RED, RED ROSE
Marjorie Farrell
Prologue
“Val…Val, it is time to go.”
The boy was brought out of his reverie by the familiar voice. He was in his mother’s garden, standing in front of her favorite rosebush with his eyes closed. If he didn’t open them, if he just wished hard enough, then she would be there, with her garden shears, cutting the dark red blossoms and dropping them into her basket. She would turn to him and smile, he would take her hand, and he would know that the last month had been only a nightmare.
But when he opened his eyes, she was still gone. Oh, he had wished and prayed hard. And cried even harder in his bed at night. But nothing would bring her back. The roses swayed in the breeze, waiting for her, as he did.
“Val! We will miss the stage.”
The boy reached out and snapped off a half-blown rose. He pulled out his pocket handkerchief and carefully wrapped the flower and put it in his jacket pocket. When he got to his aunt and uncle’s, he would press it in one of his books. It was the only thing of his mother’s that he had.
Nancy would have disagreed. Nancy, who had been their maid of all work, could have told him that he had more of his mother than he knew: her gray-blue eyes, her dark brown hair, her strength, and her warm heart. In fact, as he walked around the corner of the cottage to where Nancy was waiting, she nearly started crying again at the thought of losing all that was left of her beloved mistress. But she had to be strong for the boy.
* * * *
They were just arriving at the King’s Head when they heard the coachman striking his yard of tin. It all happened quickly—the coach arriving, the bustle of passengers getting on and off, the coachman grabbing Val’s small bag—that neither Nancy nor the boy had time to do more than frantically hug each other before he was in the coach and looking down at her with tear-brightened eyes.
“You will soon be happy in your new home. Your aunt Martha will be like your mama. And you will learn a trade.”
“I’ll miss you, Nancy.” The boy’s lower lip was trembling.
“And I’ll miss you, my brave boy. Don’t forget your Nancy.”
The coach had started to move. “I won’t forget you, Nancy,” he called back to her. “I’ll never forget.”
* * * *
It only took a day to reach Westbourne. The boy was out and handed his luggage, and the coach was off before he knew what was happening.
He waited a full hour, a forlorn little figure in the new black suit bought for his mother’s funeral. He had what he guessed was a good sum of money in the old purse tucked in his bag, but it was to go to his aunt and her husband, for taking him in. The local solicitor had told him that and so he was afraid to pull it out and buy himself supper. Finally he was getting chilled and made himself go across the street and into the inn.
The innkeeper looked down over the counter at him and said with rough humor, “We don’t serve no midgets here.”
“I am looking for the Burtons’ house, please, sir. George Burton is a blacksmith. They were going to meet me.”
“George Burton, eh? And who might you be?”
“I am Valentine Aston, Mrs. Burton’s nephew, sir.”
The man lifted his eyebrows. “Valentine, is it?” he said sarcastically. “Well, Master Valentine, I wouldn’t be expecting George Burton to be a-meeting anyone. You had best get yourself there. Come, I’ll point the way,” said the innkeeper, somewhat sorry he had teased the boy. There was an air of sadness about him, as well there should be, if he was going to the Burtons’.
“There, just past the livery stable, is the Burtons’ shop. And their house is right after.”
The boy whispered a thank you and, picking up his bag again, trudged down the road. It wasn’t a long way and he found the house easily enough.
It wasn’t a large house, not as nice as his mother’s cottage. But it was to be his home. And, he guessed, smithing would be his life. He squared his small shoulders and knocked on the door, first tentatively and then harder.
The woman who opened it was older than his mother and the boy could see a resemblance. It was as though his mother had been a fresh, vivid watercolor and this woman was the same painting, only years later and very faded.
“I am looking for Martha Burton. I am her nephew.”
The woman’s face lit up and she invited him in. “You did find us yourself. George said you was old enough to. I wanted to meet you,” she confided, “but George said if you was old enough to travel alone, you could make your own way. And George was too busy himself to go after you.”
The boy got the impression that some of what his aunt was saying were her own words, and some of them her husband’s. But her welcome seemed genuine enough; he was just relieved to have arrived and comforted by her resemblance to his mother.
* * * *
“Valentine! Valentine Aston! Wot kind of a name is that, boy?” George Burton wasn’t a tall man, but with his red face and huge hands and loud voice, he was frightening enough.
“I don’t know, sir. My name, sir,” said the boy.
“It were his father’s name. Well, one of his father’s names, George,” said his wife placatingly.
“His father! The boy’s a bastard, Martha. He has no father.”
The boy blanched. He had heard the word “bastard,” of course. He knew what it meant. It meant shame and ridicule for Samuel, a local farmer’s brother. He had asked his mother about it after hearing the farmer call his brother the squire’s bastard in a fit of temper. She had sat him down and carefully explained to him that some people had two parents who were married before they had children, but that some parents didn’t marry at all. “But whatever the parents had done, whatever mistakes they made, it had nothing to do with their children.”
“His father is the Earl of Faringdon, George,” Aunt Martha said. “Charles Richard Valentine Faringdon. He seduced my sister when she were visiting our mother’s brother. How do you think she lived all these years? Maintained a home? The earl sent her an allowance. Why would he do that if he weren’t the boy’s father?”
They had forgotten he was there. He had a father? He had thought his mother was the widow of a soldier and that his father was a very brave man who had died in the service of his country. His father had never married his mother? He was one of those shameful things people talked about, joked about?
“I don’t give a tinker’s damn who his father is, Martha,” growled the smith. “And you had better put on no airs, either, you little bastard,” he added, turning to Val. “You are lucky I am willing to take you in for your aunt’s sake. And you’ll be lucky to learn a trade from me. Now off with you. You’ll need to be up early at the smithy with me in the morning.”
Val had been imagining his new home, his new room; longing for a place where he would be alone at last and could put out his clothes and his three books and his tin soldiers that he received for Christmas last year. One of the soldiers he had imagined to be his father. He had fought up and down with that soldier, risking his life in many a battle.
When he reached the small attic room, he did take out his books and place them on a rickety table next to his bed. He pulled out his handkerchief and unwrapped the faded rose and placed it between the pages of the small leather-covered Bible his mother had given him. Then he took out the soldier. He grasped its head and twisted and twisted until the neck snapped. He took off his clothes, folded them carefully on the chair as Nancy had taught him, and climbed into bed, the headless soldier clutched in his hand. He lay there dry-eyed for hours until he fell asleep. And when he went to the smithy for the first time with George Burton, he dropped the two pieces of his soldier into the fire.
* * * *
Going fr
om his mother’s cottage to being George’s apprentice was like going from heaven to hell. The first two weeks, Val cried himself to sleep. The only good thing he could say about the man was that he was a genius at his trade. But he was a hard master and pushed the boy to the point of exhaustion.
Once his aunt spoke up in his defense, timidly asking her husband if he didn’t think he was working the boy a bit hard. “After all, George, he is only eight.” Burton’s response was to slap her and tell her not to be an interfering bitch. “I am not going to coddle the little bastard, Martha, just because he’s an earl’s by-blow.”
By the end of the first week, everyone in Westbourne knew that George Burton had been kind enough to take in his sister-in-law’s bastard. And by the second week, all the children delighted in taunting Val by calling him “Bastard Aston.”
* * * *
The first six months he thought he was going to die of heartbreak. His mother was dead. Her sister, who had some affection for him, was bullied and beaten by her husband into not showing it. The children in the village hated him, merely because of his birth and “fancy” name. And he was so tired all the time that his whole life was a blur of waking up, working in the forge, and falling into an instant sleep.
He was young and healthy, however, and began to adjust. He also began to enjoy part of the work, particularly watching George shape something intricate like a church screen. He hated George, but hating him didn’t mean he couldn’t admire the man’s talent and strength.
He tried not to think of his mother and earlier life. After a while, he began to get angry at her. Probably his father was this earl. How else could she have afforded their cottage? He had always believed his father’s pension supported them, but how much would a foot soldier leave anyway? If she had never been married and yet had had him, then she was a…. He couldn’t bring himself to say the word. But the children said it all the time. And his name? Why had she named him Valentine? Had she wanted people to know? Didn’t she care that it made his life miserable?
Underneath his anger, he loved and missed her. But he couldn’t afford to think of her too much. So he concentrated on surviving: getting enough rest, enough to eat, and avoiding George’s casual whacks and drunken punches.
By the time he had been there seven years, he was swinging the hammer himself and George allowed him to work on simple things. He had reached his adult height early and, had he not been smithing, perhaps he would have looked weedy. But the work developed his arm and chest muscles, so he was as well-built as he was tall. And the day he turned fifteen was the last day George Burton laid a hand on him. Val leveled him with one blow. “If you ever touch me again, drunk or sober, I will kill you,” he said, balancing the hammer in front of him with both hands. And both of them knew he could and he would.
* * * *
One day in late summer when Val was fifteen and a half, a well-sprung coach bearing a coat of arms on the door pulled up in front of the smithy. George had gone to the next town to buy nails and Val was in charge for the day. He watched curiously as the groom opened the coach door for a boy who looked about ten or eleven and a distinguished-looking older gentleman.
Val wiped his hands on his leather apron and stepped forward. “Can I help you, sir?” he asked the older man as he at the same time assessed the condition of the coach and team.
“I am…we are looking for George Burton.”
“Well, you have found his smithy but not him,” replied Val with a smile. “He is away and won’t be back until late this evening. I am his apprentice. What can I do for you?”
“We were looking for Mr. Burton or his wife to make inquiries about their nephew, as a matter of fact.”
“Their nephew?”
“Yes. I believe his name is Aston. Valentine Aston.”
Val hesitated. “I am Aston. What do you want with me?”
As soon as Val identified himself, the boy’s face lit up with a delighted smile. “I knew we would find him, Robinson!”
The older man placed his hand on the boy’s shoulders as if to calm him. He looked with barely disguised distaste at the young man before him, who stood, arms crossed, with no hint of obsequiousness. His face and hands were dirty, his sleeves rolled up, exposing his muscular arms, and his shirt soaked with sweat.
“What is your first name, Aston?”
“Valentine.”
“And your mother’s name?”
A subtle change came over Val’s face. “Who are you, and what has my mother to do with anything?”
“Please answer him,” broke in the boy.
Val looked down at the open, pleading face. He liked the boy. He didn’t know why, but he did.
“All right. I don’t see how it could hurt anything. My mother’s name was Sarah Aston. She died when I was eight and I came to live here. And what is it to you?” he added angrily.
The boy tugged at Robinson’s sleeve. “May I tell him?”
“Yes, my lord.”
“I am Charles Thomas Faringdon, Viscount Holme. Son of the Earl of Faringdon. We are brothers,” he added with a shy smile.
“Half-brothers,” intoned Robinson.
Val was too accustomed to hiding his feelings by now to allow any of his surprise and distaste to show. He just stood there looking expressionlessly at his two visitors and there was a long uncomfortable silence, until the boy said hesitantly, “Perhaps you didn’t know who your father was?” His face was flushed with embarrassment and he was looking down at the toe of his leather pump, which had a fine dusting of dirt on it.
“I’ve been told I am the earl’s bastard often enough,” Val replied harshly.
The boy’s face grew white as though he had been slapped and then flushed even redder. “I didn’t know I had a brother until just a few months ago,” he said softly. “I only found out after my mother died….” His voice trembled and when he finally lifted his eyes to Val’s face, Val could see the tears brimming. For one moment, Val was eight again and wanting his mother. It was as though in the boy in front of him he saw himself.
“It is hard to lose your mother,” Val said gently.
The boy only nodded.
“Well, now, my lord, you have met your brother,” said Robinson, his distaste at Val’s appearance obvious, “and now we may leave.”
“Oh, no, Robinson. Papa agreed that I could invite him home.”
“My lord,” protested Robinson.
Val waited a beat and then repeated the words. “My lord.”
“My name is Charles. We are brothers, whether you choose to acknowledge that or not,” he added with the dignity of one born heir to an earldom.
“I would say that you are the one doing the acknowledging, my lo—I mean, Charles,” replied Val with an ironic smile.
“I only hoped we could get to know one another…perhaps become like real brothers. I begged Papa to let me come.”
For all of a moment, when Val had first heard the boy’s name, he had experienced a wild hope that the earl had finally decided to acknowledge him, even had revealed some feeling for his eldest son. He despised his father, of course, for not marrying his mother, but perhaps they might have gotten beyond that. Now it was clear that the contact had only been made because of the young viscount’s whim. Yet there was something about Charles that pulled at him. He knew he was being foolish, but all he could think of was, He’s lost his mother.
“I could not leave the smithy even if I wanted to,” Val replied.
The boy’s face lit up. “Oh, Robinson is prepared to compensate Mr. Burton for your time.”
Perhaps it was his sympathy for the boy. More likely it was the desire to see the look on George Burton’s face when the earl’s man bought him out of a few weeks’ work that made him agree. Val nodded and said slowly, “All right. If George agrees, I’ll come.”
* * * *
Two days later, as the coach drew closer to Faringdon, Val wondered if it had been worth the look of consternation on George’s face w
hen approached by Robinson and the young viscount. George hated Val for the combination of noble blood with ignoble birth, and would have refused if the money hadn’t been so tempting. Greed won out, but George’s parting words had been, “Ye’ll be coming back full of yourself, I’m sure, but I’ll work it out of you.”
Val looked over to where Charlie—it had only taken a few hours in his brother’s company before he was calling him that—leaned against the squabs sound asleep. Robinson had kept his eyes resolutely on the landscape as it rolled by, clearly not eager to engage in any conversation with the earl’s bastard. Well, the earl’s bastard wasn’t particularly interested in speaking with such a stiff-rumped old bugger anyway, thought Val.
He hadn’t been able to avoid conversation with Charlie, though. He smiled to himself. The boy babbled like a brook, about his new mare and how Val would love Faringdon and he couldn’t wait to take him fishing in the river. He had a warm heart, this half-brother of his, Val had to admit. No one had shown him any interest or affection for so long that, like a fool, he’d let himself be moved by it. Well, it would be a short visit, for Val had mainly come for the opportunity to tell the earl just what he thought about a man who seduced and abandoned a woman like Sarah Aston.
* * * *
They arrived in the late afternoon and Charlie was out of the coach and up the front steps of the house before either Robinson or Val had stepped down. He was back almost immediately. “Father is out inspecting the south field,” he announced, a disappointed look on his face. “But that gives us a chance to clean up for dinner. He left word that he would be in the library at six.”
Val was standing there trying not to look the dumbfounded yokel as he took in the magnificence of his surroundings. The main part of the hall clearly went back to Tudor times, but the east and west wings were of more recent origin. Several footmen had come out to get the luggage. A dignified older man in black—whom, Val was embarrassed to confess to himself, he’d first thought was the earl when he had followed Charlie out—greeted them politely.
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