The Reckoning (25 page)

‘Because you're not in love with him.'

‘
Oh!' That was a leveller. It was surely ancient writ in the
servants' hall that she had been in love with Marcus Morland
for ever. Besides, 'That's heresy, Parslow. What was love to
do with it? You should be advising me to make a good mar
riage to a wealthy, titled man of good character.’

His eyes were too intelligent. 'If that was the advice you
needed, my lady, you wouldn't have had to ask me. You know
those things already. And if you were anyone else – if you
were your sister, or any of your cousins – it's what I'd have
told you.'

‘
Well, what then?'

‘
You're very like your mother, my lady,' Parslow said
gently, 'and I wouldn't like to see you unhappy, as I've seen
her in the past. Look, now, she'd never have married Lord
Theakston if he'd offered for her years ago, because he
wouldn't have been what the world sees as a "good" match,
but he's the very person, if you'll forgive me, to make her
happy.'

‘
He does make her happy,' Rosamund said. 'But don't you
think that Lord Chelmsford will make me happy?’

He paused for a very long time, and watching his eyes, she
saw that he was thinking a great many things that he was not
going to say aloud. She wished she knew what they were. And
then she thought that perhaps it would not be comfortable to
hear them.

‘
I think Lord Chelmsford is still a fairy-tale figure to you, like a hero out of a schoolroom story-book,' was what he did
say, which was uncanny, for it was what she had thought
herself once before. She remembered a conversation she had
had with Tantony about heroes, and how he had said that
Hektor of Troy was his model. Dear, lovely man that he was,
it was like him to choose Hektor rather than Achilles! Oh
Tantony, how can you be dead? How can there just be no
more you, ever?

‘
No, Parslow,' she said sadly, 'he's real to me now. That's
the problem. I see him just as he is.’

He digested this, and then he said, 'He will never see you just as you are, my lady. I think you may find that very tire
some at last.’

She smiled faintly. 'You think I'm a horse that needs
managing.'

‘
I will always serve you, my lady, to the best of my ability,'
he said.

Moss stirred, half-woke, smacking her lips a little, and then
settled her head back into the corner. The other two waited in
silence until her breathing steadied again, their eyes on each
other, their thoughts probably not far apart.

‘
Do you have a name?' Rosamund said at last. 'Apart from
Parslow, I mean?'

‘
My given name is John, my lady,' he said neutrally. A
neutral name, too, she thought. She tried it against him for
size in her head, and after a repetition or two, she found she
didn't mind it.

‘
John,' she said at last. 'How strange that I never knew it
before.'

‘
I hardly ever think of myself by it,' he said, and it was the
nearest thing to a confidence she had ever had from him.

*

The Angel at Stamford was crowded, but in a very different
way from the George at Grantham.

‘
Rackety,' Moss said with a disapproving sniff. In view of
the number of gigs and tilburies pulled up in the street before
it, and the shocking number of low collars to be seen going in
and out of the entrance, Rosamund was half-inclined to
agree, but she had burned her boats behind her, and it was
out of the question to go on further tonight.

‘
Don't be so particular,' she reproved. 'If I can put up with
it, so can you. Parslow, go speak for rooms. We'll wait in the
chaise until you come back.’

He was gone some time, and Rosamund guessed he had had
trouble before he spoke. 'I've secured a bedchamber for you,
my lady, but I cannot get a private parlour. The place is full
to overflowing.’

Rosamund frowned. 'What about Moss? And what about
you?'

‘
There is another lady staying here, my lady, whose abigail
is willing to share her room with Moss, if you have no objec
tion. There is a truckle bed,' he added for Moss's benefit, 'and
the room is quite large enough for two.'

‘
If Moss doesn't mind it, I don't,' Rosamund said, wanting only to get out of the carriage now. She felt that if she didn't
straighten her knees soon, she would simply die of sitting.
‘But what about you?'

‘
I shall do very well, my lady,' he said cryptically.

She narrowed her eyes. 'Amongst the horses, I suppose?’

He almost smiled. 'Not quite, my lady – the hay-loft. I had
sooner that,' he added as she opened her mouth to protest,
‘than share a room with someone's valet.'

‘
Yet you are willing to suggest Moss shares with someone's
abigail?'

‘
Abigails do not smoke tuppenny cigars in bed, my lady,' he
said with spare humour. 'If you would care to step down ...’

*

The bedchamber proved to be decent, but small, and in the
absence of a private parlour, Rosamund was obliged to take
her dinner in the coffee-room along with the other guests and travellers. Moss had to accompany her, and grumbled a good
deal, but though Rosamund felt she ought to pretend it was
an imposition, she was really rather excited about it. It
promised a little whiff of real life in her normally rose-strewn
existence. One never knew who one might meet. A surprise
encounter might change one's whole life, as it usually did in three-volume novels.

The landlord seemed flustered by her arrival, and would by
no means allow her to sit at the common board. If she would
wait just a moment, my lady, he would make a booth avail
able to her; and he waved his hands agitatedly before dashing
off through the haze of smoke that obscured the room. Rosa
mund stood in the doorway, looking with what she hoped was
an expression of sophisticated amusement at the scene.

Around the common board – a long table down the centre
of the room – guests and travellers, mostly young men and
middle-aged couples, sat elbow to elbow, helping themselves
and occasionally each other to the dishes laid out there. There
was an enormous roasted turkey, a ham, a beefsteak pie three
feet across with oysters and onions in its gravy, a smoking
cauldron of what looked like pea soup, a gigantic duff sticky
with raisins, a tongue in aspic, and a dish of stewed leeks
which everyone kept missing because it was right in the
middle and hidden from view unless you were standing up.

The potmen and maids kept running back and forth to the table with baskets of bread and pots of coffee and more and
more ale, in between serving the people sitting in the booths with their more private dinners, and seeing to the needs of a
noisy group on benches and stools in a semicircle before the
fire. It was these latter who were accounting for most of the
internal fog. They seemed to be drinking tankards of hot
brandy punch and mulled ale with their pipes and cigars, and
had drawn their circle so closely round the fire it had starved
and grown sulky. Every now and then one of them would
notice and throw something else on it, and poke it or kick it
for encouragement, which made it belch another cloud of
smoke to add to the tobacco fumes.

Moss drew her attention with a nudge to the activities of the landlord, who had approached two young men in one of
the booths, and after a brief parley was escorting them to the
common board and exhorting those already around it to
‘hitch up a bit if you please, ladies and gents – they're only little 'uns'. To the vacated booth he then invited Rosamund with a bow and crook of the finger, brushing the crumbs off
the table with the corner of his apron as he did so.

‘
That isn't right – to throw those two gentlemen out on our
account,' Rosamund muttered to Moss.

‘
Oh, don't say so, my lady!' Moss said in alarm. 'I expect
they were quite willing – besides, there's nothing else for it.'

‘
Well, I shall thank them, at least,' Rosamund said deter
minedly, and stepping past the bowing landlord she
approached the two young men, just getting comfortable on
their bench, and said, 'It is very kind of you indeed to make
room for me. I hope you are not inconvenienced by it?’

Her approach threw everything into confusion. The young
men, decent-looking clerkly types, both went scarlet, and
attempted to rise politely to their feet, a difficult task in the
confined space, and made more hazardous by the fact that
one of them had just put his hat back on his head, chiefly
because there was nowhere else to put it. On being addressed
by a lady – and a beautiful young lady in a silk gown, at that
– he naturally tried to sweep it off again, and caught his next
neighbour in the ear with his elbow. The close proximity of
the diners to each other sent the accidental shove running as
though down a row of dominoes, and a man who had just
spotted the dish of leeks and had risen to a half-way crouch to
reach for it, was caught off balance and put his hand down
straight through the pastry of his portion of beefsteak pie and
shot a hot oyster into his wife's lap.

‘
Oh no, ma'am. It's our pleasure, ma'am,' the young men stammered. 'Couldn't expect you to sit at this table, ma'am.'

‘
It's very kind, all the same,' Rosamund said. Keeping her
eyes turned resolutely from the chaos further down the table,
and biting the inside of her cheeks, she bowed her head to
them graciously and allowed Moss and the landlord to hustle
her into the booth. There she was able to put her handker
chief over her face until she had recovered.

‘
Now then, my lady,' Moss said, torn between disapproval
and the desire to giggle herself.

‘
This is better than the stuffy old George,' Rosamund said
at last, drying her eyes.

‘
I don't know, my lady,' Moss said doubtfully nodding
towards the group round the fire. 'There's some very rough-
looking types over there.'

‘Nonsense. They're not rough, only loud.'