Every third Monday when she was at Haverford House, the Duchess of Haverford was at home to her unmarried godsons and their friends. Not all of them at once, of course. Sometimes only one or two felt the need to make the trek from London out to Chelsea to pay their respects to their godmother. Sometimes as many as a score all arrived in twos or threes over the two hours that she presided over the teapot.
Today, a merry group of officers on leave from Portugal had decided to visit her before returning to Portugal and their regiments. The summer campaign would begin in June. To hear them talk about the battles to come, one would think they headed off to a picnic or a fox hunt. How many of them would return whole? How many would not return at all? The long war with France had chewed up so many of the young men she knew; had swallowed some and spat the others out broken and forever changed.
She smiled and chatted, even laughed at their tales and their jokes. Eleanor was very skilled at keeping her sorrow hidden behind a pleasant visage and polite conversation.
One of the merriest officers in the group was a guest of two of the others. Major James Foxton, a handsome fellow with a full head of red hair, full of stories and sharp-witted remarks. Fox, his friends called him. Eleanor knew his great aunt, Patricia Strathford-Bowles–counted her as a friend, though Lady Patricia had been a woman in her late thirties when Eleanor was a young wife, struggling to keep her sense of self in a near intolerable marriage.
They had never spoken of it, she and Patricia. But Eleanor always went home from a meeting with her friend with the strength to endure for another day. Those years were long past. She had moved beyond endurance to finding her own power. Perhaps she could exercise it on behalf of her friend’s great nephew? Yet there was something about him that made her uneasy–an unkind bite to his words, a sneer in his stories. She needed to know the young man better in order to see her way. She also knew, from Patricia’s letters, that he was a disappointment to his mother and his elder brother, who was now viscount in their father’s place. Yet Patricia had never said why.
“Major Foxton,” she said. “Come and sit by me, please, and let me pour you another tea while you tell me about yourself.”