Shadow among Sheaves

by Naomi Stephens

  “I’m cutting him off,” Barric explained. “You would, logically, be the next door on which he might knock for help.”

  His uncle busied his hands by conjuring an ancient, twisted pipe from within his waistcoat. The tobacco carried the same wooden aroma Barric remembered from his childhood visits, a heavy scent which hazed his mind and made him feel momentarily young. “I didn’t exactly hear a favor in there,” his uncle said pointedly.

  “I’m asking you to cut him off as well. If he asks, don’t give him any money.”

  His uncle took a deep drag off the pipe, resting his head against his chair back as he blew the smoke out his nose. “Turning your back on your own brother?” He shook his head. “A bit boorish, don’t you think?”

  “I’m leaving for France in the morning,” Barric said. “I’m bringing him back to England with me. That’s why I’m asking you not to help him.”

  His uncle cracked a faint smile, as if charmed by Barric’s plan. “You really think he’ll come back with you?”

  “Without money, he’ll have little choice.”

  His uncle tapped his pipe on his knee, ponderous. “All men have their dalliances, Barric. There’s no crime in it.” His uncle’s smile reached a bit higher as he lowered his pipe again. “Word has it your mind has been addled by a woman of your own.”

  Barric clenched his teeth, his mood blackening on the instant.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “An Indian woman, no less. Widowed. How droll of you, Barric, to seduce a widow.”

  Barric’s thoughts instantly turned to the previous night. Again, his cold dismissal echoed in his mind as his uncle’s word seduce clanged somewhere in the background.

  “If you’ll excuse me,” Barric said, nodding curtly, and moved toward the door.

  His uncle held up his hands as if he hadn’t been able to help himself. “All right, all right, you can sheath that invisible sword of yours.” He smiled faintly. “You know, when you’re good and angry, I can see your father in you, Barric. Can you blame me for riling you on occasion, if only to see him again?”

  Nearly fifteen years had passed since Barric’s parents died in a boating incident in France, caught in an unforeseen storm, but he still remembered the exact way his uncle had looked when he’d slammed into the room with news of their death thick on his tongue. Uncle George’s handsome face had been chalky white that morning, as if somewhere inside he was already buried with his brother in an unmarked grave. As soon as the news had broken, Charlie wept into his uncle’s waistcoat, but Barric merely stared in stunned silence. Then his uncle’s hand curled around his shoulder, administering a ghostly touch as he’d murmured, “All will be well again.”

  At fifteen years old, Barric had wanted to believe his uncle. He had even sought him out in his father’s library later that night, pressed his chest against the doorframe, and listened long enough to hear his uncle fill the empty room with low, angry curses. Uncle George had remained drunk for two weeks straight. He had smelled of stale alcohol and pipe tobacco at the funeral; he smelled of pipe tobacco now.

  Barric startled out of his memory in time to see his uncle run a contemplative hand across his mustache.

  “She could be useful, Jack.”

  A youthful impulse made Barric respond, “Don’t call me that.”

  Only Charlie still called him Jack. And only Charlie was allowed.

  Another puff of pipe smoke. The usual plotting arch of his uncle’s eyebrow.

  “Barric,” he corrected with an acquiescing nod. “Her husband’s family left an enviable estate, you know. Hawthorn Glen.”

  “She’s poorer than dirt,” Barric snapped. “Living off my own charity. She has clearly not inherited it.”

  “Exactly.” His uncle’s smile glimmered behind a thin cloud of smoke. “No one has. Yet.”

  Ah, thought Barric. So, there it was. His uncle always had a motive, which usually concerned money. The typical plight of a younger son.

  “What?” Barric challenged. “You want me to forge a new will for you? You would visit me in jail, wouldn’t you?”

  His uncle laughed. “Visit? No. Though, if you prove obliging, I might help you escape.”

  “What is it you’re sniffing after, exactly?”

  “Sir Alistair wasn’t the brightest of our cousins, but he is certainly the most stubborn. Since you and the girl are so…close…perhaps you might keep an eye on the estate for me, in case there is some lucky complication with his will?”

  Barric’s eyes narrowed. “To what purpose, exactly?”

  “I once made Sir Alistair a generous offer of my own, when they first relocated to India. Oh, my misguided cousin, hiding behind his silly chess set. No price I set was high enough for him. Wouldn’t it be a sad bit of irony if it fell into my hands regardless? Anyway, the money is to pass to a cousin on the Hawley side, I hear, perhaps the property as well, but nothing has been made official. I would love to have the estate if things are still negotiable. Beautiful gardens. Magnificent library. Though smaller in size, it rivals even your Misthold for beauty.”

  Barric hesitated. His uncle had never once complained about Barric’s birthright, or that Misthold Manor had passed to him. And though Barric had inherited the property at a young age, his uncle had never once tried to tell him his business in running it, but only said he was his father’s son and would surely work matters out.

  Once, when the upkeep of Misthold had felt especially burdensome, Barric had said he wished his uncle had inherited it instead of him, a cruel and heartless comment.

  “A bit drafty for my taste,” his uncle had disagreed with a knowing smile. “And I’d be haunted by memories of my stodgy governess. You know, my knuckles never did recover from all those rappings….”

  Barric knew, however, there were other memories his uncle was far keener to avoid.

  Uncle George had been wolfing around vacant estates ever since his brother had died, as if searching for a birthright of his own, though none had ever suited his interests well enough. Having secured a wife with an enormous dowry, he now lived in a comfortable house with a small property and an even smaller garden, spending very little money as he plotted for an estate to someday rival his ambition. That he had made an offer on Hawthorn Glen surprised Barric; that he still wanted the property made his stubborn mind think of Rena despite itself. How would she look at Barric if his uncle moved into her dead husband’s childhood home?

  “We may be doing her the favor,” his uncle went on, reading Barric’s uncomfortable silence as actual consideration. “The girl may want to keep it in the family, for her dead husband’s sake. Ask her about it, will you?”

  Barric most certainly would not. To do so would be to press his hand against an open wound just to hear her cry.

  “I should be going,” he said instead, stepping toward the door.

  Sensing his retreat, the dogs stirred beneath the table, stretching their languid limbs. His uncle placed his pipe gingerly on the table, then rose to see Barric out. “You won’t forget about me, will you?” He pretended to sound hurt by Barric’s usual absence, but his eyes glinted. “It’s been months since I’ve seen you. I had half forgotten your hair was that unfortunate shade of red, but here you are.”

  “I have been busy.”

  “Someday I might forget your name. Barret? Bennet? Surely it starts with a B….”

  Barric allowed himself a tentative smile, the boy in him grateful that his uncle hadn’t outgrown his usual teasing. “I will come back as soon as I have Charlie home.”

  “Ah, yes, your mission. I’ll drink to your success. And when you return, I might even wish to meet this Indian girl I hear so much about.”

  At that startling suggestion, Barric glanced up and was pinned by his uncle’s waiting eyes. They were a riptide tangle of blue and gray—the same as Barric’s father’s—a family attribute which had passed to Charlie rather than Barric.

  “I know it hurt
s you to look at me,” Uncle George said. “If we’re both honest, it sometimes hurts me to look at you too.” He placed a hand on Barric’s cheek as he’d often done when Barric was a child and he’d come with gifts from his travels. “If my son wasn’t a blithering idiot, I’d hope he might someday have your backbone, Jack.”

  Swathed in tobacco smoke, Barric stared at his uncle silently, long enough that the dogs scented the stillness and began prowling closer. “Leave the girl alone,” he finally said. “Don’t go digging into what might have been hers. For her, that estate is full of nothing but ghosts.”

  His uncle dropped his hand and smiled wistfully. “Yes,” he agreed, glancing out his window as if he could see all the way to Misthold. “The lovelier ones often are.”

  Go. The word felt heavy in Rena’s memory, but she kept rolling it over and over in her mind, allowing Barric’s voice to follow her. “Go,” he’d said, as if she were an animal to be dismissed by his command. As if everything she shared with him that night meant nothing. She spoke to him of Edric, of her decision to marry him, of the guilt she now carried everywhere she went.

  Did he think she spoke so openly with everyone? She didn’t.

  Did he think she was his to dismiss? She wasn’t.

  Did he think, because he had provided for her, he was now her master?

  A small voice in the back of her head challenged her.

  Isn’t he, though?

  Rena’s pride took another blow. She owed everything to Lord Barric. Her house, her food, even her safety when she picked from his fields. She now lived the life of less than a servant. An untouchable. The word floated back to her again, an echo from India. She’d grown too used to her father’s house to accept her new position without temper, too used to being followed by servants of her own, to living behind her veil.

  “You’ve been scrubbing that plate for an eternity.” Alice’s voice was laced with a question.

  Rena looked with dismay at the dish in her hands. She was elbow deep in murky water, the whole length of her apron drenched. Glancing around the kitchen, Rena tried to remember how long it’d been since she’d said anything to Alice, or if maybe Alice had said something while she was still untangling her frustrations with Lord Barric.

  “Oh,” she said. “Yes. I must have been daydreaming. Full stomach, you know.”

  Rena and Nell had been invited to dinner that night on the pretense that Betsy had accidentally made too much stew, but Rena suspected the invitation was offered because William was worried about her—after all, she had screamed at him the last time they spoke, as she stood in the frigid rain while he’d tried to coax her back inside.

  They’d finished eating nearly an hour ago. Nell was resting in the parlor while William fed the pigs and Betsy sorted laundry. Rena had offered to help Alice with the dishes, and though Alice seemed embarrassed to douse herself in front of company, she also seemed relieved she wouldn’t have to do so alone.

  Alice held out her hand, demanding the plate from Rena. “William says Lord Barric went to find you on the lawn a few days ago.” Giving the dish a thorough drying with her apron, she set it back in the cupboard with hardly a clank, then held her hand out for the next. “And that you followed him into Misthold.”

  Rena frowned down at her throbbing fingers as she remembered her frantic search for Edric’s ring—and Lord Barric’s cutting command that she come to her senses. “Nothing happened,” she insisted, but the words sounded mortifyingly rehearsed.

  Alice dried the next plate much longer than was necessary. “It doesn’t really matter if it did,” she said matter-of-factly. “It wouldn’t mean anything.”

  Those words felt like a trap. Rena eyed Alice sideways, trying to read her expression, but the girl’s eyes were carefully neutral. Of course, something had altered between Rena and Lord Barric, and it was foolish to deny it. She spoke to him of Edric. He brought her into his home. He nearly kissed her in the thicket, and they looked at each other differently now because of it.

  “Why wouldn’t it mean anything?”

  This time, when Alice set the plate in the cupboard, it clanked. “Because,” she explained, reaching for a larger platter, “he kissed me too.”

  Rena didn’t answer, too stunned by the admission to speak, and so Alice met her eyes. “Oh, it was years ago. I was barely sixteen at the time. It was a few months after our father had died and a year after Barric had lost his own. Well, he and William got ruddy well foxed one night. It was late, so I came looking for my brother, but Lord Barric happened upon me in the hallway.”

  Rena’s stomach clenched as she listened. “And he kissed you.”

  Alice nodded, swiping her hair away from her tired eyes. “Without saying so much as a word before. It was rather ungentlemanly of him to do it, I suppose, though it was quite satisfactory, as far as such things go.”

  Rena submerged both hands in the cooling water tub as she struggled in vain not to picture the encounter. “What happened after?” she asked very quietly.

  “He said he was sorry for doing it. I knew he was only grieving over his father. Perhaps he thought he’d try things Charlie’s way for once. Or perhaps he really thought I was pretty. Either way, neither of us has ever mentioned it again.”

  “I’m sorry,” Rena said, and she meant it. She was sorry Barric had kissed Alice. Sorry he’d apparently brushed Alice aside as quickly as he had forgotten himself. But also relieved. Relieved that she herself had not let him kiss her at the festival, for surely he would have, and could it have ended any other way?

  “It was a long time ago,” Alice answered loftily. “Like I said, it meant nothing. Such encounters are rather common for lords in his position, and though Lord Barric is far better than all the rest, he is allowed his moments of weakness. I have certainly forgiven him.”

  Though Alice sounded careless enough, Rena knew the truth. That kiss meant a great deal to Alice, and had for rather a long time. Rena knew Alice worked like a dog in their little house, cooking and cleaning and mending and hauling. Even with Betsy there to assist her, Alice’s toil was written quite plainly in the tired lines around her eyes, in the way she pushed her hair out of her face with sweaty hands so that the roots matted down to her forehead from the cooling dishwater. Alice had been but sixteen years old when Barric had kissed her and was now tipping toward the more dangerous side of her twenties. Had she spent all these years dreaming Lord Barric would deliver her? That she might live an easier life? And here she was, scrubbing dishes instead, with only a poor widow and a maid-of-all-work to assist her.

  “Lord Barric did not kiss me,” Rena confided, wanting to ease Alice’s burden in whatever way she could. “If that’s what you’re thinking. He never has.”

  Alice graciously accepted the next dish when Rena handed it to her, her expression still subdued. “I wondered if you’d maybe chased him off,” she admitted, flashing a timid smile. “Chased him off all the way to France, that is.”

  “France?” Rena felt herself rising to Alice’s bait. “Is Lord Barric in France?” For a silly moment, Rena wondered why he hadn’t mentioned such a trip to her. But, of course, his affairs had nothing to do with her. “Go,” he’d said. Back to her place, back to her world, back to her own thoughts and troubles. And never mind about his.

  “William says he left yesterday morning,” Alice went on, hauling another load of dishes to the tub. “Very unexpected. Very hurried. Not that it matters two pence to you, of course.”

  Rena didn’t have a chance to agree. William bustled back into the kitchen, his cheeks pinched pink by cold and arms weighed down with two large pails of coal.

  “Bloody pigs got out again,” he griped, clanking the pails down beside the range.

  Both women nodded, but neither spoke right away. Noting their strange silence, William glanced over his shoulder at them, a suspicious question in his eyes before his lips curled into a tight, knowing grin. “Ah, we’ve been gossiping, have we?” He leaned back against t
he table and lifted both brows expectantly. “And? Anything interesting?”

  Alice flushed to an embarrassed shade of crimson as she splashed a handful of water at her brother, and Rena was quick to assist her by talking William into another subject entirely. For, though it was many years ago, Rena still doubted Alice wanted her brother to know Lord Barric once kissed her senseless in the grim back halls of Misthold.

  As Rena and Nell prepared for bed, the two said very little to each other. Rena stepped out of her dress and left it folded in its usual place over the back of a chair. Then she set to work on the laces of her stiff corset, stripping quickly down to her chemise and tugging into her nightdress. Meanwhile, Nell brewed a pot of tea, pausing only long enough to pull Rena’s hair over one shoulder and weave the strands into a durable braid. Such was their evening routine: a silent conversation transpiring in the slips of time spent between each task. As Rena put out the lamp, Nell slid into her nightgown. As Nell sat at the table and said her nightly prayers, Rena pulled out Edric’s ring. Fiddling with the chain, she cast curious glances at Nell, whose thin fingers were threaded together on the table, her neck bent in silent supplication.

  Rena had never prayed to Edric’s god. Not even at their wedding. Not even when he had taken her to church. She usually tried not to watch as Nell prayed—it always felt like stealing into someone else’s home when they weren’t looking. Sometimes Rena almost wished to join her, but that felt wrong as well, even though words pounded beneath her breast, lodged halfway up her throat, and she couldn’t get them out. Some nights she wanted to swear, to scream as she had in the rain at Lord Barric. Other nights she crept out from under the covers to weep beside the window while Nell slumbered. In certain moments of desperation, she had considered prayer, but Edric’s god was Edric’s god, and Rena was no longer sure where or to whom her own silent petitions ought to fly.

  “How long do you think Edric would want you to suffer?”

  Startled by Nell’s quiet voice, Rena looked up from Edric’s ring. It had been weeks since Nell had spoken of Sir Alistair, or of Edric, and Rena had never dreamed of forcing such a subject with a grieving wife and mother. She shook her head before finding the words to answer. “I don’t suffer.”