His Wayward Bride (Romance of the Turf Book 3)

by Theresa Romain

  “He’s not horse mad,” Jonah realized. “He’s carriage mad.”

  Jake sneezed, shaking his big body from head to hindquarters.

  Jonah straightened the gelding’s forelock. “You don’t agree with his priority, do you? You’re a fine fellow, Jake, but the world needs wainwrights as well as horse trainers.”

  With a final pat for each of the animals, he left the horses behind and rejoined Laurie. Hargreaves had finished his work with the landau and moved into the tack room. He’d given Laurie an old wooden spoke, one of the scraps the stable hands liked to idly carve.

  “Have you a pocketknife?” Jonah asked. Laurie nodded, pulling the folded blade from his trouser pocket before clambering up to the groom’s seat at the back of the landau.

  He dug the blade into the weathered wood, flicking off shavings. As a carriage-mad boy sitting on a carriage, he should have been the picture of contentment, but his shoulders were tense. Jonah could practically feel unasked questions floating in the air.

  He leaned idly against the side of the carriage. “Almost time to fetch your mother from her work, isn’t it? How are the two of you settling in?”

  “She misses her collection. A lot of it was gone when we went back for it.” The boy was matter-of-fact, as if all adults stuffed their homes with scraps and trash. Flick. Flick. More shavings went flying. “I think she wants to go back again. Rescue more of her rescued things.”

  “Does she?” Jonah said mildly. “Did you get all your own things?”

  “I’m fine. I have everything.” Flick. Flick. A rounded head was beginning to reveal itself at the end of the spoke. A dog, maybe. It was hard to tell.

  Jonah hummed, letting the carving continue. Waiting out Laurie’s reluctance.

  At last, the question came, blurted and worried. “Uncle Jonah, did you have to go away to school?”

  Ah. So that was it. “I did. I’m the only one from my family who attended school away from home. But I wasn’t student enough to go to Harton.” Jonah wished for something to carve too, to busy his hands and aid his air of nonchalance. “Are you looking forward to beginning school in September?”

  A small shrug. “I don’t mind. It’ll be like Reenie’s school, won’t it? Where you can find all sorts of books and ask any question? But for boys.”

  “Not exactly.” When Laurie looked crestfallen, Jonah added, “My school wasn’t like that. But I haven’t seen much of Mrs. Brodie’s school. It might be very like Harton.”

  Though if it was, he thought, Irene wouldn’t have tolerated it beyond a single term. At the most prestigious schools, achievement came at the expense of safety and health—at least if one’s family wasn’t of old blue blood, and Jonah’s wasn’t. Beatings were common—stay in your place. At school, Jonah had abandoned the idea of friends, focusing instead on merely enduring. He hated the idea of kindhearted Laurie going through the same brutal initiation.

  Maybe Harton wasn’t like that. Maybe it really was the best, in all possible ways. The trustees had agreed to admit Laurie, knowing he was black. The school couldn’t be totally hidebound.

  It was the other students, though, that he’d have to watch out for. The other students made one’s life a hell or merely a purgatory.

  “There should be a school like Mrs. Brodie’s for boys,” Jonah decided. “But man to man, you should go to Harton. Even if you don’t want to.”

  “Because I’m too young to know what I want to do for a trade, I suppose.” Laurie rolled his eyes.

  “Not too young to know what you want to do. But too young to be sure you’ll never want to do anything else. I’m guessing you didn’t like carriages as much as you do now when you were, say, eight years old.”

  “I’ve always liked carriages.”

  “Ah.” Well, hell. Why was Jonah trying to give advice? He wasn’t a teacher. He’d barely even begun to be an uncle.

  He was about to excuse himself and return to the house when Laurie spoke again.

  “But not as much five years ago as I do now. I was more interested in chemistry then, but it was hard to get proper supplies for experiments. So I gave it up.”

  “I see. At Harton, you’ll have proper supplies for whatever you want to try. And when you finish your studies, if you still want to be a wainwright, you’ll be able to be a wainwright to royalty.”

  “And if I want to be something else, I can be something else to royalty?” Laurie sounded disgusted. “That’s not me. I’m just…me.”

  “That’s all any boy is. Though some are raised with more arrogance than you.”

  Laurie carved in silence for a few minutes, fine shavings dropping to the floor. “What if the other boys are rotten?”

  Jonah sighed. “I can’t promise they won’t be. All I can promise is that you’ll have a home to come to between terms. With your sister and me, or with your mother, or even with my father.”

  The pocketknife got stuck in the wood, and Laurie wrenched it free with a frown.

  “I can promise too that it’ll get better,” Jonah added.

  “What will?”

  “Everything. When you grow up and you can make more of your own choices, everything gets better. And if you go to Harton, the people you know—even if they’re rotten—will give you more opportunities in the future.”

  “So I should stick it out with them until I can take advantage of them someday.”

  Jonah blinked. “That’s one way to put it. Yes.”

  Laurie grinned. “Guess I’ve learned a few things from my father after all.”

  This surprised a laugh from Jonah. For a moment, man and boy shared a smile. Jonah’s was the first to fall.

  What had he learned from his father? Nothing so mercenary or so practical. Jonah had gone away to school knowing he’d return to the Chandler stables. The stud farm. The training track. There had been no one to tell him differently, to ask what he might like to learn.

  Maybe the answer would have been “horses and their training.” And maybe it wouldn’t have been.

  When you grow up and you can make more of your own choices…ha.

  He’d been sent away to school as the eldest son, because Sir William—not yet a baronet, but quickly building his fortune—hadn’t grown up among the gentry, and he’d wanted Jonah to have a different life. But it had become the same, hadn’t it? Training Sir William’s horses. Running Sir William’s stud farm. Now he was in London to find Sir William’s daughter. His decisions were all his father’s.

  “Did it help you?” Laurie returned his attention to his carving. “Did you learn all sorts of useful things at school?”

  Jonah stretched his mind back to the lessons that had been drilled into him. “Dead languages I don’t use. Maths, those were good. History and geography.”

  “My mum says I have maps in my head. I’m already very good at geography.”

  “Doubtless you are, at London geography. And to be honest, that’s most of what you’ll use, unless you wind up a sea captain.”

  “I’d rather drive a hackney.”

  Jonah ignored this. “Mostly, school taught me to work hard even if I didn’t see the sense in it and to be cordial to all sorts of people even if I didn’t feel like it.”

  “Did it help you rise in the world?” Laurie asked.

  Jonah snorted. “That sounds like someone else’s words in your mouth.”

  “Did it, though?”

  “No, not really,” Jonah admitted. “But my father is wealthy—or he was before he spent a fortune on Arabian mares last year—so we’ve risen as high as we’d like. I don’t mix with the aristocracy, but I sell horses to them. That means they rely on me, so maybe I’m even higher than they are.”

  Laurie narrowed his eyes, thinking this over. “If other people think they’re higher than you, then you haven’t risen.”

  Jonah tried again. “I don’t mind if I don’t rise in the world, as long as I’m living the life I want to.”

  “I’m thirteen,” Laurie
said dryly. “I can’t live the life I want.”

  Thirteen was a difficult age, with boyhood over one shoulder and manhood over the other. “Can I help?”

  “Maybe.” Laurie looked at him sideways. “Can I drive the curricle?”

  “May you, you mean?” Jonah’s mouth twitched. “I have a strange feeling you’ve been guiding the conversation to this request.”

  “I haven’t! I just thought of it.”

  “So you’re interested in driving as well as building carriages?”

  Laurie squinted at the wooden spoke he’d given a rough dog’s head. “I’m interested in how carriages are built and why they’re built that way. But I’ve never driven one, so I don’t know all I want to. I’d like to drive all three of these and see how they’re different. With the same horses”—he wagged the dog-spoke at Jonah—“so I know any differences are due to the carriage.”

  “An experiment. The coachman would die inside,” muttered Jonah. More loudly, he said, “I’ll teach you to drive sometime. If your mother says it’s all right.”

  “When will you? When can we ask?”

  “You can ask her today, once she’s back from work. If she agrees, I’ll take you. Sometime your sister can go too.”

  “All right.” Laurie tossed the carved stake into the air, then caught it. As if summoned by some magnetism between dogs and sticks, Mouse loped in and looked up at the piece of wood with soulful eyes.

  “You want to fetch, girl? Fetch?” Laurie slid from his perch on the groom’s seat and backed from the carriage partition, waggling the stick before Mouse all the way.

  Jonah was left alone as if their conversation had never happened, but with a lightness within his chest that proved it had. It felt different to help his relatives by marriage than to be tasked with something by his father. He could use his own judgment. He could, quite literally, put a purse back into his wife’s pocket. He could knit their families with animals and advice.

  At least, he could try.

  And when he helped Irene with her mission from Mrs. Brodie’s Academy, she’d see how well their lives fit together. She’d give up her worry and her work, as she’d promised.

  At least, he could hope.

  Because the hope of Irene pulled him through every lonely day.

  Not that today had to be lonely. He had a new stable boy to train up, and then he’d hire a Bow Street Runner to help him find his sister. She’d been born in Spain at the end of 1805. That, plus Anne Jones’s name and description, might be enough for a Runner to begin with.

  Determined on his next step, he set off through the rear yard to the kitchen to check on Eli’s progress toward cleanliness.

  As he stretched out a hand for the rear door, it burst open. The housekeeper, plump and motherly Mrs. Horace, was framed in the doorway, wearing a splashed-wet apron and an expression of worry. “Mr. Chandler! I was coming to find you. Sir, you told the staff to bathe a new stable boy and give him a set of clothes?”

  Jonah stared at her. “Yes, I did. Is something wrong, Mrs. Horace?”

  “Not wrong, exactly, but it’s not going to work out.” The housekeeper took a deep breath. “Sir, Eli is a girl.”

  Chapter Eight

  “Pull up here,” Susanna told the coachman driving the landau. “Right here. And wait for me, please.”

  The gray-haired Hargreaves obeyed at once. She appreciated that. Jonah had tasked the sturdy coachman with bringing Susanna to and from her work for Madame Chalfont, and over the past few days, they’d fallen into a cordial routine. But this…wasn’t work.

  The groom jumped from his seat at the back of the landau, then opened the door for Susanna. Just as if she’d the right to be driven about by two servants. Just as if when she said stop, the world ought to stop.

  Susanna couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt such ease. The pinch of financial worry had been present ever since she’d taken up with Victor Baird. The handsome American talked a better game than he played; she knew that. But she’d needed him to cover her secret.

  She still needed to cover her secret, lest she ruin the comfortable situation in which she and Laurie and Reenie now found themselves.

  “You needn’t continue working, Mrs. Baird,” Jonah had told her when she and Laurie moved into the Queen Anne Street house. “I’ll take care of you and your son, as well as your daughter.”

  She wanted to believe him. But when had a man who said such things been trustworthy?

  Besides, she had a gift with fabric and thread. Few people indeed could craft clothing like she could. It was pleasant to catch sight of the gowns she’d made on London’s tonnish ladies, like seeing a friend unexpectedly.

  But the Frenchwoman whose name was above the door took credit for all work produced by the shop, as if it were stitched by magical, invisible hands. But brown hands did the work, and freckled white hands, and every shade in between. Hands that had once been soft with youth, hands that had been raw and work-worn since childhood. All with calluses now, all stitching as if their lives depended on it.

  One day, perhaps, Susanna would get the credit for her skill. That wasn’t the purpose of today’s errand, though.

  The groom handed Susanna down to the pavement, then stood beside the landau. “Thank you,” she said, then hesitated. Did she need to say anything more? What if the carriage didn’t wait for her? These men were Chandler servants, not hers.

  Well, she’d have to trust. Quickly as she could, her stiff ankle dragging, she made her way down the narrow street in which she’d lodged until the previous Saturday.

  Every step felt different from the steps she’d taken so often before. Shouldn’t it feel the same? It was the same time of day, the end of a long day at the mantua-maker’s. It was the same feeling of counting down the steps, ignoring the ache in her ankle.

  But everything was different, because Susanna didn’t belong here now. She didn’t live here anymore. She’d been evicted, her belongings destroyed, by an impatient landlord.

  Tugging down her head scarf to cover part of her face, she ignored everyone she passed. When she reached Harris’s lodging house, she flattened herself beside the door. Nudged it open with one foot. Peered inside.

  The foyer was just as dim, just as cramped, just as reeking of boiled cabbage as when she’d last left it. But her rooms upstairs wouldn’t look at all like they ought. Harris had emptied them down to the plaster and boards.

  Susanna only hoped he hadn’t looked behind the plaster and boards.

  For once, as she trod slowly up each flight of stairs to her old rooms, her bad ankle was a boon. It forced her to go slowly, to set each foot lightly. She listened for other footsteps over the thumping of her heart, but for the moment, the house was still. Another stair, then another, closer to the box of hidden letters.

  Fear was eating her. And not just now. Always.

  It had begun with nibbles at the corners of her life, so she walled it off with stacks of things. If she had what she needed, all around her, surely there would be no reason to be afraid.

  Yet she was always afraid. For her children’s safety. Of Irene learning the truth of her birth. Of what it meant that Susanna’s feet twinged when she first set them on the floor in the morning. Of whether she’d put in stitches enough to secure the spangles to Lady Reston’s newest evening gown.

  Susanna Baird knew she had a fine mind, and that fine mind could always think of something new to fear.

  It had all started with her broken ankle. An ordinary day some eighteen months before, but as Susanna and Laurie had crossed the street, a runaway carriage had borne down on them. Horses wild and galloping, their mouths frothing, the coachman flailing for the reins. In a flash, Susanna had shoved Laurie toward the safety of the pavement. She’d stumbled and fallen, tucking her gifted seamstress’s hands into the cradle of her body. A reflex to protect her livelihood.

  Her ankle had been shattered instead, and for months she’d dragged herself on a crutch down and up
the necessary stairs for work. She could hardly bend the joint now, and though she didn’t complain—what good would that do?—sometimes her head throbbed with the effort of keeping a pleasant face and even steps.

  Victor had been gone the whole time of her recovery.

  When it became clear Susanna’s ankle would never heal completely, Irene saw to a move. It wasn’t what Susanna had wanted, to be snipped from the familiar street and the close company of her siblings and their children. Shoreditch was a bustling neighborhood for the working class. It was a place where anyone could belong, from silk-weavers to sailors to those in service as gardeners and footmen. Jewish families lived next door to Church of England families; Anglo-Indians and free black people from the West Indies and America held equal status with Irish immigrants and London-born white people. They were all united by hard work, by not quite enough money or time. Why waste either in conflict with one another?

  Yet the move had made sense. Susanna had to be able to walk to her place of employment, and a short distance was all she could manage. Harris’s lodging, expensive as it was, cost less than hiring a hackney to take her from her old home to her work each day.

  But without her siblings and friends, she’d never been so lonely as she had been near the bustle of business on Petticoat Lane—even with Laurie’s company. A young boy needed friends, not to be his mother’s crutch. Literally or figuratively.

  After that, Susanna had started rescuing items. They surrounded her, keeping her safe. And they were comforting, for she alone decided to keep them or not to keep them. Why, then, would she not keep them? If she might need something in future, she would keep it, because her husband could not be relied on. So the walls about her had grown taller and thicker, until there had been hardly anything in her home but walls and more walls.

  It was easy to remember Victor’s shortcomings when he wasn’t around. Unfortunately, it was as easy to forget them when he returned and put his mind to charming her.