“We shall not. Footmen remove trunks to porches, Banks. Porters, grooms, those sorts of fellows risk falling on their backsides in the snow and mud before the ladies.” Fairly jaunted down the stairs, lecturing as he went. “You are a man of God, the insurance provided by the Church of England that at least one gentleman resides in every village worthy of a house of worship. You do not—Daniel, come down.”
Daniel followed at a decorous pace, not because the spiritual leader of a rural community was supposed to trundle about at the speed of a monk in the middle of a funeral procession.
Daniel moved slowly because he was simply exhausted by the effort of making conversation and remaining upright.
“Am I to reside with you, Fairly?” he asked.
One grew used to Fairly’s eyes, which were mismatched—one blue, one green. One grew used to his nimble intellect and his tolerant view of the world’s foibles, but one did not grow used to his pity.
“I live two hours from here on a fast horse when the roads are dry, Banks. That would hardly do either.”
Fairly would have gone charging out into cold, brilliant sunshine, but Daniel had had enough.
“How is Danny?” he asked.
Fairly remained with his back to Daniel, one hand on the door latch. He turned slowly, his expression as blank as a marble saint’s.
“Danny is well.”
Letty would have passed along news if the boy had been ill. “Is he happy?”
The starch went out of Fairly’s posture. He ran a gloved hand through longish blond hair. This was the viscount’s version of a fit of exasperation—also stalling.
“Are you happy, Daniel? That’s what the boy will ask me.”
“If I were a better man, Fairly, I’d pity you the awkwardness of your role, but that child’s happiness means everything to me. Is he happy?”
“He is…less unhappy. He asked me to give you this.” Fairly produced a folded epistle addressed in pencil to Uncle Daniel. “He gave me that when Letty was out of the room, and I haven’t read it.”
“Did Danny ask to accompany you?” Could the child bear to tell his mother and stepfather that he missed the uncle who’d raised him since infancy?
“I did not inform Danny of the exact hour of my departure. Consider this, though, Banks: If Danny asks me how you’re faring, I will have to report to him that you’re skinny, you barely speak, and your hair needs a trim. Worse, you’d be content to welcome him for a visit in a manse overrun with bats, mice, and strange smells.”
Fairly stormed off, while Daniel absorbed that unexpected blow.
Danny was a little boy, and all boy. He’d love a place full of bats, mice, and strange smells. How could Fairly, now Danny’s physical custodian and once a small child himself, not grasp such a simple aspect of normal boyhood?
* * *
Kirsten had been in the company of handsome men for most of her life. Her brothers—Ethan, Nicholas, Beckman, Adolphus, and George—were handsome men. George was a stunner in breeches and boots—and probably even more impressive out of them.
Mr. Banks’s good looks did not account for Kirsten’s fascination with him, not entirely. He sat at the music room’s escritoire, sunlight falling across his shoulders and turning his hair reddish sable, while Susannah thumped away at a Mozart sonata.
“You’re rushing, Suze,” Della murmured without looking up from her embroidery hoop. “You need to save back for the finale. Keep your powder dry, so to speak, or the arpeggios will be harried rather than impressive.”
“Then you play it,” Susannah said, rising in the middle of a phrase.
Mr. Banks’s pencil stilled, then crossed something out. His pencil remained poised above the paper, his gaze focused in the direction of the stable across the garden.
“One of you play the cadence, please,” Kirsten said.
Della took the bench Susannah had abandoned, and played from the middle of the phrase to the end. Mr. Banks’s pencil started moving again.
Until Della stumbled on the infernal arpeggios.
“Mr. Banks, will you join me in the library?” Kirsten asked, setting aside her cutwork. “I’d like your advice on my choice of a book of sermons.”
Della attempted the same passage with no greater success, while Susannah’s consternation was writ plain on her face. Improving tomes of any sort did not figure prominently in Kirsten’s preferred reading. Bless Susannah, she decided in favor of sisterly discretion.
Mr. Banks was on his feet, lap desk in hand. “The library, you say? That would be agreeable. The company of books soothes the soul.”
He nearly pelted from the room, as did Kirsten, but he stopped halfway down the corridor.
“If you’ll pardon my rudeness, my lady, once we’ve chosen you a book, I’ll retire to my room and hope inspiration strikes me between now and Sunday.”
“Hang your rudeness, Mr. Banks. Is the countess in the library?”
He took off again, in the direction of the stairs. “With his lordship.”
Probably as snug as a pair of hibernating bats on Nicholas’s favorite blue sofa, then.
“What about the estate office?” Kirsten asked, for a man intent on composing his inaugural sermon needed peace and quiet.
“Mr. George Haddonfield has come over to copy ledgers or sort pamphlets or some such.”
“I’m surprised Elsie let George out of her sight.” Why hadn’t George made his bow before his sisters?
Banks started up the stairs. “I beg your pardon?”
Kirsten caught up to him easily, suggesting he wasn’t hurrying away from her, exactly.
“George is newly married, and he and his lady are quite besotted. Quite.”
Which was touching, surprising, and a horrible betrayal. George was the last sibling Kirsten had expected to lose to holy matrimony.
“Besotted,” Banks said, as if he were choosing among a selection of hair shirts. “Besotted is a trial to behold for those not similarly afflicted. What gave away my inability to concentrate?”
“You broke the tip of your pencil twice, you scratched out more than you wrote, and you developed a fascination with a garden that is mostly bracken and melting snow. I know a place where you won’t be disturbed.”
Kirsten should have offered a sanctuary to him sooner, but she valued what few retreats she’d been able to fashion.
“I’d like that,” Banks said, “a place where I won’t be disturbed. I usually enjoy working on sermons, but one wants a maiden effort to be memorable or even impressive, and inspiration has apparently not followed me down from Oxfordshire.”
This mattered to him, this fifteen minutes of scriptural droning most people dozed through on Sunday mornings.
“Up one more floor,” Kirsten said, pausing to give a footman instructions as she passed the family wing. “The room will be cold for a time, but quiet. I find quiet and solitude matter more than heat, more than comfort, when I’m in a certain mood.”
“Was that why I found you alone in the tenant cottage?” Mr. Banks asked.
Kirsten had underestimated him, assuming goodness equated with a lack of perceptivity or an unwillingness to confront perceptions. To her surprise, Kirsten liked that he’d ask, liked that he’d turn his perceptivity on her.
She rounded the final landing on the way to the third floor.
“You found me in a former tenant’s cottage,” she said, “one that used to house several active children. I offered to make it habitable for a successor tenant because I enjoy fitting a space to the best use of its occupants.”
Banks paused on the landing, the air noticeably colder in this part of the house. A portrait hung in the tall space of the stairwell.
“Your mother?” he asked. The lady was blond, smiling, beautiful, and cradling a baby in her arms. The infant wore a christening gown—all lace and light—and an
angelic smile.
“I’m told Mama is holding me,” Kirsten said, “though how I remained still long enough to accommodate a portraitist, I do not know.”
Mr. Banks studied the painting far more intently than Kirsten could bear to. “Your brother explained to me about the former tenant of the cottage. My flock did me a particular insult when they sent me there, didn’t they?”
“Come along, Mr. Banks,” Kirsten said, taking him by the arm. “You have years to learn what mischief Haddondale’s villagers can get up to on an idle afternoon.”
He was a big man, but not as solid as, say, Nicholas. No human was as solid as Nicholas, though the plow stock resembled him in some particulars. Mr. Banks was leaner, but Kirsten suspected he had no less strength.
“The former tenant was a fallen woman,” Mr. Banks said, accompanying Kirsten up the stairs. “When did she vacate the premises?”
Perceptive and analytical. No bats in the attic for Mr. Banks. “Addy Chalmers left the first of the week to join the household of a cousin in Shropshire. She did what was necessary and available to support her children, Mr. Banks, and her situation wasn’t entirely of her own making.”
A man had been involved in Addy’s initial fall from grace, as a man was often at the root of a woman’s worst troubles.
Kirsten had given Nicholas’s workers two days to get a plank floor down in the cottage, then she’d set about making the space habitable. Her family had avoided asking her when she’d finish with the project, and she’d not volunteered a date.
“Did the villagers know of this unfortunate woman’s departure?” Banks asked as Kirsten led him to the nursery wing.
“How should I—?” She came to a halt outside the schoolroom. Her sister Nita and Nita’s new husband, Tremaine St. Michael, had sent Addy and her brood to Shropshire in Mr. St. Michael’s commodious traveling coach. “I doubt anybody knew. Addy’s departure was quietly arranged, and we’re not sharing her destination with our neighbors.”
Mr. Banks wore calm the way some women wore their favorite shawls, as much a part of him as his voice or his hands.
“The fellows at the Queen’s Harebell were mean-spirited then,” he concluded mildly. “I don’t mind a jest at my expense, but for the woman who lived there, my arrival would have been awkward, indeed.”
Kirsten opened the door to the largest nursery suite, the one she’d spent years in as a child. What sort of vicar fretted over a prostitute’s dignity?
“You can preach to the faithful about hypocrisy and judgment,” Kirsten said, “about casting the first stone, though it’s a daring place to start. You might want to work in here.”
She led him into the schoolroom, which had remained unchanged for years, as if waiting for the arrival of more little scholars. Nicholas and Leah used a smaller group of rooms for their firstborn, one on the same floor as the earl’s suite.
Sharp sunlight illuminated a fine coating of dust on the mirror over the fireplace, but the rest of the room was as Kirsten had last left it—a small table with small chairs in one corner; a larger desk in the other; the thick, stained rug before the hearth.
A tartan blanket was draped over the settee, a battered footstool sat before the settee, and a spare lap desk had been tucked beneath it. Kirsten had also left a sewing box under the settee, and a copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets graced the footstool.
So that’s where I left it. Susannah had been asking.
Kirsten’s knees knew the rough texture of the rug’s wool, her backside recalled intimately how hard the chairs were on a fine spring day. She generally ignored those memories, but Mr. Banks’s presence infused them with uncomfortable vigor.
“You can conjure a fine sermon here, Mr. Banks. You’ll have peace, solitude, and a lovely view of the pastures. I’ve asked that the fire be lit and braziers and a tray sent up. I can even put a cat in here with you.”
For cats, while independent and regal, were the quintessence of domesticity. Mr. Banks struck Kirsten as a man much in need of domesticity.
“A cat won’t be necessary, but your consideration is appreciated.” He smiled slightly at the scene of Kirsten’s earliest attempts at scholarship. His smiles were like the rest of him—quiet, sweet, and a little sad. Attractive, but not as easy to look on as one first thought.
“If you tell me I’ll make somebody a wonderful wife, I will slap you, Mr. Banks.” Kirsten had no idea where that threat had come from, but then she was often at the mercy of remarks she hadn’t planned.
His smile changed, acquiring an intriguing hint of…mischief? Or—astounding notion—approval.
“I think you would write an extraordinary sermon,” he said. “About hypocrisy and judgment and courage. My remarks will be more prosaic, I’m sure, and bear no relation to your marital prospects.”
Sunday was two days off, and Mr. Banks hadn’t anything prepared. What had occupied his mind on the long ride down from Oxfordshire?
“Why not use a sermon you wrote for your last post?” Kirsten suggested. “Surely you have a few party pieces suitable for when the bishop comes calling?”
“Interesting analogy. I hadn’t thought to use old material.”
He had no guile, no instinct to conserve his resources for eventual hardship. Kirsten abruptly could not stand to be in the same room with him.
“I’ll leave you to your Scripture, then.”
He set his writing paraphernalia on the desk by the windows, the coldest but best-lit space in the room.
“My thanks, Lady Kirsten.”
She popped a curtsy and left Mr. Banks to his musings. Despite Kirsten’s sudden need to be away from him, she’d come back to check on him, as if he were her guest and she his hostess.
Part of what drew her to Mr. Banks was the sense that, like Kirsten, he was going slowly mad. He replied when spoken to, he complimented the countess on the meals served, he’d turned pages for Susannah at the pianoforte last night, and he had competently handled the bass part of the hymns they’d sung.
And on a handful of the infernal mopey ballads too.
And yet Mr. Banks exuded a sense of loneliness that called to Kirsten, and that was the essence of his attractiveness. He was in mourning, she knew not for what or whom. She’d look in on him, to make sure he was comfortable and to discuss his sermon.
Moral topics were great fun to debate, and even spiritual matters could hold Kirsten’s interest. What intrigued her though, what had her smiling as she passed three footmen on the stairs, was the notion that Mr. Banks would make the right someone a wonderful husband.
* * *
“Daniel was the perfect husband,” Fairly said, picking up Nick’s favorite hammer. “He was the perfect brother, the perfect father for Danny, the perfect vicar, even. This is the largest hammer I’ve had the pleasure to handle.”
Nick pushed his spectacles up his nose, for he was trying to sketch a birdhouse to make for his recently married sister, Nita.
“If I’m to use that hammer on your hard head,” Nick said, “it needs to be stout. Banks is not the perfect vicar. I assumed Banks was married, but why didn’t you tell me he’s estranged from his wife?”
Fairly prowled around Nick’s woodworking shop as a cat stuck in a library prowls from window to window, switching its tail. The viscount was always subtly agitated unless in the company of his lady.
“I’m not sure Daniel is estranged from the fair Olivia, though she’s estranged from him.” Fairly peered over Nick’s shoulder. “What are you attempting to draw?”
The viscount smelled pleasantly of sandalwood, and he was like a small boy who had to touch what interested him.
“Get out of my light,” Nick growled, elbowing his friend. “I need room to think. Explain what you mean about Banks. If he’s on the outs with his wife, he should certainly know it.”
The villagers would soon kno
w of it too, and wouldn’t that make for lively churchyard gossip? On the page, Nick had drawn a prosaic birdhouse, like a Bavarian cottage with windows, a front door, and two chimneys.
Boring, but pretty enough. Banks’s looks were not boring, they were attractive. Alluring even, some sort of celestial joke, or a penance for the ladies of the flock.
“You’ve probably heard most of this,” Fairly said, hoisting himself to sit on Nick’s worktable, “but here’s what Banks faces: His sister Letty, my own dear wife, was taken advantage of by her papa’s curate when she was quite young, and Danny is the result of that misadventure. Banks and his wife raised the boy as their own, a common enough fiction in otherwise upright families, and one undertaken in Danny’s case very successfully.”
Fairly clearly wanted the telling of this story over with, and Nick sensed much was being left out. That Banks and his wife had deceived the upright Christians of Little Weldon about the boy’s patrimony was probably a detail.
“Hands off my good eraser,” Nick said, snatching the rubber from Fairly’s grasp and smacking his lordship’s knuckles. “The next part I can guess: Letty falls in love with the handsome, dashing, filthy rich Viscount Fairly, and is now in a position to quietly acknowledge the boy and shower coin upon him. What has that to do with Banks’s wife? Vicars’ wives are supposed to be the loyal sort, reliable sopranos, handy with the comforting platitudes, and good at baking, knitting, and embroidery.”
“Olivia threatened Letty with disclosure of Danny’s origins,” Fairly said, “which would have cost Daniel his post, if not his calling. The child would be doubly cursed by scandal in that case, so Letty found ways to pay Olivia enough to keep her silent.”
Nick ripped out the page he’d been working on. Cottages put him in mind of the Chalmers woman, whom a considerate in-law had thankfully relocated to Shropshire.
“If you tell me Banks extorted money from his sister, I’ll beat you soundly, then start on him, for he’d not be welcome in any pulpit I support. What’s the last thing you’d expect to see made into a birdhouse?”
Fairly snatched up three small stones Nick used as paperweights and began to juggle them.
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