Once and Always (5 page)

Charles glowered at the closed door. “You’ll marry her, Jason,” he warned his absent son. “You’ll do it if I have to hold a gun to your head.”

He glanced up a few minutes later as Dobson came in carrying a silver tray laden with a bottle of champagne and two glasses. “I took the liberty of selecting something appropriate for the occasion,” the old servant confided happily, putting the tray on the table near Charles.

“In that case you should have selected hemlock,” Charles said wryly. “Jason has already left.”

The butler’s face fell. “Already left? But I didn’t have an opportunity to felicitate his lordship on his forthcoming nuptials.”

“Which is fortunate indeed,” Charles said with a grim chuckle. “I fear he’d have loosened your teeth.”

When the butler left, Charles picked up the bottle of champagne, opened it, and poured some into a glass. With a determined smile, he lifted his glass in a solitary toast: “To your forthcoming marriage, Jason.”

“I’ll just be a few minutes, Mr. Borowski,” Victoria said, jumping down from the farmer’s wagon that was loaded with Dorothy’s and her belongings.

“Take yer time,” he said, puffing on his pipe and smiling. “Me an‘ yer sister won’t leave without you.”

“Do hurry, Tory,” Dorothy pleaded. “The ship won’t wait for us.”

“We got plenty o‘ time,” Mr. Borowski told her. “I’ll get you to the city and yer ship afore nightfall, and that’s a promise.”

Victoria hurried up the steps of Andrew’s imposing house, which overlooked the village from a hilltop, and knocked on the heavy oaken door. “Good morning, Mrs. Tilden,” she said to the plump housekeeper. “May I see Mrs. Bainbridge for a moment? I want to tell her good-bye and give her a letter to send on to Andrew, so he’ll know where to write to me in England.”

“I’ll tell her you’re here, Victoria,” the kindly housekeeper replied with an unencouraging expression, “but I doubt she’ll see you. You know how she is when she’s having one of her sick spells.”

Victoria nodded sagely. She knew all about Mrs. Bainbridge’s “sick spells.” According to Victoria’s father, Andrew’s mother was a chronic complainer who invented ailments to avoid doing anything she didn’t wish to do, and to manipulate and control Andrew. Patrick Seaton had told Mrs. Bainbridge that to her face several years ago, in front of Victoria, and the woman had never forgiven either of them for it.

Victoria knew that Mrs. Bainbridge was a fraud, and so did Andrew. For that reason, her palpitations, dizzy spells, and tingling limbs had little effect on either of them—a fact that, Victoria knew, further antagonized her against her son’s choice of a wife.

The housekeeper returned with a grim look on her face. “I’m sorry, Victoria, Mrs. Bainbridge says she isn’t well enough to see you. I’ll take your letter to Mr. Andrew and give it to her to send on to him. She wants me to summon Dr. Morrison,” she added in tones of disgust. “She says she has a ringing in her ears.”

“Dr. Morrison sympathizes with her ailments, instead of telling her to get out of bed and do something useful with her life,” Victoria summarized with a resigned smile, handing over the letter. She wished it wasn’t so costly to send mail to Europe, so she could post her letters herself, instead of having Mrs. Bainbridge include them in her own letters to Andrew. “I think Mrs. Bainbridge likes Dr. Morrison’s attitude better than she liked my father’s.”

“If you ask me,” Mrs. Tilden said huffily, “she liked your papa a sight too much. It was almost more than a body could stand, watchin‘ her dress herself up before she sent for him in the middle of the night and—not,” she broke off and corrected herself quickly, “that your papa, dear man that he was, ever played along with her scheme.”

When Victoria left, Mrs. Tilden brought the letter upstairs. “Mrs. Bainbridge,” she said, approaching the widow’s bed, “here is Victoria’s letter for Mr. Andrew.” “Give it to me,” Mrs. Bainbridge snapped in a surprisingly strong voice for an invalid, “and then send for Dr. Morrison at once. I feel quite dizzy. When is the new doctor supposed to arrive?”

“Within a week,” Mrs. Tilden replied, handing the letter to her.

When she left, Mrs. Bainbridge patted her gray hair into place beneath her lace cap and glanced with a grimace of distaste at the letter lying beside her on the satin coverlet. “Andrew won’t marry that country mouse,” she said contemptuously to her maid. “She’s nothing! He’s written me twice that his cousin Madeline in Switzerland is a lovely girl. I’ve told Victoria that, but the foolish baggage won’t pay it any heed.”

“Do you think he’ll bring Miss Madeline home as his wife, then?” her maid asked, helping to plump the pillows behind Mrs. Bainbridge’s back.

Mrs. Bainbridge’s thin face pinched with anger. “Don’t be a fool! Andrew has no time for a wife. I’ve told him that. This place is more than enough to keep him busy, and his duty is to it, and to me.” She picked up Victoria’s letter with two fingers as if it were contaminated and passed it to her maid. “You know what to do with this,” she said coldly.

“I didn’t know there were this many people, or this much noise, in the entire world,” Dorothy burst out as she stood on a dock in New York’s bustling harbor.

Stevedores with trunks slung on their shoulders swarmed up and down the gangplanks of dozens of ships; winches creaked overhead as heavily loaded cargo nets were lifted off the wooden pier and carried over the sides of the vessels. Shouted orders from ships’ officers blended with bursts of raucous laughter from sailors and lewd invitations called out by garishly garbed ladies waiting on the docks for disembarking seamen.

“It’s exciting,” Victoria said, watching the two trunks that held all their worldly possessions being carried on board the
Gull
by a pair of burly stevedores.

Dorothy nodded agreement, but her face clouded. “It is, but I keep remembering that at the end of our voyage, we’ll be separated, and it is all our great-grandmother’s fault. What can she be thinking of to refuse you her home?”

“I don’t know, but you mustn’t dwell on it,” Victoria said with an encouraging smile. “Think only of nice things. Look at the East River. Close your eyes and smell the salty air.”

Dorothy closed her eyes and inhaled deeply, but she wrinkled her nose. “All I smell is dead fish. Tory, if our great-grandmother knew more about you, I
know
she would want you to come to her. She can’t be so cruel and unfeeling as to keep us apart. I shall tell her all about you and make her change her mind.”

“You mustn’t say or do anything to alienate her,” Victoria warned gently. “For the time being, you and I are entirely dependent upon our relatives.”

“I won’t alienate her if I can help it,” Dorothy promised, “but I shall make it ever so clear, in tiny ways, that she ought to send for you at once.” Victoria smiled but remained silent, and after a moment, Dorothy sighed. “There is one small consolation in being hauled off to England—Mr. Wilheim said that, with more practice and hard work, I might be able to become a concert pianist. He said that in London there will be excellent instructors to teach and guide me. I shall ask, no,
insist,
that our great-grandmother permit me to pursue a musical career,” Dorothy finished, displaying the determined streak that few people suspected existed behind her sweet, complaisant facade.

Victoria forebore to point out the obstacles that leapt to her mind as she considered Dorothy’s decision. With the wisdom of her additional year and a half of age, she said simply, “Don’t ‘insist’ too strongly, love.”

“I shall be discreet,” Dorothy agreed.

“Miss Dorothy Seaton?” the gentleman inquired politely, stepping aside as three burly English seamen with heavy sacks slung over their shoulders elbowed past him and strode off down the dock.

“I am she,” Dorothy said, her voice trembling with fright and excitement as she gazed at the impeccably dressed, white-haired man.

“I have been instructed by her grace, the Duchess of Claremont, to escort you to her home. Where are your trunks?”

“Right there,” Dorothy said. “There’s only one.”

He glanced over his shoulder and two liveried men climbed off the back of a shiny black coach with a gold crest on the door and hurried forward. “In that case, we can be on our way,” the man said as her trunk was lifted up and loaded atop the coach.

“But what about my sister?” Dorothy said, her hand clasping Victoria’s in a stranglehold of eager terror.

“I’m certain that the party meeting your sister will be here directly. Your ship arrived four days ahead of schedule.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Victoria said with a bright confidence she didn’t quite feel. “I’m certain the duke’s carriage will be here any minute. In the meantime, Captain Gardiner will let me stay on board. Run along now.”

Dorothy enfolded her sister in a tight hug. “Tory, I’ll contrive some way to persuade our grandmother to invite you to stay with us, you’ll see. I’m scared. Don’t forget to write. Write every day!”

Victoria stayed where she was, watching Dorothy climb daintily into the luxurious vehicle with the gold crest on the door. The stairs were put up, the coachman snapped his whip, and the four horses bounded off as Dorothy waved good-bye from the window.

Jostled by sailors leaving the ship in eager search of “foine ale and tarts,” Victoria stood on the dock, her gaze clinging to the departing coach. She had never felt so utterly alone in her life.

She spent the next two days in bored solitude in her cabin, the tedium interrupted only by her short walks on deck and her meals with Captain Gardiner, a charming, fatherly man who seemed to greatly enjoy her company. Victoria had spent a considerable amount of time with him over the past weeks, and they had shared dozens of meals during the long voyage. He knew her reasons for coming to England, and she regarded him as a newly made friend.

When by the morning of the third day no coach had arrived to convey Victoria to Wakefield Park, Captain Gardiner took matters into his own hands and hired one. “We were early getting into port, which is a rare occurrence,” he explained. “Your cousin may not think to send someone for you for days yet. I have business to conduct in London and I cannot leave you on board unprotected. In the time it would take to notify your cousin of your arrival, you can be there yourself.”

For long hours, Victoria studied the English countryside decked out in all its magical spring splendor. Pink and yellow flowers bloomed in profusion across hedgerows that inarched up and down the hills and valleys. Despite the jostling and jarring she received every time the coach wheels passed over a rut or bump, her spirits rose with every passing mile. The coachman rapped on the door above her and his ruddy face appeared. “We’re ‘bout two miles away, ma’am, so if you’d lie to—”

Everything seemed to happen at once. The wheel hit a deep rut, the coach jerked crazily to the side, the coachman’s head disappeared, and Victoria was flung to the floor in a sprawling heap. A moment later, the door was jerked open and the coachman helped her out. “You hurt?” he demanded.

Victoria shook her head, but before she could utter a word, he rounded on two men dressed in farmers’ work clothes who were sheepishly clutching their caps in their hands. “Ye bloody fools! What d’ye mean pullin‘ out in the road like that! Look what ye’ve done, me axle’s broken—” The rest of what he said was laced with stout curses.

Delicately turning her back on the loud altercation, Victoria shook her skirts, trying unsuccessfully to rid them of the dust and grime they’d acquired from the floor of the coach. The coachman crawled under his coach to inspect his broken axle, and one of the farmers shuffled over to Victoria, twisting his battered cap in his hands. “Jack ‘n’ me, we’re awful sorry, ma’am,” he said. “We’ll take you on to Wakefield Park—that is, if you don’t mind us puttin‘ yer trunk in back with them piglets?”

Grateful not to have to walk the two miles, Victoria readily agreed. She paid the coachman with the traveling money Charles Fielding had sent her and climbed onto the bench between the two burly farmers. Riding in a farm cart, although less prestigious than a coach, was scarcely any bumpier and far more comfortable. Fresh breezes cooled her face and her view of the lavish countryside was unrestricted.

With her usual unaffected friendliness, Victoria soon succeeded in engaging both men in a conversation about farming, a topic about which she knew a little and was perfectly happy to learn more. Evidently, English farmers were violently opposed to the implementation of machines for use in farming. “Put us all out of work, they will,” one of the farmers told her at the end of his impassioned condemnation of “them infernal things.”

Victoria scarcely heard that, because their wagon had turned onto a paved drive and passed between two imposing iron gates that opened onto a broad, seemingly endless stretch of gently rolling, manicured parkland punctuated with towering trees. The park stretched in both directions as far as the eye could see, bisected here and there by a stream that meandered about, its banks covered with flowers of pink and blue and white. “It’s a fairyland,” Victoria breathed aloud, .her stunned, admiring gaze roving across the carefully tended banks of the picturesque stream and the sweeping landscape. “It must take dozens of gardeners to care for a place this size.”

“That it do,” Jack said. “His lordship’s got forty of ‘em, countin’ the ones what takes care of the
real
gardens—the gardens at the house, I mean.” They had been plodding along the paved drive for fifteen minutes when the cart rounded a bend and Jack pointed proudly. “There it is— Wakefield Park. I heert it has a hunnert and sixty rooms.”

Victoria gasped, her mind reeling, her empty stomach clenching into a tense knot. Stretched out before her in all its magnificent splendor was a three-story house that altogether surpassed her wildest imaginings. Built of mellow brick with huge forward wings and steep rooftops dotted with chimneys, it loomed before her—a palace with graceful terraced steps leading up to the front door and sunlight glistening against hundreds of panes of mullioned glass.

They drew to a stop before the house and Victoria tore her gaze away long enough for one of the farmers to help her down from the wagon seat. “Thank you, you’ve been very kind,” she said, and started slowly up the steps. Apprehension turned her feet to lead and her knees to water. Behind her, the farmers went to the back of the wagon to remove her bulky trunk, but as they let down the back gate, two squealing piglets hurtled out of the wagon into empty air, hit the ground with a thud, and streaked off across the lawns.