True Pretenses: Lively St. Lemeston, Book 2

by Rose Lerner

  So he took out the letter, looked at it and put it back in his pocket, thinking, I’m only a little lonely. If I were really lonely, I’d open it. He occupied the rest of the walk home in wondering what was in it. Poetry? A lock of hair? He’d like to have a lock of her hair, tied with a bit of ribbon. Sky-blue velvet would look nice against that satiny copper.

  There was nothing wrong with swindling yourself a little, in a friendly way. He wondered sometimes if flats ever knew they were being swindled, and went along with it because it was better than no one paying them any attention at all.

  “So you’re from Cornwall,” Jamie said as they carefully washed the roots of the orange tree, suspended in mid-air by a pulley.

  Ash nodded. “Have you ever been? It’s beautiful country, and so wild it’s easy to believe pixies are hovering just out of sight.”

  “I haven’t,” Jamie said.

  “Do the local folk believe in fairies hereabouts?”

  “Where in Cornwall are you from?”

  “I was baptized in Blight’s Penryth,” he said. “But my parents died when I was young, and after that my brother and I went from aunt to aunt.”

  “And what have you been doing since you were old enough to leave your aunts behind?”

  The gardener studiously kept his eyes on the tree, his discomfort obvious. Jamie was as single-minded as his sister, and much less concerned with manners.

  “Wandering about, mostly, the two of us. I like seeing new places.”

  “You’ve never spent much time in any one place?”

  “A few weeks,” Ash said. “Not much more than that.”

  “So if I wanted to inquire as to your character, there’s absolutely no one I could ask?”

  “May I speak to you for a moment?” Ash pulled Jamie into a corner. “We’ve got to come to some kind of truce, you and I, or we’ll make Miss Reeve the subject of vulgar gossip.”

  Where Ash grew up, no one had cared about gossip. Everyone knew everything about everybody. But he’d quickly learned that it was a magic word to almost everyone else. Sure enough, Jamie immediately looked uncertain of his ground. “Time enough for a truce when I’m satisfied you haven’t got anything to hide,” he muttered.

  “Such as?” Ash said in exasperation. “What on earth do you think I’m hiding?”

  Jamie glared and didn’t answer, reassuring Ash that his suspicions were nonspecific. “You’ve never stayed anywhere more than a few weeks, and now you want to spend the rest of your life in one place and I’m not supposed to find anything about that peculiar?”

  “Your sister is an extraordinary and beautiful woman.”

  “I know that. It doesn’t answer my question.”

  He was right, it was peculiar. Of course Ash had no intention of staying in one place for the rest of his life. But when he took a moment to think, his answer was easy. “Home has never been a place to me. When I was young it was my mother, and later it was my brother. The places I’ve gone, they’ve all been home because he was there. Miss Reeve is my home now. Whither she goes, I’ll go, and her people will be my people.” He gave Jamie a half-smile. “If they’ll have me.”

  Jamie didn’t soften.

  “I don’t expect she’ll object to traveling now and again if I get itchy feet. I’d like to show her Cornwall.”

  As he said it, it became true. She’d look like a sea creature in the Cornish mist. If he took her hair down, the wind would catch it like a banner, and then they’d sit in the shelter of a twisted tree and he’d comb the tangles out and kiss her. She’d love the seals.

  Jamie snorted. “Lydia gets anxious more than twenty miles from home. She doesn’t even like going to London for the Season.”

  Ash didn’t voice his opinion that she’d like traveling with him better than she’d liked traveling with her father and brother, or that she might enjoy a real holiday better than a Parliamentary session. “Then I’ll go off on my own every so often. We’ll sort it out.” He looked Jamie in the eye. “I promise I’ll make her happy.”

  “And you think she’ll make you happy?”

  He smiled. “She makes me happy already.”

  There was silence. Out of the corner of his eye, Ash could see the gardener with his back to them, fussing over the tree. Jamie seemed to be considering his options.

  In Ash’s experience, flats like Jamie didn’t soften gradually. They kept up the appearance of mistrust long after they’d already given in in their minds, because they felt in some obscure way that letting you know they were thinking about trusting you would make them look foolish if you weren’t trustworthy. Then when they’d entirely, entirely made up their minds, they gave way in a flood of apologies and smiles and relief, and you had them. He could be patient.

  Suddenly he heard Rafe say, You don’t know what anyone can afford to lose. Maybe faith and self-respect were things they needed, things they couldn’t live without.

  He didn’t want to hurt Miss Reeve’s brother. He didn’t want to push him further apart from her. He’d seen at dinner last night how Miss Reeve had sat silent and guilty, the consciousness of her own deceit precluding easy conversation. He might be envious, but he was glad for her too, that she still had what he’d lost. He wanted her to keep it.

  But she’d already flatly refused to tell Jamie the truth. Ash’s loyalty was to her, and she wanted to lie.

  “A truce, then,” Jamie said reluctantly. “In front of the servants.”

  “Thank you.” Given the quality of Jamie’s performance up to now, Ash didn’t expect much from the truce, but if it prevented the most pointed remarks, it was worth it.

  Jamie shifted uneasily. “We’d better get back to that tree. The roots must be put in water as soon as possible.”

  Lydia sat alone in the Little Parlor, reading her correspondents’ accounts of the Prince Regent’s speech on opening the new Parliament. It was difficult to think of him with respect as the Prince Regent; her father had still called him Florizel with gentle satire.

  There was no letter from her father in the pile. There would never be a letter from her father again.

  She wished Mr. Cahill were here, flitting about the room and asking nosy questions. That would help with the vacant place in her heart. Most people only made it echo, the way talking in an empty church made you notice how high the ceiling was. With Mr. Cahill, the emptiness felt comfortable somehow, as natural as a bare-branched winter morning.

  She’d asked him not to expect more from their marriage than a simple bargain, but she was becoming terribly afraid she would expect more. One empty space in her heart she could handle. Two…she didn’t want two.

  She didn’t need Mr. Cahill, anyway, not when there was so much work to occupy her. She turned back to her neglected letters. There would be a motion put forward for Catholic emancipation after the Christmas recess. It was a question on which even Ministerialists were permitted by the government to differ, but sentiment among the Lively St. Lemeston Pink-and-Whites was strong against it. The subject had arisen at a voters’ dinner during the recent election. With a sinking feeling, she remembered that someone had said, Who’s next? The Jews?

  At the time, Lydia had agreed.

  Mr. Cahill had been born in London. He spoke English. Was his first loyalty really to an overarching Jewish nation with ties to Bonapartist Europe, or some such fancy of the pamphleteers? The idea—previously remote but plausible—was now patently asinine. If he did not feel a part of England, it was because England pointedly excluded him.

  The last Jacobite rebellion had been in ’45. Perhaps it was time to reconcile. Surely great men could find better uses for their talents and their money than keeping Papists out of public office.

  Oh, but Mr. Jessop and Mr. Dromgoole would both vote against it. Even if the motion never reached the Lords, it would look very bad if Jamie didn’t bother to att
end. And if Catholics became voters, in Lively St. Lemeston they would all be Orange-and-Purples, and the Wheatcroft interest in the borough would slide still further.

  High politics always left her feeling ill with uncertainty. A vicar in Crawley had died, so she calmed her nerves in writing another letter of recommendation for the alderman’s son. When Mrs. Jenner rapped at the door to tell her it was time to stir the pudding, she was enough herself again to start up with anticipation. “Have you sent to the greenhouse?”

  “I’ve sent to everyone, Miss Reeve. They’re all here.”

  “Of course.” Every member of the household stirred the pudding, down to the lowliest stable boy. She and Mrs. Jenner smiled at each other, for a moment not servant and mistress but only two people united by years of memories. Lydia loved Christmas.

  Christmas hit her in the face when she went through the kitchen door: brandy and suet and spices and lemons and a dozen other smells, emanating from the great cast-iron pot on a table in the center of the room. A long wooden spoon lay across it, wreathed in steam. The room was warm, the only really warm room in the house, and crammed with people. They should have been chattering excitedly—and they were, but they were doing it very quietly and darting glances at Jamie.

  Poor Jamie. Lord Wheatcroft had been the first to stir the Wheatcroft Christmas pudding for going on forty years, and he had done it with convivial charm and boyish enthusiasm. Jamie stared silently at the spoon as if it might bite him.

  He glanced up at Lydia, and for a second a really awful look crossed his face, as if she might bite him too. Was Jamie afraid of her? Why? She wanted more than anything to be a comfort to him. She didn’t know what to do or say. Anything she did would be wrong.

  Her eyes went to Mr. Cahill, chatting with one of the gamekeepers. He put his hands in his pockets and smiled at her. “Your father always used to do this, eh?” he said to Jamie. “You must miss him.”

  It must be hard for Mr. Cahill to see her and Jamie together, when he had lost his brother. What was his kindness costing him?

  Jamie nodded, then gave a short burst of self-deprecating laughter. “I wish I could be more like him,” he said, trying for confident ruefulness and missing.

  “No doubt he wasn’t much like himself at twenty-one,” Mr. Cahill said easily. “I imagine lording starts out stiff as brand-new boots, and comes to fit you over time.”

  Jamie looked startled.

  “I met a Russian woman once who said in her country they have a proverb,” Mr. Cahill continued. “It translates to ‘the first pancake is always lumpy’. I’m sure, Mrs. Marsh, that you’ll agree with the truth of that.”

  The cook laughed. “Oh, aye. The griddle’s never at the right heat, and the oil is too much or too little. I don’t mind much as I always eat that one myself.” She gave Jamie a sympathetic look. “My lord—the first time it fell to your father to begin the stirring, he dropped the spoon on the floor.”

  Lydia had never heard that story. Why had her father never told her?

  “Aye,” said Andy Weller, “and remember when his lordship sliced his leg open, cutting the first sheaf of wheat?”

  There was a chorus of mingled clucks and laughter, and then all the older members of the staff were sharing stories of Lord Wheatcroft’s youthful ineptitude. Lydia had never heard any of them.

  She thought of her own firsts. Plenty of them were Jamie’s firsts—Jamie’s first fight, Jamie’s first lesson, Jamie’s first heartbreak. She hadn’t performed particularly well through any of them. But she’d learned early that if she didn’t call attention to her own failures, often no one else noticed. Now she couldn’t open her mouth and say, The first time I saw you run a high fever, I cried and frightened you into a frenzy. Shame clogged her throat, a host of small shames she’d locked away and lost the key to.

  Now that he wasn’t the center of attention and she wouldn’t embarrass him in front of the servants, she went to Jamie and took his hand, with a grateful smile at Mr. Cahill. “I don’t wish you were more like anyone,” she whispered in her brother’s ear. “I wouldn’t change a hair on your head.”

  “As a brother, maybe,” he said. “As Lord Wheatcroft…”

  She didn’t know what to say to that. Jamie hated to clash with anyone, and he rarely put much stock in his own opinions, unless it was about plants. She had worried that he lacked the firmness to be master of an estate, leader of a political interest. Surely he would grow into command, as Mr. Cahill said. But It will be different when you’re older never pleased anyone.

  “My first dinner party was a disaster,” she blurted out, and flushed hot.

  Jamie stared at her. “It was?”

  She remembered writing to him about that evening. She had tried to make it sound like a great success. Her face had flamed all through the letter. She couldn’t tell this story.

  She looked at Mr. Cahill. Eager warmth lit his eyes, as if he were already filled with fond amusement at her endearing younger self. The heat in her body suddenly meant something very different from embarrassment.

  “I put on rouge,” she said. “I wanted to look older. Father laughed and told me I looked like a strumpet and to go and wash it off.” The corner of Mr. Cahill’s mouth turned up, but even years later, she couldn’t find it funny. And yet—why did humiliation crawl over her skin at the memory? What was so terrible about that? Surely every girl had heard that at one time or another.

  “I don’t remember that, ma’am,” Mrs. Jenner said, surprised. She had been cook then. “We all thought you behaved like a little queen through everything. I so wanted to do you credit, and then I forgot how walnuts make Mr. Baverstock’s tongue swell and put them in the cake.” She shook her head. “You were that good about it.”

  “It was an honest mistake.” She didn’t say she had blamed herself for that too. “Then I spilled pickled beets all down my dress. I ought to have gone and changed at once, but I was so mortified I couldn’t think. All I wanted was to smooth it over and say it was nothing.” She had tried to laugh ruefully; it had been as painful a sound as Jamie’s, she was sure. The comparison made her uncomfortable in a way she didn’t really understand. “Father told me not to be ridiculous and to run and change my gown. I felt like a fool, and the new dress was a completely different color and much less fine. All night, guests kept on asking me why I had changed it and I had to explain.”

  The story seemed suddenly anticlimactic. Oh, there was more, but it was all that sort of thing—tiny awkwardnesses etched into her mind with strong acid. She told Jamie how she had invited two men engaged in a lawsuit against each other, how she had made an innocent remark that struck her neighbor at dinner as uncommonly dirty, how the ladies had quarreled over precedence going in to dinner, and the more she told him, the less significance it had.

  “You never told me any of that,” Jamie said.

  “I was embarrassed.”

  Mr. Cahill leaned in and kissed her cheek. Even through the brandy and spices in the air, she could smell his skin. How had his scent become so familiar so quickly? Suddenly she was thinking of the first time they had shared in the greenhouse, and all the first times that still awaited them.

  “Shall we?” Jamie picked up the spoon. “Happy Advent! Peace on earth and goodwill towards men, and don’t forget to make a wish, everyone.”

  He stirred a few times, shut his eyes, and wished.

  Lydia wondered what he had asked for. She always wanted to know other people’s wishes. All these people living so close to her, and the nearest wish of their hearts was as great a mystery as if they were on the far side of the world.

  But that meant they couldn’t see her wish either. She took the spoon from Jamie and leaned over the pot, breathing in brandied steam. It made her feel a little drunk. She smiled at Mr. Cahill and wished for a really spectacular wedding night.

  Chapter Eighteen

 
; Lydia always tried to go into town on Market Day. The Whig newspaper came out the night before and everyone had something to say about it by Wednesday noon. It was a wonderful opportunity to see Pink-and-Whites who lived outside of town, and Lydia looked forward all week to salmagundi on a fresh roll from one of the food stalls. Even the drive to town was an enjoyable weekly ritual, with Mrs. Jenner and the still-room maid in the carriage, planning the week’s meals.

  It was drizzling in Lively St. Lemeston today, and the market less busy on that account. Lydia and her umbrella had no difficulty going from errand to errand. She turned away from promising to find an apprenticeship for Mrs. Bickerstaff’s third son and almost walked into Phoebe Dymond. Funny, that girl had been through three family names, and all of them among the most unpleasantly prominent Whig names in town. This last was unquestionably the worst.

  “How do you do, Mrs. Dymond?” Lydia said politely, and waited for the woman to step aside.

  “Well. And you, Miss Reeve?” Mrs. Dymond glared a little as she said it, and showed no sign of moving.

  “Very well, thank you.” She glanced across the square, about to pretend to see someone waving to her.

  “May I speak to you a moment?”

  Lydia’s eyebrows went up, but there was no way to refuse, and anyway, she was curious. Furling her umbrella, she let Mrs. Dymond draw her into an empty doorway a little apart from the crowd.

  Once there, the young woman seemed at a loss for words. “This is going to sound awfully rude,” she said at last. “It’s going to be awfully rude, and I don’t know why I ought to stick my neck out for you, but you’re friends with Caroline and you came to visit her.” Lydia didn’t know how Mrs. Dymond, when she was uncomfortable, contrived to look as if she were peering out from under her own eyebrows. “She was very happy about it, so thank you.”

  Lydia smiled. “I was glad to do it. Mrs. Sparks is my friend. Now if that was all you wished to say—”

  Mrs. Dymond shook her head, loose curls jostling. She always looked as if she’d put up her hair in the dark. “You probably heard that me and Will Sparks didn’t get along so well when we were married. Ma’am.”