The next two days—and nights—were the same. Cautious courtesy, little real conversation, and no more caressing touches or passionate kisses. Rosa had often wished for a woman in whom she could really confide, but never more than now. If only she could put her head in her mother’s lap and pour out her confusion and her questions. She had long, imaginary conversations with Aunt Lillibelle, who had lived a wicked life according to the entire village, so was just the person to advise Rosa now. The questions were clear enough, but the imaginary Aunt Lillibelle knew no more than Rosa, so her questions went unanswered.
Then, four mornings after their wedding, a courier arrived with Bear’s weekly package of letters from Liverpool, and everything changed again.
Chapter Twenty-One
“I won’t be above a month,” Bear told his wife, “but if this opportunity is everything Lion says, we stand to make a fortune, Rosa. You have everything you need?”
“Yes, yes. You have given me money enough for a full quarter, and we shall be perfectly comfortable, Hugh. You do not need to worry about us.”
“Caleb has everything well in hand at the Hall, but if he comes up against a problem and needs a decision, I have told him to ask you. We’ve discussed enough about my plans, I’m confident you will know what must be done.”
“You trust me with your business?”
“You are my wife. It is our business. You won’t have to concern yourself with the other properties and investments. The couriers will come after me. But you are right on hand at Thorne Hall. You are a clever woman with good instincts. I would be a fool not to trust you. You will write to let me know if you need me, or anything I can give you?”
He did not want to go; not with things unresolved. However, his wife held him at arm’s-length with a cool reserve that spoke of the depth of her hurt at his wrongful assumption. Not that she stopped caring for his ordinary needs. Rosa, he was coming to understand, couldn’t stop nurturing if she tried. She sent food to the Hall when he did not come for meals, had hot baths ready for him when he returned home, stood arm-in-arm with him to present a united front when some of the more prosperous villagers called to congratulate them. Which did not, he noted, include the Pelmans or the Thrextons.
She did it all with a dignified reserve, as the gap between them widened day by day. He didn’t dare touch her, for the taste of her was blazoned on his soul and he would not be able to stop at a touch. No more caresses. No more kisses. Not until she was ready to be his wife in truth, because where she was concerned, he did not trust himself to keep his appetites in check.
This trip might be a godsend, taking him away from the constant temptation she represented and giving her time to forget his clumsiness and stupidity.
“The horses are ready, sir,” Jeffreys said.
“I’ll be there in a minute,” Bear replied. Now. This was the one exception. With Jeffreys waiting by the horses, he would not have time to let the brute in his trousers off its leash, so giving his wife one last kiss was as safe as he could make it.
Rosa was agreeing. What to? Oh yes, she would write. “And you must write too, Hugh. Travel is uncertain at the best of times, and this weather makes it chancier. Please write every few days just so that I know you are well.”
She would worry about him. He couldn’t stop his lips curving at the thought, fool man. Undoubtedly, being Rosa, she would worry about Jeffreys, too, and the horses. “Of course, I will.” He hesitated. Before their wedding, he had hauled her into several very pleasant kisses, but he was nervous about initiating this one. “May I kiss you goodbye, dear wife?”
Her eyes widened, and she smiled before stepping closer with her face up. “Farewell, please. I do want you to come home, Hugh.”
Better than he expected and much more than he deserved. Rather like the kiss itself, which left him adjusting with some difficulty to the saddle as they rode down through the village and out to the coast and the ferry.
***
Bear’s first letter arrived three days after his departure, hand-delivered by a man who said that he now worked for Rosa.
I’ve sent this letter with Makepeace Brownlee, who comes highly recommended as a nurse for elderly gentlemen who are a bit confused in their minds. If you and your father like him, I thought he could relieve the servants of the night-care duties, but you must organize the household as you wish.
I have a brief stopover in Manchester to meet with a potential buyer for the townhouse I told you about there, then straight to London to meet with the Earl of Ruthford. The weather continues uncertain, but…
The rest of the letter contained commonplaces that could have been written to anyone, except that it began ‘My dear wife’ and ended ‘Your husband, Hugh Gavenor.’
She looked at those words for a long time, more than half tempted to kiss them, but Brownlee was waiting, regarding her with calm brown eyes. He was a man in his middle years, sturdily built, with pleasant features and a face that fell naturally into laugh lines. Instinctively, she felt she could trust him with her father, but she asked him questions about his previous positions, and then took him upstairs to meet Father.
Father sulked in his chair by the fire, and rounded on Rosa as soon as she entered. “Rosie, I don’t know what you are about, keeping such a maid. She refuses to bring me my trousers and my boots, and I must away to Thorne Hall. I am already very late, and what will Lord Hurley be thinking?”
Sukie, the calmer and kinder of the sisters Bear had hired, had her lips tightly pressed together and one cheek bore the imprint of a palm in fading scarlet.
“Oh Father,” Rosa said. “Oh Sukie, I am so sorry.”
“Didn’t move quite fast enough, Mrs. Gavenor. Don’t you worry none. But how to calm him, I do not know.”
Brownlee addressed Father directly. “Dressing you will be my job now, sir. I am Brownlee, and I have been hired to look after you.”
“A valet? Lord Hurley has hired me a valet? How very kind of him.” Father frowned. “I had one. He has gone off somewhere. Do you mean to stay, Brown? Eh?”
“For as long as you need me, sir,” Brownlee replied, unperturbed by the truncating of his name. “If you give me a minute to find out where things are, I will have your clothes directly.”
Rosa’s face must have expressed her alarm, because Brownlee murmured, “A short walk will do him no harm, and will help to turn his mind elsewhere, ma’am, if you permit.”
“He does not like to be carried,” Rosa warned.
“Just downstairs. Mr. Gavenor’s purchases for Mr. Neatham’s comfort should be offloaded by now, and we shall put the invalid’s chair to use immediately. Now, Miss— Sukie was it? Would you be kind enough to show me how Mr. Neatham likes his things to be kept?”
Father beamed. “I like this one better than the big fellow, Rosie.”
Rosa, as she later examined the other items her big fellow had sent for her father’s comfort, disagreed with her father. She liked the big fellow a lot. Far more than was comfortable, given the constraints between them.
Still, the parting kiss had been promising. Plus, he had thought of her in Liverpool; had sent her all these things and Brownlee to ease her load. She pulled his letter from her pinafore pocket and, looking around quickly to make sure she was unobserved, pressed a kiss to his signature.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Bear detoured to spend a few days in Birmingham, where a run-down block of townhouses built early in the last century was being sold to fund the owner’s interest in racehorses. Back at his hotel, after spending the day going over the derelicts with a local builder, he found his mail had caught up with him, which included a letter from his wife.
Had she liked his present? He had realized afterwards that he’d bought her nothing personal, and had shopped that afternoon to remedy the lack. A package containing a length of figured green and gold silk for a gown, a pretty bonnet, and a shawl in the same tones sat waiting for him to pen a note to go with them. Should he have purchas
ed jewelry, as well? He hadn’t been able to interpret her reaction to the ring, and as things stood, didn’t want to risk giving her an item she might see as suitable for a mistress.
Especially since he wouldn’t be there to see her face when she opened the package.
But a man might buy his wife a gown and bonnet, surely?
He put the letter to one side and dealt with the business correspondence first, but his eyes kept drifting to Rosa’s letter. Did she miss him? He snorted at the thought. After four days of marriage, and most of them awkward? She missed him like a sore tooth, no doubt.
The letter, when he could put it off no longer, was oddly reassuring. She thanked him for Brownlee and the few things he’d sent to make the care of the invalid more convenient. He’d done nothing that required thanks. She was his wife, and his duty was to provide for her care, which meant caring for her father.
She reported on the wellbeing of the household, with a couple of anecdotes that brought a smile. She had resolved a small dispute on the building site by instructing them to move the planned ice pit to the shaded side of the house, and the kitchen door so that it opened onto that part of the courtyard. She hoped she had not overstepped her authority. He checked the sketches and nodded. She was quite correct.
She addressed the letter to ‘Honored Sir,’ but the signature was a little more encouraging. ‘Yours truly, Rosa.’ She said nothing about the village. Perhaps the weather had been too poor for her to make the trip. He hoped she was having no further trouble with the squire’s mother and the Pelmans. The marriage should have spiked their guns, but Bear still could not be easy.
For the dozenth time since he’d ridden away, he wanted to turn back, sort out his marriage, and not leave again until he could bring her away with him. As if they loved one another. As if they wanted to live in one another’s pockets. No. He had work to do, and so did she. If she met with a problem she couldn’t manage, she would tell him. Wouldn’t she?
***
The villagers had divided into two camps. In some ways, Rosa had been more comfortable when she’d been the outsider—the leper who lived in the desert, was avoided by everyone, and stayed out of their way as best she could.
Marriage changed everything. Not for the Pelmans and the Thrextons, who would not acknowledge her existence, but continued to talk about her behind her back, and sometimes right in front of her—though without naming names. They had their supporters, too; people who were happy to believe the worst of her, especially if it curried favor with the gentry.
On the other hand, more people than she expected were prepared to take up the cause of the new Mrs. Gavenor, whose husband employed half the village and payed liberally. No. That was a little unfair. Several people had explained, shamed-faced, that they had never believed the scurrilous lies, but had felt unable to stand up against the most prominent members of the village. Now that Bear stood behind her, and had turned the Rector to her support, they were pleased to welcome her back into their lives, their shops, and their parlors.
Being a bone of contention in the village meant trying not to aggravate one side while soothing the other, especially when her champions resorted to fisticuffs, as happened in her husband’s work crew not long after she received his first letter.
Rosa arrived for the aftermath, the foreman Caleb Redding wading into a free-for-all and laying about liberally to separate those who refused to stop throwing punches.
“There’s the whore now,” one of the men muttered when he noticed her, prompting another scuffle and a roar from Caleb, “The next man to throw a punch or make a foul remark is dismissed!”
Should she leave? To do so felt like running away, and she was tired of hiding, but now all the men watched her. She felt the weight of their scorn, lust and derision, but also respect, admiration and even some sort of heroine worship, which sat as heavily on her as the more negative distortions of her true self.
Caleb spoke before she could decide what to do. “Mrs. Gavenor, I apologize for the men. No lady should have to see such brutality. We had a meeting, did we not? Can I ask you to wait at the tent for a few minutes while I have a further word to the men? I will join you shortly.”
Rosa took two steps away before she stopped. ‘It is our business’, Bear had said. The men worked for Bear and therefore they worked for her. “If you have no objection, Mr. Redding, I will stay. My husband has authorized me to act as his representative here, as you know. I have full confidence in your ability to handle trouble in the work team, but it is my responsibility to see that justice and peace both prevail. Also, from what I heard as I approached”—she looked around the group, noting who glared back and who would not meet her eyes—“the matter of the fight concerns me closely. I am also owed some justice, I think.”
Caleb examined her face, then nodded. “Very well. Hiram, fetch a chair for Mrs. Gavenor.”
One of the younger men ran to the tent that Caleb used as his onsite office and came back with a folding chair he set up next to Caleb, the men in a wide ring around him—two groups, mutually glaring.
The ‘pro-Gavenors’ outnumbered the others, Rosa noted, which should have eased her, but still her heart pounded and her mouth dried. “I have something to say, Mr. Redding,” she said, as firmly as she could. Here, on her own property, with her own workers, she had to take a stand, or forever be a victim of Pelman and Lady Threxton.
She met Caleb’s anxious eyes and must have appeared more confident than she felt, because he nodded encouragement.
“From what I heard, those who were fighting have taken sides in the village scandal, arguing over whether I am the innocent victim of lies or the lightskirt that my persecutors paint me. Trial by combat is rather old fashioned, gentlemen. However, here you have the person who knows what has happened and what has not happened. I will answer questions, but first I want you to know this.”
She composed her skirts around her as she thought carefully about her words.
“My husband and I are providing work in this village. Work to all of you. You will have heard, and it is true, that we intend to bring Thorne Hall back to its former glory and sell it to a family who will need servants and who will buy local services.”
She paused to allow them time to grumble agreement.
“I welcome the opportunity to defend myself from the accusations against me, especially since—for two years—my accusers have spoken behind my back so I could not hear the charges nor refute them. It is only fair to tell you that I fully support Mr. Redding. While I cannot and do not wish to tell you what to think, nor can I control what you say off this work site, you will not insult my husband and his honor by showing disrespect of any kind to me while taking his coin.” She swung her head to look at her supporters. “Nor will Mr. Redding or I tolerate fighting on this site, whether it is for or against me. Am I clear?”
Another round of nods and grumbles.
“Very well. Who wishes to ask the first question?”
Put on the spot, they were reluctant to start, but at last one burly fellow—a local villager rather than one of Gavenor’s Liverpool imports—said, “They say as the squire’s your cousin, and he don’t like you much, ma’am. That’s a fact, is it?”
The token honorific helped Rosa to answer calmly with a little family history, and her own surprise at the discovery. “Families can be difficult,” she added, and her sigh was echoed by others.
“You should meet my mother-in-law,” one man said. “Twenty years married to her daughter, and she still hates me because she wanted a better marriage for the lass. Well, I love my wife. That has to count for something, doesn’t it?”
Nods, then, and an undefinable sense of relaxation, until the next man asked, “Is it true you lived here in Thorne Hall with the old baron?”
“I lived here with my father, who was the baron’s librarian, until my father could no longer perform his duties. After that, my father and I moved to Rose Cottage, though the baron continued to live at the H
all until he died at the time of the fire. And, gentlemen, I have heard the rumors that the baron took me as mistress. Not when those rumors first appeared, which was two years ago, and four years after the baron’s death; eight years after I moved from Thorne Hall. If they were true, would servants not have talked at the time?” She raised her brows, fixing the man who had asked the question with her gaze.
“Think about that. I would also ask you to consider that the baron was a man in his sixties and I was a much younger woman than I am now, and under the care and protection of my father.”
“She’s right,” said one of the local men. “Me ma worked at the Hall when Mrs. Gavenor was living there, and she always says there isn’t nothing to these stories.”
“Servants always know,” Rosa agreed.
Afterward, the tone warmed, and when Caleb sent the men back to their work, he congratulated her. “You won’t have won them all over, Mrs. Gavenor,” he warned, “but you’ve gone a long way with the fair ones. And the others’ll keep their mouths shut if they value their jobs.”
From that day, she saw a slow increase in the number of people who nodded politely when she passed, or who spoke to her in the churchyard as she left Sunday services. She even had afternoon callers now, and servants enough that she could sit and dispense tea and hold a conversation. She made afternoon calls, watching the lady of the house closely to refresh her mother’s half-remembered lessons in hostess etiquette, given over tea parties with an assortment of dolls. One of Bear’s reasons for marrying was to have a hostess, so she practiced assiduously.
Perhaps, when he returned, they could have guests to dinner, though with the Pelmans and Thrextons still her enemies, it was a puzzle to know how to fill a table.
The unseasonable rain and cold continued, threatening the harvest, and Father caught an ague from one of the maids, which meant Rosa’s trips to the village were curtailed since she did not like to leave him. The ague was taking its toll of the village, Mrs. Gillywether told her. Even the rector was confined to bed, unable to perform any of his duties.
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