Chapter 9 #2
“I’m inviting you and your grandpapa to Sunday supper, Alice. See that you don’t turn an ankle or come down with an ague between then and now, and mind Thaddeus doesn’t either.”
“Be off with you.” She bussed his cheek. “You doubtless have correspondence to tend to, and somebody has eaten the last of the morning’s biscuits. I’d best bake another batch.”
Cam tapped his hat onto his head, blew a kiss to the cat and one to Alice. Patience was a harsh taskmaster. He nonetheless spent a few minutes in the parlor chatting with Thaddeus about rain delaying the harvest and the cost of installing an overshot mill wheel.
Before Thaddeus could bellow for Alice to bring a tea tray, Cam was out in the chilly drizzle, thinking hard, and not about his correspondence.
Alice reassembled the tea service she’d just washed, made a fresh pot, brought it to the parlor, and set it on the side of the desk.
“You just missed his lordship,” Grandpapa said. “I would have rung for the tray, but the lad bustled off as if the last coach to London might leave without him. Haven’t we any cinnamon biscuits?”
Alice moved to the mullioned window and pushed the curtains wide open. “The shortbread should be eaten before it goes stale.” The day looked dreary—a sopping home wood, gray skies, drops sliding down the panes—but to Alice, it felt merely cozy.
Special. A day for contemplating possible miracles.
“Do sit, Alice. Your bustling about will destroy my peace. We might as well get some correspondence tended to if the rain will insist on bucketing down.”
Alice pushed the second set of curtains open and turned a gimlet eye upon her progenitor.
“What about my peace, Grandpapa? What if keeping order on Mrs. Patrickson’s half day is a pleasure and a joy?
” Lady Josephine, knowing exactly when the cottage had no staff, usually left Alice in peace on half days.
“Then you are a contrary female, albeit not as contrary as some others I could name who have a penchant for housekeeping. You come by your disposition honestly, though.” Grandpapa sipped his tea.
“Rather contrary myself sometimes, but I do believe I’ve met my match in the present baron.
The boy will have his overshot mill wheel, and there’s an end to it. ”
Alice had the distinct sense that this outcome pleased Grandpapa inordinately. “Aren’t undershot wheels growing old-fashioned?”
Grandpapa selected a piece of shortbread and dunked it into his tea.
“Not old-fashioned so much as indicative of lesser means. An overshot wheel requires a significant drop in height between the upper sluice and the millpond. Unless the terrain is fortuitously designed by the hand of the Almighty, one must engineer such a drop, and engineering requires funds. The lad has funds. His father would be pleased. Alice, for the love of threshed wheat, please sit. When you insist on dusting and straightening, I feel as if I ought to climb into the saddle and make some tenant calls.”
“Not in this rain, Thaddeus Singleton. I cannot have you coming down with an ague.”
With anything, other than the occasional testy mood.
“You sound like your dear grandmama. The baron tells me Eunice Shorer has turned her ankle. The daft woman insists on a forced march from divine services, the one day of the week when rest is ordained from on high. I don’t suppose you could look in on her?”
Alice took the seat across from the desk. “I already did. She hasn’t sent for me since.”
“Of course not. She’s too proud. You ought to nip up to the Hall tomorrow anyway.
If she’s back on her feet, she’ll need a stern lecture about not overdoing.
If she’s still abed, the end times are approaching.
The sooner we’re aware of our imminent demise, the sooner some of us can turn to the immediate repair of our celestial accounts. ”
Grandpapa was in a good mood. His truly sour moments were marked by silence, a closed parlor door, and much staring off into the home wood beyond the windows.
“Hadn’t you best reconcile yourself to making the acquaintance of Old Scratch?” Alice asked, pouring herself half a cup.
“To hear Lady Josephine tell it, we’re all headed down to the pit. Be nice to have the company of one’s neighbors in the afterlife. We will fortunately be spared her membership in our infernal shire. She will be too busy instructing the angels on the latest fashion in halos.”
“You don’t care for her ladyship?” Why hadn’t Alice brought this topic up with Grandpapa previously? He groused and muttered about the many hours Lady Josephine demanded from Alice, but Grandpapa groused and muttered about nearly everything.
He paused with half a piece of shortbread poised over his tea cup.
“She thinks she bought your soul by sponsoring you for those two years at finishing school, Alice. But why send you off to learn all that deportment and folderol just so you can rusticate into old age at her ladyship’s beck and call? ”
Alice swished her tea in its little cup. “I suspect she will make a companion of me when you have no more use for me. A bit of French, some ability with watercolors, a touch of refinement are required in a lady’s companion.”
Grandpapa set down his cup. “Alice Singleton, you must not allow that… that troublesome harpy to steal the rest of your life. I forbid it. Common sense forbids it. You were all that stood between her ladyship and the late baron’s wishes for a quiet demise.
She would have driven the poor man barmy, praying by his bedside when he wanted to laugh at some bawdy play.
She tried to turn the Hall into a temple of mopery upon his death, directly contrary to his wishes.
You shall not allow her to make you her familiar any more than you already have. ”
Perhaps this was why the topic of her ladyship hadn’t come up. Absent a convenient pot of gold materializing in Alice’s cedar chest, the issue had had no resolution.
“What do you propose I do to support myself when this cottage is no longer available to me?”
“When I die?” Grandpapa dunked his shortbread and munched contentedly.
“The baron will give you a life estate, and I won’t even have to ask him.
You’d be better off marrying him, though.
The lad wants a wife. You can see that from twenty paces away in a dense fog.
He’ll immure himself in his damned commerce otherwise.
Getting and spending, laying waste his powers. Is that Scripture?”
“Wordsworth. The world is too much with us, late and soon…”
“Oh, right. The fellow was in a dreary mood when he wrote that one, or perhaps he was contemplating years serving as Lady Meddlesome’s companion. Will you drink that tea, Alice, or stare it into submission?”
Alice downed her serving. “The baron cannot marry me.”
Grandpapa topped up his cup. “Tell him that, and he’ll be down on bended knee before you can say, ‘You do me great honor.’ You never met a more contrary fellow in your life.
If his tutors told him Caesar’s Gallic letters were too advanced, Camden set about translating them at once.
If the boy’s father noted that the lad was easily winded, Camden charted a course of hikes over every bridle path and lane on the Hall’s land. ”
“He’s competitive.” And that meant, if the steward said an overshot mill was out of the question, or making fall hay ridiculous… Ah. Alice smiled into her empty tea cup.
“Camden is determined,” Grandpapa said, punctuating the air with half a piece of shortbread. “A quality Alexander never exhibited. Our present baron would make you a good husband, Alice. He asked me to give you his regards.”
“You have never suggested I marry anybody before. Why him?” That Grandpapa, who needed looking after and would need more of the same as time went on, was abruptly shoving Alice up the church aisle was as suspicious as it was touching. “Are you having heart pangs again?”
Grandpapa thumped a fist against his bony chest. “Never felt better. That damned tisane works wonders. Digitalis, of all things. A ruddy weed, and Eunice Shorer swears by it.”
And Grandpapa started his day with a serving, meekly consumed without fail. “So why present the baron to me as a marital prospect now, Grandpapa? I like him well enough, but marriage requires more than liking, and a union between us would be considered a mésalliance.”
“Marriage, my girl, goes down a good deal easier if the parties like each other. Mark me on that. I know of what I speak. The baron has taken notice of you, and marrying a woman he esteems would spike Lady Josephine’s cannon nicely.
Two birds with one stone, if we include your need to elude her dismal plans for you.
Put the Considine minx in her place, too, and before the girl becomes truly obnoxious. ”
Alice took up the letter opener and the top item in the day’s stack of mail. “Grandpapa, you surprise me.” She slit the seal on an epistle from an assistant land steward employed by the Duke of Northumberland.
“If I have thwarted your expectations, then my day has been a success. I do see what goes on around here, Alice. When I’m not discussing the advantages of rutabagas over mangel-wurzels, I listen to what the tenants and their wives tell me.
I talk to the Hall’s gardeners, and my weekly forced marches with the Queen of Dustmops and Tisanes are informative as well. ”
Alice had wondered why two confirmed adversaries insisted on that weekly show of civility. The habit had initially struck her as akin to opposing generals dining together the night before a battle. In recent years, she’d sensed more of a comrade-in-arms quality to what had become a tradition.
“Grandpapa, are you truly feeling well?”
“The rain looks to be never-ending, we’re in the middle of harvest, and you ask if I’m well.”
“We get rain every year during harvest, and you say the respite is always timely, and the crop is always brought in anyway.”
“I say a lot of things. Who is plaguing me by mail today?”
Alice passed over the letter, allowing the change of subject. “Mr. Delauncy, reporting developments from Alnwick Castle. I gather they’ve had a difficult summer.”
Grandpapa donned his spectacles and perused the letter. “Poor man has his hands full. A new duchess underfoot, one with ideas. A mere barony masquerading as a dukedom and all that land to be managed.”
“Wasn’t there an earldom somewhere in the succession?”
“Details, details. Let’s see what other laments the day’s correspondence has brought us.”
Alice worked through the stack, a much smaller pile than the baron dealt with, and the rain eventually slowed to a drizzle, then drips.
“Well, at least that’s done,” Grandpapa said. “Time to catch up on my reading. You will look in at the Hall tomorrow, won’t you, Alice? Mrs. Shorer is difficult and demanding, but she means well and will allow you to fuss over her when lesser mortals would be sent away with their pride smarting.”
Lesser mortals such as Grandpapa?
“I suppose a short visit won’t be out of the ordinary. Mrs. Shorer is always happy to confer regarding her recipes and remedies.” Alice gathered up the tea things, lit a candelabrum with a spill from the jar on the mantel, and set the candles near Grandpapa’s elbow. “Don’t strain your eyes, sir.”
“Bossy wench. Be off with you.”
That was as close to an endearment as Alice had ever heard from her grandfather, but it confirmed his high spirits.
Some scheme known only to Grandpapa had been hatched and was coming along nicely.
A cross-breeding of sheep, perhaps, or a patch of ground put into Italian clover two years ago, bearing a whacking great crop of maize this year.
Grandpapa was not indifferent to her—far from it—but he had never been demonstrative, much less affectionate.
Alice left him to his reading and returned to the kitchen. Cassandra yet dozed on the hearth, the picture of calico contentment.
“I am not content.” As Alice put another load of dishes into the sink, she pondered the nature of her restlessness and decided that discontent was an improvement over the resignation that had gripped her prior to the baron’s arrival.
His discontents had propelled him to commercial success and—at least based on appearances—happiness.
And yet, the baron would not take lightly the news that Alice had egregiously misstepped nine years ago. He might take that news very badly indeed, but Alice would not abandon her daughter to Lady Josephine’s machinations.
Not for all the handsome, ardent barons in Mayfair would Alice contemplate that course, and yet, she wasn’t quite sure how she’d convince his lordship that she really, truly did not want to be courted by him either.
Because in the weak and wanton corner of her heart that had no use for resignation, Alice was very interested in having Camden Huxley pay her his addresses.