Chapter 21
“Jump, Buster!” Lilian called out excitedly, running alongside the small white terrier as it leaped over the series of small obstacles she had set up with chairs and sticks on a course around one of the lawns. “Yes! Jump again. Cecily, Mary! Did you see Buster?”
Cecily and Mary both applauded with genuine enthusiasm.
“Oh my, what a jump! Well done!”
“Now I’m going to jump too,” Lilian announced, tucking up her skirts and returning to the start line. “That’s how I showed Buster what to do when I first got him.”
As the little girl began to run and jump around the same course of obstacles, Mary and Cecily smiled at one another and applauded again.
“Lilian must have put a great deal of time and energy into training that little dog,” Mary remarked. “I’ve never seen a terrier do anything quite like that before.”
“Yes, I believe she did,” Cecily agreed. “Unfortunately, it also seems Lilian never had the opportunity to show off Buster’s skills or anything else she’d done before.”
“There’s plenty of servants, surely,” Mary mused.
Cecily shook her head. “It’s not the same as family, Mary.
Anyway, Mrs. Barnes has to work, and I don’t think the nursemaids have much to say about training dogs or ponies.
Nathaniel really should have shown more of a personal interest before now.
It makes such a difference to Lilian to be seen and acknowledged properly. ”
Now, Lilian and Buster were running together, the little girl trying to outrun the animal and only succeeding because he kept returning to play with her.
“I can see that,” Mary acknowledged. “At first, I thought she was a naughty little girl who ought to be taught some manners. But since you got her out of that locked room, she has been as good as gold, at least with you.”
Cecily nodded thoughtfully.
It was true. Under her caring attention, Lilian was growing and flourishing in many ways.
She was keeping more consistent hours, remembering to say please and thank you, and no longer shouting at Cecily.
On some days, she even spent more than half an hour at her small desk in the schoolroom with Miss Osborne without making the well-meaning but ineffective woman cry.
“Yes, I feel I’m doing the right things for her now, but it should all have been put in place so long ago, and it’s hard to understand why it wasn’t. I know Nathaniel loves her, but why is it so hard for him to show that sensibly?”
Cecily’s expression softened as she watched Lilian stop and feed Buster treats from her pocket as a reward for his cooperation.
“Are you still angry with him, Cecily?” Mary asked tentatively.
She had listened to Cecily rage about Nathaniel’s irresponsibility for days after the locked room incident, but she knew nothing of the strange fires that had kept her anger burning.
If Cecily had not melted under Nathaniel’s knowing caresses, if she had not felt so magnetically drawn to him, would his faults irk her as much as they did?
Likely not.
“Maybe I am,” Cecily sighed. “I don’t seem to be able to let it go, although I know I must. We are married, after all.”
She had been cold toward Nathaniel since their row in the sitting room.
Briefly, she feared that he would take her at her word and come to her bed to exercise his conjugal rights before vanishing back to London.
He had not, of course, and nor would he.
He had been clear in stating that he would not take an unwilling woman.
“I believe the problem with your husband is that he has never had to face any consequences for his actions,” Mary pronounced.
“I suppose dukes often don’t face consequences, Mary,” Cecily reflected. “Who would ever have reprimanded or punished him?”
“Well, his parents should have done it,” Mary answered promptly.
“They were never around,” Cecily explained, listening thoughtfully to her own words. “Nathaniel lived here pretty much by himself, with only servants and a much younger brother. I suppose he has no idea how to be a parent because he never really had one.”
“He had a younger brother who grew up to be a completely spoiled buffoon with no motivation, no ambition, and no prospects,” Mary threw in, never losing an opportunity to run down her former lover. Patrick was always on her mind.
“Perhaps Nathaniel ought to take some responsibility for that, too. Patrick ought to have been pushed into some useful course of life when he was young enough to be steered. I suppose Nathaniel couldn’t be bothered to do that either.”
“Maybe you should punish him, Cecily,” Mary suggested with a giggle. “You are his wife, after all. Who else would ever dare?”
“Punish who?” demanded Lilian, who had come bounding up to them with Buster yapping beside her.
“Punish Papa? I’d like to see that. I’d rub horseradish in his nose while he’s sleeping, and put pins on the chair in his study, and tear up the floorboards outside his room so that he falls into a big hole! ”
Mary burst out laughing. “I’d do all those things to Patrick, too. It would serve him right.”
Cecily shot her a warning look and kept her own face straight with effort.
“Any of those things could really hurt your papa,” she pointed out to the child. “They would be very wrong, and you mustn’t ever do that. If you play tricks, let them be harmless and funny so that the other person can laugh too.”
Lilian sighed and nodded, but then frowned. “Like what kind of things?”
“I don’t know. Maybe put old eggshells in someone’s egg cup in the morning so that they think they’re about to eat breakfast, but then there’s nothing there,” Cecily offered, unsurprised that this elicited little enthusiasm.
“Or throw eggs at them from the window?” the little girl suggested.
“We don’t throw eggs at anyone,” Cecily told her firmly. “It makes a mess on the floor and could hurt them if you throw it hard.”
“Well, could we just put an egg on them instead of throwing it? We could just smear it on them.”
Cecily had to laugh at that.
“I don’t think that your father is going to stand still long enough for you to smear him with eggs,” she observed. “You must think of something else, Lilian. Now, enough talk of human tricks. I want to see what else Buster can do.”
To her relief, Lilian grinned and immediately turned her attention to showing off her little dog again. Hopefully, she would quickly forget this talk of pranks and punishments.
Her ideas for revenge on her father had indeed been entertaining, but Cecily did not like to think of how Nathaniel might react. Would he see the funny side of such a joke or not? It was not a risk she felt like taking at the moment.
* * *
“Damn it all! I want to know who is responsible for this!”
The sound of Nathaniel’s angry voice echoed into the breakfast room the following morning as Cecily and Mary were enjoying their bread and coffee.
They looked at one another with alarm, and then Cecily put down her coffee cup and rose without a word, going into the hallway to find out the cause of the disturbance.
Nathaniel stood barefoot at the bottom of the stairs with a face like thunder and a pair of shoes in his hand. Nearby, Rogers and Mrs. Barnes were looking at him open-mouthed while more junior servants peered around corners and doors to see the cause of the commotion.
“Who the hell has put eggs in my shoes?” Nathaniel demanded. “Has this house gone mad?”
“There were eggs in my shoes too!” Patrick called out from a landing above, before rushing down barefoot with his shoes and socks in his hand. “I thought it was you, Nathaniel.”
“Me? Have you lost your mind, Patrick?” Nathaniel snapped. “It’s more something you would have done once, but not at the age of eight-and-twenty, surely.”
In the pause that followed, Mary giggled.
“You!” Patrick pointed an accusatory finger at her. “You put eggs in my shoes!”
“Of course I didn’t, Patrick,” she replied. “But you’re exactly the kind of man who should have eggs put in his shoes. That’s why I’m laughing.”
“Enough!” Nathaniel thundered, cutting across their squabbling as though they were foolish children. “Someone must know who is behind this, and I want to be told now. Who has been putting eggs in shoes?”
“Oh God, Lilian,” Cecily murmured as realization struck her, not even conscious that she had spoken aloud.
Lilian had not forgotten the conversation about tricks at all. She had carried it with her and planned more on her own. She must have sneaked eggs from the kitchen, entered both her father’s and uncle’s rooms, and set her trap.
“Lilian?” Nathaniel repeated sharply, yet again showing that he was never quite as inattentive or detached from his surroundings as he liked to pretend. “Where is she? Get my daughter down here now, Mrs. Barnes. I want to get to the bottom of this.”
Cecily’s heart sank. This was the last thing Lilian needed right now.
She certainly should be called out for playing such a trick, but arguing with her father would not help either of them.
All of Cecily’s efforts could be undone in an instant, and any hope of Nathaniel building a better relationship with his daughter would be lost.
“It is not Lilian’s fault, Nathaniel,” she stated boldly, stepping forward as a young maid scurried off to the nursery to fetch the child. “This was a mistake. I think Lilian may have gotten the wrong idea.”
“It takes more than a mistake to do something like this,” Nathaniel retorted angrily. “Shoes, socks, and floors must be cleaned. Food has been wasted. These things matter.”
“I am well aware of that,” Cecily shot back, thinking of all the days she had gone without food while under her uncle’s roof. “I am only telling you that—”
“Did it work? Oh yes, how funny!” Lilian crowed as she danced down the stairs toward the assembly of unhappy adults. “Look at Papa and Uncle Patrick. I have taught them a lesson just like you told me, Cecily!”