A Lady Awakened

by Cecilia Grant

  “That does seem extravagant.” Wasteful, in fact, and foolish in the extreme.

  “Particularly given that I don’t use snuff.” This bit he delivered to his hand, which was now touching thumb to fingertips, one by one. “My father shared your assessment, though in stronger terms. So here I am.” He let the hand fall. “And no to the other.”

  “I beg your pardon? No to what?”

  “My mistress. I don’t miss her.” He indulged in a tremendous catlike stretch of his limbs, shifting all the gravity in the bed and finally liberating the sheet. “I’ve never yet missed a lady from whom I parted. I have a habit of forgetting all women save the one who is directly before me.”

  “That is …” She rolled several over-strong words round in her mouth as she adjusted the sheet. “Unfortunate.”

  “That depends on which woman you are.” He needn’t sound so satisfied.

  “I should think it unfortunate for any woman who relied on your constancy.”

  “Yes. I avoid that kind, as a rule.” He sat up and swung his feet to the floor. “The same time tomorrow?” he said over his shoulder.

  “The same time, but a different place.” She’d nearly forgot to tell him. “We’ll be meeting in another room henceforward, at the other end of the house. You can come in a side door and go up a servants’ stairway where you won’t be seen.”

  “Very good.” He stood, catching up some clothing on the way. “I have abundant experience in that sort of thing.”

  One did not encourage such remarks with an answer. She lay on her pillow and watched, silently, as he stepped into drawers and pantaloons and pulled the shirt of Irish linen back over his head. Only when he sat to put on his boots did a topic present itself. “Do you own any top boots?” she said. “They’re better suited to the countryside than your Hessians.”

  “More to your taste, are they?” He favored her with a sly half-smile. “I did happen to have a pair made, and I can certainly wear them next time if you desire to see me in them.”

  How much of this nonsense would she be obliged to endure? “I was speaking of practical matters, of walking through pastureland and such. I have no preference as to what you wear.”

  “Then obviously I haven’t worn the right thing yet.” He stretched his booted legs out before him as though for her viewing pleasure. “Now tell me how I’m to find this room where our trysts will go forward.”

  * * *

  YOU MIGHT give it out that you’d had a boy, and dress her in boys’ clothes. I’ve heard of such cases.” Thank goodness for an unshockable maid. Not once had Sheridan questioned the enterprise, or so much as raised an eyebrow. She’d been resourceful, too, in such matters as finding the way for Mr. Mirkwood to come and go unnoticed in future, to a bedroom in the house’s closed-up east wing.

  “But the truth must come out eventually, mustn’t it?” Martha frowned at her reflection. With her caller gone on his sated way, she sat at her dressing table, waiting for her hair to be put back up. “A girl couldn’t live her whole life under that pretense. Sooner or later the facts would reach Mr. James Russell, and I’d lose the estate and be in great trouble besides.”

  The maid pursed her lips and watched her own hands plaiting. “There’s switching goes on as I’ve heard of.”

  “Switching?” Almost certainly she’d rather be kept in ignorance of this.

  “Where an heir is badly wanted.” Their eyes met in the mirror. “You find a boy baby of near the same age, and when yours is born, if it’s a girl, you switch them.”

  “I couldn’t change my child for another.” Her hand went inadvertently to her heart. “I can’t believe anyone would.”

  “People who want for money will do all manner of things.” Sheridan pinned up the first plait. “Some, especially those with too many children, might be glad to give one to a fine home in exchange for some payment. If you had a girl, you could get a boy that way, and keep your own child too, and say you had twins. You might get a boy that way in any case.” The maid spoke softly, eyes averted.

  “If I don’t conceive a child of my own, you mean.” She would have thrown herself away for nothing then.

  “I’ve heard of it. A lady puts on padding under her dress, to look as though she were increasing, and—”

  “Yes, I see how it would be managed. I shall have to give that some thought.” She picked up a hand-mirror from the tabletop and turned it over and over and over again. Please Providence it wouldn’t come to that. Buying some desperate woman’s baby. That might be more than she could do.

  And yet it might, perhaps, have been the more prudent course. Women did die of this. One’s own mother, to take the obvious example. Women of insufficient bodily fortitude lay down in childbed and never got up again.

  Nothing whatsoever to be gained by dwelling on that. “Were you able to air out the rooms in the east wing?” she said, and spoke thereafter of mundane things.

  WITH HER hair all arranged and her dress restored, she went for a walk. The late-afternoon sun shone steady and warm, and her wanderings took her, as they so often did, to the low, uninhabited cottage set aside for Mr. Atkins’s school, where she found the door standing open and the curate himself within. He stood at one end of the building’s single room, bent over a table where he was sawing a thin strip of wood.

  From the corner of his eye he must have noticed her: he looked up, smiled, and waved her in, setting down his saw to reach for the coat hanging over the back of a nearby chair.

  “Don’t stop your work on my account.” She hesitated at the threshold.

  “Oh, there’s no hurry to finish this.” He shrugged into his coat. On the tabletop were stacked a dozen or so schoolroom slates.

  “Will you use those in your school?” She scraped the soles of her boots as well as she could on the grass, and came into the room. He’d spent a good hour on hands and knees, she knew, scrubbing the brick floor clean.

  “Some school will. If not ours, I’ll find another who can make use of them.” Over his shoulder he said this, as he’d turned away to button his coat. The simple gesture of modesty sent an ache to the middle of her chest. She wore traces of citrus scent still.

  “Well, as to that, I’ve posted the letter to Mr. James Russell, and I’m hopeful of a favorable reply.” She said it quickly, before he could turn to face her, and when she reached the table she bent her head to examine a slate. Lying to the curate wasn’t like lying to anyone else.

  “Your kindness has long since surpassed my power to give thanks. But I do thank you.” He’d finished with his coat and took a step back to the table.

  “Are you putting frames on these?” Foolish question. Obviously he was.

  “To make them uniform, yes.” He picked up the new subject with a will. “I’ve acquired them from all over, and some don’t have frames, as you see. Some have broken frames.” He lifted one to show her. “I shouldn’t want any pupil to have a poorer slate than any other. It may sound like a trifle, but the latest scholarship in the field tells us these things matter.” His hands straightened a pile of short slats cut from his wood strip. He wanted to be working again, clearly.

  “I can see the way it would matter.” Martha stripped off her gloves. “Now how may I be of use?”

  A smile came to his eyes first, and sifted down to his mouth. He looked up from the table. “Have you any practice with a penknife?”

  “Very little. You’d better give me some inconsequential task.”

  “No task is inconsequential. You’re speaking to a churchman, recall.” He picked up a knife from among a little arrangement of tools. “My humble worn slates come with humble worn slate-pencils in need of better points. Would you be so good as to sharpen them?”

  So she pulled up a chair and set to paring one stubby slate-pencil after another, while he measured and marked his wood strip against the slates, sawing off new pieces and arranging them in sets.

  Could any other congress with a man be so agreeable as this? He
had his work to do, and she had hers, and nothing stirred the air between them but the soft scrape of her knife, the intermittent rasping of his saw, and a noble shared purpose.

  The curate’s wife would be fortunate, as wives went. She would spend many such hours. And as to marital obligations, likely a churchman would exercise his rights with a becoming modesty. Without so much fuss and fanfare as other men found necessary. Afterward, he and his wife would lie side by side and talk. He might try out bits of the sermon he was making that week, and ask her opinion. She might tell him what she’d observed in visiting the cottagers that day. Together they would confer, and hatch plans for bettering the lives of everyone in the parish.

  Citrus wafted to her nose, as though to remind her she had no right to think of a virtuous man. But citrus could take its counsel elsewhere. She could think, if she chose, of the objective advantages of marriage to a clergyman, particularly an upright and considerate one. One who might come to his wife’s bed some nights with no other purpose than to talk. To know what were her ideas and judgments, and to share his own with her.

  A wife could look forward to those visits. Then, perhaps, to the other visits. He might touch her in different places one night, and chance across the place that governed her satisfaction. Then he would wish to please her, and she might help him discover how.

  Martha shifted in her chair and gave a tiny shake of her head. She, herself, would not do any of these things. She could see Mr. Atkins glance up at her movement, but when she neither spoke nor raised her eyes, he went back to his work. Better that way. This way. Better for a woman to see to her own satisfaction, as necessary, and to keep independent of men as far as she could.

  She lifted her sharpened slate-pencil to blow stray shavings off its tip. “Did you say you’d read studies recommending the uniformity of schoolroom supplies? I’m sure I should like to hear all you can tell of your reading.” Indeed, if her plan succeeded and she kept her position here, she could share ideas and opinions with him whenever she wished. She would have no cause at all to envy the curate’s wife, or, for that matter, any man’s wife.

  Chapter Four

  PEOPLE LIVE there?” Theo stared openly at the first of the cottages. “I’ve seen better pigpens.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” Mr. Granville said. “And I have every confidence you’ll take care not to repeat such a remark within earshot of those people who do, in fact, live here.”

  “Well, of course.” The admonition stung, then irked him. He’d never had the least intention of insulting the cottagers’ homes in their hearing.

  But the house and its grounds were appalling. He’d formed no precise expectation, having spared a thought for these buildings only when Granville spoke of them, but he’d had a vague idea, he supposed, of something pastoral, something like those tenant farms on the Lincolnshire estate. Tidy little yards, with ripe fields beyond. Robust children running about in plain but clean clothing. A fresh scent of grass and meadow flowers, perhaps, or, alternately, a whiff of some savory stew being readied for the family dinner.

  What he had not expected, first of all, were geese. Geese and their leavings. But the foul gray creatures ran rampant over what grass remained, and on passing through the gate, he was grateful for Mrs. Russell’s advice to change his Hessians for top boots. To pick his way from gate to house, avoiding all the geese’s evil handiwork, should have required a St. Vitus’s dance of sorts, entirely unsuitable for the tenants’ first glimpse of him. So he fixed his eyes straight ahead and stepped forward. One goose approached, stretched out its neck, and hissed at him, a distinctly triumphant look on its face.

  “This is the Weaver family,” said Mr. Granville.

  “Weaver,” he repeated, to show he was paying attention. “What sort of house is that? It looks as though it were made of mud.” That was charitable. Its walls suggested the dredged-up contents of a cesspit.

  “Nearly so, in part. The studs are wood, and between them is clay mixed with straw. Not as smart as stone or brick, perhaps, but durable enough. It’s stood for a hundred years and more. I expect it had some sort of whitewash at one time.”

  They were close enough now that he could hear a crying baby—the sound made each hair on the back of his neck stand up—and, as though the picture of squalor had needed any embellishment, a sizable pig came lurching round the corner of the house and made for the front door, with every appearance of expecting to accompany them inside.

  “Why do you suppose the pig is permitted in the yard?” he asked at a discreet volume, before Granville could knock on the door. “And the geese?”

  “This is all the land they have.” The man gave him a quizzical look. “These are hired laborers, mind, not tenant farmers such as you may have been accustomed to at Broughton Hall.”

  Ah. Laborers. Another fine point he’d missed. Still, one would think they could pen the geese.

  Granville knocked. The pig edged closer. Closer, too, came the sound of the crying baby as whoever was holding it approached the door. He took off his hat, and Granville did the same.

  “Mrs. Weaver, good day,” said the agent, a bit loudly to allow for the baby’s increased volume as the door opened. The pig heaved forward, but Theo blocked it with one boot. “May I present Mr. Mirkwood, the proprietor’s eldest son? I’m showing him round the estate today.” With surprising agility, the pig feinted left and then surged right. He just managed to get his boot in front of it again, prompting an indignant barrage of squeals and grunts to round out the general cacophony.

  “Come in, then,” said Mrs. Weaver. “Pleased to meet you, sir,” she added, without any perceptible effort to convince.

  Well, he was not particularly pleased to meet her, either. Her or her squalling baby or, for that matter, any one of the numerous children now to be perceived in the cottage’s dingy interior. They were probably worthy enough folk, after their fashion, but what had he to say to them? No more than he had to say to the pig, who now voiced its grievances from the other side of the closed door.

  Mr. Granville and Mrs. Weaver spoke of the weather and the recent harvest, leaving him to look about. It was a cottage of only one story, a large room in front and two doors on the back wall leading to whatever constituted the rest of the house. Sleeping-quarters, probably, for those Weavers who merited better than a pallet on the front-room floor, and then some sort of pantry or larder. The place could use a good cleaning, beginning with the kitchen table, on which sat the apparent remains of dinner along with a healthy visitation of houseflies. One would think some of the numerous children might trouble to clear the dishes.

  The children appeared to number ten altogether. A few girls, a few boys, and a few young ones of indeterminate gender in smocked dresses and unshorn curls, they disposed themselves listlessly about the pallets and other poor furnishings. One or two spared him a sullen glance. Largely he was ignored.

  Who could approve such children, with no visible capacity either for industry or for childish dissipation? Granted they lacked many of the advantages he’d enjoyed as a child, but a tidy house could boost their spirits prodigiously, and that, at least, was in their power. Someone ought to tell them so.

  A small one roused itself to cough several times, and sank back into lassitude on its pallet. Probably it was ill with something pestilent. Probably this whole room was rank with contagion. If he had been their parent, he should have insisted they go outdoors and breathe better air.

  Some movement in the corner caught his eye: one of the children was not quite idle. A round-faced girl, fifteen or so, sat in a chair with her head bent, her attention all absorbed by something in her lap. Needlework, perhaps? A diminutive pet? But no—she had a piece of gold paper and was folding it with great care and concentration. A favorite pastime of young girls, if his own sisters were anything to go by. So many hours they’d spent in this occupation, turning out the most marvelous things: swans, castles, ingenious little men with jointed limbs. They’d grown out of it, though,
by the time of reaching this girl’s years.

  As he watched, she folded the paper in half, lining up the corners. Then in half again. Then two times more, to make a small square with a thickness of sixteen sheets. She looked at it, turned it over, and unfolded it: to eighths, then quarters, then halves, then all the way out. The creases, he could see, were nearly worn through. She smoothed the paper in her lap and began to fold again, in just the same pattern, with the same force of attention.

  Some need of the baby’s drawing Mrs. Weaver away, he leaned near to Granville and spoke in an undertone. “The eldest girl is simple?”

  “Indeed,” his agent answered with a curt nod, managing to suggest quite plainly that the question would better have waited until they were gone from the house.

  So he said nothing more on the subject. The cottage looked different, though, now he knew it contained this sadness. By such an age his sisters had progressed to more intricate crafts—somewhere he had a box Mary had made for him, all pasted over with strips of paper rolled into pretty spirals—and progressed, too, to an interest in gowns, and the balls they should wear them to, and the eligible young men they should meet there. Of course no girl in this cottage was likely to attend balls, but the simpleminded daughter might have to remain here always, watching her younger sisters grow past her to contrive their own establishments.

  Those sisters who survived to adulthood, that was. He was obliged to make that emendation as the small smocked one fell into another coughing fit. What an arrogant fool he’d been to judge them. Probably half these children would never see sixteen.