Tremaine's True Love (14 page)

Any other sister, any normal sister, would have flounced out of the room, nose in the air. Kirsten patted Susannah’s shoulder.

“I love it when you’re fierce. One forgets you can be fierce. Nothing for it, then. If you want Edward Nash, then we must see that you have him. That leaves us with a puzzle regarding Nita and Mr. St. Michael though, doesn’t it? Both men want all those sheep, and Nicholas seems to be telling them they need to marry one of his sisters to get them.”

This amused Kirsten, and Susannah manufactured a smile as well—one of her few confirmed skills.

And yet, as Kirsten blathered on about plots and schemes and conjectures regarding the upcoming assembly, Susannah became increasingly discontent.

For she was vexed that Edward would attempt to negotiate settlements before securing her explicit consent to a properly tendered offer of marriage.

Exceedingly
vexed.

* * *

Why would a competent physician, established in his profession and cordial with his neighbors, hate Nita Haddonfield? For Dr. Horton’s gaze on Nita’s retreating figure had been far from friendly.

Tremaine took a contemplative sip of rich winter ale while the good, if hateful, doctor put away a prodigious quantity of cottage pie. Horton kept an eye on the cinnamon biscuits as well, as if they might skip off to another table when he wasn’t looking.

When Tremaine had been a boy in the hills of western Aberdeenshire, nothing could have shaken his focus from a plate of meat and vegetables topped with mashed potatoes. Now, investigating the doctor’s antipathy toward Lady Nita eclipsed any interest Tremaine had in the fare.

“That Lady Nita,” Horton said. “She’s not long for this earth, mark me, Mr. St. Michael. Women haven’t the constitution for medicine. They take ill, they blunder, they disregard the learned truths of modern science. Shall we order another ale?”

Such delicate creatures, women, and yet the endless, thankless, wearying burden of nursing invariably fell to the females of the household, particularly in England, where a physician’s calling was plied mostly in the parlor and between the pages of Latin tomes.

“Is Lady Nita frail?” Tremaine asked. Her brother had likened her constitution to that of a donkey, and thank the Almighty that was so.

“She’s skinny,” Horton said, the term an insult. “Don’t have to be a physician to see she needs more meat on her bones. Bellefonte should take her in hand, but the old earl was indulgent of his womenfolk. Never a good idea to allow the females a loose rein.”

Nita might have stepped around to the jakes, but Tremaine suspected her departure had had other motivations.

“Is Lady Nita medically competent?” Tremaine knew she was, Tremaine’s
sheep
knew she was, Addy Chalmers’s youngest child knew it best of all.

What Nita Haddonfield lacked was a sense of her own value.

“She reads books,” Horton said, scraping his remaining potatoes into a heap. “I’ll give her that, and she was her mother’s right hand. I don’t begrudge women the company of their own kind at a lying-in, provided a physician is on hand to oversee matters. Lady Nita would have it otherwise.”

In other words, Nita provided poorer families an alternative to paying for Horton’s services at birthings.

“Then you would have attended Addy Chalmers had she asked for you?” Tremaine asked.

A forkful of carrot hovered before the doctor’s mouth. “Mr. St. Michael, you will think me devoid of Christian charity when I say I would have made no haste whatsoever to attend that birth had the Chalmers woman had the temerity to engage my services. She cannot provide for her young and refuses to abide by the rules of decent society. To bring another child into that household is to perpetuate a problem that has no happy solution. Lady Nita insists on prolonging the misery of all concerned.”

Her ladyship prolonged the children’s
lives
too. “Many would agree with you,” Tremaine said, finishing his ale. Perhaps even the Earl of Bellefonte agreed with the physician.

Addy Chalmers’s children were not the results of immaculate conceptions, though. If Addy and the children were to be condemned out of hand, the fathers ought to bear some shame as well.

The carrots met the same fate as the rest of the doctor’s cottage pie.

“You’d best be on your way, Mr. St. Michael. Lady Nita has no doubt been accosted by old Clackengeld, who complains of bilious digestion when what he needs is a good purge and a bleeding or three. He’s usually lurking at the livery and knows better than to trouble me with his ailments.”

Tremaine dropped a few coins on the table, snatched a cinnamon biscuit before the doctor could inhale them all, and picked up the scarf Lady Nita had left draped over the back of her chair.

“I’ll heed your suggestion,” Tremaine said, “and be about my business. A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Dr. Horton.”

Horton saluted with his pint, and as Tremaine departed from the common, the physician was helping himself to the food remaining on Lady Nita’s plate.

Tremaine spotted her ladyship with the horses, across the street from the inn. She looked chilly, and she’d managed to get one side of her hem wet.

“You have a habit of leaving necessary items of apparel where they’ll do you no good,” Tremaine said, wrapping the scarf about Lady Nita’s ears and neck. “Did Horton upset your digestion?”

Her ladyship’s expression was serene, as smooth as the inn’s windows, which reflected the gray winter sky and gave away nothing of the roaring hearths and bustling custom within.

Insight struck, like the cold gust of wind that sent a dusting of snow swirling across the square: the more composed Lady Nita appeared, the greater her upset.

“Dr. Horton is much respected,” she said. “Shall we go?”

“You don’t respect him,” Tremaine replied, tugging on Atlas’s girth, then taking it up one hole. “I don’t particularly like him.”

Lady Nita relaxed fractionally at Tremaine’s observation.

“He’s old-fashioned to a fault,” she said, “and refuses to consider any medical advance that didn’t originate in England, preferably with some colleague he studied beside when German George was on the throne.”

Tremaine had traveled enough on the Continent to understand Nita’s frustration. English medicine was considered backward by Continental physicians, and yet men like Horton toiled away in every shire in the realm, doing the best they could with a science that was far from exact.

“Up you go, my lady. What’s in the sacks?” For two sacks were tied over Altas’s withers.

“I went around to the kitchen and bought a few things for the Chalmerses.” Lady Nita stepped into Tremaine’s hands and was up on her horse without Tremaine having to exert himself.

Her ladyship wasn’t skinny—Tremaine had reason to know this—but she was fit, and she didn’t lace herself too tightly to draw breath.

He rather liked that about her, though he did not look forward to this call upon the wretched of the parish.

Tremaine swung into a cold saddle and let the shock reverberate through his system for a moment. To combat that unpleasantness, he summoned the memory of Lady Nita’s soft warmth pressed against him in her nightclothes.

“Is Horton capable?” Tremaine asked as the horses shuffled away from the square.

“In some matters,” Lady Nita conceded. “He insists on bleeding a woman when she’s expecting, though if you talk to women who’ve carried a number of times or to midwives, they’ll tell you they don’t favor it. Many physicians on the Continent refuse to bleed a pregnant woman, saying it weakens her when she’s most in need of her strength. The diet Horton prescribes for an expectant mother wouldn’t sustain a rambunctious child.”

In this, Lady Nita’s sentiments echoed Grandpapa’s, who’d favored hearty fare for children and expectant mothers, contrary to prevailing English medical wisdom.

About which Tremaine did not particularly care.

Though Lady Nita had spared a thought for Tremaine’s sheep, about whom he
did
care, for healthy sheep were profitable sheep.

Tremaine also cared about the Chalmers family—inconvenient though the sentiment was—as evidenced by his relief that a plume of smoke rose from the chimney, and the wood piled on the porch remained abundant.

“I can stay with the horses,” Tremaine said when he’d assisted Lady Nita to dismount. Her hem, formerly damp, was now frozen stiff, and yet Tremaine could not recall a puddle into which she might have stepped.

“Nonsense. The horses will stand obediently enough,” Lady Nita said, handing Tremaine the sacks she’d brought from the inn. “The children will want to see you.”

Tremaine did not want to see them. “We ought not to stay for long, lest your brother worry.”

Lady Nita turned toward the cottage, shoulders square. “Nicholas has greater concerns than whether I tarry for five minutes on my way home from a social call.”

Like whether to consign his sister Susannah to a lifetime in a household where women fell down steps. On that rankling notion, Tremaine followed Lady Nita up the rickety porch stairs and wondered what fool had implied he’d be willing to accompany her ladyship on this outing.

Lady Nita rapped on the door and waited, while Tremaine stood behind her, holding sacks of provisions and pondering the doctor’s philosophy. Was it kinder to let this family starve or freeze today? Kinder to see the children into the poorhouse, where their lives would shortly end?

Addy Chalmers opened the door, the baby at her shoulder swaddled in a clean shawl, a tiny knitted cap on the infant’s head.

“Lady Nita, Mr. St. Michael, welcome.” Addy looked tired but sober, and the cottage was as neat as such a space could be, also not too cold, though Tremaine kept his coat on.

Nothing short of the Second Coming would relieve the place of the stench of boiled cabbage.

“Addy, children, hello,” Lady Nita said, sounding genuinely glad to see them. “I think the baby has grown already.”

The ladies were off, rhapsodizing about the infant, disappearing into the sleeping alcove while Tremaine was left to investigate the sacks.

“I can hold your horse again,” said the girl…Mary? “Or ride him for you.”

“Thank you, but I must decline that kind offer,” Tremaine replied. “Lady Nita and I can stay only a moment. I do believe there’s cottage pie in this sack, still warm, and bread and butter, along with cold milk and a few butter biscuits. What shall we do with it?”

“Eat it,” said the youngest boy, whose nose ran ever so copiously.

Tremaine passed Mary a handkerchief. “Please see to your brother. Why don’t we start with bread and butter, and save the cottage pie for your supper?”

Keen disappointment registered on four little faces, replaced by eager anticipation when Tremaine cut thick hunks of warm bread and slathered each one with butter.

And still, the ladies remained talking softly behind the curtain.

“Who can show me some letters?” Tremaine asked, because no toys were in evidence, and the only book looked to be a Book of Common Prayer perched on the mantel.

“We haven’t paper,” Mary said. “I can write my name, though. On paper. We have a pencil. Mama knows where it is.”

Tremaine fell back on strategies he’d learned around the shepherds’ campfires.

“Paper is an extravagance—a luxury,” he said. “We need only our minds and a fire in the hearth.”

He took a seat, cross-legged, on a floor even colder than his saddle had been and was soon ringed with children. While they watched, he spread a layer of ash over the hearthstones and used a stick of kindling to draw a large letter
M
in the ashes.

“Look familiar?” he asked the girl.

“
M
, for Mary!” she said, her expression suggesting Tremaine had put the entire French language into her keeping. “Do another!”

They had worked nearly through the alphabet—
A
is for apple,
B
is for butter,
C
is for cockles—when the ladies rejoined them. Nita’s expression was quietly pleased, the baby was drowsing on the mother’s shoulder, and Addy looked…in need of a long nap.

As new mothers should look.

“I hadn’t thought to use the ashes,” Addy said. “We certainly have enough of those, and the boys want to learn their letters.” She kissed the baby’s cheek, expression puzzled. “Thank you. For the food as well.”

“You are welcome,” Tremaine said, coming to his feet and resisting the urge to dust off his backside. “I’d never realized one can learn the alphabet by visiting an imaginary pantry. Lady Nita, shall we be on our way?”

The youngest boy was again in need of the handkerchief, while Tremaine needed to be anywhere else. He’d wanted Lady Nita’s company for the trip to Stonebridge, but he hadn’t anticipated that she’d tarry long here at the cottage.

“It is time we were leaving,” she said, readjusting the scarf around her neck. She paused, her gaze on the little fellow docilely tolerating his sister’s ministrations with the handkerchief.

The child had weak lungs. Evan was his name. He’d outgrown his trousers a year ago, and the coat he wore like a night robe was fastened with twine.

Lady Nita’s eyes held a question, about little boys and scarves, about kindness and the poorhouse. Tremaine nodded slightly, and her ladyship wrapped a beautiful blue lamb’s wool scarf about the neck of a wretched boy.

“I’ll want to hear letters should I visit again,” Tremaine said very sternly, though he’d paid his last voluntary call on this household. “And I’ll expect that baby to have doubled in size.”

He bolted for the door with as much dignity as he could muster—precious little—and Lady Nita caught him by the hand before they were down the porch steps.

“Mr. St. Michael.” She drew him closer, until her arms were around Tremaine’s middle, and his had somehow found their way around her too. “You are so very dear.”

The words melted an old anxiety in Tremaine. He could tolerate being dear, to Lady Nita anyway, better than he could tolerate the stench of cabbage, dirt, and despair. He rested his chin on her crown, fortifying himself for trotting about in the cold without benefit of his favorite scarf.