The Land of Summer Page 4

  One hour and twenty minutes later the door opened and a figure appeared, a tall elegant man with a head of thick dark hair, the unmistakable outline of her future husband.

  ‘Mr Aubrey!’ Emmaline said through chattering teeth, getting quickly to her feet. ‘How much I have been looking forward to this!’

  She hurried towards him, relief and happiness mingling in her chest as she realised that she remembered him perfectly. It was so long since they had seen each other that she had wondered whether, in fact, her recollection bore any resemblance to the reality, but now here he was, and he was just as handsome as ever.

  For a moment he stood with his arms by his side, staring at her as if he had never seen her before, but then he smiled.

  ‘Miss Nesbitt?’ He stopped. ‘Why, you are even prettier than I remembered,’ he said shyly, and now he did take her by the arms and hold her from him.

  ‘I am a great deal more purple and blue than when you last saw me, Mr Aubrey,’ Emmaline laughed, her teeth still chattering.

  ‘Forgive my being so dilatory in greeting you. Where is Ralph?’ He looked round, perplexed. ‘Has he gone already? That is too bad.’ He shook his head. ‘He knew there was something I had to finish, and he should have stayed with you while I did so. I will give him a scolding when I see him tomorrow, leaving you alone like this. It is simply not the thing at all.’

  ‘I confess I had all but given up hope of seeing another human being when the door opened, and there you were at last,’ Emmaline admitted, as lightly as she could, because she could not deny feeling disappointment at the manner of her arrival. However, she quickly put it down to English ways, to which she must grow used.

  ‘I see the fire has gone out, Miss Nesbitt. Please accept my apologies. The servants here are a slovenly lot, and it is hard to make them do anything without giving them a sovereign!’

  ‘It most certainly has gone out, but I promise you I did not just sit here waiting for it to light again of its own accord. I went in search of someone, but I couldn’t find anyone to help me—’

  ‘That would not be uncommon. They all plunge down to the kitchens when the weather is bad, like mice in search of warmth.’ Aubrey stood aside in the doorway. ‘Please come with me. I shall find someone to show you to your room.’

  ‘Oh,’ Emmaline said, hesitating. ‘Would it be possible to have some refreshment first? It has been something of a long journey – added to which the cold, as you observed, has been quite considerable.’

  Aubrey consulted a fob watch which he pulled from his waistcoat and raised his eyebrows.

  ‘I shall see what can be managed. But first I feel sure you would wish to be shown your room. After all, you have come a long way.’

  Since it sounded a little more like an order than a suggestion, and since Emmaline was well used to being given orders by her parents, she dutifully followed her fiancé into the hall.

  ‘This is a very large house,’ she observed, as they clattered across the stone floor. There was still no servant in sight.

  ‘It is, I am sorry to say, far too large and in a quite deplorable state,’ came the even reply. ‘The sensible thing would be to knock it down. Excuse me?’

  A maid had come scurrying into the hall, blowing into her cupped hands in an attempt to keep them warm.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘I wish you to show Miss Nesbitt to her room,’ he said. ‘In the East Wing. The Pink Room? At the end of the passageway.’

  ‘I don’t know, sir,’ the maid replied, wiping the end of her nose on the back of her hand. ‘I’m still new here. I keep getting lost, really I do, been lost all morning, really I have, I need a ball of string, really I do, just so’s I can follow it, you know, there an’ back, make everything much easier, and that’s a fact.’

  He opened a door at the side of the hall.

  ‘Down this corridor to the end. Up the stairs. Down the landing on the right to the door at the end, where you will find another corridor. Down it, through the door, up the stairs in front of you, down to the end of the passageway – you will come to the Pink Room.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Miss Nesbitt,’ he turned back to Emmaline, ‘I shall do what I can to arrange some refreshment for you.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Aubrey,’ Emmaline replied, and then lowered her voice. ‘I wonder, given our circumstances, if it would be possible for you to call me by my Christian name?’

  Her handsome husband-to-be looked at her without expression, but after obviously carefully considering her question he nodded.

  ‘Very well.’

  ‘And you wish me to call you …?’

  Again he regarded her silently for a while before replying.

  ‘You may call me by my first name, despite the fact that we are not yet married, and it is not the way we behave in England. It is not the custom, but even so, you may call me, yes, you may call me …’ He paused. ‘You may call me Julius, but not in front of the servants, if you wouldn’t mind, gives the wrong impression in front of the servants. First-naming in front of servants leads to all sorts of trouble.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Emmaline nodded. ‘I would like that.’

  ‘Yes, you may call me Julius, rather than Mr Aubrey, when we are alone.’

  ‘Thank you, that will be so much nicer. And you will call me Emmaline, not in front of the servants, if you would?’

  The young maid looked away, trying to pretend that she wasn’t listening, and Emmaline, realising this, smiled at her half apologetically, hoping that she hadn’t been offended by her fiancé’s observations.

  ‘Now I will leave you. The girl will take you the rest of the way,’ Julius announced, as if Emmaline was a guest rather than a young woman whom he had promised to marry.

  As she and the poor little maid, whose name was Enid, became more and more lost in their efforts to find the East Wing, let alone the Pink Room, Emmaline kept wondering about the conversation she had just had with her fiancé. She had expected a warmer welcome, particularly given the tone of the note he had written on the eve of his departure, not to mention the letter he had sent her once the terms of their marriage had been agreed. Yet he had received her just now as if they had never met before – as if she were someone coming to him seeking employment rather than about to make a union for life. Had he perhaps changed his mind? Such things happened, she had read about them, hasty decisions regretted at a later date, confusions resulting from everyone’s acting for the best and making things worse. Perhaps the reality of a young American girl arriving in his house without a maid, with nothing but a valise and a trunk, had been too much for him? Perhaps he felt disappointed in her appearance in some way? Perhaps seeing her again was a severe shock, instead of a delight?

  But all such fevered thoughts were soon dismissed as they came at last to the end of a likely passageway.

  ‘This must be the Pink Room, don’t you think?’ Emmaline asked.

  Enid, blue-lipped, and hardly able to speak clearly for the cold, nodded, and for a moment the only sound they could hear in the silence of the old, damp house was the noise of their chattering teeth.

  ‘I dare say it is, miss, given the instructions what was said to us, I dare say it is,’ Enid replied at last, her breath making small circles in the freezing air.

  Emmaline stared round at the walls bulging with damp, at the cracked plaster above them, at the grey-green film on the furniture, and for a full minute she was filled with unaccustomed despair. So this was the land of summer where the Romans built graceful villas, and grew vines, and the days were far longer than the nights?

  ‘I see,’ she said. ‘Now I wonder if I might be shown the bathroom – and perhaps you might bring me a tray of something, with a hot drink?’

  ‘Yes, miss. I’ll do my best, really I will, but I am only new, and finding my way around is wuss than the maze in the garden, I tell you it is.’

  The day was now turning fast to dusk and the wretched maid, having finished her short speech
, had run off, perhaps to lose herself somewhere else in this unfriendly mansion, leaving Emmaline without so much as a bedstick, or matches with which to light it. Emmaline stared around her, realising that she was hungry, cold and thirsty and not a little frightened too. At last she found a candle, but no matches. Feeling more than a little faint, she took up the unlit candle and ventured cautiously out into the corridor in search of some form of illumination. At last a light appeared at the end of another corridor and she hurried forward, finding when she reached her destination, to her great relief, a pair of illuminated candle-powered wall brackets. Once she had lit her own candle it seemed to her she could hear voices. Her spirits rose as she walked quietly over to the banisters on the landing and looked down. Below her she saw a small group of servants standing by a half-open doorway, talking in low voices. They were also drinking, as a bottle of what was obviously alcohol was passed around between two young men and a group of housemaids, one of whom was the delighted Enid.

  Emmaline was about to call down to them when something stopped her, some feeling that to do so would be wrong, would break up what was obviously an impromptu party. Instead she stepped back into the semi-darkness, at which point she suddenly became aware of someone standing immediately behind her.

  ‘May I perhaps be of some assistance, madam?’ a deep, although definitely female, voice enquired, causing the startled Emmaline to turn quickly about, the sudden movement dislodging her candle from its holder. She found herself face to face with a tall, raven-haired woman dressed from head to toe in black, with a set of housekeeper’s keys hanging from the belt around her waist.

  ‘Permit me,’ the woman said, after a moment, when it had become obvious that Emmaline was not going to pick up the fallen candle. She handed it back to Emmaline, who somewhat pointlessly replaced it in its holder. ‘As I was saying, miss, could I perhaps be of some assistance?’

  ‘And you are, please? My apologies, but I have only just arrived and no introductions have been effected.’

  ‘Mrs O’Clee,’ the housekeeper replied in a voice smoked by peat fires. ‘You seem, if I might say so, a little off course.’

  ‘I had no light in my room,’ Emmaline explained. ‘No fire either, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Now, that is a great and terrible pity, but could you not have called someone?’

  ‘I would have done, had there been anyone to call. And since you ask whether there might be something you could do for me, I should be grateful for some refreshment. I have eaten nothing, nor drunk anything, since my arrival here.’

  ‘Mr Aubrey has not told anyone to attend to your needs?’ the housekeeper wondered, relighting Emmaline’s candle. ‘Then I shall see that something is sent up to your room.’

  ‘And what time will dinner be served, please?’

  Mrs O’Clee frowned. ‘Dinner, you say?’

  ‘That is correct, yes. I should like to know what time dinner is, and furthermore I should like my luggage sent up to my room, and finally I shall need a maid to help me change.’

  ‘Forgive me, miss,’ Mrs O’Clee replied after a moment. ‘I was not aware you had been invited to dinner. If you would like to return to your room, I shall at once make the necessary arrangements.’

  As quietly and mysteriously as she had arrived, the housekeeper vanished into the darkness, leaving Emmaline to find her way back to the Pink Room.

  After several abortive attempts, she at last identified the correct corridor and finally her nominated bedroom, which was sadly unchanged, still dark and freezing cold. Thanks to now having a lit candle, whose life she had nursed most carefully on her trek back through the draughty passages and corridors, she managed to get the fire alight, and, after a quarter of an hour of attending to it with a small pair of bellows, was sufficiently hopeful to sit and warm herself by it, albeit still wearing her fur cape, fur hat and fur-lined gloves. Ten minutes later the fire was smoking so badly she was forced to open the window to the night air.

  ‘Alas me no,’ a tired voice said from the semi-darkness of the corridor. ‘Who was fool enough to light that fire now?’

  Peering into the smoke-filled gloom, Emmaline made out the figure of an elderly male servant bearing her luggage, followed by Enid carrying a tray with the rudiments of refreshments on it.

  ‘Whoever did that should have known better,’ the old man continued. ‘That fire is not to be lit for this very reason. This fire is a known smoker.’

  ‘I’m afraid that I lit it,’ Emmaline replied, earning herself a look of undisguised reproach followed by much clucking of what sounded like very loose teeth. ‘I fear had I not you would have come upon a human stalactite. Or do I perhaps mean a stalagmite?’

  ‘You shouldn’t have been given this room in the first place,’ the servant said severely. ‘Not that it’s my place to say, but there you have it. It’s beyond my fast disappearing memory to recall the last time anyone stayed in this room. So if I may suggest, miss, we put you in the room across the corridor from here, which is altogether more salubrious? Enid? About turn, girl, and follow after me.’

  The ancient retainer led the way, stooped by the weight of Emmaline’s luggage, her case in one hand and her trunk dragged along by the other, with Emmaline in second place followed by the maid bearing the tray. He showed Emmaline to a room which was indeed generally decorated in pink and in whose fireplace a healthy fire still burned. Having set the luggage down, the manservant placed some more coal and then a couple of small logs on the fire to stoke it up, drew the curtains, lit the rest of the candles and prepared to take his leave.

  ‘Enid has some refreshment for you, miss, as requested, and she will also help you in your toilet,’ he informed Emmaline from the doorway. ‘Dinner will be served in thirty-three minutes precisely. Thank you, miss.’

  ‘Thank you, um …’

  ‘Roderick, miss. If you need anything more, at any time, Roderick will see to it for you.’

  With half an hour to prepare Emmaline barely had time to eat more than half a fish-paste sandwich and a mouthful of seed cake while trying to instruct her appointed maid in helping her to dress for dinner.

  ‘I should like to have changed my stays,’ she said as she raised her arms ready for her evening gown to be slipped on, ‘but I am afraid time is against us.’

  ‘I carned reach,’ the maid muttered in a thick and, to Emmaline, all but indecipherable accent. ‘I carned possibly poot this on yer wi’ yer arms all stook oop like thart.’

  ‘Have you not dressed a lady before, Enid?’ Emmaline wondered, still with her arms in the air.

  ‘Nevaire the wonce, miss. Arm scull’ry.’

  ‘Scull’ry?’

  ‘Arm a scull’ry maid, miss. All at cud be spared at this time.’

  Eyeing the girl, who stood possibly no more than four and a half feet tall, a diminutive figure now largely swathed in one of Emmaline’s evening gowns, Emmaline shook her head and reflected on the chaotic organisation of this outwardly grand house. She remembered with deepening nostalgia how well-trained and skilled every member of her father’s household was required to be. No one who stayed at any of the Nesbitt residences could fail to be impressed by the attendant domestic service as well as the high standard of the cuisine. Still, Emmaline sighed to herself, having instructed the maid to stand on a chair in order to gain the height necessary to lower her gown over her head, given her own domestic experience it would not be long before she managed to instil some sort of sense and order into this chaotic household. It certainly was in need of it.

  By some miracle Emmaline arrived in thirty-four minutes precisely at the library doors, escorted by Roderick, and only seconds after a gong had been sounded in the great hall, summoning everyone to dinner. Not that it seemed to be a party of any size, Emmaline noted, as she followed the five people she imagined to be the last guests leaving the elegant book-lined room on their way to table. However, when she arrived in the enormous dining room, whose walls were heavily hung with dark wa
llpaper, it became clear that the total head count was only five, six including herself, a half-dozen that did not, for some strange reason, include Julius Aubrey, Esquire.

  As she stood waiting to be assigned a place at the table, Emmaline took stock of the dinner party, which consisted of a short stout bucolic-looking elderly gentleman with a monocle, an extremely tall and thin woman wearing a considerable amount of diamond jewellery, two indifferently dressed middle-aged ladies with large feathers in their hair, and a Roman-nosed cleric with a large, over-red moist mouth and bushy eyebrows who for some reason was clutching a Bible closely to his chest. With no one paying her the slightest attention, Emmaline remained standing until everyone else was seated, whereupon she took one of the two remaining places, the monocled gentleman to her right and the Roman-nosed clergyman on her left. When everyone was finally seated the clergyman immediately arose, whereupon everyone else stood up again except for the monocled gentleman, who ignored the reverend guest, proceeding instead to tuck a highly starched table napkin under his chin and spread it carefully over his chest.

  ‘Grace,’ the vicar announced.

  ‘Stuff and nonsense,’ the monocled gentleman said, still attending to the set of his bib. Then he took hold of his soup spoon in his right hand and a fish fork in his left and held them in the vertical position, in the manner of a badly mannered child in the nursery, throughout the longest grace Emmaline thought she had ever heard. While she stood with her head suitably bowed she noticed a silver animal set at the top of her place bearing her name card. There was no name on the card, just a question mark.