by Carla Kelly
“We weren’t supposed to say anything, we four,” Stephen Hoyt whispered.
“It’s just you four, my lodgers, that he is punishing?” she asked, appalled.
All four boys nodded. She took a deep breath, and another, unable to speak.
“Master Blake is getting even with me, with you, for his reprimand. I’ll kill the man.”
Startled, Meridee turned to the door and saw her husband standing there, his face like thunder. She stood up, took his hand, and pulled him into the room.
“No, love,” she said, taking in the ferocity of his expression as she quailed inside. “What we will do, we six, is cross the street right now and wake up Headmaster Croker.”
She held his hand until his expression changed, mellowed, even. His lips were moving, as he no doubt recited Euclid’s Propositions. She watched his shoulders relax and his eyes regain their usual benign gaze.
If that’s what it takes, she thought, so be it. Have at him, Euclid. She turned to her children, for so she considered them.
“Dress yourselves. We’re going to see the headmaster right now.”
“He’ll be angry,” Nick said, suddenly fearful.
“No, my dears. He will be sorrowful and he will right this wrong. Hurry now.”
Chapter Thirty-One
“I’ll deal with Master Blake first thing in the morning,” Headmaster Croker said.
Dressed as casually as his late-night visitors in his nightshirt and robe, the headmaster took a serious survey of his students. “Lads, look me in the eye,” he said quietly. “You’ve done nothing to be ashamed of. Master Blake used you poorly, and it was not your fault.”
Her heart tender, Meridee watched the boys slowly raise their eyes from the carpet, which had consumed their entire attention. She thought of the few moments in her life where she had been hauled up short for some infraction or other, usually on the order of pouting or talking back to her older sisters. Papa or Mama would assign some punishment of the weed-pulling, book-dusting variety, which once accomplished was forgotten, along with the initial misdemeanor.
She watched these sad children who had wormed their way right into her heart and realized no one commanding a workhouse ever let them forget their crimes, probably amplified as proof that their illegitimate, unfortunate beginnings were somehow their fault. The injustice of it made angry tears run down her face.
Embarrassed, Meridee lowered her eyes to the carpet this time, only to have her husband put his arm around her.
“There is one thing in life we all learned, didn’t we, lads?” Able asked. “The unfairness.”
They nodded, solemn.
“There were times I knew I was punished because I deserved it,” he continued, looking around with a half smile. “I’m certain you know how that felt too.” He touched Meridee’s face. “You, as well, dearest? I doubt you were an angel when you were seven or eight.”
Heaven bless you for your light touch, she thought, as she watched their little boarders smile shyly at her.
“But this was not one of those times,” Headmaster Croker reminded them. “If something of this nature ever happens again, and I mean that with all my heart, tell me. Tell Master Six. Tell Mrs. Six. We are disciplined and rigorous here at St. Brendan’s, but we are not cruel. That is all. Goodnight to you. Wait in the hall for a moment, please. I would speak to the Sixes.”
As one, the boys rose and filed out. The headmaster’s expression hardened as he closed the door and turned to Able and Meridee.
“What happened was abominable. Master Blake will be dismissed tomorrow morning, and I will chance the consequences. I will take the class until I find another instructor.” He passed his hand in front of his face as though swatting flies. “I regret I cannot do anything more than that, because Leonidas Blake is the nephew of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who controls this nation’s purse strings.”
“My goodness,” Meridee said.
“We all dance to that man’s tune,” her husband said. “Can you at least lean on his family enough to get him far from Portsmouth?”
“I wish I could. The Blake estate is a mere thirty miles away…” his voice trailed off. “I can try.”
“Here’s something else to chew on, sir,” Able said. “You told me earlier that Blake was—how did you say it?—foisted on you as punishment for his gaming habits.”
“Aye, he was,” Croker said, his voice full of a fair measure of rue, to Meridee’s ears. “This position was to—ahem—rehabilitate him.”
“Master Fletcher told me he followed Blake one afternoon right up to the doors of the Pot of Gold,” Able said.
Able must have noticed her puzzled expression. “It’s a gaming hell,” he told her, his lips practically on her ear. “Don’t ever let me catch you playing faro in there, dearest.”
“You are absurd,” she said, trying to maintain her composure.
“I wonder where he got the ready to gamble?” Croker asked. “I know his family cut him off from any cash, barring enough to live on.”
“P’raps he pimps,” Meridee said calmly, which made Able burst into laughter and the headmaster gasp and stare at her.
“I’ve been giving my sweet innocent a bit of Pompey education,” Able said, when he could talk. “I didn’t expect that, either, Headmaster.”
“It’s a thought,” she said.
“And a crazy one,” her husband retorted. “Pimps are usually charming fellows, at least with clients. We could never call Master Blake charming, could we?”
“No,” Meridee said, “we could not.”
“Take her home, Master Six,” Croker said. To Meridee’s relief, the gloom had left his face. “And keep her away from gaming hells, for the Lord’s sake!”
Four little boys waited for them in the hall. They looked at each other and nudged Nick, who stepped forward and cleared his throat. “Me mates and I were wondering what was so funny in there,” he said.
“Mrs. Six,” Able said promptly. “I won’t tell you what she said though, because you’re too tender.”
“Gor, Master Six, no one ever called us tender before,” Nick said with a grin.
“Oh, you men!” Meridee exclaimed. “I am outnumbered.”
“Aye, Mam,” silent Stephen Hoyt said.
Meridee turned away so he could not see her tears. “He called me Mam,” she whispered to Able.
“Smart lad,” her husband replied, and she noticed his own struggle.
She clapped her hands. “Gentlemen, it is past the bewitching hour of midnight, and we will still rise at seven,” she said, while her soft-hearted man composed himself. “Mam says.”
They crossed the street more cheerful than when they came this way earlier. “I’m too old for this much drama,” Able said.
“You are twenty-six,” Meridee said, ever practical.
“And you can step back from your Pompey education,” he teased.
“You started it,” she teased back.
“I did. I’m happy this whole nasty business is over.” He opened the front door and ushered in the lodgers.
“Upstairs to bed,” Meridee said.
“Aye, Mam,” John Mark said, as if trying out the word. He stopped on the first tread. “Mam, don’t you think we’re due for some good fortune, now that Master Blake will be gone tomorrow?”
“I could not agree more,” she said, and tugged at her husband’s hand. “We’ve all earned it.”
Master Blake was gone before the first classes convened on the morrow. Meridee stood at her front window and watched him leave, carrying a pasteboard box with what must have been his teaching supplies, and his pointer in one hand.
She stepped back when he turned to stare directly at her and mouth something she could not interpret. Stepping back farther, she bumped into Mrs. Perry.
“Beg pardon,” she said, startled. “I didn’t know you were in the room.”
She looked down at the serving spoon in her cook’s hand. “I don’t think it wil
l come to death by cutlery,” Meridee said, trying to joke, but finding her mouth almost too dry to speak.
“I don’t trust the man,” Mrs. Perry said. She went to the window. “And there he is, cheeky man, still staring! And look, he pointed a finger at me.”
“It’s just a finger,” Meridee said.
“It’s the wrong one,” Mrs. Perry replied.
Mrs. Perry ran into the hall and yanked open the front door. As Meridee watched, open-mouthed, the woman ran down the front steps, brandishing the spoon. She watched what appeared to be a spirited exchange of words, with Mrs. Perry jabbing Master Blake with the spoon most recently used to stir that morning’s porridge. Little blobs of oats flew about and stuck to the black robe Master Blake wore so proudly.
When Mrs. Perry raised the spoon to bat at his head, Master Blake abandoned all dignity and ran, dropping papers and pencils on the street. Meridee looked up at her husband’s classroom windows across the street, not surprised to see a row of little fellows watching. No one smiled.
“Good riddance to rubbish,” Mrs. Perry said when she came back inside and closed the door with a flourish. “And that is that.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
“I’m a prophet,” Able announced a week later when he came home from afternoon class. He grabbed Meri and hauled her away from the Rumford while Betty MacGregor watched. “You won’t believe what just happened!”
Good Lord, it wasn’t fair for someone to look so dee-lectable and dee-licious while stirring rice pudding. Heaven knows she needed a little jollying. Mrs. Perry had told him a week ago about Master Blake staring so long and hard at his wife and frightening her. The matter with Blake had turned her quiet. How nice that he had good news to share—the best news, really.
“This is probably sitting-down sort of news, but I suppose it is hard to stir dinner from a chair,” he told her. “Who should appear today in Headmaster Croker’s office but one Mabel Thomas, a butcher’s widow from Cardiff.”
“And …?”
“She produced legal documents to prove she is Nick’s great aunt on her husband’s side,” he said. “In the space of a fifteen-minute interview, Nick has come away with a home and the last name of Thomas.”
That got his wife’s attention. She gasped, took the pot off the stove, sat down, and burst into tears. Able stared at her, uncertain as he rarely was, and wondering if he should laugh at her—inadvisable—sit down and cry with her—also inadvisable—or simply gape at her sudden bout of tears as husbands since time immemorial had probably done when confronted with a weeping female.
He chose to sit beside her, handkerchief ready, and wait until she reached for it.
“It’s good news,” he said softly, after she blew her nose. “Meri, if I could somehow express with words how every workhouse child wishes and wishes for such good fortune.”
“But I will miss Nick most awfully!” she wailed, and retreated into the handkerchief.
She blew her nose again, and he watched her face as she mastered her emotions and became once more the woman he adored, and not some mercurial flibbertigibbet.
She put her hands in her lap. “Better tell me the whole story, Able.”
Relieved, he started from the beginning, seeing the matter clearly through his eyes as he saw everything. “Her name is Mrs. Mary Thomas,” he said. “She is the widow of a butcher from Cardiff, Wales. It seems her late sister-in-law had a daughter who went far astray to Northumberland.”
He thought of his own mother, wondering if anyone had ever looked for her in dingy back alleys and places like the Bare Bones. Street women lived at the mercy of pimps, and their customers could number in the dozens, one after another, on the first night when the fleet was in. He remembered his own urges after months at sea. Like other men of the fleet, he never had to look too hard for such women; they were thick as fleas on a cur. He had stood in lines he wasn’t proud of.
“Able?”
“Oh? Oh, aye. With tears, she told Headmaster Croker how she had followed up every rumor and searched for her niece. It was a deathbed promise extracted from her by her sister-in-law.”
“She found Nick,” he said simply, shortening the lengthy session with Headmaster Croker and Mrs. Thomas’s many tears, rendering her incoherent, at times, except that she patted Nick on the head until he started to dodge her.
“You’re satisfied?” she said finally.
“Aye, Mam,” he said, which he regretted instantly, as tears welled in her eyes again.
“I’ll miss him,” she said simply, and left the room.
Wise woman, Meri knew better than to show a sad face to Nick, who came to the supper table with a light in his eyes that Able envied. He thought of the times he had joined other workhouse lads, to stand in rows and watch as couples came through the bleak halls, looking anxiously at each face until the master pointed out the lucky boy or girl in question. He had never asked, but he doubted there was a single child among that number who did not hope, even after hope had left with the closing of the workhouse door.
“So soon?” Meri asked when he told them Nick was leaving tomorrow.
Even Mrs. Perry, ordinarily so neutral of expression while serving the food, frowned and looked away as she set down circles of cinnamon and sugar pie crust, created on the fly because it was Nick’s favorite. She chose not to linger in the dining room to hear oohs and aahs of appreciation, but left the room as soon as she could.
“Mrs. Thomas wants to get Nick home to Cardiff, and it is a long journey,” he said.
“She promised me my own room and a pony,” Nick told the others. “Well, she did!” he repeated, when his friends looked away.
Bless Meri. She put her hand on Nick’s arm. “It’s hard to be left behind,” she told him, her voice soft. “We will miss you more than we can say.”
Who would have thought packing his few garments, a handful of pebbles taken from the stone basin when he was cleaning it, and an extra knit cap would create such melancholy? Able would have given the world to erase the sorrow in Meri’s eyes as she did her best to put on a cheerful face.
“I can help him pack,” Able offered, to spare her further pain.
A spark of her good humor returned when she poked his chest. “Husband, you are perfectly wretched at folding anything. I hate to wound you, but it is so.”
He handed her the small case Mrs. Thomas had pressed into his hands when she left Headmaster Croker’s office, barely controlling her emotions when she told both men it had belonged to Nick Thomas’s poor, frail mother, dead of consumption.
Meri had accepted it with a sigh. She managed a smile that went no farther than her lips. “Able, there are times when I know this is the easiest pound a month a body could earn,” she said. “This is not one of them.”
He stayed with her as she tucked in the boys for bed that night, watching as she pulled up the covers, swept back hair from eyes, and kissed each forehead. She held Nick’s hand a little longer, then squeezed his fingers.
“Nick Thomas,” she said. “I like that. You have a surname now.”
Able held her close all night.
Chapter Thirty-Three
See here, Meridee Six, you are behaving like the worst sort of female, she told herself, after a night of tossing and turning, and stifling her tears because her eyes were beginning to ache from so much weeping. She finally gave up and dragged herself downstairs, to stare out the window—it would be raining—and remind herself that she was a woman grown, a wife, and not a baby.
She had extracted a promise from her husband that Mrs. Thomas would come to the house to fetch Nick. “If our own lads”—heavens, she had almost called them sons—“our own lads are so downcast at Nick’s good fortune, why should we torture other boys across the street who want to be happy for him, but wish it were them?”
Able had agreed with her reasoning, or maybe he was just weary of her emotions. She could make it up to him in spades when she felt better.
When Meridee
heard Mrs. Perry banging around in the kitchen, she dragged herself in there to plump down at the table and stare moodily into space until the cook, looking no happier, joined her with two cups of tea.
“We are obviously not looking at this situation in a sanguine manner,” Meridee said, after tea had begun its restorative work. “Why are we not delighted?”
“Because we love the little boy too,” Mrs. Perry said promptly. “We’ve been tested and tried with rat bones, and food in the middle of the night, and tears from young’uns with old eyes.”
“And now it’s Mrs. Thomas’s turn,” Meridee said quietly, after long thought. “Let’s see how excellent a Sarah Siddons I am when she comes to fetch him.”
If some cosmic observer had watched the Sixes with their boarders that morning at breakfast, he would have come away puzzled by how people trying to look happy could make such a muddle of it, and for so many reasons.
Davey Ten didn’t even attempt joy. He shook his head over Nick’s favorite rye bread, butter, and jam, complained of a belly ache, and stated he could not go to school this morning.
Able opened his mouth to object, but Meridee put her hand on his arm. “Let him be, dearest,” she said softly. “We all agree this is hard.”
“I don’t,” he declared. “Finding a family member is the dearest wish of every workhouse boy.” He sighed. “Perhaps I cannot help some melancholy, either. This is too complicated, even for my brain.”
She leaned across the toast and whispered into his ear, “Tell Euclid to move over and leave a little space in your head for the everyday commotion we both live in.”
Her reward was a weak smile, but that would have to suffice. She sent the lot of them off to school across the street with a fake show of good cheer, when she really wanted to join Davey upstairs, because her stomach ached, too.
But there was no time to mourn, not with Nick right there, anticipation writ large on his face. She stationed him in the sitting room to watch for Mrs. Thomas, had herself a quiet cry in the kitchen, and came out like a champion when the doorbell jangled.