Winterberry Fire

by Merry Farmer

  “Cleverly,” Mary answered.

  They both turned to the parlor’s doorway as Tad, one of the younger footmen, walked in. He headed for the pile of curtains.

  “And I’ve just discovered another wedge to drive between them,” Mary said. She handed Martha her rag and swayed across the room to Tad. “So, Taddy-boy, have you heard about the Valentine’s Day dance coming up next week?”

  Tad blinked and straightened from gathering curtains. He was tall, as most footmen were, and handsome enough, but instead of that light of intelligence that Mr. Turnbridge had, Tad was like a house with nobody home.

  “Dance?” He blinked. “There’s a dance?”

  “Indeed. Next week. At the town hall. It’s a sweetheart’s dance.” Mary sidled closer to him. “Are you going to invite your sweetheart?”

  “Uh, I haven’t got a sweetheart,” Tad said.

  “Sure you do.” Mary’s smile widened. “Ada Bell.”

  Tad blinked. Then he blinked again. “Ada’s not my sweetheart.”

  “But you’re sweet on her, aren’t you?”

  Tad shifted. “Am I?”

  “Of course you are. Ada is pretty and…sweet.” She batted her eyelashes over the ridiculous lie. “And she’s awfully sweet on you.”

  Tad grinned, pink splashing across his face. “Is she?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Footsteps sounded in the hall, and they both turned to look. Ada was returning from wherever she’d gone after Mr. Noakes had told her off. She paused when she saw Mary and Tad looking at her. Tad broke into a huge, dopey grin. Ada smiled politely back at him and continued into the parlor. Mary raised a hand to her mouth to hide her mischievous grin.

  “See?” she whispered to Tad as soon as Ada was back to taking down curtains. “She’s completely besotted with you.”

  “Is she?” Tad watched Ada, who, admittedly, did have a dreamy look about her. Tad didn’t have to know that look was most likely for the schoolteacher. “Maybe she is,” he said, smiling even wider.

  Mary leaned closer to him. “I think you should go after her.”

  “After her?”

  Inwardly, Mary wanted to roll her eyes. She was afraid she’d have to beat the lout over the head to get what she wanted from him. “Pursue her,” she whispered on. “Woo her. Make love to her.”

  Tad’s eyes popped wide. “I don’t know about that.”

  “Why not? I’m sure it’s what she wants. Can’t you see it?”

  The two of them glanced in Ada’s direction. She was grinning and humming to herself, but as soon as she noticed she was being watched, she snapped to attention. Luckily, she sent Tad a smile.

  “See,” Mary whispered. “Go after her, man. Fortune favors the brave.”

  “Why, I think I might,” Tad said.

  “Here, you ready with these?” Ben, the head footman, walked into the room, drawing Tad’s attention back to the curtains.

  “Yes, sir,” Tad said, jumping to help Ben gather the curtains up.

  Mary let him go, grinning as she went back to work. She’d planted the seed, and all that was left now was to watch it grow. That and put her own part of her plan into motion.

  Chapter 2

  The schoolroom was chaos. As usual. Tim waded through a small sea of crumpled bits of paper that some of the younger boys had been throwing at each other in a mock snowball fight to make his way to the chalkboard.

  “So if Y equals ten in this algebraic equation,” he said in a loud enough voice to be heard over the cluster of older girls chattering on one side of the room, “what is the value of X?”

  “Sir, aren’t letters for reading and numbers for maths?” seven-year-old Ursula Marks said from her desk near the front of the room. Only once Tim turned to her did she remember to raise her hand.

  “Yes, Ursula. Letters are for reading, but sometimes they’re used in maths too,” Tim answered her.

  A paper snowball came sailing out of nowhere and hit him in the side of the head. He flinched, then turned to see three boys scrambling for the back of the single, large room, laughing uproariously.

  “You there,” Tim called after them. “Don’t think I didn’t see that, Digby, Kettering, and Potts.”

  “Sorry, sir,” Davy Potts called from the safe haven of the back of the room. “I was aimin’ for Petunia.”

  Davy’s older sister, Petunia, broke away from the gossipy conversation she was having with her friends to gasp and shout, “Why, I never! You come here, you little punter.”

  Petunia jumped up from her seat and raced to the back of the room, where she grabbed Davy by the hair and started kicking him.

  “Stop that, Petunia.” Tim sighed, marching down the center aisle that was supposed to divide the girls’ desks from the boys’.

  “But sir.” George Floss tried to stop him, a desperate look on his face. Tim paused. “Algebra?” George appealed to him. “Only, me entrance exams for university is this spring.”

  Two other, older boys nodded along with him. Tim glanced to the Pottses beating on each other, to the group of boys who had resumed their snowball fight, and to the older girls, who were now whispering behind their hands and staring at him with starry eyes, then back to the only three pupils in his entire class whom he thought might actually gain some sort of use from higher learning.

  He sighed. “It’s nearly three o’clock anyhow. Class dismissed,” he shouted over the din. He turned back to George and his friends as even more chaos erupted. “You can stay behind, and I’ll tutor you directly.”

  The older boys looked relieved, but young Ursula got up from her desk with a pout. “I still don’t understand why letters are in maths,” she said, approaching Tim with her schoolbooks clutched to her chest.

  “Well,” Tim began, crouching to her eye-level, “some maths are very complicated indeed. They help people who build buildings and ships and carriages. They help people who study the stars and those who heal men and women and children like yourself.”

  “But why not keep letters for reading and numbers for maths? Why do both?” Ursula blinked, her blue eyes round, her braids hanging in twin strands over her shoulders. “And besides,” she went on, “everyone can see that X is 12.”

  Tim’s jaw dropped. He glanced over Ursula’s shoulder to the chalkboard, then to the older boys, who were frowning furiously over their slates as they worked out the problem. “How did you figure that?” he asked, nonplussed.

  Ursula shrugged. “I just saw it.” She grinned from ear to ear. “Can I go now, sir?”

  Tim stood slowly, shaking his head and laughing. He rested his hand on Ursula’s head for a moment, then said, “Yes, Ursula, you may go.” As the amazing girl skipped down the aisle to the back of the quickly-emptying schoolroom, he ran a hand through his hair. There went the future, provided Ursula’s parents didn’t yank her out of school to work in someone’s scullery, or to marry barely out of the schoolroom and start producing babies of her own whose potential would be wasted.

  He shook his head and continued back up the aisle to his desk and the boys who would be testing for university soon. The older, gossiping girls still clustered on their side of the aisle, sending him occasional looks. He let them loiter after classes, so their presence wasn’t unusual.

  “Did any of you give Ursula Marks the answer to the equation?” he asked.

  “No, sir,” all three of them answered.

  He could see they were telling the truth. Tim shook his head. It was a crying shame how much potential was wasted by the assumption that girls and women weren’t capable of the same intelligence as men. Time and time again in his days as a teacher he’d seen girls excel, only to be cut off and pushed into domestic life.

  Those thoughts skipped straight on to Ada Bell. He paused to take a deep breath as her lovely visage came to mind. Ada had approached him two years ago, asking to be taught to read. She’d never been to school. Her family had shunted her straight into service as soon as she could hold a br
oom. But Ada had turned out to be bright and lively, not to mention eager to learn. Tutoring her had been a joy. More than a joy. It had taken every ounce of concentration he had not to reach across the desk to take her hand and kiss it, to kiss her all over.

  “Sir?” George asked. “Is the answer twelve?”

  Tim shook himself out of his thoughts, blushing like mad. “Yes, it is. Good job, Floss.” He continued on to his desk, wishing it was one of Ada’s lesson days. “Since time is running short, I have a list of algebraic problems here for you to work on at home. You can copy them to your slates, then you’re dismissed.”

  He brought the list to the row of desks where George sat, then returned to his desk, sitting on the edge. A breath escaped his lungs as a weary sigh. He rubbed a hand over his face. Starting a school had seemed like such a good idea. He’d known from an early age he would be on his own when it came to making a living. His father might have been a baron, but as the ninth of twelve children, he wasn’t even close to inheriting the title, and what little money the family had was stretched paper-thin. He’d been fated to take a step down in the world from the moment he was born.

  He wasn’t unhappy with his fate, not really. He loved teaching, loved children. He was used to the chaos of child mobs, having grown up in one. Perhaps he should embrace this life fully and completely. Perhaps it was time for him to marry and start a family of his own. Ada would make the perfect wife. She was beautiful, intelligent, and hard-working.

  A grin broke out on his face as he thought of her, his gaze settling on the group of older girls, still chattering. Ada was so unlike them. He hadn’t seen her engaging in idle gossip once in all the time he’d known her. Ada was industrious. One would have to be to learn to read as an adult. She was strong and brave. He would be proud to have her standing beside him in life. And he wasn’t prudish enough to shy away from the idea of her lying under him as well. The way her eyes sparkled when she looked at him, the way she bit her lip just so while figuring out a difficult passage of prose, the way she stayed late to talk to him about any old thing…he was sure she would be fiery in bed.

  “Sir?”

  Tim cleared his throat, pushing himself to his feet, heat flooding his face. “Yes, Alice?”

  Alice Jones glanced to her friends, then stood to address Tim. “Are you quite all right, sir?”

  “Yes, I’m fine.” Though he dreaded to think what kind of expression he’d been wearing as he dreamed of Ada.

  Alice took a tentative step forward. “Only, it was rather a scene in here today.”

  A different kind of embarrassment flooded Tim. “Yes, well, it comes with a high enrollment.”

  “I was thinking,” Alice continued, lowering her head slightly and glancing up at him through her lashes. “I’ll be graduating in the spring. I’m almost seventeen, sir. I could…I could help you.”

  Tim blinked. “You could?”

  Alice glanced back to her friends, who grinned and blushed in typically girlish fashion, nodding and egging her on. She returned her look to Tim. “You need another teacher, sir. One to instruct the younger children while you teach the older ones.” Her breath caught on the end of her sentence, and a flush painted her young face.

  Tim tilted his head to the side. “Yes, I suppose that would be precisely what I needed.”

  And Ada would fit the bill perfectly. If he could convince her to leave her position at Winterberry Park. Working for Mr. Alexander Croydon was considered something of a coup among ambitious young women in service. Ada had been raised to her position of upstairs maid from the kitchen. She might not want to give up a reliable income to be the second teacher at a ramshackle school run by a man who didn’t fit with the upper classes or with the lower. But perhaps with an offer of marriage thrown in to sweeten the deal….

  “Thank you, Alice,” he said with a warm smile. “I think that’s an excellent suggestion.”

  He turned to walk around his desk to sit, and to his surprise, Alice followed him. Her eyes glowed as though he’d handed her an award instead of simply approving of her idea to hire a second teacher.

  “Do you think so?” she asked, clutching her hands to her chest.

  “I do.” Tim smiled and nodded, then searched for blank paper on his desk.

  “I do,” Alice repeated, her voice soft and wispy. “That sounds wonderful.”

  Tim’s brow pinched in momentary confusion, but he ignored it, looking for something to jot down a note.

  “Sir,” Alice began again, hesitant.

  “Yes?” Tim glanced to her.

  She bit her lip, cheeks bright pink. “Did you know there’s going to be a Valentine’s Day dance next week?”

  Tim paused. “I suppose I did, but I’d forgotten.” He went back to searching his desk.

  Alice leaned forward, resting her hands on the desk’s edge. “I think it would be splendid if you invited your new teacher to attend with you.”

  “Oh.” He paused to think about it. The image of Ada, dressed in her best gown, flowers in her hair, holding his arm as they walked into the town hall, warmed him from the inside out. It was a good thing he was sitting at the desk, because his imagination slowly changed the dress she was wearing to something far more scandalous, then to nothing at all. “That might be a good idea,” he said, his voice hoarse and distant.

  “Do you think so?” Alice blinked, seeming far more surprised and delighted than Tim thought his comment warranted. “Oh, that’s lovely.” She glanced over her shoulder to her friends, who were giggling up a storm.

  Tim spared them all a brief, flummoxed look, before adjusting his posture so that he could lean back in his chair without offending Alice with his body’s reaction to his imagination. But no sooner did he start to imagine Ada’s expression when he marched up to Winterberry Park to invite her to the dance than his spirits sank. He’d been chased away from Winterberry Park the other day when he’d gone to ask a simple question about Master James. Mr. Noakes had made it clear that he was not to interfere with the servants’ work. So if he was going to ask Ada, he’d either have to wait until Sunday and hope to catch her after services—which wasn’t ideal, as it gave any other man the chance to move in and invite her first—or he’d have to find a much more clever way to ask.

  “What’s the best way to ask a woman to a dance if you are unable to ask her directly?” he asked aloud.

  Alice sucked in a breath, beaming from ear to ear. “Yes, I suppose there would be reasons one couldn’t ask outright. Certain, shall we say, paternal figures who wouldn’t appreciate it.”

  Tim would never have thought of Mr. Noakes as paternal, but he certainly was in that sort of position with the staff of Winterberry Park.

  “A secret letter, sir,” Alice went on, leaning against the desk. “A romantical, secret letter. Written as a poem. Something beautiful and…and clandestine.” She clasped her hands to her chest and sighed.

  Tim arched an eyebrow. “Romantical and clandestine, eh?”

  “Yes, sir.” Alice blinked rapidly. “It would be ever so appreciated.”

  “Right.” He nodded and went back to searching for a blank sheet of paper amidst the turmoil on his desk. “Thank you, Alice. You’ve been a great help to me.”

  “I would do anything for you, sir,” Alice said, high and breathy, before turning and scurrying back to her friends.

  Tim gave her an odd look, but whatever was wrong with Alice was quickly forgotten as he located a blank piece of paper. He pulled it toward him, then reached for a fountain pen in the cup at the corner of his desk. He tested the ink, then held the pen over the paper as Alice and her friends, then George and his, gathered their things and left, leaving Tim alone in the schoolroom.

  He wasn’t much for poetry. Words just didn’t come together for him that way. He debated copying some of the great lines of Shakespeare or Byron, but that didn’t seem right either. In the end, the only thing he could think of to make the letter romantical and clandestine was to be clev
er with names.

  “‘My dearest A—,’” he began. “‘I have admired you from afar for these many years. You are the sun to my horizon, the ink to my pen.’” He paused with a smirk, staring at his pen. Apparently, original imagery wasn’t his forte. “‘Please say you’ll come to the Valentine’s Day dance with me. Perhaps that will be the dawn of a new understanding between us. Yours affectionately, T—.’”

  As far as missives went, it wasn’t brilliant. But as long as it did its job, he didn’t care. He folded the letter, then tucked it into his pocket as he stood. He marched to the back of the schoolroom, plucking his winter coat and hat from the peg where he kept them alongside those of his students. He was careful to lock the schoolhouse door as he left. His living quarters were above the schoolroom, after all, and accessed through the same door.

  The walk to Winterberry Park was a cheery one. The weather continued to be unseasonably warm and sunny, something about which Tim had no intention of complaining. He had to be careful once he crossed over onto Winterberry Park grounds, though. If Mr. Noakes spotted him, it would all be over before it began. What he really needed was someone to deliver the note to Ada for him.

  He waited, pacing around the edge of the garden, for nearly half an hour before a likely candidate came into view. At last, one of the footman strode up the lane behind him, whistling, a packet of what looked like other mail in his hands. Tim couldn’t have asked for anything more perfect.

  “Excuse me. Hello there.” He stepped away from the shrub where he’d been waiting to intercept the footman. The young man started and blinked at him. “I have a favor to ask,” Tim went on. He held up his note for Ada. “Would you be so kind as to deliver this to Miss Ada Bell for me?”

  The footman smiled and took the letter. “For Ada?”

  “Yes.” Tim nodded. “And, if you don’t mind, I’d like a reply.”

  “A reply?”

  Tim wondered just how bright the man was. “If you don’t mind. Could you tell her that I’ll wait here for her answer?”