Love & War (Alex & Eliza #2)(32)
“Yes, a porch, Mama,” Angelica repeated, laughing slightly as she took a seat beside the older woman. Her pregnancy had grown noticeably more pronounced in the three months since she had revealed it to the family. She pulled a little at the waistband of her dress, which, even though it had been let out, was still tight around her midsection.
“Baby Kitty wants to know, too,” Eliza agreed, looking down at the moon-faced bundle in her arms as she followed her sister and mother into the gazebo. Her youngest sister had just been fed and changed and was swaddled in the lightest bit of lace because of the unseasonable October heat, which, while not oppressive, was still warm enough to make Eliza wish that she could go without a petticoat like little Kitty.
As she seated herself, Mary, a housemaid, began efficiently unpacking foodstuffs from a large wicker basket, preparing a picnic with the assistance of Lew, who carried a second basket filled with china and silver.
“Gently, Lew,” Mary chided. “Just because it’s called bone china don’t mean it’s hard as your bones—which the mistress will have me crack if you break any of her mother’s Spode.”
“A porch?” Mrs. Schuyler repeated for the second time. Eliza, glancing at her mother, couldn’t tell if she was teasing Angelica, or really was that obtuse.
“A porch, Mama,” Angelica said with theatrical exasperation. “You are familiar with the concept, yes? A covered but open-air addition to a house whereupon the residents of said house can enjoy a nice spot of mint tea without having to walk a quarter mile up and downhill.”
“Don’t forget the scones!” Lew threw in, his wide eyes staring at a mound of sugar-dusted pastries that Mary was unwrapping from a brightly flowered kitchen towel.
“Mary, do give that young boy a scone and send him off before he upsets that entire basket of dishes,” Catherine Schuyler said. After Lew had accepted his treat, she continued. “Why on earth would I want to take my mint tea on a porch when I can have it in such a bucolic setting as this, with the smell of flowers in the air, and the most lovely views in every direction, and birdsong, too?”
In fact, the only thing that could be heard were Johnny, Philip, and Ren engaging in some kind of brotherly activity somewhere out of sight. Judging from the amount of screaming, they were either having a great time, or one of them was going to show up at dinner with a blackened eye. Probably both.
“I believe the trek Angelica mentioned has something to do with it,” Eliza said. “It is seventy-eight steps down the hill from our house. And while this is indeed a lovely setting, there are nearly as many flowers to smell right next to the house, including those roses Papa planted when Cornelia was born, and the birds sing at the top of the hill just as sweetly as they do down here, and I daresay the view is actually a bit better, what with the higher vantage point, and no shrubbery in the way.”
“Ah well, there you’re wrong, little missy.” Catherine Schuyler gloated with the air of someone who has caught out her interlocutor in a grievous error. “On a porch”—she still said the word as if it were a foreign concept, although it was clear now she was having a bit of fun—“you could only see in one direction, whereas down here you can see in all four.”
“There’s one thing you can’t see from here, though,” a breathless voice added. It was Peggy, trotting down the steps with a clutch of fans in her hand. “The road,” she finished as she distributed the fans among the three women already seated.
Eliza glanced over and realized that it was true. A line of lilac trees, out of bloom now, but still thickly covered in green heart-shaped leaves, blocked any view of the road.
“And if we can’t see the road,” Peggy continued as she took her own seat and snapped her fan open and began immediately waving it at her face, “it only follows that anyone passing on the road can’t see us, which is of course the point. Mama is a fine modest member of the Reformed Dutch Church. She sleeps in a rear bedroom and has her dayroom on the sunset side of the house rather than the sunrise side like everyone else. She doesn’t believe in a family displaying its activities for all to see. She finds it unseemly.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say ‘unseemly,’” Mrs. Schuyler protested. “Unseemly is the way you are fanning your face like Cook trying to save a custard. A porch is merely . . . common.”
Peggy blushed and immediately slowed her hand. Eliza, who had been fanning herself and Kitty nearly as vigorously, also slowed, but still laughed at her mother’s teasing.
In the three months since Kitty’s birth, the family dynamic had changed in tone. Mrs. Schuyler, who seemed to know that this was her last child, had relaxed into a benevolent, almost grandmotherly playfulness, treating her eighth child as a pet to be indulged at every occasion, and softening in her attitude toward her adult children. The stern mother of yore was still there, as witnessed by her chiding about Peggy’s fan, but it was delivered in a tenderer tone, sometimes even teasingly. Mrs. Schuyler no longer acted as if the slightest breach of etiquette—serving oyster forks with the fish, say, or wearing any color brighter than midnight blue on a Sunday—were a disaster from which the family’s reputation would never recover.
Eliza thought fondly of how Alex would enjoy this change in his mother-in-law. Her husband was still a bit awed and cowed by her mother.
“The truth is your father didn’t want a porch,” Catherine said now. “I amend that. Your father wanted a grand Palladian affair, with Corinthian columns and a pediment decorated with a frieze, if you can believe it. I told him it was scandalous enough that we had natural figures”—natural was Mrs. Schuyler’s code word for nude—“inside the house, on that wallpaper everyone loves to ooh and aah over, but I absolutely was not going to have . . . exposed . . . cherubs leering at my guests every time they entered or exited my home. As your father is never one to compromise, we ended up without said porch.”