He courts me. He courts me in the open, in the manner of a man who has decided that, having destroyed any number of more economical methods, he may as well submit to the most extravagant.
He sends flowers. I am, since the autumn of '15, indifferent to flowers and the milder pollens make me sneeze. I direct Burton to put them in the morning room and the breakfast room, where my mother enjoys them and I am not obliged to.
He sends jewels. I direct Theodore to enter them as assets to a small fund I have set up for parish-poor children of Surrey and Hampshire; the jewels are sold at Christie's at the spring sale and the receipts are deposited in the fund under the names of Pippa and Posy.
He sends letters. I read the first. It is six pages, very fine, and contains in the third paragraph a phrase about his having understood, at last, the precise nature of his three years' offence. I send the second, third, and fourth back unopened.
It is not, in my case, because I am moved. It is because they are long, and I am not.
Theodore observes the matter with what he calls Coldstream amusement.
"Adrian Carrow has never in his life been so plainly put out."
"He bears it."
"He bears it remarkably well. He is at the door at one again, by the way. With a small box."
The small box is a christening cup of plain silver for each girl, the engraving simply Pippa and Posy without any title or surname. He has been to the silversmith himself. Theodore tells me this in the tone of a man reporting a battle of Hougoumont.
I accept the cups for the girls.
He does not, after the first week, ever come up to the house without my leave.
He has bought, the third week of February, the small Queen Anne house across the lane from Hollybrook — three reception rooms, ten bedchambers, a paddock — for an indecent sum from the dowager's late cousin's son, who was in straits at his club. He has moved into it with a single valet and three servants and the kennel of pointers he keeps at Ashcombe in the off-season. He calls the place, with a straight face, the Lodge, although it is a substantial gentleman's country box and has, on the gravel sweep, a small Italian fountain.
Every morning at seven he is at the gate of Hollybrook with a basket. The basket contains, depending on the day, fresh bread from the oven the Hollybrook cook has, by arrangement, taught Adrian's cook to use; fresh eggs from the new fowl-house at the Lodge; a pot of preserve from a recipe of my mother's old housekeeper; once, an absurd flock of marzipan rabbits in three sizes that Pippa, three months old and unable to eat any of them, attempts at sight to bite.
At eight he is in the breakfast room of Hollybrook, on a side chair, drinking tea, while the nursery-maid brings Pippa and Posy down. Pippa, at four months, has decided he is hers; she shrieks with delight when his hat comes through the door; she pulls his cravat awry; he goes home most mornings with his cravat awry. Posy, at four months, has decided he must earn it.
Once, attempting to change a swaddling cloth on the breakfast-room hearth-rug — Pippa having committed a small civil offence — he is unable to fold the cloth correctly, and Pippa, who at four months disapproves of incompetence on principle, kicks him in the wrist hard enough to set the cloth askew. He looks at the spreading wet patch on his sleeve. He looks down at Pippa.
He laughs.
The laugh is short and unguarded. It is the laugh of a man who has, perhaps, not laughed without considering whether the laugh would be useful for some years.
I am at the door. He does not see me.
I stand a moment thinking of the morning, three years ago, when I had risen at six to make him a cup of barley gruel because Mrs. Lyle had said his stomach had been delicate, and he had, looking at the cup on the table, said the smell was wrong and instructed me to take the saucepan to the scullery and have it scoured out before he came in for his coffee.
People change.
It does not, however, alter the books behind them.
That evening he drives me and the girls home from a brief winter ride into the lanes by way of the Hampshire road. We stop, briefly, at the gate of the Lodge. He sets the brake.
"Tomorrow," he says, "is the anniversary of our first meeting."
I look at him.
"Of your first meeting, my lord."
He turns.
"What."
"I saw you, my lord, six years before you saw me. At your grandfather's seventieth birthday at Ashcombe Park. I was sixteen. You were in the lower garden. There was a small girl crying because two of the housemaids had broken her hair-clip and laughed at her for the tears. You went down on one knee in the gravel beside her, and you picked the pieces of the clip out of the box border, and you put them in her hand without speaking, and you went away."
"I do not — I do not remember this."
"You would not. You did not see me. You did not see her, particularly. You simply did the thing."
He looks at me.
"I have spent three years," I say, "married in forgery to a different man — the man Ashcombe Park made of you. I did not, in any of the three years, much care for him. — The man I cared for, my lord, was the one in the lower garden in '11."
I look out at the lane.
"Find him, my lord, if you wish to be answered. He is not in my keeping."
I get down. Theodore comes out from the porter's lodge to take the girls. Adrian sits a long minute in the chaise without lifting the reins.
He sits there, the lodge-keeper later tells me, until full dark.
A year passes.
Julian Carrow, at the spring assize of 1818, is convicted on three counts — unlawful procurement of private medical correspondence, attempted abduction, and threats by letter in writing — and is transported for fourteen years to New South Wales. The dowager Lady Helena, after her accounts are unfrozen on her solemn undertaking to retire abroad and not to enter England again during the lives of either of my children, takes a small house at Antibes and is not, by name, heard of in Hampshire for the rest of the story. Mrs. Lyle, by a kindness I had not arranged but neither chose to obstruct, finds herself with no further occupation in the Carrow household; she goes, in '19, to a distant cousin in Bath who keeps her on out of family duty, and is observed in the Pump Room dressed always in the same French silk pelisse as if the world had stopped on the night she had gone down on Hollybrook's gravel. Mr. Quilter, on the application of the Carrow trustees for clemency in light of his having ultimately turned crown's evidence, is permitted to retire to Lyme without prosecution. He does not practise again.
The Carrow earldom, by vote of the trustees in spring, is restored to Adrian without limitation. Sir Henry presides. The deaf cousin makes, once more, his closing noise.
The trustees, I am informed, had expected Adrian, on confirmation, to bring his two daughters home to Ashcombe Park.
He does not.
He stays at the Lodge, across the lane from Hollybrook. He breakfasts at Hollybrook. He pays the bills of the Lodge from his private purse and the bills of Ashcombe from the estate's. He visits Ashcombe four days in each fortnight, on business, and returns to Surrey on the fifth night. He is, the Town & Country gossips have lost interest in saying, an Earl of Ashcombe who appears to live half in his earldom and half in the gravel sweep of a Surrey gentleman's lodge.
Theodore, on the lawn one afternoon in May, observes the matter with his usual gravity.
"Is the man mad."
"It is possible."
"Will you marry him."
"My uncle, we have not been married yet."
"That is, my dear, an arrangement we might rectify."
"At present I am disinclined to rectify it."
He laughs. He goes to the side table for the sherry. From the morning room window I can see Adrian in the lower garden with the girls, on the gravel walk — Pippa has, at fifteen months, learned to run from the nurse and bring herself to a full stop only in his arms, the way a colt brings itself up against the paddock fence. Posy walks behind. Posy thinks running is undignified.
Pippa falls on the gravel. She howls. Adrian goes down on one knee in his good country coat and picks her up and presses her face into his shoulder until the howling becomes a complaint and the complaint becomes a sniff.
Posy, on the gravel beside them, slaps his trouser leg with her small palm.
"Papa, stupid."
Adrian, gravely: "Papa is stupid."
I sit at the writing-desk by the open window. Theodore brings the sherry over. He sets a glass at my elbow and does not say anything.
A note comes up on a salver from the Lodge.
Cecily, — Will you sup with me tonight at Hollybrook. — A.
I take up my pen.
I write: That shall depend upon the children's humour.
I send it down.
The reply comes back inside the quarter-hour.
Then I shall set myself, this afternoon, to win them.
I put the note in the writing-desk drawer.
A little before sunset I open the casement of the morning room. The afternoon has been warm; there are starlings on the lawn; the air smells of grass and the cook's oven at the Lodge across the lane. Adrian is on the gravel below the terrace; he has a small star-shaped paper sticker on his collar (Pippa, in the matter of stickers, takes no prisoners), and a fresh smear of marzipan icing along the wrist of his coat, and the small bewildered look of a man who has spent the afternoon among children who have used him without acknowledging it.
He does not, when I open the casement, immediately look up. He has learned that the engine of the household is the children, and that the right way to be present at Hollybrook is to wait without staking a claim on the air.
Pippa sees me first.
"Mamma!" she shouts up at the window — Pippa has the lung capacity of a foot-soldier — "Papa says he will bake us rabbit biscuits tonight!"
I look at Adrian.
The Shrewsbury biscuits cut in the shape of rabbits, I am informed by Theodore, are Adrian's third attempt at the Lodge cook's standing instruction; the first batch, in March, were burnt to the colour of paving stones; the second, in April, were too sweet for the children's stomachs and given to Theodore's pointers; the third, of late, are considered acceptable, although the ears, by Pippa's report, are not always rabbit ears.
He stands in the lower garden looking up at me, with the star sticker still on his collar, the marzipan still on his cuff, the year a year past and the year a year ahead, holding nothing in either hand.
He does not, this evening, look like the Marble Earl of '15 who once paid a frightened curate twenty pounds to write down a marriage that never was. He does not look like the man who, at the head of his refectory table, told a gallery of painted earls his children might be any man's. He looks like a man who has been baking biscuits very badly for three months, who has been kicked by a fifteen-month-old, who has, the lodge-keeper informs me, been seen on his knees in his own paddock with a small sticker on his collar.
He waits.
He waits the way a man waits when he has, this once, understood that he has no further hand to play.
I lean on the sill.
"Biscuits tonight, then."
He looks at me a moment longer.
Then the slow smile begins at the corner of his mouth — the slow, very tired, almost startled smile — and reaches his eyes a little before he speaks.
"Good."
He has, I think, learned at last to begin a sentence with the word that the answer is, rather than the word he wished it to be.
I leave the casement open. The children, on the gravel below, have already turned back to him.
I do not, yet, go down.
I am, in the matter of going down, under no obligation to.
But the casement is open. And the biscuits are on for the children.
That is to-night's account.
To-morrow's, I shall settle to-morrow.