Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
Never had Sorcha seen a more welcome sight than Bernard coming up the garden path, Jordy perched on his back.
“Our young man chose to hide in an oat bin,” Bernard said. “The lid came down and knocked him on the head. He seems right enough, if a bit groggy.”
“Jordy.” Our young man. Sorcha held out her arms, and Bernard passed her dusty little son into her embrace. Jordy barely fit on her hip anymore, but Sorcha managed. “Jordan Dolforth, I do believe you’ve had an adventure.”
“Mama.” He curled against her shoulder, as he had much earlier in life. “My head hurts.”
Coraline glanced up from the array of picnic blankets, rose from beside a hamper, and came over to the garden.
Jessica shifted from foot to foot beside Gilchrist on the terrace steps, and Elise, a purple iris in her hand, looked worried.
Annette waved from the edge of the park, while Bridget pelted across the parterres as if in pursuit of the Scots Greys.
Sorcha moved to the bench beside the sundial and sat with Jordy in her lap. “Your head hurts, your face could use a wash, and you will never again hide in any oat bins. Does anything else hurt?”
He shook his head and sighed.
“All this drama over a game of hide-and-seek,” Coraline muttered, hands on hips. “I daresay he would have rejoined us five minutes after we opened the first hamper. Children get into scrapes and are best served if they learn to get out of those scrapes on their own.”
“Jordy got out of this scrape,” Bernard said, “thanks to Eglantine’s vivid imagination. She was able to put herself in her younger cousin’s shoes and describe an ideal hiding place from Jordy’s perspective. I do hope some appropriately inspiring verse results from the day’s excitement.”
While Eglantine, probably for the first time in her life, preened, Sorcha held her son and wrapped an arm around Bridget. Loyal sister that she was, Bridget had charged into the garden and budged up against Sorcha’s side.
Jordy managed a weak smile. “I’m fine, Bridge.”
He was not fine. He was subdued and hurting, also embarrassed. That Sorcha’s son should suffer another mishap before his cousins, and in the same place where he’d come off a pony so ignominiously, meant Sorcha wasn’t fine either.
Even the garden, with its soothingly formal parterres, gleaming crushed-shell walkways, and precisely placed pots of salvia annoyed her.
The gawking cousins annoyed her, and Coraline—tapping her foot and looking impatient, then whisking herself back to the hampers—could have done with a smart rap on the head from the hand of the Almighty.
Bernard, doing his best to allay concern and hide his own annoyance, was by contrast justification for relief and gratitude.
“I hate Cousin Coraline,” Bridget whispered. “I love Cousin Bernard.”
“Coraline did not know what to do,” Sorcha replied quietly. She risked mortifying Jordy past all bearing by kissing his temple. “She makes foolish pronouncements when she’s at a loss.” Also when she wasn’t at a loss, and Annette was all but doomed to become exactly like her mother.
“Cousin Bernard is not foolish.” Bridget didn’t bother whispering.
Bernard was… a wonderment. He’d known what to do, from organizing the search, to finding Jordy, to deflecting Coraline’s criticisms with praise for Eglantine.
“Coraline wants to be the queen,” Jordy observed. “Queens are stupid.”
Worse, Coraline hoped for her daughters to be queens of a sort. “Feeling more the thing?” Sorcha asked as Jordy sat up and moved to sit beside her. He was certainly sounding somewhat recovered, though Sorcha’s heart was still thumping against her ribs nigh audibly.
“My head hurts awfully, and I’m hungry, and I want to wash my face.”
“Notify The London Times. ‘Boy seeks soap and water,’” Sorcha retorted, tousling Jordy’s hair.
He yelped and flinched away. “Even my hair hurts, Mama.”
Bernard, who’d apparently become the apple of Eglantine’s eye, as well as the pattern card for masculine perfection according to Annette, disengaged himself from both young ladies and approached the bench.
“The wounded will now be carried to the infirmary,” he said, turning, crouching down, and presenting his back. “Hop aboard, young man, and do not think of pulling my mane.”
Jordy did not exactly scramble to comply, but he did grin as he accepted his piggyback privileges.
“To the herbal,” Sorcha said, taking Bridget’s hand. “A few dabs of arnica can’t hurt and maybe a tisane of peppermint.” To soothe a mama’s nerves.
“Eww.” Bridget made a cold-porridge face. “Poor Jordy. You should have let Annette find you.”
“I thought she did find me. I heard footsteps, then somebody closed the lid of the oat bin on my head, and that hurt.”
“Your head will heal,” Sorcha said with a calm that was utterly feigned. “You will be right as a trivet in no time.” She crossed the terrace, hand in hand with Bridget, annoyance escalating to fury. One of Jordy’s cousins had injured him deliberately and then feigned ignorance of his location.
“What does that mean?” Bernard mused, sounding utterly unruffled as they passed into the house. “Right as a trivet? A trivet merely sits about the kitchen, waiting for the next hot pot to rest upon it. Why not right as a new lamb or right as a lapdog?”
“Right as a swimming unicorn,” Bridget chorused, keeping up the game until they wound down the steps and through the kitchen to reach the herbal.
“Will it sting?” Bridget asked as Sorcha located a bottle of arnica and a clean cloth.
“Not in the least, and the scent is pleasant.” She held the bottle so first Bridget and then Jordy could sniff the contents.
Bernard stood in the doorway to the herbal, arms crossed, shoulder propped on the doorjamb. To all appearances, he was slightly amused and slightly bored, though to Sorcha’s eye, he was also slightly distracted.
Somebody closed the lid of the oat bin on my head…
Children could be so thoughtless. “Hold still,” Sorcha said, gently parting Jordy’s hair, then laying the back of her palm against his crown.
Heat and swelling. “You will have a goose egg, my dear. Best not wear any crowns or top hats for the next few days.” She tipped some of the tincture onto the cloth and dabbed gently along the edges of the rising bruise.
Jordy tolerated her ministrations while Bridget began opening bottles one by one and sniffing them.
“He shouldn’t wear a helmet either,” Bridget said. “Who shut you in the oat bin, Jordy?”
Sorcha kept dabbing. Bernard watched Bridget’s progress along the lower shelf.
“I don’t know. I heard footsteps, and I thought Annette had found me, so I crouched halfway down and held my breath, and next thing I knew, the lid clobbered me on the head. Then it was all dark, and I was stuck.”
Bernard murmured in Latin. Deus nos ad-something.
“I screamed for you, Jordy.” Bridget banged a cork lid onto a wide-mouth jar with her fist. “I screamed and screamed, and Cousin Bernard and Mama came, and we found you. Cousin Coraline didn’t help at all. She’s a lady.”
“You’re a good screamer, Bridge. I bet Cousin Coraline tried to shush you.”
“Cousin Bernard shushed her, except he didn’t say ‘shush,’ or ‘be quiet,’ or anything. Did you hear big footsteps, Jordy, or little footsteps?”
The question prompted Bernard to raise an eyebrow, while Sorcha busied herself corking the arnica and folding and unfolding the damp cloth.
“Not tromping,” Jordy said. “Quick, like looking for me, but not looking carefully. Like a bird trying to find the way out when it’s flown into the church by mistake.” He made a rapid zigzag pattern in the air with his hand. “I’m hungry.”
“Are you fit enough to walk back to camp?” Bernard asked. “Your noble destrier is weary.”
“I’m fine.”
He was still nowhere near fine. Jordy’s irrepressible spirit had taken a knock along with his head. When he fully realized that one of his cousins had laid him low, he would be exceedingly troubled and probably furious.
“What is a destry-air?” Bridget asked.
“A steed,” Bernard replied. “A charger, a horse of noble mien and weighty responsibilities.”
“I want to ride a destrier!” Bridget commenced skipping a circle around the herbal.
“Let’s be off.” Sorcha resisted the urge to take Jordy’s hand. “If the weather is kind, we’ll have time for our picnic before rain arrives. I’d hoped we could stay longer, but the best-laid plans ‘gang aft agley,’ as Mr. Burns says.”
Bridget ceased her cantering. “Please, Mama, not Mr. Burns. C’mon, Jordy. We’ll share a blanket with Gilly, and the cousins will leave us alone.”
“Jess isn’t so bad,” Jordy said, following his sister out the door.
Bernard looked ready to call them back.
“Let them go,” Sorcha said. “We know the important part. Somebody closed that lid, Jordy suffered a blow to the head, and he’ll make a full recovery.”
“You consider this a prank?” Bernard asked, frowning down at her.
“I consider that Jordy has told us what he can, which isn’t enough.
I might plead youth on Jessica’s behalf for such nastiness, but Jessica likes Jordy, and she’s not given to meanness.
The other girls are old enough to know better, and while they regard Jordy and Bridget as pests, they don’t wish either child ill. ”
Bernard’s expression became remote, as if he were listening to a hymn sung in the distance and couldn’t quite recall the lyrics.
“Don’t say it, Bernard.” Sorcha started after the children.
“Don’t say what?”
“Don’t say, ‘That leaves Gilchrist.’ She would strangle anybody who sought to harm either child.”
Bernard ambled along beside Sorcha, then politely followed her up the steps to the main floor. “I wasn’t about to accuse Gilchrist, though we should ask her where she was while the children played their games.”