Chapter 13 #2
“I am used goods,” Alice said as they started up the terrace steps. “A fallen woman.”
“You are far too intelligent to accept either of those ridiculous labels. Try ‘dear’ and ‘wonderful,’ if you want accurate descriptors. I am in trade, and I plan to stay there. Horrors abounding. I can assure you, Alice, that because I am in trade and know how to manage coin and make more of same, this estate will be prospering long after the neighbors have gone bankrupt.”
“An illicit dalliance is a different sort of shame than burying oneself in commercial undertakings.” Why would he not listen?
“Alice, scandal is scandal. Hard lessons are hard lessons. We are not children, and I want to marry you. Give me leave to court you, please.”
“You were supposed to grow all chilly and distant.” Thoughtful at least. She’d expected him to allude to travel arrangements. I’ll write soon. That sort of thing. She was older and wiser now, as he’d said.
Cam stopped at the top of the steps and smiled.
“You were supposed to marry a noted amateur scholar of noble brow and independent means and preside over his household. You would raise learned brats with a genius for languages and carry on lofty correspondence with lady philosophers on the Continent.”
How could she not love him? How could she not long to share the rest of her life with him?
“I would wear my hair down,” Alice said, moving off across the terrace. She was near tears for no earthly reason. “At least during the day, and nobody would decry the color.”
“The color of your hair is glorious. We’d best go in lest we be accused of trysting in the dark.” He opened the door, and Alice stepped into the gloom of the back atrium.
Tell him. Tell him now. “I wanted children,” Alice said, her heart thumping so hard Cam would surely hear it.
“I know something of children,” he replied, possessing himself of both of her hands. “They are noisy, expensive, and take ten eternities to grow up, unless they belong to somebody else. I do believe it’s my turn.”
Alice had enough wits left to pose the only relevant question. “You don’t care for children?”
“Children are a plague. Demons come to earth.” His tone was jocular, but not humorous enough to empty the words of their plain meaning. “Kiss me, Alice.”
She slipped her arms around his waist and leaned into him, her forehead braced against his shoulder. After saying so many right, kind, wonderful if slightly daft things, he’d said the wrong thing.
Alice hated feeling muddled, but about one thing she was very clear. She could not kiss him. Not now. The discussion had traveled in a completely unplanned direction and then gone worse than imagined. Alice distrusted her own assessments, and she still wanted to cry.
Children are a plague. “Take me home, please. I have much to think about.”
“I am still asking to court you. Think about that.”
She let him have the last word, because what was the point of further discussion?
Cam escorted her home in the last of the light, and even when they’d reached the cottage front door in nigh pitch darkness, she did not kiss him.
“Nothing,” St. Didier said, eyeing the afternoon sky beyond the library windows.
“Nothing recent, nothing for the past ten years. Lady Josephine is barely noticed in York’s higher social circles.
She has called on the wife or widow of a bishop or two.
She corresponds with a few more. She patronizes the best shops, though far less extravagantly than in times past. I found nothing remotely scandalous from any quarter. ”
Cam closed the household ledger, which was a more complicated tale than he’d expected. Pensions, charities, tithes, wages, linen, wine, window glass… The list of expenses was enormous, the sources of revenue limited to rent, livestock, and crops.
“Perhaps you weren’t asking the right parties,” Cam said, setting the ledger at arm’s length and rising. “Remind me never to lift a scythe again.”
“Still sore?”
“Twinges. The ravages of aging, I suppose.” Plus sleepless nights followed by too many hours sitting at a damned desk. “How did you conduct your interviews?”
“You will laugh.”
“I will not.” He hadn’t been in the mood to laugh since leaving Alice on her grandpapa’s doorstep two nights ago. Cam still hadn’t figured out what the hell had gone so far amiss in their last conversation.
Alice had finally been forthcoming about her wicked past—her foolish past, at worst—and Cam had tried to be dismissive and sympathetic.
To no avail.
“I applied a judicious bit of rice powder to my hair,” St. Didier said.
“I also sported a slight paunch, altered my attire, and claimed to be considering Lady Josephine from a matrimonial perspective. I might even have acquired a hint of a Lowland burr and the privileges of a specious Lord of Parliament.”
“Shameless.” Also brilliant. One sympathized instinctively with an aging bachelor finally contemplating matrimony. He’d be dignified, hesitant, determined, and a little vulnerable.
Much like a younger bachelor.
St. Didier opened the French doors, letting in a gust of fresh afternoon air. “Her ladyship might simply be a higher order of meddler than one finds in the usual rural parish. She is basically a busybody. Obscure vicarages boast plenty of those.”
As did clerks’ offices. Cam could identify a garden-variety busybody easily enough.
“She’s far worse than a village gossip with airs above her station.
She plays God, all the while pretending to piety.
She has a devoted son to dote on, a commodious dwelling, regular-ish income, excellent health, and plenty of social standing, and yet, she must hurt people who have done her no harm. ”
St. Didier turned from the French doors. “Hurt people?”
What had Lady Josephine made of Alice’s little foray into wanton romance? No sixteen-year-old who fancied herself in the throes of true love could have been discreet enough to escape Lady Josephine’s eye.
“Hurt people. Ruin their happiness. Force them to spend time in drudgery at her whim. Silence them when they would speak out. She thrives in the role of arbitrary oppressor of all that is joyful, pleasurable, and spontaneous, all in the name of propriety and piety.”
St. Didier took the window seat. “She was nasty to you when you were a little boy. She’s not the Corsican’s diabolical familiar.”
Cam took up St. Didier’s post along the windows, which admitted abundant sunlight. To the east, clouds were building up, great towering billows of white that showed pewter across the bottom.
“Bernard is looking for another post,” Cam said.
“He expects to take his mama with him when he goes. I suspect he knows more than he’s saying, and that Lady Josephine might well find a way to remain here.
Alice claims Lady Josephine will thwart Bernard’s schemes, that he has no prayer of ever escaping St. Wilfrid’s. ”
“You’ve been conversing with Miss Singleton?”
“Not on that topic and not since she and Thaddeus came to supper on Sunday. She and Bernard apparently discussed his plans to depart.” When and where? Alice would avoid the vicarage unless summoned by its resident gorgon.
“You are looking for a puzzle to solve,” St. Didier said, getting to his feet.
“Some way to control Lady Josephine with the sort of little secrets she uses to control everybody from the butcher’s wife to the maids you depend on here at the Hall.
She might well not have any, and you are building dungeons for her in Spain. ”
“I would not mind seeing her ladyship occupy a social dungeon.” How to achieve that outcome, though, when Cam wasn’t willing to bargain with the serpent in St. Wilfrid’s garden?
“Alice told me about her little misstep all those years ago. I can only imagine what hay Lady Josephine has made out of an orphaned sixteen-year-old being led astray.”
Even if Lady Josephine hadn’t divined the extent of the intimacies Alice had granted her false suitor, her ladyship would have smelled a source of leverage over a friendless and befuddled young girl.
“Miss Singleton has confided the details of her past to you?” The question was posed too casually, given how protective St. Didier was generally toward the woman Cam adored.
“Not the details, but enough of the general outlines. A tale as sad as it is common. What piques my curiosity is how Lady Josephine allowed matters to progress between the steward’s granddaughter and some swell in the area visiting Alexander.
Why wasn’t St. Wilfrid’s ever-vigilant crusader against moral lapses keeping a closer eye on matters? ”
“That,” St. Didier said, “is a valid and vexing riddle, but with a whole shire for Lady Josephine to mind and a bit of sneaking about on the part of the couple involved, Alice and her admirer might have escaped detection.”
They hadn’t. Cam could think of no other explanation for the great deference Alice showed to her ladyship.
The year or two Alice had spent at finishing school took on a new light—an exile, perhaps.
A punishment, to be parted from what family Alice had left and what friendships she might have formed, also a way to put Alice forever in her ladyship’s debt.
“Don’t you have correspondence to see to?” St. Didier asked, nudging a sketch that had hung perfectly straight, then nudging it back where he’d found it.
“Always.”
“You aren’t seeing to it.”
“No one will steal my mail from my very own desk.” And the entire stack held no replies from the family solicitors or from Worth Kettering. “I have asked Alice’s permission to pay her my addresses.”
Another sketch merited a nudge and un-nudge. “Fast work.”
“That’s all you have to say? Fast work?”
He swung around to face Cam. “What I have to say, were I not bound by discretion, would elaborate on the themes of fools rushing in, pride presaging disasters, and love being blind. You would not listen. I would regret the waste of breath and time. The only opinion that matters is Miss Singleton’s, and you will abide by her decisions, as honor requires.
If you’ll excuse me, I have some correspondence of my own to see to. ”
Bother the damned correspondence. “Alice Singleton is not acting like a woman being courted by a peer, and she won’t allow me to act like a man in love. What would you have me do?”
St. Didier seemed to take the question seriously.
“The sortie into York yielded little information, and you are a great one for peering under every rock and sending your myrmidons to lurk in every doorway. Perhaps you should haul your scamps and pickpockets north and have them spy on your neighbors.”
He decamped at his usual diffident pace, leaving Cam to wonder if that peroration had been a scold, a lament, or an honest suggestion. Cam considered possibilities while leaning on the jamb of the French doors and watching the trees of the home wood dance under a lively breeze.
The boys would hate to leave London, of that Cam was certain. They’d miss Cook’s scolds and her puddings and… Cook would not hate to leave London. She was forever longing for her homeland north of the Tweed and likening London to Hades.
The lad Parkin went skipping across the back terrace, literally skipping.
“Parkin!”
He turned as if guilty of some misdemeanor. “Dint mean to make no noise, milord. Beg pardon. It’s my half day.”
The correspondence was piling up nearly as high as the damned clouds on the eastern horizon, St. Didier was in a snit, and Alice was being contrary. Cam granted himself the right to a single hour’s truancy.
“Where can I find the sort of flowers that might please a young lady?”
Parkin rubbed his wrist against his nose. “In the conservatory?”
“I’m not looking for the sort of flowers the gardeners select and carefully arrange in the perfect vase, but real flowers. Yorkshire flowers any lad can pick for his mama.”
“Cook likes flowers. Come along, I’ll show you. We have a patch of daisies by the river and hollyhocks along the wood. I know where all the best flowers are, but you mustn’t tell anybody. Potboys aren’t supposed to know about flowers.”
All boys—all children—should know about flowers, but it occurred to Cam that in London, his boys hadn’t much opportunity to learn about them.
Twenty minutes later, he had a sizable if somewhat lopsided bouquet.
He wrapped the stems in a few wheat stalks and left the lot where only his lady was likely to find them.
Alice was not acting like a woman being courted by a peer, but Cam would conduct himself like a man in love, because that’s exactly what he was.