by Rose Lerner
Her lips parted. “What?”
“I know you couldn’t be happy here.” He set down her boots, fully sealed. “I know you hate it. I can’t ask you to stay.”
She stared at him. “You don’t have to ask. I’ve already said yes.”
He could not answer her. He let his silence speak for him.
She crossed her arms. “You said we were family. You said you were my family now, and I was yours. And now you’re putting me out of the house?”
John wiped his hands, not looking at her. His chest was hollow, his heart a small hard thing rattling around inside it. “I’m not putting you out of the house. The village is only a little ways off. Even if you were here, I’d barely see you. It’s a demanding position, and—I just want you to be happy.”
“I’m happy with you! I’ve been happy with you.”
“And I’ve been happy with you,” he said with finality. “But this house would eat you alive.”
She went white. “You really do think I’m a child. Plucky little Sukey from the boarding house—isn’t she pert? God! Flirting and a humorous accent are not the sum of me. I could do this. I could work my fingers to the bone, learn to speak, make friends with a gaggle of snooty chambermaids who can’t even bake a pie or darn a sock. I could be housekeeper here someday if I’d a mind to. I’d do it for you, because I love you. And you said you loved me, but you don’t.”
He met her eyes, steadfast. “I do love you. I’ve been wanting to say it for weeks.”
“What good is love, then?” she demanded. “You promised me last night that you’d be my family. I want to have a family for more than one half-holiday a week!”
So do I. At least you’d get to live with our children. But she hadn’t even agreed to have children with him yet. “It would be more than that,” he argued hopelessly. She was going to leave, he could see it. “We could write to one another as often as we wished, and dine together sometimes, and when the family isn’t in residence, I could—”
Her jaw dropped. “Bugger you! You’ll ask me for that, but you won’t ask me to stay?”
“Sukey, for God’s sake. I’m just trying to salvage a bright spot in this damned mess.”
She pressed her lips tightly together. “The bright spot’s not having me around to embarrass you, I expect.”
He refused to rave like his father—but his anger flared. He could not bear to lose her, and yet he was so angry with her. “You don’t embarrass me.”
“Oh, no?”
He flushed, knowing it wasn’t entirely true, and even angrier, that she would twist his small, unwilling, carefully concealed betrayal into something monstrous and throw it in his face. “No.”
“Liar,” she hissed. “Just admit you don’t want me anymore.”
His calm began to crack like fine china, just a spiderweb of lines, and soon it would be smashed to powder. “I will miss you every day,” he said as steadily as he could. It was an understatement so vast it confounded him. He could not bear the thought of her going. She must know that. He had made no secret of it. “But it would be selfish of me to ask you to stay.”
Sukey felt ready to vomit blood. “You think I should be grateful for this, don’t you? Yes, you’re a regular martyr, for taking a position that pays a king’s ransom and getting your common little wife out of the way. It was a kindness to marry me and now it’s a kindness to kick me out. I’m sick of your kindnesses. Tell the truth for once in your mealymouthed life. Do you think I haven’t seen you caressing the wallpaper? Just say you want to stay, and you want me out of the way because I’d spoil the pretty picture.”
He laid his hands flat on the table by her boots. “You know how much I admire you,” he said through stiff lips.
“Oh, aye, I’m beautiful and perfect and time with me is never wasted. Tell that to the marines,” she rudely mimicked his father. “But I ate it up, didn’t I? How did you know all you had to do was polish my boots and I’d follow you about like a duckling? Was it just that I’m poor and young, or was there something about me that—”
“I cleaned your boots because they were dirty,” he burst out. “And I wouldn’t describe your behavior as having much in common with that of a duckling, either. Be reasonable, Sukey. Are you going to tell me you want to live here?”
“Yes,” she shouted. “Yes, if you’re here, I want to be here. So send me away if you like, but don’t try to pretend it’s because you’re so damn good.”
“I never said that.” John screwed the lid onto his jar of tallow, tightening it with a jerk. “I am not good, nor is this position likely to bring out the best in me. You mayn’t think asking you to leave is a kindness, but it is almost certainly kinder treatment than you’d receive if you stayed.”
“When have you ever been unkind to anyone?”
He slammed the lid shut on his box of brushes and polish. “I’ve been unkind to you,” he said, bite in his words. “And you know it.”
“You’ve been angry! Everybody’s angry sometimes, for pity’s sakes. I’m so angry right now I could spit. But taking your father’s job isn’t going to magically transform you into him. This is ridiculous.”
He pressed two fingers into his temple. “Perhaps you can agree I am best qualified to know my own heart. If you could understand how angry I am at you, only for disagreeing with me—this morning my father was bellowing filth at an unfortunate maidservant and I was actually annoyed with her because it caused her to clean inefficiently.”
“Your father was what?”
He sat down. “He tripped over her bucket of water and chose to injure himself rather than drop some crystal decanters. I have to take the position, Sukey. My mother begged me. I have to.”
“All right,” she said. “Then you have to. But if we’re family, then they’re my family too, and I also have to.”
“I won’t ask you to do that. If I let myself, I’d ask you for everything, and you’d let me do it.”
Sukey looked at her boots, shining side by side on an old newspaper, and wanted to throw his coffee cup at the spotless wall. “So now you’re best qualified to know my own heart too? At least my father didn’t pretend he was leaving for my own good. He just went clean away. You say you don’t want to live together anymore, that you want me to idle about in lodgings, listening for your step on the stair, and I’m to believe it’s because you love me? Why, because you say so?”
“Yes. Yes, because I say so.”
She shrugged. “Then I suppose you love me, and I was right all along and love’s just a stupid word that doesn’t mean anything.” She pulled her ring off her finger. “You like to polish things so much? Polish this.” And she threw it at him.
He went on his knees to pick it up, examining it for scratches.
The room blurred. She blinked back the tears so he wouldn’t see them. Crying just hurried men out the door that much faster. “Give me my boots. I’m going home.”
“They’re not ready.” He came around the table, taking her by the shoulders. “Please, Sukey—”
She stood stiffly in his grasp, unable to look at him. “Bring the boots when they’re ready, then. And tell Mr. Tomkin I want to go back to Chichester. Now.” She said the cruelest thing she could think of. “I’ll spend the night at my father’s and catch the coach in the morning.” And she stomped out.
The crowd of servants was gathered around, watching the door. She wondered what they’d heard. Although once again, she’d been the only one being loud. “Don’t bother toadying,” she said, raising her voice so John could hear. “I’m not staying.”
* * *
John sat without moving, waiting for the tallow to dry on Sukey’s boots. Perhaps if he moved them farther from the fire, it would take longer.
That was it, then. The end of his independence and his happiness. He had thought he’d neatly escaped the lot planned f
or him by his father, but here he was.
She just wants you to ask her to stay at the Hall. You might see her, and dine with her, and sleep with her at night. You might even be happy here, if she were here with you.
Yes, he might be happy. He might squeeze from her whatever happiness she had to give him, with no regard for her own. He might behave like his father, considering it his wife’s duty to care for and comfort and cheer him, and when she said, You never have time for me, we never talk to each other, I’m unhappy, you aren’t kind—then he would say, Can’t you see the strain I’m under in my work?
He could do all that, but he wouldn’t. He refused to. Servants at Tassell Hall didn’t sing while they worked. He wanted to know that she was somewhere, singing.
He went to the stables to find Abe. “I’m very sorry to bother you again so soon, and on such short notice, but would you harness the carthorses? Mrs. Toogood wishes to return to Chichester.”
Abe frowned. “What’s the matter? Has she had bad news from home?”
John turned away. “She can tell you all about it on the journey.”
Chapter Nineteen
When Sukey finally put on her pelisse and bonnet and ventured back to the kitchen with her bandbox, there was a neat stack of traveling gear by the door. None of it was hers. She watched, bones aching as if she had the influenza, while John settled an enormous hamper in the back of the cart.
He gave her a purse full of small coins next, enough for four such journeys. She’d have liked to refuse it, but arguing would make her headache worse, and besides, she had only a few shillings of her own and probably no position when she got back to Lively St. Lemeston without him.
Last he handed her her boots. She knotted the laces hastily and climbed into the cart, eager to be off. But he arranged hot bricks under her feet and handed her up a worn velvet muff. “Don’t go,” he said. “It isn’t safe for a young woman to travel alone.”
She put her hands into the muff, astonished at how warm they at once became. She felt about and found a hot water bottle at the bottom of it. “Whose muff is this?” She’d ought to give it back. She hadn’t ought to take anything from him.
“I bought it from one of the maids.” He wound a bulky shawl round her shoulders. She started violently when his hand brushed her breast, her eyes stinging anew. No, no, if she cried the tears would freeze.
“Sleep with your money on you,” he said. “And don’t let anyone see where you keep it. Don’t give the coachman and the guard a tip of more than a shilling for every stage of thirty miles, no matter what they say, and when you stop at the inn, the chambermaid should get sixpence—”
“I’m not a child,” she hissed.
He pressed his lips together, more advice clearly humming on his tongue. “Will you send me word that you’ve arrived safely?” he said at last.
Why should I? But the driver was standing by, and she didn’t know what John had told him. She nodded once.
“Be well,” he said quietly, and kissed her. It was a sad kiss, as full of goodbye as the stiff way he held himself, but she could smell his shaving soap and she wanted it to last forever. Instead it lasted about a second and a half, and he went into the house.
Her hands and feet were toasty warm but she felt numb, numb and spongy, as if a poking finger would go right through her. Surely this wasn’t happening. In a moment he’d come running back outside and beg her to stay.
But he didn’t, and she sat carefully straight as Mr. Tomkin clucked to the horses and sent them down the drive, away from the house.
* * *
She was gone. John shut himself in the tiny room they’d shared, hoping no one would come and try to talk to him. But at last, as the afternoon wore away, his mother knocked on the door. “Let me in,” she said peremptorily.
John, who had been lying on the bed, sat up and rubbed at his temples. “Come.”
She carried a tea tray. “What happened?”
He shook his head at a cup of tea, then a biscuit, then a piece of toast. “She left,” he said flatly. “What else is there to say?”
His mother frowned, setting the tray on a chair and sitting beside him. “She left you because you wanted to help your father?”
“No, because I told her I wanted her to live in the village instead of the Hall.”
His mother’s eyebrows went up. “And she didn’t take it well?”
“She thought I was embarrassed by her.”
His mother’s mouth quirked as if to say, What did she expect? “And here I thought you’d leapt to her defense at every opportunity. She didn’t make much of an effort to change your mind, did she?”
John remembered well the long-fought campaigns his mother had led to change his father’s mind. Weeks or months of murmured conversations in the butler’s pantry, occasionally punctuated by shouting, tears or both.
The words sprang at once to his tongue, to tell his mother that a marriage shouldn’t be like that. A loyal but determined courtier, intriguing endlessly to alter the king’s course by a hairsbreadth, powerless if he refused…
Because his word was law.
“I told her my mind was made up.” Like his father. Even when he tried not to be his father, he ended up behaving just like him.
What would his father not do in this situation?
Walk away from Tassell Hall.
That was the one thing his father would never, ever do. Go live quietly and happily with his wife? God forbid! And it was all John wanted. He wanted to go back to the Lively St. Lemeston vicarage and lay out the vicar’s clothes and have dinner with Mrs. Khaleel and Molly and Thea and Larry.
He also had responsibilities to them, responsibilities he wanted to fulfill.
He looked at his mother, her face tight with concern and sympathy. He loved her so much. How could he tell her no?
You don’t have to take the position if you don’t want it, only because your father isn’t well, Molly had told him. She’d said it because he’d said the same thing to her. He believed it about her, but when it came to himself— He knew in his heart that he did have to take the position. That he’d be a bad son if he didn’t.
So you’re obliged to work sixteen hours a day for the rest of your life in a job you don’t want, or you’re a bad son? You’re obliged to turn your back on your own wife, or you’re a bad son?
What kind of example would he set for Molly if he stayed? What kind of husband would he be to Sukey?
He took a deep breath. Yes, he had it in him to behave like his father. But he’d never believed in destiny. He believed in care and hard work, and with care and hard work, he could behave differently.
“I don’t want this job.”
His mother drew back. “But, John, you promised me—”
“I know, and I’m sorry. But I never wanted it, and I don’t want it now. It’s too much strain, too little leisure, too long hours, too much supervising others and not enough using my hands.”
“But if you don’t take the post, your father won’t leave it.”
“You married him, Mama,” he said gently. “That’s up to you. If you can’t make him retire, Lady Tassell can. Write to her.”
“He won’t forgive me for that.”
“After everything you’ve forgiven him? He’d better.”
She didn’t return his hug. It felt awful to stand up and leave her sitting there. Who was he, if he wasn’t a good son to his mother? Who would be proud of him if she wasn’t?
“I love you,” he said. “And I love him. But I’m going after Sukey.”
He hadn’t wanted to love Sukey, because he’d felt somehow that it was selfish, that love overpowered and dominated and demanded. He’d held himself back all this time because he didn’t want to burden her.
He’d treated her like a child, just as she said. But he wasn’t her father�
��or his. He was her husband and she was a grown woman. They were helpmeets, and it wasn’t wrong to ask her to share his burdens.
He could ask her for whatever he liked, and she’d decide for herself whether to say yes. He’d have to accept her answer, that was all.
He’d start by asking her to forgive him.
“Take a night to think it over. Don’t decide right away.”
“No. I’ve thought it over long enough. If Abe can be bribed to take me, I’m going as soon as he gets back.”
“You’re as stubborn as your father,” she said despairingly.
It occurred to him that she’d always said that when he argued with her. “I do listen to you. I thought very carefully about what you had to say. I nearly stayed. But listening doesn’t always mean agreeing. Neither of you have ever understood that.”
She sighed. “Do you want me to give him the news?”
She’d been their go-between so often over the years. So many times she’d shielded him. “No. I’ll tell him myself. But thank you.” He wondered, suddenly, if he’d ever complimented her. “You’re the best of mothers.”
She shook her head, laughing a little. “Oh, don’t. I know I’m not.”
“And I know you are.” He kissed her hand. “Thank you. I’ll visit you at the Rye Bay house as often as I can.”
* * *
Sukey didn’t really go to her father’s. She went straight to the coaching inn and bought her ticket for the next morning and space in a bed, huddling in it all afternoon with her hamper instead of venturing to the coffee room. She dined on pickled tongue and rolls that were only a little stale, conscious of stares of envy from the other women in the room. She thought of offering to share, but sadness made her closefisted. Get your own food, she thought, touching everything in the hamper like a miser caressing his gold. There was a roast chicken, a packet of biscuits, a little hard cheese, a small basket of roasted eggs—even a whole seedcake nestled in brown paper in a corner, round and golden with a crisp layer of baked sugar flaking off the top.