by Jude Knight
Her slight frown was doubtful, but she refrained from commenting, and Mrs Thorpe filled the awkwardness of her silence by declaring she would ask the shop assistant to cut off twenty yards, if dear Lalamani was absolutely certain it would not be too expensive.
Receiving Miss Finchurch’s assurance, she bustled off to make her purchases, leaving Philip to make his explanations. He took the high ground by speaking first. “Thank you for not exposing my title, Miss Finchurch. I hope to avoid the village either toadying to me because I’m the earl, or pursuing me with duns because my predecessors owed them money. And I really am here as an engineer.”
Her face cleared and she laughed. “I cannot blame you, and will support your deception, Mr Daventry. Do you make a long stay? I thought you would be back to your aqueduct.”
“I hope to be able to return once the weather is settled enough for the work to start again, but meanwhile I can use the time to find out what repairs the Hall needs. And you? I did not know you planned a visit to Feldon Roding.”
Miss Finchurch’s eyes sparkled and her lips curved beguilingly, but she did not speak whatever mischief had amused her, saying only, “My Aunt Hannah has lived here for fifty years, and has often written to me about the village. I expect to enjoy my stay, although…” She trailed off, her smile turning to a frown.
“Although?” he prompted, when it became clear she was not going to continue that sentence, but she just sent him another bright smile.
“Aunt Hannah is ready,” she said. “It has been lovely meeting you again, Mr Daventry.”
He followed her to the counter, and swooped on the large parcel before she could add it to her own load, tucking it under his less functional arm so he could reach for her basket with the useful one. “Please allow me to carry your parcels to your carriage,” he begged, to the amusement of both ladies.
“We are walking, Mr Daventry, and would not wish to take you out of your way.”
“On the contrary,” he rallied, “a walk is just what I need.”
Once he knew which direction they were walking, Lord Calne assured Lalamani and her aunt the house was barely out of his way at all, being a mere five minutes beyond the turnoff to the Hall.
Lalamani suggested he could surrender his load when they reached the half-collapsed tangle of wrought-iron that had once controlled access to the Hall’s main carriage way, but now merely wilted against the brick pillars on either side. Lord Calne insisted on escorting the ladies all the way home, and then accepted Aunt Hannah’s offer of a cup of tea.
The arrival of a representative of an earl sent Addy into a brief panic. The parlour, she told Lalamani, was the proper place for such an august personage, but she and Milly had been clearing the other rooms to give them a thorough clean, and the parlour was now full of furniture, drapery, paintings, and ornaments.
But Lord Calne assured Addy he would prefer to have his tea in the kitchen, if she would be so kind, for then he would feel at home, and he had not had a home since his mother died. Which set both Addy and Aunt Hannah fussing over him to make him comfortable, and Lalamani was torn between gratitude at his swift intervention and exasperation at his skilful management of the two older women. Yes, and Milly was a victim of his charm, too, sneaking peeks at him from the stool she reluctantly occupied after he insisted they all sit down, and blushing whenever he smiled in her direction.
The sooner he finished his cup of tea and his large helping of pound cake, the sooner he could take his leave and they could settle to their work, for Lalamani and Milly—with the enthusiastic support of Addy—were determined the whole house would be clean from the cellars to the attics before Christmas Eve.
Lord Calne accepted the second cup of tea Aunt Hannah offered, sipping it as he listened with every evidence of enjoyment to her stories of village life back when she was the rector’s wife. She had a storyteller’s gift for drama and pacing, and Lalamani was soon hanging on her words as much as she had when those stories arrived in letters. Gone was the anxious and diffident Aunt Hannah of today. As she talked about her life so long ago, her voice gained certainty and humour, her posture became confident, and Lalamani caught a glimpse of the warm, calm, loving rector’s wife who had mothered the whole parish side-by-side with her beloved husband.
Lalamani was astounded when Milly began lighting candles and Lord Calne suddenly looked up at the window and said, “It is getting dark!”
“Oh dear,” Aunt Hannah said, “I have kept you from your work.”
“You are too kind to say I have been an importunate guest, far outstaying my welcome,” Lord Calne replied. “But I beg you hold me excused, Mrs Thorpe. I was so absorbed in your stories I quite forgot myself.”
“You must not neglect your work for the earl, Mr Daventry,” Aunt Hannah scolded, and then cast a doubtful look outside.
“I will make an early start in the morning,” Lord Calne promised, “but for now I had best make my way back to the inn while it is still light enough to see my way.”
With a further exchange of mutual compliments, he disengaged himself from the kitchen and allowed Lalamani to usher him to the front of the house and out the door.
She locked the door behind him and slid the bolts, then rested her back against it, closing her eyes for a moment. For seven years, first in India and more recently in England, she had been courted and flattered by one man after another. She was not beautiful, and she was far too short, but she was passably pretty and, though merchant-born, she had the manners and training of a lady and her wealth covered a mountain of deficiencies. But none of her suitors tempted her to forgo her independence; none of them seemed to be aware of her mind or to care about engaging her in interesting conversation; not one could make her whole body tingle with just a smile.
Until now, she would have said, but Lord Calne was not a suitor. He could be, a treacherous voice whispered in the back of her mind. He needs your money. With a bit of encouragement… She shook her head but the thought would not be dislodged. What nonsense. As if she would want a husband she could purchase. As if Lord Calne would marry out of his class, even to save his estate. After all, heiresses were not unknown among the gentry, especially for a man as charming and kind as Lord Calne.
She pushed off from the door. A lot of fuss about nothing. Lord Calne would inspect his property tomorrow and then go back to London, and she would stay here and help her aunt. And the first step was to finish the cleaning.
Chapter Five
Three days of hard work saw a transformation of the main floor and the two occupied bed chambers. There was no disguising the shabbiness of the wall coverings and furnishings, but the ugly black swags were gone, bowls of holly leaves with their cheerful red berries brightened dust-free tables, and the woodwork gleamed.
Several times a day, their work was interrupted by visitors, locals who called to deliver gifts of food, examine the niece of their beloved ‘Old Rector’s wife’, and gossip about the earl’s man, who was spending every day at the broken-down old Hall.
“And not to hunt for treasure, like the last fellow,” they agreed, for periodically the previous earl had sent outsiders to dig in the gardens or haul down walls, seeking something, and what could it be but a treasure. This man, though had hired several of the local men to work on the Hall with him, and he was focusing on salvage, not destruction.
“And right grateful for the work they are, Miss,” one garrulous farm wife explained, “for with the enclosures and the taxes, it’s hard enough to feed a family, especially at this time of year. Always some as starve afore the spring sowing. Not like when Old Rector was alive.” She slid her eyes to Aunt Hannah and said no more.
Lalamani mentally measured what remained of her quarterly allowance against the cost of employing one or more of the locals. It had seemed a vast sum when she expected to pay only her own expenses and Milly’s wages, and would certainly stretch to firewood for every room they had in use and other necessities for Aunt Hannah and Addy. But the
two old ladies must have new garments, and her list of necessary repairs was growing room by room. Let alone refurbishment, though that might have to wait until after her twenty-fifth birthday. The house could be a very pleasant and comfortable place with a little work.
Aunt Hannah really needed a cook to take over the kitchen, a maid to assist with the housework, and someone to manage the garden and do necessary small repairs around the property. And a woman her age should not have to walk the two miles to the village, particularly on rainy days. But that would mean not just the cost of purchasing a gig and pony, and hiring someone to care for them, but also demolishing what had once been the stable and was now a pile of dangerous scrap, and building a new stable. Plus feed costs for both the animal and the stable hand.
Lalamani sighed, and started another list on a new page of her notebook.
Philip was also counting pennies. Most of his savings were invested up north with the consortium for whom he was building the aqueduct. Once he’d spent the absolute minimum needed to put what was left of the Calne holdings into marketable condition, he’d be left with a pittance until the canal started operating and earning.
He had hired local labour to help shore up sagging walls and make the roofs watertight over those parts of the buildings worth repairing. They were sullen to start with, and it didn’t take him long to discover they were suspicious of anyone connected with the earl. “Old ’un never did anything good fer us’n,” one of them said, as they began to relax around him. New ’un hasn’t been next nor nigh the place since the old ’un died near a year ago. Stands to reason we don’t expect much. Savin’ your presence, sir.”
Philip asked a few cautious questions, hoping to find out what had happened to the steward who vanished several years ago and the rents that hadn’t been paid since. He got more than he bargained for.
As he worked alongside them on shoring up a wall or building a temporary shelter over a pile of recycled lumber, one man after another told him about the poverty resulting from the local enclosure act, pushed through several years earlier by large landowners such as the earl and rector. Smallholders had been left with too little land to farm, and most had left the area, abandoning properties that had been in their families for hundreds of years.
Two of his workmen proved to be his own tenants, barely able to farm the land they held from him because his absent predecessor had refused to make needed repairs and improvements for the past thirty years. The absconded steward had been a local man worn down from years of acting as a buffer between the local people and the earl, who drained resources and income from his unwanted property but never answered the steward’s increasingly desperate appeals to put some money back in.
The men he had hired introduced him to others in the public room of the inn, and he spent his evening getting to know the local menfolk. Philip soon realised their expectations of the new earl might be low, but their hopes were high and had soared still higher on learning the earl had sent a man to repair the broken-down Hall.
“Stands to reason he plans to live here,” one of the men argued, “And then he’ll see for himself how things are, and will help us.”
Philip soothed his increasing guilt with a silent promise to find a buyer who would want to spend most of the year in the village, and would look after his people. Those who were left.
Opinions on the rector were divided on class lines. The prosperous local farmers, crafters, and shopkeepers praised him as a man of faith, whose rousing sermons and firm management of the parish finances were a stark contrast to his predecessor. “Good man, the Reverend Thorpe, I’m not saying other,” the innkeeper said. “But too soft on the poor. He’d give away the shirt on his back to a beggar would Old Rector Thorpe.”
Under their breath and behind the backs of their betters, the poorer men painted a different picture: of a harsh zealot who showed one face to those who supported him and another to those he considered beneath his notice. Philip’s disquiet increased at a casual reference to the quarterly rental owed to the earl and collected, since the steward left, by the local rector.
Chapter Six
On Sunday, Philip stood in the rear of the village church with other men he’d met during the week. “You could sit up there,” one of them said, pointing to a box pew on the other side of the tall pulpit. “That’s the Daventry pew, that is. And you’re a Daventry, aren’t you?”
Philip shook his head. “I’m more comfortable back here with you,” he answered, though he promised himself a closer look later. Already, he’d noticed Daventry tombstones in the cemetery he’d passed on his way in, and Daventry memorials on the walls. Once, long ago, the Daventrys had valued this village and sent down deep roots. He could feel them tugging at a part of him he hadn’t known existed. He had never belonged anywhere; had spent a lifetime roaming, first following his father from port to port, and later with the army.
“Home is not a place; it’s people,” his mother used to say. And with that his eye fell on Miss Finchurch, who was just entering the church with Mrs Thorpe, their maids behind them. The ladies made their way to the front of the nave, nodding and smiling at the gathered villagers as they passed.
Not long after they took their seats just under the pulpit, a man strode down the aisle, the academic robe he wore over his cassock billowing behind him. His identity was confirmed when he began to declaim the opening prayer, his congregation dutifully responding.
The service engaged only a fraction of Philip’s attention. He watched the rest of the assembled villagers, and one bonneted head in particular, and let his mind drift to the conundrum of how to secure the future of the people of Feldon Roding while still meeting the debts he had inherited from his reckless uncle. Or, more properly, from his cousin, who had outlived his father and brother for four weeks before dying of his injuries.
The shouted word “Harlot!” jerked Philip’s attention back to the rector, whose homily had begun while Philip was distracted. The rector, it transpired, had a low view of women, and was able to support his case with multiple passages from the Bible. Not just Proverbs chapter thirty-one, his ostensible text, where a mother warns her son against giving his strength to women, and against drunkenness. It was all one, the rector explained.
“For when a man allows himself to be blinded by lust, it is the woman who rules, and so it has been since the first woman sinned with the serpent and dragged all creation down into perdition.”
He shot out a finger, and a woman in the gallery above him blanched as her neighbours pulled away. Another woman illustrated the story of Jezebel; a third, Delilah. David, whose lust for his general’s wife led him to commit murder by enemy army, had his sins glossed over by the rector, who laid all the blame on Bathsheba. At least he had no candidate for Bathsheba in the congregation.
But the relief was short lived, because he found a Gomer, and a Potiphar’s wife. Yes, and a Lot’s wife, too. All, Philip noted, among the poorer members of the conversation, though at one point his gaze lingered on Miss Finchurch. Philip tensed, ready to leap to her defence, but the rector moved on to another victim. Which was probably just as well, since Philip could hardly challenge a man of the rector’s age, and in a church, at that.
The rector was waiting in the doorway when they left the church, Aunt Hannah congratulated him on his homily, her voice doubtful. He narrowed his eyes at Lalamani. “My niece, Lalamani Finchurch, my brother Hadley’s child. So lovely of her to visit. Lalamani, you have heard me speak of dear Reverend Wagley.”
“A heathen name,” the rector observed, sourly.
He was interrupted by the local squire and his wife, eager to meet Lalamani. Before she and her aunt had made their way to the gate, Lalamani had been introduced to most of the local gentry and the more prosperous farmers and tradespeople of the town, all of whom expressed their delight she’d come to keep her aunt company.
The squire’s wife, Lady Picknell, was only the first to express her intention of making an afternoon call. �
�My son Arthur shall escort me this very afternoon,” she said.
“My son would be delighted to meet you, Miss Finchurch, when he is home for Christmas,” said another.
Lalamani suppressed a sigh. Perhaps Feldon Roding would not be the sanctuary from match-making mothers she’d longed for.
A few spots of rain, harbinger of a steadier downpour, sent those lingering in the churchyard scurrying for their homes or their carriages, and Lalamani put up the umbrella for their walk home. But when she and Aunt Hannah reached the gate, a voice called, “Mrs Thorpe!”
Lord Calne was holding the door open to the carriage from the inn, looking far more handsome than any man had a right to. “Quickly, ladies, come in out of the rain.”
“But Milly and Addy–” Lalamani objected, planning to accept for her aunt and walk home with the maids herself. Anything to avoid being at close quarters with the pesky man, who had been invading her dreams, awake and asleep, since their waltz. Even more since his visit to the house days ago. Four days ago, and not a word since, which should be enough to prove he was not interested in furthering their acquaintance. And yet here he was.
“Your maids are already in the carriage,” Lord Calne assured her. “Hop in, and I’ll have you all home in the dry in no time.”
“How thoughtful of you,” Aunt Hannah said, as he propped the door open with his shoulder and offered her his good hand to help her up the carriage steps. With no alternative, Lalamani took his hand next. Even glove to glove, his touch sent a shiver through her, and she motioned to the maids to make room for her on the bench, leaving Lord Calne to sit next to Aunt Hannah.
“I feel sure,” he said to Aunt Hannah, “that I remember my mother reading to me about some virtuous women in the Bible. Do you think we should inform the Reverend Wagley?”