by Jo Beverley
Cyn whistled. “An impressive concoction!”
Perry tossed the paper down. “I pity the woman, but that’s a cartload of nonsense.”
“Giles Perriam does seem to have been plagued by misfortunes.”
“Life is chancy for great and small.”
“Life can also be odd. In my travels I’ve come across things that’d make me unwilling to ignore such a well-warranted curse.”
“I had no part in the wickedness.” Perry was trying to reject the curse entirely, but the direct, powerful words had their effect.
“Perhaps you’ll find an escape. Claris Mallow might already be married.”
“This will was signed only two weeks ago,” Perry pointed out.
“Your malignant relative wouldn’t be so careless?”
“He crafted this with precision to do the most harm.”
“Is there something written on the back of his letter?”
Perry turned the sheet. “To assist you to marry within the month, I tell you that Claris Mallow is a spinster of twenty-three living in the village of Old Barford, Surrey, daughter of the rector of the parish, Henry Mallow.”
“A clergyman’s daughter?” Cyn said. “I expected worse. A demure demeanor and a dedication to good works.”
“I’ve known some who break that mold.”
“Who still live in the rectory?”
“A point. But in his ravings, Giles mentioned Henry Mallow with rage. I lay odds that rectory is a pit of vipers.”
Perry reread part of the will.
“I’m only required to wed the woman. Nothing more.” He refolded the papers, stacked them neatly, and retied the black ribbon. “Once that’s done, she may stay in the rectory or take up residence here. Though Father will rage, I will have done my best for the family and be free to return to Town and sanity.”
Chapter 3
Lavender Cottage, Old Barford, Surrey
“Idling, Claris? You must be sickening.”
Claris Mallow turned from enjoying the perfume of the flowers growing up a trellis. “Simply giving thanks for all I have.”
Her grandmother Athena Mallow sniffed. “All you have is a rented cottage and a pittance.”
“I have enough to live on, and I have harmony. No one—”
“No one will storm out to berate you for every little fault,” Athena completed, “nor for many things that aren’t faults at all, such as growing sweet peas. You can’t build a life on things you don’t have.”
Athena was ill suited to a cottage garden. Despite wearing plain clothing, she always seemed elegant, and her appearance was impressive. She was a widow of nearly seventy, but her back was straight, her hawk-nosed face only lightly wrinkled, and her dark hair untouched by gray. At market, she used her appearance to tempt women to buy her creams and hair tonic, though Claris had never seen her use the stuff herself.
But then, Claris had known her for only a year, and Athena had shared little about her life. Claris had been embarrassed to ask. On the rare occasions when her father had mentioned his mother, he’d described her as a disgrace to womanhood, and once as a harlot. In truth, when Athena had arrived at the Old Barford rectory on the day after her son’s funeral, Claris had been disappointed by a lack of lascivious clothing and face paint.
Athena had shown no trace of grief, but that wasn’t surprising, when she’d abandoned husband and son forty-eight years earlier without a qualm. “I have come to nurture the orphans,” she’d announced, “but I know nothing of grandmothering and little indeed of mothering. You will call me Athena.”
Claris and her two brothers had been stunned but obedient, all relieved that someone had come to their rescue.
Their father’s death had been sudden, for Reverend Mallow had suffered an apoplexy in the pulpit when ranting against sin. In an instant his income had ceased and his family had lost any right to live in the rectory. His demented generosity to the poor had left scant savings, and Claris had known of no relations likely to offer refuge to her and her ten-year-old brothers.
Athena had not brought riches, but within days she had persuaded old Lizzie Hubble she’d be better off living with her daughter and had taken over the rent of Lavender Cottage. She’d secured their right to take many items from the vicarage, some of which they’d then sold, and she’d also claimed for them the pension allowed to the orphans of clergymen. She wasn’t an easy woman, but she’d been an angel at that time.
“I give thanks for you too,” Claris said. “You made this haven possible.”
“Perhaps a mistake. Are you to dawdle your life away here? You’re twenty-three years old, girl.”
“And thus not a girl.”
“You’re a girl to me as long as you stay here.”
“Where could we go?” Claris protested. “We only just manage as things are.”
“Because you insist on putting aside money for the boys. Let them make their own way. The world is run for the convenience of their sex.”
“They need education and a start in a profession. I’m content here; I truly am.”
“Then you’re demented. I was younger than you when I escaped my husband and set about enjoying life.”
Claris didn’t care to think what “enjoying life” might have involved, and yet Athena never showed a trace of shame over her past.
“I have no need to escape,” Claris said firmly, picking up her basket of vegetables and flowers and leading the way back toward the cottage. “I enjoy my family and my garden. I enjoy being in the village where I was born, where everyone knows me.”
“As the Mad Rector’s daughter.”
“Father was mad,” Claris pointed out, for her father’s ranting sermons and obsessive guilt could be seen no other way. “I value honesty.”
Athena snorted. “And you’re tainted by that brutal honesty as long as you remain here.”
“What purpose would there be to my leaving? Where would be better?”
“It’s time you married.”
Claris stopped to stare at her grandmother.
“With such sterling examples before me? You endured only three years of it before fleeing, and my parents were at miserable warfare all their days.”
“Extreme examples.”
“I’ve seen others in the area.”
“And many good matches too. Your parents were an odd case, and you are certainly not me.”
Claris continued toward the cottage. “No, for I’m sure you were a beauty when young. Who will marry me, penniless and without charms?”
“You have charms enough if you cared to use them. You’re kind and generous. Often too much so, but that too pleases some.”
“With a temper as wild as my father’s when stirred.”
“There’s nothing wrong with a temper when faced with injustice.”
“Injustice is part of marriage when a husband has all the power, so I’d likely murder any man unwise enough to wed me. I’m a free woman! I have no man to dictate to me. Why should I change that?”
Claris heard panic in her rising voice and strove to calm herself. “The Mad Rector’s daughter” could easily be misunderstood as “the rector’s mad daughter.”
Athena picked a sprig of rosemary and laid it on the flowers in Claris’s basket. “For its soothing powers, child. Clearly I spoke too soon, but you must look to your future. The boys will go away to school, and I . . . Enough of this. I’m off to deliver a tonic to Miss Trueby. I may linger to chat, for she has amusing wisdom for a villager.”
“Don’t tell her fortune,” Claris implored. “We need no more talk of you being a witch!”
Athena ignored her.
She stalked away toward the side path that led to the lane, tall and straight in her plain black gown, a black three-cornered hat on the white cap on her dark hair. Why would a woman who’d fled a cruel husband and lived an adventurous life become cautious now?
Athena’s black cat, Yatta, stirred, stretched, and looked as if he would follow, but
then he returned to rub against Claris’s ankle.
“Why can’t you teach her sense?” Claris asked, bending to stroke him.
Somewhere in her adventures Athena had learned herbal lore, and as the previous tenant, Lizzie Hubble, had grown many herbs, she was plying that trade. She took payment in kind from the local people but went to market in Guildford once a month to earn money. The money was useful and her creams and potions seemed effective, but even the grateful villagers talked of her being a witch. They didn’t really mean it, but Claris knew country ways. If a disaster happened, if animals died in numbers or a barn burned down, they’d look for someone to blame.
The new rector, Cudlingston, regarded Athena with suspicion, egged on by the local doctor, whose trade she’d usurped.
Claris was grateful to her grandmother, but she could be a difficult woman, especially if she was going to try to push Claris into marriage. Why on earth would she do that? She remembered the words And I . . . And I what?
Must leave here soon? Did Athena think Claris needed a man to take care of her before she could leave?
As she approached the back door to the cottage, Claris wondered how Athena could leave. She seemed to have no money other than her herbal earnings. Surely she wasn’t hoping Claris would marry them all into a more comfortable life. That would be a sacrifice too far!
Claris went inside and put the basket on the kitchen table. Perhaps she thumped it down, for Ellie Gable asked, “What’s the matter, dearie?”
Ellie had arrived with Athena, having been her companion from her early days. Claris had never sorted out whether Ellie had been her grandmother’s lady’s maid or a housemaid or even simply a friend, but here, despite her age, she seemed willing to be a maid of all work.
She was a short, wiry woman, with frothy white curls and a face creased by frequent smiles. She seemed to have endless energy. Claris hardly ever saw her sit down, and if she did, she’d have work in her hands.
At the moment she was standing at one end of the table, rubbing something smelly into rabbit skins. The twins had snared three rabbits yesterday, so there’d be rabbit stew today and fur for the winter, but Claris could do without the smell.
If Athena went, Ellie would go too, and that would be a blow. She’d miss Ellie’s hard work, but she’d miss her generous nature more, and her sensible advice.
“She told me to marry, would you believe?”
“Athena? Marry who?”
“Anyone.”
Ellie picked up another rabbit skin. “She’d never do that, dearie. Too many bad husbands out there.”
Claris took down a pottery vase from a shelf and went to the water bucket to fill it. “Exactly, and if there are potential good husbands in the world, I don’t see them around here.”
“Young Farmer Barnett has an eye on you.”
Claris laughed. “If he were so foolish, his mother and grandmother would tie him up, like Odysseus tied to the mast to resist the allure of the siren.”
Ellie chuckled with her. “They’d try, wouldn’t they, the prating fools, but he’s a young man with a mind of his own, and with his father dead he’s master there.”
Claris put the vase in the middle of the table and filled it with sweet peas. The perfume fought the smell of Ellie’s work but was losing.
Gideon Barnett a suitor?
He was a sturdy man and they were of an age. The Barnetts were regular churchgoers, so they’d met on Sundays and feast days all their lives, but no more than that. Her father had never wanted to mix with others, and her mother had refused to mingle with what she’d called the lesser ones—the villagers and farmers.
She realized Farmer Barnett had called at the cottage now and then. Athena provided a cream to help his grandmother’s joints and when someone came for it they always brought something from the farm in gratitude. In the past few months, however, it had been Farmer Barnett himself, and last time the gift had been a good-sized piece of choice pork.
A courting gift?
“Barnett has his pick of the young women for miles around,” she said, “and thank heavens. I don’t want to have to reject him. Shall I wash the vegetables now? If not, I’ll hoe around the beans. This warm weather suits the weeds too well.”
“You do that, dearie. I’ve finished these and I want to wash the floors now Athena’s not in and out. But wear your hat or you’ll never rid yourself of those freckles.”
Claris laughed. “I’ve had them all my life, but very well.” She put on her wide-brimmed straw hat before going out to vent her emotions on groundsel and chickweed.
Then she wondered, What emotions?
Panic?
Over the mere mention of marriage?
Or over the idea of leaving here?
She glanced back at the cottage. It was the end one of a terrace of four, all of which sagged to the right—that was, to Lavender Cottage. The windows were tiny. The small panes had glass in them, but it was a thick, rough glass that distorted the view.
The thatch roof that covered all the cottages needed repairs, but Squire Callway, their landlord, was ignoring requests. She didn’t know the state of the other cottages, but hers had damp patches in the upstairs bedrooms.
Everyone pitied them for having to live here after growing up in the rectory, but Claris had been ecstatic to escape. Despite the cottage’s damp and drafts, which had made the winter hard, she didn’t want to leave.
She was safe here, and if Athena left, so be it. She could manage on her own.
Chapter 4
Perry approached a terrace of four small cottages, skeptical that one housed Miss Claris Mallow, daughter of the Reverend Henry Mallow, once a friend of Giles Perriam. On arrival in Old Barford, he’d left his horse at the inn and gone to the rectory, which was a handsome house that couldn’t be more than forty years old. There he’d learned that Mallow was a year dead and that his family was living at Lavender Cottage.
Sometimes “cottage” was applied to a small house of some style and dignity, and that’s what he’d expected. This row lacked both, but the end one on the left was fronted by lavender plants, so that must be his destination. The modern rectory lay only a hundred yards away as the crow flies, but it was a hundred miles away in all other respects. Henry Mallow hadn’t provided well for his family, but that could be to his own advantage.
If the family was impoverished, Miss Mallow would be eager to wed. In fact, he’d be an angel to rival Gabriel at the Annunciation. Amused by that image, he walked up to the warped door and rapped on it with the head of his riding crop. He’d soon be back in Town.
In the week since Giles’s death, he’d received two reproaches about tasks abandoned when he’d obeyed Cousin Giles’s summons. One was indirectly from the king. There’d also been a fuming letter from his father. As usual, his father fumed to no purpose, for there was nothing to be done about Perriam Manor other than this.
He was about to knock again when the door was opened by a maidservant so short he thought her a child until he saw the wrinkled face. Sixty if she was a day, though when she smiled her teeth all seemed sound.
“Good afternoon, sir. Can I help you?”
“Is Miss Mallow at home?”
“Miss Mallow, is it?” the maid asked, seeming surprised.
“Yes.” Was she married after all? No, for then she’d not be a Mallow.
“She’s in the garden, sir. Would you mind going round, for I’m swabbing the floor.”
He could see the truth of that behind her. The door opened into a front room with an uneven flagstone floor that was awash with water. A mop was propped against the wall. Oddly, the room contained a large table and shelves of jars and bottles.
A stillroom?
Potions?
The curse returned unsettlingly to mind.
Clarrie had laid a curse on Giles, and her sister, Nora, had claimed to know how to raise it. Nora was Claris Mallow’s mother.
Would he be marrying into a family of witches? Witc
hes who knew how to cast curses?
Even so, it must be done.
“A shame to bring Miss Mallow indoors on such a lovely day,” Perry agreed. “The path to my left?”
“That’s right, sir. She’ll likely be down the end.”
Whatever that meant. Perry headed for the path.
The cottage was in a poor state, but it had some rural charms. The path was bordered on the right by a bed bursting with colorful flowers, worked over by bees on this sunny afternoon. To his left lay a hedge, twitteringly full of birds.
When he came to the end of the path, he found a contrast. Far less color here, because the garden was devoted to herbs. He had little interest in horticulture, but he was sure everything here had its purpose for cooking or healing, even the brash marigolds crowding along some edges.
Cooking, healing—and magic?
He looked around for other evidence of witchcraft but found none.
A bench sat in one corner with a wooden table in front of it in a position that would catch the afternoon sun. Behind it, a line strung from house to tree carried a full load of white laundry, stirring in the breeze. His life rarely involved lines of laundry, and there was a simple beauty in the movement.
Then he noted the simplicity of the undergarments and that some were patched or darned.
Impoverished.
Excellent.
So where was his bride?
Down the end.
He circled the herb garden and realized that a trellis covered by climbing flowers wasn’t the end of the garden but a partition. He went behind to find a gated fence, and beyond that a vegetable garden being pecked over by hens.
