“The young illegitimate one,” Susanna realized. “You had a momentous day too.”
“Indeed. It was a day of bastardy for you and me both.” His broad shoulders sank; his head bowed. “I found her, then lost her again. But I only lost her because I wanted to find her. Because I’d decided I couldn’t be without her, but then for her sake, I decided I should.” He looked up at Susanna, craggy features beseeching. “Does that make sense?”
She rested a hand on his forearm. “It does. It makes perfect sense.”
Her injured ankle gave a throb, and she winced. “Say, do you mind if we talk as we go upstairs? I’m tired as can be. I don’t even care about dinner.”
“Of course. We’ll take the lift.” He held out a hand-sized parcel wrapped in silver paper. “I didn’t know why I got these cakes earlier, but it’s clear now I got them for you.”
She took the package gingerly. “Such pretty paper.” With great care, she unfastened the wrapping to reveal four tiny cakes. They looked like heaven, plump with jam and adorned with dainty marzipan decorations. “I’ll have one right now. One for you?”
He shook his head. As she entered the lift before him, she popped the confection into her mouth whole. The soft sponge popped, releasing a sweet-sour taste of berries that mixed with the sugary crunch of marzipan. Covering her mouth with her hand, she raised her eyes to the heaven that had surely created this marvelous dessert.
And then Sir William was in the lift with her, having summoned two footmen to operate the machinery. Had two people ever fit into the lift before? It was a close fit, especially with the pile of papers still in the corner of the compartment. The closeness was not unpleasant, though. It felt safe.
She eyed the silver paper holding the three remaining cakes. The papers in the corner. The baronet at her side. They were being drawn up into the air on ropes and pulleys as if it were perfectly natural to be lifted into the air.
It was good to be a baronet. And it was good to be with a baronet—if that baronet was Sir William Chandler in the year 1819. Humbled by his faults and mistakes, dispensing cakes and offers of employment.
Susanna was glad she hadn’t met him as that cocky young man in the portrait. And she was glad she’d met him now.
When the lift reached the first floor, Susanna hung back. Sir William wheeled out to the corridor, asking, “Everything all right?”
“Maybe. I think.” She looked at the silver paper of cakes in one hand, then picked up a few papers from the floor of the lift. “If I’m to keep this wrapping, I’ll need to dispose of something else. These can go in the fire.”
“Can they? You impress me, madam.” He looked pleased, and she felt pleased accordingly.
“By the by,” he added casually, “I’ve been considering purchasing a dressmaker’s shop in Cheapside. For an investment, you understand.”
“An investment. In a dressmaker’s shop.” She laughed. “You’re still trying to persuade me? Well, I like the idea after all.”
His heavy brows lifted. “You do?”
“Indeed. Place the shop in Fleet Street, and you might have yourself a modiste.”
His hands grasped the rims of his chair. “Would this modiste be you?”
She nodded. “I’ve thought about it. And I’ve worried over it. And I’ve decided that something needs to change. I don’t want to crouch before women on pedestals anymore. I don’t want to be looked down on. I want to stand beside them. Beside women like me.”
“You’re not worried about the white Frenchwomen, then?”
“We won’t be in competition. Not with the sort of shop I have planned.”
“Intriguing. If it helps to have a stubborn old baronet on your side, know that you have him.”
Susanna grinned. “Excellent. In that case, I’d like a loan.”
“A gift. You’re family.”
“A loan,” she said firmly, “and that only if you promise to give me total control over the way the shop is run. It’s to be my own. My success.”
Not my success or failure. Simply my success.
Perhaps he noticed, for he smiled. Almost. “A loan,” he agreed, “but with no interest. And even when I return to Newmarket, you’re welcome to stay in this house as long as you wish.” He stuck out a hand. “What do you say?”
“Are you leaving soon?” How deflating.
“Fairly soon, I hope. Jonah’s leaving tomorrow, so I’ve told him I’ll see to his horse. Either I’ll help Bridget’s Brown recover, or…” His outstretched hand clenched.
“Or that’s it for him.” Susanna understood what was at stake. “I hope you have good luck.”
“Thanks. For Jonah’s sake as well as the horse’s.” Sir William looked away. Down. Up. Around. “When I am back in Newmarket, might I write to you sometimes?”
He really was a kind man. And once she had her shop, and Laurie was in school…who knew what sort of relationship might fit into her life? She wouldn’t allow the millstone of Victor Baird to weigh down her life anymore.
She was Susanna Norris, who had once captivated a prince. And now she had to please only herself.
“Yes,” she decided. “I’ll always make room for your letters in my collection.”
Extending her hand, she grasped his. The one he’d stretched out, clenched, withdrawn.
At this moment, they both had what they wanted.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Jonah had spent two days on the road from London to the Chandler stud farm, passing the night at the coaching inn his brother, Nathaniel, operated with his wife, Rosalind. The Rosy Hart had been newly built in the stone shell of a burned-out inn, and it was everything modern and comfortable and welcoming.
He couldn’t wait to leave.
Nathaniel and Rosalind were just so delighted to see him and so happy together and in their occupation. They were expecting their first child. They had a spaniel named Sheltie that they doted upon. They either knew everyone who came through their doors or befriended them in an instant.
He was happy for their happiness, but it only made him miss Irene more. And Mouse. And Eli, and Laurie, and Susanna. Not Victor. Bridget’s Brown, though, and the gelding Jake. Even his father, God help him.
He’d feel better, he thought, when he reached the stud farm.
Fortunately, grumbly was the family’s favorite word to describe Jonah, so no one minded his reserve. His hugs farewell the next morning were rib-crushing and genuine, and Nathaniel begged him to come again soon.
Jonah felt his pocket, where the ring was tied up in its little velvet bag. “Maybe I will.” Maybe he’d be on the road again soon.
He’d been in his father’s home, then his brother’s. Returning to the stud farm was as close to Jonah’s own home as any other place. The house here was a hodge-podge, having begun a century or more before as a simple lodge with chunky flint walls. Over time, brick additions had been pasted onto one bit or another, and the original thatched roof had been replaced by slates as the roofline pitched and rolled with each addition. Within the past decade, yet more of the house had been pulled about to create a complete arrangement of rooms on the ground floor for those times Sir William traveled the few miles from his Newmarket house. If one were a bird, one’s view from the air would probably be a sturdy starfish or octopus, and one’s bird self would wonder at the size of it some sixty miles from the sea.
The stables, by contrast, were large and modern. Nothing but the best for the horses. After seeing Commonwealth and Scintilla stabled and turned over to grooms, Jonah spoke with the head stud groom, one of several dozen hands who cared for the horses and land. All the pregnant broodmares were in good health, and the mare Helena was showing signs of labor and would likely deliver within the next day.
“I’ll move her to a foaling stall this evening,” Jonah told the man. Time to get busy again. To occupy his mind and body with familiar work, not that it would make him any less grumbly.
He started by touring the stables, hug
e buildings with high ceilings and tall windows. They were light and airy and, with their flagged limestone floors, easy to wash and clean. The stalls were cushioned, their floors made of sand and earth. Straw over that foundation kept delicate legs comfortable.
The stallions were stabled at a distance, temperamental creatures that they were. Golden Barb, winner of the Two Thousand Guineas Stakes as a colt two years before, still raced occasionally, but was now in his first breeding season. Finicky about wet weather but playful, the black-stockinged bay’s first foals would be born the following year. Perhaps some of them would win purses a few racing seasons into the future.
Or maybe they wouldn’t. One never knew, after eleven months of waiting and a year of growing and early training, whether it would come to triumph or to nothing at all.
Not that victory on the turf was the only marker of success. Racing talent was the only sort most owners cared about, but there were many others. Just like there were with people. The world needed calm ones, steady ones, jumpers, good pullers, horses with stamina, playful horses, bright horses.
He wondered how Bridget’s Brown was doing.
He walked through the stallions’ stable with its box stalls, then the stables for weanlings and yearlings with fenced training paddocks. In the broodmare stable, mothers and young foals remained together.
The Arabian broodmares—smuggled from their homeland and sold to Sir William at an exorbitant price—were now heavy with the first foals to be born to them in England. They were good-tempered and intelligent, curious animals who had always been treated well and trusted that they always would be.
Coneflower’s stall was still empty, but the stable cats had settled into it. Tabitha and Max kept rodents from the hay and were known to doze on the warm back of a horse or burrow into clean straw. Jonah was glad to see the space reclaimed by an animal presence.
Everything was just as it should be, clean and scented with hay and wood and leather and the horses themselves, warm and earthy. The harness room was neat, the granary and hay room full.
There wasn’t a thing for him to do.
He had always thought the stud farm peaceful, but perhaps it was just isolated. Hundreds of acres of railed-off grassy paddocks. Barns numbered rather than named, a businesslike touch that revealed the Chandler roots in work and sweat.
No one stayed. Not a parent, not a sibling, not a spouse. Even the horses he birthed and trained moved along, ready to begin their racing days once they’d learned what Jonah could teach them. He was a stepping-stone to something better.
He’d let himself become so, but it didn’t have to stay that way.
Animals could heal a heart, but they couldn’t fill it. He was lonely, curse it. He’d got attached to Irene, fallen more in love with her than ever, and now his own company wasn’t enough. Maybe Mrs. Brodie would give him some missions, if he wrote to her.
He felt the ring in his pocket, uncertain. He’d never give up on Irene, but was there a point after which devotion became stubbornness? He’d taken no steps to pursue an annulment, but if she truly wanted one…
He always tried to give her what she wanted. She’d praised him for that once, as if it knit them together more tightly. Maybe it was the quality that would tear them apart for good and all.
As he leaned on the door of the stall that had been Coneflower’s, pondering, a female voice sounded from behind him. “Hullo, you old grump.”
This could be only his sister Hannah. “Hullo, sister dear.” He turned about to greet her with a hug. “Miss me while I was gone?”
“Pfft, not a bit.” Sandy-haired and rangy, Hannah’s resemblance to Jonah was more than passing. She returned his hug with the same rib-cracking force Nathaniel used. “I heard Helena was near ready to foal and wanted to be here.”
She blinked up at him with hazel eyes like his own. Like their father’s. “Not because of what Father said about Coneflower. You know that, right? No one’s better than you at foaling. I just want to be here to meet the baby.”
“Actually…Father apologized to me.”
“He what?” Hannah’s brows shot up. “My goodness. First time for everything, I guess.”
Though two other siblings had been born between them, Jonah knew Hannah best. His twin sister, Abigail—no, she went by her middle name of Kate since her first marriage—had long ago moved to Ireland, and he’d rarely seen her since. Nathaniel, his only brother, had been selfish and troubled throughout their youths. When he outgrew some of the selfishness and slightly less of the trouble, he traveled all the time as the blithe and smiling face of the Chandler racing stables. He was well suited to the innkeeper’s life and the happiness he’d found there.
Hannah was the horsiest of all, most determined of all. As the youngest of the four, and a female, she had to work all the harder to convince the racing community that they’d be fools to exclude someone of her knowledge and skill. After winning the Two Thousand Guineas with a colt she owned jointly with the young baronet she soon wed, the naysayers had clapped their mouths shut.
Her husband’s family, the Crosbys, had incurred debts and sold off a large amount of land and stock. Now out of financial straits, the Crosbys housed their horses on the Chandler lands at ridiculously good terms.
“Did you bring Bridget’s Brown with you?” Hannah asked. “You wrote me that you bought him, and I want to see him again.”
“He can’t make the journey.” Jonah explained about the match race and Bridget’s new injury. “Father’s treating him in London.”
Hannah goggled at him. “But he’s the one who sold Bridget in the first place! Do you really think he’ll—”
“He’ll do what I need him to do.”
“Will he?” Hannah laughed sharply. “And again I say, there’s a first time for everything.”
Jonah didn’t want to think about London right now. About all he’d left behind. “Let’s move Helena to a foaling stall.”
Hannah looked at him oddly—maybe his change of subject had been too abrupt—then strode off toward the mare’s usual box. By the time Jonah caught up with her, she’d got a halter on the broodmare and was leading her forth. Helena was dark with sweat, her breathing deep and rough with labor pains. The foaling stall was bigger, private and soft with straw, but Jonah and Hannah could keep watch all the same.
Once Hannah had given the horse some feed the mare ignored and some water she didn’t, she closed the stall door and skewered Jonah with a knowing look. “There’s something wrong with you. You’re not laughing at my jokes.”
“Did you make jokes? Maybe they weren’t funny.”
“I’m very funny.” She leveled an index finger at him. “You are in a sour mood.”
“That doesn’t keep me from taking good care of horses.”
She blinked. “You only accept that you’re in a sour mood when you’re in a really sour mood. What the devil happened in London?”
So they were going to have to talk about it. Sisters. Hell. “Isn’t it obvious? I went looking for our sister and my wife. I found them both. Now they’re both out of our lives.”
Hannah looked bewildered, as if he’d spoken the words backward. “Explain.”
There was too much to explain. “In sum, my wife didn’t really abandon me. We’ve been meeting in secret for the past four years while she worked as an unofficial spy until she could make her family fortunes, which somehow just got made by destroying Bridget’s Brown’s health, and now she doesn’t want anything to do with me anymore.”
Hannah mulled this over, tugging at the long sleeves of her inevitable riding habits. “You left out a lot of information.”
“I said it was a summary. Anyway, I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Fine, grumbly. I see you think you’re the only one with a right to be upset.” She rolled her eyes. “When you’ve never let me meet your wife. My sister by law.”
“If it’s sisters you want to know about, Anne Jones’s girl is—”
&n
bsp; “I can guess.” Hannah unlinked her cuffs, eyeing the pacing, panting broodmare. “Father decided not to force her to join our family. He left her be.”
“That was basically it, yes. How did you know?”
“I hoped. It’s the right thing to do. We’re wonderful to know, but she won’t be happier having her whole world upset.” She glanced sharply at Jonah. “Which is what seems to have happened to you.”
“I just wanted a family, Hannah. Doesn’t it—don’t you think we haven’t had a family for a long time?”
“Pieces,” she said. “We’re pieces of one, we Chandlers. Our father gone, our mother dead. But we did our best. We leaned on each other.”
“We did,” Jonah replied. “And we stood on our own a lot too. I can keep doing just that.”
“I didn’t mean you,” Hannah corrected. “I meant Nathaniel and me. Mother died when you were away at school, and when you came home, you weren’t the same.”
Strange how differently two people remembered the same experience. “No, home wasn’t the same. You all had moved on without me. There wasn’t a place for me there anymore.”
“As if you weren’t big and strong enough to make a place for yourself,” Hannah scoffed, but he could tell from the hitch in her voice that he’d caught her by surprise.
For a minute or two, they watched the mare pace the generous bounds of the stall. When she lay on her side, it would be time for the birth, but for now there was only waiting.
“Is that why you married in secret?” Hannah broke out. “Why we never met your wife? You didn’t feel like you were part of the family anymore?”
“I suppose so. I decided I’d make my own family. Only, it didn’t work out like I expected.”
“Did it work out at all?” Blatant curiosity bounced in her tone.
“It had its moments.” Maybe it still would. “Are we done gossiping?”
“No. Never.” Hannah smiled. “Jonah, why don’t you have supper with us tonight? You won’t even have to change your clothing. Bart and I never do. From stable to table, that’s how we operate.”
His Wayward Bride (Romance of the Turf Book 3) Page 24