by Carla Kelly
She had no particular problem remaining aboard during stops when the horses were changed. Beyond a quick visit to the necessary and a drink of water at the ice-rimed bucket left there for impecunious travellers, she could resume her place in the coach as they travelled north. She had money for food, but she was not hungry. She was defeated.
If there had been any place to go except Wapping Street in Edinburgh, she would have gone there. For a small moment, a day earlier, she almost asked the coachman to let her off near the village closest to Skowcroft. She knew the Everetts would take her in, but it would mean explanation and she was too upset to explain anything.
* * *
By the time Mary arrived in Edinburgh, she had concocted a serviceable lie to explain her black eye that was even now turning a mottled purple. She took her travelling case and found a hackney. She had hoped that saying ‘Number Fifty-six Wapping Street, please’ to the jehu would change her misgivings to relief, but it did not. The Rennies’ home had been a refuge when her parents’ died, but it was just an address now. No, it was something worse: Wapping Street was the final stop on her life’s journey that had begun with promise, twenty-seven years ago.
The jehu let her off, looking at her with some sympathy because she had been unable to hide her face from him. ‘I can take you somewhere else, if you wish, mum,’ he had said in a low voice, perhaps interpreting her reluctance to enter the house because she feared for her treatment there. It was kindly meant, and she smiled at him with what she hoped was reassurance. His glance remained sceptical, so she wished him Merry Christmas, squared her shoulders and knocked on the door.
The butler opened the door, smiled to see her, then gasped as he looked closer. Mary laughed and handed him her travelling case. ‘Jackson, you know how Mrs Morison wanted me to have an adventure.’
‘Aye, lass, but...’ he said, dubious, concerned.
She pointed to her eye. ‘This is the consequence of icy highways and a sudden stop.’
And then everyone was in the vestibule—her aunt and uncle, Dina and a plump fellow with two-and-a-half chins who must be Mr Page. Their concern turned to smiles when she described how she crashed into a skinny vicar with an amazingly sharp elbow, after the coach skidded sideways near Knaresborough. ‘What a joke on me,’ she said, then took a cautious look around.
Everyone seemed to believe her. It was the one good moment she could recall in the past days of solitary travelling. Better have them smiling before she admitted defeat. ‘Alas, for all my obvious pains, no ring,’ she said. ‘I fear I have failed you.’
To her astonishment, everyone laughed. Dina came forwards, tugging Mr Page with her. She held out her hand and waved it in front of Mary’s one good eye. Mary gasped. The last time she had seen that insignificant little ring was just before it sank into the fruitcake batter.
‘Fooled you, fooled you!’ Dina crowed as she danced around.
Mary sank down on one of the hall chairs and put her head in her hands. When she looked up, feeling despair settle around her shoulders like wet laundry, the others grew silent.
‘Mrs Morison wanted you to have an adventure, silly. You were turning into such an old stick. That’s what she told me when she handed me the ring after you left,’ Dina said, when no one else spoke. ‘You’ll have to go downstairs and tell her everything.’ She clapped her hands. ‘Better yet, we’ll get the old dear upstairs and you can tell us what happened when you chased fruitcake all over Scotland and northern England. I have explained it all to Mr Page. We were amazed to get your note from Carlisle with word of York.’ She glanced at the butler hovering nearby, a frown on his face. ‘Get Mrs Morison.’
‘No!’ With all the dignity she could muster, Mary picked up her travelling case and went to the stairs. The treads looked tall enough to require a stepstool and the stairway landing so far away. Child’s play. With a sob she could not hide, she left them standing in the hallway.
* * *
Ross did not protest when his sister insisted they drive to Kirkbean to visit the estate she had mentioned in more letters to him than he cared to admit. He put on an interested face as Alice Mae described the six bedchambers, two sitting rooms—‘One small and dainty for a wife, should you ever choose to marry, Brother’— efficiently drawing fireplaces, panelled bookroom, library and billiards room.
He couldn’t deny that it was a lovely estate, with well-tended lawns and a postage-stamp view of the sea that Alice Mae had promised. The trees were bare of leaves and the little burn frozen in place until spring. ‘It will look so much more lovely by April,’ she assured him, and he could not deny that either.
He stood a long time at the upstairs window in what was the largest bedchamber and probably destined to become his, if Alice Mae badgered him enough. He didn’t really care any more; everyone probably needed a house. Damn the matter, but the view of the ocean was too paltry to please him. All it made him want to do was start walking until he reached the ocean and found a coasting vessel to take him south to English ports and warships.
‘What do you think, Brother?’ Alice asked after the tour.
I think I am God’s fool, he told himself. I am a wicked man.
‘Brother?’
‘It’s lovely, dear lassie. I don’t know that I am much in the mood to buy property, though.’
He waited for her pout—ah, there it was. ‘I have all but promised the agent...’ she began.
‘Then unpromise him!’ he declared, probably more sharply than he intended, but not nearly with the vehemence that had lacerated Mary Rennie right down to her bone marrow. ‘I’m sorry. Just give me time. The war’s not over yet, despite what everyone thinks.’
* * *
That was his problem, or one of them, he had decided in the week after Christmas when he began his solitary walks that took him farther and farther from his sister’s home. Nathan seemed content to play with his cousins and their Christmas toys. He certainly never asked to accompany his father.
Ross’s stump always ached, but he couldn’t help himself; he had to walk. It was as though he were trying to distance himself from himself, an impossibility. He started taking along his pistol, tucking it in the inside pocket of his boat cloak. On the third day, he sat on a boulder in sight of the ocean and took out the pistol. It was a spoil of war, taken from the body of a French captain after a sharp engagement near Hawaii. The firing accuracy amazed him, but he had scant use for it in close combat, preferring his hanger, because he never had to reload a cutlass. Still, he had turned down plenty of offers for the little beauty.
It would be so easy. He put it back in his pocket.
* * *
The next day, Nathan came to him, defiance in his eyes, and said he was writing to Mary.
‘I think you should, Son,’ Ross said simply. ‘Do you know her direction?’
Nathan stared at him in surprise, and Ross wondered how long his boy had nerved himself to announce his intention to correspond. I have become an unpredictable ogre to my child, he thought in perfect misery.
‘Wapping Street is all I know,’ Nathan said, his demeanour less reserved, probably because his father hadn’t forbidden him.
‘Try it. We know the family name is Rennie.’
Nathan gave him the first genuine smile in days. ‘I really like her, Da.’
‘What is it you like about Mary?’ He had to know. Ross knew what he liked about Mary, not the least of which was the softness of her breasts. She was smart and lively in a quiet sort of way—even if that did seem contradictory—resourceful and courageous. As he waited for an answer, Ross looked down the long corridor of years ahead. If the war was really over and his life wasn’t in so much danger any more—discounting the usual dangers at sea—he wondered how he would manage without Mary.
‘I like the way she looks at me and touches me, and listens to
me,’ his son said.
‘I do those things, too,’ Ross reminded him, feeling sorry for himself and suddenly envious of Mary.
‘I know, Da, but you have to,’ his boy told him with that logic of children. ‘Mary doesn’t have to do any of those things, but she does, because I’m special to her.’
He couldn’t help but smile. ‘How do you know that, Son?’
‘I just do,’ Nathan replied simply. ‘I don’t need words.’
* * *
Snow was falling the next day. The sky was Scotland grey, the wind a tumult. They were leaving next morning for Plymouth. To further placate his son, Ross had told him they could travel by mail coach if he wanted. A shadow had passed over Nathan’s face and he shook his head.
‘Why not? You know you love the mail coach.’
‘No, Da.’ Nathan sighed. ‘I’d just be looking for Mary at every stop.’
And so Ross walked again to the headland, pistol in his pocket. He knew Nathan enjoyed his cousins. He could live here with them. After a sleepless night, he had risen early to write an amendment to his will and testament that would probably stand up in probate. Years ago, he had signed over everything to his son, with his sister as guardian. This codicil would mean a handy competence to Mary Rennie of Wapping Street, Edinburgh, that would get her to Canada or the United States. He folded it, put Alice’s name on it, and left it on the desk in his room.
He took out his pistol, loaded now. For the last time, he flagellated himself for the folly of using war as an excuse never to find a wife, or to moon over a mythological lady. What nonsense that was, considering how many of his lieutenants and friends had found wives to marry and worry about and miss. Some of his friends had died in service to their sovereign, leaving widows and children behind. For years he had secretly thought them foolish. They had been the brave ones, to love and marry and get children on those odd moments they were in port, as though their lives were normal and the world was not at war.
As each year passed and his senses became more dulled by violence and death, he had turned into the worst kind of man, a man without hope. Until he died, which likely would be within the next few minutes, he would see the stricken look on Mary’s face as he accused her of deception. Perhaps she had fooled him. Did it matter, really? He loved her. He had never told her and she was gone.
With a steady breath, Ross put the pistol into his ear. The cold barrel made him wince. He pulled back the hammer, then stopped. He pulled away the pistol. Shooting himself in the head would be unsuccessful, he reasoned with a wry smile. The events in Knaresborough had proved to everyone in the Methodist Church vestibule that he had no brains. Shooting himself there would do no damage at all.
He reflected on the matter and unbuttoned his uniform jacket. He edged the barrel through his shirt opening and held the pistol against his heart. This would be fast. Lord, no, it would not do. ‘I have no heart, either,’ he whispered to the wind. ‘What good would it do to shoot myself there?’
He took the pistol off full cock and threw it over the cliff. He would jump to his death. That would work. If he landed on his feet, his leg bones would ram through his body and kill him quickly. If he landed on his head, his neck would snap. He knew the descent would be unpleasant. He had seen foretopmen fall from the yardarm, screaming all the way down. Still, in the greater scheme of things, it was a quick death, preferable to gangrene from a gunshot wound in the heat and stink of the Malay Peninsula, dying by degrees in terrible pain, as Dale Everett had died.
That was another thing to chastise himself about. Was he a coward to lie to the Everetts and tell them their son had wasted away from a fever, sinking into a merciful coma? He could not bring himself to write the truth, even to a vicar who dealt only in truth. Pray God no one would ever check the co-ordinates he had given them to carve on Dale Everett’s tombstone in the church’s holy ground. Few had died as painfully as his midshipman.
Ross took off his boat cloak and set it on the rock. He felt in his pockets for a scrap of paper and a pencil stub. Perhaps he should put his name on the paper, in case the leap rendered him unrecognisable. But that was folly; his peg would identify him. He took his hand from his pocket and brought with it the list, the pernicious list that had guided him to Mary in Carlisle. If there hadn’t been a list, he would never have met the woman. He opened it for a last look and stopped.
Nathan had written an entry—Mrs Pritchert’s kitchen, burgoo for my da and cod and leeks for me.
Furious with himself and humbled in a maddening way, he ripped the list into shreds and tossed them after the pistol. They blew back into his face instead like an indictment.
‘You have a son, you blockhead,’ he roared in his loudest quarterdeck voice. Ross put on his boat cloak again, wishing he hadn’t tossed away a perfectly good pistol. It was time to return to Plymouth, cod and leeks and burgoo.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Because children were charitable and kinder than adults, Nathan had sat closer to Ross on the ride to the West Country and Plymouth. He had seemed in good humour again, laughing and teasing with his father. The nights were different. On the last night before Plymouth, Ross woke to Nathan in tears.
‘Oh, laddie, what?’ he asked, holding him close in the bed they shared.
Maybe Nathan was still asleep, because Ross doubted he would have been so blunt, had he been awake. ‘Da, you did a fearsome bad thing,’ he said, drowsy.
‘I know. Please forgive me.’
‘What about Mary?’ Nathan yawned and returned to sleep.
* * *
In the morning, there was no indication that he remembered his question. Ross knew he would never forget it. What about Mary?
Mrs Pritchert greeted them both in her arms-open way, scolding Nathan for leaving his collar unbuttoned in this raw wind and not tying his muffler tighter. Ross watched them, a smile on his face, listening to a good woman scold. The smile left his face. In a coup d’état that he never quite understood, Mary had taken over the duty of seeing that Nathan was buttoned and warm, but she never sounded like Mrs Pritchert. He supposed it was possible for two women who both loved his son to use different tactics. He decided he preferred Mary’s gentle admonition to Mrs Pritchert’s rough-and-tumble justice: same result, but maybe easier on the heart.
Loathe to leave his son in Plymouth, he sat in the kitchen, blinking his eyes against his own weariness. Now that Nathan was deposited again, Ross knew he had to pour himself back into the post chaise for a quick trip to London and Admiralty House. He had sailed often under Special Orders, but surely the orders in January of 1815 wouldn’t have much teeth to them, now that Napoleon was on Elba. Maybe his duty would allow him more frequent trips to Plymouth, where he could attempt to repair his faulty credit with his son. A captain could hope.
* * *
Admiralty House seemed to be sleeping, so maybe the long war really was over. His orders included nothing more strenuous than cruising the Channel at his own discretion—ah, the reward for being a well-seasoned post captain—and popping into port now and then, if the mood was on him. These orders were a far cry from desperate days when only his Britannic Majesty’s Sovereign Navy stood between Napoleon and defeat. If this was what peace was going to look like—dull—he wasn’t sanguine about his prospects.
* * *
Ross returned to Plymouth, argued with himself for a few fruitless moments at the posting house, then visited a discreet house far enough from the docks to cater only to officers. The whores were as pretty as he remembered them, but he picked out one new to him this time. His regulars pouted and he couldn’t quite understand his impulsive choice, either, until he took a closer look at the sprinkling of freckles across her nose that she had tried to disguise with powder. I have to stop seeing Mary everywhere I look, especially here, he thought with disgust, as he followed her upstairs. She�
��d slap my chops into next Tuesday if I ever mentioned this. The reality that he would never see her again turned him glum.
After closing the door and kissing him, Belinda—Good God, she reeked of roses—asked him what he wanted her to do. He was about to list his particular favourites, when he surprised himself. ‘Would you remove my peg first? It’s paining me a bit.’
Belinda—or was it Marcella?—stared at him and gulped. She backed away, eyeing his wooden leg with revulsion.
‘You’re probably better at that than I am,’ she temporised. She came closer, unbuttoned his uniform jacket and started edging her hand down his trousers, maybe thinking to distract him so he’d pull off his own leg.
Mary didn’t mind removing it, he thought, as he backed away from whoever she was. He couldn’t recall that Mary had looked on his peg with anything but curiosity, at first. There had been no disgust on her face when she touched his stump and remarked that it felt hot. Following that first experience, he couldn’t recall that she ever said anything about it.
‘I should be about my business,’ he told the astonished whore. He left a small sum on the bed—after all, he had occupied ten minutes of her working day. ‘Time and tide won’t wait.’ He was down the stairs and out the door in mere moments, but not before he heard his winsome, mid-morning choice lean over the banister and tell one of the other parlour girls about the cove who wanted her to ‘tyke orf his bleedin’ laig’.
Unrefreshed and ashamed of himself, he returned to Flora Street to say goodbye to Nathan. He was hoping his son would greet him with his former enthusiasm and he did, except this time he waved a letter and the enthusiasm wasn’t for him.
‘She wrote, Da, she wrote!’ Nathan said as he hurtled into his father’s arms. He wrinkled his nose. ‘You smell like roses.’
‘Imagine,’ was all Ross could think to say, as he blushed and hoped Mrs Pritchert wouldn’t notice. ‘How did Mary know to write you here?’