The look Edeline gave her seared her skin. “That is a large assignment for a child, don’t you think? I don’t believe that is my responsibility as a mother, to force my child to remake the world. I just want him to be happy, and to learn fairness, and that he can’t do in this class. No. I will take him away and I will give him the life that will make him happy. We were happy as children. I will see to it that he is, as well.”
Verbena thought of Lizabeth and Annabelle. Were they happy? She was not at all sure she wanted to ask. Whatever Edeline had gone through with the Therns, she had forgotten much about life with the less privileged. Even before the hard times had hit, their life was not as gilded as her sister wanted to remember, though Verbena knew she would not be able to convince her otherwise.
Edeline was carrying the heir to whatever money the Therns had, and Verbena could only assume that was quite a bit. She wanted to leave that all behind. Verbena could only hope when Edeline’s mind cleared, she would go back and demand the child’s due.
She wondered how they would survive, how she would provide for her brothers and sisters, without Edeline’s gifts, and felt guilty that the thought had even slid through her mind. Andrew was dead. “Where will you go?”
“I promise I have been thinking on nothing else for days, from the moment Andrew got worse.” Edeline gave a hiccup of a last sob. “You must help me find some place.”
The request irritated Verbena. Why did everyone expect her to make things right? And then the solution popped up, so obvious she was amazed neither of them had thought of it instantly. “I have it! How perfect! Mother’s sister. Remember Aunt Mabel? She lives near Bath, and she married a wealthy man in trade. She writes from time to time. I don’t know if you knew, but she is widowed now.” She bit her lip. “You will have to find a way to get there. We will need money. Can you get some?”
Edeline seemed to sit straighter. “I don’t know. Maybe. I can’t ask anyone here at Thernwood, that is a certainty. Andrew handled all the finances. I might have a bit of money left, but I have no idea how much. I have not gotten any allowance for – I don’t remember when. Andrew was sick, I could not think of money.” Her eyes filled again. She cleared her throat fiercely.
The gazebo was quiet for another minute. Edeline looked down and tugged at a bit of rose-colored lace, murmuring absently, “I will have to get some black gowns made. Somehow. I can no longer go about in what I have.” She gave a shudder, grabbed Verbena’s arms again, and held on. “Do not tell anyone that I’m increasing, not the children, not even Father. Especially not Father. You will write Aunt Mabel for me, won’t you? I may not have much time. Can you, oh please, will you help me escape? Promise me!”
Looking in Edeline’s moist blue eyes, Verbena stifled a sigh. It was a mistake, but this was her sister. She would defend her family from everything. And everyone. “I promise.” She could only hope they were not making a terrible mistake.
The sisters parted at the garden arch. Verbena watched Edeline’s figure disappear around the sheds, walking back to a house that terrified her.
Edeline’s foolish plan was one more burden to carry, and the children needed their breakfast. Thomas Barnes was undoubtedly up by now, and he was going to be angry. His first rising had alarmed her already, warning that last night’s drinking was wearing off. How the man could drink himself into a stupor and still wake early in the morning, she did not know. Verbena straightened her shoulders and took a deep breath. She had been gone far too long as it was. She turned the opposite way, and slipped back into the woods.
*
The sun still hid beneath the horizon, leaving him in enough darkness to keep anyone from seeing the tears on his cheeks.
Andrew was dead. He, Damon Theodore Thern, was the heir now. As often as he had worried what his brother the dreamer would do with the family estate, he never wanted the responsibility himself. Especially not at the expense of Andrew’s life.
Damon took a step wrong and his leg buckled. He grabbed a branch just in time to keep himself from doing a facer into the mat of rotting leaves from last autumn. The doctor had warned him, when he refused to let the man saw off his leg, that it would never be normal.
He had made the right decision. If he had to hang onto branches or lean on a cane for the rest of his life, he would do it on his own two feet. He had not gone back to London yet. It was one thing to be so confident when alone, it was another when surrounded by former friends and new acquaintances.
His leg stopped throbbing, and Damon forced himself to start walking again. He wanted to reach the little clearing. He had not made it there, not yet, but he would this time. He needed to visit the place of that memory, needed to go back to where he had last seen her. Her memory had helped him through the worst times before, maybe it would again.
For the last grim years, the face he had seen, the face that had kept him company when the nights were dark and the battle waited only for sunrise to resume with smoke, blood, screams, and the smell of death, was a girl with curly hair the color of sunshine and eyes like summer leaves, carrying a basket nearly as big as she was.
He had left the village only days after that meeting, not knowing what an impact that single encounter would have. His grandmother, his mother’s mother, had left him property, a medium-sized house three villages away from Thernwood complete with land and livestock, horses and sheep and cows. Damon visited it once when he reached his majority, assured himself that everything was well, checked the village for comely maids, and went on to London, where he found his share of mistresses, slept as late as he wanted, attended balls, and raced on the trails of Hyde Park.
He had hired a man of affairs for that nearly-forgotten inheritance, who lived there year-round and watched over the place as if it were his own. Strange that he had never gone back to the little village and his own land.
Damon shook his head at the man he had been, and at the high price he had paid. Shortly after that visit to Thernwood and in the foolishness of youth, he had leapt at the chance to go to war just to get away from a life that had become ever more stifling and pointless, joined the army, an officer because of his wealth and birth, and sailed away to France and the battlefield.
That was when the dreams had started. At first it had confused him, that the face he saw was not that of any of his mistresses, but of a girl he had only seen once, standing on a woody path, holding a basket of bread that perfumed the air with its warm, yeasty scent. He even thought, sometimes, after a battle when the odors on the air were blood and death, that he still smelled her bread.
He learned to live for those dreams, had put the smiles he wanted to see on her face, anything to get a respite from the nightmare that surrounded him in the day. When the bullet had torn through his leg and sent him home, Damon chose to go, not to his London house nor to his grandmother’s gift, but here, to Thernwood, the place where his dreams had given him peace. Oddly enough, the dreams stopped then.
For several months as his body fought the infection and the fever, he stared at the walls in his bedchamber. Somewhere inside he had held onto too much youth and health to succumb and as weeks passed, the wounds found a way to heal as much as they could. Life awakened outside his window with the spring, bringing with it the need to find her. He learned to walk again, struggled to keep his balance as he reawakened his familiarity with the land, spent days wandering these very woods.
Of course the fences demanded by the Enclosure Acts were up. Every rock that went into the stone fences, every pole that fit into every slot in the wood on the forest fences, every wooden gate meant no one was allowed through, that she could not follow this path, his only link to her. Only the most audacious tenants would dare cross the barriers of wood and stone now, but she had not been dressed as one of them.
He had never asked her name, had just assumed from her attire, and from the responsibility she apparently felt toward others who might be hungry, that she had to be of the landed gentry.
The fa
mily had not thrown a house party since he arrived, the one thing that would draw in all the gentry from miles around. Andrew had been sick. Such a thing would not happen now. This path and the small clearing was the only link he had to her, a foolish idea, but he could go and stand there and remember.
*
Edeline crept back into the big house as quietly as she had left, but despite her care Agnes waited for her by the servants’ door, reproach etched on her face. “The family wishes to see you in Andrew’s room. They are mourning.”
Her tone was as haughty as a queen’s. Dread dripped down Edeline’s spine like blood as she followed her maid up the dim stairs.
Even when she still had a place in the house, Edeline thought, before last night, she had never dared to censure Agnes. The maid’s wages came from the estate, and Edeline knew, had known all along, that every word she herself uttered got back to Madam Thern.
She had been foolish to have entrusted the letter to Agnes, but she dared not get anyone else involved. If it had not been Agnes it would have been another of the maids, and they all owed their loyalty to the Therns. The other Therns, never her, despite her marriage. She had not exaggerated when she told Verbena so.
Edeline followed her motherin-law’s maid up the stairs. Her steps slowed as they neared Andrew’s room. A few servants were still up, drifting past like quiet ghosts, weeping softly when out of sight of the family as they did the endless petty chores the Therns demanded. It never occurred to them that servants needed sleep, and Edeline wished she had the authority to demand consideration for their workers.
She could not even get consideration for herself. Still, it would be nice to see if such a kindness would soften the servants toward herself. Not that it would change her mind about leaving.
Agnes made no effort to be polite. Her lip curled. “Let us hope you manage to stay where you belong this time.” And she stalked off.
Edeline supposed the woman’s open effrontery said it all. She looked at the faint light washing past the door’s edge. No doubt worse waited inside, but she would not have to endure it much longer. Taking courage from that thought, she eased the door open just far enough to slip in.
Red-rimmed and accusing eyes glared at her from three matching faces, Andrew’s mother and sisters. She did not know where his father and brother were. Facing three was more than enough.
Where the boys were split between light and dark, Andrew a pale, gentle blonde with his father’s blue eyes, Damon vivid dark with the snapping black eyes of his mother, the two girls were the blend, both brunette, one blue-eyed like their father, the other dark like Imogene. Catherine and Margaret turned away. That left her alone, in a matter of speaking, to face Madam Thern.
Imogene Thern rose slowly, her face like a storm building, darker and darker, the atmosphere around her matching her coloring, menace pummeling at her until Edeline could barely breathe. The air itself was thick, whether with grief or loathing, Edeline could not tell. “What a thoughtless girl you are. At last I can speak my mind, now that my son is gone. I have been waiting for this chance.”
For your son to die? Edeline wanted to ask, but she bit her tongue and sidled toward the bed, keeping a wary eye on her motherin-law, trying to ignore the ugly words battering her.
“You never deserved him, you with your commonness, your lack of breeding. You showed it again now, with your husband lying here dead and you out doing who knows what. Dallying with one of the stableboys, most likely. Your husband not even in his grave!”
Andrew lay so still, his face like wax in that strange washed-out color that proclaimed to everyone that life was gone, hope was gone. His hair was still damp from the wet cloth she had wiped over his forehead again and again, hoping the coolness would put the fever’s fire out. His lips, though, were dry, all evidence of her last kisses when she begged him to stay, to kiss her back, to whisper her name one more time, withered now.
Cruel words battered her but Edeline stopped listening, all her attention on the shell of her husband. His hands were so still, the skin lying loose as if the very bones underneath had shriveled. She could not bring herself to touch those hands, not when they would not curl absently around her as they had when he was reading and she would slide in next to him. He had held her hand then, still reading, not even taking his attention from the page but knowing she was there and more content because of it. His lips had curved each time, just a little, a smile hovering there until he had finished and could put the book aside and take her up on her invitation, even if it was just a kiss before rolling over and sliding into sleep. He had usually been too tired to do anything more. It was no wonder it had taken him these six years to plant a child in her womb.
He died not knowing his heir was on the way. She had known even then, known without knowing, that death had hovered too close. It would have been one more burden for him to carry into death, that she would be raising their child without him.
So she had kept her silence but now, just for a moment, she wished he had known.
“Well?” Mrs. Thern snapped, the word sharp and close by, making Edeline jump and whirl around. A hand struck her face hard enough that the sound was sharp as a gunshot in the room. Edeline clapped a palm over the stinging cheek and stared, jolted back to reality, at her motherin-law.
“You – you – ” Mrs. Thern sputtered, struggling for words, then tried again. “You commoner! Look around you!” She waved a hand at the room. Edeline did not bother to so much as move her eyes. “You don’t belong here, you never did.”
She was becoming redundant, Edeline thought dimly, repeating the same insults. But Mrs. Thern was not nearly done. “Andrew died as a refined person should, in his bed, with his true family at his side.”
Unlike a certain high-placed and very married lord who had recently been found dead in a popular brothel, Edeline thought, and wished she dared say it to Mrs. Thern, remind the woman of the cracks in her precious Society. She also wished she dared remind Mrs. Thern just who had nursed Andrew for the endless aching weeks of his final illness.
“How typical of your common origins, that he died and you survived.”
Common origins. She remembered, finally, what she had said to Verbena only moments ago. Freedom was nearly at hand. A spark flared inside Edeline, and she fanned it, let it build. “But I heard you say many a time, every time a servant made a mistake, that the common people died so easily.” She actually waved a hand toward the door, surprised that any part of her body had the audacity to move. “You said how very fortunate that was, so a new, better crop could take their place.”
She lowered her hand one inch at a time, watching Mrs. Thern for the first signs of another impending attack, verbal or physical, although she had no idea what she would do in response. “And if you will remember, I’m his wife, his true family in God’s eyes, and I was at his side every minute he was sick. I sat with him in the carriage when we took the trip down here at your insistence.”
“You did not stay at his side long, though,” Mrs. Thern sniped back.
“I was beside him until his very last breath,” Edeline returned, but her voice was drowned out.
“Mother,” Margaret cut in with quelling tones. It was not in character for either of the girls to stand against their mother, probably since they agreed with her all the time, but Edeline was grateful for even this small rebellion from her sister-in-law. “Don’t start again. You have made your point. There are more important things to do at the moment than bother with her.”
Now that sounded more like Margaret.
Love, her love for Andrew and his for her, made Edeline take one final stand. This burst of courage, or daring, or shock, did not have to be for long. “I went to the gazebo to weep in private. God knows, I get none here.” She sat down on the bed and glared at them. “This is our bedroom, Andrew’s and mine. Since you disapprove of my going out to find privacy, I will order you all to find yours elsewhere. While Andrew is with me, this room still belongs to us,
and you have no place here. You have said your goodbyes for the nonce, now I ask you to leave.”
Her motherin-law found her voice again. “Just wait until my son is buried.” It came out a snarl, but the three women amazed Edeline by turning away and walking out of the door.
They had one final unspoken say when the door slammed shut, the sound echoing through the house.
Edeline sagged, her rebellion slipping away as though draining through a crack in the floor, and placed a hand on low on her belly, protecting her secret. She turned to her husband’s still face and made him a vow, silently, in case there were ears at the door. Andrew, I will protect our child. If it is the last thing I do, I will keep our baby safe from them.
She sat in the hard chair beside the bed and stared at his face for a long time as the sun came up and filled the room.
CHAPTER 3
The path showed clearly, too clearly. The sun was nearly up.
It was a nasty thing to be around her father when he was craving liquor, and she had left the children sleeping in the house. Verbena knew she could not protect her younger brothers and sisters from all of it, but she promised herself long ago that she would do her best to shield them from as much as she could. She picked up her skirts and started running.
Her special place in the woods came up quickly. Why was it the coming back was always faster than the getting there, she wondered distantly, and suddenly skidded to a stop so quickly she nearly fell.
Damon stood in the middle of the path, his back to her, a stark, unmoving figure blocking her way. Tall as ever, his shoulders broad, his hair dark, he dominated the small clearing even without a horse to lift him above other mortals. The sun must have broken the horizon, for a faint glow touched his hair. Or else it was her imagination, the effect he had always had on her. That giddy fifteen-year-old was back, her breath catching in her throat.
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