The Arrangement: Number 2 in series (Survivors' Club)

by Mary Balogh

  There was peace.

  And ultimately there was restlessness.

  He had written two letters home—or, rather, Martin had done it for him—the first two days after he left, to explain that he needed some time alone and that he was perfectly safe in his valet’s capable hands. He had not explained either where he was at the time or where he was going. He advised his mother not to expect him home for a month or so. He confirmed everything in the second letter and assured her that he was safe and happy and in good health.

  Miss Dean and her mama and papa and sisters would presumably have returned to London in time to secure her some other eligible husband before the Season was out. Vincent hoped she would find someone to fulfill the dual demands of duty and personal inclination. He sincerely hoped so, both for her sake and for the sake of his conscience.

  He could go home, he decided at last. The Deans would be long gone. So, probably, would all three of his sisters. He would be able to have a frank talk with his mother and grandmother. It was high time. He would assure them that he was more than happy to have them live at Middlebury, where he could know that they were both comfortable and secure. Or he would be equally happy if they wished to move to Bath. The choice must be theirs, but they must not feel compelled to stay for his sake. He did not need them, he would explain as tactfully as he could. He did not need their assistance in his day-to-day living. Martin and the rest of his well-staffed household were perfectly capable of catering to all his needs. Neither did he need their assistance in finding him a bride to make his life more comfortable. He would find a wife for himself when he judged the time to be right.

  It would not be easy to get his mother to accept the truth of what he would say. She had dedicated herself to learning to be mistress of a large home and estate, and she had done superlatively well. Too well, actually. By the time he had arrived at Middlebury, one year after her, he had felt like a little boy returning from school to the care of his mama. And because it had soothed her to see herself in that role, and because his new home and his new life had bewildered him, even overwhelmed him, he had not made a strong enough effort from the start to assert himself as the man of the house.

  He had been only twenty years old, after all.

  He did consider going back to Cornwall for a while to stay with George Crabbe, Duke of Stanbrook, as he had done for a few weeks in March—and for a few years following his return home from the Peninsula after losing his sight in battle. George was his very dearest friend. But, though he did not doubt the duke would welcome him and allow him to stay as long as he wished, Vincent would not use him as an emotional crutch. Not any longer. Those days, and those needs, were long past.

  His years of dependency were past. It was time to grow up and take charge. It was not going to be easy. But he had long ago realized that he must treat his blindness as a challenge rather than as a handicap if he wished to enjoy anything like a happy, fulfilled life.

  Sooner or later, then, he must return to Middlebury Park and begin the life he intended to live. He did not feel quite ready yet, however. He had done much thinking in the Lake District, and he needed to do more so that he would not return and simply fall back into the old routine, from which he would never be able to extricate himself.

  He was done with the Lake District, though. He was restless.

  Where else would he go but home?

  The answer came to him with surprising ease.

  Of course. He would go … home.

  For Middlebury Park was only where he had lived for the past three years, the stately home he had inherited with his title and not set foot inside until three years ago. It was very grand, and he liked it well enough. He was determined to settle there and make it his own. It was not yet really home, however. Home was Covington House, where he had grown up, an altogether more modest dwelling, not much larger than a cottage actually, on the edge of the village of Barton Coombs in Somerset.

  He had not been there in almost six years. Not since he left for the Peninsula, in fact. Now he had a sudden hankering to go back again, even though he would not be able to see it. It had happy associations. His childhood and boyhood years had been good ones despite the near poverty in which they had lived even before the death of his father when he was fifteen.

  “We are going home,” he announced to Martin one morning after breakfast. He could hear rain pelting against the windows of the small cottage on Windermere he had rented for a month. “Not to Middlebury, though. To Barton Coombs.”

  “Mhmm,” Martin said noncommittally as he gathered up the dishes from the table.

  “You will be glad?” Vincent asked.

  Martin too was from Barton Coombs. His father was the village blacksmith there. The two boys had gone to the village school together, for there had been no money for private education for Vincent despite the fact that socially he was a gentleman. The blacksmith fancied having a son who could read and write. Vincent had learned his lessons, as had his sisters, from his own father, who had been the schoolmaster. Often he and Martin had played together. Most of the neighborhood children had, in fact, regardless of social rank or financial status or gender or age. It had all been rather idyllic.

  Vincent’s well-to-do maternal uncle had returned from a long residence in the Far East when Vincent was seventeen and had purchased a commission for his nephew. Martin, upon hearing the news, had come to Covington House, hat clutched in hand, to ask if he could go too as Vincent’s batman. That position had not lasted long, as it turned out. Vincent had lost his sight during his very first battle. But Martin had remained with him as his valet, even during those early years when Vincent had not been able to pay him. He had stubbornly refused to be turned off.

  “My mam will be glad to see me,” Martin said now. “So will my dad, though no doubt he will make the usual grumbling quips to his anvil about his one and only son choosing to be a gentleman’s valett.”

  And so they went.

  They traveled all through the last night of the journey, weary as they were, and arrived at Covington House at first light—or so Martin informed him. Vincent would have known it himself, though, as soon as the carriage stopped moving and the door was opened. He could hear a few birds singing with that almost echoing clarity that was peculiar to the predawn period. And the air had a freshening feel to it that suggested an end to night but not quite a start to day.

  There was no real need for secrecy except that Vincent would rather no one know he was at Covington House, at least for a while. He did not want to be a curiosity to old friends and neighbors. He did not want them trekking to his door to pay their respects and to satisfy their curiosity about what a blind man looked like. And he did not want anyone writing to his mother and bringing her hurrying here to look after him. He probably would not stay long anyway. He just needed enough time to get his thoughts in order.

  A house key had always been kept above the lintel on the inside of the potting shed behind the house. Vincent sent Handry to see if it was still there. If it was not, then Martin was going to have to climb through the window into the wine cellar. It was very doubtful anyone had thought of mending the catch on it in the last six years, since it had never been mended throughout Vincent’s boyhood. It had been a regular middle-of-the-night escape and reentry route, in fact.

  Handry came back with the key. It was looking slightly rusty, he reported, but it fit in the lock of the front door and turned with a grinding sound and a little persuasion. The door opened.

  The house smelled neither musty nor stale from being shut up, Vincent discovered. The cleaners he paid to come in once a fortnight must be doing a conscientious job. There was a smell, though, an indefinable something that brought back memories of boyhood days and of his mother and his sisters as they had been when they all lived here. Even faint memories of his father. It was strange that he had never noticed the smell while he lived here—perhaps because he had not needed to notice smells in those days.

  He felt about t
he hall with the aid of his cane. The old oak table was still where it had always been, opposite the door, the umbrella stand beside it. Both were draped with holland covers.

  “I know this house like the back of my hand,” he told Martin, pulling the cover off the stand and placing his cane in it. “I am going to explore it on my own. And then I am going to lie down in my room for an hour or two. A carriage is not designed for sleeping in, is it?”

  “Not when it has to travel over English roads,” Martin agreed, “and there isn’t any alternative that I have discovered. I’ll go and help Handry with the horses. And then I’ll bring your bags inside.”

  One thing Vincent particularly liked about Martin Fisk was that he cared for all his needs without fuss and bluster. Best of all was the fact that he did not hover. If Vincent walked into the occasional wall or door or tripped over the occasional object lying in his path or even once in a while tumbled down a flight of steps or—on one memorable occasion—head first into a lily pond, then Martin would be there to deal with any cuts and scratches and other assorted consequences and to make appropriate or inappropriate comments without any sentiment creeping into his voice.

  He even occasionally informed his master that he was a clumsy clod.

  It was better—ah, infinitely better—than the solicitous care with which almost everyone else of his acquaintance smothered him.

  He was an ungrateful wretch, he knew.

  Actually, his fellow members of the Survivors’ Club treated him much as Martin did. It was one reason why he loved his annual stay at Penderris Hall so much, he supposed. But then all seven of them had been badly wounded in the wars and still bore the scars inside or out or both. They understood the frustrations of too much sympathetic care.

  When he was alone in the house, he made his way to the sitting room on his left, the room in which all the daytime living had been done. Everything was as he remembered it and where he remembered it, except for the fact that all the furniture was covered. He moved through to the drawing room, larger and less used than the other room. Sometimes there had been dancing in the drawing room. Eight couples had been able to form for a country set with some comfort, ten with a little less comfort, twelve at a squeeze.

  There was a pianoforte in this room. Vincent found his way to it. Like everything else, it was hidden beneath a cover. He was tempted to pull it off, to lift the lid over the keyboard and play. But the instrument must be horribly out of tune.

  It was strange that he had never learned to play it when he was a lad. No one had even thought of suggesting that he might. The pianoforte was for the girls, an instrument of torture peculiarly their own—or so Amy, his eldest sister, had always claimed.

  Strangely, now that he was here, he missed all three of them. And his mother. Even his father, who had been gone for eight years now. He missed those carefree days of his childhood and youth. And they were not even so very long ago. He was only twenty-three now.

  Twenty-three going on fifty.

  Or seventy.

  He sighed and decided to leave the cover where it was. But standing there at the pianoforte, his hands resting on the top of it, his head bowed, he was suddenly smitten by a familiar tidal wave of panic.

  He felt the blood drain from his head, leaving it cold and clammy. He felt the breath cold in his nostrils and so thin that there seemed not enough of it to inhale. He felt all the terror of the unending darkness, of the sure knowledge that if he closed his eyes, as he did now, and opened them again, as he did not, he would still be blind.

  Always and forever.

  With no reprieve.

  No light.

  Not ever.

  He fought to control his breathing, knowing from long experience of such episodes that if he lost control of it, he would soon be gasping for air and even losing consciousness until he came out of his swoon, perhaps alone, perhaps—much worse—with someone hovering over him. But still sightless.

  He kept his eyes shut. He counted his breaths again, trying to concentrate upon them to the exclusion of all the thoughts that teemed and tumbled through his mind.

  In. Out.

  After a while he opened his eyes again and loosened his grip on the top of the pianoforte. He lifted his head. He would be damned, he thought, before he would allow the darkness to encroach upon his inner being. It was enough that it was there outside himself for all time. His own stupidity in battle had caused the outer darkness. He would not compound that youthful folly by allowing the light that was within him to be doused.

  He would live his life. He would live it to the full. He would make something of it and of himself. He would not give in to either depression or hopelessness.

  He would not, by God.

  He was desperately tired. That was the problem, he supposed, and it was easily solved. He would feel better after a bit of a sleep. He would continue his exploration of the house after that.

  He found the staircase with no trouble at all. And he found his way up it without mishap. He found his room without having to feel his way along the wall. He had done it in darkness on numerous occasions when he had sneaked out of the house and in again before daylight.

  He turned the knob on his door and stepped inside the room. He hoped there were at least blankets on the bed. He was too tired to worry about sheets. But when he found the bed, he discovered that it was made up as if he had been expected—and he remembered his mother saying that she had left instructions with the biweekly cleaners that the house always be kept ready for the unexpected arrival of a family member.

  He removed his coat and boots and cravat and lay down gratefully between the sheets. He felt as if he could sleep for a week.

  Perhaps he would spend a week here, alone and quiet in these achingly familiar surroundings, unencumbered by any company other than Martin’s. That should be enough time to get his head firmly on his shoulders so that he could go back to Middlebury Park to live and not merely to drift onward.

  He had given instructions that the carriage be hidden from sight without delay. He had told Martin to inform anyone who asked that he had come alone to visit his parents at the smithy and that his master had granted him permission to stay at Covington House. Martin would have to tell only one person and within an hour everyone would know.

  No one would know he was here too.

  It all sounded like bliss.

  He fell asleep before he could fully enjoy the feeling.

  2

  Vincent’s arrival had not gone unobserved.

  Covington House was the last building at one end of the main street through the village. To the far side of it was a low hill covered with trees. There was a young woman on that hill and among those trees. She wandered at all times of day about the countryside surrounding Barton Hall, where she lived with her aunt and uncle, Sir Clarence and Lady March, though she was not often out quite this early. But this morning she had woken when it was still dark and had been unable to get back to sleep. Her window was open, and a bird with a particularly strident call had obviously not noticed that dawn had not yet arrived. So, rather than shut her window and climb back into bed, she had dressed and come outside, chilly as the early morning air was, because there was something rare and lovely about watching the darkness lift away from another dawning day. And she had come here in particular because the trees housed dozens, perhaps hundreds, of birds, many of them with sweeter voices than the one that had awoken her, and they always sang most earnestly when they were heralding a new day.

  She stood very still so as not to disturb them, her back against the sturdy trunk of a beech tree, her arms stretched out about it behind her to enjoy its rough texture through her thin gloves—so thin, in fact, that the left thumb and right forefinger had already worn through. She drank in the beauty and peace of her surroundings and ignored the cold, which penetrated her almost threadbare cloak as if it were not even there, and set her fingers to tingling.

  She looked down upon Covington House, her favorite b
uilding in Barton Coombs. It was neither a mansion nor a cottage. It was not even a manor. But it was large and square and solid. It was also deserted and had been since before she came here to live two years ago. It was still owned by the Hunt family, about whom she had heard many stories, perhaps because Vincent Hunt, the only son, had unexpectedly inherited a title and fortune a few years ago. It was the stuff of fairy tales, except that it had a sad component too, as many fairy tales did.

  She liked to look at the house and imagine it as it might have been when the Hunts lived there—the absentminded but much-loved schoolmaster, his busy wife and three pretty daughters, and his exuberant, athletic, mischievous son, who was always the best at whatever sport was being played and always at the forefront of any waggery that was brewing and always adored by old and young alike—except by the Marches, against whom his pranks were most often directed. She liked to think that if she had lived here then, she would have been friends with the girls and perhaps even with their brother, although they were all older than she. She liked to picture herself running in and out of Covington House without even knocking at the door, almost as if she belonged there. She liked to imagine that she would have attended the village school with all the other children, except Henrietta March, her cousin, who had been educated at home by a French governess.