“How disappointing,” Joan sighed.
“Why?” Thaddeus asked.
“I imagine actors, especially lead actors, relishing a cloud of Shakespearean language. A sour prince one night, and a villain the next.”
Mr. Wooty smiled wryly. “It’s a hard life, my lady. For those of us with the passion and the backbone for it, there’s nothing else. Caballero is a brilliant actor, but he will walk out on me one of these days. He’s just biding his time.”
“Not fair,” Joan said. “So many people would like to be lead actors!”
“Presumably he has the talent, and the others do not,” Thaddeus said. “He’s playing the roles for money, one would assume.”
“That’s it,” Mr. Wooty said. “Caballero is impatient with applause, if you can believe it. Another actor can wither if an audience doesn’t like his performance, but he just laughs. All right. Enough of him!”
He clapped his hands. “Time for dinner!”
Chapter Nine
“Where shall we practice dueling?” Thaddeus asked Joan the next day, when Mr. Wooty dismissed them after a morning of rehearsal. Otis would be drilled in his lines by Madeline all afternoon, a fate he seemed to welcome.
“Outside, don’t you think?” Joan asked. “So I can learn how to fall. Also, so that no one can see me make a fool of myself.”
Thaddeus agreed. To learn how to fence properly, she’d have to take off her coat. And he’d be damned if anyone ever saw her rear again.
Except for him.
But he didn’t count. Friend of the family, she had called him.
“I’m hungry,” he said.
“We can stop by the kitchens and ask Cook for a picnic,” Joan said.
Thaddeus had been thinking along the lines of several courses, eaten comfortably at a table. Instead, he was handed a weighty basket.
“I know just the place,” Joan said, heading down one of the castle’s many narrow corridors. “There’s a lovely spot on the island, on the other side of the apple orchard.”
To his surprise, the corridor led to the library. Lindow was so sprawling, and had been added to and elaborated upon by so many owners, that once inside a person could lose his sense of direction altogether. They walked through the library onto a terrace.
“We call this Peacock Terrace. There’s Fitzy!” Joan said, trotting down the marble steps to the lawn.
Fitzy—an aging but still majestic peacock—paced toward them, dragging his tail in the grass.
“He’s frightfully old,” Joan said. “Drat! I usually have bread in my pocket, but these breeches are hopeless. The pockets are terribly small; I can’t imagine how you gentlemen manage.”
The peacock came a few steps closer and flicked his tail, as if to suggest that he could raise it if he wished, but they weren’t worth the trouble.
“Don’t step forward, because he’ll realize you’re a man and become exceedingly annoyed,” Joan said. She’d taken the basket from Thaddeus and was rooting around in it. “He loathes the male sex.”
“Every one?” Thaddeus asked, rather startled.
“He tolerates my brothers,” Joan said. “Isn’t it interesting that he doesn’t mind me, even though I’m in breeches? I gather he responds to something more innate than clothing.”
Fitzy gobbled up the bread she threw, but Thaddeus noticed that he cocked his head to the side, keeping a close watch. Sure enough, when Joan stepped back onto the path, leaving Thaddeus in clear view, Fitzy’s head jerked up.
His tail followed: a magnificent fan of blue and green feathers, waving in the breeze caused by displaying all that plumage. Fitzy’s shining eyes bent on Thaddeus, he scratched one claw in the dirt and opened his beak very wide, throwing his head back.
“Time to go,” Joan said. “He’ll be cross at me for two days for bringing a male into his territory.”
Sure enough, Fitzy’s curses followed them across the lawn. When they plunged into a wood, they could still hear him issuing challenges.
Thaddeus followed Joan’s slender, upright form out the other side of the wood and into an apple orchard.
A white goat gamboled toward them, some strands of grass sticking to his whiskers, a frayed rope at his neck. “Gully! I’m happy to introduce you to Gulliver, who likes to travel, obviously,” Joan told Thaddeus, scratching the goat’s forehead. “Gully mostly spends his time in the orchard, but always goes home to the stable at night, so we don’t worry about him.”
“Goats are herd animals,” Thaddeus said. “Is he entirely alone?”
“He’s a Lindow castle goat,” Joan explained. “Not your ordinary type. He seems to disdain his fellows. The stables were built for one hundred and twenty-two horses, but we have far fewer these days, so Gully has a group of friendly nanny-goats who reside with him. Most days he escapes and spends the day in the orchard or the back lawn.”
“One hundred and twenty-two horses,” Thaddeus said, struck by the number.
“The stables were meant to hold about that many hounds as well, and then there’s the cow barn and so on. Gully is not fond of other goats, and certainly not cows or hounds. He prefers to be alone.”
Thaddeus nodded. “He has magnificent horns.” They rose in an extravagant twist above Gully’s head before they curled backward.
“Apparently he was dangerous before his horns grew backwards. Now he can’t poke them into anyone. Father says he’s a ducal goat, too ornamental for ordinary company.”
“That’s a rather sad characterization of a duke’s life,” Thaddeus said, taking his turn scratching Gulliver, who had sidled up to him and began sniffing his shoes in a way that suggested he would be happy to start chewing leather rather than grass. “No,” he told him.
Gulliver obediently raised his head and rubbed it against Thaddeus’s coat, demanding petting in lieu of leather.
“Father claims it’s a lonely business being a duke. Aunt Knowe just laughs and says that without the family, his head would swell like a bladder,” Joan said.
“From compliments?” Thaddeus inquired.
“All the people bowing and scraping.”
“Not an attractive vision but perhaps accurate,” he admitted.
“Gully will keep you scratching his head all day,” Joan said. “I’ll distract him with luncheon.” She took the basket again, knelt, and pulled out some grapes. “Luncheon, Gully!”
Gulliver deserted Thaddeus and trotted over to her. They left him meditatively eating grapes under an apple tree, and continued through the orchard until the path wound down a gentle slope to end at an ornamental lake.
At some point in the past, the lake had been turned into an artistic refuge for gentlepersons to enjoy nature without a hint of nature’s irritating irregularities; the round lake was dotted with a round island, punctuated by a marble cupola with a round roof.
“This is the lake that your great-grandfather dug into a circle?” Thaddeus asked.
Joan nodded. “My grandfather built that temple thing for my grandmother,” she said, waving at the island. “The one that looks like a third of an eggshell with legs.”