Betina Krahn (9 page)

Madeline peeled the children from her secretary’s skirts and took their damp faces in her hands. “Theodore, Jonathan … Mrs. Davenport has some scrumptious buttered toast and jam left from our breakfast. I believe she may have some kippers tucked away somewhere too.” She looked up at Emily. “Why don’t you take them over to our house for a bit of breakfast? Beaumont will be here at any moment, and we’ll manage for a while without you.”

Poor woman,
Madeline thought, leaning against the door frame and watching as Emily’s darlings pulled her toward the stairs, then abandoned her to race down the rotted steps. She didn’t realize she had also spoken it aloud, until a voice answered her.

“She’s in a bit of a fix, all right.” She turned to find Beaumont Tattersall standing behind her, watching Emily too. “Trying to keep up with those two … keep up her house … keep up her work … all while keeping up the old standards. It’s a lot.”

Madeline nodded ruefully. “But she’ll learn. She just needs a bit of help now, at the start.” She headed for the sample room to do a bit of sketching. “When Endicott arrives, tell him I want to see him straightaway.”

“Miss Duncan, before you begin …” Tattersall called her back with an apologetic tone. “I’ve a stack of drafts for you to sign and, while you’re at it, I’d like you to go over the accounts with me. I fear a number of bills have come in over the initial estimates.”

She glanced wistfully at the sample room, then retraced her steps. Where would she be without Beaumont? The wiry, self-effacing little man was the epitome of organization. Small wonder Ecklesbery, Townshend, and Dunwoody had gone
into near apoplexy the moment he announced he was leaving their office to join Madeline’s Ideal Garment Company. His defection to her cause had proved the last straw where her gentlemen trustees were concerned. Knowing now just how much of a loss they had sustained, she could scarcely blame them.

Together she and her head clerk went over each invoice, bill, and entry in the account ledgers, scarcely noticing Emily Farrow’s return. But they couldn’t help noticing when a hollow-eyed Fritz Gonnering barged into the office, dragging two terrified boys by their Lord Fauntleroy curls, growling that if Emily wanted them to survive to grow up, she should keep them on a leash. They watched in sympathy as she dragged her weeping children up onto her lap, dried their tears, and then sent them outside with the admonition to keep their white lisle stockings and velvet knickerbockers clean. Madeline made a mental note to speak with Fritz Gonnering about being a bit more understanding with Emily’s children. Poor, fatherless things. Of late they had subsisted almost exclusively on a diet of tears and burned porridge.

Shortly after things settled down again, a burly workman clomped into the office with his woolen cap in his hand, asking to speak with the proprietor. He scowled and shuffled his feet when Madeline presented herself and demanded to know his business. He explained that he was the foreman of the crew laying water pipes through the village and they were nearly finished with the job. He was there to collect his workmen’s money.

“You’ve finished?” Madeline brightened. It was the best news she’d had in weeks. “You’re ready to turn the wheel and fill the pipes—set it in motion?”

“Well …” He scratched his head and looked a bit uncomfortable. “That ain’t my job. That ’ere en-gineer—that’d be his say. Turnin’ wheels an’ such, that ain’t my place.” He drew a sweat-stained piece of paper from his belt and peeled it open. “Now, about this here bill—”

“But if the pipes are all laid and the pumps are in place, it should be ready to use, should it not?”

“Well, I ain’t responsible for—” The fellow shoved the bill into her hands. “If’n ye’ll just give us our money, me and my blokes’ll be on our way.”

This was a momentous day indeed for Madeline and the resurrected St. Crispin. A safe and plentiful water supply piped into each cottage was her first major step in revitalizing the village itself. Now, after months of planning, that goal was finally being realized. She was seized by a fever of excitement.

“I want to see it work. I want to see water running in each and every cottage!”

Beaumont, Emily, and the sputtering foreman were hard put to keep up with her as she hurried through the cutting rooms, down the steps, and out into the yard. Getting her bearings, she headed for a clutch of men standing by the open ditch that snaked along the lane running through the center of the village. The workmen doffed their caps and stepped back to give her access. She stood admiring the thick iron pipe at the bottom of the ditch, then, the light of discovery in her face, located a junction with a smaller pipe that led into a nearby cottage.

The pipe ran beneath the side wall of the cottage’s front room and ended in a pump attached to a dry sink. Emily, Beaumont, Fritz Gonnering, and a number of the village’s old and new residents crowded into the doorway or peered through the broken window, watching her inspect it. Feathering a touch over the pump handle, she savored the accomplishment for a moment, then turned to them with her face glowing.

“Let’s fire up the pump!”

The sun was high in the sky when Cole Mandeville crested the last rise on his big bay gelding and paused to scowl at the village below. After four miserable days and three interminable
nights on the road—thrashing through half a dozen ditchwater places with names like Stonecrouch, Flimwell, and Three Leg Cross, following the locals’ vague and erroneous recollections of the way to St. Crispin on Crewes—he was hot and sweaty and cross as a cat stuffed down a rain barrel. It seemed Madeline Duncan’s village had not only died, it had also been forgotten.

Now that he had finally located the accursed place, he was greatly annoyed to discover that from the top of that rise it appeared perfectly idyllic. A score of stone cottages dotted the rolling hills and clustered along a winding lane that descended gently through a little valley. Mature trees formed picturesque clusters along a stream—presumably the less than noteworthy Crewes—and there was the odd sheep grazing here and there on verdant slopes. The spire of a quaint church nestled at the near end of a greensward and a large brick and limestone building were visible at the far end of the resurrected hamlet.

It looked like Eden reopened. A little slice of heaven newly reissued to earth.

And he was there to give its guardian angel a sound thrashing.

With a glance back at his carriage lumbering up a rise on the road behind him, he started down the sloping lane leading toward the center of the village. Surprisingly, the closer he came to the cottages, the worse they began to look. Many of the roofs were swayed or buckled; most of the windows had been removed, leaving raw holes in the stone walls; and from what he glimpsed through the gaping doors inside, many had only dirt floors. When he turned his attention to the surrounding countryside, he discovered that what had appeared to be lush pasture from a distance was actually coarse grass infested with burdock and thistles. And the road itself was degenerating into a rutted, scarcely navigable track.

He brightened. With each hovel he passed, the grim set
of his jaw eased and he relaxed a bit in the saddle. This, he told himself, was more like it.

At the edge of the main part of the village he noticed a freshly dug ditch running the length of the lane. He steered his mount closer to have a look. The iron pipe at the bottom of the trench and occasional offshoots of smaller pipe toward the cottages suggested some sort of public works in progress. It seemed rather small for a sewer. He edged his mount closer, frowning. A water supply pipe, perhaps.

His horse danced skittishly as he urged it still closer, studying the layout, trying to see the full extent of the project. The big bay tensed and laid its ears back, listening, alarmed by something. It took a moment for Cole to perceive the low rumble that worried his horse. It seemed to be coming from the ditch … that pipe … He increased the pressure of his knees and leaned far to one side, listening, focusing his attention on the middle of that trench.

Water suddenly came shooting out of the pipe in all directions, startling Cole’s horse and setting it rearing. Jolted out of the saddle, he flailed and grabbed handfuls of saddle pad and mane, trying to avoid tumbling headlong into the open ditch. Struggling back into his seat, he fought to regain control of his plunging mount. It was only when he realized that they were being pelted with water that he urged the frantic animal out of range. Panting, his heart pounding wildly, he reined up and turned to discover circular flumes of water rising above the trench at regular intervals.

Further commotion followed as a dozen people rushed from a break in the line of cottages and came to a halt, staring in dismay at the spewing water. A figure in pale blue pushed through to the front of the crowd and quickly dispatched some of the others back the way they had come.

Before long the impromptu fountains lowered, sputtered, and then died with a gurgle. In the shocked silence Cole shivered and looked down at his clothes. He was half soaked.
His gaze raking over the onlookers down the lane, he fastened on the one he deemed responsible and made straight for her.

“…  simply won’t do,” Madeline Duncan was saying to a surly, platter-faced fellow as Cole rode up. “We’ll lose half the water before it reaches the cottages—not to mention the possibility of contamination. I’m afraid, Mr. Gibbons, that you and your men shall simply have to—”

“Miss Duncan!” Cole called out in a booming voice. “What in infernal blazes is going on here?” He reined up at the edge of the crowd and sat glowering at her. She seemed startled by the sight of him—or perhaps by the water dripping from his hat.

“Your lordship.” She held her ground, though her face suffused with color. “It seems you arrived just in time for the first test of our new municipal water system.”

“A test?” He clamped his jaw together while he waited for the impulse to climb down from the saddle and give her a good throttling to pass. “Well, I’d say it failed the test. So much for wasting money on absurdities.”

“It’s not an absurdity. The village needs a safe, plentiful water supply,” she pointed out. “We’ll have it running properly in a few days.”

“No, you won’t,” he declared, straightening in the saddle. “Water systems qualify as capital expenditures, and as such they come under my authority. I refuse to allow good money to be thrown after bad”—he glared at the now-muddy trench—“into an accursed hole in the ground.”

“You can’t do that!”

“Oh, but I can.” He located the fellow Madeline Duncan had been laying down orders to and spoke directly to him. “Gibbons, is it? Pack up your men and leave. Your boondoggle here is over.”

Shocked mutters wafted through the onlookers.

“For your information, Lord Mandeville, these workmen have already been paid for much of the work.” She planted herself before his horse, which reversed its ears and eyed her
nervously. “Now it is up to him and his men to make it right—to rejoin the pipes and stop the leaks. It makes no sense at all to send them packing and leave the village without water, when a few more days would see the system finished and functional … as well as paid for.”

Undercut by her logic, he retreated into aristocratic disdain. “We shall discuss this further”—he raked a glance over their gawking audience—“in private. Now, if you will be so good as to point me toward my accommodations, so that I may change these wet garments …”

“Six miles.” She flung a finger at the horizon. “Back the way you came.”

“Six
miles
?”

“The nearest inn.”

Was it possible the chit would refuse him—the court’s designated agent in her affairs—the basic courtesy of accommodations? She expected him to travel six bloody miles to—“You mean to say there isn’t an inn or boarding establishment in this wretched hole?”

“Not a one. The closest thing to a room to let is in Netter’s Tavern, and I fear it wouldn’t be up to your usual standards.” She seemed inordinately pleased to conclude: “The only
suitable
accommodations for you are six miles away.”

He glanced around for evidence to the contrary, but found none. When he looked at her upturned face again, he caught a glint of challenge in her eyes. She was serving notice that she intended to keep him at a distance, to diminish his involvement and authority here. The thought rankled. “I shall be the judge of what is suitable and what isn’t.”

“Suit yourself,” she said, and headed off down the lane toward the factory, drawing several members of the crowd along with her.

He watched her go, feeling the same burning frustration he had experienced in his uncle’s chambers—from the same cause. How was it that both of their meetings had turned into
confrontations, and both times it felt as if he had come out on bottom?

“Beggin’ yer pardon, sarr.” A toothy fellow in a soiled, haphazard apron stepped out of the dwindling crowd and gave an awkward bob of respect. “I be Hiram Netter. If’n ye plan to stay … I got th’ only room to let, o’er my tavern.”

Cole looked back down the road, thinking of the miserable miles he had just traversed. What choice did he have?

“Lead the way.”

Netter’s Tavern proved to be nothing more than one of the larger cottages converted to public use. It was filled with sundry crude tables and benches, and a makeshift bar of barrels topped with a plank. The single guest room was actually the cottage loft, recently closed off by a few hastily nailed boards and accessed by a set of steps that looked like a ladder with a case of the bloat. Once upstairs, Cole discovered he couldn’t straighten without banging his head. When the carriage arrived with his manservant minutes later, Cravits took one look at the place and went into a decline.

With determination fueled by discomfort, Cole climbed down the steps and sought out tavernkeeper Netter to demand water and clean linen. The fellow behaved as if he hadn’t heard of the latter and the former was well beyond his technical capabilities.

“Have to haul water from the commons well,” he said, scratching his chin and then his chest. “Ain’t got no help fer that.”