Miss Alma had probably told him where she’d gone and why. Stuffing her hair inside the crown of her hat, she tugged it into place.
“Ah, no, thank you, Mr. Rufus. I mean, yes. In a minute, you may help me. But not yet. To put on my shoes, I have to put on my stockings first.”
That should hold him off long enough for her to gather her poise, and any incriminating evidence.
She smoothed her hands along her bodice and skirt as she checked that no buttons gaped open before sitting on the bench to tug on her boots and angle a casual look in the direction Mr. Banner had gone.
He’d vanished without a sound into the surrounding foliage, much like a lone wolf disappearing into the forest.
Wobbling with relief, she retrieved the nearest wine glass and dipped it in the pond to rinse out the red residue before tucking it inside the basket and tossing the wrapper from one of the sandwiches in after it.
One more restorative breath, and a look around to ensure she hadn’t missed anything that might lead someone—Rufus—to suspect she hadn’t been picnicking alone, and she nodded.
“All right, Mr. Rufus. You can come help me now.”
“THESE COME FOR YOU today, Mr. Banner.” Miss Alma retrieved a pair of envelopes from behind a vase on the foyer table. “And Mr. Guenther sent word, asking if Miss Maisie and Miss Lisette might be permitted to stay over this coming weekend, Friday to Sunday. He promises to get Miss Lisette and Maisie to church on time, and home afterwards.”
“Thank you.” He slid the envelopes in his shirt pocket without opening either. He recognised his mother’s handwriting on one, and the other was a Western Union telegram he sensed was best not read in front of inquiring minds. “And yes, Maisie and Miss Lisette can stay next weekend if that’s what they want. Then I won’t feel guilty catching up on the work I put aside to clean up the cottage.”
Miss Alma offered an understanding smile. “I’ll let Mrs. Guenther know you’re agreeable.” She started to turn away and then paused. “Will you be joining Miss Maisie and Mrs. Sweeney at dinner this evening?”
A fresh resurgence of the guilt he’d managed to talk himself out of after leaving Mrs. Sweeney at the pond churned in his chest.
He’d delayed his return to the manor by two and a half hours, using the time to inspect fences and drainage ditches. Not that he expected anyone to question his whereabouts. He had full run of the plantation save the manor and the workers’ housing. Only one was inviolate: the manor. Usually. His current unfettered access was temporary. As soon as he had a place to call his own again, he’d stay out unless invited in. Just as he stayed out of the workers’ homes unless invited in.
People had a right to a quiet place all their own, somewhere to retreat from the world and people in it, a philosophy he believed more keenly than ever now he had no place of his own. And that was why, over the last hour, he’d managed to convince himself that his lack of response to his employer’s question, to the romantic notion swimming in her tear-glazed eyes, had been the best response.
Every minute he spent in her company was another fractional chisel bite out of his conviction that the best action where she was concerned was no action at all. And for Maisie’s sake, if not for his own, he needed to remain grounded. Solid. Someone Maisie could rely on to put her needs first. Mrs. Sweeney was capable of casting a wide net in her search for a lover. But he was all Maisie had.
For now.
“I’ll take dinner in my room,” he said. “I’ve irrigation plans to double-check.”
With the cottage’s burned-out remnants cleaned up and the ground repaired and both fallow fields turned and in the process of being harrowed over the next few days, he’d run out of honest excuses to avoid evening meals in the dining room with Mrs. Sweeney. And from the disappointment shadowing Miss Alma’s gaze, she knew it, too.
“Very good, Mr. Banner,” she said. “I’ll have your meal delivered. Around seven?”
“Yes. Is Maisie in her room?”
She shook her head. “In the rear parlour with Mrs. Sweeney. It’s their first lesson today.” The light returned to her eyes. “You ought to look in, see how they’re doing.”
He wanted to. He did. But the thought of seeing their red heads bowed together, and the affection on Mrs. Sweeney’s face when she looked at Maisie...It only made his decision to keep things professional harder. And it reinforced for him that he’d made the right decision in hiring Lyons to help him find Simmy, though he doubted anyone else but Maisie—especially not Miss Alma, who’d never forgiven Simone for abandoning her tiny blind baby—would agree with him.
“I don’t want to disturb them,” he said. “I’ll just go to my room and get to work. Could you let Maisie know I’m there when she’s done her lesson?”
“I will, Mr. Banner.” Miss Alma turned away, but not before he noted the tightening of skin around her mouth and eyes. Her soft-soled black shoes struck like muted hammers as she made her way down the hall towards the kitchen.
He’d caught that look on her face a few times over the years. It had always followed on the heels of him asking her to employ her elegant cursive to pen yet another polite note on his behalf, declining an invitation to dinner sent him by a local mother known to have a young daughter in the market for a husband.
He shook his head.
Clearly Lyons’s lecture was preying on his mind and mood more than he cared to admit, because he was imagining naive romantic sentiment in a woman, birthed into slavery, whose experience under Terrence and Cyril Sweeney had honed within her a steely if unwaveringly compassionate core of intelligent pragmatism. It was the same pragmatism and intelligence Mrs. Sweeney possessed and that would see her marry up, not down.
Yes, he decided as he turned into hallway of the guest wing, if there was one fool currently residing under this roof who harboured even the slightest of unrealistic romantic notions, it was him.
“BRILLIANT, MAISIE.” Margaret grasped Maisie’s hand and squeezed affectionately. “Our first braille lesson, and already you’ve mastered the first ten letters of the alphabet. At this rate, you’ll know them all by week’s end, whilst I’m still struggling to memorise A, B, and C.”
“It’s easier for me, Mrs. Sweeney,” Maisie offered kindly. “I’ve had to learn by touch all my life, while you’re only just starting. Maybe you’ll find it easier if you close your eyes.”
“Yes.” Margaret withheld a self-deprecating smile. She had closed her eyes, and still found it nigh impossible to imprint on her mind the number and configuration of tiny bumps that corresponded to a letter of the alphabet. “You’re quite right. Next time, I’ll close my eyes and let you teach me.”
“I’d like that,” Maisie said. “I’d like to be a teacher like you one day.”
Margaret bit her lip as a small crack jagged across her heart.
“And so you shall, my darling,” she murmured. “If that is your calling, so you shall. Well, that’s it for this lesson,” she added, careful to keep her reluctance at ending their lesson from her voice. “It’s time we depart to our chambers and prepare for dinner. Will your father be joining us this evening?”
Maisie shrugged, and slid from her chair. “I can ask him, but I don’t think so. He says he has too much work to do. You don’t mind do you?” she added, her small freckled brow stippling with concern as she faced Margaret. “You don’t mind having dinner only with me?”
“Oh, heaven no, Maisie. Not at all. I look forward to spending time with you.”
A smile erased Maisie’s worried frown. She reached out, and when Margaret grasped her hand, she pulled herself into Margaret’s embrace.
“You’re my favourite time of the day,” she whispered, and then spun away, extending a hand towards Miss Lisette, who’d sat reading in the armchair in the corner of the room during the lesson.
Miss Lisette offered Margaret a grateful smile as she took Maisie’s hand, and led her from the parlour. Margaret clasped a hand to her aching chest.
/> Heaven. It was more difficult than she’d imagined to keep herself from falling hopelessly and desperately in love with that child and her cheeky, cheerful, impulsively honest, and huggable ways.
An hour later, gooseflesh prickling her skin alerted her to how cold the bathwater had grown. With a sigh, she pushed herself up and reached for the towel draped on a chair by the tub. Wrapping it around her, she stepped gingerly out on to the floor and, grasping her jar of scented skin cream, lathered on the lotion while suppressing shivers of cold.
This was her second bath of the day, the first being upon her return from her picnic prior to settling in with Miss Maisie, and yet still she was chilled. She had been ever since departing the pond, not just physically but psychically.
“You’re a foolish woman, Margaret Sweeney,” she muttered as she shrugged into her robe. “It was a dare. You took it when you should have had the sense to walk away—” She jerked the robe closed around her at a knock on the bedchamber door.
Coral poked her head in. “Mr. Banner asked that I send Miss Maisie’s regrets. She’ll be eating dinner with him in his suite.”
Margaret finished knotting the robe’s tie and turned towards her desk so Coral wouldn’t see the depth of her disappointment.
“That’s just as well, then,” she said and drew out the desk chair to sit. “I’ve a mountain of work to catch up on.”
The sun was low in the west, its amber glow seeming to coalesce around the escritoire and pile of unopened business and personal correspondence she’d let amass over the last week in favour of readying things for her students.
“Please tell Miss Alma I’ll take my meal here.”
“Yes, ma’am. You want I should clean the tub now or—”
“Later. After dinner?” she suggested with a smiling glance over her shoulder. “I work better in silence.”
Coral nodded. “I’ll bring your dinner, and then come back up to help you prepare for bed as soon as I finish helping Miss Alma with the dinner dishes.”
“You help with the dishes in addition to your duties on my behalf?” When did the child have time to work towards her dream? In her dreams?
“Yes’m,” Coral said. “I always help with the dishes.”
“Is there not someone else Miss Alma could task with that?” She slid Dianna’s letter free of the stack and edged the tip of the opener under its flap. “Not here in the house, of course—I know there’s only you and Miss Alma and Mr. Rufus—but on the estate. Someone in need of work, or a different kind of work?”
Staffing, and staffing shortfalls, fell under her purview, something she might have noticed and rectified sooner had she not been indulging in girlish foolery and fantasy with and about her overseer.
“My friend Winnie,” Coral said after a long moment. “She works in the fields with her mama and papa now that her younger sister, Harper, took over looking after their younger brothers. I know she hates it. But she don’t want to upset her mama and papa, or make trouble for Mr. Banner.”
Trouble and Mr. Banner seemed to go hand in hand.
Her fingers tightened on the letter opener with the memory of his silken length pulsing in her hands—and his chilly response afterwards to her foolish confession. Clearing her throat, she smiled at Coral.
“Could you ask your friend if she’d be interested in kitchen work? If she is, and her parents approve, then I’ll bring it up with Miss Alma. She has final say over anyone hired to directly help her.”
Coral’s eyes widened with delight. “Yes, ma’am. I can do that, but I know what Winnie’s answer’ll be. Her mama and papa’s, too. Still, I’ll wait and let them tell you themselves.”
Her breathless excitement filled Margaret with chagrin.
It hadn’t occurred to her that Coral might be lonely until seeing at that moment Coral’s joy at the possibility her friend, someone her own age, might work inside the house with her. Someone she could relate to and talk with, maybe even share gripes with as the maids Margaret had grown up around had whenever they believed their charges asleep or too young to comprehend their whispers. The same way she had with Emma when they were young, and later as she’d done as an adult with Dianna.
Swallowing a sharp stone of homesickness, she said, “Oh, and Coral...”
“Yes’m?”
“Don’t worry about cleaning the tub tonight or attending me later. I’ll get myself to bed and see you promptly at eight tomorrow morning.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Good night, Coral.”
“Good night, ma’am.”
Chapter 26
Be Strong. Be Brave.
JULY 26th, 1916
Darling Maggie,
I cannot wait to meet everyone you’ve mentioned. Anything I, or any of us, can do to help you find a fingerhold and put down roots of your own, we will do it. You so deserve to be happy and feel grounded. Heaven knows you’ve suffered enough in recent years for anyone’s lifetime, and I can’t tell you how glad it makes my heart to know you’ve found in Mr. Banner someone intelligent and interesting as well as courageous and responsible. Honestly, he sounds like a catch, which begs the question...
Why isn’t he caught? Have you learned any more about him...
“No, I haven’t,” she rasped. “Though not for a lack of trying.”
Folding the letter, she tucked it away in her escritoire along with a twinge of guilt at her reluctance to finish reading it and write an immediate reply.
From the dates of her and Dianna’s letters, they’d responded the same day, or within a day, of receiving each new note. Yet she’d let a whole week pass before she’d even opened this one. Almost three weeks after Dianna had penned it, and she couldn’t find the temerity to answer, as that meant confessing her latest interaction with Mr. Banner. Not to mention the matter of his cottage.
She couldn’t not tell Dianna about it. Nor could she tell her, and not tell her about Mr. Banner’s suspicions—and the fact he and his daughter now resided under her roof. Because then she’d no longer have to worry about Cousin Jake hopping a train to come here and exact Texas justice—Dianna herself would descend on Sugar Hill like an avenging angel to demand it.
With a sigh, she gazed out the window at the darkness—and saw sunlight reflecting off the pond’s surface, water beading along Mr. Banner’s broad honey-bronze shoulders and sliding through the tight whorls of dark hair descending from his navel to his—
“Stop it, Margaret.” She grabbed a ledger off the desk and flipped it open.
George’s penmanship was as straight and linear as his nature. No hesitation marks. No smudges. No corrections. No doubts.
“Why couldn’t you have been as honest and forthright with me as you were with your bloody accounting?”
She slapped the ledger closed, and, shoving herself to her feet, she paced over to the terrace doors where her meal sat on the small table. Beyond them, the night sky was the same bruised shades as her mood.
Lifting the silver dome, she picked a pea from the pile nestled between similarly sized portions of corn niblets and baby carrots. Popping the pea in her mouth, she grimaced at the roast chicken thigh and the small dab of mashed potatoes drizzled in butter and topped with a sprinkle of parsley.
The pea was lukewarm, as no doubt was the rest of the meal. It was her own fault. If she’d eaten when Coral had first delivered her meal, it might be more appetising.
Resetting the lid, she stared at her distorted image in the silver dome, a wavy egg-shaped head with odd unbalanced eyes crowned with flame-coloured hair.
She felt exactly like that: odd and unbalanced and still unable, hours after wading out of the pond and back into normalcy—in as much as dining alone and sleeping alone and reading alone had become normal for her—to find bottom. Some foundation for moving forward without any consideration that Mr. Banner and Maisie were anything more than her overseer and her overseer’s daughter who also happened to be her student.
The bottle of Haut S
auternes Coral had brought with her meal remained untouched in the ice bucket, condensation gliding down its smooth length, reviving the memory of water droplets sliding along Mr. Banner’s biceps and through the soft, dark curls on his chest.
With a faint rasp of exasperation, she grasped the bottle and retrieved the corkscrew from the tray where Coral had left it.
With enough wine, she’d stop thinking about Mr. Banner.
She’d stop thinking about anything and just sleep.
Sleep. What a wondrous concept. She couldn’t remember when she’d last fallen asleep with ease, her mind at peace as she slipped into the muted warmth of slumber.
Since George’s death, her brain had been a beehive of activity and sound, thoughts flying in and out, some sweet and others sharp as stingers, piercing her again and again until her whole being was swollen with fatigue and burning irritation.
Many nights she had walked the floor of the guest chamber at Dianna and Jake’s, her footfalls muffled by the moccasins Jake had made her. Still, Dianna must have heard some noise on occasion, or noticed Margaret’s light on under the bedchamber door when she roused to respond to one of her children’s nighttime whimpers, because she frequently ended up in Margaret’s chamber, holding her hand and offering comfort while Margaret struggled to comprehend the unfairness of having yet another husband taken from her.
The cork came out so suddenly, the damp and slick bottle almost slipped from her grasp. She managed to catch it on her thigh, grateful for the robe and nightdress that protected her leg from the worst of the cold and dampness. Tossing the corkscrew aside, the bottle in both hands, she poured herself a good half goblet.
The wine was sweet and crisp with a hint of peach. Or perhaps pear. Something fruity. She’d never been very good at detecting flavours in wine, much to William’s resigned disappointment after two years of his trying to educate her on aroma, taste, and finish.
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