Chapter 4
Chapter
Farrow Cottage
Julianna braided her thick, dark hair as well as she could and donned the same walking dress she’d worn nearly every day this spring.
And then she went about her morning chores.
Gathering the eggs, milking their single dairy cow, and testing the soil to see if it was still frozen.
Early April was well past the time she began to plant the spring crops—she had double checked her notes from last year to be certain—but it was still too bitterly cold despite being two weeks overdue.
When she made her way back inside the stone cottage she shared with Thomas, she brewed tea and then carried it up the stairs to his small room.
They really ought to move him downstairs as navigating steps had become increasingly difficult for him, but it was draftier on the first floor than in the cozy nook he now used as his sickroom on the second. And she didn’t want him to be cold.
“Are you up, Tom?”
“Yes,” came his weak, phlegmy reply. Julianna closed her eyes against the sound of it. The longer the cold weather wore on, the worse his condition became.
She opened his door and deposited the tray on the table beside the bed. “How are you this morning?”
“Not as bad as yesterday.”
“In that case,” she said, handing him his cup of tea, “I made toast too. Surely you can get some down if you really are feeling better?”
Her heart lifted at the thought. He had eaten less than a dormouse these past weeks.
If she believed he would have even a mouthful, she would go down to the kitchen this very instant and prepare whatever dish he desired.
A fine seed-cake. A pigeon pie. She would scour the market for a peacock and strip it of its splendid feathers with her own hands, if that was what it took.
“I would, but…” He looked away from her and she knew his assertion he was feeling better was nothing but that. An assertion but not a fact. “Perhaps I’ll feel up for dinner.”
“Never you mind.” She turned away from the sight of his too-thin body underneath the bed linens. He didn’t need to see the stricken look on her face. “The tea will do you wonders. I’ve a few more errands to take care of and then I’ll be back up to read to you.”
“Forget the errands, Julianna. We do need to have that talk.”
“I know. I’ve thought about what you said, Thomas. I truly have. But I cannot take money from the man who killed our parents. I won’t do it.”
“It was a carriage accident, sister. Not murder. Perhaps we’ve judged him too harshly all these years.”
Thomas’s gaze drifted toward the window as if he could see past the hedgerows, past the frozen fields, past the life they had been left with.
When he spoke again, his voice had lost its teasing edge.
“Do you think I don’t know what I’m asking?
I know what it will cost you but I don’t see a way around it.
You cannot live here alone again. You remember what happened last time. ”
“Stop, Thomas. I do not wish to speak of him.”
“Nonetheless, we must. If word had gotten out about your affair you would be in an even worse situation than you already are. You’re lucky Rothchild took my back pay to keep his mouth shut.
” Thomas closed his eyes for a moment. “I hate that we’ve come to this.
But I am asking you to give Fred a chance to improve your circumstances. He is the only one who can.”
“I know you’d like to think so. He was your best friend, after all.
And, truly, you can feel about him however you’d like.
You may forgive him. You may go to London and eat ices together for all I care.
But please don’t ask me to be so forgiving.
If it wasn’t for his recklessness, Mother and Father would still be alive.
We’d still be a family. And I cannot, I will not, forgive it. ”
A loud banging on the door interrupted whatever Thomas might have been about to say next.
Julianna frowned, her forehead creasing. “Are you expecting a visitor?” she asked but Tom had taken the moment to reach for his tea and so only gave a vague shrug.
They rarely had visitors. The closest estates were Sedgewick Manor, which had been abandoned for years, and Hawthorne Hall, to which they were never extended an invitation now.
They’d been a few times, when the Earl had commissioned music from their father and the Farrows were in a much more influential social position, but now they’d sunk too far down into genteel poverty for the Hawthornes to suffer their company.
The banging on the door continued.
“Whoever could that be?” she muttered. “That’s quite the racket they’re making.”
“Go and see then,” Tom said. As she turned to leave, he added, “But Julie-bug? Best wipe the soil off your face before you open the door and meet our visitor.”
“I do not have soil on my face.” She reached a hand up to her cheek as if to check.
“You’ve only gone and smeared it now.”
“Well then, I’m going to leave it. It will serve whomever is making that infernal racket right to have to stare at it.”
Downstairs she flung open the front door, expecting a distant neighbor, perhaps. Although she couldn’t imagine one who would announce themselves quite so aggressively. Or one of the stray peddlers who stopped by now and again, seeking jobs she could not afford to give them.
But no, there was a different sort of person entirely standing on her threshold.
Her eyes traveled from the finely dressed man, out to the carriage emblazoned with some kind of family crest behind him, and back to the gentleman’s face.
There was no question, given the clothes and the bearing and the carriage, that he was in fact a gentleman.
She did wish then she’d taken the time to clean herself off, especially given that he was Renaissance painting handsome, with blue eyes and blond hair and dimples of all things.
“Can I help you, my lord?” She dipped into a curtsey.
“Jules,” the man said. “It’s me. Fred.”
She straightened back up immediately. “Frederick? Sedgewick?”
Her heart began to hammer away at her chest as she took him in again, more closely this time.
From the tip of his curly blond head—his hat now removed—down the length of his body, clad in exactingly tailored clothes that clung more tightly to his physique than she cared to admit she’d noticed, and stopping at the excessive shine on his boots.
“It’s me,” he said again, right before she slammed the door shut in his face.
“Julianna?” Thomas called from upstairs. “Who is it?”
The infernal pounding on the door started once more, but she didn’t answer. She knew who it was now, and she had no interest in having a conversation with Frederick Sedgewick. Of all the unexpected people to arrive at her—
She stopped, her eyes sliding up the stairs to where Thomas lay in his sick bed, and remembered how he’d urged her to take the annuity. And how he’d changed his tune about Fred’s actions so precipitously just this morning.
Frederick Sedgewick hadn’t arrived here on a whim after a decade of silence.
“Thomas,” she growled, her heart still beating too hard in her chest.
She might have swooned, damn it, if she’d happened to have a comfy chaise lounge nearby to catch her. Or someone to bring her smelling salts and tea. She didn’t have those things, of course. There was just herself and the hard-backed chair in the kitchen so she didn’t bother with the swooning.
“Open the door, Julianna.” The cold, aristocratic voice of Frederick Sedgewick, the Earl of Chester, made its way inside.
“No!”
She would not open the door. She would go upstairs and give Thomas a well-earned thrashing for whatever nonsensical notion had made him invite Frederick Sedgewick, of all the people, into her home. And not even bother to tell her!
Unfortunately, she hadn’t locked the front door when she slammed it shut. Why hadn’t she locked it? Was she a complete dunderhead?
She knew she hadn’t because Fred grasped the door handle and opened it himself, letting in the cold April air along with his loathsome person. He stepped across the threshold as though he owned the place, smelling all the while of polished leather and expensive soap. Of money, basically.
“Get out,” she snarled, like she did when addressing the fox. Vermin were vermin after all. No need to treat them any differently when one came calling in gentleman’s attire.
“Don’t worry.” He brushed past her as if she wasn’t even there, utterly unruffled by her anger. “I won’t overstay my welcome.”
“Too late for that. You were never welcome here at all.”
Fred turned his head, slowly, his gaze cutting into her like the newly honed edge of a razor. “Then I’ve nothing to trouble myself over. Where is Thomas?”
A cold wind blew through the room and Julianna shivered. She glanced at the door which he hadn’t even bothered to close behind him. Of course he hadn’t. People like him had servants to accomplish even the smallest of tasks, like opening and closing doors.
And here she stood, with her brother sick in bed in a cottage they could hardly afford, her crops beset by frost and her hens by foxes. All of which was Fred’s fault because he’d rather drink wine and carouse than mind his own damned reins!
The injustice of it made her fists clench at her side. If it hadn’t been for him, her parents would still be alive. Her brother would never have gone off to war in an effort to provide for them. He wouldn’t have gotten sick.
A wail escaped her throat. This man. This rich, presumptuous, too handsome arsehole of a man, was responsible for every terrible thing in her life. She reached for the open door and slammed it so hard the hinges shook and a puff of dust from the otherwise immaculate premises bloomed into the air.
“He won’t want to see you,” she spit out.
Fred peeled off his gloves with the slow deliberation of a man who could care less that he wasn’t wanted where he stood. Much like she imagined the devil himself did, which would fit, wouldn’t it?
“I rather think your brother has been keeping secrets from you.”