Chapter 6 #2
“Meaning we won’t be first to market with this year’s batch.
” The baron steepled his fingers and tapped them against his lips.
“Tell him… tell him to secure weaving capacity now with small deposits paid directly to the women. He is not to pass the coin to the menfolk, who are likely to drink the unforeseen bounty or squander it at the cockfights. The women will reserve capacity for us in exchange for some coin. Tell him to send additional dispatches as needed, much appreciation for his hard work. Regards to his dear Brigid. Cordially, Camden Huxley.”
“Cordially, Lorne,” Alice said, penciling notes on the margin of the epistle. “Tidy up your ledgers. This won’t take but a moment.”
They apparently had moved past the need to spat over requests and imperatives. The baron saw to his ledgers and stacked them one-handedly on the side of the desk.
“I don’t suppose you have any interest in seeing London?” he asked as Alice penned regards to the factor’s lady.
“None. I am content here in Yorkshire.” Not exactly true.
“I wanted to see the whole world when I was younger.” His lordship began a prowling circuit of the library. “A few years in uniform sufficed to quell that urge. You never want to leave here? Never want to see Paris?”
Of course Alice wanted to see Paris, and Edinburgh, and Hyde Park, and the baron’s London establishments. “My current surrounds are beautiful. I am fortunate to dwell here.” Two true statements.
Alice lifted her pen and surveyed a neat little missive. “Have you no wish to remain at your boyhood home?”
He wandered to the atlas and peered at whatever map it was opened to. “None.”
A single, simple, honest syllable that disappointed Alice inordinately. His lordship wasn’t even protesting too much. He was merely stating reality.
“Lorne Hall is lovely in its way,” he went on, turning a page, “but I was made to feel like a guest here pretty much from birth, an uninvited guest. Alexander was as good a brother to me as he could have been. When my father bought my colors, it was Alex who wrote to me, Alex who admonished me to take care. I miss him, but I have never, ever missed this place.”
“Perhaps you’ll miss it when next you leave,” Alice said a bit too brightly. “You can sign this one, and I believe we’re through. Let me see your hand.”
He came over to the desk and held out an appendage still discolored, but the purple was already beginning to fade, and the yellow wasn’t so ghastly. The swelling had abated entirely.
“You heeded my advice.”
He tucked both hands behind his back. “I am not so foolish as to disdain your wisdom, Alice Singleton. Will you miss me when I return to London?”
Alice was not so foolish as to mistake that for a simple, teasing inquiry. His curiosity had been piqued, and Camden Huxley’s—Lord Lorne’s—curiosity was formidable.
All the same, he’d gallop back to Town, to his countinghouse, to his disloyal clerks and Peruvian bark, and never think of her again.
Temper goaded Alice to imprudence. “I will miss you very much. I believe you are sufficiently recovered from Gooseberry’s bad behavior to manage without me. Good day, my lord.”
She rose, curtseyed, and departed, and was half running by the time she’d cleared the terrace steps.
Not until she’d returned to the cottage to find Grandpapa asleep in his chair by the hearth did she realize she’d forgotten her dratted shawl in the dratted library where she must never, ever again be alone with the dratted baron—even with the double-drat-dratted door open.
“Dinky has deserted his post,” Cam said. “I lift my glass to the freedom of bachelorhood. The poor fellow was doubtless goaded into rash measures by that wife of his. She is acquisitive by nature, and Dinky would do anything to keep her in gloves and bonnets.”
St. Didier shifted in his wing chair. “Perhaps Mrs. Armendink is increasing. One views the future differently when bringing children into it.”
“As one damned well should.” Cam sipped his brandy and tried not to envy Armendink, who stood six feet tall in his stockings.
True, Dinky was smitten with his wife, and Mrs. Dinky regarded her dear Dink-Dink as the zenith of masculine perfection.
She gushed so profusely over every flower and token Dinky brought her that it was a wonder they ever got round to the procreating part of the business.
St. Didier visually consulted the clock ticking over the sideboard. “You are thinking of your pickpockets.”
“They aren’t pickpockets any longer. They are junior clerks.”
St. Didier tasted his drink, though how did he make even that mundane activity look elegant?
“They are clerks,” he said, “but they never sit at a desk for longer than thirty minutes. You send them haring all over London like your personal arsenal of pigeons. You set them to watching the docks and Doctors’ Commons, to sentry duty outside Carlton House, and to the very trees of Hyde Park. Oddest sort of clerking I’ve seen.”
“Boys like to climb trees and lurk and spy, and they are good at it.” I miss them almost slipped out on a brandy-fueled impulse toward sentimentality. “I lied to Alice today. To Miss Singleton.”
“She probably sensed the falsehood. I would not be too concerned that you’ve deceived her.”
For all his elegance, St. Didier could be a dunce. “I did not advise her to buy the wrong reticule, St. Didier. I told her I did not miss Yorkshire. I half lied.” And Cam did not entirely understand his own motivations.
“Then you half told the truth, I suppose.”
“You are an utter failure at wheedling confidences, St. Didier.” And somebody had drunk Cam’s whole serving of Alexander’s good brandy.
“Perhaps you need to work harder at sharing them. How does this prevarication trouble you?”
Cam got up and helped himself to another half serving. St. Didier shook his head when offered more.
“I told Alice I never missed my boyhood home—Miss Singleton, rather—and that was only technically true. I do not miss Lorne Hall as a dwelling. I have no fond memories of hiding behind bannisters to eavesdrop on the adults, no favorite hiding places where nobody ever found me. I was delighted to go off to public school and spent every holiday with a school chum rather than return to the Hall.”
“It’s a house,” St. Didier replied. “When I admit to missing my family’s former seat, I am not expressing a longing simply to return to that rather drafty edifice.”
Cam considered his meager drink by the light of the fire in the library’s main hearth. “The Hall itself could go up in flames tomorrow, and provided no lives were lost or injury suffered, I would honestly be relieved. Damned place is impossible to heat. But this little corner of Yorkshire…?”
“Quite lovely, I agree.”
“Heartbreakingly lovely, incomparably lovely. The light here in any season, the roll and majesty of the land. The beautiful vistas in spring, summer, and fall, the uncompromising bleakness of the winters… The people who can weather anything and relish the challenge. I worked very hard not to sound like a Yorkshireman when I went off to public school, but I hear the accent now, and…”
“And?”
“I am,”—Cam spoke softly—“homesick. Homesick for the beauty and even the bleakness, for the feel of the place. As a youth, I could not leave Lorne Hall fast enough or often enough, but now… I understand why Alexander chose to end his days here rather than amid the blandishments and conveniences of Town. This little piece of creation nourishes the spirit.”
“Do you miss London as well?”
The honest answer was no. Summer, winter, and every season in between, the metropolis stank. London was increasingly filled with people who could find no work, no housing, no means to keep body and soul together.
London was also full of matchmakers, peers, and politicians. Who on earth would choose London?
“I am not homesick for Town, though I am concerned for my business affairs. Besides, the boys would hate it here.”
“The boys who love to climb trees and roam and spy and lurk. They’d be miserable, I quite agree.”
“Not subtle, St. Didier. My business is in Town, and from every appearance, the Hall will run like clockwork with or without a baron in residence.”
St. Didier finished his drink. “Clocks invariably need winding. How’s the hand?”
“Looks ghastly and is quite tender, but I can hold a pen.” Carefully. “I don’t suppose you need another horse? The fellow who did this to me isn’t a bad sort, but he wants consistent handling and a real job.”
St. Didier toed off his boots and put his feet up on the leather hassock before his wing chair. “Do you see every wayward creature as an orphaned boy in need of shelter and support?”
Alice Singleton was not a boy, and she was the furthest thing from wayward, but Cam worried about her needs for shelter and support.
“Why isn’t Alice Singleton married, St. Didier?”
St. Didier crossed stockinged feet and settled lower in his chair.
“Why does the sun rise in the east? Is your mind never idle? She’s a formidable woman without substantial means.
Perhaps she prefers the unwed state to risking her life in childbed every two years.
Perhaps she prefers to be a human being in the eyes of the law, rather than some husband’s chattel. Perhaps she has been unlucky in love.”
“That was my thought. She’s reached the sadder and wiser phase of the proceedings.” Much sadder, though she hid it well. “She said she wasn’t in love with Alexander.”
St. Didier sighed. “You did not ask her. Please, my lord, say you did not.”
“She could have inspired him to marry her, and then she’d have been the widowed baroness, but she didn’t make the effort. She said they were friends. Why be friends when you can be baron and baroness? It’s not as if Alex would have importuned her for conjugal favors.”