Salt Redux

by Lucinda Brant

  “In white muslin mob cap hidden away,” Sir Antony recited, “Flap, Flap, Flap, the frilly fringe would not obey. A servant wench of abundant hair in disarray… Good Lord! Why hadn’t I made the connection earlier? I saw her in the garden… Mr. Wraxton saw her at Hendon in company with Mrs. Smith and Lady St. John… She must be in my sister’s pay; or Mrs. Smith’s, which is one and the same! I wondered how she would find a means to get inside the house…”

  “The domestic re-entered the Earl’s premises via the garden gate,” Semper started to explain but was cut off. “She had in her possession—”

  “Not her! My sis—Lady St. John,” Sir Antony said brusquely, heart beginning to race. He had a deep foreboding about this girl and her involvement in his sister’s mischief making. He stared at Semper without really seeing him. “Mr. T is well-prepared for the night of the masquerade?”

  “Yes, my lord. Everything is in hand. Mr. T has his instructions and your letter for the authorities, should he and his associations be questioned about their activities on the night. He has also employed a dozen strong-armed and reliable men who would be willing to abduct His Majesty, given the gold coin you have offered them for their services.”

  “Good. Did you say this maid had something in her possession?”

  “When she exited the carriage, she was carrying a small parcel.”

  Sir Antony snatched up his personal accoutrements and shoved them in a deep frock coat pocket. “I’m off to Salt House, to have a word with this supposed servant girl. When Mr. T has something to tell you about his interview at the smallpox hospital, you know where to find me…”

  “My lord? Sir Antony!” Semper called as his master strode purposefully from the dressing room. “You’ve forgotten your pocket watch…!”

  ~

  SIR ANTONY took in the activity in the Salt House breakfast room as he tentatively crossed the threshold, having shooed aside the officious under-butler, whose offer to announce him went unheeded. A footman was down on his hands and knees collecting up remnants of what appeared to be a shattered teacup. A second was clearing the table of breakfast things. The butler was giving directions to a third, no doubt to fetch a maid to mop the floor of milky tea. But what stopped Sir Antony in his tracks was the Countess’s stricken look. She was up out of her chair, a hand to the table, as if to keep herself upright, seemingly oblivious to everyone and everything around her.

  The Earl tossed aside his napkin, and within three strides was at the foot of the table, the Countess in his arms just as she went limp. A little girl in a high chair was straining to look under the table and squealing with delight at a boy with golden ringlets who had scampered between the chair legs to better view the mess left by Mamma’s smashed teacup.

  “Antony! Thank God you’ve come!” Jane burst out, grabbing Sir Antony’s silken sleeve when he came straight up the length of the table.

  He saw Jane was trembling and shot a concerned glance over her dark hair at her husband, wondering what had caused the normally self-contained Countess such distress that she had dropped her teacup. Salt was about as responsive as a marble statue, though the fact he was holding his wife and ignoring all else about him spoke volumes.

  “What is it, Jane?” Sir Antony asked gently. “How may I be of help?”

  “She was here. Here in our house! She-she was in my children’s bedchamber. She took—Merry saw her… Thank God Merry came upon her… I hate to think what she meant to do—Magnus! Magnus, you said she couldn’t gain entry to this house. You said our children would be safe. But they aren’t safe, are they? They aren’t safe anywhere while that-that witch roams free. Antony! Antony, you must do something! You can stop her!”

  “She gained entry using a sedan chair and disguised in a red cloak.”

  This simple statement was all it took to trigger the Earl’s pent up fury, anger he had carefully bottled in consideration of his wife and the fact his children were present. As it stood, Diana’s escape from her castle confinement had made him question his judgment, and now, with her menacing trespass of his home he felt a thoroughly derisory head of his house. His inadequacy was further exacerbated hearing his wife seek the help of his cousin, as if she had abandoned all hope in his abilities to protect her and their children. Sir Antony’s seemingly flippant statement was the final straw.

  “What the bloody hell does it matter how she got in or what she was wearing? Didn’t you listen to anything of what was said? The bloody woman was in the nursery, for God’s sake! I don’t know why I let you convince me you could handle her! Ha! Your incompetence in allowing her to gain entry to my house—in a bloody chair no less—you might as well have opened the bloody front door yourself and welcomed her in!” Salt gave a fuming huff of dismissal. “I don’t know why I put my trust in you. What a bloody God-awful mess you’ve made—”

  “I beg your pardon?! My bloody mess?” Sir Antony retorted, temporarily forgetting his manners and his mission in coming to Salt House unexpected and unannounced. “You’re the one who locked her up, threw away the key, and then stuck your head under a carpet for four years! You may not have wanted her in your bed but you certainly did nothing to stop her running your life! She stroked your ego and you let her! Always telling you how bloody clever you were! How you would one day be First Lord of bloody everything!”

  “I won’t stand here listening to your tripe—”

  “Enough! That’s enough from you both. Magnus! Antony! Take stock. That woman’s evil is working to divide you! We cannot be at each other’s throats if we are to have any chance against her. If she truly is a witch, she is peering into her cauldron this very moment and cackling to see her malevolence at work. And for pity’s sake, remember your manners!”

  It was Jane. The strong, quietly unflappable and ever optimistic Jane had returned, all traces of fear and anguish dissolved. But it was not her husband’s explosive outburst or Antony’s equally furious reply that had vanquished her fear and snapped her back to her true self. It was her little daughter’s crying and the rush of motherly instinct to quell her baby girl’s fears and need to soothe the little red and crumpled tearstained face. Beth was so frightened by her Papa’s uncharacteristic blast of anger that in her young mind her Papa had turned into an unrecognizable bad-tempered giant.

  Hearing her little daughter’s howls of fright, Jane instantly scooped her up and held her tight, all other considerations pushed aside. She murmured words of comfort and reassurance that all was right with her world, and her Papa was not an ogre and loved her very much.

  As for Ned, he had rarely seen his father angry. It was only on the odd occasion when he did something so exciting his heart would race, which his father called dangerous. Such as the time he climbed all the way to the top of the library ladder, because he wanted to capture a robin red breast that had flown in through the open window and was perched on the carved wooden lintel of the bookcase. Or when he had stretched out his net too far at the lake’s edge to catch up one last tadpole and had slipped and fallen into the cold water. But this anger was much more ferocious, and although he was scared, he wasn’t going to be a baby about it like Beth. So instead of cowering under the table, he poked his head up and rested his chin on the padded seat of his mother’s vacated chair and gazed up at his father in trembling awe. He’d never seen Papa’s face so red. It opened his brown eyes very wide and sunk his little shoulders out of sight.

  Sir Antony was the first to come to a sense of his surroundings and humbly apologize. He bowed to the Countess who held her daughter in her arms; the little girl exhausted of tears, her head nestled on her mother’s shoulder, a thumb in her mouth. He then stuck out his hand to the Earl, who instantly took it in a firm clasp.

  “She may not have achieved her object, thanks to Merry’s interference,” Sir Antony said evenly, “but trust Diana to upend your household, upset your wife and children, and get you to blow steam out of your cravat! Not to mention make me feel as small and as useful as a gnat!�
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  “Apologies,” Salt grumbled, feeling utterly foolish, particularly for losing his temper in front of his children. He bowed to his wife. “I crave your forgiveness, my lady.” He smiled at his daughter and son, Ned clambering up onto his mother’s chair the instant his father smiled, and said with a sad shake of his head, “Papa was very naughty to get so angry with your Uncle Tony. Yes, this is him,” he said in response to Ned’s cautious side long glance at the man with the big chin who was as tall as Papa, “the Uncle Tony from ’Petersburg you have heard Merry talk so much about. Uncle Tony and Papa were very silly doltheads and we deserve to fall hard on our rumps for losing our manners. I hope you will forgive us—”

  “Papa! You said r-rump-s,” Ned exclaimed, shoulders hunched with excitement to hear an adult, his father no less, say a word he had been told repeatedly was not a nice word to use in polite company; nor was he to shout it at his sister, even if it did make her laugh.

  “Did I, Ned?” the Earl replied with surprise, a surreptitious roll of his eyes at Sir Antony and then a conspiratorial wink at the Countess before looking back at his son as if he could not remember ever having said such a vulgar word. “Did Papa say the word rump? How remiss! I must tell Uncle Tony that in our house rump is quite a vulgar word, but not quite as vulgar as bottom or buttock, which we never say in company. Do we, Mamma? The polite thing to do is not to mention our rump, bottom or buttock ever. Not in front of the servants and most definitely not in polite company. It is not a pleasant topic of conversation. So I do apologize to all present. To Miller and James and Jeffrey and-and—”

  “Meg,” the Countess offered, when the Earl had no idea as to the name of the maid mopping the floor.

  “Thank you, my lady. Yes, and Meg,” said the Earl, a nod to his wife. “But most particularly to Mamma, and Uncle Tony.”

  Ned took a look about the room at all the adults, servant and relation alike, and his mouth dropped open at his father’s use of three words he was expressly forbidden to utter, ever. A swift glance up at his mother and he caught her smile, which she tried hard to suppress, and with a cheeky grin he dared to blurt out those three words, which had the Earl covering his ears as if to block such vulgarity from his hearing.

  Salt then scooped up his son and ran around the sunny room, careful to avoid the footmen still clearing the table, and Miller, who had a watchful eye on a maid mopping the floor. Returning to the table, he tipped Ned upside down, as if about to set him down head first on Jane’s chair, his squealing son’s blond ringlets just brushing the blue patterned damask covering. Finally, Salt righted him and held him for a moment to settle any dizziness, his little son laughing and giggling, all fear at his father’s burst of anger extinguished.

  Beth sat up in her mother’s arms, watching her father’s antics and laughed along with her brother. She flung wide her arms to Papa for him to lift her high in the air and run about the table as he had done with Ned, which he did, much to her great delight. The end of Beth’s flight coincided with the appearance of two nursery maids, who took the children by the hand and out to the garden for their morning playtime. Beth and Ned were happy to go off with a kiss and a wave from their parents, both again in charity with their father.

  A silence followed the exit of the children, and the contingent of servants ushered from the morning room by the butler, who also excused himself because there seemed to be a minor servant disturbance requiring his intervention.

  “You were not exaggerating,” Sir Antony said to the Earl. “They are beautiful children. You are blessed—”

  “—with a beautiful and level-headed wife,” Salt responded with a smile and kissed Jane’s forehead. “I don’t know what came over me,” he murmured. “To shout in front of the children in that unforgivable way…”

  “We are all simmering pots of nerves to think Diana so easily gained access to the nursery… I still don’t know how she did so, and I won’t be able to sleep tonight, knowing she can! Perhaps we should put the children’s beds in our bedchamber until after the masquerade…?”

  “I hope it will ease your mind, in a small way, to know that Diana’s trespass was not due to the lax practices of your servants. You misread my response earlier,” Sir Antony explained. “Diana gained entry to your house by seizing upon a unique opportunity; she would not have been able to do so under normal circumstances.”

  The Earl and Countess waited for him to explain, all wide-eyed interest, and Sir Antony gave them a measured and heavily-edited version of events of Caroline’s visit to his townhouse of the night before, adding sheepishly, because it was an outright lie, and because Jane was looking at him intently, a strange half-smile curving her mouth,

  “You know Caro—always fretting over her animals. No sense of time or occasion when there is an animal to save, feed and house. She couldn’t sleep, so just had to discuss a home for Boots the Pug’s brother with the Sempers.”

  “How like her to go off in the middle of the night without a thought to her welfare or reputation, or a thought for others, all for the sake of a blasted dog!” Salt retorted, swallowing Sir Antony’s story whole. “A soldier could be dying of his wounds, and it would be the horse shot out from under him which Caroline would prefer to nurse back to full health! God knows where she inherited her mawkish affection for the animal kingdom. It’s certainly not in the Sinclair blood!”

  “No. But perhaps it is in the St. John blood, or the Allenby blood…?” Sir Antony suggested lightly.

  It had not been his intention to divulge what he knew about Caroline’s true parentage, confirmed in the strictest of confidences by Tom, but it had just come out. And now that he had voiced it, he wasn’t about to let Salt brush the matter aside. Besides with no servants present, not even the hovering butler or a footman or two at the doors, it was the perfect and possibly only opportunity to do so. Jane’s soft smile alerted him that she knew well enough to what he was referring, and the fact she held fast to her noble husband’s arm was all the encouragement he needed to say his piece.

  “I will say this once, now, and then bury it for all time. Caroline’s parentage doesn’t matter a flea’s hair to me. She will always be a Sinclair and your sister in my eyes and the eyes of the world. I have known almost since the day you married, when I first clapped eyes on Tom’s mother at the ceremony. Caroline bears a striking resemblance to the Allenbys. None of the Sinclairs are so curvaceous, and that magnificent mane of fiery hair is a St. John trait. Caroline is St. John’s natural daughter; her mother, Tom’s aunt who died in childbed.” He smiled crookedly. “Don’t blame Tom for telling me the truth. He did so because he knows I love Caroline. I won’t let it bother me, if it doesn’t bother you both. We three and Tom are the only ones who know and nothing need ever be said again to anyone…”

  “Good. Let’s leave it there,” the Earl replied in a clipped voice by way of acknowledgment of the truth of Sir Antony’s words, as he pulled needlessly on the points of his crumpled oyster silk waistcoat, a heightened color to his cheeks. Yet, a glance at Jane and the wash of tears in her eyes and he stepped down from his pedestal to add with a dry swallow, “She—Caroline—she has St. John’s green eyes… Her preference for saving the Animal Kingdom must be an Allenby trait…”

  “Well that explains why Tom is Caro’s partner in the rescue of abandoned and abused animals,” Sir Antony said, deftly returning the conversation to a more comfortable and less controversial subject. “I gathered from Tom’s letters he is enjoying a newly-established menagerie on his estate. Well, that is what it is now. All those large animals saved from baiting rings and mismanaged menageries, and which are unable to be housed domestically are crated up and shipped off to Tom…”

  “Yes, that’s true,” Jane answered brightly, a counterweight to her husband’s continued uneasiness. “We took Ned and Beth to see Tom’s menagerie, did we not, Salt? It has become something of a talking point for locals and travelers alike. At last count, he had two zebras, an ostrich, a handf
ul of large African cats, and Ned’s favorites, any number of monkeys in their special enclosure. Oh, and there is an elephant Caroline has teasingly named Magnus.”

  “Ha! Ha! The minx!” Sir Antony laughed, and shut his mouth tight when Salt glared at him.

  “When I give my blessing to your marriage with Caroline, you’ll promise on oath not to encourage her waywardness,” Salt grumbled. “An elephant named Magnus indeed!”

  Jane kissed his cheek. “I think it a perfectly majestic name for a big handsome brute—and for an elephant.” She smiled at Sir Antony, “And you won’t make Antony promise any such thing. Truth be told, Caroline will co-opt Antony to join her and Tom in her quest to rescue every forlorn four-legged and feathered creature in this kingdom.”

  “I don’t doubt it! Now, my lady, Antony, you must excuse this brute. I have a mountain of papers requiring my signature that will please Ellis no end. He may even allow me to escape the library for a game of tennis before nuncheon… If you are up for it…?”

  “Oh yes, you must stay to nuncheon,” Jane insisted, adding her voice to that of her husband, spirits much restored and lifted by the restoration of the friendship between these two big men who had once been the best of friends.

  “Willingly, if my time were my own,” Sir Antony replied with a sigh of regret. “I desire nothing more than to beat you at tennis, Salt, then join you, my lady, and the family for nuncheon, but I must decline. Diana and I are promised to Lady Porter’s with those of her set who are invited to your masquerade ball. No doubt the conversation will be all about our costumes and masks.”

  “How can you maintain the façade?” Salt asked with disgust.

  “With great fortitude and because I must. For you. For Jane. For your children. For Caroline. For all our futures. I have set myself the task of sister’s keeper, and I will maintain the façade of doltish younger brother until such time as Diana is in my custody, Society none the wiser to her evil.” Sir Antony smiled crookedly. “You forget, I am a diplomat, after all, and dissimulation is my weapon of choice.”