Chapter One #2
One of the men loitering in the pub came out to load the gig.
Martin paid his tip, then helped Mrs. Bellamy up.
In that small moment, she proved herself a country woman: her gloved hand was thick in his, her grip sturdy, and she barely needed a boost to get onto the bench.
But as she rose past him, he caught a surprising whiff of perfume—a spicy, flowery smell he associated with the excess of London.
Martin tucked away the observation. “Shall you join us for Sunday dinner this week?” he asked Caroline.
She smiled—that fake smile she used with him so often now to pretend that she still thought of him as her beloved father. “You may expect Eddie and me both.”
He had meant the collective you. Caroline never came without Eddie, as if she were afraid that spending one meal away from him might rend them apart forever. Or perhaps she was afraid her great and terrible father would lock her away if she didn’t bring her husband to protect her.
In any case, she had said yes, which meant Martin could resume this dance with her in a few days. He nodded. “Excellent. I’ll inform Mrs. Chow.”
Caroline smiled. Martin climbed into the gig. Mrs. Bellamy shifted away, so that not even the lace trim of her widow’s weeds brushed against his leg.
And there was nothing left to do but spur the horse on through Thatcham, which was always the same and yet ever changing.
Martha knew better than to make small talk with a baron.
If he desired to speak to her, he would find a topic of conversation.
The last thing she wanted was for him to think she might grab upward at this first real interaction, and so she kept herself to herself as the gig rocked down the dirt road to Northfield Hall.
She had only been to the Hall once in her ten years living in Thatcham, and that had been for the wedding of Miss Preston and Eddie Chow.
A strange day, that: the ceremony and following party had both been in the fields, like a summer festival, and no one—not even her husband, Kenneth—would say how unnatural it was for a baron’s daughter to marry a glazier.
Martha had been seized with terrible anger and walked home early, even though it was five miles and she had been wearing her good slippers instead of sturdy boots.
When Kenneth had returned at twilight, he waved off her apology, saying no one had noticed her absence—not even him, until the dancing started.
Two years later, and the new Mrs. Chow was still a blushing bride, her glazier husband often seen stealing a kiss as they retreated to their small set of rooms that no baron’s daughter should rightfully be happy in.
To his credit, he worked hard; to her credit, she still acted like a lady of the realm as she inserted herself in this dispute or that and generally helped patch the tears in Thatcham’s social fabric.
Martha had gotten to know Mrs. Caroline Chow through visits to sickbeds and the new annual Christmas fete to raise parish funds, held in the barn-cum-schoolroom-cum-assembly hall.
There was nothing Martha could object to in Mrs. Chow, except that she should have let well enough alone and married someone of her own class.
But Martha knew, too, that her fury did not really have anything to do with Mrs. Chow or God’s social order. Like everything else in her life, it came back to Lucas, who would never come home to make things right.
“I feel I should apologize,” Lord Preston said as the gig turned from the road onto Northfield Hall’s private drive. “I appointed Mr. Sebright to the living while I was still in London, and it did not occur to me to advise you of it nor to ensure you had somewhere to go afterward.”
Embarrassment burned her cheeks. She believed Lord Preston’s apology was sincere, yet it only served to remind her how poorly she had managed life since—well, at least since Kenneth had died of that horrid cough.
“You had no obligation to me. You gave me the full six months to make my preparations. I only regret that those six months were not enough for me and that now you must take me on as your burden.”
The truth was that she had been wallowing. Visiting Kenneth’s grave each day with a new sprig of flowers. Pleasuring in the fact that at last, she could wear black. Accepting visits and condolence letters and all the rituals of grieving that had been denied her when Lucas died.
She hadn’t stopped to think about the fact that she must keep on living until the new rector had been announced.
“You are no burden to me,” he said, as anyone gallant would have done.
Martha had expected that much of him. She had only met the man a handful of times, but his reputation loomed large in Britain and especially in Thatcham.
He had turned Northfield Hall from a typical country estate into a safe haven for anyone destitute or alone, where everyone who labored on the property shared in its profits, and where no imports from the colonial economy—tainted by chattel slavery and other forced labor—were consumed.
He was the kind of lord who attended every sitting of Parliament and took up the poor man’s plight at great cost to his own reputation.
Even before he had pulled up to the inn, Martha had suspected her homelessness would be solved with a room somewhere on the five hundred acres of Northfield.
That didn’t change the fact that she was a burden.
“I am waiting to hear from my niece,” Martha assured him, looking at the farmers diligently building hayricks in the field so she didn’t have to face the baron. “Her husband has a living in Battersea. They’ll have room in the vicarage for an old woman.”
She did not tell him of her nephew, who commanded both a rectory and a vicarage near Devon, who had replied to her inquiry with a polite no (Between my family and my students, dear Aunt, I am afraid there would be no bed for you).
Nor her youngest sister’s letter, which had made excuses for herself as well as all three of her children.
Her eldest brother had long since passed, but his grandson had proactively written Martha to offer condolences and inform her there was no place for her at his farm.
No one wanted to be tainted by Lucas’s scandal.
It was why she and Kenneth had been shuffled from Tolpuddle to Thatcham—and why Kenneth had ossified into a man who could bear no imperfections, risk no laughter.
People already believed that Lucas hovered over them like a curse; Kenneth reacted by dedicating every moment of his life to proving they were above reproach, despite their son.
Martha had hopes that her niece Georgina, a practical girl for whom she had always had a soft spot, would take her in.
“In the meantime, you shall have your choice of rooms at Northfield Hall,” Lord Preston said.
Ahead of them, the house began to appear with its odd combination of a Tudor east wing attached to the rest of its red brick.
“My children have all relinquished their claims to any specific suite, and for the moment, I have no other houseguests.”
He said it with the intonation of an upper-class toff who found everything amusing and nothing important.
The tone did not come naturally from him.
Martha turned her head ever so slightly so she could examine his profile: the patrician silver hair tied back in an old-fashioned queue, the heavy eyebrows that made him look perpetually serious, the lines—some deep, some fine as a feather—that defined his face.
He watched the drive ahead of them, his mouth arranged in a facsimile of a smile.
This was a man who was unhappy—but didn’t want to admit it.
Or didn’t know how.
Martha resisted the urge to touch her fingers to his wrist. “Then we two shall fill up Northfield Hall until the younger and more interesting come along.”
Lord Preston looked from the horse to her with a quirk of his eyebrow. “Younger they may be, Mrs. Bellamy, but I can hardly think they would be more interesting.”
This time, he sounded sincere—and Martha was surprised to notice her heart flutter at the compliment.