uncertain, then recalled his chicken tale of the night before. Still, she had a hard time thinking of him as amusing. Self-assured, polite—whatever emotions he had buried deeply under his controlled demeanor—that’s what Henry was. But not, generally, amusing.

“You will make Henry a fine wife. You would not have been chosen otherwise, you know.” She gave Tatiana a final pat on the head. “Do come back and visit soon.” She put her hands in her lap and abruptly dozed off.

Elle stared at her for some moments, not quite believing the interview was already at an end. Well, the woman did claim to be Henry’s great-grandmother, and that would make her how old? A minimum of ninety, surely. Old enough to fall asleep at a moment’s notice.

Feeling slightly deflated, she got up to leave, Tatiana trailing along with canine reluctance at leaving a good head-scratcher. When she reached the door, the woman spoke again.

“I am glad they found you,” she rasped.

Elle looked back at her, bemused. “They?” she inquired. A soft snore was the only response she got from the huddled form. She must have misheard. The woman had probably said “he,” not “they.” What could this old woman know of her life, and the fairy folk who brought her here?

It took less than five minutes to find her way back to
the main part of the house. She seemed incapable of making a wrong turn, and opened with some astonishment a door into the front hall. From the hall side, the door was invisible, its outline following the creases of the linen-fold paneling. She was standing there on the checkered marble floor, dusting cobwebs from her skirts, when Marianne appeared, looking worried.

“My lady, I have been searching everywhere for you. You are late for luncheon.”

“I can’t be, I’ve been out of your sight for less than an hour.”

“I beg your pardon, my lady, but it is three hours you have been gone.”

“What?” She had a reliable internal clock and was almost never late. How could she have so seriously miscalculated? “His lordship, is he here?”

“In the breakfast parlour, my lady.”

Elle followed Marianne to that room, pausing outside the door to push a stray lock of hair back behind her ear. She could feel her heart beating in her chest, and scolded herself for her eagerness. He left her alone for half a day, and suddenly she couldn’t wait to see him again.

A servant was removing the plate from in front of Henry as she stepped into the room, and her heart sank as she realized she was not only late, she had entirely missed the meal.

“Ah, there you are, my dear,” Henry said, standing up. “Do sit down.” He gestured to the place that was set across the small table from him.

The servant pulled her seat out for her and she sat, taking in the pleasant little room. A mural of a beach scene on some tropical island covered the walls, the picture faded and damaged by time, but Elle could still make out the palm trees and the sails of a ship. Dark figures rolled barrels to waiting longboats, and jungle creatures peeped from leafy foliage, their faces distorted by the inaccurate artistry of the painter. “I’m terribly sorry,
Henry. Somehow I lost all track of time. I was exploring and—”

“No apologies necessary, my dear,” he interrupted her, still standing.

“You’re not angry?”

“Of course not. I do regret, however, that I will be unable to stay to keep you company while you eat.”

She looked up at him, searching his face for some hint of his mood. He appeared blandly unconcerned. “Are you going out?”

“I have a veritable mountain of paperwork that I fear cannot be left another day.”

“Oh.” The sound was small and disappointed even to her own ears.

“You will excuse me, my dear?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Until dinner, then.”

“I won’t be late again.”

He smiled vaguely at her in response, and left.

Elle watched him go, feeling abandoned.

“My lady?” the servant asked, gesturing towards the cold meats and bread on the table. Elle nodded and he served her as she tried to look out the tall windows. There was an overgrown rhododendron just beyond the glass, and it cut off any view of the garden.

The servant bowed and withdrew, and she was left alone with her plate of chilled beef.