A Gentleman’s Game (20 page)

Sir William’s hands spasmed, but he said nothing.

So Nathaniel explained. “We were no more than half-grown when Mother died. We were sick with the loss of her. We needed you to tell us everything would be all right, that there was still someone who cared for us.”

Instead, Sir William was gone more than ever. As if with his wife dead, there was no reason to stay in Newmarket. As if his children were nothing.

Jonah had turned inward. Abigail married horribly young. Hannah, sweet of heart, had latched on to Nathaniel and Sheltie and the grooms. Out of such inadequate substitutes had she made partial parents. “I was the only one who told you the truth, Father: that you had abandoned us. I know you only came home because you were ill. You would never have come back if you’d had legs to walk away from us.”

The words flowed so calmly, so readily, that Nathaniel realized he’d been waiting to speak them for quite some time. They had lined up and marched forth, presenting themselves like soldiers for inspection.

Pushing to his feet, he paced across the room. Two steps before he was halted by the pallet. “I was horrid to you. I know that. And I’m sorry for the way I acted. It was wrong of me. But after all this time, I wanted you to know why I’d done it.”

He turned his steps toward the doorway, but Sir William held up a hand. “Wait, Nathaniel.” Back and forth, he rolled the empty tumbler between flat palms. When he spoke, the words seemed unearthed with great effort. “I had no idea how to be a father without a mother. But I knew how to travel and connect. I could turn conversations into contracts, and contracts into coin. I was fooling myself, I know, to think that piling up money would be enough for you all.”

He sounded bitter, so Nathaniel said, “It was certainly better to have it than not, if those were the two choices.”

“I hated you too,” added the baronet mildly. “At least I hated that you spent your days in a bottle. Not even old enough for Oxford, and you were pickling your healthy body. No help when I tried to learn to walk again, or when I realized I never would.”

Nathaniel leaned against the door frame. He felt time like a distance, as though they were talking about people so far away they could not be seen clearly anymore. “Did you want my company? Or did you only think I owed you?”

Smack
. The tumbler slipped and skidded across the tabletop. “Both, if I’m honest. Both of those things. Even before your mother died, I made a comfortable home for all of you. Traveling about to the races and the sales, earning money. So often absent that I was never able to be a part of my own family.”

Nathaniel had never considered that before, that his father had felt pushed to the side in his own home. Taken for granted. Pressured to provide.

“You were a good provider,” he said. “We never doubted that. I should have told you.”

Sir William waved this off. “Your mother told me. She told me she missed me, and she wrote me letters about what you children were doing, and…” His hazel eyes seemed to be looking at those faraway figures. “In truth, I wanted to be that person she made me feel I was. I wanted to be indispensable.”

Nathaniel had to smile at this. “You never really wanted my help, did you?”

“I have never wanted any help. From anyone. But sometimes I have needed it. And when I came back from Spain you made clear to me, with your drinking and scorn, that I would not get it from you.”

This was so deep a wound, Nathaniel realized, that it had never truly healed. It had scarred, closing with a tight wariness that made Sir William tense every time something approached that tender spot.

“I am sorry, Father. I wish I could undo that old selfishness and give you the help you needed.”

Sir William shook his head.

And Nathaniel knew that this apology could never be adequate. Nothing could make up for the years of hurt on both sides. Of wanting the other to say,
Be there for me
, and of wanting the other to have been present.

But an apology was all he could give.

And then his father pushed back from the table to face him and smiled, an expression so halting that Nathaniel hardly recognized it for what it was. “You gave it now. That’s enough.”

Nathaniel slid down the door frame about a foot before his knees remembered to hold him up. “What?”

“I asked Lombard about the… What do you call them? Milkmaids? Yes, right. All the milkmaids you’ve encountered since leaving Newmarket. You handled them well.”

“Milkmaids love being handled,” Nathaniel mumbled.

“You hid from me all the good you could do. Have done all these years to help the family. Or maybe I didn’t want to see it.” The hazel eyes, so unlike Nathaniel’s in shape or color, held an expression he understood well. “I’m not sorry I came along to Epsom. I’m only sorry I didn’t come on a journey with you long ago.”

They would have fallen into silence, but a round of drunken cheers erupted from the taproom, making them both smile. “Are you going to place a bet?” Sir William asked. “Only one more day to enter your wager.”

“I don’t know. The turf has never seemed the sort of place I might find victory.”

What form would his own victory take? He had once thought he would find it in Epsom. But now a future without a bronze-haired, wry woman at his side seemed incomplete.

And he remembered—yes, he needed to place a bet for Rosalind. “Father. Yes, I do want to wager on the race. Do you know the odds on Epigram?”

The baronet scratched his head. “Fifteen to one at noon today. Prince Paul is the favorite, going off at eleven to five.”

“As though I’d bet on a prince when I’ve seen how good a knight and a baronet’s horses can be,” Nathaniel scoffed. “Have you a bookmaker you trust? Oh, that’s good. Will you place a wager for me?”

He pulled notes from his waistcoat pocket. Day after day, he’d kept them with him like some sort of talisman of Rosalind. “Place it all on Epigram. One hundred pounds.”

Sir William took the money slowly, smoothing the notes out flat. “Is some of this for her?”

Nathaniel did not pretend to misunderstand. “Miss Agate left that up to me. She trusted me to decide.”

“Good for her. She’s a bright girl. I put money on Epigram myself.” Sir William rolled forward, aiming for the doorway. “Oh, I put a bit on Pale Marauder too, since he’s my own horse. Didn’t want him to feel neglected. But Epigram—he’s the sort of horse that does what he sets out to do. He’s a good horse.”

He looked up at Nathaniel. “Good horse,” he repeated quietly. “Thank you for bringing him—all of them—as far as you did. I…have been pleased with their progress.”

And then, with a press at the door handle, he was gone with a steady
tick, tick, tick
of chair wheels before the door closed behind him and left Nathaniel alone.

Well, not quite alone. There was a full bottle of brandy here.

For the first time in thirteen years, its golden wink did not appeal to him not at all.

After several days at the Eight Bells, Rosalind remembered why she had fallen into the habit of silence as a child. With the building always bustling with relatives and lodgers and those who stopped in for a pint or meal after a day’s toil, one had no privacy save the thoughts one kept inside one’s head.

Perhaps because of this, she was entrusted with many secrets by others who couldn’t help but let the words out. Peg the kitchen maid disliked Polly, who worked in the scullery, supposedly because Polly was lazy but in truth because Peg’s man had flirted with her. Carys and Elder were battling over some Spanish trinket from Aunt Annie—given to their oldest brother, Bert, but left behind when he married. And so on, daily.

You’ve got the sort of face people want to talk to
, Nathaniel had once told her. The world tipped its troubles into her ear until she was full of them and could not let them out. Why could not all life be changing bedding in guest rooms or currying a horse in need of soothing? Straightforward work, honest work. To fit within a web of people made Rosalind feel tugged about.

But though uncomfortable, it was not unpleasant. The unpleasant bits were inside her, remembering the night in Nathaniel’s simple room here—and not only when she passed by the chamber door or smoothed the coverlet after making up the bed anew. And then there were the stairs, over and over, so different from Chandler Hall. Reminding her of the parlor in Epsom, a room she had hardly seen for begging, and where the desires of her heart and flesh were denied.

She could not regret these memories entirely. Not as tied up as they were with Nathaniel, who would always be the taste of sugared almonds, the scent of soap, the warmth of a body over hers.

After some discussion of where best to put Rosalind to help, her parents had agreed to let her work in the scullery. This was Rosalind’s own request. Though the scullery was the lowest of the low, a position so ill paid and dull that other maids looked down upon it, there was really nowhere else help was needed. And Rosalind would do any job to feel useful.

So she spent her days beside the heat of the kitchen, testing her limits with hot water and soap. It seemed to soften her tight parts and steam away her sentimental bits. She stacked up clean dishes, knowing she had done something to help.

Aunt Annie seemed to be avoiding her, as though she knew she had pushed too far. When a line was tugged sharply, the animal might bite. Rosalind was not as well trained as Anweledig had long assumed.

When the week finished its turn and the next one had marched along, Rosalind realized it was Thursday. Derby Day. Scrubbing at a pot, she wondered whether Nathaniel had placed a wager for her. The favor now seemed as pointless as the price she had once thought to put on her freedom.

Still, if he had placed a wager for her, that would mean he thought of her. One shining thought to lay next to the great pile of thoughts she had about him.

She hoped Epigram won. It was impossible not to like the steadiness of the horse and his determination to get what he wanted, whether a mouthful of grass or a victory against blue-blooded colts. He’d no idea that asking and trying were not enough to get what one wanted. To a horse, ignorance was both bliss and success.

That afternoon, Aunt Annie poked her head into the scullery. “Come speak with me in the sitting room.”

“Ah, so you’ve made an appearance at last,” Rosalind replied without looking up from the plate she was scraping into a slop bucket. “You waited long enough to tell me what was on your mind. By now, you could have sent an express ten times over.”

“Of course, my Cyfrinach. You have every right to be puzzled.” Aunt Annie stepped into the scullery. “We can speak in here just as easily.”

Puzzled? Ha.

“If you want to talk, help me dry these.” Rosalind flung out an elbow to indicate a stack of plates. “They’ll be needed again soon. They haven’t time to dry in their racks.” She didn’t bother to try to sound other than she felt: like an automaton.

“Where is the other scullery maid? Polly?”

Rosalind shrugged. Polly was probably out with Peg’s man somewhere, not that Rosalind cared to investigate. Her head already held more than enough secrets.

A long pause succeeded, during which Rosalind kept her hands busy and her eyes down. She never looked at anything now but soap and plates. Slops and hot water.

And sometimes the back garden, which was springing into life outside the scullery’s sole window.

But she did not look at it often.

“Your mother told me you lost your position.” Aunt Annie crossed the few feet between the doorway and the worktable on which Rosalind had stacked dishes. From the corner of her eye, she saw the older woman pick up a cloth and a dish, then begin to dry. “I am sorry for that. I did it for the best.”

“You did it. For the best.” Rosalind pumped water over the plate, then rubbed it with soap. “So there was no reason for that express? There’s no danger?”

“There is always danger—but this time, it was to you. I sent the express for the same reason I sent the article to Sir William. It is unwise to grow too close to one’s target. You were beginning to grow fond of the Chandlers, were you not?”

More than beginning. Far, far more.

Aunt Annie was still speaking. “Your jobs were to find the information we needed to meet your debt. To keep Tranc satisfied so he would not turn his gaze to your sister instead.”

Rosalind clenched her jaw so tightly her teeth ground against each other.
Better me than someone else.
She knew that, but it was not as easy to say as it had been before she lost hope that her situation would change.

Maybe it was the soap or the hot water or the lack of fogging optimism, but she finally calculated that Aunt Annie’s daughter had been born in 1805. Rosalind had been burned in 1808. “Was it my debt or yours? You turned over my debt to Tranc only because he held your own secret.”

“I
had
to, my Cyfrinach. I had no power to decline.”

“So you sold me. My burns were an opportunity for you.” A pawn which, if saved, could be sent out to battle for and protect the queen.

“Not
sold
. I needed your help. That was all. You were willing enough to give it at first.”

“I was a
child
. You should have protected me.”

“Protected you? I paid for the care that saved your life. What has made you so ungrateful now?
Wfft
. Spending time with Chandlers. It’s best you’re away from them.”

Rosalind could hardly disagree more if she painted the words on her forehead. She shook her head and scrubbed harder.

The silence was broken by the tidy sound of crockery set onto a tabletop. Then one dish set within another. Then another.

“However,” Aunt Annie spoke up, “your association with that family might not have been entirely bad. After all this time, I believe I have found what I need.”

She crossed to Rosalind’s side and extended a letter before her lowered head.

“My letter of reference from Sir William Chandler.” She couldn’t even touch it; her hands were soapy and sopping. “How—Why do you have it? Why did you open it?”

“You and Carys never lock your chamber. I couldn’t have taught you to search so well if I didn’t know a bit about it myself.”

“Why were you searching my things?” As though the answer mattered. No answer would be acceptable.

“To see if there was anything I could use.”

Rosalind dropped the plate into the sink, where it bubbled down into murky dishwater. Wheeling to face Aunt Annie, she said, “I am not yours to use. And I own little enough in this world that I should think I could go unmolested.”

The widow shook this off. “But you see, you
were
useful. I have this same writing on a—a personal letter from 1805. It’s signed Gwilym, which is what I called Sir William in—personal moments. But until now I had no paper to connect my Gwilym to Sir William Chandler.”

“Surely signed papers from Sir William Chandler are not hard to locate.” Rosalind wiped her wet hands on her apron. “You don’t need that one. Give it back. It’s mine, and I haven’t even read it.”

A serene smile crossed Anne Jones’s features. “You’d never have it, were it not for me.”

“I could say that about a great many things. Good and bad.”

“Well, then.” As though this were an answer and they were in complete accord, Anne slid the letter into the bodice of her black crepe gown.

“What does it say? Why couldn’t you lay hold of any other letter over all these years?” Rosalind’s voice was rising. Her voice
never
rose. “Why must you take from me one of the few things I have?”

With each question, the older woman’s expression became more bemused. “Have you finished?”

“No!”

“My Cyfrinach, the letter says very little. That he found you as efficient in certain tasks as he had his own daughter. For a character, it was not likely to do you much good.”

Rosalind plunged her hands into the dishwater and retrieved the plate. “Was it the reference to a daughter? Was that why you took it?”

Anne Jones did not reply but turned to trail about the room, peering into pots and drawing fingertips across furniture.

Searching.

Grimly, Rosalind returned to her scrubbing. Questions were no use. Words were weapons, and Anne Jones was marvelous at wielding them. She twisted them, creating them anew. Why, she had a forger at her beck and call to create characters and references for Rosalind’s every post.

A forger at her beck and call…

Rosalind dropped the plate into the water again. Forcing her tired back upright, she looked the other woman in the eye. “You have given me forged papers time and again. If you needed a paper from Sir William, why did you not forge it?”

The widow dipped her head demurely. “If you must know, the personal letter was a love letter while we were in Spain. He promised me marriage.” She looked up with liquid dark eyes. “But then he became ill—with palsy, you know—and he was taken back to England. I never heard from him again. I didn’t dare write.”

“You dared write to him last week to summon him to London.”

“But that was for
your
sake, my Cyfrinach. I needed to get you out of that household.”

“Why? As far as you knew, I hadn’t found anything useful yet.”

Anne Jones glided back to the worktable and resumed drying dishes. “Do you know what my name really is? It’s not Anne.”

“And mine is not Cyfrinach.”

“It’s Annwyl
.
It means ‘beloved’ in the Welsh tongue.” She set down a dry bowl, then picked up a dripping one. “It’s not so difficult to turn from someone’s
annwyl
into a dirty, dark secret. A
cyfrinach
. An
anweledig
that must remain invisible ever after. I didn’t know it had happened to me until it was done. Almost like you with your burns. Do you remember that time?”

“No.” Rosalind rubbed at her right elbow with her damp hands. Her memories were morphine-fogged until the blisters healed and were popped. Then agony, raw agony, and she lay on her belly for weeks as her own skin turned into a vise about her.

She released her elbow, then picked up a second cloth and began drying a different stack of dishes. “You have answered none of my questions.”

“What more could you possibly want to know? If I’m satisfied with this letter, then the debt is paid. You shall not have to go into service again. Isn’t that good?”

“But I didn’t pay the debt. And I want to know—”

“Oh, of course. I should have said that at once. Tranc will have no reason to come for Carys if your service has been satisfactory.”

“But you said he wanted information, not money.”

Not everything people tell you is true.
Nathaniel had spoken the words to her a few days before, a pebble tossed against the wall of secrets between them.

Maybe more than a pebble.

Rosalind set a plate down unsteadily. It rolled on its base in a slow circle before clattering flat. Just so spun her thoughts.

She looked at Aunt Annie, so familiar that her presence—her goodwill—was taken for granted.

Now she looked again. Really looked.
Looked.
This was Annwyl Jones. Mrs. Bowen Jones. The proper widow, once a beauty, whose hair was threaded with the gray of loss and sorrow. A saint on earth who moved benevolently through Holloway. Who traveled about visiting foundling homes.

Or did she?

Why had she befriended the Agates? Had she always hoped to gather an indentured servant from the plentiful ranks of their children? For less than one hundred pounds in physicians’ fees, she had won ten years of service from Rosalind.

Rosalind had once regarded Anne Jones with the trusting eyes of the wounded child, salved and grateful. Now she looked at her with the skeptical gaze of the adult.

The other woman seemed to feel the weight of this gaze. When she looked up, her dark eyes were all sympathy. “I should have known it was the money you were concerned about. Do not worry, my Cyfrinach. You gave me this letter. And now we will get all the payment we want.”

“You have answered none of my questions,” Rosalind said for the second time. It was easy to become distracted from this fact when one was bombarded with irrelevant replies. “I’m not interested in money. I want to know who Sir William is to you, and who Tranc is, and how you think he is to be satisfied. I want to be certain my sister is safe.”

She wanted to be done with Anne Jones.

“Do not worry, my Cyfrinach. Let me take care of everything.” The widow sighed and smoothed her drying cloth onto the table. “I must be going now. I know you are busy. You see? You don’t need a new post. You already have one.”

Before Rosalind could protest, Anne Jones trailed from the scullery, leaving behind more questions than ever.

And the determination on Rosalind’s part to find the answers at last.