Thomas and the Society of Sentinels 11/15)
Chapter Eleven
“The Conclave is coming up,” Mama remarked one afternoon at tea. “Will you presenting,” she hesitated noticeably, “Barrow?”
“I don’t know,” Gerald admitted. He was becoming increasingly certain that Thomas’s pattern of avoidance and approach was not his imagination, but he had no idea how-or even whether-to encourage him without scaring him off. “I rather think not.” Only Guides were presented, and Barrow had not said anything openly to indicate that he had changed his mind about being one. “We can always do it later, if he likes.”
“We’ve all become accustomed to the way he carries on,” Mama said, not entirely truthfully, “but it will appear quite odd to the rest of the House.”
“Then it’ll just have to look odd,” Gerald answered. “Do I even have to go? Surely Papa and Simon can represent the family again.” As they had during the years he’d been “away.”
“Simon is not the heir,” she reminded him.
“He wasn’t the heir last year, either,” Gerald said, a bit sulkily.
“And this year, you are not ill.”
He supposed he wasn’t. “When is it?” It was always in November, but beyond that the date varied a bit.
“The third week. The Conclave proper is on the 19th; I suppose you could skip the social events, if you insist.”
“All right.” He’d have to speak to Barrow about it-it was a trip; Barrow would need to know what to pack, if nothing else. It was hardly the sort of subject he wanted to introduce-a big, frightening Sentinel Event, full of traditions that even he acknowledged were odd, and he’d grown up with them. And the question of whether to present him or not-Thomas was likely to remember the talk they’d had about his presentation; if they were at Conclave but Gerald never mentioned it, he might interpret it as a rejection of him, or of the cautious advances he’d been making lately. On the other hand, it would be all too easy to give the impression that he was pressing for a speedy reconciliation-not least because he’d like it very much if things were progressing a bit more quickly. “I’ll see what Barrow wants to do about the presentation.” But perhaps not right away-it was almost a month off yet; he had some time to think about how to introduce the subject.
Felicity, Mama’s Guide, spoke up. “He’s been a bit more talkative lately.”
Gerald restrained himself with an effort from asking precisely what he had said and if any of it had to do with him. “Has he? That’s good.”
“Just a bit, mind.”
“Still, it sounds like a good sign.”
A sign of what, Felicity didn’t ask. Perhaps everyone knew what he was hoping would happen.
Mama swept Georgie into a conversation about the gowns they were having made for Conclave, and Gerald realized abruptly that he couldn’t put off mentioning it to Barrow. The London tailor had held on to his uniform, and he knew it was around somewhere, but it had been made to his measurements of nearly four years ago. Alterations might be required, and Barrow wouldn’t thank him for making him rush it.
But the same realization provided a low-key way to broach the subject. That evening, when he was dressing for dinner, he asked, “We brought my uniform back from London, didn’t we?” as Barrow was helping him out of his daytime jacket.
“Yes, my lord.”
“I’ll need to try it on, sometime in the next day or two, to see if it still fits all right,” Gerald said, as he unbuttoned his shirt.
“Yes, my lord,” Barrow said again. “I’ll bring it down tomorrow.” He hesitated-somehow, Gerald could tell he was hesitating, and not merely being quiet. “Are you going to the Armistice Day service, my lord?”
He’d planned on it-he’d never been to one, since last November he’d been quite unable to leave his room-but he hadn’t planned on wearing his uniform. “Do I have to wear my uniform for that?”
“Lord Grantham did, my lord, but I don’t believe it’s mandatory.”
“I’ll just wear a suit, I think.”
He was about to bring up Conclave, but before he could, Barrow said, “Am I expected to be there?” For a second, Gerald thought that Barrow had already heard about Conclave from someone else, but he continued, “Lord Grantham also expected the house to be fully represented.”
Oh-he was still talking about Armistice Day. And smelling anxious about it. Gerald wondered what last year’s service had been like, for him. “No, not if you don’t wish to. I’d like the house to be well represented as well, but in my view any man who served in France has represented quite enough and is entitled to decide for himself how he’ll commemorate the occasion.”
“Very good, my lord.”
Gerald went on, “No, I’ll need the uniform for Conclave-the annual gathering of the House of Mowbray. It is mandatory there, I’m afraid.”
“Yes, my lord. When’s that?” Barrow asked warily.
“Conclave proper is the nineteenth,” Gerald answered, wondering if he should, or even could, explain what that was. “Most people stay the week, but I might try to beg off of part of it; I’m not sure yet. So I’m not sure about the rest of the packing, either. I’ll only need the uniform for the nineteenth; the rest of I’ll just wear ordinary country house-party things. Evening dress and tweeds and so on. I’ll have to let you know about that, and about travel arrangements-most of the family will be taking cars, but if we go late we might need to take the train.”
“Yes, my lord,” Barrow said.
That was the businesslike part of the conversation over with. Gerald waited until they’d finished changing his trousers to start the next part-the part where they had to, for at least a moment, drop the pretense that Barrow was simply a valet. “Conclave proper is when new Guides are presented to the Head of House. Infants, and those who have married in, and so on. We’ve discussed it before, I think.” He knew perfectly well that they had, but wanted to see how Barrow would respond.
He said, “Yes, my lord,” and picked up Gerald’s waistcoat, which was not terribly helpful.
“If you’re to be presented, you’ll need livery,” Gerald went on, slipping into the waistcoat as Barrow held it for him. “Otherwise, your ordinary suits should be all right.”
“Am I to be presented, my lord?”
“That’s your decision,” Gerald answered. “It isn’t required, and we could always do it later, if you were to decide you’d like to. But if you don’t, people are likely to wonder why not.” And God only knew what conclusions they’d come to if Barrow refused to answer any questions. “And there’s no way to stop them speculating, I’m afraid. Simply doing it would attract less attention.”
“But it is just for Guides. Isn’t it, my lord? I mean, someone like Mrs. Pirbright wouldn’t have to do it.”
“Yes, that’s correct.” He took a deep breath. “I hope you realize that I could tell other Sentinels that you are not a Guide until I go blue in the face, and they would still believe that you are.”
“Yes. My lord. I understand.” Shaking his head slightly, Barrow smoothed the back of Gerald’s waistcoat and took up the dinner jacket. “It isn’t just personal Guides, though,” he said, in a low tone that Gerald couldn’t quite tell if he was meant to hear. “Clint, and the farmers, and everyone-they’re all presented.”
“Yes.” Usually at birth, but there was no need to belabor that point.
“I don’t know,” Thomas said. “I’m not sure what I want to do, my lord.”
“You can have until the morning of the 19th to make up your mind as far as I’m concerned,” Gerald said. “Although you’ll have to see Thompson about your livery, if you think you might need it. We never cancelled the order, so it’s there; he just wants to do a final fitting.”
“Yes, my lord.”
#
Thomas might have dithered endlessly about visiting Mr. Clement again, if it weren’t for this news about Conclave. The decision about being presented or not might not really mean anything, but he felt it was rather symbolic of the whole thing: agreeing to be presented would mean admitting, at least to himself, that he really was a Guide. And if he was going to admit that eventually, he might as well do it now. Time to shit or get off the pot, as his mother would have said. Beyond that, he wanted to have a better idea of what this Conclave business was all about, and asking his lordship might have implied something about their relationship that he wasn’t quite ready to imply yet.
So the next day, after his lordship had gone out for his walk, Thomas knocked at the butler’s pantry door-rather foolishly, since the door was open, but he felt a bit shy.
“Come in, Barrow,” Mr. Clement said.
Thomas went in, and sat. “His lordship told me last night there’s something called Conclave coming up next month.” He’d decided to start out with the less personal subject. “I’m not sure what that is.”
“Conclave, or Conclave proper?”
“Either, or both,” Thomas said.
“Conclave proper is when the Head of the House holds formal court in a ritual costume that must be seen to be believed,” Mr. Clement said.
“I’d heard about the antlers.”
“Yes. It’s very colorful. And historic. The central business is for each of the Lords of the House, and their heirs, to pledge their loyalty to the House. The ritual dates back to feudal times-they used to pledge fealty to the Head of House, but the crown never liked that, and Parliament likes it even less, so it was changed after the Restoration. In days of yore, there was all sorts of other business, as well: the awarding of lands and titles, announcements of marriageable daughters, presentation of conflicts between Lords of the House for arbitration by the Head, and so on. These days, the Mowbray’s seneschal will ask if anyone wants to do those things, everyone will shuffle their feet and flick lint off their cuffs for a moment, and that will be that. The only other surviving part is the presentation of new Guides.” Mr. Clement paused meaningfully.
“I’ve heard about that, too,” Thomas said.
“Ah. Did you have any questions about it?”
“I don’t think so. I’m not sure whether I’m doing it or not. His lordship said I didn’t have to. But I have to decide, and get my livery if I do.”
Mr. Clement nodded. “I can talk you through the whole ceremony, if necessary, but there really isn’t much to it.”
“All right,” Thomas said. “So that’s Conclave proper. What about the rest of it?”
“The rest of it is…you can think of it as a very large house party with a few rather eccentric touches. There are eight Lords of the House-not counting the Mowbray himself-and most of them will bring wives and other relations as well as heirs. The un-titled families of the House are usually represented in similar numbers. Now that things are returning to the pre-war standard, they’ll be anticipating in excess of a hundred Sentinel guests, and perhaps three times as many Guides.”
“That…is very large,” Thomas agreed. He couldn’t even begin to imagine the logistics of handling a crowd like that.
“It is indeed. The castle is also quite large-it’s a complex of buildings, in fact, rather than a single one. No single building could be big enough for that many Sentinels. Each titled household traditionally occupies some particular wing or building-we have what’s known as the east wing of the old stables.”
Thomas’s expression must have shown what he thought of that.
“The area last housed a horse sometime in the sixteenth century, and has been renovated several times since then. It’s comfortable enough, if not entirely modern.”
“How not entirely modern?” Thomas asked warily. He hoped there wouldn’t be chamber pots.
“We’ll be tending oil lamps and candles, and hauling hot water from the scullery for baths. But there are water closets. That modernization was considered a priority given the Sentinels’ sensitivity to odors.”
“That’s something,” Thomas said. “How much of that do we have to do, and how much does the Duke’s staff do?”
“All of it and none of it, respectively. We do usually hire a handful of local Insensates for the really heavy work, but the Mowbray’s staff doesn’t enter our territory while we occupy it, so a substantial portion of the household will be going along. Your duties won’t be affected too much. Lord Gerald can usually be persuaded to have a stand-up wash instead of a bath, and when he does want one, the footmen will help carry the water. You’ll have to tend the lamps in his room-have you done that before?”
“Yes, Downton Abbey didn’t have electricity laid on yet when I started.”
“Good. And you’ll need to light his fires and maintain them-there’s no central heating, of course. The temporary servants will clean the grates daily, unless Lord Gerald decides he can’t bear to have strangers in his room. The touchier Sentinels sometimes do-something about being in a small area with so many other Sentinels aggravates their territorial instincts. In that case, you’d have to keep his room in order on your own, grates and all. But Lord Gerald usually doesn’t have that sort of trouble.”
Thomas hoped he didn’t, this time. “All right. I looked after fires when I was a footman, too. A maid always did the bedroom fires, but I’ve done the ones in the public rooms. I don’t expect they’re much different.”
Mr. Clement nodded. “No, they shouldn’t be. Good. Apart from that, all you’ll have to do is dress him for the various events. Conclave proper is the only thing that’s mandatory; he’ll need his Army uniform for that.”
“Yes, he said so. What are the other events?”
“There’s always a ball-the ladies are having new dresses made, but of course the gentlemen just wear evening dress. Dinners in the Mowbray’s hall on the first night and the night of Conclave proper. We’ll be having guests to dinner in our territory one evening-her ladyship hasn’t decided which one yet, and I must ask her. Lord Gerald will likely be asked to dinner by other families on the other nights. I doubt you’ll need his dinner jacket; it’ll be either white tie or a tray in his room each night.”
“And in the daytime?” So far, nothing apart from Conclave proper and the scale of the thing sounded particularly eccentric.
“There will be riding and shooting-I don’t know if Lord Gerald will participate in either, but of course if he does he’ll need the appropriate clothing.” Mr. Clement paused. “And then there’s the hunt.”
“I doubt his lordship’s riding is up to that.”
“Not a foxhunt. The gentlemen pursue a stag, on foot, without hounds, and dispatch it with knives.”
“Oh,” Thomas said. He couldn’t picture it.
“It’s expected that at least one gentleman from each household will participate, but I can’t imagine Lord Gerald will be representing us. His lordship will have to do it, or perhaps Lord Simon. But I thought I’d best mention it, since it is…unusual. The venison is then served at the dinner after Conclave proper.”
“Why do they do that?” Thomas asked.
“I gather the original reason was to provide the Sentinels of the House with practice operating as a fighting body. Now, it’s done because it’s always been done.”
“Good a reason as any, I suppose.”
“There are also tournaments, for the young men to test their strength in ritual combat. They used to do jousting, archery, and sword fighting. These days, it’s boxing, sharpshooting, and fencing. I doubt Lord Gerald will do any of that, either, but he might watch some of it. Lord Simon usually fences, and if his brother doesn’t watch him do it, it’ll look pointed.”
Lord Simon would fence, Thomas thought. He was just that sort of git, to do something useless and showy.
“So that will take up an afternoon or two,” Mr. Clement finished.
It sounded like his lordship had gotten it about right, then-evening dress and tweeds, plus maybe a shooting jacket and riding things. “All right,” Thomas said with a nod. “Anything else?”
“Nothing they have to dress for.”
For a second, Thomas got an entirely inappropriate idea-though one that, given the nearly bare-handed stag hunt, was perhaps not completely far-fetched.
But Mr. Clement continued, “The gentlemen would say that the central purpose of the modern Conclave is for the Lords of the House to negotiate a position on current affairs, so as to present a unified force in the House of Lords. The ladies would likely say that the purpose is to negotiate marriages and thus ensure continuance of the House, its various titles, and our way of life. But those things take place in the background, as it were, of the other events.”
So. Not an orgy. Thomas was relieved. But if they were finished talking about the Conclave, it would soon be time for that other conversation. Casting about for a delaying tactic, he asked, “Why do you call him the Mowbray? I thought he was the Duke of Norfolk.” His lordship had called him Mowbray, too-but then, he’d also called him “Cousin Rupert.” “It is the same person, isn’t it? And the dukedom is the higher title.” There wasn’t a dukedom called Mowbray, and the only thing above a duke was royalty. Thomas knew, because Carson had made him memorize the entire table of precedence, years ago.
“Yes,” Mr. Clement said. “But his Headship of the House of Mowbray predates the establishment of the dukedom by several centuries, so in reference to affairs of the House-such as Conclave-he’s called the Mowbray. The ladies and gentlemen have to keep track of which he is at any given time; fortunately, to us he’s ‘your grace’ either way.”
“And the ‘the’?”
“That’s to distinguish him from all the other Mowbrays. It’s a surname, so there are quite a few of them, but only the Head of House is called the Mowbray.”
“Oh. Makes sense, I suppose.”
A long moment stretched between them. Mr. Clement broke first. “Have you given any thought to the question I asked you last time we spoke?”
“Yes,” Thomas said. “Quite a bit, really.”
After another long moment, Mr. Clement asked, “Would you like to say anything more about it?”
“‘Like’ might be too strong a word,” Thomas said. “But I think I’m ready, yes.”
He stumbled through the explanation he’d worked out, haltingly, a little at a time. He left out the parts about Lady Sybil and Lieutenant Courtenay, and especially the parts about the Duke, but he explained most of the rest of it. Mr. Clement said little beyond, “I see,” and “Yes, go on.”
When he’d finally finished, Thomas said, “Is that…all right?” He’d thought they were pretty good reasons, himself, but he still had no idea what Mr. Clement was looking for.
“Hm? Oh, yes. It doesn’t really matter that much what the reasons are, in this case. The point is that you have some and you’re able to talk about them.”
Oh. “So…what now?”
“Now, there are several things we’ll need to think about. First, I don’t think it entirely fair to Lord Gerald to keep him in the dark about this process for much longer.”
“Is he in the dark?” Thomas asked. He had a real feeling he wasn’t.
“I’ve kept our previous conversation in confidence, as you asked, but he does seem aware that something is afoot-and it’s causing him some anxiety.”
“Is it?” Thomas hadn’t realized that.
“Just a bit. So you’ll need to make a decision about what to tell him, and when, and how. If you’d like me to speak with him, rather than do it yourself, I’ll be glad to.”
“I’ll have to think about that,” Thomas said. At least Mr. Clement wasn’t threatening to tell him if Thomas didn’t. Not yet, anyway.
“I thought you might. Along the same lines, you’ll need to become more comfortable discussing personal subjects. This was good, but it did take you nearly three weeks.”
“How do I do that?” Thomas asked. Even if he was ready to admit he wanted to, he still didn’t know how.
“Practice, I expect. Now, I could come up with a plan for you-but, correct me if I’m wrong, Mr. Barrow, I suspect if I did, you’d immediately begin looking for a way ‘round it.”
It was more than a little unsettling, being reminded that someone else knew how his mind worked. Still, Mr. Clement wasn’t wrong, so Thomas didn’t correct him.
“So it’s probably best if you come up with the plan, and I’ll help you in any way that you’d like me to.”
Thomas escaped, after agreeing to speak with Mr. Clement again once he’d made a decision about what to tell his lordship.
This time, at least, he didn’t waste too much time in trying to avoid the questions. After making sure that his lordship was having luncheon in the dining room and wouldn’t need anything until it was time to change for his ride, Thomas set off for the village, with the aim of buying some cigarettes and doing some thinking on the way there and back. He thought better walking than standing still, and surely it didn’t count as running away if he had some aim in mind.
One of the first things he realized was that the task Mr. Clement had set him was not so very different from the one that his lordship had given him in the Grantham Arms a few months ago-tell him how he could help. It didn’t make him want to run away and sulk quite as much, though-perhaps because this time, he’d started by asking for help in the first place. That, and Mr. Clement was unlikely to badger him about his progress. He’d proven that in the last three weeks: it wasn’t as though the butler hadn’t seen him since then, but he hadn’t pressed.
Kicking idly at a stone in the path, he wondered if his lordship might be willing to learn from Mr. Clement on that score. Because that would be all right, really. He understood about his lordship needing to know things about him. But surely he didn’t have to know everything all at once.
And he could stand to start smaller. “What would make you happy?” and “what’s wrong?” were very difficult questions. Not that, “Why do you want to be a Guide?” and “How can you be more comfortable talking about your feelings?” were simple ones, either, but he could at least find a place to begin, with those.
In fact, he’d just found two places to begin with that second question: more time to think about it, and smaller questions.
He was barely halfway to the village, and that had hardly hurt at all.
#
“Do you want to try your uniform on now, my lord?” Barrow asked as he helped Gerald out of the bath after his ride.
“Yes, all right.” A few weeks ago, he’d have left it at that, but now he ventured to add, “I can’t say I’m keen on it, but now is as good a time as any.”
“Yes, my lord,” Barrow answered, but his tone bordered on the sympathetic. And as he dressed Gerald in it, he added, “I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one this clean before. Except Lord Grantham’s, perhaps.”
“I take it he was posted somewhere out of the mud?”
“Yes-Downton Abbey, my lord. He had some sort of honorary post, but it didn’t even take him as far as London.”
“Armchair colonels,” Gerald said with a shake of his head. “How we loved them, in the trenches.”
Barrow was smiling slightly. “I’d heard he was keen to go, my lord, but the Army didn’t want him.”
“Lucky old him.”
Barrow slid the Sam Browne belt through his epaulette and buckled it. It reminded Gerald of the harness for his prosthetic leg-reminded him even more of the ones the men who’d lost arms had.
“‘Thank God they had to amputate,’” Gerald quoted under his breath.
“My lord?” Barrow had been circling ‘round him, checking the fit of the uniform with a professional eye, but now he stopped and looked Gerald in the face.
“It’s the tag line from a poem,” Gerald explained. “About a man who’s home from the war-well, that particular poem doesn’t mention the war, but one assumes. He’s looking out at the countryside and thinking about how grateful he is for it all, and then it ends, ‘Safe with his wound, a citizen of life, he hobbled blithely through the garden gate, and thought, “Thank God they had to amputate!”’”
“Hm,” Barrow said, glancing down at his gloved hand and smelling anxious. The moment stretched. Finally Barrow said, “I suppose a great many men felt that way, my lord.”
Gerald had the impression he’d been thinking of saying something a bit less anodyne than that, but didn’t press. “I expect so.”
Barrow went on to point out a few minor alterations he wanted to make-bolting to the other side of the paddock, Gerald couldn’t help thinking. It was tempting to try and coax him back-to say something more about his own war experience, for instance, or even to ask a question about Thomas’s-but he refrained.
The next few days passed without another approach until one evening, as Gerald was having a drink in his room before bed, Barrow came out of the dressing room, where he’d been bustling around for a bit. As valets did. But now he said, “My lord? I wondered if I could speak to you for a moment.”
Gerald could tell at once that whatever Barrow had to say had nothing to do with his wardrobe-he wouldn’t smell so anxious if it did. He put his book aside and said, “Of course.”
Barrow stood in front of him for a long moment. First he folded his hands behind his back, then put them down at his sides. Then he folded them in front of himself. Finally he put them behind his back again.
This, Gerald thought, was it-whatever had been brewing for the last few weeks, Barrow was finally planning to speak about it. He’d been waiting for this moment, but now that it was here, he had a moment’s panic that it wasn’t what he’d thought. Perhaps Barrow was nerving himself up to say that he was leaving after all. Or something even worse-though Gerald wasn’t sure what that might be.
Gerald was on the point of bolting himself-or would have been, if he hadn’t already taken his leg off for the night-when Barrow finally spoke. “I’ve been thinking, my lord.”
Yes, I know. What about? Gerald managed to confine his outward response to an encouraging nod.
“I’ve been thinking, my lord, that I may have been a bit…hasty. The last…conversation we had.”
For a second, Gerald wasn’t sure what he meant-the one they’d had about what pyjamas he’d wear tonight? He’d hardly call that a conversation, and what had been hasty about-oh. Now he remembered Thomas saying, that night nearly two months ago, This is the last conversation we’ll ever have about my …he didn’t quite remember the rest of it. About what Thomas wanted, something like that.
It could still go either way. He could mean that even the valet compromise was too much. “All right,” Gerald said cautiously.
“I thought that…we might…begin seeing a bit more of each other. My lord. If you’d like to.”
What would Clint do now? He wouldn’t jump up and embrace Thomas, that much was certain. “I would. I would like that. What, ah, what did you have in mind?”
Thomas shifted his weight onto one foot, and for a second Gerald thought he was going to bolt, literally. But finally he said, “I’m not certain, my lord. I thought I might-” He took a deep breath and swallowed hard. “Might be interested in being your Guide after all. Eventually.”
Sending up a silent prayer to a God he’d stopped believing in several years before, Gerald said, “I’d…be interested in that as well.”
“Yes, my lord. Thank you. In that case, I thought we could…get to know each other a bit. More slowly. Start over, sort of.”
Gerald nodded, beginning to see the shape of what Thomas had in mind. “That sounds like a very good idea.” Thomas didn’t seem to be getting himself ready to say anything else, so Gerald went on, “We often begin these things with afternoon tea. How does that sound?”
“Yes, my lord,” Thomas said, taking half a step back. “I mean, that sounds…good. Ah. Perhaps in a couple of days?”
“Certainly.” A couple of days, literally, would be Tuesday, but he was going round some farms with his father that day, more’s the pity. “Wednesday?”
“All right,” Thomas said. Then he retreated, visibly, though he still stood exactly where he had been, and Barrow asked, “Will that be all for this evening, my lord?”
“Yes,” Gerald said, trying not to stumble through the change. “Goodnight, Barrow.”
“Goodnight, my lord.” He disappeared into the dressing room.
Gerald sat watching him go, then finally picked up his drink and drained it. This was good.
#
That hadn’t gone too badly, all things considered, Thomas thought as he made his way outside to smoke. He’d gotten through it, at least. An uncharitable observer might have called the last part “running away,” but he preferred to think of it using a phrase he’d picked up in an Army bulletin: “Advancing to the rear.” And he’d managed to accomplish his strategic objectives before doing it, so he was doing better than the Army usually had.
Over the next few days until their tea engagement, Thomas was sure that the clocks, usually so reliable, were playing tricks on him. At times the hours seemed to drag, but the days themselves passed in an eyeblink. His lordship acted as though nothing had changed-he still called him “Barrow” and refrained from asking personal questions-but there was a tension there that hadn’t been before, something crackling and electric. But not, Thomas noted with some surprise, entirely unpleasant. It was almost, but not quite, erotic.
He did a bit of looking into how first meetings between Sentinels and Guides usually went. He’d begun by asking a few questions of the other servants, but had given that up when he realized they knew why he was asking. Then he’d turned to other sources, starting with the books Mr. Clement and Mrs. Hope kept in their respective offices. Mr. Clement had Godfrey’s Guide to the Sentinel Peerage, which seemed to be the Sentinel equivalent of Burke’s or Debrett’s. It listed all of the families and titles-Thomas examined the Pellingers’ page closely, and found that his lordship had an uncle and another aunt that Thomas had never even heard of. The section on forms of address would have come in particularly useful several months ago. There was also a section of advice for Insensate visitors to Sentinel homes that would have been helpful around the same time, but by now he’d already learned most of what was in it in other ways.
In the housekeeper’s pantry was something called Advice For Young People: By A Sentinel Lady, which, despite being over 70 years old, looked promising. It had a chapter on “Selecting a Personal Guide,” which he read carefully. Unfortunately, it mostly consisted of advice about how to choose the right person: punctuality, “a neat appearance,” and “a pleasing voice” were mentioned among the desirable attributes. There was a section on “The First Meeting,” but much of it was taken up with the Sentinel Lady’s views on the pressing question of whether such meetings should be chaperoned-she said not necessarily, but on no account should they take place in a “sleeping-chamber.”
That was a mark against them already-he’d checked with Mr. Clement, after being struck by the horrifying notion that he might have inadvertently agreed to tea in the gallery again. Mr. Clement had assured him that it would be in his lordship’s room-which was fine with Thomas, no matter what the Sentinel Lady said about it.
Finally, there was a bit about what to talk about. The Sentinel Lady suggested beginning with innocuous subjects “to put the prospective Guide at his ease,” such as the weather and “how was the journey (walk, railway-ride, etc.)?” Then, apparently, the Sentinel was supposed to ask about upbringing, education, and work experience. That would have been all right with Thomas-he could prepare answers for those that were neither lies nor excruciatingly revelatory-but he strongly suspected that his lordship had never read this book.
In desperation, Thomas turned to the bookshelf in the servants’ hall. There were a surprising number of cheap novels about Sentinels, which, unlike the ones he’d seen before, were not the least bit pornographic. Thomas had a feeling that these were not particularly realistic narratives, but they did often have first meeting scenes in them. The footmen and hall-boys favored adventure stories about Sentinels and their Guides in the wilds of Africa or the American West, which often began with the Sentinel in question-nearly always the younger son of some very distinguished lord-searching for a Guide with sufficient mettle to accompany him to exotic foreign lands. These often began with conversations similar to the ones the Lady Sentinel advised, but it seemed that the key to the Guide characters’ success was refraining from hiding under the tea-table when the pistol-shots sounded or the mysterious stranger burst in.
The maids, on the other hand, tended more towards love stories, which typically featured Guides and Sentinels of opposite sexes falling in love across the barriers of class. Usually the hero and heroine met in some improbable way, such as taking shelter in the same abandoned cottage during a sudden storm, or one or the other of them falling off a horse. For contrast, they usually also had the main characters having a conventional tea-time visit with a more socially appropriate match who had some glaring defect of personality-often terminal dullness-that made the main characters realize that they had to defy convention and follow their hearts.
In both kinds of stories, the sympathetic Guide characters were almost always what one novel called “artlessly impertinent,” which seemed to mean “disrespectful and naïve.” They addressed people wrongly, asked foolish questions, and stated their ill-informed opinions on the slightest provocation; as a result, the Sentinel characters found them more “interesting” and “spirited” than ordinary Guides.
In the end, none of this reading was particularly helpful, but it did serve to pass the time.
Wednesday afternoon after his ride, his lordship seemed to be taking unusual care in dressing again, asking for a fresh shirt and tie, for instance, when he usually put back on the ones he’d taken off when changing into his riding things.
“I don’t know,” his lordship said, looking over the selection of ties that Thomas was holding out for his inspection. “What about the one with the mauve lozenges?”
“That one goes with your grey suit, my lord,” Thomas said.
“Oh,” his lordship said. “Well, perhaps this…no….”
Thomas let out a slight huff of impatience. Was he trying to make this take until tea-time? Thomas did have a thing or two that he wanted to do before then.
“Sorry,” his lordship said. “It’s just that I’m meeting a Guide today, you know, so I want to look my best.”
Thomas glanced over at him sharply; his expression was completely innocent. Deciding to play along, he said, “In that case, my lord-” He selected one of the ties. “The green brings out your eyes.”
“Does it? All right, then, that’s the one.” He started to put it on as Thomas put the others away.
After helping him into his jacket, Thomas asked, “Will that be all, my lord?”
“Ah, yes. I’ll see you, ah, later.”
“Yes, my lord.”
Going up to his room, he recalled with a rush of satisfaction that his lordship had paid no particular attention to tie-selection when he’d met with the other Guides.
#
Thomas came in a little early, while Douglas was still setting the tea up. For a moment, he looked on the point of stepping in and finishing the serving himself, but he gathered himself, and refrained.
“Good afternoon,” Gerald said. “Please, sit down.”
Thomas nodded, mutely, and did so. As he did, Gerald noticed that he’d changed his tie as well-he was wearing the Society one, in place of the plain black one that Barrow always wore. Gerald wondered if he had several of them-probably, but if he did, Gerald had never noticed any difference among them. “Good afternoon,” Thomas managed to say after he’d seated himself.
Douglas finished setting out the plates of cakes and sandwiches. “Thank you, Douglas-I’ll pour,” Gerald said, and the footman withdrew. Gerald busied himself with pouring tea, offering sugar, all the usual things. He wasn’t entirely sure how to proceed-Thomas had spoken of getting to know each other, but he hoped they weren’t going to pretend to have never met before-surely that would be taking things a bit far. “So, ah,” he said as Thomas toyed with a slice of bread and butter. “It’s nice seeing you again.”
“You as well, my lord.”
“I, ah….” He’d compiled a list of innocuous topics they could talk about, but he hadn’t thought to prepare ways of leading up to any of them. “I understand you like cricket.”
“I do,” Thomas said, sounding like a very inexperienced actor who had been asked to portray enthusiasm. “Played for my school, when I was a kid. And at my last place, we used to play against the village once a year.”
“We’ve never done that here,” Gerald said. “But it sounds like an enjoyable tradition.” He wondered if Thomas would find it overbearing of him to inaugurate it, starting next summer. Perhaps by then they’d be on good enough terms that he could ask.
“I liked it, my lord,” Thomas agreed. “Even though the house usually lost-we never had much choice of players for our side; the outside staff played for the village, if they played.” He sounded a bit more natural, now. “I think the tradition must have been started by an earl who had a healthy crop of sons.”
“Very likely,” Gerald agreed. They fell silent again. Gerald ate a sandwich. So did Thomas.
“I like your tie,” Thomas said.
“Do you?” Gerald wondered where he was going with this.
“Yes. Brings out your eyes.”
“Well, I have a very good valet,” Gerald said. Was this badinage? All signs suggested it might be.
“Don’t go on about him too much; I might get jealous.”
“Hm, any Guide of mine must be on good terms with my valet. The man’s a genius with neckties and so on.”
“Sounds irreplaceable,” Thomas said with a slight smile.
“Oh, he is. Couldn’t live without him.”
Thomas shifted back slightly in his chair. Too much?
Given that in this case it was literally true, perhaps it was. “But enough about him,” Gerald added quickly. “Have you tried one of these sandwiches? Lobster mayonnaise; they’re quite good.”
“No, my lord,” Thomas said, and took one. After taking a cautious nibble of it, he said, “That is nice,” and put it down on his plate.
Gerald returned to his mental list of innocuous topics. “So, ah, where did you grow up?” He’d been surprised to realize that, with everything he did know about Thomas, he didn’t know that.
Thomas had been lifting his teacup as Gerald spoke, and now he was definitely hiding a smile behind it. Gerald didn’t have the slightest idea why, but he supposed he’d take that as a victory anyway. “Ripon, my lord. Not too far from Downton Abbey.”
“Ah,” Gerald said. “I suppose you went to the village school?”
“Yes, my lord. My parents had me try for the grammar school, but I didn’t get in. I didn’t prepare very well for the exam, because I didn’t want to go.”
Now it was Gerald’s turn to smile; that matched up well with what he’d learned of Thomas over the last few months. “That’s one way to do it, I suppose. Never went to school myself-Sentinels rarely do. Always thought it sounded ghastly. We always had tutors.”
“You and Lord Simon?” Thomas asked.
“No-well, he had tutors too, but after the first month when he was six, we always had separate ones. Apparently it was not possible to pay a tutor enough to teach both of us at once. Euan always did lessons with me, and Georgie and Simon shared a tutor and a schoolroom.” Neither of them had liked it much, either, but they hadn’t been quite as explosive together as Gerald and Simon. “You don’t have any siblings?”
“No-a sister, but she died when she was two.”
“That’s a shame.”
“I was four, so I don’t really remember.” Gerald hadn’t been planning on asking about his parents, since Thomas had already told him they didn’t speak, but he went on, “Dad was a clockmaker-more of a clock repairer, really, but the sign said clockmaker. Used to help him out in the shop after school-I liked that. Cleaning workings and so on. Lots of kids I knew, their dads worked in factories, and they barely saw them. We lived above the shop, so that was nice.”
It sounded rather nice to Gerald, but he suspected there was a lot Thomas was leaving out. “What about your mother?”
Thomas shrugged and looked away. “What about her? She was there.”
“I’m sorry,” Gerald said. “I shouldn’t have pried.”
Thomas’s eyes flicked up to meet his for a second. “It’s all right.” He fell silent for a moment. Gerald was about to move on to some other topic when he went on, “She was a hard woman to please. One hair out of place and the neighbors might get the idea we weren’t quite respectable, that sort of thing. Dad spent a lot of time in the shop, and once I was old enough, I did too.”
That didn’t sound unusual to Gerald-his own parents didn’t spend a great deal of time together, either. But as working-class Insensates, they had presumably married for love. “Well, you already know about my family,” he went on, so Thomas wouldn’t feel he had to elaborate. “Georgie is the youngest, if you hadn’t guessed. Simon is the second son, and precisely the sort who, if we’d been born in the Middle Ages, would have been plotting my gruesome murder since before his voice changed. Mama is overbearing but means well, and Papa is…Papa.”
“I’m not sure I’ve ever heard him speak, my lord,” Thomas observed.
He very likely hadn’t. “It’s odd, isn’t it? He can be very nearly garrulous when he’s out visiting farms, and I’ve heard him whooping it up with Aunt Matilda a few times when he thought the rest of the house was asleep, but as for the rest of us-very little.” Gerald considered. “I suppose he must speak to Baxter, as well.”
“I’ve never heard Baxter say much, either.”
“Perhaps they save all their conversation for each other,” Gerald said. “And of course you know nearly as much about Sophia and Dennis as I do.” They’d visited the nursery once, before Thomas stopped being his Guide. Dennis had walked over, handed Thomas a somewhat sticky wooden soldier, and then firmly refused to have anything further to do with either of them, despite the nanny’s cajoling, and Thomas’s efforts to find some way of unobtrusively disposing of the toy.
“No one seems to pay much attention to Lady Sophia, my lord,” Thomas said.
“No, I suppose not.” Gerald had been back for two weeks before he’d even learned her Guide’s name-Matilda, as it happened. “Poor woman. It was a very hasty marriage. They’d barely met before they were engaged.”
“Is that…unusual for Sentinels, my lord?”
“Yes, rather,” Gerald said. “Usually, even between Sentinels, there’s a bit more affection than that-friendship, at least. But there was a bit of a rush to get at least one of us married before we left for France. We’d both joined up almost as soon as the war began, and only found out later that the Sentinels of the regular Army were dropping like flies. Even faster than everyone else, I mean.”
“That’s saying something,” Thomas noted.
Gerald nodded. “Apparently we have a tendency to become enthralled during infantry charges. It only took them about six months to realize it made more sense to reserve us for other duties, but by the time they had, nearly every Sentinel who’d been in the Army at the time war was declared was dead.” He shook his head. “Including my two cousins on Papa’s side, who’d have been next in line after me and Simon.”
“Lord Simon wasn’t at the Front, was he?” Thomas asked.
“No, he ended up on general staff, but we didn’t know that at the time. So Mama was in a panic and essentially swapped poor Georgie for Sophia-she also had two brothers who were headed for the Front, so her mother was just as frantic, and that was the primary consideration. Georgie’s husband was killed, and she hadn’t had a baby, so she came home. Sophia’s stuck with us, I’m afraid. I’ll have to make more of an effort to be kind to her once she’s out of her confinement.” Simon might kick at that-but if it inspired him to pay more attention to his own wife, so much the better. “Georgie does see a fair bit of her-she knows what it’s like, being a war bride.”
Thomas took another nibble at his sandwich-perhaps he hadn’t disliked it, after all. “I suppose they agreed to it?”
“Yes-not even Sentinels go in for forced marriage anymore. But, well, I suppose it was a bit like all of us who signed up for the Army-we felt it was our duty.” During the war, Georgie had once suggested in a letter that her sacrifice was comparable to his, which had seemed absurd when he was knee-deep in mud and it seemed as though the war would never end, while she only had to put up with an unfamiliar drawing room. But for the men, the war had ended, at last. For Sophia and all the other Sentinel girls strong-armed into similar marriages, it never would, if the strangers they’d married survived.
“Yes, my lord,” Thomas said. He smelled anxious and sad-not surprising, given they were talking about the war.
Gerald cast about for some change of subject. What Thomas had done after leaving home was next on the usual list, but Gerald had a feeling it was connected in some way to the reason his parents preferred he not write to them, so it would have to be approached delicately. He settled on, “I went to University, of course, once I’d left the schoolroom. I think I’ve mentioned that before?”
“Yes, my lord. It’s where you met Mr. Langley-Smythe.”
“Right.” So Thomas was willing to acknowledge directly that this was not, in fact, their first meeting. “I read history, and they eventually awarded me a degree-more to get rid of me than anything else, I suspect. My work was not particularly distinguished, although I did enjoy it. Parts of it, at least. I suppose I went largely in order to be away from home for a bit-though as a method of striking out on my own, University was not terribly adventurous.”
Thomas shifted a little. “Being the heir, I don’t imagine you could go searching for lost temples in darkest Africa, my lord.”
“No, rather not.” He’d often wished Simon would, though. “After University I came back and my father started teaching me about the running of the estate-more seriously than he had done when I was a child, I mean. Accounts and crop failures and all that sort of thing. He has an idea-which I suppose is rather a good one-that even though we have managers and men of business and so on, we should know at least a bit about what we’re paying them to do. He even had me help with bringing in harvest one year at the home farm-I daresay it was more work for the real farmers to show me how to do things than it would have been just doing it themselves, but they seemed to find some amusement in the process.”
“I can’t quite picture that, my lord,” Thomas admitted.
“Mama has a photograph somewhere of me in my farm-labourer’s clothes,” Gerald said. He’d have to ask her for it. “It was an eye-opening experience. When I’d visit the farm as a child, they’d always let us gather a few eggs, or bottle-feed some lambs, pull up a few potatoes, that sort of thing, and it seemed like a very jolly sort of life, farming. It’s a bit different when there’s a real task to be done and one can’t quit as soon as one becomes bored.”
“I suppose it would be, my lord.”
Of course, Thomas would know all about it. He’d worked since he left home. “What about you?” Gerald asked. “Was Downton Abbey the only place you worked?”
“No, I started out in a smaller house-as a footman-but I was only there for about a year. Once I’d got a bit of experience I went on to Downton.” He hesitated. “And you know all about that, my lord.”
“Yes,” Gerald agreed. That was all the usual topics exhausted, then. And cricket.
Thomas glanced over his shoulder, at the door to the corridor.
“Do you…need to get back to your work?” Gerald asked.
“I should soon, my lord,” Thomas said. He picked up his sandwich again and this time, finally, finished it.
Yes, he’d been sitting in one place discussing somewhat personal subjects for nearly half an hour now. “Shall we do this again?”
“If you like, my lord.”
“Perhaps, er…Saturday?”
“Very good, my lord.” Thomas took a last sip from his teacup and stood.
Gerald stood as well. “Thank you for coming.”
“Thank you for…asking me, my lord.”
#
Perhaps his lordship had read the Sentinel Lady’s book, after all. Thomas was glad he’d prepared answers to those questions-with some advice warning, he could sort out what he was willing to talk about, and avoid accidentally bringing up anything that would raise questions he didn’t want to answer.
He’d planned, too, how he would handle questions he didn’t want to answer: Mr. Clement had assured him that it was perfectly all right to simply say that he didn’t want to discuss the subject or would have to think it over, as an alternative to lying or running away. He’d rehearsed several polite phrases for expressing just that idea, but when the question about his mother had come up, his nerve had failed him. He’d wound up giving away a little more than he’d meant to-after his lordship had figured out on his own that Thomas didn’t want to answer, he’d felt some perverse need to answer after all.
But at least his lordship had allowed the subject to drop, after that. Thomas was also impressed that his lordship had answered the questions for himself. The Sentinel Lady didn’t say anything about that, and the Sentinels in the novels usually didn’t, either. It left him feeling a bit less like something hairy being examined under a microscope. Thomas couldn’t say that the afternoon ranked among the most pleasant of his life, but it had been bearable.
Saturday’s tea was both better and worse. Mostly worse. His lordship appeared to have run out of prepared questions, and Thomas had similarly run out of answers. They spent a fair bit of time paying much more attention to the tea things than they really deserved, clearing their throats, and speaking in monosyllables.
“Mama’s quite pleased with the design for the War Memorial,” his lordship said at one point.
“Is she, my lord?” There had been a fair bit of talk in the servants’ hall about the Armistice Day service, which would be centered around the unveiling of the memorial. Thomas thought it might be a more-than-usually wrenching example; he wished he could advise his lordship not to go.
“An obelisk with a cross on top. Local stone. With all the names of the fallen engraved on the base.”
“That sounds nice,” Thomas said.
“I’m not entirely sure why it took so long to pick it out; it seems fairly standard.”
Thomas suspected that perhaps they’d wondered whether they’d have to put his lordship’s name on it, but he didn’t want to say so. They lapsed into silence.
Conversation limped on. Thomas rather wished that a mysterious stranger would burst in, if only to give them something to talk about. When the tea had gone cold, his lordship said, “I wonder.”
“My lord?”
“We had talked, earlier, about how it might be a good idea for you to learn to ride. Perhaps, if you’d like to try that, it would give us something to do other than stare at each other across a tea-table.”
“I don’t have any riding clothes, my lord,” Thomas pointed out.
“No, I suppose you wouldn’t.”
Silence stretched.
“I’m sorry,” his lordship said. “I don’t know whether you mean that we’ll have to find you some riding clothes, or that you don’t wish to learn to ride and would prefer not to talk about why.”
“I don’t either, my lord,” Thomas answered. He liked the idea of spending their time together doing something rather than just talking, but it seemed a big step. “I’ll…think about it and let you know.” There, at least he’d tried that out, now.
Fortunately, his lordship accepted the answer. “All right. Of course, if you have a different idea…?”
“I’ll think about that, too, my lord.”
Over the next few days, Thomas considered his objections to the plan. First, of course, was that he’d never been closer to a horse than handing round stirrup cups before a hunt, and he understandably found them somewhat intimidating. Next was that a horseback ride was a rather difficult situation to run away from-at least, if you didn’t know how to ride, it was. Horses were more or less designed for running away, but he’d probably fall off, and then they’d end up in one of those novels the maids read.
The biggest thing, really, was that learning to ride meant he really was going through with this business of being a Guide. There was absolutely no need for a valet to know how to ride a horse. The only reason for him to learn was so that he could accompany his lordship on his rides. So that he could share that part of his lordship’s life.
On the other hand, Thomas told himself, his lordship went riding with that stable boy every day, and that didn’t seem to mean much. And he was going to be a Guide-he’d already made up his mind about that when he’d first gone to speak to Mr. Clement. He’d left himself an escape route by saying he was just trying it out, but he still had one-it wasn’t as though his lordship could realistically claim that, having ridden a horse, he was now obligated to be a Guide.
All right, then. He’d do it. Still, he waited another day or two after making the decision, just to see if his lordship was going to begin badgering him for an answer. When he didn’t, Thomas finally asked, one afternoon as he was dressing his lordship in riding clothes, “How would we go about finding me some riding clothes, my lord?”
His lordship looked a little surprised, but didn’t immediately leap into a series of intrusive questions. Instead he said, “I’d start by asking Clement. There’s likely something in the attics that can be made to fit. Old things of mine, or Papa’s, or even Simon’s.” He said the last with a hint of distaste. “Boots might be more difficult-altering those might be a bit beyond even your skills.”
“Yes, my lord,” Thomas admitted. He knew how to clean boots, but he’d never done any boot-making.
“So if there isn’t a pair that fits, we’ll have to have some new ones made-in fact, if it turns out that you’ll be riding a great deal, we should do that in any case. But that always takes a bit of time. I don’t think your feet are any larger than mine,” he added, with a glance down at them. “And I had a new pair every six months while I was still growing, so there ought to be something close enough to be going on with.”
“Yes, my lord. I’ll speak to Mr. Clement.”
“All right. And, ah, I suppose I’ll speak to Clint about a horse.”
There was a faint hint of a question in his tone. “Yes, my lord,” Thomas said.
Link to Chapter Twelve
“The Conclave is coming up,” Mama remarked one afternoon at tea. “Will you presenting,” she hesitated noticeably, “Barrow?”
“I don’t know,” Gerald admitted. He was becoming increasingly certain that Thomas’s pattern of avoidance and approach was not his imagination, but he had no idea how-or even whether-to encourage him without scaring him off. “I rather think not.” Only Guides were presented, and Barrow had not said anything openly to indicate that he had changed his mind about being one. “We can always do it later, if he likes.”
“We’ve all become accustomed to the way he carries on,” Mama said, not entirely truthfully, “but it will appear quite odd to the rest of the House.”
“Then it’ll just have to look odd,” Gerald answered. “Do I even have to go? Surely Papa and Simon can represent the family again.” As they had during the years he’d been “away.”
“Simon is not the heir,” she reminded him.
“He wasn’t the heir last year, either,” Gerald said, a bit sulkily.
“And this year, you are not ill.”
He supposed he wasn’t. “When is it?” It was always in November, but beyond that the date varied a bit.
“The third week. The Conclave proper is on the 19th; I suppose you could skip the social events, if you insist.”
“All right.” He’d have to speak to Barrow about it-it was a trip; Barrow would need to know what to pack, if nothing else. It was hardly the sort of subject he wanted to introduce-a big, frightening Sentinel Event, full of traditions that even he acknowledged were odd, and he’d grown up with them. And the question of whether to present him or not-Thomas was likely to remember the talk they’d had about his presentation; if they were at Conclave but Gerald never mentioned it, he might interpret it as a rejection of him, or of the cautious advances he’d been making lately. On the other hand, it would be all too easy to give the impression that he was pressing for a speedy reconciliation-not least because he’d like it very much if things were progressing a bit more quickly. “I’ll see what Barrow wants to do about the presentation.” But perhaps not right away-it was almost a month off yet; he had some time to think about how to introduce the subject.
Felicity, Mama’s Guide, spoke up. “He’s been a bit more talkative lately.”
Gerald restrained himself with an effort from asking precisely what he had said and if any of it had to do with him. “Has he? That’s good.”
“Just a bit, mind.”
“Still, it sounds like a good sign.”
A sign of what, Felicity didn’t ask. Perhaps everyone knew what he was hoping would happen.
Mama swept Georgie into a conversation about the gowns they were having made for Conclave, and Gerald realized abruptly that he couldn’t put off mentioning it to Barrow. The London tailor had held on to his uniform, and he knew it was around somewhere, but it had been made to his measurements of nearly four years ago. Alterations might be required, and Barrow wouldn’t thank him for making him rush it.
But the same realization provided a low-key way to broach the subject. That evening, when he was dressing for dinner, he asked, “We brought my uniform back from London, didn’t we?” as Barrow was helping him out of his daytime jacket.
“Yes, my lord.”
“I’ll need to try it on, sometime in the next day or two, to see if it still fits all right,” Gerald said, as he unbuttoned his shirt.
“Yes, my lord,” Barrow said again. “I’ll bring it down tomorrow.” He hesitated-somehow, Gerald could tell he was hesitating, and not merely being quiet. “Are you going to the Armistice Day service, my lord?”
He’d planned on it-he’d never been to one, since last November he’d been quite unable to leave his room-but he hadn’t planned on wearing his uniform. “Do I have to wear my uniform for that?”
“Lord Grantham did, my lord, but I don’t believe it’s mandatory.”
“I’ll just wear a suit, I think.”
He was about to bring up Conclave, but before he could, Barrow said, “Am I expected to be there?” For a second, Gerald thought that Barrow had already heard about Conclave from someone else, but he continued, “Lord Grantham also expected the house to be fully represented.”
Oh-he was still talking about Armistice Day. And smelling anxious about it. Gerald wondered what last year’s service had been like, for him. “No, not if you don’t wish to. I’d like the house to be well represented as well, but in my view any man who served in France has represented quite enough and is entitled to decide for himself how he’ll commemorate the occasion.”
“Very good, my lord.”
Gerald went on, “No, I’ll need the uniform for Conclave-the annual gathering of the House of Mowbray. It is mandatory there, I’m afraid.”
“Yes, my lord. When’s that?” Barrow asked warily.
“Conclave proper is the nineteenth,” Gerald answered, wondering if he should, or even could, explain what that was. “Most people stay the week, but I might try to beg off of part of it; I’m not sure yet. So I’m not sure about the rest of the packing, either. I’ll only need the uniform for the nineteenth; the rest of I’ll just wear ordinary country house-party things. Evening dress and tweeds and so on. I’ll have to let you know about that, and about travel arrangements-most of the family will be taking cars, but if we go late we might need to take the train.”
“Yes, my lord,” Barrow said.
That was the businesslike part of the conversation over with. Gerald waited until they’d finished changing his trousers to start the next part-the part where they had to, for at least a moment, drop the pretense that Barrow was simply a valet. “Conclave proper is when new Guides are presented to the Head of House. Infants, and those who have married in, and so on. We’ve discussed it before, I think.” He knew perfectly well that they had, but wanted to see how Barrow would respond.
He said, “Yes, my lord,” and picked up Gerald’s waistcoat, which was not terribly helpful.
“If you’re to be presented, you’ll need livery,” Gerald went on, slipping into the waistcoat as Barrow held it for him. “Otherwise, your ordinary suits should be all right.”
“Am I to be presented, my lord?”
“That’s your decision,” Gerald answered. “It isn’t required, and we could always do it later, if you were to decide you’d like to. But if you don’t, people are likely to wonder why not.” And God only knew what conclusions they’d come to if Barrow refused to answer any questions. “And there’s no way to stop them speculating, I’m afraid. Simply doing it would attract less attention.”
“But it is just for Guides. Isn’t it, my lord? I mean, someone like Mrs. Pirbright wouldn’t have to do it.”
“Yes, that’s correct.” He took a deep breath. “I hope you realize that I could tell other Sentinels that you are not a Guide until I go blue in the face, and they would still believe that you are.”
“Yes. My lord. I understand.” Shaking his head slightly, Barrow smoothed the back of Gerald’s waistcoat and took up the dinner jacket. “It isn’t just personal Guides, though,” he said, in a low tone that Gerald couldn’t quite tell if he was meant to hear. “Clint, and the farmers, and everyone-they’re all presented.”
“Yes.” Usually at birth, but there was no need to belabor that point.
“I don’t know,” Thomas said. “I’m not sure what I want to do, my lord.”
“You can have until the morning of the 19th to make up your mind as far as I’m concerned,” Gerald said. “Although you’ll have to see Thompson about your livery, if you think you might need it. We never cancelled the order, so it’s there; he just wants to do a final fitting.”
“Yes, my lord.”
#
Thomas might have dithered endlessly about visiting Mr. Clement again, if it weren’t for this news about Conclave. The decision about being presented or not might not really mean anything, but he felt it was rather symbolic of the whole thing: agreeing to be presented would mean admitting, at least to himself, that he really was a Guide. And if he was going to admit that eventually, he might as well do it now. Time to shit or get off the pot, as his mother would have said. Beyond that, he wanted to have a better idea of what this Conclave business was all about, and asking his lordship might have implied something about their relationship that he wasn’t quite ready to imply yet.
So the next day, after his lordship had gone out for his walk, Thomas knocked at the butler’s pantry door-rather foolishly, since the door was open, but he felt a bit shy.
“Come in, Barrow,” Mr. Clement said.
Thomas went in, and sat. “His lordship told me last night there’s something called Conclave coming up next month.” He’d decided to start out with the less personal subject. “I’m not sure what that is.”
“Conclave, or Conclave proper?”
“Either, or both,” Thomas said.
“Conclave proper is when the Head of the House holds formal court in a ritual costume that must be seen to be believed,” Mr. Clement said.
“I’d heard about the antlers.”
“Yes. It’s very colorful. And historic. The central business is for each of the Lords of the House, and their heirs, to pledge their loyalty to the House. The ritual dates back to feudal times-they used to pledge fealty to the Head of House, but the crown never liked that, and Parliament likes it even less, so it was changed after the Restoration. In days of yore, there was all sorts of other business, as well: the awarding of lands and titles, announcements of marriageable daughters, presentation of conflicts between Lords of the House for arbitration by the Head, and so on. These days, the Mowbray’s seneschal will ask if anyone wants to do those things, everyone will shuffle their feet and flick lint off their cuffs for a moment, and that will be that. The only other surviving part is the presentation of new Guides.” Mr. Clement paused meaningfully.
“I’ve heard about that, too,” Thomas said.
“Ah. Did you have any questions about it?”
“I don’t think so. I’m not sure whether I’m doing it or not. His lordship said I didn’t have to. But I have to decide, and get my livery if I do.”
Mr. Clement nodded. “I can talk you through the whole ceremony, if necessary, but there really isn’t much to it.”
“All right,” Thomas said. “So that’s Conclave proper. What about the rest of it?”
“The rest of it is…you can think of it as a very large house party with a few rather eccentric touches. There are eight Lords of the House-not counting the Mowbray himself-and most of them will bring wives and other relations as well as heirs. The un-titled families of the House are usually represented in similar numbers. Now that things are returning to the pre-war standard, they’ll be anticipating in excess of a hundred Sentinel guests, and perhaps three times as many Guides.”
“That…is very large,” Thomas agreed. He couldn’t even begin to imagine the logistics of handling a crowd like that.
“It is indeed. The castle is also quite large-it’s a complex of buildings, in fact, rather than a single one. No single building could be big enough for that many Sentinels. Each titled household traditionally occupies some particular wing or building-we have what’s known as the east wing of the old stables.”
Thomas’s expression must have shown what he thought of that.
“The area last housed a horse sometime in the sixteenth century, and has been renovated several times since then. It’s comfortable enough, if not entirely modern.”
“How not entirely modern?” Thomas asked warily. He hoped there wouldn’t be chamber pots.
“We’ll be tending oil lamps and candles, and hauling hot water from the scullery for baths. But there are water closets. That modernization was considered a priority given the Sentinels’ sensitivity to odors.”
“That’s something,” Thomas said. “How much of that do we have to do, and how much does the Duke’s staff do?”
“All of it and none of it, respectively. We do usually hire a handful of local Insensates for the really heavy work, but the Mowbray’s staff doesn’t enter our territory while we occupy it, so a substantial portion of the household will be going along. Your duties won’t be affected too much. Lord Gerald can usually be persuaded to have a stand-up wash instead of a bath, and when he does want one, the footmen will help carry the water. You’ll have to tend the lamps in his room-have you done that before?”
“Yes, Downton Abbey didn’t have electricity laid on yet when I started.”
“Good. And you’ll need to light his fires and maintain them-there’s no central heating, of course. The temporary servants will clean the grates daily, unless Lord Gerald decides he can’t bear to have strangers in his room. The touchier Sentinels sometimes do-something about being in a small area with so many other Sentinels aggravates their territorial instincts. In that case, you’d have to keep his room in order on your own, grates and all. But Lord Gerald usually doesn’t have that sort of trouble.”
Thomas hoped he didn’t, this time. “All right. I looked after fires when I was a footman, too. A maid always did the bedroom fires, but I’ve done the ones in the public rooms. I don’t expect they’re much different.”
Mr. Clement nodded. “No, they shouldn’t be. Good. Apart from that, all you’ll have to do is dress him for the various events. Conclave proper is the only thing that’s mandatory; he’ll need his Army uniform for that.”
“Yes, he said so. What are the other events?”
“There’s always a ball-the ladies are having new dresses made, but of course the gentlemen just wear evening dress. Dinners in the Mowbray’s hall on the first night and the night of Conclave proper. We’ll be having guests to dinner in our territory one evening-her ladyship hasn’t decided which one yet, and I must ask her. Lord Gerald will likely be asked to dinner by other families on the other nights. I doubt you’ll need his dinner jacket; it’ll be either white tie or a tray in his room each night.”
“And in the daytime?” So far, nothing apart from Conclave proper and the scale of the thing sounded particularly eccentric.
“There will be riding and shooting-I don’t know if Lord Gerald will participate in either, but of course if he does he’ll need the appropriate clothing.” Mr. Clement paused. “And then there’s the hunt.”
“I doubt his lordship’s riding is up to that.”
“Not a foxhunt. The gentlemen pursue a stag, on foot, without hounds, and dispatch it with knives.”
“Oh,” Thomas said. He couldn’t picture it.
“It’s expected that at least one gentleman from each household will participate, but I can’t imagine Lord Gerald will be representing us. His lordship will have to do it, or perhaps Lord Simon. But I thought I’d best mention it, since it is…unusual. The venison is then served at the dinner after Conclave proper.”
“Why do they do that?” Thomas asked.
“I gather the original reason was to provide the Sentinels of the House with practice operating as a fighting body. Now, it’s done because it’s always been done.”
“Good a reason as any, I suppose.”
“There are also tournaments, for the young men to test their strength in ritual combat. They used to do jousting, archery, and sword fighting. These days, it’s boxing, sharpshooting, and fencing. I doubt Lord Gerald will do any of that, either, but he might watch some of it. Lord Simon usually fences, and if his brother doesn’t watch him do it, it’ll look pointed.”
Lord Simon would fence, Thomas thought. He was just that sort of git, to do something useless and showy.
“So that will take up an afternoon or two,” Mr. Clement finished.
It sounded like his lordship had gotten it about right, then-evening dress and tweeds, plus maybe a shooting jacket and riding things. “All right,” Thomas said with a nod. “Anything else?”
“Nothing they have to dress for.”
For a second, Thomas got an entirely inappropriate idea-though one that, given the nearly bare-handed stag hunt, was perhaps not completely far-fetched.
But Mr. Clement continued, “The gentlemen would say that the central purpose of the modern Conclave is for the Lords of the House to negotiate a position on current affairs, so as to present a unified force in the House of Lords. The ladies would likely say that the purpose is to negotiate marriages and thus ensure continuance of the House, its various titles, and our way of life. But those things take place in the background, as it were, of the other events.”
So. Not an orgy. Thomas was relieved. But if they were finished talking about the Conclave, it would soon be time for that other conversation. Casting about for a delaying tactic, he asked, “Why do you call him the Mowbray? I thought he was the Duke of Norfolk.” His lordship had called him Mowbray, too-but then, he’d also called him “Cousin Rupert.” “It is the same person, isn’t it? And the dukedom is the higher title.” There wasn’t a dukedom called Mowbray, and the only thing above a duke was royalty. Thomas knew, because Carson had made him memorize the entire table of precedence, years ago.
“Yes,” Mr. Clement said. “But his Headship of the House of Mowbray predates the establishment of the dukedom by several centuries, so in reference to affairs of the House-such as Conclave-he’s called the Mowbray. The ladies and gentlemen have to keep track of which he is at any given time; fortunately, to us he’s ‘your grace’ either way.”
“And the ‘the’?”
“That’s to distinguish him from all the other Mowbrays. It’s a surname, so there are quite a few of them, but only the Head of House is called the Mowbray.”
“Oh. Makes sense, I suppose.”
A long moment stretched between them. Mr. Clement broke first. “Have you given any thought to the question I asked you last time we spoke?”
“Yes,” Thomas said. “Quite a bit, really.”
After another long moment, Mr. Clement asked, “Would you like to say anything more about it?”
“‘Like’ might be too strong a word,” Thomas said. “But I think I’m ready, yes.”
He stumbled through the explanation he’d worked out, haltingly, a little at a time. He left out the parts about Lady Sybil and Lieutenant Courtenay, and especially the parts about the Duke, but he explained most of the rest of it. Mr. Clement said little beyond, “I see,” and “Yes, go on.”
When he’d finally finished, Thomas said, “Is that…all right?” He’d thought they were pretty good reasons, himself, but he still had no idea what Mr. Clement was looking for.
“Hm? Oh, yes. It doesn’t really matter that much what the reasons are, in this case. The point is that you have some and you’re able to talk about them.”
Oh. “So…what now?”
“Now, there are several things we’ll need to think about. First, I don’t think it entirely fair to Lord Gerald to keep him in the dark about this process for much longer.”
“Is he in the dark?” Thomas asked. He had a real feeling he wasn’t.
“I’ve kept our previous conversation in confidence, as you asked, but he does seem aware that something is afoot-and it’s causing him some anxiety.”
“Is it?” Thomas hadn’t realized that.
“Just a bit. So you’ll need to make a decision about what to tell him, and when, and how. If you’d like me to speak with him, rather than do it yourself, I’ll be glad to.”
“I’ll have to think about that,” Thomas said. At least Mr. Clement wasn’t threatening to tell him if Thomas didn’t. Not yet, anyway.
“I thought you might. Along the same lines, you’ll need to become more comfortable discussing personal subjects. This was good, but it did take you nearly three weeks.”
“How do I do that?” Thomas asked. Even if he was ready to admit he wanted to, he still didn’t know how.
“Practice, I expect. Now, I could come up with a plan for you-but, correct me if I’m wrong, Mr. Barrow, I suspect if I did, you’d immediately begin looking for a way ‘round it.”
It was more than a little unsettling, being reminded that someone else knew how his mind worked. Still, Mr. Clement wasn’t wrong, so Thomas didn’t correct him.
“So it’s probably best if you come up with the plan, and I’ll help you in any way that you’d like me to.”
Thomas escaped, after agreeing to speak with Mr. Clement again once he’d made a decision about what to tell his lordship.
This time, at least, he didn’t waste too much time in trying to avoid the questions. After making sure that his lordship was having luncheon in the dining room and wouldn’t need anything until it was time to change for his ride, Thomas set off for the village, with the aim of buying some cigarettes and doing some thinking on the way there and back. He thought better walking than standing still, and surely it didn’t count as running away if he had some aim in mind.
One of the first things he realized was that the task Mr. Clement had set him was not so very different from the one that his lordship had given him in the Grantham Arms a few months ago-tell him how he could help. It didn’t make him want to run away and sulk quite as much, though-perhaps because this time, he’d started by asking for help in the first place. That, and Mr. Clement was unlikely to badger him about his progress. He’d proven that in the last three weeks: it wasn’t as though the butler hadn’t seen him since then, but he hadn’t pressed.
Kicking idly at a stone in the path, he wondered if his lordship might be willing to learn from Mr. Clement on that score. Because that would be all right, really. He understood about his lordship needing to know things about him. But surely he didn’t have to know everything all at once.
And he could stand to start smaller. “What would make you happy?” and “what’s wrong?” were very difficult questions. Not that, “Why do you want to be a Guide?” and “How can you be more comfortable talking about your feelings?” were simple ones, either, but he could at least find a place to begin, with those.
In fact, he’d just found two places to begin with that second question: more time to think about it, and smaller questions.
He was barely halfway to the village, and that had hardly hurt at all.
#
“Do you want to try your uniform on now, my lord?” Barrow asked as he helped Gerald out of the bath after his ride.
“Yes, all right.” A few weeks ago, he’d have left it at that, but now he ventured to add, “I can’t say I’m keen on it, but now is as good a time as any.”
“Yes, my lord,” Barrow answered, but his tone bordered on the sympathetic. And as he dressed Gerald in it, he added, “I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one this clean before. Except Lord Grantham’s, perhaps.”
“I take it he was posted somewhere out of the mud?”
“Yes-Downton Abbey, my lord. He had some sort of honorary post, but it didn’t even take him as far as London.”
“Armchair colonels,” Gerald said with a shake of his head. “How we loved them, in the trenches.”
Barrow was smiling slightly. “I’d heard he was keen to go, my lord, but the Army didn’t want him.”
“Lucky old him.”
Barrow slid the Sam Browne belt through his epaulette and buckled it. It reminded Gerald of the harness for his prosthetic leg-reminded him even more of the ones the men who’d lost arms had.
“‘Thank God they had to amputate,’” Gerald quoted under his breath.
“My lord?” Barrow had been circling ‘round him, checking the fit of the uniform with a professional eye, but now he stopped and looked Gerald in the face.
“It’s the tag line from a poem,” Gerald explained. “About a man who’s home from the war-well, that particular poem doesn’t mention the war, but one assumes. He’s looking out at the countryside and thinking about how grateful he is for it all, and then it ends, ‘Safe with his wound, a citizen of life, he hobbled blithely through the garden gate, and thought, “Thank God they had to amputate!”’”
“Hm,” Barrow said, glancing down at his gloved hand and smelling anxious. The moment stretched. Finally Barrow said, “I suppose a great many men felt that way, my lord.”
Gerald had the impression he’d been thinking of saying something a bit less anodyne than that, but didn’t press. “I expect so.”
Barrow went on to point out a few minor alterations he wanted to make-bolting to the other side of the paddock, Gerald couldn’t help thinking. It was tempting to try and coax him back-to say something more about his own war experience, for instance, or even to ask a question about Thomas’s-but he refrained.
The next few days passed without another approach until one evening, as Gerald was having a drink in his room before bed, Barrow came out of the dressing room, where he’d been bustling around for a bit. As valets did. But now he said, “My lord? I wondered if I could speak to you for a moment.”
Gerald could tell at once that whatever Barrow had to say had nothing to do with his wardrobe-he wouldn’t smell so anxious if it did. He put his book aside and said, “Of course.”
Barrow stood in front of him for a long moment. First he folded his hands behind his back, then put them down at his sides. Then he folded them in front of himself. Finally he put them behind his back again.
This, Gerald thought, was it-whatever had been brewing for the last few weeks, Barrow was finally planning to speak about it. He’d been waiting for this moment, but now that it was here, he had a moment’s panic that it wasn’t what he’d thought. Perhaps Barrow was nerving himself up to say that he was leaving after all. Or something even worse-though Gerald wasn’t sure what that might be.
Gerald was on the point of bolting himself-or would have been, if he hadn’t already taken his leg off for the night-when Barrow finally spoke. “I’ve been thinking, my lord.”
Yes, I know. What about? Gerald managed to confine his outward response to an encouraging nod.
“I’ve been thinking, my lord, that I may have been a bit…hasty. The last…conversation we had.”
For a second, Gerald wasn’t sure what he meant-the one they’d had about what pyjamas he’d wear tonight? He’d hardly call that a conversation, and what had been hasty about-oh. Now he remembered Thomas saying, that night nearly two months ago, This is the last conversation we’ll ever have about my …he didn’t quite remember the rest of it. About what Thomas wanted, something like that.
It could still go either way. He could mean that even the valet compromise was too much. “All right,” Gerald said cautiously.
“I thought that…we might…begin seeing a bit more of each other. My lord. If you’d like to.”
What would Clint do now? He wouldn’t jump up and embrace Thomas, that much was certain. “I would. I would like that. What, ah, what did you have in mind?”
Thomas shifted his weight onto one foot, and for a second Gerald thought he was going to bolt, literally. But finally he said, “I’m not certain, my lord. I thought I might-” He took a deep breath and swallowed hard. “Might be interested in being your Guide after all. Eventually.”
Sending up a silent prayer to a God he’d stopped believing in several years before, Gerald said, “I’d…be interested in that as well.”
“Yes, my lord. Thank you. In that case, I thought we could…get to know each other a bit. More slowly. Start over, sort of.”
Gerald nodded, beginning to see the shape of what Thomas had in mind. “That sounds like a very good idea.” Thomas didn’t seem to be getting himself ready to say anything else, so Gerald went on, “We often begin these things with afternoon tea. How does that sound?”
“Yes, my lord,” Thomas said, taking half a step back. “I mean, that sounds…good. Ah. Perhaps in a couple of days?”
“Certainly.” A couple of days, literally, would be Tuesday, but he was going round some farms with his father that day, more’s the pity. “Wednesday?”
“All right,” Thomas said. Then he retreated, visibly, though he still stood exactly where he had been, and Barrow asked, “Will that be all for this evening, my lord?”
“Yes,” Gerald said, trying not to stumble through the change. “Goodnight, Barrow.”
“Goodnight, my lord.” He disappeared into the dressing room.
Gerald sat watching him go, then finally picked up his drink and drained it. This was good.
#
That hadn’t gone too badly, all things considered, Thomas thought as he made his way outside to smoke. He’d gotten through it, at least. An uncharitable observer might have called the last part “running away,” but he preferred to think of it using a phrase he’d picked up in an Army bulletin: “Advancing to the rear.” And he’d managed to accomplish his strategic objectives before doing it, so he was doing better than the Army usually had.
Over the next few days until their tea engagement, Thomas was sure that the clocks, usually so reliable, were playing tricks on him. At times the hours seemed to drag, but the days themselves passed in an eyeblink. His lordship acted as though nothing had changed-he still called him “Barrow” and refrained from asking personal questions-but there was a tension there that hadn’t been before, something crackling and electric. But not, Thomas noted with some surprise, entirely unpleasant. It was almost, but not quite, erotic.
He did a bit of looking into how first meetings between Sentinels and Guides usually went. He’d begun by asking a few questions of the other servants, but had given that up when he realized they knew why he was asking. Then he’d turned to other sources, starting with the books Mr. Clement and Mrs. Hope kept in their respective offices. Mr. Clement had Godfrey’s Guide to the Sentinel Peerage, which seemed to be the Sentinel equivalent of Burke’s or Debrett’s. It listed all of the families and titles-Thomas examined the Pellingers’ page closely, and found that his lordship had an uncle and another aunt that Thomas had never even heard of. The section on forms of address would have come in particularly useful several months ago. There was also a section of advice for Insensate visitors to Sentinel homes that would have been helpful around the same time, but by now he’d already learned most of what was in it in other ways.
In the housekeeper’s pantry was something called Advice For Young People: By A Sentinel Lady, which, despite being over 70 years old, looked promising. It had a chapter on “Selecting a Personal Guide,” which he read carefully. Unfortunately, it mostly consisted of advice about how to choose the right person: punctuality, “a neat appearance,” and “a pleasing voice” were mentioned among the desirable attributes. There was a section on “The First Meeting,” but much of it was taken up with the Sentinel Lady’s views on the pressing question of whether such meetings should be chaperoned-she said not necessarily, but on no account should they take place in a “sleeping-chamber.”
That was a mark against them already-he’d checked with Mr. Clement, after being struck by the horrifying notion that he might have inadvertently agreed to tea in the gallery again. Mr. Clement had assured him that it would be in his lordship’s room-which was fine with Thomas, no matter what the Sentinel Lady said about it.
Finally, there was a bit about what to talk about. The Sentinel Lady suggested beginning with innocuous subjects “to put the prospective Guide at his ease,” such as the weather and “how was the journey (walk, railway-ride, etc.)?” Then, apparently, the Sentinel was supposed to ask about upbringing, education, and work experience. That would have been all right with Thomas-he could prepare answers for those that were neither lies nor excruciatingly revelatory-but he strongly suspected that his lordship had never read this book.
In desperation, Thomas turned to the bookshelf in the servants’ hall. There were a surprising number of cheap novels about Sentinels, which, unlike the ones he’d seen before, were not the least bit pornographic. Thomas had a feeling that these were not particularly realistic narratives, but they did often have first meeting scenes in them. The footmen and hall-boys favored adventure stories about Sentinels and their Guides in the wilds of Africa or the American West, which often began with the Sentinel in question-nearly always the younger son of some very distinguished lord-searching for a Guide with sufficient mettle to accompany him to exotic foreign lands. These often began with conversations similar to the ones the Lady Sentinel advised, but it seemed that the key to the Guide characters’ success was refraining from hiding under the tea-table when the pistol-shots sounded or the mysterious stranger burst in.
The maids, on the other hand, tended more towards love stories, which typically featured Guides and Sentinels of opposite sexes falling in love across the barriers of class. Usually the hero and heroine met in some improbable way, such as taking shelter in the same abandoned cottage during a sudden storm, or one or the other of them falling off a horse. For contrast, they usually also had the main characters having a conventional tea-time visit with a more socially appropriate match who had some glaring defect of personality-often terminal dullness-that made the main characters realize that they had to defy convention and follow their hearts.
In both kinds of stories, the sympathetic Guide characters were almost always what one novel called “artlessly impertinent,” which seemed to mean “disrespectful and naïve.” They addressed people wrongly, asked foolish questions, and stated their ill-informed opinions on the slightest provocation; as a result, the Sentinel characters found them more “interesting” and “spirited” than ordinary Guides.
In the end, none of this reading was particularly helpful, but it did serve to pass the time.
Wednesday afternoon after his ride, his lordship seemed to be taking unusual care in dressing again, asking for a fresh shirt and tie, for instance, when he usually put back on the ones he’d taken off when changing into his riding things.
“I don’t know,” his lordship said, looking over the selection of ties that Thomas was holding out for his inspection. “What about the one with the mauve lozenges?”
“That one goes with your grey suit, my lord,” Thomas said.
“Oh,” his lordship said. “Well, perhaps this…no….”
Thomas let out a slight huff of impatience. Was he trying to make this take until tea-time? Thomas did have a thing or two that he wanted to do before then.
“Sorry,” his lordship said. “It’s just that I’m meeting a Guide today, you know, so I want to look my best.”
Thomas glanced over at him sharply; his expression was completely innocent. Deciding to play along, he said, “In that case, my lord-” He selected one of the ties. “The green brings out your eyes.”
“Does it? All right, then, that’s the one.” He started to put it on as Thomas put the others away.
After helping him into his jacket, Thomas asked, “Will that be all, my lord?”
“Ah, yes. I’ll see you, ah, later.”
“Yes, my lord.”
Going up to his room, he recalled with a rush of satisfaction that his lordship had paid no particular attention to tie-selection when he’d met with the other Guides.
#
Thomas came in a little early, while Douglas was still setting the tea up. For a moment, he looked on the point of stepping in and finishing the serving himself, but he gathered himself, and refrained.
“Good afternoon,” Gerald said. “Please, sit down.”
Thomas nodded, mutely, and did so. As he did, Gerald noticed that he’d changed his tie as well-he was wearing the Society one, in place of the plain black one that Barrow always wore. Gerald wondered if he had several of them-probably, but if he did, Gerald had never noticed any difference among them. “Good afternoon,” Thomas managed to say after he’d seated himself.
Douglas finished setting out the plates of cakes and sandwiches. “Thank you, Douglas-I’ll pour,” Gerald said, and the footman withdrew. Gerald busied himself with pouring tea, offering sugar, all the usual things. He wasn’t entirely sure how to proceed-Thomas had spoken of getting to know each other, but he hoped they weren’t going to pretend to have never met before-surely that would be taking things a bit far. “So, ah,” he said as Thomas toyed with a slice of bread and butter. “It’s nice seeing you again.”
“You as well, my lord.”
“I, ah….” He’d compiled a list of innocuous topics they could talk about, but he hadn’t thought to prepare ways of leading up to any of them. “I understand you like cricket.”
“I do,” Thomas said, sounding like a very inexperienced actor who had been asked to portray enthusiasm. “Played for my school, when I was a kid. And at my last place, we used to play against the village once a year.”
“We’ve never done that here,” Gerald said. “But it sounds like an enjoyable tradition.” He wondered if Thomas would find it overbearing of him to inaugurate it, starting next summer. Perhaps by then they’d be on good enough terms that he could ask.
“I liked it, my lord,” Thomas agreed. “Even though the house usually lost-we never had much choice of players for our side; the outside staff played for the village, if they played.” He sounded a bit more natural, now. “I think the tradition must have been started by an earl who had a healthy crop of sons.”
“Very likely,” Gerald agreed. They fell silent again. Gerald ate a sandwich. So did Thomas.
“I like your tie,” Thomas said.
“Do you?” Gerald wondered where he was going with this.
“Yes. Brings out your eyes.”
“Well, I have a very good valet,” Gerald said. Was this badinage? All signs suggested it might be.
“Don’t go on about him too much; I might get jealous.”
“Hm, any Guide of mine must be on good terms with my valet. The man’s a genius with neckties and so on.”
“Sounds irreplaceable,” Thomas said with a slight smile.
“Oh, he is. Couldn’t live without him.”
Thomas shifted back slightly in his chair. Too much?
Given that in this case it was literally true, perhaps it was. “But enough about him,” Gerald added quickly. “Have you tried one of these sandwiches? Lobster mayonnaise; they’re quite good.”
“No, my lord,” Thomas said, and took one. After taking a cautious nibble of it, he said, “That is nice,” and put it down on his plate.
Gerald returned to his mental list of innocuous topics. “So, ah, where did you grow up?” He’d been surprised to realize that, with everything he did know about Thomas, he didn’t know that.
Thomas had been lifting his teacup as Gerald spoke, and now he was definitely hiding a smile behind it. Gerald didn’t have the slightest idea why, but he supposed he’d take that as a victory anyway. “Ripon, my lord. Not too far from Downton Abbey.”
“Ah,” Gerald said. “I suppose you went to the village school?”
“Yes, my lord. My parents had me try for the grammar school, but I didn’t get in. I didn’t prepare very well for the exam, because I didn’t want to go.”
Now it was Gerald’s turn to smile; that matched up well with what he’d learned of Thomas over the last few months. “That’s one way to do it, I suppose. Never went to school myself-Sentinels rarely do. Always thought it sounded ghastly. We always had tutors.”
“You and Lord Simon?” Thomas asked.
“No-well, he had tutors too, but after the first month when he was six, we always had separate ones. Apparently it was not possible to pay a tutor enough to teach both of us at once. Euan always did lessons with me, and Georgie and Simon shared a tutor and a schoolroom.” Neither of them had liked it much, either, but they hadn’t been quite as explosive together as Gerald and Simon. “You don’t have any siblings?”
“No-a sister, but she died when she was two.”
“That’s a shame.”
“I was four, so I don’t really remember.” Gerald hadn’t been planning on asking about his parents, since Thomas had already told him they didn’t speak, but he went on, “Dad was a clockmaker-more of a clock repairer, really, but the sign said clockmaker. Used to help him out in the shop after school-I liked that. Cleaning workings and so on. Lots of kids I knew, their dads worked in factories, and they barely saw them. We lived above the shop, so that was nice.”
It sounded rather nice to Gerald, but he suspected there was a lot Thomas was leaving out. “What about your mother?”
Thomas shrugged and looked away. “What about her? She was there.”
“I’m sorry,” Gerald said. “I shouldn’t have pried.”
Thomas’s eyes flicked up to meet his for a second. “It’s all right.” He fell silent for a moment. Gerald was about to move on to some other topic when he went on, “She was a hard woman to please. One hair out of place and the neighbors might get the idea we weren’t quite respectable, that sort of thing. Dad spent a lot of time in the shop, and once I was old enough, I did too.”
That didn’t sound unusual to Gerald-his own parents didn’t spend a great deal of time together, either. But as working-class Insensates, they had presumably married for love. “Well, you already know about my family,” he went on, so Thomas wouldn’t feel he had to elaborate. “Georgie is the youngest, if you hadn’t guessed. Simon is the second son, and precisely the sort who, if we’d been born in the Middle Ages, would have been plotting my gruesome murder since before his voice changed. Mama is overbearing but means well, and Papa is…Papa.”
“I’m not sure I’ve ever heard him speak, my lord,” Thomas observed.
He very likely hadn’t. “It’s odd, isn’t it? He can be very nearly garrulous when he’s out visiting farms, and I’ve heard him whooping it up with Aunt Matilda a few times when he thought the rest of the house was asleep, but as for the rest of us-very little.” Gerald considered. “I suppose he must speak to Baxter, as well.”
“I’ve never heard Baxter say much, either.”
“Perhaps they save all their conversation for each other,” Gerald said. “And of course you know nearly as much about Sophia and Dennis as I do.” They’d visited the nursery once, before Thomas stopped being his Guide. Dennis had walked over, handed Thomas a somewhat sticky wooden soldier, and then firmly refused to have anything further to do with either of them, despite the nanny’s cajoling, and Thomas’s efforts to find some way of unobtrusively disposing of the toy.
“No one seems to pay much attention to Lady Sophia, my lord,” Thomas said.
“No, I suppose not.” Gerald had been back for two weeks before he’d even learned her Guide’s name-Matilda, as it happened. “Poor woman. It was a very hasty marriage. They’d barely met before they were engaged.”
“Is that…unusual for Sentinels, my lord?”
“Yes, rather,” Gerald said. “Usually, even between Sentinels, there’s a bit more affection than that-friendship, at least. But there was a bit of a rush to get at least one of us married before we left for France. We’d both joined up almost as soon as the war began, and only found out later that the Sentinels of the regular Army were dropping like flies. Even faster than everyone else, I mean.”
“That’s saying something,” Thomas noted.
Gerald nodded. “Apparently we have a tendency to become enthralled during infantry charges. It only took them about six months to realize it made more sense to reserve us for other duties, but by the time they had, nearly every Sentinel who’d been in the Army at the time war was declared was dead.” He shook his head. “Including my two cousins on Papa’s side, who’d have been next in line after me and Simon.”
“Lord Simon wasn’t at the Front, was he?” Thomas asked.
“No, he ended up on general staff, but we didn’t know that at the time. So Mama was in a panic and essentially swapped poor Georgie for Sophia-she also had two brothers who were headed for the Front, so her mother was just as frantic, and that was the primary consideration. Georgie’s husband was killed, and she hadn’t had a baby, so she came home. Sophia’s stuck with us, I’m afraid. I’ll have to make more of an effort to be kind to her once she’s out of her confinement.” Simon might kick at that-but if it inspired him to pay more attention to his own wife, so much the better. “Georgie does see a fair bit of her-she knows what it’s like, being a war bride.”
Thomas took another nibble at his sandwich-perhaps he hadn’t disliked it, after all. “I suppose they agreed to it?”
“Yes-not even Sentinels go in for forced marriage anymore. But, well, I suppose it was a bit like all of us who signed up for the Army-we felt it was our duty.” During the war, Georgie had once suggested in a letter that her sacrifice was comparable to his, which had seemed absurd when he was knee-deep in mud and it seemed as though the war would never end, while she only had to put up with an unfamiliar drawing room. But for the men, the war had ended, at last. For Sophia and all the other Sentinel girls strong-armed into similar marriages, it never would, if the strangers they’d married survived.
“Yes, my lord,” Thomas said. He smelled anxious and sad-not surprising, given they were talking about the war.
Gerald cast about for some change of subject. What Thomas had done after leaving home was next on the usual list, but Gerald had a feeling it was connected in some way to the reason his parents preferred he not write to them, so it would have to be approached delicately. He settled on, “I went to University, of course, once I’d left the schoolroom. I think I’ve mentioned that before?”
“Yes, my lord. It’s where you met Mr. Langley-Smythe.”
“Right.” So Thomas was willing to acknowledge directly that this was not, in fact, their first meeting. “I read history, and they eventually awarded me a degree-more to get rid of me than anything else, I suspect. My work was not particularly distinguished, although I did enjoy it. Parts of it, at least. I suppose I went largely in order to be away from home for a bit-though as a method of striking out on my own, University was not terribly adventurous.”
Thomas shifted a little. “Being the heir, I don’t imagine you could go searching for lost temples in darkest Africa, my lord.”
“No, rather not.” He’d often wished Simon would, though. “After University I came back and my father started teaching me about the running of the estate-more seriously than he had done when I was a child, I mean. Accounts and crop failures and all that sort of thing. He has an idea-which I suppose is rather a good one-that even though we have managers and men of business and so on, we should know at least a bit about what we’re paying them to do. He even had me help with bringing in harvest one year at the home farm-I daresay it was more work for the real farmers to show me how to do things than it would have been just doing it themselves, but they seemed to find some amusement in the process.”
“I can’t quite picture that, my lord,” Thomas admitted.
“Mama has a photograph somewhere of me in my farm-labourer’s clothes,” Gerald said. He’d have to ask her for it. “It was an eye-opening experience. When I’d visit the farm as a child, they’d always let us gather a few eggs, or bottle-feed some lambs, pull up a few potatoes, that sort of thing, and it seemed like a very jolly sort of life, farming. It’s a bit different when there’s a real task to be done and one can’t quit as soon as one becomes bored.”
“I suppose it would be, my lord.”
Of course, Thomas would know all about it. He’d worked since he left home. “What about you?” Gerald asked. “Was Downton Abbey the only place you worked?”
“No, I started out in a smaller house-as a footman-but I was only there for about a year. Once I’d got a bit of experience I went on to Downton.” He hesitated. “And you know all about that, my lord.”
“Yes,” Gerald agreed. That was all the usual topics exhausted, then. And cricket.
Thomas glanced over his shoulder, at the door to the corridor.
“Do you…need to get back to your work?” Gerald asked.
“I should soon, my lord,” Thomas said. He picked up his sandwich again and this time, finally, finished it.
Yes, he’d been sitting in one place discussing somewhat personal subjects for nearly half an hour now. “Shall we do this again?”
“If you like, my lord.”
“Perhaps, er…Saturday?”
“Very good, my lord.” Thomas took a last sip from his teacup and stood.
Gerald stood as well. “Thank you for coming.”
“Thank you for…asking me, my lord.”
#
Perhaps his lordship had read the Sentinel Lady’s book, after all. Thomas was glad he’d prepared answers to those questions-with some advice warning, he could sort out what he was willing to talk about, and avoid accidentally bringing up anything that would raise questions he didn’t want to answer.
He’d planned, too, how he would handle questions he didn’t want to answer: Mr. Clement had assured him that it was perfectly all right to simply say that he didn’t want to discuss the subject or would have to think it over, as an alternative to lying or running away. He’d rehearsed several polite phrases for expressing just that idea, but when the question about his mother had come up, his nerve had failed him. He’d wound up giving away a little more than he’d meant to-after his lordship had figured out on his own that Thomas didn’t want to answer, he’d felt some perverse need to answer after all.
But at least his lordship had allowed the subject to drop, after that. Thomas was also impressed that his lordship had answered the questions for himself. The Sentinel Lady didn’t say anything about that, and the Sentinels in the novels usually didn’t, either. It left him feeling a bit less like something hairy being examined under a microscope. Thomas couldn’t say that the afternoon ranked among the most pleasant of his life, but it had been bearable.
Saturday’s tea was both better and worse. Mostly worse. His lordship appeared to have run out of prepared questions, and Thomas had similarly run out of answers. They spent a fair bit of time paying much more attention to the tea things than they really deserved, clearing their throats, and speaking in monosyllables.
“Mama’s quite pleased with the design for the War Memorial,” his lordship said at one point.
“Is she, my lord?” There had been a fair bit of talk in the servants’ hall about the Armistice Day service, which would be centered around the unveiling of the memorial. Thomas thought it might be a more-than-usually wrenching example; he wished he could advise his lordship not to go.
“An obelisk with a cross on top. Local stone. With all the names of the fallen engraved on the base.”
“That sounds nice,” Thomas said.
“I’m not entirely sure why it took so long to pick it out; it seems fairly standard.”
Thomas suspected that perhaps they’d wondered whether they’d have to put his lordship’s name on it, but he didn’t want to say so. They lapsed into silence.
Conversation limped on. Thomas rather wished that a mysterious stranger would burst in, if only to give them something to talk about. When the tea had gone cold, his lordship said, “I wonder.”
“My lord?”
“We had talked, earlier, about how it might be a good idea for you to learn to ride. Perhaps, if you’d like to try that, it would give us something to do other than stare at each other across a tea-table.”
“I don’t have any riding clothes, my lord,” Thomas pointed out.
“No, I suppose you wouldn’t.”
Silence stretched.
“I’m sorry,” his lordship said. “I don’t know whether you mean that we’ll have to find you some riding clothes, or that you don’t wish to learn to ride and would prefer not to talk about why.”
“I don’t either, my lord,” Thomas answered. He liked the idea of spending their time together doing something rather than just talking, but it seemed a big step. “I’ll…think about it and let you know.” There, at least he’d tried that out, now.
Fortunately, his lordship accepted the answer. “All right. Of course, if you have a different idea…?”
“I’ll think about that, too, my lord.”
Over the next few days, Thomas considered his objections to the plan. First, of course, was that he’d never been closer to a horse than handing round stirrup cups before a hunt, and he understandably found them somewhat intimidating. Next was that a horseback ride was a rather difficult situation to run away from-at least, if you didn’t know how to ride, it was. Horses were more or less designed for running away, but he’d probably fall off, and then they’d end up in one of those novels the maids read.
The biggest thing, really, was that learning to ride meant he really was going through with this business of being a Guide. There was absolutely no need for a valet to know how to ride a horse. The only reason for him to learn was so that he could accompany his lordship on his rides. So that he could share that part of his lordship’s life.
On the other hand, Thomas told himself, his lordship went riding with that stable boy every day, and that didn’t seem to mean much. And he was going to be a Guide-he’d already made up his mind about that when he’d first gone to speak to Mr. Clement. He’d left himself an escape route by saying he was just trying it out, but he still had one-it wasn’t as though his lordship could realistically claim that, having ridden a horse, he was now obligated to be a Guide.
All right, then. He’d do it. Still, he waited another day or two after making the decision, just to see if his lordship was going to begin badgering him for an answer. When he didn’t, Thomas finally asked, one afternoon as he was dressing his lordship in riding clothes, “How would we go about finding me some riding clothes, my lord?”
His lordship looked a little surprised, but didn’t immediately leap into a series of intrusive questions. Instead he said, “I’d start by asking Clement. There’s likely something in the attics that can be made to fit. Old things of mine, or Papa’s, or even Simon’s.” He said the last with a hint of distaste. “Boots might be more difficult-altering those might be a bit beyond even your skills.”
“Yes, my lord,” Thomas admitted. He knew how to clean boots, but he’d never done any boot-making.
“So if there isn’t a pair that fits, we’ll have to have some new ones made-in fact, if it turns out that you’ll be riding a great deal, we should do that in any case. But that always takes a bit of time. I don’t think your feet are any larger than mine,” he added, with a glance down at them. “And I had a new pair every six months while I was still growing, so there ought to be something close enough to be going on with.”
“Yes, my lord. I’ll speak to Mr. Clement.”
“All right. And, ah, I suppose I’ll speak to Clint about a horse.”
There was a faint hint of a question in his tone. “Yes, my lord,” Thomas said.
Link to Chapter Twelve