Chapter 10
The sun had climbed higher by the time Benjamin and Jacob returned to Russell Hall, the basket cradled against Jacob's arm, still warm with the weight of six wrapped meals.
The scent of stewed beef and fresh bread rose up around them as they crossed the rubble-strewn path to the main hall, where hammers still rang and saws still bit through old timber.
The workers paused as they came into view.
"What is this?" one of them asked, straightening, wiping sweat from his brow.
"Lunch." Benjamin said it as Jacob set the basket down on a broad stone slab that had once been a garden bench. "From the inn. Stew, bread, something sweet besides."
A beat of silence. Confusion, then something closer to disbelief.
"You are giving us lunch?"
"No lord has ever fed us before," someone muttered, half to himself.
Benjamin looked round at them evenly. "This one does. Eat. You have earned it."
They hesitated only a moment longer before the smell won out over their doubt.
Thomas leaned over and counted the bundles with one finger, unhurried, the way a man counts a thing he has already counted with his eyes.
"Six," he said. "And there are six of us sitting here." He looked up. "I imagine, then, that you two have already eaten."
"We have." Jacob set the basket down with enormous care and lowered himself onto the stone beside it as though sitting were a thing he intended to do properly. "And I met Mrs. Miller."
"Did you."
"She is more frightening than the whole of you put together.
" Jacob said it with real feeling. "She looked at me for about four seconds and then she put two portions in front of me and stood there until I had eaten both, and I did not once think of arguing about it, and I do not know how I am meant to work this afternoon.
" He put a hand flat on his own stomach.
"I am done for. I shall be no use to anybody until Thursday. "
That got the laugh he had been angling for.
"She was always so," Benjamin said, settling against the wall. "She was so when I was a boy. I have watched grown men in that house eat a second meal without being hungry and never work out afterward how it had happened."
Thomas chewed on that a moment.
"So you have known her some years, then." He said it without any particular weight. "I remember her sitting with you the night I came over to your table at the inn. I took her for a housekeeper you had hired out of London."
"She is family."
Thomas nodded slowly.
"Then we shall treat her as such," he said, and went back to his bread, and that was the end of it.
The talk moved on to the stairwell and whether the iron would hold and a story of Fletcher's about a chimney in Newbury that nobody entirely believed, and Jacob sat through most of it without saying anything, which was unlike him.
Then, when the noise had risen enough to cover it, he leaned over.
"Sir. Might I have a word."
"Of course."
They walked a little way off, out past the corner of the hall where the long grass began, and Jacob stopped and turned his cap over twice in his hands before he managed it.
"I am sorry," he blurted. "About this morning. About the way I took it. I did not mean — I was not thinking—"
Benjamin raised a hand.
"It is well. You are not the first man to speak before he thinks. You will not be the last."
Jacob looked down, cheeks still burning.
There was a long, quiet moment. Benjamin watched the trees stir beyond the broken wall, and then he spoke.
"When I was about your age — perhaps a year younger — I said something foolish. To an officer with more medals than fingers. It was not loud. Only a comment under my breath. I thought no one had heard it."
Jacob glanced sideways at him, caught despite himself.
"But someone had. The man who trained me.
He did not punish me for it. He stepped in instead — put himself in front of that officer, took the risk of it onto his own account, so that I would not be turned out.
" Benjamin paused. "Then he did not speak to me for three days.
Not until I had worked out what he had done.
And when I finally asked him why, all he said was — when you are young, people forgive your mistakes. But somebody always pays for them."
Jacob was quiet.
"I did not mean to give offense," he said at last. "I only — say things. Before I have thought them through."
"Then begin thinking first. Starting now." Benjamin looked at him. "You have a great many more years in front of you than behind. Spend them better than I spent mine at your age."
Jacob turned the cap over again.
"May I ask you something, sir."
"You may."
"What was he like? The man who trained you.
" He said it in a rush, the way a person asks a thing he has been carrying about for a while.
"Only — you never say anything about before.
None of us knows a thing about you and I do not mean it as a complaint, I only—" He stopped.
"I would like to know what a man like that is like. "
Benjamin did not answer at once.
"He was the hardest man I have ever known," he said finally. "He never once gave me anything I had not earned twice over, and he never told me I had done well, and I do not believe I have ever wanted anybody's good opinion so much in my life."
"Is he living?"
"He is."
Jacob waited.
Nothing else came.
"Right," he said, after a moment, and put his cap back on, and did not push it any further — which Benjamin noticed, and did not remark upon, and thought rather better of him for.
"Come on." Benjamin pushed off the wall. "You have eaten two portions at my expense and I intend to have the value of them out of you before dark."
"Yes, sir."
They went back across the yard together, and the hammers started up again behind them, and by mid-afternoon the stairwell had its iron in it and the heat had gone out of the day, and nobody mentioned the morning again.
◆◆◆
Amelia went out to the garden the moment they were back, because there was nothing else to do with the rest of the morning and she had no intention of sitting in a cool room turning over what the man by the door had said.
She had been at the north bed perhaps a quarter of an hour when the sound came over the wall.
It was laughter first — several men at once, the rough unguarded kind that people only make when they have stopped working — and under it the ordinary noise of a meal being eaten out of doors. Then a boy's voice, going on at some length about something. Then more laughter, louder.
She stopped working and knelt there with her hands in the soil and listened, which she knew perfectly well she ought not to have been doing.
"He has been here a matter of days," she said, when Frederick's step came up the path behind her. "Days, Frederick."
"My lady."
"That house has stood dead on that hill my whole life.
And now there is Jacob in it, and Thomas, and four more besides, sitting on the ground eating out of their hands and shouting at one another about a chimney.
" She did not turn round. "It sounds more like a family at its dinner than anything that has ever happened at our table.
And we have the silver out three times a week. "
Frederick did not answer that immediately.
"There is more life carrying over that wall this morning," Amelia said, "than has come out of our own house in a year."
"A remarkable deed indeed, my lady," Frederick said, "however it was managed."
"I wish I could be there right now."
"I think we have already discussed—"
"Not the agreement." She turned then. "I do not mean the garden, or the flowers, or any of it.
I mean sitting with them. Watching a thing that was ugly for all my life turn into something worth looking at, and being in the middle of it while it happens rather than at the edge of a hedge listening to other people enjoy it. "
Frederick considered the wall, and the sound coming over it.
"You may marvel at the change from here," he said. "It is a matter of a few hundred yards. The house will not look any different for your standing closer to it."
"That is not the same and you know it is not."
"It is not," he agreed. "It is, however, considerably safer."
Amelia pulled off one glove and turned it over in her hands, which was what she did instead of arguing when she intended to go on arguing.
"There is another matter," she said. "And this one has nothing to do with what I want.
" She looked at him properly. "Nobody from this house has called on him.
Not once. He has been in that lane a fortnight and the first people to set foot on his ground were six laborers he had to pay to come.
Not his neighbors. Not the family that has held the ground beside his since before either of us was born.
" She shook her head. "That is not caution, Frederick.
That is discourtesy, and every soul in this village knows it, and they are watching to see how long we intend to keep it up. "
"That," Frederick said slowly, "is a better argument than the last one."
"It is the same argument. I have simply found the version you cannot refuse."
He almost smiled.
"We ought to go over," she pressed. "Properly welcome him as a family, give the men proper instruction on the soil while they work — which plants want turning, which cuttings are worth saving. It would go faster if someone told them plainly, rather than leaving them to guess."
"You conceded this argument on Tuesday, my lady."
"I conceded the garden. I said nothing about manners."
Frederick considered this. "A sensible notion. Your father would not thank either of us for acting on it before he has made up his own mind about the man, however."
"If you came with me, there would be nothing improper in it."
"It would look better, certainly." He shook his head. "But I will not risk my place in this house, my lady, nor your father's trust in me, by going behind his back."
Amelia turned to look at him properly.