A Flight of Fancy (24 page)

“What do you want?” he demanded.

“I should think you would be grateful to me having your work here save your mill.”

“It also got me shot. Now what do you want with me?”

For a moment so brief Whittaker would have missed it had he not been staring hard at the man, the major’s eyes flashed and his jaw hardened. Then he became the languid gentleman again. “I want to know who the leaders are—quickly. I have been mucking about here in the north long enough. My regiment is in London and I wish to enjoy the fleshpots there rather than the strict morals here.”

“Strict morals?” Whittaker took a step closer to Crawford. “What about your attentions to Miss Honore?”

“Purely honorable.” Crawford laughed as though he had made a great jest. “She is a charming creature with a good dowry, and though her father is nothing more than a baron, he holds considerable political power and is a step higher than my own father.”

“Ah, so you are the son of a baronet. You have done well to have purchased a major’s commission.”

Crawford shot to his feet, the tightness returning to his face. “I earned this commission. My father could only afford a captaincy for me, but I was promoted for my work here in the north. And I will be a lieutenant colonel at the least if you do your work without getting yourself killed.” He strode to the door and yanked it open. “And do not think you are my only spy. You are being watched.” He slammed the door behind himself so hard it shook the house frame.

Whittaker slumped onto the vacated settee and dropped his face into his hands. He did not like lording his rank over others. The Lord of all knew he did not like even having the rank. And if the major was going to force his hand to take actions Whittaker found dangerous and unpleasant—spying on men whose families had depended on the Gileses’ and Herns’ employment for generations and felt ill-used—Whittaker needed to maintain some of his power. The Lord knew too well how much he had lost everywhere else.

But his snobbishness had played in his favor for once. He had angered the major enough for him to definitively admit that someone watched his noble spy.

“So you do not trust me, Major,” Whittaker murmured to the plain, whitewashed walls of his cottage.

He rose and began to make his simple meal of cheese and bread and an apple. He wanted hot soup. To get it meant going to a tavern, and he did not wish to encounter any of the rebels he knew right then. He needed a day or two to plan his next steps, work out how to discover the information the major wanted and who wanted an earl dead badly enough to risk hanging for it.

“Make friends,” Whittaker said to himself. “Make friends.”

Thus far he had avoided any more contact with the rebels than necessary. They were men with whom he held nothing in common, uneducated men save for their skill at weaving. They were traitors to their country and disloyal to their employers.

And they were taking him away from his purpose—winning Cassandra back.

That thinking kept him awake most of the night as he pondered how to extricate himself from the blackmail, from the risk of being shot again or taken up as a traitor and hanged, of being away from Cassandra too much while Philip Sorrells spent too much time with her.

So he set aside his repulsion and headed out the next night.

Near the hedge tavern where he had seen Rob and Hugh taking their supper, he hesitated in the shadow of a pine tree. He intended to join them for a bowl of the owner’s tasty stew. Perhaps if he befriended them, pretended wholehearted interest in their cause, talked assault outside of their meetings, they would trust him enough to give something vital away such as the name of the man who gave them—or at least one of them—orders. He would have to find a different way to befriend Jimmy, for he had a family with whom he took his meals.

Risking his family’s future with his rebellion against factory owners and the Crown.

Whittaker curled his upper lip and stepped out of the shadow of the tree. The sourness of ale fumes replaced the tang of the pine. He grimaced but forced himself forward.

From the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of another shadow, a flicker of movement. He pivoted on one heel. “Is someone—” He stopped. He was forgetting to roughen his accent.

He saw no one anyway. Starting at chimeras, at nothing substantial.

He headed for the door again, bracing himself for the smells of unwashed men, spilled spirits, and rough talk he would find inside. He must not show his distaste, his dislike. He was supposed to be one of them, quiet, solitary, but agreeing with their cause in a cautious way.

He reached for the door handle.

“You don’t want to go in there.” Jimmy spoke from the darkness behind Whittaker.

He jerked his hand from the latch, dropped it to the knife hilt at his waistband. “I do if I want my supper.”

“If that’s all you want, then come to my house. It’ll be naught but bread and dripping, but the bread’s good.”

And likely Whittaker would be taking tomorrow’s breakfast from someone like Jimmy himself.

“Why?” Whittaker asked, turning slowly.

Jimmy shrugged. “You’re too young to be cozying up to the likes of Rob and Hugh. If you’re tired of your own company, then you’ll find plenty in my house.”

“That’s, um, very kind of you.” Despite the melding of his words together, Whittaker still sounded too educated for the role he attempted to play. Not knowing what else to say, he shrugged and stepped away from the tavern door. “Let’s be off then.”

Off to a possible trap?

One hand on the hilt of his knife, he fell into step beside Jimmy. “Will your wife care about an extra to table?”

“My wife?” Jimmy snorted. “I don’t have a wife.” His tone was decidedly bitter.

“I’m sorry. I thought . . . You mentioned making enough to support a family once, and I thought . . .”

“Aye, I have a family. Four children, but my wife left me after the baby was born. I came home from the mill one day, and she was gone with every spare penny in t’house.”

“I’m sorry.” Whittaker recalled Miss Honore’s brief missive expressing Cassandra’s wishes. In two and a half months, she insisted she had not changed her mind, and her father had agreed and sent Whittaker packing too.

“I lost my la—woman too,” he murmured. “We weren’t married yet.”

“Best for you ’til you can support her and any little ones proper.”

And not need Cassandra’s dowry.

But that was years into the future. Her father would find her a husband before then—a nice, quiet, and dispassionate man like Philip Sorrells.

“Maybe you’re right.” Whittaker sighed. “But the nights are lonely.”

“Aye, that they are. Here we go.” Abruptly, Jimmy turned down a track invisible to Whittaker, though after a few dozen yards, he began to recognize the terrain even in the dark.

Beyond the mills, beyond the fence surrounding his own weaving houses, lay hovels no larger than his own bedchamber. They smelled of rotting vegetables, coal smoke, and night soil.

His stomach churned. His feet dragged like those of a schoolboy not wanting to take his punishment.

Going into Jimmy’s cottage was punishment. From what a solitary tallow dip on a plain deal table showed, the single room forming the lower floor appeared spotlessly clean. So did the old woman and three children seated around that table, though a whimpering baby, lying in a wooden box for a cradle beside the grate that gave off more smoke than warmth, smelled as though he or she needed to be changed.

A very young baby. So Jimmy’s loss of his wife must have been recent.

Whittaker’s heart wrenched. He stood on the threshold, his head ducked to keep from banging his brow on the lintel.

Jimmy went straight to the cradle and lifted up the baby, murmuring something that made the whimpering cease. The others scrambled from their stools, the three children swarming around him and chattering like a flock of sparrows. The old woman crossed to the dresser in a corner and removed the remnants of a loaf from the shelf. A knife flashed. What wasn’t enough food for one man was divided in two.

How to repay the man’s kindness without insulting him?

Watching Jimmy embrace and talk to each of his children in turn, then carry the baby into a dim corner to take care of the dirty napkin, Whittaker could not believe the same man engaged in wholesale destruction of property and sometimes lives.

No, Jimmy would avoid taking lives. Surely a man who played nursery maid to his child instead of leaving that for the old woman—surely his grandmother, judging from her lined and wrinkled skin and white hair—was too good to harm a human being. And yet, perhaps mill owners and those workers who would not join the Luddite cause were fair game.

Pondering these thoughts, Whittaker did not realize that
everyone was staring at him until Jimmy gave him a playful punch on the shoulder.

“Come in, man. We aren’t warming the outside.”

They were not doing much to warm the inside either.

With a muttered apology, Whittaker stepped into the single room and pulled the door closed behind him.

“Let me introduce the children,” Jimmy said. “Sally, Little Jimmy, Timothy, and Susan is the baby there.” Tenderness filled his voice as he spoke each name.

An emptiness opened inside Whittaker, a longing for children of his own, a family to greet him when he returned from the mills or Parliament. Not that most children in his class were allowed to greet their fathers at the door. Their wives did not go up in balloons either. But his family would greet him at the door. All of them—wife, children, perhaps a dog or two . . .

He bowed to the children, making them laugh.

“Is he a prince, Papa?” Sally asked.

Jimmy chuckled. “Aye, to you, no doubt, he is just that. But right now we’re havin’ our bread and dripping. Ma, come meet my new friend, Geoff.”

His mother? Surely his mother should not look seventy instead of forty-five or fifty, the same age as his own mother. Jimmy was not all that old, especially not for a man with four children.

Four children and a mother to support on his meager wages. When this was over, Whittaker would find work for the man in the Hern mills.

Jimmy led the way to the table. His mother brought wooden plates with the bread smeared with a glaze of meat fat probably procured for a pittance at the nearest chophouse or tavern. It smelled vile, perhaps a little rancid. Whittaker ate it anyway,
washed it down with water, and longed for a chair with a back he could lean against, beside a fire that warmed him.

Jimmy worked a whole lot harder and had neither. Yet he had a mother and children who loved him. They came to him in turn to receive what appeared to be a silent blessing, with his hand resting momentarily on their heads, then they vanished up a stairway little more than a ladder, and the room grew quiet save for the baby’s snuffling noises beside the hearth and the patter of fresh rain outside. The residents of the nearby houses must have been asleep or away.

“Thank you for joining me,” Jimmy said into the stillness. “Ma don’t talk much ’cause I won’t let her say aught ill of my wife in front of the children, and she says that’s all there is to talk about. And the nights are long.”

Whittaker nodded. Long nights alone he understood.

“Maybe one day,” Jimmy continued, “I can learn to read to fill the time before I can sleep. I’d love to read my Bible.”

Something Whittaker had not been doing much of lately, and he bore no such excuse as being unable to read. Guilt prompted him to blurt out, “I could read it to you if you like.”

Too late he realized he should not admit to any kind of education.

“I’d like that, but not now.” Jimmy did not appear in the least surprised that Whittaker could read.

His skin chilled beneath his woolen shirt and coat. If Jimmy was not surprised, it might mean he knew more than was safe for Whittaker.

He dropped his hand to the hilt of his knife.

Jimmy curled his fingers around Whittaker’s wrist gently but firmly. “You don’t need to be pulling that out. I’m not your enemy.”

Whittaker did not move except to raise his eyebrows. “I have an enemy?”

“Aye, at least one.” Jimmy laughed and released Whittaker’s wrist. “That’s what I wanted to tell you. I don’t know if it’s Rob or Hugh, or maybe it’s a friend of theirs, but I followed them one night and overheard them talking.”

“Did you, now?” Whittaker pretended nonchalance. “Seems an odd risk to take when you have a mother and four children depending on you.”

“They’re why I do this. Until we make more money, I cannot support them. They won’t have a future if the machines take over our jobs.”

“But neither will they have a future if you get yourself hanged.”

“I won’t.”

Whittaker wanted to call him a fool. No man should be so cavalier about his mortality, especially when others depended on him remaining alive.

“You,” Jimmy continued, “are the one who will die.”

Gunshots and gunpowder!

Whittaker gripped the edge of his stool and tried to control the bunching of his jaw muscles as he strove for a disinterested mien.

“Rob and Hugh know who you are,” Jimmy announced.

Whittaker’s stomach felt as though the pork dripping had turned back into a boar and commenced galloping around his innards. “Truly? And who is that?”

“The ninth earl of Whittaker, with a death sentence hanging over him.”

“Hmm. And what would his lordship be doing consorting with those wishing to steal his livelihood?”

Jimmy laughed, a great guffaw. “You can’t talk like us no matter how hard you try. You can get the accent right, but you still talk like a nobleman.”

“Indeed?” Whittaker’s ears went hot beneath his hair.

Jimmy laughed harder. “And you’re too cool and calm. You should’ve knocked me flat for laughing at you.”

“I would never—” Whittaker’s lips curled into a reluctant grin. Still, not admitting anything, he said, “So if someone knows me, why don’t they stick a knife in my back?”

“Gotta look like an accident, milor’. You can’t just go around killing peers. They’d hang everybody they could think was in the area at the time.” Jimmy leaned forward. “But you watch yourself and your mills. They’re going to kill you and burn the mills.” He shoved back his stool with a screech of wood against wood. “Now I’ll walk you home before anyone notices you’re gone.”