Chapter 9 #2
"I think you should have introduced yourself already. Invitations come secondary."
"All in due time, my dear. We have a face to maintain." He glanced sideways at her. "Which reminds me — now that we are on the subject of invitations. I had a letter this morning."
Amelia's gaze went to him properly for the first time since Benjamin had passed.
"From whom?"
"Earl Harrington. He and Earl Somerset intend to visit before the week is out."
Her expression did not change, though her fingers found the edge of her shawl and closed around it.
"How charming," she said. "Another evening of practiced smiles."
"Do not be flippant. Harrington is no ordinary guest." Her father's voice sharpened, though he kept his eyes on the road ahead, nodding to a passing tenant as they went. "A visit from him is not a small thing, Amelia, whatever face you mean to pull about it."
"Interesting," she said. "And rather conveniently timed."
"Timed with what?"
"Nothing." She lifted her chin slightly and said no more.
"This family cannot afford to overlook opportunities. Not in this climate."
"Ah. The climate." Amelia kept her voice light, though something colder moved beneath it. "So very delicate. So very political."
"Be serious. Harrington's visit is a blessing, and we would be fools to treat it otherwise."
"And how would you have me make the most of it, Father? Smile. Sit. Curtsy prettily and say nothing of consequence?"
He looked at her then, properly, and did not answer at once.
"You will meet him," he said finally. "That is all I ask."
They had nearly reached the square by then, the noise of the stalls rising ahead of them, and Amelia said nothing further on the subject.
"Why does it always come down to names and titles," she said instead, quieter, almost to herself.
"Because names and titles are what shape the world," her father said. "And we are not in a position to shape it alone."
"I doubt very much those new friends of yours would carry their own supplies through the lane like that," Amelia said, "the way ordinary men do. The way you do, on occasion."
"I do it because I choose to," her father said. "A man cannot be blamed for not wanting the same."
"No. But it says something of a man's character, all the same, when he carries his own weight rather than sending someone else to carry it for him."
"It does." He glanced at her, and something in his face had gone thoughtful rather than dismissive.
"And this particular man has evidently been making a habit of the village inn.
" He turned them both toward the sign, hanging dead still in the heat.
"Come. It is too hot to stand about in a square, and I find I should like an egg. "
The common room was cooler than the lane and smelled of frying, and only a handful of tables were filled at that hour. The girl behind the counter straightened at the sight of the Baron's coat before he had crossed half the room.
"My lord. What may I bring you?"
"Whatever it was you gave the boy from the mill road this morning." The Baron handed his daughter into a chair by the window. "I am told it was very good."
It was. The eggs came very hot and the Baron ate his with an appetite Amelia had not seen from him in some months, and it was perhaps a quarter of an hour before he set his knife down and turned, mildly, to the room.
"I understand there is a new occupant at Russell Hall. Have you had dealings with the man?"
The effect was immediate and not at all uniform.
"A little, my lord." The girl considered, wiping her hands on her apron.
"Quiet. Polite. Always says please and thank you to the serving, which not every gentleman troubles himself to do.
Measured, I would say. Does not raise his voice.
Pays what he owes the moment it is asked, never haggles.
" She glanced past them, toward a woman seated near the window with knitting in her lap, needles clicking steadily, and lowered her voice slightly.
"The old lady he brought with him thinks the world of him, if that tells you anything. "
"And beyond that?"
"Beyond that I could not tell you a thing about him, my lord, and I have served him four times. I heard that he saved the butcher’s boy. He cut his arm and he stitched it. So, I would assume he is kind and willing to help."
"He also helped old Wicks with his water barrel," said a woman by the fire. "Never asked. Just took it off him and carried it up the lane and went away again. Wicks did not know what to make of it."
"Nor should he." The man opposite her did not look up from his cup. "There is something not right in a gentleman who works like a laborer and knows how to properly stitch a wound. Either he is not a gentleman or he is not working, and I have not decided which."
"He is a fool, is what he is." This from a broad man near the door, who had evidently been waiting for the subject.
"Begging your pardon, my lord. But I will say it.
Twenty-three years that ground has stood empty and there was a reason for it, and now a man comes and puts good money and six sound workers into a house that no decent family in this county would set foot in.
" He shook his head. "The money will run out, or something worse will happen, and the whole of us will be standing about wondering how nobody saw it coming.
And we shall have seen it coming. We are seeing it now. "
"That is a great deal to say about a man you have never spoken to," the woman by the fire said.
"I do not need to speak to him. I knew what that house was when I was a boy."
Nobody answered that, and after a moment the room went back to its own business, and the girl came and took the Baron's plate away, and the conversation broke up into the ordinary noise of a room that has finished with a subject.
Amelia's eyes went to the window without deciding to.
The woman there was perhaps sixty, silver-haired, her hands moving with the brisk competence of someone who had done this a thousand times without needing to look down.
She glanced up — caught Amelia's gaze for a moment, the way a stranger's eyes catch and hold across a public room — and gave the faintest, courteous nod, the kind exchanged between two people who share nothing but the same room for a moment.
Amelia returned it, and looked away again, out through the leaded window toward the lane.
Neither of them said a word.
The Baron sat back.
"Well," he said.
"Well," Amelia agreed.
"A good man, a strange man, and a fool." He turned his cup a little on the cloth. "In one room, in a quarter of an hour, from people who have all seen precisely the same thing."
He was quiet a moment.
"And not one of them told me anything substantial about him," he said. "Only what they think of him."
He rose, and thanked the girl, and they went back out into a heat that had thickened while they sat.
"Perhaps there is simply not much to know," Amelia said.
"Perhaps." He did not sound convinced, though he did not sound suspicious either — only thoughtful, in the particular way he had when weighing something he had not yet decided how to weigh.
"Or perhaps he has been careful about what he lets people learn.
A man does not stay unknown in a village this size by accident, Amelia. He does it by design."
She said nothing to that, only watched the hedgerows pass, dusty and still, on either side of the lane.
"I find I am more curious than before," the Baron added, as the roofline of Whitfield Hall came into view ahead of them, "rather than less. I believe there is more than a kind man who happens to know how to close a wound."