There, they were simmering nicely, she thought, standing back and admiring her work much as she would have a flower arrangement in the past, and in a few minutes she would put a cover over the pot so the dumplings could fluff up. It was twilight. On the horizon the purple hills loomed like great hump-backed beasts, laying along the moors, slumbering. The cottage had only the one window, so the interior was ever dim, but now the only light came from a tallow candle on the scarred table that served as workspace and dining table.
That was where Mary worked, sprinkling flour over her circlet of pastry, her dress sleeves rolled up over her forearms, flour clinging to the small hairs. So far that day she had milked the cow, collected eggs from her chickens, spun several bobbins of her fine wool—selling the wool would bring in much-needed money for necessities such as flour, tea, sugar and the occasional treat—as well as feeding and caring for Molly, washing clothes, cleaning her tidy cottage, reading the Bible for half an hour and making the meals in the meantime.
And all had been done with a cheery smile and a song, some of which Mary had taught her. Jane had tried to help, but more often than not her “help” had hindered. She was best at simply playing with Molly while Mary went efficiently about her business.
But at that moment Mary’s forehead was puckered in a frown, and she looked up at her guest with a doubtful expression. “Jenny, I’d not make you feel unwelcome . . .”
In the pale pool of light from the candle Jane could see the worry on her hostess’s face. Here it came, the polite request to move on. Well, she had known she could not stay there indefinitely. Trying to be casual, determined to seem unconcerned, she moved over to the table and took the clean cloth from a loaf pan, peeking to see if the bread dough she had just learned to make was rising. It was a little, but it still did not look like Mary’s loaf, proudly filling the pan beside it. “What is it, Mary?” She braced herself for what was to come, feeling sure it must be the inevitable politely couched ejection from the idyllic cottage on the moors.
The woman dusted flour from her hands and folded the circle of dough into a triangle, then laid it gently in the deep pan. As she patted the dough into the pan, she took a deep breath and said, “I’ve always considered meself a good judge o’ character. It was why I waited and married Jem rather than some of the lads who had already asked me. Jem was older, but he had kind eyes an’ a good heart. I never once regretted waiting, e’en though I be a widow now.” Wiping her hands on her apron, she gazed at the younger woman, the firelight from the hearth, the only other light in the room, casting her features in sharp relief. “Jenny, what I’m tryin’ to say is . . .” She paused, pursed her lips and gazed at her houseguest, but then continued in a rush of words, “Jenny, yer not a lady’s maid, and you never have bin.”
Jane’s heart thumped and she bit her lip. Well, what did she expect? Mary had asked her a few rudimentary questions, such as how to get bloodstains from undergarments, and she hadn’t had the slightest idea how to answer. She did not even know if it was something that a lady’s maid should know. Perhaps she should have declared haughtily that that was up to the laundry to take care of, and was no part of a lady’s maid’s duties.
When she didn’t speak, Mary continued. “If’n you don’t want to talk about it, just tell me to shut me mouth.” She spooned the chicken filling into the pie shell and picked up the other circlet of pastry. “When I said I was a good judge o’ character, I meant I like you. Yer a good woman and so I’ll not question you too close about what yer past is, nor why you happened to be in my barn late of a rainy evening with a torn dress.” A faint shadow of anger crossed her face. She vigorously pinched the dough into a raised rim and said, “But if some man in Lesleydale has abused ya, I’ll get the devil, I promise you that. Don’t be afraid o’ him. I’ll get him and turn him over to Gerry, and Gerry’ll beat the tar out o’ him. I’ve seen ’im do it before.”
“Really?” Impressed despite her long-held aversion to violence, Jane sat down at the table watching Mary’s deft movements as she slashed gashes in the pastry-covered pie and set it aside. She was inevitably fascinated by any new view of Gerry Neville’s character. She had not stopped thinking of him all day, a tiny trill of excitement racing down her back at the memory of their hours together. “He . . . he isn’t violent, is he?”
“Nobbut more gentle than Gerry.” Mary looked deep into Jane’s eyes. “He’s a good man. Doesn’t hold with mishandlin’ women, though. That’s the only time I’ve seen him angry, and then he near killed the scum what abused one o’ his maids . . . uh, I mean, a-a village maiden.”
Abstracted by her own thoughts, Jane barely heard the last part of Mary’s speech. She put one cheek in her hand and stared off out the window at the twilit hill, lost in remembrance of Gerry and their long walk through the hills, the look in his sparkling blue eyes, the gentleness of his hands. Everything about him, from his voice to his physical being, fascinated her. What a champion he would make, she thought, feeling again the strength of his hands and seeing the breadth of his shoulders. A woman could feel secure and loved being held by a man like that. A woman could—
“But I was askin’ about you, lass.” Mary’s voice brought Jane back to the dim interior of the little cottage. “Yer no lady’s maid. If . . . if yer of th’gentry but down on yer luck, or . . . or if ya bin abandoned by yer man . . .” She let the subject drop as her cheeks turned a rosy red. Molly set up a thin wail just then and Mary bustled over to the cradle. “Time for yer dinner, my little lady,” she said. She sat down in the chair near the fire, unbuttoned the top of her gown and shifted Molly.
“No, Mary,” Jane said, moving over to the low cot in the corner so she could still see Mary’s face. She smiled, not offended at all by her new friend’s surmises. It is what she might have thought in the same circumstances. “I have not been seduced and abandoned without benefit of clergy.”
Mary, even pinker, grimaced. “I didna mean to offend you.”
“I’m not offended,” she reassured Mary. “You have a right to your surmises. But I am not an abandoned woman, merely . . .” She took a deep breath, but then let it out without finishing her sentence. Should she tell Mary the whole story? But that would make her a partner to something that the woman should not be burdened with. Mary had an obligation to the lord of Haven Court. She had told Jane that the viscount was good enough to let her live in the cottage even after Jem’s death and even though she no longer had any right to the property. It was hers as long as she needed it, he had apparently told her, and until she married again. If she married again, for there were no conditions attached. How could Jane make her a party to the deception? For the viscount would likely be at least angry that Mary, to whom he had granted a valuable boon, had hidden his supposed betrothed from him.
Sadly Jane realized that it just emphasized that she must move on, that she was doing Mary a grave disservice, one she must right eventually by telling Viscount Haven that Mary had no part in the deception, that she thought she was shielding a frightened, friendless woman, not Miss Jane Dresden, runaway bride-to-be. Guilt overtook Jane but she didn’t know how to correct, at that moment, the wrong she had done Mary Cooper. She could only hold her breath and know that within days she must move on; she could not keep delaying the inevitable in the hope of seeing Gerry one more time. She must leave, return to the inn in the village, or go . . . somewhere, and send a letter to Lord Haven explaining everything and stating outright that Mary Cooper was an innocent bystander.
But for the time being— “Mary, I am not a lady’s maid. And I am . . . well, I’m hiding.” She caught the worry on the other woman’s face and rushed to continue. “But I have done nothing illegal, nor do I feel I have done anything morally wrong, though I may have hurt some people inadvertently. I don’t think I have. But there are things . . . my . . . my life is not simple. I . . . I’ll not be here much longer. I promise.” As much as she tried, she could not keep tears from choking her voice. In three days
the cottage had become such an important part of her life, as had Mary and Molly and . . . and Gerry. In one meeting, just three short hours, she had learned what it was to see the future in another’s eyes.
“I trust you, Jenny.”
Simple words, but they held a wealth of meaning.
Silence fell in the little cottage, broken only by the faint crackling of the fire, the hissing of the bubbling pot on the stove, and the tock-tock of the mantel clock. Jane stared into the fire and reflected on what had made her take such an extreme measure as running away.
The journey to Yorkshire had been excruciating, for the whole way was taken with her aunt Mortimer’s long lectures on how disgraceful it was to the family to have a girl, well-dowered and seven-and-twenty, and not yet wed. “People,” she had said, “are beginning to talk, beginning to say there must be something wrong in the family that the girl was not yet wed.”
Jane could see how she was going to be tormented and cajoled and threatened and wheedled into marrying the horrible Haven. He had become an ogre in her mind, the criticism she had heard of him growing into condemnation. Dour. Cold. Hard. Cruel, even. Bumbling and clumsy and doltish and brutal. Life would be one squalid scene after another. She had seen it happen, had seen childhood friends descend into fretful, neglected, or even abused wives. It would not happen to her, she vowed. If she could not have a marriage of her own choosing then she would have no marriage at all.
And as if Haven was not bad enough, there was his family, described by Lady Mortimer in excruciating detail as the jolting miles had mounted in number and Yorkshire drew ever closer. The grandmother was an ancient harridan, according to Lady Mortimer, and though her aunt extolled the viscount’s mother’s virtues, she sounded a perfect fright: high in the instep and as demanding, selfish and cold-natured as even her aunt Mortimer. Her wholehearted endorsement of the woman was enough to earn Jane’s dislike. And the viscount had two sisters, one of whom was a wild hoyden and the other who sounded a perfect prig. For one second she wondered which one of those Miss Pamela was; probably the hoyden. She seemed a rather nice girl, but then maybe Jane did not know her well enough. The thought of living in that uncomfortable household brought back all the worst moments of her life in London, all the whispering, all the unkind jibes, the feeling of not fitting in.
Whether in London, Bath, or Brighton—another social milieu to which her mother had dragged her, hoping to find her a husband—friendly faces were few, outnumbered hopelessly by the masks of those false friends one met within every one of those quagmires of insipidity. She had never, even from her first Season, fit in, and suspected it had to do with her inability to maintain a social mask of frigid gentility. Too often her true feelings and thoughts escaped, marking her as an outsider, little better than a parvenu. She was far too honest for the liars’ den that was society.
And she despised the life she was forced to lead, the endless boring morning visits, the gossip, the enforced stillness. She hated the people she had been constrained to smile and chat with, the sycophants and sneerers of London, the pathetic royal hangers-on of Brighton, and the faux invalids and toadying bootlickers of Bath. She had never known whether there were other more worthy people in those cities because as an unmarried woman her circle of acquaintances was restricted and her behavior carefully monitored. When her mother’s health became too poor for her to go about much, her aunt Mortimer was enlisted, and that woman’s rigid list of those she considered acceptable to socialize with was severely limited, restricted to only the most dull and lifeless of beaux.
All of that was bad enough in London or Bath, but how would it be to live with that day in and day out in the home one could never leave? And divorced, as she would be, from every familiar scene, every friendly face—
But still, Jane would not have done such a wild and ridiculous thing as flee her aunt and the Tippling Swan inn if she hadn’t gotten the letter.
The letter.
My dear,
By the time you get this I will be Mrs. Jessup. I hope you understand why I encouraged you to go. Every girl should be married, and every woman. Mr. Jessup has promised to look after me most tenderly, but dearest, he really wants only me. You are old enough, past old enough, really, to understand that your best chance at happiness lays in making an arrangement with the viscount and staying in Yorkshire. I will miss you terribly, but I send my regards to your new husband. He is a fortunate man to marry you. Good-bye, and good luck, dearest.
Affectionately,
Your Mother
And that was it. She wasn’t expected back. Her mother was consigning her to the tender mercies of a man she didn’t even know! At that moment, reading that despicable letter in the room she had been assigned at the inn, rebellion had surfaced for the very first time in all of her years. She had always been a dutiful daughter, a demure and respectful niece, but at that moment anything seemed preferable to allowing her aunt to lead her like a bridled horse to Haven Court and present her to his lordship for inspection, to marry if he found her worthy. She would not want to marry him—she already knew that—and there would be endless hideous scenes, harrying from her aunt, bullying from the odious Lady Haven. She could not do it, she just couldn’t! She didn’t know if she was strong enough to resist their demands in her emotionally drained state.
So on a mad impulse she had stolen a barmaid’s dress from a laundry hamper and run. Then even her hasty plans fell about her in disarray and she had gotten lost in the darkness, wandering for hours, fear and shock making her mindless. It had been a long and horrible night, worsened by the advent of a light rain that soaked her to the skin. Finally she had crawled into the first barn she found after what seemed like hours of walking, and that was where Mary found her, cold, scared, and desperately tired. She now knew that she was many miles from both Lesleydale and Haven Court, but that had been merely luck.
“The bairn’s asleep,” Mary said, buttoning her nursing gown and standing. She laid Molly in her cradle.
Jane, awoken from her reverie, gazed at Mary. “If my being here is a burden or troubles you in any way—”
“Don’t be daft, Jenny,” the woman said, kindly, as she straightened from the cradle. “Yer welcome to stay here as long as you like. I bin lonely these long months and ne’er really knew it ’til now. But enough o’ that. Shall we eat yer dumplings?”
As they took up the stew and the surprisingly light dumplings, Mary laid her hand over her new friend’s and said, “Jenny, I can see yer still troubled in yer mind. I canna say it strongly enough. I want you to stay here as long as you need to. Yer welcome here, and I need not know yer story. Whatever time you need to think, take it, and be sure about yer life, for you only get the one. I refused many an offer that folk in the village thought I was out o’ my mind for refusin’, but I waited and then Jem asked me. It were the right thing and I was wise to wait.” She glanced over at the cradle and put one hand over her heart. “It were the right thing to do. When it is right, whatever is right, you will know it deep in yer heart.”
• • •
Morning was the best time for walking the moors, Haven had always thought. Or had he only begun thinking so when the morning ahead promised such a fine distraction? His heart thudding in his chest, the viscount strode down the long hill toward Mary’s cottage, where it sat cozily tucked between two high fells, gentle puffs of smoke drifting up from the stone chimney. Perhaps he should not be taking this time for himself, but he had done nothing for the past days but worry and search for Miss Dresden. Surely a couple of hours out of his day would not hurt anyone.
What would he find this morning at the Haven home farm? Would he get a cold reception from Miss Jenny? Would she know that he had misled her as to his identity? The next few minutes would tell if Pammy had let slip anything that would connect, in her mind, the lord of Haven Court with the farmer Gerry Neville.
He saw the door of the barn standing open and moved to investigate, remembering that he had noticed t
hat the latch was beginning to work loose at the haft. But no, the latch was still intact. He poked his head in the door and looked around; there in the shadows, by Esther, sat Jenny on a stool, her hands on the cow’s teats. Lally, the barn cat, lay near her in contented sloth. He enjoyed the sight of Jenny’s full hips swaying as she tried to get the necessary rhythm.
He fought back the lascivious direction his thoughts would take and watched for a moment. She was getting more and more frustrated, he thought, and so was Esther. Finally the cow let out a low bawl and kicked out, upsetting the pail which luckily only had a small amount of milk in it.
“You’ll starve at that rate,” he said, leaning against the door frame with his arms folded over his chest.
She jumped and staggered off the stool. Her cheeks were flushed with exertion and her curls disheveled, and to Haven she looked utterly adorable.
“This is a ridiculous way to have to get milk,” she said huffily. Her mouth primmed in a straight line. Esther shifted her bulk and knocked Jenny off balance. Haven chuckled, pushed away from the door frame and moved toward her, grabbing her arm and helping her stay upright.
“Let me show you how it’s done, my girl,” he said. He righted the pail, straddled the low stool and grasped Esther’s teats in his hands, starting the strong and steady movements that sent a stream of milk into the bucket.
“One can certainly tell that you have done that before,” Jenny said, her eyes on his capable hands.
He suppressed a chuckle, enjoying the flood of warm feeling he experienced watching her pretty face. Seeing her again he knew that what he had felt on their walk was real. There was something between them, something true and fine and deep, and he wanted badly to explore the new feeling he was experiencing, new emotions that flooded his heart and his mind. To hell with Grand’s assertion that naught but a lady born could ever be Viscountess Haven. Some things were more important than rank, and love was one of them.
Lord Haven's Deception Page 12
