Chapter 5 #2
Alone again, Kitty picked up her current book, Clarissa.
Her third reading hadn’t softened the ending’s blow.
Clarissa, scorned by her family, half-mad with the loss of her virtue, was dead.
Robert Lovelace, libertine, was dead. Did a girl really lose her will to live after the loss of her virtue?
Was there nothing more to a girl? Did girls not have dreams like Julian’s, to build a fleet of ships, to conquer the seas?
“I won’t be able to sail all my ships,” Julian had said once, sable eyes lost in his dreams, “but I’ll be there. Anchoring in turquoise waters off unknown lands. Firing cannons in battle. Outrunning pirates. And I’ll be the pirates too.”
Kitty had giggled, rolling to her stomach on the summer grass and tickling Julian’s mouth with a lock of her hair. “I want to be a pirate.”
So long ago. Before Eton. Before he had turned into a right bastard.
Back then, Julian hadn’t told her she couldn’t be a pirate, that the only thing girls did was create children.
He had drawn her in, an arm hooking around her head and smothering her in his coat.
Right smack in the middle of his dreams, he had appointed Kitty his second mate and navigator, teaching her the thirty-two points of a compass.
Noreast by North raiseth a degree in sayling twenty-four leagues.
Where were her dreams now? What good was knowing that one should reef the sails when running downwind under a storm? To pull a jib when getting out of irons?
Tossing the book aside, Kitty stood, nodding to Harry, the red stag on the wall, who watched her every move.
She fled the room to the kitchen. No one noticed her.
She nabbed a carrot, two biscuits, and a cup of cold tea.
Walking through the garden, past the shrubs in need of tending and the broken fountain with brown water, she halted at the lime tree shading the graves.
“Mama?”
No one answered.
Because they were all dead.
She smiled for her mother. “I brought you your favorite.”
Dropping to her knees, she set down the tea and biscuits and plucked the weeds from Mary Katherine Babbington’s headstone.
She kissed the name struck in cold stone.
Lying down on her side, as if tucked at her mother’s side, she stroked a rock nestled atop her mother’s grave.
Only four days and fresh shoots of grass had already grown around it.
The day Julian had stared at Kitty like she was a stranger and said, “Oh, you,” she had returned home to find her finest furry friend, Daisy, dead.
She placed a nibbles-worth of carrot next to the stone. “Good afternoon, Daisy. Surely not as grand as the lettuce in heaven but I want you to know that I miss you. And love you. Always will.”
Why did Daisy die? Why did her mother die?
Why did anyone die? Father Dunlevy said that God called his flock home because he needed them.
A glorious mystery to be revealed in time.
A mystery: that God, who could have anyone to keep him company, to love, had taken her mother and Daisy. Even Julian, in a way.
Rolling to her back, she tried to find God’s reason in the lime-green leaves shaped like hearts and the clouds shifting between the branches.
“I miss you, Mama,” she whispered.
“Kitty!”
Kitty shot up. For a moment, she thought her mother had answered, but it was only Clara calling her to dinner. Dashing the tea to the earth, she hurried inside. Her father dined with her only on Sundays and demanded punctuality.
Clara Burton, once her mother’s companion and dearest friend, had agreed to teach Kitty her lessons after her mother had died, for half the wage of a real governess.
She sorely lacked scholarship, for which Kitty’s father cared nil, so Kitty secretly read books from their library.
Books that her father was selling at an alarming rate.
But Clara compensated with needlework, comportment, and music.
Clara met her at the door, hands clutched at her sprigged linen gown. One of the many Kitty’s mother had bequeathed to Clara before her death. “I’ve been searching for you for a half hour.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t hear.”
“I told Sir Jeffrey you were ill.” Clara knitted her thin brows with a harried glance toward the front of the old house. “Dinner has already been served.”
Clara guided her to the dining room with more antlers and grotesquely stuffed heads upon the walls. Kitty often wondered if any of the poor creatures watched their very selves be eaten. An insult in the extreme.
After a dismissive glance down his thin, hooked nose, her father ignored her through his soup. Which was as usual. He conversed with Shelley on the subjects worthy of his consideration: hunting, hounds, weather, and war.
One day, Kitty was going to eat in a room without stuffed creatures with glass eyes and drink champagne instead of watered-down sugared wine. And people would fall upon themselves to converse with her—or simply deign to talk to her—and it would be in French.
Yes, that was her new dream. To be seen.
Her father stabbed his beef roast and jabbed it at her brother, Shelley. “Best your sister forget about that St. Clair boy.”
Kitty started. How did her father know she had any feelings to forget?
“A title given by a heretical whoremonger, theirs is.”
Time for her father’s tirade on the eighth King Henry. The Babbingtons conformed to the Anglican faith but were cryptic Catholics. In their chapel, called a library, Father Dunlevy who made a secret circuit about the neighboring counties, celebrated mass—called prayers—twice monthly.
Did it matter if she was Anglican or Catholic? Either God had selfishly stolen her loved ones.
“If my ancestors had given up the faith, I would be a duke,” her father said. “Nothing but commoners before that, the St. Clairs, digging in the dirt for their supper. Damn heretics.”
“Julian’s brother is heir to an earldom,” Kitty said. “I believe their nobility arose with the Conqueror.”
“Cut off a lot of heads, they did,” Shelley said to her father.
Kitty sliced a tiny piece of roast and chewed. And chewed.
“Right you are, son. No, ’tis best the boy’s done with Katherine. Wouldn’t want their greedy, heretic hands to get hold of Babbington lands. They’d want nothing more than to have it.”
Even when speaking on her, her father did not speak to her.
He lifted a long finger. “Heed me. St. Clairs will do anything to get what they want. No sense of honor in any of them. And God forbid he continued his attentions to Katherine. She’d be having his children and carrying it on.
Mingling our honor with their discredit.
No. Your sister shall marry a man of the true faith and when Bonnie Prince Charlie rides in to save us all from the heretical whoremongers… ”
What was a whore and how did one monger? It sounded more exciting than discussing the proper length for one’s stirrups.
Kitty played at the pianoforte, a variation of Vivaldi’s Summer she had been torturing for a fortnight, when she heard her name.
Kitty halted her play. Clara stood at the music room door. She spent much time watching and worrying over Kitty of late. She had offered to play with her while Georgiana forgot her for the Notfelle Hedge.
Kitty pasted a smile. “Time for dinner?”
Clara frowned at the window where the sun attacked the panes from the east. It was still morning.
Kitty forced a giggle. “Oh. Time passes so quickly.”
In the distance, hounds bayed. Her father and brother killing something. Clara fidgeted.
“Clara? What is it?”
“Master Julian has arrived.”
Kitty leapt from her seat. “Did he ask for me?”
“And who else would the very devil be asking for?”
Joy, startling, painful, streaked through her.
Rushing past Clara, she stopped at the front door.
Her hands shook like Father Dunlevy’s when he sipped wine.
Without warning, tears rushed like a waterfall.
What if Julian returned the paints she had long lent him for rendering his ships more lifelike?
Or the lock of her hair she had gifted him before he had left for Eton?
Clara turned Kitty around, scoured her face and neck with a handkerchief, and straightened her fichu. “There. Pretty as a penny and fit as a fiddle.”
If only she felt fit as a fiddle on the inside. “Thank you.”
“Lucifer is waiting.” Clara swung the door open wide, pressed her to the stoop, and shut the door.
The very air electrified about her. An easterly wind harried the tatty rose bushes overgrowing the steps. Julian stood there, at the foot, framed by the topiaries’ whimsical shapes lost to neglect.
His coat hooked on his finger draped jauntily over his right shoulder. In his left hand, he clutched a nosegay of corncockles. He averted his eyes and dug his boot heel to a weed sprouting from the sparse gravel. “That, er, other boy told me you’d be here.”
“He did?”
“Mm-hmm. And…” He swallowed. “I despise Eton. Nothing but stupid boys.”
“I thought you liked boys.”
“Suppose I’m particular now.” He brushed his jaw against his shoulder. “I’m not going back.”
A flock of starlings cackled beyond them. “Will your father agree to it?”
“I, er, knocked out a few teeth from a snotty bastard when he stole one of your letters and read it at luncheon. I might not be welcome back.”
Kitty took two steps. “How wonderful. I mean, I’m so very sorry he lost his teeth but…”
“And I might have stolen my father’s seal and forged a letter that he was withdrawing me from school. Last November.” He leaned into the step, flexing his thigh. “Then I might have run off to Southampton and apprenticed with a shipwright.”
If anyone ever asked her, a score of years from today, when she was old and grey, when she had truly fallen in love with Julian St. Clair, she would know. Today. The boy who risked all for his dreams.
“I’m returning in September,” he said. “That’s a secret, by the by.”
“But your father. He’s sure to discover your deception.”
He shrugged. “I might have stolen the school’s seal and been forging my marks and the headmaster’s letters, praising my, you know, exemplary behavior.”
He shoved the flowers at her. Taking the final two steps, Kitty reached for them, sliding her hand beneath his, and he didn’t grimace or pull away. He held her there, entwining his fingers with hers.
“Look, Kitty. I—” He squared his shoulders. “I missed you.”
“Oh, I thought I’d die if I never saw you again.”
“I didn’t think I’d die.” He winked. “I figured God had something worse in mind, like having me live without you.”
She leapt into his arms with a squeal. The starlings burst from the oaks as Julian spun her around. She stiffened as he set her down and the earth shook beneath her.
“My father’s near. We need to leave.”
“Why?”
“Because he worries you might marry me and make children with me.”
His masculine features screwed in horror. “I’d never do that to you.”
The first brown-and-black hounds bounded from the north woods on their left. Julian caught her hand and ran right, escaping into a stand of birch as her father and brother galloped past in pursuit of a black-footed fox.
Kitty prayed the fox got away and her father took a fall to forever keep him from mounting a horse and shooting a gun.
“Bloodthirsty dolts,” Julian muttered, before gazing down at her from his astonishing height. It afforded a panorama of his smile. “Are you certain you’re related?”
“How could I not be?”
“Easy enough.”
“But how? I would so much like to be an orphan.”
“You don’t want to be an orphan, trust me. I’ve seen them. Come. I have a surprise.”
Leading through woods and fields knee-high with barley, taking the brunt of a hawthorn hedge to allow her to pass, Julian remained silent until a squirrel scampered across their path, and leaping to a tree, froze spread-legged on the craggy trunk.
“Where’s Daisy?” he asked, picking a twig from her hair.
She wouldn’t spoil his surprise. “I left her at home.”
“Getting fat on carrots?”
She smiled weakly.
His eyes flattened in a serious line. “Is she ill?”
“No. Not ill.” She widened her smile. “Does the surprise have to do with her?”
“I did make a special place for her. A throne, if you will.” They were off again, covering another half mile, the ground growing soft with the rains and the swelling banks of the river.
Losing a shoe, she dislodged it from the muck and straightened as Julian pressed a tree bough aside. There ahead, floating in the sparkle of sun and the rippling river water, sat a boat. Single-masted with the sail reefed and oar locks for narrow passages and windless days.
She walked to the lapping water and reeds. Apart from Julian and the sunrise and the memory of her mother, it was the most beautiful sight she’d ever laid eyes upon.
Near the stern sat an open box filled with straw, with daisies carved on its walls.
Oh, Daisy, he did love you.
She blinked away a rush of tears. “Did you build this?”
“Mm-hmm,” Julian murmured at her ear. “And I named her Fairy.”