Chapter 14 #2
She sipped her tea, made a face, and put the cup down. “Do ring for a fresh tray while you’re on your feet. I vow tea cools faster in summer than winter.”
Thus dismissed, Alice descended to the vicarage’s ground floor in a state between a waking nightmare and catatonic rage.
She tapped on the study door, heard no reply, and entered.
The room smelled faintly of lavender and books—Mrs. Shorer’s sachets for keeping the bugs and mice from eating the paper—and could have been any vicarage study in any corner of the realm.
Where was Bernard? Out sending off another hopeless inquiry, perhaps.
The window looked over the rolling acreage of the glebe land, the home wood forming its distant boundary. A landscape of Lorne Hall held pride of place over the mantel. Sketches of St. Wilfrid’s and the previous vicar were the sole art on the opposite wall.
The desk was serviceable rather than elegant, and the blotter sported a Bible, some commentaries, and a neat stack of foolscap covered in Vicar’s exquisite hand. Several other letters had been opened and sat beside the wax jack, and on those Alice spotted Lady Josephine’s looping scrawl.
They would require responses, but Alice was not in the mood—not at all in the mood—to tend to the task. Lady Josephine had casually threatened to rip out Alice’s heart without even saying Gabriella’s name.
And if Alice did marry Cam? Lady Josephine would always have Gabriella to hold over Alice’s head, and thus Cam would have a traitor for a wife.
“Damn, drat, and perdition.” Worse profanity was called for, but Alice didn’t know any.
She set the lap desk on the blotter, opened it, and gathered up the additional mail. The lap desk had a small drawer available for the purpose, so Alice…
Some piece of paper was already caught in the drawer, or caught between the back of the drawer and the top of its compartment. Alice worked the jammed paper loose and found a note from a Mrs. MacDougal of St. Wulfstan’s by the Forest.
Alice read the final paragraph while struggling to breathe.
The unfortunate girl will be sure to find her salvation in hard work and prayer.
The Irish are nothing if not devout, and they are even afflicted with a disproportionate occurrence of red hair, so she’ll be among those similarly burdened.
Send her to me, and I will make all the arrangements.
A reasonable sum for travel expense and so forth is all I ask…
Yours in prayer…
Alice knew not how long she stood in the study, staring at the little piece of paper, raging, despairing, and wishing.
But when she finished tidying up the lap desk and had stowed it on its assigned shelf, she had to admit that Lady Josephine was right in at least one regard: A clean break was best for all concerned.
The sooner the better.
“You need a new name,” Cam said, patting the gelding’s neck. “Gooseberry will no longer do.” How much had the name—a cognomen for Old Scratch—influenced the horse’s lot in life?
Since being exercised regularly, fed treats only from a bucket, and being verbally reprimanded for the near occasion of almost-naughty behavior, the beast had stopped nipping.
“A quick learner,” Cam said, letting the gelding pick his way up the track. “Maybe you had to be, and won’t they all be surprised when you take a first among the foxhunters?”
Farnes Crossing in all its modest splendor wrapped the foot of the hill. The village was not out on the Dales proper, but lay at the foot of a sizable ridge of green that anticipated the contours of the land farther west.
“If anybody asks, I came on inspection.” Partly true.
Cam had simply been unwilling to face another mountain of reports, complaints, requests, and invoices.
The creditors were growing strident, the debtors increasingly apologetic, and none of that seemed to matter as long as the situation with Alice remained unsettled.
“I should be robbing Peter to pay Paul.” Instead, Cam was taking in a view so purely Yorkshire and lovely and worth missing that he’d been unable to remain at his desk. “I have been knocked off my commercial horse, and I am disinclined to get back in the saddle.”
He brought Gooseberry to a halt and surveyed the village below. On market days, the place would be thronged.
Farnes Crossing enjoyed coaching traffic along both north-south and east-west routes—it truly was a crossing, had been for eons—and yet, for those seeking metropolitan conveniences, York lay just a few stops on.
Farnes Crossing was still a village, with a market green, a single house of worship, and one coaching inn, though town-hood wasn’t far off.
Cam’s excuse for making this trek had been duty. The barony supported several local charities, and one of them, a home for orphans, lay just outside the perimeter of Farnes Crossing proper.
“Best get on with it.” He nudged Gooseberry in a half circle and headed down the hill toward a manor house fallen on utilitarian times. He did not want to swill tea with Mrs. Dumfries, the headmistress, did not want to face the correspondence he’d once regarded as so much plum pudding.
“I want Alice.”
The horse flicked an ear.
“Not in that sense… Well, yes, in that sense too, rather desperately, but also…” Cam fell silent, lest he sound like Armendink, who’d written to thank Cam for such a gracious attitude toward parting.
“I miss her, when she’s only five miles away.
I want to talk with her almost as much as I want to kiss her.
I worry about her and wonder if she worries about me. ”
That last was a reckless admission, even to a horse. Nobody worried about Camden Huxley. Not his family, not his clerks. Not… well, Mrs. Shorer probably kept him in her prayers, and St. Didier fretted in his quiet, sniffy way.
A burst of children emerged from the aging manor house, the little ones in their short dresses and pinafores, the older girls in longer dresses. They made noise to go with the energy they displayed, though they were apparently not bent on play.
A sturdy pair of females in mobcaps and aprons followed, and a pair of tall girls dragging a laundry cart brought up the rear.
A well-rehearsed drill followed, with the laundry maids lowering the wash lines, the children affixing wet laundry to the lines, and the maids raising the lines when full by means of a pulley rope.
The drill would play out in reverse probably just before supper, when the brisk Yorkshire breeze would have thoroughly dried all those sheets, pillowcases, aprons, shirts, and whatnot. The whatnot—small articles of underlinen—went up last on the central of three wash lines.
With the outer lines hoisted, the undergarments were not in plain view, a tradition Cam had thought unique to the laundresses at the Hall.
“And the laundry will come in clean,” he told the horse. In London, nobody hung laundry out of doors, lest it come in dirtier than it went out. The kitchen sufficed as a drying space for many households, or they sent their washing to the country.
“I am not precisely missing London.” How much of Cam’s perpetual exhaustion there had simply been bad air? “I am missing the boys.” They would have liked hanging out the wash. Within five minutes, they’d have formed teams and started a race, or been wearing Cook’s unmentionables on their heads.
The task complete, the children were herded back indoors. A little sprite with red hair won the honor of dragging the empty laundry cart, which meant she went indoors last. She spotted Cam riding down the hill and waved.
He waved back, and then she disappeared.
Inspection nominally completed. The children were energetic, clean, and… not loud enough. Not nearly.
“Suppose I should have a look.”
Gooseberry completed the descent, and Cam turned him toward the posting inn. Wouldn’t hurt to enjoy summer ale and a meat pie before calling on the headmistress. Mrs. Dumfries was probably a tartar who approved of snoods and knitting sessions.
“Nobody will steal my mail.” And tending to that towering stack of responsibilities would not make Cam miss Alice any less. “I should have brought her roses.”
He instead left Gooseberry munching hay at the livery and was halfway to the coaching inn when a lady marching along the opposite side of the street caught his eye. Something about the militant kick of the ruffle at her hem…
Cam crossed the high street, nimbly dodging a dog cart and an antique gig.
“Alice Singleton, good day.”
She halted, skirts swishing about her boots. “My lord.” A crisp, correct curtsey. “Greetings.”
I’ve missed you did not strike Cam as a place to start the conversation, not when Alice was in high dudgeon over something.
“What brings you to Farnes Crossing?” Alice asked.
“Business, more or less. You?” He did not even offer her his arm, so self-contained did she seem. Not angry, but sharply focused on some serious end.
“An errand.”
“A very weighty errand, if your mood is any indication.”
Alice glanced around at the few pedestrians going about their day. “Important to me, but completed now. I suppose I’ll see you at services on Sunday.”
Not so fast. “Alice, might we talk?”
She shook her head. “We’ve talked enough, and that Lady Josephine hasn’t yet acquired a written transcript of our very words is surely an oversight on her part.”
Well, of course. If Alice was vexed, Lady Josephine was somehow the cause.
“I offer a suggestion, then. We will proceed back to the Hall and stop at the lake to enjoy the view. We will be in public the entire way, but should have the privacy to discuss her ladyship’s latest affront to common decency. ”
The glint in Alice’s eyes became diamond bright. “She all but reads Bernard’s correspondence. She and the postmistress at the inn are apparently quite in each other’s confidence. He’s trying to find another pulpit, and she has, with her usual efficiency, found the means to thwart him.”
How had Alice uncovered the postmistress’s collusion with her ladyship? “Bernard hopes to take his mama with him.”
Alice finally looked at Cam as if seeing the man before her eyes. “Bernard told you that?”
“And I’ve sent out some inquiries of my own, including a few regarding church posts. Bernard is going to waste at St. Wilfrid’s. He’s well educated, shrewd, capable of hard work, and frustrated for lack of challenge.” Also bored and lonely. Had the telltale ink stain on his cuff to prove it.
“Proximity to her ladyship seems to result in frustration,” Alice said. “We mustn’t tarry long at the lake, but you are right that we need to discuss some delicate matters. I owe you that.”
“I won’t hear a you-do-me-great-honor speech, Alice. Not from you. We’d suit, and you know it.”
She started off in the direction of the livery. “We do, and I do, and yet, there is more that must be said.”
Then Cam did not want to hear her announcements at the location traditionally frequented by Farnes Crossing’s courting couples.
“Come to the Hall. Gather up more medicinals for Thaddeus, discuss his situation with Mrs. Shorer. Harvest has at least another week to go, and your grandpapa is looking distracted and tired to me.”
“He might say the same about you, my lord. When we meet at the Hall, we are more or less under surveillance. Surely you know that.” Alice offered that reminder tiredly and stopped at the edge of the livery yard.
“We are likely being watched now, by some groom or chambermaid at the inn. That we met on the street will be reported to Lady Josephine, who has suggested that you mean to ruin me, by the way.”
Cam realized then what affected Alice. She was in the same state he’d been in by the time he’d come of age.
Perpetually angry, so angry that the litany of affronts ran like an off-key hymn in his head he could not escape, one that had to be ignored while making the great effort to appear calm and even good-humored over and over and over again.
People in that state made rash, brave, often irreversible decisions.
“If you will not meet me at the Hall, Alice, I will come to your grandpapa’s cottage, and if you refuse me entry, I will sing beneath your window, or climb through your window, and Lady Josephine can make of my ardor whatever she pleases. She is not God, Alice, and we are not powerless.”
“She might well be the devil, though, and in all of eternity, the celestial powers have not seen fit to excise Lucifer from existence, have they?”
The very last thing Cam was capable of discussing in that moment was theology. “Where, Alice? If we are to clear the air, you choose the location, and it must be soon.”
“Because you are returning to London?”
“Because I am losing my mind, and I have already lost my heart.”
She winced. “My wits went begging nearly a decade ago. I will see you tomorrow morning in the herb garden.”
“When the dew has risen.” Yorkshire fashion.
Alice nodded once, then swished away into the stable yard. Cam let her go, and when her gig tooled past, he merely tipped his hat.
As negotiations went, he hadn’t distinguished himself. Alice was planning to cry off on an engagement that had never started, and all Cam had done was give her more time to prepare the little speech that would wreck him from the heart out.
She had made up her mind. Cam knew the look and knew how once a decision was made, dissuading a woman of Alice’s formidable determination would be nigh impossible.
He made himself down a pint of ale and eat half a meat pie and considered that was head start enough for Alice—he’d interview the headmistress later. When he retrieved his horse, the groom kept a careful hand on the reins.
“This would be the famous Gooseberry?”
“You know this horse?”
“Oh, aye. The Goose will fly over anything. Hedges, stiles, the moon, but he’ll as soon have you for breakfast as look at you. The squires all around thought it a great joke when he was sold to the lord of Lorne Hall. Goose seems a bit subdued today, or I’d be missing me ear.”
The horse sent Cam a you-see-what-I-have-to-put-up-with look, or so it seemed to Cam.
“His name is Galahad, and he’s only nippy when people are foolish enough to tempt and tease him, or inflict boredom upon him.
I don’t know this other horse you refer to, but if the beast is so talented, somebody ought to take the time to put a few manners on him lest a valuable animal end up in the knacker’s yard. ”
Cam checked the stirrups and girth, led Galahad to a mounting block, and swung aboard. He left a slightly puzzled groom in the stable yard and set off at a brisk trot for the Hall.