4
The earl’s apartments, as might have been expected, had the place of honor at the center front of the upper story of the house. They afforded the best view of any room—a panoramic prospect across lawns and flower beds to a band of gorse bushes and cliffs and the sea below stretching to infinity. It was a truly magnificent sight.
It turned Percy’s knees weak with sheer terror.
His bedchamber was also damp, he discovered the first night when he lay down upon noticeably soggy sheets. The housekeeper was horrified and mystified and apologetic. She had checked the sheets with her own hands before they were put upon his bed, she assured his lordship, and so had her ladyship. But damp they now were, and she could not deny the evidence when confronted with it.
“Perhaps,” Percy suggested, “it is the mattress itself that is damp.”
Mattress and sheets and blankets were changed by one hefty footman and an army of maids, all of whom had no doubt been rousted out of their beds so that their master might sleep without drowning.
And there was also, Percy discovered when he threw back the curtains from the windows before lying down upon his newly made-up bed, a great V of soggy dampness on the wallpaper below the windowsill. A bit mysterious, he thought, since he had not encountered any rain during his journey and had not noticed that patch earlier.
The sun was sparkling off the sea the next morning when Percy got out of bed and gingerly looked out. The water was calm. Both sea and sky were a clear blue—at last. It all appeared very benevolent, in fact, and the expanse of the park between the house and the cliffs looked reassuringly broad. It would surely take all of five minutes to walk from the house to those gorse bushes. Nevertheless, he wished his rooms were at the back of the house, facing those solid rocks.
The damp patch below the windowsill appeared considerably less damp this morning, he noticed.
He could hear Watkins pottering in his dressing room and ran a hand over the rough stubble on his jaw. It was time to face the day. He grimaced slightly, though, at the prospect. One would have thought that at some time during the past two years someone would have thought of mentioning that the late earl had died in possession of a resident spinster sister and a widowed daughter-in-law. And there was the sharp-tongued cousin, mercifully unrelated to him, who spoke in a baritone voice that might cause one to mistake her for a man if one could not see her. And there were the animals . . .
He longed suddenly for the sanity of his London home and White’s Club and his familiar friends and . . . boredom. But he had no one but himself to blame.
He had breakfast with Lady Lavinia and Mrs. Ferby. The former explained what she thought must be the exact relationship between them from what he had told them last evening. They had clearly shared a great-great-grandfather, even though their relative ages would lead anyone to assume they were a generation apart. Cousin Percy was Lady Lavinia’s third cousin. Dicky, her late brother’s son, would have been his third cousin once removed. Therefore, Imogen was his third cousin-in-law once removed.
The lady in question did not put in an appearance. She was, Percy assumed, a late riser.
“Dicky!” Mrs. Ferby said, addressing the food on her plate. “He was Richard, was he not, Lavinia? I am surprised he did not rebel against such an infantile name.” She paused in her eating and fixed Percy with a glare. “I suppose you are Percival?”
“I am, ma’am,” he agreed.
“The only time my husband addressed me as Addy,” she said, “was also the last time. He died seven months after I married him.”
Percy did not ask if there was a connection between the two incidents.
“I was seventeen,” she added, “and he was fifty-three. It was not a May/September match. It was more like a January/December mismatch.”
Her brief marriage, Percy concluded, had not been of the variety made in heaven, though he guessed Mr. Ferby might well have been quite happy to retire there after seven months with his young bride.
Lady Lavinia offered to show him to the morning room after breakfast, on the assumption, he supposed, that he might wish to put his feet up there and enjoy his existence before a roaring fire. It was a large chamber and was what he would call the library, though it did admittedly face east and therefore caught the morning sun. There was an impressive array of books shelved there. He would enjoy browsing through them at another time.
Two cats were lying at their ease before the windows, each in a shaft of warm sunlight. Wise cats. The great lump of a bulldog had taken ownership of the rug before the fire and was stretched out there, apparently asleep. The spindly dog of the bulging eyes was cowering under an oak desk but scrambled out when he saw Percy to wave his tail and gaze upward with abject hope. Percy trained his quizzing glass upon it and ordered it to sit. He might as well have asked it to perform a pirouette on the pointed toes of one paw.
He was going to have to do something about those strays, Percy thought for at least the dozenth time since yesterday afternoon.
He did not stay. At his request, Lady Lavinia took him to the steward’s office at the back of the house and left him in the hands of Ratchett, who looked to be eighty if he was a day and every bit as dusty as the mountain of estate and account books that were piled everywhere, including on the top of his desk.
The man bobbed his bald head several times—or was it merely that he had the shakes?—and squinted in the general direction of Percy’s left ear. He indicated the dusty piles and expressed himself of the opinion that his lordship must be desirous of spending the day going through them. His lordship desired no such thing. But looking thoughtfully at his good and faithful servant, who had not once looked directly into his face, he made the instant decision not to ask the man to take him about the estate in person.