Chapter 8
Anne had put off going to her grandparents’ house. Other people lived there now and she’d not been ready to see the dear place altered, preferring to keep alive memories of the happy second home it had once been to her.
After nearly three weeks in Painswick, Anne decided she had postponed long enough. So the next afternoon, while Lady Celia and Louie were both resting, she went out for a walk with that specific destination in mind.
Allowing the warm sunshine and fresh air to bolster her, she strolled along St. Mary’s Street, the churchyard on one side, and on the other, stone cottages festooned with ivy or climbing roses.
Beyond the main streets of town, smaller lanes sloped down toward the stream with its many mills.
Anne turned right at the first of these lanes, passed under the dangling heart sign of the Golden Heart Inn, and descended the steep slope of Tibbiwell Lane.
Her own heart aching, she stopped outside the house where her grandparents used to live.
The charming cottage was fronted by a narrow flower garden within a low stone wall.
Oh, the happy hours she had spent there over the years, from girlhood to young adulthood.
A woman was standing in the garden with shallow basket and shears, cutting roses from her grandmother’s prized rosebushes. Each metallic snip of the shears was another jab to Anne’s heart. At least the roses are still there, she comforted herself.
Noticing her loitering, the woman gave Anne a friendly smile.
“Good day. May I . . . help you with something?”
Self-consciousness flooded Anne. “Oh. No, sorry. I was only reminiscing. My grandparents used to live here.”
“Ah! Thomas and Sarah Spring?”
“That’s right. You certainly keep the garden in good order. That would make my grandmother happy.” And me too.
“I’m glad. Many of these plants were already well established when we bought the place. I add a few annuals now and again but mostly tend to the perennials already here.” The woman lifted her basket. “Her roses are doing well this year.”
“So I see.”
The woman looked up with kindly eyes. “Would you like to come in and see the house again?”
“Oh, thank you, but I don’t wish to intrude.”
“Not at all.” She grinned. “If you’re going to walk down memory lane, you might as well go all the way to the end.”
“Very well. Just for a few minutes. If you’re sure you don’t mind.”
“It would be a pleasure, Miss . . . ?”
“Loveday. Anne Loveday.”
“And I am Mrs. Baylis. Do come in.”
Anne followed the woman inside and immediately breathed in the familiar aroma: the mingled scent of woodsmoke, fresh herbs, and old books. How did it still linger?
“We have not changed much,” the woman said, “though we did remove a wall to make this sitting room larger.”
Her grandfather’s small study. Gone. Yet Anne had to admit it was an improvement. “It looks well.”
Mrs. Baylis pointed out the dining room, much the same, down to the china cabinet, table, and chairs.
Anne said, “I recognize this furniture.”
“Yes, we bought it along with the house.”
Anne remembered the last time she had come to Painswick to help clean out the house and prepare for the sale. She and Fanny had each taken a few keepsakes, but most things had been sold, the proceeds paying for their grandparents’ few debts, burial expenses, and fine gravestone in the churchyard.
Mrs. Baylis then led her to the rear of the house, to the little built-on conservatory with its many sunny windows that looked out onto a kitchen garden where her grandparents had once grown vegetables, next to a hen house, and a small meadow beyond.
Spying a house across the meadow, Anne said, “I’d forgotten these windows overlook the back garden of that house.” She pointed. “I believe a schoolmaster used to live there.”
“That’s Valley View Lodge. Dr. Finch lets it now. I sometimes see him outside with his wife and child.”
Shock struck Anne like an icy wave. “His wife and child?”
“Well, I don’t know that she is his wife . . . exactly. I did hear he was a single man. I usually see the child with Bess or Hannah Tufley, who work for him, I understand. But now and again I see a young woman with the child.”
“Oh?” Anne’s chest tightened at the thought of a child. Then she recalled the toy rabbit. Perhaps she should not be so surprised.
“Sorry to gossip,” Mrs. Baylis went on. “I am interested in all my neighbors, and having a new doctor in town, well, one is naturally curious.”
“Naturally.”
“Now, here. Do take a few of these roses with you. . . .”
Anne left a short while later, curious herself and unsettled. Did Ernest Finch have a child with someone? She told herself his private life meant nothing to her. Even so, disappointment curdled her stomach.
Katherine Fitzjohn had planned a special dinner to welcome her cousins back to Painswick Court. She invited her mother to join them, but Lady Celia said she was not feeling equal to all those stairs nor to dressing for dinner.
To Anne, Lady Celia confessed that she had little appetite and could not face several courses of rich food. Anne promised to bring her some comforting broth, plain custard, and stewed fruit instead. Along with warm peppermint tea for her stomach.
Going downstairs to retrieve a tray for Lady Celia, Anne glanced into the parlour and saw Colonel Paine and Mr. Dalby having a drink together.
Katherine entered wearing a dinner dress of primrose yellow with long sleeves and a falling collar.
The gown was finely made, but the color did not flatter her complexion.
Anne continued belowstairs to the kitchen, which was filled with savory smells and more bustle than usual for the celebratory meal. Mrs. Pratt moved from meat spit to stove to worktable in a rapid circuit, now and again requesting something from one of the maids.
While Anne gathered the other items for Lady Celia’s meal herself, the kitchen maid, Clara, paused in her tasks to heat the broth for her.
Anne carried the tray upstairs and helped Lady Celia sit up, arranged a linen napkin over her bodice, and set the tray over her lap.
“Can you manage, or shall I help?”
“I have fed myself since childhood, Anne. I have not forgotten how.”
Thus dismissed, Anne went back downstairs for her own dinner and Louie’s as well. When she returned, Louie climbed into his small bed near the fire with a contented sigh and fell asleep. Anne read to Lady Celia for a time, until the woman nodded off too.
Then Anne read a few more paragraphs from Management of the Sick Chamber.
A nurse should be allowed to breathe the fresh air in the morning, and time to change her clothes, as great cleanliness is absolutely necessary.
A cheerful and pleasant looking woman with a clean, neat appearance and an amiable disposition, is an appendage to the sick chamber of the utmost value and deserves to be esteemed a blessing of no small magnitude. . . .
Footsteps and voices in the corridor announced the return of Miss Fitzjohn and her cousins to their rooms after dinner.
Rising from the armchair a short while later, Anne saw that Lady Celia’s shawl had fallen to the floor. She picked it up and went to hang it in the dressing room. While there, she peeked into Rosa’s adjoining room and found it empty, a small Bible lying on the bed.
Anne quietly opened the outer dressing room door, planning to walk to the water closet from there.
Noticing movement down the passage, she hesitated on the threshold.
From her concealed vantage, she saw Rosa, hand on the latch of Mr. Dalby’s room, furtively looking right and left before slipping inside.
“Foolish girl!” her stepmother’s voice rang in her mind, and Anne wondered if Nancy had felt this frustrated by her own behavior over the years.
From the conversation she had overheard, Anne knew Rosa and Mr. Dalby had met before and apparently had some sort of relationship. Even so, what was she doing entering the man’s bedchamber now? Rosa certainly did not seem like a young lady of low morals. Or was she mistaken?
Anne slowly tiptoed across the passage, then paused near the door.
“No, that’s not why I came,” Rosa was saying.
“What else am I to think when a beautiful young woman enters my bedchamber?”
“That I wish to speak with you in private—that’s all.”
His voice was a velvet purr. “But now you are here . . .”
A scuffle. A scrape of chair legs. Something falling to the floor.
Anne tensed. Should she knock? Barge in? Would Rosa thank her for interfering or not?
“Mr. Dalby, stop,” Rosa implored. “Listen to me. Just because I allowed you to sway me once before does not mean I am that sort of woman. You assured me you loved me and would marry me. Do you not remember? When we parted, you said you would call on me again, but I never heard from you.”
His voice changed, lost its alluring smoothness. “Of course not. I was already married.”
Her voice changed as well. Became sharper. “A fact you neglected to mention while you were seducing me.”
Anne pressed a hand to her mouth to cover a gasp.
“It was not something I wished to dwell upon.”
“Clearly. But now you are free. And I am prepared to give you a second chance. I came to Painswick hoping you would honor the promise you made to me then.”
“To marry you?” He laughed, though it was a harsh, repellent sound. “I knew you had an ulterior motive for coming here. As pretty as you are, I’m afraid I must decline.” Then once again his voice deepened to a husky register. “Although you might try to convince me. . . .”
The man her sister had once thought charming now sounded like a sly serpent. Anne raised her hand to knock when the sharp sound of a slap reverberated through the wood.
The door jerked open, and Anne backed away, but not fast enough.