Chapter 18
Chapter
Eighteen
An Inheritance of a Different Kind
Croft’s letter had said only that he was bringing a matter to London that required my presence in person. I had assumed it was estate business of some weight that needed my consent.
I did not expect him to arrive before ten this evening.
The journey from Yorkshire took the better part of a day even by express train.
So I settled in the library to wait. A fire burned low in the grate, throwing a subdued amber light across the room.
Rain whispered now and then against the windows.
A book lay open in my hand, untouched this past hour, and a snifter of brandy stood at my elbow.
The mantel clock had only just struck ten when footsteps sounded in the hall.
A moment later Dawson opened the library door. “Mr. Croft has arrived, my lord. And—” he hesitated, which was unlike him “—he has a boy with him.”
“A boy?”
“Ten years of age, perhaps. From the estate.” Dawson’s face was composed in the blankness he reserved for matters he did not yet understand. “Mr. Croft asks whether he might speak with you privately first.”
“Of course. Show him in. The boy can wait in the morning room. And bring coffee and sandwiches. Croft will want feeding after such a journey.”
“Very good, my lord.”
I rose as Croft entered. He was a square, weathered man of fifty, dressed in the plain dark coat he had worn in every weather since I had known him in the Crimea.
He carried his hat in one hand and a leather satchel in the other.
The journey south had marked him about the eyes, but his bearing was as it always was: a sergeant’s bearing, attentive and unsurprised.
“My lord.”
“Croft. Sit down. Dawson is bringing refreshment.”
He did not sit. “If you’ll forgive me, my lord, I would prefer to deliver my report standing. It is short.”
I knew that tone. It belonged to the moments before a casualty list was read. “Very well. You’ll not mind my sitting.” The damp had gotten into my leg.
“No, of course not, my lord.”
I sat. “Go on.”
“Twelve days ago,” Croft said, “a woman by the name of Sarah Hodge died of a fever in the village of Beckwith, three miles from the estate. She had a son, ten years old. The boy’s aunt—Mrs. Beadle, sister to the deceased—came to me four days ago.
She has six children of her own and a husband on a laborer’s wage. She cannot keep the boy.”
I waited. There was more. Croft would deliver it in his own time.
“Sarah Hodge was a housemaid at Everthorne Manor in the spring of 1848. She left service that summer. The boy was born in November of the same year.” Croft’s eyes met mine.
They held nothing beyond the steady regard of a man who had been asked to carry an unpleasant thing and had carried it.
“Mrs. Beadle says her sister never named the father to anyone but her, and made her swear never to speak the name aloud. On her deathbed, she released her from the promise. The name was William Ashcombe.”
The room did not change. The fire crackled on; the clock marked the seconds with its small, indifferent precision. But something had shifted and would not shift back.
Sarah Hodge. Her initials lay in my grandmother’s journal, in a passage I had read three nights before.
S.H., dismissed June, with six months’ wages.
The girl is no fool. She knows the use of silence.
I had read the line and turned the page, because there had been so many such lines, and one cannot weep at every one.
“Thank you, Croft.” My voice was even. I was distantly proud of it. “You have done what was right.”
“I took the liberty of bringing him myself, my lord. I did not want him sent on the carrier with a label round his neck.”
“No. Quite right.”
“He knows his mother is dead. He knows he is being brought to a gentleman who is brother to his father.” Croft paused. “He does not know his father’s name. His mother kept it from him to the end, and I have not told him.”
“Good.”
“He is—” Croft hesitated for the second time in our long acquaintance, and I understood I was being given a warning of some kind.
“He is a fine boy. He is also angry, and frightened, and grieving, and ten years old, and he has been on a train an entire day with a stranger. I would ask you to remember that when you meet him.”
I looked at Croft for a long moment. He had never spoken to me in such terms, not in the years we had served together. He had buried friends with me in the Crimea and never once offered an opinion that had not been asked for.
“I shall remember it,” I said. “Bring him in.”
The boy walked into the library three paces ahead of Croft, stopped in the center of the carpet, and looked at me as I came to my feet.
He was small for ten—narrow-shouldered, thin in the wrist, with the hollow-eyed leanness of a country child whose meals had been counted.
His hair was dark, almost black, and curled at the ends in a way I recognized before I was ready to.
His face was my brother’s face, fined down by hunger and grief into something at once younger and older than itself.
The Ashcombe stamp was on him as plain as a seal in wax.
But the eyes were not my brother’s. William’s had been pale and restless; this boy’s were dark and steady. They met mine without flinching and did not like what they found.
“Good evening,” I said.
He did not answer.
Dawson came in with the coffee things and a plate of sandwiches, set them on a small table, and withdrew.
I gestured to the tray. “Croft, help yourself.”
“Thank you, my lord.” He took nothing and remained standing.
I turned to the boy. “Now then. My name is Julian Ashcombe. You have been told, I think, that I am to look after you for a time.”
“For a time,” he repeated. His voice came higher than I expected, roughened by the catarrh of a long day’s travel. The accent was Yorkshire, broad and unforced. “How long is a time?”
I had not expected to be interrogated within thirty seconds of the boy’s arrival; I had not expected, either, how immediately I should respect him for it.
“I do not yet know,” I said. “That is an honest answer. I had rather give you an honest one than a comfortable one. Is that acceptable?”
He considered this. “Aye.”
“May I know your name?”
“You know my name.”
“I know what your mother named you. I do not know what you are called.”
Something flickered behind his eyes—surprise, perhaps, or the small, unwelcome recognition of being addressed as a person and not a parcel. He weighed me a moment longer.
“Will,” he said. “Mam called me Will. I’ll not answer to William.”
“Then Will it shall be.” I let a small pause settle. “Would you like something to eat? You must be hungry.”
He eyed the plate of sandwiches with suspicion. “Nah.”
I needed to talk to him in private. “Croft, I think Master Will and I want a moment alone. If you’ll excuse us.”
“Right, my lord.” He made to go.
“Take the food and drink through to the morning room.”
“Thank you, my lord.” He left with the tray.
“Now, Master Will. You found some objection to the sandwiches.”
He shrugged. “Don’t matter.”
“It matters to me. I’d rather not guess wrong. What would you like?”
He chewed the inside of his cheek. “Bread and butter,” he said at last, with the air of a witness conceding ground under cross-examination. “And milk, if there is any.”
I opened the door to find Dawson waiting outside. “Bread and butter for Master Will, and a glass of milk.”
“Very good, my lord.”
Will’s gaze followed him out. “He called you my lord.”
I closed the door and turned to him. “He did.”
“Are you a lord?”
“I am.”
His mouth tightened. “Mam said my father were a great gentleman who’d not claimed me. Was he a lord and all?”
I had been a soldier. I had been shot at, bayoneted, knocked half off my feet by a shell that killed three men at my side. I had stood at my grandmother’s grave, and my brother’s, and Lydia Gray’s, and had taught myself to feel none of it where it might be seen.
I felt this. It struck like a blow to the ribs, inward and graceless, and I allowed myself the smallest moment to take it before I answered.
“He was,” I said. “My elder brother. He died of a fever months ago. I am sorry he did not claim you, Will. He should have done.”
The boy’s chin came up. I knew the defiance in his face; I had worn the same look in my father’s study at twenty-three.
“I don’t want owt of his,” Will said. “I don’t want his name. I don’t want his money.”
“You need not take his name. You shall have what you need to live, and you shall have it, not as a kindness, because it is owed you. That distinction matters to me. In time, I hope it may matter to you.”
He stared at me. “You talk like a book.”
I bit back a grin. “So I am told. I shall try to mend it.”
Will’s gaze moved over the library. The whole of the cottage he had come from might have fit inside it. “Am I to live here?”
“For now.”
He drew into himself. The answer had frightened him. I cursed my clumsiness.
“Do you want to live here?”
He shrugged and wiped his nose with a less-than-pristine hand.
A knock, and Dawson entered with a tray—several slices of bread, a small dish of butter, and a tall glass of milk. He set it on the same table he had left Croft’s and withdrew.
I nodded to it. “Help yourself.”
For a moment, Will held off; then hunger won out.
I let him eat in peace. It was the least he deserved. When he had finished, he said, “Thank ’ee.”
Somebody had taught him manners.
“Now, Will. You are ten years old—old enough to have a say in how you live, within reason. I shall ask your opinion on matters that concern you, and I shall expect you to give it honestly. In return, I shall be honest with you. That is the arrangement I propose. Do you accept it?”
He weighed it. He was a boy who weighed everything—a boy who had learned that words may be coin or weapon and had not yet decided which I was offering.
“Aye,” he said. “For now.” The little devil had given me back my own words.
“For now is enough. If you’ll excuse me, I must speak with Croft again. Could you wait in the morning room?”
“Can I take the food?”
“Of course.”
“A couple of them sandwiches would go down a treat.”
“I shall have Dawson bring some.”
“Thank ’ee kindly, my lord.”
Will kept his shoulders square as he left the library and did not let himself look about the room. He had decided not to be impressed.
I admired him for it more than I cared to examine.