A Yuletide Treasure (14 page)

Then she looked again and yet once more. No gray light of early morning this—it was snow, piled as high as the second row of mullions that divided the windows into neat squares. Whatever sunlight there was came in filtered through the pressing weight of the snow.

“We’re going to sled later,” the older sister said. “Mr. Samson has promised us two big trays.”

“How thrilling,” Camilla commented, unable to take her eyes from the window.

“I see they’ve shown you,” Sir Philip said from behind her. “Merridew says it’s the most snow he’s seen since he was a boy, though I think the winter of 1814 was colder.”

“I remember that very well,” Camilla said. “We had to sacrifice an old card table when the wood gave out.”

“Fortunately, we won’t have to go to that extreme,” he said, solemnly giving a hand to each of his clamoring nieces. “Though, frankly, I can think of several pieces that could be spared,” he added, his undertone further masked by the little girls’ demands that he venture into the snow with them.

“Not until the stable lads and the gardeners have dug out all the doorways,” he said. “And Cook is making gingerbread dollies and seems to be at rather a loss on how to decorate them properly. She seems to want to use sultanas for their vest buttons.”

This, it seemed, was some kind of offense. The two children ran off, protesting. Sir Philip turned back to Camilla, who, suddenly, felt shy. “It is a good thing that Dr. March left last night,” she said, choosing a neutral subject. “It would be too bad if someone needed him and he could not get out.”

“He’s more likely to be needed here. My sister-in-law is quite near her time.” He looked at her curiously. “You’re smiling. Why?”

“Oh, merely...” She remembered with what openness they’d spoken last night and could not bring herself to retreat entirely into the common usage of a pair of strangers. “It’s only that my mother sent me away so I should not be present at the birth of my niece. And here I am....”

“Awaiting another birth? Fate must have made it so, Miss Twainsbury.”

“I’m not sure I believe in fate, Sir Philip.”

“Ah, but does it believe in you?”

Camilla felt that her first duty, even before breakfast, was to visit Nanny Mallow. Assured by Mavis that the patient was awake and eager for visitors, Camilla knocked, wishing she had some flowers or calf’s foot jelly to bring to a sufferer. Her mother made wonderfully clear jellies.

“You’re looking very well,” Camilla said, smiling on the wrinkled face turned up to hers. Nanny seemed to expect more, so Camilla bent down and kissed her surprisingly soft cheek. She felt a little off balance about it; she’d not been raised to expect or to give easy kisses.

“It’s like a miracle to be so safe and comfortable after so hard a time.”

“Well, you look blooming,” Camilla said stoutly. “If I thought it would improve my looks at all, I’d do the same as you. Only with my fortune, I should be more likely to sprain my nose rather than a knee.”

“Oh, I know just the right treatment for a sprained nose,” Nanny Mallow said with her young-old laughter. Camilla didn’t know whether to take her seriously or not.

“I hope you are feeling much better this morning,” Camilla said.

Nanny grasped Camilla’s sleeve, and leaning forward, she turned a sly glance toward the nurse. “She pretends to be so stern and unfeeling, but she’s as gentle as a mother.”

Mrs. Duke growled a little, like a dog making sure no one makes off with her special bone. Then she whisked away to stand by the fireplace, poking at some aromatic mixture in a pot set down among the ashes.

Nanny Mallow laughed and settled back again against her mounded pillows and cushions. A twinge of pain crossed her face. “I never would have believed so many bits of ourselves are strung through the knee,” she said. “Even if I don’t use it or go anywhere near it, it starts aching all over again. Mind you, I’m glad to be clean and warm— two I thought I’d never see anymore—but I wish this clever doctor’d explain how come when I wiggle m’left thumb, m’right knee starts giving me three kinds of gyp.”

“I know it must be hard to find the patience to wait for yourself to heal.”

“I know, I know,” she said irritably. “That’s the same advice I give m’self. Can’t say I pay much attention.”

“None at all,” Mrs. Duke muttered under her breath but clear enough to be heard.

“Never mind her. How are you getting on, Miss Camilla?”

“Everyone is treating me like an old friend already.”

“Hmmm, could be good that, or could be bad. Which is it?”

“Oh, good, very good. I feel quite one of the family already. Sir Philip—” She began and then hesitated. These fearsome old women could build a whole tragic fairy tale out of two chance-fallen words. “Sir Philip has been more than gracious,” she said quickly.

The two women exchanged glances. Mrs. Duke twitched her shoulder and turned again to the mixture on the hearth. “He’s a very pleasant gentleman,” Nanny Mallow allowed. “Very good to his dependents. Sent me down a venison pasty last time he shot a deer in the park.”

“I’m sure he takes his position very seriously,” Camilla agreed, thinking that last night he’d seemed almost reluctant to take on his brother’s fallen burden.

Nanny Mallow tried to adjust her position on the pillows, sucking in her breath through her teeth at the twinge of pain that accompanied her every movement.

“Let me help you, Nanny,” Camilla said, straightening a fallen cushion.

“It passes me,” Nanny said. “Would you say I so much as moved that knee?”

“If you would lay still, nothing would hurt,” Mrs. Duke said.

“If I’m going to lie that still,” Nanny Mallow retorted,
“I
might as well have died.”

Camilla tried to turn the conversation into more cheerful channels. “Have you heard about the snow?”

“She
claims ‘tis higher than m’head,” Nanny said, scornful of such exaggerated claims.

“That’s more or less true. Sir Philip says you and I will be his guests while it lasts. The stable lads are trying to clear paths, but he says the drive is too long to be attempted just yet.”

Nanny Mallow nodded portentously. “There. That’s what I mean about him. Kind, generous to a fault, and quite good-looking if you like that kind. I always preferred ‘em dark and brooding with a smile that could turn a girl’s heart inside out. That’s not the sort to marry, though.” She sighed at the thought with reminiscent pleasure. “You could do worse, Miss Camilla.”

The older woman took hold of her hand. “Now, don’t be shy ‘bout this sort of thing. If a girl can’t talk to her elders about love, she’s left on her own, and that’s a bad place to be when you’re young ‘n’ foolish.”

“No fool like an old fool,” Mrs. Duke said from her corner. She’d brought out a skein of gray wool and was knitting along at great speed.

“Hush, Portia Duke. You could go farther and fare worse for a mistress than any girl raised by my Miss Lolly.”

Camilla balked at the thought of anyone calling her mother “Lolly.” As a matter of fact, she couldn’t think of anyone anymore who called her mother anything save “Mrs. Twainsbury.” Thus she lost her moment to declare that nothing would make her think of marrying Sir Philip.

“My Miss Lolly was a bit wild when she was a girl, maybe so, but she soon learned the error of her ways. Life’s been more than a little hard on her, but she soon learned that being down-to-earth and no-nonsense was the way to get on.”

“Wild?” Camilla coughed, “My mother?”

“Oh, not a hurly-burly girl by any means, just a bit... neither to lead nor to drive. The more she was told she couldn’t nor shouldn’t, the more headstrong she grew. I knew how to handle her, but those parents of hers ...” She clicked her tongue in derision. “She never would have run off with your father if they’d let him come calling at the house like a Christian ‘stead of forcing ‘em into meeting behind hedges and in the church on Monday mornings.”

Camilla pressed her fingers hard to her temple, feeling as if the top of her head was about to spin off. She’d never heard a word of this before. Her parents—a runaway marriage?

“I hadn’t realized,” she began carefully, “that my Feldon grandparents were opposed to my father.”

“Oh, they came around by the time Linnet was born, but for the first year or two, not a word passed between ‘em. My Miss Lolly didn’t care a twig. She wasn’t the sort to come crawling back on her hands ‘n’ knees, no, not if she were starving, which they pretty near did that first year. They lived in lodgings not far from where I was employed at the time, so I’d see ‘em now and again with the hind end of a loaf or a few scones in my basket. Not a shred had she but the clothes she’d gone away in, and a few things she’d bundled into a bandbox, but she was just as gay and merry as any bride should be.”

Gay? Merry? It was hard to imagine her stern, proper mother as a spoiled, ardent girl determined to throw her heart over the windmill. Perhaps Nanny was confusing her mother with some other young girl she’d attended. “This was in Portsmouth, Nanny?”

“No. No, Canterbury. My employer lived in the shadow of the cathedral, or so his wife liked to say. Proud, stuck-up piece she was, no better than she ought to be, as I learned later.”

Camilla breathed a sigh of relief. “My sister was born in Portsmouth, not Canterbury. You must be thinking of someone else, Nanny, not my mother.”

“Not your mother? Pshaw! Little Lolly was my first charge as a sole nursery maid. I’d worked under Nanny Langton as undernursery maid at Viscount D’Arby’s town house—coo, she was a tartar if ever there was one. Regular Attila the Hun in petticoats.” She shook her head. “Finicky, my heavens! Always turned out neat as a cat in pattens, and that’s not such a simple matter when you’re in charge of five holy terrors all under the age of six. I stayed out my year, but that was quite enough.”

“So you went to my grandparents?”

“That’s it. Came to them just after the month. Tiny thing she was. First baby I ever saw with curls, sausage curls, and she hardly born. I remember ‘em curling up again, spry as springs, after the parson wet her little head. She never cried a tear either, just smiled up and tried to catch the parson’s linen. I remember brushing those curls round ‘n’ round m’finger. She kept them all her life, too. Why, I couldn’t forget my first baby.”

“No, of course not,” Camilla said soothingly, more confident yet that Nanny had grown confused. Though she’d but rarely seen her mother without the stern widow’s caps she affected, she knew that there was not now, nor could there ever have been, curls in her hair. She wore it in smooth bands without even a fringe to soften it. Camilla well recalled how gravely her mother had read her a lecture on vanity when she had, several years ago, wantonly cut her hair so that it curled softly on her cheeks as she’d seen in a ladies’ magazine. It had been rather flattering, or so Camilla had thought, but when her hair grew out, she did not cut it again.

Once more seeking to change the subject, Camilla brought up something that she knew would interest Nanny Mallow. “I wanted to tell you that Rex is doing very well.”

“You saw him today?”

“No, last night. He was lying by the fire, looking happy as the king he was named for. Chasing rabbits in his sleep, if I’m any judge.”

“In the house? Oh, ho, her la’ship won’t care for that!”

“He was there by Sir Philip’s invitation.”

“That’s all right, then,” Nanny said, ignoring the snort from the corner. “You see how kind he is. And so good with the children, though well I know what a nuisance little girls can be to the gentlemen. But he always takes time to speak to them, and I know he had one of little Grace’s daubs framed and hung up in his dressing room. She said it was him on his favorite horse, but bless her little heart, it looked no more like that than a plate of cold vermicelli.”

“Aye, he’s fond enough of them,” Mrs. Duke said. She sat knitting like a chorus out of some Greek play. “Considerin’ how he never came nigh ‘em ‘til the master died. Off gallivanting t’ the four corners of the world, he was, and her la’ship here on her own with three little ‘uns to raise up in the way they should go. Not so much as a penny whistle at Christmastide either.”

“Gallivanting? Gallivanting? When you’ve heard with your own ears Dr. Marsh say how he saw him wounded in that sink o’ sin, Paris, France.” The amount of venom infused into the name of the French capital could have poisoned the whole city.

“And whose ears would I use, Mrs. Mallow? I heard him, right enough, but who’s to say how he came by that wound? He weren’t in no regiment
I
ever heard of,” she said with the air of one who studied the Army List regularly for her light entertainment.

Though it undoubtedly fell under the heading of the strictly banned “gossiping with the servants,” Camilla added her might to the conversation. “Oh, Dr. March told that story at dinner last night.”

She suddenly felt like an innocent fishing boat facing the open gunports of an enemy, so attentive did the two ladies become.

“Did he, now? You never told me that, Portia Duke,” Nanny Mallow accused.

“I didn’t know. If my Eunice has been keeping secrets from her ma ...”

“Oh, only Mr. Samson was in the room at the time,” Camilla said, not wishing to cause the maid difficulties.

“He won’t gossip,” Nanny Mallow said. “That’s the worst of him. So what did Dr. March say?”

Camilla told them the tale simply, without any of the flourishes the doctor had added. The two women nodded at each other like wise Mandarins. “ ‘Them what lives by the sword dies by the sword,’ “ Mrs. Duke proclaimed. “That’s in the Bible an’ true as the day it was handed down.”

“Well, he didn’t die by any sword,” Nanny shot back with incontrovertible logic. “ ‘Twas most likely a knife, and he didn’t die anyway. Probably was robbed by one of them nasty, murdering French. Use a knife as soon as look at you if not sooner. Poor lamb’s lucky not to be buried in a pauper’s grave with a foreign priest a-mumbling over him an’ all his bits and bobs handed over to the French king.”

“What would he want with Sir Philip’s old clothes?” Mrs. Duke scoffed. “Besides, it’s more’n likely he had a fallin’ out with some of those artist fellows. Geniuses, ha! Low’s what I call ‘em. D’you remember the time he brought those friends of his here? Poor as church mice, the lot of ‘em, and not a vail did they hand out while they were here.”