Chapter Four #2
“I have a terrific speech to answer that question to anyone in London,” Martin confessed to Mrs. Bellamy, “but the truth is that I was distracted by my wife’s illness. I would have permitted just about anything that kept my children occupied and happy.”
They were at the door to the carpentry workshop, but he hesitated to knock on it, glancing instead at the woman at his side to see her reaction. Her smile was gone, replaced with a look that was becoming familiar to him. One of fellow feeling. One of compassion.
He worried he had made that confession just to earn that look from her again.
At last, he knocked on the door and was answered, as expected, by Spencer Chow. Spencer was the second eldest of the Chow boys and the only one who remained at Northfield—unless one counted Eddie in Thatcham, which Martin did not. He bowed at the neck to greet them.
“I wonder if you could spare some time for me this morning to examine the women’s dormitories,” Martin said.
“Yes, sir.” Removing his apron and work gloves, Spencer rearranged some tools and donned his coat before joining them at the gig.
Assuming they hadn’t met, Martin conducted the introductions: “This is Mrs. Bellamy, widow of the late rector. Spencer Chow, our head carpenter.”
Mrs. Bellamy smiled politely. “We have met a few times at Mrs. Caroline Chow’s fetes.”
Caroline hosted fetes? As far as Martin knew, she and Eddie lived in a two-room house leased from one of the Thatcham farmers. Where could she play hostess? And when?
Perhaps they had all happened while Martin was in London, which was why no one had seen fit to inform him of them.
Spencer, as usual, found the least amount of words to make a reply and then hoisted himself onto the back of the gig. Mrs. Bellamy hiked up her skirt to climb up to the bench.
Martin could let her do it herself. With either hand gripping the gig and her foot already firmly planted on a spoke, she seemed more than capable of managing it.
But her skirt fell backward, revealing a stockinged ankle above her half-boots, and Martin had a premonition of her leg twisting in the wheel.
“Permit me,” he begged, and he lifted her by the waist.
Their eyes met as she settled on the bench. Martin couldn’t help but notice her lashes flutter like a lady’s fan at a ball.
If they were younger—if she were not a somber widow—he might assume she was flirting with him.
But he did not want that. And she was most certainly not making such an overture, not when she was in the throes of grief. Martin was being silly, like a young buck in his first Season.
He hiked himself onto the bench and drove the gig towards the dormitory.
Martha supposed every woman who found herself in the path of Lord Martin Preston ended up dazzled by him. He was too handsome, too intelligent, too kind not to incite excitement in the hearts of those around him.
No doubt he had a dozen noble ladies courting him every Season in London.
Even more likely, he had a mistress tucked away in some respectable neighborhood, paid a generous sum and treated like a wife in every way except sacred matrimony.
Martha would not judge him for it. The man was a baron: he couldn’t marry just anyone that he fell in love with, especially not when he had to keep a sterling reputation for his coalition in Parliament.
Yet he was such a feeling man. He deserved the love of a good woman—or, Martha supposed, of a woman who loved him back, since a mistress who accepted such terms could hardly be a good woman.
In any case, she was quite sure her breathless excitement each time they were within reach of each other was exclusively on her part.
It did not dull Martha’s feelings that he would not be dazzled in return by her, an old woman.
The sensation of bubbling like champagne because he was near, the habit of collecting observations throughout her day and imagining how he might respond, the primping in front of her looking glass to make sure her hair was just right—Martha was enjoying it all.
She hadn’t been consumed by such frivolity since Lucas died, and therefore had assumed it was a part of her life she would never get back.
She hadn’t even wanted it, especially not with Kenneth constantly reminding her she had to behave properly or else bring the scorn of Thatcham down upon them.
Who could have guessed that at sixty-two, she would be riding in a gig next to a gentleman hoping that their arms might bump together?
It was enough to make her feel alive again.
The ride from the trade village to the women’s dormitory did not take long—and provided no fateful tilts that would have slid her down the bench into Lord Preston’s lap.
Which was just as well, since Mr. Spencer Chow was there to observe her girlish foolishness.
Still, Martha waited as primly as a fine lady for Lord Preston to help her down from the gig.
When his hands framed her waist, she allowed herself to press as close to his shoulders as she needed.
Their cheeks almost kissed.
And then the ground was under her feet and she had to let go. Still, joy bubbled through her, and Martha curled her fingers to try to keep the memory of his body inside them.
She shifted her attention to the task at hand: the dormitory. It was a brick building several hundred feet long and four stories high. Its facade was redder than that of Northfield Hall, its shingle roof newer. For a single woman, it must be a fine place to live.
“Would you be so kind as to go in and inquire whether there is anyone about who would be disturbed by Spencer and me entering?” Lord Preston asked her.
Part of her feelings for him were simply that he made her feel useful. Martha tried not to preen as she answered, “Certainly.”
Inside, the building smelled of lumber and coal fire. The ground floor featured a staircase where she entered, a long hallway of rooms, and another staircase on the other end. Martha knocked on a door or two and, getting no reply, called out, “Is there anyone about?”
For good measure, she climbed up to each floor and called out the same, never getting a reply.
As she did, she noted the whitewashed walls, the well-tended fireplaces, the clean smell of the place.
It had none of the marks of dilapidation that she had noted around the great house—whose wallpapers were stained and scarred, whose carpets were beginning to show patches, and whose windows seemed to jam more often than they opened.
To Martha’s eye, the grounds of Northfield Hall received much better care than the house in which the Preston family lived.
A little breathless from the exertion of climbing four flights of stairs, Martha returned to where Lord Preston and Mr. Chow awaited her. “It seems everyone is at work.”
“Thank you.” Lord Preston beckoned Mr. Chow inside.
His voice adopting the low, melodious tone he used when explaining, he said, “We have only one vacant room at the moment, and in the last year, we have had at least three new women presenting themselves every month. While single men tend to stay at Northfield Hall for six months or a year as they bide a bad season, the women who come tend to stay, and I never want to turn anyone away or ask them to leave. With a little ingenuity, Spencer, do you think we shall be able to add rooms to the existing floorplan?”
Mr. Chow replied with a thoughtful grunt and tilted his head at the corridor.
Together, the three of them walked the length of the building.
Lord Preston and Mr. Chow discussed various ideas: Could a room fit underneath the stairwell?
Could the larger rooms be split in two and still provide a reasonable living space?
Could one of the staircases be removed entirely and replaced with an extra set of rooms?
Martha trailed a few steps behind them at all times, reading glasses on as she jotted down their ideas in the traveling notebook she had brought along.
She also wrote down the things Lord Preston seemed to take for granted: that each room should have a window, so that every individual had access to daylight; that the fireplaces must remain, so that the building would not get too cold in the winter; that no two people must be required to share a room, even if it could fit two ticks, because each laborer deserved some small space of their own with a door they could shut.
They were dignified requirements. They were radical requirements.
Hearing him list them as if they were as basic as that every person should eat a meal each day filled Martha with admiration.
This was why everyone in Britain knew his name—and why his correspondence was full of strangers asking him for advice, for help, for money.
Lord Preston saw the world differently than the rest of their leaders did, and he made a person want to join him in that vision.
Unfortunately, there was no clear solution for adding rooms to the dormitory.
When they had exhausted their inspection of the inside, Spencer led them out to examine the strip of land beside the building, onto which they could add a second wing or a separate building entirely.
Yet to expand, either a farm field must be cleared or a narrow, boggy patch of land must be tamed.
“Could be a better place to build,” Spencer offered as they returned to the gig.
“Yes,” Lord Preston agreed with a sigh, “there must be.”
The carpenter walked himself back to the trade village while Martha and Lord Preston moved on to review the textile works.
These, too, were in better condition than the great house, yet the barn roof required repair and its walls needed repainting.
And Mrs. Shayler, the supervisor of the looms, warned, “We’ll have less surplus to sell to London this year, my lord, since we’ve got that many more people to clothe here on the estate. ”
Lord Preston didn’t sigh this time, but Martha noticed his lips compress as he accepted the news with a nod.
“You are no doubt noticing the pattern, Mrs. Bellamy,” he said as they set off in the gig back towards the great house. “There isn’t enough of anything this year. Not enough crops, not enough space, not enough linens…”
“Quite enough people, I should say.” Martha meant it to cheer him up, but she feared it sounded like a reprimand. “You are to be commended for welcoming so many of us in our darkest hours.”
He relaxed against the back of the bench. “I hope not everyone is in their darkest hour. Some people present themselves simply because they have heard Northfield is the very best place to be.”
“Then I hope they are worthy of your generosity.”
His lips—those handsome lips that she couldn’t stop watching!—compressed again. “I struggle with that philosophy.”
“Which philosophy?”
“That I am being generous. It often feels like generosity, and I am always glad to hear the compliment. However, when I stop to examine it, I am not sure it qualifies as generosity to share the land with those who work it. Is that not fairness? Is that not how we are intended to behave?”
Martha could see this was not simply a debate to keep his mind active but a question that plagued him.
She replied as best she could: “Do you not believe in the natural order of the world and that we are intended to care for each other through the great chain, beginning with God and going all the way down to the ants in the anthill?”
The gig rolled past the pond, whose water glittered with a greenish hue in the noontime sun, as Lord Preston selected the words for his reply.
“Forgive me if I offend you, but I do not believe it is part of the divine plan, if there is such a thing. I think that because it is how our society behaves, it is an order to which we must adhere or else risk great chaos, but I do not think it is the correct moral code.”
Martha shouldn’t have been surprised that the radical Lord Preston would espouse radical ideas.
If printed, such a sentiment could get him locked in prison for blasphemy.
Still, even with her heart racing at the joy of being near him, she found her hands folding primly in her lap, as if that would protect her from his words.
“Caroline accused me of being unwilling to break that great chain when I forbade her to marry Eddie,” Lord Preston continued, his voice a little raw.
“And to a certain degree, she is right. I am unwilling to throw off the great chain. I am still a baron; I have not renounced the system of aristocracy and thrown in my lot with the Americans. I see the humanity in every person who lives here at Northfield, but I do not insist we all live equally. When my daughter—well, I thought it was dangerous for her to marry Eddie, for both their sakes. But none of that means it is right. It is simply the way things are at this moment in time, in this particular place. After all, the plantation owners argue that they care for their slaves as part of the great chain—and I repudiate that every chance I get.”
Radical indeed—Martha had never heard the idea of renouncing aristocracy, and certainly not from an aristocrat himself.
“If I spend my fortune on purchasing land to build new cottages and dormitories and increase our production, is that generosity? How can I even call it my money, when it is all earned by the labor that hundreds of people do collectively? Would you call a steward generous for fulfilling his responsibility?” Before she had a chance to answer, he continued: “Yet if I invest in Northfield so it can keep growing as it wants to do, then I will have no money left for my family. Am I not a father first? Must I not guard the family’s fortune so that we do not end up in need of the very sanctuary that Northfield Hall provides? ”
No—Martha didn’t believe that anyone could sit beside Lord Preston for three days, as she had, and not be enchanted with him. Who else was so careful and selfless and honest and brave?
He offered her a self-deprecating smile. “I am sorry to burden you with these ruminations. I am often guilty of thinking too thoroughly about things, but on this matter, I am afraid I still have much contemplating to do.”
Martha gave in to the urge she had resisted all morning and threaded her hand through the crook of his elbow. “Yours is not an easy path, sir. It is no burden at all to walk it with you for a little while.”
His smile blossomed, and Martha dared imagine it was because his heart, too, was leaping at her touch.