Rena had not known Sir Alistair well. He was a stern-looking man who wore a suit like a badge of honor. He was quiet and forceful, and bloody good at chess, as he liked to boast. He smoked cigars only on the back terrace where his wife couldn’t complain about the smoke.
When Edric had brought Rena home that first morning, and introduced her as his wife, Sir Alistair had not thundered as he seemed likely to do, or demanded if Edric was joking. Instead, he had risen from his chair, smelling strongly of tobacco, taken Rena’s hand, and asked her if she played chess. To her startled reply that, no, she had never played, he had told her she must learn. And that was that. As a baronet, Sir Alistair had seemed too rigid to be Nell’s husband, and yet he had watched his wife often with a faint smile on his lips, and when she beat him at chess, he had howled with delight and called her a cheat.
Rena focused again on Nell’s empty hands. The poor woman had lost her husband and son barely two years apart, but she hadn’t spoken of either of them since she and Rena had left India. Edric and his father seemed to live and linger in these moments, filling up the quiet and pressing outward, as if both men were pushing at them from behind a glass wall. Was Nell aware of this? Perhaps this was why she closed her eyes and sat in such silence. Did she feel closer to them?
Rena balanced the tray of food on her hip as she slid into the room and shut the door quietly behind her. “Are you speaking to your husband?” Rena asked the question before she could consider the strangeness of it. Rena had watched her own family meditate each morning for lost family members—her mother prayed for their peace and her father strove to do good deeds in their names so they might each find their way in the next life. But, of course, Edric’s family followed other paths with their prayers.
As if awakened from a much deeper world, Nell’s head jerked toward the door, and her eyes widened as they flashed from Rena to the overflowing tray and back again. “Speaking to…my husband?” She let out an amused, breathy laugh. “Goodness, child. I was praying for our stomachs!” Her eyes dropped once more to the tray, and she quirked a suspicious eyebrow. “Although it would seem my prayers have been answered. Unless I am hallucinating those pork pies—”
Rena grinned down at the feast, the smell of meat and warm bread filling her belly with foreign longing. Wanting to quash any suspicion she was stingy, Mrs. Bagley had loaded the tray with a sampling of nearly everything the kitchen had on hand—meat pies, cheese, and pickled eggs; shreds of roast with slabs of bread; two short glasses of dark ale, rimmed with foam.
But Rena had never touched meat before, nor eggs, nor even tasted alcohol. She had always been a meticulous follower of the Hindu diet, even after she had married Edric. Cows were sacred to her people, and eggs forbidden, and so much of the tray’s contents were off-limits to her.
Did she really dare?
Rena caught the desperate hunger in Nell’s eyes, knew it mirrored her own, and felt her stomach tighten. Realizing she was far too hungry to starve on her own uncertainty, she slid the tray to the middle of the table and dropped into the seat across from Nell.
“I assure you the food is quite real,” she said, stretching her aching muscles. “Well, either that, or I suppose we both could be hallucinating.”
Nell ignored Rena’s tired attempt at humor. “Yes, but how on earth did you afford this?” Eyebrows lifted, she gestured to the closet they had come to call home, which would forever smell of rotting turnips. “Last time I checked, we were scandalously destitute.”
Rena smiled sheepishly, pressing her fingers against the deep scratches in the table’s surface.
“Please, don’t be cross with me, Nell. I had two pence I’ve been holding back, just in case.” Her smile grew as she plucked up a steaming pie and held it temptingly out to Nell.
Nell did not take the pie but glanced at it as if it could not be trusted or might vanish if she tried to eat it.
“Two pence would never have purchased all of this,” she disagreed, shaking her head in disbelief.
“Perhaps Mrs. Bagley was of a generous bent this evening,” Rena offered, trying to sound hopeful as she placed the pie back on the tray.
Nell pointed at Rena, her tone suddenly crisp. “That is as brash a lie as ever I’ve heard. Now you tell me the truth. Where did this come from?”
This conversation was not going at all as Rena had hoped. She knew Nell would be mortified if she learned the parson had stepped in publicly and forced charity on their behalf, and Rena had no wish to prod the woman’s already wounded pride. Besides, they should be celebrating. Laughing. Feasting. Their bellies should be full of warm bread and cool ale.
“It really doesn’t matter where it came from,” Rena said, waving a dismissive hand. “What matters is why I purchased it in the first place.”
The suspicion did not fade from Nell’s eyes, but she sat silently, patiently awaiting Rena’s explanation. Leaning across the table, Rena grabbed her mother-in-law’s hand and squeezed her withering fingers.
Nell’s hand tensed. “Have you found work, then?” She sounded skeptical. Rena had been trying for weeks to no avail. Of course, it seemed too perfect to be even remotely possible.
“Not exactly. But someone has discovered our situation, and he has welcomed me to pick from his field however often as we are in need.”
Nell broke her hand from Rena’s and stood abruptly. “You are to be a beggar. That is how we are to survive?”
“How could I refuse such an offer? Nell, this man has saved us.”
“Who?” Nell demanded. “Who is this man?”
“He’s called Lord Barric.”
Nell’s eyes widened. “Lord Barric,” she repeated incredulously. “Why, you cannot possibly mean Jack Fairfax?”
Rena began to feel uneasy again. “You know him?”
“The Earl of Barric? He is a relative of ours, though I myself have not met him. Sir Alistair’s mother was a Fairfax before she married into the Hawley line, but our two families have not mingled on familiar terms in many years.”
“Did something…happen?”
The older woman waved a hand. “It is an old fight,” she said, as if it signified nothing. “Sir Alistair was always grieved not to have seen the families reconcile in his lifetime.”
Nell glanced at the wall beside the bench, where a small portrait hung from a rusty nail. Rena followed her gaze. The picture—which captured the Hawley family before disease had struck, snatching away two of their strongest—was one of Nell’s few remaining possessions, apart from a crucifix she had hung over the doorframe and an intricately woven shawl she had once made under the tutelage of her mother. Nell’s jewelry had already been sold, all but her wedding ring, to pay for their passage to England. Everything that could fetch a price was gone, leaving the room as barren as the women living within.
Nell crossed to the portrait and stared for an unnervingly long moment at the painted figure of Edric, who stood tall beside his father, right hand resting firm on an imperial sword. The colors in the picture were clear and vibrant, as Edric’s smile had been before death had dulled it. Despite Edric’s regal pose and solemn expression, the artist had somehow captured his laughing eyes, the secret look of a man who was never entirely serious. Rena clenched her teeth, trying to blot out the sound of her husband’s murmuring laugh. “I don’t mind a little scandal,” he had whispered in that coy way of his, “if it means I can call you wife and find you in my bed every morning.”
“I cannot allow this.” Nell spoke quietly, as if she’d said the words directly to her son. She placed two fingers on the gilded frame and shook her head one last time before softly deciding, “Rena, you must go home.”
Rena nearly knocked her chair over as she rose.
“Go home?” she repeated, stunned.
She knew Nell had been anxious those past few weeks, often sitting by herself in marked silence. Rena had thought the woman was grieving. Was this what Nell had really been thinking in those moments? Of shipping Rena off and away?
Of being rid of her? Rena’s heart began beating harder from the inside of her breast, as if tearing through her chest would give it more room to feel.
“Yes.” Nell turned and met Rena’s eyes directly. “You must return to your parents. To your family.”
Rena’s mind journeyed back to everything she loved and missed most about her childhood home: an earthen city sprawling beneath the sunbaked horizon, bookshelves lined with ancient volumes written in every language imaginable, luxurious tapestries slung from the walls in shades of apricot and pomegranate, her father’s mustache tickling slightly as he kissed her cheek and called her my child.
Her father was raised in an aristocratic family before the British takeover. Since he was well read and had studied hard in his youth, he was singled out to assist in translations for the British officers. For a Brahmin to carry out any act that smacked of servitude was degrading. Though Rena’s father often suffered guilt for siding so strongly with the British after the mutiny, like many others he also saw crown rule as an opportunity to strengthen India, and—far more importantly—his family’s place within it.
But Edric had changed all of that.
Her father had cursed the British crown in every language he knew when he realized one of its officers had stolen away with his only daughter. He had been hard as stone and withdrawn when Rena had returned to them in the wake of Edric’s death. But then Rena had packed her bag and told him she was leaving with Nell.
“Rena,” her father had rasped, a broken man, grief left in the place of his rage. It was the first time he had spoken her name in over two years, since before she was married. His fingers had clutched at her shoulders, then her fingers, then her hair, reaching and grasping as if his flesh-and-blood daughter had turned to sand beneath his pleas. “My child, you must not go. You must not go to England….”
“There is no future for you in England,” Nell went on, an unpleasant echo of Rena’s father. “I have no connections. No money. An earl may allow you to pick in his fields, but that does not mean he may not trample you in the process. I’ll not have you so degraded.”
Rena opened her eyes, staring bleakly across the room at Nell. Once again she traced the woman’s features, finding poignant similarities around the eyes and brow to the man Rena had once called her husband. Rena had given up everything to follow Nell to England. Her family and her home. Yes, even her future. And when her parents had demanded a reason for this strange departure, she could name no other reason than love. For as long as Rena cleaved to Nell—for as long as she loved her and looked after her—she clung, in a way, to Edric.
“I cannot go back,” Rena insisted, tears rising up despite the firmness of her voice. When a few tears escaped, trickling down her face, she ground out the next words: “India is not my home anymore.”
Glancing at the cross above the door, Nell continued on. “And after I am gone?” Rena knew the woman was trying to sound practical, but her voice betrayed her with a quaver. “You will never marry so long as you stay here, never have a family of your own. If you return to India, there are still men who may offer you a life worth living.”
Rena still felt this was unlikely, though her parents had entertained similar foolish hopes. Her eyes panned once more to the portrait at Nell’s side, glimpsing Edric’s painted half smile.
In their wedding vows, she and Edric had promised each other all they had or would ever have. In the moment of his death, all Edric had left behind was his mother, a woman who had clutched his right hand as Rena had held so desperately to his left. She remembered watching Nell’s grief from the other side of his fresh corpse. She shivered violently and leaned her weight against the table, feeling as if Edric’s clammy skin was still coupled with hers.
“I have a family.”
An aching belly, an empty room, skin pulled tight over hungry bones—all of these sacrifices were worth it, she knew, if it meant staying with Nell, if it meant her family would be her family forever.
Nell crossed the room and placed a steadying hand on Rena’s damp cheek. “Edric begged me to look after you,” she whispered, as if she could read and anticipate the direction of Rena’s thoughts. “It would kill him all over again to see you as a beggar, for his proud bride to be brought so low.”
Rena’s hands found Nell’s, and she gripped the woman’s fingers achingly tight. “You must not send me away,” she pleaded, beginning to weep when she saw the determination in Nell’s expression. The woman was as stubborn as Edric had been and would certainly send her away if she thought it was for the best. “I would rather beg in the field of every lord, to be trampled over and mocked, to be hated by every person who sees me on my knees, if it only means I may remain at your side.”
Nell opened her mouth, eyes stern as if to chide her daughter-in-law for her passionate words, but Rena fell to her knees, clamping her hands to the woman’s shabby skirt. “You must not send me away,” she cried again, pressing a tearstained cheek to Nell’s feet. “Your home is my home. And everything you are and everything you love—that is all I ever wish to be.”
Nell placed her hand gently on top of Rena’s head as if to offer a silent blessing. “Then God help us both,” Nell breathed unevenly, her fingers trembling slightly as she combed them through Rena’s hair. “For I am no match for these tears.”
Barric had not been looking for the girl as he strode through his fields, but his eyes found her anyway. Wearing the same dull black dress, she stooped beneath thick stalks of grain, gathering a few fallen buds into her bag. She moved steadily, her eyes carefully neutral, shoulders guarded as she bent low over her task. Though she kept mostly to herself, two male workers on either side of the row stole surreptitious glances at her as they made their way down the line. A few other workers whispered to each other, their voices low over their working hands. Barric tore his eyes away from the girl before any of them could notice where his gaze had strayed.
He still wasn’t entirely sure what had made him offer his fields to her in the first place. He was certain his peers would find rich amusement in the unusual arrangement. Why had he allowed a beggar to glean from his crops, especially one who had previously been caught stealing from him? He could already hear their mocking speculations. She was a pretty little thing, they would say. Surely that had something to do with it.
Barric’s eyes drifted back to her. He wasn’t sure what, exactly, Thomas’s intentions were, or what he and Sir Ellis might have done if he hadn’t happened upon them on his ride. Sometimes Barric almost wished he might forget that he and his cousin shared blood. They had been educated together as children and played together. As they grew older, they had shared in games of whist and bottles of brandy. Thomas had never been a monster, exactly, though he had always been monstrously arrogant, the product of a negligent mother who had taken too much laudanum and a father who had never quite settled into his own place as a second son.
Thomas’s mother had died when he was very young, well before the boating accident which had claimed Barric’s own parents. Though Barric’s uncle had made too many allowances for Thomas, university had unleashed him entirely, giving him an even more heightened sense of entitlement. Too often for Barric’s liking, Thomas flaunted his education and extensive travels, insinuating in subtle ways they made him a better man than Barric. Of course, there was far more standing between the cousins than education. Barric had inherited everything from the Fairfax line; Thomas only had what was left to him from his father’s marriage to a moderately wealthy heiress with extravagant tastes.
If he were honest with himself, Barric pitied the man Thomas had become. Feeling the empty hands of one who did not stand to inherit title or fortune, Thomas had developed a deep-rooted anger which often acted without reason. His schoolfellows had not helped matters. Most of them were knaves like the cowardly Sir Ellis Andrews, who was, lamentably, not the worst of Thomas’s associates.
Still, Barric could not believe his cousin had gone so far as to hit the girl. A
s soon as he’d seen it happen, something dark and unpleasant had burst within him.
Crossing his arms, Barric once again considered the girl’s progress. Her skirt was rimmed with dirt and her face was layered with sweat. Even her movements seemed stiff and achy, as if her small frame was unused to manual labor. If he gazed upon her back, Barric suspected he would be able to see every notch of her spine.
Rena, she had called herself, with eyes strangely stripped. The name fit her well, an uncommon but lovely slip of sound. He knew she had been afraid of him, and for good reason. She had stolen from him. His peers would have thought it only right if he had acted toward her in anger or had her tossed into prison—or at the very least, looked the other way while his cousin had his sport with her.
He watched her move to the other side of the row, where one of the men had let a few extra kernels fall from his bundle. Barric frowned. The hollowness from the night before seemed gone from her eyes. Gone, he wondered, or just artfully covered? It would serve her well, he supposed, to seem strong in the presence of those who might hate her.
“Looks like our little thief has returned,” William observed out of nowhere, clapping Barric on the shoulder. “An interesting development.”
“I fail to see what’s so interesting about it.” Barric broke his gaze from the girl to consult some notes he held in his hand. “I told her she could return.”
William’s eyebrows shot up, and he took a small step back. “Indeed?” He stole a secret glance at Rena, his expression ponderous. “I wonder what’s in your mind, Barric, to allow such a thing.”
“Aren’t you the one who let her help herself to my grain in the first place?”
“Yes,” William answered slowly. “I told her she could take enough food for the day. But I am a steward and you are an earl, and you must consider…appearances.”
Barric frowned. As if he hadn’t thought the same thing the previous night, that he was opening himself up to a world of gossip and impossible scandal. After years of managing his affairs with an iron fist, he might as well paint a target on his back to anyone of rank and title. And all for what? For a foreign girl who sang to herself as she picked from his fields.
Shadow among Sheaves Page 5