Not Quite a Lady (The Dressmakers 4)

She wanted a firm hand, he thought, not for the first time.

“Speaking of those old times,” said Kenning as they entered the colonel’s bedroom, “I heard something.”

“Did you, indeed?”

Though Colonel Morrell did not keep a large staff, and most of those were in bed, Kenning closed the door. “I’ve been to the Axe and Cleaver,” he said.

This, the colonel knew, was a tavern in Altrincham Lower Town. Like most taverns, it offered gossip in abundance.

“To wet your whistle,” Colonel Morrell said with a thin smile.

“More to wet somebody else’s,” said Kenning. “A coachman what felt ill-used and needed a sympathetic ear.”

“Fewkes.”

The servant’s bald head bobbed up and down. “He got to talking, sir, as men will do when lubricated sufficient. He got to telling me how he’d served the family since a boy and knew things.”

“I daresay he does,” said his commander, “know things.”

Nothing more was said until he had donned his dressing gown and was settled in his favorite chair, his nightly glass of whiskey at his elbow.

Then, in a low voice—as though they stood in a tent and Napoleon’s spies might be listening outside—Kenning told his commander what the aggrieved coachman knew.

It was not much, the smallest dirty nugget of a clue. Still, as Colonel Morrell knew, sometimes small, dirty nuggets proved to contain solid gold.

Beechwood

Monday morning 1 July

On Sunday night, Darius had received a note from Lady Lithby. Her youngest, Stephen, was ill. She would return to her duties at Beechwood as soon as he recovered, which she did not expect to take long.

Though work in and on the house continued without her and Lady Charlotte, the atmosphere was not the same. Darius felt the difference, a constant awareness of something wrong. It took him a while to pinpoint it.

At first he thought he was simply out of sorts because of spending the morning in his study, attending to the stacks of bills and staring at the columns of figures in his ledgers, most of the figures being in the outgoing columns.

This did not satisfactorily account for the troubling change in atmosphere.

Being a man of uncommon intelligence, he did not require months, weeks, or even days to work out the answer.

He remembered what Lady Charlotte had said, on the evening he’d dined at Lithby Hall.

He has so much work to do, and a great deal on his mind. I should think he would want a refuge.

…after all, it is his house, and ought to be the way he likes it.

He remembered his brief vision of a beautiful someone making a refuge for him, a place of warmth and order, a place of his own where things were as he liked them to be.

He recalled the magic she’d wrought in his dairy and the advice she’d given him about bribing his grandmother with a fan. He remembered the last time they’d spoken, and his sense that a barrier between them had cracked. Listening to her then, he’d realized she was two people. One was the woman with whom he conversed so easily, the one who giggled and laughed as they stood at the edge of the marshy remnants of a fishpond, so careful not to touch each other. She was intelligent and perceptive. She had a naughty streak and a sense of humor.

This was the real Lady Charlotte.

The wrongness in the house was her absence.

He missed her.

“This is not good,” he muttered to himself. He stared at the columns of the ledger. “I cannot—”

“Bugger the little bastard!” came a shout from the corridor. “He’s bad luck! You keep that devil-eyed whoreson away from us, or I’ll tear a strip off his hide.”

Darius couldn’t hear Tyler’s answer and didn’t wait to hear it.

He went out into the passage. “What is this noise?” he said, in a precise imitation of his father. Like his father, he did not raise his voice. Like his father, he didn’t need to. No Carsington male ever had to raise his voice to obtain instant and undivided attention.

The two men looked at him.

“Well?” he said.

The noisy fellow, who turned out to be Jowett, the head carpenter, had the usual complaint. One of his men had dropped a hammer on his foot and broken a toe. Pip was at the other end of the house, but it was his fault.

Jowett refused to continue working while the boy remained on the property. He could not endanger his men, he said.

Darius was strongly tempted to tell the man to leave the property and never come back. A carpenter could be replaced easily. The trouble was, his replacement was all too likely to have the same irrational attitude about Pip.

Instead, Darius told him to go back to work. Then, feeling depressingly like his father, he summoned Tyler into the study.

The plasterer apologized for the disturbance. “I’ll have to get rid of the boy,” he said. “He were a mistake, like the missus says. Only ever brought bad luck to everyone he come near. He’s bad luck to me if no one’ll work near him.”

“I told you I don’t hold with superstition—or tormenting and persecuting children,” Darius said.

“Sir, I can’t stop folk from believing what they believe,” Tyler said.

That was true enough. Darius couldn’t stop them, either.

It was ignorance that bred prejudice and superstition, and ignorance was a good deal more intractable an ailment than it ought to be. It did not respond to facts or logic.

He would simply have to command.

“You may not get rid of the boy for the present,” he told Tyler. “Lord Lithby needs him to exercise the dog.”

“But sir—”

“I shall find other tasks for him,” Darius said. “Make sure the other workmen are aware that he is now in my charge.”

Exactly what he needed. Another responsibility, with complications attached. But he couldn’t abandon the lad.

He told Tyler to prepare an itemized account of what he’d spent on Pip since his articles of indenture were signed. Though the amount would probably be small, it was one more expense Darius could ill afford. Very possibly, legal issues might be involved as well, either with the articles of indenture or with the parish workhouse.

Since he knew nothing about workhouses and orphans and his brother Benedict knew everything, Darius would write to him.

To Tyler, meanwhile, Darius pretended to know precisely what he was about. He asked questions about Pip, and wrote the answers down in a businesslike way.

Name: Philip Ogden.

Place of birth: Yorkshire. Possibly the West Riding.

Date of birth: Tyler unable to remember. Believes boy is age eleven “or thereabouts.”

Mother: Unknown.

Father: Unknown.

Note: Both believed to be highborn.

“Leastways, that’s what everyone said, on account of how it was a parson and his wife who adopted him,” Tyler explained.

Clergyman and wife, last name Ogden, of Sheffield, Yorkshire, died “about four years ago” (1818?)

Second adoptive “father”: Samuel Welton, widowed clergyman of Salford, Lancashire, and cousin of Mrs. Ogden. Died December 1820.

Philip Ogden given into the care of Salford parish workhouse in late 1820 or early 1821.

Indentured to Tyler in May 1821.

A short, unhappy history. Darius found no comfort in knowing that the majority of illegitimate children endured worse.

He thought matters over after Tyler left and decided he’d better visit the Salford workhouse. He wanted to make sure he’d encounter no bureaucratic obstacles to breaking the indenture, and to fill in any other missing details he could.

But first he called in Pip and told him he would not be continuing in Tyler’s employ.

The boy looked as though he’d been struck. Something in his expression nagged at Darius’s mind, but he hadn’t time to ponder it. The lad was blinking hard, trying not to cry.

“Come, come,” Darius said bracingl

y. “I promised I would find a place for you, and I shall. For the present, we’ll see Purchase at the home farm and find out how you can best be of use to him.”

Pip nodded, but the look of utter misery remained.

Feeling unwanted and unloved was not the most agreeable sensation. Being abandoned repeatedly, though it was fate rather than the boy’s doing, could not be pleasant, either.