Chapter 7
Amelia woke to the sound of hammering — steady, distant, iron on stone — and went to the balcony before she had properly decided to, scanning the ridge for some shape moving against the ivy.
There was nothing to see from this angle. Only the sound, carrying faint across the fields, and the grey bulk of the house half-hidden behind its own trees.
A knock came at the door.
"Good morning," her father said, letting himself in before she had answered. He was still in his dressing gown, his hair not yet combed flat, and there was nothing in his face of the argument from two nights before. "You are up early."
"So is someone else, apparently." Amelia came back in from the balcony and tipped her head toward the window. "What is that?"
"A man at Russell Hall." Her father crossed to the window and looked out, though there was nothing to see from this side of the house either.
"I saw him myself last night, very late — thought at first he was a vagrant.
Some beggar who had found himself an empty roof and decided to make free with it.
Frederick tells me he was already at it again this morning before either of us was awake. "
"I have seen him too," Amelia said.
"Some foreigner, I expect. Or a man from town who does not know the place's history, and sees an empty house and thinks — well. Why not. There is no one left to say otherwise."
"I do not think that is it," she said carefully. "I think he does not care one way or the other. And in fairness, Father, why should he? It is only land. Stone and soil and old timber. None of it did anything to deserve being hated for so many years."
Her father looked at her for a moment, faintly surprised.
"Now that," he said, "sounds a great deal like something Frederick would say."
"Then perhaps he has been a strong influence on me."
"Perhaps he has." Her father almost smiled.
"You are not wrong, in any case. Though reputation still matters, and that is precisely why I have kept up my correspondence with Earl Somerset.
We made an excellent impression there, whatever you think of the son.
" His hand rested briefly on her shoulder.
"I am proud of you, Amelia. However it went at that table, you conducted yourself as a Whitfield ought. "
A knock came again, softer, and two of the maids came in with something folded in tissue and blue silk showing through at the edges, and behind them a third carrying a hatbox.
"And this," her father said, "is your gift."
Amelia looked at it, and then at him.
"Another dress?"
"I was under the impression that dresses and shoes were the things women actually wanted." He said it with the particular satisfaction of a man delivering a line he had been saving.
"I do want them. I only think I already have enough.
" She glanced at the wardrobe, where the doors did not quite close over what was already inside it.
"More than enough, if I am honest. Perhaps we ought to give some of the older ones to the church instead — there are women in this parish who would be glad of a good dress and have never once had the chance to be particular about the color. "
Her father was quiet a moment, and something in his face went from pleased to something warmer still.
"You deserve every dress in the world," he said. "Not for how you carried yourself at Earl Somerset's table, though you did that well enough. For what you have just said. I am prouder of that, this morning, than I was of the whole of that dinner."
"Father—"
"Try it on," he said, before she could go on. "Then we shall see about the church. Pick out whatever you no longer wear, and speak to Frederick about having it delivered."
"I will." She hesitated. "And I should like to mention it to a few of the girls my own age. Not why. Only that they ought to call at the church in the coming days."
"You will spoil the surprise."
"I will not tell them why. I only do not want any of them to miss it."
Her father laughed and waved a hand toward the screen in the corner, and turned himself deliberately toward the balcony doors and the view of the garden while the maids drew Amelia behind it.
"You always had good taste," she called over the top of the screen, working her arms into the sleeves as the maids fussed at the buttons. "For a man."
"I will take that as the compliment it very nearly was and I agree that neither of us understands the first thing about women's fashion," his voice came back easy, unhurried, still facing the glass.
"Though I will confess, since you have raised the subject of my taste — I had a great deal of help. I asked Mrs. Prentice."
"You ought to thank her properly, then."
"I already have. She has one for herself, made up alongside yours." He said it lightly, though there was something pleased underneath it. "She did not believe me at first that it was truly meant for her and not merely a length of fabric wanted for the kitchen linens."
Amelia smiled behind the screen, where he could not see it, and came round it a moment later in the finished gown — blue silk, cut clean through the shoulders, her hair still loose from sleep and catching gold where the morning light found it.
Her father did not say anything for a moment.
"Well," she said, turning to the glass instead of to him, mostly so she would not have to watch his face doing what she could already hear in his silence. "It is very nice. Thank you, Father."
"You are welcome, my dear.''
She crossed to him and kissed his cheek.
"I want to go to the market today," she said, glancing down at the gown. "But I do not think this is at all suitable for it."
"No," he agreed, something rueful in it now. "It is not, rather. Save it for when it is wanted — a guest at the table, an occasion that asks for it." A pause, and something careful came into his voice. "I do hope Earl Somerset means to call again before the season is out."
"I imagine you count on it."
"I do," he said, without apology. "You may make of that what you like."
She let it pass.
"I shall change and come down," she said. "I only want something simpler."
"Do not be long. Your eggs are waiting, and they will not improve for the delay."
He went, and the door closed behind him, and Amelia stood a moment in the blue silk looking at her own reflection before she called the maids back and began, methodically, working through the wardrobe — setting aside two dresses barely worn and three older ones with more give in the seams, folding them over the back of the chair for Frederick to see to.
Then she took down the grey dress instead — plain, soft with washing, the kind of dress that told a person nothing about who was wearing it until they looked at her face — and put it on, and went to the shelf where the jars stood in their rows, and began deciding.
Meadowsweet for Mrs. Cobb, though she had sent her a jar only a fortnight past — the woman gave half of it away to her neighbors before she had used a spoonful herself, and there would be nothing left by now.
Comfrey salve for old Hodge's knee, which he would not admit troubled him and which troubled him regardless.
A small twist of chamomile, dried, for the miller's wife, who could not sleep since her youngest had gone for a soldier and would not say so to anyone but Amelia, and only then in the doorway, quickly, as though the words might be taken back if she said them fast enough.
She wrote a name on a scrap of paper for each one and tied it to the neck of the jar with a length of thread, because she had learned that lesson the hard way as well — a jar without a name in her basket was a jar she gave to the wrong person, once, memorably, and had spent a fortnight afterward making it right.
She looked one more time at her basket and went down to her eggs.
◆◆◆
Benjamin was three streets from the mill, a coil of rope over one shoulder for the fence line, when he heard the sound change ahead of him — the ordinary noise of children playing giving way, all at once, to something sharper.
He was moving before he had decided to.
By the time he reached the corner a small crowd had already gathered outside a cottage door, and at the center of it a boy of perhaps eight sat on the ground with his father's coat wrapped round him and his arm held out in front of him as though it belonged to somebody else, and blood was coming through the coat fast enough that it had already found the cobbles.
Amelia was on her knees in front of him.
She had his forearm in both hands, pressing a folded cloth hard against it, and she was talking to him low and steady — look at me, not at your arm, look at me — while around her a dozen people stood close and useless, the way people do when they cannot see anything to be done and have not yet been told to do it.
"How did it happen?" Benjamin said, dropping to a crouch on the boy's other side.
"Broken glass. Behind the smithy." A woman's voice, high and frightened. "He fell right onto it."
Amelia lifted the cloth for half a second, looked, and set it back down harder than before.
"It is deep," she said, not to Benjamin, to the boy's father, standing over them white in the face. "Deeper than I can close with what I have. He will need a proper surgeon. If we send now, and the roads hold, we could have him in London by dark—"
"That is eight hours," Benjamin said. "More, on a cart, with him losing blood the whole way."
Every face in the crowd turned to him at once.
"I can close it," he said. He did not raise his voice, and he did not soften it either. "Now. If it is not closed within the hour it will fester before you are halfway to London, whatever the surgeon there might do for him afterward."
The boy's father looked at him — really looked, the way a man looks at a stranger he has been told, by every part of the village at once, not to trust.
"Are you a doctor?"
"No."
"Then—"