Not Quite a Lady

by Loretta Chase

  She wanted a firm hand, he thought, not for the first time.

  “Speaking of those old times,” said Kenning as they entered the colonel’s bedroom, “I heard something.”

  “Did you, indeed?”

  Though Colonel Morrell did not keep a large staff, and most of those were in bed, Kenning closed the door. “I’ve been to the Axe and Cleaver,” he said.

  This, the colonel knew, was a tavern in Altrincham Lower Town. Like most taverns, it offered gossip in abundance.

  “To wet your whistle,” Colonel Morrell said with a thin smile.

  “More to wet somebody else’s,” said Kenning. “A coachman what felt ill-used and needed a sympathetic ear.”

  “Fewkes.”

  The servant’s bald head bobbed up and down. “He got to talking, sir, as men will do when lubricated sufficient. He got to telling me how he’d served the family since a boy and knew things.”

  “I daresay he does,” said his commander, “know things.”

  Nothing more was said until he had donned his dressing gown and was settled in his favorite chair, his nightly glass of whiskey at his elbow.

  Then, in a low voice—as though they stood in a tent and Napoleon’s spies might be listening outside—Kenning told his commander what the aggrieved coachman knew.

  It was not much, the smallest dirty nugget of a clue. Still, as Colonel Morrell knew, sometimes small, dirty nuggets proved to contain solid gold.

  Beechwood

  Monday morning 1 July

  On Sunday night, Darius had received a note from Lady Lithby. Her youngest, Stephen, was ill. She would return to her duties at Beechwood as soon as he recovered, which she did not expect to take long.

  Though work in and on the house continued without her and Lady Charlotte, the atmosphere was not the same. Darius felt the difference, a constant awareness of something wrong. It took him a while to pinpoint it.

  At first he thought he was simply out of sorts because of spending the morning in his study, attending to the stacks of bills and staring at the columns of figures in his ledgers, most of the figures being in the outgoing columns.

  This did not satisfactorily account for the troubling change in atmosphere.

  Being a man of uncommon intelligence, he did not require months, weeks, or even days to work out the answer.

  He remembered what Lady Charlotte had said, on the evening he’d dined at Lithby Hall.

  He has so much work to do, and a great deal on his mind. I should think he would want a refuge.

  …after all, it is his house, and ought to be the way he likes it.

  He remembered his brief vision of a beautiful someone making a refuge for him, a place of warmth and order, a place of his own where things were as he liked them to be.

  He recalled the magic she’d wrought in his dairy and the advice she’d given him about bribing his grandmother with a fan. He remembered the last time they’d spoken, and his sense that a barrier between them had cracked. Listening to her then, he’d realized she was two people. One was the woman with whom he conversed so easily, the one who giggled and laughed as they stood at the edge of the marshy remnants of a fishpond, so careful not to touch each other. She was intelligent and perceptive. She had a naughty streak and a sense of humor.

  This was the real Lady Charlotte.

  The wrongness in the house was her absence.

  He missed her.

  “This is not good,” he muttered to himself. He stared at the columns of the ledger. “I cannot—”

  “Bugger the little bastard!” came a shout from the corridor. “He’s bad luck! You keep that devil-eyed whoreson away from us, or I’ll tear a strip off his hide.”

  Darius couldn’t hear Tyler’s answer and didn’t wait to hear it.

  He went out into the passage. “What is this noise?” he said, in a precise imitation of his father. Like his father, he did not raise his voice. Like his father, he didn’t need to. No Carsington male ever had to raise his voice to obtain instant and undivided attention.

  The two men looked at him.

  “Well?” he said.

  The noisy fellow, who turned out to be Jowett, the head carpenter, had the usual complaint. One of his men had dropped a hammer on his foot and broken a toe. Pip was at the other end of the house, but it was his fault.

  Jowett refused to continue working while the boy remained on the property. He could not endanger his men, he said.

  Darius was strongly tempted to tell the man to leave the property and never come back. A carpenter could be replaced easily. The trouble was, his replacement was all too likely to have the same irrational attitude about Pip.

  Instead, Darius told him to go back to work. Then, feeling depressingly like his father, he summoned Tyler into the study.

  The plasterer apologized for the disturbance. “I’ll have to get rid of the boy,” he said. “He were a mistake, like the missus says. Only ever brought bad luck to everyone he come near. He’s bad luck to me if no one’ll work near him.”

  “I told you I don’t hold with superstition—or tormenting and persecuting children,” Darius said.

  “Sir, I can’t stop folk from believing what they believe,” Tyler said.

  That was true enough. Darius couldn’t stop them, either.

  It was ignorance that bred prejudice and superstition, and ignorance was a good deal more intractable an ailment than it ought to be. It did not respond to facts or logic.

  He would simply have to command.

  “You may not get rid of the boy for the present,” he told Tyler. “Lord Lithby needs him to exercise the dog.”

  “But sir—”

  “I shall find other tasks for him,” Darius said. “Make sure the other workmen are aware that he is now in my charge.”

  Exactly what he needed. Another responsibility, with complications attached. But he couldn’t abandon the lad.

  He told Tyler to prepare an itemized account of what he’d spent on Pip since his articles of indenture were signed. Though the amount would probably be small, it was one more expense Darius could ill afford. Very possibly, legal issues might be involved as well, either with the articles of indenture or with the parish workhouse.

  Since he knew nothing about workhouses and orphans and his brother Benedict knew everything, Darius would write to him.

  To Tyler, meanwhile, Darius pretended to know precisely what he was about. He asked questions about Pip, and wrote the answers down in a businesslike way.

  Name: Philip Ogden.

  Place of birth: Yorkshire. Possibly the West Riding.

  Date of birth: Tyler unable to remember. Believes boy is age eleven “or thereabouts.”

  Mother: Unknown.

  Father: Unknown.

  Note: Both believed to be highborn.

  “Leastways, that’s what everyone said, on account of how it was a parson and his wife who adopted him,” Tyler explained.

  Clergyman and wife, last name Ogden, of Sheffield, Yorkshire, died “about four years ago” (1818?)

  Second adoptive “father”: Samuel Welton, widowed clergyman of Salford, Lancashire, and cousin of Mrs. Ogden. Died December 1820.

  Philip Ogden given into the care of Salford parish workhouse in late 1820 or early 1821.

  Indentured to Tyler in May 1821.

  A short, unhappy history. Darius found no comfort in knowing that the majority of illegitimate children endured worse.

  He thought matters over after Tyler left and decided he’d better visit the Salford workhouse. He wanted to make sure he’d encounter no bureaucratic obstacles to breaking the indenture, and to fill in any other missing details he could.

  But first he called in Pip and told him he would not be continuing in Tyler’s employ.

  The boy looked as though he’d been struck. Something in his expression nagged at Darius’s mind, but he hadn’t time to ponder it. The lad was blinking hard, trying not to cry.

  “Come, come,” Darius said bracingl
y. “I promised I would find a place for you, and I shall. For the present, we’ll see Purchase at the home farm and find out how you can best be of use to him.”

  Pip nodded, but the look of utter misery remained.

  Feeling unwanted and unloved was not the most agreeable sensation. Being abandoned repeatedly, though it was fate rather than the boy’s doing, could not be pleasant, either.

  Darius’s family merely deemed him aggravating, and it bothered him more than he liked. This boy had no family, and strangers disliked him on sight.

  Darius wished Lady Charlotte were here. She would know what to say to the child. She had known what to say to Darius. Hadn’t she given him a completely new perspective on his father?

  “Come now,” Darius said. “You can do better than this, Pip. Mr. Welton must have thought so, or he wouldn’t have taken such pains with your schooling.”

  Pip wiped his eyes with a grimy sleeve.

  “You must not mind these fellows,” Darius went on. “They don’t know any better. William the Conqueror was a bastard. Do you know who he was?”

  Pip nodded.

  “There’s a lot of that, among the upper orders,” Darius said. “If it wasn’t for bastards, we should be able to fit the entire House of Lords in a wardrobe, with room to spare.”

  The image of England’s great lords stuffed into a wardrobe brought a shaky smile to the boy’s face.

  “The first Duke of Richmond,” Darius said. “The first Duke of Grafton. The first Duke of St. Albans. All of them the by-blows of King Charles II.”

  The boy’s mismatched eyes widened, and his mouth formed an O.

  “The Duke of Somerset’s descended from a bastard son of the Duke of Lancaster,” Darius continued. “These are merely the ones who come quickly to mind.”

  He had the lad fully diverted from his sorrow now. “All of them were conceived in sin, sir?”

  The concept of sin had never made the slightest sense to Darius. “They were conceived in the usual way,” he said. “Do you know how it’s done?”

  Pip’s face reddened. He covered his mouth, but Darius heard the stifled snigger.

  Again, something nagged at the back of Darius’s mind, but it must wait for another time. For now he must press his advantage.

  “Then you know it’s nothing to do with you, and not your fault,” he went on. “There’s nothing evil about your eyes, either. I’ve seen it before. At Eton. One of the older boys, if I remember aright. None of my schoolfellows ran away screaming from the sight, or uttered nonsense about devil’s work. It’s a quirk of nature, nothing more, and a very interesting one, in my opinion. Anybody can have two matching eyes. Eyes of two different colors are distinctive.”

  “Eton,” the boy murmured. “Distinctive.” He stood a little straighter.

  “We’ve got that sorted out, then,” Darius said. “We’ve only one other matter to settle. I must make sure there’s no trouble about your indenture. For that I must go to Salford.”

  The boy looked alarmed at the mention of Salford, but he lifted his chin bravely, ready to trust Darius. “Yes, sir.”

  “You’d better play least in sight today,” Darius said. “I’ll take you with me. Can you ride?”

  Yes, Pip could ride. Mr. Welton had taught him.

  The prospect of riding one of Darius’s fine horses helped quell the child’s anxieties about returning to the scene of his nightmares. Not twenty minutes later, he and Darius set out for Lancashire.

  Tuesday night

  Colonel Morrell sipped his whiskey. “Jowett,” he repeated.

  “Head carpenter over at Beechwood, sir,” said Kenning. “Said Mr. Carsington took an interest in the plasterer’s apprentice. The one I told you about, with them odd eyes. The one who walks Lady Lithby’s dog.”

  “Odd eyes,” his commander repeated.

  “One blue is what Jowett said. The other a sort of muddy green.”

  The colonel considered for a time. “I knew a man with eyes like that,” he said. “Frederick Blaine. He was one of my officers. You remember him, Kenning?”

  “Oh, him,” said Kenning. “Never noticed his eyes.”

  “Troublesome fellow,” said his commander. “Blown up at Waterloo. Always careless and impetuous, but he grew worse after his younger brother Geordie died in a duel, some years before that. That one was a rake of the worst kind. Locals complained about his leading their daughters astray. Had he been under my command, I should have had him up on misconduct charges at the first whiff of scandal.” He considered again. “But his commander was notoriously lax. If my memory does not mislead me, the battalion were stationed somewhere hereabouts for a time.”

  Colonel Morrell’s memory rarely misled him. On the contrary, it was a prodigious memory, and it had served him well in his profession.

  “The boy’s one of his bastards, you think, sir? From what Jowett said, he’s somebody’s bastard.”

  There was a silence while the colonel’s reliable faculty made a connection between a coachman’s obscure references to events of a decade ago and the current discussion. “How old did you say the boy was?”

  “Ten or thereabouts, sir.”

  “Ten.” Colonel Morrell sipped his whiskey. “Or thereabouts. Came from the Salford workhouse.”

  “Previous in Sheffield.”

  “Sheffield, Yorkshire,” said the colonel. “Ten years. Yorkshire.” A possibility occurred to him. A week ago, he would have deemed it unthinkable.

  Now he thought it.

  “Kenning,” he said. “You’re going to Salford tomorrow.”

  Beechwood

  Friday morning 5 July

  “I was afraid you’d abandoned me,” Mr. Carsington said, “to the hordes of servants and workmen.”

  He and Charlotte stood outside the open doorway of the corner guest chamber. The housekeeper, Mrs. Endicott, had told Charlotte that he’d asked to speak to her as soon as she arrived.

  “We might have come sooner,” she said. “Stephen’s fever passed quickly. But he was ill and fretful afterward, and Stepmama decided he might be allowed some coddling. Usually she leaves the children to the nursemaids—and Papa. But when the boys are ill, she steps in. When they’re especially obnoxious, too.”

  “What are they?—one of them not three, as I recollect, and one four or five years old?” he said. “Can such little ones be especially obnoxious?”

  “The older ones, certainly,” Charlotte said. “She banished Richard and William to Shropshire because they’d started bullying Georgie. In Shropshire, they have older cousins who’ll give them a dose of their own medicine.”

  “Her ideas of child rearing sound like my mother’s,” Mr. Carsington said.

  “She is unsentimental about them,” Charlotte said. “She needs to be, I think, because Papa tends to overindulge them. She does not want the boys to be spoiled.”

  “Were you spoiled, does she think?”

  “I don’t know what she thinks about that,” Charlotte said. “I only know that she did me a great deal of good when she came.” She pushed the past to the back of her mind, where it belonged. “You did not summon me here to discuss the rearing of children, I think?”

  “No,” he said. “The image of obnoxious infants led my thoughts astray. I asked you to come because I need your help.”

  She said nothing, but she could not conceal her surprise. She hoped she did a better job of hiding the foolish burst of happiness that made her heart beat erratically.

  “Those last may be the most difficult four words I’ve ever uttered in my life,” he said. “I thought I would choke saying them.”

  “I thought I’d faint, hearing them,” she said. “In my experience, men would rather have a limb amputated than admit they need help. And to seek it from a woman is completely unheard of.”

  He smiled. “The pain is nearly unbearable.”

  “Yet you appear to be breathing normally,” she said. “Your face has not turned blue.”

 
“Perhaps there will be a delayed reaction,” he said. “In the meantime, I will tell you that I am at a loss.” He nodded toward the room. “I don’t know where to begin.”

  Several pieces of furniture had been moved out of rooms in which work was being done and into this one, which would need only cleaning and perhaps a fresh coat of paint.

  “Both Mrs. Endicott and Lady Lithby say this is not something for them to decide,” he said. “But I have no idea how one decides what to keep and what to throw away.”

  Charlotte stepped into the room. It was more crowded than the last time she’d entered, to investigate the trunk. It would grow more crowded still as repairs proceeded. The trunk, she saw, was still here. It stood open on the floor. Judging by appearances, someone had thrown back into it everything she’d taken out and so carefully sorted.

  He must have followed the direction of her gaze because he said, “I gave up. I still haven’t chosen a fan for my grandmother. Perhaps I should send her the lot.”

  “That would ruin the effect,” she said. “The effect you want is of one exquisite item, carefully chosen for her and her alone. Then she will believe you are more thoughtful than she’d supposed. If you choose well, she may even decide that you have more sensitivity and feeling than she gave you credit for.”

  “That shouldn’t be difficult,” he said. “She gives me credit for having none whatsoever.”

  He spoke in the detached way he often adopted, but she detected the note of frustration. “Do you mind so very much what your grandmother thinks?” she said.

  “I shouldn’t mind,” he said. “She’s equally merciless to everybody, including my esteemed father.” He smiled. “But I should like to astonish her. At least once in my lifetime.”

  He had so many smiles, and in this one she saw his younger self so clearly: the boy vexed with his provoking grandmama.

  “I’m acquainted with your grandmother,” she said. Compared to the Dowager Lady Hargate, Mrs. Badgely was the meekest of lambs. “I’ll choose a fan. As to the rest…” She made a sweeping gesture. “Tell me what the rules are, and I’ll make a preliminary list.”