“Coward!” shrieked Teresa.
“I better go now.” Merry’s head bobbed up and down unctuously. “I’m just upsetting her.”
“Fine,” Lily said, unsheathing the blade and holding its glinting surface up to the candlelight, eyeing its lethal edge with satisfaction. It flashed wicked silver.
Avery felt his head swim.
Granted leave to flee, Merry fled.
“You’re not going to use that on her?” Avery whispered in horror.
“She won’t feel a thing,” Lily assured him and closed the door in his face.
For Avery the next hour seemed to last forever. Sporadic bouts of cursing were followed by long, tension-filled silences. On several occasions Avery was treated to graphic and imaginative vows regarding what Teresa would do to the fellow who’d impregnated her if he should ever have the misfortune to cross her path again.
Soon even these vociferous pledges ended and only Lily’s low, calm murmurs could be heard punctuated by sounds he associated with incredible exertion. He withdrew Karl’s watch from his pocket and noted the time and as he did so he wondered how many of Karl’s forefathers had marked the birth of their children by it. He wondered if he, too, would someday watch the minute hand creep around the ivory face accompanied to the sounds of Li—of his wife’s labor.
The door swung open. Lily stood in the doorway, holding a tiny parcel in her bloodstained arms. Behind her, Teresa lay on the bed, her eyes closed, her chest rising and falling in shallow breaths. His head swam.
“Here,” Lily said. “Hold the baby close, she needs to be kept warm.”
She? Avery peered down at the bundle Lily still held out. He couldn’t see anything. Certainly not something that resembled a “she,” not even a pre-she.
“I haven’t got the brazier ready for her yet.”
“What,” he asked, “are you going to bake her?”
She laughed—a sweet, sweet sound. “No. I’m going to set up a little bed before it for them, to keep them all toasty and warm. Usually we’d put them in the bread warmer in the oven but the oven’s gone cold.”
“Them?”
“Yes.” Lily beamed. “Teresa’s having twins.”
Teresa stirred in the bed behind Lily. She glanced over her shoulder. “Here. Take her and keep her close.”
Mutely, numbly, he accepted the tiny creature she placed in his arms. She rewarded him with an encouraging smile. “That was easy, wasn’t it? Next one seems to be taking his sweet time in making his appearance,” she confided, leaning closer. “But it’ll be fine. You’ll see.”
Why was she consoling him? It was just a baby, for God’s sake. He could hold a baby.
“Are you going to help me or stand about all night talking to that maaa—” Teresa bolted straight up in the bed and grabbing hold the iron rails on either side, threw back her head and howled.
“Teresa tells me she’s Irish,” Lily said. And on the enigmatic and casual comment closed the door on him.
Avery stared down at the baby’s dusky purple little face scrunched up like a badly darned sock. One of his palms engulfed her entire head and most of her upper body. He’d seen freshly whelped pups as big.
Carefully, he moved some of the linen from around her face. She wriggled and a tiny fist punched its way up from the loose cloth. In amazement, Avery stared at the minuscule hand, perfection in the sliver of nail tipping each minute fingertip, the wrinkled palm, the delicate wrist.
He bent his head nearer. Her lashes were no more than mayfly antennae, mere suggestions feathering a dusky rounded cheek. He closed his eyes and inhaled the warm, human scent of absolute newness, and touched her cheek. Downy warmth.
Her uniqueness, her singularity, the life he cupped in his hands staggered him with awe, suffused him with a primal need to shelter and protect. How much more urgent would that need be if this were his own child?
The door opened once more. Lily stood on the other side of the door, her face relaxed into a triumphant smile. In her arms she held another tiny infant.
He looked down at his charge. “If she were mine,” he said, “I’d do whatever necessary to protect her and keep her safe. No one would take her from me. Ever. I swear it.”
The smile died on Lily’s face. Her dark eyes went flat. Their truce had ended, the hostility and longing that were the cornerstones of their relationship obvious once more.
“As would I,” she said.
Chapter Twenty
By next morning the storm had ended. A fresh wind chased the tattered remnants of clouds, leaving behind a fresh washed sky. Lily took breakfast in the library with the door closed.
She’d revealed things to Avery Thorne that she’d never told another. She’d entrusted him with her reasons for her commitment to the women’s rights movement and her difficult decision not to marry. She’d been unprepared for his passionate reaction, his accusation that her decision was reckless and irresponsible and selfish—and by extension, so was her mother’s. He’d been so self-righteous, so immune to the meaning of a mother’s loss, and yet … she understood.
She stayed in the library through lunch.
She needn’t have bothered. Avery left the house well before dawn, arriving at Drummond’s door and offering his services in whatever capacity Drummond saw fit to use him—as long as it was strenuous, exhausting, and kept him away from the manor until after dark. Drummond gleefully obliged.
He sent Avery to work on a haying crew in the meadow behind the stables where he climbed the huge piles of hay, called rucks, and caught the hay tossed up to him from below, heaping it into an ever higher mountain.
For the next week Mill House was singularly quiet. Francesca took to her bedroom without offering any excuse or apology. Teresa kept Kathy and a tearfully penitent Merry busy admiring her babies. Evelyn, feeling obliged to keep Polly Makepeace company while her leg slowly mended, played hostess. Surprisingly, the two ladies began to look forward to their hours together. Their interest in promoting Lily Bede and Avery Thorne’s relationship for the moment was on hiatus as it was hard to orchestrate encounters between people who were rarely even in the house at the same time. Bernard kept to his own devices.
When Avery finally mastered his emotions he realized that in fleeing Lily’s presence he’d abandoned his young cousin to the company of women.
That being so, on the day before the Camfields’ party, Avery went in search of Bernard. The boy wasn’t in his room or in the library—his polite query through the closed door had been met with Lily’s terse, clipped reply—nor was he in the drawing room. Mrs. Kettle finally steered him to the attic above the second floor servants’ wing.
As he walked down the narrow servants’ hall he realized he would have to pass Teresa’s open door on his way to the pull-down ladder that ascended to the attic at the end of the hall. He approached warily, half-expecting Teresa to start flinging wet rags or something a fair deal sharper at his person.
From within her room he heard a trio of women cooing. Eyes riveted ahead, he strode by.
“Mr. Thorne!” Teresa’s voice snagged him a few feet from the ladder. She didn’t sound crazed. Still, one couldn’t be too careful. “Mr. Thorne, do come see the babies! After all, you as much as birthed them yerself!”
He could not let this rumor go unchecked. He retraced his steps and poked his head through the door. Teresa sat propped up by at least a half dozen pillows, an incongruous and matronly lace bonnet covering her hair, and a fluffy pink yarn caplet around her shoulders. Merry and Kathy, holding a baby apiece, sat on either side of her bed. All three ladies beamed at him.
He cleared his throat. “How are you, Teresa?”
“Oh, I’m fine, Mr. Thorne!” Teresa enthused, her fingers playing flirtatiously with the ribbon of her cap. “Come look at the babies. You all but delivered—”
“No,” he said firmly, taking a step into the room. “I did not almost do anything. Miss Bede delivered your babies. I sat outside.”
Teresa waggled her forefinger playfully. “Now, that’s not how I remember it, sir. You’re just being modest, is all. You were my pillar, you were. My tower of strength in my time of need. I’d only to look at you to know that I would be all right, that you wouldn’t let nuthin’ ’orrible ’appen to me.” Her eyelashes fluttered adoringly.
The woman was delusional. She’d been planning on filleting his private parts the last time she’d seen him. Obviously, there was no reason to continue the conversation.
“Lookit the babies, sir!” Merry chirruped brightly and thrust a little creature out at arm’s length for his approval. Kathy, giggling loudly, followed suit. He leaned over and gave each of the babes a cursory glance. They looked like tiny, animated turnips.
“Very nice,” he said.
“Would you like to hold one, sir?” Kathy asked.
The baby opened its little maw and wailed, a long, reverberating howl of dissatisfaction. He stared at her in bemusement, stunned that anything that little could be that loud. And red—her scrunched-up face was rapidly becoming aubergine colored. And mad—she let loose another howl of discontent. Obviously, she’d inherited her mother’s lungs.
Amazingly, Kathy didn’t appear to notice that the baby she held had turned into a banshee.
“Here.” She pushed the baby further into his face.
“No.” He lowered his voice. “No. I … I … my hands.” He pointed at one blameless member with the other and grimaced apologetically. “Dirty. Disgusting. Unfit to touch babies.”
All three of the maids’ faces fell. “Oh,” Teresa said disappointedly and then shrugged. “Well, later then.” “Yes,” he agreed, “later. Nice, er, nice babies.” He nodded in Teresa’s direction and promptly escaped, being halfway up the stairs before they could recall him.
He heard Bernard before he saw him. Grunting, the boy was dragging an enormous yacht’s telescope toward one of the windows beneath Mill House’s deep eaves.
Avery looked around. The attic was surprisingly free of clutter containing only a few well rummaged steamer trunks; an armoire missing a front door panel; a battered sideboard; and a great, musty-looking four-poster improbably set up in the center of the room.
Bernard, oblivious to his presence, had by now situated the telescope in front of the window and was absorbed in adjusting the eyepiece.
“Hallo, Bernard,” Avery greeted mildly, approaching the nook the boy had created for himself. An upturned butter churn acted as an end table, stacks of books banked a battered armchair, and a ceramic jar—from which arose a steam redolent of chicken soup—stood by Bernard’s feet.
The boy looked up, caught back a start of surprise, and grinned his welcome. “Cousin Avery! I say, I thought you were out with Drummond’s men again. I was just going to try to find you with this.” He patted the monstrous old telescope affectionately.
“Come here often, do you?” Avery indicated the evidence of dozens of sandwiches in the gnawed over crusts and crumpled oiled paper wrappings littering the area around his chair.
“Yes. I ’spect I do,” Bernard said. “Seems silly, doesn’t it? I mean, I so look forward to being with my family and then once I’m here it’s so different from what I’m used to that I have to take myself off sometimes.”
Avery understood. He’d felt the same way when he was a child, craving the days at Mill House and yet needing the hours of solitude in which to absorb the deeds of the day: every detail, every aroma, every inch of the place. It hadn’t been until his adulthood that he’d learned to be comfortable with others, and then only a few, boon companions. Friendships had never come easily for him, and the few he had he’d treasured. Karl’s somber face flickered through his memory.
He wished he could have saved him. Sometimes late at night he would replay the day of his death, rechart their course over the Greenland snowfields, question why Karl had been on his right rather than his left, whether he should have insisted they go in single file.
Guilt came then, an insidious visitor poisoning his thoughts, denying him sleep, mutating his affection for Karl into a painful encumbrance. Then he would read Lily’s letter, a zenith of cool compassion and unerring wisdom.
Only all her letters, including the one that had meant so much, had misrepresented the woman.
She wasn’t infallibly wise, after all. She was far too human in her failings. She’d chained herself to a dead woman’s grievances and made a crusade of her mother’s pain. There was no room in her heart for him. He’d never hold the place of importance in her life that she’d come to hold in his.
“Of course, you’re always welcome,” Bernard said. “I mean, it’s not really mine to welcome you to but—” Avery gazed at the boy uncomprehendingly before realizing that Bernard had misread his silence.
“Does that prick?” Avery asked, knowing that as Horatio’s heir, the boy had more right to Mill House than either Lily or himself.
“Oh!” Bernard blinked in surprise. “No!”
Relief washed through Avery. He’d have had to convince Lily to give the boy the place should he want it, but then, should he want it, as Horatio’s primary heir he could afford to buy it from Lily.
“I mean,” Bernard went on, “it’s a jolly pleasant sort of place but if truth be told, I fancy a more urban setting myself. No rough and tumble existence for me.
“Really?” Avery considered his cousin. He’d assumed the lad to be like him at that age: eager for adventure, a chance to prove himself, test his physical courage. “You might find you enjoy the ‘rough and tumble existence’ given the opportunity.”
“Definitely not. Not that I don’t admire you profoundly. Your adventures are all the crack and terribly bully, but not the sort of thing I’d fancy. A dip in the old mill pond is one thing but wrestling crocodiles in the Nile is another.”
He was telling the truth. There was not the slightest bit of chagrin in his expression or tone.
“What do you want to do, Bernard?” Avery asked, sitting down on the arm of the chair.
The boy’s head dipped shyly. “I’d like to be an actor.”
“An actor?” Avery asked in astonishment.
“Yes,” Bernard said. “I should like to try on any number of roles, hundreds of different men, hero and villain. Someday, I might even write plays. I think I could write a decent sort of play.” Chagrin touched his smile. “You think it’s foolish, don’t you?”
“No,” Avery said carefully.
It wouldn’t have been his choice but after his own youth and the years of Horatio’s bullying he knew he would never try to force another into a prescribed mold. Whatever Bernard wanted, he’d stand behind him in his seeking it. “It’s never foolish to work toward something. It’s only foolish to strive for something you haven’t a chance of attaining.”
He frowned uncertain of whether he spoke of his desire for Mill House, Lily’s desire for Mill House, or his desire for Lily. He could not deny it any longer. She was in his heart. He’d always accounted himself an honest man and he would be honest with himself.
He leaned over and rubbed the glass window with his sleeve. From this vantage one could see most of the Mill House property. Below them the apple orchard spread in a wedge from the mill pond. Beyond, sheep bloomed like ripe cotton in a green pasture. Avery looked south where hay rucks the size of small houses dotted the field close to the stables.
He’d always thought of this place as his. His gaze traveled toward the paddock in which a dappled gray, sway-backed nag chomped contentedly. And Lily Bede thought of this as hers.
“Your ambitions are worthy, Bernard,” Avery said. “Mine are not so laudable. I’ve allowed myself to be forced into a competition with a woman whose future depends on acquiring the one thing in the world I’ve ever wanted.”
“I don’t see that you had a choice.”
“There’s always a choice.”
“You won’t hurt her,” Bernard said quickly. “If you win, you won’t let anything bad happen
to her?”
He should have taken affront at the very suggestion, but the boy’s sincere concern for Lily could not be gainsaid. “I’ll do whatever needs to be done,” he said wearily. “She shan’t be displaced, I promise you that.”
“Have you”—the boy darted a quick glance at him and fitted his eye to the telescope lens before continuing—“have you given any consideration to my suggestion?”
“What suggestion was that?” Avery asked.
“That you and Miss Bede marry,” Bernard said. “It would solve so many problems.”
“I don’t think so.”
Avery shook his head. “We are as unsuited as oil and water, as bees and wasps, as fire and ice. I have little in the way of family, Bernard, but what I do have is irrevocably bound and represented by the name ‘Thorne.’ I am proud of that name. It represents something important to me, something worth sustaining. Miss Bede doesn’t give a rip for name or station or any of the things I hold dear. She’d burn the family archives for tinder and call it a fair use of wasted paper.”
“No, she wouldn’t.”
“She doesn’t value any of the things that I value.” He said the words to purge her from his heart and hopes. To make himself realize how futile his—his love was. “Lily Bede doesn’t value anything I am, anything I have done, anything I will do.”
“That’s not true.”
“Really?” Avery asked, his voice sounding desolate.
Bernard had risen, his young sallow face in stubborn lines. “Come with me.”
“Really, Bernard, I don’t much feel like—”
“Come with me.” His insistence so surprised Avery that he complied, trailing the lad slowly down the ladder, past Teresa’s closed door, out of the servants’ wing and into the abandoned corridors directly beneath his own rooms.
“Where are we going?” Avery asked.
Bernard didn’t answer, but simply led him through the empty wing until they reached a double set of doors leading into what Avery remembered was the ballroom. The boy disappeared inside.
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