Death at Dawn - Caro Peacock [58]
‘Miss Lock, may I introduce my son Stephen. Stephen, Miss Lock, our new governess.’
It was graceful in her, to introduce us properly. Her son’s response was equally graceful, a touch of the hand, a slight movement of the upper body that was an indication of a bow, though not as pronounced as it would have been to a lady. The dark eyes that met mine gave no indication that he remembered seeing me before. Celia glanced up from her sewing.
‘Miss Lock, do you sketch? Should you mind if I consulted you sometimes about my attempts?’
Her anxious eyes answered my question. She hadn’t told her brother. I should be delighted, I said. Soon after that they went in to dinner and we were free to escape to the nursery quarters.
The next day, Saturday, followed much the same pattern in the schoolroom. On Sunday we all went to church, the children travelling with their parents in the family carriage a mile across the park to the little Gothic church by the back gates, the rest of us walking in the sunshine. The family sat in their own screened pew up by the altar, at right angles to the rest of the congregation, so I had only a glimpse of Celia, solemn and dutiful in an oyster-coloured bonnet, and Sir Herbert looking stern, as if he were only there to make sure that God and the clergyman did their duty.
After church, once the family had driven away in the carriage, there was a rare chance for the servants to linger in the sun and gossip. I strolled among the gravestones and round the old yew trees, catching the occasional scrap of conversation. There were quite a few complaints about being worked too hard, not only the usual burden, but something more.
‘… all the bedrooms opened and cleaned, even the ones they haven’t used for years …’
‘… bringing waiters in from London, just for the weekend. Where they’re going to put them all …’
‘So I said I didn’t think it was very respectful having a ball, with the poor old king not even buried yet.’
‘Well, he will be by then, won’t he?’
‘I think they’re going to announce an engagement for Miss Celia.’
‘They’d never go to all that trouble, would they?’
I tried to hear more, but the women who were talking saw me and lowered their voices. I wandered away to look more closely at some of the gravestones. The oldest of them went back two hundred years or more and although they looked higgledy-piggledy, leaning at angles among the long grass and moon daisies, there was an order about them. Ordinary folk were on the outside, nearest the old stone wall that divided the churchyard from the grazing cattle, then upper servants at Mandeville Hall, still defined even in death by their service to the family, forty years a keeper, thirty years a faithful steward. Nearest the church, protected by a grove of yew trees, were the big table tombs of the Mandeville family themselves. I was reading the florid description of the virtues of the fifth baronet, as distinguished in his Piety and Familial Duty as in the high service of his Country, when I heard footsteps on the dry ground behind me.
‘He really was the worst villain of the lot of them,’ a man’s voice said over my shoulder. ‘Made a fortune selling bad meat to the army.’
I turned round and saw Stephen Mandeville standing there smiling in grey cutaway jacket and white stock with a plain gold pin, tall hat in hand. I dare say my mouth dropped open.