Proud Mary

by Lucinda Brant

  Ideally she would have preferred the Duke of Roxton to be Teddy’s guardian. He was, after all, Teddy’s uncle. But if not the Duke, truth told, she was content to have Mr. Bryce, because Teddy loved her Uncle Bryce as much as she loved her true uncles, Mary’s brothers Dair and Charles.

  Tonight, Christopher Bryce sat at her table not as the steward, but as Squire Bryce, her neighbor and Teddy’s legally appointed guardian. In these roles it was perfectly socially acceptable for him to do so, and until a few moments ago he had played his part well. In fact, in all the years they had known each other he had never faulted and strayed from the path of social formality in his dealings with her. And now, with one sentence, he had changed everything. She could never be comfortable in his company again…

  “MAMA ISN’T LOVELY, Uncle Bryce. She’s beautiful,” Teddy announced into the heavy silence as she scooped up a large helping of apple dumpling. “Uncle Dair says I’m certain to grow up to be just like her, but that I wasn’t to tell because little brothers like to tease their elder sisters, not compliment them. I told Uncle Dair that he isn’t little in the least, and that Mama and I keep no secrets. Granny said it’s a crying shame I look like Mama with my frightful red hair and freckles because they will never change no matter how old I get or how much lemon juice is applied. So it’s just as well I have powerful relatives to look after my interests… Sometimes, most times, I have no idea what Granny is talking about! But you like our red hair and you don’t think the color frightful, do you, Uncle Bryce?”

  “Yes, I do, and no, I don’t,” Christopher replied without hesitation, gaze fixed on Teddy. “You wouldn’t be you with it any other way, would you?

  “And Mama wouldn’t be Mama. But I think you’re fibbing when you say freckles are the ruby kisses left by fairies.”

  “Oh? But what a lovely notion!” Mary smiled, shaking off her pensiveness, determined to ignore and forget the Squire’s unguarded compliment was ever uttered. “I’ve never heard freckles described in such a delightful way before.”

  “I cannot take the credit, my lady. A sprite said something similar in the bard’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, and I happened to remember it—”

  “Because you like red hair and freckles,” Teddy stated. “Mr. Shakespeare must’ve, too.”

  “Yes. Yes, something like that,” Christopher murmured, and suddenly found the apple dumplings in front of him of intense interest.

  “After pudding, Teddy and I usually retire to the parlor for a game of Goose, or she reads to me while I embroider.” She looked at her daughter. “But perhaps today you would like to play at skittles in the hall?”

  “May we? Will you play at skittles with us, Uncle Bryce?”

  “Yes. I would like that,” he replied. He set down his spoon and finally turned to look at Mary. “My lady, I crave your pardon for my earlier indiscreet admission. I did not mean to offend you, or make you uncomfortable. But—”

  “It is of no importance, Mr. Bryce.”

  “—as it was a compliment, I will not retract it. I cannot.”

  Mary pushed back her chair and stood. Christopher and Teddy followed her lead. She placed her napkin on the table, brushed down the front of her damask gown, and only then did she look at the Squire. She lifted her chin slightly and said in an imperious manner her mother the Countess would’ve approved, “As you are a guest at my table, Mr. Bryce, I will accept your compliment. That is all I ever intend to say on the matter.” She put out her hand for her daughter and said in an altogether different tone, “While the skittles are being readied, let’s have our tea by the hall fire, shall we?”

  THEY HAD TEA and gingerbread biscuits in front of the main fireplace in the long hall, and played a round of Goose—because Uncle Bryce had stayed to dinner and three players were much better than two. And while they played the board game, two maids repositioned the larger of the two Turkey rugs up one end of the long room that had upon the paneled wall a row of paintings of lesser Cavendish ancestors. They then set out the nine wooden pins at this end of the rug and three wooden oblate balls at the other. One maid remained by the pins to set them upright when they were knocked down, while her companion was tasked with returning the wooden balls to the competitors.

  Teddy and Christopher played three rounds, with Mary more than happy to be spectator and keep score. They won a game apiece, and on the third hand she saw Christopher deliberately turn his wrist, sending his ball wide of the mark of a pin he could easily have toppled. This allowed Teddy the chance to take the game, and as she was a tireless competitor and very much wanted to win, she took her time to size up the strike before pitching her ball. It toppled the remaining skittle and everyone in the hall applauded, Christopher making her a grandiloquent bow and conceding the game.

  “You let her win,” Mary stated some time later when she and Christopher were alone, Teddy fetched by her nurse to ready her for bed, and the intervening handful of hours allowing the couple to return to a semblance of easy formality.

  “I gave her the chance to win. There is a difference.”

  Mary sat by the fire with her embroidery in her lap and her sewing box at her feet, attempting to thread a needle, while Christopher stood to one side of the enormous fireplace watching her and sipping a fresh cup of tea. Neither had spoken since Teddy had wished them a good night. Yet both were acutely aware of the other, which made threading the needle almost impossible, so she put her hands in her lap and looked up at him.

  “Thank-you. And thank-you for making light of the ghost so she would not be afraid to go to her bed tonight.”

  “Ah. I should’ve realized you would be awake to my cunning plan.”

  “Not from the outset,” she confessed. “But all that chatter about the ghost’s culinary preferences was quite absurd and made me wonder…”

  “And now, after hearing about the thefts from the pantry, do you believe it likely that it is a ghost who is making forays into the kitchen in search of food?”

  “But… surely it could be a coincidence that I hear noises in Sir Gerald’s rooms, and Cook announcing it must be a ghost not a thief who has stolen from the kitchen?”

  “I do not believe it is a coincidence, or a ghost.”

  “Then what do you believe, Mr. Bryce?”

  Christopher finished his tea, then put the teacup on its saucer and set both on the mantel.

  “That whoever is in Sir Gerald’s rooms is corporeal rather than ethereal, and that he is indeed a thief, but not just of condiments.”

  Mary sat up a little taller. Alarm registered in her voice. “A-a thief? There is a thief occupying Sir Gerald’s rooms?”

  Christopher thought it ironic she was more agitated at the prospect the intruder was a villain rather than a specter, but he managed to say without giving himself away,

  “Yes, my lady. A hungry thief.”

  “Why?”

  The side of his mouth twitched.

  “Even thieves require sustenance.”

  “Dear me, you are witty today, Mr. Bryce,” Mary retorted. “Why has a thief chosen to hide out in my husband’s rooms of all the rooms in Abbeywood? There are other bedchambers, far from mine, that would serve him better. Particularly as he chooses to make enough noise in the middle of the night to wake me! Which surely defeats his purpose in hiding. Your supposition does not rule out the possibility that we have two intruders. The one in Sir Gerald’s bedchamber being ethereal, and the one in the pantry most definitely possessing, at the very least, a human stomach!”

  Christopher suppressed a chuckle, more at her indignation than her theorizing, and inclined his head. “That is a possibility, I grant you, my lady. But not plausible. As I said, I do not believe in coincidences. But as to why this individual is a particularly noisy thief, I have no clearer idea than you.”

  That much was true. What he did not reveal was that he was very sure the thief had not chosen Sir Gerald’s rooms at random. There was something of particular value in amongst Sir Gerald’s
personal possessions which the thief wanted, or been directed to find on behalf of persons unknown. Whatever the thief was searching for, Christopher wondered if it had something to do with Sir Gerald’s involvement in a spy ring operating out of Stroud.

  The Spymaster General was convinced Sir Gerald was the mastermind of this Stroud spy ring. Christopher was skeptical. Not that Sir Gerald was not capable of deviousness. He was. The man had deceived the local gentry, his wife, and his creditors that he possessed great wealth. He had also bragged to gentlemen of means and position within Gloucestershire that through his marriage to the daughter of an earl, and by reason of his birth as a member of the Cavendish family, he had important connections within government and political circles that would help advance the schemes and causes of the local squires.

  On the strength of this Sir Gerald was “pricked” to be High Sheriff of Gloucestershire. An office he held with all the pomposity he could muster, so his neighbors had confided. And as the men of Gloucester possessed a legendary reticence, Sir Gerald as High Sheriff must have been insufferable. Which made Christopher wonder why they had suffered him at all.

  The good people of Gloucester could not have known, as Christopher knew, that Sir Gerald’s puffed up conceit was a cloud of hot air that hid a thunderstorm of lies. Sir Gerald was in debt up to his wig, and had been isolated from those within Polite Society with any political and social influence for many years. He could not get a well-shod heel inside the houses of his wife’s noble connections, never mind their influential friends and relatives.

  Which was why Shrewsbury believed Sir Gerald ripe for turning and betraying his country—he needed money and he needed to feel important. Spying for the French was a lucrative business, particularly now with Louis’ government on the verge of openly declaring its support for the American rebels. But for all the hours Christopher had spent in Sir Gerald’s company, he had only received the strongest impression that the Baronet was fiercely loyal to his King. Not only that, but Sir Gerald loathed the French with a passion bordering on mania, and this came from his hatred of his wife’s half-French cousins, the Dukes of Roxton. Such was Sir Gerald’s loathing of the Duke of Roxton and his family that Christopher believed the man wanted to do everything in his power to bring about that family’s downfall.

  It was Christopher’s belief—and he had told Shrewsbury as much—that if Sir Gerald was part of a spy ring, or had had anything to do with traitors to His Majesty’s government, it was because he’d been duped into believing he was aiding the British cause, when in fact he was unwittingly helping the enemy. Sir Gerald did not have the brains to be a successful traitor, least of all the architect of an elaborate spy network. Shrewsbury charged Christopher with providing evidence to substantiate his accusations and in discovering just who had been Sir Gerald’s contacts. Christopher also believed that one of those contacts was at that very moment holed up in Sir Gerald’s private rooms enjoying Cook’s walnut pickle.

  All this he did not voice to Lady Mary, though he wished he could confide in her enough to allay her fears that Sir Gerald’s ghost had not come back to haunt her. And if the pantry thief was a traitor in the pay of the French, he would deal with the villain expeditiously. But for now he turned the conversation away from ghosts and thieves and to a topic he was sure would divert her attention.

  “May I ask what it is you are embroidering?”

  Mary was startled by the question. No male who was not a close relative had ever shown enough polite interest to ask her such a question, her husband certainly had not, in all the years of their marriage. She was so delighted by it that she beamed.

  “Oh! Yes! Yes, of course you may,” she replied with genuine warmth. She held up the embroidery hoop by its lap stand so he could see her stitchery—the half-finished leaf, with its scrolls and swirls. “This is one of three acanthus leaves.”

  He peered closer. “And if I’m not mistaken, the yellow flower is a meadow buttercup, the white a strawberry flower, and you have a trail of fine ivy too.”

  “You know your flora in thread, Mr. Bryce!”

  “Only when it is embroidered with such delicate care, my lady. But I also meant—what is the article you are embroidering?”

  “When it is sewn up it will be an infant’s christening cap.”

  “May I?”

  He put out a hand and after she had secured the needle in the pink silk she gave him the embroidery hoop. Trailing the tips of his long fingers lightly above the stitchery, he inspected her handiwork, then stopped at the metallic twist of the unfinished acanthus leaf and looked up.

  “Methinks this exquisite finery is not for just any infant.”

  “You are correct, Mr. Bryce. This cap will be for Cousin Duchess’s baby, which is due in the new year.”

  “Cousin Duchess? Not the Duchess of Roxton’s latest infant then?”

  “No. Not for baby Otto. The Roxtons still use the cap I embroidered for the christening of Frederick—their first baby and their heir. They then decided to use it for their subsequent babies. It is something of which I am very proud,” she added in an emphatic rush, as if she needed to elevate her handiwork above the mundane.

  “And so you should be. You have a very fine hand, and the shading of your stitches is beyond compare.”

  “Oh! I thought—”

  “That being male I would have little appreciation of the care and attention, and the fine worksmanship, not to mention love, which goes into such needlecraft?”

  “Yes,” she confessed guiltily, and blushed because she could not help herself and his words touched her deeply. “I always thought—privately of course—that I was a fair embroiderer, much better with a needle and thread than any of my nurses. But no one except family has ever said so. And I assumed their praise was more out of a sense of duty and politeness than because they considered my stitchery above the ordinary.”

  “You sell yourself short. To produce such fine floral designs, you not only need to have an expert technique with short and long stitches but also an understanding of tonal shade. You also need the ability to blend colors to give your creations the appearance of nature. Is that not so?”

  She nodded, unable to articulate her astonishment at his knowledge of what she assumed was of interest and understood by her sex alone.

  “Am I right in presuming you also sketched the pattern before you began?”

  “Yes, of course. I draw all my own patterns.”

  “Then you are not only a skilled needlewoman, but an artist as well.”

  “A draughtsman rather than an artist. I can only reproduce what I see. I lack the imagination to conjure images.”

  “Then at least concede that you are able to draw well, too. And what you have drawn you then paint with your needle and thread.”

  “Paint with my needle and thread…” she repeated, and smiled with satisfaction at his description. “That is very true. Thank-you.” She took back her embroidery hoop and set it on her lap. “May I presume then that you have seen a great deal of embroidery in your day?”

  “Possibly more than any male alive, other than the handful who choose to do embroidery work themselves.”

  “You refer to artisans who do so in their line of work, for profit, not as I do, to pass the time and as gifts for family and friends.”

  “There is that, of course. But no, I mean gentlemen who stitch purely for relaxation.”

  Mary sat forward, disbelieving. “I beg your pardon. A gentleman embroider? I do not believe you!”

  “Oh, but you must, my lady. I have seen them sitting at tambour frames and with ivory and wood embroidery hoops such as yours. A few even knit and crochet.” When Mary continued to stare at him in open-mouthed disbelief, he added with a smile, “My aunt can verify my claims, and were her eyes not grown so weak, no doubt would agree with my assessment of your skill, too.”

  “And where did you and your aunt gain such wisdom in the art of embroidery?”

  “Here and—um—th
ere. But mostly there.”

  “On the Continent?”

  “Yes.”

  “You must have inspected an inordinate amount of stitchery to make such claims about mine—if indeed you are sincere.”

  Her frown of incomprehension was so reminiscent of her daughter that he grinned. He was so eager to have her believe him genuine that again he let down his guard, this time about his past—the first time he had been so open about it since his return to this sleepy vale.

  “Sincere? With you—always. And yes, you can believe me when I tell you I have inspected, evaluated, praised, remarked upon, and offered constructive criticism when asked to do so, on a great many pieces of embroidery. So I do know beautiful stitchery when I see it.”

  Mary smiled thinly. Sometimes she could surprise herself when she muttered audibly, tongue firmly in cheek, “All pieces done by your aunt, I am sure.”

  He laughed out loud at her quip.

  “If only that were true! That would’ve saved me a great deal of time and effort. But I regret none of it,” he added seriously. “For that path has led me here—and to you—”

  “Mr. Bryce, whatever path you have chosen to take is of concern to no one but yourself,” she interrupted, throat and cheeks stained a crimson to match her flaming braids. She dropped her chin. “It is certainly not my con—”

  “—and to Teddy. I have no children of my own, but I at least have the privilege of acting as an uncle to Theodora, and for that I will always be thankful to you.”

  She looked up at him, all embarrassment extinguished at mention of her daughter.

  “To me? It was Sir Gerald who made you Teddy’s guardian, not I. And I should be thanking you, Mr. Bryce. I don’t believe I have formally done so. And I must, for all you’ve done for her, for taking an interest in her, and that was remiss of me.”

  “There is no need, my lady. I enjoy Teddy’s company for its own sake. She reminds me of what it is to be young and carefree. She finds joy in the everyday, and she has a deep love of the vale. We should all strive to be like her. Most of us lose sight of that as we age.”