Chapter Fourteen The Price of Loving Him #3
“They said she was not to repeat talk from Blackthorn. She said she never had. Then yesterday the housekeeper told her she ought to think carefully about visiting us while... while there is notice taken here.”
Heat rose behind Mary Beth’s ribs.
“Has she been dismissed?”
“No, ma’am. Not yet. That is what I came about.”
She waited.
His shame was worse than anger would have been.
“If you came to the cottage less for a while,” he said, barely above a murmur, “or if Mr. Tavener was not seen there when he comes back... My girl has a good place. She sends money to her mother. I would not ask, except—”
“Except her wages matter.”
His eyes lifted then.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Mary Beth could have told him that his daughter’s employer was cruel.
She could have said no respectable household had the right to punish a servant for the private life of a landowner miles away.
She could have delivered every righteous sentence available to a woman with property, money, and the luxury of surviving other people’s contempt.
None of those sentences would replace the girl’s wages if she lost them.
“You were right to come,” Mary Beth said.
Relief and embarrassment crossed his face together.
“I am sorry, ma’am.”
“Do not apologize for protecting your daughter.”
“Mr. Tavener did right by the cottages. Everybody knows that.”
“I know.”
“It is only—”
“I know what it is.”
Mary Beth promised she would not call at the cottage without need for the next few weeks. She did not promise Ambrose would never be seen there. That decision belonged to more people than the frightened man in front of her, and she would not purchase his relief with a lie she could not keep.
After he left, she remained in the estate office until the room grew too dim to read.
Her first impulse was to solve it with money.
She could offer the girl a position at Blackthorn, increase the family allowance, find another household through an acquaintance who cared less for gossip.
Each answer offended her for a different reason.
The girl had not asked to leave a good place.
Her father had not come begging for charity.
They wanted the ordinary security they had earned before Mary Beth’s private life became public currency.
Her second impulse was worse: make Ambrose invisible again.
The thought arrived so smoothly that she hated it at once. She could put Ambrose back in the blue room, send him out by the side passage, stop kissing him on the front steps, and give the county room to invent a more comfortable lie.
The worst part was that it might even work.
Mary Beth pressed both palms to the desk.
She could protect the tenant’s daughter by asking Ambrose to accept the very shame she had spent weeks refusing for herself.
She went through the possibilities again and disliked every one. Owning the decision did not make it simple; it only meant nobody else could make it for her.
Ambrose had warned her on the hill.
She had answered that she knew the cost.
She had meant invitations, whispers, doors closing, Benedict’s mother failing to acknowledge her in a room full of people. She had even meant credit, because money could be counted and rearranged.
She had not pictured a nineteen-year-old servant being told that visiting her parents might make her morally suspect.
She was ashamed she had not pictured it.
At dinner Mary Beth ate alone in the morning room.
No lamp burned in the sitting-room window. Ambrose was sixty miles away, probably arguing with someone about drainage or the foolish optimism of schedules.
She missed him with an irritation so physical she nearly laughed at herself.
Afterward she went upstairs and found a letter waiting on the table in her sitting room.
The envelope carried a Wakefield postmark.
Ambrose’s handwriting leaned hard to the right, as though even ink had difficulty keeping up with him.
Mary Beth opened it beside the fire.
He wrote that the retaining wall was worse than its owner admitted, the foreman was competent, the cook at his lodging believed pepper was a food group, and he had discovered that sleeping alone had become an unexpectedly poor arrangement.
Near the bottom he had added: If anything changes at Blackthorn, tell me the truth. Do not protect me by editing the unpleasant parts. I have already had that argument with you once and lost.
Mary Beth read the sentence twice.
Then she carried writing paper to the desk.
She wrote about the hospital carriage, the merchant, and the tenant who had come to protect his daughter’s place.
She described the tenant’s visit exactly as it had happened.
At the end she wrote: I still want you to come back through the front door.
She hesitated, then added one more line.
I understand now that other people may be made to pay for what I choose. I do not know yet what to do about that, but I will not hide it from you.
Mary Beth sanded the page, folded it, and sealed it before she could turn it into a braver letter than she actually felt.
When she went to bed, the house felt too large.
She left the curtains open anyway.