Darius returned to Beechwood late in the day, nursing a headache. His visit had upset Mrs. Tyler, and when she was upset, her voice rose to a screech. Since he was a gentleman as well as her husband’s employer, she couldn’t shriek at him, so she shrieked at her daughters instead.
“Stop that coughing, Sally! Watch what you’re doing with them greens, Annie! Mind that pail, Joan! You’re splashing water everywhere!” And so on.
The girls shrieked back, defending themselves. She screeched at them not to talk back to their elders.
It was amazing that Tyler still had his hearing.
Screeching notwithstanding, it was not, all in all, a bad place for an orphan boy. Pip ate with the family instead of waiting for their table scraps, as was the case for many in a similar position. He slept in the kitchen, not a cupboard or a dank cellar. They did not dress him in rags. Whatever Mrs. Tyler’s faults, she took great pride in her housewifery. Everyone under her roof—including the lowly apprentice—was “fed and clothed proper and knew what soap was,” she told Darius.
Still, it represented a steep descent from Mr. Welton’s household. Life with the Tylers meant no more schooling and that, Darius had discovered during last week’s ride to Salford, distressed the boy, though he made a brave show of not minding.
I shall have to send him to school,
Darius thought, as he rode home. It was that or take on Mr. Welton’s role and tutor the boy himself.
School was better. A boy ought to be with other boys. The trouble was, one must pay for it. As it was, Darius still needed to find the ready money to reimburse the Tylers for Pip’s upkeep. Mrs. Tyler might deem the boy bad luck, but she wasn’t about to let the articles of indenture be broken until she was compensated—in hard coin—for every last scrap they’d provided him and every minute they’d spent on him.
Darius was analyzing his finances for the hundredth time as he neared his stables. A series of shouts and shrieks brought him out of the mathematical reverie.
He hurried toward the noise. A short distance from the stables, he found two boys rolling in the dirt, pummeling each other.
“You queer-eyed little bastard!”
“You’ll look queer when I break your nose!”
“Your ma’s a whore!”
“Your father buggers sheep!”
“Your pa’s prick fell off from pox!”
“Your grandmother poxed the Royal Navy!”
Darius swiftly dismounted, strode to the combatants, grabbed them, and pulled them apart.
They continued to swing ineffectually at each other while breathlessly trading insults.
Darius lifted them off the ground and gave them both a shake. “Enough!” he said.
He didn’t raise his voice. He never had to raise his voice.
The boys fell silent.
He let them down but didn’t let them go.
He looked at Pip, who sported a bloody nose and would soon boast a black eye as well. “He never heard of William the Conqueror,” Pip said. “He’s an ignorant bloody buggering sod of an arsehole.”
“That’s enough,” Darius said. He looked at the other boy, whose nose was bleeding as well. “Who are you?”
“Rob Jowett. Sir.”
Rob looked to have suffered the worst of the battle. Not only was his eye promising to turn colorful, but his jaw was starting to swell. Darius released him. “Go home, Rob,” he said.
“He said the House of Lords is all bastards like him, sir,” Rob said indignantly. “That’s treason, ain’t it?”
“It isn’t, and I didn’t say
all
of them,” Pip said scornfully. “I said
some
of them
were.
Past tense. I suppose you can’t hear any better than you can hit.”
“That’s enough,” Darius said. “Rob, go home. Pip, I want to speak to you.”
Rob went off, making hideous faces at Pip over his shoulder until he was out of sight.
When he was out of sight, and Pip had no one to make hideous faces back at, Darius said, “What was that all about?”
“He’s as big as I am, sir,” Pip said. “It’s not wrong to hit someone as big as you are.”
“What was it about?”
“He’s so
ignorant,
” Pip said, looking in the direction Rob had gone. “He said Daisy was ugly.” He wiped his bloody nose on his coat sleeve.
Oh, Mrs. Tyler was going to love that.
“Where is Daisy?” Darius said.
“I brought her back. They like to have her home at Lithby Hall when Lady Lithby gets back from here, and these days the ladies go home near noon.”
“Then Rob didn’t try to hurt the dog,” Darius said. “He merely found fault with her looks. And you hit him for that?”
Pip shook his head. “Oh, no, sir. First I tried to reason with him. First I said that she’s a bulldog and that’s how they’re supposed to look. Besides, how could you say whether an animal was ugly or not, unless it was deformed? And he said I was deformed, and I said I wasn’t—like you said. I said my eyes were
distinctive.
And he said I gave myself airs because I was a pet with the Lithby Hall ladies, exactly like the dog. And I said the ladies were only polite to me because that’s how ladies are—polite, not that I expected him to know anything about what was polite any more than what was present and what was past tense. And he said my eyes were queer and it was because my mother was a poxy whore. And
then
I hit him.” He looked toward where Rob had gone and smiled an unmistakably self-satisfied smile.
That smile.
Darius knew that smile.
But no.
It vanished as the boy’s gaze came back, all earnestness now, to Darius. “I had to defend her honor, didn’t I, sir?” he said.
His mother’s honor.
The mother he’d never seen because she’d given him up when he was an infant.
A
newborn
infant?
Perhaps, but not the same newborn.
A coincidence, that was all.
“Sir?” said Pip. “Am I in trouble?”
“You’ll be in a great deal of trouble if you return to Mrs. Tyler looking like that,” Darius said. “You’d better put your head under the pump. And your coat sleeve as well. Where’s your cap?”
The boy looked about, found it, and snatched it up.
The cap.
Darius remembered the way Lady Charlotte had held that same cap in her hand, the dazed look on her beautiful face.
He remembered her odd behavior when she’d tripped over the bucket. He remembered Pip standing in front of her, wide-eyed…
…wearing an expression much like the one she wore.
Had she wondered what Darius wondered now?
Staring at the boy’s hair—filthy and tangled at present—Darius saw in his mind’s eye Lady Charlotte on the day they’d tussled on the gravel: the Botticelli Venus bedraggled and dirty.
He saw the same contradiction: the angelic beauty and the grimy belligerence.
Coincidence. She must have thought so, too. What were the chances, after all?
Yet when he returned to the house, the first thing Darius did was review the notes he’d made over the course of the last week, about Philip Ogden.
He thought about it for the rest of the day.
Even when he lay in bed, aggravating himself imagining the time when Lady Charlotte would be lying with him, in his arms, his mind reverted to the puzzle.
By the time he fell asleep, he’d decided he must travel to Yorkshire and try to get to the bottom of this. But first he’d better talk to her.
Tuesday 9 July
Darius was adding notes to those he’d already made when Mrs. Endicott appeared in the doorway of his study. “If you please, sir, the ladies are here,” she said. “Lady Lithby wishes to speak to you.”
He had not yet decided how to raise the subject of Pip with Charlotte. He knew he had no tact. He didn’t want to upset her. He needed to think. What he didn’t need was to have to make decisions about furnishings.
“It isn’t about wall coverings, is it?” Darius said. “She does understand that I can’t be asked about wall coverings. Or curtains.”
“I can’t say, sir,” said Mrs. Endicott said. “All I know is—”
“Oh, come, Mr. Carsington, you are not afraid of curtains, I hope,” said a light, laughing voice.
Mrs. Endicott hastily moved away from the door, and Lady Lithby sailed in, Lady Charlotte behind her, looking utterly angelic in a fluffy white dress.
Darius remembered her sitting on the desk upstairs and pulling up her pristine skirts, unabashed, uninhibited.
He took a calming breath and rose from his chair, casually pushing the papers under a ledger.
“I am deeply afraid of curtains,” he said. “I say I want red curtains. You ask whether I mean crimson or scarlet. You ask whether I prefer brocade or embroidered. Fringed or unfringed. Then you ask about
tassels,”
he added darkly. “It is a quick route to dementia.”
Lady Lithby laughed.
“There’s nothing to be frightened of,” Lady Charlotte said. “It’s only about the laundry.”
“I know nothing about laundry, either,” he said.
“We refer to the building on your property where the washing used to be done,” Lady Lithby said patiently. “The dirty linen is accumulating there.”
“I thought Goodbody sent my things out,” he said.
“That may be, but a household requires household linens,” said Lady Lithby. “Bed linens. Kitchen linens. The servants’ smocks and aprons and such. As a single gentleman, you may feel it is more practical to send your laundry out or to have a wash maid come in once a week. However, if you plan any change in your circumstances…” She paused very briefly. “…or if you plan to entertain often, you may find it more convenient to hire live-in laundry maids.”
Where the devil was he to find money to pay laundry maids? He needed money for Pip first.
He must have looked panicked because Lady Charlotte said, “Your laundry needs almost no repair. We’ve had it cleaned. The maids can begin working as soon as you please.”
“I have a great deal of business to see to,” he said. “I’ll stop and look at it as soon as I finish here. Then I’ll weigh the pros and cons on my way to the home farm.”
“That seems a most logical and efficient use of your time,” Lady Charlotte said, looking mightily amused.
“Indeed, I dare not keep Mr. Carsington any longer from his work,” Lady Lithby said. She turned away and left the room.
Darius joined Lady Charlotte as she started after her stepmother. He touched her arm to slow her down. “Meet me at the laundry in half an hour,” he whispered.
“What shall I tell her?” she said.
“Anything but the truth,” he said.
It took Charlotte more than half an hour to escape to the laundry because, naturally, this must be one of the days Molly accompanied her to Beechwood. The maid had plenty to do at home, tending to her mistress’s clothing and overseeing the servants who looked after Charlotte’s rooms. Like Lizzie’s maid, she had precious little time to spare for following her mistress about at Beechwood, where one certainly didn’t need her, with servants swarming about like flies.
But Molly came today, and getting rid of her wasn’t easy. Finally, Charlotte sent the maid to consult with the housekeeper about a heap of Lady Margaret’s gowns they’d found stuffed into a window seat. The consultation would involve tea, Charlotte knew, because Mrs. Endicott would be eager to establish a good relationship with the upper servants of the great house next door. As lady’s maid to Lord Lithby’s daughter, Molly stood near the top of the female staff hierarchy, only a very little below Lizzie’s maid.
Amid all the bustle—workmen and servants going to and fro, hammering, scraping, cleaning, and so on—it was easy enough to slip out of the house. Sneaking to the laundry was more difficult. It had been built farther away from the house than other service areas because it could be very smelly, especially in the old days, when lye was the main cleansing agent.
Still, Charlotte knew the place well enough by now to work out a path that would keep her out of view for the most part. If caught, she could manufacture an excuse on the spur of the moment. She’d had plenty of practice lying.
She didn’t have to lie to Mr. Carsington.
No pretending. No concealing. Freedom, to be herself.
The thought made her dizzy.
Or maybe that was simply happiness.
She came to the laundry at last and reached for the door handle. At the same instant, the door flew open and a large hand grabbed hers and pulled her inside.
He shut the door and pulled her into his arms and kissed her.
Her knees instantly gave way. She clutched the front of his coat and hung on and kissed him back as hard as she could. She didn’t know how to hold back, with him. She didn’t want to hold back. She only wanted to hold on.
He smelled of outdoors. His coat held the sun’s warmth, and his kiss was warm, too, and so wonderfully familiar. She could have stayed forever like this, pressed against his big, hard body, letting her mind swirl, giddy as a girl’s, while they kissed, endlessly.
But it ended as abruptly as it had begun. He broke the kiss and put her away from him.
“We must talk,” he said.
It was the tone, the serious tone that drained away the warmth, as much as the distance he’d made between them.
Then it came back to her in a vivid flash of recollection: Geordie’s voice on that last day, so grave.
We cannot see each other so often,
he’d said.
People will talk. I’d better go away for a time.
“I may need to go away for a time,” Mr. Carsington said.
She shook her head, unable to comprehend. Too much noise in her head, and too much noise in her pounding heart. Why had he kissed her, only to put her away from him and say he was going away?
He frowned. “Are you ill?”
“No,” she said. “No. Only tell me straight out. Don’t break it to me gently.”
His frown deepened. “When have you ever known me to break anything gently? I scarcely know how. That’s the difficulty with…” He trailed off. “But tell me what’s troubling you.”
“I don’t know,” she said.
Be sensible,
she told herself.
This isn’t Geordie.
“It’s your face,” she said. “You look so serious. I wondered if you’d changed your mind…about me.”