Chapter 11
Eleven
Ithought you lived a quiet life, not an utterly dull one.” Barlow yawned more to punctuate his sentence than anything. His friend could not be tired from reclining on the couch all morning.
“We have been out every morning this week.” Victor’s defense was weak.
Monday, they had gone to the timber traders, and on Tuesday, they visited the surveyors.
As for today, Victor had yet to find a suitable venue for an errand.
After Lady Katherine’s blatant warning, he considered taking Barlow anywhere females might gather a risk.
With Miss Jane Lightwood away, Victor did not need to worry about his friend’s lack of entertainment while planning for the harvest fair, as this afternoon’s meeting would not happen.
Barlow sat up. “I enjoy a good gallop on my horse as well as any man. However, every morning?”
“If my company bores you, you are welcome to leave for one of those house parties you are so eager to attend.”
“Not a chance. Your mother should be here today, and I will very much enjoy attending her tea with the Dowager Lady Godderidge.” Barlow chuckled.
“Neither of us will be in attendance.”
“You would decline the opportunity to see Miss Godderidge? Do you think I have missed your many references to her these last several days?”
Victor bristled. He had not mentioned Miss Godderidge more than absolutely necessary.
Definitely not as often as his mind had wandered in her direction.
The ridiculous story about her brother and his advice for the hounds.
Thinking about it now, Miss Godderidge’s story had nothing to do with hounds and everything to do with Barlow.
She was chasing off the women flocking to him.
Barlow seemed relieved to have her do so.
For the first time since Barlow was in the nursery he seemed determined to avoid women.
Something at the house party Barlow had vacated left the man shaken enough that he preferred to hole up at Pittsfield rather than find entertainment elsewhere, and now he was making Victor’s life his entertainment.
It was best to ignore his friend’s troubles until he chose to speak of them.
“I realize no matter what I say, you will use it as proof that I have some feelings for Miss Godderidge, that I do not.”
Barlow smirked. “I do not see why you cannot accept your attraction to the woman.”
“What would you have me say? In the last three days, you have tricked me into admitting she is a beauty, possesses more sense than others of her station, and has some wit. Which, while all true, hardly means there is any attraction to her. Her manipulations are annoying.” As was this conversation.
Barlow, in his boredom, had taken up matchmaking as his hobby as the gossip paper should report.
Or rather taken it up again, assuming that Victor was correct and Barlow made a hobby of it among the ton finding young misses more appropriate husbands.
“I am annoying but not skilled. Which, in my opinion, is better. A man does not wish to be constantly steered in a direction that he doesn’t wish to go.
While admittedly attempting to sway you to Miss Godderidge’s side, I do so in such a transparent manner that it would be easy to avoid her machinations.
If she had any on you, which she does not, nor is she particularly skilled in such. ”
Victor raised his brows. “Machinations you are acquainted with?”
“Not as intimately, in her case, but yes, a skilled woman can flatter her way into a man believing that he is in control of his own mind when he is not.” A deep sadness accompanied Barlows’s words.
“You are not speaking of Miss Godderidge still?”
“No, Miss Godderidge is good and kind. She should be admired especially in her attempts to shield the village girls from me.” Barlow shed his melancholy as he pulled out his snuffbox.
“Her manipulations, as you call them, were wholly unnecessary. I have no intention of any father coming after me with a pitchfork.”
“The timber merchant’s daughter is the one you should be worried about, her father has an axe.”
Barlow laughed. “You almost persuade me to give up my rakish ways.”
A commotion on the drive drew their attention to the window.
Victor recognized the carriage instantly. “Mother is here. Perhaps she will aid in your reformation.”
An hour later, Mrs. Dalrymple—refreshed and settled in her rooms—sought out Victor. “You have done well, son. This house is very well situated. You must take me for a tour of the grounds.”
Victor nodded to the rain-streaked window. “I am afraid that you will need to content yourself with learning the inside of the house.”
“It is rather large for one man, is it not?”
“I had hoped for more visitors than I have had these past two years.” Victor regretted the words as soon as they popped out of his mouth. Slighting his mother was not on his list that day. Neither she nor his sister had accepted his previous invitations.
She raised her chin. “I had meant to visit.”
“My apologies, Mother, I did not mean only you. I thought that this fine house would be one where I could invite friends. However, I am not given to making them as easily as I wish.” A fault his father had often decried.
Mother waved her hand dismissively. “Well, I am here now, to lend that air of respectability you need to entertain. What is first?”
“Lady Godderidge, or I should say the Dowager Lady, has asked to meet you when you arrive.”
“Are we to go calling then?” Mother looked around as if her pelisse would appear for an outing.
“No, we are to invite her and her daughter here as soon as you are ready to receive. It seems that the newest Lady Godderidge has been taken with some illness, and Leadon Hill is closed to visitors.”
“Is it safe to invite the family then? We are not in danger?”
“I think not. Even though Lord and Lady Godderidge absented themselves from Sunday services, their servants, Lady Katherine, and Miss Godderidge were in attendance. If the physician had put them under quarantine, they could not have been.”
“Miss Godderidge is the young woman you wrote about, the one you need to work with to plan this harvest festival. It will be the talk of all England.”
“Not so grand as a festival, merely a fair.”
“It should be grand. Look at this house and the lands.”
Victor had hoped not to need to explain to his mother the necessity of simplicity, especially this year.
The conversation explaining the need to economize, why members of the ton were not invited to the event, and why every human within a five-mile radius would come, went worse than he assumed it would, so he rang for tea to be served.
Mother’s nose scrunched as she inspected the tray, which, while more than adequate to feed the two of them and Barlow if he joined them, had only two kinds of sandwiches and one of cake. “I see I must have a talk with your housekeeper and cook, this is not how one presents a proper tea.”
“As I have explained this past half hour, the wheat harvest is poor this year. This household, like others, is doing all we can to not allow food to go to waste. I have instructed my housekeeper and cook to be wise so that none but the hogs suffer from lack of food. It is not necessary or prudent to live like the ton in London heedless of those who help us.”
“But you can afford to purchase wheat.”
Victor looked heavenward for help. “Mother, all of Europe is in short supply. It has rained far too much this year. The news I received from Canada and America indicates they are also having a poor growing year. I cannot live in excess when others are set to starve.”
“The poor are always starving. I should know.” Mother took a bite of her sandwich. To his knowledge she had never known true want, raised in the merchant class. How easily she had picked up the ways of those who had no need to care.
“This. Is. Different.” Victor drew a breath. “This is not like the stories father told us of growing up poor on the streets and stealing food.”
“Hush! Lord Barlow will hear you.”
“Barlow knows. This is a potential famine of proportions the world has not seen since Joseph interpreted Pharaoh’s dream.”
“Surely you exaggerate.” Mother set her half-eaten sandwich down.
“I pray I am. But every communication I have from anyplace in the empire points towards a year of crop failure.”
“But the papers say nothing about a famine.”
The society pages wouldn’t. His mother didn’t have the patience to wade through the rest of the news. “Not yet, but I am afraid they will.”
“Well, I don’t care what they say, you cannot feed your visitors such simple fare.”
He could, and he would. Perhaps the Godderidges could impress upon his mother what he could not. “Shall I invite them for tomorrow afternoon then?”
“Only if you talk with your cook.” Mother sniffed in the affected way he had witnessed other matrons do.
Victor smiled. He would inform his cook that his mother was not to change a single thing about the menu. Miss Godderidge better appreciate the lengths he was going to in order to accommodate her harvest fair. Six weeks under the same roof with his mother would be more difficult than he remembered.