Not Quite a Lady (21 page)

There was a silence. She didn’t care. This was not a social event, and she wasn’t obliged to keep the conversation going. She watched the insects and birds darting over the water and into the surrounding trees. In the late-morning silence, the buzzing and twittering sounded like music. For a moment, at least, she could pretend she was at Beechwood in the way she always used to be, as herself. For a moment, at least, she was almost calm.

“It pains me to admit this,” came his deep voice at last, “but you continue to surprise me.”

She looked at him. He, too, was watching the insects and birds—no doubt with a deeper understanding than she had of what each creature was and what they were about. Though his hat brim partly shaded his face, the shadow only seemed to emphasize the strong, chiseled features. She remembered the feel of his cheek against hers, the taste of his mouth, the comfort of his strong arms. The wild longing she felt was not a memory but a current of feeling. It belonged not to yesterday but to this moment.

She wished she might touch his hand, as one might touch a friend’s hand in a moment of understanding. Only that. But when could it be like that, with a man?

She pushed aside both the wish and the longing. This was not so very difficult to do. She’d had years of practice.

“You’ve surprised me, too,” she said. “You can admit a mistake, which so many men—and women—cannot do. You can apologize, a form of speech that seems to strike even the most loquacious dumb. And you have shown compassion for an insignificant apprentice,” she added, her voice almost perfectly steady.

“It is nothing to get maudlin about,” he said.

“I was not maudlin,” she said. “I only remarked on your kindness to the boy.”

“You make too much of it,” he said. “I gave him a job to do, that is all. There’s nothing out of the way in hiring boys to rid the property of vermin. Your keepers pay hosts of boys to kill crows and starlings, rats and weasels and such. Your father suggested it, in fact.”

“It seems you and Papa discussed Pip at length,” she said.

“I sought his advice,” Mr. Carsington said. “Your father’s experience far surpasses mine. I wanted to give Pip something to do outside of the house. Some of the workmen have got it into their heads that he’s bad luck. Every time there’s an accident, it’s because of him—not another’s clumsiness or carelessness or simple happenstance. It’s hard enough managing the multitudes at work on my house. The last thing I need is a Jonah.”

“Perhaps we could find something for him to do at Lithby Hall,” she said—and instantly wished the words back.

She could not have the boy about constantly. As large as her father’s property was, she’d know Pip was there, and she’d be looking for him, constantly looking for him. She was demented to raise the possibility.

“Your father’s vermin are under control,” Mr. Carsington said. “I’ve more need of Pip at Beechwood. We’ve arranged for him to go to Lithby Hall to collect Daisy, early every morning, as soon as the servants are up. After her exercise, he’ll return to work—if the other laborers will let him. Meanwhile, I’ll watch how matters proceed in that regard. He seems to like the plaster work—what little he gets to do of it. Like any apprentice, he’s assigned the drudge work and fetching and carrying. But Tyler admits the boy has a talent for designing patterns, some of which he’s used. If Pip is suited to the trade, then it’s folly to take him away. But we shall wait and see.”

“And if matters do not go well?” she said. “You promised to find a place for him, and I do not think you make idle promises.”

He turned and smiled at her. “Do you not? What, have I a redeeming quality?”

She lifted her chin. “Being kind to children is a redeeming quality, I believe. It seems I must mark that down in your favor.”

“Are you keeping a book?” he said.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “Always.” She glanced up at the sun, half-obscured by a cloud. “It must be close to noon. Stepmama will be ready to go home. I had better go back.”

She left him then.

He did not come after her this time, yet she could feel it, as palpable as a touch, the golden gaze following her, and she wondered if he wore that softened smile.

Chapter 10

Sunday night 30 June

“A difficult day, sir?” Kenning said as he followed his commander up the stairs. “You’re later than your usual time.”

“Lord Eastham had a good deal of advice for me concerning Lord Lithby’s forthcoming house party,” said Colonel Morrell.

The invitees to Lithby Hall included half a dozen of England’s most eligible gentlemen—that was to say, the half dozen Lady Charlotte had not yet rejected out of hand.

She’d reject this lot, too, because they’d all make the same mistake. They would go directly for their target.

Lady Charlotte must be won by stealth, indirection, and slow siege.

Colonel Morrell did not explain his strategy to his uncle. Nor did he mention that the only man who worried him was Darius Carsington, who gave no signs of courting her and had the advantage of proximity.

“The house party will mean the end of the ladies’ daily visits to Beechwood,” the colonel said. “I was in the army too long, it seems. I had no idea a gentleman would permit his wife and unwed daughter to spend so much time in the house of an unmarried man.”

“His lordship’s always let Lady Charlotte run on a long leash,” said Kenning. “On account of how she almost died.”

“Ten years ago,” his commander said. “Hardly a reason to risk her safety and reputation. In his place, I should be all the more cautious.”

She wanted a firm hand, he thought, not for the first time.

“Speaking of those old times,” said Kenning as they entered the colonel’s bedroom, “I heard something.”

“Did you, indeed?”

Though Colonel Morrell did not keep a large staff, and most of those were in bed, Kenning closed the door. “I’ve been to the Axe and Cleaver,” he said.

This, the colonel knew, was a tavern in Altrincham Lower Town. Like most taverns, it offered gossip in abundance.

“To wet your whistle,” Colonel Morrell said with a thin smile.

“More to wet somebody else’s,” said Kenning. “A coachman what felt ill-used and needed a sympathetic ear.”

“Fewkes.”

The servant’s bald head bobbed up and down. “He got to talking, sir, as men will do when lubricated sufficient. He got to telling me how he’d served the family since a boy and knew things.”

“I daresay he does,” said his commander, “know things.”

Nothing more was said until he had donned his dressing gown and was settled in his favorite chair, his nightly glass of whiskey at his elbow.

Then, in a low voice—as though they stood in a tent and Napoleon’s spies might be listening outside—Kenning told his commander what the aggrieved coachman knew.

It was not much, the smallest dirty nugget of a clue. Still, as Colonel Morrell knew, sometimes small, dirty nuggets proved to contain solid gold.

Beechwood
Monday morning 1 July

On Sunday night, Darius had received a note from Lady Lithby. Her youngest, Stephen, was ill. She would return to her duties at Beechwood as soon as he recovered, which she did not expect to take long.

Though work in and on the house continued without her and Lady Charlotte, the atmosphere was not the same. Darius felt the difference, a constant awareness of something wrong. It took him a while to pinpoint it.

At first he thought he was simply out of sorts because of spending the morning in his study, attending to the stacks of bills and staring at the columns of figures in his ledgers, most of the figures being in the outgoing columns.

This did not satisfactorily account for the troubling change in atmosphere.

Being a man of uncommon intelligence, he did not require months, weeks, or even days to work out the answer.

He remembered what Lady Charlotte had said, on the evening he’d dined at Lithby Hall.

He has so much work to do, and a great deal on his mind. I should think he would want a refuge.

…after all, it is his house, and ought to be the way he likes it.

He remembered his brief vision of a beautiful someone making a refuge for him, a place of warmth and order, a place of his own where things were as
he
liked them to be.

He recalled the magic she’d wrought in his dairy and the advice she’d given him about bribing his grandmother with a fan. He remembered the last time they’d spoken, and his sense that a barrier between them had cracked. Listening to her then, he’d realized she was two people. One was the woman with whom he conversed so easily, the one who giggled and laughed as they stood at the edge of the marshy remnants of a fishpond, so careful not to touch each other. She was intelligent and perceptive. She had a naughty streak and a sense of humor.

This was the real Lady Charlotte.

The wrongness in the house was her absence.

He missed her.

“This is not good,” he muttered to himself. He stared at the columns of the ledger. “I cannot—”

“Bugger the little bastard!” came a shout from the corridor. “He’s bad luck! You keep that devil-eyed whoreson away from us, or I’ll tear a strip off his hide.”

Darius couldn’t hear Tyler’s answer and didn’t wait to hear it.

He went out into the passage. “What is this noise?” he said, in a precise imitation of his father. Like his father, he did not raise his voice. Like his father, he didn’t need to. No Carsington male ever had to raise his voice to obtain instant and undivided attention.

The two men looked at him.

“Well?” he said.

The noisy fellow, who turned out to be Jowett, the head carpenter, had the usual complaint. One of his men had dropped a hammer on his foot and broken a toe. Pip was at the other end of the house, but it was his fault.

Jowett refused to continue working while the boy remained on the property. He could not endanger his men, he said.

Darius was strongly tempted to tell the man to leave the property and never come back. A carpenter could be replaced easily. The trouble was, his replacement was all too likely to have the same irrational attitude about Pip.

Instead, Darius told him to go back to work. Then, feeling depressingly like his father, he summoned Tyler into the study.

The plasterer apologized for the disturbance. “I’ll have to get rid of the boy,” he said. “He were a mistake, like the missus says. Only ever brought bad luck to everyone he come near. He’s bad luck to me if no one’ll work near him.”

“I told you I don’t hold with superstition—or tormenting and persecuting children,” Darius said.

“Sir, I can’t stop folk from believing what they believe,” Tyler said.

That was true enough. Darius couldn’t stop them, either.

It was ignorance that bred prejudice and superstition, and ignorance was a good deal more intractable an ailment than it ought to be. It did not respond to facts or logic.

He would simply have to command.

“You may not get rid of the boy for the present,” he told Tyler. “Lord Lithby needs him to exercise the dog.”

“But sir—”

“I shall find other tasks for him,” Darius said. “Make sure the other workmen are aware that he is now in my charge.”

Exactly what he needed. Another responsibility, with complications attached. But he couldn’t abandon the lad.

He told Tyler to prepare an itemized account of what he’d spent on Pip since his articles of indenture were signed. Though the amount would probably be small, it was one more expense Darius could ill afford. Very possibly, legal issues might be involved as well, either with the articles of indenture or with the parish workhouse.

Since he knew nothing about workhouses and orphans and his brother Benedict knew everything, Darius would write to him.

To Tyler, meanwhile, Darius pretended to know precisely what he was about. He asked questions about Pip, and wrote the answers down in a businesslike way.

Name: Philip Ogden.

Place of birth: Yorkshire. Possibly the West Riding.

Date of birth: Tyler unable to remember. Believes boy is age eleven “or thereabouts.”

Mother: Unknown.

Father: Unknown.

Note: Both believed to be highborn.

“Leastways, that’s what everyone said, on account of how it was a parson and his wife who adopted him,” Tyler explained.

Clergyman and wife, last name Ogden, of Sheffield, Yorkshire, died “about four years ago” (1818?)

Second adoptive “father”: Samuel Welton, widowed clergyman of Salford, Lancashire, and cousin of Mrs. Ogden. Died December 1820.

Philip Ogden given into the care of Salford parish workhouse in late 1820 or early 1821.

Indentured to Tyler in May 1821.

A short, unhappy history. Darius found no comfort in knowing that the majority of illegitimate children endured worse.

He thought matters over after Tyler left and decided he’d better visit the Salford workhouse. He wanted to make sure he’d encounter no bureaucratic obstacles to breaking the indenture, and to fill in any other missing details he could.

But first he called in Pip and told him he would not be continuing in Tyler’s employ.

The boy looked as though he’d been struck. Something in his expression nagged at Darius’s mind, but he hadn’t time to ponder it. The lad was blinking hard, trying not to cry.

“Come, come,” Darius said bracingly. “I promised I would find a place for you, and I shall. For the present, we’ll see Purchase at the home farm and find out how you can best be of use to him.”

Pip nodded, but the look of utter misery remained.

Feeling unwanted and unloved was not the most agreeable sensation. Being abandoned repeatedly, though it was fate rather than the boy’s doing, could not be pleasant, either.