by Rose Lerner
“I don’t know how to do this,” he admitted. “I—well. I suppose you know I aspired to be like you. But I find I’m like my father after all.”
“That’s not so bad,” Plumtree said quietly. “Nor is it surprising. He sired you, and he’s a good man.”
John laughed. “Plumtree.”
The valet fussed with his meringue. “I hate to speak ill of your father to you. You’ve always been so hard on him.”
“He’s always been hard on me.”
“I know. And I suppose it’s no secret that I find him—irritating. I’ve…well, I’ve been avoiding him lately. He isn’t well, you know.”
John nodded. “Lord Lenfield said the same thing in November. But I don’t see what I can do. I can’t leave my post, and Lady Tassell…”
Plumtree rolled his eyes. “Ah, yes. I don’t know how she imagines you could have stopped Nick Dymond from thinking with the head in his breeches. And so I told her.”
John choked on his coffee. “You told her that?”
“Not in so many words, but of course I did. She was making a cake of herself. Does she really think her friends aren’t laughing at her behind her back over it?”
John cringed. “Did you say that too?”
“What was she going to do, sack me? Not with everything I know about that family, she wasn’t. I told her to take it out of my pay.”
John wondered if he would ever be so brave. “Meanwhile, I’m sure my father didn’t say a word in my defense.”
“I believe he has privately. I know I didn’t take her to task before witnesses.”
John did not put much stock in that.
Plumtree leaned forward. “Your father is a good man, and a good butler. A better butler than I could be. Lord, that house would be a mock-beggar hall inside a fortnight if I had your father’s position!”
John clenched his jaw. His mother and Plumtree both always insisted that John was being unfair to his father. Somehow it had been up to John to be reasonable, even when he was twelve years old and his father a grown man.
“I’m not saying that to take his side. But you’re a good man too. If you share some qualities with him, that’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“I don’t want to be disliked behind my back the way he is.”
Plumtree raised his eyebrows. “Then don’t be.”
“I wish it were that simple. But I nag at them, I get angry…my wife finds out everything before I do.” In the end, though he had talked to Mr. Summers about the curate, it was Sukey who had comforted Mrs. Khaleel, because John would just embarrass her.
John hadn’t done much, in fact. Mr. Summers had been trustworthy after all, and his own guardianship mostly unnecessary. “I don’t want them to be afraid of me.”
“Afraid?” Plumtree looked surprised. “I suppose the henhearts among the staff are afraid of getting shouted at, but I don’t think your father is quite the Ivan the Terrible you make him out to be. It’s only natural to be a little afraid when someone has the power to dismiss you. You can’t expect to be their friend, any more than Lord Tassell can expect to be mine. If you don’t like it, you should have stayed a valet. We’re every servant’s friend. Unless they’re shits.”
Some of that was very good advice, and some of it was nonsense; John couldn’t sort out which was which. Plumtree was impervious to intimidation, but John had seen footmen’s hands shake when Mr. Toogood came in a foul mood to watch them work, and grown women burst into tears at his sarcasm.
John admitted that he had been afraid. It seemed both disloyalty and melodrama—his father, after all, was no ogre. He loved his son. But John could remember begging his mother: don’t tell him I dropped the ice cream pail, don’t tell him I was rude to Lord Tassell, don’t tell him I was drinking, please, please don’t. He remembered his father towering over him when small crimes could not be concealed. Much of John’s long-ago childhood was indistinct now, but those memories were etched cleanly into his mind.
What had he been afraid of? He had known quite well his father wouldn’t give him the sack—would not even seriously harm him. The worst he faced was the switch and a little mortification.
He had been an oversensitive child, that was all, just as he was an oversensitive adult. Knowing he was a disappointment to his father, that he didn’t measure up, had filled him with awful, hollow panic, like stepping on a rotten beam and plummeting through the floor.
That, he acknowledged at last, was the impending disaster he truly feared when he saw something ill done. Not Mr. Summers’s displeasure. Not the loss of his or anyone else’s position. Nothing real. It was only an echo of his terror of his father’s disappointment, established by long force of habit. He always felt as if someone was about to pop out from behind an end table and tell him he had failed.
It angered and humiliated him that he’d left the Hall and his father, that he’d purposely made himself a life where his father’s disappointment had no place and could not touch him, and then had promptly begun where his father had left off, blaming and upbraiding himself for every failing, and blaming and upbraiding others in turn. Why? Why in the name of God was he so perverse and so impressionable?
“I’m sorry. I’m sure you’re as tired of this old tangle as I am. Tell me, how is everyone at the Hall?”
Plumtree’s eyes gleamed. “Well, you’ll be happy to know that Notts has a new light-o’-love.” Notts, the head gardener at Tassell Hall, was something of a Lothario among the local widows despite being now in his seventies. He would fall madly in love, plant the object of his affection a new garden, and then find his enthusiasm unaccountably waning. “A new one? I really thought he might marry Mrs. Fry.”
“Oh, I knew it wouldn’t last. He finished building her trellis and ‘his love, Lord help us, faded like my gredaline petticoat’.”
Anecdote followed anecdote, and then, when John was laughing helplessly at a story about stealing peach stucklings, Plumtree said, “Your father still wants you to succeed him, Johnny.”
John stilled. “What?”
“I told you, he’s not well. Even your mother isn’t as young as she was.”
John felt a pang of fear. Mrs. Toogood was seventy-five. Still hale and active, she might live another twenty years, but there was no denying she was old.
“Lady Tassell has asked them to manage the Rye Bay house, but your father won’t go.”
The Rye Bay house stood on a tiny estate on the East Sussex coast, far removed from the Dymonds’ political interest in the western part of the county. It was used purely (and rarely) for pleasure jaunts and would be a charming retirement for his parents.
“That’s not my fault. He knows I never wanted to be the Tassell Hall butler.”
“Yes, but he also knows you never wanted to be a butler at all. And now you are one, aren’t you?”
John rubbed at his eyes. “My mother hasn’t said a word in her letters.”
“Hasn’t she? I daresay she doesn’t want to press you, and I ought not to have brought it up.”
“Sukey would hate Tassell Hall.”
Plumtree winced. “Terribly provincial, is she?”
“That’s not what I meant.” It hadn’t been. He’d meant that Tassell Hall was chilly and full of a sense of its own importance.
Rather like me, he thought unhappily. “It doesn’t matter. Lady Tassell won’t consider it.” He’d never expected to be glad of that.
Plumtree smiled at John. “It’s funny, really. I always thought you would succeed me.”
“As Lord Tassell’s valet?” John asked, startled. “Are you thinking of retiring?”
“Oh, heavens, no. As the next earl’s valet.”
John felt warm. He had hoped the same thing, he admitted to himself. That one day Lord Lenfield would succeed to the title and he himself would stand as beloved uncle to the yo
unger servants. But perhaps he wasn’t suited for that. “I hope you aren’t disappointed.”
“In you, my dear boy? Never.”
* * *
Sukey, walking down Cross Street after a delicious penny plate of Scotch collops at the Robin Hood, glanced in the windows of Makepeace’s and saw her husband clasping the hand of an older man. So that was Gil Plumtree, the reason John had become a gentleman’s gentleman. They looked very cozy together, and he probably knew all sorts of darling stories about when John was a kid.
She wished she’d agreed to go along—and didn’t much like that she wished it. Her half-holidays were the only time she had apart from John—nearly all she had apart from him at all, excepting one set of clothes and a few coins. Give them up, and…
She didn’t know what she thought would happen, except that maybe they’d get sick of each other. Was she really still on about what if he left her?
Well, but he might. Someday. And then she’d better have something left of her own.
Even so, she almost went in. She’d been invited, and she knew John would be glad to see her. But Mr. Plumtree looked even more like a gentleman than John did: dandyish, with gold rings on his fingers. She could tell just by the way he held his face that he spoke beautifully. What if he didn’t think she was good enough for his adoptive nephew?
Not wanting them to catch sight of her, she quickened her steps until she was before the broad stairs of the boarding house next door. A well-dressed lady leaving the circulating library on the ground floor ran smack into her. She looked Sukey up and down with a sniff. “Mind where you’re going.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Sukey muttered, and then wished she hadn’t. But she couldn’t be rude. What if the lady recognized her at church and complained to Mr. Summers? Maybe she’d ought to have begged her pardon too. The Scotch collops stirred queasily in her stomach.
The woman went her unmerry way, but Sukey stood there, struck by a thought. John liked to read. He used to borrow books from Mr. Dymond, but now…
How much did a subscription cost? She’d never inquired, knowing she didn’t want one. A friend of hers split a single subscription with a dozen other girls, so it must be expensive. On the other hand, she still had most of her Christmas money burning a hole in her shift, and on Lady Day she’d have three whole pounds coming to her.
But she couldn’t make herself walk up those steps. She wasn’t rich enough or clever enough. Everyone inside would turn up their noses as soon as they saw her boots. And that was before she opened her mouth and broad Sussex came out.
So she trudged on to the Gilchrists’, where she gave back the necklace, ribbons, and two neat pin-papers, counted over three times on the pavement outside. “Thanks so much for letting me borrow them. And thank you again for the dress.”
“You’re very welcome,” Mrs. Gilchrist said. “So, did he swoon at your feet?”
Sukey flushed. “I—”
The girl’s face fell. “He didn’t?” She patted the blue beads as if to soothe their wounded feelings.
Sukey thought back to before the disaster. “No, he did,” she said, surprised to remember it. You look as if you’d wandered out of a faerie ring. “Right at my feet.”
Mrs. Gilchrist looked very relieved. “As he should have.”
He’d swooned at her feet, and he’d cleaned her dress, and he’d told her he’d been wrong and that she ought to enjoy herself because he wanted her to be happy. He asked her every week to spend Saturday afternoon with him.
She’d been worrying and worrying that he’d leave her, that she’d make him not want her. But she’d started every quarrel. She was angry with him. She was dissatisfied with their marriage. She wanted something different from what they had. How had she got it so backwards?
And what on God’s green earth did she want?
“Ma’am, you used to work at the circulating library, didn’t you?”
Mrs. Gilchrist put a worried hand to her belly. “I still do.” Once a lady grew round, she wasn’t supposed to go about much. Just another way the gentry had of making their own lives difficult. “I wonder if Mrs. Potticary will still give me the first look at the fashion magazines when I’m only a subscriber.”
“I’m sure she will,” Sukey said. “Can I ask you how much a subscription costs?”
The girl sniffed. “Surely Mr. Summers isn’t going to subscribe after all his preaching against novels.”
Mr. Summers was indeed severe on the subject, fond of jokes about the soggy tipsy-cake a girl’s brain came to resemble when she read them. “No, I think my husband might like to become a member.”
“Oh, of course, I’m sorry. It’s fifteen shillings and sixpence per annum.” Mrs. Gilchrist tried bravely to sound as if she thought maybe Sukey could afford that.
Sukey tried to sound as if she thought so too. “I see. Thanks!” Too bright by half.
“It’s only a crown for two months, though,” Mrs. Gilchrist said hopefully.
That was almost twice as much yearly—but Sukey had a crown.
She’d been screwing up her courage to open a bank account, so she’d have something to fall back on if John left her. But for God’s sake, she hadn’t been married a month yet. It was too soon to plan for John leaving.
No, it’s too soon to stop planning for it, she thought. But she’d wanted to go with him today when he asked her, and she hadn’t let herself. She’d told herself she couldn’t have what she wanted, and that it was for her own good. In fact, she’d been miserly with herself, and miserly with him, and she was sick of it.
Maybe that was why she’d been so discontented, why she never quite felt as she ought. It wasn’t John’s fault after all. It was hers, for keeping her heart in a locked cupboard instead of sharing it with him.
She was going to put her money on them.
Walking back down Cross Street, her dirty boots stood out against the smooth flagstone sidewalk. Once, she’d have taken no notice, but now they’d been clean, it ate at her to see them caked with mud and water.
John would clean them for her if she asked him.
She remembered that first time in Mrs. Pengilly’s kitchen, how she’d been seduced by his hands on her shoes before he ever touched her. It still frightened her, how soft and open she’d felt.
She’d liked it though, hadn’t she? So maybe instead of insisting he’d ought to stop taking care of her, she should give her all to taking care of him back.
* * *
Sukey went home early, a pasty in hand for her supper, not surprised to find John reading by the banked fire in the empty kitchen. She’d been slowly coming to understand she liked doing other people’s kindnesses: polishing Mrs. Pengilly’s silver and making John eat his breakfast and comforting Mrs. Khaleel. But today felt even better than that, because she’d chosen and planned it. Her anticipation of John’s happiness was a lantern burning in her chest.
“How was your afternoon?”
“Molly’s father was insensible with drink when I went to speak to him about his health,” John said. “I’ll have to go again next week.”
Oh dear. Poor Molly. “What are you reading?”
He wrinkled his nose, turning the book over. “A history of the Anglo-Saxons. Mr. Summers has generously allowed me the use of his library, but I’m afraid his taste runs to…histories of the Anglo-Saxons.”
She beamed, drawing the little card from her bodice and handing it to him.
“This card entitles the bearer, John Toogood, to withdraw two books at a time from the Lively Library,” he read slowly.
“It’s good until Lady Day. They have more than a thousand books.”
He turned the card over. “Thank you, but…you bought it for the quarter? Libraries charge twice as much that way.”
Her smile wobbled. “I know, but I didn’t want to spend more than seven and six.
”
He looked sick. “You spent seven and six on this?”
The light in her chest guttered. “Yes, because I thought you would like it!”
He looked at her, and his face cleared. “I do. I do like it.” Standing, he took her in his arms. “I hadn’t even thought of a circulating library.”
“You thought we were too small.”
“You’re too small,” he teased, leaning very far down to kiss her. “I’m sorry, I only—the difference in our wages—you ought not to be buying me presents.”
“With the difference in our ages, you ought not to strain your back carrying me to bed, but I don’t try to stop you,” she retorted.
He took the hint.
Afterwards, she said, “When you asked me to marry you, I told you I didn’t want to get married only to have some man take care of me.”
“That wasn’t when I asked you to marry me,” he said. “That was when you said yes. There were some intervening hours.”
“Which I’m sure you spent nursing your broken heart.”
He sighed. “No, I suppose not. But I was disappointed.”
Pleased, she nestled closer to his side. “The point is, you said that it wasn’t weak to want a helpmeet. That you wanted one yourself.”
He nodded.
“I want to be a helpmeet to you. You were right at the servants’ ball; I’ve been asking you to treat me equal, but I haven’t taken equal responsibility.” She put a hand over his mouth when he tried to interrupt. “Not at the vicarage. In our marriage. Well, I mean to try. And you’ve got to let me. You can’t scold me for buying you a present.”
He bit her palm. “If you insist.”
“I do.” She wiped her hand on his shirt. “And I think—I think we should take our dinner alone two or three days in the week. I think it would be nice for us, and nice for the rest of the staff.”
He sighed. “Plumtree told me today that I can’t expect to be their friend, any more than Mr. Summers can expect to be mine.” He sounded sad. I was lonely, and I wanted the job at the vicarage, and you took pity on me, he’d said. There was at least a little truth in it.