Hearts in the Land of Ferns

by Jude Knight

  The explosions continued, battering their ears for several minutes at a time, dying to distant rumbles for a long moment, then returning to full force as the earthquakes kept coming.

  The cloud, now thousands of yards high, began to spread out from the column of fire, rapidly approaching across the sky towards Te Wairoa.

  "We need to take cover," Mr Berry said. He grabbed her hand, and she followed where he led, stumbling over snags on the bush floor and pushing between ferns. A sudden vicious wind snarled into them, and stones and great dollops of mud began to fall, battering at the arms they held up to protect their heads.

  Then, suddenly, they were in a dark space, and just in time, as the deluge thickened, drumming onto whatever protected them from above. When Mr Berry wrapped his arms around her, Lottie did not object but leant into his comfort.

  "It's an abandoned house," Mr Berry said into her ear so he didn't have to shout to be heard over the racket of the deluge of airborne missiles. "It's still solid. I hope it's strong enough to keep us safe."

  As the barrage continued, so did the same pattern of explosions and shakes: periods of sound and fury followed by brief lulls in which they could speak, raising their voices to be heard over the noise of the downfall.

  "I beg your pardon, Miss Thompson. I am taking liberties." Mr Berry was apologising, but not, Lottie noted, letting go.

  "I appreciate the comfort of being held, Mr Berry. Do you not think you should call me Lottie, since you are taking liberties?"

  She could hear the smile in his voice when he replied. "Lottie, then. For Charlotte? And I am Tad."

  Lottie shook her head. "For Otillie. At school, they used to call me Tillie, and I hated it. Is Tad short for Thaddeus?"

  It had been a long time since Tad had had a woman in his arms, and this one fit perfectly. A certain part of Tad's anatomy thought the danger they were in was of no account compared to the opportunity she presented. But she was a decent woman, and he was a scoundrel to even be thinking such things when all she sought was comfort. But she had asked him a question.

  "Yes. Thaddeus." And before he'd thought about it, he told her the secret that had risen yesterday to confront him. "I chose the name myself when I left England, and I've been Thaddeus Berry for the past two decades."

  She waited through the next round of noise and its onslaught of stones and mud. In the next comparative lull, she didn't ask the question he expected, instead saying simply, "How lovely to be able to sail away from your past, Tad. Or perhaps I am misjudging, and you left behind people you missed."

  "Not many. One aunt. My next younger brother. I was angry with him at the time, but I've just found out he didn't do the thing for which I was blamed."

  Lottie heard what he didn't say. "You let yourself be blamed because you thought you were protecting him? Did you get sent into exile, Tad? I beg your pardon. It is not my business."

  "I'd like to tell you, if you'd like to hear." He probably shouldn't share his family's dirty laundry with a stranger, but he was burning to talk to someone who would understand, and somehow, he thought he could trust her. "It is not a particularly pretty tale, but we are going nowhere until this is over."

  "If you wish."

  In between explosions, waves of missiles, and occasional stronger shakes that silenced him while she clutched him for support, he told her what he'd never shared with anyone but Atame. And much use that was, since his partner found pakeha ways incomprehensible and said so.

  "Where should I start? My name, perhaps. My brother Sextus and I invented the name Thaddeus Fartleberry. The school thought the Honourable Mr Fartleberry was a benign uncle, whose letters sent train tickets and instructions for the two of us to be sent to whichever part of the country we could manage to invent in our fertile imaginations and afford with our limited purses. Father thought Fartleberry was a school friend's parent, one indulgent and foolish enough to want extra boys cluttering his home and eating his food."

  Tad had begun his career in business to fund Fartleberry holidays, waking before dawn to creep from the school down to the town to buy penny buns fresh from the oven and hawk them around the dormitories for a penny ha'penny.

  "You did not want to go home to your father for the holidays?" Lottie asked.

  His shudder was probably answer enough, but he wanted her to understand the reason. "It was no home, Lottie. Let me tell you my name and see if you can guess what my other brothers were called? I was christened Quintus."

  "And your brother is Sextus, so Latin numbers for all of you?"

  "Primus, Secundus, Tertius, Quartus, all the way to Septimus. Seven sons. Father's proof of virility and the strength of his line. Numbered, because we weren't people to him but pawns in his grand plan. Primus to inherit and to breed, Secondus for the army, Tertius for the church, Quartus as our eldest brother's steward, and the rest of us to be dispersed to Father's advantage. All gone now, except me and Six. Man proposes; God disposes, my Auntie Em would have said."

  "She's the one you miss."

  Tad nodded, then remembered she couldn't see him. "Yes. My mother's sister, a wealthy widow who was not dependent on my father. Fartleberry holidays always began or ended at her house. I think she suspected we did not have Father's permission, but she never gave us away, and I had no idea she knew about Fartleberry until she suggested taking his name so Father's control couldn't follow me overseas."

  "It worked?" Her voice squeaked at a fearsome barrage on their tenuous shelter. He stroked her hair, silently saluting her courage.

  "It worked well, though I shortened it to Berry soon enough." Within months, Tad's private joke with his younger brother had ceased to be funny in the foul mouths of the sailors and then miners with whom he earned his daily bread.

  "I suppose you leaving England was not in your father's grand plan."

  "You were right the first time, Otillie. I was exiled. My father didn't count on my brother Primus being unable to get his wife with child. After ten years, Father was looking around for brood mare for Secundus when Evangeline attempted to creep into my bed. I refused her, but when Auntie Em wrote later to say she was carrying, I assumed one of my other brothers had provided the wherewithal to continue the line. I don't blame her. Father was cruel to those who failed him, as he would have seen it."

  He said nothing through the next lull, thinking about the miserable house his Father ruled so harshly.

  Lottie had clearly been turning over all that he'd said. "You assumed it was Sextus?"

  "I did. She was always making up to him, leaning on his arm and patting his cheek. Primus thought she was being motherly, since she was fifteen years his senior. He was only sixteen, Lottie, and she a woman in her thirties, but there was nothing motherly about the way she fondled his thigh under the cover of the table when she sat between us, nor about some of the things I overheard her whisper to him. She knew I would never say anything to betray Sextus."

  "You couldn't tell her husband?"

  He shook his head, more in bemusement at his seventeen-year-old self than in negation. "Primus was my father's shadow. He would have told Father and Father would have beaten Evangeline and Sextus. I told Sextus he had to stop. I told Evangeline to leave Sextus alone. She set me up to get rid of me, and I fell for it like a fool."

  Lottie said nothing, but the hands she had wrapped around him firmed, pulling herself closer into his side, more in comfort than in fear.

  "She sent me a note. And, oh, it was carefully worded. We had to meet to discuss how I felt about her. She couldn't have the family torn apart by what was between us. They found it in my room after..." He trailed off. He had never again been so naive.

  The onslaught above thickened again making talking impossible, and he was grateful for the respite.

  "You were caught with her?" Lottie asked, once the noise subsided a little.

  "In the garden. By Primus and Father. She threw herself at me when she heard them coming. It must have looked very bad. She claimed she h
ad been fighting off my attentions for weeks."

  "And, of course, they believed her and not you."

  That didn't need an answer. It had been the worst beating of his life, and he couldn't think how to defend himself without accusing Six.

  "I am so sorry, Tad."

  "It's ancient history. And Evangeline did me a favour. I would have stayed there under Father's thumb forever. Instead, I've had the world and my freedom. If I'm sorry for anything, it's that I didn't take Six with me."

  Not that he'd been given the option. Quartus had been the only one to stand by him, and Six's defection had hurt until yesterday's revelations put a new light on what happened. Quartus had taken Tad to Auntie Em as soon as he was recovered enough to move, and that was the last he'd seen of any of his brothers.

  Until yesterday.

  Overhead, the roof beams groaned. "Are we safe, Tad? Will it hold?" Before he could answer, he felt her shake her head under his resting chin, and when she spoke again, she had imposed an iron calm on her voice. "No, of course we are not safe. Forget I said anything. We shall wait, and pray, and hope."

  "Let's move into the corner, my dear, where the walls may support enough roof for us to survive." He suited actions to word, helping her to her feet, and together, they stumbled further into the room, away from the gap by which they'd entered. The flashes of light as missiles fell outside did not illuminate their refuge, but they at least gave a direction to avoid.

  5

  Tad settled into the corner, a shoulder on each wall. A cupboard to his left meant there was not enough room for them side by side, so he pulled Lottie onto his lap. She didn't resist, but once again wrapped her arms around him. He felt cold, and she was shivering herself, as he could clearly tell.

  "Lottie, sit up for a moment. I'm going to open my jacket so I can wrap it around you and we can share body heat."

  Lottie unbuttoned her own coat, and when Tad welcomed her back into his arms, wrapping his jacket around her, she tucked the sides of her coat as far around him as she could. How long had it been since any man had hugged her? Anyone at all, in fact? She would enjoy it while she could, this time out of the quiet despair of her life. It seemed very likely they would not live to see dawn, and she would at least die in comforting arms, even if they belonged to a stranger.

  Though he felt less of a stranger now that he'd shared his story.

  "My own exile was to Yorkshire," she told him, "but the reason was the same. Circumstances that looked black for me but were not what they seemed, and a relative who lied."

  He rested his cheek on her hair, murmuring a sound she took as encouragement to continue. Talking helped keep her from panic, and besides, his gift of his past deserved a fair return.

  "I made my debut with my cousin, Rebecca. No. I need to start earlier than that. My brother and I were raised by our uncle and his family. And I will say that they always treated us well, though our parents had left little for our keep. Most of what we had went to send my brother to university, but my aunt said I should have my chance, and firing off me and Rebecca in the same year would be a saving."

  The roof groaned again and something broke, bringing an avalanche of debris through the resulting hole. They felt the rush of displaced air, but nothing reached their corner, and after a moment, Lottie caught her breath and picked up her story.

  "My aunt had relatives in the gentry, my uncle was manager at a bank and comfortably well off, and they expected Rebecca to make a good match, not least because she was beautiful and knew how to charm. Though charm did not get her the London Season she wanted. She talked about catching a duke, or an earl at the very least, but her father told her he would not gamble on such an unlikely outcome, and she should find herself a husband within her own class."

  Lottie wriggled to settle herself more comfortably. Tad seemed to have something hard in his pocket.

  "So, we were allowed to go to a few parties in Brighton, where we lived, and then Uncle and two other merchants hired the ballroom at a hotel and held a ball to launch me and their daughters. And it was at that ball, Rebecca met him."

  "I assumed there was a him," Tad said.

  "He was the eldest son of an earl, you see, and Rebecca lost her head. She was a year younger than I, only seventeen, and used to getting what she wanted. And she wanted him. Or at least she wanted his title and his social position."

  Tad shifted, tucking his knees to one side and his feet under him, and lifting her to sit on the top of his upper thigh. "There. That'll be more comfortable for you. What did he want, Lottie?"

  "Relief from boredom, I think. I found out later that he'd been sent down from Cambridge and had been sent to Brighton to rusticate with his older sister, who was mother of one of the other debutantes. This can't be comfortable, Tad. If you spread your legs, I can sit on the ground between them."

  "That might not be the best..." Whatever argument he was about to make was interrupted when another roof beam collapsed, and he must have decided in favour of Lottie's sensible decision, for he made no more protests as they rearranged themselves. "He courted her, I assume," he said.

  "So it appeared." He went to every party Rebecca attended, visited at the house, flattered Lottie's aunt, and wrote terrible poems to Rebecca's eyes, which she giggled at and kept in her prayer book.

  "Rebecca and her mother thought a marriage proposal was imminent. Rebecca—did not keep him at a proper distance."

  "He compromised her?"

  "He seduced her." Lottie had been asleep when Rebecca left their shared bedroom late at night, but was awake and waiting for her cousin when the girl returned, creeping in the door, her face both gleeful and guilty. It was not as pleasant as she'd been led to expect, she’d told Lottie, but Lord Fernhame would have to marry her now. "She crept out to meet him, and he bedded her. And then never called again."

  "What a cad. Your cousin must have been beside herself. What did her parents say?"

  "Nothing. We didn't tell them."

  Lottie had wanted to confide in Rebecca's parents but had succumbed to her cousin's pleas and threats. If only she had stood firm, made a clean breast of it to her uncle, then none of the rest of it would have happened. As it was, Rebecca set out to trap her seducer. And Lottie got caught in the trap.

  "So, what happened? How did you become involved, Lottie?"

  Despite their cramped position, despite a sudden tattoo on the roof as another onslaught of volcanic missiles found them, Lottie nearly purred at the warmth and concern in his voice.

  "It was a party, amateur theatricals. I managed to slip away. There was a book in the library that I'd started the last time we were at that house."

  Tad's voice held a smile. "You made a habit of reading during parties?"

  "No one ever noticed. Why would they? I'm not ugly, or at least I don't think so, though I am middle-aged. But even at eighteen, I was not pretty. And certainly, I could not hold a candle to Rebecca."

  "I find you—"

  He was going to perjure himself for the sake of her feelings, and it wasn't necessary. Lottie knew her limitations. "I had just settled myself to read when Rebecca's lover arrived." She would not repeat, had never told anyone, the extremely coarse suggestion he had made, bracketed by comments about his boredom and how it outweighed her unprepossessing appearance.

  "His assumption I was there to meet him was explained when Rebecca turned up, just as I was fighting him off. And before we could stop her screaming, Rebecca's mother arrived with our hostess, the biggest gossip in town."

  "You told them what happened?"

  "They didn't believe me. The viscount produced a note, unsigned, inviting him to an assignation. Rebecca burst into tears and accused me of trying to steal the man she loved. The viscount told her and all present that he had no intention of dishonouring his family by marry a cit. And I was taken home and locked in my room until my brother could be sent for."

  "And you waited for your cousin to tell the truth, but she denied everyth
ing."

  "We had never been close, Tad. But I thought we were friends."

  "And that's how you came to be with Mrs Bletherow. Why did your brother let that happen? Didn't he believe you?"

  "He believed me. He took me home to his rooms and wrote to our mother's cousin in Yorkshire to ask for refuge for me, then challenged the viscount to a duel." Twenty years of misery clogged her throat. She had begged Barnabas just to take her away, to let the insult go. But he would not.

  Tad's hands around her body tightened in sympathy. "Ah. It turned out badly, I take it."

  "Not as you might think." Lottie didn't try to stop the tears. "Duelling is illegal. They were arrested and thrown into goal. The viscount was out the next day, his fine paid. It took me days to sell everything of value I had, and by then, Barnabas had contracted goal fever. He died." And by the time he was dead, Lottie had sold all of value in his rooms to pay for the doctor who gave no help and the medicine that would not work. She had just enough left for a ticket to Yorkshire, where Cousin Myrtle took her in and gave her a home. And there she had been ever since, until Myrtle took it into her head to see the world before she was too old to travel.

  "And so, I went to live with Myrtle and have been content, on the whole."

  And the uncle and aunt abandoned her, ruined by their daughter's lies and a conscienceless scoundrel, bereaved, poverty stricken. "I have been content, on the whole." Tad was moved beyond words, her gracious acceptance casting sharp relief on his anger at the players in his own tragedy. And his break with his family had given him freedom, not enslavement to the whims of a cantankerous widow.

  He rubbed his cheek gently on the soft hair that tickled his chin. She was wrong about her appeal. She might not have the kind of spectacular beauty that attracted fawning courtiers, but she was pretty. If she was his, he would dress her in colours that better became her. Green, perhaps, to bring out the green flecks in her eyes.