Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
“Are we really doing this, Papa?” Charlie asked softly. “Are we really going to the autumn fair?”
Saturday arrived under a sky scrubbed clean by overnight rain. The carriage rattled along the turnpike road toward Langton Cross, and Freddie had pressed himself so far forward on the bench that Alice feared he would slide off it.
She looked up at Kenneth, who flashed her a tired smile.
“Indeed, we are,” he said simply.
“Will there be swordfighting?” Freddie demanded. “Tommy Briggs said last year that a man swallowed fire. Real fire. From his mouth.”
“Tommy Briggs,” Kenneth said from the opposite bench, “has a tendency to embellish.”
“But there could be fire swallowing. You don’t know. You weren’t there.”
Kenneth’s mouth thinned. He glanced at Alice, and she saw a flicker of discomfort cross his features before he mastered it. He had not been to a village fair in years, she suspected.
Charlie sat beside her, his telescope balanced on one knee, his gaze fixed on the green blur of hedgerows beyond the glass. His elbow brushed her sleeve when the carriage swayed.
Miss Leyton occupied the remaining corner, her hands folded around a small reticule. She kept her mouth set in a line that suggested she understood precisely how difficult managing the twins would become once the carriage door opened.
The fair announced itself before the carriage crested the final hill. Music floated up from the valley, a fiddle and a squeeze-box tangled in some country reel.
Freddie scrambled across to the window and pressed his nose to the glass. “I can see tents. And a flag. There are people everywhere.”
Kenneth descended first. He offered his hand to Alice, and she took it, conscious of Miss Leyton climbing down behind her and the boys spilling out of the carriage door before the step had been properly lowered.
Langton Cross had transformed. The village green, which on ordinary days hosted nothing more exciting than a flock of geese and a war memorial, was crowded by canvas stalls, bunting strung between the elms, and a press of bodies that smelled of roasting meat and crushed grass and cider.
A man in a leather apron was turning a pig on a spit near the church wall.
Children darted between the stalls, clutching sticky buns.
A woman sold ribbons from a tray balanced on her hip.
Alice could hardly believe how all this had come together so easily. Of course, her part in it was more that of a silent patron than an organizer. But it had kept the boys busy enough and had shown the tenant families her willingness to be involved in their lives.
Freddie seized her hand and pulled. “Sweets. I can smell them. This way.”
He dragged her through the crowd before she could object, and Charlie followed at a trot. She looked back over her shoulder to see Kenneth follow them leisurely.
The sweets stall occupied a prime spot near the maypole.
Glass jars lined the table in rows: barley sugar, bull’s-eyes, pear drops, treacle toffee wrapped in wax paper, sugared almonds in three colors.
The stallholder wore a stained apron and a grin that suggested she had been selling sweets to children for decades and found the work endlessly amusing.
“One each,” Alice said.
Freddie chose a paper twist of treacle toffee without hesitation. Charlie studied the jars for a full minute before pointing to the sugared almonds.
“Pink or white?” the stallholder asked.
“Pink, please.” Charlie took the small bag and held it against his chest.
“And you, Alice?” Freddie was already unwrapping his toffee. “You have to pick one. Fair rules.”
“I do not believe those are the rules.”
“They are now. I just made them. Pick.”
Alice pointed to the pear drops. The stallholder scooped a generous handful into a paper cone and winked.
Kenneth materialized beside her and paid for the pear drops. He stood close enough that his sleeve brushed hers, and she became aware of his height in a way she had not been since the carriage ride after the dinner party, when his body had filled her field of vision and his mouth had covered hers.
She took a step sideways.
Freddie, toffee bulging in one cheek, pointed across the green toward a cluster of barrels arranged beneath a canvas awning. “Apple bobbing! Alice, you must try it. You must.”
“I am a duchess, Frederick. I cannot put my head in a barrel in public.”
“Why not? Duchesses don’t eat apples?”
“Duchesses do not submerge their faces in water at village fairs for the entertainment of strangers.”
“Coward,” Freddie said, grinning.
Alice looked at the barrels. A line of children waited their turns, and a red-faced farmer presided over the contest, bellowing encouragement. The apples bobbed in the grey water, glossy and defiant.
She unfastened the ribbons of her bonnet and handed it to Miss Leyton. “Hold this, please.”
Kenneth’s eyebrows rose. She ignored him.
The water shocked her when she plunged her arms in, cold enough to send a jolt through the wool of her sleeves where they had been rolled past the cuffs.
The apple slid away from her teeth once, twice, a third time.
She could hear Freddie shouting instructions from the sideline, none of them useful.
Charlie’s quieter voice called, “Try the small one on the left.”
Her hair was soaking. Water ran down her chin and into the collar of her dress.
The farmer chuckled. A group of village women had gathered to watch. She could feel their stares on the back of her neck, but she did not withdraw. She was not going to surface empty-mouthed in front of Freddie and hear about it for the next three years.
She lunged forward. Her teeth broke the apple’s skin and closed around the flesh, then she straightened, dripping, triumphant, the apple clamped between her jaws.
Freddie erupted into cheers. Charlie clapped, two sharp strikes that rang out above the din. Even Miss Leyton smiled.
Alice removed the apple from her mouth and laughed.
She pushed her wet hair back from her face and turned to find Kenneth watching her.
His gaze settled on her mouth and stayed there a beat too long, then another beat still.
She could feel the weight of his attention on her lips, warm and focused, while a flush that had nothing to do with the cold water crept up her neck.
She looked away first and reached for the cloth the farmer offered, pressing it against her dripping chin.
“Well done,” Kenneth praised, his voice rough. He cleared his throat. “Well done.”
They moved through the fair. Freddie led the way, as he always did, keeping up a running commentary that left no silence unfilled. Charlie walked beside Alice, his bag of sugared almonds tucked into his coat pocket.
The cannon blast came without warning. A man at the far end of the green had set off a signal gun to mark the start of a sack race, and the report cracked across the fair like a whip.
Charlie flinched, and his hand shot out and closed around Alice’s fingers, gripping them hard. He pressed himself against her side.
Alice curled her fingers around his and held on. She did not kneel or fuss. She simply held his hand and kept walking, as though this were the most natural arrangement in the world. After a few yards, his grip loosened, but he did not release her.
Kenneth had stopped three paces ahead. He turned and looked at Charlie’s hand in Alice’s, and Alice watched his expression shift from surprise to a reluctant recognition of what it meant that his quieter son, the one who measured every interaction and weighed every risk before committing to contact, had reached for her without hesitation.
He swallowed once, turned around, and walked on.
The archery butts stood at the far edge of the green, away from the crowd, six straw targets set at forty yards. A chalk line marked the shooting position, and a squat man in a felt hat was collecting entries for the next round.
“Papa.” Freddie planted himself in Kenneth’s path. “You should enter.”
“I should not.”
“But you’re good at archery. Mr. Briggs says that you used to practice in the south paddock every morning. He says you could put an arrow through a keyhole at fifty paces.”
“Mr. Briggs exaggerates.”
“But show us.” Freddie crossed his arms. “Enter the contest. Win us a prize.”
Kenneth looked at the targets, then at the queue of farmers and tradesmen lining up to shoot. He shook his head.
“Perhaps your father is worried he might lose,” Alice piped up. She kept her tone mild, innocent. “In front of the tenants. That would be embarrassing.”
Kenneth turned to her. She met his gaze and held it.
“I am not worried about losing.”
“Then there is no reason not to enter.”
He looked at Freddie, whose face had achieved a state of expectation so intense that refusal would have been a cruelty, and then he looked back at the targets.
He removed his coat and handed it to Alice. The waistcoat beneath stretched across his shoulders, and Alice busied herself by folding the coat over her arm rather than looking at the width of his back as he walked to the chalk line.
The felt-hat man handed him a bow. Kenneth tested the draw, adjusted his grip, and sighted along the shaft. Alice watched his right hand draw the string to his cheek, the cords of his forearm taut beneath his rolled shirtsleeves, before he loosed the arrow.
It struck the center ring and buried itself in the straw with a clean, solid thud.
Freddie shouted. Kenneth nocked a second arrow without expression and released it into the center ring again, an inch from the first. He drew a third and then a fourth, and each one found the same tight cluster, the shafts angled slightly, crowding one another in the straw.
A crowd had gathered. Farmers nudged each other. The felt-hat man rubbed the back of his neck and stared at the target.
Kenneth set the bow down and walked back to Alice. His face betrayed nothing, but his eyes held a glint she had not seen before, hovering between amusement and quiet satisfaction.