A Place to Belong (West Meets East Book 2)

by Merry Farmer

  The thought of them being parents—together—sent tempting shivers through all the right places in Clara.

  “When life gives you no warning before throwing something this big in your path, you have to make do with what you have,” she said, winking at James and sending a smile Arthur’s way.

  “True.” Arthur straightened from where he had been adding washing soda to the tub. “Maybe we could just swish Jimmy’s bum around in the washtub before we start the laundry?” he suggested with a grin.

  Clara laughed as she imagined that too. “He’d probably like it,” she said. “Although I’m not so sure the laundry soap would be good for him.”

  “Why not?” Arthur shrugged, planting his hands on his hips and smiling with pride at the tub. “Soap is soap, right?”

  Clara laughed harder. “Have you ever tried washing your manly bits with lye soap?

  Arthur turned bright red, though whether it was from the mention of manly bits or the idea of using lye soap on them, she couldn’t tell.

  “I don’t think James would like it very much,” she rushed on, smoothing out the bumpy moment.

  Although once she conjured up the image of Arthur’s bits, it was hard to imagine anything else. She’d learned to be a fair judge of a man from looking at the fit of his trousers, and as far as she could tell, Arthur had nothing to be ashamed of.

  Which was the very last thing she should have been thinking about, given their current agreement. James first, after all.

  “Maybe it would be best if I just washed James in the sink inside, then brought him out here for his lunch once he’s clean,” she said, abandoning the roasting pan and picking James up.

  “If you think that’s best.” Arthur grinned madly, sounding as though he were on the verge of giggles, but avoided Clara’s eyes. The day was beginning to feel entirely too hot for early autumn.

  The kitchen sink was a much better location for a bath for James than outside where Arthur was washing the laundry, but the bath only lasted so long. It seemed like no time before James was clean, dressed, fed, and sound asleep in his basket, in the shade of one of the trees that separated the vicarage garden from the churchyard. Clara had never been one to sit around, so as soon as James was happily in dreamland, she summoned up her courage, forced herself to focus, and moved to help Arthur with the laundry.

  “I never had to do these things growing up,” Arthur said with a laugh as he knelt in the grass beside the tub, scrubbing diapers against a washboard.

  “Really? I did laundry every week from the time I was old enough to hold a bar of soap,” Clara replied from the wringer that Arthur had set up beside the tub.

  “Well, my family did have servants, after all,” he said, a sheepish red flooding his cheeks.

  The reminder of how different their pasts had been gave Clara a moment of pause, but she continued the conversation all the same. “Do you miss having servants?” she asked.

  Arthur shrugged. “Sometimes. This living certain would allow me to afford a maid, but I promised myself when I took the position that I would learn what it is to be self-sufficient before giving up and hiring help.”

  Clara’s brow went up as she took a handful of clean diapers from the wringer to hang on the line strung between the tree and the side of the house. “I don’t think many men in your position would feel the same way.”

  “Probably not,” Arthur chuckled, finishing the last diaper and running it through the wringer himself. He only narrowly managed to escape flattening his fingers in the process. “My mother always used to say I was the oddball of the family.”

  “My mother use to tell me I was the black sheep, and not because of my hair or my height.” Clara jabbed a clothespin onto the diaper she had draped on the line, trying not to be bitter and failing. “Someone had to do something to put food on the table,” she went on quietly, half consumed with memory, half as if justifying herself to her mother. “Pa failed us in so many ways, and I’m not entirely convinced Ma didn’t either.”

  Arthur’s low hum of sympathy drew Clara’s attention to the fact that he was only a few yards away from her, hanging clothes at the other end of the line, and getting closer to her. “There were times when I wasn’t even certain my parents remembered I existed,” he said.

  “How could they forget?” Clara glanced down the line to him. Her heart shuddered in her chest at the sight of his sad frown.

  He shrugged and fastened a towel to the line. “Mine was a large family. Three girls in addition to the five of us boys. And being of a certain class, we were all raised by nannies and nursemaids.”

  “Oh?” Clara could hardly imagine such a thing, especially if the parents were right there, with money and everything.

  “Since I was the youngest, I often wonder if my mother was just…done by the time I came along. I only really ever saw her on Sundays.”

  “When she called you an oddball?” Clara wasn’t so sure she liked the woman, no matter how much higher up the social ladder she was.

  Arthur hummed, taking a step closer to her, and hanging a few articles of his clothing that he’d washed.

  “Is that why you became a vicar?” Clara asked. “Because Sundays were the only time you saw your mother?”

  He laughed. “I hadn’t thought of that.” He tilted his head to the side and moved closer still to her. “I might be tempted to say that the opposite was true. Sundays were painful as a child. Maybe I joined the church to make them joyful again.”

  Clara moved her way along the line, hanging the last of the diapers, as well. They ended by working almost shoulder to shoulder in the middle of the line.

  “I’ve always liked Sundays,” she said, watching Arthur’s hands as he hung the last piece of laundry. He had such nice, large hands. “I like to think of God resting.”

  “You do?” Arthur finished and pivoted to face her.

  “Yes.” She smiled. “Can’t you just see Him, His work of creation done, kicking back in a rocking chair on some divine porch, sipping a lemonade and fanning Himself while watching His children play?”

  Arthur laughed. “I’ll have to use that image in one of my sermons.”

  “Just don’t tell people it came from me.”

  “Why not?” His brow knit in puzzlement.

  “They’d probably laugh at me,” Clara admitted, eyes lowered. “Then again, folks find pretty much any excuse to laugh at me. Usually it’s my size, at least, until I open my mouth. I have a hard time keeping my sillier thoughts to myself.”

  “Your thoughts aren’t silly at all,” he said, a tenderness to his voice that Clara hadn’t expected. He reached out and rubbed a smudge of some sort off her cheek with his thumb. “I like the things you say.” His hand stayed against her cheek when he finished rubbing. “I like everything about you.”

  Clara’s breath caught in her throat. She found herself swaying toward him as he slipped a hand around her waist. When their lips met, it was as though some forbidden fruit had burst between them, flooding their kiss with sweetness. He explored her gently at first, tentatively. But when she sighed and closed her arms around him, he grew bolder.

  His tongue flickered across the seam of her lips, prompting her to open for him. She’d certainly been kissed before, but never like this. Arthur was passionate, almost teasing, as he tasted her, delving deep only to inch away, then start the whole process of exploration over again. His arms felt so right around her, even though he held back from touching her where she would really liked to have been touched. In fact, his restraint drove her to heights of passion that the most intimate invasions of her past never had. And, unlike her past, she wanted the closeness between them to last forever.

  A rustling from the corner of the churchyard eventually startled them into stepping apart. Clara wasn’t sure, but she thought she saw someone retreating down the road.

  “Do you think someone saw us?” she whispered.

  “There’s no law that says a vicar can’t kiss a beautiful woman
,” he replied, a little too fast to be as confident as he sounded.

  For some reason, that made Clara laugh. She raised a hand to her still tingling lips.

  Arthur caught her laughter. “We must do a better job of keeping our vow of non-attachment,” he chuckled.

  “We must,” Clara agreed.

  But she had no idea how it would be possible now that she knew how glorious it was to be in Arthur’s arms.

  CHAPTER 7

  F or the first time since setting foot on English soil, Clara looked forward to her day’s work when she got up in the morning. James needed her. Arthur needed her…in more ways than one. The kiss they shared seemed to prove it. And even though she could think of nothing but the way his arms felt around her, the scent of his skin, and the passion in his lips, she forced herself to hold back from pouring her heart out to him. The time didn’t quite seem right, not with so much still up in the air. And they had made a promise not to get romantically involved…yet.

  “Are these tarts for the baby?” Clara asked as Mrs. Carlisle pushed a basket into her arms. She was on her way out the door, heading down to the vicarage, but stopped when she was presented with the gift.

  “They’re for Rev. Fallon,” Mrs. Carlisle corrected, glancing secretively over her shoulder. Voices were raised in the servant’s hall, where the rest of the staff was in the middle of lunch. “And for you,” Mrs. Carlisle added in a whisper. “I know it’s not popular to say right now, but Rev. Fallon is a saint for caring for that poor child. And you are too. It warms my heart to see you and the reverend together.”

  “It does?” Clara blinked in surprise.

  Mrs. Carlisle sent her a conspiratorial smile. “If ever a man needed a formidable woman in his life, it’s Rev. Fallon.”

  Clara opened her mouth to thank Mrs. Carlisle from the bottom of her heart, but before she could, Ben, one of Winterberry Park’s footmen, dashed in through the kitchen door and pushed between Clara and the cook.

  “You’ll never guess what I just heard,” he said as he burst into the servant’s hall.

  Sense told Clara to ignore what was sure to be gossip and to go on her way, but when Mrs. Carlisle inched closer to the servant’s hall, Clara did too.

  “They’ve been cleaning out Primrose Cottage,” Ben revealed, “and you’ll never guess what they found.”

  “What?”

  “Tell us.”

  The rest of the household was as curious as Clara was, but judging by the tone of their questions, for less than savory reasons.

  “They found letters,” Ben revealed.

  Clara exchanged a confused glance with Mrs. Carlisle as they stood in the hallway, just out of sight of the rest of the staff.

  “That hardly warrants all the fuss,” Mary said.

  “It wouldn’t,” Ben went on, “except that the letters were from men. Gentlemen. Well-known gentlemen. Gentlemen who were not Mr. Croydon.” Mary, Martha, and the others gasped and made sounds of curiosity. A creeping feeling spread down Clara’s back. “The letters were of an intimate nature,” Ben finished as if declaring triumph.

  “I should have known,” Martha said. Clara couldn’t see her, but she could imagine the woman with her nose in the air. “Trollops like that woman always reveal themselves to be faithless eventually.”

  A round of agreements sounded from the room.

  “But…but that woman was living a quiet life,” Ada’s small voice rang out over the scoffing. “My sister Nancy says she was trying to turn over a new leaf, be a good woman. Maybe gentlemen just sent her letters and she didn’t answer.”

  Everyone else in the servant’s hall snorted in derision or made unkind noises at the comment. Clara felt her anger rising. She inched closer to the doorway.

  “I’ll bet she answered, all right,” Martha said.

  “Once a woman has gone down the wrong path, her character is forever besmirched,” Mr. Noakes said, his voice more supercilious than Clara had ever heard it. “There is no recovering from moral disgrace.”

  The chorus of agreement only made Clara’s blood boil hotter.

  “I wouldn’t be caught dead giving the time of day to a woman like that,” Mary said.

  “Me neither,” Martha agreed. “What that woman did was disgusting.”

  “And it’s scandalous that Rev. Fallon is soiling himself by association,” Mary added.

  “I can’t understand why any bloke would want a baby in the first place,” Ben said.

  A few hums of agreement answered him.

  “I could barely listen to him on Sunday,” Mary went on. “Preaching about moral uprightness and Christian charity when he’s harboring that child under his roof.”

  If she hadn’t been holding the basket Mrs. Carlisle had given her, Clara would have balled her hands into fists. Arthur had worked long and hard on that sermon under trying circumstances. He had hoped to inspire the townsfolk to look inside of themselves, to remind them that he or she who did the least of those things to those in need did them also to Jesus, as the gospel said.

  “If you ask me,” Ben chimed in, “the good reverend should have just left that baby out in a field for fate to take care of.”

  That was the final straw. Clara stepped around the corner, face hot and body shaking with fury. “How dare you suggest harming a helpless infant?” she shouted, regardless of Mr. Noakes’s look of shock or Mrs. Musgrave’s frown of disapproval from either end of the servant’s table. “James is a sweet, unfortunate baby. He can’t help who his parents are, and he deserves our help. And as for Rev. Fallon, he is the kindest, most noble, most good man I’ve ever met. You should be praising him for his selflessness instead of turning your noses up at him.”

  Her tirade was met by stunned silence from the servants around the table. Everyone from Mr. Noakes to Mary and Martha to Ada blinked at her with wide-eyed surprise. And then Martha burst into a snorting laugh. She clapped a hand to her face, but didn’t seem to make any effort to check her dismissive laughter. Worse than that, Mary started laughing too, then Ben, then Robby, the other footman. Clara’s anger flared to fury blended with shame, but it wasn’t shame for her own actions. She could barely look at the people in front of her.

  Only Mrs. Musgrave kept her stern expression instead of laughing at Clara. “We do not have outbursts like this at the table,” she scolded the others, even Mr. Noakes, whose lips were twitching. “The woman in question, regardless of her character, is not an appropriate conversation topic.”

  “Settle down,” Mr. Noakes said, trying to take charge, as his job dictated he do. The others only nominally listened.

  Clara couldn’t stand to witness another moment of the cruelty her fellow servants were displaying. She turned and marched off down the hall, toward the kitchen door, aching from the inside out. It wasn’t just Violetta that the others had insulted, it was her too. It was every one of her friends from Bonnie’s Place, every girl who had been pushed into a life she didn’t want. Life had been cruel enough to people like her. They didn’t need folks kicking them once they were already down.

  “Don’t let them ruffle your feathers, dearie.” Clara was surprised to find that Mrs. Carlisle had followed her out of the house and into the courtyard leading to the stables. “Young folks are foolish, and this lot is more foolish than most.”

  Clara stopped her march and turned back to Mrs. Carlisle, her brow inching up. “You don’t think Rev. Fallon is a fool, do you?”

  “Of course not.” Mrs. Carlisle closed the distance between her and Clara and reached out to rub Clara’s arm. She was at least a foot shorter than Clara, but in that moment, she felt like someone Clara could look up to. “You go ahead and keep doing what you’re doing. Good will have its reward, and bad will expose itself in time. Smart folks know which one is which.” She winked, gave Clara’s arm one more pat, then headed back into the house.

  Clara kept going, walking as fast as she could to get away from the house. Mrs. Carlisle’s words were a balm of sorts
, but her heart was still heavy. How long would it be before people would see how kind Arthur was and how fortunate James was to have him? And how would she ever be able to live out the rest of her life working under the same roof as the people who had put him—and her—down so harshly?

  Arthur was in no way inclined to pretend that his life wasn’t absolutely perfect, just the way it was. He was the last person who should have been pushing a pram down the sunny road that led from the pond, where he and Clara had taken James for a picnic, into town. And he probably shouldn’t have been grinning like a lunatic and stealing fond glances at Clara every few seconds either. But she looked utterly divine with the sunlight glinting off her rosy-pink complexion.

  Although, considering how uncharacteristically quiet she’d been since arriving at the vicarage earlier, the pink of her cheeks could have indicated something else.

  “You’ve been more silent than usual today,” he observed as they walked. Initiating conversation about things like moods and feelings was as foreign to him as the orient, but it didn’t feel like such a steep mountain to climb where Clara was concerned.

  She took a long time to reply, staring at the ground in front of them and pursing her lips as they walked. “Some unkind things were said in the servant’s hall this morning,” she said at last.

  “Oh? What sort of things?” Part of him felt as though he didn’t need to ask. Someone had insulted her in some way, and he would be blind not to think it had something to do with her being there with him, with James.

  She must have sensed that his questions were a way to give her leave to talk about it. She let out a breath and her shoulders dropped. “They were gossiping about how Violetta was immoral. They said that once a woman loses her reputation, she is forever tainted, never able to redeem herself.”

  “We both know that’s not true.” He reached out to take her hand as they walked, pushing the pram with one hand. It was a bold move, one he probably shouldn’t have considered, but it felt right.

  Clara blinked rapidly, glancing to their joined hands with a sudden smile. It faded too quickly. “If they ever find out about me, about why I came here from Wyoming, they’ll say such terrible things.”