Chapter 7 #2
She knows. Alice hunched meekly over her tea cup and listened with growing dismay to a genteel tirade.
Somehow, Lady Josephine had divined what Alice herself had only reluctantly admitted: Alice had enjoyed those hours talking business with Camden Huxley.
She respected his expertise, his commitment to his enterprise.
She liked that he didn’t take himself too seriously, though he took his obligations very seriously indeed.
The word Alice had spent half the night avoiding was respect. She respected Camden Huxley, in part because he had respected her first. Not her fine figure, her hair, or her complexion—her.
Her mind, her capability, her temper, her judgment. Camden Huxley, by his words and deeds, had made it plain that he respected Alice, and she was helpless not to find that aspect of him attractive.
The less said about his shoulders, his voice, his subdued smile… All very lovely, but so was the way he looked Alice in the eye, paused before he fashioned replies to her arguments, and laughed when she caught him out in convenient illogic. Why had his hand healed so very swiftly?
“Alice, are you attending me?”
“Every word, ma’am. Your guidance is most appreciated.”
“Then you will exert yourself to charm Mr. Peabody?”
Heaven forbid. “I will be as charming to him as I know how to be, though my best efforts might never bring his sisters around.”
“Once you are his wife, you will be in line to become the female authority in the household. The Misses Peabody will understand their places.”
Lady Josephine would delight in assuring that result, though Alice had no intention of encouraging Bless Peabody’s affections.
“Ma’am, look at the hour! I really must be going, though I do so appreciate moments spent with you. I would love to stay a bit longer, but Grandpapa is very particular about mealtimes, and his temper has been rather short lately, what with all the extra effort of harvest.”
Alice rose, dipped a curtsey, and took the first of the twenty steps that separated the parlor from the front door.
“Be off, then, if you must,” Lady Josephine said, waving a hand. “Give the bell-pull a tug while you’re on your feet, and I will see you at services on Sunday.”
Eighteen, seventeen, sixteen… Alice was at the parlor door when Lady Josephine’s voice stopped her.
“By the way, Alice, I have arranged with Mrs. Dumfries for the girls to use Tuesday morning for an outing. You may consider yourself excused from your usual duties in Farnes Crossing. I know you will appreciate a few more hours to yourself, particularly when your grandpapa is in one of his more difficult moods. Don’t thank me, my dear.
Even the Almighty permitted Himself a respite from the labors of creation. ”
She beamed placidly from her well-cushioned sofa, and never had Alice felt such an impulse to do another human being an injury.
“My regards to Mrs. Dumfries and the children, then, your ladyship. I will put that time to good use. Until Sunday.” Alice saw herself out as a maid hurried past with a fresh tea tray.
By sheer force of self-discipline, Alice traveled the path that led behind the vicarage, past the glebe acreage, and onto Lorne Hall land. The harvest crews had already taken the wheat off the glebe fields, and from there, the path wound through Lorne Hall’s home wood.
The way was beautiful, bathed in waning afternoon sunshine, saturated with the peace unique to a late-summer day. Alice’s path was also devoid of other travelers, which was convenient when a lady needed to cry most of the way home and then some.
“His lordship’s head is buried in his ledgers even as he has one foot out the door,” Mrs. Shorer said. “Beagle tells me that the daily correspondence from London could fill a bookstall.”
Thaddeus Singleton kept up with the small woman at his side, though it took effort. “This is no business of ours, madam. You meddle with the young people at your peril.” Hadn’t Vicar just half an hour past preached a sermon on ‘blessed are the meek’? Or maybe that was last week.
“If you sit back and do nothing, Thaddeus Singleton, Alice will be left with nothing. You’ve turned her into your drudge. The brightest, most thoughtful, prettiest young lady in these surrounds, and she spends her days waiting on you hand and foot.”
Thaddeus wasn’t quite sure how Alice spent much of her days.
“She waits on Lady Josephine nearly as much. Deprive her ladyship of Alice’s companionship, and we will all suffer for it.
” Thaddeus was also not quite sure how her ladyship would exact retribution.
Good Christian soul that she was, Lady Josephine would never burden the Almighty with exacting vengeance. She’d tend to that task herself.
“The baron and our Alice laugh when they’re together, Thaddeus. He has a nice laugh, and he makes Alice sparkle.”
“Alice does not sparkle. Next, you’ll be claiming that he puts roses in her cheeks and stars in her eyes. We’ll be having none of that, Eunice Shorer.” The blasted woman was tireless, while Thaddeus was nearly puffing with exertion.
“Nature herself put the roses in our Alice’s cheeks, you dunderhead. Though I vow, when the poor girl came back from her year of finishing school, I feared she’d turned consumptive.”
“Madam, I remind you that the Sabbath is a day of rest, not a day to go sprinting across half of Yorkshire. Moderate your pace, if you please, and Alice was at finishing school for two years, thanks exclusively to Lady Josephine’s generosity.”
Mrs. Shorer glowered up at him, which always put Thaddeus in mind of a displeased pantry mouser. A small creature exuding sheer disdain wrapped in regal indifference.
“Thaddeus, we are not long for this earth. What will become of Alice when you go to your reward?”
The question troubled Thaddeus, when he wasn’t troubled by the water level in the millpond, the slow progress of the harvest crews, the baron’s outlandish plan to make autumn hay, and the pervasive aching of joints no longer happy to spend hours in the saddle.
“Alice will manage. Alice always manages. She excels at managing.” Thank the heavenly powers somebody was inclined to manage Lady Josephine, else the shire would have no peace.
“The most brilliant female on the planet cannot manage without coin, sir. Alice yet claims the status of lady, and if we don’t do something, that conniving Considine harpy will snatch the baron right out from under Alice’s nose, with Lady Josephine applauding loudly.”
Alice claimed the good, proud Singleton nose. Everybody could see that. “Eunice, I am in great good health, and Alice will inherit all I have to give her.”
Finally, the dratted woman paused at the stile between the home wood and the mares’ pasture. She wasn’t remotely out of breath.
“And how much do you have to leave her, Thaddeus? Three hundred pounds? Four hundred? You like your brandy and pipe tobacco, you indulge your taste for good fashion, and you have a fine collection of books and pamphlets. I don’t begrudge any man some creature comforts, but a young woman cannot live for the rest of her long life on four hundred pounds.
Alice must marry, and before you and I are no longer on hand to see the thing done properly.
Do you want Priggy Peabody for a grandson-in-law? ”
Bless Peabody was slated to come into some good land. He ought to be draining more, though, because he hadn’t enough grazing for how many sheep he was running. Sheep could be harbingers of destruction if improperly husbanded.
“He’s not a bad person, Eunice, just because he’s somewhat high in the instep. Young people today aren’t as open-minded as we were.”
Eunice hopped up the steps and down the other side as nimbly as a nanny goat.
“Bless is not a bad person, but he’d be a penance of a husband, to say nothing of what his sisters would contribute to Alice’s misery.
Thaddeus, I’m telling you, we must give nature a helping hand here.
The baron is smitten with Alice, and that confirms my opinion that Camden was always a sensible boy.
The old baron agreed with me, but one could not get him to admit it. ”
That much was true. “You doubtless did not allow Baron Leland the privilege of a word in edgewise, and Baron Alexander fared even worse. You will not meddle, Eunice. Promise me.”
Off she went across the mares’ pasture, the horses pausing in their placid munching, doubtless to wonder at such energy on a summer Sabbath morning. Eunice Shorer put Thaddeus in mind of a comet streaking across the heavens, leaving all who beheld her dumbstruck at her sheer momentum.
“I promise you,” she retorted, “that I shall do all in my power to see our Alice and Baron Cam happy. You don’t want her to go off to London and take her place in Society, and that is shameful of you, Thaddeus. I thought better of you.”
Nobody could deliver a scold like Eunice Shorer. Lady Josephine overshot the mark with sighs, biblical allusions, and buckets of disappointment. Eunice fired off a flaming arrow of outrage and went about her business.
“Alice would hate London.” London would love Alice, though. She was smart, sensible, kind, quietly beautiful and not vain with it. Cam had always been Thaddeus’s favorite of the three boys.
“You don’t know how Alice would fare in Town,” Mrs. Shorer retorted. “You would hate coming home to an empty house, nobody to grouse to, nobody to ask you how the work is coming along and if the Bladens have finally come up with some rent.”
Truth be known, Thaddeus had come up with the coin more than once to keep the Bladens on their little farm. Good people, but they needed time for their boys to grow up enough to help out. Each year, they did a little better and were less dependent on Alice’s baskets.
Alice herself approved of Thaddeus’s little rent-abatement maneuvers, though whenever he surrendered his own coin to the Bladens’ cause, he felt guilty for slighting Alice’s inheritance.
“I would miss Alice, true, but I managed on my own quite well before she was thrust upon me, and I’ll manage should she accept Bless Peabody’s offer.” Though, really, Bless Peabody was no prize, and he would not improve with age.
Camden Huxley, on the other hand…
“Thrust upon you? You claim Alice was thrust upon you? Thaddeus, your memory is deserting you. She rescued you from a lonely and cantankerous old age, sees that you have proper meals, a tidy house, and clean clothing. She preserves you from premature senility and relieves you of inflicting your miserable handwriting on half the merchants in the shire, or driving Lorne Hall into debt with your indolent attitude toward the ledgers.”
All true. When had the mare’s field become such a wide expanse? “Eunice, you are in fine form today. One must ask if some sort of brain fever stalks you?”
Her steps mercifully slowed. “A brain fever. Now there’s a notion. I am not in fine form, Thaddeus. I am worried.”
She stopped and gazed at the majestic edifice rising up across the ornamental lake. Lorne Hall showed well from this perspective, though not as well as from the curving main drive.
Alice was worth more than ten Lorne Halls and lacked the sense to appreciate her own value. That was the trouble with her. Thaddeus’s granddaughter did not appreciate her own value, and that was no sort of legacy to bequeath to her.
Eunice Shorer, on the other hand, spent her days scrubbing and polishing and conducted herself with more dignity than any queen. Always had.
“You do not appear worried, Eunice. You appear to be deeply absorbed with the process of plotting mayhem. I beg you, don’t do anything stupid.
The baron will hare off back to London, taking his uppish friend with him, and we will be left to deal with Lady Josephine and her endless displeasures. Step carefully.”
Lady Josephine, a new mill wheel and mill design, a lot of footmen thinking themselves experts on the land because they’d spent a day or two wielding a scythe, and Alice in Lady Josephine’s bad books.
Though Eunice had a point, as usual. The baron might not go haring off to London without having chosen a baroness.
“I quite like Mr. St. Didier,” Eunice said. “He’s proper without being stuffy. So few bachelors can manage that balance.” She emphasized this opinion by brushing Thaddeus with a passing scowl.
“I was a widower, not a bachelor.”
“And forty years on, you still miss your first wife.” Eunice wrapped her fingers around Thaddeus’s forearm as she continued her progress. “I still miss my Harold, though sometimes I forget what he looked like.”
“Janette always smelled of honeysuckle, and she…”
“Yes?”
“Made me laugh.”
Eunice did not hoot out an I-told-you-so. Thaddeus did not shake his arm free. Instead, they shared the sort of old soldier’s smile that was not for airing before witnesses.
“I will be careful,” Eunice said. “You mind you get enough sleep and don’t neglect your tucker, old man. Harvest is no time to go spare with yourself.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He endured her surreptitious half squeeze and bowed to her retreating form as she marched across the pasture. Only when she’d passed through the gate and onto the main drive did Thaddeus turn his steps back toward the home wood and his own abode.
Janette would have liked Eunice Shorer, and Thaddeus well knew that he would have heartily enjoyed the company of Eunice’s long-departed Harold.
Ah well. Time for a nap, because the Sabbath was good for that, as well as for a weekly scolding from one of the finest, most contrary women Thaddeus had the pleasure to know.