Authors: Father Christmas
Crow shook his head sadly. “And here I thought seeing the infants would cure you of that rumgumption. Looks like the opposite. Lady Sefton’s holding a rout next month. May as well start looking there.”
He may as well. He couldn’t worry about some other man raising Tony’s children, and he couldn’t live the rest of his own life in Graceanne’s pocket, either. Besides, now that he was in London he had other interests to take care of, not just heirs and the Hold. There were other investments, other properties that needed tending. There were definitely more willing women.
* * *
Before Lady Sefton held her rout, and the newest crop of debutantes made their curtsies, Leland received a note from the Foreign Office. There was some trouble with the Prussian allies—power, money, the usual things—that called for his skills at diplomacy and his sober head at the stalled peace talks in Vienna. No Duke of Ware had ever refused the Crown. He’d have to go.
Before he left, Leland wrote to Graceanne in Warwick, assuring her that her finances were secure, as they’d discussed. His man of business, Eric Olmstead, would keep an eye on her accounts, and Milsom, who was now at Ware House, Grosvenor Square, London, could always get a message to him through the Foreign Office in case of emergency.
A ha’penny’s worth of good that was going to do her, Graceanne thought as she read his letter. By the time Ware got any of her correspondence, Pru would be long gone.
Days were easier than nights. Dreary January gave way to a brighter February, and Graceanne settled into her new, more comfortable life. Even the vicar reluctantly agreed their situation was improved. There were enough candles for him to read as late as he wanted, enough food that his stomach didn’t rumble embarrassingly during his sermons, and enough servants and nurserymaids that his pesky grandsons were not underfoot as much. Through his new correspondence with Professor Jordan, he was able to purchase some modern, modest texts, but still worthy additions to his collection.
Mrs. Beckwith recovered some of her health and some of her animation under the new regimen. She even began to make social calls now that she was not ashamed to reciprocate, and parish visits, since bringing bread to the needy did not mean taking it off her own table. Graceanne or one of the servants—they now had a cook, a man-of-all-work, and three girls who came from the village every day to clean and serve and help Meg in the nursery—would drive her in the pony can.
At first Prudence was also reaping the benefits of Graceanne’s windfall. Not that she ever did much, but even fewer chores fell on Pru’s shoulders now. Therefore she could spend most of her days with her bosom bow, Lucy, at the manor, to everyone’s relief, from Graceanne to the children to the servants, who were all targets of Pru’s derisive and demanding nature. Prudence was helping Lucy plan her trousseau, she claimed, and Graceanne hoped it was so, and not helping Liam Hallorahan supervise Squire’s new racing stable. Pru was filling out under the new cook’s plain but decent cooking, growing more womanly by the day, and Graceanne worried the young Irishman might find her sister even more appealing.
Somehow Graceanne’s days were as full as ever, even if she didn’t have to do all the baking and shopping and parish work. She still taught Sunday school and still helped her father make clean copies of his sermons, mostly to keep the peace with him. She still saw to the running of the household to conserve her mother’s strength, and she still kept the household accounts. In addition she spent hours over her own bank statements, making budgets, figuring interest, trying to plan for emergencies so she would not have to call on the duke. That extra money each month meant her security, so she stayed careful with her pence and pounds and did not turn into a spendthrift overnight.
Whatever excess of time Graceanne might have found was devoted to the boys. She took them on long tromps on nice days, to exercise the dog and the children. The sheepdog seemed to know his job by instinct, having adopted the twins as his own small flock. Duke always kept Willy and Les in sight, and tried his best to keep them together and out of danger. Unfortunately, he perceived the sexton as a sheep-stealer and the village dogs as wolves, but Graceanne was working on that. She was also working on teaching the boys their letters and numbers, after swearing to Leland that they were too young for formal schooling. The only fault he’d be able to find with their education was the lack of schoolbooks: Indoors they read from picture books, outdoors from tombstones in the church graveyard next door.
Her days were busy, but Graceanne no longer fell exhausted into her bed right after dinner. Now she had time to sit with her reading, mending, or letters, and think of all the time she had yet to fill. Endless hours, countless nights.
Then Liam Hallorahan came to ask Vicar Beckwith for Prudence’s hand.
The vicar said no, to no one’s surprise, not even Liam’s, Graceanne suspected. She was only surprised Mr. Hallorahan managed to leave with all his skin.
After that there wasn’t a restful night’s sleep to be had, what with Prudence alternating between shrieking and sobbing and slamming doors. The first night the twins woke up crying; the second night Mr. Beckwith moved a cot into the church; the third night a trembling Mrs. Beckwith pleaded with Graceanne to talk to her sister.
* * *
“You’re what?” Graceanne sank down on the one chair in Pru’s room. Prudence was stretched out on the mattress, a blanket over her head. Maybe she heard wrong. “You’re not really…?”
The blanket nodded, yes.
“Dear Lord, how did that happen? No, I know how it happens. That wicked Irishman had his way with you, didn’t he? Why, that dastard should be shot. If I were a man, I’d call him out, I would.”
There was a mumble from under the bedcovers.
“What do you mean, it wasn’t his fault? There was somebody else, too?”
Now Prudence sat up, indignation writ on her tear-puffed face. “Of course not, you gudgeon. I meant it wasn’t Liam’s fault. It wasn’t even his idea. I thought Papa would let us marry if I wasn’t a…you know.”
“But now you’re breeding!”
“Well, I didn’t
know
that would happen, did I? No one told me!”
No one thought she needed to know. Graceanne wanted to tear someone’s hair out—her own or Pru’s, she couldn’t decide. “You should have found out, for heaven’s sake! And you should have known better in the first place. What were you thinking?” she wailed, well aware the nodcocks hadn’t been thinking at all.
“I was thinking that I had to get out of here, that’s what. That if I stayed another year I’d grow old and ugly without ever going to parties and having fun. That I’d never meet any young men and I’d be on the shelf and living with my parents forever. Or end up marrying a farmer and having his grubby brats.”
“Now you’ll have Liam’s grubby—er, children.” Graceanne couldn’t quite see how a horse breeder was much above a wheat-and-barley farmer or a hog grower, but she didn’t have a chance to clarify that.
“Well, I never wanted a baby. I just wanted to go places. Liam goes to Tattersall’s twice a year to the auctions. That’s in London, you know. And he goes to horse fairs all the time. He said I could go along.”
Graceanne doubted any of those venues were proper places for a lady, and certainly not one with an infant. “When is the baby due?”
Pru rolled over, tired of the conversation. “Oh, I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know? Haven’t you been counting? Pru, you have to know, to make plans!”
“Stop shouting at me! Everyone’s always shouting at me! And I made my plans: I am going to marry Liam and get out of here. I didn’t want any baby, I told you. And no one ever told me I had to count. What, did you think Mama was going to tell me about breeding?”
No, Graceanne couldn’t picture their anxious mother explaining the marriage bed to her seventeen-year-old daughter. Mrs. Beckwith never told Graceanne a thing, not even on her wedding day. Tony only laughed and said he’d show her.
“I thought I could get rid of it somehow if I didn’t want it.”
Some of the army wives had hinted about such things, but Graceanne certainly didn’t know of any. “But Liam said that would be a sin.”
And laying with an innocent girl wasn’t? No matter, what was done was done, and if it couldn’t be undone, or redone differently, had to be fixed. “Papa said no?”
“He said he’d see me burn in Hell before he let me wed a Papist. I think they are one and the same to him. And no one else will marry us, since I am underage.”
“But did he know about the baby? Surely that must make a difference, even to Papa.”
“Liam was supposed to tell him when he asked permission for us to marry.” She sat up in the bed. “
You
can go talk to him, Gracie. He listens to you.”
* * *
If the Almighty himself was whispering in Beckwith’s ear, the vicar wouldn’t have listened. No daughter of his was going to marry out of the only true church, and that was that.
“But what do you expect Prudence to do, Papa? This isn’t just a flirtation she’ll grow out of if you forbid her to see the young man. This is a baby!”
The vicar slammed shut the Bible he’d been studying as though he could slam shut this conversation. “Then she can have it at the workhouse for all I care. Or let her go live in sin with her stableboy. She has already sinned, what difference can it make to her immortal soul?”
“But what about the child, Papa? Will you permit your own grandchild to be branded a bastard? Its life would be ruined forever, through no fault of the baby’s.”
“That is no grandchild of mine. Prudence is no longer my daughter.” He opened the Bible again, to the front, and pointed to the family listings.
Prudence Lynne Beckwith
was drawn through with a heavy black line. Several. If Graceanne hadn’t known the name, she couldn’t have made it out.
She shook her head. “You foolish old man. Did you think crossing her out of the family Bible was going to make the problem go away? Your daughter, your daughter Prudence, sir, is upstairs in her bedroom here, growing bigger with child even as you contemplate her life in the hereafter. What are you going to do about that, sir?”
“I’m going to write next Sunday’s sermon, girl, that’s what. About serpents’ tongues and disrespectful children and silver-tongued devils. You think something should be done about your sister’s condition, you do it. Get that…that Jezebel out of my house. You’re the one with the money and the influential friends, so go make your wicked arrangements. I blame you for the whole evil mess anyway.” He opened the Bible and began to read, his lips moving.
Graceanne wasn’t being shut out. “I? I am to blame, Papa? How can you say such a thing? I never encouraged her to meet with Liam, I never left them alone. I think she’s been planning this since before I came home from the Peninsula.”
Without looking up, without hearing her logic, the vicar growled: “Yes, you. You challenged my authority, you and your twice-damned duke. You’re the one who put ideas in her head, ideas above her station, made her want what she couldn’t have.”
“That’s unfair, Papa. Just seeing what Lucy Maxton had was enough to make Pru jealous when she had so little. Why, if you’d just let her laugh and dance like the other girls, she may have paid more attention to your lectures. You lavished everything on your precious books.” She waved her arms toward the glass-fronted cases. “And ignored the needs of your own family. You didn’t even give her your affection, Papa, how could you expect her not to look elsewhere?”
“Bah. To an Irishman? He cannot even vote.”
“Neither can women, but what’s that to the point?”
“The point is you encouraged her to think she could make decisions for herself, contrary to mine, counter to the natural order of things. Now she has to pay the price. Or you do, since you think money is more important than religion. Get out of my sight, girl, you are keeping me from God’s work.”
* * *
If there was one thing Graceanne was sure of, it was that not even God could want Pru’s baby to be born out of wedlock. Mary and Joseph were married, weren’t they? If He wasn’t going to take care of the situation, and the vicar wasn’t going to take care of the situation, Graceanne was damned well going to have to take matters into her own two hands.
Thinking this was very much a case of slamming the barn door after the cow ran out, Graceanne went to see Liam Hallorahan at Squire’s. She didn’t stop at the manor or pay her respects to Mrs. Maxton; she didn’t stop to think what gossip would arise. She just drove Posy around back to the new paddocks and stable complex. She pulled up alongside the cleared racing oval and handed Posy’s reins to one of the grooms who was standing around watching the training runs. Liam’s red hair stood out in the knot of men observing at the rails, and Graceanne marched purposely toward him, giving Squire a brief nod.
“A moment of your time, Mr. Hallorahan?”
“Sure and I wouldn’t deny a pretty lady, ma’am. Excuse me, Squire. Carry on, lads.”
Graceanne was fractionally aware, in one tiny corner of her mind, that Squire’s mouth was hanging open and some of the stablehands were sniggling and elbowing each other. “Choir business,” she firmly declared. In a way it was, although Liam and Pru had been making a lot more than music.
With her arm resting lightly on his, Liam drew her away from the others. When they were in full sight, but out of hearing, he grabbed her hand and asked, “Pru? She’s all right, Mrs. Warrington? Nothing’s wrong?”
The desperation in his voice reassured Graceanne. The handsome Irishman hadn’t just been leading her sister down the primrose path; he seemed to care. She bit back her first answer, that no, Prudence was not all right, she was
enceinte.
He already knew that. “Yes, she is fine,” she said instead. “Or as fine as can be expected while expecting. I, ah, came to ask your intentions.” Good grief, Graceanne thought, that sounded like a cheap melodrama. Her lines should have been declaimed by a maiden’s father or brother or someone who at least stood higher than the villain’s shoulder. Not that Liam Hallorahan was a true villain. He didn’t even look the part. He was tall and broad, but his sun-weathered face had laugh wrinkles and freckles, and he was running hard, callused hands through his hair in a distracted manner.
“I’m sorry,” she began again. “I know you asked my father in an honorable fashion for permission to marry Prudence. I meant, how shall you accomplish that, in light of his refusal?”
“And how soon, you’ll be after wanting to know, I’m sure. B’gad, and it’s all I’ve been worriting over meself.”
Graceanne noted that his brogue returned under duress. She patted his arm the way she would have comforted one of the twins, except Liam had muscles of iron under his corduroy jacket. She nodded. “And I came to offer my help. I have some money put by, if you need it to purchase a special license. I don’t know how expensive they are, do you?”
Liam smiled at her, showing dimples—he really was a most attractive man, not that hard muscles and dimples were any excuse for Pru’s fall from grace—and gently touched her cheek. “’Tis a fine lady you are indeed, Mrs. Warrington, but things are nary so simple. Aye, a special license would do the trick, but archbishops don’t hand dispensations to poor Irish Catholics. Your highborn English lords could get a license to marry their stepsisters, likely, given enow money and influence. I misdoubt they’d let me in the door unless I had that pot o’ gold I’ve been seeking me whole life.”