Elisabeth Fairchild (22 page)

He nodded. “He will be glad to hear of it. Walks the fells, he does. Every day. Paces the room like a man possessed. No patience for fishing. Seems a bit melancholy since the wedding.”

And she, the reason, she thought, tongue cleaving to the top of her mouth.

 “You know we leave in three days?” he said.

“I was unaware.” As her father had said, then, it was true. She felt them lost to her already.

Oscar ran a finger along the ridges in his cane pole. “I know it is forward of me to ask, but do you mean to speak to him?”
She said nothing for a moment, took a deep breath, and said, “Yes, of course. I must thank Mr. Shelbourne for what he did yesterday for my father, the flock.”

“He did it for you, you know. Loves you, he does. Do you love him?” he asked flatly, catching her off guard.

She threw back her head,  one hand clutching the brown paper parcel from the apothecary’s,  the other covering her mouth, the mouth he had kissed, oh, so long ago. She mumbled, “I am not certain he still loves me.”

“Surely you jest. I have never seen him so besotted.”
She frowned. “But, perhaps he has told you . . . I asked of him, something I should not have.”
“Enough that he could not forgive you for it?” He lost hold of his line,  the hooked end swinging in her direction like the pendulum in a clock.
“I am very much afraid so.” Nimbly, she grabbed the line, and handed it back to him.

He clasped it more carefully to the pole, saying, “You could go to him now. He was asleep when I left, but must be up by now.”
She imagined him in bed, eyes closed, face gone soft with sleep, as he had been after his fall from Nichol’s chair. “I cannot. Felicity . . . ”
“Needs you?” He finished the thought.

Did she imagine it, or was there the faintest trace of derision in the way he said the words?

As she rode away, all she could think of was the sin of which Alexander Shelbourne had condemned her. Self-sacrifice.

Morning found Felicity fretting and feverish with a rasping cough and watery eyes. An exhausted Val rocked her in his arms, gently trying to coax her into drinking a milky liquid.

“If you will swallow like a good girl, I will give you horehound drops.” Penny said from the doorway.

Val looked up with a sigh of relief. “I began to think you did not mean to come,” he said.

“As promised,” she said. “But, you do quite well without me.”

“Do not say so,”groaned. “I have been up all night.”
“Well, now I have come, you must rest,” she said.

He seemed happy to oblige, and went away as soon as Felicity had taken her medicine. 

Rain dominated the afternoon,  a great, noisy, soaking deluge that turned the muddy roads to an impassable morass. She stood in the window at Wharton Manor, listening to Felicity’s ragged breathing, listening to wind driven sheets of rain batter the window pane, and wondered if Alexander Shelbourne might postpone his leaving. She hoped he would.

She had nursed her hurt, her belief that he was wrong, and she was right. She had held it close to her, waiting for him to call on her, to apologize. She knew now, on this rain-drenched afternoon, that he would not call, that he was not in any way to blame for the child who murmured uneasily in the bed behind her.

It had taken years of individual actions--hers, Val’s, Eve’s--for the child to end up here, prostrate and ill. She knew, in a way, that this illness was in some way a gift from God to Val, that he might rise above his weaknesses, and strive to be a whole man.

Not a drop had he had to drink since she had come to care for Felicity. Haggard and sunken eyed he might be, but he was sober, anxious to help in Felicity’s care, humble in accepting her assistance.

And as much as she wanted to be indispensable to him, to Felicity, she knew, deep inside that it was best if they were not so completely dependant upon her, best that she trust in him. If he would carry the burden of responsibility, she must allow him to do so. Felicity was his daughter, after all, and it was clear from the way he tended her, from the way he had written down the visiting physician’s every suggestion, that he meant to do his best.

She set off down the stairs at the noon hour, ready to ride again to Appleby, thinking as she went, of Alexander Shelbourne, of all that she must say to him, of how she would beg him to believe in her again, to refuse to let her go.

With complete astonishment she met Yarrow’s response to her question, “Is your master better rested now?”

“I hardly think so, miss. It is difficult to rest, horseback.”

“I do not understand.”

“Rode away, miss. Right after your arrival.”

“Gone?” she said in disbelief. “Where?”

Yarrow stared blankly at the wall. “His lordship did not see fit to inform me, miss.”

Rained faded what little daylight they had, into evening. What had slowed to a gentle mist became a peltering assault with the coming darkness, thunder rumbling.

Alexander shared a dinner of the latest catch with Oscar at the King’s Head: fresh trout, grilled in butter and dill. The pale flesh fell from the bones, flakey and moist.

He agreed to Oscar’s suggestion of a game of darts afterward, in the pub, “But first,” he said. “I would check on the gray.”

“And a quick trot out to the Foster farm to ask after the flock?” Oscar asked with a wink.

Alexander shrugged, trying not to smile. “Just a quick walk down Bridge Street to clear the smoke from my lungs, and to check on the gray,” he insisted.

Appleby squatted in the rain, gutters running full, the sight of other people’s lives framed golden in lamp lit windows. How he had longed for such light, and crackling fires, and a full belly on many a march. How easy, he thought, to step inside and forget. It was only in standing outside, dripping wet, looking in, that the memories flooded back again. Memories he ought not forget. Must not. Must not grow complacent--to the bounty that was his.

Oscar’s suggestion that he ought to ride out to the Foster’s, to ask after the state of the flock, to encounter, God-willing, one more time, Penny Foster, seemed part of that bounty he ought not take for granted.

It was in the stables he set eyes first on Val’s horse, then Val himself, as he staggered in out of the rain, bellowing for his bay to be saddled, “At once!”

Too familiar that tone in his voice, the drunken weave of his gait.

“Stand still,” he admonished the beast gruffly when it was held for him, and he could not see fit to put foot to stirrup.

“So, Val! “Alexander stepped from the shadows of the gray’s stall. “Miss Foster’s glowing reports of your transformation were premature.”
Val swung his head heavily,  raindrops flying from drenched locks. as he settled rump in the saddle. He blinked a moment without recognition. “Pox on the woman,” he drawled. “Pox on you, as well, Cupid.”

Alexander frowned. “And the child?”

Val laughed, rubbing his nose dry on dripping sleeve. “Have you not heard?” he asked. “Brought a pox home with her, little vixen.” He turned the horse toward the rain curtained doorway.
Alexander called after him. “You cannot go on like this, Val. Must not.”
Val stopped the horse, with a wrench of the reins, and without turning said, “Could not go on listening to the voices, Cupid.”

“Voices?” Alexander breathed in disbelief. He knew what voices, and yet this was the first time he had heard mention of them from Val, whom he had believed impervious to bad memories.

Val’s voice rose with the flash of lightening. “Do not pretend you never hear them.”
“I hear them.” Alexander admitted. “In the wind, and yesterday at Foster’s farm.”
Val turned at that, eyes gleaming, “Yes. The cry of the lambs.”

A moment of grim silence hung between them, the horses shuffling in their stalls, the ostler’s lad wide-eyed, still holding the door wide for Val, the warm smell of hay and dung and musky rain enfolding them, safe from the wet rumble of thunder and awful memories.

“Mercy.” Val murmured, shifting in the saddle, leaning low that he might clear the doorway, digging home his spurs. The bay leapt into violent motion, through the curtain of rain and into the night, as Val said savagely, “And we showed them none.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

Sadly, Alexander rode into the bleakest of nights, not to follow Val, not to try to resurrect a friendship that withered on the vine, but to visit, one last time, the Foster farm, that he might see how the flock did, that he might wish Penny farewell.

Disappointment met him when he arrived to find her gone.

“Tending the child again,” her father said, as they warmed themselves by the fire over cups of coffee. “Not yet come home. She will likely be late again, like last night. Came in an hour or more after you left us. Let me thank you again for that. Up with the roosters this morning, Penny was.”
“How does Felicity do?” he asked.

“Feverish. She said the child had bumps.” The old man shook his head. “Contagious, she feared, and yet she is not convinced it is smallpox, as was assumed.”

“What then?”

He shrugged. “I only know she asked me to keep my distance until she was certain she had not contracted the illness.”

“And the flock, sir?”

“Ah. Kind of you to ask, lad.” He said it with shaken head and a drawn out sigh. “Seven dead, including the lambs, a half dozen more very shaky on their pins, and yet I think we are over the worst of it if the newborns do not catch chill from this dreadful downpour.” He went to the window and peered out. “I will be that glad when Penny finds herself a husband to help with the flock on wet evenings like this. I’ve a touch of the rheumatism, you see. “
Alexander nodded. “My father suffers, when the wind blows from the northwest.”

Mr. Foster tossed the dregs of his coffee on the fire. “It is a dreadful thing, this getting older, lad. Tell me, do you still mean to avoid growing a day or so older here in Appleby? Will you be leaving us if the roads are knee-deep in mud?”

Alexander thought about it a moment, the aroma of whiskied coffee warm against his nose, the patter of the rain threatening an uncomfortable ride back to the inn. “I’ve nothing to keep me here,” he said. “And decisions to be made about a future outside the military. I would not be dependent upon my father’s largess, you see.”

The old man laughed dryly. “And here I was thinking you might be dreaming of depending upon mine.”
Alexander squinted at him over the brim of his cup.

Mr. Foster smiled. “I could just see you making my girl happy, perhaps giving her a wee one of her own, so she need not mourn  Felicity’s going.”
Alexander cleared his throat. “I had at one time, just such a picture in my own head.”

“No longer?” The old man’s brow furrowed.

Alexander felt he owed Penny’s father the truth. “I fear she loves the child more than me, sir.”
“No, lad.” His voice carried the amusement of a parent who thought he knew all there was to know about their child. Alexander knew it an unmerited confidence.
“We had words,” he said.
“Will you not go to Wharton and speak to her?”

Alexander rubbed his brow and stood. “I am unwelcome there. You will tell her I called? That I shall try to call again before I go?”
“Aye, lad. I’ll tell her right enough. She’ll be sorry to have missed you.”

Mr. Foster walked him to the door, and as Alexander donned his hat, he said, “I would not be one to stand in your way, son, if you see fit to change your mind and hers.”

Warmed by the words, Alexander looked him in the eyes, clapped him briskly on the shoulder, and stepped into the spattering mist.

The rain continued,  damp, dismal and unending, and Penny, unwilling to leave Felicity alone in the care of the maids,  sat at the window and waited for Val’s return by clouded moonlight.

She fell asleep before he galloped home again, cheek cradled in her arm, face pressed to the cold pane. Her back was bent into a most uncomfortable position when she woke to word from the maid, “The master has returned. In the wee hours.”

She was on her way downstairs to give him a piece of her mind when Felicity roused,  begging for a drink.

The child’s forehead felt cooler. Her color seemed less elevated. She suffered nothing but the trace of a cough, and a rash of worrisome white bumps behind her ears.

“May I get up?” Felicity wanted to know, and Penny said she saw no reason to keep her confined.

“You may play quietly with your dolls,” she said, as she gazed out of the window, in the direction of Appleby, looking for a man, as she had the night before. Not Val, of course. She had but to walk downstairs to find Val.

“Do not let me catch you running about without slippers on your feet,” she said absently, turning from the sight of an empty road.

When Felicity drank broth with greedy enthusiasm, and asked if she might have toast, cut in fingers, to dunk in it,  Penny believed the worst was over. With exhausted elation, she went to tell Val his daughter recovered. She found him in the library,  lounging in a wingback chair by the fire, a pistol in his lap, glass in hand, a decanter on the table beside him.

“Do I disturb you?” she asked curtly.

“Not unless you bring me bad news or lectures,” he said with a negligent wave of the glass. “How fares Felicity?”