Proud Mary

by Lucinda Brant

  The truth was something else entirely.

  He preferred not to think about those first few years abroad, and what he had done to survive. But by the time he was regularly writing to his parents, he had transformed from squire’s son to “Cristoforo”, sought-after cicisbeo of many a married lady—skilled in the gentlemanly arts of deportment, dance, and agreeable conversation. He discovered he had an innate talent for music and took up playing the mandora, and also that he had an ear for languages. Where these gifts came from he knew not, though he suspected one or the other of his true parents to be musically and linguistically talented. And there was another talent he was certain they had blessed him with, and which the womanizing baronet would have been proud. His reputation as a considerate and accomplished lover saw him rise to the position of acknowledged cicisbeo of the Contessa Maddalena De Nobili, wife of one of the Republic of Lucca’s foremost noblemen.

  It was while part of the De Nobili triangle of husband, wife, and cicisbeo, that “Cristoforo” was recruited by England’s Spymaster General to report on Lucca’s first families. The Spymaster’s agent in Florence assured Christopher his parents would never find out their son had stooped so low as to become the whore-companion of a married foreign lady. No matter the cicisbeo had a respected and recognized status in Italian society, it would never be understood by the English, and thus Christopher would never be considered anything other than a high-class male whore.

  But as long as he provided regular reports to the Spymaster’s Florentine agent, then the English government would be grateful and Christopher’s life, however he chose to live it, could go on unimpeded. Christopher wanted no part of such subterfuge. But as the English agent bluntly told him, Christopher’s entire life was one of subterfuge. And if he did not cooperate it would not only be his adoptive parents who suffered. The titled lady who had given birth to him would be publically shamed, and as a consequence her husband the Admiral would lose his commissions and influence with the Admiralty, not to mention that the scandal that ensued would see the couple pariahs of good society. As for Sir George’s heirs, who knew nothing of the existence of a bastard half-brother, they, too, would also be shamed, shunned by their illustrious relative, the Duke of Devonshire, and outraged to think their father had left a fortune to a bastard. Christopher wouldn’t want to be the cause of the disharmony and ruin of at least three good families, now would he? Christopher most certainly would not.

  Then one day he received news from his mother that her sister, the woman who had given birth to him, was now a widow. Her ladyship had moved abroad for her health and was dividing her time between a villa in the seaside town of Leghorn, and as a regular guest of the British consul in Florence—and she wanted to meet him. The medieval walled town of Lucca was just thirty miles away from her new home. Christopher did nothing with this piece of news. As far as he was concerned, he only needed or wanted one mother, and she was living in the wilds of Gloucestershire.

  It was two years later, and he had just turned twenty-nine, when Kate found him. It coincided with the end of his contract with the Conte and Contessa De Nobili, and so he left Lucca and went to live with her. They had a year together before news reached him that his mother had taken ill.

  He returned to the vale in time to nurse his mother through the final stages of her illness. His father, now old, gray, and stooped, could not live without his “darling Sophie” and died within six months of his wife’s passing. It was the physician’s opinion—and the vicar and his good wife agreed—that the couple died happy and at peace knowing their son was determined to take on the responsibilities as Squire of Brycecomb Hall. With his parents’ deaths, Christopher knew he never wanted to leave the vale again. This was home.

  Having mourned his parents, he sent for Kate. With Kate came Fran, Carlo, and Silvia. Brycecomb Hall was once again a happy place, albeit one stuffed to the rafters with furnishings and decorative objects from abroad, the glorious aromas of Italian cooking, and a menagerie of domesticated animals and birds worthy of a guinea a visit.

  TEDDY’S FIRST VISIT to Brycecomb Hall was without her parents’ knowledge. She was six. She followed Christopher home one morning on her cob. And on every visit since, she was met with the same enthusiastic and loving welcome, as if she had been away for years, not days, and her company was most dreadfully missed.

  “Ah! You are taller every time I see you, cara ragazza!” Silvia exclaimed as she hugged Teddy to her ample bosom and kissed the top of her head. “And more beautiful, always more beautiful!”

  “Don’t smother the child, Silvia!” her husband complained good-naturedly. Ignoring his own advice, he pulled Teddy into a loving hug before letting her go and spinning her about. “Yes! Yes! Much taller, sei una bella ragazza! Silvia! Why are you standing there? Get the child something to eat. She’s half-starved.”

  “Sto bene, grazie, signori Mansi,” Teddy responded with a smile and an impromptu curtsy.

  She looked about at Christopher to see if she had spoken the sentence correctly. He winked at her and Teddy was again hugged and kissed and complimented by the couple, until Christopher cut short the profuse greetings.

  “I’m famished. What’s for dinner?” he asked in Italian. “I hope it’s farro followed by rabbit stew?”

  “Of course! And tortelli lucchesi,” Silvia responded smugly. “Always I make all your favorites after you’ve spent time away eating insipido cibo inglese.”

  “Silvia, you are forever my angel.” Christopher kissed his fingertips, adding in English as Carlo helped him shrug out of his greatcoat, so that Teddy would understand the run of conversation, “Teddy has brought something special for her ladyship but perhaps she could first have a couple of your delicious chestnut biscuits and a milk coffee in the kitchen?”

  Silvia and Carlo knew what he meant. He wanted a private word with Kate without the child present.

  “Sì! But of course!” Silvia exclaimed, helping Teddy out of her cape and handing it off to Carlo.

  She brushed down the sleeves of the girl’s fitted wool jacket and gave her flushed cheek an affectionate pinch. “We find a bone for your furry brother, too, eh?” she said, referring to Lorenzo, who obediently remained on the straw matting just inside the door but whose ears were wide to the conversation. With her arm about Teddy, Silvia said to Christopher, because the tiredness in his eyes worried her, “That great lady over the hill she keeps you away for too long. You are tired. You need sleep—”

  “Enough, Silvia!” Carlo demanded, shaking out Christopher’s greatcoat, then hanging it on a peg behind the door next to Teddy’s wool cape. “It is not our business if the widow she does not know a worthy man when he is standing before her.”

  “What kept me away was a ghost,” Christopher said placidly, and huffed, thinking of Evelyn, befuddled by the man’s intentions toward Mary. He grinned when the couple’s eyes widened with fright. “Not a real ghost. And say nothing. The child had a nightmare last night about her father’s ghost.” Adding in English to Teddy, “Do you wish to give your surprise to Kate before or after dinner? You decide.”

  “After. When we have our coffee in the salon.”

  “Very well, in the salon with our coffee it is,” Christopher replied gravely, suppressing a smile that though she was all seriousness, Teddy could not help punctuating her sentence by hunching her shoulders with delight. And then he found out why when she added in a rush,

  “After you play the mandora for us!”

  “Ah! Must I?”

  Teddy nodded. “You must.”

  “Very well. But if I do, then you must dance the steps I taught you—Or have you forgotten them? It has been a week since you were here last.”

  “No! No! I’ve not forgotten, Uncle Bryce. I’ve been practicing with Mama.”

  Christopher’s eyebrows rose. “With your mama? She knows I’ve been teaching you the minuet? And she’s been practicing with you?”

  Teddy nodded excitedly. “But Mama promis
ed she would not say a word. She said she would indeed be surprised when the day came that I danced the minuet with you.” Adding naively, “Mama said she found it astonishing.”

  “I do not doubt that,” Christopher muttered.

  “Silly! Not that you don’t know how to dance, Uncle Bryce, because Mama said you carry yourself very well indeed,” Teddy assured him quickly, thinking he did not believe her. “Mama was astonished you were teaching me.”

  “Ah! I see. Shall we ask Kate to play the mandora while we practice our steps together? Is that agreeable?” When Teddy nodded, he said with a smile, “Now you will have to excuse me for a little while.”

  “Take the child to the kitchen and feed her and her furry brother, I beg of you, Silvia!” Carlo insisted.

  Silvia shrugged good naturedly and hugged Teddy to her again, kissed her temple, and said in English, “Come, little one, see what Silvia she has for you in the kitchen. And I will have Carlo bring you a very strong coffee,” she said to Christopher with a sad shake of the head before throwing up her hands and walking off towards the kitchen hand in hand with Teddy, Lorenzo trotting beside her.

  Carlo scurried after Christopher as he strode across the paneled great hall with its large hanging tapestries and enormous fireplace. “Signore! Signore!” he hissed in a loud whisper, which stopped Christopher at the base of the oak staircase. “Signore, the mistress, she is having one of her bad days. I thought you should know. Today, it is a very bad day, one of the worst in a very long time…”

  Christopher glanced up the staircase to the gallery, then looked down at Carlo, frowning, “Anything in particular I should know about?”

  Carlo stuck out his bottom lip with a frown. “Letters four—no five—of them. They arrived just hours after you left to stay over the hill with the great lady—”

  “That was bad timing.”

  “Yes. Very bad timing. The mistress has counted every hour you’ve been gone. She does not like that more and more you desert her.”

  “Contrary to what she claims, I do not desert her. She knows, as do you all, that my stay at Abbeywood is for only two nights in the fortnight. And nothing has changed in two years. It is just that this time it was three nights, due to unforeseen circumstances.”

  “The ghost?”

  “Yes. The ghost.”

  Carlo shrugged. “She will not believe it. Not this time. This time is very bad.”

  “Once I’ve read the letters to her she’ll be more cheerful. Bring the large coffee pot and make it strong. And keep Teddy with you a little longer than usual. I had best make an effort to read her at least one entire letter before dinner.”

  Carlo bowed and clasped his hands in front of him. “Sì, Signore. It will be done! Teddy she can play at bocce with Carlo.”

  Christopher patted the older man’s shoulder affectionately. “Thank-you. And, Carlo. Let Teddy win occasionally…”

  “Ah! I do not need to let her win. She beats Carlo fair and square. On my honor!”

  KATE WAS IN her bedchamber, curled up in the window seat, bathed in the light and warmth of autumn sunshine that filtered through the mullioned windows. She was still in the dressing stage, salt-and-pepper waist-length hair mussed and unpinned about her shoulders, unbrushed since she had risen earlier that morning. She had a fur-trimmed dressing jacket across her shoulders, but it was left untied, revealing a fitted velvet bodice and quilted petticoats of rich burgundy and silver thread.

  Given her present frame of mind, he was surprised she had bothered to dress at all, and was not still in her nightgown and banyan. But for a woman who had spent her entire adult life in Society’s public gaze, dressing and being dressed in the height of fashion made from the best textiles and prints money could buy, with hair adornments and embroidered shoes to match, was as natural to her as breathing. So this uncharacteristic slovenliness was alarming, and had no doubt exacerbated her understandable frustration and self-pity as she struggled to come to terms with her growing loss of sight.

  While she was not entirely blind, she had lost her central field of vision, and in both eyes. She explained, it was as if a splotch of black ink had been dripped onto the iris, so that light and vision existed only in a slim band at the very edges of her sight. It meant she could no longer participate in those things she loved most, which were to write, read, and embroider.

  One of her greatest joys had been corresponding with her multitude of friends, here in England and on the Continent, allowing her to keep abreast of the political and social whirl that was Polite Society, a society of which she had been very much a part until the death of her husband the Admiral and the loss of income from his sinecures. But even with his death and her move to the Continent due to her straightened circumstances, she was not a recluse, and was welcomed with open arms by the English community abroad. And then her loss of vision became worse.

  That’s when her quest to find Christopher became a frantic fight against time. She was determined to see him, to etch his handsome face in her mind’s eye forevermore before the blackness robbed her of him altogether, and his smile and those brown eyes were lost to her forever.

  And now here she was, a world away from the drawing rooms of Society, English and Italian, no longer able to see a person’s facial features; where the face was, there was only darkness. Her only contact with the outside world was maintained through correspondence—which Christopher read aloud to her, and the letters she sent—dictated to her lady’s companion, Fran, who wrote them on her behalf. But Fran was limited to writing in English and schoolgirl French. Most correspondence required a high degree of competence in the French language, which meant waiting for Christopher to have the free time to be her eyes and her scribe.

  Carlo need not have warned Christopher, though he was grateful for the man’s concern, because it did not require a mastermind to see what had brought on her latest bout of self-loathing. She might appear a study of serenity, staring unseeing out the window with her hands lightly in her lap, but the paper littering the room told a different story.

  Pages from freshly-opened letters were strewn from four-poster to dressing table and across to the window seat. Parchment littered bed coverlet, Turkey rug, and window seat cushions. Wax seals had been broken or torn off, some pages were so heavily creased it was as if they had been scrunched into a tight ball and tossed away, only to be retrieved and hastily smoothed out again. Thankfully, none had been torn to shreds. That had happened in the past and Christopher with Fran’s help had spent an evening reconstructing a letter from one of Kate’s many faithful correspondents, a duchess no less.

  Kate’s selfless companion sat by the fire, crocheting, and as he crossed the room she looked up and went to speak, but he put a finger to his lips and also gestured for her to remain seated. Both exchanged a significant look, Fran going so far as to smile resignedly before rolling her eyes to the beamed ceiling, indication her mistress was in a particularly foul mood.

  “I know you’re there,” Kate stated turning her head from the view. “That’s the thing about blindness. When one sense starts to fail other senses become more acute.” She tilted her cheek to receive his kiss, then resettled on the cushions, nose twitching. “You reek of horseflesh and manly sweat.”

  “Yes, I must. Thank-you for the reminder I need to bathe and change before dinner. But I came to you first. But if you would prefer I go—”

  “No! Stay,” she commanded, brushing the window seat clear of paper so he could sit beside her. “And it wasn’t a criticism. I defy any female not to swoon at the scent of you. You’re worth bottling.”

  Christopher did not immediately sit where directed. Instead he went on his haunches to collect the paper she had swept to the floor.

  “Fran, be good enough to help me pick up the rest of these letters strewn like petals…”

  “I’ve made you blush! I can hear it in your voice,” Kate teased, adding sullenly, “I don’t know why you’ve gone all coy since returning to England,
when you are well aware of the effect you have on females, and had no conscience about using it to your advantage when it suited, too. English roses are no different to Italian blooms, y’know.”

  “Cristoforo had that effect on females. Christopher does not.”

  “Ballocks!”

  Christopher laughed and straightened. He handed Fran a pile of paper to add to her own collection and returned to the window seat. “Feel a little better for the outburst?”

  “Don’t be facetious. Of course I don’t feel better. But you’re here now. Though it was yesterday I needed you most. But what are my needs, what is reading aloud a few letters penned to an old lady, when compared to the needs and wants of Proud Mary? No doubt she did not think to thank you for putting yourself at her disposal at a moment’s notice? She just expects you to do her bidding. I wonder if she even knows you have a home of your own, people who care about you, need you here just as much—more—than she ever could or would—”

  “You’re being unreasonable and unfair.”

  Kate sat up tall. “Unreasonable? Unfair? Me?”

  “Yes. She was most concerned you were not inconvenienced if I stayed an extra night, and—”

  “Was she?” Kate shrugged a shoulder, not placated. “She worries needlessly about your aunt.”

  “—you forget,” he continued, ignoring her slur on the word aunt, “it was not Mary who made me Teddy’s guardian, or appointed me steward of Abbeywood, it was her husband.”

  “Apart from marrying Mary, appointing you that child’s guardian was Gerald’s only worthy act as baronet. The despicable dullard was a sad disappointment to his father. His sniveling cowardice and unfortunate looks, the fault of his mother. You would’ve made an exemplary baronet—

  “There is no point to this, Kate,” Christopher interrupted evenly, stifling a sigh of exasperation. “Or to ruminating over the past and what might have been had the planets and stars aligned differently. We can only go on as we are now.”

  “Gerald only made you Teddy’s guardian as a spiteful joke at Roxton’s expense!”