A Notorious Countess Confesses (PG7) (15 page)

It nearly broke Evie’s heart.

She drew herself up, and announced, “I am the Countess of Wareham, and word has reached me that this particular crew needs a leader. And how old are you, Katharine?” she kept her voice crisp. Though she yearned to reach out a hand, touch her bony shoulder.

“I am eight years old.”

“Splendid. Just the right age for a captain. It’s a good deal of responsibility, mind you. One must be very clever and brave and very much enjoy giving orders.”

“I am,” she declared, drawing herself up. “I do!” This was delivered with relish.

Very good. Pride and arrogance had their dangers, but were often so much better than diffidence when it came to surviving in the long run.

“As I am a countess, you will show me your curtsy, Katharine, and you young men—bow to me now!”

To her amazement, the ones who weren’t tied up hopped down from the settee and bowed. And the girls curtsied. It was all a game to them now, and she needed to continue to make it feel that way.

“That will do for now,” she said haughtily. “Though you all need practice. Remain standing, please.”

“Listen, Captain Katharine.” She knelt next to her. “This”— she lifted the St. Christopher’s medal up from her bodice and pulled it over her head—“is the captain’s medal.” She looped it around Katharine’s neck. “It will give you luck and help keep you safe if you hold it and pray, and it’s a mark of authority. Don’t allow it ever to leave you. Do you promise me? Do I have your solemn vow?”

Captain Katharine nodded, enthralled by the beautiful clean lady and the sudden gift of jewelry.

Evie stood again “Now, the captain’s job is to rally the troops to make and to make sure the ship is fit for sail and protected against pirates and marauders at all times, as well as to protect the babies in your care. The HMS O’Flaherty must be spotless, mind you. From floor to ceiling. And so must the proud mates who sail her. How else will you properly serve your liege mother? For she is your commander, and you sail at her pleasure.”

She gestured to Mary O’Flaherty, who had taken a seat in a rocking chair, clutching the baby, watching all of this with dazed wonder. She shot a wry glance at Evie when she learned of her promotion to queen. But even the baby and toddler had gone silent, marveling at the brightly colored madwoman who’d burst into their house and begun bellowing and gesturing.

“Now I shall appoint the ship’s officers and assign duties. But it will be up to you and your queen to make sure they’re done well and done often. First: Untie your brother at once! You are a crew now, and you will look after each other and protect each other, not tie each other up. And for your first command as a crew: Fetch me pails of water, boys!”

WHEN ADAM ARRIVED at the O’Flaherty house an hour later with a wagon of lumber and a few volunteers, he saw Miss Pitney, Miss Charing, and Mrs. Sneath arrayed outside the fence, staring with trepidation at the house.

He stuffed the jar of honey he’d brought into his coat pocket and swung down from the wagon. When he landed, the toe of his boot sent something rolling, and he paused to look down.

It appeared to be a tea cake.

A second look told him that there were, in fact, three tea cakes on the ground.

“Good afternoon, ladies. What are we all looking at today?”

“Good afternoon, Reverend. She hasn’t yet come out.”

He wondered why the two young ladies, both of whom usually tripped over themselves to greet him, refused to meet his eyes. They seemed unusually aloof.

“You sent Lady Wareham in on her own? Did you leave her alone here?”

They didn’t answer this though there was a good deal of foot shifting and hand-wringing and eye darting. So: Yes, they had. He stifled a surge of anger.

Miss Amy Pitney said, “It’s just that the screaming seems to have stopped, and it’s gotten very quiet. It’s unnerving.”

“Has anyone at all come out at all? And how did these”— he prodded a tea cake with his toe—“get here?”

“Well, two little boys did come out of the house carrying a pail. But they screamed “Pirates!” when they saw us and fired the tea cakes at us. One of them struck Amy in the side of the head.”

“The largest target,” whispered Josephine.

Amy rounded on her.

Mrs. Sneath. “We decided a tactical retreat might be best, and we were reassessing how we might approach safely.”

But Adam had stopped listening. He scrambled for the house at a run, scattering the chickens and exciting the dog, who woke up from her nap beneath the tree and ran alongside him happily.

He paused outside the ajar door and listened, and heard … nothing at all.

For a moment, a vision of horror visited him: He imagined the room littered with unconscious bodies, a result of a teacake battle.

He nudged it cautiously open a foot more.

And blinked in shock.

The windows were flung open; the room was filled with light, and air circulated friskily. The faded rug had clearly been taken out, beaten within an inch of its life, and straightened nicely, the dishes had been collected and scrubbed and stacked, the hearth had been swept, the furniture righted, and the youngest girl was wielding a broom in the other part of the room, sending up luxurious clouds of dust.

One of the boys was scrubbing at the walls with a rag, making inroads into the gray layers of smoke, another was hard at work on a window, and the oldest girl, Katharine, was wearing an apron and stirring something that smelled almost appetizing simmering on woodstove.

Every last one of them appeared to be tiptoeing as they went about it, and not one of them so much as hummed. And yet the humming sound persisted. Mrs. O’Flaherty was also asleep in her chair, mouth wide open, snoring softly, but that wasn’t it; the toddler was asleep in his mother’s lap, thumb inserted into his mouth.

It wasn’t until he was deeper into the room that he saw Eve: she was standing near the window wearing a paper admiral’s hat. She appeared to have rag of some sort pinned around her dress, a makeshift apron, and she was holding the baby in the crook of one arm.

She was rocking and crooning softly,

“Oh, if you thought you’d never see

The end of Colin Eversea

Well, come along with me, lads, come along with me …”

A versatile song, that one, he had to admit.

She looked as though she’d been hard at work all morning, too: flushed and shiny-faced, and her hair was coming out of its pins. She sported what appeared to be two enormous muddy paw prints on each shoulder, like epaulets.

He froze. And drank in the sight.

Something about his motionlessness in a room humming with quiet activity alerted her. She glanced up and saw him. Something flared swift and hot in her eyes—a reaction, he suspected, to what she might have seen in his.

She ducked her head abruptly and seemed to lose her place in the song, and the rhythm of the baby rocking stalled. The baby stirred and fussed a bit, and she cooed and began again.

Then she glanced up again and smiled and held a finger to her lips and winked.

And resumed the “Lullaby of Colin Eversea.”

The pretty lad was mighty bad …

The baby yawned and waved a fist about, like a cheer.

Adam could have, in fact, stood there all day watching her, listening to the wildly inappropriate lullaby.

He liked her voice, too.

Alas, one of the little boys spotted him. He froze midscrub. And then bellowed:

“A marauder, Captain Kate!” he lunged for the tea cakes, levering his arm back. “We must protect the HMS O’Flaherty!”

“Put that down, Cedric,” Eve said sternly, still on a hush. “He’s the vicar, and you know it, and you will show him the same respect you show me.”

“Which means you should bow to him,” the oldest girl said, and glanced to Evie, enjoying her authority.

“Very good, Captain Kate. That’s exactly what it means. Show him how beautifully you bow.”

Cedric bowed, and Katharine curtsied, and all the other children bobbed and bent, too.

Adam was agog. He approached Evie gingerly, hating to disturb the harmony she’d achieved. He peered down into her arms with something like trepidation.

“It’s a baby, Vicar. They’re not too frightening once you get accustomed to them.”

He looked up at her. “I know about babies,” he said evenly.

She tipped her head curiously at his tone, narrowing her eyes a bit. Then returned them to the baby.

“Lady Wareheam … How did you … ?” He gestured widely. He meant everything that had happened in the O’Flaherty house today.

She half smiled. Her eyes remained on the baby. “Well, in Killarney, there were eight of us in one room. One needed to compete for everything, you see, from food to a word from our da to a place in the bed where your brother’s foot wouldn’t go up your nose, because Seamus did like to sleep backward. I was the oldest, you see. I learned how to get what I needed when I needed it. And then I needed to mind the rest of them later on when …”

“Mind them?” He kept the question soft. Noncommittal. But his heart was beating strangely faster. As if he were reaching the end of the route drawn by a treasure map.

“Someone needed to, didn’t they, when my parents were gone?” Almost absently, driftingly said. She kept her voice lulling, singsong, for the baby.

He asked a question he was almost certain he knew the answer to.

“Do you look after them still?”

It might have been one question too many. For a time, he thought she wouldn’t answer. Her face had darkened a little.

But then she slowly lifted her head. And fixed him with an unreadable gaze. A hint of defiance in it. He noted that what looked like a child’s smudged fingerprint now mingled with her freckles.

“Of course,” she said softly. “Will I let them go hungry now?”

Their gazes fused.

And now he understood the source of the vulnerability that peeked through the gloss of her exterior: It was her family. For when one loved, one was vulnerable.

“Of course not,” he agreed softly.

She returned her eyes to the baby, and her face softened with something like yearning, an ache, and he stood and drank in that expression the way flowers take in sun it. He wanted to ask more questions, and more, and more. But everything about her posture now, her closed face, forbade it.

He risked a look at the baby then. It was terrifyingly miniature, the baby, such a fragile thing to be surrounded by the chaos of this room. He knew all too well what a dangerous place the world could be for a new human. It gazed up at him in dazed wonderment, then furrowed its tiny brow, an expression he’d seen more than once on the faces of parishioners come a Sunday morning.

It was then they realized that Mrs. O’Flaherty had stirred from her chair and come to join them, smiling down at the baby.

“Go on and hold him, Reverend Sylvaine,” she said gently.

Adam froze.

Evie looked up at Mrs. O’Flaherty, surprised.

“Go on,” Mary insisted gently.

Adam exhaled and nodded shortly, like a man bracing himself for a surgeon’s stitches.

So the countess gently transferred a warm, squirmy bundle into his arms.

Adam slowed his breath, as if he could slow time for the little one. He looked down fiercely into the tiny face. As if the weight of his solemnity, of his sheer desire to keep him safe would shelter and protect him. Just to be certain, he silent prayed for precisely that as he stood there, with the baby fitted warmly in his arms.

He was aware of Eve watching him. Clearly bemused. The faint, puzzled frown not unlike the baby’s.

He inhaled deeply and exhaled a long breath, then gingerly gave the baby back to Mrs. O’Flaherty.

“He’s wonderful, Mrs. O’Flaherty. Thank you. Congratulations,” he said gently. “I’ll see him for the christening?”

Adam turned around and walked out of the door, past all the preternaturally industrious O’Flaherty children.

Eve stared after him and frowned a little.

“Men can be so funny,” she laughed softly. “Frightened of such a tiny thing.”

“Oh, I don’t think that’s it, Lady Wareham.” Mary shifted the baby to fit more comfortably in her arms as the toddler wobbled over to tug on Eve’s skirts. “I don’t think much frightens that man. It’s just that I lost a baby last year at his age. He was very frail, the little one, and I knew he wouldn’t be long for the world. He died right in our reverend’s arms, took his last wee breath, as the reverend gave him the last rites.”

Eve’s breath snagged. That fierce expression on his face as he looked down at the baby … as though he was daring Harm to ever reach out its evil bony fingers for that child. For it would need to answer to him.

Shame heated her face. They’re my people, Lady Balmain. Fiercely possessive, protective, unyielding. A man who would likely do nearly anything for those he loved.

So … strangely like her.

Just a vicar. And with those words she’d tried to reduce him to something manageable, maneuverable, understandable. She’d given no thought as to what the word truly meant. Or why his control was so necessary: It was in proportion to how much he felt and how much he needed to give day after day.

And once again, she felt like a flailing child, humbled and abashed.

How temptingly easy it was to imagine him as a father to a baby.

“Oh, Mary.” Her voice cracked a little, faltered. “I’m so sorry. I do know what it’s like … when I was young, you see, I’ve lost brothers and sisters …”

It was a perilous world for babies, especially when they grew up in cottages like this one. It was an inescapable fact of life.

Mrs. O’Flaherty nodded stoic acknowledgment. “I was so glad of him, Reverend Sylvaine. He was just lately come here to Pennyroyal Green, and new as a vicar, but never did I see any man so gentle. And so kind to me and mine in my suffering; somehow he made everything easier. But no one is untouched by the death of a little one. I wanted him to hold the new baby. To feel the new life after such a sad loss. There’s always hope, aye?”

Such wisdom and generosity in the midst of chaos and fear. Eve couldn’t speak through a tide of emotion.

“Aye,” she agreed, finally, softly.