It Takes Two to Tumble

by Cat Sebastian

  Phillip crossed the sun-dappled stable yard. As he approached he realized the twins were not working silently, but rather reciting something. For an astonished moment he thought it had to be a prayer, but then realized it was a history lesson.

  “James, Charles, Charles, James, WilliamandMary—” these last monarchs were said in a single rush “—Anne, and then three Georges.”

  “You’ve rather glossed over the interregnum, but you’re in good company there. Also I’m afraid there were a couple of wars in there we ought to at least be able to name, but I can’t for the life of me remember the name of the one that wasn’t against the French.”

  “The War of the Spanish Succession,” Jamie suggested.

  “No, that one was all about the French,” Peggy said.

  “Perhaps Peggy wouldn’t mind looking it up for me later. I’d be mortified if one of my parishioners asked me and I didn’t have an answer. I’d look daft. Can’t have a daft vicar.”

  The twins giggled, but then Jamie caught sight of Phillip, nudged his sister, and the two of them dropped their rakes and vanished into the stables. He heard rustling and creaking and supposed they were hiding in the loft. Ned, looking over at the commotion, saw his father and immediately stiffened.

  “Hullo!” Sedgwick called, waving his hand and smiling like an idiot, like someone who was genuinely glad to see him. Liar. Phillip knew it was all for the children’s benefit, that Sedgwick was behaving with exaggerated friendliness so the children might follow his lead. This only made Phillip resent the man more. The vicar seemed to have his own personal ray of sunshine following him about, casting light in his path and drawing people to him, while Phillip was ever under a storm cloud.

  “Good morning,” he said tightly.

  “Good day, Captain Dacre. Did you come to assist with our history lesson?” the vicar asked with a smile that let Phillip see a mouthful of teeth.

  Phillip very nearly responded that as far as history lessons went, this was perhaps the least adequate he had ever conceived of. A list of monarchs—an incomplete list of monarchs, no less—without any dates or events. Even Phillip had managed to learn more than that at school, not that he could remember any of it now. Not that he’d want to. For a moment he questioned the wisdom of expecting his young children to master facts he had forgotten two decades since, but then thought better of it. Children were supposed to learn these things, and it wasn’t for Phillip—or the vicar, damn him—to decide single-handedly what children were and weren’t supposed to do.

  Phillip couldn’t believe he was going to put his trust in a man who had straw in his hair, a foal nuzzling his pocket, and no knowledge of the—ha!

  “It’s the Great Northern War,” Phillip said in triumph. “The one that didn’t involve France during the period you were discussing.”

  “Oh, there’s a good half dozen,” Sedgwick said airily. “All those dos involving the Dutch and the Portuguese, to start with. Peg will look it up and by dinner she’ll know the belligerents and the casus belli for all of them. And then she’ll tell the rest of us and we’ll all be the wiser. She’s a wizard with that sort of thing.”

  Phillip now felt very stupid, first for not knowing all the Dutch wars and second for not having grasped that the vicar had manipulated the twins into doing the research on their own. “Ah,” was all he said. “And what of Ned?”

  “Who do you think told me about all those Dutch wars in the first place?” the vicar said cheerfully. He had too many freckles, and he was only going to get more if he stood out here bareheaded. “Also, he’s been working with Mr. Smythe on estate matters. Mr. Smythe has a passion for drains and is cultivating in Ned a proper appreciation for them as well.”

  This was, in substance, unobjectionable. Phillip was rummaging through his brain in search of some objection, and came up empty-handed. “I thought you’d be at church this morning,” he said instead. “It’s Sunday.”

  “It’s hardly eight o’clock. But I ought to go clean up, I suppose,” he said, glancing sheepishly down at his clothes. “Can’t be trailing hay into the church, can I? If you’re looking for a way to amuse the children, promise to read them Robinson Crusoe at teatime.”

  Fat chance of that. “You’re going?” Phillip asked, frowning. “You don’t take them with you?”

  “You can manage it on your own,” Sedgwick said, his cheerfulness undimmed. And then he walked into the house. Whistling.

  By the time the clock struck noon, Ben had hung up his cassock and put on a sturdy pair of boots to walk the distance to Fellside Grange.

  He made the journey as seldom as possible. He had a litany of excuses—he didn’t like to borrow a horse to go over such uneven ground, his duties kept him near the parish, he hated to intrude on his father without warning—but the truth was that he much preferred life on this side of the lake.

  His parishioners might hear tales of his father’s doings, but nobody repeated a word to him. After all, there was nothing he could do. He had spent most of his life trying to get his father to act reasonably—respectability and responsibility were beyond hope, but the man could have aspired to reason—and failed at every turn.

  It was a hot day, and Ben shed his coat before he had gotten a quarter of the way around the lake. The path was steep in places, rocky in others, and familiar throughout. It was much easier to reach the grange from the other side, from Keswick or wherever his father’s many admirers disembarked from the stagecoaches they had taken to visit the old man. So very many admirers. And creditors, acolytes, partners in failed business ventures, spurned lovers, illegitimate children, legitimate children, and prospective lovers.

  The grange had seldom been empty.

  He paused halfway up the crag, in a place where a few convenient boulders made a place to look down at the lake and eat the sandwich Mrs. Winston had wrapped for him. He had always felt that at this elevation everything looked manageable. His father had written a dozen or so poems about the wild beauty of the lakes and mountains, but for Ben, all the wildness was confined indoors. Out here, high above the village, Ben could very well believe that all he had to do was walk the distance from the grange to the orderly white buildings of Kirkby Barton and find safety.

  Which wasn’t to say that his father’s house was precisely unsafe. Everyone was perfectly kind. He might have had to forage in the woods for mushrooms to eat and the roof might have perpetually leaked in the attic room he shared with his brothers, but nobody wanted to harm him, at least. The general sentiment among Alton Sedgwick’s disciples was that the Sedgwick children were beautiful and picturesque, much like the sheep that dotted the hills. Ben and his brothers had a handful of mortifying poems written about them, not that anyone had seen fit to ask for their permission.

  Alton Sedgwick hadn’t had much to do with his children beyond siring them and sometimes conscripting one of his friends to serve as occasional tutor. But none of Ben’s resentment had to do with that. What fueled Ben’s bitterness was how little his father had prepared them to live in any way other than his own mode of living—scrounging, scraping, borrowing, occasionally cheating. If any of the Sedgwick boys wanted a more commonplace life, it had been up to them to figure it out on their own.

  He finished his sandwich, drained his flask of cider, and continued up the hill until the path curved and he saw Fellside Grange, with its ivy-covered gray stone and the mullioned windows that were scattered across the front with no apparent rhyme or reason. He hesitated there, wanting to enjoy the last few moments of the house still seeming benign, wanting to preserve his sanity for that extra half minute.

  His father answered the door himself, and then seemed surprised to find a person standing on his doorstep, as if he had forgotten how doors and knocking worked.

  “Father,” Ben said.

  “Good God, is that you, Benedict?”

  Ben wanted to protest that he didn’t visit so very seldom—he had been here twice since Easter, he was quite certain. Instead h
e stepped into the house and pasted on the smile he used when the sexton was being difficult. “My housekeeper made you a tart.” He produced the dish from his satchel and placed it on top of a stack of books, which seemed the only available flat surface. “So I thought I’d pay a visit.”

  “I’m glad you did,” Ben’s father said. “I’m quite alone.” He hated being alone; after all, he had written an entire sonnet on the theme of solitude. “Norton and his—ah—lady friend have gone traipsing through the hills and I haven’t seen them since last night.”

  Ben widened his eyes in alarm. “Do you need help assembling a search party, Father?”

  “A what? No, no, they’re sleeping beneath the stars, my boy. And stop calling me Father. You know I can’t stand it.” Ben did know, which might have partly been why he reverted to using the title. “Now sit down and we’ll see if we can find something to feed you with.”

  “You look well,” Ben said when they were settled in the book room, eating a random assortment of fruits. Alton Sedgwick was only fifty, and he didn’t even look that old despite the bushy gray beard he had allowed to grow. Ben supposed that blithe indifference to everyone’s well-being other than one’s own let a man sleep well at night. He tried to sweep aside that uncharitable thought. It wasn’t that his father didn’t care, he told himself, but that he had his own notion of what was worth caring about. His own frustrating, impossible, largely fictitious notion of what mattered.

  “Are you still marrying that girl?” his father asked.

  “Alice Crawford. Yes. Later this summer.”

  His father narrowed his eyes. “Then there’s still time for me to tell you what I think.”

  “You’ve already done so.” Ben sighed. “Please spare yourself the trouble.” And spare me the embarrassment, he wanted to add, but that wouldn’t have mattered. Alton Sedgwick was beyond such mundane concerns as embarrassment. He was also beyond concerns like imprisonment, defrocking and pillorying. “Please tell me the servants are out,” Ben said quickly, before his father could start in.

  “Servants?” he asked, as if the concept hadn’t occurred to him. “The woman isn’t here today. She comes in when she comes in.” He gestured in a direction Ben supposed was the direction from whence “the woman” came when the spirit moved her to do so. He wondered if she was motivated by wages, more esoteric forms of remuneration, or sheer pity for a dotty old man. “You cannot shackle yourself for life to a person you don’t love.”

  “I do love Miss Crawford,” Ben said evenly. Truthfully.

  “You’re being deliberately obtuse. If you wish to hear a lecture on the different varieties of love, I can hold forth—”

  “That won’t be necessary.”

  “I didn’t think so. You cannot marry someone you don’t wish to take to bed.”

  Ben winced at this frank speech. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t wish to take advice on this topic from a man who believed he could live as man and wife with more than one woman at a time,” he said primly, and then immediately regretted it.

  Alton Sedgwick waved his hand dismissively. “That arrangement suited me and your mother and dear Annette perfectly fine.” He was right, of course; Ben wished he could have cast his father as a seducer and betrayer of innocent women, but the three of them had been as happy as larks with their arrangement. “Better than your marriage will suit either you or Miss Crawford.”

  “You can’t know that.”

  “Does she understand this to be a marriage of convenience? Or does she think she’s marrying a man who might have a use for her in his bed?”

  “I didn’t come all this way to be lectured by my father about what I do or don’t do in my bed. I don’t know why you’re so certain my marrying Miss Crawford would be any different from any other marriage.”

  “Because you and I both know what I caught you doing in the hayloft with Robbie Briggs.”

  Ben sighed. The hayloft incident had been a source of extreme mortification, mainly because his father had taken it as an opportunity to tell sixteen-year-old Ben about the Greeks. Ben had wanted to sink into the earth, not have his private matters become the subject of his father’s vague musings. He supposed his father’s reaction had been better than what he might have expected from a more conventional parent, but it had been embarrassing in its own way. “For all you know I sneak into haylofts with women all the time,” he said, trying to lighten the conversation.

  “Do you?” his father said with a skeptically raised eyebrow.

  “Of course not. I’m a clergyman.”

  “That’s a subject for another day.” Alton Sedgwick did not have much use for the Church of England.

  “I got a letter from Hartley,” Ben said, trying to change the subject. “He says the heat in London is becoming unbearable and he might visit us this month.” Hartley was the brother nearest to Ben in age. His godfather, Sir Humphrey Easterbrook, had left him a bequest that amounted to what Ben understood to be a modest competence. Ben winced at the realization that Hartley’s inheritance, however small, must be more fuel for Martin’s grudge against the Sedgwicks.

  “What about Will?”

  Ben’s fingers tightened around his mug of cider. “It’s rather hard to say. His letters . . . meander. But I’ve had letters from Percival and Francis.” Ben’s youngest brothers were both training to become solicitors, no thanks to their father.

  His father furrowed his brow, as if trying to recall who Percival and Francis were and why they mattered. Ben resisted the urge to draw a family tree.

  “At any rate, most of your children are doing well.”

  “Debatable,” his father said, frowning. “I still don’t like this marriage.”

  “Happily, it isn’t up to you.” Ben didn’t need his father’s approval, and in fact was fairly certain that this father’s disapproval in itself constituted a reason to go forward with any plan.

  The sun was lower in the sky but still shining brightly as Ben made his way down the hill. He bypassed the village and headed directly to Barton Hall, and at no point during the trip down did the landscape arrange itself into something that looked manageable and orderly.

  Chapter Eight

  Phillip had experienced summers on all seven seas and in cities circling the globe, and very few at Barton Hall, so he was surprised that the combination of scents in the air registered in his mind as precisely what summer ought to smell like. There were roses, of course, but also other flowers the names of which he’d never bothered to learn, knowing he’d only leave before the next time they bloomed. A soft breeze blew in across the lake after wafting over fields of clover. Somewhere in there were less pretty smells—sheep and manure and sweat—but they only threw the rest of it into relief.

  The sun had dipped behind the hills and the children were in the nursery, where Ned was reading aloud from a book of adventure stories that would quite possibly inspire tomorrow’s mayhem. Phillip paused silently in the doorway, hesitant to make a noise, lest his presence disrupt the peace of the moment.

  Sedgwick hadn’t returned from wherever he went after church. Phillip imagined him surrounded by convivial faces, sipping tea and eating biscuits, sharing tales of the ornery sea captain and the children who barely tolerated their own father. Phillip desperately hoped Walsh turned up soon. It would be a relief to share space with someone who actually liked him rather than grudgingly endured his company. The ship surgeon’s presence would be a welcome reminder that Phillip belonged somewhere, that he was needed and wanted somewhere.

  But one by one the children noticed him. Ned gave him the quick nod of one man to another, which Phillip solemnly returned; Peggy cracked a fraction of a smile; and Jamie waved cheerfully. These tiny scraps of acceptance felt more valuable than any prize money Phillip had ever won over the course of the war. He felt almost triumphant when they all returned to listening to the story without rejecting his presence.

  Slipping from the doorway, he decided to walk to the lake. The day was s
till warm despite the approaching dusk, and Phillip shed his coat as soon as he reached one of the graveled paths that led towards the water. As he wended his way further down the path, he heard lapping water, a sound that might have been comfortingly similar to the sea, if not for the accompanying calls of birds he ought to be able to identify but never would.

  At some point he became aware of a sound that didn’t quite belong—a sort of exaggerated rustling. It could have been a cat in one of the trees lining the lakeshore, but only if it were a very large cat indeed. Then he heard what sounded like a muffled oath, and he stopped walking.

  There, balanced on a branch that reached over the water, was the vicar. He had a knife between his teeth as he tugged on a rope looped over a higher branch, testing to see whether it would support his weight. Even from the ground Phillip could tell that the knot was a poor one.

  “That won’t do,” Phillip called.

  The vicar startled, dropped his knife, and nearly lost his footing. “Oh, terribly sorry about that,” Sedgwick said, recovering his balance by gripping the trunk. “You probably weren’t expecting to get stabbed.”

  “Not by you, at least,” Phillip said, bending to retrieve the knife. He reached up and passed it to the vicar. “I can’t say I’d be surprised to get knifed by Jamie.”

  “Not Jamie. Possibly Peg, but even she seems to have declared an armistice. I keep telling you, they’re cheerful little souls as long as nobody makes them study.”

  He had obviously been right about this, so Phillip didn’t argue. “What are you doing up there?”