Carla Kelly (23 page)

“Promise me you will never lie to me, Susan,” was all she said. “Let me know straight up what is going on.”

“I cannot fool her,” she told the bailiff on the hillside as May slipped into June.

He massaged her knee thoughtfully. “Has she asked you about Charlie?”

“No, thank God. I pray she will not.” She took his hand and pressed it to her cheek. “But she does ask me all the time now when we are going to Belgium. She talks of Brussels, and Mont St. Jean, and stopping at the chateau at Hougoumont. Oh, David, is there any way we could take her there?”

“It would mean our jobs and no character references, Suzie, if the Marches found out,” he said. “No. The answer’s no. It’s what I tell her when she asks me.”

“But she keeps asking!”

“And we keep telling her no, Susan. It just can’t be.”

It was easy enough to agree with him, sitting there in the wheat, his hand on her leg, but harder all the time as she finished copying the letters, then began to write Lady Bushnell’s army experiences in the Peninsula as the widow dictated them. After wrangling half a day over the title, they decided they would call it “A Lady’s Reminiscence in the Army of Wellington.”

“I like that,” the bailiff said one night when they were lying in bed, pleasantly pleased with each other. He kissed her hand and draped it over his chest. “Where do you start?”

“Well, you usually don’t object if I touch you here and here,” she mentioned, moving her hand and putting her leg across his.

“Silly! You know what I mean. Does she begin at Vimeiro?”

“Yes. And we’ve already covered the part where she rescued that wretched Welshman from three hundred lashes. Let’s discuss this later, David.”

“He was a wretch,” the bailiff murmured, rolling over and giving her his undivided attention.

Later, when he slept, his arms protective around her as usual, she lay awake, thinking of Lady Bushnell. Every day now, you ask me about Waterloo, and I feel your urgency, and all I can do is shake my head and tell you no. You tell me of Busaco, and Ciudad Rodrigo, and horrible Badajoz, and I write it all down, but behind it all, like a blaze behind a fire screen, is Waterloo and Charles. She sighed and burrowed closer into the bailiff’s warmth. Your mother’s heart has to know.

She knew better than to pester the bailiff anymore about it. “Susan, that’s enough,” he had said firmly one night on the hill. The wheat was almost up to her waist now, and she ran her hands across it as he did, enjoying the prickle of the forming kernel in the hull against her palms.

She stopped, embarrassed. “I know you have other things on your mind,” she apologized. Only last week the bailiff and his crofters had washed the sheep in the dip beside the shearing floor. He had come home so tired from picking up sheep and tossing them into the narrow trough of water that she had to sit on his back and rub his arms and shoulders so he could sleep. The shearing would begin tomorrow.

“I shouldn’t pester you,” she said as she looked at the manor beyond the wheat. “It’s just that she wants it so badly and . . .”

“Sometimes we don’t get what we want,” he interrupted, his voice short.

She looked at him then, really looked at him, admiring the fineness of his face. “You did,” she said softly. “So did I.”

“Susan!” he protested. He took her hands in his, turned up the palms, and kissed them. “Susan.” He smiled at her, his irritation gone already. “I suppose we will have the most stubborn children.”

“Of course,” she agreed as she watched the storm leave his face as quickly as it had come. “There’s nothing weak about this Hampton.”

Later on, much later, when she had time to contemplate the many-stranded weaving that is fate, she asked herself if saying Hampton had brought on what followed. It didn’t seem likely, and she was not superstitious, but there was something in the saying; she knew it.

The shearing went without a hitch, all noise, and heat, and smell and excitement, and crofters’ children running about beside the shearing floor, where the itinerant shearers did their rapid trade. The bailiff even tried one sheep, grinning at her as he wrestled the sheep between his legs and clipped away, stripping it naked. The odor of lanolin rose and filled the stone hall, and she had to turn away, smiling to herself and thinking naughty thoughts for the bailiff to satisfy later.

Lady Bushnell had insisted on coming along for the shearing. “I am always at the shearing, Susan, so save your breath to cool your porridge,” the woman insisted. She sat ramrod straight like royalty, taking in the business of the day, accepting a glass of ale from an awed Owen Thrice.

“Is she a queen?” he whispered to Susan.

“I think so,” Susan whispered back. Most of all you are a colonel’s wife, she thought, her arms around Owen’s shoulders, a follower of the drum who did not flinch from guns, or hunger, or siege, or betrayal, or the fickleness of fortune, that tawdry slut. I wonder what you would do if I told you I loved you, she considered. She had no answer, so she kissed the top of Owen’s head instead, sending him into the worst paroxysm of mingled pleasure and embarrassment. He released himself from the burden of affection by teasing a crofter’s child and making her cry.

It was a long day, and she was glad, for Lady Bushnell’s sake, to see the end of it. The widow was much too tired to read any of her army letters, or eat anything beyond a few bites of gruel, which came with Mrs. Skerlong’s loving admonitions about overdoing it, and “forgetting that we’re not as young as we think we are, Lady B.”

The bailiff dragged himself in later, reeking of wool, exhausted beyond food and single-minded about his bed. He offered no objections when Susan helped him from his clothes, and was asleep before she extinguished the lamp. If he even moved all night, she was unaware of it.

In wordless conspiracy, Susan and Mrs. Skerlong let them sleep the next morning. They ate porridge and milk in the kitchen, listening to the thunder rumble and then fade. “I wish it would rain,” Mrs. Skerlong said as she took the dishes to the sink. “Have you seen such weather?”

She had not. The sky was gray-green and seemed to loom over the earth like a blanket, casting an eerie shadow on the Waterloo wheat. She sniffed the air, shading her eyes with her hand to watch the thundercloud rise up and up like a genie out of a lamp. It was quiet, too, with no barnyard fowl complaining; even the birds were silent.

How good that I am not given to megrims over the weather, she thought, even as she frowned at the sky and wandered from room to room, dissatisfied without being able to explain why. She looked in on the bailiff, who slept bare on top of the sheets now, sweating from the strange, wet heat. Lady Bushnell stayed decorously under the covers in her room, but she seemed troubled by dreams.

When Susan came downstairs, she noticed the letters on the small table by the entrance. They must have come yesterday while we were at the shearing, she thought, picking them up to read the directions, then dropping them with a gasp, as though they burned.

It was her father’s handwriting, and the letters were addressed to Lady Bushnell and David Wiggins. Her first thought was to fling them into the fireplace, but there was no fire in the hearth. She was still sitting on the staircase steps when the bailiff came downstairs. He sat beside her obligingly, questioning her with his eyes.

“Love, if the weather saps your energy, go back to bed,” he told her. “I doubt that anything won’t keep until later in the day, except the harpsichord.” He smiled at her. It was already an old joke in their young marriage. Nothing deterred Lady Bushnell from Susan’s daily piano practice, not female complaints, or outside duties, or even the bailiff’s needs, after that first week of fervid marriage.

She nodded in the direction of the table. “Letters.”

A puzzled look on his face, he picked them from the silver basket and sat beside her again. “One to me,” he said. “Well, don’t be so blue about it, Suzie. I don’t have a secret wife, and I’m not owing taxes.”

“It’s my father’s handwriting,” she said, her words clipped and shorter than she meant them to be.

“Don’t bite me, now,” he said mildly.

Mrs. Skerlong came into the hall with Lady Bushnell’s breakfast tray. “She’s pulling her bell, Susan,” the housekeeper said as she edged up the stairs between them. The bailiff handed her the other letter. “Thank you, David.”

He borrowed one of her hairpins, slit the letter open, then replaced the pin. She felt him stiffen beside her as he read the letter, and read it again. “By damn,” he said finally when he finished the second reading. “By damn.” He looked at her, and it seemed to her, nerves on edge, that he scooted slightly away from her. “What a parent you have, Suzie. Thank God I’m a bastard.”

Her fingers almost numb, she snatched the letter from his outstretched hand. Her eyes filled with tears almost before she began, so on the first reading she saw only snatches of “Newgate,” and “debts,” and “no help from any source,” and “I’m relying on you.” Shocked down to her toenails, she swiped at her eyes with the hem of her dress before she turned the page over.

“You’ll like the back page even more,” her husband said. “Don’t miss a word of it.”

She glared at him, angry at his unexpected sarcasm, but she calmed herself enough to read every word. She read it again, even as her husband had done, nausea rising in her throat. “No,” she whispered. “How can he think . . .”

The bailiff took it from her and opened his mouth to speak, but stopped at the sound of Lady Bushnell’s cane beating on the floor. They looked at each other, and Susan saw her own reflection in the depths of his eyes. It did not please her, any more than the frown on his face. He stood up and helped her to her feet, then hurried ahead of her up the stairs.

“Susan, your father is a monster,” met her at the door like a lead wall. Lady Bushnell glared at her and thrust the letter at the bailiff, who read it, then stared at her, too. She leaned against the wall, afraid to come any farther into the room.

“Oh, this is good, Lady B,” the bailiff said. He looked at her then. “Suzie, he asks . . . no, no, he demands that your employer pay him enough money to keep his sorry hide out of Newgate.” He looked down at the letter. “‘Knowing how you feel about my daughter, I am sure you would not wish to see her suffer with the knowledge of my incarceration. Yours, sincerely, etc. etc.’”

“Someone should have shot him in a duel years ago,” Lady Bushnell said.

“Wait until you hear mine. Me, the lucky husband,” he said.

Susan flinched at his angry words, swallowing her nausea with the greatest difficulty. “Please don’t use that tone,” she pleaded.

“Maybe you can suggest a better one, after you hear this?” he snapped back. “Lady Bushnell, he asks me to doctor the estate books and send him two hundred pounds!”

“God!” Susan gasped. She sank to the floor, but no one noticed.

“Hear this, Lady B. ‘My own steward cheated me regularly, I am sure, so I know it can be done—depend upon it,’” he read, each word more clipped than the one before. With an oath that made her ears hum, he balled both letters, strode to the window, and threw them as far as he could. When he turned around, staring at her, his face was as hard as stone. She could not meet his eyes, even as a voice inside her pleading “It’s not me,” tried to scratch its way out of her throat.

To her ineffable relief, the expression passed. In another moment, he gave her a hand up from the floor and helped her to sit on Lady Bushnell’s bed. “I’m sorry, Suzie.”

For me, or for you, she wanted to whisper. His hand was heavy on her shoulder, and she felt weighed down, instead of buoyed up, as usual, by his touch. She couldn’t see his face, but she could see Lady Bushnell’s, and her pain reached full circle.

The widow lay back against her propped-up pillows, looking every minute of her years. She groped for Susan’s hand. “Dismiss it, Susan. He’s not worthy of a tenth part of you.” Her eyes seemed to fade and dim as she looked at the bailiff then, and Susan understood the source of her agony, even before she spoke of it. Oh, don’t speak it, dear lady, she wanted to say.

“Sergeant Wiggins, do you understand what damage parents can do to children?” She made a fierce gesture with her hands that had nothing to do with old age about it. “We’ve just flayed Susan with our anger, and it’s not her fault.”

“I don’t mind,” she managed to whisper. “You didn’t mean it.”

Her hand tightened around Susan’s. “My dear, I am trying to point out to your lug-brained husband that parents can do some terrible things. I wonder if I am any better, but you will not tell me. Should I have forced Charles to take command of the regiment? Did
I
send a coward son to a living hell? Am I no better than Sir Rodney Hampton?”

Her voice was as loud as the bailiff’s had been a moment ago. Susan covered her ears with her hands. I cannot bear it if you lie
or
tell the truth, husband, she thought.

“He was no coward,” the bailiff lied.

“I don’t believe you,” the widow said.

“Then ask Susan and take her word over mine.” His fingers bit into her shoulder like an auger.

“He was no coward,” she lied. “David told me everything.”

She knew if Lady Bushnell was to believe her, she had to look her in the eyes, so she did, raising her own ravaged face to the widow’s. Her gaze was steady, dishonest as the day was long, and entirely fitting for a Hampton. She knew from the bottom of her heart that Lady Bushnell believed her, and the knowledge was bitter beyond belief.

Lady Bushnell relaxed against the pillows with a great sigh. She squeezed Susan’s hand, then released it. “Very well, Susan,” she murmured, closing her eyes.

I must get out of here, Susan thought, wondering if there were enough hours left in the day to get her to that door that seemed miles away. “Excuse me, please,” she said, and hurried from the room.

Her husband followed her. She looked back at him, but did not stop as she moved toward the stairs. She paused halfway down and looked up at him. “You can still tell her the truth,” she pleaded.

“I don’t have to now, Susan, and you know I can lie with the best of them.”