The hardships of the intervening years had put premature lines on her young face and had dulled the sparkle of her once-magnificent eyes. Her hair, cropped short like a convict, drew even more attention to the lack of flesh on her now-bony features.
“Why did ye not come back to us, lass? Yer Da would not have made objection to the child. He’d have taken ye both in, no questions asked. He would not have had to pine away for the loss of ye, as he did.”
Joanna had no real answer to this, nor to many of Maggie Mae’s other questions.
She did tell Maggie Mae of her jobs at King John’s Reward and at the tea shop. She spoke of vicious Gwenda, slatternly Betty, and dear, generous Missus Vi. She spoke of the cruelty of Private Herbert and the horrors of Clerkenwell.
But she never spoke of the reason she had left for London in the first place. Nor did she ever identify the little girl’s father. It could have been “tinker, tailor, soldier, or sailor,” as the old nursery rhyme described it. Joanna refused to give the slightest clue of Hannah’s parentage to Maggie Mae, or to anyone else.
With proper nourishment, with care and attention and relief from constant fear, Joanna gradually returned to her former health and beauty. Her lovely form filled out again. Her hair again flowed in soft, black waves, although now only to her shoulders. The lines smoothed from her face, bit by bit.
Some might even have seen in her matured face the addition of a different kind of beauty, one born of sadness, experience, and wisdom.
The other Travellers were very kind to her. Although at first inclined to be judgmental—after all, she had abandoned her dear father, who had died of the loss!—Joanna realized that the Travellers were coming to respect the gravity and dignity with which she now tried to carry herself.
Beathan came and spoke to her one day, to welcome her home to her people.
“‘Tis a blessing ye’re back safe, Joanna. And the child is a bonny one, like ye were yerself at that age.” He asked no questions about Hannah’s father. It was no longer his business, now, except as a friend.
“And your wife, Athan? She’s well?”
“Oh, aye. She’s a darling wife to me, and our fourth child is on the way.”
He paused for a moment, then said very softly—like one guilty of some disloyalty, “I’ve sometimes thought, what it might have been like, if—”
“No, no, Athan, you did the right thing, and you’re a fortunate man. Don’t ever think otherwise. Things happen as they’re meant to happen, I suppose.”
“I suppose,” he answered doubtfully. But the way he looked into her gem-like eyes, he seemed to lack her sense of certainty about it.
The months passed. Joanna’s days fell into an easy rhythm. She taught and cared for Hannah, who remained sickly and was often prone to bouts of feverish coughing. She cared, too, for Maggie Mae, whose advanced years were beginning to show.
Joanna was not happy—she believed she would never really be happy again. Not with her Da gone. Not with Christy forever lost to her. But so long as Hannah seemed to thrive, Joanna was at least content.
The gypsies remained at Stonehenge until the winter equinox. Joanna often looked at the Sarsen stones. Was it really there that Christy spread out his blanket for us to lie upon? Was it there that I lay face up, watching dawn approach, as he knelt over me with his manhood hard and ready for me, and when he entered me and made a woman of me? It seemed a long time ago.
The winter solstice passed, and then the vernal equinox on the twenty-first of March. There was merry, festive Beltane—May Day—to look forward to. The Travellers were once again making their long journey eastward to Gresham, where they would summer, camped in its lush woodlands.
The spring and early summer were chilly and rainy. By the time they reached Gresham, Hannah’s illness once again had taken hold of her.
None of Maggie Mae’s herbal remedies, nor even the potions of Old Sal, the clan’s wise woman, seemed to help. Day after day, Hannah grew weaker and thinner. Fever burned her. She could not eat, and it hurt her even to swallow cool water.
It seemed to Joanna that her child was dying before her eyes.
Maggie Mae had no further wisdom to offer, except perhaps that it would be a mercy to Hannah—and to her mother—if the child died.
This Joanna could not accept. She had to believe that with proper care—with the attentions of a learned physician who knew things the Travellers did not—her daughter would live.
So she made the hardest choice she had ever had to make in her life. Under cover of night, she wrapped her sick daughter in blankets and left her on the doorstep of Gresham Manor.
Christy clearly no longer loved her, so he could not be counted on to do the child any favors for her sake. Moreover, Christy would not even know this was his child. To him, it would just be a sick, abandoned little girl in desperate need.
What Christy might no longer do for love’s sake, he would surely do for pity’s sake. He had always been a kind boy.
Chapter 28
Brought Back to Life
It was Cook who found Hannah outside the Gresham Manor kitchen door. Had it been Brown, the estate manager, Hannah might well have been left there to die. But it was Hannah’s great luck that the first person she encountered at Gresham Manor was Cook.
Cook was coming back from a meeting with the livestock manager, planning the butchering that would need to be done before Their Graces the Duke and Duchess returned to Gresham. It was raining, and she bustled out of her horse-drawn cart into the kitchen.
She almost tripped over what appeared to be a bundle of colorful rags in the doorway.
“Ho there! Maids! Get over here, you lazies, and clean this mess from the doorway before someone breaks their neck falling over it!”
The bundle stirred and tried to sit up. Startled, Cook bent down to look at it. The bundle turned out to be a little girl.
Her features were delicate and pale, except for the rosy spots on her cheeks. Her hair was a mass of rich mahogany curls, and her eyes were beautiful in their unusual colors, one golden brown, one glittering green.
She was the loveliest little girl Cook had ever seen. And from her perspiring brow to her ragged gasps for breath, she was clearly deathly ill, if Cook was any judge of these things.
“Boy!” she called to one of the kitchen lads standing about. “Go out and grab that horse-and-cart before the stable man takes them. Ride to town as quick as ye dare, and don’t rest till ye have found the physician. Tell him he’s needed at once at the Manor. Take no excuses from him—tell him I need him out here. Now shake those shanks, lazybones! Get ye going!”
By the time the kitchen boy had returned with the old physician, Cook had pulled a pallet up near the heat of the kitchen fire for the child, and she was massaging the little girl’s ice-cold feet and hands with her own broad fingers.
The doctor’s examination took only a few minutes. He had seen these symptoms many times before among the poor and malnourished, as this child clearly was. “Consumption,” he told Cook grimly. “It’s taken her in the lungs.”
“Will she survive?” asked the Cook, who was terribly soft-hearted under her gruff exterior.
“Only time will tell. She needs rest, warmth, and nourishment. Here, give her these pills to build up her strength, three a day, and feed her on rich beef broth until she can take solid foods. Give her a few drops of this”—here he pulled a small glass vial from his voluminous pockets—“every two hours till the fever breaks. I’ll stop back in tomorrow to see how she is doing. If you need me sooner, just send a message.”
“Thank ye, Doctor. Now ye mustn’t ride back all the way to town on an empty stomach. Sit ye down and have some ham and cheese, along wi’ a cup of my good ale.”
* * *
As it happened, Hannah not only survived but thrived under Cook’s care.
Cook called her “my little pet,” and indeed she followed Cook around the kitchen all day like an adorable puppy. She did little task
s for Cook, stirring pots, sweeping the kitchen hearth with a little broom, polishing pieces of silver till they shone.
In particular, she liked to help Cook as the plump, motherly woman made one of her complicated recipes. Hannah was full of curiosity. Why did bread dough rise? Why did boiling water make bubbles?
Cook loved explaining things to her, and the intelligent little girl listened carefully to her every word. The rest of the kitchen staff smiled to watch the pair confer together like two old professors.
One day, Hannah asked Cook, “Could we make the letters?”
“Whatever do ye mean, child?”
Hannah explained how Missus Vi used to make biscuits shaped like letters, so Hannah could practice her spelling and learn new words.
“Why, what a lovely idea! Was this Missus Vi your mother, then?”
Hannah thought for a little while. “No, Mama was my mother. But Missus Vi was my best friend. She died,” the little girl said matter-of-factly. “In the workhouse. I think she must have starved to death.”
Cook was shocked to hear a sweet little girl express horrors so calmly. Not for the first time, she wondered where the abandoned child had come from, and what sort of life she had led before Cook took her in.
But no matter. She was Cook’s little pet now, a chatty, charming little imp, and Cook would let no more harm come to her.
* * *
It was late summer. The Duke and Duchess were returning to Gresham Manor, having spent their summer among the aristocracy of St. Petersburg.
The Duchess’s trip to Prussia with Lady Henrietta the prior summer had borne fruit. Lady Henrietta had met and enchanted a Prussian prince, himself a first cousin to the Tsar of All the Russias, and this summer her family had accompanied her to Prussia for the wedding.
No one was surprised at Lady Henrietta’s elevation to yet loftier heights of nobility. She was so beautiful that the title of Princess seemed to be hers by right. And the Prussian Prince was a pleasant enough fellow, by all accounts.
He was a good bit older than Lady Henrietta, and somewhat stodgy in his ways, but tremendously wealthy. He was profoundly infatuated with his beautiful young bride-to-be, in the manner of some older men.
She had him wrapped around her little finger already. In the general opinion of the haut ton, Lady Henrietta had made a wise choice.
Thankfully, the Prussian Prince was too far from England to ever have heard any rumors calling Lady Henrietta a bit ‘fast’.
And of course, whenever she might travel home to England for a visit, Lady Henrietta would take social precedence over most of her noble English friends, as a Princess would have a perfect right to do. The Duke suspected, a little cynically, that his sister was looking forward to that.
Lady Henrietta had a splendid summer wedding at the Prince’s gilded hundred-room dacha. The Tsar and many of his Grand Dukes and Grand Duchesses attended. A number of other crowned heads traveled to see the Tsar’s first cousin marry. Even England’s Prince Regent honored them by making the lengthy journey.
Of course, Lady Henrietta’s immediate family were there, including her brother, the Duke of Gresham, her sister-in-law the Duchess, and the Duchess’s father. Lady Daphne, the bride’s sister and wife to that rising ecclesiastical star, the Bishop of Cornwall, was the bride’s honor attendant.
The wedding had taken the Duke and Duchess away from Gresham Manor for most of the summer. Now they would stay in Gresham till early fall, when the London Season would again begin.
The Duke dreaded returning to Gresham Manor. It would no longer be the tranquil haven it was last summer, a harmonious place where the rhythms of man and nature moved in slow synchrony. The Duchess and Mr. Coleman would shatter the place’s gentle peace.
By now, the hostility of the Duchess and her father to the Duke was barely hidden. As far as the father and daughter were concerned, this was their house, kept alive by their money, and they merely permitted the Duke, a worthless parasite, to live there.
Once, Mr. Coleman bluntly said as much to the Duke. The Duke had wanted to host a small dinner party for some of the minor gentry living in the area, many of whom had been the Duke’s childhood friends.
He would have included his old schoolmate, Sir Reginald Smyth, K.C., once a charity boy, now a respected barrister who had been knighted for his service to the Crown. The town magistrate and his wife would have been invited, and a few baronets who held land around Gresham.
“Absolutely not,” the Duchess ruled. “Father, have you noticed that My Lord husband only feels comfortable socializing with those who are his inferiors in rank?”
Yes, that’s probably why I married a nobody like you. The Duke permitted himself some dark, sarcastic humor in his own private thoughts.
“Yes,” Mr. Coleman agreed. “But what His Grace fails to recognize is that it’s my money, my dear, that keeps him fed at this very table. I have no interest in feeding his bloodsucking friends, as well.”
The Duke’s face burned. It was not true, of course. The Coleman money helped immensely with day-to-day expenses. But it came nowhere near to approximating the vast wealth, held in land and other illiquid assets, that was owned by the Dukedom.
Thank goodness the estate was entailed. Should the Duke die, he had no wish for the Duchess or her grasping, loathsome father to receive more than the small pittance the law would reserve for his widow.
It was with dark thoughts like these that the Duke was roaming restlessly through the halls of his own house, when he came upon a pretty little girl in servant’s garb.
He had no idea who she was—one of the maids’ children, perhaps?—but she clearly knew him to be the Duke. She curtsied with surprising grace—someone must have been teaching her—then spoiled the effect by giggling and running off.
Before she turned away, however, he caught a glimpse of her piquant little face. Her eyes were beautiful, one golden brown like topaz, one glittering green like jade.
Unique eyes.
Joanna’s eyes.
He was so startled he had to grab the wall for support, afraid he would fall over from shock.
* * *
Who was the child? He needed to know.
His valet said the little girl worked in the kitchen. The story he had heard was that she was some nameless orphan abandoned on the Manor doorstep, sick and nearly dying till Cook took her in and nursed her back to health.
Armed with this information, the Duke visited his old friend Cook in her kitchen empire. Over a cup of hot tea—for Cook had always loved to have ‘the young Master’ visit her domain—the stout old lady confirmed the valet’s gossip.
“She’s like a little angel, sent to us from heaven. The most beautiful child I’ve ever laid eyes on,” Cook said.
Seeing something scurry in the hall outside the kitchen, Cook called the child in. “Come, little one. His Grace the Duke would like to meet ye.”
Once again, the Duke was startled to look into the child’s eyes, which were identical with those of Joanna. Her hair was lighter than Joanna’s—closer to a dark auburn, like his own. Her whole little being radiated charm and energy.
“How old are you, little girl?”
“Eight,” the child responded.
“You must say ‘Yer Grace’,” Cook chided gently.
“Eight, Your Grace,” the child repeated dutifully. But her bright eyes overflowed with suppressed mirth.
“Eight years old. It sounds like you know your numbers, then.”
“Oh, yes, Your Grace. And all my letters, too.”
“My, my. A smart little girl,” said the Duke, who was charmed by her. “And do you know your name, smart little girl?”
“Yes, Your Grace. It’s ‘Hannah Bagley,’ Your Grace.”
Bagley. I wonder! But Joanna used to say it was a very common gypsy name. With her coloring, the girl could indeed be some relative of Joanna’s, if not her own child.
She says she’s eight years old. But she looks a lot smaller, a
lot younger than that. Perhaps Joanna had a child out of wedlock with some other man?
No, I won’t believe that. Joanna would never abandon a child of hers on a doorstep. And even if it happened to be true, even if the father is a rival for Joanna’s love, the child’s parentage is not her own fault.
“Here, child,” the Duke said generously. “Would you like a nice gold coin?”
“Real gold? Oooh, yes!” She took the guinea piece the Duke gave her, turning it round and round to look at the face in the front and the inscriptions front and back.
“That’s the face of our King George III on the front of the coin. Now, will you keep that coin ever so carefully till you’re a little older?”
“Oh, yes, Your Grace.”
“Say thank ye, child,” urged Cook under her breath.
“Thank you, Your Grace. Ever so much!”
“You’re welcome, Hannah,” said the Duke.
He left the kitchen smiling. Meeting little Hannah had cheered him up immensely.
But still, he wondered who she was, and where she came from. Something in him was not going to rest until he found that out.
Chapter 29
An Inevitable Encounter
It would have been impossible, in a community as small as that of the Travellers, to hide that sick little Hannah was suddenly no longer among them. Maggie Mae handled the gossip: she explained to all who questioned her that Joanna, heartbroken but refusing to give up hope, had taken Hannah to the Outsiders for medical help.
Cormac sat with Maggie Mae one late summer evening, sipping whiskey and gently pressing her for details. Joanna, in a melancholy mood, had already gone to sleep that night, but Cormac remained with the old lady. There were a few things he was curious about.
“People can understand that she’d bring the little lass to the Manor for help,” Cormac pondered aloud. “But why leave her there among strangers? Why not stay with her child? It makes no sense, Maggie.”
Tamed By The Marquess (Steamy Historical Regency) Page 19