‘I very much doubt it. They can get inside those well-cut clothes, they can rumple his sheets—but lay bare the man underneath? No.’
‘But…’ But I get to the real man sometimes. I can touch more than his skin. She almost said it, then realised how pathetic it would sound. I’m different. He lets me in. He trusts me. And Hannah, who has known Alex for most of their lives, will smile and be kind about my illusions. She might even think I’m developing a tendre for him. How humiliating.
‘Why does he need a mask?’ she said instead. ‘What is he hiding?’
Hannah laughed and set off a coughing fit. She waved Tess back to her chair when she reached for the water glass. ‘I’m all right. He isn’t hiding, he is creating. He has remade himself from scratch these past ten years.’
‘Ten? But he’s twenty-seven now. What happened when he was seventeen?’
‘He left home.’ Hannah frowned at a harmless print hanging over the fireplace. ‘For good, I mean. He’d been at university for one term. He came home for…he came home for a visit, and when he returned to Oxford he never went back to Tempeston again.’
‘But seventeen is very young.’ What had she been like at seventeen? Full of questions and uncertainties, her body no longer that of a girl, her emotions torn between a yearning to be back in the safety of childhood and an uneasy impatience to discover the world. What must it be like for a boy, out by himself in that big, dangerous world?
‘Yes, it is young,’ Hannah agreed. ‘But he had friends and anger and intelligence to keep him going.’
Anger. ‘What happened? What drove him away?’
Hannah shook her head. ‘As I said, it is not my story to tell. If Alex ever does tell you about that Christmas, then you will know you really have got under the mask, under his skin. If he trusts you with that, then he has entrusted you with his soul and everything fragile within that tough carapace he has built around himself.’
They sat in silence. Hannah seemingly worn out after her outburst, Tess unable to find words. So it had been Christmas. Was that why he was so cynical about the festival? Eventually she said, ‘But don’t his parents want to be reconciled with him?’
‘Have you ever wounded someone badly?’
Tess shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. I hope not.’
‘If you had, then perhaps you would understand. If you injure a person close to you so cruelly that your own conscience is riven, then sometimes you become angry with them for making you feel so guilty. His father did something inexcusable, something that resulted in a death, something that slashed Alex to the heart. Lord Moreland is a man who never found himself at fault, who has never been known to own a wrong or to apologise. I expect nothing has changed.’ She shrugged, a complicated heaving of blankets and shawls. ‘Therefore, if he is not at faul
t, then Alex must be. If he had hurt Alex, then Alex must have been to blame. Do you understand?’
‘I think so. How dreadful.’ The words were inadequate, but she could find no others. Tess reached out a hand to the fire for some warmth. ‘Could Alex not make the first move to reconcile?’
‘You know those horse-drawn tramways? There are iron or wooden rails and the horse can draw a heavy load quite easily along them?’ Hannah did not wait for an answer. ‘To move from that exact track would need huge effort and would most certainly overturn the cart, injure the horse, possibly kill the driver. Should the driver try to leave the tracks, drive a new path, risk that injury, just on the off chance it might work?’
The silence stretched on. Tess looked up and found Hannah’s eyes were closed, her breathing slow and deep. She had fallen asleep, worn out, perhaps by emotion.
Tess uncurled herself and put on her shoes, found her things and tiptoed out.
*
‘I don’t think Mrs Semple is well enough to come back to work, not this side of Christmas. I know it is almost three weeks away, but there is all the preparation to be thought of.’ Tess folded back the notebook she was using to keep lists of things to be done. Now a fresh page was headed Christmas?? and she had caught Alex just before William Bland, his secretary, arrived. She was determined to pin him down for some answers.
‘I thought she was not seriously ill.’ He stopped mending the end of his pen with a pocket knife and looked up. ‘I must send the doctor round again.’
‘She is getting better, but the infection seems to have settled on the lungs of all of the sufferers and they are worn out with coughing. She needs a holiday somewhere she can be looked after. What would she usually do at Christmas?’
‘Go back to her husband’s family in Kent. It’s a big family and she’s very fond of them.’ Alex squinted at the pen nib, then stuck it in the standish. ‘I could send her down early, in the coach with rugs and hot bricks and one of the men to escort her.’
‘That sounds like a good idea. Shall I arrange it?’
‘No. I’ll go and talk to her, if that dragon of a landlady will let me, a dangerous man, into her female fortress. Anything else in that very efficient little notebook?’
‘I need to know exactly what happens here at Christmas. What the arrangements for the rest of the staff are, whether you’ll be entertaining, whether you’ll be out much. I need to plan for meals, shop for provisions,’ she added when he looked at her blankly. ‘Phipps and MacDonald tell me they don’t have family in the south and then there’s the coachman and your grooms.’
‘What happens is that I don’t expect to see them from the morning of the twenty-fourth until the evening of the twenty-sixth. They fill the coal scuttles and leave the place tidy and I eat out at my clubs. I can cope with making my own bed once a year,’ he added, presumably in response to her opening and closing her mouth like a landed carp. ‘I told you—I spend Christmas by my own fireside with a pile of books and a bottle or so of good brandy. All of my friends of a sociable disposition will be out of town.’
‘Then, you do not mind what happens below stairs so long as it does not disturb you?’
‘Or burn the house down or bring in the parish constable. Exactly.’