To Have and to Hold (3 page)

"I have."

"And?"

She looked up. Her unearthly gaze riveted him again. "I could not find a place," she answered, still without any emphasis, weighting all the words equally.

"How much money was stolen from you?"

"Nine pounds, four shillings, my lord."

"Indeed? And how did you come by such a princely sum?"

"I earned it in prison, my lord."

"Doing what?"

She took an audible breath, as if all this vocalizing were wearing her out. "I worked most recently in the tailor's shop."

"You're a seamstress?"

"No, I was the bookkeeper."

"The bookkeeper." He raised his brows to show that he was impressed, but it didn't persuade her to say more. "But no one would engage you in that capacity upon your release?"

"No, my lord."

"Did you try for other employment?"

"Yes, my lord."

He made an impatient gesture with his hand, telling her to keep going.

"I sought employment as a clerk in a dressmaker's shop, a draper's, a—tobacconist's. After that, I tried for work as a domestic servant and then'as a laundress. But I could not get a place."

"Because of your past, is that it?"

She bowed her head in assent.

He watched her, brooding, aware that time was passing. Her passivity irked him. He thought of Hester Prynne, facing down the indignation of her Puritan judges. The two. women were in roughly similar straits, both confronting a community's censure and abandonment; but Mrs. Wade lacked the adulteress's cold, fierce, trampled dignity. Mrs. Wade had simply erased herself.

He felt pity for her, and curiosity, and an undeniably lurid sense of anticipation. Against ail reason, she interested him sexually. What was it about a woman—a certain kind of woman—standing at the mercy of men—righteous, civic-minded men, with the moral force of public outrage on their side—that could sometimes be secretly, shamefacedly titillating? He thought of the hypocritical justices from England's less than glorious past, men who had taken a lewd pleasure in sending women to the stake for witchcraft. Watching the pale, silent, motionless figure behind the bar, Sebastian had to admit a reluctant but definite kinship, not with their sentencing practices but with their prurient fervor.

"If the vicar were here," Vanstone spoke up, "something might be done for her. But as you know, Reverend Morrell is in Italy and not expected to return for several more weeks."

"Isn't there anyone else who can help her?"

"Help her?" The mayor chose his words carefully. "We are not an adjudicatory body—as you know, my lord," he tacked on hastily, "—and as such our task is not
to
find places for the indigent or the luckless who come before us. Our mandate regarding the deserving as well as the undeserving poor is simply to uphold the law."

"And what law was it Mrs. Wade broke?"

Vanstone blinked rapidly. "Beyond murdering her husband, you mean? She is indigent, she has no address—"

"Yes, but what—"

"I beg your pardon—
-and
she is not the responsibility of St. Giles' parish, my lord. Her own village in Dorset expelled her to save the drain on their poor law allotment, and now she's here, asking to be a drain on ours. She's unemployed and unemployable; in my view she ought to have been transported after her conditional release, not dumped on the tax rolls of citizens who aren't legally responsible for her in the first place."

Captain Carnock nodded his large head several times and said, "Quite right, sir, quite right."

"We don't judge this woman," the mayor went on in more modulated tones, seeing he was carrying the day. "We only propose to remand her to the county gaol in Tavistock until the assize judges sit next month. No doubt they'll determine her appropriate residence. If it's here, we will, of course, take her into our charity house, assuming no alternatives present themselves in the interim. But for now, I think we must do our duty . . ."

Sebastian stopped listening. He'd seen something in the woman's face when Vanstone spoke of the Tavistock gaol, and he thought it was fear. No, more than fear; panic. But it was so fleeting, replaced so quickly by the blind-eyed mask, that afterward he felt confused, almost disoriented. Had he imagined that look of terror? No. All his preconceptions vanished. She'd piqued his interest before because she appeared to have only one dimension: nervelessness, emotional torpor, impassivity to the point of numbness. Now she fascinated him because—maybe—that was a lie. She had her head down again, shoulders hunched in the chary, wounded posture of self-effacement that seemed second nature to her. But he knew what he'd seen, and the quick flick of panic in her disturbing eyes somehow changed everything. He stood up.

Vanstone broke off in the middle of a sentence, gaping up at him; Carnock's mouth fell open in surprise. They thought he was leaving. "My lord," Vanstone began, but Sebastian ignored him and walked across the short space of dusty floor between the magistrates' bench and the prisoner's bar.

Mrs. Wade kept her eyes on his feet; when he was within an arm's length of her, she looked up briefly, lashes fluttering with nerves, as if she expected some affront, a curse or a slap. Otherwise she stayed still, palms pressed to the sides of her thighs. While he studied her, a faint pink flush began to bloom in her prison-pallid cheeks. At the base of her throat, above the narrow collar of her cheap dress, a fast, erratic pulse hammered. Still, despite her physical vulnerability, she managed to convey an attitude of remoteness.
You won't touch me,
her body said,
because I am untouchable.

"What were you before you went to prison, Mrs. Wade?"

She hid her confusion by keeping her eyes on his knees. "I was ... a girl. That is, I had finished my studies and I—was living with my family. I was . . ." She drew a shaky breath. "My lord, I don't quite know what you mean."

"Quite" sounded extravagant on her lips; until now she'd limited her short, declarative sentences to nouns and verbs. "Were you a respectable girl?"

"My lord?"

"Were you a lady?"

Inquisitive murmuring sounded all around them. But after only a slight hesitation, and in a tone of voice that was, for once, adamant, Mrs. Wade answered, "Yes. I was."

"Yes," Sebastian agreed. He let his gaze roam over the length of her tall frame, rather enjoying her reaction, which was to stop breathing. "So. You can keep books, you say?"

"Yes, my—"

"And when you were a schoolgirl you were very bright, weren't you? Top of the class and all that? Come, Mrs. Wade, answer me."

"I_yes—I—"

"Quite. Do you think you could manage a household?" Everyone, including Mrs. Wade, stared at him in disbelief. "Mine, I'm speaking of," he clarified, turning toward his fellow magistrates but still addressing the woman. "I happen to be in urgent need of a housekeeper, my former one having retired only this week. I'd pay you whatever she earned, and naturally you'd have your room and board. It's no sinecure, I assure you; the place is in chaos—I'm having difficulty entertaining my friends." That was all true, and came out sounding perfectly rational, he thought. Strange, since his real motives for offering employment to this woman, this murderess, were murky in the extreme and would undoubtedly prove, if a light were shone on them, to be the reverse of rational. "Do you know who I am?" he thought to ask.
  
.

"Lord D'Aubrey—they told us."

"Right, and my house is Lynton Great Hall, which is unfortunately not nearly as grand as its name. You'd have your work cut out for you, as the saying goes. Well, madam, what is your answer?"

"My lord!" sputtered the mayor, coming to his feet. He had to pound on the table for order because the whispering among the spectators had become full-throated exclamations of surprise and excitement. "I beg you to reconsider this—this—perhaps hastily made offer, which I'm sure you've made in good faith, out of your kind and generous nature."

Sebastian bowed gratefully, smiling. His motives might be murky, but one thing was certain: they had nothing to do with either kindness or generosity.

"But perhaps it is a little too hasty? The woman is a convicted felon, my lord, the crime she committed a terrible one—"

"For which she paid a high price and has presumably repented. Have you repented, Mrs. Wade? Ah, she's speechless. Well, we win give her the benefit of the doubt. Tell me, Mayor, are you a proponent of the retribution theory of penal servitude, or the rehabilitation theory?"

"What? Why, I support both, to some extent. I suppose you would say a judicious mix of the two."

"Yes, very good, very diplomatic; one might say mayoral, even. Under either theory, sir, do you think it was intended that a convict prisoner pay for her crime indefinitely, without regard to the length of the sentence she's served already?"

"Certainly not, but with respect, my lord, is that really the point?"

"No, you're quite right. The point is that Mrs. Wade wouldn't be here if she had been able to find a job after her incarceration. Would you agree with that— that she's committed no actual crime?"

Vanstone couldn't seem to answer. It was Carnock who finally said, "No, my lord, other than indigence, which is more of a condition, I suppose."

' 'Thank you, sir. And that being the case, you'll also agree that the remedy for her unfortunate condition is
employment,
not imprisonment. I'm as eager as anyone here—more so, I daresay—not to tax our charity allotment with the addition of aliens and undesirables. By hiring Mrs. Wade, I can save the parish the cost of supporting her in the workhouse, save the overburdened judges the trouble and expense of trying her at assize—for what we've concluded is not a crime to begin with—and offer gainful employment to a woman who we have no reason to think was not rehabilitated by our modern and enlightened criminal justice system. And I get a housekeeper in the bargain. Gentlemen, what could you possibly find objectionable in this ingenious solution?"

Mayor Vanstone found many things objectionable in it, but what they all boiled down to was an aversion to the thought of the lord of Lynton Great Hall employing a felon for his housekeeper. Since Sebastian wasn't prepared to explain that, either to himself or to Van-stone, and certainly not to the sharp-eyed spectators who were following the debate as if the future of civilized life in Wyckerley depended on it, he resorted to tyranny—the favored fallback of English aristocrats when democracy wasn't going their way. "Right, then," he said, "it's done."

Occasionally the rewards of viscountcy were extremely gratifying.

He turned back to Mrs. Wade. Rachel, her name was. She looked dazed. Now that he had her, a hundred misgivings assailed him. What if she were stupid? What if she proved incompetent? What if she murdered him in his bed?

She'd been following the exchange in a kind of frozen fascination, and the swiftness of the resolution had caught her off guard. "Oh, I say," he exclaimed, as though the thought had just occurred to him, "you haven't said whether or not you agree to my proposal, Mrs. Wade. Well?" he prompted when she couldn't seem to speak.

"A housekeeper," she said carefully, as if needing to make certain she had the exact nature of this astounding
deus ex machina
straight in her mind.

"That's it. We can put you up in the Tavistock lockup for two months, after which the assize judge will send you to the workhouse, probably for the rest of your life. Or you can come home with me and manage my household. Which do you choose?"

She didn't smile, not so much as a twitch of the lip. But a desert-dry look of appreciation flickered briefly in her eyes, and it set his mind to rest on two out of three scores: she wasn't stupid, and she wouldn't be incompetent.

"My lord," she said with appropriate solemnity, "I choose the latter."

3

The short carriage ride back to Lynton Hall was accomplished in virtual silence. Sebastian could have broken it, could have chattered all the way home if he'd cared
to
torment his new housekeeper. Had she not been allowed to speak in prison? It would explain why the simple utterance of words seemed to exhaust all her resources. Instead of talking to her, he watched her (not an activity calculated to set her at ease), bothered only occasionally by the strangeness, the enormity of what he'd just done. Since he couldn't justify it, he decided to put off thinking about it.

They were facing each other on opposite seats of the brougham. Once their knees bumped when the carriage swung round a curve, and Mrs. Wade shrank back as if from a sparking fireplace. To keep from meeting his eyes, she looked out the window and watched the village go by, then the newly plowed fields, then the greening oaks and alders bordering the carriageway to his house. Her one and only possession, a tapestry bag, lay on the seat by her thigh; she kept a protective hand on it at all times, seemingly out of habit. She'd been robbed in Chudleigh, he recalled. He studied her sharp, clean-edged profile, in pale relief against the dark seat cushion. Shafts of the blinding sunset struck her in the face, making her squint. She lifted her hand to shield her eyes, and he saw that the nails were short and broken, the palm calloused. Her shabby dress had a faint stain on the bodice that looked as if it had been washed, futilely, more than once. The constable had said they'd found her in a barn, surviving on stolen apples. Impossible; it was a picture he could not make his mind form. Even with her derelict clothes and deplorable hair, she looked like someone's upper-class governess fallen on hard times. Or ... a nun. That was it, she looked like a nun, who'd suddenly been yanked out of her dark, safe cloister and shoved into the chaos of real life.