A Season of Love

by Carla Kelly

  Trust Beth. “This really mustn’t be more than a shilling,” her daughter told the shop owner, her eyes anxious, too.

  “No, no, seven pence, my dear,” Mary Ann said, unmindful of the man who watched them with such interest. “Five will get us back to Haven on the conveyance. Remember? That was our plan.”

  “I can walk, Mama. It isn’t that far, and it isn’t too dark yet. Besides, what road agent is going to accost us?” Beth assured her. “We need this. It would be nice if we had paper, too.”

  They both looked at the stationer. Mary Ann felt Beth’s fingers seeking hers and they held hands. She was loath to pray about something so unimportant to the Lord Omnipotent, who had far bigger fish to fry, but she hadn’t asked for anything in ever so long. Please, Father, she prayed silently. Just a little diversion for a change. It’s Christmas.

  “I won’t sell it to you without paper, because you need the right kind of rough texture for the colors to stick,” the owner said. He looked from one to the other.

  “My father died in the war,” Beth announced all of a sudden. “He never saw my face.”

  Mary Ann felt her own face go hot. “Beth, we don’t do that,” she said quietly. She raised Beth’s hand, kissed it and turned toward the door. “We don’t have enough money, but we aren’t pitiful yet.”

  “I’m sorry, Mama,” Beth whispered as she opened the door.

  “My dears, you haven’t even heard my offer,” the shop owner said. “Come back here, please.”

  Too embarrassed to turn around, Mary Ann stood where she was and took a deep breath. “We didn’t mean to trouble you,” she told the half-open door.

  “You haven’t. Come, come. Let us consider this.”

  As one, they returned to the counter. The man stared hard at the colors, then shook his head. “I could sell you the colors alone for a shilling. They came from Conté in Paris. That is the best I can do.” He brightened. “I can set aside the rest for you and you could pay me next week.”

  Next week there wouldn’t be a spare shilling, not with Lady Naismith ready to cut her loose. “We will just take the pencils then,” she said.

  “No,” said Beth. “I want it all.”

  “So do I,” Mary Ann said, wanting the whole day to be over. Somehow, their visit to Thomas Jenkins and Suzie Davis had raised her expectations, never high in the first place, and certainly not after Bart’s death in battle.

  She thought the unthinkable and touched the necklace her mother had given her so many years ago. It was nothing but a simple gold chain, but she had never removed it.

  She removed it now. Beth gasped as she laid it on the counter, along with the shilling. Mary Ann said nothing. It took all her courage, but she looked the shop keeper in the eye.

  Silence. Somewhere a clock ticked.

  “Done, madam,” the man said as he scooped up the necklace. “This will buy you a lot of paper, and … and,” he handed back the shilling, “your change.” He leaned closer, his eyes merry. “I wouldn’t want you walking back to Haven with all of this. You might drop it.”

  T

  Thomas watched Mary Ann and Beth through the front window after they left, a frown on his face. “They didn’t turn toward the conveyance stop, Suzie. Do you suppose they are going to find a stationers and buy those colors and pencils and walk home? It’s dark out.”

  He felt Suzie’s fingers in the small of his back. “Follow them, or I will,” she ordered and gave him a push. “I don’t care what you have to do, but get them on that carriage.”

  He needed no further insistence to fling his boat cloak around his shoulders, grab his low-crowned beaver hat—criminy, but he hated the thing, after years of wearing that intimidating bicorn—and set off into the Barbican.

  He stopped as he saw them enter the only stationers’ shop he knew of and blended into the shadow as much as a fairly tall man could blend anywhere. They were in there a long time. At one point he saw them turn around and head to the door, but no, they returned to the counter. He saw Mary Ann lift her arms to her neck.

  “You’re giving him a treasure,” he whispered, which made a passing sailor step back in surprise then hurry around him.

  Impatient now, he waited until they came out of the shop, Mary Ann carrying something bulky that must be paper, and Beth holding a smaller parcel. This time, they hurried toward the carriage stand in the next block, heads together, laughing. For one terrible moment, he felt as though a cosmic hand smacked him with the sorrow of knowing that but for war and Napoleon, Bart Poole would have walked alongside his girls. He closed his eyes, thinking of his own lost opportunities, and decided to make the most of this holiday season for a widow and a child he had only met today.

  When no one was in sight, he crossed the street and went into the stationers’ shop. “That lady and child,” he began, without any prologue, “what did they buy and could they afford it?”

  The old fellow gave Thomas a wary stare, and he certainly deserved one. “I am Thomas Jenkins of Notte Street. Mrs. Poole and her daughter recently visited my sister and me. I am hoping they did not spend their carriage money.”

  The man shook his head, the wary look gone. “The little minx even told me that her father died in battle! Oh my, I would hate to have been the recipient of that look her mam gave her!” He turned serious quickly. “She took off a necklace, this necklace, and asked if that would do.” He rummaged under the counter and held out a gold necklace, the modest sort that a woman of simple means might receive as a wedding gift. “I was able to give her the watercolors, brushes, and lots of paper, plus return their shilling.”

  He leaned closer, looking most benevolent and like the grandfather he probably was. “I would never have let them walk back to Haven in the dark.” He straightened up. “I suppose they are drawing something grand for someone for Christmas.”

  “Actually, no,” Thomas said. “They are barely getting by. What they do is draw a picture of something they know the other one wants Father Christmas to give them, then present the picture because they cannot afford the actual gift.” He wasn’t sure how he managed to say that without his lips trembling, but he was made of stern stuff himself.

  The stationer was silent a long time. He tried to speak, failed, then tried again. “At least they are not walking to Haven tonight.” He turned away to collect himself.

  “Bless you, sir,” Thomas said. He reached for his wallet. “Let me pay you for the necklace, and I will see that it is returned.” How, he had no idea, because whatever he did would brand him as a meddler. He knew he would think of something, because he was a resourceful man.

  Necklace in his pocket, Thomas Jenkins walked slowly home, planning his next maneuver in what he already thought of as the Second Battle for Corunna.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  U

  The next day was Sunday. Accompanying his sister, Thomas twiddled and fumed his way through a boring sermon about loving his neighbors and remembering to be charitable at Christmas. He wanted to stand up and ask the vicar what would be the harm in being charitable all year.

  He must have made a motion to get to his feet, because Suzie grabbed his arm and hissed in his ear that if he didn’t behave himself she would confine him to his room and feed him bread and water. That made him smile and settle down, but still he wondered, he who knew better, why the world was so unfair.

  He spent the afternoon just standing at the window, hands in his pockets, rocking back and forth on his heels. He longed to be at sea so much that it was almost a physical ache. Suzie finally threw up her hands and told him in pithy Welsh that he was behaving worse than a small boy, and would he grow up?

  Such admonition always sounded worse in Welsh, so he stomped off to his bookroom and took down his well-worn Euclid. He reread favorite portions until he felt better, then stared at his battered sextant, reduced to hanging on the wall now, until his shoulders relaxed.

  Thomas slept the troubled sleep of the worried, because he had stayed awake
far too long, pacing the floor in his room until he had a serviceable idea. It would involve a bit of snooping worthy of a secret agent, but needs must, as his mother would have said.

  I don’t look like a secret agent, he thought as he shaved and stared back into his mirror at a man tallish for a Welshman, but with the requisite dark hair and eyes that branded his race. He was common as kelp and nothing more than an able-bodied seaman who had risen to senior warrant officer because of true facility with numbers.

  One of his lowly tasks at the age of fourteen aboard the mighty Agamemnon had been swabbing decks, of which that ship of the line had plenty. Topside, he always seemed to find his way to that corner of the quarterdeck where the sailing master, a dragon of a fellow, schooled the current crop of midshipmen in determining distance and latitude, and shooting the sun with a sextant. Not one of the students had seemed willing to make an acquaintance with Euclid, so it took all of Thomas’s discipline to scrub away, but not too fast, while he listened and absorbed sines, cosines, and tangents.

  He might well be an able-bodied seaman yet, except that when the midshipmen straggled away, leaving the improvised classroom empty, he had boldly gone up to the blackboard and finished the equation no one had understood. He knew he was in for trouble when the sailing master returned to retrieve his blackboard, found the correct answer, and demanded to know who had done it.

  With real trepidation he answered aye. “Then you’ll sit in on every class of mine,” the man growled. “I’ll tell the boatswain that you’re mine now.”

  So began Thomas Jenkins’s steady rise to the top of his profession in the Royal Navy. Talent, hard work, and good fortune had kept him employed mainly aboard frigates, which meant a growing one-eighth share of prize money from every enemy vessel captured and sold into the fleet or as salvage. Thanks to the curse of a long war, he was well off.

  Now he stood staring at his lathered face in the shaving mirror, wondering just how he could worm his way into a little family of two and make their life better. Suzie warned him about propriety, so he knew that he must be circumspect. When he suggested that she do the probing and inquiry, his sister just smiled at him and shook her head.

  “I am not bored, Tommy,” she told him. “In fact, I am becoming excessively diverted.”

  He felt too grouchy to demand that she explain herself, or perhaps he was too shy, he thought later, wondering when a stable sort of man, which he was, had turned so moody. It was painfully evident that he was missing the sea, and so he told Suzie. She just smiled in the same maddening, big-sister way that used to irritate him no end when he was eight.

  After breakfast, Thomas rewrapped the package and allowed himself the luxury of hiring a post chaise for the day. “We’ll be driving around Haven is all,” he told the manager of the posting house, who provided him a chaise and only one post rider. Who needed two for such a short jaunt?

  His first stop was 29 Dinwoody, arriving at a respectable hour to hand over his calling card to the maid, explain himself, and be ushered into the sitting room. Mrs. Myrna Poole entered the room in good time, offered him tea, which he accepted, and expressed her pleasure at being reunited with the ivory-back comb and brush set that had belonged to her mother.

  Small talk, small talk, Thomas advised himself as he drank tea, listened to the old lady praise her new house in Haven, the village of her youth, then inquire how he and his sister were settling into her old house in Plymouth. He assured her that all was well, then segued into the part where he explained why he had come in person with the comb and brush.

  It was easy enough to describe the younger Mrs. Poole and her charming daughter Beth. The tricky part was to feign merely casual interest in Mrs. Poole’s employer, Lady Naismith. He must have done well, because Mrs. Poole launched into a graphic bit of local gossip about the very common Lady Naismith, whose husband had clawed and scratched his way to the top of a fishing fleet.

  “There is great wealth in herring,” Mrs. Myrna Poole told him with a straight face. “And don’t you know, he made enough money to attract the attention of our Prince Regent. That led to a loan, which the Prince of Wales paid off with a paltry title,” the old lady informed him. “I am told it happens often.”

  Thomas’s heart sank as he heard the woman’s tidbits about Lady Naismith’s meanness and nipfarthing ways. “My neighbor says she is a martinet and no one wants to work for her,” Mrs. Poole continued. “I feel sorry for those who must.” She sighed with so much drama that Thomas wondered how she had avoided a life on the wicked stage.

  Then came the coup de grâce, when Mrs. Poole leaned closer and whispered that her maid had told her that another maid had told her that Lady Naismith was sacking her overworked secretary, an upstairs maid, and one of the scullery girls. She leaned closer still to add, “Rumor says that Sir Edwin Naismith is taking too great an interest in those women to suit the old witch.” She sat back in triumph, her dose of gossip finished.

  “Wait? What?” he had asked, stunned by the news. “Lady Naismith is letting go of her secretary … and the others?”

  “On Christmas Eve,” Mrs. Poole said, almost as if she savored bad news. “I call that heartless, but what can anyone do about it?”

  The thought that Mary Ann Poole, lady with a heart of oak herself, must put herself in soul-sucking employment just to survive made Thomas wonder about his nation. It was beyond him that widows and orphans must continue to suffer long after the last signature on the treaty, the congratulatory victory balls, and the departure of kings and rulers for their own countries. And now Mary Ann Poole was soon to be unemployed. No wonder every pence mattered. He thought of her in the stationers’ shop and saw her purchases for what they were: a little light illuminating a growing world of darkness.

  “These are trying times, are they not?” Mrs. Poole said to him, she who had likely suffered little or not at all.

  He agreed that they were, which allowed him to turn the conversation to the poor, and then St. Luke’s charity school. That Thomas moved easily from one topic to the other gave him confidence that he was getting better at skullduggery.

  “More tea?” Mrs. Poole asked before launching into additional gossip about how little the vicar knew on any subject. “But the poor must take what they can, eh?”

  Even the talented ones who exhibit early signs of mathematical genius, he thought, wondering how many promising minds and ideas had been snuffed out by poverty. His might have been numbered among those, had he not taken a chance on the deck of the Agamemnon. Young girls had even less chance, and it chafed him.

  By the time he left, Thomas’s head throbbed. He wanted to snatch Mary Ann and Beth Poole away from Haven and the hand that had been dealt them, just grab them up, hold them close and promise them something much better, even though he had no idea what it was or how he could achieve it. He gave his head a rueful shake—which didn’t help the pounding within—and wondered if perhaps boredom was easier than action, and less hard on the heart.

  Instead, he directed his post rider to a vague address that included Carmoody Street and a row of four houses close to a shoe factory. Smoke curled up from three of the one-story row houses, telling him that the fourth one must belong to a working woman and her daughter at school.

  That bit of detection gave him three doors to knock on. The first was opened by a woman with a nursing baby at her breast who slammed the door in his face. The second attempt introduced him to Sharlto Laidlaw, landlord, and an old Ancient of Days.

  This meant more tea, a further trial to his already overloaded plumbing, and more information about the widow and her daughter next door.

  Thomas invented some fiction about looking for his distant relative, a Lieutenant Poole survived by a widow and infant child. When Thomas mentioned that he planned to return in a few hours and invite his second cousin’s widow and child to dinner, Mr. Laidlaw brightened.

  “That will be a rare treat,” he said. “You will be the first visitor they have ever had.”


  With no more encouragement than an inquiring look—my, but he was getting good at effortless detection—Thomas learned that Mrs. Poole’s father had been a clerk in a woolens warehouse in Northumberland, where woolens were surely needed.

  “She married the youngest son of a vicar, who had a paltry living on the estate of a marquess who spent his days running from creditors.” Mr. Laidlaw stared into his teacup as though he were reading his neighbor’s destiny. “She came here to watch the lieutenant buried in Plymouth, and then she was taken in childbirth. For all I know, she’d like to return to Northumberland, but that would take money and she has none.”

  Thomas sipped his tea. “Did the vicar and his wife think to do right by their son’s widow and child?”

  “Mary Ann said they never looked with much favor on her marriage. They hounded him because he married for love, and not with an eye to finding a lady with enough inheritance to support them both. I hear that army careers aren’t cheap.”

  “Mrs. Poole told me her husband was convinced he was destined for greatness in the army,” Thomas said. “His parents won’t help her?”

  “Can’t now. Both dead,” Laidlaw said.

  They sat in silence, each aware how seldom does greatness touch the deserving, but meanness seems to linger forever.

  Mr. Laidlaw brightened then, and pointed to a pencil drawing over his mantelpiece. “Mary Ann drew that for me last Christmas. I told her how much I liked a good piece of beef and dripping pudding.”