Chapter 15 #3
Her ladyship tucked a missive into her reticule, a little message addressed to Mrs. MacDougal at St. Wulfstan’s by the Forest. A five-pound note had been sealed within, which ought to be sufficient to buy both silence and services promised.
“Mama, are you going out?” Bernard, looking too dapper and handsome for St. Wilfrid’s, had emerged from his study.
“I must tend to some errands in Farnes Crossing.” Mendacity was a sin, and her ladyship avoided sin at all costs. Putting that infernal little girl on the stage coach qualified as an errand. “Duty calls, and I am a good and faithful servant, if I do humbly say so myself.”
“I plan to go into Farnes Crossing later today. Might I spare you the journey?”
Doubtless to send off more inquiries regarding a new position, the ungrateful boy. “Unless you’ve taken up knitting, Bernard, I must refuse your kind offer. I can have the coach back by noon or shortly thereafter if you’d like to go by carriage.”
“No need. It’s a pleasant hack over and back. You must not wait your nooning on me.”
“If you don’t need the coach, then I will make some calls while I’m out and about. Thaddeus Singleton has looked unwell to me lately. The harvest is too much for him, and why a man his age thinks he’s equal to such a challenge defies common sense and the plain evidence of one’s eyes.”
“And yet,” Bernard replied, “harvest progresses well, as it tends to do under his guidance, and the talk is we’re to have a fine crop this year. I’ll see you at supper.”
As last words went, that was a poor effort, and Bernard must have known it, because he disappeared back into his study.
Her ladyship collected a plain parasol from the stand in the corner and inspected her lip color one more time—subtly done, if she did say so herself.
She waited by the foyer window until the coach had halted at the foot of the steps and then descended at the brisk pace of a woman with much to accomplish and not nearly enough time to accomplish it.
Cam took the piece of paper from Alice’s hand. “You’re sure?”
Alice paced off across the sitting room carpet.
“I manage her ladyship’s correspondence, just as I do Grandpapa’s.
I know her hand, my lord, and it is atrocious.
A fidgety schoolgirl writes more legibly.
Her ladyship is particularly vain about her majuscule J’s.
The double loop with the bar across the top is part of her signature.
She has no doubt tried to copy the solicitor’s penmanship, but the J gives her away.
The L in London is hers too. Nearly unrecognizable for all the curling flourishes. ”
“She would have seen plenty of reports and epistles from that office,” Cam said, though a pair of messy capital letters was hardly enough evidence to convict her ladyship of a bad forgery. “Would she really do this?”
Even for Josephine… but then, Cam knew her ladyship only as the nasty-polite aunt of his youth, the busybody trying to matchmake in recent days. Alice knew her far better.
Alice knew her as an enemy.
“She would,” Alice said, going to the window. “She would, and you must believe me. If you have pigeons, send one to Town. If they are as fast as Grandpapa claims, the bird will be there before you’ve finished your noon meal.”
The best pigeons could fly from John O’Groats to Dover in a day. “A reply will take some time.”
“Squire Huffnagel has pigeons in Town. His daughters married Londoners, and Mrs. Huffnagel insisted they both have pigeons. I can give you the direction.”
Cam examined the note more closely. “I don’t need more proof, Alice. You are right that no law clerk wrote this note, at least not when sober, and neither did Isaac Claplady. His closing is always ‘Your Obed Serv,’ and this isn’t quite his signature.”
Alice turned, the window at her back. “But to Lady Josephine, he’d sign a letter ‘Respectfully Yours.’”
Cam was honestly taken aback by Lady Josephine’s audacity, while Alice appeared unsurprised.
No wonder Bernard wanted to relocate his mother to parts distant.
Tampering with the king’s mail was a felony, and if her ladyship persisted, she would sooner or later meddle herself right onto a convict transport ship.
“What will you do?” Alice asked, resuming her pacing. “You cannot allow Lady Josephine’s mischief to pass unremarked. The whole shire pretends she’s not that bad, that she means well, that she knows not what she does, but she knows very well the consequences of her schemes.”
Alice knew the consequences, too, if Cam was to believe her, and the only recourse she could think of was to flee. Why? What would make a woman of Alice’s fortitude and integrity turn her back on an aging Grandpapa, on a chance at marital happiness, on…
On the terrace below, Parkin was again skipping off on some errand known only to him and Cook. Berry picking, gathering flowers, taking a note to the home farm on another beautiful Yorkshire morning.
He might not be the best potboy in Yorkshire, but he was certainly among the most indulged. Clearly, the whole kitchen doted on the boy.
As Parkin tried with limited success to slide down the stone banister into the garden, a theory popped into Cam’s head.
Lady Josephine had accurately predicted that when faced with the prospect of a child in difficulties, Cam would make all haste to safeguard the child.
He’d set aside business, pleasure, courting, everything for the sake of a child for whom he felt responsible.
In that moment, Cam hated his aunt. Hated her as he’d never hated anybody and hoped never to hate again.
“Tell me about your experiences at finishing school, Alice. Your grandpapa thinks Lady Josephine sponsored you for two years, but you have alluded to only a single year of studies. Thaddeus enjoys excellent recollection, in the general case.”
Alice ceased pacing at the window and stood up quite tall. “My past is not your concern.”
Everything about you is my concern. “Forgive me. I should have phrased the request more respectfully. Forewarned is forearmed, and good decisions are made based on good information. You apparently have some information that I need, and I ask you, for my sake and for the sake of others who cannot defend themselves from her ladyship’s deviltry, to trust me with the truth of your past.”
Alice remained by the window, the brilliant blue of the Yorkshire morning sky behind her as the clock ticked and Cam waited.
“You ask me…” she said at length. “You ask me for everything.” A single tear slipped down her cheek.
Cam had made her cry, and yet, if he offered comfort, she would storm off, never to return. The decision to share the truth with him was Alice’s and Alice’s alone.
“Know, Alice, that I pledge everything in return.”
Another tear followed the first. Cam dared to offer his handkerchief, a plain white square of unstarched linen. “Alice, I cannot bear that you are—”
She snatched the handkerchief and pitched herself against him, silent sobs racking her.
Heat rolled off her and the occasional muffled moan that tore Cam’s heart to shreds.
This outpouring was not sadness or frustration or the weight of a hard day.
This was the burden of an impossible life, a heart that had given up on comfort, a body possessed by despair for too long.
“Mrs. Shorer has considered poison,” Alice said when the storm had passed. “So have I.” Her voice was low and bitter, far from her usual lilting contralto.
Cam stroked Alice’s hair and plotted vengeance. “Mrs. Shorer considered poison for Lady Josephine. You thought to take your own life.”
Alice pushed away, dabbing at a pink nose with Cam’s handkerchief. “Not recently. I haven’t the right. We should sit.”
Cam let Alice choose an end of the sofa and then came down right beside her and took her hand. “Where is the child?”
“You are so quick. No wonder Alexander was jealous of you.”
“He wasn’t.”
A watery smile. “Was too. Told me so himself. Wished you the best, though. Admired you.”
“I appreciate the news and will consider it later, but you are stalling, Alice.” And Cam had never loved her more.
“Gathering my courage.”
“You have been gathering your courage since your parents died. Just tell me.”
She nodded. “The child is a girl, Gabriella. I named her for the angel, and the adoptive parents respected my wishes. They were good people, the best, extraordinarily kind. Gabriella had a wonderful and loving start in life.”
Were good people. “What happened?”
“The wife died of influenza when Gabriella was about four. The husband decided he had a missionary calling. He placed Gabriella at the orphans’ home in Farnes Crossing and ensured that I would have regular access to her, then went off and expired of a tropical fever.
Gabriella is an orphan as far as anybody knows, and Lady Josephine is the patroness of the orphanage. ”
And thus Lady Josephine could bind Alice with the heaviest chains known to a loving heart. “You meant to take Gabriella and flee.”
“I mean to. Lady Josephine has arranged for Gabriella to be put in service in some Irish household. I saw the letter myself. If Gabriella is sent to Ireland, her ladyship would hold Gabriella’s location and welfare over my head for all the rest of my days.
I would never know where my daughter was or how she fared, though I’d be given the occasional well-timed and certainly fictitious hint. ”
Cam kissed Alice’s knuckles, locked a good quantity of rage in his mental safe, and considered what Lady Josephine’s tactics said about her mettle as an opponent.
“She’s consistent, or lacks imagination. Her ladyship tried to use the boys to manipulate me. Probably learned of the composition of my household through the family solicitors. She then gambled that alluding to a junior member of the staff would pluck my heartstrings past all bearing.”
“She nearly won that bet.”
At some point in this exchange, Cam had put an arm around Alice’s shoulders, and she had let her weight fall against his side. She drew her knees up, positively cuddling against him.
“I am so afraid,” she said, “and I have been afraid until I’m sick with it.
I would like to see my daughter. I would, in fact, like to provide my daughter a home, to raise her, and to blazes with what polite society or the church or Lady Rubbishing Josephine has to say on the matter.
I want to be a mother to my child, if she’ll have me, and if that means I cannot be your baroness, I am sorry.
I am truly sorry, but my decision is firm. ”
The rest of Alice was all soft curves and sweetness. Cam kissed her on the lips simply because he could and because those lips said such wonderful things.
“There is room for Gabriella right here at the Hall and certainly room for her in my heart. What do you think of adding some noisy, rambunctious boys to the household too?”
Alice murmured something about “all the children” and “kiss me again,” and while Cam wasn’t quite certain what the first phrase was in reference to—though he had a good idea—he knew exactly what to do about the second.