Chapter 27
Twenty-Seven
He felt the shiver go through her before she admitted it.
Not fear, at least not the kind that turned a spine to water.
It was the fine tremor of danger narrowly missed.
She had insisted upon the village, so he had stubbornly decided to give her the village.
And carry her across its threshold himself if only to quiet the painful, irrational memory of her wrist under a stranger’s hand.
They put their hands on her. They tried to take her prisoner. After the life she has lived at Gillray House! If that was Lady Gillray’s doing, I will burn her house to the ground.
The Hart and Thistle stood on the green, its sign creaking, its whitewashed front sunlit and already warm with the day’s trade.
Curtains twitched at the glazing of the upper windows.
The Duke of Duskwood, striding through the door of the inn with his future duchess on his arm, was, judging by the sudden hush, a spectacle no one had expected to witness before noon.
Or at all, given his years of distance from his tenants.
Inside the inn, cool shadow, the smell of yeast and roasting meat, the mellow drone of voices halted mid-word.
Mr. Reeve, a great-shouldered fellow with careful hands and a mayor’s sash worn as if it embarrassed him, pushed through the taproom with the briskness of a man used to every kind of trouble that could walk in from the green.
“Your Grace,” he said, bowing.
His eyes went at once to Christine’s face.
“And my lady. You’ll be wanting a chair and a private room if there is one to be had that suits you. Alice!” He clicked his fingers.
A girl appeared.
“Upstairs, the front chamber. The one with the good light.”
The front chamber was plain, clean, with a window looking over the green and the church beyond.
Sunlight fell across the scrubbed boards.
Christine sat down upon the settle near the window.
Tristan stood before her. He studied her face for the signs he dreaded.
Color had come back to her cheeks, and the stubborn line had returned to her mouth.
She will be difficult again within the hour.
Relief, unwelcome and foolish, eased the tightness in his throat.
“I am not porcelain,” she said softly, watching him watch her.
“That has never been my complaint,” he said, equally soft, “if you were a porcelain doll you wouldn’t be so…”
He turned away, frustration on his face and gates slamming shut behind his eyes.
No, this is not what I either wanted or needed. I will not let her become closer than she already has.
“So…annoying? Stubborn? Unsuitable?” Christine asked.
He whirled to face her, anger sparked by her self-deprecation. It had never been less appropriate.
“Magnificent, fierce. Independent. Strong.”
She watched him silently. His chest was heaving, and he glared, knowing that he was glaring.
It couldn’t be helped. She had drawn the confession from him, broken down the gates.
The footsteps of the innkeeper reached them, and Tristan composed himself.
Mr. Reeve appeared and hovered respectfully at the threshold.
“I’ve sent a lad for hot tea, my lady. And for the vicar, if you wish him.”
“What I wish is a physician to be sent for from High Duxbury. Selwyn is a competent man. My wife was assaulted on the road here by highwaymen,” Tristan snarled as though it was the personal fault of the mayor.
“Highwaymen? At Duxworth?” Reeve exclaimed, mopping his brow with a handkerchief, “I’ve never heard the like.
They’ll starve waiting on pickings around these parts.
If you’ll pardon me, though, there's an old woman out by Thorn Brook who’ll do you better for a shock or a sprain.
She’s the one we go to when it matters.”
Tristan’s gaze cooled a degree. “A hedge-witch.”
“A healer,” Reeve answered without blinking, “name of Mother Hobb. Been catching babies and setting bones in this parish since before I grew my first whisker. If you want speed and sense, you’ll have her. If you want a Latin phrase and a bill, send for Selwyn.”
Christine’s eyes had brightened with weary amusement. “And what do you want, Tristan?”
“To have you looked over by someone who knows more than the contents of a stillroom,” he said, “and to have those men in a ditch before sundown.”
Reeve looked to Christine. “My lady, will I send for Mother Hobb, then?”
“Yes,” she said, “please.”
“It’s settled. You’ve come to see me about the ball, my lady. You’ll forgive that you hear me twice at once, innkeeper and mayor. The town wears both hats without changing its head.”
His weathered face softened. “While you catch your breath, you’ll do me a kindness and glance down yonder.”
He nodded toward the landing. “You asked in the note your boy brought to me to meet us where we live.”
Christine rose, and Tristan was by her side in an instant, taking her by the arm.
“I am quite well,” she said.
“I know,” Tristan replied, his hand to the small of her back, “allow me.”
She smiled, intended for him alone, even though it was in full sight of Mr. Reeve.
The meaning behind it wasn’t in his sight.
They went down the stairs and to the common room.
The noon crowd had not gathered yet. Half a dozen men stood at the counter with their tankards, a pair of apprentices lounged on the settle, a woman with a baby swayed as if the motion were a lullaby she had learnt before she could speak.
In the far corner near the hearth, a long board had been laid.
On it: bowls, bread, a pot steaming gently.
A boy whose clothes had been mended more times than they had been new approached, hesitant.
The innkeeper’s wife, Alice, with capable hands and a voice that travelled, handed him a bowl with a piece of cheese on top and ruffled his hair as if he were her own.
A chalk slate hung on the wall beside the board.
On it, in a clear hand, someone had written:
Parish Supper: Widow’s Fund and the Duke’s Rents, Michaelmas Quarter.
Underneath, a list of names he did not know.
And a figure, modest, sufficient, drawn off each week and set aside, turned into bread.
He felt the oddest sensation, as if a door he had expected to find bolted had opened instead.
The gifts he sent down the hill each quarter did not merely vanish into Reeve’s pockets through the consumption of his customers.
They walked out as loaves and soup into the bellies of people who would never look him in the eye.
“You see?” Christine asked.
“I do. I always knew such things were done. But I did not think of it. I assumed men seized on that which they came by freely and kept it to themselves. Men like Reeve anyway.”
“Mr. Reeve, I think, is a very decent man with a strong sense of community. Admirable,” Christine said.
“You have a different perspective. Seeing things from the point of view of the ordinary.”
“I am ordinary.”
“Do not be ridiculous!” Tristan chortled, then caught the dangerous glint in her eye, “I was not mocking you or scoffing,” he said.
“Then you were complimenting me?” Christine asked in a voice that said this was a ludicrous notion.
“Yes.”
She did not reply with words. Her hand squeezed his arm and did not release the tension immediately.
Her eyes found his, and he was lost in them, unaware of his surroundings or the words being spoken to him.
He wanted to kiss her, to wrap her in his arms, carry her away to some remote place where no one knew them.
A place where individual privacy was prized so highly that a man would die before intruding.
Might as well wish for Christine to fall in love with me while I am wishing for the impossible. How could she when our relationship has begun and continues to be about nothing but necessity? Duty?
Reeve cleared his throat.
“It’s not charity if the money’s yours, Your Grace,” the innkeeper said. “Only good housekeeping. The bread tastes the same, but it sits better.”
Tristan could have disliked the man for his neat phrases. He did not. He found, instead, that the stiffness in his shoulders had loosened to the smallest degree.
“See that the board is kept,” he said, as if it had been in question, “and send to Duskwood tomorrow for flour. The stores are heavy this summer. I’ll not have weevils in my granary.”
Reeve grinned, seemingly surprised by the moment of camaraderie. “Aye, Your Grace.”
A knock, quick and crisp, sounded behind him. Alice, breathless, her arm dusted with flour, slipped past Reeve and set a tray on the table near Christine. Tea, bread, honey, a wedge of something pale that would do for a stomach that had forgotten its purpose.
“Eat a bit, my lady. Healers like you fed,” Her eyes went to Tristan then, not quite deferential, not quite bold, “And if Your Grace will forgive a woman’s tongue, telling her she’s strong is fine. Letting her sit is better.”
He found himself almost smiling. “Noted.”
“Mother Hobb will be here afore the kettle boils dry,” Alice said, “She keeps a basket packed for moments like this.”
“This is all a lot of fuss about nothing. I am completely fine,” Christine protested.
Tristan took the tea and pushed it gently toward Christine.
On the green, life resumed its ordinary motions, as if nothing more than a gust of wind had passed through.
The blacksmith’s hammer fell, and a goose hissed at a child who was foolish enough to hiss back.
From this height, the village looked almost like a painting.
A shuffle at the door. Reeve stood aside. An old woman came in without ceremony.
She was small, bent in the back like a branch, her hair a thatch of pewter braided round her head. She wore a clean apron and carried a basket from which rose the smells of mint, vinegar, camphor, and a hundred other green things. Eyes were the sharp blue of a winter sky.
“Duke,” she said mildly, as if he were a man with mud on his boots rather than the largest purse within five miles, “girl.”
Christine straightened on the settle.
“Lady Christine,” Tristan said, with more edge than the woman deserved.
“Lady Girl,” the old woman corrected, and set her basket down, “let me see your hands.”
Christine bit back a smile and held them out obediently. Mother Hobb turned them over, pressed at the tendons of the wrist, glanced at the half-moons under the nails as if they told her the weather.
“Heart’s galloping but not wild,” she muttered, “shock. A bite of honey. And you’ll take this.”
She unstoppered a little blue bottle and poured three drops into a spoon. “Tastes like a lie a parson would tell, but it’ll set you right.”
Tristan moved before he meant to, his hand seeing Mother Hobb’s wrist, preventing it from moving any closer to Christine.
“What is it?” he demanded.
“A medicinal draught…” Mother Hobb began.
“The ingredients,” Tristan demanded.
Christine put a hand on his arm.
“Linden and valerian and sense,” Mother Hobb said, without looking at him, “if you don’t like it, eat your own pride. That’ll settle anyone.”
“I will take it,” Christine said, she winced after swallowing, “though it does taste like a lie. Ugh!”
“It will do you good. Settle your nerves and your spleen after a bad experience,” Mother Hobb said, giving Tristan a jaundiced eye.
Mother Hobb’s hands were brisk and gentle together as she touched the line of Christine’s throat, watched the swallow, then nodded, satisfied.
“No harm done. You’ll be tired before night.”
Tristan heard himself ask, against his own prejudice.
“Have you no admiration for physicians, Mother Hobb?”
“I do,” she said serenely, “I admire their handwriting.”
She fixed him with that winter-blue stare and, for the first time that morning, he felt seen as more than a height and a name, “and I admire a duke that brings a girl to the inn rather than dragging her back up the hill to wait in a draughty old house for an over-priced quack.”
He stilled. Saw Christine’s eyes flick to him, felt his lips twitch. Mother Hobb turned, picked a leaf from her basket, crushed it between finger and thumb, and held it under Christine’s nose.
“Peppermint,” she said, “For the shakes. Smell it when the memory comes back.”
She tucked a folded paper of dried leaves into Christine’s hand. “And when your thoughts run too fast for your feet. Drop them into hot water. It also soothes the stomach. Pregnant women swear by it.”