The River of No Return

lap. “Thank you. I am sure all will be well.”
    “I don’t like him,” Rob said. “Neither does anyone else below stairs.”
    “Change is difficult, I know, Rob.”
    “It’s more than that, miss. He’s searching for something, and he isn’t finding it. Last night I heard him as he was going to bed, and he was muttering your name, over and over again. It gave me a chill, and I said to myself, ‘There’s no harm that will come to Miss Percy while I’m here,’ and I said so to everyone at our morning gathering, and Mr. Pringle and Mrs. Cooper agreed with me. We consider you our mistress, miss, despite him being the man who holds the purse strings. We want you to know that.”
    Julia had known Rob for years, and liked him, but she had never really thought about who he might be, besides a perfectly amenable footman. Now she saw that he was the earnest sort, the kind of man whose heart shone out of his eyes. “Thank you, Rob,” she said. “I’m sure there will be no need for you to act on your feelings, and you really must keep them to yourselves. Eamon—Lord Percy—is not someone to cross.”
    Rob was short and very thin, but he straightened his shoulders and managed to convey a sense of strength. “I know that, miss, and you may be sure we will all be as subtle as snakes, but I thought you should know how we feel. When the time comes that you need our help, you need do nothing more than ask.”
    “Thank you, Rob.”
    “It is my pleasure, miss.” He bowed. “May I serve you some more coffee?”
    “No, thank you. I shall go and beard the lion in his den now.”
    “That’s the way, miss.”
    Julia stood and smoothed her skirts. She wasn’t sure whether to be comforted by Rob’s promise of support or troubled that the servants had noticed that Eamon’s behavior was strange. Now she couldn’t pretend that everything was as it should be, that Eamon was simply taking his place as earl and they must all adapt. If the servants were disturbed, well then, things were disturbing.
    * * *
    Eamon was writing. He motioned her to a straight-backed chair placed squarely before Grandfather’s desk. The desk was still cluttered with Grandfather’s favorite objects—stones, bits of sculpture, pots of various colored inks—and a few books remained splayed open to the place where Grandfather had stopped reading them when he took to his bed, his big, bold handwriting in the margins still black and fresh. Julia could read one word upside down, scrawled half across the print of a book of sermons: “Hogwash!” She allowed her lips to quirk upward: Grandfather had raged against the inanities of the world until the very end.
    The parasite who now sat in Grandfather’s chair could not have been more different from that fiery old man. Eamon was big and bald like Grandfather, but he was tight. He even held his quill tightly, and his handwriting was choppy. He kept writing, line after line, making her wait. She sat and listened to the scratch of his quill. It needed trimming, and had it been Grandfather sitting there writing, she would have simply taken it from him, wiped it clean, and trimmed it. Grandfather would have snapped his fingers as she worked, trying to hurry her along, even as he talked to her about what he was reading, what he was writing. Now Julia rejoiced in the quill’s irritating noise and in the way it split the line of ink, making Eamon’s ugly writing even uglier.
    Finally Eamon laid the quill down, sprinkled sand over his page, dusted it off, and set it aside. Only then did he look up at her. She met his eyes for a fraction of a second. “You must pretend,” Grandfather had said. Julia dropped her gaze.
    “Julia, Julia, Julia.” Eamon steepled his fingers and leaned forward, propping his pointy elbows on the desktop. “How old are you now?”
    “Twenty-two.”
    “Twenty-two, twenty-two. And not yet married.”
    Disgust traced its way up her spine, like a cold finger. She would not answer a question that was no question at all.
    “No offers?” Eamon’s voice was unctuous.
    Julia snapped her eyes at him for a moment.
    “You haven’t lost that temper, I see. You try to hide it, but . . .” He paused, and she saw the long white fingers descend to the desktop in fists. “Look at me, Julia.”
    She fought to keep her expression bland.
    “You try to hide it, but I see everything. Do you understand? I see everything. You can have no secrets from me.”
    “I have no secrets.”