‘I was wrong, Pheemy. You’ve always known that, haven’t you? There is a risk in loving, that’s true.’ And how well he understood that now when he was risking so much to be speaking to her in this way. ‘But there is so much to gain. So much …’
‘So much,’ she said, and her voice was barely more than a whisper.
‘I have something to tell you,’ he said, trying to be formal even though his senses were blazing. ‘Something I should have told you long ago, only I wasn’t sure you would want to hear it. Something so important…’
Her face was changing, softening, glowing as though it was being lit by sunshine, even though the wind was lifting their umbrella like a sail and they could hear the sleet pattering down upon them as sharp as shingle. ‘Will?’ she said, and there was such hope in the word. Hope and trust and affection. ‘Oh my dear, my dear, my dear.’
There was no need for a formal proposal now, but he made one just the same. ‘I love you, Pheemy,’ he said. ‘I want to marry you.’
She closed her eyes in the joy of the moment, lifting her face, her lips spreading in a tremulous smile. And he bent beneath the umbrella and kissed her at last, gently, because there was still enough reason in him to remember that they were out in the street, but with passion enough to say everything else that needed to be said.
Afterwards they had no idea how long they talked nor what time it took them to stroll the last few hundred yards to Richmond Hill. They didn’t notice how wildly the wind was blowing them along nor how wet their feet were getting.
Caroline did, of course. ‘Pheemy, dearest!’ she said, when her two wind-tattered relations were ushered into her parlour. ‘Just look at your boots! Where have you been?’
‘Will and I are going to get married,’ Euphemia said breathlessly, as though that explained it all. Which it did.
Caroline gave a squeal of pleasure and threw herself at her cousin, kissing her over and over before she flung her arms about her brother’s neck. ‘Oh, how marvellous! How marvellous! And about time too.’ Then she rushed to the door to yell for Henry. ‘Henry! Henry! Come down, do! Will and Pheemy are getting married.’
‘Is this before or after lunch?’ Henry called to them over the banisters.
‘Lunch!’ Caroline said. ‘I must tell Cook we’re one extra. We’ll have champagne.’
The meal was a babble of happy talk. Cook came upstairs to add her congratulations and apologize because the food was so plain. ‘I’d ha’ done you proud if I’d known,’ she said.
But Caroline assured her that none of them had known and anyway they couldn’t have enjoyed her food any more, ‘not if you’d served us peacock pie and caviare’.
‘Which in your present state,’ Henry said happily, ‘would probably have made you sick.’
‘Oh, ain’t this fine,’ she said, when Cook had departed, mollified and smiling. ‘When will you marry?’
They answered her together, Will saying ‘Tomorrow’ and Euphemia ‘After your baby is born’. And that made them all laugh.
‘Tomorrow would be best,’ Will said. He was full of confidence, glowingly sure of himself.
‘No, no,’ Euphemia laughed. ‘We must wait a little. Until Nan has come home at least.’
‘Should we write and tell her?’ Henry wondered.
But they decided not to. ‘Let it be our secret for a little while longer,’ Euphemia said. ‘Until you are quite well, my darling, and the baby is born.’
‘I am quite well now,’ Caroline said. ‘And the baby will be born in less than eight weeks. Taffy says so. Where are you going to live? Oh, I’m so happy for you. So happy.’
Chapter 35
It was so peaceful in Penrith, cocooned in snow and completely blocked off from the worries and miseries of the outside world. And Frederick was so touchingly pleased to see them, stooping out into the snow-covered courtyard to help his dear Nan from the carriage when it had slithered to a halt, and settling her into the warmest chimney corner with a tumbler of ‘good old-fashioned brandy and hot water’ to thaw her, and arranging for rooms to be opened and aired for Bessie and Tom, unremittingly hospitable.
He fed her well too, for the house was well-stocked against the winter, hams hanging from the kitchen chimney and the oatmeal tubs filled to the brim, cheese and butter, sugars and spices, tea, coffee and chocolate in abundance.
‘Everything we need to hand,’ he said to Nan, as the lamps were being lit that evening. ‘I mean to be snug this season.’
It was good to be back with him again, cosy as bears in their high warm bed, talking over all the events of the past year, and agreeing that they were through the worst of it.
‘Caroline improves,’ he said, as he finally blew out the candle, ‘trade will pick up in the spring and tomorrow we will visit my cousins.’
‘Yes,’ she said, settling to sleep. He was right. Life was returning to normal.
The days that followed were quiet and easy. They visited the cousins, travelling in a horse-drawn sledge like Russians, because the snow was too thick for any other form of transport; and they went to church by sledge too and sang carols lustily; and when fresh snow began to fall they sat by the fire in Frederick’s panelled parlour and watched as the fat flakes curtained the window and felt glad to be inside in the warm. And the next morning when they woke to find that the terraced steps before the drawing room had been transformed into a sloping snowbank, and that the garden rose above them like a white hill, they were both quite pleased to think that the winter was increasing their isolation in this northern retreat of theirs. If they couldn’t walk on the fells they could walk through the house. It was plenty big enough for the limited exercise they needed, and besides, it was warm.
There were so many quiet pleasures to savour, strong Scottish beef and sweet Westmoreland water, oatcakes hot from the griddle and porridge thick enough to cut. And every morning when Frederick was in his dressing room being shaved, Bessie came hobbling in to be lady’s maid to her dear Nan, brushing her white hair most tenderly and easing her into her clothes and gossiping about the old days all the while. Oh, they were pleasant easy days, and they passed with amazing speed.
Nan was quite surprised to come down one morning to find the servants decking the panelled hall with boughs of yew and holly.
‘Is Christmas come around so soon?’ she said, fingering the red berries.
‘It has,’ Frederick said happily. ‘Mr Mackay is to fetch the goose this afternoon.’
A fine fat goose it was and made good eating.
‘Caroline is forbidden Christmas this year, poor child,’ Nan said, remembering with pity.
‘Only for this year, my dear. Next year, when she is quite well, she will enjoy it again, and with her whole life before her, which is more than may be said of you and I.’
‘Does that distress ‘ee, Frederick my dear?’
‘When I have lived so long and so well and with such a companion? Fie upon you! How could you ask such a thing?’
‘Aye,’ she said, ‘we’ve had a fine life together you and I.’
‘And with more to come,’ he told her, his long face pale in the firelight. Now that he was old his nose looked longer and sharper and his chin more angular, but his eyes were as tender and teasing as ever. ‘I have a little gift for you. Would you like it now?’
‘Yes, yes, yes,’ she said. ‘At once, now, this very minute.’
It was a cameo brooch set with seed pearls, a lovely thing that had to be pinned to her dress immediately.
‘Dear Frederick,’ she said. ‘What style you have. There en’t another man living with such style. And now I’ve a present for you, my dear.’
‘Indeed?’ he teased. ‘I see no parcel anywhere. And I assure you I have looked for it most assiduously.’
‘I had Tom hide it behind the settee,’ she said triumphantly, ‘where you couldn’t stoop to look.’
The only trouble was that she couldn’t stoop to pull it out again, and neither of them
were strong enough to lift the settee away from the wall. In the end they had to fish the package from its hiding place with her walking stick and a lot of giggling.
But it was worth the effort, for it was a thick woollen dressing gown to keep him warm in the mornings while he was being washed and shaved. Both of them were delighted by it, he because it was good to be petted by this extraordinary woman, she because she had made certain he wouldn’t catch cold. His pallor in the early morning was often quite alarming.
The Christmas festivities continued. There were services and parties and even a ball at the cousins’ house in the fells, which both of them enjoyed very much, even though they danced very little. And then there was Hogmanay and Tom Thistlethwaite was much in demand for first-footing, being dark haired and a stranger to the neighbourhood.
On the first day of the new year Nan and Frederick went for a drive in their horse-drawn sledge. The landscape was magical, the river Eamont steel grey between its white banks, crows tumbling black against a pearl-white sky and the snow-covered fells glistening in the pale sunlight.
‘It is so peaceful here,’ she said. ‘I wish I could stay longer.’
‘Then do so, my dear.’
‘Caroline’s baby is due this month,’ she said. ‘I must travel in a day or so.’
‘Stay another week,’ he urged. ‘The days are long here without you.’
‘My heart alive!’ she said, charmed to be asked so romantically. ‘That en’t an invitation to refuse, upon my life.’
So they spent another week together in their snow-bound fastness. And a very cold week, for the temperature dropped lower every night, so that by morning the bedroom windows were covered with frost-ferns, layered upon the panes in such thickly intricate patterns that it was ten o’clock before the heat from the fires could clear them.
Nan and Frederick came down to breakfast later and later, preferring the warmth of their bed to the chill of the dining room. And one morning Frederick even decided that he would go back to bed for a little nap after he’d been washed and shaved.
‘Quite right,’ Nan approved. ‘You can breakfast later.’ He was paper-pale. The rest and warmth would do him good.
She tucked him under the eiderdown, still in his new dressing gown, and kissed him before she went downstairs. ‘I’ll be back presently,’ she promised.
It was warmer than she expected before the dining room fire, so she and Bessie took their breakfast in the chimney corner.
‘I’ve left him sleeping,’ Nan said. ‘I shan’t go up for an hour or two.’
‘Let him sleep his sleep out,’ Bessie agreed, nodding her head sagely. ‘Much the best way.’
So they gossiped on.
When the hall clock struck ten Nan felt it was really time he got up. ‘There won’t be any morning left if he goes on at this rate,’ she said, as she left the chimney corner.
It was very quiet in the bedroom. She could hear the coals clicking in the grate, and the soft plop of snow falling from the branches in the garden beyond the window. But Frederick wasn’t making a sound. She couldn’t even hear him breathing. He must be awake, she thought, walking across the room towards the bed. But no. His eyes were still closed. Very tightly closed. My heart alive, she thought, he’s in a deep sleep. And for a few seconds as she walked the last few feet she wondered whether she ought to wake him. But then she reached the bed and her hand touched his fingers, and she knew that no one would ever wake Frederick Brougham again. For her lover was dead, his face already grey and vacated, with that ancient emptiness that cannot be misinterpreted.
‘Oh Frederick,’ she said. ‘To leave me so, my dear, without a word of good-bye.’ Then she sat on the edge of the bed beside him and began to cry.
Downstairs in the kitchen Bessie was busy helping Cook to prepare the evening meal, while the scullery maids scoured some of the breakfast pots and Tom helped the butler to polish the silver. Time went on but nobody rang for Mr Brougham’s breakfast and finally Bessie got worried by such a long silence and said she really thought she ought to go up and see what was what.
She found Nan still sitting on the bed and still weeping, her poor old face puffed with tears.
‘Oh Bessie my dear, you see how it is,’ she said thickly.
Bessie saw how it was in a glance and decided to get her mistress out of it as quickly as she could. ‘Now you come downstairs, my lovey,’ she said, speaking as though Nan were a child. ‘Your old hands are like ice. You jest come down with ol’ Bessie. That’s the style.’
‘I ought to stay with him,’ Nan tried.
‘No you oughtn’t,’ Bessie said, leading her away. ‘You can’t help him now, poor gentleman. You’ve give him a good life, my dear, and he’s had a nice peaceful death. You can’t do more fer a man than that.’
So Nan allowed herself to be led down to the parlour, where Bessie sat by the fire and wrapped her in a blanket and gave her a dose of laudanum to ease the first pain of loss. Then she sent Tom across the fell to tell the cousins.
Two of them came straight back with him, to commiserate with Nan and, as the older one explained, ‘to take the weight of this sad business from your shoulders, Mrs Easter, ma’am. You’ve enough to do grieving, without arranging funerals and such.’
‘And just as well,’ Bessie said to Cook, when the two men had gone down to Penrith to see the undertaker and the vicar. ‘She’s had enough to contend with, poor lady.’
‘They mean to keep the house on for when Miss Penelope marries,’ Cook confided. ‘Your missus won’t want to visit, I daresay, not without the master, poor soul. Fancy the poor man dying like that.’
‘’E went peaceful,’ Bessie said. ‘That’s the main thing. There’s others ain’t so lucky.’
‘Aye,’ Cook agreed. ‘That’s the one comfort. Would she could see it so.’
But Nan had a lot of grief to cry out before she could accept that the gentleness of Frederick’s death was something to be thankful for.
‘We are the only ones left,’ she said to Bessie on the morning of the funeral. ‘First John and then Billy and now my dear old Frederick.’ The coffin was being carried from the house, strewn with Christmas holly, its dark green leaves and bright berries bold against the white background of the snow. ‘Now it’s only us.’
‘And Will and Euphemia,’ Bessie said, ‘and Annie and James and all their children, and Matty and Jimmy and their little ones, and Caroline and Henry and little Harry, and a new baby coming.’
‘Yes,’ Nan said, drying her eyes. ‘A new baby coming. We must go back to London as soon as everything is settled here. I wonder how she is, poor girl.’
‘Going on lovely, I shouldn’t wonder,’ Bessie said. ‘But she’ll be all the better for seeing you.’
‘We might travel tomorrow,’ Nan said, ‘if the weather holds. There is nothing to keep us here once this is over.’
‘There’s the carriage come,’ Bessie said. ‘We’d better go down. Take my arm, Mrs Easter dear. That’s it. Easy does it. I’ve got yer.’
Chapter 36
‘It’s a boy,’ Dr Brambling said. ‘Bravo, my dear. A lovely baby.’
‘Give him to me. Give him to me,’ Caroline said hungrily, holding out her arms for her new-born. ‘Oh, he’s lovely! Lovely! Ain’t he a pet, Pheemy?’
‘He’s beautiful,’ Euphemia said, admiring him from the foot of the bed. She was sweating and tired after the long effort of labour but this birth was a triumph. Despite the trial and her long illness, Caroline had been delivered easily. ‘And born on a Sunday too, when his dear Papa is here to see him.’
‘The child that is born on the Sabbath day, is bonny and blithe and good and gay,’ Caroline quoted, nuzzling the baby’s dark head, ‘and so you will be, won’t you my pet?’
‘Born in time for breakfast,’ Taffy said. ‘Look at him rootin’ around fer it all-a-ready, bless him.’
‘Is it breakfast time?’ Caroline said. ‘I’m jolly hungry.’
‘
It is seven o’clock, my dear,’ Dr Brambling told her, ‘and you shall have whatever you fancy as soon as you’ve fed milord. What shall you call him? Have you decided?’
‘Oh yes,’ Caroline said, as the infant began to suckle. ‘We decided ages ago.’ It was all of three weeks. ‘He’s to be John Joseph, after his grandfathers.’
John Joseph was a contented baby. He fed till he slept and then lay pale and peaceful in his father’s arms, blowing milk bubbles from his little red mouth to the amazement of his brother, who had been brought in for five minutes to see him, and was now using his newest word over and over again. ‘Baby! Baby! Baby!’
Three days later Annie came down to visit, bringing Meg and her three youngest children with her, all of them full of eagerness to see the new arrival. Annie said he was an absolute duck and allowed all three children to cuddle him. Then they all came trouping downstairs to take tea in the parlour before their long journey back to Rattlesden, Annie and Meg and the children, and Will and Euphemia and Henry, rosy with delight at his new son. And Harry took tea with them too, delighting them all with his new word, which he was saying at every opportunity, now that he’d found out he would be applauded for using it.
In their relief and happiness, the tea party steadily became riotous. First the children joined Harry in a chant, ‘Baby, baby, baby’. Then hands were clapped in rhythm. Finally the tea table was pushed to the side of the room, tea-things and all, and the chant became a round dance, ‘Baby, baby, we’ve got a baby’, with all five children and all five adults leaping and prancing among the potted plants, skirts tipping and coat-tails flying.
They were making such a noise, they didn’t hear Nan’s arrival. She was inside the parlour and laughing at them before they realized she’d arrived. But then they rushed towards her all talking at once, a-babble with news, and totally ignoring Bessie who was making hideous faces at them to implore them to stop.
‘My heart alive,’ the old lady said, when she’d managed to make sense of their bedlam. ‘What a home-coming! Is Carrie well? Tell me that?’
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