Chapter 8
That afternoon Frederick found her at the edge of the garden, standing quite still with her hands loose at her sides, looking east.
"You are seeking privacy today, my lady."
"I seek solace, not privacy." She did not turn round. "I have had an eventful morning."
"So I am told." Frederick came to stand beside her. "I heard of the trouble at the market. A boy cut badly, and you among those who went to him."
"I did what I could. It was not enough. It was our neighbor who saved the day."
"I heard that also. That he stitched the wound himself, and that you assisted him."
"I did. And I am glad of it." She turned to face him properly. "But I think we ought to be considerably more troubled by the fact that there is no doctor within a day's ride of this village than by the fact that a man has taken up residence in an abandoned house."
"You are quite right." Frederick did not disagree with her, which she had half expected him to.
"Though I hope you will allow me to be cautious regardless.
A man who happens to have some knowledge of wounds is one thing.
A man who closes a wound the way a surgeon closes it — quickly, and without hesitating over what to do next — is another. "
"He had done it before." Amelia looked back toward the ridge. "His hands did not shake once, the whole time. A man's hands only hold that still when it is not the first occasion."
"Then he has done it a great many times, in a great many places, and none of them, I would wager, were drawing rooms." Frederick's voice stayed even. "Who knows what else a man like that knows how to do."
"He is mysterious. I will grant you that entirely." She lifted her chin slightly. "But he was a hero this morning, Frederick, whatever else he is besides, and I believe he has earned at least that much credit from this house."
Frederick considered this a long moment, and did not argue it.
"There is one thing more," Amelia said. "I overheard him mention, while we were seeing to the boy, that he still wants men for the work at Russell Hall. Builders. Stoneworkers."
"The boy's father might see to that himself, in gratitude, if he has a mind to."
"He might. But if it comes from this house instead — if word goes round that the Whitfields consider him worth vouching for — it will carry a great deal more weight with the men who are still uncertain of him.
" She glanced sideways. "It also does us no harm to be seen as generous, Frederick.
And it costs remarkably little. You need only say a few words to the right people on your way through the village. "
Something dry came back into Frederick's face.
"You have thought this through rather more thoroughly than a morning at the market usually allows for."
"I have had the whole afternoon."
He almost smiled.
"I am going that way regardless," he said. "I promised your father I would see the dresses delivered to the church before evening."
"Yes — please, be careful with them. The green one creases if it is folded wrong, and I should not like it arriving looking as though it had been dragged there."
"Your mother would be proud of you, my lady." He said it simply, the way he said most things that mattered to him. "As would everyone else in this house, though we are none of us so free with saying it as we ought to be."
"She would have done exactly the same. I have always thought so." Amelia's voice softened. "Thank you, Frederick. And do not forget the workers."
He bowed, and went, and Amelia stood a while longer at the edge of the garden before she turned back toward the house.
◆◆◆
That evening, Benjamin found Mrs. Miller in a chair by the window when he came into the inn, needle going through a hem she did not appear to be paying much attention to.
"Well," Mrs. Miller said, not looking up. "I did not expect to see you again before morning."
"I thought you might want company at dinner. And I confess I wanted to hear what the village is saying, before I heard a poorer version of it secondhand."
"Sit, then." She set the needle down. "I have heard a great deal today, as it happens.
There was an accident at the market. A boy, hurt badly.
And I am told a certain gentleman who has lately taken up residence at Russell Hall closed the wound himself, with his own hands, in front of half the parish. "
"I could help. There was no sense in standing back and pretending otherwise."
"No one is troubled that you helped, Benjamin. They are troubled by how well you did it." She studied him a moment. "People are asking where a man learns to stitch a wound like a surgeon."
"That part is best kept where it is, for now."
Something in her face softened, and she reached across and took his hand.
"The day will come," she said, "when you will not have to hide any part of yourself from anybody."
"It will." He let her hand rest over his a moment before he answered properly. "But until it does, I think it is wiser to let this town judge me by what I do here, rather than by what I did before I came to it."
"Wise words, Master Benjamin." Something warm crossed her face. "The apple does not fall so very far from the tree, after all."
He did not answer that directly, and she did not press him to.
"If you go on being the answer to their problems," she said instead, "they will stop asking questions about everything else soon enough.
People forgive a great deal in a man who keeps solving what troubles them.
We are simple creatures after all." She picked the needle back up, though she did not use it.
"I shall keep an eye on it. And an ear."
"You would have made an excellent spy, Mrs. Miller."
"I spent the better part of thirty years watching every maid who came within ten feet of your Mr. Miller, and learning within the hour whether she meant anything by it or not." She said it without any particular modesty. "This is a child's game, by comparison."
"I do not doubt it. Though I will warn you of one thing." His voice went more serious. "If you hear anything said against me — anything at all — I would ask that you not defend me. Not yet."
"And why should I do a foolish thing like that?"
"Because a housekeeper's word carries less weight than silence does, in a town like this. Let them wonder. Do not give them an answer before they have finished asking the question."
Mrs. Miller considered this, and something reluctant crossed her face, as though she disliked the sense of it precisely because it was sensible.
"Speaking of defending," she said instead, glancing past his shoulder, "there is a very large man at that corner table who has been looking at us for some minutes now."
Benjamin did not turn at once. "The bearded one?"
"The one who looks a good deal more like a bear than a man, yes. And I hope your defending skills are as sharp as your stitching, Master Benjamin, because he is coming this way."
Benjamin's attention sharpened without any outward change in him at all.
"As long as you mean to be respectful to the lady," he said, before the man had covered half the distance, "you are welcome to join us."
The man stopped where he stood, caught out.
"You are the one who owns Russell Hall," he said. "The one wanting men for the work."
Benjamin rose, turned to face him fully, and offered his hand.
"A pleasure. Benjamin. And you have the right of it."
The man took the hand — slower than he might have, taking Benjamin's measure as he did it, and finding, evidently, that there was rather more to measure than he had expected.
"My name is Thomas. Work of that kind carries a cost past the ordinary rate," the man said. "I am sure a gentleman such as yourself understands."
"Double the usual wage." Benjamin did not hesitate over it. "In exchange for forgetting what that estate used to be, and helping me make it into something else."
The man considered this for exactly as long as it took to be seen considering it.
"Now that," he said, "is a conversation worth having."
"Then I would be glad if you came to the estate tomorrow, and we discussed it properly. But may I ask how did you find out?"
"Then it is settled and I was informed by a man working at the Whitefield house." Thomas nodded once, to Mrs. Miller, and went back to his own table.
Mrs. Miller waited until he was well out of earshot.
"I retract what I said earlier," she said. "About you making friends. That man was sizing you up the entire time he was walking toward this table."
"As all men do, at first." Benjamin picked up his fork again. "As you said yourself, Mrs. Miller. Simple creatures."
She laughed, and did not disagree.
◆◆◆
Frederick had been at the gate a good while before Benjamin ever came into view, though he would not have called it waiting.
He had simply found reason to be there — a loose stone in the wall wanting attention, then not wanting it particularly urgently after all — and so he had a clear line down the lane when the man came walking back from the direction of the village, well after dark, the last of the inn's lamplight long since lost behind the hedgerows.
He watched him the whole way.
There was something in how the fellow moved that Frederick had marked the first day and had not stopped marking since.
Not the walk of a man who had spent his life behind a desk or at a card table.
Even at ease, even tired — and he did look tired, shirt dark at the collar, hands loose at his sides in a way that suggested they had done a great deal that day and knew it — there was a readiness to him.
The kind a man only kept if something had once taught him, hard, that stillness could be a mistake.
Frederick had seen that kind of readiness before, on other men, in other years. It did not sit easily on him now, watching it walk toward Amelia's garden gate at such an hour.