Phillip cleared his throat and the woman jumped backward, nearly dropping her abused ball of dough.
“Ooh,” she said, dragging the sound out to several syllables of vexation. “It’s like working in a madhouse, people coming in at all hours, stealing your pies and telling you how to make your puddings.”
“I do beg your pardon,” Phillip said, feeling genuinely remorseful. He knew better than to interrupt servants at their work. “I’m—”
“If you’re after a taste of the damson tart, yonder pie-thieving hellion—” she gestured with a floury hand towards the garden “—has already run off with it.” Phillip gathered that “yonder hellion” was meant to refer to Jamie. Her imperious air made sense: this was her domain, and she ruled it with an authority as absolute as his over the Patroclus. He knew a rush of fellow feeling for this young woman whose sensibilities about puddings had been challenged. “And what I say is that if plain suet pudding was good enough for Sir Humphrey, and he a baronet, then it’s good enough for you.”
“Quite,” Phillip replied in what he hoped was a conciliatory tone. “Mrs. Morris, is it? Were you Sir Humphrey’s cook?”
She looked at him as if he were dim. “He’s been dead these three years, and if you think I look old enough to have been his cook, then it’s only because the last two months working here have tried my soul, they have.” She was, Phillip realized, scarcely more than a girl. Twenty at the utmost. He wondered if the “Mrs.” was simply there by custom or if there could possibly be a Mr. Morris on the premises. “My da owns the Blue Boar in Keswick, don’t he. And my mum was Lady Easterbrook’s cook before she married my da. If you want puddings finer than what was good enough for Lady Easterbrook and what’s served at the Blue Boar, you can hire a grand London cook, and she’ll quit after two days once she realizes she’s cooking for a pack of bedlamites.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Phillip said hastily.
“And that old witch Mrs. Winston can keep her ideas about suet pudding—”
“Quite,” Phillip agreed, trying to forestall any further complaints on this topic. “Last night’s mutton was most competently prepared,” he said.
She stared at him. “That supposed to be a compliment? All right, then. Thank you. I suppose.” Then, in a more agreeable tone, “You can tell Mr. Sedgwick I’m making those lemon biscuits he fancies. Mr. Sedgwick, for all he’s a vicar, knows how to keep the twins out of mischief. Or at least too much mischief. Stands to reason, since he’s one of that old lunatic’s children.”
Phillip shook his head in confusion. “I don’t follow.”
“His father is the poet fellow who lives on the other side of Buttermere. Something Grange.”
Phillip had spent so little time at Barton Hall that it took him a while to figure out the girl’s meaning. “Good God. Alton Sedgwick is the vicar’s father? Didn’t he have two—” He cut himself off, realizing he couldn’t finish that sentence around a woman.
The girl had no such scruples. “Two wives!” she said in obvious delight. “He was actually married to Sedgwick’s mother, I think, but there was a French lady too. Mrs. Winston says he’s a very respected poet, for all his peculiarities,” she said, in the tone of a person who doesn’t care overmuch for poets, respected or otherwise. “Mrs. Winston also says he’s settled into a quiet sort of life these days and hasn’t gotten into anything too shocking lately.” She deftly turned the dough into a bowl and covered it with a towel before setting it near the hearth. “And the vicar is a good man,” she said, pointing her finger at Phillip as if he had suggested otherwise. “Never heard a whisper against him. He’s going to marry Miss Crawford before the end of the summer, and she’s as respectable a young lady as you’ll find within twenty leagues of Kirkby Barton.”
“Miss Crawford,” Phillip repeated. “I hadn’t realized he was to marry.” But of course he was. Vicars tended to arrive on the scene already married, in Phillip’s limited experience. He shouldn’t be surprised. Perhaps Sedgwick liked men and women equally—it happened, he knew. Even McCarthy had been known to bed women when they were in port.
“She was a niece, or maybe a cousin, of old Sir Humphrey. He was friends with the vicar’s father and took a shine to Mr. Sedgwick when he was a lad. Mrs. Winston says Sir Humphrey saw which way the wind blew and fixed Mr. Sedgwick up with his post at St. Aelred’s to make sure that his niece would marry a man with a decent income.”
“Ah,” Phillip said, his voice strained. “An advantageous match.”
“I suppose,” the cook said with a shrug, as if she didn’t deign to comment on the merits of the vicar’s marriage. “If you ask me, none of the Easterbrooks are the sort to give away anything without a fair price, but it’s not my place to judge, or that’s what Mrs. Winston says. Whichever way it happened, Mr. Sedgwick has St. Aelred’s and Miss Crawford has Mr. Sedgwick, and now you know as much as I do.”
Phillip tried to take all this in. “While I’m here,” he said casually, “would you mind reading me this letter?” He had noticed a book open on the worktable, likely a cookery book, so he knew the girl could read at least a little. “My spectacles have gone missing and I don’t want to waste a day going into Carlisle to be fitted for a new pair when the old ones might yet turn up.” He was talking too much. Better to hand the paper over to the cook, so that’s what he did.
The girl took Ernestine’s fine paper in her plump, floury hands and read the letter aloud with only the slightest hesitancy over some of the more florid language. The letter was, as Phillip expected, largely irrelevant—a stream of apologies for having fled Barton Hall in advance of his arrival, mingled with a stream of invectives against the children’s wicked ways. He might as well have tossed it into the fire unread, but of course he couldn’t have known that.
Phillip felt old familiar tendrils of shame curl around his insides at the sight of this girl, a common servant, the daughter of an innkeeper and a cook, mastering a skill he hadn’t and couldn’t and never would. On his ship, he knew how to arrange things so he’d never be called upon to read—he dictated, delegated, and when all else failed, simply ordered someone to read for him. Here, he felt like he’d be exposed at any moment as a fraud, not a real gentleman, not worthy of this house.
Those wisps of shame, flimsy and easily brushed aside on board a ship, took hold of him inside this house, the place where his father had made it all too clear that Phillip, illiterate and uneducable, was about as unworthy an heir as could be imagined. At sea, there was the comforting reminder that the Royal Navy did not promote fools or idiots to the rank of captain; the mere fact of his position was a reminder that he was competent, and there was always a task he could complete in order to reaffirm his value. Here, he had nothing to stop him slipping into a relentless eddy of drear and doubt.
He had a moment of landlocked panic, as if walls of earth and stone were closing in on him, and he desperately wanted to get back to sea.
Ben was stupidly surprised that the world was precisely the same as he had left it. The previous night, for all it threatened to set him on a course that was new and unknown, hadn’t changed the world outside his window.
He hadn’t thought something that felt so gentle and right could change everything. Twelve hours earlier he had been able to at least pretend that he was still clinging to all his old hopes and dreams. Twelve hours ago he at least thought himself an honest man.
Now, though. Now he was ruined.
Now he knew what it was to truly want something, to truly want someone, and he had to figure out how to live with that knowledge.
But until then, there was work to do, and he thanked God for it.
The lambs needed shearing, and Ned was determined to learn as much about the process as he could. Strictly speaking, Ben didn’t need to be there, but the twins wanted to watch and Ben, for all he had spent his life in proximity to sheep, never got tired of watching the lambs. Alice always told him he had the aesthetic sensibilities of an infant: h
e liked summer, and baby animals, and fruit tarts. He rather thought there was nothing not to like there, but he didn’t doubt that Alice’s tastes were more refined.
The thought of Alice pierced through the pleasantness of the morning with an icy sharpness. It wasn’t guilt that he felt, but the uneasy certainty that he needed to speak with Alice. Either he needed to tell her that they couldn’t marry, or he needed to find a way to confess to her the truth of what their marriage would be. Because now he knew what it wouldn’t be—it wouldn’t be breathless, desperate, heated touches. It wouldn’t be the mad rush to get hands inside clothes, to get lips onto skin.
Jamie came and sat on the fence beside him, and picked up a conversation they had ended some hours earlier. Ben hadn’t the faintest idea what the boy was going on about, but it had to do with numbers and it was unintelligible. Unintelligible, but consistently so, which made Ben think his failure to understand was a lack of comprehension on his part, rather than a lack of sense on Jamie’s.
This was the only flaw in his scheme to persuade Captain Dacre to have the children educated at home. Jamie really couldn’t go to school—not where he’d be ostracized and shamed for not being able to read. But an ordinary tutor might not be able to teach him more mathematics than what the boy already knew. Ben vaguely remembered a mathematically inclined scholar who had been a frequent visitor of his father’s at Fellside Grange. He had spoken of a blind mathematician. If the blind could learn and excel at mathematics, then it stood to reason so could Jamie.
Perhaps his father’s friend would know of a tutor who could work within Jamie’s abilities. But Ben shrank from the idea of deliberately bringing one of his father’s set into his current orbit. They tended to arrive on the scene with grand ideas, expensive habits, and no sense of who was to pay the butcher or what to do when the roof sprang a leak. One winter they had gotten snowed in—Alton Sedgwick, his five sons, and Sir Humphrey Easterbrook. His father and Easterbrook had spent the duration of the storm planning some kind of utopian community in the Argentine; before the snow melted, Easterbrook had pledged a sum of money to the founding of this delusional paradise. Ben, who spent that same time quietly panicking about dwindling rations and hungry brothers, had hardly been able to contain his wrath at men who thought they could plan an entire village but could not lay in supplies to weather a storm. However, it had been Easterbrook who paid Ben’s fees at university, and Easterbrook who appointed Ben as vicar of St. Aelred’s, so Ben tended to bite his tongue on the subject of men who spent too freely and without sense. In truth, a part of him suspected that a man with more sense might have balked at the notion of one of Alton Sedgwick’s sons being a clergyman.
Ben himself ought to have recognized it as a mad idea. But he had dreamt of being a clergyman the way other boys might have dreamt of being cavalry officers. He had grown up in genteel chaos and wanted nothing more than a chance to bring peace and order to the world around him. Peace, Ben knew, was a series of small things, each insignificant but together making landmarks for a life: his parishioners knew that when they were sick, he would visit, that when they were needy, he would find a way to help. Marriages and funerals, morning prayer and evening prayer, all a recognition that they were here for a greater reason. This, too, was peace, and he believed he served God and his flock by bringing it about.
He dragged his thoughts to the present: woolly lambs needing shearing, a boy who needed a teacher, three children and a father who needed a little help trusting one another. He could restore order in these small ways.
“You look like you ate a green apple.”
Ben spun to see his father standing in the dappled light of the Barton Hall barnyard. “What are you doing here?” This was hardly cordial, but Alton Sedgwick seldom left Fellside Grange. Today he wore a large straw hat that might have been borrowed from a local plowman, or might have been imported at great cost from someplace like Constantinople. With Alton Sedgwick, it was never easy to say.
“I needed to meet whoever was responsible for the gooseberry tart.”
“Mrs. Winston? She’s my housekeeper, so I daresay you’ll find her at the vicarage.”
“Your housekeeper,” he repeated, as if this were an unfamiliar concept. Which, to be fair, it might have been, given Alton Sedgwick’s meager experience with the management of normal households. “There were currants in the hedgerow behind the grange, so I gathered some for your Mrs. Winston.” He indicated a basket that dangled from his arm. There was also a bottle of wine in the crook of his elbow. Mrs. Winston’s gooseberry custard tart must have made an impression for Alton Sedgwick to have come this distance and bearing gifts, no less.
With that, Ben’s father absently tapped the brim of his hat and carried on down the hill.
“Wait!” Ben called. “I need to ask for the direction of that mathematician friend of yours.”
It was his duty to help the Dacres. And something more than duty, something like fondness combined with responsibility and multiplied by some arcane mathematical process that only Jamie would understand. And if asking for his father’s help was what Ben needed to do to help the Dacres, then that’s what he’d do, however little he liked it.
Chapter Ten
Sedgwick was an absolute rotter. He didn’t even have the decency to make himself scarce after that episode in the boathouse. For two days—forty-eight bloody hours, damn it—he dogged Phillip like a shadow, like a rash, like a bloody plague. Every time Phillip opened his eyes, there was the vicar, all freckles and smiles, as if they hadn’t had their hands inside one another’s clothes, as if they hadn’t kissed one another like their lives depended on it. It had taken all Phillip’s training and self-command to summon up the necessary chilliness. The worst part was that occasionally he’d catch Sedgwick looking at him as if he were thinking of what they had done together, like he couldn’t even do them both the courtesy of pretending it hadn’t happened.
“How would you like to visit some tenants?” Phillip asked the twins. Sedgwick was blessedly absent and Ned was off helping with a lamb who had gotten caught in brambles. “You can bring that dog,” he added to Peggy. “And perhaps we can persuade Ned to read us Robinson Crusoe when we get back,” he said to Jamie. He was learning what currency he could use to curry favor with them and it seemed to be working.
The children agreed, and they set off in the direction of the tenant farmers the steward had suggested Phillip visit. They were an elderly couple who were no longer able to work their land as well as they once had. The steward suggested they lease part of the land to the farmer whose land adjoined theirs, but the couple hadn’t made a decision. Phillip intended to let them know that they’d have the use of his solicitor to look over any paperwork that would be required in the lease.
“We forgot the jam,” Peggy said when they were about halfway there.
“Jam?” Phillip asked.
“Whenever we visit people with Mr. Sedgwick, we take baskets of jam and cheese,” Jamie explained.
Too late, Phillip remembered that this was indeed proper protocol. “Will you go back and get it? With my thanks to Mrs. Morris, of course,” he added, thinking of the rather fearsome cook, “and meet me at the Farleighs’ farm?” It wasn’t far, and he wasn’t sure if this was a reasonable task for a pair of eight-year-olds. He didn’t know what young people were expected to do when they weren’t on board a ship. But this farm was along a single lane from Barton Hall, and according to Sedgwick, the children had spent months roaming freely around the countryside, so he decided to use his judgment and send them on the errand.
“Yes!” the twins cried at once.
“You’ll need to keep the dog,” Peggy added. “He always tries to eat the basket. And I don’t think his leg is good enough yet to make the trip twice.”
Phillip agreed and they set off in their separate directions.
When he reached the farm, Phillip tied the dog to a fence post. The dog didn’t look too happy about it. “It’s only for a f
ew minutes,” Phillip explained. “And then the twins will be back and I’m sure they’ll have something good for you to eat.”
“That you, Captain Dacre?” came a voice from the door. He turned to see Mrs. Farleigh, the wife of the farmer he had come to speak to. She was gaunt and slightly stooped; as far as Phillip remembered, she had always been old but now she was ancient. “I heard you were back.” She didn’t look entirely pleased to see him. Her hands were fisted in her apron.
The dooryard contained none of the usual bustle Phillip was accustomed to seeing at even the smallest farmsteads. A few chickens wandered by an overgrown vegetable garden. The gate had rot off a small pen, perhaps explaining why there was no longer any pig in residence.
After delivering a civil greeting, Phillip said, “I came to speak with Mr. Farleigh about drawing up papers for the lease of your land.”
She didn’t move out of the doorway, and Phillip thought he saw her forehead wrinkle beneath her large white cap. “He’s in bed, and there’s no chance of his getting out of it, not in this state. But I’ll tell him you called.” She took a step backward into the house.
This, Phillip understood, was a dismissal. “What I have to say is very much to his advantage,” he called. He saw the paint peeling from the door, the torn seam of the woman’s sleeve, and knew they could use any extra money that could be scraped together. And if what the steward had said was correct and Mr. Farleigh wasn’t likely to live much longer, it was imperative that they get matters settled as soon as possible. “If I could talk to him for just a few moments. I promise not to overtax him.”
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