Authors: The Ladys Companion
“Were you infantry?” she asked, wanting confirmation.
“Yes. Do you like to walk?” He smiled. “Well, certain you do.”
Susan nodded. “It used to irritate my cousins. They went walking in Hyde Park to see and be seen, but I liked to walk.”
“No flirting?” he asked as he took off his coat and reached for the hay fork.
“Of course! But not with some sprite whose pantaloons were too tight to move fast,” she said, sitting herself on the same bucket from yesterday. “Some men are slaves of fashion.”
“Not around here,” he said as he pulled down straw from the loft overhead and spread it around the loose box where the newest bovine arrival was lying. “Or in Spain.” He leaned on the hay fork a moment, remembering, then looked at her. “Up you get, Miss Hampton, if you will earn your thirty pounds. Take that sacking over there and wipe down this heifer. She’s a bit delicate yet, and a good rubbing will do wonders for her circulation. I didn’t have time while I was milking.”
She did as he asked, gingerly at first, and then vigorously as the fawnlike Jersey struggled to rise.
“Good girl!” Wiggins said, and Susan didn’t know if he meant her or the heifer. “Let up now, Susan.”
She sat back on the newly mounded straw and watched with satisfaction as the calf struggled to rise. The cow, who still appeared to be nursing her own grievances at the irritation of birth, looked around and lowed her encouragement.
“And there we go,” the bailiff said as the calf wobbled to all fours, swayed back and forth a moment, then moved, stiff-legged, to her mother’s side. “They do have an instinct, do little ones.”
He put down the hay fork and sat beside Susan, just watching mother and daughter, a slight smile on his face. “I never get tired of it!” He laughed. “Except when it’s too cold, or I’m feeling forty.”
“I promise not to tease you about that again,” Susan said. “Now tell me about Lady Bushnell.”
He hesitated. “I’ve always made it a point to respect her privacy.”
“You promised! If I can find out what she’s like, perhaps I can please her. Surely you will help me. After all, you did ask me to marry you . . .” she wheedled, well aware of the growing look of stubbornness on his face.
He got up and brushed off the straw. “I have a feeling that this is going to come before many a negotiation with you,” he told the cattle byre in general.
“Probably,” she allowed. “You did offer your help.”
“But you didn’t accept,” he pointed out, even as he looked away from her and smiled.
“True,” she agreed, her tone reasonable, “but that doesn’t mean I won’t use you.”
He laughed out loud and helped her to her feet. “Well, you’re an honest piece,” he admitted, reaching for his coat and putting it on again. “Come on, I’m not through yet.”
Neither am I, she thought as he took her hand again and they faced into the wind. I have a lot of information to pry out of you tonight.
She thought they were going back to the kitchen, but the bailiff led her instead to the long, many-windowed succession house that stood apart from the other outbuildings, away from the shade of trees. The building was dark inside, but there was sufficient light through the windows for David to light a lamp and set it by a draftsman’s desk, and then light other lamps.
Susan looked about her with interest, removing Mrs. Skerlong’s coat because the long room was warm. There along the south-facing wall were several mounds of cucumbers and cantaloupe with large, healthy leaves and blossoms indicating fruit to come.
Catching her attention were the long rows of grain in full growth on the tables down the middle of the succession house. She didn’t know what kind it was—one grain was much like the next to her, and always had been—but the renewal of coal in the furnaces had set off more warm current of air that stirred the greenery in front of her fascinated eyes. “It’s beautiful,” she said softly, and found her heart aching for spring and summer and warmth again. And all from rows of grain. She wondered why Lady Bushnell would want grain in her succession house, when she could have hothouse fruits and flowers.
“Nice,” she said to David Wiggins, who walked past her carrying a coal shuttle.
“I think so,” he agreed.
She watched the bailiff shovel coal into the small furnaces at opposite ends to the succession house, then admired the white- and yellow-middled strawberry blossoms blooming in their own bed.
“Strawberries in winter.” She sighed. “How I should like some dipped in sugar and cream.” She looked down at the cat at her feet and patted the tall draftsman’s stool beside her. The cat meowed and paced back and forth, but did not leap up. “Oh, goodness, you’re a lazy creature,” she said as she picked up the cat and set it on the table.
“No, she’s just in the family way and not given to leaping about,” the bailiff said as he joined her. “I’m sure you would feel the same.” He patted the animal’s bulging sides. “Thank goodness cats do not require the attention of cows.” He rubbed the cat under the chin, set her gently back on the floor, and pulled out a ledger. “She’s a good mouser, and that’s why I keep her in here, but she does like the toms.”
Susan smiled, wondering what Aunt Louisa would make of such a conversation. She looked over his shoulder at the rows and rows of careful entries. “What do you have there?”
“Something to occupy you while you pummel me for information about a rather private lady I would just as soon not discuss.”
Wiggins took off his coat and picked up a ruler from the desk. “I’m going to call out numbers. I want you to locate the number, then look for a, b, c, or d. I’ll call out inches to you, which I want you to record next to the date. What is today?” he asked, more to himself than to her.
“January 15, 1820,” she said promptly.”
“I know the year!” He nudged her over to get the pencil out of the drawer under the drafting table. “Pencil in the date by each number group.”
“Very well. The things I must do to get information,” she grumbled as she tried to find a ladylike way to climb onto the stool.
Without a word he picked her up and set her squarely in the middle of it, then looked over her shoulder at the neat entries of dates and inches before starting down the row. As he approached the first row of grain, she noticed that it had been subdivided into smaller boxes. A, b, c, and d, she decided as she took up the pencil and carefully wrote in the date.
“Fifty-nine a,” he said, then stood the ruler next to the grain shoot. “One quarter inch.”
She recorded the measurement, then put the pencil on the b entry.
“Fifty-nine b. One quarter inch and a plus.” He looked up at her. “It’s not quite half, and I don’t have a better ruler right now.”
She wrote in the inches he dictated to her as he went efficiently down the row, wanting to know what he was doing, but mindful of breaking his concentration. When he finished the row, he looked up at her.
“This is such a help to me. Usually I get Matthew Beverage—he’s my underbailiff—but he got married at Christmas and can’t get the bed off his wife’s back.”
Susan grinned over the figures, wondering what else he would say. No subject seemed too sensitive for the bailiff. “And you assured him you could do all his work, too?” she said when she knew she wouldn’t laugh.
“Why not?” he countered. “It’s winter, and Matthew’s got to keep his wife’s stomach warm. He and his bride will be back in a few weeks. She usually helps Cora with the milk and the laundry.”
He came around to the other side of the wooden tables and began to go up, calling out numbers and inches as she recorded them in the right slots. “Eighty-three d, one inch. Damn, that’s good.”
He was back at the draftsman’s desk again, looking over her shoulder at the entries, putting his arm around her to run his finger down the columns. She would have been offended, except that he was not mindful of her presence at all. He kept nodding, chuckling to himself, and nodding again, his eyes on the page, and then down the rows of grain in front of them. He put his arms down finally, and she felt free to breathe again. Not that such nearness to the bailiff was unpleasant; far from it. She found that she enjoyed that smell of hay always about him, and the clean honest scent of lye soap. I am a long way from ballroom pomades and gagging colognes, she thought as she sat quietly, the pen still in her hand.
He took the pen from her and then lifted her from the stool. “Now let us each take a side and pluck out any weeds. I just want the grain shoots. You can ask me about Lady Bushnell now, if you choose.” He hung two more lamps over the tables, then began to weed silently and efficiently, as he did everything.
“What
is
this grain?” she asked. “Why are you doing this?” She weeded slower, her eyes on the tender, fragile stalks before her, force-grown in winter.
He looked over at her. “Didn’t I say?”
“No! And I’ve been wanting to ask.”
“It’s my Waterloo wheat, Susan,” he said, his eyes unfocusing for the briefest moment and looking beyond her to a place she had never been. “A detachment from my regiment helped fortify Hougoumont, and I swiped a handful of grain from a storage bin that night. I intended to eat it, but never got the time. And when the battle was over, there it was in my pocket.”
He continued his work, then he reached across his row of grain to weed hers, too, and speed her along. “It was growing on the hillside above the chateau. You can’t imagine how tall it was before it was trampled by both armies.” He touched a sprout, and the touch was almost a caress. “I’m growing it with English grain to get a good seed. This is the third growth and, so far, my best combination.”
“My goodness,” Susan said, for want of anything better.
“Waterloo tall and English tough. I’ll call it Waterloo Harvest.” He returned his attention to his own row when Susan caught up with him. “Now, what do you want to know about Lady Bushnell?”
“How did you meet? Mrs. Skerlong said you soldiered together in Spain, but I hardly . . .”
“So we did,” he agreed, his eyes unfocusing again for a moment. “And harken. I’ll only tell this once, because it’s no kind reflection on David Wiggins. She saved a thief from a three-hundred-lash flogging.”
“Who?”
“Me.”
Susan couldn’t say anything for a moment. She stopped weeding and stared at the bailiff across the row from her. When he started weeding her row, too, she remembered what she should be doing and shook her head at him to stop. She weeded in silence for a moment, then her curiosity was bigger than her amazement.
“How can someone survive three hundred lashes? My God, Mr. Wiggins, what did you
do
to earn such a punishment?”
“I thieved. I was a sergeant in a Welsh border guard called up when Sir John Moore went to Portugal. You seldom saw a regiment so poorly commanded. We were all starving, and I stole a box of hardtack for me and my men. The colonel wanted to make an example of me.” He stopped then and looked at her intently. “You really want to hear this?”
She nodded, unable to speak, her eyes wide.
“I think they were about halfway to three hundred. I quit counting after one hundred. All I remember was that my blood was dripping on the ground and I was grunting like a pig.”
She shuddered. “I can’t even imagine such a thing!”
As she watched, horrified, he turned around and pulled up his shirt. His back was crisscrossed with scars from his neck to his waistband. “They go lower, but you don’t need to see those, too.” He tucked his shirt in and continued weeding as calmly as though he had shown her a hangnail that was troubling him. “It was a hard army, Susan.”
“Yes, but . . .” she began, then dabbed her fingers across her eyes.
“I don’t remember hearing Lady Bushnell say anything, but the next thing I knew, the flogging had stopped and she was standing between me and the punishment sergeant.” He finished the row and waited for her to catch up. “Apparently she and Lord Bushnell had been riding by the regiment. I wish I could have appreciated it, but I was a bit fine drawn by then.”
It was masterful understatement. “She just leaped off her horse and threw herself in the middle of all that?” Susan asked when she could speak.
“So Lord Bushnell told me later. She refused to move until that colonel, goddamn him, agreed to stop. I think she gave him a real tongue-lashing, but it all sounded like a swarm of bees to me. I can’t remember it.” He grinned at her. “Old Lord Bushnell told me later that he learned some new words that morning.”
When Susan finished weeding, he walked with her to the furnace and put in more coal, then upturned a bucket for her to sit on while he perched on the edge of an empty table. “I don’t know how she did it, but I was moved from my regiment to the Fighting Fifth. It was regular army and a dandy outfit.”
“Why didn’t you die?”
He shrugged. “I wanted to. You know on Good Friday services when the vicar usually talks about Christ on the cross?” He shook his head. “I have some small idea . . . and I can appreciate the thieves on either side.”
“Were you in the hospital?” she said, almost fearful of intruding on his thoughts.
“No. It was just after Vimeiro, and we were on our way back to Torres Vedras. And you know, Lady Bushnell came to me that night, when I couldn’t do anything but lie on my stomach and cry from the pain. She washed my back and told me that if I ever thieved again, she would be the first to flog me. I believed her.”
Susan nodded, remembering her sharp words.
“In the morning I put on my clothes again and marched with the Fifth.” He looked down at his feet. “I was crying again by the afternoon, but by God, I marched.”
“You owe her your life,” Susan said finally, when the silence was too big to ignore.
“Yes. There wasn’t anything I wouldn’t do for her or the colonel,” he said simply. “He made me a regimental master sergeant a year later before Talavera, and I always kept him in sight in all our battles together.” He sighed. “But I couldn’t help him on the march across the Pyrenees, and it pains me to this day.”
“Was that when he died, he and his daughter?”
The bailiff left his perch on the table, as though only by walking back and forth could he finish the story. “It happened so fast. It was raining, pouring, more like. Lady Elizabeth’s horse slipped off the trail and down a gorge.” He snapped his fingers, and Susan jumped. “Just like that she was gone. I was on the far side of the colonel, and he beat me to the edge of the path. It was deadly slick, and he went over, too.” The bailiff shook his head as though he still could not believe it, after all that time. “We went through so many years of danger, and there we were, on the road to Paris . . .” His voice trailed off and he looked into that far distance again.
“And Lady Bushnell?”
“She saw it all.” Wiggins turned his back to her, his hands on his hips, staring out at the moon on the snow. “She sent me down the gorge with a rope and two pistols. Told me to make sure they were not suffering.” He tightened his lips and looked at Susan over his shoulder.
“The horses or the people?” Susan asked quietly.
He shrugged. “I never asked her. And don’t ask me. Not now, not ever.”
Susan was silent then, her chin in her hands. The only sound was the purring of the cat at her feet as it wriggled around to find a comfortable spot. Absently, she rubbed its swollen abdomen. And I have the effrontery to think that I can be Lady Bushnell’s companion? she asked herself. A woman so strong has no need of my puny efforts. She is right, after all.
“I took the three of them home to Bushnell—it’s about twenty miles from here—then rejoined the regiment and served with the next Lord Bushnell. And after Waterloo, I brought his body back and stayed,” Wiggins said as he extinguished the lamps. “I don’t know that it was anybody’s idea that I remain, but it happened that way.” He smiled at her. “Another story for another day.”
Susan followed him down the row. “She lost everyone to the wars.”
“Yes. The Bushnells—father and son—may have earned the gratitude of a nation, but that’s cold comfort to the widow.” He was at the draftsman’s desk again, where he looked at the ledger one more time, an expression of satisfaction on his face.
“What on earth can I do for someone like Lady Bushnell?” she asked, voicing her fear. She looked back at the long rows of Waterloo wheat, the green sprouts motionless now, as the furnaces cooled. The color was gone, too, with the light from the lamps, changed to gray. “I wish it were spring,” she murmured, more to herself than to the bailiff. And now you will think I am whining, she thought. Well, I am.
“It will be spring soon enough,” he said, his voice gentle, as though he were advising a grumpy child. “Then I will be too busy to come here so often. You ask what you can do for Lady Bushnell. Well, what would you like someone to do for you?”
Susan looked at the bailiff. He had extinguished the last lamp, and the color was gone from him, too. “You’re as trying as Joel Steinman, exchanging question for question!” she exclaimed, then remembered the employment agent’s last words to her. “And tell me how you know him,” she demanded.
He laughed. “That can keep for another day. Seriously, what would you like someone to do for you?”
Susan leaned against the stool and considered his question. I would like someone to love me, she thought, but knew she could never say that out loud. “When I was a little girl, I liked someone to read to me, and brush my hair, and make sure I was tucked in at night.” That was true enough. No matter how old I get, a part of me will always long for my mother, Susan thought. It was a foolish notion. She was afraid to look at the bailiff. You must think me an idiot, she thought. “You know, those things mothers do. It can’t be far different from a lady’s companion, do you think?”
“I wouldn’t know,” he said as he finished buttoning his coat. “My mother either died when I was born or just abandoned me at a workhouse. That’s where I grew up, and I don’t remember anyone reading to me.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said automatically. How strong you must be to have survived that, she considered as he carefully lifted the cat into a box lined with soft rags. And then the army and war. I wonder you are not out of patience with my silly problem.
“Why be sorry? What you never have you can’t miss.” He laughed, but she couldn’t hear much humor in it. “And the matron shaved our heads so she wouldn’t be bothered with lice. I think we had very different upbringings, Miss Hampton.”
“I suppose we did,” she agreed.
He took her by the elbow and steered her from the dark succession house. The cold made her gasp out loud. The bailiff tightened his hold on her as he walked her to the kitchen, then released her when they were inside. Susan took off Mrs. Skerlong’s coat and hung it on the coat tree, her mind full of Spain and soldiering.
“And yet reading—it’s not a bad notion,” he said, his hand on the doorknob. “You might try that. I’ve come in on her several times and seen her staring down at a book in her lap.”
“She likes to read?”
“She did once, I’m thinking. More and more now, I’ll see her with the same book in her lap, but no pages turned. Could it be that her eyes are not what they once were?”
“It
is
a good idea,” Susan agreed, “but what should I read to her? I feel as though I know her better, but that I am no closer to solving my problems. And would she ever let me read to her?”
He opened the door. “I suggest that you read to her whatever it is that you . . .”
“I know, I know!” she interrupted, exasperated with the bailiff. “Whatever I would like someone to read to me!”
The bailiff closed the door, and she heard him laugh as his footsteps crunched on the icy path. “You are remarkably shortsighted yourself,” she told the closed door. “Anyone can see that Lady Bushnell and I are nothing alike. How will I know what she likes?” These people are giants, she thought, sitting in Mrs. Skerlong’s chair and breathing in the fragrance of spices overhead and tomorrow’s yeast bread, a lump of covered dough on the table. I feel young and foolish and out of my sphere, and yet, I have to try, because I have been given a chance.
Mrs. Skerlong’s tom jumped into her lap, startling her. He turned about several times, as if testing her lap for solidity, then settled down to purr and groom himself. Absently, she scratched around his ears, smiling a little when he turned to oblige her fingers. “And I suppose you are the father of that forthcoming litter in the succession house?” she murmured, her fingers gentle now on his back. “I trust you’ll do right by your family.”
She leaned back in the chair and closed her eyes, thinking of her father. And don’t disgust your little ones or make extravagant promises you have no way of fulfilling. If you promise them a mouse, give them a mouse. And for God’s sake, teach them how to hunt for themselves. She settled lower in the chair, unmindful of her posture for once, and propped her feet on the footstool. The cat was warm, and his purring created a pleasant vibration against her stomach.
She must have dozed off, but for how long she had no idea. She snapped her eyes open and tightened her hand on the cat, which tensed to spring. David Wiggins stood looking down at her. He shook his head. “Miss Hampton, go to bed!”
She relaxed again and regarded him out of sleepy eyes. “What are you doing still up, Mr. Wiggins?” Her accusation was blunted by a yawn that she could not stifle.
He looked down at his boots as though she had caught him at mischief. “Oh, I just had to take another look at the Waterloo wheat.” He squatted down beside her chair until he was on her eye level, his enthusiasm balancing the exhaustion in his face. “I’m going to sow an entire field of it this spring. It’s a good blend of wheat, Susan. You’ll see.”
She nodded and closed her eyes again, but opened them wide when the bailiff picked her up, cat and all. With a hiss, the tom jumped off.
“Do I have to carry you upstairs to bed?” he asked.
“No . . . no,” she stammered. “I’ll go.”
“When?”
“Now! Only let me down.” He did as she asked and she straightened her skirts around her. I should be so indignant, she told herself as she frowned at him. How odd that I am not.
“You won’t get anywhere staying up late to worry about things, Susan,” he said as he went to the door again. He observed the frown on her face. “But maybe you weren’t worrying about Lady Bushnell. Homesick?” he asked, his voice sympathetic.
“Not at all,” she said too quickly. “There is nothing to miss there.”
He watched her face another moment, his own expressionless. “So that’s how it is,” he said finally. “Well, life is short, Miss Hampton. Don’t hate them too long. Go to bed.”
She waited until she heard his footsteps on the path again, then took up a candle and holder from the table beside the lamp, lit it from the lamp, and extinguished the greater light. She went carefully upstairs and set the candlestick on her bedside table.
The curtains were still open, so she went to close them, and stood there instead, watching the bailiff make his progress to his own house. She inclined her head against the window frame, enjoying the simple pleasure of watching the man in motion. He had a competent stride, and she could only marvel at the miles he must have walked, and under what circumstances. No wonder both Lord Bushnells had relied on him, she thought as she stood at the window watching him and slowly unbuttoning Lady Elizabeth Bushnell’s dress. He looks enormously capable, even from a second-story window. I can sleep now.
***
She did sleep well, to her gratification, and woke with Jane Austen on her mind—more specifically, Emma Woodhouse, she of the sharp tongue and strong will. Susan had nearly finished
Emma
on the long journey from London to Quilling, but she knew she could begin it again with no loss of interest. She got up from bed and wadded her nightgown—a loan from the generously endowed Mrs. Skerlong—around her as she padded on bare feet to the dressing room for her reticule. When she picked it up, she knew it was too light to contain the book, and then she remembered stuffing it into her trunk before walking to Quilling Manor. “Drat!” she said as she plumped herself down on her bed again and flopped onto her back with her arms out. There was a knock on the door.
“Come,” she said, trying to keep the dismal note out of her voice. No sense in troubling Cora with her woes.