Chapter Sixteen
T hey brought the steward’s cook-housekeeper into the secret. The steward assured Pol that Mrs. Finch would be sympathetic to Gran and would tell no one. Pol agreed. They needed a woman to wash Gran and make her comfortable in a clean night rail, and Pol knew Mrs. Finch to be a kind woman and a good one.
Since she was the steward’s only servant and they were making extra work for her, Pol volunteered to bring up heated water and do anything she needed in the kitchen, after he stripped off the clothes he was wearing. Gran had vomited twice while he was carrying her, and had suffered a flux, dirtying his trousers.
After he’d washed and changed in the cottage’s little laundry shed, he put the clothes he’d been wearing in to soak, dressed in some old clothes of his own that Mrs. Finch had found in the attic and then went through to the kitchen to peel some extra vegetables for dinner, since the maids had only prepared enough for Mrs. Finch and the steward.
It gave him something to do while Mrs. Finch was with Gran and helped to keep him from peering out the windows to see if the servants were out hunting for Gran, for he had expected the nurse to set up a hue and cry long before this. He also had to resist hurrying upstairs every few minutes to ask how Gran was. She was so weak, so gaunt, so sick.
“You’re a good lad,” Mrs. Finch said approvingly, when she came downstairs and saw what he had done. “And the kettle’s hot, too!”
“I thought you might need a cup of tea,” Pol told her. “Gran, too. How is she?”
“Asleep, poor dear. Keith is sitting with her for a few minutes. I expect you’ll want to go up, but I just wanted to talk to you first, Mr. Allegro.”
“Sit down,” Pol suggested. “I’ll make that tea.”
She protested, but without much spirit, and was easily convinced to sit while he poured the boiling water into the prepared tea pot. He took a seat opposite her. “Now tell me,” he said.
“Her ladyship is in a bad way,” the housekeeper told him. “I don’t know all that is wrong with her. She is more than half-starved, and they have been dosing her with laudanum. All sorts of other things, too, but it is the laudanum that makes her forgetful and confused.”
She frowned. “I don’t like the way she’s vomiting, and that’s a fact. Could be one of those elixirs, or it could be that quack of a doctor took too much blood, for that he did. She is bruised all over, from the leeches and from being pinched or hit. You were right to take her out of there, Mr. Allegro. They were killing her, between them.”
She poured her tea. “This was kind of you, sir,” she said.
“A way of showing how much I appreciate your kindness to my Gran,” Pol replied.
“She is a great lady, sir. We should have noticed what was happening, and that is a fact.”
“I should have noticed,” Pol told her. “Though I think she is much worse than she was when I last saw her, nearly two weeks ago.”
The housekeeper nodded. “Likely. Whatever they have been doing, they had to be careful when you were visiting nearly every day.”
“I should have taken her with me when I left.” Though how he could have done so when he was turned off the estate with nowhere to go, he did not know.
“You are here now, sir. One of us must sit with her through the night. I’ll give you a jug of barley water. We’ll need to get as much of it into her as we can. My Mam always said that if liquid came out, liquid had to go in, and she nursed three of us through typhoid fever.”
“You think Gran has typhoid?” Pol asked, alarmed.
“I don’t see how. She goes nowhere and sees no one. And I’ve not heard of typhoid in the village or on the estate. Besides, she has no fever. I wish I knew how long she has been sick.”
“Gran might know,” Pol suggested. “When will she be well enough to travel?”
The housekeeper didn’t know that, either, but when Pol went upstairs with the jug of barley water, the steward said it didn’t matter. “We can’t keep her here,” he said. “Sooner or later, they’ll search this cottage, Allegro. The pair of you will have to leave. In the morning, I’ll ride into town and organize a carriage.”
“I daresay there’ll be a hue and cry as soon as the maid returns to Gran’s room,” Pol admitted.
“I’m the steward,” his old friend pointed out. “In the absence of the Rieses, I can keep the Whitelys and other servants out until someone thinks to go to the magistrate in town to get authority to search.”
He went off downstairs, leaving Pol to take his turn watching Gran. Pol roused Gran enough to drink some of the barley water through an invalid’s cup that the housekeeper had found, but she fell back into a deep sleep as soon as he allowed her to lie back on the pillow.
Darkness had fallen. Pol could see the lights of the house beyond the hedges of the maze. Not too many lights. With the family away, most of the life in the building would be below stairs. He could not see Gran’s window from here, but at any moment, he expected to see the house light up as people hurried from room to room, looking for her.
It didn’t happen. Perhaps he still had an opportunity. After catching Jackie in the study, he’d searched it for something that might incriminate Oscar, and then he’d searched Oscar’s chambers. Predictably, Oscar was not the sort to keep paperwork or souvenirs. Both searches gave Pol zero ammunition.
Lady Riese’s suite of chambers had been beyond his reach, however. If she was not in them, her maid was or was likely to return at any time. But not now. Not this evening, when Lady Riese was in London and so was her maid.
He couldn’t leave Gran, of course, until the steward or his housekeeper took over the watch. It was, in any case, too early to make his foray into the manor house. Later. When the servants were all asleep.
That is, if Gran’s nursemaid—her keeper, more like—didn’t set the whole house stirring like an ant nest by announcing that Gran was missing, and she would, of course. Something had delayed her return to Gran’s bedroom, but as soon as she went back, she would have every servant on the estate out looking for the missing dowager countess.
As the night deepened, candlelight shone through the attic windows of the rooms where the maids slept. The servants were going to bed. Still no alarm. Perhaps the nursemaid had no intention of seeing Gran again tonight, in which case, Lady Riese’s bedchambers might be within his reach.
Gran shifted restlessly as she slept, but didn’t wake even when he fed her more barley water. He sat watching her, but his mind was miles away, in Little Tidbury, with Jackie. It would please her, he was certain, if he found something in Lady Riese’s rooms that could be used against the awful pair. He had no idea what sort of thing he might find, but the thought of Jackie’s reaction made him determined to take the risk.
Jackie . It had seemed like a good plan, back when he proposed it, for the three of them—four, with Gran—to share a cottage. And financially it made sense. He had not considered what it would be like to live in the same house as a woman he desired. A woman with whom, if he was going to be honest with himself, he was falling in love.
Not so much the falling, either. He’d spent a week in close quarters, and his head and heart were full of her. Her smile over the breakfast table, her greeting when he arrived home from work, her conversation over dinner, her sweet face bent intently over her sewing while he read out loud of an evening, her on his arm as he escorted her and her mother to Sunday services.
He wanted more. He wanted the right to live with her for a lifetime, to wake up next to her every morning, to kiss her in greeting when he came home, to follow her up the stairs and join her in their bed every night.
Yet, all his earlier doubts were still justified. He was a poor man without a permanent job. He could not offer her the kind of life to which she should have been accustomed. He was base born. No lady—for she was a lady, even if she had to work for a living—would consider marriage to such as him.
It didn’t matter next to the truth that he loved her. If Pol could persuade her to marry him, he would spend his life making certain that she never regretted it. Whether searching Lady Riese’s rooms would help, he did not know. But he was going to do it.
The steward rejoined him. “I’ll watch your grandmother, Allegro. You should get some sleep.”
“Not quite yet,” Pol said. “First, I want to search Lady Riese’s rooms. There must be some evidence that I can use to stop Oscar and his mother from exploiting and tormenting the people around here, but I’ve already searched Oscar’s room and the study and found nothing.”
He waited for the steward to tell him not to go, though Pol didn’t think the man would actively try to stop him. However, the steward surprised him. “Look for the family Bible,” he said. “It went missing some time ago. Lady Riese may have taken it to London, but if it is still in the house, it must be in her rooms.”
“The family Bible?” Pol asked. “Why would she hide it?”
“I cannot be certain,” the steward said. “I think it records your parents’ marriage and your birth, but I only had one glimpse, when it was brought out to write Amanda’s name sixteen years ago. Lady Riese saw me looking and sent me on an errand, and the Bible was gone from its place when I looked for it later. I never saw it prominently displayed again. I don’t know where she put it.”
“My parents’ marriage ?” Pol’s head reeled as he absorbed the steward’s words and the room seemed to recede around him, leaving him remote from everything except the steward’s voice. If his parents were married when he was born, that changed everything.
“Look for that and anything else that might show you are the true viscount,” the steward advised. “Marriage lines, letters to your grandfather.”
“She might have destroyed them all,” Pol recovered enough from his shock to point that out. If she had stolen his heritage, then destroying the evidence made sense. But then, in fact, if he was a threat to her and her son, why had she kept him at all? She could have had him killed or sold him to a chimney sweep—which would have amounted to the same thing.
“I’ve worked for the Rieses for a long time,” the steward said. “One thing we can say about your aunt is that she always has a backup plan. If I am right about you being legitimate, then you were Lady Riese’s backup plan in case something happened to her son.”
It made a sort of sense. “Why have you never mentioned this to me before?” Pol asked.
“Back then, I was not certain,” the steward said, “and I did not think there was much a boy of your age and a man like me, with no powerful friends, could do against Lady Riese. All I would do, I thought, was get you killed and me dismissed. I should have said something when you turned twenty-one. But your cousin had already been confirmed as viscount, and the House of Lords does not like admitting it has made a mistake. I was too much of a coward to say anything when there was no chance of it making a difference.”
“It would have made a difference to me,” Pol told him, his building anger at the steward deflected by the man’s admission of cowardice. He had to remember that the man had been his good friend for this last decade. He was a good man, if timid.
As to his news, if Pol’s father had loved his mother enough to marry her… It didn’t change anything, and yet, it changed everything. “If I can prove that Lady Riese deliberately hid the truth, will the House of Lords put right the injustice?” he asked.
The steward shrugged. “I do not know, Allegro. A lawyer might be able to advise you. Look for the evidence. If you can find something to prove you should be viscount, something that warrants an inquiry, then you can decide your next steps.”
Pol had no fear of being caught. On a wet night like tonight, the guards would be tucked up in the lodges, drinking. In the unlikely event they bothered to look out a window, they would see nothing because of the rain. In the house, the servants would be asleep. He would have all the rest of the night to search Lady Riese’s chambers.