Traitors Gate - Anne Perry [80]
“Yes, Martha?”
“Please ma’am, there’s a Mrs. Chancellor ‘as called to see you. A Mrs. Linus Chancellor. She’s very …”
“Yes?”
“Oh, I think you’d better come, ma’am. Shall I say as you’ll receive her?”
Nobby contained her amusement, and not inconsiderable surprise. What on earth was Susannah Chancellor doing paying an afternoon call here? Nobby was hardly in her social or her political sphere.
“Certainly tell her so,” she replied. “And show her out onto the terrace.”
Martha bobbed something like half a curtsy and hurried with insufficient dignity back across the grass and up the steps to discharge her errand.
A moment later Susannah emerged from the French doors, by which time Nobby was coming up the shallow stone steps from the lawn, her skirt brushing against the urns with scarlet and vermilion nasturtiums spilling out of them, almost luminous in their brilliance.
Susannah was dressed very formally in white, trimmed with pale pink and a thread of carmine-shaded ribbon. White lace foamed at her throat and wrists and her parasol was trimmed with ribbon and a blush pink rose. She looked exquisite, and unhappy.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Chancellor,” Nobby said formally. This was an extremely formal time of the afternoon to call. “How very pleasant of you to come.”
“Good afternoon, Miss Gunne,” Susannah replied with less than her usual assurance. She looked beyond Nobby to the garden as if seeking someone else. “Have I interrupted you with … with other visitors?” She forced a smile.
“No, I am quite alone,” Nobby replied, wondering what so troubled the younger woman. “I was simply enjoying the perfect weather and thinking what a delight it is to have a garden.”
“Yes, isn’t it,” Susannah agreed, stepping farther across the terrace and starting down the steps to the lawn. “Yours is particularly beautiful. Would you think me discourteous to ask if you would show me ’round it? It is too much to take in at a glance. And it looks as if there is more of it yet, beyond that stone wall and the archway. Is that so?”
“Yes, I am very fortunate in its size,” Nobby agreed. “Of course I should be delighted to show you.” It was far too early to offer refreshment, and anyway that was not customary during the first hour of time appropriate for receiving. Although, of course, some fifteen minutes was all one stayed; it was also not done to walk around the garden, which would take half an hour at the very least.
Nobby was now quite concerned as to why Susannah had come. It was impossible to imagine it was a simple call for the usual social purposes. Leaving her card would have been quite adequate, in fact the proper thing, since they were not in any real sense acquainted.
They walked very gently, Susannah stopping every few yards to admire something or other. Often she appeared not to know its name, simply to like its color, form, or its position complementing something else. They passed the gardener weeding around the antirrhinums and pulling a few long spears of grass from the mass of the blue salvia.
“Of course, as close to Westminster as we live,” Susannah went on, “we do not have room for a garden such as this. It is one of the things I most miss. We do go down to the country when my husband can arrange it, but that is not so very often. His position is most demanding.”
“I can imagine that it would be,” Nobby murmured.
A brief smile touched Susannah’s face and immediately vanished again. A curious expression followed, a softness in her eyes, at once pleasure and pain, yet her lips were pulled tight with some underlying anxiety which would not let her relax. She said the words “my husband” with the pride of a woman in love. Yet her hands fiddled incessantly with the ribbons on her parasol, her fingers stiff, as if she did not care if she broke the threads.
There was nothing Nobby could do but wait.
Susannah turned and began walking towards the great cedar and the white garden seat under its shade. The grass was thin where the needles had shed