Chapter 24
The kitchen at Russell Hall smelled of rendered butter and fresh thyme, and Amelia had flour on her wrist and no particular intention of removing it.
"Not like that." Mrs. Miller reached across without ceremony and repositioned her hands on the rolling pin, pressing down and forward in one even motion. "You are not punishing it. You are persuading it."
"I did not know pastry required persuasion."
"Everything requires persuasion if you want it to behave.
" Mrs. Miller stepped back to her own board and resumed the onions she had abandoned for the correction, her knife moving with the unhurried confidence of long practice.
"This is the second time you have visited in a week.
Your father must have come around considerably. "
Amelia kept her eyes on the pastry. "He knows I am visiting you."
Mrs. Miller's knife did not pause. "Ah."
"When Benjamin returns — I am not entirely certain he will find it quite so easy to allow me to visit."
"I imagine not." Mrs. Miller swept the onions into the pan with the flat of the blade, and the kitchen filled immediately with the smell of them softening in the butter.
"Though from the look on that man's face before he left, I suspect your father will find most of his objections considerably harder to maintain. "
Amelia looked up at that.
"He will make it right," Mrs. Miller said, simply, as though it were a thing already decided rather than hoped for. "When he returns. That includes your stubborn father."
Amelia laughed, quiet and genuine. "I only hope he is alive to manage it."
"He will be —"
"Do not worry about him."
The voice came from the doorway. Amelia spun, and the spoon left her hand entirely, clattering against the edge of the board and dropping to the flagstone floor.
Oliver stood in the kitchen entrance, arms loose at his sides, wearing the expression of a man who found the reaction both expected and faintly satisfying.
"Good God." Amelia pressed one hand flat to her sternum. "You have the same habit as Benjamin. You appear from nowhere and frighten people half to death." She looked at him. "I am quite certain this is not what most soldiers do."
"Most soldiers, no." Oliver moved into the kitchen and retrieved the spoon from the floor, setting it on the board with a composure that suggested he had done a great deal of things that were considerably more complicated. "We were not most soldiers, my lady."
Mrs. Miller had turned from the stove, watching him with an expression of frank interest.
"I should not say much more than that," Oliver added.
"Neither should Benjamin, if you ever succeed in getting it out of him.
But —" He glanced between them, and something in his face shifted slightly, as if he had weighed something and arrived at a decision.
"I have seen how much you care for him. I think you deserve to know a little more of what you are caring for. "
Amelia said nothing. She waited.
"We were sent to places," Oliver said, "where ordinary soldiers were not permitted to go. Unofficial. Off any record that would survive an inquiry." He paused. "Each of us was given a code name, in the field. It was how we communicated when rank and real names were a liability."
Mrs. Miller set down her spoon entirely. "What was yours?"
"The Shadow."
The fire in the grate popped softly. Outside, somewhere across the grounds, one of the workmen called out to another and the sound faded.
Amelia looked at him steadily. "And Benjamin's?"
Oliver's mouth curved, just slightly. "The Banished Duke." He held her gaze. "Though within the unit we only ever called him the Duke." A pause. "I would ask you not to repeat any of this — and specifically not to tell him I told you. He would have opinions on the matter."
"I imagine he would," Amelia said.
"I tell you because —" Oliver stopped. Tried again. "Because you will be looking after him from now on, I suspect. And a woman who intends to do that well ought to know what manner of man she has taken on."
The kitchen was quiet for a moment.
Mrs. Miller turned back to the stove, and the ordinary sounds of cooking resumed — the onions shifting in the pan, the low breath of the fire — and the silence became something easier to sit inside.
"When he returns," Mrs. Miller said, without turning around, "I intend to write to General Aldric myself and inform him that you are required here on a permanent basis and will not be available for further deployment."
Oliver looked at the back of her head with something that was, unmistakably, relief.
"I look forward to that day, Mrs. Miller," he said. "More than I can reasonably say."
She pulled a third bowl from the shelf above the stove and set it on the table without ceremony. "Then sit down. You can look forward to it after you have eaten."
Oliver sat. Amelia retrieved her spoon. The pastry waited on the board, and the onions had turned golden, and outside the afternoon light was moving slowly across the grounds of Russell Hall the way it did when nothing in the world was required to hurry.
Then it stopped being quiet.
It came in from the yard first — a voice raised, and then a second one over it, and then the particular disordered noise of men who have all stopped working at the same moment and are talking across each other about the same thing. Oliver was on his feet before either woman had put anything down.
They came out into the yard together.
Half the crew had come down off the scaffolding. The rest were standing where they had been when the news reached them, tools still in their hands, and in the middle of them Thomas was pulling his coat off a post with the sort of movement that had no thought in it at all.
"Thomas." Amelia crossed the gravel. "What has happened?"
"Jacob has gone, my lady." He got the coat on and did not look at her while he answered.
"A boy came up from the village not five minutes past. His mother went down in the doorway of her own house an hour ago and has not come up out of it since, and the woman next door has been sitting with her since then and has sent for the family.
" His hands were working at the buttons and getting them wrong.
Amelia was already turning.
She went down the drive at a walk that lasted about nine paces and then stopped being a walk at all.
The gravel was wrong for it and the ground past the piers was worse, and she took the lane with one hand holding her skirts clear and did not stop at the fence or go round by the gate but through the gap, sideways, the way she had learned to do in the dark, and came up the lawn at Whitfield with her hair coming down and two of the gardeners staring after her.
She did not go in by the front. She went up the servants' stair because it was nearer, and along the passage, and into her own room, and shut the door behind her.
The box came out from under the bed.
She did not take all of it. Meadowsweet, and the willow bark she had stripped in March and never yet had cause to use.
The little jar of honey, because nothing at all would go down without it.
Muslin, and the spoon, and the small brass scales, and the folded paper of dried root she had been saving for a winter that had not come yet.
She put the lot into the basket and looked at it for one second and then took the whole box as well.
Coming down the front stairs with both arms full she nearly went straight past Frederick, who had come in from the terrace with his shears still in his hand and stopped dead at the sight of her.
"My lady." He got in front of her. "What has happened?"
"Jacob's mother has collapsed." She did not slow down and he had to turn and come with her. "This morning, in her own doorway. She has not woken since and they have sent for the family."
Frederick stopped walking.
"Oh," he said. "Oh, the poor woman."
Something had gone out of his face entirely. Amelia had reached the door before she realized he was no longer beside her, and turned.
"That illness has taken the whole of her life," he said.
"Six years of it, my lady. I have watched her go down by inches ever since, and there has not been one thing any of us could do but carry her firewood.
" He shook his head slowly. "We must send her to London.
That is the only thing left. There are men there who—"
"Frederick."
"I will go myself and hire the cart. If it is money, your father will—"
"There is no time for London." Amelia said it flatly, because she had already worked it out on the lane and there was nothing in the arithmetic that came out otherwise.
"It is eight hours in a cart for a woman who cannot hold her own head up.
She would not last past Berkshire, and if she did, she would arrive to a physician who has never seen her before and knows nothing of the six years. "
Frederick's mouth opened.
"First I have to wake her," Amelia said. "After that we may talk about London. If there is anything to—"
She did not finish it.
She went out of the door and down the steps with the basket in one hand and the box under the other arm, and Frederick stood in the hall and watched her go across the lawn at a run, and did not call after her, and did not follow.
Then he set the shears down on the hall table, which he had never once in forty years done, and went to find her father.
◆◆◆
The door was open and there were three people in a room built for two.
Jacob was on the floor beside the bed with both hands round his mother's, and he had been there long enough that he did not look up when the light changed in the doorway.
The neighbor woman was at the foot of it with a basin she had not used.
The room was hot enough to feel from the step, and every window in it was shut, and somebody had put two blankets and a coat over a woman who was already burning.
"Jacob."
He turned then. His face came apart when he saw her and he did not manage to stop it.