“She comes not a moment too soon,” Lady Lithby went on. “Our guests arrive in a fortnight, and Charlotte and I shall not be able to come to Beechwood so often or stay so long as we’ve been doing. But all is in hand. By the end of the day I shall have brought Mrs. Endicott fully up to date. Then we may leave a great many matters to her.”
At that moment, the boy Pip hurried into the entrance hall, the young bulldog at his heels.
“Good heavens, I’d altogether forgotten her,” Lady Lithby said. “I hope she hasn’t been up to mischief.”
“She wanted to play in the master bedroom, your ladyship,” the boy said. “Mr. Tyler told me to take her out because it isn’t safe there. Something could fall on her, he said. He told me to stay out, too, until he got all the broken plaster taken down and cleared away.”
“She is not allowed in the bedrooms,” said Lady Lithby. “You naughty girl,” she admonished the dog. “You know you are not allowed upstairs.”
Daisy only gazed at her blankly, tongue hanging out of the side of her mouth, with its crooked teeth. It was hard to look at her and keep a straight face.
“It’s a waste of breath scolding her now,” Darius said. “She’s a dog. To all intents and purposes, they have no past. She wandered because she was bored. She must have been very bored to climb all those stairs.”
“Ah, yes, how could I forget?” Lady Lithby said with that easy laugh of hers. “You are the animal expert.”
“It doesn’t want expertise,” Darius said. “One need only remember that they’re dogs, not children.”
The boy found the courage to rise to Daisy’s defense. “She’s a good dog, sir,” he said. “She came right away when I said, ‘Come.’ Didn’t you, girl?” He bent and rubbed Daisy’s head. She submitted happily to his attentions, tongue lolling, drool oozing out of the side of her mouth.
Darius recollected what the plasterer had told him. “Lady Lithby is busy at the moment, Pip. Since your master doesn’t want you underfoot, you shall help us by giving the dog air and exercise. I’m on my way to the stables. You and Daisy had better come with me.”
Charlotte’s unhappy wandering took her to Beechwood’s stables. They needed a great deal of work. The sloped paving was in the process of being replaced, she saw. The window shutters and the racks were undergoing repair. The old-fashioned building was being taken care of and the horses looked to be well tended.
She hadn’t come to inspect them, though.
She’d come because of the horses.
Horses, Papa said, were the animals to go to when one wanted calming. Pigs were good for reflection and talking over important matters but a horse was Nature’s great tranquilizer. Some people believed this was because the animal’s large eyes exuded a quieting energy. He doubted this was the proper reason. Whatever the true reason was, though, the effect was not to be denied.
Mr. Carsington’s groom being elsewhere at the moment, Charlotte had the tranquilizing effects all to herself.
She stood inside the stable door, leaning against the doorpost and inhaling the familiar earthy aromas while she waited for Mr. Carsington’s cattle to work their equine magic on her troubled spirit.
Her turmoil was beginning to subside when she heard his deep voice outside—and a heartbeat later, the boyish tenor, instantly recognizable. The stable offered only one way out, and that would bring her into their path. She moved farther into the building and pressed herself up against the wall, waiting for them to pass.
The voices came ever nearer, to the door itself. She edged yet more deeply inside, aiming for a shadowy corner where she might not be noticed when they entered.
“I understand you’ve had schooling,” came Mr. Carsington’s voice, so very near.
“Yes, sir. That is, not a public school, you know. Mr. Welton, the gentleman who took me in after my parents died, took pupils. He taught me along with them.”
“He must have been a well-educated gentleman, then,” Mr. Carsington said, “if you learned your speech from his example.”
“Mrs. Tyler says it won’t do me any good, talking like my betters,” the young voice answered. “She says I’m not to think I’m above anyone else on account of it. And I said ‘But I was in the workhouse, ma’am, and we were all the same.’ And I told her I was as glad and grateful as any of the others to get a place and get out.”
Charlotte pushed her fist against her mouth to keep from crying out. A
workhouse?
This child—not hers, no, he couldn’t be hers, but even so—this innocent boy consigned to a workhouse with the parish homeless, jobless, hopeless?
“It was not a long time you were in that place, I understand,” Mr. Carsington said.
One minute was too long,
she wanted to cry. She made herself remain still, very still, looking straight ahead.
“It felt like a long time,” the boy said. “It wasn’t as long as some stay there, though. Mr. Welton died in the winter, and it was spring when Mr. Tyler took me on.”
“I’m sorry you were there for even a few months,” Mr. Carsington said. “But you had no one to take you in, I suppose, and it was that or an orphanage.”
“I heard some of them are worse than any workhouse,” Pips said. “Worse than prison. I know I was lucky, sir. And I got out, didn’t I? Now I pretend it was a bad dream.”
“That’s probably best.”
“All I have to do is do what I’m told,” Pip said. “And do it the best I can. Mr. Welton said I must always do my best. Mrs. Tyler says I had too much schooling and speak too fine. But if I could learn from Mr. Welton, why can’t I learn from Mr. Tyler? If I could learn from books, why can’t I learn from doing? Why do they think I can’t?”
Mr. Carsington must have heard the anxiety in the boy’s voice, for he said sharply, “There’s no reason you can’t. There’s no need for you to go back to the workhouse. If you lose your place with the Tylers, you must come to me, and I will find you a place. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir, thank you, sir,” the boy said, in a rush of relief.
“Never mind thanking me,” came the gruff answer. “Take Daisy for a good run. She’s getting fat from want of exercise. She needs to run and play. Unfortunately these elegant ladies don’t run and play. And so the dog will only grow fatter, and stupid and lethargic besides. We can’t have that.”
“No, sir.”
“Pip, I am charging you with running and playing with Daisy and keeping her lively—and out from underfoot of the workmen,” Mr. Carsington said. “You’ll see to this for me?”
Charlotte couldn’t help smiling. He’d paid a good deal more attention to Daisy than one could have guessed.
He’d paid attention to an insignificant apprentice, too. She’d heard in Mr. Carsington’s voice a degree of compassion and generosity that surprised her. Rakes, in her experience, were among the most selfish and self-centered of men.
“Indeed, I will, sir. You are very good to take the trouble to explain.” The boy sounded as surprised as Charlotte was. “Where may I take her to play?”
“Keep to the gardens and park—such as they are—and watch where you’re going. We are not yet properly civilized here, and offer a hundred ways to break your skull. Try not to trip over anything or fall into the ponds. Some of them are as thick as marshes, and you’ll find falling in much easier than getting out again.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
She heard footsteps dashing away and Daisy’s short bark.
Heavier footsteps came nearer. She edged farther into the shadows.
“You are the most deluded woman in the Northern Hemisphere if you think you can hide from me there, when you are wearing a light-colored dress,” came the deep voice. “You were eavesdropping, Lady Charlotte. Yet one more to add to your long list of unfortunate habits.”
She stepped out from the gloom. “I came here for solitude,” she said, putting her chin up. “I could hardly accomplish that if I came out and joined in the conversation. Or should I say ‘interrogation’?”
“It was an interrogation,” Mr. Carsington said. “I spoke to Tyler. I did not want the boy to be beaten on account of someone else’s error.”
Her hands clenched. She made herself unclench them. “I wish you had told me,” she said. “I should never permit such a thing.”
“That’s what a woman would say,” said Mr. Carsington. “Since you are a woman, Tyler would humor you now and beat the boy later.”
“And since you are not a woman, what then? Why should he not beat the boy later, whatever you said?”
“Because Tyler understood that he should have to answer to me, and because he could see that I was quite capable of beating
him,
should he disregard my wishes.”
Her gaze shot to Mr. Carsington’s hands. He had not yet put on his gloves but held them in one hand. It was not hard and callused. It wasn’t soft, either. It was unfashionably large, the fingers long, not thick yet sturdy and capable. She was sure that a blow from those hands would not be a gentle one…though their touch could be gentle enough when he chose.
Devastatingly so. She remembered the light brush of his fingers…
She hastily returned her gaze to his face. In the dappled light of this corner of the stables, it was hard to read.
“Then I thank you,” she said. “It was kind of you to take notice of such a thing and take trouble over a boy you don’t know.”
“I know him now,” Mr. Carsington said. “I had only to notice his eyes to understand he’d met more than his share of trouble.”
She could not prevent the quick inhalation but it was the tiniest of gasps, scarcely noticeable, she hoped. “His eyes?” she said, keeping her voice noncommittal.
“You were too dizzy to note it, I don’t doubt,” he said. “The boy’s eyes don’t match. One is blue, the other a sort of green. Uneducated people can be superstitious about such things. The devil’s work or a sign of bad luck, they call these oddities, when it is merely an innocent quirk of nature. This combines with other factors to make Pip’s position less secure than it ought to be.”
“The Tylers seem to think him overeducated,” she said.
“His schooling is a drawback,” Mr. Carsington said. “Yet another is his uncertain parentage.”
The last sentence was a blow, and she felt as though a heavy fist delivered it to her heart. But on the outside she was composed, as cold as ice.
“People can be…so unkind…to children with defects or without parents,” she said through stiff lips. “As though…as though it were the child’s fault.”
He ducked his head to look at her more closely. “Good gad, are you crying? Well, what a softhearted creature you can be at times, to be sure.”
“I am not crying,” she said with a sniff. “And if I was, what of it? You are softhearted, too. I heard you assure the boy that he would not go back to the workhouse.”
He would not let her lead him into the detour. He bent nearer still, and even in the uncertain light, she felt the falcon’s gaze, too keen. “Something is wrong,” he said. “You are not yourself. You’ve been behaving strangely ever since you stumbled on the water bucket.”
She saw the boy’s face, as sharp and clear as life, in her mind’s eye.
Grief came, sudden and vast, like a rising ocean wave. She saw it sweeping toward her, threatening to swallow her as it had done ten years ago.
Utter despair. No way out.
No. Not again. If she sank into that darkness again, she’d never come out.
She brought her hands up, grasped the back of Mr. Carsington’s head, and pulled him to her as a drowning man would seize a rope.
She pressed her mouth to his, and kissed him, as though she were dying in fact, and he offered life.
The small, happy lifetime he’d given her yesterday.
He wrapped his arms about her, as though he understood. He held her as though for dear life, as though he sensed the danger.
Make me forget.
As though he understood, he deepened the kiss, and sorrow melted away in the sweetness of their mingling. The taste of him was like a honeyed liqueur, cool at first on the tongue yet flooding her senses with warmth. Happiness.
This is right.
She dragged her hands down over his arms, feeling the muscles shift under the coat, under her touch. She spread her hands over his chest, broad and hard, and made it, for this moment, her own. Like a blind woman, she discovered him with her hands, and the chill of shame could not withstand the warmth of touch and the sense of belonging: she to him, he to her. Shame and grief dissolved. The past dissolved and with it the loneliness of the time since.
Only now remained. Only now mattered.
Now
was his mouth, sliding from hers to mark her throat with its warm imprint.
Now
was his hands covering her breasts, molding to them as though imprinting their shape on his palms and fingers.
Now
was the movement of his fingers, over her bodice, and the tingle of her skin, under layers of clothing, as it awakened to his touch.
The warmth spread, and prickling sensations with it, swarming over her skin and under it and pooling in the pit of her belly. One moment. This moment. This happiness. To want and know she was wanted in return.
She remembered the tenderness he’d shown her and she gave it back, tracing the planes and angles of his face with her mouth. Her senses became vibrantly aware of a world of masculinity: the tickle of his neckcloth against her cheek, the light wool under her hands, and the male scents of starch and soap, the light fragrance of herbs, all mixed with the potent scent of his skin. She swam in sensations, touch and taste and smell. She was no longer drowning, except in pleasure. It was as though she’d slipped into a crystalline pool in some exotic place, far, far away from the world. The darkness of her mind now was pleasurable, not fearful. It was a summer darkness, lit with stars and a glowing moon.
She let her hands rove the way his did. She dragged her hands down over his chest and slipped them inside his coat, and let her fingers trace the sinuous lines of embroidery on his waistcoat. She was searching now, for the man under the fine cloth, and her hands moved on to the back of the waistcoat, where it gathered, then down lower still, to the edge of his waistband. She slid her fingers under it, to the fine, thin fabric—the only barrier between her hands and the skin of his back.