Tremaine's True Love (6 page)

Likely it had been, but such was the poverty of the household that the simple wooden box was Annie’s bed for now. Mr. St. Michael set the box up on the table beside Nita and the pile of winter vegetables.

“She’ll be out of the drafts if she’s off the floor,” he said. “Damned dirt holds the cold and damp, excuse my language. I’m off to check on the laundry and prevent horse thievery. You’ll want to add a quantity of potatoes to that stew and a dash of salt.”

Mr. St. Michael scooped up the entire lot of dirty clothes, and out the door he went, leaving Evan and Nita to exchange a look.

“He talks funny,” Evan said.

“He’s from far away. That was a mountain of laundry, Evan. I don’t think a single stocking escaped your notice. Would you like a bite of sausage?”

Evan’s nod was heart-wrenchingly solemn. Outside, more laughter pealed, interrupted by Mr. St. Michael’s stern tones.

“I’ll bet he was a hard worker when he was a lad, even if he is a fine gent,” Evan said around a mouthful of sausage. “I’ll never be as tall as him.”

“You’ll never be as rich as him,” said a voice from the back of the cottage. Addy stood beside the lone bed, the alcove’s curtain pushed back. “Lady Nita, hello. You will excuse me for not greeting you properly.”

Addy had been pretty once, and raised in a proper squire’s household, though her parents were dead now. As a girl, she’d played hide-and-seek among the gravestones in the churchyard along with all the other children of the parish. She was three years older than Nita, considerably smaller, and already looking careworn.

“Hullo, Mama.” Evan had finished his bite of sausage, and he kept his gaze on his mother’s feet, which were encased in a pair of Nita’s much-darned cast-off stockings. An old, blue woolen shawl of Susannah’s was wrapped about Addy’s shoulders. “The man is from far away, and he can chop wood. He’s boiling laundry too.”

“Not a Haddonfield, then,” Addy said, wrinkling her nose. “I smell meat.”

Addy’s observation about Nita’s brothers was merely honest, for an earl and his brothers did not boil laundry, and the town strumpet didn’t expect them to.

“Sausage,” Nita said, slicing off an inch-long section and passing it to Addy. “How are you feeling?”

Addy’s smile was so sad, Nita regretted the question.

“Not bad,” Addy replied, taking a nibble of sausage. “Mary was the worst. I nearly bled to death after she was born, and then her father’s family wanted nothing to do with her. This is good, spicy sausage. Evan, you may put my boots on to go out for a moment, but don’t you take a chill, and mind Lady Nita’s gentleman friend.”

Addy’s boots were too large for him, of course, and the coat he tied around his waist with twine was too large as well, but a too-large coat could be a blessing when the wind was sharp and a little boy’s trousers ended several inches above his ankles.

“Is your fellow good-looking?” Addy asked when Evan had gone.

Nita hacked a potato to bits—a potato she would have forgotten to add to the pot, but for Mr. St. Michael’s reminder. Addy had long ago lost the knack of standing on ceremony, probably as much an occupational hazard for soiled doves as it was for those who attended birthings.

“Mr. St. Michael’s looks are not excessively refined, and he’s not my fellow,” Nita said, going after a second potato. “But he recites poetry, loves children, and once upon a time, he was very, very poor.”

Which Nita’s family likely would not have guessed in a thousand years.

* * *

Tremaine had spent years forgetting how dirty poverty was, though the state of his fingernails brought the reality back quickly. He’d also forgotten that boiling laundry was an art, which the child Mary had apparently studied.

Stale bread rubbed on the linen would have taken out the grease stain on her pinafore she’d assured him, though of course no bread survived long enough in her household to become stale. Hot milk should have been applied to the jam Evan had got on his sleeve—though no milk could be spared for such a vanity.

Most of the items they’d boiled had been small, stained, and threadbare, a metaphor for life as those children knew it.

“You’re very quiet, Mr. St. Michael,” Lady Nita observed.

“Thinking about Mr. Burns’s mouse,” Tremaine replied as the horses clopped along in the direction of Belle Maison. Laundry was a tedious undertaking, thus much of the afternoon had been wasted at the malodorous cottage. At least the laundry had allowed Tremaine to remain outside in the fresh air, while Lady Nita had been indoors, cooking, mending, and cleaning.

And likely breathing through her mouth.

“Nobody will believe we spent the past three hours trotting about the shire,” Tremaine pointed out. “Not in this weather.”

“They won’t ask.”

Lady Nita had trained them not to ask, in other words.

On this refreshing hack through the nearer reaches of destitution, Tremaine had picked up two splinters, a twinge in his left shoulder—a dull ax was an abomination against God and Nature—and dirty fingernails.

Lady Nita was still tidy, serene, and unruffled by their visit to the cottage.

“Your brother won’t have to ask
us
what we’ve got up to,” Tremaine said. “He’ll interrogate the grooms about how long we were gone and in which direction we rode. He’ll inquire in the kitchen about bread, milk, sausage, tea, salt, sugar, and other necessities. He’ll inspect your hems and my boots as we pass him in the corridor.”

Even the Earl of Bellefonte would recognize the stink of boiled cabbage clinging to their clothing.

Tremaine’s recitation did not please her ladyship. She turned her face up to a frigid breeze, as if seeking fortification from the cold.

“Nicholas might ask,” she said, “but he won’t interfere, though he probably wishes all the infirm and indigent would simply leave the realm, or his little corner of it.”

No, Bellefonte wished his sisters would leave—for the dubious comforts of holy matrimony. In this, his lordship was simply a conscientious English patriarch.

“Then why not marry?” Tremaine asked. “You’d be out from under your brother’s roof.” Though Bellefonte appeared to dote on his sisters—on most of his sisters.

Lady Nita glanced back in the direction of the cottage, which now boasted a cheery plume of smoke from the chimney, a load of chopped wood on the porch, and a deal of laundry laid over the bushes and porch railings in hopes it would dry rather than freeze.

“I have no use for marriage,” Lady Nita said. “If I hadn’t attended Annie’s birth, she’d likely have died. Addy was decent once, and she does not cope well with her fall from grace. Women in such circumstances can give up—”

She fell silent as the wind gusted, the breeze rewrapping the tail of her ladyship’s scarf so the wool covered her mouth.

The horses plodded along the frozen lane while Tremaine considered Lady Nita’s point: an evening she might have spent embroidering by a cozy fire was instead spent seeing that a baby arrived safely into the world. She was justifiably proud of that, and yet she was also troubled.

“You hope,” Tremaine said, “that by attending the birth, you did the child a service, rather than a disservice, for life in that cottage is precarious indeed.”

Lady Nita’s plow horse shuffled onward, head down, gait weary—for the horse, too, had been out at all hours in bad weather. As the wind continued to whip through the bare branches of the hedgerows, tiny flakes of snow came with it.

Any shepherd boy knew the smaller the snowflakes the more likely the weather would turn nasty in earnest.

“Here is the rest of the syllogism,” Tremaine said, because Lady Nita’s family had apparently neglected to say these words to her. “Babies will be born and babies will die, and it’s the duty of those amply blessed to aid those in precarious circumstances. However, because babies
do
die, we all occasionally need a pretty waltz and a pleasant evening in good company. Martyrs have many admirers but few friends, Lady Nita, and worst of all, they never have any fun.”

On the Continent, where decades of war had laid waste to much that was good, sweet, and dear, people seemed to grasp this. Life was for living, for rejoicing in, not for suffering through. In the Highlands, where thrift had become a cultural fixture, the same rejoicing was brewed into the very whiskey and song that punctuated every celebration.

Lady Nita swiped at her cheek, as if a stray snowflake might have smacked into her, then she did it again on the other cheek.

“I love to waltz,” she said, gaze on the horse’s coarse mane. “I love to sing, and I like nothing better than to join my sisters for great silliness over cards, until we’re laughing so hard we’re in tears. Nicholas would take even that from me to see me married to some viscount or lordling.”

She tapped her whip against the horse’s quarters and sent him into a businesslike canter.

Tremaine followed several yards behind and grappled with a realization. His objective was no longer strictly a profitable transaction with Lord Bellefonte, for where Lady Nita was concerned, a point had to be made about life and her entitlement to some of its joy.

Then too, a woman constantly in the company of the ill and impoverished was a woman at risk for illness herself, of the body or of the spirit. Lady Nita’s brothers were remiss in not protecting her from those harms, though Tremaine lacked any authority to correct their oversights.

And yet he could not stand idly by while Nita Haddonfield martyred herself on an altar of guilt and obligation. He was bound for Germany at week’s end if Bellefonte would not offer terms for the sheep, but in the remaining two days, the choice of weapon belonged to Tremaine:

Waltzing, singing, or cards.

Or perhaps all three.

* * *

“Damn fookin’ cranky besom yowe! Git ye doon the now!”

Kinser’s affectionate profanity seemed to impress the wayward ewe—“yowe”—not one bit. She’d leaped up onto the stone wall marking the boundaries of the pasture, and considered freedom with what George took for ovine glee.

“Perhaps we should leave her to find her own way off the wall,” George suggested. “She won’t jump back into the pasture if we’re glowering at her.”

“She’ll nae leave her own kind,” Kinser said. “Unless she takes a notion to ramble aboot the shire. That un’s piss-all contrary.”

Every damned denizen of the pasture struck George as contrary—much like the Haddonfield womenfolk—but he hadn’t trusted Kinser to get the ewes moved before worse weather arrived.
Kinser
was contrary and, more to the point, plagued with a fondness for both whiskey and warmth.

A small boy came trundling down the lane on the far side of the stone wall. He moved with the trudging gait of a child bundled up against the elements and stopped when the ewe baa’d at him.

“Tell her to get down,” George called. “Wave your arms and chase her back toward us.”

“That be the Nash lad,” Kinser said. “On his way hame from Vicar’s.”

The boy apparently grasped the situation, for he rushed the sheep, waving his arms and making a racket. She bounded down from her perch and scampered back to the herd bunched at the far end of the pasture.

“That’s it, then,” Kinser said, taking another pull from his flask. “My thanks, Master George. Best get ye to a warm hearth soonest.”

Kinser waved at the boy, blew a kiss to the sheep, and left George in the middle of the pasture, his toes freezing, his nose freezing, and his arse none too cozy either.

“Digby!” George called to the boy. “I’ll take you up on my horse if you’re bound for home.”

The child did not have to be asked twice. He scrambled onto a stile and waited for George to mount up and trot over to the fence.

“My thanks, Mr. Haddonfield,” Digby said, climbing up before George. “B-beastly cold, isn’t it?”

“Wretched beastly
damned
cold,” George said, for a boy ought to know that colorful language in the company of other fellows was quite acceptable. “You were at your Latin with Vicar?”

“I was keeping warm,” Digby said, wiggling in the saddle, which was cold as hell against George’s fundament. “Uncle thinks I’m slow, but Vicar has a fire in the study, while the schoolroom at home is freezing.” The child’s words were nearly unintelligible, so badly were his teeth chattering.

“Ask Vicar about the Second Punic Wars,” George suggested. “The Battle of Cannae is good for at least an hour’s diversion.”

Digby twisted around to peer up at George. The boy had his mother’s lovely blue eyes, bright red hair, and pale complexion.

“
You
know about the Second Punic Wars, Mr. Haddonfield?”

“Every Latin scholar worth his salt knows about Cannae. Hannibal won with a smaller force because he used his wits. The Romans charged at him headlong, but he fell back with his main army while sending columns around the enemy’s flanks. The Romans thought they were charging to victory until they realized they were surrounded. Have you considered asking your mama to order a fire in the schoolroom?”

A frigid third-floor schoolroom was no place for a solitary boy to learn anything.

“Mama won’t allow it if Uncle has said no. I hate winter.” Digby drew himself up in the saddle. “I hate Uncle too.”

Most little boys hated discipline and structure—George certainly had. George wasn’t particularly keen on Edward Nash either, come to that.

“I’ll tell you a secret, Digby Nash, just between us Latin scholars. The schoolroom is exactly where you want to spend your time. Nobody will bother you there if it’s kept that cold.”

“You can see your breath in the schoolroom, Mr. Haddonfield. Uncle says that builds character. I think it saves on the coal bill and gives a lad the sniffles.”

Digby had his mother’s common sense too.

“Maybe a cold schoolroom does both,” George temporized as they approached the Stonebridge lane. “Make friends with the scullery maid. She’ll bring up chocolate with your nooning. As long as you’re at your studies, you’ll have all the peace and quiet you can wish for—enough to play with your soldiers, draw, read, or take a nap. I’ll send you over a few books with lots of battles in them.” Though the boy apparently had a few battles of his own brewing. “Does your mama even know how cold the schoolroom is?”