“They weren’t exactly friendly,” Theresa said, as Matthew took the place beside her and gave the horse leave to trot on.
“Loris Tanner, whom most of them merely tolerated, ensnared the handsome, wealthy baron in holy matrimony,” Matthew said. “They wonder about the baron’s sister, and her plans for the confirmed bachelor, Mr. Belmont. I’m sure they would have gladly extended their supper invitations to you, had we tarried long enough to draw that fire.”
The day was beautiful, warm in the sun, cool in the shade, as the best autumn days could be. The harvest had gone well, the orchards offered handsome yields, and Matthew had taken a woman to services whom he esteemed and was attracted to.
As the gig rattled out of the village, more gratitude filled his heart than he could ever have experienced sitting on a hard pew among his curious neighbors.
“You love this,” Theresa said. “You love being out in the fresh air, the ribbons in your hands. You trained this gelding, didn’t you?”
“Foaled him out, trained him in harness, and taught him to go under saddle,” Matthew said. “Leo is a smart fellow and enjoyed having a succession of new challenges. He can do some tricks too.”
“You enjoyed the challenges,” Theresa said, turning her face to the breeze and closing her eyes.
Matthew enjoyed her. “Would you like to drive?”
“No, thank you. You deserve the pleasure. Some people don’t have to over-imbibe, over-wager, or indulge in opium, hashish, or other vices. They have the great gift of intoxicating themselves on legitimate diversions.”
As if thunder had rumbled to the south, Matthew’s joy in the morning’s accomplishment dimmed.
“Now you will tell me that your youthful excesses included those intoxicants you listed, and then you’ll regale me with a description of your scandalous wardrobe when you embarked on this dissipation,” he said. “I did go up to university, you know.”
He’d had a year and a half to sample the vices of the wider world before holy matrimony had cut short his education.
“Matthew, I wasn’t wearing nearly enough on some of the occasions when I abused those intoxicants.”
The notion that she’d been twenty years old, a gently reared lady of the baronial manor, and so fallen into wickedness sickened him. She’d had a grandfather, a brother, two cousins, and none of them had intervened as she’d courted disgrace.
For a young lady did not pitch her good name that far into the weeds on a single toss.
“Tell me the rest of it.” Matthew had heard confessions of murder that troubled him less than the truths she wanted to inflict on him. “Tell me whatever horrors and sins you think will give me a disgust of you, for that’s your aim.”
She’d fail, of course. If Matthew admired one virtue above all others, it was honesty. His own wife had never been honest with him, while Theresa Jennings had never dissembled.
“You think I was some delicate creature, taken advantage of by a charming scoundrel,” she said. “I was… awful, Matthew. I had my reasons, at first, but then I had no reason, or so it seems in hindsight. My cousins were a pair of ne’er-do-well wastrels, my grandfather a tired old man. I was lost and I ran wild.”
Matthew passed Theresa the reins, which she accepted. She wasn’t wearing the right gloves for driving, but Leonardo had a delicate mouth, and the distance to Linden was short.
“You were lost, you ran wild, for years,” Matthew said, slipping an arm around the lady’s waist. “Your cousins were a pair of bad influences, your brother left in a peevish tantrum, your grandfather washed his hands of his grandchildren, and of life.”
“Thomas didn’t—”
Matthew kissed her cheek. “I’m not finished. You were sunk in disgrace, headed for a bad end, the despair of the house of Sutcliffe, and then you conceived a child, the inevitable wages of your folly.”
She gently checked Leo, who’d sped up, probably at the ire in Matthew’s voice. “My situation was worse than that, but you’ve grasped the main points.”
What could be worse than the road to perdition? “And then, rather than throw yourself into the sea,” Matthew went on, “or blame the authors of your ruin, or drown yourself in years of self-pity, you righted your ship, found calm waters, and got on with the business of a raising a daughter.”
“I was the author of my own ruin, mostly,” Theresa said as they tooled past the drive to Matthew’s estate. “I became the author of my own ruin.”
“And you became the sole author of your own salvation, and your daughter’s,” Matthew said. “I admire that about you. Rather a lot. Would you like to join me for supper at my in-laws’? Agatha is a dreadful bore, Emmanuel a bit too jovial, and the roast often undercooked, but they’re family. You know how it is with family.”
* * *
The trip to church had broken Theresa’s heart all over again, when she’d thought that traitorous organ too far gone to fracture anew.
Matthew’s grand scheme to return her to propriety in the space of a Sunday morning had been ridiculous and dear. She’d indulged him, hoping a few glaring biddies, or a snub from the pastor would make her point eloquently enough. The congregation hadn’t obliged, and so she’d loaded her cannon with greater, sadder truths.
“I tell you I was as debauched as a decently reared woman can be, and you threaten me with undercooked roast?” she asked.
“You’re pulling a bit to the right, probably because I’m distracting you.”
Matthew was nearly sitting in Theresa’s lap, his arm around her waist, his warmth a pleasure on a crisp autumn morning. Courting couples occupied the bench of a buggy like this, and in no regard could Theresa consider that she and Matthew…
She scooted a few inches away and corrected her contact with the gelding’s mouth.
Matthew withdrew his arm. “Agatha and Emmanuel mean well. Agatha is Matilda’s older sister, and they have me to dinner one Sunday per month, weather permitting. The weather today, alas, permits.”
Theresa hadn’t told Matthew the whole of her descent into vice and oblivion, but she’d told him as much as she dared and even exaggerated a bit for the sake of emphasis.
“You are determined to minimize my unfitness. Why, Matthew?”
“Why are you determined to see yourself only as you were years ago?” he countered. “Years ago, I was a miserable, angry, widower; an irritable father; a negligent brother; and a poor choice as magistrate.”
He propped a boot on the fender, the casual gesture of a man bracing himself for verbal fisticuffs, when Theresa truly hadn’t an answer for him.
So she asked a question. “You were angry?”
“Furious,” he said, gaze going to the scythed hayfield beside the lane. “I’d always thought that someday, Matilda and I might come to a sort of peace. She could explain to me why, for the duration of our marriage, she had given her heart to a man who treated her dishonorably. I could explain to her how much I loved the children, and wanted to love her as their mother, despite all the other mess and complication in our lives. When she fell ill, I tried—”
The shrewd, relentless Mr. Belmont hadn’t intended these words. He liked Theresa for her honesty, but wasn’t so keen on sharing his own truths.
“You tried?”
“Matilda was not interested in any great, dramatic rapprochement with her husband of convenience. As she lay dying, she grieved not the life she might have had with me and the boys, but the life she’d never have with her old love. I was enraged, with her, with him, with the marriage that was dying even as she too faded.”
Theresa blinked at a lane gone blurry. “I’m sorry, Matthew. For you, for her. Were you ever tempted to call her old love out?”
“Before she wed me, I assured her I’d never ask her for his name. I was young, and yet, I think that promise was wise.”
Kind, in any case. Kind to the young couple married amid so much sadness and necessity.
“The turn to Linden is coming up,” Matthew s
aid. “Shall I take the ribbons?”
Theresa passed them over. She’d intended to set Matthew straight, to save him from his own good intentions and tolerant nature, and she’d failed.
Which was a relief, albeit bewildering. Matthew was not a rural innocent, caught in the grip of an honorable excess of tolerance for a neighbor’s tarnished sister. He was a man wrestling with his own bitterness and unhappy past.
And Theresa—may heaven help her—hoped he’d ask her to drive with him to church again next week.
* * *
“Squire, have a seat. It’s only sporting to let you finish your ale before I thrash you.” Nick slid over on the bench that ran the length of the tavern’s snug, taking his own ale with him.
“We have rules here in England, Haddonfield,” Matthew said, settling in on the opposite bench. “You can’t arrest, try, and convict a man without letting him know how he’s transgressed. Why is it, the pews in the church always feel so much harder than the benches of the local tavern, when both are made of simple wood?”
Why was it, having enjoyed Agatha’s Sunday fare, Matthew was still hungry, for both company and food?
Nick pushed a tray of bread and butter at Matthew. “The Papists generally start off with ‘Bless me father, for I have sinned.’ I dispense with the popery and generously administer a restorative beating to those clearly in need. You took Theresa Jennings to services this morning.”
Matthew had taken the lady somewhat to task too. He saluted with his tankard. “Your powers of observation appear to be quite in order, Nicholas.”
Nick cut off a slice of bread, dabbed butter on it, and set it on a wooden dish. “Do you fancy strawberry jam?”
Strawberry was Rem’s favorite. “No, thank you, Nicholas. If this is the condemned squire’s last meal, will you at least finish reading the charges against me before I go nobly to my fate? The last time I checked, taking a lady to services was hardly a threat to the king’s peace.”
Nick fixed himself a serving of bread and butter, and topped his slice with a dab of preserves. He was the largest man Matthew knew, his present position one of mostly manual labor, and yet, his table manners were exquisite, his hands always clean.
“Thomas, Baron Sutcliffe, should have been the one to take Miss Jennings to services,” Nick said. “He declined that honor, for the present, and we must conclude he did so for reasons.”
Matthew took a sip of ambrosial ale. Soon the publican would switch to the winter brews, which were too dark and bitter for Matthew’s palate.
“Did Thomas decline the honor of escorting his sister to services, overlook the obligation in the uproar of the wedding, or did he neglect the privilege?”
Nick sat back, his bread and butter in his hand. Not a crumb dared fall before he popped the sustenance into his mouth.
“Did you imbibe too much wine with your Sunday viands, Squire?”
“Too much of my in-laws’ company. At some point, Agatha and Emmanuel came to expect that one-quarter of my Sunday afternoons belonged to them. I complied with this assumption because the boys needed to know their aunt and uncle, but the time has come to reclaim my Sabbath. What is wrong with me, Nicholas, that I am increasingly vexed with my late wife’s only relations?”
What was wrong with Matthew, that he’d stop off at the local watering hole of a late Sunday afternoon rather than go directly home to his own hearth? A toddy or three, a cozy fire, a riveting pamphlet on the benefits of running sheep over fallow turnip patches… These appealed more strongly than another serving of Agatha’s pear compote, and another hour of Emmanuel’s jovial insinuations about debauches on the banks of the River Isis.
“I don’t much care for in-laws on general principles,” Nick said. “The presence of in-laws implies the presence of a wife.”
“Bless me, Father, for an earl’s heir must marry, Nicholas?”
“My father’s health is not good,” Nick said, dusting his hands over the bread board. “But he can wield a pen with the accuracy of a coachman’s lash, stinging my filial devotion down to the bone. I can’t ask Beckman to marry again, George is hopeless, and Adolphus will likely take up academics rather than holy matrimony.”
Such was life as a magistrate often saw it.
Mr. Dweedle complained about Mrs. Puckett’s dog barking at all hours, though Dweedle himself still missed the hound he’d buried last summer. Mrs. Puckett relished her imbroglios with old Dweedle, mostly because she’d been sweet on him half a century ago, and he’d offered instead for Maude Peckley, gone ten years past.
If Dweedle had had the sense to marry Dorie Puckett upon Maude’s death, then Dorie would not have bought the dog for company, and nobody would lose sleep over endless barking.
Nicholas needed a wife, while Matthew needed another ale.
“I have in-laws but no wife,” Matthew said. “You adore the ladies, love children, have a duty to marry, and yet want neither in-laws nor a wife. Perhaps we should switch to brandy.”
“He who mixes the grape and grain is sure to have a very sore brain,” Nick muttered. “How are the Capshaws, and why are you still enduring their company when you’ve long been a widower?”
Matthew had dragged Nick along to the Sunday feasts a time or two. Nick was a good friend, but undercooked roast, along with Agatha’s sniffy manners, was penance such as even friendship ought not to endure. When Agatha was on her mettle, she could come up with a grace as long as Matthew’s arm.
On the ride back from Trieshock, Matthew had pondered Nick’s question, in a different light: Why endure the Capshaw’s company with such frequency?
What was it about Matilda’s older sister and brother-in-law that made Matthew increasingly want to upend the entire table and stomp off in a tantrum worthy of his youngest son?
“They insist on treating me as if I’m still that seventeen-year-old boy,” Matthew said. “The youth who quaked at the altar, certain only that a gentleman would never leave a lady in the circumstances Matilda faced. She was distant kin, and I was very young, but determined to uphold the family honor.”
“You were randy,” Nick said charitably. “Maybe you’re still randy.”
Back to this. “I am lonely, Nicholas, and I see in Thomas’s sister another person whose youth and uncertainty led her to make unfortunate choices. Thomas has hardly been a saint.”
Nick cut another slice of bread. The knife could have been sharper, so the undertaking required patience and a light hand.
“I’m the last to judge anybody for youthful folly, but Theresa Jennings is a troubled woman,” Nick said, applying butter and jam to the bread.
Matthew swiped the food from Nick’s hand before Nick could take a bite.
“Emmanuel Capshaw made the same point, and without having so much as laid eyes on Miss Jennings.” Bread, butter, and jam were good for the soul. Pear compote was… too sweet and a waste of good spirits.
“In-laws are like that,” Nick said, slicing off yet more bread. “They have powers of divination. If you marry Theresa Jennings, Thomas will become your brother-in-law. Ponder that.”
“If I marry Theresa Jennings, Loris would also become an in-law,” Matthew said, taking a sip of mellow ale.
Marry Theresa Jennings.
“Half the congregation was buzzing about your choice of companion this morning,” Nick said. “The other half, as usual, was asleep.”
Beckman came sauntering into the common, winked at the barmaid sitting on a stool and polishing glasses, then took the place beside Matthew.
“Jamie’s knees are acting up,” Beckman said, taking a sip of Matthew’s ale. “Rain before morning.”
Nick slathered butter on his bread and added more than a dab of jam. “Or maybe, Jamie took a look at the sky and saw clouds gathering to the southeast. Nothing but trouble comes from the direction of France.”
Nick lifted the bread and even had his mouth open when Beckman neatly appropriated it, took a bite, and passed it back.
“I come here for the bread and butter,” Beck said. “Not for the weather predictions. How was Sunday penance, Squire?”
Beckman too, had once been dragooned into joining Matthew at the Capshaws’ table.
“My Sabbath meal was undercooked and preachy,” Matthew said. “I accompanied Miss Jennings to services. I have accompanied any number of ladies to services. When Clarissa Springdorf broke her ankle, I spent an entire summer playing coachman. Dorie Puckett prevailed on my good offices not a month past when her gig needed a new wheel.”
The barmaid delivered Beckman’s ale, along with more butter and a wedge of cheese.
“Linden aged cheese is the finest,” Nick said, cutting the wedge into three parts. “And you accompany only widows, spinsters, and dowagers to services, Matthew. Miss Jennings is none of the above.”
Matthew ate his portion of cheese for two reasons. First, Agatha’s meal had left him hungry. She arrayed her table beautifully. Her porcelain matched, her silver gleamed, her serving dishes were coordinated and placed just so.
Of food, however, there was far less than Matthew required. Matilda had once said her sister excelled at the art of extravagant miserliness.
The second reason he munched his cheese in thoughtful silence was that Nick had asked a question.
Theresa Jennings was not a widow, a spinster, or a dowager—so what was she?
“Miss Jennings is brave,” Beckman said, dipping his cheese in his ale before taking a bite. “I like her.”
“Are you warning me of something, Beckman?” Matthew asked. Emmanuel had been full of warnings. “I took the lady straight home, in an open gig, mind you, and then I took myself home. I did not set one handsome, booted foot inside the Linden manor house. Once under my own roof, I made myself a few sandwiches of ham and cheddar, three to be exact. Then I sat in my library for more than an hour procrastinating the afternoon’s call upon the Capshaws while writing to my offspring.”
Matthew Page 11
