Beckman: Lord of Sins (9 page)

“I cannot vouch for her artistic ability.” North counted up his hand. “Allie says her aunt is as good as anybody she saw in London.”

“Allie’s been to the museums?”

“I gather she would have been four at the time.” North moved his peg. “She remembers what she saw.”

“Sara…” Beck ran a hand through his hair, mentally revising and reassessing things he’d tried to tally up before. “She’s hiding then too.”

“What do you mean?” North appropriated the deck and began to deal the next hand.

“You’re hiding.”

“Earlier today I was entitled to privacy. Now I’m hiding. And what of you, are you hiding?”

Beck smiled a little. “Probably. When I keep company with my brother in Town, there are too many females willing to tolerate my attentions in exchange for an introduction to Nick. It’s safer for me and Nick both if we move independently.”

“I’m familiar with the problem,” North said. “I’m told you first become aware of it when some sweet and naughty young thing rises up from your sheets and asks if you ever carouse with your brother.”

Beck’s eyebrows flew up. “And here I thought I was the only one.”

“We always do,” North said, glowering afresh at his cards. “We always think we’re the only ones when it counts, though in fact, we never are.”

***

Beck finished a quick lunch under a shady tree, soreness reverberating through every muscle and sinew of his body. At least the crushing fatigue of spring plowing had kept him from misbehaving with Sara again.

She hadn’t dragged him to any more pretty corners of the property, and no longer offered to light him to his room. Allie was a good and constant chaperone, and ye gods, the child was sharp. She was waiting for him when he got back to his team, grinning as she stroked the nose of the nearest horse.

“Watch your feet around these fellows,” Beck warned, checking the harness. “One misstep on their part, and you’ll have toes like a duck.”

“I’m wearing my half boots.”

“So have you come to help?” Beck surveyed the ground yet to be turned. Thank all the gods, there wasn’t that much of it. Just another few backbreaking, arm-wrenching, hand-blistering, gut-wearying hours of work.

“I have come to cadge a piggyback ride on old Hector. Mama said I might, because it’s a lovely day, the chores are done, and you’re to send me back to her if I’m a nuisance.”

“Duly noted.” Beck hefted her up into his arms. Hector took the outside position on the left, which, given the direction Beck turned the team, put him on the inside of each turn, and gave him the least to do. He could carry a little girl without even noticing the weight. “Up you go.”

Allie scrambled onto the horse’s broad back and, predictably, began to chatter. Not so predictably, she also scooted around, swinging a leg over the beast’s withers, then another over his rump, so she was sitting on him backward.

“This is more polite,” she informed Beck as the team turned into the first furrow. “So when are you going into Portsmouth? Mama says you might also make a trip into Brighton, because you’re thinking of selling the vegetables there later this summer. I think you ought to sell our flowers.”

Conversing with somebody facing him while he plowed was oddly disorienting. Beck had to look past Allie to fix his gaze on some object at the end of the furrow. Plowing straight was an art, and Beck would have said he had the talent for it, until Allie sat between him and the end of the furrow.

“What sort of flowers, princess?”

“All kinds. I don’t know all their names, but I can draw them. We put them all over the house when summer comes. Before the strawberries even come in, we have bunches and bunches of tulips and irises—I know how to separate those—and there are roses too, but Mama despairs of them. I like to draw the roses—they’re complicated.”

“What have you been drawing lately?” Beck asked, reaching the first turn.

“I always draw. In my head, mostly, which Aunt says is good practice. Mama saw you and Mr. North without your clothes, and Aunt said she wished she could draw you.”

“That’s nice,” Beck muttered. Turns were tricky, especially with horses hitched three across. “What else do you—she saw
what
?”

“You.” Allie grinned beatifically. “Without your clothes. Both of you. Mama and Aunt Polly saw Mr. North in the pond last summer, but after you unloaded hay, Mama was up in the carriage house and saw you bathing in the cistern. She said the sight would keep her up at night for weeks, which is silly. It’s just skin.”

Beck tried to divide his attention. “Allemande, you can’t go repeating such things merely to provoke a reaction. I’m sure your mother was mortified, and had we known, North and I would have been mortified as well. Modesty is a virtue shared by most decent folk.”

“Not Aunt. She says artists have to study nudes because human subjects are the most complicated. She drew naked people all the time when we were in Italy. I will draw naked people again too one day.” She wrinkled her nose and sighed in resignation. “I draw naked pigs and cats and so forth now. From what little I’ve done with them, I don’t expect people will be much different.”

“We aren’t going to talk about naked people. Or naked pigs or cats. What’s for dinner tonight?”

“Aunt is making roast chicken with smashed potatoes.” Allie smacked her lips dramatically. “And she said she’s making a chocolate cake
with
icing
to sweeten Mr. North’s temper, because plowing makes him cranky.”

“Plowing, not getting much sleep, and dodging busy little girls with nothing better to do than plague their elders.”

“I’d paint if Mama would let me,” Allie groused. “Am I really plaguing you?”

“Of course not,” Beck assured her, though she absolutely was. He wanted to carefully examine his recall of the day they’d unloaded the hay wagon, and go over every detail of his dunking in the cistern. They’d both stripped down completely; that much he was sure of.

“I’ve decided I would like to paint Mr. North’s hands,” Allie went on happily. “It’s not quite a human subject, because I’m forbidden those, but I like hands.”

“Your mother might not approve. She was not even comfortable with your doing Heifer’s portrait.”

“But she told me it turned out well, and Aunt agreed. Aunt is never one to spare feelings at the expense of truth. She says an artist has to be ruthless.”

“I can’t like the idea of you being ruthless,” Beck said, thinking a relatively carefree Allie was challenge enough. “But tell me something, oracle of the plow, when was the last time you heard your mother play her violin?”

“I haven’t heard her play since I was little. There’s a pianoforte in the downstairs parlor, but she only dusts it, she doesn’t play it. She and Aunt argue about that too.”

“About dusting it?”

“No, silly.” Allie lifted her arms to the spring day in casual joy. “Aunt says Mama should teach me a little so I am suitably capable at the keyboard, but Mama gets all tight around her eyes and does that cranky-without-saying-a-word thing, and then Aunt gets quiet, but that never lasts.”

“Most mamas know how to do what you describe, sisters too.”

Allie lowered her arms and shuddered. “Papa could do it. I was little, but I remember him glaring and glaring. Mama wouldn’t play for him and his friends, and it was awful.”

She glared herself in recollection.

“I thought you were very young when you came back to England, Allie.” The plow hit a subterranean rock, and the team stopped.

“We came back when I was four, and we saw everything. That’s when Papa found out I could draw like Aunt. Then it was back to Italy, and I got lessons and everything. Aunt and I both had lessons. Then we came back to England again, but we didn’t see anything except Brighton and Three Springs. Papa was dead. Mama said I didn’t have to wear black if I didn’t want to.”

Beck urged the team forward and hefted the plow over the rock, his back screaming at the abuse.

“Did you want to wear black?” Beck tossed the question out as a distraction, unwilling to pry more directly. From Allie’s account and Sara’s own comments, Sara’s marriage had had its share of rough spots and challenges.

Allie smoothed her hand over the horse’s broad rump. “Of course not. I’m to have more long dresses in the fall.”

“You are growing up,” Beck said, wishing it didn’t have to be so. He missed his sisters badly and wanted nothing so much as to leave the team in the field, mount Ulysses, and see his father one last time. The realization blended with the plowing-ache to form a peculiarly poignant misery.

Allie heaved a great sigh. “I know it’s not all bad, growing up. When I’m older, Mama won’t be able to tell me what to paint. Hermione’s udder is dripping on both sides.”

“Thank you for telling me.” The plow hit another rock and sent jolts of pain up both Beck’s arms into his shoulders. “For good measure, I think you ought to tell Mr. North as well.”

“I’m being a nuisance.” Allie grinned, nuisance-ing apparently being great good fun in her lexicon. “See if I share these biscuits Aunt sent out for you, Mr. Haddonfield.”

Beck signaled the horses to halt at the end of the furrow. “If you want off that horse, my price is one biscuit.”

“Here.” Allie passed him a sweet and drew one from her pocket for herself. “They’re still warm.” They shared a companionable moment, munching their bounty, then Beck swung her down.

“Don’t sneak up on North. His language is colorful today.”

“His back hurts,” Allie said, her tone serious. “Aunt says he needs horse liniment, but he’s too stubborn to admit it. Mama agrees.”

“Then it’s unanimous. Where is the horse liniment?”

“Mama makes it.” Allie began to trot off to the next field. “It isn’t really for horses, and it’s in the still room with a purple flower on it. ’Bye!”

Leaving Beck to try to recall if, on the occasion of bathing in the cistern, he’d scratched his ass, pissed in the yard, or otherwise disgraced himself. He didn’t think so, because the business of the moment had been getting clean.

And Sara hadn’t just peeked, she’d peeked and told and was plagued by the memory of what she’d seen. He decided this was only fair. In the past weeks, he’d seen Sara on four occasions with her hair not only uncovered, but flowing down her back in a shiny, thoroughly unforgettable braid.

His sore, aching hands itched with the frustrated desire to undo that braid and touch the silken glory he’d known once before. His groin started to throb, until the plow hit another rock, and pain once again served to displace desire.

After dinner, an uncharacteristically sociable North had accompanied Beck to the hot springs, and a medicinal soak had followed. As Beck hung up the new towels in the laundry to dry and made his way to his room, it occurred to him his sojourn at Three Springs was different from many of the other trips he’d been sent on.

Here, while the typical traveler’s propensity for observing hadn’t left him, he was not among strangers. He was among the same people day and night, and he was becoming familiar with them in ways a lone wayfarer in a distant land did not.

He was, in short, growing attached. Whatever plagued North, Beck wanted it resolved, not out of a need for tidy endings and neat answers, but because it weighed on North’s soul, put shadows in a good man’s eyes, and kept him scanning the horizon rather than focusing on the bounty at his feet.

And then there was Sarabande Adagio herself. Beck’s feelings for her were growing complicated, beyond the simple, powerful lust of a man who permitted himself only infrequent attractions. He watched her moving around the house, taking down this set of curtains for a good washing, polishing andirons in that unused parlor, mixing up a salve for burns to keep in Polly’s kitchen.

Sara was preoccupied, biding her time, doing what the situation called for, but she had an eye on the horizon as well, and it was an anxious eye. Beck wanted to banish her anxieties, to carry her burdens for her and offer her the comfort of a shoulder to lean on—and so much more.

Except she deserved to be able to rely on the man she bestowed her favors and her fears on. Rely on him utterly and exclusively, and Beck was not that man. He sank down on his bed, frowning, as something nagged at the back of his mind, something from the day’s flotsam of conversations and silences.

Hermione’s dripping from both sides.

Allie’s casual information trotted up from the back of Beck’s mind, pushing him to his tired feet even as he cursed the need to check on the mare. He took a lantern and a jacket from the back hall and shuddered at the chill of the spring night.

As soon as he spied Hermione in her stall, Beck knew he wouldn’t be going back into the house any time soon. She was slowly circling, pawing at the straw, her belly distended, her eye both restless and resigned. She swung her gaze at Beck as soon as he approached her stall.

“It’s only me, sweetheart.” He kept his voice low and relaxed, because a mare could stop the foaling process if she became disturbed. “I’ve come to tidy up your nest. Thought you might want a bit of company on a chilly night.”

While Hermione stood along one wall of her stall, pawing occasionally, Beck mucked out her loose box and heaped extra clean straw in one corner. He scrubbed out her water bucket next and forked her a mound of fresh hay into another corner, then left her in peace to resume her pacing.

“I’m told”—he spoke softly to the horse—“I’m good at foaling. Nick says the mares like me, which is fine with me, because I certainly like them. One wonders, though, who the papa of your foal is, Miss Hermione Hunt. You were a naughty girl, going courting without an escort that way…”

He pattered on, until with a heavy groan, the mare went to her knees then lay down on her side. She began to strain, and Beck went silent, standing outside the stall and praying for nature to do what nature alone could do best. A few minutes later, a very undainty hoof emerged from beneath Hermione’s tail.

Beck had assisted at many, many foalings, from the time he’d been a boy at Belle Maison right up through the past two years in Sussex. He was good at it, and he enjoyed it. If the size of that hoof and the one appearing next to it were any indication, Hermione had taken up with a damned draft stud.

She couldn’t help that now, of course, so Beck waited another couple of anxious minutes while the mare made no progress.

Resuming his quiet monologue, Beck eased open the door to the stall and approached the mare.

“Not cooperating, I take it.” Beck knelt and stroked a hand over the mare’s sweaty flank. “Children are like that. Ask my papa. What say I lend a hand, and we’ll see if we can’t persuade the Foal Royal to join us sooner rather than later?”

Hermione rested her head in the straw, lying flat out as if dead, which was only prudent when she was between contractions. God willing, the old girl would need her rest. Beck continued stroking and talking until he was positioned behind the mare, his hands wrapped around the foal’s hooves. When Hermione began to strain again, Beck exerted a steady, increasing pull on those hooves, and the foal started to shift in the birth canal.

“Come to Papa,” Beck gritted through clenched teeth. The mare was laboring to the limit of her strength, Beck’s aching back was screaming with his efforts, and progress was agonizingly slow. The contraction ebbed, and Beck released his hold as the foal slipped back a few inches.

“Next time, my girl, we are going to have a damned foal,” Beck panted, getting his breath while he could.

Hermione grunted and thrashed and began to push again, so Beck went back to work. It took two more back-aching, harrowing attempts, but on a rush of fluid, a sizable filly was born. Beck peeled the placenta back from the foal’s nose, made sure the little beast was breathing, then sat back in the straw, leaning against the sturdy wall.

He beamed at the mare, who had shifted to start licking her new treasure. “Would you look at that? Look what a lovely little business you’ve done here. She’s gorgeous and hale and full of beans already.”

The filly was shaking her head and trying to prop her front feet out before her, while Hermione methodically licked her baby’s coat dry.

“Beckman?” Sara’s voice came from the aisle way. “To whom are you speaking?”

“My newest goddaughter.” Beck rose slowly, careful not to disturb the mare and foal. “Hermione has tended to the Creator’s business tonight, and done a splendid job.”

He eased from the stall, moved, as he always was, by the spontaneous joy of seeing a new life begin. Hermione was acquitting herself like an old hand, but Beck would stay around to make sure the foal nursed in the first hour of its life and the mare passed the afterbirth. After that, there was little he could do to keep the odds running in the filly’s favor.

Sara, wrapped in a thick wool shawl, peered over the half door. “What a little beauty.”

“A big beauty,” Beck countered. “Hermione has an eye for the draft stallions, I think, but the filly’s elegant for all her size.”

“She’s gorgeous.”

Beck was taken aback to see a sheen on Sara’s eyes. He moved in close and wrapped his arms around her. “Mother and baby are doing fine, and all’s well.”

“I know.” This sounded more like lament than agreement. “But she’s so… dear. Precious.” Beck said nothing, thinking dear and precious applied to the female in his arms as well. When he stepped back, he kept hold of her hand.

“I’ll mind them until the baby nurses,” he assured her. “Sit with me over here. They’ll do better with a little privacy.” He tugged her across the darkened barn aisle to sit on a trunk outside Ulysses’s stall. The gelding noted their presence without a pause in his consumption of hay.

“What made you come out here?” Sara asked, her hand still in his.

“Allie told me the signs were pointing to sooner rather than later, and mares are famous for dropping foals in the quiet and privacy of the night,” Beck said. “How about you? What drew you out here on this chilly night?”

“I saw your lantern light.” Sara’s voice was soft, as if she were mindful of the peace conducive to a newly forming bond between mare and foal. “I don’t think North could have been any help, so badly is his back hurting.”

“Does it pain him often?” The ladies seemed better attuned to North’s back than the man himself was.

“When he overdoes, which is to say, yes. Last year, he tried to do the plowing alone, and it did not go well for him. Polly made him hire help for the haying and the harvest, or he’d still be sitting in the hot spring, cursing and refusing help.”

And the ladies would have been without any meaningful protection. The precariousness of Sara’s existence at Three Springs loomed more clearly in Beck’s mind.

“North and Polly are stubborn, but Three Springs requires stubbornness, I think.” Beside him, he felt a little shudder go through Sara’s smaller frame. “You’re cold.” He tucked an arm across her shoulders. “Budge up. I’m good for warmth, if little else. So when are you going to let Allie make another painting?”

He drew away again to drape his jacket around Sara then used his arm about her shoulders to draw her close to his side.

She made no protest, and the feel of her against him comforted in a way that had to do with the mare and foal and with being far from home.

“I should let Allie paint again soon. She needs to paint the way Polly needs to cook and North needs to stomp around the property cursing the weeds, the fences, and the foxes.”

“And what does Sara need?” A safer question than what Beck himself needed.

“To see the people I care for happy and safe,” Sara said. “That’s what I need, Beckman. What about you?”

“This is a mystery.” Beck resisted the urge to nuzzle her hair, was which flowing down her back in one glorious fat plait. “For now, I need to be here in this barn with you, and I need that little filly to thrive with her mother.”

“Good needs,” Sara said. “If only for the near term.”

“Your hands are cold.” Beck covered hers with his own where it rested on her thigh. “I should shoo you back into the house, Sara. You haven’t the luxury of the periodic cold or sniffle.”

“I won’t go back to sleep until you tell me the little one is nursing. And what if you hadn’t been here? North is worn out, and Polly and I wouldn’t have known what to do. How would we have managed?”

His
question
exactly.
“Nature usually knows what to do, but you and Polly need more help here.”

Beside him, Sara pokered up but didn’t move away. “Without family in residence, there’s no reason for hiring more staff.”

“There is every reason to,” Beck said, sitting up to watch as the filly tried to thrash to her feet. “The estate needs the help, even if you don’t.”

“Should we help her?” Sara started to rise, but Beck tugged her back beside him.

“She has to figure out where her feet go,” he said softly. “If she struggles so long she’s getting too weak to stand, then we’ll intervene, but give her a chance to work it out for herself first.”

“That’s a very difficult part of parenting.” Sara sighed as she settled against him and brushed her nose near the jacket lapel, where the fabric would carry his scent. He resettled his arm across her shoulders and took a whiff of her hair.

“Difficult? Watching a child’s first steps?” Beck folded her hand in his again, and again, Sara made no protest.

“That, and the whole business of letting them struggle, letting them find their own balance. I am protective of Allie, sometimes I think not protective enough.”

As if worrying about her very livelihood and the entire manor house wasn’t enough?

“What’s the worst that can happen to her? Short of a tragic accident or illness, such as might befall anybody?”

Sara was silent for a moment; then she tugged his jacket more closely around her.

“She might meet the wrong type of man,” she said, “and let him take her from all she’s ever known, fill her head with silly fancies about fame and art and wealth, and discard her when her usefulness is over.”

Beck heard the bitterness and the bewilderment too.

“We all have the occasional unwise attachment,” Beck said gently, for it wasn’t Allie whom Sara was discussing. “And nobody chooses a perfect fit.”

“Was your wife a good fit?”

Well, of course. He should have known Sara Hunt, quiet, serious, and observant, might ask such a thing. The sense of… rootlessness in his belly grew as he considered an honest answer.

“We were not married long enough to assess such a thing.” A version of the truth. “We were both eager for the union, and our families approved.”

“How old were you?”

“Not old enough. Not nearly old enough.”

“I’m sorry for your loss. I have been grateful, on occasion, that Reynard lived long enough for me to see his true colors, to hate him. I cannot imagine losing a spouse with whom there was potential for a lifetime of happiness.”

What did it say, that a woman professed to be grateful to hate her own spouse? Beck’s arm over Sarah’s shoulders became less casual and more protective.

“I would have been grateful for a few years of contentment,” Beck said. “It wasn’t meant to be.” And what a useless, true platitude that was.

“How long were you married?”

“Little more than a summer. At the time, it seemed like forever, and then she was gone, and forever took on a very different meaning.”

“I was married for nearly a decade. That was a forever too.”

A decade was forever to grieve, forever to carry guilt and rage and remorse by the barge load. “So how do you manage now? What sustains you?”

“Allie,” Sara replied immediately. “Polly.”

“But what sustains
you
?” Beck pressed. “Allie will grow up, sooner rather than later, and Polly could well bring Mr. North up to scratch. Five years hence, Sara Hunt, will it be enough to polish silver, beat rugs, and mix vinegar to shine the windows?”

Would it be enough for Beckman to spend most of his year traveling, to hear more foreign tongues than English, and to be always planning the next journey, even as he turned his steps for home?

Sara was quiet, and Beck regretted the question.

He squeezed her fingers. “Don’t answer. I am feeling philosophical because my father is at his last prayers, and he was always such a robust man. I am aware that any day I could be summoned to his side, and you’ll no longer be plagued by my larking about here.”

“You are on good terms with your father?”

How to answer? “Such good terms, he sent me down here, rather than allow me at his bedside.”

“You’re hurt by this,” Sara concluded. “You mustn’t be. Men are proud, and they can’t admit when they need to draw comfort from others.”