Chapter 6 #2
The hours passed with nothing but Thomas’s uneven breathing upstairs and the wind worrying the cottage roof. Julianna found herself almost wishing Fred would come so she could stop waiting for him to arrive. But it was nearly noon the following day when the carriage showed.
Julianna saw it first through the kitchen window: the same dark lacquered panels and crest picked out in gold as he’d had on his first visit. This time with two enormous bay horses tossing their heads impatiently in the traces.
Fred climbed down from the conveyance with the same irritating ease with which he seemed to do everything. She wiped her hands on her apron and went to the door.
“Miss Farrow,” he said when she opened it. “Still wearing dirt as your best accessory, I see.”
“Better dirt than arrogance.”
His mouth twitched faintly. “I thought you might wish to see the Manor. It will be your future home after all. I’ll wait for you to—”
“I’m ready now.”
His eyebrows rose in surprise. Hers might have too at the speed of her own acquiescence had she not ruthlessly suppressed them. She was tired of sitting around the cottage, waiting.
“Unless you have more uninvited visitors you wish to spring upon us?”
Fred froze in the doorway and blinked. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“You may think yourself adept at lying but you’ve had the same tell since you were fourteen.
Try waving your hands around in the air next time you feel the urge for falsehoods.
It will be less obvious than standing as still as a marble and looking like there is something caught in your eye.
” She glanced at the waiting carriage. “And we’re walking.
It’s less than a quarter mile and I want to see if the oysters are out yet. ”
“Oysters?”
“Oyster mushrooms, obviously. They grow along the hedgerows this time of year and they are quite good. I’ll just go tell Thomas I’m leaving.”
She did not wait for his reply before turning back into the cottage. Thomas was awake when she climbed the stairs, his breathing shallow but steadier than it had been during the night.
“I’m going to see the Manor,” she said.
His brows lifted faintly. “Really?”
“Don’t be coy. This is all your doing and you know it.” She couldn’t help but smile at him fondly, though. “If you’re lucky there will be mushrooms in cream sauce for supper.”
“I cannot wait,” he said even though they both knew he was lying. Thomas could barely manage the broth she prepared for him.
She kissed his brow and went back downstairs. Fred was outside, examining the chicken coop with an expression of curiosity, as if he had never seen such a thing before.
“I did not know they came in black,” he said when she arrived at his side.
She stepped past him onto the path. She did not care to discuss the color of chickens. She didn’t care to discuss anything with him. “They do. Let us go and see this Manor of yours.”
Fred fell into step beside her and they walked in silence, the narrow path cutting through a low hedgerow still bare of leaves. Fred occasionally kicked at the frozen ground with the toe of his stupidly shiny boot.
“Alright,” she said eventually, when the silence grew unbearable. There were no mushrooms yet, which was unfortunate. Without the distraction of gathering them, one of them was going to have to speak. “Tell me about the Manor.”
He turned his head down to her. “It’s in need of repair.”
She knew that. Everyone knew how he’d let the once beautiful home fall to ruin.
But before she could say more, he pointed at a stone on the side of the road. “Look there. Is that one of your mushrooms?”
Julianna’s gaze followed his finger. “That’s a rock.”
“Are you certain?”
She almost said Shall I pick it up and throw it at you to be sure?
but stopped, because behind the rock—between the outcropping and the hedge—was indeed a patch of mushrooms. The first of the season.
The soil must be slightly warmer here, insulated as it was.
She’d have to remember to mark it down in her notebook.
She brushed aside a cluster of damp leaves. Beneath them pale, bulbous mushrooms pushed through the soil. “Look at that,” she said with satisfaction as she gathered them up.
Fred regarded her skeptically. “Just as I said.”
“You pointed to the rock.”
“And yet here you stand, hands full of fungus.”
She straightened up to better scowl at him. “They are delicious.”
“They grow out of rotting leaves.”
“And the other kind of oyster grows in rocks covered in bird droppings, and yet I’m certain you eat those.”
Fred was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Point taken,” and held out his hands.
“So now you want my mushrooms?”
“I certainly do not. But I will carry them for you. Give them here.”
“No.”
He sounded frustrated and she enjoyed it. “I am trying to be civil, Miss Farrow. Hand over your damned fungus.”
She shoved them into his hands, not bothering to wipe the dirt or leaves off first. They did not speak again until they came within sight of the Manor.
The great stone house she remembered from her childhood suddenly loomed at the end of the drive as it always had, but that did not lessen the shock of seeing it there. Nor had the rumors that he’d let the place go to ruin. She’d heard them all and yet her mouth still hung open in surprise.
Sedgewick Manor was truly in shambles. Ivy climbed the walls in unruly swaths, covering doors and windows both, and the once-careful lawns had been entirely surrendered to weeds and decay.
“You aren’t living there,” she said.
Fred glanced at her. “No. I’m at the coaching inn.” She had no idea what expression her face was making but it must have been in quite the state because then he said, “Have you something to say about my abode, Miss Farrow?”
She had many things to say: That the house was far worse than she’d imagined. That she oughtn’t be surprised, it was only fitting that he should let this once beautiful house rot away, feckless creature that he was.
She settled on, “It suits you.”
His mouth twitched again. “I thought just the same yesterday.”
And that—made her turn to look at him. She would not have pegged the Local Adonis as a man of introspection. But there was no way to take what she’d said as a compliment, which meant he’d understood the insult and…agreed with it?
No.
Fred was without humility in every way.
Her eyes moved over the gardens as they approached the house. They were, somehow, worse than the lawns. She remembered the terraced beds that had been here. The roses and clipped hedges and gravel paths. Now everything had collapsed into a snarling mass of thorn and vine.
She walked toward one of the beds, pushing aside a tangle of briars with her boot. “You could bring the roses back, you know. If you cared at all. Although, I doubt you—”
“Truly?” He was staring at the mess of thorn and dirt with a look flickering across his face that she’d have called hopeful if she didn’t know better.
“Yes,” she said slowly. “If you bothered even a little it wouldn’t be hard. I remember these so fondly. They were striped.”
“They were.” He still had that stupid look on his face. “Camaieux they were called. Galician roses. Eva loved their stripes too.”
His voice had gone quiet in a way she didn’t care for. It was his fault his stepmother had lost her beloved roses, after all. Everything was his fault and he shouldn’t sound wistful about it.
“She must have missed them in France then.”
“Not at that point, no. I don’t imagine she did.” He turned abruptly for the house and began to stride away, calling over his shoulder, “The gardens will require rebuilding. You may oversee the gardener, if you’d like.”
“About that,” she said briskly, hurrying to keep up with him. He had insufferably long legs. “We should discuss the matter at hand.”
“You may outfit the Manor and staff however you like. Tend to the gardens if you wish. I don’t see what else there is to speak about.”
“Is that why you brought me here? To decorate the house you couldn’t be bothered to take care of? To re-grow the rose gardens you let die? I am not your refurbishment act, sir.”
He stopped on the wayward, broken front steps of Sedgewick Manor and stared at her. He looked precisely as he had the day before—perfectly composed, perfectly controlled—despite the devastation all around him.
And she hated that. She hated him. “No. I won’t do it.”
The wind stirred the dead rose canes but neither of them moved. “Then don’t,” he said eventually.
Julianna opened her mouth, found she had nothing to say and closed it again. She didn’t know whether he meant don’t get married, don’t decorate Sedgewick Manor, or don’t oversee the growing of the roses. He offered nothing to make his words clearer.
“We should return,” she finally said. “Thomas will be wondering what became of me.”
“You have not seen the house.”
“I’ve seen quite enough, thank you.”