Carla Kelly (5 page)

“Oh, I shall!” Susan declared. “This is grim indeed.”

The nursemaid retied the bow under her chin and glanced out the window as the coach began to slow. “’Tis what my uncle heard from the gardener’s cousin, who had it from the laundry maid.”

“Apocryphal, then,” Susan murmured.

“No, miss. The apothecary ain’t had nothing to do with it!”

“My mistake,” Susan replied, careful not to smile. “But tell me something of David Wiggins. Do you know him?”

“Nobody knows him, miss, for all that he’s lived here five years or so. He came back from Waterloo with Lord Bushnell’s body, and he never left. I call that strange.”

“He’s not friendly, then?” Susan asked, feeling her hopes dribble away.

“’Oo knows? He could be shy or queer as Dick’s hatband.” The nursemaid smiled when the coachman blew his horn. “Here we are, miss, and I don’t mind saying it’s high time!”

It was high time and then some, Susan agreed as she left the mail coach, stiff in all her joints and with a head so huge she felt like turning sideways to get out of the door. The coachman unstrapped her trunk and dropped it into the snow. Shaking her head at the ostler, who would only expect coins she did not have, Susan tugged the trunk close to the inn door. She glanced briefly at her reflection in the window, thankful to discover her bonnet straight and her hair still smoothed in place. Aunt Louisa always did say I had a knack for that, she thought. At least I will not frighten the shy, retiring, and elusive David Wiggins, be he ever so queer.

He was also the nonexistent David Wiggins. When Susan worked up her courage to enter the taproom and inquire of the innkeep, he only shook his head. “Haven’t seen him today, miss. Not at all.” The innkeep sighed and stacked away the last of the glasses. “Of course, it’s been a rum day for the hostelry business. I misdoubt he can get off the place, what with all this snow. Can I speak you a room, miss?”

She shook her head. “Thank you, no. I am to be Lady Bushnell’s companion, and a letter was sent for someone to meet me. I can wait for conveyance.”

“That’d be David Wiggins, then. Some tea, miss?”

She shook her head again. “I would like a glass of water, if you please.”

The innkeep eyed her more closely. You are wondering why I am dressed so well, and such a nipfarthing, she thought, her humiliation complete. Her eyes were beginning to fill up and she wanted to look away, but she raised her chin higher instead. After another moment’s appraisal, the innkeep turned away, then came back with tea.

“Oh, I can’t,” she protested.

“Take it, miss,” he said, his voice kind. “We all end up at low tide sometimes.” As she sniffed back her tears, he looked under the counter. “And Lord bless us, here’s a pasty left from supper. Let me stick it on the hob a moment, and you’ll never know it wasn’t fresh.”

“Oh, I mustn’t,” she began.

“You must and will, or I’ll get ugly,” he said, his tone firm.

Something tells me you have daughters, Susan thought as she sipped the welcome tea and then followed him a moment later to a table as he brought the meat pie. “And look at this, I even found a bit of soup, all sad and lonely,” he said, setting it down with a flourish beside the pasty.

She couldn’t speak, but he didn’t seem to expect her to. He gazed around the room while she blew her nose hard, and then he began to stack chairs on tables. “It’s not a big village, miss, is Quilling, but we’re good enough for most,” he said at last.

Her headache was gone by the time she finished eating. The innkeep had busied himself in a back room somewhere, and she had the taproom to herself. She ached for sleep, but there wasn’t anything she could do but sit there, back straight, like a lady, and wait for David Wiggins to show up.

As anxious as she was to meet him and take his measure, Susan felt no qualms about his nonappearance. I am used to dealing with men who do not keep promises or deliver what is promised, she thought. A woman unfamiliar with Sir Rodney’s frippery ways would probably have worn the floorboards through to the ground, pacing back and forth. If one has no expectations, one is seldom disappointed, she told herself as her eyes grew blurry and midnight turned into one o’clock. The innkeep had given up trying to give her a room upstairs, and said good night an hour before.

It was nearly two o’clock when she realized with a prickle down her back that someone was standing in the taproom doorway, looking at her. She hadn’t heard anyone come in, but there was a subtle difference in the air of the room, as if it had rearranged itself to accommodate another body. Intruding on stale tobacco was the fragrance of hay, remembered just vaguely from the years before Papa sold the estate.

I should be jumping out of my skin, she thought as she breathed the tiny odor and felt the intensity of someone’s eyes on her. I wonder if the landlord has any ax murderers in Quilling, or Caribbean conjurers left over from market circuses. She smiled to herself. I think it must be David Wiggins.

Just as she turned around, the man in the doorway gave an enormous yawn, the epitome of all yawns. “Sorry,” he said when he could speak. “It’s been a day, Miss Hampton.” He straightened up from the door frame, where he had been leaning. “I’m David Wiggins, and I’ve come to fetch you.”

His voice had the lilt of the Welsh in it, and he had the look of dark folk beyond the Dee, Wye, and Severn rivers, for all that his name was so plainly English. If he was a little taller than some, and blockier of build, she considered, that would account for the Wiggins side. His dark hair and eyes and a certain intensity of observation about him told the Welsh side. And his lovely speech. But he was much too young to fit her fiction of a retired sergeant from the Regulars. Oh, dear me, she thought. I shall have to change my strategies.

“You’re David Wiggins?” she said, wondering instantly at her stupid question.

“Said I was,” he commented. “And you’re our latest lady’s companion, pain in the side, burr in the balbriggans?”

Double dear me, she thought. “I’m Susan Hampton,” she said, sidestepping the question. “And I don’t know what balbriggans are, sir.”

He didn’t reply right away, but he turned his head a little away from her and smiled into the dark, as though someone else were there. “I’ll tell it this way,” he began in his musical voice. “I hope you’re wearing woolen balbriggans under all those skirts, because we have to walk partway.”

He looked at her again and raised one eyebrow. You’re hoping I back out, she thought, returning his gaze, even though her cheeks flamed. Her anger blew in and out like a spring wind through an open door. She shrugged into her coat again, and pulled on her gloves, nourishing herself with an honest reply.

“I’ll manage,” she said. “And you can mind your manners.”

Again he turned his head away for that surreptitious grin, and he chose not to rise to the bait. “Come along, then. I’ll send someone to fetch your trunk in the morning.”

She followed him into the inn yard, understanding why she had not heard him approach, with the snow muffling all sounds. The deep winter silence made her want to speak in whispers, had she possessed any desire to address David Wiggins, which she did not. Still, he had come a long way through the snow. She could at least follow with good enough grace and not let him know her legs were already cold.

The snow was deep. He set a brisk pace, and she floundered behind him, her lips set tight against any word of complaint. She focused her attention on his perfectly disreputable hat, a wide-brimmed, squashed-in felt monstrosity. He wouldn’t dare ever set that thing on the floor, she thought. A dog would commit misdemeanors on it. She chuckled in spite of herself. He looked over his shoulder, one eyebrow raised.

“You’re a rare one, Miss Hampton,” was all he said. “Too bad you will not last.”

He talks as though he has murdered and buried a row of lady’s companions in the shubbery somewhere, Susan thought as she labored on. Probably killed by his devastating wit. She suppressed most of her laughter, but still he looked back, and this time took her arm, tucking it close to his side.

“Big drifts,” was all he said as he tugged her along.

She opened her mouth to protest his ill usage, then closed it again. He didn’t seem so much impatient with her as he was eager to get somewhere. How can I protest, she thought, giving him a small glance, when you look so tired?

“You know, you didn’t really have to get me tonight,” she said, out of breath from hurrying.

“This morning,” he said. “I told Lady Bushnell I would.”

And that was it, apparently. He had nothing else to say, and it was pointless to waste her breath. This is a man with tight words, she realized as she grimly hung on to his arm and let him help her over the deepest drifts.

After another silent stretch, in which they seemed to be steadily climbing, they broke through the last of the deep snow. David Wiggins let go of her arm, but she did not follow him toward the gig and blanketed horse tethered to a tree. Instead, she clasped her hands together and looked around, enchanted by what lay before her.

They stood at the head of a valley all tucked in tidy and protected from the deepest snows behind them. The moon was up now, and it cast a brittle light on the snow that illuminated the valley as though it were day. She could clearly make out the dark coil of a river and a fringe of woods offering some shelter to fields asleep now, but still rectangles outlined by fence and furrow only partly snow-covered. She could not see Quilling Manor itself; it must be beyond the trees.

Lovely, she thought, stamping her feet. She cast a guilty glance at Wiggins, who tossed the blanket in the back of the gig and climbed onto the seat. She started toward him then, waiting for a scold to hurry up. He surprised her. Reins slack in his hands, he nodded in her direction. “It’s beyond beautiful in the summer,” he said, his voice warm.

Like all his few words, these were quietly spoken. She hurried to the gig now, buoyed up by his obvious affection. Someone who has a fellow feeling for his land can’t be all prickles and rabbit pebbles, she decided as he tucked a lap robe around her and said something to the horse in a language she did not know.

“Welsh pony,” he allowed, and that was all the conversation between them as they crossed the sheltered valley on a better road.

Lord, I am weary, she thought as she sat so firmly upright on the seat beside the bailiff. She tried hard not to touch him, but it was a narrow seat, and he was the kind of man who overlapped. He sat easy, his eyes on the road in front of him, almost as though she were not there. He seemed relaxed, except that he kept tapping his feet, as though he could speed the passage. I suppose there is a sleepy wife somewhere and a warm bed, she considered.

“I don’t think the world would end if you leaned back and rested yourself.”

She shook her head, surprised that he had noticed. Hamptons don’t lean or lounge about, she thought. He shrugged and turned his full attention to the road again. Or he seemed to, at any rate; she couldn’t tell.

Susan closed her eyes once or twice as they moved slowly across the valley, always opening them before she felt herself leaning toward the bailiff. She must have had them closed longer than usual, because the next time she opened them they were stopped in the barnyard.

How did that get here? she thought stupidly, staring wide-eyed at the stone barn that looked as though it had been there since the Romans. Her mind was sluggish and starved for sleep, and she waited for the bailiff to help her down. To her dismay, he knotted the reins, climbed from the gig, and hurried on a half run into the barn without a look over his shoulder at her. “Worse-than-useless man,” Susan muttered out loud as she helped herself from the gig.

She wouldn’t have followed him into the barn, except that the wind was teasing her ankles again and lifting her skirts. She followed him inside, careful to watch where she walked. She sniffed the air and looked around her. They were in a cattle byre, pungent of cow and timothy grass. So this is where you were before you came for me, Susan reflected as she moved quietly down the stalls toward a lamp hanging on the far wall.

David Wiggins was sitting cross-legged on the hay-covered floor, a calf of ravishing beauty across his legs. He was rubbing her down with a piece of sacking, and speaking low in Welsh. He looked up at Susan and motioned her to join him. He nodded toward the fawnlike creature before him.

“This is why I was late, discounting the snow, Miss Hampton,” he explained. “I had to blow into her mouth to get her going, so I figured you could wait.”

Susan came inside the loose box and sat down on an overturned bucket, her eyes on the cow, a Jersey who gazed back mildly without missing any rhythm as she chewed her cud. Susan looked at the slimy rope on the hay beside the cow. “You had a hard tug of it,” she commented, leaning forward and resting her chin on her hands.

“I did,” he agreed. He lifted the little thing off his lap, smiling as it raised up on back legs and pitched nose-first into the hay. “You come to a hard, cold world, lass,” he said, his voice soft. He leaned back against the partition, content to watch the animal struggle, fall, struggle, and rise, wobbly but on all fours.

David got up, too, wincing as though he ached from everywhere, and prodded the cow to her feet. “Cush, lass, cush,” he crooned, “there’s work afoot.”

The calf knew what to do. In another moment, she had found her way to the udder, nudged it, and settled to business. David sighed and rubbed his back.

“Now to you, miss,” he said, turning to Susan.

“I’m tired, not hungry,” she said. It was only a very little joke, but he smiled and held out his hand. She allowed him to haul her to her feet. Her eyelids felt weighted down with lead shot, and grainy in the bargain.

“There’s a place in the house for you,” he said, pulling her along the passageway. He chuckled. “I misdoubt it’s still warm from the last lady’s companion!”

She looked at him, her eyes narrowed, but his face was bland and smooth again and his dark eyes completely unreadable.

The wind braced her and woke her up again as they crossed the barnyard and came to the back entrance of the manor, solid stone and hunkered down to outlast any kind of winter thrown at it. I can admire it in the morning, she considered as her mind turned to porridge.