Chapter 5 #2
His lordship held up his end of the bargain.
Two cups of willow bark tea, his hand slightly elevated on a stack of books and wrapped in a cold compress from time to time.
All the while, he worked, choosing his words carefully for both brevity and impact.
His French was confident and practical. His praises were sincere, his criticisms to the point and professional.
Reports were to be submitted timely. Tallies were to be accurate. Extenuating circumstances merited lenience. Flimsy excuses earned a blunt warning.
Alice penned the appropriate missives, and all the while, she was aware of the sound of Camden Huxley’s voice.
The depth and slight rasp that hadn’t characterized the youthful version of the Lorne spare.
In the quiet of the library, he created a steady discourse that spoke of expertise, focus, and commitment.
The clock ticked, the willow bark tea disappeared, the stacks of correspondence became stacks of sanded, sealed replies.
Alice ought to have gone home an hour ago.
“We have spun the straw into gold,” the baron said, unwrapping his hand from the latest cold compress. “Might I have that dry towel?”
Alice fired the clean linen at his chest. “Stop flexing that hand. It might be worse tomorrow, and the day after, it will look truly horrendous, but the pain and swelling should have abated.”
He gently dried his hand. “Patience is not my forte.”
“If you could send your Peruvian bark to India and wait for the proceeds to come back to you, you are capable of great patience. I suspect it’s taking orders that you cannot abide.”
He tossed the towel onto the reading table.
“A failing we share, apparently, though I am willing to take reasonable orders. Too often in the army, the orders were unreasonable. Fly across the countryside like all the demons of hell pursued us one day, wait about the next, only to be told to race back the way we’d come.
Commerce is ever so much more sensible than war. ”
Other men preferred the racing about, the belief that their racing was heroic, however pointless in the moment.
“I’ll leave you to contemplate Gooseberry’s fate.” Alice straightened up her side of the desk, then rose to tidy the blotter as well. “Can you hold a knife and fork, or will you take a tray of sandwiches and soup for supper?”
“Gooseberry is not a bad horse. He’s nippy, and when he realized he’d chomped rather more than he bargained for, he knew he’d been bad.”
“The lads likely feed him treats by hand, and that should stop,” Alice said, locating her medicinals on the sideboard. “He should be fed only from his bucket, and his nipping merits firm reprimands.”
“Would you like to take him on?”
Oh, to have a sizable, brave mount with the athleticism to hop an occasional stile, and the stamina for a whole day of visiting the tenants.
But what would Lady Josephine say about Alice making such a spectacle of herself?
“I could improve Gooseberry’s manners, and then he would be well behaved for me, but the lads would still have to teach him to be good for them.
Thank you for the thought, though. Look after your hand, my lord, and I will send more arnica to Mrs. Shorer tomorrow. ”
He came around the desk, arms once again folded. “Might you bring it yourself?”
A tempting idea and, like all tempting notions, to be nipped in the bud. “I’ll be quite busy tomorrow. Grandpapa has correspondence that I assist with, and Lady Josephine will expect me to attend her knitting circle.”
A penance of an obligation. Nobody willing to share any truly interesting gossip, needles dutifully clicking for an eternal hour, and Lady Josephine selecting the dullest bit of some improving tome to inflict on her captives.
The burden of reading that drivel aloud was often imposed on Alice, another well-intended cruelty on Lady Josephine’s part.
“Lady Josephine can struggle along without you for one day, but I have nobody else to rely on. You have the knack for the business letter, Alice, and I mean that as a compliment.”
Genuine compliments were few and far between in Alice’s life, but she must not relent. “Lady Josephine expects me to attend, and I am loath to disappoint her.”
“One sympathizes. My entire boyhood I did nothing but, though if her ladyship is so focused on Christian virtues and doing unto others, would she not advise you to assist me in my hour of need?”
This was teasing, or wheedling, or perhaps—from Camden Huxley—negotiating.
Alice knew a thing or two about negotiating. “You will donate a quantity of good-quality yarn to her ladyship’s knitting projects.”
He nodded. “Done and done. A quantity of good-quality yarn in sensible colors. Not too fancy—I suspect you ladies are knitting socks and caps and scarves and the like—but soft and durable. I know just the supplier, and you may inform her ladyship that my donation will arrive within four weeks.”
Surely her ladyship would forgive a single absence when the prize earned was so great?
Even as Alice mentally posed the question, she already knew the answer.
Lady Josephine would appreciate the donation and manage to be disappointed in Alice’s assistance to the baron too.
A lady must not put herself forward. A lady must not accept compensation for charitable undertakings.
A lady must keep to her place, lest she lose the reputation that was her most precious and fragile asset.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, then,” the baron said, tugging the bell-pull. “Let’s say around noon. You have been an inestimable help today, Alice. The whole household is in your debt, whether they know it or not. By the way, what were you and Lady Josephine doing out and about this morning?”
The instinct to prevaricate was as imperative as it was unbecoming. “We call in Farnes Crossing for charitable purposes only. Nothing of any moment, but her ladyship observes that weekly duty unless the weather is exceptionally inclement. She takes her role in the community seriously.”
“What isn’t taken seriously in these surrounds? Your grandpapa defends the honor of the mill wheel as if modernization were akin to moral decay. That I’d invite footmen to wield a scythe is tantamount to treason, and making hay at harvest a violation of the commandments.”
Jumping Jerusalem. “Grandpapa would hear that as closer to blasphemy.” Though the mill was a relic, and the footmen would be glad of a day in the fresh air. Rather late in the year for making hay, though. “Until tomorrow, my lord.”
“I’ll look forward to it.”
For her part, Alice regarded the next day’s commitment with a frisson of dread. The baron bowed her through the door, a footman materialized to carry her basket, of all the inanities, and she was soon making her way across the back terrace.
“I must develop a megrim,” she muttered, having dismissed the footman at the back door.
“A slight head cold. Even Lady Josephine gets megrims and head colds from time to time.” Usually when Squire Huffnagel’s aunt-by-marriage, Lady Euphrenia Wolling-Banner, was visiting her nephew. Lady Eu’s brother was a marquess.
Maybe a megrim and a head cold?
The previous baron—Alexander—had been charming, intelligent, a hopeless flirt, and easily ignored.
He was what Society had expected him to be, a mostly fribbling sort whose appreciation for his privileges was abstract and a little disingenuous.
He’d known wealth and privilege his entire life.
He expected to be treated with deference, albeit he’d been gracious about it even when he’d become quite ill.
The present baron, though… He worked. He chose his words with precision and intent, nothing careless about him.
Problems most people would consider minor—a late report, a tally off by sixpence—merited his whole focus.
He tended to stacks of mail despite a throbbing hand.
He set the example he expected his employees to live up to, even when those employees were two hundred miles distant.
Those qualities in somebody who could have become the idle peer intrigued Alice, and she well knew where imprudent curiosity about a man could lead her.
For the first time in memory, Cam wished the day’s correspondence were more voluminous, and not only because answering mail made him feel less banished from his life’s purpose.
“We’ve been at this for an hour,” he said when Alice finished the mild rebuke due to Cam’s solicitors for failing to make every change he’d requested in a draft contract. “Might we break for a meal?”
In the normal course, he would have nibbled from a tray, if such a tray had appeared. Alice struck him as one who actually sat a table, consumed her food there, and probably conversed with her grandfather throughout.
“If you’re hungry, you should eat,” she said, sanding the page. “I can return later, though we haven’t much more to do.”
A pity, that. Cam wasn’t keen on fine art and poetry, but he did enjoy the sight of Alice wielding a quill pen, her brows knit in concentration, her hand moving with confident grace over the page. He still disapproved of the damned snood.
“I’m not famished,” Cam said, “but I’m learning that the kitchen expects me to eat regularly and well. I told them I’d take my nooning on the back terrace and to set the table for two.”
That announcement earned him a scowl, though he was coming to enjoy even Alice’s scowls. She could scowl thoughtfully, disapprovingly, severely, or in passing.
“Dining alone with you will create awkwardness for me, my lord. I appreciate the generosity of spirit, but you are a peer, and I am nobody.”
Nobodys did not briskly correct peers in the ordinary course. “Ne’er the twain should share a tray of sandwiches? Alice, you decry the snobbery of a Society that values idle wealth over everyday gumption, but you disdain to break bread with me.”