The Peculiar Folly of Long Legged Meg

by Jayne Fresina

  He replied solemnly, "Oh, the work is far from done, madam. There is much yet to be finished, although we've been lucky with the good weather."

  "The marchioness is having a temple built," Persey managed on a taut breath. "Amongst other delights."

  Flora laughed. "Of course she is. Will there be statues of herself all around it? Shall we have to make sacrificial offerings on the altar of Minty?"

  "Master Radcliffe is not at liberty to tell us about the design. Certainly not to tell you and I, Flora."

  He looked across at Persey and gave a wry smile but said nothing.

  "Must you be so secretive, Master Radcliffe?" Flora teased. "Surely we can pry it out of you somehow, can we not?"

  "But if I told you, the prying wouldn't be nearly as much fun, would it, madam? For any of us?"

  This caused Flora to bubble away with husky laughter, squeezing Persey's arm ever tighter. "He's quite naughty, your gardener."

  "Minty's gardener," she corrected swiftly.

  * * * *

  At dinner, Joss was seated between the current marchioness and Lady Flora Hartnell. It was a chilly position, since clearly neither woman cared for the other, but both wanted his ear at the same time. If either lady thought the other woman had monopolized his conversation too long, they resorted to several painful tricks to regain his notice. Fork tines were used, as were pinching fingers. Lady Flora even spilled wine into his lap at one point, just to have his attention returned to her.

  Through it all he occasionally caught Persey's eye across the table. She seemed to be taking it all in, quietly amused.

  "How long do you mean to stay in Norfolk, Master Radcliffe?" Lady Flora asked, dabbing at his thigh with her bunched napkin. "Perhaps you might come to my brother's manor and cast your eyes over us when you are done here."

  "He won't be finished with Holbrooke for some months," the marchioness interrupted from his other side, "and I'm sure Master Radcliffe's calendar is full for the foreseeable future. He is in great demand."

  "I've no doubt he is, but I know we can make him a very attractive offer in return for his services."

  Joss glanced over at Persey again, just in time to catch her looking away from him. She looked flushed and somewhat annoyed with her friend. Or was she simply amused by Flora's flirtatious antics? Just when he thought he read her expressions, another popped up to confuse him again.

  "I've told you," Francis Chelmsworth chimed in from across the table, "I have no desire to change the grounds at Wyndham, Flora."

  "If Persey said Wyndham needed improvement, you'd hire the fellow at once. Anything to get her there."

  The dowager marchioness politely changed the subject to save Lord Chelmsworth's blushes. "Might we have the windows open? 'Tis dreadfully warm in here tonight."

  It was warm, especially with all the candles lit and even a fire. These old houses were often damp, of course, and needed fires in every season, but tonight the air was close and heavy, all the guests around the table perspired.

  The marchioness protested, however. "Flies and moths will find their way indoors to the candles if the windows are opened. I would rather they remain closed."

  And so they were. While everybody grew increasingly uncomfortable. The marquess did not attempt to overrule his wife, and Joss remembered what Shawcross had said about that relationship. He thought again of that conversation he'd overheard recently.

  I have great reason to need my lady wife in a happy, tranquil temper now, madam. We hope, in the Yuletide season, to welcome an heir for the estate.

  Persey had looked so lost and abandoned after Albert left her parlor. He'd wanted to leap over the window ledge and hold her in his arms. Forever.

  A shocking thought for a man who led his life in transitory fashion, nothing permanent, nothing "forever".

  "We'd better have some more wine then," Hugo Weston exclaimed loudly from one end of the table. "No point being parched as well as sweated to death, is there?"

  His cousin shot him a dour look, but the footman was already refilling the gentleman's glass.

  "You must tell us, Master Radcliffe, how you came to find success in your chosen field?" Weston bellowed. "I am always interested to meet men who have known great luck, since I have so little of it. What is your secret, sir?"

  Joss felt every eye turned to him. "I suppose I must say...hard work, dedication. And yes, perhaps some good fortune in the people I've met."

  The young Lady Honoria had been much less lively than usual for most of the evening, pushing food around her plate and shooting dark looks down the table at her brother. But now she joined the conversation to say, "Master Radcliffe has a remarkable talent so he doesn't need a great deal of luck. To say he has been lucky is to disparage his talent and his achievements."

  At once the marchioness bit back at her. "Really, Honoria, I do not think that is what my cousin meant to suggest."

  "I'm quite sure he did. Master Weston's excuse for most things is that he has bad luck."

  There followed a period of silence while they all ate. Hugo Weston did not appear at all bothered by the young lady's remarks. Perhaps he was already too inebriated to care. His eyes rolled around in his head, and every so often he hummed parts of a tune under his breath. This too annoyed the marchioness, but rather than say anything to her cousin, she raised her voice to shout at Joss.

  "Has the stone not arrived yet for my temple, Master Radcliffe? I expected the building to begin by now."

  "Some stone has arrived, madam, but I fear it is not the right color for your temple."

  "I do not like to wait, Master Radcliffe. It is quite inconvenient."

  Persey commented wryly, "It took twenty years to build the Great Wall of China. The pyramids of Giza took even longer."

  "What does that have to do with my temple?"

  "Merely that great construction takes time if it is to stand for posterity. Rome wasn't built in a day. I'm sure Master Radcliffe knows what he is about."

  He smiled across the table at her. "Dowager, that is the nicest thing you've said about me since I came here."

  At once she looked away.

  The marquess coughed and signaled for the next course. He had not spoken a word throughout dinner, but ate with his gaze trained on his plate, apparently uninterested in anything happening at the table. He had a sad face, old before its time.

  What must it have been like for him, Joss wondered, when the old marquess brought that pretty young wife, Persephone, home to Holbrooke for the first time? Albert must have had quite a shock. The entire estate would have been shaken to its old-fashioned, damp and fusty core. From what Shawcross had said, Persey had brought fresh air to Holbrooke and much joy to the previous marquess. But Albert looked like a man afraid of too much fresh air and certainly not somebody who knew joy often.

  On Albert's right sat his wife, of course, and on his left there was Persephone, his stepmother. The marquess had spoken to neither woman since the meal began, but if he looked anywhere other than his plate, it was at the dowager. It was a strange expression, part confusion, part trepidation. Ultimately mournful.

  Unfortunately for the marquess, his wife had noticed the route his gaze occasionally took too, and from her treatment of the minted lamb on her plate, it did not please her. When this savage attack on her dinner was insufficient release, she threw terse comments at her sister-in-law, telling her to remember her posture and wanting to know what conversation was happening without her at the far end of the dining table.

  Persey spoke occasionally to Francis Chelmsworth and his sister, but had little to say to anybody else and Honoria pertly ignored her.

  As for Joss, he didn't feel a desire to talk. Instead he let his gaze wander over the dowager marchioness, his imagination feasting upon her greedily by candlelight. He nibbled at the side of her neck, licked her earlobe, whispered against her warm temple. And then he made his way down again, to the tip of her nose, her lips, her chin. Was this the correct way to do it?
He'd have to learn as he went along.

  His lips kissed their way slowly under that white fichu and he inhaled her perfume, deeply, hungrily. He may not know much about how to please a woman, but he knew how she'd please him.

  He watched as she sipped her wine and it stained her lips with a darker flush. She smiled at something Chelmsworth said, but her gaze crossed the candles to find Joss and he felt the shiver of pleasure that came from knowing he had her attention at last. Even when others spoke to her, she was diverted. It was the same for him.

  But had she remembered him yet? The gleam in her eye whenever she glanced his way suggested she tried to place him in her memories and had yet to fit him anywhere.

  Good. He liked making her guess. In fact, she put him in a distinctly playful mood.

  * * * *

  Radcliffe would have to stop staring at her. Did he not see how obvious it was?

  Perhaps he didn't care. Why would he? He had power over her now.

  The air was too warm, too close. She itched under her chemise and longed to get out of her many layers and this uncomfortable corset. After so many years she ought to be used to it, but the older she got the more her body protested the indignity of being hoisted in, bound tightly, flattened, pushed out and formed into unnatural shapes.

  Men had it so much easier.

  She thought of Radcliffe, sprawling naked in her bath earlier. What a sight that was for sore eyes. Flora would faint with envy if she ever knew about that, and once she regained consciousness she would be full of prurient questions.

  Glancing over at her chattering friend, she couldn't resist a smirk, but hid it hastily in her wine glass as she took another sip.

  It would quite be beyond her to describe Radcliffe to her friend. Even with the vast supply of gory adjectives she kept at her disposal. Nothing would suffice.

  Oh dear, she should never have ventured through the buttery door with that kettle of warm water, because ever since then she'd been suffering even more indecent thoughts about Minty's young gardener.

  Everybody at the table melted slowly in the heat, but Minty, blaming her fear of insects invading, still refused to open a window.

  If she didn't breathe cool air soon, Persey felt certain she would pass out. Radcliffe's heated glances were not helping.

  "Where is it you are from, sir?" Hugo Weston slurred out from his end of the table. "You grew up in the country, I assume, considering your affinity with nature?"

  The gardener finally took his gaze from her to reply. "I come from a small village along the banks of the river Nene. Left there when I was a young boy and never went back."

  Persey dropped her fork, but nobody noticed.

  "My father was in the wool trade," he added, "but I did not care to follow his footsteps."

  The room spun around her. She tried to lick her lips but they were numb.

  He looked at her again, smiled, and took a drink from his wine glass. "People seldom leave the village where I grew up. They tend to stay where they were born, where their roots are sunk into the ground. But I wanted something new. I am a rambling plant, I suppose."

  It couldn't be. Surely. Her mind galloped to find the answer.

  "My elder brother, Jasper, took over our father's business in any case," he said, "so I went to sea for a while. By the time I came back I knew I preferred solid earth under my feet. I began as an apprentice for Sir Benjamin Rowley and there I found what I wanted to do with my life." He got on with his dinner and didn't look at her again for some time.

  "Well, that is lucky to find what you like to do at such a young age and to be skilled at it," said Hugo Weston. "You see, Lady Honoria, there is always luck involved somewhere."

  "My cousin Hugo always has the most wonderful ideas for business ventures, Master Radcliffe," Araminta exclaimed, tapping her gardener's arm with stiff, white-gloved fingers.

  "I thought he was a scientist," Honoria muttered.

  "I am an inventor," Hugo replied airily. "I always have ideas in my head, Master Radcliffe. You will understand, being the creative sort yourself."

  "But your ideas never actually come to anything, do they?" Honoria snorted into her wine.

  Predictably, Araminta rushed to her cousin's defense. "Hugo has not yet found his one great opportunity for financing and exposure, but it will come soon, I have no doubt. He is a man with many prospects. He must simply settle upon one into which he can put his all. A wife will help settle him, no doubt."

  "Oh, lord," Flora exclaimed. "Why is it that marriage settles everybody and everything? I'm sure it never settled me."

  Persey was slowly recovering the feeling in her lips and fingers. She stared at Radcliffe's dark eyelashes, at his brows, at the line of his nose, now in profile as he turned his head in response to something Hugo asked.

  But suddenly when she looked at this man, all she could see was Jasper Wallop's little brother, with a sticky face and scabby knees, shooting fish heads and bait worms at her as she walked along the river. She should have seen it before now. He always did like climbing trees, not to mention causing her trouble.

  If that child was him...

  Oh, she was wicked to have been thinking of him they way she had of late. Wicked, wicked, wicked. Because he was a boy, for heaven's sake. A boy!

  Why had he changed his name?

  Perhaps for the same reason she changed her own. So she had not been the only soul striving to escape from Twytchel-on-the-Nene after all.

  Chapter Nineteen

  After dinner the ladies took coffee in the drawing room, while the men stayed for port and brandy. Persey noted with sadness the many changes wrought to Holbrooke House since Albert's wife assumed the management of staff, housekeeping and decoration. Any touches Persey had once made to the house were now swept away, Araminta's ostentatious stamp left on everything.

  Persey stood a while by the glass case that contained Jebediah's automaton monkey and whispered her commiserations.

  "I daresay you will soon be sold off, my poor dear, now that a new mistress rules the castle."

  The monkey, frozen mid cymbal clash, its head on one side, stared back, forlorn, wondering why it was never wound up these days— where the kindly old gent had gone who once laughed at its antics. Much as Persey had felt for the past two years.

  Now there was a man who laughed at her again. And looked to wind her up. But he was not like Jebediah at all.

  The household staff were mostly new faces now. Only a few of the stalwarts remained, looking browbeaten and sorry for themselves. If Persey could take them all with her to the lodge, she would, but there wasn't the room, and on her dowager allowance there was not enough money to pay them all either.

  "Do sit down, Persephone," Minty exclaimed, "you make me dizzy with your pacing."

  "I think your dizziness can be blamed upon the heat," she replied, terse. "If we don't soon open a window I will have to go outside just to breathe."

  Her stepson's wife ignored that, of course, and turned to Honoria. "Well, what do you think of my cousin? He has grown so handsome, has he not?"

  Honoria looked askance. "His head has grown bigger. I see little else has changed."

  Flora came over to where Persey patrolled a closed window and handed her a cup of coffee. "What's the matter with you?" she whispered.

  Where to begin? She could only laugh softly, hovering on the edge of madness. "Do you have many memories from childhood, Flora?"

  "A few. Mostly of being the unwanted girl. Once Francis was born they could be satisfied, but until then I was merely a delay to my parents being able to live the separate lives they so craved. I was the cause of much frustration."

  Flora, of course, had known a much different life to Persey's. Apart from being unwanted— that was something they shared. But Flora had never been forced to rely upon herself for survival.

  "Why?" she asked, her head tilted, candlelight gleaming on her pearls. "Something troubles you, Persey?"

  "I've been thinking
a great deal lately about my own childhood." Somber, she looked at her friend. "Do you think it's possible for an adult to make up for sins in their past?"

  "Good lord, I'm quite certain no child is an angel and every adult has things they'd rather not remember about the past. But that is what life is all about— learning from one's mistakes. Nobody is without fault, and we all have regrets."

  But did they all have dead bodies? Sometimes, she wondered if there might have been another way, but at the time she had none. She was desperate, trying to protect others as well as herself, and she saw no other solution. Who else could she go to for help? No one would listen to the word of a scullery maid, a girl of no family, a storyteller.

  The doctor was not quite her fault, for she had only meant for him to sleep deeply and it had worked well for a time, but Dame Glossop was a different matter. When Meg picked those shiny, black, beautiful berries and set them on the table she knew what she was doing— ending the old hag's reign of tyranny and cruelty.

  If Josias Radcliffe, or whatever his name truly was, had remembered her by the crescent scar on her face, he would know all of that. All of her wickedness and deceit.

  For how long had he known? She thought of that day when he handed her rosemary for "remembrance".

  "You can no longer hide from the truth," Flora whispered suddenly, her eyes warm and teasing. "The gardener. After the way he stared at you through dinner. It's obvious to anybody, surely.”

  "Oh, that?" She gave a taut laugh.

  "You're troubled because you don't know what to do with a young, able-bodied man? I can help. Call on me if you need it."

  "Very amusing, Flora."

  "Well, I would hate to see all that passion go to waste. Now that would be a sin!"

  "Passion?"

  "My dear friend, I had no fear of the candles going out at dinner. In this heat one blink of his eyes could have struck flame anew when he looked at you."