Chapter 7
“You are seeing the Glen at its best.” Miss Fielding turned her mare into the wide expanse of the grassy park.
“But then, I love it in any season. Winters are so bleak as to qualify as beautiful to my mind. You would not believe the brilliance of our winter sunsets. Autumn is golden and sweet, the summers exquisite, and in spring… You can appreciate spring for yourself.”
Richard appreciated that Amabel Fielding was a natural on horseback and the de facto land steward and house steward at Shepherd’s Glen.
She knew old Erasmus Blackstock’s theories about breeding sheep and explained them to Richard with offhand expertise.
She greeted the farmhands and dikers by name and reminded the latter to have a look at the wall along the path to the village.
Their ease with her confirmed Richard’s suspicions, though he was slower to realize that she was giving the outdoor employees a chance to look him over in a setting they’d find comfortable.
“The Glen is delightful,” Richard said. “Or what I’ve seen of it thus far has been, but I assume you are showing me the best parts first, lest I scamper off in a fit of the vapors.”
“Have you ever had a fit of the vapors?”
“Certainly not. Have you, Miss Fielding?”
He’d meant the question in fun, but she looked unaccountably serious at his query.
“I have, and I do not recommend the experience.
As for the Glen, you will find we are falling behind the times.
The design of plows is constantly improving, but we have only older equipment on hand.
We could easily sell that and buy the more modern versions.
“We should have better goats,” she went on, giving the mare a loose rein.
“They can survive on less even than sheep and yield both milk and meat. The poorer families depend on them, but if we do not keep good breeding stock at the Glen, the local specimens become increasingly puny, the poorer children right along with them. The midwife has been after me for three years to buy some sizable nannies and a new billy.”
“Why the midwife?” Baldur tried for a bite of grass. Richard dissuaded him.
“Because if a human mother loses her milk or has insufficient milk, she can sometimes keep her baby thriving by substituting or adding goat’s milk. The solution is far from ideal and no guarantee of success, but the midwife keeps an eye on our goat herd nonetheless.”
“A connection I would never have made in a thousand years. Tell me, Miss Fielding, do we have time for a look at the Tuffington property?”
The hour was yet early. The mists were drifting from the streams, the birds were greeting the day in excellent voice, and the grass yet sparkled with dew.
Miss Fielding had shown Richard the home farm, the primary bridle path through and along the home wood, and a few of the nearer tenant properties.
The walled kitchen garden covered no less than five acres, and a second walled garden was designed to produce flowers, spices, and espaliered fruit.
All was in good trim. Summer would doubtless see the deadfall collected from the wood and a few ditches cleared, but on the whole, the Glen had been well cared for.
“You’d like to see The Oaks?” she asked. “It’s not far, though it was sold to a cit who mostly comes up from Town for the shooting. I doubt many refer to it as ‘the Tuffington property’ these days.”
“And my Tuffington relations?”
“None extant that I know of. Tuffington had but the two daughters, and either Marie or Orla was to marry a squire competent to take over the land. Papa Joseph was competent, but unfortunately expired too soon. Orla and Blackstock agreed to sell the place when your grandfather went to his reward, and most of the proceeds went to paying off debts. Orla says she put the rest of her portion toward Wealtha’s competence. ”
What might Mama have done with half the proceeds of her father’s estate? If the money had been left in trust for her, Blackstock could not have touched it.
Miss Fielding steered her mare onto another bridle path that cut through the woods ringing three sides of the park. The manor house sat on its slight rise, as majestic when viewed from the back as from the front.
“Why would your step-mama use the funds to secure Wealtha’s future when Wealtha’s papa was on hand and more than competent to see to that task?
” Richard half expected the question to be rebuffed, though he was nominally head of the Blackstock family now, and Miss Fielding was a member of the Glen’s household.
“I have a competence from my mother,” Miss Fielding said. “My Fielding relations took an interest in my situation, and it was felt that Wealtha was owed some show of family support too. That wall marks the boundary between the Taits’ tenancy and the Glen’s home farm.”
She nodded to the east, where a solid stone wall marched with the line of the trees.
As changes of subject went, that one was notably unsubtle. “The Taits have some lush pasture.”
“They will start to take the hay off it any day now. They are good farmers.” Miss Fielding fell silent as the horses picked their way along the leafy path.
“You received nothing from your step-mother as a result of the Tuffington sale,” Richard said. “I gather your Season in Mayfair was supposed to be the excuse for that inequity. Was the experience worth the price?” Another impertinent question, worse than the first for its presumption.
“If you must characterize Orla’s decision that way, then yes, the experience was worth the small amount of coin in question. I learned much while in London, while Wealtha, who longs to go, has no idea what an empty, lonely, wasteful ordeal she’s being spared.”
Miss Fielding’s reply was offered with studied calm.
She nonetheless cued her mare into a canter and was four lengths ahead before Richard had the presence of mind to follow her.
He’d no intention of being lost for twenty years in the Glen’s lovely forest, which was exactly what might befall him if he didn’t mind his tongue.
“I apologize,” he said when the horses were once again walking side by side, neither beast remotely winded. “I was left to puzzle much of life out for myself from an early age, and the habit yet stalks me. I did not mean to probe old wounds.”
“No apology needed, and no old wounds probed. We take the left turning.”
They were a quarter mile from a crossroads, though no sign indicated what lay in any direction.
“How much farther is The Oaks?”
“Less than a mile.”
He’d well and truly misstepped, and Miss Fielding was a liar. Her experiences in Town had been painful. The wound still bothered her.
“I came to hate London,” Richard said, apropos of nothing, save the frosty silence limning the sunny air.
“You refer to it as an ‘ordeal,’ and the word fits. All that gaiety, most of it feigned, all that waste, while children begged in the streets and old soldiers died of starvation rather than beg. The place made me crazy.”
“You could have been one of those children?”
“Precisely, but for my mother’s ingenuity and hard work, but for my ducal family’s eventual willingness to acknowledge a likeness—and the irrefutable evidence of my father’s habits with the ladies.
If I’d been born with the wrong nose and chin, if my mother had succumbed to pleurisy ten years earlier… ”
Miss Fielding relaxed her reins. “Were you a lonely child?”
“I was a bewildered child and, yes, probably lonely. As the housekeeper’s son, I was an oddity.
I wasn’t a servant myself, precisely, but neither was my mother a lady.
A rural abode was surely the best place for a changeling such as myself.
I had a decent education, and my prospects improved once my father took an interest in me. ”
“How did your mother explain that?”
“I don’t know. An unexpected bequest is the logical lie. My mother kept much to herself, and that could drive me to distraction, too, if I let it.” Still did, truth be told, even as Richard understood her motives and the advantages of solo combat. “I am babbling. You will think me intemperate.”
Miss Fielding took the left turn. “I think you honest, and I know what it is to have questions that your mother cannot or will not answer. Do you have a likeness of her?”
The query was so insightful, so unexpected Richard nearly gaped. “I do. Not the best—I did it myself just before she fell ill. The duchess found a small portrait of my mother in some old trunk of Lord Jerome’s effects. It’s not very good, but I have that as well.”
“Good. Shall we let the horses stretch their legs again?” Miss Fielding was off at another brisk canter before Richard could ask if she had a likeness of her mother—her first mother, to use her words.
She brought the mare down to the walk at the top of a slight rise. “That’s The Oaks, where your mama and Orla grew up. I’ve always thought it a lovely manor.”
Half-timbered and whitewashed, like the Rooster, but much prettier for sitting in pastoral splendor rather than among a lot of gray granite shops.
Maples on the hill behind the house were in the last, luminous stages of leafing out, while a quartet of majestic oaks, two on either side of the manor, created the perfect setting.
“Does the property prosper?” Why had Mama been so eager to leave this handsome home that she’d married a man who’d lost her loyalty in less than two years?
“The place is said to be solvent now. You are not to squander sentimental coin on its acquisition, my lord, not until you have put the Glen to rights.”
Miss Fielding was being stern with him, a vast improvement over her earlier chilly correctness.
“You need have no fear I will shirk any duty incumbent upon me regarding the Glen. I own property in Hampshire and have an unpretentious house in London. I reside from time to time in each place, and I still have a house in Porto as well. Those are residences, and I appreciate any roof that keeps me out of the wet.”
“But?”
“But I like the Glen.”
She waited.