A Lady of True Distinction

by Grace Burrowes

  “I’m glad you stayed with me last night.” She could say that much honestly. “I hate that Bancroft has done this, and I am angry that the girls must endure his machinations, but thinking clearly is beyond me right now. You will please get us to Summerfield and keep me from proving that Bancroft’s low opinion of me is justified.”

  Hawthorne’s smile was wan. “We will mind our manners, not because we approve of him or like him, but because the children learn from our example.”

  The girls charged back into the foyer, and then Hawthorne was tossing them up into the coach.

  “You brought Captain,” Greta said. “He isn’t muddy this time.”

  The dog sat up on the box, looking like the coachman’s eager assistant.

  “I thought he could use a change of air,” Hawthorne said. “Shall we be off?”

  He was smiling, calm, and relaxed, for which Margaret nearly hated him and also loved him dearly. She climbed into the coach, Hawthorne followed, and when the children finished arguing over who sat where, he rapped on the roof. The coach lurched forward, and Margaret swallowed past a lump in her throat bigger than all of Dorsetshire.

  Hawthorne entertained the children for most of the ride, pointing out manor houses, an occasional oak tree claimed by the Royal Navy, and other landmarks. He mediated squabbles about seating, answered the endless how much farther? questions, and launched into a description of London that made an excessively dirty city seem like a place of enchantment.

  The miles rolled by, and all too soon the coach pulled up before the Summerfield main entrance. The children burst from the coach almost before the horses had halted—rather, Adriana burst from the coach, and Greta climbed down after—while Margaret sat beside her husband, wanting to shout at the children to get back in the carriage.

  “I cannot do this, Hawthorne.”

  “You should not have to do this. Before we leave, I will negotiate with Bancroft an end date for this visit. He can tell his guests whatever he pleases, but the children will be returned to you.”

  Margaret could not allow herself to hope, but she did appreciate that Hawthorne believed what he said. He left the coach and turned to offer her his hand. She emerged into a sunny afternoon and beheld an anxious Fenny standing on the steps.

  “Ambers took the children upstairs,” Fenny said. “You should come see them settled.”

  Hawthorne offered his arm.

  “Was the nursery at least clean?” Margaret asked, accepting her husband’s escort.

  “They burn coal in the nursery here,” Fenny said. “I had a word with the butler and the housekeeper, and we’ve been airing the nursery since I got here. The whole place is at sixes and sevens because of the London guests arriving tomorrow or Monday. I suspect the children will be largely left in peace.”

  Hawthorne held the door, though where was the butler? The first footman? Anybody to mind the front door?

  “I told Greta that if she’s feeling overwhelmed, she can ask to be taken to the nursery for a nap,” Hawthorne said. “I don’t know as that tactic will help, but it can’t hurt.”

  “I’ll pass the same suggestion to Adriana,” Fenny said, starting up the main staircase. “This really could be a lovely house, but the housekeeper says it hasn’t fared well since the current Mr. Summerfield took over.”

  Margaret did not care that Summerfield was dusty and—as Greta had said—chilly. She really should care that the children still did not know of her nuptials, but at that moment, she could not muster one iota of concern on that score either. Climbing the steps to the nursery felt like climbing the scaffold to a gallows, where all of Margaret’s hopes and happiness would be snuffed out to suit Bancroft’s greed.

  “Is Bancroft too busy rehearsing his flirtations to greet his nieces?” Margaret asked.

  “Mr. Summerfield had to meet with his tenants,” Fenny said. “Something about a hay wagon that broke down on the way to a field that’s to be cut Monday morning. Mr. Hartley was quite vexed.”

  “If Bancroft isn’t home, so much the better,” Margaret said. “I’ll take the children on a tour of the premises before he gets back, and we can part at our leisure without Bancroft hovering and gloating.”

  Fenny winced. “Mr. Summerfield is most anxious to make a good impression on his Town guests. Ambers and I intend to keep the children out of sight as much as possible.”

  Hawthorne paused outside the nursery door. “Do we know when Bancroft will return from his meeting with the tenants?”

  “Mr. Hartley didn’t tell me that.”

  “Which means,” Margaret said, “we cannot negotiate an end date for this visit today, can we?” She hated her peevish tone, she hated that Bancroft had likely outmaneuvered her, and she hated worst of all that good manners prevented her from collapsing into a screaming, kicking heap right there on the floor of the corridor.

  “Nelson is new to the job,” Oak said, taking off his straw hat, and swiping a forearm across his brow. “Can’t really blame the lad.”

  “The lad has been driving teams since King George went mad,” Hawthorne retorted. “How in the hell anybody can overturn a hay wagon on a field that’s all but level…” The wagon sat halfway down the windrow, the hapless driver now at the heads of the team. The horses stomped at flies and whisked short tails about their quarters, as if they too were out of patience with human incompetence.

  The crews that should have been raking were instead knotted around the wagon, pointing and chattering as if somebody had dropped an elephant carcass in their midst.

  “We didn’t lose the team,” Oak said. “That’s something.”

  “Because the singletree snapped loose from the wagon carriage,” Hawthorne retorted. “Now we have a useless wagon, a load of hay scattering itself on the breeze, and grounds for arguments that will last the next fortnight.”

  Hawthorne risked a glance at his watch while Valerian sauntered over with the water bucket and dipper.

  “Only the third day of haying,” Valerian said, “and already the Millers and Rileys are exchanging threats and curses. Nothing like country life, is there?”

  He took a drink and passed Oak the bucket.

  “So why, Vanity Dearest,” Hawthorne said, “aren’t you ensuring that the Millers and the Rileys work at opposite ends of the field?”

  Valerian shaded his eyes and regarded the overturned wagon. “They love to bicker. It’s entertaining.”

  Ye gods, why did it seem as if haying grew more difficult every year? “And when they are bickering, they aren’t working, but those rain clouds come closer nonetheless. Then too, their bickering occasionally descends into fisticuffs, and then nobody works while the spectacle unfolds.”

  “That’s why you’re here,” Oaks said, taking a good long slurp from the dipper. “To keep us all sorted out.” He grinned, as if he’d made a joke.

  “I should be leaving,” Hawthorne said. “Margaret asked that we pay a call on Summerfield this afternoon, and I will have to disappoint my wife. The alternative is to leave one of the most important jobs I do in the hands of a pair of fools who should be righting that damned wagon instead of placing bets on the Rileys and Millers.”

  Oak had the grace to look sheepish, Valerian stepped closer. “You cannot leave now, Thorne. If anybody can get the Millers and Rileys sorted out, it’s you. If anybody can make an overturned wagon a slightly humorous triviality, it’s you. If anybody can gauge when the damned rain will get here, it’s you. This is no time for a social call.”

  Haying did this. It shortened tempers, blistering more than just hands and backs. Haying frayed scarred neighborly relationships, incited violence, and tried nerves.

  “I promised my wife,” Hawthorne said. “The one thing she asked me to do—to keep the children from their uncle’s meddling—and I have failed her. Now she makes an even more reasonable request, and you want me to instead sweat away my afternoon playing nanny to a parcel of bumblers.”

  Oak plopped his hat back o
n his head. “The hay crop was short last year. Playing nanny to a parcel of bumblers might be all that stands between them and another very hard winter.”

  “You can pay the call on Bancroft tomorrow,” Valerian added. “Go first thing in the day and you can be back in the fields before noon.”

  I do not want to be back in the fields. The thought landed between Hawthorne’s temper and his devotion to duty as something of a revelation.

  “Where else in the entire realm,” he said, “are three earl’s sons sweating like beasts, getting blisters on their blisters, and earning headaches to go with their sore backs?”

  Oak had the courage to answer. “Nowhere.”

  “Casriel himself would be here too,” Valerian said, “if he wasn’t in Town.”

  “But he is in Town, with his wife. As I should be with mine.”

  Something in Thorne’s tone must have communicated itself to Valerian, for he offered the bucket and dipper. “We’ll apologize to Margaret, Thorne. We’ll explain to her that the day turned rotten on you. We’ll make your excuses.”

  Margaret was doubtless pacing the parlor at Summerton, dressed for paying a call, and fretting herself senseless because after less than a week of marriage, her husband was rehearsing excuses. Hawthorne hated that picture, and hated himself for adding to her disappointments.

  “We can make our excuses to her in person,” Oak said, gaze on a gig that had turned into the field by way of a break in the tree line.

  Margaret held the reins, and her posture suggested she was ready to hold forth on the topic of tardy husbands too.

  “Explain about the overturned wagon,” Valerian said. “She has to see that’s not a problem you can walk away from.”

  “And the rain clouds,” Oak added. “Closer by the minute.”

  While Oak and Valerian were backing away. “Cowards.”

  Their expressions went blank, then they turned their backs and retreated in earnest.

  “Get the damned hay wagon righted,” Thorne called after them. “Fill it up and push it by main strength to the haystack. Stop scything until that’s done and maybe the rain will pass us by.”

  Valerian waved an arm without turning.

  “And separate the damned warring factions.”

  Another wave, while Margaret drove the gig directly across the field. She halted the horse so a mere six feet separated her from her husband.

  “You are late,” she said, and throughout the entire history of marriage, no wife had ever packed more disapproval into those three words.

  More hurt.

  “I lost track of the time and things here rather went to hell.” As Hawthorne’s marriage was going to hell, day by day. The draft team that had been pulling the wagonload of hay was now snacking on the pile of cut, dried grass dumped between the windrows.

  “Get those horses away from that uncured hay!” he called. “They’ll colic before sundown otherwise.”

  “Hawthorne, you said we’d call on the girls today.”

  In truth, he’d said on Monday that they’d pay a call Tuesday, once the haying had commenced. Yesterday, he’d put Margaret off until today.

  “Would you care for a drink of water?” he asked, mostly because he hadn’t anything else to offer her.

  “I would care to see the children.” She was outwardly composed, her words calm, but her eyes told a different tale.

  He was breaking her heart, plain and simple. “I’d like to see them too, but in some ways, these people are my children. They rely on me, and I have allowed them to.”

  Margaret regarded him as somebody led the team away from the pile of new hay and Oak and Valerian organized men along one side of the wagon.

  “You cannot rely on your brothers to tend matters here for one afternoon, Hawthorne?”

  “My brothers are half the reason that wagon is on its side. Half the reason the Rileys and the Millers got within feuding distance, half the reason nobody takes any initiative but instead stands around hoping the hay will make itself.”

  She blinked a few times and then gazed off across the fields. “They’ve disappointed you. I see.”

  “More than that,” Hawthorne said, waving away a fly. “They know our situation and they aren’t taking it into account. I expected better from my own brothers.” The actual feeling, the one Hawthorne didn’t want to name aloud, was betrayal. “The heat is making me irritable.”

  Beyond irritable. Ready to knock heads and curse and tell the lot of them to go to perdition—over a few acres of hay?

  “You are needed here,” Margaret said, taking up the reins. “I see that. I will pay my own call on Summerfield.”

  She would not reproach him, would not scold or plead, and what was at stake for her was much more precious than a load of hay. If Valerian and Oak’s lack of understanding rose to the status of betrayal, what must Margaret be feeling toward a husband who did not keep his word?

  The hot breeze wafted more of the spilled load away as the men got the wagon righted with a shout and a loud clatter. Some of them began forking up the loose hay, while others heeded Valerian’s direction to get back to the raking.

  They had known what to do, they had simply wanted somebody to reassure them before they did it.

  “Margaret, do you smell rain on the way?” Hawthorne asked.

  She closed her eyes for a moment. “Not rain, just humidity. An hour from now I might give you a different answer, but no rain on the way at present. Why?”

  “Because I would not want us to get a soaking on the way to Summerfield.” He climbed into the gig, leaving the bucket and dipper between two windrows.

  Margaret sat for a moment, the reins in her hands. “You’re sure you can spare the time?”

  “I’m sure that you were wiser than I. You asked me how I’d cope if I ever had to choose between my new family and my old. I choose you and the girls, Margaret. If my brothers and neighbors cannot manage without me for an afternoon, then I have not helped them, I have held them back from developing their own abilities.”

  Perhaps that was overstating the case, perhaps the matter was one of allowing habits to form—the habit of relying on Hawthorne and the habit of being relied on. Maybe Casriel’s arm’s length attitude toward the botanical venture was an attempt to right a similar error. Hawthorne did not much care to parse the philosophical questions, he cared only that his wife know she had his loyalty.

  “You’ll need a bath,” Margaret said. “I daresay you’ll need some comfrey salve too.”

  I need you. Rather than say that, Thorne kissed her cheek. Their hat brims mashed against each other, and somebody hooted from halfway across the field.

  “A bath and some salve sounds heavenly.”

  Oak and Valerian watched them go, and it seemed to Hawthorne that both of his brothers were smiling. Of a certainty, Margaret was smiling, and so was Hawthorne.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “I do hope you’re enjoying your visit,” Bancroft said as Miss Pepper donned a straw hat adorned with blue silk flowers. She had a knack for tying a bow off-center under her chin that drew Bancroft’s notice. Was it purely by chance that her bonnet ribbons curled ever so fetchingly against her breasts?

  He thought not. Emily Pepper was clever in the way women were meant to be clever, meaning she knew how to hold a man’s notice and make him feel appreciated.

  “Dorsetshire is delightful,” Miss Pepper replied, taking up her parasol. “Summerfield is delightful. Papa is much taken with your property.”

  “May I tell you a secret?”

  She sashayed out the door ahead of him, and Bancroft took a moment to admire the view before following her onto the back terrace.

  “I’d rather you didn’t,” she said. “Secrets want keeping, and that takes effort. Let’s stroll, shall we?” She opened her parasol, a lacy blue confection that matched her bonnet ribbons.

  Such fashion sense, she had.

  “This isn’t that sort of secret,” Bancroft said as sh
e took his arm. “I had Hartley move the hay crews to the fields closest to the house because I thought you and Mr. Pepper would find the sight of the yeomen at their labors charming.”

  The lads made a happy picture, swinging their blades. Bancroft had told Hartley that a song or two wouldn’t go amiss, but so far, the tenants hadn’t obliged in Bancroft’s hearing. Perhaps haying songs were naughty.

  “Everything about Summerfield is charming,” Miss Pepper said. “That gazebo, for example, just begs for a lady to escape for a few hours with a book or some sketching paper. If I were Greta or Adriana, I’d be planning tea parties for my dolls there.”

  Of all topics, Bancroft did not want to discuss his nieces. “That pair won’t be blighting my garden anytime in the near future. Until they can conduct themselves like ladies, they will be confined to the nursery.”

  Miss Pepper dropped his arm and bent to sniff a pot of purple flowers. “I’ve always thought hyacinths were too sweet, too overpowering, but these have a lovely scent.”

  Which was probably part of Margaret’s legacy. She had been permitted to meddle inordinately with the gardeners and groundskeepers.

  “Are those hyacinths? They do lovely things for your eyes, my dear.”

  “Flatterer.” She resumed her progress toward the gazebo, which was a hexagonal, open-sided little temple to architectural vanity at the foot of the garden. “Was your late sister confined to the nursery as a child, Bancroft?”

  “My sister was a much-wanted daughter, and the only daughter. She was overindulged from infancy.” Charles had enjoyed the role of doting big brother where their sister had been concerned, and Bancroft had always wondered if he’d been denied some critical sibling sentiment. Siblings were simply there—usually getting most of the parental attention and resources. Siblings weren’t particularly useful, and they did tend to complicate one’s aspirations.

  “Were you and your brother confined to the nursery?”

  What did any of that matter? “I spent a fair amount of time with my books. Charles was the heir, though—the oldest and the favorite. Charles and Papa frequently rode out together, Charles sat between Mama and Papa at services, and Charles went to public school and did two years of university.” A complete waste of funds and attention, as it turned out.