Chapter Four The Gamekeeper
CHAPTER FOUR
The Gamekeeper
By half past nine the next morning, red survey flags had appeared across the north slope like a small invading army.
Mary Beth stood at the edge of the upper path with her hands clasped behind her back and tried not to take their existence personally.
Ambrose Tavener had been annoyingly literal.
He had marked the unstable ground with stakes, tied strips of scarlet cloth at every place he considered unsafe, and instructed his men to keep anyone without a shovel, measuring chain, or useful purpose beyond them.
Mary Beth had not asked whether ownership of the land qualified as a useful purpose.
She suspected his answer would irritate her before breakfast.
Below, four men worked along the broken drainage line. Two dug carefully into the washed-out bank while another carried spoil toward a growing heap. Ambrose crouched beside the exposed channel with his coat off and his sleeves rolled to the forearms, studying something in the earth.
Mary Beth had discovered that his sleeves were a problem.
This was unreasonable. A man’s forearms had never before threatened the orderly management of Blackthorn Manor.
She had known handsome men, graceful men, titled men, and one particularly beautiful Italian tenor whose conversation had been considerably less memorable than his shoulders.
None had made the sight of rolled linen seem like a personal challenge.
Ambrose did.
Perhaps because he had no idea he was being observed.
Or perhaps because he did, and was simply better at pretending otherwise.
Mary Beth stepped toward the flags.
Ambrose spoke without raising his head.
“Don’t.”
She stopped.
“You cannot possibly know what I was about to do.”
“You were about to cross the line.”
“I might have been admiring the craftsmanship.”
“Of red cloth tied to sticks?”
“Blackthorn has endured worse decoration.”
One of the men digging nearest Ambrose made a suspicious sound that might have been a cough.
Ambrose finally glanced up. “The line means what it meant yesterday.”
“Yesterday there was no line.”
“That was the problem.”
Mary Beth smiled despite herself. “You have become authoritarian overnight.”
“I slept in a room with blue birds painted on the ceiling. It changed me.”
His answer drew a laugh from her before she could decide whether he deserved one.
The man beside him grinned down at his shovel. Ambrose returned to the exposed drain, but Mary Beth saw the corner of his mouth move.
She remained behind the flags.
That, she decided, was generosity enough for one morning.
The work had changed the north slope considerably since dawn.
A shallow trench now revealed the old drainage line that had failed beneath the upper field.
The original stone channel had been repaired at least twice over the years, each repair narrowing the passage until mud and roots had nearly sealed it.
Recent rain had done the rest. Water had sought another route, found the loose fill behind the retaining wall, and pushed until stone and soil gave way together.
Ambrose had explained all of this to her at breakfast using a spoon, a folded napkin, and Mary Beth’s marmalade pot.
The pot had represented the cottages.
Mary Beth had objected to this assignment on aesthetic grounds.
He had ignored her.
Now, watching the trench deepen, she could see the shape of the failure herself.
“You were right about the old line,” she called.
Ambrose straightened. “I shall have that engraved.”
“Do not grow accustomed to it.”
“Too late.”
He climbed toward her, stepping around the flagged section rather than through it. Mud covered his boots almost to the ankle. A smear of earth marked one cuff. He carried a length of broken clay pipe in one hand.
“This is later than the stone drain,” he said. “Someone tried to improve the flow perhaps twenty or thirty years ago. They joined clay to stone, which might have worked if they had given the water somewhere adequate to go.”
Mary Beth took the broken piece. “My husband’s uncle did a great deal of work on this side of the estate.”
“Did he keep records?”
“He kept bills. Whether those are the same thing is debatable.”
“Bills tell me who was paid.”
“At Blackthorn, they occasionally tell us who hoped to be paid.”
Ambrose’s gaze warmed. “I would like to see them.”
“The estate ledgers are in the west office.”
“After luncheon.”
He held out his hand for the pipe.
Mary Beth did not immediately return it.
His fingers remained open between them.
Yesterday those hands had closed around her waist.
The memory arrived with irritating clarity: his body braced behind hers, his breath near her temple, the hard certainty of his grip while the ground shifted beneath them.
Mary Beth put the clay fragment into his palm.
Their fingers touched, and neither commented.
“After luncheon,” she agreed.
Ambrose turned back toward the trench.
One of the laborers had come up from below carrying a coil of rope. He was older than the others, broad through the shoulders, with the flattened vowels of the district. He waited until Ambrose reached him, then spoke in a voice intended to remain private.
It did not.
“Didn’t know this was that Blackthorn place, sir.”
Ambrose took the rope. “It says Blackthorn on the gate.”
The man shifted. “Aye. I meant her place.”
Mary Beth went very still, and Ambrose did too.
The laborer noticed too late that silence could carry farther than speech.
“No offense meant.”
Mary Beth could have walked away.
Once, years ago, she might have. She had spent the first months after the rumors began learning the exhausting mathematics of dignity: when to pretend not to hear, when to deny, when to laugh, when to leave a room before someone forced her to acknowledge what everyone already believed.
She had eventually discovered a simpler method.
Never surrender the floor to a coward.
“Which story?” she asked.
The man’s face reddened beneath the weather in his skin.
Ambrose said quietly, “Mrs. Blackthorn.”
Mary Beth ignored the warning in his tone.
“There are several,” she continued. “If we are interrupting drainage work for gossip, we should at least be precise.”
The laborer stared at the rope in his hands.
“I heard nothing worth repeating, ma’am.”
“Then it seems unfair that I have already heard it.”
Ambrose’s jaw tightened.
“Back to the trench,” he told the man.
The laborer needed no second instruction. He descended the slope so quickly he nearly crossed one of Ambrose’s precious flags.
Mary Beth watched him go.
“You frightened him.”
“He embarrassed himself.”
“Those are not mutually exclusive.”
Ambrose’s eyes settled on her face. “You knew what he meant.”
“Of course.”
“Do you always answer like that?”
“Only when someone gives me an opportunity.”
“You could have let it pass.”
Mary Beth’s smile vanished. “Yes.”
The single word made him reconsider whatever he had meant to say next.
She handed him the coil of rope the laborer had forgotten to take.
“Your men are waiting.”
“Mary Beth-”
“After luncheon, Mr. Tavener. The west office.”
She turned toward the house before he could answer.
She did not hurry.
She was absurdly pleased that she had managed not to hurry.
The garden door stood open when she reached the house.
Mary Beth slowed.
It was an ordinary door of dark oak set into the side passage between the library wing and the old gun room.
In summer the gardeners used it when carrying flowers to the drawing rooms. Servants crossed through it with baskets from the kitchen garden.
Dogs had scratched the lower panel for generations.
Yet half the county could have identified it from description.
A little more than three years earlier, a housemaid returning from the laundry court had seen a man’s coat disappear through that doorway after eleven at night.
By breakfast the coat belonged to the gamekeeper.
By luncheon he had supposedly been discovered in Mary Beth’s bedroom.
By Sunday, according to a woman who had not entered Blackthorn Manor in six years, Mary Beth had been meeting him there while her husband was still alive.
That final invention had nearly made her violent.
The insult to her virtue was not what angered her. She had discovered that virtue was a currency whose value depended largely upon who wished to spend it.
It insulted her husband.
Whatever their marriage had lacked, she had never deceived him.
The gamekeeper had first come through the garden door almost a year after the funeral. He had brought a ledger concerning damage by deer in the south coppice. He had stayed because Mary Beth asked him to. The next time there had been no ledger.
She remembered very little about the beginning now except that he had treated her like a woman rather than a widow and had never once used her loneliness to promise something he could not give.
When the affair ended, it ended cleanly.
He had already intended to leave Yorkshire.
She gave him the reference his work deserved and nothing more.
He accepted it without asking for money, favor, or silence.
Society had found this arrangement incomprehensible.
A ruined woman was supposed to have been seduced, abandoned, blackmailed, or forgiven. There was apparently no useful category for a grown woman who had wanted a man, enjoyed him, and then continued managing her property afterward.
Mary Beth touched the brass latch of the door.
She had stopped using this entrance for nearly a year after the gossip began, telling herself it was practicality rather than shame. Every servant who saw it open seemed to glance twice.
Then one rainy afternoon she had realized she was allowing women in drawing rooms ten miles away to choose which doors she used in her own house.
She had never avoided it again.
Today, however, Ambrose’s face returned to her mind as she stepped inside.
What returned to her was not Ambrose’s expression after hearing the rumor; he had hidden that too quickly for her to read.