A Lady Awakened (25 page)

A
SECOND DAY
of threshing only solidified his opinions. How was he to properly enjoy a slice of toast again, knowing the terrible drudgery that lay behind it? And what primordial coxcomb had first grown discontented with the earth’s bounty of fruit and game, and cast a calculating eye on stalks of grain? He should like to meet that man, and fetch him a sound knock to his shaggy head. If he hadn’t lost all his quickness, that was. Nearly four weeks without a bout at the parlor might have done irreparable harm. Each in turn he took his hands from the traces to flex out the fingers and clench them in fists.

“Should you like me to take the reins, sir?” Mr. Quigley, a slight whippet of a man, had clearly been nonplussed by the master’s inclination to drive the wagon instead of riding alongside on a horse, as Granville had the decency to do, and was every minute watching for signs that he might be required to take over.

“Not at all. You did your part with the threshing this past week. You’re to sit back now, and enjoy what scenery we encounter on the way to this mill.”

Quigley set his wide-splayed fingertips on his knees, and frowned at the road before him. Something in the attitude brought Mrs. Russell to mind. Not much for the incidental pleasures, these denizens of Sussex.

But the scenery rolled past, for those capable of enjoying it, until finally a town loomed into view, and at its near end, a smallish river with a gray-brick mill on its bank. A fall in the river sent water over the top of the wheel, driving it round and round with presumably enough energy to turn a grindstone. Gears came into it somehow, or so Granville had said. Large gears and small gears interacting in some mysterious way to make the stone turn faster than the wheel itself. Sideways as well. The waterwheel sat upright while the grindstones, both the fixed one and the one that moved, lay horizontal. Granville had sketched a diagram and Theo had nodded sagely at it while daydreaming of the widow’s bed.

At the mill they unloaded their sacks of grain—let Quigley eye him as dubiously as he would; he could match muscles with any laborer—and watched a wheel-driven chain hoist them one by one to the sack floor, where some mill fellow stood ready to pour the grain down a chute to the grindstones. There would be nothing to do now but wait for the wheat to come back as sacks of flour.

He looked about him, reaching for the hat he’d put off while unloading the wagon. “I might go take a walk through that town, if you can spare me,” he said to the agent. “I’ve been used to going for long rambles this time of day, but never yet to any of the neighboring towns.” A superfluous lie, perhaps. For all he knew, Granville hadn’t even noticed his pattern of absences in the afternoons. At all events, the agent could indeed spare him, and Quigley raised no objections to his going, and so he set off up the road to where the hamlet properly began.

The town was a pretty thing of its kind, a hodgepodge of brick, whitewashed, and half-timbered buildings all shouldered together in cheerful ignorance of the modern age. Carts cluttered the curving high street: he’d come on market day. A flaxen-haired child was leaning out an upstairs window, wide eyes taking in all the bustle below. Theo raised his hat when the child’s gaze came to him, and was rewarded with as joyous a wave as if he’d been some beloved uncle just returned from a sea voyage with presents in his pockets.

Presents. He felt through the coins in his coat. He might buy a thing or two here. Decent cheese for Mr. Barrow, perhaps. Maybe something for Mrs. Russell. He started for the far end of the street, to make his way slowly back and see what was on offer.

More than one pretty girl glanced up at his passing. Speak of what was on offer. Even in the plainer clothes he’d put on for today’s chores, he must cut a notable figure in this town. He gave a little straightening tug to his coat and smiled at the girl nearest him.

Things could begin this way. Things so often had. Glances exchanged, a gaze held half a second longer than was proper, a smile in which she could read everything, or nothing at all.

Confound his shallow soul. Was he no better than this? He’d thought he’d detected, of late … well, he rather thought he’d detected a certain tenderness in his thoughts of Mrs. Russell. A certain something that ought to preclude such speculative attention to other women. Such full-body notice of the russet curls escaping this one’s bonnet. Of that one’s lips, quirked up at the corners and lush in between.

Well, his body looked out for his welfare, didn’t it? No profit in tender thoughts of Mrs. Russell. If he were foolish enough to fall in love—and Lord knows he was foolish enough for most uses—his would be a solitary plunge. He would blink up at her, as from the bottom of a well into which only he had been careless enough to tumble, while she peered down at him with a disapproving face, because she liked a man to be dependable and he could not be relied upon even to watch where he set his feet.

Regardless, he would be faithful. He’d pledged the widow a month of exclusive attentions, and a man’s word must be worth something. He turned deliberately to a cart at which the only female present was an un-tempting sort, a solid-looking matron in the lavender of half-mourning. Another widow, like as not. So much the better. She was picking, with a stately aspect, through the cart’s assortment of leafy things. Lettuces. Watercress. God only knew what. She threw one quick sharp look at him, and he bent his attention to the leafy things too.

“I beg your pardon.” Why not make a friend of her, if only for the minute or two they must bear each other’s company? He spoke softly, to omit the vegetable-seller from the discussion. “I’m not at all sure of how to choose a good lettuce. Are the darker leaves better?”

She looked at him again, assessing this time. Then she jabbed at a lettuce. “This is as good as you’re likely to find,” she muttered at the same confidential volume. “But don’t pay more than tuppence for it, no matter what he asks.”

Now what could he do but buy the lettuce? With one hand he hefted it; with the other he fished out a few coins.

“A lettuce for you there, sir?” said the vendor, all affability. “That’s five pence.”

Presumably he was to insult the vegetable, and its seller into the bargain, in hopes of threepence saved. He glanced at his neighbor, but she was picking with concentration through some parsley and didn’t glance back. He paid the five pence.

“Badly done,” she said through pursed lips as soon as the man had turned his attention elsewhere. “He saw your fine clothes and raised up the price. They’ll always take such advantage, if you allow it.”

“It’s only threepence lost. I’ve thrown that much away just cleaning out my pockets.”

“And didn’t he know that, too, to look at you. You look like you don’t know the cost of anything, pardon my saying so.”

“That’s only too true.” To be lectured by a lady in mourning had almost a cozy familiarity to it, these days. “I thought to buy a bit of cheese, and I haven’t the least idea what’s reasonable to pay.”

This subject drew her in further. “You’d do better to buy your own cow. There’s only the one dairy in these parts, and their cheese is inferior. You’d be sure to overpay for it, too, just as you did for that lettuce.”

“I can’t regret the threepence. I can’t begrudge the man a little profit. If he can get an extra few pennies here and there from those who won’t miss it, won’t that help to keep the price low for everybody else?” That was really a rather solid argument, all the way around.

Her eyes ran critically up and down his face. “I frankly fear for you at the dairy stall. They’ll have your pockets inside out before you’ve half begun.”

“Then might I prevail on you to go there with me and keep me out of danger? I’ll give you this fine lettuce for your trouble.” Notions were beginning to form; hazy notions of more than one good deed in which this woman might play some part.

“Keep your lettuce. I couldn’t enjoy it at the price, even paid by someone else. I can spare you five minutes, I think.”

They started up the high street. He introduced himself. The woman was a Mrs. Canning, a widow of some years who had apparently seen no reason to ever put off her half-mourning. “I’m neighbor to a widow myself,” he said, “though a much more recent one. Are you acquainted with Mrs. Russell of Seton Park?”

He could see her revising her opinion of his intelligence another notch downward. Yes, he was used to
that
from a woman in mourning as well. “She’s landed gentry,” came the answer. “Our paths haven’t crossed.”

“Ah, of course. Only you strike me as so much alike in your manner, in your common sense and plain way of speaking, and then of course the gravity with which you each approach widowhood. I had supposed you might know one another.” This gambit took him as far as the dairy stall, where he came to a stop, arms folded, and made a show of studying a wheel of cheese.

“I shouldn’t eat that if it stood between me and starvation.” Mrs. Canning dismissed the cheese with a single swift gesture. “Do you mean to say you’ve been calling on Mrs. Russell yourself?”

“A time or two, I have. How much will he ask for this inedible cheese?”

“Eight or ten pence a pound is what I hear. They’ve no shame. I’d lay my soul it’s half sawdust.” She frowned at the cheese with some ferocity. “It’s not proper for an unrelated man to call on a widow.”

“My point exactly. I wish I’d brought along a sister to keep house for me, so I could send her to call. A gentleman on his own isn’t a very useful kind of neighbor in these cases. And then, I don’t seem to make the right sort of conversation.” He rubbed a rueful hand over his jaw.

“You ought not to be making conversation at all. Hasn’t she any family come to stay with her?”

“None, I’m afraid. They’re mostly occupied with professions.” He moved along the stall. “Barrister and soldier and some such. And she was married too short a time, I gather, to acquire proper friends among the neighboring gentry. Ought the butter to be that color?”

“Don’t start me on the butter.” She shifted her glare to where it sat. “Do you know what they add to get that color? Copper.”

“Copper, indeed? Singular. You know, Mrs. Russell takes an interest in just these things. The diet of those too poor to keep a cow, and so forth. I shall have to tell her—but no, it’s better I don’t call. You’re quite right. Though she did serve me the most delectable cake. Now would you be so good as to ascertain the prices of some of these items for me?” He brought out a pencil and pocket-book. “I daren’t ask myself, or I’ll end by buying one of each.”

Mrs. Canning obliged him in fearsome fashion, demanding to know the cost of everything and repeating each price in ringing tones of incredulity, that he might have time to hear and copy it down. Here was grist for an idea, indeed, if the grindstones of his brain were up to the task. He pocketed the book and pencil, thanked the woman for her time, and insisted she take the lettuce, if only to feed to her pig.

He’d meant to buy presents. Perhaps he’d done better than that. Still, because a gentleman ought to finish what he set out to do, he stopped at the bakery stall and picked out a currant bun. At the street’s end he pitched the bun upstairs to the flaxen-haired child, who caught it, laughing, on the first try.

I
HAVEN’T THE
least idea of how to broach the subject.” Martha stood in the bay-window alcove of her dressing room, watching Sheridan put away some underclothes just back from laundering. “Her manners aren’t encouraging. And once she knows I’m seeking a child, she will surely deduce the reason, and then I’ll be at the mercy of her discretion and her sympathy, the latter of which seems to be in decidedly short supply.”

Sheridan brushed at the mourning gown hung over the wardrobe door. “I doubt she’d give it that much thought. I don’t think farm people care a great deal about intrigues among the gentry. Probably it’s all the same to her who owns Seton Park.”

I doubt … I don’t think … Probably …
These were not the foundations upon which to go forward with such a risk. She set her hands on her hips and tilted her chin to study the ceiling. “I wish I knew how long Mr. James Russell meant to stay. If he means to be here at the time of confinement, then I don’t see how to manage at all.”

“If you give birth to a son, there’ll be nothing to manage.” The maid knelt to brush the ruffle at the gown’s hem.

“Yes, but to count entirely on that outcome would be imprudent.” Though really, the deeper she got into this undertaking, the more imprudent every bit of it seemed. Mrs. Weaver’s child could very well turn out a girl. How was a desperate widow to proceed? Bargain with a dozen different women for the right to their unborn babies, to be certain of getting at least one boy?

And yet she wouldn’t regret her course. Not when the alternative had been to sit idle and watch everything fall into Mr. James Russell’s hands. “I shall have to cultivate that woman’s goodwill first of all.” She folded her arms and shifted her gaze to the view from the window. “
There
will be challenge enough to occupy all my resources, I don’t doubt. I can worry about how to broach the pertinent subject after I’ve accomplished that.”