“Yes, the fellow who thought my children had been poaching on your land. Pardon me, but I doubt the man’s judgment.”
“I can’t afford to pay him proper wages, so he takes a percentage of the rents he brings in.”
“You can’t afford to pay him?” Phillip repeated. But he looked around the room more closely, and noticed that it was devoid of any art, vases, or decent furniture. Anything that could be sold already had been.
“It’s only natural that he’s a bit zealous, but I’m certain his actions are within the letter of the law.” There was a shadow of doubt in Easterbrook’s face, though, and Phillip had to wonder if the younger man was in well over his head. Managing an estate, Phillip was learning, was fraught with complication. If Ned had been left the running of Barton Hall’s land, and he hadn’t had the guidance of a man as fair and practical as Smythe, might he have behaved as badly as Easterbrook? Phillip doubted it, but he could see how Easterbrook had gotten into this mess. “My father died with a great deal of debt,” Easterbrook went on, “and as I’m saddled with this place, I need to figure out some way to make it pay for itself.”
“Sell it off. Sell the Priory, the land, all of it.”
“It’s entailed,” Easterbrook said with obvious bitterness.
“Marry, then.” That’s what Phillip had done when his own father died penniless.
Easterbrook’s face crumpled, and for a moment, Phillip thought the younger man might break down in tears. But then he straightened his spine and resumed his earlier surliness. “Thank you for your advice, Captain Dacre, but I have an estate to run.” His voice dripped with sarcasm.
“Talk to the vicar,” Phillip said in a flash of inspiration. “He could surely figure out a way to help you that didn’t quite punish your tenants so much.”
“I’m well acquainted with Ben Sedgwick. I’m entirely too acquainted with all the Sedgwicks, in fact, and if I have to see any of them again I don’t think I could resist slapping the smiles off their faces.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“For the Sedgwicks to be happy and comfortable while I’m sitting here without a penny to my name is just a bit much, Dacre.”
“What on earth do the Sedgwicks have to do with your predicament?” He was trying to remember precisely what the cook had told him about the late Sir Humphrey. If Sir Humphrey hadn’t given the living of St. Aelred’s to Ben, it could have been sold off; this was a common enough practice. It seemed far-fetched that Easterbrook’s resentment stemmed from what had to be a trifling sum of money, however.
“You don’t know.” Easterbrook sat back in his chair and regarded Phillip with something like amusement. “You really don’t. Well, my father spent every last farthing on that family.”
“Why?” Phillip asked, baffled.
Easterbrook’s mouth curved into an angry smile. “I’m not going to tell you. Ask your precious vicar.”
As he left Lindley Priory and headed home, Phillip wondered whether Ben knew how bitterly Easterbrook resented him and his family. He doubted it, recalling Ben’s confusion that night when Peggy and Jamie had been caught on Easterbrook’s land.
Ned and Jamie waylaid Phillip on his path back to Barton Hall. “We’re having a picnic by the lake,” the younger boy shouted. And indeed, they were carrying a picnic hamper between them. “Peggy and Mr. Sedgwick are already there.”
Phillip was in no condition for company, but the sight of his children laughing and struggling with the basket made him smile. And wasn’t that something. When he arrived a week ago, he would have been annoyed with how loud, dirty, and undisciplined they were. He would have grumbled that they ought to have been studying, that they ought to have been eating a proper meal rather than whatever cakes they had pilfered when the poor put-upon cook had her back turned. But now he took the basket and gestured for them to lead the way, his heart already a bit lighter for having seen them happy, and for knowing he was about to see Ben.
They found their little party disposed on a blanket in a clearing by the lake. Peg was braiding flowers into the dog’s hair while Ben leaned back on his elbows, his long legs crossed at the ankles before him. His coat was slung on a low branch of the nearest tree, and his sleeves were rolled up. He hadn’t yet noticed Phillip’s approach.
Phillip felt the doom of impending awkwardness. What the hell could even be said after last night? He had let Ben see a part of him he hadn’t ever wanted to acknowledge to himself, let alone show to anyone else. Now he felt raw and vulnerable and somehow embarrassed; the old familiar cloud began to descend upon him. He was better off on his own, far away, where he couldn’t disappoint anyone. He didn’t belong here after all; he belonged on the Patroclus, where he was in control, at a safe distance from anything that might pierce his defenses or expose him as lacking.
But then Ben turned his head, and when he saw Phillip, his face broke unhesitatingly into a smile. Phillip smiled back despite himself. How could he not? He couldn’t even muster up any icy reserve. This man was the antidote to chilliness. He was a counterweight to Phillip’s natural inclination to aloofness.
Phillip set the basket down and then sat on the blanket at a discreet distance from Ben, near enough so that they could talk without being overheard, but not so near that they could touch. He didn’t trust himself at closer range.
Jamie distributed the contents of the hamper. Cakes, cakes, and more cakes, as Phillip had expected, but no matter. If Mrs. Morris enjoyed making cakes and tiny little tarts and lemon biscuits, and the children enjoyed eating them, then everyone won. He watched as Ben’s eyes lit up at the sight of the biscuits.
“What did you do today?” Phillip asked, and was regaled with tales of sheep shearing and medieval queens and square roots. He wasn’t sure how the topics came together, or if they even did, only that three happy, smiling faces were turned towards him, telling him their stories as if they wanted him to know.
They were treating him as if he did belong here, not on a ship a thousand miles away, but on a picnic blanket, basking in the sunshine. As if he belonged to these children and they to him, as if he were at all worthy of that. And somehow, this country vicar belonged there, too, with them.
After the cakes had been reduced to rubble, the children ran off to wade in the lake. Phillip knew he ought to acknowledge how happy and healthy the children were, not to mention how they had even come around to not openly detesting the sight of him. He ought to thank Sedgwick for giving him his family. But he couldn’t find the words. And even if he could have, he wouldn’t have been brave enough to speak them.
“I had a fine afternoon cleaning up the mess your Sir Martin Easterbrook made,” Phillip said, trying to put some distance between them with an unpleasant topic. “He’s closed off more grazing land.” He didn’t need to explain to Sedgwick, who had been raised here, that this communal grazing land was all that made it possible for some of the more modest tenants to scrape together a living. “And then he evicts the tenants who can’t pay their rents. So now my tenants expect the same treatment from me, which makes it damned hard to do business with them.”
“I doubt that Martin Easterbrook, whatever his faults may be, is single-handedly responsible for the tradition of mistrusting landlords.”
“Goodness. You’re a radical.”
“Hardly. But I was raised by radicals, so some of it might have rubbed off.”
“I called on him and he was an ungrateful little wretch.”
Benedict frowned. “He swam in this lake with my brothers and me. And now he’s . . .” He shook his head, obviously not wanting to say precisely what Martin Easterbrook was.
“He doesn’t seem overfond of your family,” Phillip said, striving for tact. “Says he can’t bear to see you happy when he’s miserable. And he seems to resent some expenditures your father made on behalf of you and your brothers.”
“He must mean my living or my brothers’ school fees, although the latter can’t have amounted to much. One of
my brothers was mentioned in Sir Humphrey’s will, but I don’t believe it amounted to much.”
Phillip thought of the tiny church in the village and the rather tumbledown vicarage beside it; he took in the well-worn soles of Ben’s boots and the frayed edges of his cuffs. Giving the living of St. Aelred’s to Ben rather than selling it hadn’t been what impoverished the Easterbrooks. And the venom in young Easterbrook’s voice suggested more than resentment over a few hundred pounds a year. You really don’t know, the man had said. And now Phillip wondered if Ben even knew what lay at the heart of his neighbor’s antipathy. Whatever the source of Easterbrook’s rancor toward the Sedgwicks, Phillip knew Ben wouldn’t be pleased to learn of it. Phillip realized he would have given a good deal to protect Ben from what seemed an inevitable disappointment.
“You know,” Phillip said. “There’s a time-honored method of dealing with encumbered estates. When my father left me with debts to pay, I found a wealthy wife. I daresay Easterbrook could do the same. He has a title and an estate.”
He watched as Ben sucked in a breath and let it out slowly before he responded. “Is that the only reason you married? Money?”
“No, of course not. Caroline wanted a home and children of her own, and the fact that I would generally be away from home was, ah, perhaps a factor she weighed in my advantage when considering potential suitors.” She had quite explicitly said that she did not require a husband on the premises, and Phillip, remembering what life had been like for his mother during his father’s tenure at Barton Hall, felt that he quite understood. “I was fond of her. She was, I believe, fond of me, and marriage was the answer to both our problems. At the time I thought it not a bad bargain for either of us.”
Another minute passed in silence, and Phillip thought Ben might let the subject drop. “Did she know?” he asked, his voice pitched low.
The sound of the children splashing in the water fell away at this reminder of their shared predicament. He felt a sense of responsibility to help Ben navigate these muddy waters. “No, I don’t believe she did. I hardly think she would have known that there was anything to be known, if you follow me. It’s hardly a topic that a lady can expect to hear about in the ordinary course of things. And I couldn’t have told her without exposing myself to ruin.” That wasn’t true, though. Caroline would have kept his secret. She was too practical to do otherwise.
The real reason Phillip had never spoken of it to his wife, the woman who had been his ally and friend, was that he had been afraid she would think less of him if she knew his desires. And that perhaps she would think less of their marriage, their family, their friendship. He never wanted to risk finding out, so he had kept it a secret. Now Phillip wondered if he had spent his entire life keeping hidden the parts of himself that he feared would invite scorn. But the situation hadn’t been fair for either of them, and he felt a sudden swell of anger at the injustice of a world that left a man like him with so few options.
He turned to Ben, thinking of saying something to the younger man, some word of advice, but he realized he didn’t have anything useful to say. He couldn’t tell him not to marry this girl, not to live a lie, because what else was there? He had nothing to say, nothing to offer. And that felt terribly familiar.
Ben wanted to punch somebody. It had been a good number of years since he had actually needed to hit anyone, and he dearly wished he had a convenient target now—some fool who was unwise enough to bother one of his brothers or mock his mother and who desperately needed a corrective sock in the jaw—because his right hand was clenching into a fist on its own.
But now he was furious and he didn’t even have the satisfaction of knowing who he was furious with, unless it was himself. He was angry at life, and wasn’t that a stupid thing. He was angry that there was no way for him to have what he wanted, what he needed, what surely was any man’s dream—a home, a family, a place of his own in the world—without a wife, and he didn’t know how to have a wife without deceiving or misleading her on a matter that she must find of the utmost importance.
And it wasn’t only that. It wasn’t fair to himself. Until meeting Dacre, his attraction to men had been vague. He had known that he was drawn to men in a general way, as a category of people, but the objects of his desire had thus far been faceless, safe in their abstraction. Until he had felt Dacre’s hands on him, he hadn’t quite grasped what it meant to be with a person you desired.
Now he wanted this man’s hands on him, this man’s skin on his own, his mouth on his mouth. Only Dacre would do. Ben had to figure out what to do with himself now that he had this very inconvenient piece of knowledge. Because he couldn’t have Dacre or any other man if he married Alice. But he couldn’t marry Alice if he planned to go to bed with anyone else. And without marriage and children and a place in the world, he didn’t know what to do with himself. He’d feel incomplete, cheated of his own future.
Punching somebody was out of the question, so he hurled a stone into the lake. He didn’t even try to skip it; he just plonked it into the water to cause the biggest possible splash. Then he did it a couple more times. It was utterly unsatisfying, but it must have looked more thrilling than it was, because the next thing he knew Jamie had materialized from whatever tree he had been climbing and started hurling rocks into the water beside Ben. And then the dog, who really was not a very bright creature but was possessed of good intentions, thought he was meant to run after whatever Jamie had thrown. In due course they had a very wet, very confused dog.
Ben found himself laughing despite himself as the children tried to soothe the animal.
“You can hit me if it’ll make you feel better,” Dacre said, coming up behind him to watch the children.
Ben huffed out a laugh. “Am I that easy to read?”
“Sometimes. But I was angry myself, and I guessed.”
That they shared this reason to be angry did nothing to make Ben feel better, but solidarity was worth something. It had to be, because it was one of the few things Ben had left.
Dacre cleared his throat. “You said you don’t go in much for penance, and I believe you, but I’m afraid that I do. Not in a spiritual sense,” he added hastily. But he stepped closer to Ben, still watching the lake. “I’ll always regret the secrecy. I’ll always regret that I couldn’t be more to Caroline. She deserved better. But I don’t know what else I could have done.”
“Did you ever think that maybe you deserved better?” The words were out before Ben could really think of what he meant. “That you deserved the kind of life you believe you deprived your wife of?”
“We both know that’s impossible.”
“No,” Ben said, his fists clenched at his sides. “We don’t.” This was too close to the central problem of Ben’s life for him to talk about calmly, so he made what he hoped was an apologetic gesture and turned away to watch the children.
Dacre didn’t walk away. Ben had thought he’d surely take any opportunity to leave, but he stayed beside Ben. Several minutes passed before either of them spoke. “Earlier, when they were talking to me,” Dacre said, his voice gruff, “it felt . . . normal. I think they were pleased with me. Thank you.”
“You did the work,” Ben said softly. “You showed them they could trust you, and now they do. They’re fonder of you than I would have thought, if I’m honest,” he added impishly.
Dacre stomped his boot in the shallow water to splash Ben, and Ben laughed. “What’s that supposed to mean? I inspire fondness in all sorts of people.”
Ben looked away and shoved his hands in his pockets. “I can attest to the truth of that.”
When he looked back at Dacre, he found the man blushing.
In truth, Ben was pleased to see that once they realized that their father was not going to ship them off to school or consign them to the nearest tutor, the Dacre children accepted his presence, and later his participation, in their activities. The children had lost their mother and would soon be without their father for another extended
sea voyage. It seemed to Ben that what this family needed most was time together, time to remind the children that they weren’t orphans, alone in the world.
The sun began to dip below the hills, and the children splashed barefoot in the shallow water while the dog ran back and forth. Ben perched in a branch of a tree, and Dacre seemed to be having a bit of a sleep against the trunk.
Despite his misgivings about his future, Ben had no doubt about the present. He was content with the Dacres and he knew he had achieved something good. He had restored something important to the entire family. This was why he had endured his father’s scorn and his brothers’ confusion by going into the church. When people needed help, they went to a clergyman. And he wanted to be that person who people turned to for help. Somebody had to fill in the gaps—make sure the elderly had company, the sick solace, the poor food. He had spent his childhood doing that for his family and he knew he wanted to spend the rest of the life doing more of the same.
His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of hoofbeats and carriage wheels, and he turned to see a gig approaching. That was strange, because they were on Dacre’s land and Phillip hadn’t mentioned expecting anybody. He dropped down from the tree and stepped towards the conveyance.
There he saw the last two people on earth he had wanted to see.
Phillip looked up at the sound of carriage wheels to see a strange gig approaching. It was being driven by a man who was dressed at the absolute height of fashion, and by his side was a very pretty young lady whom Phillip did not recognize.
“Hullo!” cried the lady, pulling off her hat to wave it towards the lake. “Is that you looking like an urchin over there, Benedict?” She had hair a few shades darker than Ben’s, more dark gold than flax.
“A sad lack of dignity,” murmured her companion. He had maneuvered the conveyance close enough so that Phillip could see and hear them quite clearly despite being concealed by the shade of the tree he leaned against. “Look, he’s about to come greet us, as if he’s decent. My eyes, Alice.”
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