“We will try making a babe in a few days,” he said now as he climbed into the bed with her, almost as if he had read her thoughts. “As soon as your flux is finished, so you may as well rest while you can.”
Lark hated that his “threat” to get her with child felt of a sudden like a hoped-for promise, an unsettling reaction that centered physically, there, where she bled, where his hand had made magic inside her, and where his manly parsnip would later invade her.
Lark hid her face against the shoulder of the very man she should be running from. When he tucked her head neatly beneath his chin, she placed her hand against his softly rising chest. “Tell me how people celebrate Christmas,” she said, and her husband covered her hand with his and did.
The following morning Lark woke alone, but before she dressed, she took the time to examine the “sling,” he had dressed her in and discovered that it must be nothing more than a pair of his own under-linen. Nevertheless, with trouser-type legs and a tie-fastened three-button front, the short drawers did a fine job of holding up the folded rag she used for her “monthlies,” and she marveled at his resourceful kindness.
Her fist thought was to thank him for his personal garment, but she decided that in the light of day, no such comment could be made. Husbands and wives must speak only in the bedchamber of such things, though now that she thought on it, they had become quite outrageous in their whispers in the orchard the other day, not to mention her search in the root cellar.
Her “feminine sling,” as Ash dubbed his gift at breakfast—speaking about such things outside the bedroom obviously did not embarrass him—worked marvelously well beneath her dress and made Lark feel, for perhaps the first time in her life, like a real woman. A woman not expected to die young. Fancy that.
When she learned that he would be attending to estate matters all day, and that she would not see him until dinner, Larkin visited his mother, and gave Nan an hour free. She told her mother-in-law about their marriage, every foolish detail, omitting their baby bargain and what went on in their bedchamber, of course. When Nan returned, Lark promised Ash’s mother that she would visit on the morrow.
Afterward, Lark turned to cleaning out the sitting room that would be her own. Cook and Mim came to help. “On the Earl’s orders,” Cook said.
Lark chose several beautiful old pieces of furniture from the attic for her sitting room—everything she needed for a place where she might go to rest, or dream, or read, if she learned. A place where she might sew clothes for the babe, when she learned to sew, and when she expected a babe. A place where she might draw or paint on parchment sheets, like a fancy lady in a fancy dress.
She had always liked to draw. Her sister had taught her to burn corks. She’d sketched with their charred edges on any surface she could find. Her favorite had been the smooth limestone wall out by the pigsty.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Ash stood waiting for Lark that evening in the drawing room and offered her his arm to escort her into the dining room. They sat in silence while Grimsley served.
Beside Ash’s plate there sat a missive which he opened after Grim finished. “I received this note today from Gideon St. Goddard, Duke of Stanthorpe, another rogue of the club, and I thought you might enjoy hearing it. Would you?”
Lark nodded, honestly interested.
“Dearest Ash” he read. “Though Myles and Hunter still suffer the after-effects of your decline into depravity on the day of your last jilt, they have finally confessed that your own consequences will be of some longer duration.
“If you expect to be congratulated, my friend, on your nuptials, you could at least tell a fellow rogue that you have stepped into parson’s mousetrap. Sabrina and I were never so shocked. Had we not been in mourning, we would surely have been at the church to witness your “echoing” disgrace. And I mean that in the broadest of terms.
“Sorry old boy, but it is somewhat amusing, a rogue of your caliber being so oft jilted. At any rate, Myles and Hunter feel that you “won” yourself a bride that wants taming. I am ordered to tell you, on Sabrina’s behalf, to be gentle and kind to her.
“For my own part, I will confess—providing you promise never to reveal as much to Sabrina—that I never did succeed in taming my own bride, and I was never more glad of anything in my life. Congratulations and best wishes. Yours, G.St.G.”“
“I like Sabrina already,” Lark said. “I want to meet her … and the Duke too, I suppose, for he is funny in teasing you, though the notion of meeting him frightens me witless.”
“You will, eventually, meet all the rogues and their wives, but first we will have to teach you how to entertain in society.”
“I suppose pig riding is out of the question, then?”
Ash raised a brow, not finding her statement the least amusing. “My grandfather sent a note ‘round this morning to remind me that you will need lessons in walking, talking, and acting the lady.”
“Lessons?” Lark laughed. “I could not act the lady if you trussed me up and shoved an apple in my mouth.”
Ash looked to the heavens and stabbed a piece of boiled potato with his fork. “To act the lady, I would truss you up and shove a fan in your hand.”
“Same nonsense. I refuse to simper and gossip.”
“I will hire tutors and you will learn to be a lady, by God. I will also hire a dressmaker, because you really cannot go into society wearing those clothes.”
“What is wrong with these clothes?”
“They do not fit, to begin with, plus they’re years out of date.”
“Why do I need clothes that fit? Why would you want to pay dressmakers and tutors when you are trying to economize by doing your own estate work? You can teach me, yourself, what you believe I need to know, even if I do not believe I need it. And I am perfectly happy wearing the clothes I already have.” Larkin smoothed her bodice lovingly. “These dresses are a hundred times better than anything I’ve ever owned before.”
“Which is not saying much. Look, you have already torn the sleeve at the wrist, precisely why you must learn to act the lady.”
Lark found the tear, winced, and firmed her jaw.
Ash placed his fork against his plate. “I apologize, Lark, but your current wardrobe is simply not fit for society, though the dresses that were my mother’s might do for a start, while you learn, and if you do not tatter them too badly.”
He shook his head. “Though how I will keep the locals from calling for much longer, I cannot imagine. Not that this is a big village—it is particularly small, as a matter of record—but the gossips will want to examine you.”
“I was going to ask why you must keep them from visiting, but if they are to come only to inspect me, I’d rather they remained at home, thank you very much. But why have they not come sooner?”
“They are respecting our honey month.”
“Which is?”
“The month after marriage when a newly married couple normally try to make a baby.”
Her face warmed. “Oh, then they will come soon.”
“Unless I can think of a way to stop them.”
“You may tell them I am contagious.”
“What manner of disease should you have?” Ash asked, the light in his eyes making him look rather more handsome than a man had the right, Lark thought.
“I heard of a disease that sounds so exotic, I think I might like to have it. Have you ever heard of the French Pox?”
Ash spit his tea across the dinner table and took to coughing so hard, Grimsley came running to smack his back while Larkin offered water.
“I cannot do it,” Ash said when he recovered his breath. “I cannot teach you myself. You need tutors of every kind, yesterday, if not sooner.”
“Tutors perhaps,” Lark conceded. “But can I not keep the clothes I have?”
“Why must you always choose clothes that do not fit?”
Lark turned from his gaze. “You know why.”
“So men will not treat you in
the same detestable way that some fiend treated your sister, which simply means that you want respect. What if men and women, both, were to respect you and treat you as an equal? Would you not prefer as much?”
“I do not need respect. Safety will do.”
“But you would like to be respected, would you not? Be honest.”
Lark folded her arms and set her mouth.
“If you wore the proper clothes, and learned to talk properly, and had table manners, and could dance, we might attend some fine and fancy dress ball where even the Regent might partner you.”
“Hah!” Lark slammed down her fork. “The day the regent dances with me is the day I tell you my deepest secret.”
“You have those lessons, and I will take you to the Regent’s Ball in three months time.”
“But no dressmaker, not yet. Let me wear what I have for the nonce, please?”
“Fine for now, but you will have a dancing master and a tutor for a start.”
“What will the tutor teach me?”
“Reading and writing to begin with.”
“You can teach me those things.”
“That did not work, if you will remember.”
Lark pouted for half a beat. “Fine but I would rather you taught me manners and how to act. You would know better than a stuffy-smelling tutor.”
“You want me to teach you manners and how to act the lady? Excellent. We shall begin this instant. You will please remove your elbows from the table and stop eating your peas with a knife. Now.”
Lark sat back and laughed, and then she chose a pea pod from her plate, split it with her thumb, bent it like a bow and pelted him across the table.
“Dear God, I have my work cut out for me.”
Ash’s lectures on deportment began the very next day while Lark tried not to listen. He lectured her as he drove her to the Dower house to meet his father’s former estate manager and his wife.
Stanley “Stan” Redman, Ash’s father’s retired estate manager, and his wife Olive, epitomized Lark’s every interpretation of what grandparents should be. Both with kindly eyes and white hair, Olive’s tied in a bun at her nape, and Stan’s long and waving, they welcomed her with surprise and graciousness, after she embraced them and realized, from Ash’s stern look, that as the Lady of the Manor, she had erred.
Olive, kind and generous to a fault, fed Lark tea with plenty of milk and asked her plans for the house. Lark told her about her sitting room and how she wanted to learn to sew and draw like a lady, and Olive offered to give her sewing lessons.
“Eventually, we will hire you a drawing master,” Ash said. “But I will order drawing supplies tomorrow.”
Stan stroked his long white beard thoughtfully, and said with a twinkle in his eye that he would build her an easel for painting. He liked to work with wood, did Stan, so she talked him into building a Christmas Stable and carving the figures for a Nativity Scene.
Lark thought that if she were to judge by her new neighbors, and by Ash’s explanation of the spirit of the holiday, that Christmas had surely come early this year.
Over the course of the following week, her husband continued to lecture her in ladylike behavior between visits to his tenants, one thatched roof cottages after another, while she did her utmost to ignore his words.
All the village men seemed to work the Blackburne Chase Estate, all except for their curmudgeon of a doctor, Phinias Buckston—Ash called him Buckstubborn behind his back—who also served as apothecary.
Lark was glad the doctor was not in when they stopped, for she wondered how she would face him again after threatening to shoot him in the ballocks if he examined her on her wedding night.
“Basically,” she said, during an evening’s drive home, “the village of Gorhambury consists mainly of the Blackburne Estate and its tenants.”
Ash looked about him, at his property as far as the eye could see. “Ours is like an old feudal estate that never grew beyond. We have to drive all the way to St. Albans proper, fifteen miles away, to purchase anything of significance that we cannot raise, grow, weave, thatch, or make ourselves.” He urged the old farm horses to move faster while the rickety estate wagon bumped them along the rutted dirt road like pebbles in a bouncing pot.
“The original Chase burned down in the sixteen hundreds,” Ash said, “and didn’t get rebuilt until seventeen-fifty, but the village kept going, barely, until my great-grandfather’s family returned to rebuild.”
“It must be wonderful to know your family history.”
Ash mocked himself with a laugh. “I come from a long line of liars and cheats, men who put themselves first, right down to my father. My mother cautioned me from the cradle that I had a responsibility to turn the tides and not let the villagers flounder again. My father, on the other hand, did not give a flying leap whether the tenants, or my mother, lived or died. And that’s the unforgivable truth.”
“Will you never forgive him, then?”
“I do not forgive my own failings when I am sincerely sorry for them; why would I forgive my father’s, when he was not the least repentant?”
“So you might be described as unforgiving but not suspicious.”
“I suppose that is correct, for if I were a suspicious sort,” he said with a wink, “I would have approached you with more caution on our wedding night.”
Lord, would her sordid past never set her free? And yet, free she felt, especially when she saw the Chase come into view, as if she were coming to a safe haven, a new and amazing experience when once her only haven had been a loft cot where, for the most part, she escaped her father’s drunken customers. But was she safe now? Was she home? Would her unforgiving husband let her stay when he learned how she forced his hand in the card game that united them?
“I have a surprise waiting for you,” Ash said as he threw the wagon’s reins to Brinks at the stable. “Actually, ‘tis more in the nature of a double surprise.”
He covered her eyes with his hands at the base of the curved main stairs. They took a clumsy climb, and turned, not right, but left, at the top. She knew then that he was taking her to her “sitting room” and she hoped he hadn’t taken it upon himself to purchase “better” furniture than the rickety old attic pieces she’d fallen in love with and that Stan promised to fix.
But when Ash took his hands away and Lark looked about, she saw in a glance that every piece she wanted had been fixed, polished and buffed. Even the old curtains she loved had been brought to life and hung from her windows, but none of it, not an inch of her beautiful new sitting room mattered as much as the shy little boy sitting in the needle-worked chair she’d chosen as her own.
“Micah!” she screamed, rushing him, but she was no faster than him as he ran from her, as if he’d sat pinned like a butterfly on wax one minute, and came to life the next.
He seemed too small for a seven year old, Lark thought off-handedly as he flew from her reaching arms to huddle in a corner, and too bony by far. We’re going to fatten you up, she thought, ignoring the tears spilling from her eyes as she began carefully to approach him. “I am so happy you are come,” she said. “Micah, do you remember me?” Though his clothes were clean, as was he, they were old, and as tattered as her own had been.
He was like a small wounded bird and did not seem to know her, but why would he? It had been a year or more since she’d been able to visit him, though she’d paid for his keep regularly, and was shocked to find him in this deplorable undernourished state.
She’d met a number of seven year olds among the tenants recently, all better fed and clothed, and when she realized it, she looked at her husband through new eyes and with a new dawning respect as well.
Ash did his own estate management to economize for his tenants’ sakes, tenants who ate well and lived in warm, well-kept cottages. So much for his roguish ways, she thought. Perhaps Ashford Blackburne was as much of a fraud to the better, as the family to whom she’d sent money for Micah’s board were, to the worse.
“Ash,” she said, stopping before Micah when he began to tremble. “This is my nephew, Micah. Micah, you may not yet remember me but I am your Aunt Larkin and His Lordship, here, the Earl of Blackburne, is my husband. We will see that you are cared for now and neglected no more.”
Micah looked at her with surprise, then as silent and wide of eye toward Ash.
Ash rested on his haunches before the boy. “I am pleased to make your acquaintance, Micah, and glad you will be living with us.”
Micah said nothing but slid down the wall and closed his arms around his knees, narrowing his small shoulders, as if he could become invisible.
“You will now be living in a very special village,” Ash said. “Did you know that Gorhambury is famous?”
Though Micah made no move to show he’d heard, Ash continued. “Father Christmas lives here,” he said, hoping the name might evoke some life in a child. “Many of the villagers have actually seen him.” Ash regarded Lark. “Does he not know Christmas either?”
“Look at him and tell me why he should.” She wiped the tears from her cheeks with her hands.
Ash sighed and rose. “Then it will be up to us to teach him.”
“We had best start by showing him that he will eat regularly,” Lark said.
They each took Micah by a hand and brought him up to the old nursery that housed more toys than most children would see in a lifetime, more certainly than Micah had ever seen, if he had seen any, Lark thought.
There, Lark was surprised to find Mim waiting as if she knew they were coming.
“Mim has brothers and sisters,” Ash said, “and she is willing to sleep in the bedchamber adjacent to Micah’s and help you with him whenever needs be.”
“Thank you, Mim,” Lark said, grateful her nephew would not be alone at night in a strange place, but more so for the look on Micah’s face as he fingered one of a regiment of tin soldiers.
“That was my regiment,” Ash said, “The Life Guards, the regiment I joined to fight Bonaparte under Wellington’s command.”
Untamable Rogue (Formerly: A Christmas Baby) Page 11
