A footman opened the carriage door to assist them down. Aurelia glanced around but could see no sign of Mr. Madden. Feeling oddly disappointed, she stepped out and embraced Bridey. Caught up in the emotion of the meeting, Aurelia was better able to pay heed to her words.
“I cannot believe your father let you leave his castle,” Bridey exclaimed. “I had to see this with my own eyes. Will is not exactly the persuasive type, so this must be a momentous occasion.”
“A sad one, I fear,” Aurelia said. “We’ve brought you a patient I don’t think even your herbs can heal.”
Like the duke, Bridey had medical training. Her expertise was with women and children, though. She really was Mrs. Crockett’s only hope.
Her more worldly cousin sent her a look that practically spoke aloud: And you could not send her with servants? But thankfully, she was too polite to say it. Aurelia couldn’t have explained her decision to herself.
Bridey took charge, directing the footmen to carry the unconscious patient into a newly-renovated infirmary. A tall gentleman strolled out in the company of twins slightly younger than Rose. Bridey’s husband was an Ives, Aurelia knew. He vaguely resembled Mr. Madden, bearing the same square jaw, deep-set eyes, and angular cheekbones, but there the resemblance ended.
Dark-haired, lean, and elegantly garbed, Sir Pascoe-Ives held out his hand. “You must be Lady Aurelia. Call me Pascoe, please, it’s simpler than the explanations Will hates to make.”
Unable to recall the relationship between the men, Aurelia accepted his hand while cradling the crying infant in one arm. “Pleased to meet you, sir. Bridey looks happier than I’ve ever seen her, and I assume you must be the reason.”
He looked pleased as he watched his wife return to the carriage to take the babe.
“Oh, the poor thing,” Bridey cried, unbundling the infant. “He’s starving, but he looks flushed and healthy. You’ve done a wonderful job keeping him warm. Now let’s see if we can find him some milk. Pascoe, why don’t you take Aurelia into the house?” She glanced down at Rose, clinging to Addy’s skirt. “Would the little girl like to go in with the twins?”
“She’s deaf,” Pascoe explained. “Will’s already informed the nursemaid and asked if she could bring her puppy inside. As if he had to ask,” he said with a laugh, gesturing at the deerhounds loping out to join them.
“Then go inside, Lela. I’ll join you in a little while, after I examine our patient.” Bridey waved them off.
“Mr. Madden is an exceedingly elusive gentleman,” Aurelia said as she took Sir Pascoe’s arm and lifted her skirt to cross the rain-swept cobblestones while Addy followed with the children and the puppy in its basket. “And yet, he performs miracles without being noticed.”
“Will, elusive?” Pascoe snorted in a manner resembling Mr. Madden’s. “With his size, he has to work hard at being unobtrusive. Since your brothers are so far apart in age, you may not have noticed how males learn to communicate. But we were all brought up in a nursery that was little better than a puppy kennel.”
Aurelia considered her father’s kennels. “You fought for every crumb thrown your way?”
“And wrestled for the upper hand when there was naught else to do,” he said with a tone of amusement. “Will was younger than most of us, but he could still lay Ashford flat on his back if he was angry enough. Laying the Earl of Ives on his back was frowned upon by the staff, even if the rest of us thought it was great entertainment. As the eldest, Ashford is a bit of a bully.”
The Marquess of Ashford was a power behind political reform, a wealthy man with his fingers in more pots than her father. She’d not met him, but she’d heard he was large. A young lord with wealth, power, name, and older than his brothers would not appreciate being overpowered by a boy with nothing. Aurelia recognized it was the nature of the beast.
“So Mr. Madden learned to disappear from the pack,” she concluded.
Pascoe shrugged as they entered the rear door into a towering hall.
The noise of the household washed over her, but she was too fascinated by Sir Pascoe’s tale to let it affect her.
“Will isn’t much on book learning, so he couldn’t hide in the library. He chose to hide with the animals. And unlike the rest of us, he had a mother part of the time, so he could vanish as often as he liked, and we never knew where he was.”
A mother who ran a village inn and had no doubt taught him to be silent and courteous, as servants must be. Aurelia began to understand.
“If he grew peeved with us,” Pascoe continued, “he’d take a horse and ride out on his own, from Surrey to Yorkshire. The first time he did it was at the tender age of nine, if I remember correctly. He’s been traveling ever since.”
Pascoe introduced her to the housekeeper to take her to her room, so Aurelia didn’t have time to question more. She was enthralled—and appalled—at the idea of a man who picked up and went where the wind blew him.
Traveling and meeting other people was more enlightening than she had expected. The distraction of learning new surroundings apparently allowed her to dismiss extraneous noise with greater ease. Of course, it helped that she was interested in these particular environs—and also the silent gentleman who didn’t fling himself at her feet. That was quite perverse of her.
Dinner in the abbey’s towering medieval dining hall that evening was equally educational. The children sat at a small table with their nursemaid instead of in the nursery. From the larger, adult table, Aurelia could hear them clearly, but the distance was such that she assumed the others only heard their childish murmurs.
But more interesting yet, she was seated across from Mr. Madden—a man who would never have been allowed to sit down at her father’s table. That it was expected he sit with his family seemed normal, but she suspected he did not usually consent to dine with them. Vanishing was more his style.
He wore a loose country tweed, a decent embroidered waistcoat, and plain white cravat. His perpetual bristle had been shaved, and someone had trimmed his hair so it no longer brushed his neckcloth. His manners were more impeccable than the gruff country squire that he appeared.
She could also practice her dinner table manners and speak when spoken to for a change. The children seemed to be communicating in silence and did not overload her senses. The Pascoes apparently didn’t employ many servants, and she could scarcely hear them from the bowels of the distant kitchen. She was accustomed to the usual drips and clangs of a household. To her relief, she could actually follow the present conversation.
“I fear Mrs. Crockett’s infection is from her wounds, and her general weak health will make healing difficult,” Bridey was saying. “I’ll have to send for Emilia.”
Mr. Pascoe and Will were discussing dogs, so Aurelia could focus on her cousin. “Emilia?”
“Lady Dare, one of Lady McDowell’s brood. She is a botanist who has just published a pharmacopeia. But she also has a gift for healing, if we can keep her from overdoing herself. She’s with child, so it’s a delicate situation.”
Aurelia recalled the McDowells from her last trip to London—more of her distant Malcolm relations. “Healing would be such a useful gift,” she said wistfully.
“Because of her gift, Emilia couldn’t hug her own family,” Bridey corrected. “She could feel all their pains as her own. And if someone is truly ill, she is compelled to heal them, to the detriment of her own health. She’s still skittish about touching, but her husband’s weak lungs are teaching her how to manage the discomfort. We all need experience to work with our gifts.”
“Experience?” Aurelia said cynically. “I have had ears all my life but no amount of experience in listening will teach me to be deaf.”
Bridey frowned, and Aurelia suddenly realized the men had quit talking. She winced and studied the food she was supposed to be eating.
“It hurts you to listen?” Bridey asked tentatively.
“It’s not a subject for the dinner table.” She sipped her soup but didn’t t
aste it.
“Bridey cannot open her inner eye without inviting evil spirits,” Pascoe said cheerfully, as if his wife’s gift was a jest. “I can smell fear right now and not have a clue from whom, although my experience with people tells me it’s from both you and Will.”
“Not fear,” Will said, also tasting his soup. “Your nose stinks.”
Aurelia tittered and hid it behind her napkin. Will lifted that lovely eyebrow at her. It made a perfect point, like a triangle, when he did that, causing her pulse to race.
“My undiplomatic husband is saying that it’s not just experience with your gift, but experience with using it, that makes a difference. I have learned to test for spirits before looking at auras. Will and Pascoe are Ives, so they barely even recognize their gifts as such. They simply employ them in their daily life, and in their male arrogance, just assume they’re better than anyone else.”
“Mr. Madden has a gift?” Aurelia glanced across the table to see him addressing his food as if he were starved.
“The dogs,” Pascoe pointed out helpfully. “He talks to dogs.”
“Dogs don’t talk,” Will said, unhelpfully.
“Thank goodness. I don’t need any more voices in my head.” Not knowing how to take this extremely odd conversation, Aurelia set down her spoon and looked around for a footman to take away her bowl. There were none. She breathed a little easier that no servants could overhear them.
“You heard me call last night?” Mr. Madden asked warily.
“I couldn’t say precisely that it was you, but I thought I heard my name, and I. . .” She sighed, unable to explain what she had never tried to explain before. “Is there another word for emotion? That is not quite what I mean, but it’s all I have. Voices raised in. . . emotion. . . carry far.”
His ears reddened, and he tore a piece of bread as if he studied a subject of vast importance.
“Imperturbable Will, shouting with. . . emotion?” Pascoe asked in amusement.
“If I were closer, I’d kick you under the table.” Bridey rang a bell, and a footman appeared to clear the soup bowls, while a maid hurried to serve the next course. Then both servants melted silently into the shadows of an anteroom.
“One would have to be made of stone not to react to finding a dying woman and baby,” Aurelia said in defense of Mr. Madden. “I cannot hear him at all most times, unlike other people.”
“Apparently because he lacks emotion,” Pascoe said in amusement.
“Please excuse my husband,” Bridey said in exasperation. “Now that he needn’t be diplomatic, he’s releasing a lifetime of rudeness. Lela, explain, please. We’ve never had time to talk much, so let us use this moment judiciously.”
“We have not had time to talk because I cannot sit in a room full of people and think at all. It’s like being swept away on waves of noise. The more emotional conversations in the background often overwhelm, while the people who are talking directly to me go unheard. And if there is also music and dancing and laughter and horses in the street. . .” Fearing she’d gone too far into her weirdness, she shoved a piece of bread into her mouth to shut herself up.
“You can hear people in the house even when you’re in the garden?” Mr. Madden asked with actual interest.
She blushed. “Let this serve as warning—I can hear a great deal more than people would like me to hear. Mostly, though, I let all the babble wash over me and just don’t listen.”
He snorted and she thought she saw a look of appreciation in his eyes. He had seen her in the garden with Lord Clayton. He had to have known that Clayton was proposing. She hadn’t been listening, because she’d heard it all before. And she hadn’t been interested in hearing it from Clayton, who didn’t ring true even when he said hello. So she’d simply let the noise wash over her.
Pascoe and Bridey waited for explanation. Aurelia refused to say more. Mr. Madden looked up with surprise when he saw that they waited on him.
He pointed his roll at her. “Every man in existence falls on their knees when Lady Aurelia walks into a room. They spout poetry and songs and beg her to marry them. One can’t walk through the garden without stumbling over the louts.”
“Now I see why he doesn’t talk. He’s very bad at it.” Pascoe turned back to Aurelia. “What is he trying to tell us?”
“That I don’t hear them,” she said, blushing even more. “I’m listening to the birds and my sister’s piano and my father shouting at Rain and an amorous couple in the shrubbery, and I just don’t hear their poetry and proposals.”
Bridey snickered. Pascoe grinned. Mr. Madden nodded as if he’d known it all the time.
“The half-wit look,” he said, before digging into his beef.
Chapter 7
Deliberately distracting himself from the memory of last night’s dinner with the gossamer-beauty of Lady Fairy and her enchanting spells, Will hummed a tune stuck in his head and studied Bridey’s deerhound pups. He chose the one with the least amount of white in his coat, not because of its color, but its mind. Deerhounds were difficult to train, but the full gray responded to his humming. It had a more focused mind than the others, one he could work with. A normal deerhound would leap happily all over strangers, then race after an animal they thought they could bring down. A trained deerhound. . . Will hoped for the best. If nothing else, he could breed the dog later for the traits he needed.
He had been relieved last night that his annoying family had focused on Lady Aurelia and hadn’t turned the conversation to his own peculiarities. Bridey had been right. He’d never thought of his gift as peculiar until he’d heard the Malcolm ladies discussing their own abilities. Until then, he’d thought he’d been paying attention where others didn’t and prided himself on his one accomplishment.
It made him uneasy to know he was even more odd than he’d thought.
It made him even more uncomfortable to understand that the perfect lady had her own problems. She’d always been so distant that he’d just assumed she was arrogant or half-witted. Now that he grasped some of her difficulty, he was in danger of becoming as enthralled as her other idiot suitors. She’d made him witless. Malcolm women were well beyond the reach of a landless bastard, and the duke’s daughter was on the furthest pinnacle. He needed to move on soon, before he made an ass of himself.
He lifted the pup, let him eat from his hand and learn his smell. The wee ones had so much potential, it was exciting to watch. He really needed to build that kennel soon. It was a nuisance to keep traveling back to Iveston when he had a new pup. The Cotswolds were nicely central.
Feeling someone watching, he looked up to discover Rose lingering in the courtyard. How had she fled the nursery?
Hearing the laughter of Pascoe’s twin escape artists, he rolled his eyes. Of course she’d bolted. The twins had taught her how. The little lass wasn’t stupid, and she was older than the privileged brats.
He’d had to remove her dog from the nursery so the children weren’t too rough while he healed. So he carried his puppy over for her to pet. She smiled in delight and rubbed its head with one finger, which the puppy attempted to nip.
They were in the courtyard where the women’s voices carried through unglazed windows from the infirmary. Pascoe intended to have the windows glazed before snow flew, but Will supposed these things took time. Feeling incompetent to take care of children, he started across the stones with the child at his heels.
Bridey’s warning carried clearly through the window. “Be prepared to take Emilia’s arms as soon as she starts swaying. That means she’s going too deep.”
“Touching her helps?” Lady Aurelia asked.
He probably shouldn’t be listening, but the lady had admitted to listening to private conversations no one could know she was hearing. This one didn’t seem precisely private.
“If spirits take me over,” Bridey explained, “I need Pascoe or my brother to bring me down by holding my hands. I’m hoping we can do the same for Emilia.”
“Hus
h,” a third feminine voice said. “Let me concentrate.”
Will considered looking in the high window but thought that went a shade too far. He stopped outside the infirmary door and leaned against the wall to let the child play with the pup. From the sounds of it, her mother was still among the living. He prayed Dare’s wife could work miracles. Mute Rose wouldn’t fare well in an orphanage.
The silence on the other side of the wall was disturbing. He knew what to do with women in bed, but outside of it, they remained mysterious creatures whose minds he couldn’t read. Well, some of them were simple enough to read, but ones like Lady Aurelia. . . required far more attention than he possessed.
“She’s stirring,” Bridey said in muffled excitement. “It’s time to bring Emilia back.”
Rustling, a low moan, and then hurried whispers. It ought to be safe to enter now. He knocked.
Lady Aurelia answered, looking flushed and excited and so appealing Will had to resist hugging her. He would crush her if he did. He’d best stop to visit Miranda before returning to the castle.
The lady saw Rose at once and lifted the girl. “Mrs. Crockett is waking up! Emilia did it!”
“She also wore herself out. We need to pour some hot broth into her,” Bridey called.
“I’ll fetch it,” Will offered, “if you’ll look after the child. She’s wandering loose. The twins probably are too.”
Bridey glanced his way, noted Aurelia holding Rose, and nodded. “The devil children will be with Pascoe. Rose might be useful here.”
Emilia, Lady Dare, rested on a stool against the wall. Tall and slender, dark-haired where most Malcolms were light, she laughed at Bridey’s description of the twins. “I could eat a side of beef, right now, if you’ll tell the kitchen that, please.”
Comfortable with a serving role, Will acknowledged her request. “One side of beef coming up. Tea for everyone else?”
“Hot chocolate for Rose and broth for Mrs. Crockett, please,” Lady Aurelia requested, looking so winsome Will almost didn’t hear what she said.
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