“Ah,” said Emma, touching the girl’s cheek. “Herr Franck’s arrangement, I see. One of my favorites. I will open the instrument for you,” she added, hurrying over to the pianoforte that stood in one corner of the room.
“I can do it, Aunt Emma,” the child said. “Don’t fuss over me.”
“Aleta!” Cecily protested. “You must not address your aunt in that tone.”
“It’s all right,” said Emma, retreating. “I shall wait over here with your Mama until you are ready. Thank you for bringing her,” she told Cecily quietly as they watched the child make her preparations at the pianoforte. “I do not get to see her as much as I would like. She’s growing up so fast. Do you think Otto would allow me to take her with me to Paris?” She sighed. “He will probably say it is not wise.”
Cecily looked at her, wide-eyed. “You mean to go back to Paris? When?”
“After Christmas, of course,” Emma answered. “January. Once the boys are back in school, there is nothing to keep me in England. And now that the Corsican tyrant is safely exiled to Elba, there is nothing to keep me out of France. I have many friends at the French court. And I have bought a splendid little house in the Faubourg de St. Honore.”
“Exile!” Cecily said unhappily.
“I’ll take Paris over the sanctimonious hypocrisy of London any day,” Emma replied. “In Paris I can be at liberty. No one judges me. Why, by Parisian standards, I am a model of virtue!”
“Aunt Emma! Mama!” Aleta called from the pianoforte. “I am ready now.”
Cecily and Emma hurried to take their seats as the child began to sing haltingly in German as her fingers limped over the keys. Cecily did not know the words, but Emma gamely joined in singing the old German folk tune.
Ach Tannenbaum, Ach Tannenbaum,
Du bist ein edler Zweig!
Du grünest uns den Winter,
Die liebe Sommerzeit.
The musician stayed afterward for twenty minutes—quite twenty times the length of the little song—shyly accepting the praise of her grateful audience. Then her governess whisked her away for her watercolor lesson.
Emma spent the rest of the morning writing letters. After luncheon, she went out for a long walk, returning to the house for tea. To her surprise, Lord Hugh had not yet arrived. The man was usually punctual. He certainly never missed a meal, if he could help it.
As evening dragged into night, Emma became worried, not about Lord Hugh, of course. She could not have cared less about him. Her fears were for Harry and Grey; she could only assume that they were with their great-uncle and guardian. Using her widowhood as an excuse to avoid company, she dined alone in her room, hardly touching her food, much to the dismay of her French chef. Otto and Cecily, Colin and Monty dined with the other guests, but they could discover nothing about Lord Hugh. If he had sent any word to Warwick about a change in his travel plans, Emma was not to be privy to the information.
At ten o’clock, the gates to Warwick were closed, and the guards released the mastiffs to patrol the grounds. Emma lay in bed for hours, restless and uneasy, before drifting off to sleep.
Chapter Two
Sunday, December 11, 1814
Nicholas St. Austell sat in the swaying carriage, squeezed between Lord Hugh and Lady Anne Fitzroy, while five young ladies, daughters of Lord Hugh and Lady Anne, sat packed together on the opposite seat. Wearing a brown George wig and a greatcoat with half a dozen capes, Lord Hugh looked the prosperous, well-fed gentleman. His wife, by comparison, was a thin, faded lady with frightened, watery blue eyes. More often than not, she seemed bewildered by the world around her. They were as unlikely a couple, Nicholas supposed, as the brilliantly colored peacock and his lackluster peahen.
Until very recently, the young naval officer had not been aware of the existence of the Fitzroys at all, but now he was to understand that Lord Hugh and Lady Anne were his uncle and aunt—the lady being the elder sister of Nicholas’s dead father—and the five young ladies, whom he could scarcely tell apart, were his cousins. Together, they comprised all the family he had in the world, or so they claimed.
All seven of these Fitzroys had been waiting for him on the dock at Plymouth on the day his ship arrived in the harbor. They had been searching the world over for him, they said, and they seemed genuinely delighted to have found him, safe and sound, aboard the H.M.S. Gorgon. Before Nicholas quite knew what was happening, his aunt and uncle had claimed him, and he was in a carriage on his way to someplace called Warwick Palace.
It felt like he was being kidnapped. They are my family, he often had to remind himself. They are not kidnaping me. They simply are taking me home with them for Christmas.
Their delight in him continued unabated, but two days of travel had been more than enough to weary Nicholas of his companions. Lord Hugh—or Uncle Hugh, as he demanded to be called—had quickly revealed himself as a blustering bully. He shouted and snarled at his wife and daughters continuously, while Nicholas never received anything but smiles and platitudes from the man. As for the young ladies, they seemed to do little more than preen and giggle. Nicholas did his best to ignore them, but he was sure that their inane giggling would haunt his dreams for years to come. Lady Anne—Aunt Anne—was the only one among them for whom Nicholas had any feelings, and her he merely pitied.
As darkness fell around them on the third day, the carriage fell silent. Lord Hugh’s head fell onto Nicholas’s shoulder, and he began to snore, eliciting sleepy giggles from some one or other of his daughters. Suddenly, the carriage ground to a halt. Lord Hugh was pitched forward, his wig falling into Nicholas’s lap. Cursing, Lord Hugh let down the window and barked at the driver.
“We are at the gates,” Lord Hugh announced presently, closing the window against the cold night air. “Thank you, Nephew,” he added gruffly as Nicholas passed him his wig. “We will be at the house in two shakes,” he went on, clapping the hairpiece to his skull. “I’ve sent word ahead to my sister, and the keepers are holding the dogs.”
“If we had not stopped to help those stranded people, we would be there now,” one of the girls said resentfully. “I’ve missed my dinner!”
“We have all missed dinner,” one of the older girls told her sharply.
“A broken axle on a lonely road is no joke,” Nicholas said, nettled by the girls’ lack of charity. “It was our Christian duty to help the vicar and his wife.”
“Oh, someone else would have come along to help them,” said Lord Hugh. “I suppose at sea one is obliged to help all sorts of people clinging to shipwreck and all that sort of thing, but it’s really not necessary in a civilized country. You’re not in the Royal Navy anymore, you know.”
“But, sir, the lady was with child!” Nicholas protested.
“Shameless the way these clergyman breed,” said Lord Hugh, shaking his head. “Ah, well! What’s done is done. We’ll be in our beds soon enough.”
“I’m so tired! I’m cold! I’m hungry!” the girls complained.
“Then you should have eaten the sandwiches that were offered you,” Nicholas told them curtly. “And I can’t imagine why you’d be tired,” he went on angrily. “You’ve done nothing but sleep and giggle for three days. If there’s any work to be done, you fob it off on your mama.”
Lady Anne’s hand crept to touch his arm. “Do forgive them, Nicholas,” she pleaded. “They’re just tired and cross, that’s all. They don’t mean to complain. There’s no complaining in the Royal Navy, I’m sure,” she added.
Nicholas instantly felt ashamed. In the navy, malcontents routinely were flogged,