Page 41 of A Tale of Two Dukes

It wasn’t the first time Viola had come into a great house as mistress in the place of a woman who was now dead.

But this was different – worse in some ways, and better in others.

Mostly, it was better. She wasn’t replacing the beloved and much-missed Duchess Elizabeth at Edward’s side, nobody was looking at her as though she was little better than an imposter, and above all, she wasn’t a nervous seventeen-year-old with barely a clue of how she should go on and no one to help her find her feet.

She might be a southerner, which she couldn’t mend, and Richard might in some sense be an interloper too, but she was a grown woman now, and had run a household much larger than this one for many years.

And as for her late predecessor being missed by her former employees, she soon discovered that this was only partly true.

She’d been ‘a rare character’, with all that that implied.

Viola knew all about rare characters – her mother was one.

Living with them wasn’t always easy or comfortable.

It quickly became clear that what she had first taken for unfriendliness, even disapproval, in the Castle’s inhabitants’ attitude towards her was, at least partly, sheer embarrassment.

The rooms that were in use were spotlessly clean, and the food served to the family was hearty, well-cooked and decorously presented, but that was all that could be said.

She found Ventris Castle to be barren of what most people would consider the necessities of existence, let alone the luxuries.

Life there could only be described as primitive, for everyone, family and staff alike.

The servants’ quarters, when she saw them, took her breath away; they could have come straight from the Middle Ages, and presumably had.

It might have been picturesque to see, in an antiquarian volume or portrayed upon the stage in a fairy tale – as a reality in the nineteenth century, in the home of a wealthy woman, it was shocking.

The building and repair work was under way, at least the most urgent parts of it, as Richard had told her, action that would make sure the Castle survived another winter without crumbling into utter ruin and sliding into the sea.

But Richard and the boys seemed to think it was either a matter of indifference or a great adventure that there was not a piece of linen or a curtain anywhere in the house that was not practically in tatters, and that items of furniture – chairs, for example, or beds – were as likely to collapse into piles of firewood at moments of maximum inconvenience as to bear a person’s weight in a reliable way.

For her part, she would prefer less excitement and fewer splinters, though she was prepared to admit privately that she and Richard continued to make some heavy demands on the fixtures and fittings of their bedchamber.

Once the butler and housekeeper, a married couple named Codling, had realised that she did not blame them for the many deficiencies caused by their former mistress’s miserly ways, and that furthermore, though the new Lady Ventris had once been a duchess, she was not at all high in the instep, they got on quite comfortably together.

It was apparent that they’d feared for their position and their home – such as it was – under the new regime, and now could relax as it became clear that Viola had no intention of putting them out of doors in their late middle age and replacing them with smart London servants of her own.

She meant instead to make their lives more comfortable along with her family’s, and told them so.

Mrs Codling had been heard to comment that it was good to see children in the old place again – that they brought it to life after a-many years of sad emptiness – and Viola could see that this was a rare encomium, by Yorkshire standards.

She could hardly hope for more. Her sons were boisterous, but the Codlings did not appear to mind the disruption they caused, but rather to see it as perfectly natural, and even, on occasion, entertaining.

Mr Codling was largely silent unless circumstances absolutely required communication, as though somebody might be going to charge him a ha’penny a word, and he only had a shilling.

But Mrs Codling had a wide repertoire of highly expressive sniffs, which could mean anything from extreme disapproval to grudging praise; there was even one that seemed to signify that she was highly if reluctantly amused, and Ned and Robin’s antics often provoked her into deploying it.

The boys had at first thought that she was suffering from a severe cold in the head, but had grown accustomed to her odd ways now, and showed alarming signs of wrapping her around their little fingers.

Viola was also aware that the woman – who was plainly nobody’s fool – sometimes eyed her shrewdly up and down as they talked together, as if to ascertain whether her mistress’s plumpness disguised the fact that a little Ventris might be expected to make an appearance in due course, to add even further to the bustle of the Castle.

But she resolved to show no sign that she had noticed this scrutiny.

Time would tell, and her body and its secrets were her own, for now.

And if the housekeeper or any of the other, junior staff thought that the young Armstrongs resembled their stepfather more closely than mere cousins should, they did not give the slightest hint of such a suspicion.

They were sharp, she thought; if it were obvious, they’d have noticed it.

Probably she was worrying too much about that particular matter, and could lay it to rest, if Tarquin Armstrong remained silent and inactive, as he appeared to have done so far.

Maybe he was indeed intimidated by his half-brother’s unsavoury reputation, as she had hoped.

Or perhaps her fears, and Edward’s on his deathbed, had always been fanciful and entirely without foundation.

It was easy to think cheerful thoughts here, so far away from all she’d known before, busy in her new life setting the Castle to rights, watching the boys and Richard learn about each other by slow degrees, learning about her new husband herself, and spending night after night in his arms. They’d not resumed their painful discussion about his past, and she did not mean to, since it did no good to dwell on what could not be mended.

She’d ascertained that Tarquin had never been here, neither in his childhood nor more recently, because of course he was no Ventris, no relation at all, and had no business and no place here.

Day by day, as they lived together undisturbed, she grew less anxious and more hopeful for the future.