To Love and to Cherish Read Online Free PDF

her to fetch the housemaid (a surly, disagreeable woman called Violet; already we loathe each other) to help me take down the bed hangings in Geoffrey’s room and shake the dust from them outside. No one came; I struggled along by myself until, at last, the parlor maid arrived (Susan, a sweet-natured Irish girl who makes me laugh), armed with her hearth-box full of brushes and blacking, ready to clean all the fireplaces!
    I wasn’t born to give orders to servants, I think. Certainly I’ve had no practice at it. We had maids sometimes in Italy and France, Papa and I, but I was too young to tell them what to do with any effectiveness.
    I like William Holyoake. “The bailey,” they call him here, which means bailiff; the estate agent, in other words. He’s six feet tall, strong as a boulder, and he doesn’t speak unless he has something to say. Geoffrey would never admit it, but I think he’s intimidated by him. When Mr. Holyoake finished telling us everything Edward Verlaine neglected and all the repairs, improvements, and investments that must be made to Lynton Hall Farm immediately to stave off disaster, I was intimidated, too. What would he do if he knew that the new lord of the manor has no intention of becoming a good, strong squire, a man the people of Wyckerley could rely on to pull them out of the trough of neglect that was his father’s legacy?
    Meanwhile, I try to cope with the legacy of this house. Thirty-nine rooms! What shall I do with thirty-nine rooms? Old D’Aubrey’s answer was to shut most of them up. I like the simplicity of that solution, but not the results: dry rot, mildew, and damp; mice, rats, and spiders; dust, cobwebs, and ghosts. (This last is only a surmise; but how could a stone manor house built four centuries ago not have ghosts?) Every trembling, uncarpeted floor creaks like an old man’s bones, and no two corners meet plumb. Drafts blow from everywhere, without regard for conventional origins like windows and doors. The plaster is crumbling, the wallpaper peeling. All the fireplaces smoke. The windows are old-fashioned casements, hard to crank open, often painted shut; the glazing in them is so old, the world outside ripples and rolls like waves on the ocean.
    For all its flaws and inconveniences, I can’t help liking the house, though. The furnishings are fairly atrocious, with such things as stuffed animals in glass globes in the hall, a case of stuffed hummingbirds in the library—so cheery—and gilt-framed engravings of Lord Nelson and the Duke of Wellington gracing the dining room. But there are unexpected delights: a curtained alcove in the musty library, for instance, complete with a soft, cushioned bench and a bow window with a view of the hump-backed bridge over the river; balconies and little porches everywhere, most too rickety-looking to hazard, but one, off the center hall overlooking the parkland west of the house, perfect for watching the sunset; and of course my little sitting room under the eaves, snug and cozy, with sweeping views of pastures, sheep fences, and hedgerows, narrow clay-colored lanes arched over with trees, the stone spire of All Saints Church rising black and tall from a gap in distant oaks. Except for Ravenna when I was a little girl, the longest I have ever lived in one place was two and a half years—in Rouen, when Papa had a patron in the Comte de Beauvais. I can only imagine what “home” feels like, therefore. Could it be this tolerant fondness I’ve acquired for Lynton Hall, the sort of charitable, forgiving affection one feels for an eccentric relative? I won’t set too much store by these pulls at my heartstrings, however. I can never see myself putting down roots, here or anywhere. I think I wasn’t meant to have a home.
    How lugubrious that sounds. I’m weary. I’ll bank the fire and go down to bed now, and hope I don’t meet my husband in my new house.
    11 April
    Heard my first bit of village gossip today: all the unmarried