by Carla Kelly
“Jane!”
She wondered why he kept calling her name, and then she realized that for the first time in her life, she must have fainted. She opened her eyes to find herself lying on Lord Denby’s bed and staring at the plaster cherubs in the ceiling. She could not have been unconscious long, because Mr. Butterworth was still unbuttoning her bodice and the handyman was fanning her with the book. She started to breathe again, and put up her hand to stop the mill owner. “I think I am all right, sir,” she said, her face flaming with embarrassment. “Do help me up.”
“No,” said the mill owner firmly. “You will stay right where you are, Jane.”
“At least button me again,” she ordered, then put up her hand to stop him when he obliged her, his fingers warm against her chemise. “No! I will do it.”
She lay there with her eyes closed and her mind whirling about, waiting for the room to quit dipping and revolving. When her breathing returned to normal again, the mill owner lifted her into a sitting position. “I have never fainted before,” she assured Lord Denby. “Truly I have not.”
No one said anything as she looked from Lord Denby to the handyman. Why did I not notice, she asked herself in astonishment. True, Lord Denby’s hair is long past auburn, but that portrait from his younger days hangs in the gallery, and his hair is glorious and abundant like Dale’s, with just that same curl to it. Discounting the years, I have never seen two men who look so much alike. “I must be an idiot,” she admitted finally.
“Not at all,” Dale said, putting down the book. “Why would you look for a resemblance where none was even dreamt of? And tell me truly: have you been this close to both of us at the same time?”
He was right, of course. She shook her head, and regretted the sudden motion. “I only looked in on you each afternoon, when I wondered where you were,” she told him, her fingers pressed to her temple. “Dale, who are you? And how could I be so dense?”
“I am Dale Bingham, and you’re not dense.”
“Bingham.” She looked at the mill owner for confirmation. “Mr. Butterworth, Edward Bingham of Connecticut!” she said slowly, fixing her gaze again upon the handyman. “The name on the list. He is your ….”
“My stepfather,” the handyman said. “Along with Lord Denby here, he served on Sir Henry Clinton’s staff in New York City during the rebellion.”
She looked at the book. “And Edward Bingham was quartered in the same house with Lord … with Lieutenant Dill?” she asked. “But you say you are from Ohio.”
“I didn’t lie to you, Miss Milton,” he said. “I am from Ohio. I live in the Western Reserve and Kirtland. I was in Connecticut visiting my parents when your letter arrived.”
“And you came all this way?” she asked.
He nodded, and looked at his father. “I was on my way to Scotland anyway to buy surveyor’s transits. Miss Milton, I am a land agent in the Western Reserve. The best surveying supplies and transits in the world come from Abercrombie and Mackey in Edinburgh and I am chary about spending that much money sight unseen.”
“You said you were a handyman,” she accused him.
Patiently he shook his head. “No, Miss Milton, you asked me if I could fix things. I happen to be good at fixing things.”
“But why didn’t you tell me who you were?” she persisted.
“You didn’t give me a chance.” He smiled at her indignation. “To be honest, Miss Milton—are we cousins of some sort?—I was not so sure that I wanted anyone to know who I was anyway.” He seemed to lose his confidence for a moment. “You can appreciate the … the delicacy of this situation.”
She considered his artless statement and could not disagree. “I suppose I can,” she murmured. She touched Lord Denby’s hand. “Can I assume that you did not part on precisely good terms with Edward Bingham, all those years ago?”
“He was in New York, and by the time Dale was born, I was in Yorktown with Cornwallis, ready to be shipped back to England.” He looked at Dale, a long, hungry look that brought sudden tears to Jane’s eyes. “Edward wrote me a scathing letter and demanded to know what I was going to do about this situation of my own creation.” He sighed. “I ignored his letter and left Dale’s mother to suffer considerable abuse, taunts, and mistreatments from her neighbors and relatives. When I speak of regret, Jane ….” He could not finish.
Still pressing her hand to her temple, she leaned forward and kissed him. “You don’t need to say any more, my lord.”
“But I do,” he insisted. “Edward Bingham—the second son of an earl, I might add—evacuated New York after the Treaty of Paris, returned to England, and resigned his commission immediately.”
“And returned to New York?” she asked.
“By way of Canada, where I was then on duty. He gave me a tongue lashing for deserting a good woman, called me out, and nearly killed me in a duel,” he said. His face grew red. “It was long before you came here. You know my war wounds that Blair liked to tease about? He had no idea. In all my years of active duty in India, Canada, America, and the Caribbean, I was only wounded in a duel instigated by an outraged man in love with the mother of my American son. A pretty picture, eh, Jane? Any wonder it never came up in conversation over whist or cigars?”
She was silent then, leaning back against Mr. Butterworth, who put his arm around her. “I’m sorry for both of you,” she said at last.
“No need,” Dale said, “at least on my part. I realize that now.” It was his turn to look away, but she could still see the struggle on his face. “Pa married Mama and adopted me, and we moved to Connecticut where no one knew us. He’s a farmer, and a good one, I might add. I have five brothers and two sisters. My little sister and her family live in Ohio, and I stay with her when I am not surveying.”
“Your parents?” she asked gently.
“Mama has never regretted my birth, and Pa loves me,” he replied simply. “I have a good life.” He looked at his father. “I wouldn’t change it, but I think I needed to know that there wasn’t any point in hating you, sir.” He took the old man’s hand and kissed it, then twined his fingers through Lord Denby’s. “On the voyage over here, I rehearsed what I was going to say at that reunion banquet. I was all ready to stand up tomorrow night and expose you as a hypocrite and a fraud.”
“I would not blame you if you did,” Lord Denby said.
The handyman shrugged. “What would be the point? My stepfather knows, and he chose not to say anything. Lord Ware—they have been corresponding for years—seems to suspect, but he is a gentleman. And if your essays have served a useful purpose ….” He looked down at his father’s hand in his. “I can forgive. If there is anything to forgive.”
She sat up suddenly, as another thought occurred to her. “Will you … can you make Dale your heir, my lord? And what about Andrew? I know he is Blair’s son.”
“I know he is not. Miss Milton, although you are too kind to consider it, sometimes rumors are true.”
Jane gasped and turned around to stare at Stanton, who stood in the doorway. She held her breath, and wondered if everyone else in the room was doing the same thing. The silence seemed to thunder in her ears.
“I … do not think we need you now, Stanton,” Mr. Butterworth said slowly, intruding upon the quiet. “There really wasn’t an emergency after all.”
“I believe there is, sir, if you will excuse me,” the butler said, as imperturbable as usual.
“I will not!” the mill owner exclaimed. “Damn you, Stanton. I did not ask for this!”
“No, you didn’t,” he replied, all serenity. “I have taken it entirely upon myself.” He turned to Jane. “I should have done so years ago.” He gave an apologetic look to Dale Bingham, who was glancing from the mill owner to the butler, his eyes lively with interest. “Dale, this is what comes of too many tales belowstairs of initiative and Yankee know-how. I shall blame you.”
“Go right ahead, Oliver,” Dale said, grinning.
“Since everyone else is f
ree enough with the truth this afternoon, I intend to speak my mind, Miss Milton,” the butler said. “It is a long time overdue, wouldn’t you say, Mr. Butterworth?” Without a word, the mill owner got up from the bed and sat himself in the window seat, looking no one in the face. “Does it matter what I think?” he said finally.
“Right now? Probably not, sir,” Stanton replied. “I like you too well to see you flog yourself one more minute. Shall I tell these good people, or will you do it, sir? It would come better from you, I believe.”
He is so alone there, Jane thought. Quietly she got to her feet, swayed a little, and sat beside Mr. Butterworth. “I can return a favor,” she said simply, taking his hand onto her lap. “Andrew is your son, is he not?” She looked at Lord Denby and Dale. “God help me, Mr. Butterworth, but that afternoon at Rumsey when you and Andrew and Jacob—oh, heavens, Jacob is his cousin!—came back from the factory with grease on your faces and identical smiles!” She pressed his hand. “But Dale would only say I was not looking for a resemblance, and therefore saw none.”
When he still said nothing, she nudged his shoulder gently. “The empty miniature frame on your desk, Mr. Butterworth. Was it Lucinda?”
To her horror, he began to cry, gulping sobs that came from a place she had no idea existed in the mill owner, that man of competence and ability. Without a word, she wrapped her arms around him and held him while he cried. “Oh, sir,” she murmured as she ran her hand over his back. “Rumor said he was an older man and a ne’er-do-well. None of us ever actually knew who she loved before she married Blair,” Jane said, when he was silent in her arms. “It was you, wasn’t it?”
He nodded, taking out his handkerchief and then blowing his nose. “I loved her too much, obviously.” He still could not look at anyone. “These things happen, don’t they, Lord Denby?” he said, with just a touch of his old humor.
“It seems to be the way of the world, Mr. Butterworth,” the marquis replied. “Why didn’t you marry Lucinda? You are certainly a man of principle, even if you will not sell me your lake.”
He Mr. Butterworth looked at them then, and Jane could only bite her lip at the sight of so much anguish in one man’s eyes. “She wrote a note telling me that I had got her with child. I came right there and proposed.” He tightened his grip on Jane’s hand. “I was not a scoundrel, Jane, not precisely.”
“Of course you were not. She … she did not accept?”
His eyes grew bewildered, as though he were going through the experience all over again. “Turned me down flat.” He released her hand and got to his feet, unable to keep still. “My God, I wanted to do the right thing! I was on my knees before her! There she was, pale as whey and worn from puking, and all she could say was that I was a mill owner and my father had come from a pig farm! Even in that extremity, she would not marry me.” He walked over to the bed. “She chose to dupe your son instead, my lord.” He leaned closer and touched the old man’s shoulder. “I think he knew, but he loved her and thought that would be enough. I think it might have been enough, too, if she had not died.”
Jane nodded. “After she died, Blair seldom came home.” She leaped to her feet. “But why did you not say something then? It would have been a scandal, Mr. B., but people forget! You could have had your son all these years!”
He attempted a smile, but it barely crossed his lips before it vanished. “I thought about it, Jane, I really did, but as far as anyone knew, Andrew was Blair’s son. I thought that my son’s life as a marquis would be better than anything I could offer him. . Lucinda certainly thought so, anyway, because she rejected me. Why should I upset that apple cart, when no one had an inkling?”
“Even after the rumors started?” Jane persisted.
Lord Denby chuckled. “Won’t my sister be amazed to know that she was right after all? Oh, Lord, what webs we weave, Dale.”
“I knew my son had a worthy advocate in you, Jane,” Mr. Butterworth said. “I put all my trust in you.” He smiled. “All those years ago, when I sought you out at town gatherings and … and parties when someone condescended to include me, I became such a master at monopolizing you and pulling the conversation around to my son. You were always so pleased to talk about him, and I thank you for that.” He took a deep and shaky breath. “It was all I lived for.”
Jane sat on the bed again, overwhelmed by the enormity of what she was hearing. “And Stanton?”
The mill owner looked at the butler, who had come into the room now. “Stanton’s father was my father’s partner in the pig farm, and that was all just good fortune, on my part. When I learned that he was footman here at Stover Hall and then butler, I knew that I could count on him to keep me totally informed about Andrew.” He touched her hair. “Between the two of you—one of you knowing, and the other totally convinced that Andrew was Blair’s son—I managed.”
Jane took a deep breath, wondering for a moment if so much revelation had sucked the very air out of the room. She looked around at the others. How much time you have all wasted, she thought.
“When you would do a kindness for me and then say you were only doing it to thank me for the way I was taking care of Andrew, you really meant it, didn’t you?” she asked, her voice soft.
“More than you know, my dear.” He chuckled. “Except that you do know now.”
“And when you helped me through my own particular crisis?” she asked.
“That was for you, alone,” he replied, his voice equally soft.
“Thank you.”
And now comes the moment I am dreading, she thought. No sense in putting it off another second. “Mr. Butterworth, I am certain that Lord Derby and Dale will excuse us all. I know that you have a conversation in the formal garden that has been postponed far too long.”
He nodded. “It scares me a little bit.”
It kills me, she thought. You are taking the child I raised from infancy far out of my reach. “I do not doubt that you will find just the right touch.”
“Come with me,” he asked, taking her hand.
She let him pull her from the room. Stanton closed the door and stood in the hall with them. “Miss Milton, I have one more confession.”
“I am certain it cannot be any more difficult that anything we have heard yet,” she said. “And then I do insist that Mr. Butterworth tell me why he came back, if he has not yet received my letter about the handyman.”
“Don’t, Stanton,” Mr. Butterworth said.
“I have to,” he said simply. “Miss Milton, I forwarded all of your letters—the ones you wrote late at night in the bookroom—to Mr. Butterworth at Rumsey. Mrs. Newton must have sent them on to Scotland.”
She stared at him, unable to speak. “Those were not meant for anyone’s eyes,” she managed to say finally, not even daring to look at the mill owner.
“You did not mean what you wrote?” Mr. Butterworth asked, his voice low.
“Of course I did!” she exclaimed, stung to irritation. “I meant every word!”
“That is what I came to speak to you about,” he said. “I suppose your thank you letter about the handyman is somewhere between Rumsey, Edinburgh, and here. It is not what brought me back.”
She closed her eyes, near to tears. “You needn’t concern yourself about it now, Mr. Butterworth, especially since I think you owe your son a long conversation.”
“Miss Milton ….”
“It can keep, Mr. Butterworth. Excuse me, please, both of you.”
Shaking her head when Stanton called her name, she hurried down the hall to the sanctuary of her own room. Her head throbbing, she sank onto the window seat, fit for nothing more than to stare out at the trees. He has never recovered from his passion for Lucinda, she told herself, and thanks to Stanton, I have bombarded this intensely private soul with love letters he never wanted. “Dear me,” she said, resting her forehead against the cool glass of the window. “I know it’s good to speak one’s mind, but perhaps some things are better left unsaid.”
H
er mind on her own misery, she stared out the window, then sat up straighter to watch as Mr. Butterworth walked across the terrace. He stood there so long, hands behind his back, rocking back and forth on his heels in that familiar manner, that she felt herself growing impatient. “Do not waste one more minute,” she told him firmly through the glass.
To her gratification, he left the terrace and walked with real purpose toward the formal garden. “The rose patch,” she said with her lips against the window. “Dear Mr. Butterworth, you are such a commoner. How I will miss you both.”
Andrew sat on his haunches, pulling weeds. “Sit down there next to him, Mr. Butterworth,” she whispered. “Ah, that is the way. Tell him everything; hold nothing back. He is my own dearest child—heaven knows I raised him—and he will make you … us … proud.”
She knew it was a long story, but she was patient to wait there at the window, watching their heads close together, and then the mill owner’s arm around his son, and then their fierce embrace. “Oh, God, I would feel so good if this did not hurt so much,” she whispered against the glass as they rose, hugged again, and started arm in arm down to the lake, and then to the mill owner’s house beyond.
She watched them until they were gone, and then sat there in the window seat until the room was dark. She was aware that Stanton knocked on her door once, and said he was leaving a tray outside. She was silent, and he went away. Dale came by later, but she had nothing to say to him, either.
Hours later, hollow-eyed with staring into the darkness and feeling far older than her years, she dragged herself to bed, only to spend the night staring at the ceiling and wishing for dawn. Dale, you would call this a fine how-de-do, she thought as the sun finally rose on the day of the reunion. I spoke my mind—we all did, for heaven’s sake—and everyone is happy now, except me.
Chapter Eighteen
She sat in the window seat all night and watched the clouds blot out the stars. She flinched from the lightning, thinking of Andrew at Mr. Butterworth’s home, and hoping that he would not mind if the boy came into his room and sat on his bed until the storm passed. You could sing, Mr. Butterworth, if you are so inclined. Andrew knows my entire repertory of rain songs.
