“I should have sent the lad for a glass of water,” he said. “Shall I summon a servant? It’s not as though we’ve a shortage of them.” He looked about the room. “Are the bellpulls working?”
“I don’t need a glass of water,” she said. “It was nothing. A momentary dizziness. I’m quite recovered.”
He didn’t think she was.
He wasn’t, certainly. His gut was in knots.
She had been very ill at one time, for a long time, he remembered. Had the ailment returned?
“It must have been a combination of events,” he said. He had to concentrate to keep his tone light. “My shocking apology following all your hard work of emptying the trunk. I shall not ask why you didn’t let a maid do it while you sat here, supervising.”
“You should not have to ask,” she said. “Can you not see how boring it is always to have someone else do everything, even the lightest tasks? Can you not understand how tiresome it is, always to be looking on, never to be
doing?
But you would not understand, because you are a man, and you do not have someone hovering over you constantly and doing for you and watching you as though you were completely helpless and brainless.”
“You are out of sorts, I see,” he said. “Perhaps it is the menses.”
She shot him one of her I-must-kill-you-now looks.
A promising sign.
“Many women become weakened during the menses because of the loss of blood,” he said. “That would account for your lightheadedness. The imbalance this loss of blood causes to the bodily system no doubt explains the irritability that is so often a symptom as well.”
She gazed at him for a long moment. “Have you any idea,” she said, “how aggravating you are?”
She was definitely recovering her spirits.
A weight lifted from his. “I should like to know how I could fail to have an idea of it,” he said, “since everyone in my family tells me, repeatedly. My grandmother in particular. She says that of all the aggravating men in the family—and that includes
Rupert,
she always takes care to remind me—I am the most aggravating. That, according to her, is my most remarkable achievement.”
Lady Charlotte looked away from him and out of the window. She folded her hands in her lap and gave a little sigh. Then she turned her gaze to the trunk.
“You might soften your grandmother’s feelings if you gave her one of the fans,” she said. “They are splendid.”
“Grandmother Hargate cannot be softened,” he said. “Melting granite would be easier. Still, she does like fripperies.”
He left the window seat and went to the trunk. “What a curious conglomeration of artifacts,” he said, squatting to take up one of the masks. “Lady Lithby said you found it in the dairy, of all places.”
He heard her light footsteps approaching. He didn’t look up. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the hem of her dress, and the thin-soled, soft kid shoes, tied with ribbons and water-spotted. He remembered putting his hands on her feet and following the rise of her instep. He remembered the feel of her legs under his hand and the whisper of her stockings. He remembered the miraculous softness between her legs…and the way she’d trembled under his touch.
He felt a stab of something. Regret? Frustration? Who could say what it was? Feelings of some kind. Exactly what he didn’t need.
Resolutely he gathered his wayward thoughts, shoved them into a distant recess of his mind, and planted his full attention on the chest’s contents.
“I’ve no idea how it ended up there,” she said. “We found a great deal else that didn’t belong, but those were all discards: broken furniture and such. When the servants opened the trunk, I expected to find a nest of mice or a lot of decayed rubbish. But it was supremely well made, as you see. The lid fits snugly. The mice didn’t get in, and nothing seems the worse for damp.”
“It looks like a seaman’s chest,” he said. “Made to withstand abuse and wet.”
He noticed the letters. “More of Lady Margaret’s mad wills, do you think?” he said. “Or love letters?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “There may be a story in that trunk. I shall leave you and your brilliant mind to get to the bottom of it.”
The light footsteps moved away, the door closed, and when he looked up, she was gone.
Don’t look for him,
Charlotte told herself when the door closed behind her and she stood in the corridor.
The bucket was gone and the floor was dry. A maid had come, done her work, and departed speedily.
The maid the boy had run away to summon.
Don’t look for him.
How many fair-haired women did Great Britain hold? How many women had Geordie Blaine bedded and abandoned? How many bastards had he left behind? And what of his family? He had siblings, cousins. Any number of others, the most distant relations or no relation at all, might have those eyes. Others might have left their by-blows throughout the length and breadth of England—and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland besides. And who was to say the child was anybody’s bastard? For all one knew, one of the boy’s parents, properly wed to the other, had those eyes.
The cowlick needn’t be Charlotte’s, either: the obstinate tuft at the back of her head, the bane of Molly’s existence. The boy’s cap could have made indentations that appeared to be curls and a cowlick.
The boy needn’t be ten years, one month, and fifteen days old. He might be eight or nine or eleven or twelve. Some children looked younger than their age, some older. Eight was not too young for an apprentice. Boys went to sea at that age and younger.
Don’t look for him.
Put it out of your mind.
Even if it is he…
But it isn’t. Put it out of your mind.
She looked down at her hands. They were shaking again.
It had taken a supreme effort of will to keep from trembling all that long while she’d made herself stay in the room with Mr. Carsington. She’d made herself stay and speak calmly because she knew that if she didn’t take time, didn’t make herself calm, she would run out and look for the boy.
She could not have trusted herself with anyone else. Anyone else she might have ignored.
She couldn’t ignore Mr. Carsington. He called her mind away from the boy—at least a part of her mind—and he annoyed and worried her and kept her feet planted on the ground.
He called her mind to the trunk and its odd assortment of mementoes. She couldn’t shake off the feeling that it meant something. She knew so little about Lady Margaret. She was one of the numerous daughters of the Earl of Wilmoth, who’d gambled away a great fortune. She’d married Sir William Andover, who came of an old and wealthy Cheshire family.
Charlotte had tried to search her mind for more—fact or rumor—about mad Lady Margaret. She might have stayed and told Mr. Carsington what she knew. The two of them might have tried to piece together the puzzle.
She couldn’t, not so soon after seeing the child. As strong as Charlotte’s self-control was, she doubted it was strong enough. In speculating about Lady Margaret’s secrets, she was too likely to give away her own.
Mr. Carsington was a typically thickheaded male in so many typically male ways. In so many other ways, however, he was exceedingly quick and observant.
She’d stayed with him only until she was sure she could trust herself not to hunt down the boy.
Don’t look for him,
she told herself.
Nothing can come of it but grief.
And so she continued down the hall and down the stairs, and in time, out of the house, looking nowhere for nobody.
Though the trunk offered a glimpse into times long gone, it was not intriguing enough to take Darius’s mind off Lady Charlotte.
The boy Pip and his worried look, however, nagged at Darius even more insistently.
Any of scores of people might be responsible for a bucket forgotten in the corridor. Workmen crawled and climbed, scraped and hammered and carved and sawed throughout the house. Servants filled the remaining spaces. Any one of these hordes might have set a bucket of water down and forgotten it.
And any one of them would be happy to blame someone else, like a young apprentice. Any intelligent young apprentice would look worried, too, in such a case, seeing a beating in his future.
True, Darius had had his share of beatings and did not consider himself much the worse for it. He’d deserved his punishments, however. So far as he could determine, Pip did not. Yet the lad must have been beaten undeservedly or badly in the past to look so anxious.
The concern was sufficient to make Darius abandon the trunk for the time being and seek the boy’s master.
Since others were at work in the master bedroom, Darius summoned Tyler to his study and shamelessly adopted his father’s intimidating mode. He sat behind the desk, a letter in front of him, and looked up at the plasterer from under his eyebrows.
“You wished to speak to me, sir?” Tyler said, tightly clutching his cap.
“Regarding the boy Pip,” Darius said.
“I told him not to run about the house, sir,” said Tyler. “I hope it weren’t on his account her ladyship got hurt. He don’t mean to be ill luck but he’s like a black cat. People see him, and it makes ’em leery.”
Darius merely lifted his eyebrows, as his father might have done.
“On account his eyes, sir,” said Tyler. “Them queer eyes of his that don’t match. It takes some people funny. They say her ladyship fainted when she saw him.”
If only one could devise a vehicle that traveled as quickly as gossip did through a community, Darius thought. Artillery fire was slower than news racing through a household.
“Lady Charlotte tripped over a bucket,” he said. “The boy had nothing to do with the accident. On the contrary, he tried to warn her. I wished to make certain he would not be blamed.”
“I can’t help him being blamed, sir,” said Tyler. “Everyone blames him for everything. On account them eyes.”
“Superstition,” Darius said.
“I dunno, sir. I never guessed the trouble them eyes would be. But I was needing a boy to help me. Me and the missus, we’ve six girls and no lads. Pip’s healthy and willing, I’ll say that for him. Don’t find many such, in or out of the workhouse.”
“You found him in the workhouse?” Darius said, astonished. Pip bore no resemblance to the wretched creatures typically consigned to the parish workhouse.
“Me and my missus used to live in Manchester, near the Salford side,” said Tyler. “I looked all over Manchester for a lad. Finally found Pip in the Salford workhouse. Weren’t there long, which is why he was healthy. Clergyman he lived with died, winter before last. If you spoke to him, sir, maybe you noticed as he was educated.”
Darius had noticed. He’d had too much else on his mind to wonder at it, though. Now he recalled the voice, with no trace of dialect, and the bow, the gentlemanly bow.
“Don’t I wish I’d had my missus with me that day,” Tyler said. “She saw quick enough what a trouble it would be, them eyes and him being educated like a gentleman. But he was healthy, sir, and willing and cheerful, and I hated to take him back and start looking again.”
“It’s unusual for a gentleman’s child to end up in the parish workhouse,” Darius said.
“He don’t know who his father was,” said Tyler. “Nor his mother, neither. He’s somebody’s bastard, that’s all we know. Yorkshire clergyman and his missus, name of Ogden, got him when a infant. Then they died, and he went to the other clergyman in Salford, name of Welton. Then
he
died.”
This sad story was one of thousands, Darius knew. It might have been sadder still. At least this boy had been given a good home to start. Many unwanted children were simply abandoned. Many ended in orphanages, living in far worse conditions than those of the workhouse.
He could do nothing for them, however. He could do something for Pip.
“His parentage is not his fault,” Darius said. “The color of his eyes is a quirk of nature. I do not hold with superstition and will not allow a child to be tormented or persecuted on account of it.”
“Oh, no, sir, I only meant—”
“I wish to make myself quite clear,” Darius said. “No one in my employ is allowed to beat a child who has done nothing wrong. In the matter of Lady Charlotte’s accident today, Pip did nothing wrong. On the contrary, his behavior was exactly what it ought to be. I should be greatly displeased were anyone to give the boy reason to believe otherwise. Children ought to be encouraged to do what is right. Do you understand me, Tyler?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then you may return to your work.”
Though the matter of Pip was settled, Darius continued unsettled for some time after Tyler left his study.
He doubted Lady Charlotte would faint because a boy’s eyes didn’t match. He also doubted that the menses explained what had happened. Though she’d seemed to recover herself, he was sure she was not altogether well when she left him to puzzle over Lady Margaret’s belongings.
He recalled the illness everyone talked about, the so-called “wasting sickness” Lady Charlotte had suffered years ago. They all said it was like her mother’s ailment. But “wasting sickness” was merely one of those exasperating terms that covered a multitude of ailments. Consumption, cancer, diseases of the heart, and many others all qualified.
Brooding in his study would not answer the question, he told himself. He might as well do something productive with his day, and go to Altrincham, as he’d intended to do yesterday before the provoking encounter with Morrell.
In the entrance hall, Darius found Lady Lithby conversing with a woman of neatly unexciting appearance who appeared to be not much older than she was.
“Ah, here you are, Mr. Carsington,” said Lady Lithby. “I was told you were in the study with a workman. I did not wish to disturb you when you were busy.”
Now
what? “Disturb me with what?” Darius said.
“Good news this time,” said Lady Lithby. “Mrs. Endicott is your new housekeeper.”
His new housekeeper was plain and whippet thin, but her unremarkable brown eyes were bright and intelligent. Her curtsy was as crisp and neat as her attire.