Chapter 15 #2
He withdrew some papers from a drawer, uncapped the ink, and scrawled a few lines. “I have a supply of coin in the safe in the library. You will accept some ready cash too, Alice.”
“I cannot take your charity. Not when I’m…”
“Lying to me?” He sanded the little document. “Lying to yourself? Breaking my heart? I suppose I had that coming. I’ve been disdainful of those struck by Cupid’s arrow. I never expected the dart to be aimed my way. Never had the courage to be that hopeful.”
Drat him forever. “I would stay if I could.”
“I would go with you if I could.”
Alice sank back down onto the sofa. She hadn’t foreseen… hadn’t in her wildest imaginings… “You mustn’t say such things. You employ many people, and Peruvian bark alleviates terrible suffering. Your business matters.”
He blew the sand into the dustbin. “Oddly enough, it’s not the business that’s inspiring my departure.” He took a single sheet of paper from the top of the stack on the corner of the escritoire. “The family solicitors are being discreet.”
He passed Alice the note.
Your lordship’s return to London is most urgently advised. Discretion forbids details, but all haste is recommended. Junior staff has become entangled in a personal matter requiring your lordship’s presence at the soonest possible moment.
Respectfully Yours,
Isaac T. Claplady
“Cryptic,” Alice said, choosing the word carefully. Cryptic rather than discreet. “Nearly hysterical with urgency.”
“The business solicitors would simply state the problem. That the family solicitors are communicating regarding my junior staff suggests one of my boys has imperiled his health or lost his liberty to Bow Street’s vigilance.”
Alice stared at the note, an instinctive distaste coloring her regard. The words were manipulative, guaranteed to send his lordship south without revealing the true nature of the problem.
She set the epistle on the arm of the sofa. “What boys?”
“I collect clerks, very junior clerks whose previous professions tended to be illegal or dangerous. I have two former climbing boys on my payroll, several failed pickpockets, and one who escaped from the mines. Another went to sea at age eight and has a ferocious head for rum. He has a prodigious memory, though, and keeps order in the ranks.”
“Boys? I thought you didn’t care for children.”
“I care for my own pack of demons, and they can eat their weight in bread and cheese every day. They know they’re valued, though.
They know if they don’t come home, somebody will notice and go looking for them.
” Cam picked up the document he’d written and passed it to Alice.
“If you don’t want my heart, at least take some blunt.
I would like your trust in return, but if you can’t give me that, then know that wherever you go, my love goes with you. ”
He was returning to London with all possible haste because he feared for some child he’d plucked off the street. Alice absorbed that fact, absorbed that Cam Huxley more or less ran his own personal orphanage, because he well knew how it felt when nobody came looking for a missing boy.
She stared at the piece of paper in her hand. Cam’s tidy penmanship and… he’d written her a bearer note for five hundred pounds. “You cannot afford this.”
“I can. My business would be a trifle pressed to cover it, but that’s drawn on a personal account.
You are leaving your home, your aging grandpapa, the people who care about you, and the people you care for.
That’s a desperate measure, Alice. I know.
I also know that you can’t simply show up at a regimental office and be guaranteed housing, food, and respectable work. ”
Five hundred pounds. “Why? Why do this when I’m refusing your addresses?”
He sat beside her. “Because you see me, see why I indulge in all the busyness, and see why the busyness has been so alluring and meaningful. I tell you I employ budding thieves, and you have no lectures for me about encouraging sin or giving the lower orders airs. You put your reputation at risk to help with my stupid letters. You look after my old guard so they can look after the Hall.”
“The letters aren’t stupid.” And yet, the solicitor’s note was disrespectful in a way.
“You manage Lady Josephine,” Cam went on.
“As long as she can bully you, summon you, make you work for no pay, and treat you as the homeliest spinster in the parish, she has less time and attention to spend on other victims. Between you and Bernard, she’s placated.
If you leave, she’ll find new victims. I feel compelled to make that point. ”
But Gabriella would not be one of them. “I must leave nonetheless. I have a year of finishing school, I am passably musical. My French is adequate, my needlework superb, and my penmanship exemplary. I can find work.” And with five hundred pounds for Gabriella, Alice might also find peace.
But she would never, ever find a man to love who was even one-quarter as decent as the one sitting beside her.
She pushed forward and Cam was instantly on his feet, his hand extended. “I will kiss you good-bye, Alice, and bedamned to whose turn it is.”
“We will kiss each other good-bye.”
They went about it slowly, a farewell kiss, but also, for Alice, a celebration.
She loved Camden Huxley, and he loved her enough to respect and support her decisions, even her decision to leave.
A bittersweet irony, that she wished he’d instead demand that she marry him, come what may, while some convenient magic spell sent Lady Josephine to the ends of the earth.
Cam did not rush, but when Alice broke the kiss, he allowed it. “I can only ask that you let me know you are safe. That you don’t need anything.”
“I can’t write to you here.” She ought not to write to him at all, in fairness to him.
“Write to me on Backneedle Street in Town. As attentive as I am to my correspondence, I will positively dwell at the posting inn until I know you are safe.”
Alice bussed his cheek rather than make promises she wasn’t certain she could keep.
“I’m not sorry you came to the Hall,” she said. “I’m not sorry for loving you.”
“But we are both sorry you must leave and that, now of all times, so must I. Alice, what aren’t you telling me?”
That Alice had reduced him nearly to begging shamed her. The temptation to confide, to burden him with the whole tale had her taking a turn staring at the carpet.
The note from the family solicitors had been carried to the floor by some wayward breeze. Alice knelt to retrieve it, scanning the words a final time.
“Alice, you regard that note as if it were a lewd verse.”
“I don’t care for the tone, and something…” A realization emerged from the miasma of Alice’s emotions like the physical and aural blast of a harbor cannon firing through fog.
“Alice?”
“The J,” Alice said, shaking the note at him. “That is Lady Josephine’s J, and your solicitors did not write this note.”
“Loitering in the herb garden.” Lady Josephine’s tone suggested this offense eclipsed all seven deadly sins put together, which, given the potential consequences, it well might. “Loitering, like a goosegirl hoping to catch sight of the pantry boy.”
She ceased muttering long enough to tie her bonnet ribbons in a tidy bow three inches to the right of her chin. The mirror over the sideboard in the vicarage foyer suggested that chin was sagging a bit, but only a bit.
“I vow Alice Singleton is simple.” Her ladyship retrieved her reticule from its designated drawer in the sideboard.
A cursory inspection revealed a half-dozen pennies in a side pocket—alms to be given to urchins and beggars in public locations—as well as a small bound version of the Gospels, also for brandishing in public.
A pocket comb, bulging coin purse, folding mirror, and a vial of smelling salts completed the list.
“If Alice sought to give the baron the set-down he deserves, she should have known better than to dawdle about where the entire staff could see her.”
Of course, Alice might not be planning any sort of set-down for the baron. She might—the girl was lamentably fanciful—be planning to become his baroness.
“And I have strategies in place for all eventualities, because somebody must.” Her ladyship folded her lips together, then pushed them out. A modest touch of color about the lips was becoming at any age.
“Then too, Camden isn’t exactly a temple of brilliance either.” Her ladyship inspected herself in three-quarter profile from both sides. Bernard had the same nose, positively patrician.
“Did I or did I not send dear Camden instructions to get back to London more than twenty-four hours ago? And he has yet to summon his traveling coach. That St. Didier fellow has been a bad influence indeed, or perhaps my wretched nephew is hoping to entice Alice into leaving with him.”
The situation wanted a firm hand. Alice knew better than to elope with the baron.
She would know better still when Lady Josephine controlled all information regarding the whereabouts and welfare of Alice’s bastard daughter.
Such a harsh word, but the truth must be faced, and a clean break was—had always been—the wisest course.
Her ladyship withdrew a pair of black gloves from another drawer in the sideboard.
The note to his lordship had been a bit of inspiration. Alice tried hard, and she meant well, but she was utterly lackwitted when it came to men and their designs. Then too, tell Camden Huxley that a lady wasn’t interested, and he might well be buying a special license in the next instant.
“He has always been hopelessly contrary. Too convinced of his own conclusions to listen to the voice of reason.” The situation wanted simplifying if all was to be properly managed. “And as usual, I must do everything myself if I want it done at all.”