Chapter 18 #3
“Oh, what terrible news!” Cici cried. “We oughtn’t be imposing on you at such a time.”
“I need the cheering,” Bertie answered, refilling Cici’s dish of tea. “It’s been terribly grim. Mama and I have prepared ourselves, but Jem— I think he’s been trying to pretend our grandfather doesn’t exist. And now he can’t avoid it.”
Bertie met Lucasta’s gaze, then looked away. They both knew how Jem felt about his father. And when the present Earl Payne succeeded the Marquess of Arendale and returned from Barbados, what would happen to the rest of his family?
No wonder Jem had been in a temper at Ranelagh Gardens. It didn’t excuse his unkindness to Lucasta, but fear for what would happen to his half-siblings still in Barbados—if his father would leave them, or bring them to Britain—had to be preying on his mind.
The room stilled as Jem appeared in the doorway. Lucasta’s heart pinched.
He looked terrible. His face was drawn with fine lines, all pointing downward.
His neckcloth drooped, and the gold buttons on his coat, waistcoat, and sleeves were dull.
His breeches were creased from sitting, and with his hair drawn back in a simple queue, tied with a dark ribbon, he looked more vulnerable than Lucasta had ever seen him.
His eyes found hers as though there were no one else in the room. She was still furious with him, yet she wanted to draw him into her arms.
“Do you wish us gone, so your family may be alone together?” she asked quietly.
He scrubbed a hand over his face. “Alone, together, is the worst thing for us at this moment,” he said in a tired, gravelly voice. “I am glad you are here—that you are all here—for Bertie.”
He glanced at his cousin, whose expression turned miserable. “Should I—must I?” Bertie fretted, holding her dish of tea close, as if he meant to take it.
“No.” Jem shook his head. “It cannot be long now. He is afraid and suffering, and— It is best you stay here.”
As if lost for direction, he turned and left the room. Lucasta’s ire at him fell away. She had never seen Smart Jeremy so rumpled and at a loss.
“He forgot his tea,” Bertie whispered.
Lucasta rose. How could he have this power over her? He’d scorned her, taunted her, set out to humiliate her, and kissed her. Now he needed her, and she went.
“I shall take him a cup, and one for your mother, too, if you prepare it as she likes.”
Bertie gave her directions to the master’s rooms, and Lucasta balanced the tea tray carefully as she ascended the stairs and knocked. “What now?” Lady Payne called in an irritated voice as Jem opened the door.
The look of relief in his eyes assured her she had done right. Lucasta entered and set the tray on a small table, moving aside a clutter of parchment and broken quills. The marquess was working on his last will and testament, or rather, his secretary was.
The room smelled of illness, that thin, sour undertone that Lucasta knew from other rooms where doctors had bled and dosed a body past its endurance of pain. The Marquess of Arendale, a powerful peer of the realm, was a thin stick under a heavy quilt, his face starkly white, his breathing labored.
Others stood in the shadows, watching, waiting. Every eye was dry.
A man was leaving this life, and it was a business transaction, to be witnessed and formally documented. No one mourned.
“The entail,” the marquess rasped, his weak eyes searching out Jem. “Promise me. You’ll renew the entail. An heir of your body. It won’t go…” He struggled for breath. “No bastards.”
“You must leave the directive for my father.” Jem’s tone was as clipped as if he were shearing fabric. He might have been carved from wood. “All your holdings will fall to him.”
“Insolent whelp.” The marquess flailed his hands, clenched into weak fists. “Fancy boy…a draper’s daughter…leave me this at least.” His breath hissed. “Promise. Don’t let him destroy my legacy.”
“We will heed your wishes, sir.” Lady Payne glared at Jem. “I will see to it.”
“You.” The marquess turned his eye on her, beady beneath cragged white brows. “You’re not to take what you can get. Vulture.” The eye closed, the fingers curved around the bed quilt growing still. “Make…sure,” he breathed.
Lucasta’s stomach turned over. His last moments, and the man could not rein in his bile.
It was a miracle that Jem had not been poisoned by this man, or his father.
Somehow, she would guess due to the influence of his mother, he’d become a man of warmth and humor.
And the tenderness he showed his siblings and cousin could not be denied.
She’d watched him arrange bolts of cloth across his shop window, filling a space with beauty.
She’d seen him come stomping into the cottage in Little Chelsea with his hands reeking of fish and his half-siblings frisking about him like puppies.
Jem would never become this bitter and broken, not even on his deathbed. He was a better man in every respect.
“What do you want?” Lady Payne asked sharply, seeing Lucasta stood near the table, fixing Jem’s tea.
Lucasta stirred in sugar with trembling hands. “I came to ask if I may offer anything.” She glanced at the impassive faces of the others in the room, the secretary scribbling at a desk, two men dressed as solicitors, and the last a doctor, lifting leeches from the Marquess’s arm.
Lady Payne’s face held stony. “What could you possibly offer?”
Jem stepped forward and slipped a hand around her arm. His grip was warm, firm, and yet she felt he drew strength from her. She gave it gladly.
Lucasta pressed her hands together, meeting Jem’s eyes. “I—My father often liked for me to sing to him, when…” When he was at his most frail, and dying. “It…soothed him.” She’d been a fool to come. She turned, ready to flee back to the parlor, but Jem’s hand stayed her.
“I do not think there is much else we can do,” he said, glancing at the still figure on the bed.
The thick hangings, woven with rampant dragons and swirling gold foliage, quite drowned the frail figure in the white linen bedgown and cap. The draperies at the window were drawn against the light, and the scent of a burnt pastille added an acrid odor to the room.
Lucasta swallowed hard, recalling too well those last days with her father. How precious every moment had been, and how terrifying the thought of losing him. She fought not to cry, for weeping would ruin her voice.
“It would help me to hear you,” Jem said softly. “And it might ease him as well.”
Lucasta nodded, unable for the moment to speak.
His anger with her had not lessened, nor had she forgiven him for the May game he had set out to play with her.
But around and within the exasperation she felt a deeper pull, the connection that had been building between them for months. This was not the moment to examine it.
“Arendale is in the north, I understand?” she asked.
“In Northumberland, above Newcastle. In fact near the Borders of Scotland,” Jem answered.
“This is not the time to distress him your warbling,” Lady Payne snapped.
Lucasta bent over the bed. “Would you wish a song or two, milord? I do not want to disturb any business.”
A cold eye glared at her, slitted like a snake. “You,” he rasped. “Jeremiah’s ladybird.”
“A friend,” she said. “I’ll sing a northern ballad I know, and if it distresses you, turn me out.”
She folded her hands before her, squared her shoulders and filled her lungs, and imagined she was in the music parlor at Miss Gregoire’s.
A gracious if elegantly shabby room, filled with her favorite people.
She sang to soothe Jem; she sang to calm Lady Payne; but mostly, she sang for the still, wracked man on the bed, to gentle his path into that bourn from which no traveler returns.
She sang of weary travelers, of Mary McCree, of the green mossy banks of the Lea.
She sang a few Scottish tunes she knew, “The Flowers of the Forest” and “The Birks of Abergeldy.” The Marquess breathed slowly, listening, his hand occasionally twitching, but the twist of pain in his face eased.
The solicitors rustled quietly in their corner, the nib of the clerk’s pen scratching steadily across the parchment, and the doctor wiped a tear from his eye at the end of a slow, sad air in Scots Gaelic that a friend at Miss Gregoire’s had taught her.
Lady Payne sat with her head bowed, still as marble. Jem nodded when Lucasta drew a small wooden flute from her pocket.
“You always have a musical instrument about you, do you not?” His smile, though it brought out the lines about his mouth and the shadows of strain beneath his eyes, was unbearably fond. Lucasta’s heart clenched again.
“Most times,” she agreed, and took a sip of his tea to wet her lips.
The air in the room changed as Lucasta sang and played.
Lady Payne dropped her head to her folded hands, her lips moving in prayer, and a few tears slid down her cheeks.
She was a woman who had lost the protection of her husband and was now losing her father-in-law’s protection as well, to be thrown on the mercy of a nephew she had never been able to like.
It was a precariousness that faced all women who had no secure income of their own, and Lucasta understood it.
The doctor collected his leeches and sat beside his patient, monitoring his pulse. The secretary blotted dry his ink and passed his documents to the men of business, who reviewed them at length and nodded. They passed the copy to Jem, whose face tightened as he read, but he made no comment.
Lucasta played the lovely, haunting “The Rowan Tree,” singing the lyrics written by the Baroness Nairne, as the doctor roused the marquess to sign his last testament.
And she played the gentle, sad melody of “Hasten and Come With Me” when the doctor picked up the thin, white wrist for the last time and shook his head gravely, indicating that the Marquess had stepped through that thin veil between worlds, and the man on the bed was a man no more.