by Rose Lerner
He might know, by the end of this meal. He had offered to help out of instinct—here, finally, was a simple problem with a simple solution that could be effected by one simple action—but had quickly recognized an unrivaled opportunity to pump Mrs. Sparks’s mother for information that would help him marry her off.
He rapped at the door with his walking stick. It soon opened to reveal a stout, tired-looking woman with wispy silver hair. Mrs. Sparks’s dark eyes and stubborn chin looked out of place in her faded countenance. She was dressed in black so old it had streaked and paled to a patchy dark gray.
“You must be Mrs. Knight,” he said with a smile. “I’m terribly sorry to drop in upon you like this. I’m Nicholas Dymond, Mr. Anthony’s brother, and I’ve come to help with his campaign.”
Her eyes narrowed suspiciously. “I’ve spent enough of my time talking to your brother. I even had my daughter take him on a tour of the town, with special attention to the Voluntary Hospital. I’m not sure he really took what we said seriously.”
Nick wasn’t exactly shocked to hear it, but he said, “It’s only that he’s young and lively. He might not always seem serious, but the well-being of the borough is very near to his heart. It was he who suggested you would be a splendid person to advise someone new to the campaign on the real interests and situation of the people of Lively St. Lemeston.” He’d have to remember to tell Tony that, later.
Her shoulders unhunched and her mouth lost its ill-humored twist. A golden key unlocks all doors, but flattery oils the hinges, Lady Tassell used to say. He’d always writhed in vicarious humiliation watching people swallow her lies. Didn’t they know what she would say about them later at the supper table? And now here he was, following her example.
“I’m very busy.” Mrs. Knight’s dark eyes were still narrowed. “A woman alone, you know, cannot afford to waste daylight hours.” For a moment he was struck by how like her Mrs. Sparks was. Except that Mrs. Sparks had been sincere, and her mother clearly only wished to be a little more persuaded.
“I promise I won’t take up more of your time than just the dinner hour,” he said earnestly. “And I believe the Lost Bell is serving jugged hare today.”
She sighed wistfully. “Jugged hare was my husband’s favorite. I used to make it for him whenever I could—he received presents of game quite often—but since his death it seems like so much work for one meal…”
“Come and dine with me, and tell me all about him. I’ve heard him spoken of by everyone with the greatest respect and affection, even after so many years.”
Her eyes brimmed with tears. “He was a saint. Wait a moment, I’ll get my pelisse.”
“…which is why my dear Mr. Knight believed that a Police Act was an absolute necessity.”
“That was very forward-thinking of him.” Since the question of increased policing for Lively St. Lemeston had occupied no one until the last year or so, either Mr. Knight had been forward-thinking indeed, or Mrs. Knight simply prefaced all her own opinions with as my late husband always said.
“He was very clever,” Mrs. Knight said proudly. “The girls take after him in that.”
Nick smiled. “And after you as well, clearly.”
Mrs. Knight looked genuinely surprised, as if she hadn’t just delivered an oration worthy of being read in the Commons. “Oh, well, I suppose I’m not a dullard. But the girls really have talent.”
“Mrs. Sparks writes stories for children, doesn’t she?”
Mrs. Knight sighed. “She could wring tears from a stone with those. She began after she lost the baby, you know. It was poetry, when she was younger.”
“Really?” He tried to quash his guilt. Some people—evidently Mrs. Knight among them—thought the topic of poetry quite neutral. But Nick guessed that Mrs. Sparks would consider it deeply personal.
Mrs. Knight sniffed. “Well. It was novels to start with, when she was only ten or eleven, those awful Gothic things. She got them from the maid—we gave that girl a stern talking-to! Mr. Knight would have none of it. He always said novels weakened the mind. Phoebe threw a pretty tantrum, but in the end she came around to his way of thinking. Both the girls looked up to him. I wish he were here now.”
Nick spared a moment to be grateful that his father had never paid the slightest attention to what his sons might be reading. “Did Mr. Sparks like to read?”
“He was a printer, wasn’t he?” she said snidely. She met Nick’s eyes, inviting him to share in her ridicule.
He smiled uneasily. He had forgotten how touchy the middling sort could be about slight gradations of rank. He supposed a man who worked a press, even if he was a successful newspaper editor, would seem low to a lawyer’s wife.
Mrs. Knight speared a piece of hare with more force than necessary. “There were weeks they ate oatcakes and potatoes because he’d sent away to London for the newest account of some good-for-nothing’s voyage to the South Seas.”
“Did he order books for Mrs. Sparks as well?”
“Oh, she was just as bad. When he took sick, she had nothing but a great useless library and a brand-new cast-iron printing press for his newspaper. They bought it broken, if you can believe, and spent everything they had left on fixing it. She sold the library to pay the doctor, and his brother got the press and the paper. So much for providing for his wife.”
“Did your husband like Mr. Sparks?”
“Oh, very well—as a supplier of legal forms!” She chuckled.
Nick laughed politely, despising himself for it.
“Sparks would never have dared to come courting when Mr. Knight was alive. Dove in like a vulture, with Mr. Knight not cold in his grave. I could never credit how they’d go walking and she’d come back singing, as if nothing was wrong.” She sighed. “It’s painful for a mother to see her daughter’s faults. I know she loved her father with all her heart, but she always did think of herself first.”
It was becoming obvious that Mrs. Sparks had heard a great deal about her faults growing up. “She speaks of him with great affection,” Nick said evenly.
“When she was small she preferred me, you know.” Mrs. Knight toyed with her fork. “And then all at once I couldn’t do anything right.”
There was something terribly pathetic in the admission. Nick wondered if his own mother felt so wronged and mystified by his resentment. “Did something happen?”
“Ask her! I’ve never understood it.”
“Did you ask her?”
“Oh yes, again and again, and got an earful of recriminations and accusations. She never forgets a thing, that girl. She remembers slights from when she was four and expects me to somehow atone for them. But when I try, it’s never good enough. I always did my best.”
“I’m sure you did.” He was surprised at how quickly poor Mrs. Knight had made him angry. The polite replies were becoming difficult. Soon he’d be reduced to monosyllables.
Just because Mrs. Sparks also had a difficult mother, that was no reason to feel this—not even sympathy, but an intimation of kinship. Half the world had difficult mothers, at a low estimate.
“But here, I’ve been boring you with talk of my children when you wanted to hear about the borough. Now the magistrates say…”
He’d wanted, of course, to hear about her children. The borough interested him not at all. But he didn’t have the heart to pry further. He listened with half an ear as Mrs. Knight explained, in detail, Sir Samuel Romilly’s recent reforms of the penal code, the Lively St. Lemeston system of magistrates, and the obstinacy of the corporation, who liked to have the whip hand in this town. It was just like being at home.
When he had safely deposited Mrs. Knight at her house, he headed for Mrs. Sparks’s lodgings to make sure her mission had been successful.
The door was opened by a vision of loveliness. A lovely mouth, lovely dark eyes, and a lovely straight nose were arranged in perfect harmony in an oval face, peaches-and-cream skin a startling contrast to her neat coronet of dark, dark hair. A n
eat, serviceable dress of faded rose, kerchief embroidered with neat rows of green vines tucked neatly into its neck, showed off her trim figure.
Indeed, “neat” was the first word that came to mind after “lovely”—and then, close behind, “haunted”. It was her eyes that did it; they were so large and fine and surrounded by such dark lashes, and the soft skin beneath them was so translucent, that they stood out starkly in her face like a plea. There was something about her, some tension and contrast of light and dark, that told a man she would be easy to bruise, that made him want to bruise her and protect her from bruises all at once.
She started back, her gaze falling from his and fixing on the floor. “Mr. D-Dymond,” she said with an effort. “Please come in. I’m Helen Knight.”
Oh, Christ. This was the pregnant little sister. Of course she was, and he’d been staring at her as if she were a portrait or a whore. He tried to smile. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
Her eyes darted to his with something like suspicion. “Thank you.”
Mrs. Sparks appeared in the doorway of her bedroom, the same suspicious look on her face as she glanced between him and her sister. She had the same eyes, he realized, the same lovely mouth and straight nose, the same peaches-and-cream skin and dark hair. But somehow she had missed her sister’s blinding beauty.
It wasn’t her different build. Perhaps it was that neatness, the self-contained precision and grace of Miss Knight’s movements and dress. It gave her an otherworldly quality that drew the eye with its improbability.
Mrs. Sparks was emphatically here, vibrant and determined, stray bits of hair and cuff and shoelace poking at the world as if to say, Stop shilly-shallying and listen to me.
He hadn’t come here to see if she’d got her sister’s clothes, he realized. He’d wanted to see her. He was nursing a tendre for her, in fact.
This was inconvenient, to say the least. “Mrs. Sparks.” He bowed.
“Thank you for your help with that errand,” she said meaningfully. “I would have taken care of it myself, only I was fetching Helen’s things.” She hadn’t told her sister about the quarrel with Mrs. Knight, he surmised.
“It was on my way,” he said. “I was having dinner with your mother. I believe she knows more about the borough than my brother’s election agent.”
Mrs. Sparks smiled, but there was a sour twist to her lips. “Did—what did—what did you talk about?”
Guilt squirmed a little in Nick’s chest; he knew Mrs. Knight had said a number of things Mrs. Sparks wouldn’t have wanted him to hear, and he had encouraged her. “Mostly the borough,” he prevaricated. “She didn’t much like your husband, though, did she?”
Mrs. Sparks glowered. “She doesn’t much like anybody.”
“That isn’t fair,” Miss Knight said tightly. “Will—”
“—made me happy,” Mrs. Sparks finished. “She couldn’t forgive either of us for that.”
“He made you happy at first,” her sister muttered.
“It was my fault things went wrong with Will.” She gazed up at Nick with those big eyes, looking as haunted as her sister. “I’ll do better this time. Mr. Moon needn’t worry.”
Nick had no idea what to say.
Miss Knight’s eyes brimmed with tears; she looked like a painting of grief. “I’m so sorry, Fee,” she whispered.
Mrs. Sparks looked, for a moment, almost annoyed. She straightened her spine just the tiniest fraction. “I don’t—” she began, and stopped. “You don’t have to be sorry.”
A fat tear rolled down Miss Knight’s cheek. Her lip trembled. She stared straight ahead and said nothing.
“I’ve heated some milk for cocoa,” Mrs. Sparks said desperately. “It’s by the bed. We’ll talk when Mr. Dymond is gone.”
Miss Knight gave him that suspicious, searching look again. “You shouldn’t be alone with him.”
Mrs. Sparks raised her eyebrows nearly to her hairline. Her sister flushed scarlet, stumbling over her hem in her haste to leave the room.
Mrs. Sparks’s shoulders sagged. “I didn’t mean to imply that she was throwing stones in a glass house—oh drat, I suppose I did. I don’t mean to be short with her. I only—she keeps apologizing, and I’ve said I don’t blame her several hundred times already. What’s the use in saying it again? Oh, and I’m keeping you standing, please, sit down—” She sat on the very edge of her worn comb-back armchair, as if she might need to leap into action at any moment. She looked frazzled to the bone, and it was only two in the afternoon.
Nick lowered himself onto the window seat. “You’re doing the best you can. You can’t do more.”
Her jaw set. “This isn’t the best I can do. It can’t be.”
“I wouldn’t think less of you if you did blame your sister,” he said carefully. “She’s put you in a very difficult situation.”
Her eyes flew to his, half-afraid and half-hopeful. “I don’t understand what happened. I don’t understand how—but I left her there with our mother. I should have looked after her better. My father would be so disappointed in me.” She covered her mouth with the tips of her fingers, as if they could trap words that had already escaped—or, he realized, to hide that her lips were trembling.
During elections, his mother had used to regale them at supper—when she came to supper—with accounts of her canvassing visits and the various tales of woe she had heard. My heart went out to him, she used to say. My heart went out to her. He had thought it an empty phrase, but now he felt it, a sudden vertigo in his chest as if a narrow piece of the world had tipped sideways and his heart was falling towards her.
Did Lady Tassell really feel this way in every house she stopped in? Or was this different? Was this a connection between him and Mrs. Sparks?
His mother also said, Never confide in a voter. He was about to break that rule. “My mother doesn’t support the war.”
She blinked. “What?”
“We’ve been at war with France almost continuously since 1793. And her opinion has never changed in all that time: that it is a reactionary war to oppose the will of the French people, who freely chose Bonaparte to lead them, and an unconscionable squandering of British money and British lives. She used to weep over the casualty lists and call it a tragic waste.”
Mrs. Sparks frowned. “But you were in the army. She was so proud of you. At Christmas she always asked the vicar to pray for absent soldiers.”
He hadn’t known that. For a moment he faltered—but what his mother did in the borough had nothing to do with how she felt. “She loves me and she made the best of it, but she wasn’t proud,” he said, a bitter taste on his tongue. “She thinks she shouldn’t have let me go.” He gestured at his cane. “To her, I’m a tragic waste. Proof of a political idea, and symbol of her failure. She wants to fix me, and she can’t, and she hates it.”
“What did she want you to do?”
“Politics.”
“She must be proud now, then,” she said uncertainly, perched on the edge of her armchair with her mouth scrunched up and a piece of hair falling over her ear, and he wanted to kiss her. If he wanted to kiss her now, in the midst of the most soul-baring conversation he’d had in a long time, then he really wanted her. This was not good.
It was terrible, because the truthful answer was, No, she isn’t proud. But I’ll do everything I can to force you into this marriage you don’t want, because I think maybe then—“I don’t care if she’s proud. I only—I only want her to see me when she looks at me. Not some idea in her head—just me.”
He could see she understood completely. Her lips parted, and then closed. “Do you think your injury was a waste?”
“No,” he said at once, as if he were sure. As if he had never lost a soldier under his command or a friend, and gone to sleep that night in his leaking, icy tent wondering whether the war was worth it. As if, breathless with pain in the hospital, he hadn’t listened to men dying and suffering all around him and thought that his mother had been righ
t all along.
But doubt always came like a thief in the night. It came when you were alone. He had hardly ever been alone in the army. Christ, he missed that certainty and companionship. “I would do it again. We all sacrificed for something we believed in. Something I still believe in.”
She drew in a deep breath and steadied like a raw recruit given a few encouraging words and a clap on the back. “I believe in my sister.”
He was going to win his bet with his mother. He looked away. “Talk to your sister. She’s apologizing because when she looks at you, she sees her guilt that she’s forcing you into marriage. And when you look at her, you see your father’s disappointment. I don’t care whether he would have been disappointed. He would have been wrong.” He couldn’t turn his gaze back to Mrs. Sparks’s face. When he looked at her, he was supposed to see his chance to show his mother the truth of himself. He wasn’t supposed to see her.
Footsteps came rattling up the stairs. Mrs. Sparks catapulted out of her chair. Nick rose politely. When his leg had been whole, he’d never realized how annoying the rule about never sitting in front of a standing woman could be. To top it off, he hit his head on the eaves.
“Sorry!” Her rosebud mouth made a twisty little knot of embarrassment. “You’re much taller than most of my visitors.”
With her leap out of her chair and his step forward to the higher part of the ceiling, she was exactly at kissing distance. She had to tilt her head back to look up at him, eyes wide, and for a moment he felt flooded with strength and confidence. He could lean down and kiss her expressive mouth, and all their doubts and fears would melt away and everything would be perfect…
A loud rap sounded at the door. Mrs. Sparks started violently and went to open it. Nick’s fingers curled with wanting to slide into her soft, thick hair.
Her visitor was short and narrow and brown, with longish hair and a boyish, foxlike face. The pink-and-white tea rose in his buttonhole proclaimed him a Tory. “You’re looking lovely today, Mrs. Sparks. Lavender is a good color for you.”
