My Sweet Folly (26 page)

“Lander?” Folie snorted. “I doubt a shipwreck on an iceberg could kill the man.”

Melinda’s mouth took on a mulish set. She did not reply, but turned to look out the window. Folie suffered the silent reproof, in no mood to cajole for a smile. She had not thought Melinda was so attached to the ferret.

“We have had great success!” Lady Dingley said, proffering a package hopefully. “Look at this pretty blonde lace, Mrs. Hamilton!”

ELEVEN

Robert had no notion where he was. He had walked unseeing, passing among crowds of strangers, carried by the traffic across a river bridge, chagrin and a vehement shame striding with him. He could not have said if he was wandering in London or a Delhi market. He could not stop—if he paused, it seemed as if they might see through him, see inside to a whole futile lifetime spent in hiding.

He walked. But there was no Srí Ramanu, no alien temple to attract him, no place to go with his anger and humiliation. Only dusk falling on a field beyond the last house, aproned housewives arguing on a stoop, the road beneath his feet no longer paved.

He was hungry. The evening wind cut through his cloak. There was a blister on his heel from a pair of new boots.

“I don’t suppose you are a homing ferret,” he said to the muff.

There was no answer from the creature under his arm. Robert peered into the fur. He squeezed it a little, wondering if the thing had smothered itself. Nothing moved.

He poked his gloved finger inside.

“Christ!” He jerked back from the hard nip. It went right through the leather. Robert dropped the bundle and stood nursing his hand. “No doubt you learned this technique from your mistress.”

A deep-throated horn heralded the approach of a stagecoach along the dirt road. Robert retrieved the muff, keeping his hands carefully clear of the openings, and stepped out of the way. After the coach had passed, he stood in the quiet village street. He had hardly been aware of leaving the city. He could see the chimneys and smoke behind him, and smell it too, like the breath of a great panting black dog crouched on the horizon.

A sign creaked on its hinges. “The Highflyer” was lettered in red beneath a painting of a carriage with absurdly tall, light wheels. The advertised inn was hardly so elegant as its namesake, with a lowering thatch roof that hung nearly to the ground and a stone threshold worn so deeply concave that water puddled in it. The bowed tilt of the half-timbered walls seemed almost to defy gravity.

But a warm light fell from the single window onto a tiny garden in bloom with yellow daffodils. Robert’s head ached from lack of food. He pushed open the garden gate and ducked inside the door.

Inside, a portly woman looked up from her knitting. “Good even’, fine sir. What will ye?”

“Dinner?” he asked.

“Aye, that she can.” The woman stood up, setting her work aside. “Cold pork pie, or a mulligatawny soup?”

“Mulligatawny?” Robert echoed in pleased surprise.

“Aye, ‘tis a curry dish, for me son Tucker,” she said apologetically. “It be main tasty, but full o’ spice. That Tucker Moloney, he got such a relish for the peppery morsel off there in India! Maybe ye’d take to the pie better.”

“Keep the pie.” He grinned. “I’m an old Qui Hai myself.”

“Oh, you won’t think I know them words, but I do! I do!” The tip of her nose turned red when she laughed. “A gentleman of Bengal, aye. My Tucker taught his old mother a good bit o’ that talk. I could listen to him go on for hours, I could.”

“Tenth Regiment, Bengal Infantry,” Robert said approvingly. “You are an excellent student. Where was your son?”

“Madras,” she said promptly, and then added with a wink, “A Mull. But I’ll have your soup up in a blink, sir—you look some weary and leer. Ale for you?”

Robert nodded. He settled in an age-blackened booth beside the fire, looking up at the cutlass hung below a native
havildar’s
foraging cap. A cheerful shepherd dog nosed up to him, black and white tail wagging, and sat down with an ecstatic sigh under Robert’s stroke.

“What pleasing manners,” he murmured. “Not like some ferrets I might name.”

The landlady’s white cap bobbed up from the depths of a staircase. She carried a steaming bowl and a spoon. “Get away now, Skipper,” she said, nudging the dog with a foot. “There’s your pepper-water, sir. Take care with it.”

Robert smiled a little. “So I shall.” He took a bite, watching Skipper move obediently away and curl up on the hearth.

His hostess brought him ale and bread and sat down in her rocker. “You must tell me how ye likes it.”

“Superb,” Robert said. It was fairly spiced, as she had warned, full more of potatoes than of meat. But he was glad enough to taste curry again. He ate slowly, gazing at the dog.

Her knitting needles clacked. “Do ye miss the place, then?” she asked.

Robert glanced up at her. He shrugged. “Not really.”

“Ye had such a sad far look just then,” she said.

“I was thinking of the dog, I suppose.” He took a deep swallow of ale. “I had a dog named Skip.”

“Ah,” she said, shaking her head sympathetically. “A good ‘n?”

Something about the quiet room, the easy way she rocked, made him speak of Skip. “He was just a pariah dog—the yellow sort. Ugly.”

“It don’t matter how they look, do it?”

Robert took a hot bite of curry. His eyes ran. He shook his head.

“A mite spicy?” She gave a happy laugh. He nodded, turning his face down so that she could not see him.

“‘Tis the way me son will have it.”

Robert soaked his bread in the golden broth and ate.

“Not many of the gentlemen from town stops here,” she said. “You come afoot?”

“Yes. Just walking.” Robert pulled out a clean handkerchief and blew his nose. “Do you have a room for the night?”

“Surely,” she said. “Very wise of you, sir. It’s late. You won’t want to walk back alone. We have the footpads now and again, so close to town. Bad times, it is.” Her needles paused. She gave him a quizzical look. “And I believe you are low.”

Robert wiped his eyes. “It is the curry.”
 

“Oh, aye,” she said, nodding.

“I don’t know what has got into you this afternoon, Mama!” Melinda said, following Folie into her bedroom.

“I am having a fit of the dismals, if you please,” Folie snapped, tossing her bonnet onto the dressing table. “Kindly go away and leave me to it.”

“Did Mr. Hawkridge give you bad news?”

“Nothing that I did not know already. We are entirely at the mercy of Mr. Robert Cambourne.”

“Oh, that,” Melinda said dismissively.

“Well enough for you to say ‘oh that’—you will have a rich husband to dote upon you the rest of your life!” Folie sat down and began to loosen her shoes.

“Well...perhaps.”

“While I shall be a slave to that—that—
madman.
” Folie kicked a shoe across the room. “Oh!” She pressed her fists against her eyes.

“Mama—” Melinda said. “I wanted to talk to you.”

“Not now. Please. Let me rest a bit.”

“But—”

“No!” For the first time in her life as a mother, Folie let a note of impending tantrum leak into her own voice. She shook her head behind her hands. “I cannot, Melinda.”
 

“But Mama—”
 

“Please
go away!”

Folie heard Melinda breathing sharply. After a moment, her stepdaughter’s footsteps crossed the floor. The door opened and closed.

Folie dropped her hands.

She stared at the patterns on the India carpet, reds and blues and golds running together. With a speechless sound, she flung herself on the bed and curled her knees up against her chest.

“What do you know?” she whispered, clinging to a pillow. “Silly girl, you won’t have to live alone. You won’t have to live on stupid dreams.”

As night fell, the soft chatter of the knitting needles did not cease. There was a strange sheltered silence in the room, a hush between the fire and the rocking chair. Skipper stretched and slept.

Robert sipped his ale. “What are you making?’’ he asked at last.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Sometimes I just knits, and see what comes of it. Often enough, I pull it all apart again. But now and then, ah, my hands just seem to know what they want to do.”

He smiled in the darkness. Skipper stood up and turned around, lying down again in the firelight.

“I love the best what I make that way,” she said. “ ‘Just make a scarf,’ me husband he’d say. ‘Ye can turn out lovely stuff. Just make me a waistcoat, can’t you? How hard can it be?’ But even if I tried, it would come out ugly. And I took it apart. Don’t know why. It was because my hands wanted to make something else.”

He thought of Phillippa.
Can’t you just put your mind to something useful? You’ve wits enough. How hard can it be?

“Makes no sense, I know,” the landlady said. Robert stared into the flames.
 

“Yes, it does,” he said quietly.

“Do you think?” The rocking chair creaked a little faster. “I never met a man before who didn’t laugh over it.”

He was not laughing. He drank, watching her needles move with such smooth certainty. “I’ve never known what my hands wanted to do.”

She smiled. “You must just let them move,” she said.

“Ah. The secret.”

She lifted yarn over her forefinger deftly. “They don’t always do the handiest thing for me. Times I would have liked a soft little cap for me grandbaby, and I got a shawl fit for a fine lady. But afterward I seen that the wool weren’t soft enough, and the ribbons I bought to weave in were too stiff for a baby. But the hands knew it, y’see, before I did.” She chuckled. “So I give it to me daughter-in-law, and never said naught o’ the cap at all. And she’s a happy mother, full o’ love. May be it’s that shawl, for she was main pleased by it.”

Robert made slow circles with his thumb on the tabletop. “I wrote letters once. That way. Didn’t think. Just let my hands move.”

“Did ye? And did it come out gainful in the end?”

He smiled wryly. “She fell in love with me. The lady that I wrote to.”