Chapter 25
Twenty-Five
Tom ran across the grass, faster than the other boys who had been playing nearby, all of them catching sight of a small sailing dinghy coming into view round a bend in The Serpentine.
The other boys, varying in age, Madelaine guessed, from five to twelve, all clustered near the shore.
Their fine coat suits and the cluster of neatly dressed nursemaids and minders following in their wake proclaimed them as children of the highest rank.
Tom glanced between them and the boat, hanging back, diffident and wary, shoulders hunched.
“No matter how often I take him to the park,” her aunt said, “he stays as pale as ever.”
“A gentleman is supposed to be pale,” Madelaine reminded her. “He is no coarse farmer’s son.”
Her aunt pressed her lips together, troubled, as she tugged her skirts straight. They’d found a bench to sit on while Tom ran and explored and kicked at molehills, and everything else small boys did that got them covered head to toe in muck.
“We don’t know what he is. I don’t think he does anymore. Not a gentleman’s son but doted on by an earl. They’re engaging him a tutor, I heard today when I went to pick him up. Lord Arnon was talking about Eton.” She sniffed at that, knowing full well how Madelaine’s brother had fared there.
“They’d torment him, hearing his accent, knowing his birth.”
“I know. I know. I’ll speak to the earl.”
There was no betraying blush, but Madelaine studied her aunt’s profile for a moment, smiling softly.
That her aunt shouldn’t drop the connection with Lord Cotereigh’s household had been her main priority once the first hour or so of wretched weeping and confessions had been gotten out of the way. Not that she needed to confess much. Her aunt had heard the whole.
“That wretch! That despicable, wicked wretch.”
Madelaine had never seen such a martial light in her aunt’s eye.
Nor such fury. That even her aunt, her dear, sweet, most generous aunt, hadn’t been able to forgive Lord Cotereigh’s behaviour had been a comfort.
At first. But Madelaine had been exhausted by the time she’d convinced her aunt to act towards the Thornes as she’d always done.
“Don’t punish Tom for it. And…and don’t punish the father for the son.”
Don’t punish yourself, dear aunt.
That had been three days ago. Four days since the ball and that darkened room.
Now Madelaine was able to move and smile and talk as though almost nothing had happened.
She’d been busy, packing and preparing for her departure from London.
She would leave for Sussex tomorrow. This trip to the park, no matter her aunt’s talk of fresh air and exercise being necessary for young boys, had been organised to allow her to say goodbye to Tom somewhere safely away from Lord Cotereigh’s house.
Tom had scowled when she’d told him she was leaving.
“It’s because of him, ain’t it.” He’d kicked at the grass, her aunt pleading ineffectually for him to stop and think of his shoes. “He did something, and now you’re going. I knows how it is, though no one says nuffink to me.”
“No, Tom,” she said, though her heart might as well have been one of the molehills he was flattening. Dark and crumbling to earth. “I live in Sussex. My parents are there, and most of my brothers, and my nieces and nephews. I only ever come to London for a few months in the spring.”
Tom shifted his attention to her aunt. “Not you, though? You ain’t going too?”
“No, Tom. I live in London. I’ll be here just the same as always.”
He’d nodded at that, a little mollified.
Then Tom had eyed her, squinting, anger hiding whatever pleading note might have otherwise crept into his tone. “So you’ll be back next year?”
Her heart had thumped. God help her. Would she?
“Of course, Tom.” She’d smiled. “I can’t wait to see how you’ve grown.”
Now she watched him watch the boat with his engineer’s avidity for anything that moved. Alfred would have watched the boat like it was alive, a wild horse to harness. He’d had one just like it.
The sails flapped, loose. Someone had dropped the jib.
There was a shout from the men as one swung the boom arm over and nearly knocked the other overboard.
She wrinkled her nose. Alfred would’ve had a thing or two to say about that.
She did herself. Even she could sail better.
He’d taught her, the sea breeze in his hair—
“Some sixteen-year-old in his calf love—”
Her fingers clenched into her skirts. The voice snarled in her mind as loud and vicious as though he was really there, black eyes boring into her, cold as unmined coal in the chill earth. Halfway to hell.
It was good her aunt’s attention was on the boat and the boy. There was no masking this wave of despair. They came like squalls, out of nowhere.
The thing that was hardest to forgive…one of the things…was him poisoning…poisoning everything.
Bad enough that another man’s taste and another man’s touch kept sliding insidiously into her mind. But to call it calf love, a young boy’s mooning…
She shook her head, breathing out sharply. Her aunt glanced over at the motion but said nothing.
Tomorrow she would be gone. Tomorrow evening she would arrive at that beloved, familiar home. And in the morning, she’d walk on the marsh in the fresh, unresting air, curlew cries blown among the wiry grasses…
Probably soon there would be an announcement in the Morning Post. Lord Cotereigh to marry Lady Frances Elston…
She would never see it. How small and trivial it all seemed.
London and the papers and the stuffy nonsense of balls.
Her parents didn’t read the Post. London’s news made little difference at the seaworn edge of Sussex.
Maybe her aunt would write, fretting for long hours over the words to use, the ones that would cause least pain.
But Madelaine wouldn’t care. It couldn’t hurt her.
She wouldn’t accept him if he came crawling on his knees. Not now she knew him.
He didn’t deserve her.
Yes, that was a comforting thought. It was pleasant when she could make herself believe it. Her fingers loosened and she breathed out, longer, softer. He didn’t deserve her. She could make a very rational and convincing nest out of that.
When she got home tomorrow, if it wasn’t too dark, she’d walk to the churchyard and go to the memorial plaque in the wall.
Alfred didn’t have a grave, but his parents and hers had funded that plaque, debating for a while over what style the stonemason should cut the letters and exactly where it should be positioned and how large and if it should be granite or marble or slate, as though any of that mattered.
It said: Alfred Charles Ardingly, beloved son and husband, lost at sea.
She could close her eyes and see it exactly.
She would go to it tomorrow, in the dusk, with the grass dew-damp and the birds singing of the night to come. She would kneel before it and…
I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.
If he watched her, would he forgive her? He would agree, wouldn’t he, that Lord Cotereigh didn’t deserve her? That she was right to hate him? Alfred, who had only ever been joy and kindness and warmth, he would agree she deserved better and that her heart…her heart had made a terrible mistake.
Surely he would forgive her.
“Oh dear, my poor dear…”
Which was how she realised she was crying, a silent tear tracking down her cheek, stinging like saltwater, the taste of the sea.
Her aunt rifled through her reticule and passed her a handkerchief.
Madelaine took it with a sniff, clearing her throat, blinking.
She forced a smile and waved back at Tom, who had, with the uncanny senses of a small boy, spotted someone selling hot buns in the distance.
“How he’s still so skinny with the amount he eats, I’ll never know,” said her aunt, kindness in the way she didn’t look at Madelaine’s watery smile. She pushed herself to her feet with a small groan, rifling once more through her reticule for her coin purse. “One for you, dear?”
“No. I…I am not hungry. But thank you.”
“You better promise me you’re not going to waste away over that…that man. Or I’ll come to Sussex and feed you myself.”
She gave her best smile. “I promise, Aunt. Though that is hardly a threat. More a promised treat.”
Tom was waiting, head turning between the approach of Lady Pemberthy and the bun-seller, body straining like a dog on a leash. Madelaine watched them walk together. A different boy, who’d led a different life, might have taken the older woman’s hand.
But all that had been beaten out of him…
“So perhaps I’m broken. Doesn’t that make me an object of your compassion, my Mary Magdalene, my goddess Eleos?”
No. He was a grown man, quite capable of knowing right from wrong.
But yes…she grieved bitterly over everything that had been done to him. If his mother had lived, if he’d never met Jonathan Tait, if he hadn’t been abandoned to bullies and the lash…
Then he’d still be Lord Cotereigh, heir to the Earl of Arnon, and far too high and mighty for a parson’s daughter.
Tom came back smelling of spices and sugar and warm raisins. He tore a piece from his bun with a grubby hand, shoved it into hers, and ran off before she could dare to thank him.
She raised it slowly, breathing deep, smiling and trying not to cry. She had no appetite, but she ate it anyway, her aunt settling her bulk down beside her again with a satisfied sigh. She ate her own bun with relish, scattering crumbs to the sparrows.
The next morning, as she settled into the dim interior of the post chaise, Madelaine imagined she could still taste cinnamon. She brushed the seat’s velvet nap with her gloved fingers. What luxury, borrowed for a day.
The bun had been sticky, marring the fingers of yesterday’s gloves. She would wash them when she got home. She would mend and darn and wash… She would make herself a new dress, cream muslin trimmed in coral ribbon… And Tom… When she saw Tom again, he might say his haitches and be a gentleman’s son…
“Clothing can alter a person’s perceptions of the wearer…”
Yes, Lord Cotereigh had proved that point, she supposed. She would wear coral ribbons and her coral necklace, and Tom would be a gentleman’s son. The past could not be changed, but the future could. The future—she smiled to herself—for Tom, the future tasted of cinnamon.
It was good. It was enough. Perhaps she wished she could have suffered less, but to have set up the society and to have saved Tom… That was a decent sum of work for her time in London.
She settled back against the plump seat, having waved her last goodbye to her aunt.
She would not cry. There had been enough of that.
She brushed the velvet again, concentrating on that, the changing textures beneath her fingertips, back and forth, light and dark, determined to think of London as success, not failure.
Here she was, whisked away from the capital in the finest elegance…and the fact she owed it to Lord Cotereigh only made her more grimly determined to hold onto her smile.
Her aunt had arranged the chaise. Her aunt had insisted she travel post. When Madelaine had protested the cost, her aunt had anxiously revealed the letter she’d received.
A bankers draft from Lord Cotereigh. It was for twelve thousand pounds. His winnings from the wager. And, though she was no expert on the costs of such things, at least ten times the value of everything she’d returned to him.
His note, addressed to her aunt, had stated the sum was to be spent or invested ‘however she saw fit.’
For the society, of course, both women agreed it must be that.
Just as both women silently knew that by addressing his note to Lady Pemberthy, by instructing her man of business via his own, this money was no whore’s trinket.
It was nothing to do with Madelaine at all.
His actions said it, loud and clear. He just happened to be philanthropic all of a sudden.
Well, let him, if it eased his conscience.
Whatever spiked emotions the gesture had produced in her—so many sharp, complicated, painful things, like shards of glass in a thick lawn, impossible to get out—she felt no guilt.
She would not let guilt be one of the things she felt when making use of this money to speed her journey.
His wealth took her from him.
It seemed a fitting justice.