And Andrew's jaw dropped and hung for a long, astonished moment.
After a minute, he managed to collect himself enough to mutter, “It is still just so much rot, mother!”
But there was just that niggling of doubt in his voice and Lady Lydia was satisfied that she had made him see that perhaps he did have reason to fear, and she was not just being a foolish old woman after all.
“And he does run through it as though it were water,” she pointed out.
Andrew glanced at her, but now his eyes were preoccupied. “He is still hardly a pauper, mother!”
But even so, an hour later when he stopped back in her rooms (for her lady's maid was now attending her, brushing out her hair before the vanity) he was not dressed for turning in for the night, but more substantially, as though he intended to be gone on a journey. “I'll be using the carriage, mother, I hope that will not inconvenience you to any great degree.”
“No, of course not,” she said as she watched the progress of her hair in the mirror, “for I can have a hired one brought around with no difficulty, and it is your carriage.” But then she pouted and met his eyes in the mirror. “But, Andrew, where are you going? You have only just returned and with your grandmother gone to Chestershire, I shall be here all alone.”
“Chestershire also, mother.”
“You just came from there!”
And he flushed a little, but only said, “There is something I was remiss in not speaking with Miss Murdock about.” Then, as his mother turned in her seat to look at him straight on, interrupting her lady's maid's work, he added, “Nothing that you need concern yourself with for now, mother, I assure you. Now, I must run, and do not fret, for I shall be back in several days to escort you to any balls or dinners we are invited to,” he coaxed her. And she smiled and was happy.
At about the same time as Earl Larrimer was bidding goodbye to his mother, Ryan Tempton arrived at Squire Murdock's home. He had considered staying at the inn five miles away, had decided that he would instead journey to the manor and see if the Squire, being a widower and thus perhaps used to keeping odd hours, was still awake.
He turned onto the overgrown lane and rode his weary horse to the end of the drive, and saw with satisfaction that there were still lamps lit on the lower level of the house.
He tied his horse off at the hitching ring in the drive, making sure it could reach the trough of water that was there, and then with still a great deal of youthful energy, bounded up the well-swept steps to the door of the house. The wide stone of the stoop, even in the dim gleam of the moon, was swept also, and he thought that rather odd when he had been under the impression from the Squire's speech at the inn that fateful night not even a week ago that they did not have much in the way of servants. And as Miss Murdock had, of course, been in London, he could not quite wrap his mind around the vision of the Squire out sweeping the porch in her absence.
The door knocker was well polished also, he noticed, as he let it fall with a bang.
After a second knocking, the door swung open, and he was faced not with a surly and rather unkempt Squire Murdock as he had been expecting, but by a neatly dressed woman of indeterminate middle years with a crisp apron tied around her middle. Her hair, a shiny mass of coppery waves with a pronounced streak of white through it, was pinned with precision and twisted into a serviceable topknot on the crown of her head, and her rather rotund figure stood formidable in the door, causing him to take a startled step backward. Then he caught himself, asked, “Mrs. Herriot?”
She looked him over with critical eyes, holding the lamp up higher to better see his face that was a good distance above her own, and then the soft wrinkles of her cheeks fanned back into a wide and radiant smile. “Why if it isn't Mister Tempton!” she said. “What a most pleasant surprise. You must come in, of course, and I will tell the Squire that you are here, although I dare say he was not expecting you, for he made no mention of it to me.”
And thus bade, he followed her into the house. There he stood for a moment, blinking, for if he had pictured the inside of the house at all, it had not been this vision of prim and immaculate neatness. There was not a cobweb to be seen anywhere, nor a speck of dust, and the chimneys of the chandelier, not much of a chandelier, but a chandelier all the same, in the hallway positively sparkled, with not a hint of built up soot or ash to betray use without regular cleaning.
The hardwood floor beneath his feet was polished to a high degree, as was the banister that wound up the steep flight of stairs. And although the home still showed its age, and a rather pronounced pitching of walls, floors and ceilings, it seemed to be in the midst of some remarkable transformation that promised that in but another five or six days, it could be a very respectable home indeed. “How ever did you come to be here, Mrs. Herriot?” he asked her somewhat mystified. “For I had not realized that you had left Morningside.”
“Why, I was asked to provide a few house maids from his lordship's manor until more permanent arrangements could be made here, and I thought I should just come along to see that all was being done right and tight.” And her voice dropped to a whisper, “T'is rumored that milord is to be married at last!” and she could not have seemed happier than if it were own son's nuptials that were expected to be announced.
And Ryan frowned. “St. James set all this up then?”
Mrs. Herriot nodded as she led him into the parlor and returned the lamp to the table she had taken it from. “Aye, indeed! The roof is under repair, the stables are being restored, and a proper gardener has been retained to tear out the vegetables and plant something more suitable for gentry to have on display. The pigs and the chickens have been carted to market and those awful sheds will be, of course, destroyed. I should not tell you, I know, but the place was in the most lamentable condition, but, well,” and her face wreathed into endless smiles, “it little matters, does it? What matters is that his lordship has fallen at last and I cannot wait to see what lovely creature has finally done the trick. I daresay she must be the most beautiful of girls!”
“Indeed,” Ryan said, a little numb. “She is certainly not in the common way.” But somehow, seeing all this activity set to action on St. James' bequest filled him with a great deal of unease. The banns hadn't even been posted, for heaven's sake, and if it should get out that the duke was spending what Ryan could only surmise to be an incredible amount of blunt on Miss Murdock's behalf—! Well, the situation could be read in quite a negative manner.
“I'll just let the Squire know you are here,” Mrs. Herriot told him. “He is settled in for a little late snack in the kitchens,” and she made a little moue of distaste, “which I can not convince him is unnecessary as the dining room is now perfectly habitable,” but she smiled and ended with, “but I shall have him brought around soon enough, I dare say, although he has been fighting me, and indeed, all the maids and workers, tooth and nail since I arrived. Quite a card, he is! And such a temper! I daresay his lordship's proposed fiancé has a gentler nature that must surely come from her dear, sweet, departed mother.”
And Ryan stared at her feeling a great deal disconcerted, for if he hadn't seen Miss Murdock angry (other than the brief display at the Dowager's house upon their arrival in London), he had seen the results of her anger on St. James' cheek, and he had to wonder, just a little bit, what Mrs. Herriot would make of Miss Murdock's gentle nature if she were to become aware that Miss Murdock had clobbered the duke most effectively. “Quite,” he said, his voice a little weak.
Mrs. Herriot held her hand out for his coat, and he removed it in distracted motions and she took it from him. “Just make yourself comfortable,” she told him, and then she scurried off in search of Squire Murdock.
And Ryan was left with the sinking feeling that evidently Mrs. Herriot had not made Miss Murdock's acquaintance, and hence, Miss Murdock was not here.
He had no time to know what to make of this discovery, for the hall floor boards creaked in protesting, and then the Squire lumbe
red through the door. And if the house had improved in its condition, the Squire had not.
He wore a worn dressing gown in need of washing. One leg, bared from mid-calf down to his slipper, was swelled beyond even its usual obesity, and as he lurched upon it the pain it caused him was obvious. He held in one puffy hand a bottle of rum, and there were stains down the front of him to show he had been drinking at it for some time. His thick thatch of gray hair was mussed and matted, and looked as though it had not had a comb through it for several days. To complete this impression of someone who has been on an extended drinking binge, when he spoke, his words were slurred and pugnacious.
“You!” he said, hurting Ryan's ears. “You're t'lad that was here the night that son of a fiend ran off with me daughter!”
Mrs. Herriot, who stood in the door frame, cringed with distress. She glanced at Ryan, looking a deal embarrassed, and Ryan could well understand her chagrin that the Duke of St. James had picked a lass with a roaring drunk as a father. He smiled in sympathy to her from around the massive bulk of the Squire, and she dared to hiss, “My apologies, Mister Tempton, but he utterly refuses—”
But her words were cut off as the Squire swung around and bawled at her. “Get on with ye, you pesky hen! How many times am I to tell ya your presence is not needed and not welcome?”
And with a little squeak, Mrs. Herriot fled from the door frame and quite disappeared.
This little by-play between the Squire and the housekeeper at least shifted the Squire's apparent ire to that unfortunate lady and as he turned back to Ryan, he did not continue to rail at him, but instead collapsed onto the sofa (which Ryan judged to be recently upholstered) and muttered of high-handed females bursting into his home and refusing to leave even when he threatened to bodily throw them out. “Who are you again?” he asked Ryan in the midst of his dire diatribe. “I rem'ber who you are, just what was yer bloody name, I mean?”
And Ryan coughed, plastered a polite smile on his face and said, “Mister Ryan Tempton, Squire. I was here to see your filly run with my brother, Lord Tempton and Milord Duke of St.—”
“Aye! I rem'ber! That son of a heathen! What's become of me
daughter, Mister Ryan?”
“Tempton. Mister Tempton.”
“Yes, Tempton,” and the Squire waved the bottle of rum before him in a drunken ark. “Whate'er. Where's me Lizzie? For I tell ya, I've traveled e'ery day to the inn, five miles t'is. Five miles in the rain most morns or afternoons or eve's or whene'er I man'ge t'get there. But five miles in the rain most, uh, covered that, I think, but where was I? Traveled to the inn, and I looks for the banns,” and he nodded his head and put a sage finger up to tap upon his forehead, nearly stabbing one eye as he was about it, “for the banns, mind ya! And does ya think I finds any?” and his head was back very far and his eyes opened very wide and Ryan swallowed for answer and the Squire boomed, “No, be God, I sure as bloody do not! Now what says ya to that, Mister Ryan!”
Ryan, who had not the least idea what to say to that, and as to the question of where Lizzie was, could not even answer it with any certainty, only fumbled for an answer that would not put the Squire into even more of a rage.
But the Squire did not even heed his hesitancy. Instead he lurched to his feet. “Here!” he bellowed. “I'll show 'em to ya, if'n ya don't believes me.” And he swayed about the room, looking on first one table and then another, and then looked beneath the sofa and the chairs, of which Ryan politely lifted his feet when the Squire stumbled over to his, and it was when he was tearing the cushions from the sofa that the Squire began to curse. “Blasted, bloody Mrs. Hooligan with her incessant tidy'n up'n all. Man can't even have a bloody newspaper 'round for more than a single day!”
“Herriot,” Ryan corrected for want of something better to say.
“What's that?” the Squire demanded.
“The housekeeper. Her name is Mrs. Herriot, I'm sure.”
The Squire waved his bottle of rum again. “Whate'er.” He sat down with a force onto the now disarrayed cushions of the sofa and his blustering left him with the sitting. He took a long, unsteady pull from the mouth of the bottle, fixed Ryan with his drunken and rather bewildered eyes and said with sad finality, “Me thinks the duke has ruined me lass. That's what me thinks. And all this—” and he waved his arm about to indicate the changes being made in his home, “is the buy off. That and a hundred quid a month.” Then his eyes closed, the bottle listed in his hand, and in but a moment he was snoring, his chin resting in the thick folds of his neck.
Ryan cocked his head, looked at the Squire with some amazement at this rapid nodding off. Then he frowned, for a hundred pounds a month did seem too generous to be legitimate. Add to that the cost of repairs and refurbishing. . .
He was interrupted in his thoughts by Mrs. Herriot peeking around the door frame, and her face once again wreathed into smiles when she saw that the Squire was asleep. “Now then,” she said, “I've taken the liberty of bringing you a spot of tea and I have made up an extra room for you so you should be quite comfortable, and asked the groom to take care of your horse.” She bustled into the room, ignoring the Squire's fitful snores, and held a saucer and cup out to him, which he took.
“Thank you, Mrs. Herriot,” he told her with pleasure.
Mrs. Herriot beamed at him and said, “Yes, she must be quite a lass to have his lordship not only overlooking the behavior of her father, but being quite generous toward him also. And before any announcements have even been made,” she confided to him.
And Ryan felt a sick twisting in his stomach that perhaps, just perhaps, he had not been doing St. James a service by coming here, but had nearly mangled up a very neat job on his part of managing to shirk off his responsibility toward Miss Murdock.
For how better to dally with a young lady and then sweep the whole affair beneath the rug than to persuade a rather impressionable younger man to elope with her?
And he would have admired this trick quite completely, chalking it off as another sign of St. James' infinite resourcefulness, if it had been played upon any other young female besides Miss Murdock.
“What's yer name, lad?” the bald bartender asked. He leaned one massive forearm along the smooth, worn surface of what passed as a bar in Red's Pub.
The bar was, in fact, nothing more than an old barn door, cut in half, and then laid end to end across four saw horses along the length of the narrow room. The dim room was crowded, even at half past two in the morning, and the smell of gin and sweaty men attracted a steady swarm of flies in the windows that were blocked with nothing but gaping oil cloth. The flies were sluggish from the cold and the wet and the foggy night air, but there were a great deal of them all the same, and if they flew somewhat slower, they also buzzed somewhat louder.
There was no proper door entering the pub, but only clapped together boards, which seemed more nuisance than otherwise as it was constantly being yanked open as tired men made their way in, and others, drunk, made their way out. Below the rumble of rising and dying voices, the cold murmur of the Thames was heard, and the creaking of dock ropes as they held their barges in discipline.
“Steven. Steven Crockner,” Steven said and he stared at the bald man with his gray eyes. “Me dad was on a job for Red. Tell 'im that.”
The bartender frowned, said beneath his breath, “Shut up about that business here in the front room, lad. Wait here.” He turned and pushed his way down the narrow space between bar and barrels and Steven was left standing only shoulder high between the press of men.
They looked at him, curious, and he looked with insolence back at them. It was a look that he had not had but for perhaps twentyfour hours, and it was not one that he was aware that he had now, but it was there all the same. Mayhaps milordship's pistol beneath his coat had something to do with it. But the men only ignored him, and he stood amongst them and watch as they drank.
Then the large, bald man was back in front of him, and he poked a finger across the bar
and into Steven's narrow chest. “Yer wanted in t'back,” he growled. And Steven looked up at him and in a voice unrecognizable to himself, said, “Coo, mister. Don't e'er be pokin' me in the chest again, do ya ken?”
And the men hooted in laughter at this remark, but the bartender, seeing something in the eyes of the boy that he did not like, did remove his finger. “Sure, m'lad,” he said with an exaggerated chuckle. “Fer if ya be a 'man' of Red's, I t'wouldn't want to be steppin' over to yer wrong side.” And the laughter increased as the bartender threw his hands in the air for dramatic effect.
But Steven didn't smile, he just nodded and said, “You'd be wise t'remember it.”
“Oh ho,” the bartender exclaimed. “I'd be wise to rem'ber it, he says. And where'd a dirty scrap of a lad such as you get such fancy talk, I wonder? Mayhaps t'same place ye got those fancy breeches, for if t'rest of ya is a ragtag bit, those are some mighty fine bloomers!”
And the press of men roared and glanced at the pants that were below Steven's unbuttoned coat. They were a fine quality of thread, and a deal too large for him, but he had remedied this by cutting the hems to the proper lengths and belting the waist of it about him with twine.
Steven didn't answer, but his eyes moved around the men that surrounded him, laughing until tears streamed down their faces and clapping each other on the back. “Be wise!” they mimicked. “Oh, hoity-toity, but you'd be wise! for I be here in me fancy mucketymuck breeches!”
And he marked all their faces, one by one, and it was something in his demeanor, the way he did not flush with embarrassment at their laughter, nor even seemed to notice it over much, but just marked them with intentness, that they subsided and settled back to leaning upon the bar, their shoulders hunched. The bartender said, “Ah, get on with ya, lad,” and he made a motion again to a door at the end of the room, a proper door this time, and Steven turned and went to it. And he was very aware of all those men's eyes upon him as he went.
In the Brief Eternal Silence Page 43