In for a Penny (8 page)

Of course, there was nothing else
to
think about, except what awaited him at Loweston, and Nev did not want to think about that. Unlike his bride, he had not brought a book. He was bored, bored, bored. He longed to be out in the open air, spelling the coachman with the horses—but that would be rude to his wife, and besides, he could not drive the horses as fast as he would like, because they weren’t changing them at the next stage. Every time his restless mind began to search for a new topic, it brought up unwelcome, all-too-pleasant images of Amy or his friends or even a damned game of solitaire. Nev had sworn off cards along with liquor and horse racing and women of easy virtue, and so all that was left was mentally undressing his wife, over and over again.

To make matters worse, the interior of the carriage, even with the windows open to their fullest extent, had become unbearably hot. The day before had been cloudy, but this afternoon there was no such shelter from the elements. Nev’s black coat, pantaloons, and boots were suffocating him, and
even Penelope in her short-sleeved carriage dress was starting to wilt. July was a poor time for long journeys in full mourning. Nev was well aware that in a few minutes he would be indulging in thoughts of the most unfilial kind—viz, if only Papa had had the decency to die in the winter, when it was not so damned hot!

Then, as he watched, a trickle of sweat ran down Penelope’s collarbone and into the space between her breasts, and Nev had had enough. “What are you reading?”

She laid down the book readily enough. “
Mansfield Park
, by Miss Austen.”

“Are you enjoying it?”

She looked away. “Not quite as much as I did the first time. I don’t think—” She licked her lip. “I don’t think she likes music very much,” she finished awkwardly.

He could have sworn that wasn’t what she’d been planning to say. “She doesn’t?”

“Well…” She flipped through the book. “In this scene she talks of Miss Crawford playing—here it is—‘with an expression and taste which were peculiarly becoming.’ Not pleasing or inspiring,
becoming
. And it is not even her playing that ensnares Edmund, but rather the elegant picture she makes with the harp.”

Suddenly Nev found he was in complete harmony with her. “Plenty of young ladies make a dashed elegant picture with their harp! But most of them don’t practice sufficiently, or haven’t the feeling for it. Even if they are proficient enough, one grows bored after a very few minutes. One certainly doesn’t fall in love with them.”

She gave him an approving smile; he tried not to feel as proud as if he’d slain a dragon for her.

“This is too bad,” he said. “I’d been planning to read Miss Austen’s work, for Sir Walter Scott gave one of her books a most favorable review in the
Quarterly
—”

Penelope raised an eyebrow. “You have been planning it a long time, then. That review was three years ago.” Her eyes glinted with amusement.

“I’ve been busy. Besides, now I am thinking of changing my mind.

‘The man that hath no music in himself,

Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,

Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils;

The motions of his spirit are dull as night

And his affections dark as Erebus:

Let no such man be trusted.’”

“
Merchant of Venice
,” she said. Damn her, she looked startled. It wasn’t even an obscure quote.

“I’m not quite a dullard, even if I can’t audit a banker’s books.”

“I’m sorry. I should have known better. You took a first at Cambridge, didn’t you?”

It was his turn to be startled. “How the dev—how on earth did you know that?”

She bit her lip and gave him a mirthful sidelong glance. “My mother looked you up in
Debrett’s
.”

“Really,” he said, fascinated. “What else do you know about me?”

She considered, a smile playing around her mouth. “I think I shall keep the strategic advantage best by not telling you. I don’t think that quote is quite fair, anyway. Edward is tone-deaf, and he—” She stopped, looking stricken.

“Ah, yes, Edward,” Nev said cautiously. “He is like a brother to you, is he not? You correspond.” Then why did she look guilty as sin every time his name came up?

“Not very often.”

“Well, that is only to be expected, isn’t it?” Nev was startled at the undercurrent of anger in his own voice, but he
couldn’t stop. “Brothers are notoriously bad correspondents. But sisters are rather different creatures. And you, presumably, are like a sister to Edward—”

She shot him a furious, cornered glance. “Stop it! We quarreled, all right?”

Well, he had wanted to know, and now he did. Penelope and Edward had quarreled between Penelope’s betrothal and her wedding. What else could it be about? He wanted desperately to inquire further, but something stopped him.
It’s none of my affair
, he thought. Well, that was patently ridiculous. Of course it was his affair; Penelope was his wife. But he felt, nonetheless, that he had no right to demand confidences. She had married him; he was sure she would not betray him. That would have to suffice.

Penelope was staring out the window. He did not think she was seeing the landscape.

“I’m sorry,” he said, clumsily. “Surely—surely he’ll come around, in time.”

She shrugged. Then, with an effort, she turned and smiled at him. “Maybe so. I do recommend Miss Austen’s work. As Sir Walter wrote, her writing is astonishingly entertaining and lifelike. There are none of the constant swoons and desperate duels amidst Gothic ruins that one sees so often in the work of other novelists.”

“But they are novels,” Nev said with some surprise. “I never imagined they were supposed to be lifelike. That is not their purpose.”

“But they
can
be. They
ought
to be. Have you ever
read
a horrid novel?”

In fact, Nev’s shameful fondness for the Minerva Press had been an open secret among his peers since Lower Shell at school. But he found he had not the heart to admit it, not when Penelope’s eyes were flashing scornfully. “I prefer poetry, myself,” he said, “but my sister is uncommonly fond of
The Castle of Otranto
.” Damn. He would have to inform Louisa
of that as soon as possible, before she let slip that she generally read nothing but tales of knights and accounts of the doings of pirates, the bloodier the better. Oh, and Byron’s poems, but only because he was so handsome, and
The Corsair
was about a pirate, after all.

“Much may be forgiven the enthusiasm of youth, but
I
could never read that book without a shudder—not at the horror or pathos of the material, but at the woodenness of the prose, the improbability of the action, and the flatness of the characters! It and its ilk never taught us to know ourselves or our fellows better; it never inspired the spark of recognition that Miss Austen achieves so effortlessly. I never felt, while reading, that here was
myself
.”

“Perhaps so,” Nev said, stung, “but one doesn’t always wish to be oneself. Sometimes it can be pleasant to imagine oneself as a dark hero tormented by his sinful past, or a noble knight capable of saving a fainting female with one blow of his lance.”

She leaned forward, her cheeks flushed. Nev tried not to look at her bosom. “Do you have any notion how galling it is to see oneself everywhere portrayed as a fainthearted creature incapable of a single coherent speech or thought? Existing merely to be abused by one’s guardian or abducted by an unprincipled rake? I never fainted in my life, and I am quite as capable of self-exertion and rational thought as Sir Horace Walpole.”

Nev, prey to the lowering suspicion that his wife was a good deal more capable of self-exertion and rational thought than he was himself, turned the subject. “If you are so hot on the subject of Gothic ruins, you won’t be best pleased when you see Loweston.”

“Is there a ruin? Surely Mama would have mentioned that.”

“Oh, there’s a ruin, all right. A ruined corner of a medieval Ambrey fortress, on a hill near the house.”

She nodded sagely. “I expect most of the stones were carried away for reuse. Papa took Mama and me to Canterbury once, and all the old abbeys were nearly down to the foundations.”

“I’m afraid most of the stones were never there at all. It was built by my grandfather.”

She stared for a moment, then started to laugh. “Oh, dear.”

“You should have read
Debrett’s
more carefully. We haven’t been at Loweston long enough to have family ruins. If you were hoping we dated to the Conquest, you’ve been most cruelly deceived. The first earl was one of Charles the Second’s by-blows.”

“Alas, Mama only read me the parts about your Cambridge career and your grandfather’s art collection.”

He tsked.

She shook her head regretfully. “If only I had thought of it, I might have refused you and waited for an earl with a genuine ruin!”

He realized all at once how little she
had
sought to find out about him. She had not asked or investigated anything—she had accepted him on the spot, on an acquaintance of a few minutes. Would she have accepted any peer with full use of his limbs?

He had assumed he understood the nature of their bargain: he got her money, while she got his title and his position. After all, the idea of a Cit’s daughter
not
wishing to marry an earl had been utterly foreign to him. Everyone knew that was a self-made man’s goal in life. First he made his millions; then he bought a noble name for his grandchildren; then he sold his business and purchased a house in the country.

But she had never suggested, by word or sign, that she cared a straw for his title or his position. She could not even say that “there was something about a title” without blushing
for her frivolity. Her parents had not pushed her into it; they had been against the match. If he read matters aright, this Edward, no doubt a “good, sensible man,” had wanted to marry her.

What then? Why had she married him?

And was she satisfied with her mysterious side of the deal, or did she regret her choice?

Penelope awoke in an unfamiliar bed, in an unfamiliar room, with unfamiliar sounds leaking in from outside. It took a moment to recall that she was married and at her husband’s seat of Loweston. Yes, now she remembered; the last hour, after they diverged from the highway, had been over terrible country roads. They had stumbled into her new home travelstained and weary, and Nev had simply taken her to “the countess’s room” and given her privacy. After Molly had undressed her, Penelope had gone straight to bed and fallen into a deep sleep. Too deep, evidently, for nerves—her stomach had not troubled her in the mornings since the wedding, for which she was profoundly grateful. Casting up her accounts in front of Nev would have been the worst possible start to a marriage.

Now she sat up and looked about her with interest. The room showed no signs of neglect, even in the bright sunlight streaming in through the enormous picture windows. The furnishings and wallpaper were modern and fashionable. The bureau was cluttered with an array of expensive perfume bottles, rouge jars, and silver brushes and combs that Penelope realized must be the dowager countess’s. She moved to the window—it was late morning, and the room was already close and hot. Opening the casement was not a large improvement and made the cheeping of birds even louder, but at least there was a warm breeze.

The air, though, was clearer and purer than in London. Penelope had forgotten how much. And the view was lovely—a rolling lawn with picturesque stands of trees, winding
paths, and even a narrow, sparkling brook. It did not look in the least neglected or impoverished. For a mad moment, Penelope wondered if Nev could have been mistaken about his financial situation—if he had, in fact, married her for nothing.

A moment’s reflection convinced her of the folly of this notion. She did not know the countess well, nor had she ever met the late earl; but she was not surprised to learn that little economy had been practiced in the park itself. She would have to look over the books to find out where, exactly, it
had
been practiced—if at all.

Yes, Penelope decided, she would have a quick breakfast before asking the steward if she might see the books; it was the only thing here in the country that she still knew how to do. She called for Molly, and when she was dressed asked a passing maid to direct her to the breakfast room.

“Do you know where Lord Bedlow is?” she added.

“He’s in the steward’s room, my lady.”

Penelope decided breakfast could wait.

“Oh, Penelope!” Nev stood up so fast he nearly knocked the chair over. “Perhaps you can make some sense of this.”

She couldn’t help smiling at his obvious relief at seeing her. “I can certainly try.”

She looked about the room—and felt a pang of dismay. Her father would have fired on the spot any agent of his who kept his office in so sorry a state. Open ledgers were everywhere, as were dirty wineglasses, small piles of pipe ash, and broken pens. A bottle of ink had spilled in one corner and been left to dry where it lay.

“Lady Bedlow, may I present Captain Trelawney?” Nev said.

“How do you do?” Penelope said, trying to hide her consternation. The steward looked more promising than his office.
He was an upright, well-built man in perhaps his late forties, with a military mustache and a ruddy complexion.

“At your service, my lady.” His smile struck her as too friendly. “I’m honored. Please, sit down.”

Nev took his seat again once she was settled. “My wife is going to be helping me with the business end of things. She understands these things better than I do.”

Penelope could not help blushing under the captain’s speculative gaze. “What were you discussing with Lord Bedlow?”

“I was explaining the nature of the estate’s expenses and how difficult any new economy would be.” His patronizing tone raised Penelope’s hackles. “As you can see, my lord, Loweston will not run itself, and the harvest is close by.”

Nev nodded uncertainly. It was perfectly clear to Penelope—and, she was sure, to Captain Trelawney—that he could not make heads or tails of the accounts. “May I see?” she asked.

“Certainly, my lady.” The captain smiled and passed the ledger across the table.

Penelope stared. No wonder Nev had been baffled. The accounts were in a largely illegible scrawl—the captain’s, she assumed. She squinted at the page. It appeared to be nothing more than a long tally of expenses, all jumbled together, and every so often a gain from the sale of—she squinted closer—“4 grate oaks” or the like. The last several pages appeared mostly to record the sale of various horses: “Prometheus, a prime goer, to Sir J,” and so on.

“How are the books organized?” she asked at last. “Have you separate accounts for the house and the farm? Surely economies might be most easily made here.”

“Separate accounts?” the captain said in some amusement. “I don’t know how it’s done in London, but I’ve never met a steward who kept separate accounts. Estate books merely show charge and discharge.”

“But then, how can you tell if you’ve made money on a particular venture or if your expenses are rising?” She looked at the expenses more carefully, but it seemed he was right. She saw an outlay for candles cheek-by-jowl with one for feed for the workhorses, and there a record of wages paid to have the lawn scythed.

“Either you’ve a balance or you haven’t, I’m afraid,” he said, confirming her worst fears. It would be next to impossible to make any kind of systematic analysis of where money might best be saved. She thought of her father’s shelves of ledgers, all so clear and neat. All showing a profit.

She glanced at Nev, who had been counting on her to make sense of these chaotic, unreadable books. He was staring longingly out the window at the morning sun. “Is the principal income from the home farm or from rents?” she asked.

The captain chuckled. “Oh, rents, certainly. Fortunately all your tenants are upstanding men who paid even through the recent bad harvests.”

“How many tenants have we?” Penelope asked.

“Four, and good men all.”

Nev turned his head sharply. “Only four? But I thought we had dozens of tenants.”

“Not during my tenure here,” the captain said. “I daresay you mean before your father enclosed the commons, four or five years ago. The majority of your former tenants chose to avoid the expense of the hedges by selling to larger farmers.”

“Oh.” Nev was plainly disconcerted. “Who’s left?”

“Thomas Kedge, John Claxton, Henry Larwood, and William Shreeves. Mr. Kedge has by far the largest part. He pays us almost three thousand pounds per annum in rents and does very well for himself with what remains. The others amount to less than a thousand pounds each.”

“So our income at New Year’s will be…?” Penelope asked.

“Very nearly two thousand pounds and three-quarters.”

She sat appalled. Only a few thousand pounds left of her dowry to last them through the year, and then only a few thousand more to be gained! And Nev thought the estate had been abused; where was the money to refurbish it to come from?

“Will there be much profit on the home farm’s harvest?” Nev asked.

The captain stroked his mustache. “Five hundred pounds at the most. Very likely less. It has not been a good year, though nowhere near so disastrous as ’16, of course. With more funds, perhaps, we might have made more of it, but—” He shrugged, without the least embarrassment at this reference to his late employer’s prodigality, nor with the least consciousness, Penelope thought angrily, of Nev’s stricken look.

“How much of an outlay will we need to make the farm more profitable next year?” Nev said. It had to be asked, but Penelope suspected the answer would not comfort him.

The captain made an airy gesture. “Oh, two thousand pounds at the least.”

Nev stared out the window again, shoulders slumped.

“Why don’t you assemble the last five years’ ledgers and receipts for me to look over? I’ll get them from you this evening,” Penelope said. “Perhaps going over the home farm and visiting our tenants will help us understand what needs to be done. Lord Bedlow, what is your opinion?”

Nev started, then looked hopeful. “Oh, yes. Jolly good idea. I’ll have two horses saddled directly.”

Penelope would have liked to tell him when Captain Trelawney was not by, but then he would have the horses already saddled and he would want to know why she hadn’t said anything, and she would look a fool. “I don’t ride.”

Nev stared at her. “You don’t—you don’t
ride
?”

Penelope could not help glancing at the captain. Sure
enough, his eyebrows had shot up nearly to his graying hairline.

“No,” she said shortly.

Nev’s disappointed look smoothed away into probably false cheer. “No matter. We’ll take the cart.”

They plodded down the tree-lined avenue in silence. Nev had wanted to be on horseback for this, able to gallop off and lose himself in the wind on his face and the ground flashing away beneath him if things got too bad. He would have to teach his wife to ride soon. It wasn’t an unpleasant thought. He glanced at Penelope, sitting quietly beside him in the cart. Her face was hidden by the brim of her bonnet as she gazed out over the lawn. But he could see the rest of her just fine, and she would look nice in a riding habit.

“If we cut down these trees, we might be able to get almost a thousand pounds for them,” she said.

Nev turned to look at her.

A wash of crimson covered her cheeks before she looked away. “I’m sorry,” she said in a small voice. “That was mercantile of me. Of course we can’t cut down the trees, they’ve been here for generations and—”

Nev grinned at her. “I wanted to cut them down myself, but my mother threw a fit.”

She relaxed and smiled at him. He wondered what would happen if he leaned over and kissed her. He probably couldn’t, because of the bonnet. He was calculating his angle when the gardener came into view and the opportunity was lost.

Nev had been encouraged by the appearance of the park when he had looked at it out of his window this morning. Although he knew it couldn’t be true, he had almost hoped for a moment that it was all a sham, that when he looked over Loweston later he would find it as prosperous and flourishing as ever.

He had known it couldn’t be true, and it wasn’t.

Things began to deteriorate as soon as they passed out of sight of the house. Nothing dramatic, at first. The grass was less well-kept, and there were stumps where Nev remembered inviting stands of elms and beeches. Then the path curved through a small wood of trees not valuable enough to be cut down, and they came out in view of the home farm.

There seemed to be fewer people working than Nev remembered from previous years this close to harvest—not that he had ever paid much attention. Indeed, Nev wasn’t sure he would even notice if there were anything wrong with the fields or the equipment. The swaying, ripening wheat ran in thick, crooked rows just as it always had. Was it a little thinner, or was that his imagination? He had no idea. In the distance he could see pastures where sheep grazed, but it was too far off to judge the size or health of the herd.

No, what struck Nev were the men. As a child he had known them all, by sight if not by name. Now he recognized a few faces, but the majority were unfamiliar. They seemed thinner than he remembered, thinner and harsher, somehow. As a child he would ride past them, waving and shouting, and they would wave and shout back. Now they tugged their forelocks or touched their caps in sullen silence.

Nev glanced at his wife. She was shrinking back against the seat, but when she caught his eye she straightened. “I’m sure they will be friendlier when they’ve got to know us better.” Her voice barely shook at all. “They are just unsure of what kind of master you will be.”

Nev was not sure what kind of master he would be either.

“Have you met Mr. Kedge before?” Penelope asked her husband.

“Tom Kedge? A hundred times. A stout man with dirt under his fingernails, a roly-poly wife, and a loud voice. His cottage is half a mile up ahead. His laborers live with him until they marry, so there are always a dozen folk in and out.
Every time I’ve seen Mrs. Kedge she’s been passing someone a mug of ale in one hand and swatting someone with a rolling pin with the other. She used to give me fresh rolls.”

Penelope smiled.

He bit his lip. “I haven’t seen them in years, though.” Then they rounded a bend, and Thomas Kedge’s cottage was visible. It was larger than Penelope had expected, the largest house they had seen along the road—although, of course, on nowhere near the same scale as Loweston Grange itself. Nev whistled. But it was not until they got closer that Penelope realized why; it was larger than he had expected too. The whole left part of the cottage was visibly newer, as were the shingles on the roof. Honeysuckle and roses, along with a local plant she didn’t recognize, were just beginning to creep up a new trellis on the older side of the house.

“Tom Kedge never had glazed windows before!” Nev pulled up the horses in front of a neat drive. “I don’t understand—I thought things had been going poorly here.”

Surely this was a good sign, but Penelope could not appreciate it. She was seized with nervousness. She did not want to meet Nev’s tenants. What if she could find nothing to say to them? What if they disliked her? What if they only gazed at her blankly like the laborers in the field?

Nev looked as uncertain as she felt. He had pulled the cart to a stop, but now merely sat holding the reins. They exchanged rueful smiles. She wished there were something she could do, but she was as out of her depth here as he was; more so, probably. He, at least, was used to the idea of having tenants. Mrs. Kedge had given him fresh rolls.

After half a minute or so, a scrawny boy ran out from behind the house to take the horses. As Nev and Penelope walked up the path, the front door opened and a round woman of middle years stuck her head out the door. “Come in, come in!” As they got nearer, Penelope saw that her blue
muslin gown was nearly new. So was the lace on her cap, though it looked machine-made to Penelope. Her graying hair was inexpertly teased into ringlets around her ears. “I haven’t seen you in so long, Lord Bedlow! Look at you, handsomer than ever! Is this Lady Bedlow?”