Susanna Fraser (9 page)

“So do I. We’ve earned a good long peace.”

She laid a hand on his cheek. “But are you truly happy about being here? It can’t be easy for you.”

“Not all of it, but I never expected it to be. But you were right about this village. There are good people here, and I like to think of making the inn bigger and finer and having something to pass on to our children, should any of them want to follow in our footsteps. Truly, I’m as happy as I’ve ever been in my life, to be here with you, building our life together.”

“But those servants who wouldn’t even stay to give you a chance...”

“Have already been replaced by ones who are eager to have the work. I don’t expect to have any trouble keeping the inn staffed.”

“No, but...I’d hoped for better from my home. And, truly, if you aren’t happy here, I’m sure we could find a buyer who’d pay us as much as we paid, or almost, and we could set up at another inn somewhere else. Perhaps even in London. We could see so much more of your family, and the children would have their grandparents around every day.”

Elijah shook his head. “I like London, and I’m glad we’re close enough to visit my family, or have them here, but I don’t want to live there. I think the country air will better agree with Jake, just for a start.” Jake wasn’t precisely a sickly child, but nor was he a strong, robust one, either, and he’d had a cough last winter that had lingered into May. Elijah swore the boy already had a better color after only a month away from the city’s dirty air.

“That’s very true,” Rose allowed.

“Are
you
not happy here?” he asked. Maybe she was at last ready to voice what he’d suspected for days.

She bit her lip. “What would you say if I wasn’t?”

“The same thing you said to me, more or less. If you’re truly miserable, it wouldn’t matter how content I am. We can find a place where
both
of us are happy. But I wouldn’t want you to give up too soon. This is your home, and it’s been your dream almost all your life. You shouldn’t abandon it on a whim.”

“It’s not a whim,” she protested, stepping out of his encircling arm. “It’s
not.
Only, I never imagined coming back home and having Jenny, of all people, not even willing to speak to me, and Sam’s own parents wanting me to stay away. They’re
family
, you see. Even before I married Sam, they were like my second parents. They took me in when I had no place to go. And growing up, I hardly have any happy memories that I don’t share with Jenny. I thought when I came back she’d be as glad to see me as I was her, and that we’d visit each other whenever we had a spare moment, and that our children would play together. I—I am glad to have the inn, and a great kitchen all of my own at last, but Aspwell Heath doesn’t truly seem like home if the Merrifields cast me aside.”

“I see.” Abruptly Elijah came to a decision. “I believe I’m going to go have a talk with your Jenny.”

Rose’s eyes widened. “She’ll refuse to see you.”

“I think I can persuade her to listen long enough.” Sometimes the best way to gain a victory was a head-on assault, and he meant to try it—in the most gentle, courteous manner he could manage.

Now her brows narrowed dubiously. “Well...good luck.”

He kissed her. “Trust me.”

* * *

He waited until after dinner and welcomed three parties of travelers who would stay the night at the inn before striding out into the long sunlight of the summer evening to Jenny’s cottage. As he’d hoped, he found her alone with just her two children, as her husband was about his evening’s farm chores.

She frowned when she opened the door to him. “What are you doing here?”

“I’ve come to talk about Rose and Jake,” he said calmly. He adopted his least threatening posture, slouching slightly with his arms behind his back, and made no move to step inside before he was invited.

“What of them?”

“Rose misses you. She cannot understand why you won’t speak to her, when you were like a sister before. And Jake doesn’t know what to think of his grandparents. He’s frightened of them, a little. Surely that’s not what they wanted.”

Jenny blinked and shook her head.

“I didn’t think so. I realize I’m not what you expected as a husband for Rose, but am I really so dreadful to be worth making your best friend, your sister-in-law, this unhappy over?”

“She’s not my sister-in-law anymore.” Her voice was low, pained and angry. “You’re
not
Sam.”

“No, I’m not.” He shrugged. “That I can’t remedy. But surely you wouldn’t have expected Rose to mourn him for the rest of her life. Would you have minded her marrying again, if she’d brought home a white husband?”

“I don’t know.” She stepped back and waved her arm in invitation. “Oh, do come in. I don’t like to think what these two will get into if I leave them alone too long.”

Her two children, a girl a little younger than Jake and a toddling son a little older than Mary, stood in the center of the cottage and stared at him, round-eyed. Elijah smiled at them. The girl shrank back a little, but the baby pointed at him and laughed.

It broke the tension. Elijah chuckled, and Jenny smiled. “I’m sorry. He’s too young to have any manners.”

“It’s quite all right. I’m sure he’s never seen anything like me before.”

“No, none of us have.” She led him to a table, offered him a chair and sat opposite him. “That—that’s the trouble, you see. I suppose it would’ve been easier if you’d looked more like Sam. But it’s not just your skin. You’re nothing like Sam in any way—and I knew from the moment I laid eyes on the two of you together that Rose is besotted with you. She wasn’t like that with Sam, when they were first married. She didn’t smile at him like she had a secret or sit as close to him as decency allows in church. The way she looks at you is hard for his family to see.”

Elijah considered this. He’d achieved what he hoped—shocking Jenny into facing him and owning up to what her coldness was doing to Rose—but he wasn’t sure what to make of this much honesty. “She loved Sam, too,” he said after a moment. “Truly. I knew them from the time they arrived on the Peninsula, and anyone could see they were devoted to each other. If she was quieter about it when they first married, maybe it was because she was still grieving for her parents, or she was just more bashful about showing it then. As for me—well, she told me once that if a woman is to have two loves in her life, it’s well that they’re not too much the same, so she can hold both the loves in her heart. Both strong, but nothing alike.”

Jenny seemed to weigh this, her head turned to one side. “I suppose. But, it’s so hard. Rose always talked of having the Red Lion someday, from the time her mother started teaching her to cook. It was a byword for dreadful food, you see, and she wanted to make it famous for just the opposite cause. But we all had dreams, in those days. I was going to have my own dressmaker’s shop and sew all of Lady Bassett’s gowns. And look at me now.” She waved a hand to indicate the rather shabby little cottage. “You’ve given Rose her dream. Sam talked of it, when he asked her to marry him, but he never could’ve managed it, any more than I could’ve managed to set up my own shop. You’ve done more than my brother ever could’ve done for my friend, and there is the sting of it all. I can’t bear it, and my parents cannot either.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” he said softly.

She shook her head. “No. I know my brother. He—he wasn’t you. I’ve heard all the talk about you, how clever the vicar says you are, how everyone sees already how good you are at managing the inn. Sam couldn’t have done that, and he never would’ve made such an impression on his colonel that he set him up with such a place, either.”

That was the story Elijah and Rose had let get abroad, without either confirming or denying it—that his colonel or some other rich officer patron had lent them the money to buy the Red Lion. They’d got into such a habit of keeping the rubies a secret that they didn’t want the source of their good fortune much talked of even now that it had been sold and converted into ownership of an inn, with a little left over and set aside against future necessity. But he’d give Jenny and her parents the truth. They deserved to know what Sam had done.

“And I tell you you’re wrong,” he repeated. “I don’t know what kind of innkeeper Sam would’ve been. But I do know he’s the reason we were able to buy it at all.” He went on to tell her the story of the rubies, briefly. “The inn was his dream for Rose, as much as it was hers, as much as it became mine. We’re here because of him. I’m sure he’s happy for her, and he’d want all his family to be happy, too.”

Now slow tears trickled down Jenny’s cheeks. “Oh.
Oh.
I suppose—I suppose I had a better brother than I thought.”

Elijah smiled. “He truly was.”

“Tell Rose...tell her I’ll come to see her tomorrow, and I’ll try to get my parents to come, too.”

“She’ll be so glad to see you. And thank you for hearing me out.”

* * *

The next morning Jenny and the Merrifields came to the inn and engaged in a tearful reunion with Rose. Elijah kept away at first, but when Rose called for him he shook hands all around and accepted apologies for how cold their first reception of him had been. He was prepared to give them a second chance, since their coldness had sprung from grief and their love for their son. And for Rose and Jake they were family, and always would be. Forgiveness was worth it for their sakes, too.

Just before midnight Elijah went through what was already becoming a nightly ritual. He could not seek his own rest until he was sure all was well with the inn, so he started in the stables, listening to the rustlings of the horses and murmuring a greeting to a wakeful groom.

He entered the inn through the kitchen, keeping his steps quiet and cautious to avoid waking the scullery maid. The guard dog thumped his tail at Elijah’s familiar tread, and the sleek-coated, fat kitchen cat rubbed against his legs, purring and doing her best to make him stumble.

After he was sure all was well on the ground level, he made his way up the creaky stairs and down the passage where their overnight customers slept. All was still, though someone in Room Three snored so loudly Elijah could hear him through the thick oaken door.

At last he climbed another flight of stairs to his family’s rooms. First he stepped into the children’s room—somehow
he
couldn’t sleep until he knew they were safely slumbering. Tonight, all was peaceful. Jake slept in his low bed, clutching the same blanket he’d carried all the way through Spain and France. And there in the cradle lay little Mary, the apple of Elijah’s eye. Carefully, for if nothing else, Rose had taught him that one must
never
wake a sleeping baby, he stroked her soft curls. Her hair, though as black as his, fell in soft ringlets like her mother’s, and she had, all unexpectedly, Rose’s gray eyes set in skin nearly as dark a brown as his own. His father had already warned him to be prepared for the day in sixteen years or so when Mary decided to try the effect of those eyes in that face on susceptible youths. Elijah reflected it was a good thing he’d had so much early practice at being terrifying.

But tonight all that was far away. He left the children for his own room. Though he tried to undress quietly, since Rose had had such a long day of it between the kitchen and her reunion with the Merrifields, she awoke as he slid into bed beside her and she drew him into her arms for a sleepy kiss.

“Is it your dream now?” he asked.

She settled deeper into the embrace. “
Our
dream.”

* * * * *

Historical Note

Writing the story of a black soldier in Wellington’s Peninsular War army required a certain amount of extrapolation on my part. England had a free black community in the early decades of the nineteenth century, and many of its men were sailors and at least some of them soldiers. While I haven’t yet run across an account of a black soldier in the Peninsular campaign, nor have I found anything to suggest it couldn’t have happened, I decided that was license enough for the story I wanted to tell.

The Forty-Third was a real regiment that fought throughout the American Revolution and, a few decades later and rather more victoriously, in the Peninsular War. They then went on to serve at the end of the War of 1812 at the Battle of New Orleans. However, all of its officers and men in this story are my own inventions.

For Elijah’s parents’ background as slaves from a Virginia plantation who escaped to freedom under the auspices of the British army during the American Revolution, I’m indebted to
Rough Crossings:
Britain
,
the Slaves and the American Revolution
, by Simon Schama. My other sources included
Colour
,
Class and the Victorians
, by Douglas A. Lorimer, which includes enough information on the decades preceding Victoria’s reign to be of use in constructing my Regency-era story, and
Reconstructing the Black Past:
Blacks in Britain 1780-1830
, by Norma Myers.

Pick up these captivating historical romance reads from Susanna Fraser, available now!

The Sergeant’s Lady

Highborn Anna Arrington has been “following the drum,” obeying the wishes of her cold, controlling cavalry officer husband. When he dies, all she wants is to leave life with Wellington’s army in Spain behind her and go home to her family’s castle in Scotland.

As Anna journeys home with a convoy of wounded soldiers, she forms an unlikely friendship with Will. When the convoy is ambushed and their fellow soldiers captured, they become fugitives—together. The attraction between them is strong—but even if they can escape the threat of death at the hands of the French, is love strong enough to bridge the gap between a viscount’s daughter and an innkeeper’s son?

A Marriage of Inconvenience

Lucy Jones is a nobody. As an orphan she was reluctantly taken in by her wealthy relatives, the Arringtons, on the condition that she be silent and obedient, always. When her lifelong infatuation with her cousin Sebastian is rewarded by a proposal of marriage, she’s happy and grateful, even though the family finds excuses to keep the engagement a secret.

James Wright-Gordon has always had the benefits of money and a high station in society, but he is no snob. He’s very close to his sister, Anna, who quickly falls for the dashing Sebastian when the families are brought together at a wedding party. Meanwhile, James is struck by Lucy’s quiet intelligence, and drawn to her despite their different circumstances in life.

An Infamous Marriage

Northumberland
,
1815

At long last, Britain is at peace, and General Jack Armstrong is coming home to the wife he barely knows. Wed for mutual convenience, their union unconsummated, the couple has exchanged only cold, dutiful letters. With no more wars to fight, Jack is ready to attempt a peace treaty of his own.

Elizabeth Armstrong is on the warpath. She never expected fidelity from the husband she knew for only a week, but his scandalous exploits have made her the object of pity for years. Now that he’s back, she has no intention of sharing her bed with him—or providing him with an heir—unless he can earn her forgiveness. No matter what feelings he ignites within her...

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