He does not let me keep it shut.
He waits twenty minutes on the gravel, the way men in his position wait when they wish to be observed waiting, and at the end of the twenty minutes my mother, watching from the upper window, sends down word that one should not let a peer of the realm take a chill in one's own front gravel, however richly he may deserve it. I have the door opened to the front step. I do not have him brought into the hall. We stand on the broad stone step under the lamp, with the door open behind me and Theodore at the foot of the staircase out of sight.
Adrian puts a thick portfolio on the step between us.
"I have engaged Sir William Knighton's son for the post-natal examination. Discreet, expensive, will not record names except in my hand. I have ordered him to wait upon you tomorrow."
"I have engaged a Mrs. Halloran at Guildford."
He registers this without expression.
"As you wish. — Cecily, this morning at the gallery, I should not have said what I said."
"Indeed."
"I beg your pardon for it."
I look at him under the lamp. The rain has begun again — a thin Surrey drizzle on the boxwood — and a drop is travelling along his temple toward the cheekbone. I do not lift my eyes to watch it.
For three years I waited for an apology. I waited for one after he left me at the Carrow ball in '15 when his mother was unwell. I waited for one in '16 when he allowed Vivien to be seated at his right at dinner with the dowager of Devonshire and put me below her. I waited for one when his aunt put the divorce settlement his mother had drawn up before me at breakfast and Adrian read his newspaper through the whole interview.
None of them came.
This one has.
I find it pleases me less than I would have expected.
"My lord, if I had wanted your apology a year ago, I should have written you a list of the offences and a printed form for the signature. I do not want it now. The form has expired."
He breathes out, controlled.
"I shall acknowledge the children."
"Unnecessary."
"I shall give them the Ashcombe name."
"Unwanted."
"I shall settle a portion on them. A considerable —"
"Already settled, my lord. The Hollybrook–Ashcombe trust does very well."
His jaw works.
"Cecily, must you speak to me in this fashion."
I tip my head. "Does it grate, my lord?"
"Yes."
"Then bear it. I bore it three years."
He does not answer at once. The drop reaches his cheekbone and goes down inside his collar.
"I would have us," he says, "begin again."
The drizzle has begun to make the lamp hiss. I look past him down the avenue.
"My lord, with what shall we begin again. With the words you spoke this morning at the gallery? With the marriage line you bought at twenty pounds? With the autumn night that you do not remember? With three years of the steward's ledger, on which I am Miss Hollybrook for household maintenance? — You have nothing on which to begin again, my lord. The board has been cleared. You did the clearing."
He looks at me as if he is searching, somewhere behind my eyes, for the Cecily Hollybrook of fifteen who used to ride two miles from Hollybrook to the Hampshire road only to see him pass on his way to Ashcombe. He is searching very carefully.
He cannot find her.
I turn back into the house.
I stop, my hand on the door.
"My lord."
"Yes."
"Had you known of the child in August, what would you have done."
It is the only question I have ever asked him in earnest.
He stands a moment in the rain.
"I should not have let you go to any apothecary in Cheapside."
"That, my lord, is not what I asked."
He does not answer.
I close the door.
The trustees reconvene at Ashcombe Park on the fourteenth.
I do not go.
I send Mr. Octavius Pell, of Pell and Burgh, Gray's Inn, with three documents in a black case and Theodore at his back for the look of the thing.
Pell is thirty-eight, very tall, very thin, the kind of barrister who in court reads aloud as if the document were doing the reading by itself. He has handled my mother's affairs since 1814; he has handled mine since the day my father died. He knows the Carrow archives better than the Carrow archivist. He keeps in his desk a drawer labelled, in pencil, Hollybrook contra Ashcombe, which he has had ready, in case, since 1813.
He reports to me by express that evening.
He laid the first document on the boards: the result of Mrs. Halloran's post-natal examination, taken at Hollybrook two days previous. Both infants, in the antiquated method of the day, displayed the markers of the Carrow blood. Lord Ashcombe was present, by his own signed application, to provide the donor sample. He sat through the test without comment.
He laid the second document on the boards: the deposition of Curate Theakston of Nether Wyck, taken at Lincoln's Inn under oath, with the addendum sworn by Mr. Quilter that the instruction to forge the entry in the parish register had originated with Lord Ashcombe, and that the bribe of twenty pounds had been paid by Mr. Quilter's clerk from his lordship's private purse. Felony under the Marriage Act 1753, formerly capital, now transportation.
He laid the third document on the boards: the original holograph codicil written by the late Lord Edmund Carrow in the November of 1812, witnessed by the rector of St. Andrew's Selborne and by Lord Edmund's own valet (now also under oath), together with the deathbed dictation taken down by Mr. Quilter at the bedside on the second of March, 1813.
The codicil settles the unentailed Hampshire farmland of Westmoor — rental three thousand two hundred a year — and eighty thousand pounds in four-per-cent consols upon the female line of Margaret Hollybrook. The dictation specifies the trigger: the birth of two children of Adrian Carrow's direct line. And the dictation closes — Mr. Pell read this passage himself, in his courtroom voice — with the words:
Margaret Hollybrook saved my life at the cost of her own walking. Her daughter shall have Westmoor and the consols. The Carrow trustees shall have no power over the disposition. They shall not interfere. They shall not administer. They shall not contest the guardianship. I am at peace.
There is then a long silence in the gallery, Pell reports. Sir Henry sits with his folded magisterial hands. The dowager Lady Helena does not, again, speak. Julian Carrow — who has been admitted by special licence of Sir Henry to present his case, though no longer in voting standing — stands up.
He calls the trust a private fancy of an old man failing in his wits. He calls my mother a Vance fortune-hunter. He calls the codicil a piece of dotage extracted in a sickroom. He demands the trustees set the document aside and refer it to the Court of Chancery, where, he is at pains to remind them, the case may sit for ten years.
Mr. Pell, in answer, sets a fourth paper on the boards.
It is a notarised statement made in 1813 by the rector of Selborne — the same rector who witnessed the codicil. The rector swears, under the form of the most solemn ecclesiastical oath that an English clergyman may make, that Lord Edmund Carrow was in his full mind at the dictation; that the dictation was at Lord Edmund's own initiative; and that Lord Edmund, in private with the rector immediately afterward, said the following:
If they make any difficulty, they may have my answer in my own words. Margaret saved my life. My grandson is well-made and cold. I had rather Westmoor go to the woman who broke her back for me than to a man who will not warm his own wife's chair.
Pell reports that Sir Henry, hearing this read aloud, took the magistrate's hands down at last from their fold and put them flat on the boards.
Julian sits down.
The deaf cousin makes the noise that, in his vocabulary, signifies finality.
The codicil is admitted. The trust is admitted. The trustees of the Carrow estate are to have no power of intervention. The position is settled.
Pell ends his express:
Madam — your lord of Ashcombe voted for admission.
I am at the writing-desk in my mother's room, cutting a faded rose off a stem with the scissors at my elbow. The scissors halt half-way through the stem.
"What did he say."
Theodore, who has come into the room behind Pell, lifts an eyebrow at me from the doorway.
"He said — aye — in good order, with the rest. He neither qualified nor explained the vote. He said aye and sat down."
I finish the cut. The faded rose falls onto the desk.
"Soft, were we?" Theodore asks, mild.
"Not at all."
"It would be permitted, you know."
"Adrian's vote, uncle, was not a softening. It was the first morning he has seen his own position clearly enough to know he had no place from which to refuse."
Theodore considers this.
"That," he says, "is a Hollybrook reading."
"It is the correct one."
I put the rose stem into the wastepaper basket.
In the fourth month of the pregnancy he begins to come every day.
The first day he comes with a Wedgwood basket sent up from the Carrow town kitchens — pickled tongue, raised pies, jellies, three different sorts of beef tea in stoppered Wedgwood jars. I have it carried out to the lodge before the basket has crossed the front step, and instruct the lodge-keeper to give the contents to the tenant families along the lane.
The second day he comes with a Harley Street accoucheur in person, a Dr. Knighton — a different one — in a black coat and an air of professional consequence. I send Dr. Knighton out to attend to Adrian's own pulse, which, I observe through the morning-room window, is plainly elevated, and inform him that Mrs. Halloran of Guildford and Dr. Margate of Harley Street between them are perfectly adequate to my own.
The third day he comes with two pannier hampers of infant linen. Caps, bibs, gowns, swaddling bands, two flannel nightshirts. All in pale rose and pale blue, arranged alternately, with a card on the top in his own hand.
I look at the card. I look at the linen. I send Theodore down to the gravel sweep.
"Tell his lordship," I say, "that I have not been informed which of these infants he supposes to be a boy. He may inform me, since he appears to have particular knowledge."
Theodore conveys the message with grave Coldstream composure. Adrian sends back, very quietly, that he begs my pardon; that the colour was the linen-draper's selection, not his; and that he will have the hampers exchanged for white.
I send Theodore down again.
"Tell his lordship: a child is not a curiosity-box upon which a man may furnish his fancies. The white hampers may stay."
Adrian, the message returned, leaves the white hampers and goes away.
On the fourth day he comes empty-handed.
He stands in the gravel sweep from a little after one o'clock to a little before sunset. He does not ride up to the door. He does not call for the lodge-keeper. He does not, the lodge-keeper reports, even appear to expect to be admitted. He stands holding his horse's bridle, looking up at the house, in the way a man looks at a house he has been informed he may not enter.
At four the sky goes the colour of slate. By five the rain has begun and is settling for the long evening sort.
Theodore comes upstairs.
"He has not put his hat on. He has not the air of having brought a hat."
"Mm."
"It is the wounded-soldier ploy, my dear. Every shamed officer at White's has done it. It works on no one twice."
"Has it worked on anyone, ever."
"Once. On a fool of a girl in '12 who I shall not name."
"Then I do not propose to be the second instance. — Send Mr. Burton out with hot brandy and a dry coat. He may stand in the rain at his pleasure. He is not to come into the house."
Theodore relays this. Adrian accepts the coat. He sends back the brandy.
By seven he is coughing.
My mother says, gently, "Cecily, my love."
"He has a town carriage, mama, and a Harley Street physician at his retainer."
"He has not been very well-mothered. I had a great deal more time to consider the deficiency last summer than was perhaps comfortable for him."
"You are softening, mama."
"I am observing. They are not, my dear, the same operation."
I close my book.
I send the family surgeon out to him at half past seven. The surgeon attends his pulse, opens his coat at the throat, listens to his chest with the stethoscopic tube, finds the cough thready but not yet serious, and sends back word that his lordship requires nothing more than dry quarters and an hour in front of a fire.
Adrian, when the surgeon withdraws, stands in the rain another quarter of an hour. Then he writes a note, gives it to the lodge-keeper, mounts his horse, and goes.
The note is short.
Cecily — I came only to see you at the window. — A.
I write back, on a card sent down through Burton:
You have seen. Now go.
Adrian, the lodge-keeper reports, reads the card under the lamp before mounting.
In the morning a leather portfolio is brought up from town by his under-steward and laid on the writing-desk.
It is not a hamper. It is not flowers. It is not a letter.
It is a deed of access, drawn up by Mr. Quilter under Adrian's authority and sealed with the earl's signet, lodged separately at Pell and Burgh, granting me — Cecily Hollybrook of Hollybrook in the county of Surrey — for the term of my natural life, the following: free unrestricted recourse to Dr. Margate of Harley Street, retained permanently at the Ashcombe expense; free use of the Ashcombe house at Bath for any lying-in or convalescence; the attendance of the Carrow accoucheur upon my confinement; and a separate annual sum of two hundred pounds to be applied, at my sole discretion, to the medical care of any person, of any class, in any village, attached to me by my own judgement.
The deed is exercisable without his permission. It cannot be revoked. The Carrow signet is at the foot of it.
I read it through twice.
I send for my own seal and counter-sign the receipt.
Theodore, watching me from the doorway, raises an eyebrow.
"You have accepted, my dear."
"Feeling is useless," I say. "Resources are useful."