CHAPTER TEN
The cottage was minute. Was it from here that Rosina had written that fateful letter? The woman who opened the door had her eyes, but they moved constantly, in the way of blind people, and it was clear they saw nothing.
She was a pudgy woman, of less than average stature, with a wrinkled face under a large mob-cap, and a slightly grimy apron tied about her middle. She looked, Raith thought, exactly like a nurse.
“Who’s this you’ve brought, Toly?” she said gruffly, just as if she could see them both.
“It’s two gennelmen, Mrs H. Come to find you. I didn’t rightly know if I ought to have brung ’em. Only I didn’t like to refuse, seeing as —”
“I think, ma’am, that we can speak for ourselves,” Ottery interrupted. “May we come in?”
The nurse raised her chin, moving her head from side to side as though she took in something of the look of her visitors. Almost Raith would swear that she could see. After a moment, she nodded, somewhat grudgingly opening the door.
It led directly into an incommodious kitchen, which must nevertheless, Raith thought, be the biggest room in the place.
The two of them, great-coated as they were, seemed to dwarf the place.
The nurse bade them all sit down, herself moving to an open range where she set a copper kettle to the fire.
Raith noted how she felt her way about, marvelling at her resilience.
He seated himself on a plain wooden chair at one end of the table, while Ottery took his place next to him. The boy hovered by the door. The elderly dame then turned from the fire, and came to the table. She did not sit.
“You’re the one, I think,” she said, turning her face in Raith’s direction.
“The one what?” he asked, in quick reaction.
“As wants to see me.”
“Your guesses are uncanny.”
She shook her head. “It ain’t guesswork, sir, not by a long way. When you’ve lost one sense, you find you can use others a deal better.”
“I have heard it said so,” Ottery put in. “It is reassuring to discover it is true.”
“Now you, sir,” said the nurse, turning to him, “are one as comes along of t’other. It ain’t nowise your affair as you’ve come for.”
“You are perfectly correct,” said Ottery, with a lift of the eyebrow and a smile for his client.
Raith was experiencing the most extraordinary sensation of premonition. This woman knew just who he was.
As if she read his thought, she turned her sightless eyes towards the door. “I thank you, Toly, and you can leave the gentlemen safe here with me. They ain’t nowise harmful.”
“You sure, Mrs H?”
“Yes, you run along, boy. ’Tis private business as this gentleman has with me.” She waited only until the young lad who had been their guide had left the cottage and shut the door. Then she moved back to the range. “Now, my lord, you’ll take tea?”
She did know! Raith exchanged a glance with his lawyer, and found his own amazement reflected in the other’s face. The nurse was busying herself with a pot and a set of cups and saucers. He put it into words. “How do you know me?”
“Ah, that would be telling,” said the elderly dame over her shoulder. She spooned tea-leaves into the pot.
Raith grimaced at the lawyer. Ottery grinned. He looked at the woman’s back.
“How long have you lived in Withibrooke, Mrs Hoswick?”
“Since just after Mrs Charlton upped and died,” she said, without turning round. “I’d a deal better have stayed with my dove, but it weren’t to be. He wouldn’t have me, not as my sight were going.”
Raith mouthed at Ottery, “Who?” and received a lift of the eyebrows, and a quick shake of the head. Perhaps it was too soon to probe.
She was extraordinarily handy with the teacups for a blind person.
Raith jumped up to accept them from her, passing a saucer with a cup containing the steaming brew across to Ottery.
It was not a beverage to which he was partial, but it would be politic to drink it.
He would not wish to offend this woman’s sensibilities.
He watched her place her own dish carefully in front of her, some distance from the edge of the table.
Then she pulled out a chair and sat down, facing Raith.
“Now, my lord, tell me. How is my Rosy? Fourteen days it’s been. Is she well? Is she happy?”
Raith could not speak for a moment, silenced by his consciousness of the distress to which he had reduced the girl for whom this woman obviously cared deeply. She had been counting the days. What was he to tell her?
He hesitated too long. Mrs Hoswick’s head drooped a trifle, and she sighed.
“I knew it. Her letter was all too silent, poor lamb.” She tutted for a moment, sipped her tea, and then looked up, suddenly brisk. “Well, and what do you want of me, my lord?”
On impulse, Raith reached out to touch one of the work-roughened hands. “Your help, Mrs Hoswick. I am as anxious as you are for Rosina’s happiness.”
She allowed his hand to rest upon hers for a moment without speaking. He removed it, and she stood up. “Will you allow an old woman a liberty, my lord?”
Raith shot a glance at Ottery, who shrugged expressively. “Of what nature?”
“Let me feel your face.”
Instinct caused Raith to shrink inwardly. What had Rosina told her in that letter? The thought of those pudgy hands playing over his scarred face was acutely uncomfortable. But if that was what it was going to take? He looked at his lawyer, whose features were creased with concern.
“It is a blind person’s way of seeing, my lord,” he murmured, setting down his own cup, and mouthing further on a whisper, “Will you risk it?”
Raith drew a breath, and mouthed back, “I have no choice.” Ottery nodded, and Raith turned back to the nurse. “Very well.”
She moved around the table, obviously so familiar a motion she did not need to use her hands. Raith shifted his chair, and waited, rigid with tension, as she stood before him.
The fingers that came to rest upon his face were gentle.
He had an immediate vision of Rosina under these hands as they stroked comfort.
The touch was feather-light, and his rigidity lessened, until it came in contact with his disfigurement, and hesitated.
Unlike Rosina, whose finger had traced the line, the nurse’s played a rhythmic stroke back and forth across it, at the same time as she did as much on his other cheek.
He sighed out his breath as her examination ended, and saw her nod. “You’ll do.”
Raith was betrayed into a laugh. “I thank you.”
Ottery intervened. “Do you feel inclined to help his lordship, ma’am?”
“I’ll tell him only where to find out what he wants to know.”
Raith could take this no longer. “How do you know what I want? How did you know it was I?”
The nurse laughed comfortably. “Ah, you mustn’t run away with the idea that I’m a seer, nor nothing like that.
Deduction, my lord. You weren’t him, I’d take my oath.
He’d not have come here with no pleasant words for such as I, he wouldn’t.
Nor he wouldn’t bring no one with him, unless it were t’other.
Him I’d know, though we ain’t met. One whiff of his breath is all it ’ud take, my lord, and that’s a fact. ”
So that was what she had been doing on the doorstep.
Sniffing at them. He glanced to his lawyer and found the same deep appreciation upon his features.
But this passage had been all too confusing, besides sending a riffle of that jealous flame burning through him.
Two of them. Which of these was the man whose throat his itching hands sought to surround and strangle?
“I pray you, Mrs Hoswick, could you sort out one ‘him’ from the other?”
There must have been an indication of his unquiet thoughts in his voice, for she shot her face towards him, and a frown creased her brow. Raith felt impelled to reassure her.
“Don’t be alarmed. I have need of this information. I will not use it ill, I promise you.”
Mrs Hoswick clasped her hands together on the table. “The only thing I care for, my lord, is that my Rosy is safe. Now, if you can’t make her so, then you’d best bring her back to me.”
“I want to keep her, Mrs Hoswick. Only I cannot, if I do not…” He faded out, unwilling to put into words the hideous truth of his intended findings. He wondered how much she knew. He dared swear she would not say.
“I can’t tell you nothing, my lord,” said the nurse, folding her lips together, and rising. “You’d best go now.”
Raith leaped up, casting an anguished glance at his lawyer. To his relief, Ottery took over. Rising, too, he moved to lay a hand on the nurse’s shoulder. She must have heard him approach, but she flinched, throwing it off.
“His lordship is anxious to find out the truth, ma’am. You cannot wish for Lady Raith — I mean, for your nurseling, for that is now her name — to find herself back in the hands of the man whom she fears above all others.”
For the first time, Mrs Hoswick began to look anxious, kneading her hands in her apron. “If only I knew what to do for the best.”
“She is my wife, ma’am,” said Raith, anxiety rife. “Neither of us knew, when we wed, that we would find ourselves with a marriage utterly other than that we had planned. But it is so. Help me to make it safe for her.” He hesitated, watching uncertainty ripple across the elderly dame’s features.
“I don’t know, my lord,” she said, the sightless eyes shifting with the uneven tenor of her thoughts.
Raith moved to her, and sought her hands, holding them strongly. “Mrs Hoswick, if it turns out otherwise, I promise you faithfully that I will return Rosina to you, intact. And provide you both with means to secure what haven you please.”
“He means it, Mrs Hoswick,” Ottery put in, adding persuasively, “If you wish, I will write it all out for you, and His lordship will sign it, that you may be certain of a right in law.”