Chloe, Is That You?

Eileen had asked it irritably, but Scrooge only bowed his head in silence and gave her no answer at all.

Just then the drawing-room door opened and two maids came in with a tray of refreshments: hot black tea and soft sponge cake.

“Let us wait a while. Chloe will have her reasons for behaving so.”

The Viscount’s temper was running no cooler than his daughter’s, but he made an effort to hold on to his composure. He could not let a mere member of the household staff see him worked up.

At a gesture from him, Eileen let out a short sigh and sat down demurely on the sofa. Angry as she was, and hardly knowing what to do with herself, every movement she made was the picture of good breeding.

Scrooge, stealing sidelong glances at Eileen, caught sight of the ring on her finger and drew his brows into a deep frown. That ring was one of the keepsakes of the mistress Mariya, her ladyship’s birth mother.

Why should Lady Eileen have that ring?

However thoughtless her ladyship might be, she would never have handed over on the spot a ring her mother had worn every day of her life. There had to be some reason for it, he was sure of that, and being sure did nothing to cool his anger.

After Scrooge had gone out, Eileen took a mouthful of tea and let out a snort of a laugh, as though the whole business were beneath her.

“Father. Chloe must have overslept.”
“Quite so. Still, it does her credit — she has at least not come out in her nightdress.”
“However she dresses herself up, it will come to much the same. She’ll be out in one of those tacky dresses again.”
“Are those dresses not every one of them of your own choosing?”
“Precisely. You have no idea what trouble I went to, picking out the things that would not suit Chloe. And to watch her wear them about, delighted, without the faintest idea — it is too funny.”
“What is to be done. Unlike you, she has neither an eye for quality nor any knack for making the right use of people.”
“True enough. Keeping that old man on all this time instead of throwing him out — Chloe really is softhearted to no purpose.”
“Leave it be. That is the child’s one merit and her one failing both, is it not.”

Had Chloe been hard or cold by nature, getting inside Grace Castle might have been difficult in the first place. On the strength of nothing more than his being her dead father’s own blood, she had welcomed him fervently and leaned on him. Her soft nature was what had made the whole of it possible.

Eileen heard her father out, nodded, and drank down a mouthful of the warm tea. This place was truly dreadful, but the tea and the cake at least were superb, so she decided she would take what small peace she could get. Smiling and pretending to like stupid Chloe was no small labor, after all.

It was another two hours before Chloe met the two of them. Patrasche and Eileen were thoroughly angry by then, but outwardly they put on unruffled smiles.

“Her ladyship is coming.”

The drawing-room door swung wide open, and Handsome, entering ahead of her, spoke with every courtesy to the two who had been waiting. Viscount Patrasche studied the young man, familiar and unfamiliar at once, and placed him as one of the household staff who had worked inside the castle before.

“Handsome, is it. Have you been made butler?”

He had guessed it from the change in Handsome’s clothes. Handsome was so startled that the Viscount should remember his name that he very nearly hiccupped, but her ladyship was coming in behind him, so he forced himself to look composed.

“Yes. By her ladyship’s kindness I have been raised to butler.”
“Good for you. Work hard at it. I trust you will look after my niece well.”

Instead of answering, Handsome bowed deeply from the waist. It was an iron rule of his never to answer an order from anyone but the lord of Grace.

Patrasche frowned a moment at the lack of an answer, then caught sight of Chloe coming in behind him, and his face turned more astonished still than it had been a breath before.

“Chloe?”
“I am sorry to have kept you waiting. It is such an early hour that I never expected any guests.”

She had aimed it at the hour of their visit, which was a breach of noble etiquette. Ordinarily she would have known nothing whatever about noble etiquette, but she had it from Delma’s grumbling. Visits between nobles were generally paid between two and five o’clock, and to break that was held a discourtesy. Turning up out of the blue at an hour as early as this meant they had not the least respect for her ladyship. Delma had muttered about it the whole way here.

Patrasche’s thick eyebrows twitched above his sharp gaze. A reaction like this from Chloe was also a first. By rights she ought to have come running to him in delight the moment she laid eyes on him; today she kept her distance and stayed on her guard.

What astonished him more, though, was what she had on. In place of the loud, childish dresses she wore a quiet navy one, and Chloe looked for all the world as though Mariya had come back to life. A ruby necklace and earrings had taken the place of the trailing ribbons, and they made her look a great deal older than her years.

Nor was Patrasche the only one taken aback. Eileen came right up to Chloe and looked her up and down as though she could not believe it.

“Chloe, is that you?”
“Of course it’s Chloe. Who else would it be.”

Dong-hui answered in a passably friendly voice and sat down on the sofa.

“I had your letter saying you would be visiting not long ago.”
“Indeed. Have you been keeping well? I knew you were all alone here and I have been too busy to look in on you often.”
“It is quite all right. And I am not alone.”

She said it with a glance at Delma and Handsome and Scrooge, standing there at her side.

“Even so, can hired help ever truly be the same as family with your own blood in them?”
“That is true. Family is different.”

Dong-hui played along, up to a point. If she treated them too differently all at once, she would never learn what the two of them were really after.

“Chloe, there’s something different about you, isn’t there? What have you done with all the dresses I picked out for you?”

Ah — so those tacky clothes all came from you.

Dong-hui smiled as though she understood and picked up her teacup. Black tea had never been much to her taste, but drinking it so often had turned out to suit her rather well. Sometime she would put milk in it and make milk tea, she thought, and took a mouthful of the hot tea.

“Those? I threw them all out.”
“What?”

Eileen was so startled she very nearly dropped the cup she was holding.

“Why? You really loved those dresses.”
“I got tired of them.”
“Then don’t tell me you bought other ones?”

Her tone seemed to have an unspoken ‘with no money, and in your circumstances’ folded into it.

“No.”

Eileen’s expression grew more bewildered still.

“Then?”
“I’m going to buy some now. Things that suit me. I’ve sent for a tailor, too. They’ll be here before long.”

Patrasche heard her out and let a bland little laugh escape him, the look on his face saying that this was exactly what he had expected. He had gone tense over a small change in her looks and the way she spoke; his childish niece was only playing at being grown up, he decided, and it did not suit her.

“If you wanted dresses, why did you not send word? I know how you are placed — is your uncle not able to buy his niece a few dresses?”
“Really?”
“Of course. Ask for as much as you like. How many will you need? Ah — while we are about it, go to Fran with Eileen and have the dresses made up. I shall send word ahead.”
“Fran…, you say?”

Dong-hui said it hesitantly, never having heard of the place, but Patrasche took it for Chloe being too delighted to get her words out. He smiled broadly and nodded.

“Oh, how wonderful, Chloe. My birthday party is coming up soon and I was going to have a new dress made anyway. Come with me and we’ll have them made together. I’ll pick out a design that suits you perfectly.”

Eileen said it while shifting over to sit right up against her.

Dong-hui thought of fluttering lace and gave an awkward smile. Eileen, carried away by her own mood, took it for Chloe smiling out of pleasure.

“But what are all these? Don’t tell me they’re fake? Whatever else, you have a lord’s dignity to keep up — you can’t go about in fakes.”

Certain that Chloe was in no position to buy real jewels, Eileen scolded her without so much as looking closely, and as she did she pressed into Chloe’s hand one of the gift boxes she had brought.

“This is the present I brought for you. I thought it would suit you, so I made a point of bringing it along. Open it.”

Dong-hui remembered what she had been told about Eileen and her cheap trinkets. The box, though, looked very fine indeed, and thinking that perhaps this time would be different, she lifted the lid.

“A brooch?”
“Well? You like it, don’t you? Would you like to try it on?”

What Eileen had brought was an amethyst brooch. And of a design only an old woman would wear, at that.

Dong-hui shook her head, and when Eileen hurriedly took the brooch out, she pushed it lightly away with her palm.

“Why?”

Eileen looked shocked. Never once had Chloe refused a present from her. The stupid child had always grinned and delighted over anything at all she was given, and a reaction like this from her was more than Eileen could believe.

“I’ll put it on later. It doesn’t go with what I’m wearing.”
“…Is that so?”

Whatever Eileen gave her, suited or not, Chloe had always put it straight on first thing. Eileen looked hard about her, as though to work out what had happened, but she and her father seemed to be the only ones in the room put out by it. The rest of the household staff were as easy and untroubled as if this were an everyday thing.

Patrasche took a closer look now at the jewels Chloe was wearing. Eileen seemed to think them fakes; to his eye they were nothing of the kind.

Those are real rubies, no question. And of the very finest sort. How did she get her hands on such things? Don’t tell me…

Patrasche sat sunk in his own thoughts a moment longer. Then his eyes went wide, and he asked in a sharp voice.

“Do not tell me you have sold land to somebody else?”

For a moment Dong-hui did not understand what he was talking about. Then she saw his gaze touch the jewelry she was wearing and fall away again, and she shook her head.

“No. Why would I sell the estate? And to an outsider, at that.”

The ‘to an outsider’ Dong-hui had deliberately tacked on left Patrasche visibly relieved. It meant that there was at least no chance of the estate passing to anybody other than himself.

“Then where has all that money come from? Those jewels you are wearing — are they not every one of them real?”

At the Viscount’s words Eileen gave a great start, took hold of Chloe’s arm and lifted it up. Jewels were a great interest of hers, and only now did she look closely at the bracelet she had never for a moment doubted was a fake. The ruby bracelet glittering red on Chloe’s wrist was a beautiful thing, more beautiful than any she herself had ever owned.