“Mick from the stables just rode out.”
She'd forgotten her shawl. The air in the unheated passage between kitchen and manor chilled the sheen of perspiration on her face and neck. Dickie pushed open doors: doors to the warming kitchen, doors to another passage, doors to the butler's pantry. Her heart thumped as they entered the dining room. But it was empty, save for an ominously overturned chair. On the floor by the chair were a puddle of water and, a little away, a miraculously unbroken crystal goblet, glinting in the light of the candelabra. A forlorn, half-finished bowl of onion soup still sat at the head of the table, waiting for dinner to resume.
Dickie led her to a drawing room deeper into the house. A gaggle of housemaids stood by the door, clutching each other's sleeves and peering in cautiously. They fell back at Verity's approach and bobbed unnecessary curtsies.
Her erstwhile lover reclined, supine, on a settee of dark blue. He wore a disconcertingly peaceful expression. Someone had loosened his necktie and opened his shirt at the collar. This state of undress contrasted sharply with his stiff positioning, his hands folded together above his breastbone like those of an effigy atop a stone sarcophagus.
Mr. Prior, the butler, stood guard over Bertie's inert body, more or less wringing his hands. At her entrance, he hurried to her side and whispered, “He's not breathing.”
Her own breath quite left her at that. “Since when?”
“Since before Dickie went to the kitchen, Madame,” said the butler, without quite his usual sangfroid.
Was that five minutes? Seven? She stood immobile a long moment, unable to think. It didn't make any sense. Bertie was a healthy man who experienced few physical maladies.
She crossed the room, dipping to one knee before the settee. “Bertie,” she called softly, addressing him more intimately than she had at any point in the past decade. “Can you hear me, Bertie?”
He did not respond. No dramatic fluttering of the eyelids. No looking at her as if he were Snow White freshly awakened from a poisoned sleep and she the prince who brought him back to life.
She touched him, something else she hadn't done in ten years. His palm was wet as was his starched cuff. He was still warm, but her finger pressed over his wrist could detect no pulse, only an obstinate stillness.
She dug the pad of her thumb into his veins. Could he possibly be dead? He was only thirty-eight years old. He hadn't even been ill. And he had an assignation with Mrs. Danner tonight. The oysters for his post-coital fortification were resting on a bed of ice in the cold larder and the hazelnut butter was ready for the dessert crepes beloved by Mrs. Danner.
But his pulse refused to beat.
She released his hand and rose, her mind numb. With the exception of the kitchen regiment, the staff had assembled in the drawing room, the men behind Mr. Prior, the women behind Mrs. Boyce the housekeeper, everyone pressed close to the walls, a sea of black uniforms with foam caps of white collars and white aprons.
To Mrs. Boyce's inquiring gaze, Verity shook her head. The man who was once to be her prince was dead. He had taken her up to his castle, but had not kept her there. In the end she had returned to the kitchen, dumped the shards of her delusion in the rubbish bin, and carried on as if she'd never believed that she stood to become the mistress of this esteemed house.
“We'd better cable his solicitors then,” said Mrs. Boyce. “They'll need to inform his brother that Fairleigh Park is now his.”
His brother. In all the drama of Bertie's abrupt passing, Verity had not even thought of the succession of Fairleigh Park. Now she shook somewhere deep inside, like a dish of aspic set down too hard.
She nodded vaguely. “I'll be in the kitchen should you need me.”
*
In her copy of Taillevent's Le Viandier, where the book opened to a recipe for gilded chicken with quenelles, Verity kept a brown envelope marked “List of Cheese Merchants in the 16th Arondissement.”
In the envelope was a news clipping from the county fish wrapper, about the Liberals' victory in the general election after six years in opposition. In a corner of the clipping, Verity had written the date: 16.08.1892. In the middle of the article, a grainy photograph of Stuart Somerset looked back at her— local boy made good.
She never touched his image, for fear that her strokes would blur it. Sometimes she looked at it very close, the clipping almost at her nose. Sometimes she put it as far as her lap, but never further, never beyond reach.