Unclaimed (14 page)

He stepped to the side and gestured. “Please. Come in.”

“I couldn’t. Didn’t mean to enter your home—”

“But I’m inviting you. I should be honored if you’d accept my hospitality.”

In many ways, despite the heights he’d ascended to, Mark felt more comfortable around this laborer than he did around the rector. The man followed him down the hall. From the corner of his eye, Mark detected a slight limp in his step—not so much to incapacitate him, nor even to render him lame. Just an old wound.

The man thought nothing of Mark putting on a kettle for their tea on his own. He didn’t protest the simple bread and jam that Mark laid out or ask why Mark had no servants. For all the wealth his elder brother had won, Mark’s first memories were of sweeping the floor while his elder sister finished the washing-up. In his brother’s house, he was constantly fighting his urge to do things for himself—to fetch his own paper, to shrug on a coat, instead of standing still while a valet eased it over his arms.

“I tend Bowser’s sheep, now,” the man said. “My wife—she’s Mrs. Judith Taunton.”

“Taunton,” Mark said slowly. “I remember her.” The memory was dim—a single room in the village. She’d been a young woman, with two small children. His mother had visited her; Mark had come along. He’d always come along. “That was years ago. Decades.”

“Aye,” Mr. Taunton replied, then met Mark’s eyes. “That would have been before I returned from transportation. I don’t know what Judy would have done without your mother.”

“Ah.”

“Yes,” Taunton said stiffly, “I was one of those young firebrands.” He stretched out his arms. “I helped burn the mill down, when they brought in the spinning jenny and sacked half the workers.” He glanced at Mark and colored—as if perhaps remembering that the mill he’d destroyed had belonged to Mark’s father. “The magistrates sent me away for my sins. It was your mother who made sure my boys had enough to eat. Your mother paid my passage back when my time was done. She found me work, posted a bond as surety for my good behavior, when nobody would hire a criminal.”

“Maybe this is true,” Mark said quietly, “but I’m guessing it was my father who sacked you. The scales are balanced between us.” His mother would have agreed. She’d been mad, but there had been a frightening lucidity to everything she had done. She’d sold everything the family owned and had given it all to the poor. But she’d never seen it as charity. She’d always imagined she was giving it
back.

Mr. Taunton looked up at him. “I’ll beg your pardon, sir, but I don’t feel so balanced. I am very much in your family’s debt.” He rubbed his head. “Didn’t come here to argue with you, in any event. You see, I have this dog. A bitch—the finest sheep dog in all of Somerset, she is. She’s a breed from Scotland.” The man’s eyes shone with a sudden light. “She came into heat a few months back. All the men hereabouts are mad for a chance at one of Daisy’s pups. There’s five of them, seven weeks old now. Four are spoken for. I’ve held the last one back, because…” The man spread his blunt fingers. The fingernails were lined by dark grease. “Sir Mark, are you by any chance in want of a pup? I’d be honored to know that Daisy’s whelp went to one of Elizabeth Turner’s sons.”

Mark swallowed a lump in his throat. The wealthier members of the community—the mill owners, the landowners—had offered him a few scant meals around their table. Even that hospitality had not been freely given. They’d wanted to trade gossip and to boast that they’d had him as a guest.

But Mark knew what a good sheepdog meant to these men. Not just income, but companionship, friendship, the difference between a hardscrabble life and comfort. It was as if the man had offered him his firstborn child.

“Mr. Taunton, I came to Shepton Mallet to think…to think on an opportunity that presented itself to me. You see, I’ve been asked to join the Commission on the Poor Laws.”

Taunton, for all the dirt he carried, nodded sagely. “That’s…an honor,” he said, his mouth twitching.

Mark rubbed his forehead. “You mean it’s a nuisance. I’m not a proponent of the Poor Laws, and the Commission has bungled the administration worse than Parliament. I’ve no wish to spend my time attending to details like the allotment of gruel at workhouses around the country.”

Taunton drummed his fingers against his knee. “If it’s a mess, mayhap you could clean it up. Happen they could use a good man.”

“I know. It’s the only reason I haven’t turned the offer down flat.”

And people—
important
people—would listen to him if he said the system was falling to pieces. He could make a difference. He’d been granted a measure of popularity by fate; he had an obligation to use it to do good. He just wished it didn’t sound like such an ever-loving chore.

“But, you see, if I accept the position, I’ll be traveling constantly. I’d have nowhere to keep a dog. Surely, Daisy’s pup deserves better.”

Mark looked across into a face that was slowly shuttering.

“Of course,” Taunton muttered. “You’ll be going into the finest drawing rooms. No room
there
for a filthy mutt.” His shoulders squared. “Well, perhaps I might be of service some other way.” He looked around the room.

Maybe
Mark
didn’t think of his mother’s actions as pure charity. But this man—this proud man—undoubtedly did. Mark could as soon have cut the man’s hand off as refuse the offer.

“But my brother,” he heard himself saying. “My elder brother—he’d not lock the animal up in a tiny London parlor. And I know he’d enjoy having an animal around. I was thinking just the other day that I ought to get him one.”

The man looked up, the light returning to his eyes.

“In fact,” Mark promised, “I’m
sure
he’d want it. And the dog would be happier with him.”

Taunton broke into a broad grin. “It needs a few days yet with its dam. But you’re right. I suppose there’d be more room to romp at Parford Manor.”

“Actually,” Mark started to say, and then realized that he didn’t need to clarify
which
brother he’d intended the gift for. “Actually, I won’t be visiting him immediately in any event, so a delay is just as well. Thank you. You’ve no idea what this will mean to my brother.”

Taunton gave him a jerk of a nod. “Truthfully, Sir Mark—this scarcely means anything. All these years, I’ve carried the shame of knowing I should have done more. About…about your sister. And you and your brothers. I saw what was happening, when I first came back, but didn’t dare to speak up.”

Mark sat still, not wanting to move. Not wanting to acknowledge by so much as a breath that those words reached any part of him.

Taunton continued, “Only one person in all of Shepton Mallet would have stopped that kind of wrong when it happened. And she was Elizabeth Turner.”

One nod, that was all Mark could manage.

“I always thought that what happened to you and your brothers after she passed on—that was her way of looking out for you, once she found her way round to herself again.”

“Yes.” Mark felt as if he were standing at a great distance from the conversation. “Yes. I suppose it was.” The silence grew after that, and the man took his leave.

After he’d gone, Mark wrapped his arms around himself. Sometimes he thought he was the only one of his mother’s sons who could see her clearly. She’d always been stern and earnest; devout, too. Even before she went mad, she’d had no balance, too much excess. She’d afflicted all her children with Bible verses for names, after all.

She’d seen a great deal of suffering and had thought it her duty to alleviate it. She’d also seen a great deal of sin and had railed against that, too. Mark didn’t remember his father at all, but he remembered his mother. All too well.

She’d let Hope, his elder sister, perish by neglect. She’d beaten Ash. She’d locked Smite in the cellar for…for longer than Mark could truly remember.

But Mark… Mark she’d spared. She’d not felt it necessary to cleanse the devil from his soul. She’d told him once she didn’t need to, because he alone was
her
son, not his father’s. That she’d seen herself in Mark, that she’d identified in him the same unwieldy imbalance that had torn her to pieces, he kept first and foremost in his mind. Perhaps that was why he’d become who he was. He’d had to prove to himself that his mother’s finest qualities—her compassion, her charity, her goodness—could be married to peace and tranquility. He wanted to prove that he could be
good
without going
mad.

The thought of dedicating his life to the Poor Laws made him feel frenetic and unbalanced. It would be
good.
It would be
righteous.
But he didn’t want to do it.

He’d come to Shepton Mallet to find himself. Instead, he’d met Mrs. Farleigh. Mark smiled faintly and thought of her fingers, warm and curling about his. The soft pressure of her lips—he’d have wondered what he’d been thinking when he kissed her, except it was perfectly clear he’d not thought at all.

And now, he didn’t want to do good. He wanted to do it again.

London, the Commission and every gossip rag in the country could wait another week.

LONDON, IT TURNED OUT, had other thoughts.

Three days later, Mark ventured into town. He was on his way to the square to deliver another handful of letters when a familiar voice stopped him.

“Sir Mark!”

Parret was the last man Mark wanted to see at the moment. Still, the tiny man hurried over, his boots clattering over cobblestones. He held his hat to his head with one hand as he ran, lending an odd, undulating appearance to his stride. “Sir Mark. I was hoping—it’s just you and me, out here in the country.” Parret stopped a few feet before him next to the gray stone of the Market Cross, doubling over. His words spilled out between gasps of air.

“Indeed,” Mark said ironically, indicating the people around them.

But Parret appeared gratified. He removed his top hat, revealing a pate covered by a few sparse, carefully combed strings of hair, and wiped beads of sweat off with a yellowing handkerchief of doubtful cleanliness. “Perhaps you might consider an exclusive interview?”

Nigel Parret was nothing if not persistent. Mark would have admired him—or, at a minimum, felt sorry for him—except that the man published the most intrusive articles. On one particular occasion, he’d actually picked through Mark’s household trash and had published a piece in which he had explained, on rather dubious grounds, that Sir Mark preferred leg of lamb to beef.

It happened to have been true…at least, it had been true until Mark was served lamb at every dinner he’d gone to for a fortnight.

And that hadn’t been the worst of Parret’s sins. Three months ago, Mark had danced one dance with Lady Eugenia Fitzhaven. She had seemed a sweet girl—emphasis on
girl
—and he was friends with her father. It had also happened to be the supper dance, and so he’d taken her in to the meal. A hundred men in London had done the same for a hundred ladies throughout town that evening, and nobody had spoken of those conversations again. But Mark was not a hundred men. He was Sir Mark.

Of course, he’d observed the brightness of her eyes, the color of her cheeks. He couldn’t help but notice that she was utterly tongue-tied in his presence. He couldn’t prevent impressionable young girls from imagining themselves in love with him. All he could do was recognize when the infatuation started and do his best not to offer them encouragement. Girlish appreciation had a way of working itself to nothing if he offered a polite distance. It didn’t take long for most ladies to shift their attentions to a source who would appreciate it.

But Nigel Parret had found Lady Eugenia before her affections had a chance to alter. He’d spoken to her, and she had told him every detail of her unrequited fancies. She’d outlined her childish plan to win Mark’s affections—mainly this had involved looking radiant in his presence. She’d enumerated the children she planned to have with him once they were married. Mark
still
winced, thinking of it.

Parret had published her juvenile dreams on the front page of his paper. Mark’s reputation hadn’t suffered—the article had made it painfully clear that Mark had done nothing whatsoever to encourage the girl—but children of that age hardly needed encouragement to dream. There was no way to stop them from wishing for the impossible.

No way, that was, except to expose their aspiration to the ridicule of all London society.

Lady Eugenia had become a laughingstock; Nigel Parret had collected a small fortune selling papers. And Mark had stopped talking to young, impressionable ladies.

Parret stared up at Mark now with a certain speculative hunger. Mark could almost see the next article brewing in those calculating depths. Maybe, this time, he’d analyze Mark’s woodpile. What his column would make of Mrs. Farleigh, Mark didn’t want to know.

“One little interview,” Parret said, in what Mark supposed was intended to be a cajoling tone. “Just a few questions.”

“Not a chance. You are the last person on earth to whom I would grant an exclusive interview.”

Parret nodded as if Mark had not just insulted him, pulled out his notebook and started scribbling.

Mark glanced down uneasily. Parret wrote in a large, round hand—visible even upside down at two paces.

Your correspondent met with Sir Mark in his birthplace of Shepton Mallet.
The man wrote with astonishing speed.
Upon seeing his dear friend—for so, my readers, I dare to believe Sir Mark thinks of me—Sir Mark greeted me with effusive superlatives.