Carla Kelly (10 page)

“She did. There is a tenor she is fond of.”

“Tell me, Mrs. Skerlong, if David is a Welshman, how did he come by a name like Wiggins?” Susan asked, concentrating on the intricate pattern of Lady Bushnell’s best table knives.

“I think it had something to do with what hurried him from Wales in the first place, Susan.” She leaned closer and lowered her voice some more. “Poaching.”

Susan’s eyes widened. “My goodness, but he’s a resourceful man. So he thought it best to revise his name?”

“Happens there is a village name of Wiggins just this side of the border,” Mrs. Skerlong explained. She shook her head. “I expect he’s not the first Welshman to decide on a name change, considering what hotheaded, impulsive works of nature most of them are. And it was probably one of those silly names with loads of
l
’s and
y
’s that decent folk can’t pronounce.”

“And then he took the king’s shilling and went to war?”

“It would appeal to a Welshman,” Mrs. Skerlong said. “When you’re done polishing, there’s plenty of nice warm water on the Rumford for rinsing.”

When the last piece of silverware was polished, washed, and returned to its felt-lined case, Susan sat down with Mrs. Skerlong for a bowl of mutton stew and brown bread good enough to exclaim over.

“On Thursday nights, I just leave the pot on the hob and everyone helps himself,” she said as they pushed away from the table. “Cora always seems to find the longest way home, usually dragging a tenor behind her.”

Susan went to the sink to help with dishes. “I should want a shortcut on these cold winter nights!”

“Well, then, you’re not in love, are you now?” The housekeeper said as she handed Susan a bowl to dry.

No, I am not, Susan thought, and felt a momentary pang for Cora and her singer. I think I would like to be, however. It was a pleasant notion, and one that nourished her through another slice of bread and cup of tea. She listened to the clock tick and the cat purr, and felt content. Last week I was stewing and fretting at Aunt Louisa’s, Susan reflected as she picked up her book and Mr. Wiggins’s package. Now I am happy enough to polish silver and eat in a kitchen. I am thinking that good breeding may be just a veneer among the Hamptons. Aunt Louisa would be flabbergasted. Susan nodded to the housekeeper, who was preparing Lady Bushnell’s dinner tray, and went upstairs.

There was another dress on her bed, this one a dusty rose, soft from much wear. She sniffed the fabric, breathing in the faint fragrance of cloves. “Packed away in cloves and tissue,” she murmured, holding the dress up to her and admiring it in the mirror. “Lady Elizabeth, your taste was impeccable.”

She sad on the bed, running her hand lightly over the material, thinking of ladies and officers, battle and bivouac. Such a strange life for a lady, to follow the drum, she considered. I wonder if I could ever love someone enough to give up comfort and ease, to ride a horse, sleep in tents, and abandon my privacy. I think I do not know much about love. She thought of Elizabeth following her father through all of Spain and Portugal, and realized with pain that she would not follow Sir Rodney Hampton across the street. “Why ever should I?” she said suddenly, her words a rebuke in the quiet room. She covered her mouth and looked around; she hadn’t meant to be so loud.

Lady Bushnell had also left scissors, needle, and thread on the bed, so Susan removed her dress, put on one of her own simple frocks, and cut the buttons off the dress she had been wearing. “Lady Elizabeth, you had a neater figure than mine,” she said as she realigned the buttons to allow herself more room.

Evening came quickly, and she lit a lamp to complete the work, humming to herself and looking out at the snow. It was melting now, exposing dark patches of earth. She willed spring to come, even as she sighed and watched clouds weighed down with snow boil up again from the northwest. She snipped the thread tail off the button and leaned back in her chair, her eyes on the road from Quilling. The room was warm and her eyes closed.

“Susan? Susan?”

She opened her eyes slowly, reluctant to surrender her peace, to see someone of familiar height and bulk standing in the open doorway. It was full dark outside, and the coals in the hearth had settled into a compact glow. She sat up and turned the lamp higher. “Someone wants me? Lady Bushnell?” she asked him.

“No. Just me,” the bailiff said, apology at disturbing her evident in his voice. “I knocked, but you were sunk pretty deep.” His eyes went to the rose wool dress on the bed. “I remember that dress.”

Susan indicated the other chair in the room. Leaving the door open, he crossed to the hearth, squatted down to add some more coal, then sat in the chair.

“Was she pretty?” Susan asked, looking at the dress, too.

He rested casually in the chair, his feet propped on the fireplace fender, making himself entirely at home, to her amusement. “Oh, something like,” he said, his voice warm now with reminiscence. “Her hair wasn’t as dark as yours, and her eyes were green like her mother’s. She was a bit of a flirt, with a quick temper.” He folded his hands across his stomach, more completely relaxed than Susan had seen him yet. He looked at her. “You’d probably have found her an ignorant puss—Lady Bushnell could never interest her in books or theorems—but she knew tactics and strategies as well as the rest of us, and much better than the little lordlings with purchased commissions.”

I believe I could listen to a Welshman all day, Susan thought, making herself more comfortable. I love the way his voice lifts like a question at the end of his sentences. “Would I have liked her?” she asked, wanting him to speak.

He considered the question a moment. “I doubt it,” he said honestly. “She was an imperious baggage, quite proud of her horsemanship and her command over the men of the regiment.” He sighed and looked at the fire again.

“Were you in love with her?”

He chuckled, but did not look at her. “We all were,” he said softly. “It wasn’t so much that she was pretty—offhand, I think you’re more attractive than she was—but she was
there.
” He spread his hands palms up in his lap, his eyes still on the fire. “You can’t have any conception how nice it was to just pass by Lady Elizabeth on the quick march and smell her. By God, we stunk the length and breadth of Spain, but she always smelled so sweet.” He reached behind him and fingered the dress on the bed. “Of cloves.”

Do you think me attractive? she thought. Too bad one of my own kind never did. “How sad that she died,” Susan murmured.

“Yes. Did you know, she was just newly engaged to one of the officers of the regiment?” the bailiff commented, taking his booted feet off the fender and sitting up straighter.

“How tragic!”

He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter, not really. Her fiancé died at Waterloo.” He looked at her then. “She would just have been a widow like her mother and sister-in-law. My God, there is a whole generation of young widows. Can I tell you how much I hate war?”

His words hung in the air, and she could think of nothing to say. After a moment, she picked up the blue dress again and sewed on another button while the bailiff returned his gaze to the flames. She watched his profile, dark and intent, his shoulders tense, and half rose from her chair, her hand extended to touch him.

Reason prevailed; she put down her hand. But the bailiff had turned slightly when she rose, so she could not sit down like an idiot, with no explanation of her sudden movement. She remembered the package on the bureau and crossed in front of him, her skirts brushing his legs. She handed it to him. “Forgive my manners. Did you come for this package? I don’t know why I didn’t just leave it on the kitchen table.”

He looked at her in surprise, as if wondering why he had come at all. “Why, yes, I did,” he said smoothly, then laughed. “What a bumbler I am!” He opened the package and pulled out two letters. “One to you and one to me.”

“To me?” she asked, accepting the folded sheet with her name clearly written on it.

He nodded and then laughed again, less self-consciously, as he pulled a glove from the package. “And a present from our friend Joel Steinman.”

Susan put down her letter unread and pulled her chair up before the fire and beside the bailiff. “What kind of joke is this?” she asked, grateful that his mood had changed.

He laid the glove across his leg and opened his letter. “No joke, Susan. My chief shepherd lost his left hand in a shearing accident a few years back. I wrote to Joel about it, and now he sends the right glove that he has no use for, every time he buys a new pair.”

“The two of you are so clever,” Susan commented, picking up the glove.

“It’s a small thing, but just what old Ben Rich needed to get himself over the melancholy of it all,” the bailiff explained. He smiled again in that oblique way that she was beginning to recognize as shyness. “I don’t think any old Waterloo shades would rise and haunt me if I fibbed and told the old fellow that Steinman was a war hero. It seemed to help.”

“I think you were all heroes,” she said softly, shy herself now as she returned the glove to his leg.

“Not all,” he said, his voice intense again, with no lilt to it. “Not all,” he repeated, leaning back again. “I could tell you . . .” He paused. “Except that I won’t.” He picked up the note from the employment agent, and his face relaxed as he continued reading. “Oh, this is good, Susan. ‘David, here is another glove for Ben Rich from his Jewish Waterloo hero, Steinman the Magnificent.’” He looked at Susan, then back at the letter. “Except that I don’t understand this part,” he commented, holding the paper closer to the fire.” ‘Remember the debt I said I could never pay? Have I paid it now? Let me know what you think. Your Waterloo albatross, Joel.’” he crumpled the letter and overhanded it into the fireplace. “Joel is, at times, inscrutable.”

“Waterloo albatross?” Susan asked. She hitched her chair closer. “I have been wondering how you know Mr. Steinman. And what is this debt? And I wish I knew why he was so keen to send me here, considering that Lady Bushnell is a bit of an ogre,” she grumbled, folding the blue dress and putting it on the bureau.

The bailiff looked up from the little blaze from the burning paper and gave her his full attention. His frown turned into a modest smile, and then a grin that went all the way to his eyes. She gazed back at him, pleased that he was gone from gloomy to elated in so short a time, and unable to resist smiling at him, too. What a good thing that my social class makes me impervious to bailiffs with shady backgrounds, she told herself. All of a sudden she didn’t know what to do with her hands. As David Wiggins continued to smile at her, she put them behind her back. Welshmen are so changeable, she thought. I wonder what is on his mind?

“I’m glad you’re feeling cheerful again, but I am just nosy enough to want to know how you became friends with a Jewish employment agent, and at Waterloo yet? I would not have thought Mr. Steinman to be soldier material. That is, if you don’t mind telling me,” she asked, wondering why it was she had a marked tendency to babble in front of the bailiff.

“Oh, my word,” David said, still regarding her with an expression that was beginning to make her stomach feel warm. “I suppose I saved his life, and he decided to become my burden. He swore he would do me a good deed that would fulfill his obligation.”

“And did he?” she asked. “From that letter, he seems to think so. Do you?”

“I think he has,” the bailiff replied after another moment of regard in her general direction. He patted the chair she had vacated. “Sit and I’ll tell you. It’s not a long story.”

She did as he said, thinking about Aunt Louisa and propriety, then tucked her feet up under her to be more comfortable. It would be rude for me to tell him that ladies did not listen to war stories, but who is to say that I am still a lady, anyway. There was nothing proper about having this man in her room, and so late at night, except that it felt right. Somehow, I must learn to trust my own judgment, she told herself.

“It’s a tame enough story, Susan. Joel Steinman was a purchasing agent with the army at Ostend, on the coast,” David began.

“You knew him then?”

He shook his head. “No. Our acquaintance was one of those sudden war things. He and others in the commissary went to Mont St. Jean to witness the battle from its height, so he told me later. The Fifth formed one of the squares on the battle line above the farmhouse called La Haye Sainte.”

“Wheat fields?”

“Yeah,” he said simply, and for a moment his eyes saw something far away. “By late afternoon it was not much of a square, what with Boney’s lovely daughters pounding away, and the
chasseurs
riding at us when the guns were silent.” He looked at her. “Have you ever been in a situation that you thought would never end?”

She decided it would be fatuous to compare endlessly waiting for her London Season to something as desperate as that battle, so she shook her head.

“It was the longest day of my life, and the shortest,” he said simply. “Time passed so strangely. It was during one of those intervals when the
chasseurs
were retiring down the hill and our own gunners were running from the protection of our squares back into the firing lines, when someone in the rear decided that we might—just might—be low on ordnance. Some of the noncombatants watching the fight were pressed into service. Joel was one of them.” The bailiff closed his eyes as if to aid his memory. “He leaped off the cart and tugged out two or three boxes of cartridges before we noticed that the
chasseurs
were returning, and the cart and driver had fled the front lines.”

“So there he stayed and fought?” Susan asked when the bailiff’s silence continued.

He opened his eyes. “No. There he stayed in time for a shell to crash into his arm. It must have been one of the last shells, before the cavalry was on us again. I was the closest man to him not otherwise occupied, or not wounded too seriously, so I ran to help.”

“No wonder he feels under obligation to you. How good that you were quick enough.”

To her surprise, he shook his head. “I was one of two sergeants still alive, and I left my position beside Lord Bushnell.” His voice shook, and his hand knotted into a fist as it rested in the arm of the chair. He looked at her again, as if asking for judgment. “What could I do? My duty was to stay by my commander, and here was this man screaming in agony. I went to him, jerked on a tourniquet, but after the next charge, Lord Bushnell was dead.”