Miss Lindel's Love

“Mother,” Maris said, reaching for the sugar bowl. “Do you need anything from the village?”

“The village, my dear?” Mrs. Lindel brought her attention back from wherever it had wandered. Maris was extremely fond of her mother, but there could be no doubt that her abstracted fits were on the increase. Mrs. Lindel looked over her shoulder at the morning room window. “Isn’t it raining?”

“Not so very hard,” Maris said, though the drumming on the roof made her a liar.

“Cosby says the horses don’t like the rain.”

“I wasn’t going to bother the stables, Mother. I’ll walk. I like to walk in the rain.” Besides, Cosby took advantage of his privileges as an old family servant to report on her movements. Today, she wanted no watch kept.

Half an hour later, her mother’s list and a swatch of silk thrust into a pocket, Maris stepped out the side door. Casting a glance into the sky, she drew the hood of her cloak over her blond head and put up her umbrella. It was not a long walk into the village of Danesby, two miles or so, but she kept to the wet, springy grass on the verge of the road, making better time there than through the muddy ruts of the road itself. She arrived breathless but in time.

“Maris!” A handkerchief fluttered above the shining gray stones of the low wall that separated the vicarage from the street.

Catching a second wind, she looked carefully both ways and hurried across, taking care to hold her skirt and cloak away from the sticky brown ooze. The soil in this part of the south was half good earth and half clay. As Maris reached the wicket gate in the wall, she shook her head disgustedly. ‘Too thick for planting and too thin to make good pots.”

Glancing up and down the inner wall, she saw no sign of her bosom friend. “Lucy?” she called, sure she’d seen that handkerchief.

“Over here,” Lucy called hoarsely from a clump of spindly trees in the corner.

The untidy vicarage, badly in need of painting wherever the gray stone walls were interrupted by windows or doors, was a cheerful-looking building, even in the rain, well suited to the family who lived in it. A dirt-crusted trowel, a battledore without its shuttlecock, a crooked stick with a crosspiece nailed low to give the sword its haft, all left out in the rain spoke silently of the interests of the rest of the family. Lucy would sooner have slept in the rain herself than leave one of her precious books out to be so abused.

The Reverend Dr. Timothy Pike had given his height to all his offspring, including his only daughter, Lucy. As a result, she stooped, trying to make herself smaller. She had also inherited his high-bridged nose, softened by her mother’s slanted dark eyes.

Maris crossed the long grass, the wet marking her skirt and cloak. “Why under the trees?”

Lucy ran a loose strand of mist-frosted hair behind her ear. “I don’t want Mother to call me in. She is drawing a bath for Ryan. He was filthy.”

“Ryan usually is, isn’t he?”

Lucy giggled and nodded. “Worse than usual, though. He was digging in the garden—excavating, he calls it. He even had mud in his hair. Alexander and Conner combined were cleaner than Ryan, though not by much.”

From the way the Pikes talked, one could be forgiven for thinking Ryan was a small boy of nine or ten. In fact, he was seventeen, taller than his father, and had already begun to make something of a name for himself as an Oxford scholar. The two younger boys showed considerable promise as well, though Alexander preferred boats to dirt and Conner had already memorized huge passages of the Bible.

“Mother was so angry,” Lucy went on. “She thought he could have stayed out of the dirt just for today, with the party tonight and all. He says he forgot about it but how could he when it’s all we’ve spoken of for a week?”

“I don’t think parties make much of an impression on men’s minds,” Maris said with a worldly-wise air.

She stooped to pat the small, damp dogs at Lucy’s feet. Gog shivered all over, nose to tail, with pleasure, while Magog pawed at the air, his pop eyes fixed on her face. With a rueful laugh, she drew from her pocket a grease-paper roll with a few tidbits saved from breakfast.

Lucy made a token protest. “They’re too fat already. The boys are always slipping treats to them under the table. Father scolds but they don’t listen.”

“Considering how often I’ve seen your father do the same, you can hardly blame the little ones.”

Lucy smiled. “I suppose example is better than precept.” When Lucy smiled or laughed, she was transformed. Her skin pinkened, her eyes widened, and light seemed to shine from within. Regrettably, she seldom smiled, having confessed long ago to Maris that she felt her teeth weren’t good enough for display.

“Shall we go?” Maris asked rhetorically, already leading the way out of the gate.

With an anxious look over her shoulder at the vicarage, Lucy followed, hunched in her own cloak as if hoping not to be seen. “Maybe we’re too late,” she suggested, half hopefully, catching up to Maris. Maris held the umbrella higher to shelter her friend. “I heard that if his lordship doesn’t leave by noon, he’ll not arrive in town until almost midnight.”

“Roger said the parish meeting would be over at ten o’clock and that
he
was
leaving immediately afterwards.”

“I do wish you wouldn’t gossip with servants, Maris. Mother says that nothing could be more un-genteel.”

“Roger’s not a servant. He’s a waiter and I’ve known him my whole life. If being a lady means snubbing one’s oldest friends, on the whole, I’d rather not bother.”

The dogs trotted wheezily alongside the girls, only to be picked up and tucked under each girl’s arm when they came to the muddy street. There’d been heavy snows that winter and with the first warmth of spring, the runnels down the sides of the street had overflowed. Farmers were saying it would be good year for planting, but it was a bad spring for walking.

“I should have worn pattens,” Lucy moaned.

“Hold up your skirts. All the girls are showing their ankles this year.”

“Oh, no. I’m sure you’re wrong.”

“I’ll bring along my
Ladies’ Magazine
tonight and you’ll see.”

“Father says all fashion is a snare. One need only be clean and clothed to be fashionable in God’s eyes.”

“Very true,” Maris agreed, having occasionally when younger, and not so very much younger, she confessed, kept only the clothed part of that commandment. “But, alas, London thrives on fashion and since I must go to London, so must I.”

“Do you think you’ll see
him
in town?” Lucy whispered.

“I imagine I shall,” She tossed the words off. Though she and Lucy had been bosom beaus since their earliest childhood, having met even before they could toddle, there were some secrets she kept locked in her most secret imaginings.

Not even under torture would she have confessed the wild daydreams that often brought a smile to her lips even as she acknowledged their implausibility. Saving Lord Danesby from a runaway horse, boldly standing by him when all the
ton
turned him away on discovering his nameless crimes, nursing him through every terrible disease in the calendar...

She would be eighteen in a month. Surely it was past time for her to grow up and put such childish fancies behind her. A month after her birthday, she would be in town, making her curtsy to the polite world. She and her mother would stay with Mrs. Elvira Paladin, an old friend of Mrs. Lindel’s with a daughter of her own to launch. The two families were joining forces for the conquest of suitable suitors. Miss Paladin would be in her second Season, having failed to take during the first. Maris prayed that particular disaster would not overtake her.

Yet, try as she might, she could not reconcile her conflicting wishes. On the one hand, she knew she must find at least a fiancé by the end of the Season. Sophie, sixteen, would expect her chance next year. There wasn’t enough money in the Lindels’ coffers to send either girl twice.

On the other hand, how could she marry anyone who didn’t live up to the image she had enshrined in her heart? She dreaded the thought of marrying without true affection, yet the one she adored was so far removed from her that even her dreams were forced to conform to reality. She relinquished his hand far more often than she achieved it—usually retiring to a nunnery despite having never been nor ever wished to be a Catholic.

The most she could hope for, Maris decided, would be to find a man who truly loved her, enough to overlook her more obvious faults. She would pray that one day she would come to appreciate her husband’s qualities and virtues. “I suppose I could always take comfort in good works,” she mumbled, thinking it all sounded very dreary.

The dogs, their tiny bodies surprisingly heavy with muscle, wriggled and writhed to be let down as soon as the girls came within smelling distance of the old inn’s stables.

“All right, Gog,” Maris said. She let Gog down and he took off instantly, his claws scrabbling on the cobblestones. Magog yapped, eager to follow her mate. Through some strange affinity, both dogs adored horses. Whenever the vicarage gate was inadvertently left ajar, the pugs would make a beeline for the stables. The horses seemed to like the company, or at any rate, not to mind it.

Maris was also fond of horses. She had loved to ride with her father in long jaunts over the countryside. But upon his death all the riding horses had been sold. Mrs. Lindel preferred a quiet stroll or a gentle airing in her barouche. “Dashing ladies of high degree may ride neck-or-nothing,” she warned, “but a gentleman’s daughter must make decorum her watchword.”

Maris did try, though she chafed under all the restrictions. She didn’t mind their reduced income nearly so much as the forced inaction of her mother’s notions of propriety. They had not been Mr. Lindel’s. “Don’t you be missish, Maris. Airs and graces are all very well but I’d rather see you stand up and hit out.”

Maris laughed suddenly as they entered the inn’s yard and Lucy looked questioningly at her, “Nothing,” she said. “I was just thinking how pleasant it must be to be an orphan.”

“Oh, no,” Lucy protested. “So lonesome. A girl needs someone to look out for her.”

“True. Perhaps I shouldn’t like to be one all the time, only once in a while.”

Lucy’s brow wrinkled. “You mean, have a guardian?”

“Something of the sort,” Maris said, to relieve her friend’s mind. Dr. Pike was the undisputed master of his house, Mrs. Pike having an even greater belief in his superiority than he himself. Even Ryan had acceded to his father’s wishes and had agreed to take holy orders as well as pursue his scientific interests. The storm that had hovered over the vicarage while this issue was hammered out had cast a damper over the entire winter. Several times, Lucy had stayed home to pour oil on the waters rather than attend an assembly. Rather than go without her, Maris had fabricated headaches on each occasion until Mrs. Lindel was quite sure Maris was falling into a decline.

Lucy and Maris had lamented together when, on one of the evenings they had missed, Lord Danesby had made an appearance. They had rejoiced upon learning, from a despised rival, that Lord Danesby had danced with none of the young ladies present, having only looked in on the way back from some political dinner and not having been dressed for dancing. Each had assured the other that he would have been sure to dance with them both, no matter how informal his attire.

Lucy clutched at Maris’s arm. “That’s his carriage,” she whispered.

“Of course. We’ve seen it a hundred times.”

“What if he’s in it?”

“He isn’t. The driver isn’t up yet.” Indeed, the shining black carriage had its door open, waiting for its master. The colored crest on the door panel caught the light, the gilding glinting over the three gaunt leopards and wavy lines that represented the channel his ancestor had crossed seven hundred fifty years ago. His horses, too, were black and so glossy with health and good care they looked as though they’d been carved from onyx. They danced with eagerness to be off. The coachman stood near them, draining off a last pint.

Maris might have felt sorry for him, riding all the way to London without shelter from the rain, if she hadn’t been perfectly aware that somewhere in his voluminous coat a flask had been stowed to “keep the cold out.” If it had not been raining, the flask would have helped to “keep the dust out.” Everyone knew that Albert Hughes drank too much.

That was the worst part of living all her life in one place, she’d decided long ago. Not only did everyone know all about her, she knew all about everyone else. Except for one person. He alone remained a mystery.

“Let’s go into the inn.”

“Oh, no,” Lucy said, gripping her arm again. Maris began to wish her friend had been a little more diligent about trimming her fingernails. “We mustn’t. We couldn’t.”

“It’s all right. I have a message from my mother to deliver. Unless you want to wait for me here. After all, I might miss seeing him.”

“I couldn’t stand out here by myself. How odd that would look.” Lucy shook her head as though a shiver had passed over her. “It’s just, I’ve never been inside the King’s Oak in all my life.”