by Jaima Fixsen
It took a moment to regain her poise. “Is that what he said?”
“Did you?”
She supposed you could call it that, but thought it was shabby of him to say so.
“Is that why you stayed in today?” Aunt Yates looked disapproving.
“It isn’t that. My head hurts. Truly.” She assured Aunt Yates that it had only been a warm discussion of last evening’s music and accepted a visit from the local doctor so she could spend the rest of the day in her room, fuming about Mr. Murray and what he had and hadn’t told Aunt Yates. A note from him came in the evening.
Have I ruined everything? Please talk with me.
She sent back two words: I can’t.
She needed time to invent sufficient poise to brush it off like he could.
Two days later she went down to the hotel reading room, sweaty-palmed, but convinced she had to be ready. Delay was only making her more ridiculous. Unfortunately, Neil wasn’t in his usual place. Mary took his chair and read all the papers, but he didn’t come and Aunt Yates scolded her for reading the news.
“Better this than The Arabian Nights,” Mary muttered. “Have you seen Mr. Murray?”
“No, and if he’s found another young lady to walk with, I’m sure it’s what you deserve.”
After dinner Mary tracked down the boot boy. “Have you seen Mr. Murray today?”
“He’s left, miss. Gone home to London yesterday evening.”
Mary bit her lip, unable to hide her surprise. The boot boy was looking at her knowingly and she had no ready excuse. Her feet felt twice as heavy climbing the stairs where she reluctantly gave the news to Aunt Yates.
She sniffed and twitched her handkerchief, remarking that uppity girls who took no pains to make themselves agreeable had no one to blame but themselves when they withered into spinsters.
Mary sank into the empty chair. “I’m sure no thought of marrying me has ever crossed Mr. Murray’s mind.”
“Then you’re a greater fool than I thought,” Aunt Yates said. “Surely—”
Mary interrupted her with a shake of her head. “Don’t. Please. It wasn’t like that at all.”
Aunt Yates didn’t look convinced, but at least she said nothing. She was especially solicitous of Mary next morning and offered to accompany her to the library.
“I’ll go alone,” Mary said. Aunt Yates had an appointment with the masseuse, and she wanted to check at the post office. Perhaps Neil had left her something.
She told herself it was too soon, that after dismissing him she couldn’t expect a letter, but was still frustrated to only find letters from Samuel.
There was nothing but nothing for over a week. Finally she had a letter from Neil. It was short.
I have learned, to my cost, that I shouldn’t attempt to change your mind. You’ve made your position clear and I will no longer bother you.
He asked her to contact Samuel if she had any business to conduct with her bank and closed in his quick, spiky script with his regards. Mary burned the note and drew an unflattering portrait of herself wearing a dunce cap.
“Are we to stay in Bath forever?” Mary asked her aunt.
“Your father thinks it unadvisable to return to London. Not until this business is settled by the Lords.”
Mary frowned at her. “They won’t vote down the bill.” They wouldn’t dare, not with the people in a froth and so many of the Lords siding with Grey’s government. “Any who vote no might as well hand their heads to the Republicans.”
“Such sentiments are unbecoming to think, let alone speak aloud.”
“Then I’ll say nothing.” Mary picked up her drawing, but she was in too much of a temper to make anything good. In the end she produced something passable and packaged it up to send to Mr. Barnes, glad she wasn’t called to witness his reaction. If it wasn’t good enough they wouldn’t print it, and that was depressing too.
“No letters today,” said the clerk at the post office. Mary didn’t bother saying she didn’t expect any. Samuel wrote regularly, once a week.
“Miss Buchanan?”
Two ladies, just come in the door, stared at her. Mary took a step back, feeling like an insect in front of hungry birds. She didn’t know either of them.
“Forgive me, but you are Mary Buchanan?” The second, shorter one advanced with a determined step.
“Do you know these ladies?” asked the clerk behind the counter.
“N-no.” But she’d placed the taller. It was the lady from the concert, without the burgundy gown; the one who’d made such eyes at Neil.
“Can I help you, ladies?”
Mary threw a grateful glance to the clerk and fled the shop. She was halfway down the block when she heard the bell on the post office door ring behind her. The two ladies had abandoned their business, if they’d ever had any. Mary thought not.
“I’ve come all this way,” the shorter one said and shook off the arm of her friend. Mary put her eyes forward and walked faster. She darted round the first corner she came to and broke into a run. It wasn’t that the lady seemed dangerous, but something about the way she looked at her was frightening. Mary didn’t want to find out why.
“Wait! Please wait!” came the call behind her.
Mary dodged past a governess and her charges, down a side street and into a tavern, halting half a step past the threshold as conversation in the room stopped. A dozen tough-looking men stared. Only the keep moved, placidly wiping the bar. This was not the right place for young ladies in neat brown pelisses, Mary decided.
“Forgive me…I…” Why was she talking? Mary bolted back into the street. Twenty yards away, the woman spied her.
“Mary, wait!” She was short of breath, but had enough to call again, “Mary Gabriella!”
Mary nearly stumbled, steadying herself on the rough masonry of the nearby wall. She couldn’t move, even to turn around. Nor did she want to.
“Goodness, you can run.” The breathless woman closed the distance behind her.
“How do you know my name?” Mary asked when the sound of her footsteps was close.
“I chose it.” The answer provoked a violent turn.
“That’s impossible.”
“Why should it be?”
Because dead people didn’t ambush you in post offices.
“My name is Lydia Wilton. My friend recognized Susan Yates at a concert. Your aunt.”
Mary didn’t deny it. Anyone might deduce that.
“She said there was a girl with her. She knew it must be you. She wrote me a letter express and I came to Bath at once. I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
Mary lifted her eyebrows. “Then why did you chase me down the street?”
“I didn’t think I’d have to. It took days to discover where you were staying and then find you alone. I had to take the chance to speak to you.” She drew a breath. “I’m your mother.”
“I don’t believe you.” This was some trickster preying on her sensibilities, taking advantage of a young girl’s loneliness and quick imagination. Someone must have overheard her talking with Neil Murray and cobbled this fantasy together. “I have no mother,” Mary said.
The woman’s lips twisted. “I can’t stop you from pretending, and I don’t blame you for it. But if you won’t receive my letters you must at least hear me out.”
“What letters?”
The woman looked at her. “It’s been a few years since I wrote, but given your last response, I think you can hardly blame me.”
“I’ve had no letters,” Mary said.
A half-formed word stuck on the woman’s plump bottom lip. “Not one?”
“I told you,” Mary said with as much dignity as she could manage, “my mother is dead.”
The woman closed her eyes. “I should have known that’s what he told you. Well, I’m not dead, though I expect your papa would find that convenient.”
Mary shifted her feet on the cobbles. “Why should I believe you?”
“Because yo
ur name is Mary Gabriella Buchanan. Your father is Sidney Alexander Buchanan of number fourteen, Wimpole Street, London, and formerly of Edinburgh. You were born in a brick house—”
“I’ve no way to know if that’s true.”
Lydia Wilton squared her shoulders. “Ask your father. Ask him what became of his wife.” She reached into her reticule and pulled out a card. “Write me afterward. Please.”
Mary turned over the pasteboard. An address in Exeter was pencilled below a name: Mrs. Charles Wilton. “What was your maiden name?” Mary asked.
“Don’t you know?” Her eyebrows, too dark to match her thick blond hair, curved up as the mouth flattened.
“I know.” Mary didn’t say for how long.
“It was Blair. I have two sons, your half-brothers, but you are my only daughter.”
Mary nodded, unsure how to respond. She took two sideways steps and when Lydia Wilton didn’t move, Mary hurried past her. At the mouth of the street, Mary looked back. Lydia Wilton’s face almost made her stop, so profound was the longing and defeat.
I will write, Mary told herself, fingering the pasteboard card, if what she says is true. Holding onto her bonnet, Mary lowered her chin against the wind and hurried away.
She must speak to Papa.
Thirty-Two
Back at the hotel Mary found herself thwarted by the absence of Aunt Yates, who hadn’t returned from the baths. Undeterred, Mary set out, grimmer than ever. Ignoring the attendant at the entrance, Mary stalked through the hall into the widest corridor, following vapours of camphor and eucalyptus. Her feet were loud on the tiles.
“Miss, may I—stop, you can’t go in there!” The attendant ran after her.
“I need Mrs. Yates,” she told him.
“She has another quarter hour of steam treatment.” He lunged ahead of her and stretched out his arms, barring the way.
“It’s an emergency.” Mary ducked underneath his arm and seized the first door on her left.
“No, that’s Mr. Woolley!” The attendant’s voice climbed and cracked as he threw himself against the door. Eluding his pursuit, Mary tried the one opposite. Blinking through a cloud of steam, she saw a figure swathed in towels.
“Aunt Yates?”
“Sadly, no.” The smooth masculine voice made her jump.
“I beg your pardon.” Mary was back in the hall before he could do more than sit up, unnerved by so much skin and breadth in the shoulders.
“You can’t just barge wherever you please!” the attendant yelled. An angular woman in blue stripes rushed at her from the other end of the hall. Mary had time for one more door.
“Aunt Yates?”
“What is it?” Her aunt lay on the table like a lump of dough left to rise in a towel. “Mary!” Her hands flew to her hair, limp and dragging from all the steam.
Mary shut the door and leaned against it. Ignoring the dire warnings of the bath house staff pounding on the other side, Mary glared at her aunt. “Why wasn’t I told?”
“Told what?” demanded her exasperated aunt, still trying to clear the hair from her eyes.
“That my mother lives with a new family in Exeter!”
The ruckus outside the door died as swiftly as a French royalist beneath the guillotine.
“Shhhh!” Her aunt sat up, gathering her towels. “Everyone will hear!”
“I was accosted by a lady called Lydia Wilton—”
“Is that what she calls herself?” Aunt Yates sneered.
Mary braced her shoulders as the door heaved once more. “Then you know her?”
Aunt licked her lips. “She—”
“Is she really my mother? Why wasn’t I told?”
Aunt Yates groped automatically for her sal volatile, forgetting she was clad only in a towel. “I—It wasn’t my decision. I just did the same as your papa.”
Useless to expect answers from Aunt Yates. She should have known better. Mary banked her temper, saving the coals. “I’ll ask him, then.” If she hurried, she could catch the next mail coach.
“Mary, you can’t—”
“Please stop telling me what I can and cannot do. You know nothing about it.” Mary let go of the door, sidestepping the attendants who fell headlong into the steam.
“Got you!” The woman in stripes seized Mary’s arm.
“I’m quite finished,” Mary said, as they marched her out to the street.
“Wait!” Aunt Yates’s voice floated after her down the hall.
Mary smiled. Despite the bitter expostulations of the bath house staff, she had all the head start she needed. Aunt wasn’t dressed.
Ten minutes before the mail coach was scheduled to depart, Aunt Yates tumbled out of a sedan chair in the inn yard. Her coat was incorrectly buttoned, and her hair wet beneath her bonnet. She carried only a bandbox and glared balefully at Mary’s corded trunks.
“Come back to the hotel,” she hissed.
“You know I won’t,” Mary said. “Why else would you bring a bandbox?”
Unperturbed, she waited while Aunt Yates bought a ticket and bullied a place on the bench beside her, displacing a sandy-haired curate with a large Adam’s apple.
“Listen to me, Mary.”
“I have, and I’m done with lies,” Mary said.
Aunt Yates looked at the other waiting passengers and dropped her voice.
“She was utterly impossible…the marriage was a disaster from the start…completely unsuitable…”
Mary detached herself and thought of the journey before her, not this unbidden picture of a youthful, flighty mama married to her dour father. She didn’t want to pity her.
I’m the one who was left behind, she reminded herself.
Inside the coach Aunt Yates abandoned the family scandal, and pleaded with Mary to turn back. They’d end up being robbed, raped, and abandoned on the highway. The woman next to Mary grew increasingly fidgety until the curate silenced Aunt Yates. “That’s quite enough, madam. We have a very good driver. I’ve made countless journeys on this stage, and the worst thing I’ve been subjected to is your hysterics!”
Aunt Yates was silent after that. The journey was fast if not comfortable and they reached London suffering nothing worse than an indifferent meal eaten on the road. When they arrived the house on Wimpole Street was dark.
“I told you he’d have gone to his club,” Aunt Yates said. Now that she and Mary were alone she could unravel a long thread of complaint without any qualms.
“No matter. I have my key.” Mary thought it unlikely Aunt’s bandbox held anything so useful. So far she’d retrieved a long string of pearls, bed slippers, some loose pound notes and a letter opener.
The house was seldom loud, but as they stepped inside Mary felt oppressed by the heavy quiet. Something’s wrong, she thought, seized by an urgent need to discover why there were no lights. She struck a match and was struggling with the lamp when Cook appeared in the hallway, making her jump.
“Where’s Annie?” Mary asked.
“You and I had best get Mrs. Yates to bed,” was the evasive answer. Mary’s gaze sharpened, taking in the swelling of Cook’s eyes.
Together they brought up the trunks and dressed Aunt Yates for bed. Mary let her pour her own laudanum, which she sipped feebly between dissatisfied rumblings. “And then we were jolted across the country in a rattling coach, crammed in with a student who kept nudging Mary’s legs and a curate who snored.” Seeing little sympathy on their faces Aunt Yates added, “But Mary is so insensible I dare say she scarcely noticed.”
“I had much on my mind.” Mary’s look silenced her. Cook shut the curtains and they stepped out into the hall.
“Where is Papa?” Mary asked in an undertone. The house was so quiet and dark, and there was no sign of Annie. Dust filmed the frames of the pictures on the walls. Papa’d written Aunt just the week before—he couldn’t be ill. Not so quickly. He might not stomach fried eggs, but he never suffered from infectious complaints and Annie was sturdy as a Welsh pony.
>
“He dismissed our Annie.”
Mary shook her head. She couldn’t have heard right. “Papa? He’d do no such thing.” He made his opinions felt, but always left the household management to her and Aunt Yates. Even if he had usurped control of the domestics, Mary would fix it. “I’m sure it was just bad temper. A meal that didn’t sit well with him or a letter in The Lancet…”
Cook shook her head. “She’s packed and gone. A week ago. I told him there was no harm in it, that they’re pledged to marry as soon as they can.”
Mary’s fingers tightened on Cook’s arm. “He saw her with Ben?” That, her father wouldn’t forgive. Still on the raw after discovering her own correspondence with Samuel Brown, he’d have found Annie an easier target.
“In the garden. They were kissing. Annie begged his pardon, but he didn’t care. He even went to Mrs. Chin and demanded she dismiss Ben.”
Mary tried to swallow but couldn’t. “Did she sack him?”
“I don’t know. Haven’t seen him, so I’m afraid she did. I shouldn’t—but you and I know they have hearts as good as gold. And so full of plans for the future.”
With both of them working they might have been able to marry, eventually. No chance of that now, not with Annie dismissed without a character.
“It’s not right.” Cook shook her head.
“Mrs. Chin would never sack him.” If she couldn’t persuade Papa to hire Annie back, she could give her money and a reference—enough to set them on their feet. But if Ben had lost his job… “It will be all right. I’ll fix it. Where’s Annie now?”
“Gone to her mother.” Cook brushed at her eyes. “It’s late. You can’t go now.”
Perhaps not. “Annie must be so miserable.” Mary had envied her often enough, wishing she’d been the one to catch Ben’s eye. She’d never been proud of those secret feelings, and now they pricked and stung. “It can’t wait,” Mary said and went for her coat.
“What are you doing here?” Papa’s voice stopped her halfway down the stair.
Mary was so startled it took her a moment to remember. She felt the betrayal before she recalled it, her eyes filling with humiliating tears.