Drops of Gold (10 page)

Layton looked back at Caroline. She was definitely feverish but not restless. She seemed to be resting relatively well. “Children get fevers, Layton,” Mater had said once when he’d fretted over a brief illness of Caroline’s. “Rest and water. That’s what she needs.”

He leaned closer to his daughter. “Caroline?” he whispered. Her eyes opened perhaps a quarter of an inch. “Have some water, dear. It will help you feel better.”

Miss Wood pressed a glass of water into Layton’s hand in the very next moment, as if anticipating the request he had been about to make. He managed to get two mouthfuls of water past Caroline’s lips before she drifted to sleep again.

Miss Wood pressed the cool, wet cloth to Caroline’s forehead, and they both watched her sleep for several long minutes without a word between them. Layton had grown so accustomed to a chipper, chatty Miss Wood that her pensive silence unnerved him.

“If she does not seem better by morning, I will send for the doctor,” Layton said, attempting to reassure her.

Miss Wood looked across the bed at him, and to Layton’s surprise, tears coursed down her cheeks. “I didn’t know what to do.” She sobbed and buried her face in the damp cloth she held in her hands.

Layton kissed Caroline’s hand, slipped it under her blanket, and walked around to where Miss Wood sat crying on the edge of his daughter’s bed. Her concern for his daughter seemed to surpass even his own. He couldn’t imagine a mother being more distraught over an illness afflicting her own child. Caroline’s own mother hadn’t shown so much concern for her.

“Miss Wood.” He laid his hand softly on her shoulder. That same tingle he’d felt when he’d touched her down at the river coursed through him again. “Caroline will be fine, I assure you. The fever will most certainly pass.”

“I could never forgive myself if anything were to happen to her.” She pulled just far enough away from the cloth for her words to be distinguishable. “To be so useless again.”

Her voice broke on the last word. Her anguish was almost palpable. Layton closed his eyes for a moment, trying to block it out, being too strongly reminded of another time when the house had been filled with heart-wrenching sobs. He’d been such a failure then. The memory froze him to his core.

Miss Wood continued to cry. He couldn’t bear it. Layton shifted his hand from her shoulder to her chin, tilting her face so he could see her. She tried to smile through her tears. With a jolt, he realized he was well on his way to falling helplessly in love with her, this ball of energy and chaos that ran rampant through his house and encouraged his daughter to steal cake and laugh. His heart wrenched to see her crying.

“What did you mean?” he asked. “‘Useless again’?”

And her smile slipped away completely. “My mother . . .” She took a deep, shuddering breath. “She had a f-f-fever . . .”

A surge of sympathy swept through him.

“I tried so hard to help her, but I didn’t know what to do!”

Layton wasn’t sure how it happened, but the next moment, he was holding Miss Wood in his arms, rubbing her back and whispering what he hoped were soothing words. He expected her to pull away—Bridget always had when he’d tried to comfort her; she’d rejected even her husband’s support. But Miss Wood remained, leaning her head against him, her tears soaking through the fine linen of his shirt.

So he held her more tightly, listening to her breathing slowly steady as his heart began to thud more erratically. He couldn’t bear to hear her cry any longer. No woman should cry that way.

“I was ten years old,” she said from against his chest. “I was so frightened.”

“You were only a child. What could you possibly have done?”

“Oh, I know, I know.” She pulled back and out of his arms, dabbing at her eyes with the cuff of her dressing robe.

Layton instinctively reached for a handkerchief in the pocket of the jacket he was not wearing. She smiled. “Sorry.” He smiled back. “I gave my last square of linen to a precocious young lady who hasn’t yet returned it to me.”

“The little scamp.” Miss Wood managed the slightest laugh, wiping another tear with her cuff. She took a deep breath and seemed to compose herself. “I realize now, looking back, that I couldn’t have done anything for my mother, but . . .” Her words trailed off.

He wanted to reach out, to wipe that last tear from her face. He didn’t, of course. That would be decidedly improper and, more likely than not, unwanted on her part.

Caroline moaned in the bed beside them. Miss Wood moved as quickly as he, lightly touching the back of her hand to Caroline’s forehead.

“Still warm, sir, but not worse.”

“‘Watchful waiting.’ That’s what Mater would say,” Layton said.

“Mater?”

“My mother,” Layton explained. “We’ve always called her that.”

Miss Wood smiled up at him, but the smile looked a little forced. He pulled the chair he’d occupied a few minutes earlier around to her side of the bed, beside the one already situated there. “Please sit, Miss Wood.”

After tucking the blankets more closely around Caroline’s shoulders, she did.

“Will you allow me to tell you a story?” He could hardly believe himself.

“Do you know stories, sir?” Some of her characteristic playfulness returned to her voice.

“Oh, I have a few.” He tried to match her tone and succeeded to a degree.

“I love stories.” A look of encouragement entered her chocolate-brown eyes.

“Once upon a time,” Layton said with a self-deprecating smile. “Isn’t that how I’m supposed to begin?”

She smiled back. “It’s your story. Tell it however you choose.”

“It’s not that kind of story, anyway.”

“You mean it is a ‘positively true’ story?” Miss Wood asked with an ironic raise of her auburn eyebrows. “Even that kind can be told with a ‘once upon a time’ beginning, you know.”

“Are all of yours true, then?” He had wondered about that. The family in her stories seemed quite real.

“I have always said they were” was all the explanation Miss Wood offered.

“Hmm.” He watched her for a moment, half expecting her to elaborate further, but she didn’t. “I was away at school when my father died.” It was an abrupt beginning, he knew. Layton had never considered himself a storyteller. “I was eighteen, which is, I grant you, older than ten but still far too young to lose a parent.”

Miss Wood offered an empathetic smile, her eyes never leaving his face. Gads, had he ever talked to anyone about those days after Father died? He didn’t think he had.

“All the way home, I kept asking myself over and over, what could have been done, what might I have done differently to prevent his death.” The weight of that misplaced guilt sat heavily on him again.

“But you weren’t even there when your father died.”

“And
you
were only ten years old when
your
mother died, but that didn’t keep you from taking the responsibility of it on your shoulders,” Layton pointed out.

She winced ever so slightly, his words obviously hitting home. “That is true enough.”

“Seeing the whole family in blacks and Mater teary eyed made it that much worse,” Layton continued. Miss Wood nodded, obviously remembering a similar experience after her mother’s passing. “I spent weeks, months, to a lesser degree years, going over every encounter I’d had with my father before he died, wondering if I could have—should have—seen symptoms or some indication that he was ill.”

“Did you find any?” Miss Wood asked quietly.

“Of course. The signs were there, and after the fact, the puzzle was not difficult to piece together.”

“Just like looking back now, I can see how very ill my mother truly was.” Miss Wood nodded as she spoke. “At the time, it was not so obvious.”

Layton instinctively took her hand. “Perhaps the grave nature of her illness escaped you because you were little more than a child. You were so very young, Miss Wood.”

She sighed, her eyes focused off in the distance. “I didn’t think so at the time.”

“How many of us do?” Layton could remember feeling quite grown-up and invincible at ten. “Tell me, Miss Wood, was your mother’s care left entirely in your hands? Was there no one else to tend her?”

She nodded wearily. “Until that last night. My father left to fetch my brother home.” A look of contemplation crossed her features. “In retrospect, that should have been another clue, I suppose. Father thought her condition serious enough to warrant bringing Robert home from Harrow.”

Harrow
? Layton wondered momentarily. A family of some means, then.

“He told me to care for Mother. That he’d be back soon.”

“Did he return in time?” A familiar dread clung to his heart.

Miss Wood shook her head, the slightest tremble in her lips. Layton squeezed her hand, only then realizing he still held it. Somehow, her hand fit so snugly in his, it felt natural there. “And so you felt you’d let down your father and brother?” She didn’t answer his rhetorical question. He hadn’t expected her to. “Believe me, Miss Wood, I know how that feels, many times over.”

She sat silently. Layton didn’t release her hand but told himself he would if she seemed to want him to. He desperately hoped she didn’t.

“How did your father die?” Miss Wood asked quietly.

“His heart,” Layton answered simply. “It was quite sudden, I understand, though he’d been more tired and pale than usual the last time I’d seen him. He had even joked about his children giving him heart spasms.”

“You couldn’t have known.”

“Precisely, Mary,” he cut across her words. “I couldn’t have known. I couldn’t have helped or prevented what happened. No more than you could have with your mother.”

Miss Wood’s slender fingers closed tighter around his own, and he felt the clasp clear to his heart.

Caroline shifted again. Miss Wood moved to the bedside to dab a soothingly cool rag along the girl’s forehead. Layton watched her, already missing the feel of her hand in his and wondering what it was about the woman that had captured his attention when nothing else,
no one
else, had in years.

He wasn’t overly worried about Caroline. She was feverish, yes, but slept soundly with hardly a stir.

He did, however, feel uneasy about his own emotions. This was his child’s governess. Everything, her position in his household, his code as a gentleman, the distinction of class, forbade any pursuit. Yet he yearned to do just that, to further their acquaintance, to try to discover what had so captured him. But he owed Caroline a life without further scandals and whispers among the gossipmongers.

Layton kept his eyes on Caroline’s sleeping face as Miss Wood returned to the seat beside him. He reminded himself that Miss Wood was out of his bounds. Any connection between her and himself would be scandalous for her as well—far more than she probably realized.

Caroline issued the occasional cough but little else. Three weeks had passed since her fever broke, and Doctor Habbersham assured Marion that Caroline would recover completely. Even so, January had been exhausting. Marion slept on a pallet on the floor in Caroline’s room, afraid that if she left, the girl would take a turn for the worse and no one would be there to tend her.

She found that being close enough to hear the girl’s every movement made sleeping difficult. By some miracle, Mrs. Sanders had granted her a half day, saying she looked too tired to be performing her duties properly what with all the coming events and that she should take her morning off to rest.

So Marion sat on a blanket on the banks of the Trent, a second blanket, heavy and woolen, pulled around her shoulders. Winter necessitated the extra layer.

Mr. Jonquil had received a letter from his brother “Flip,” whom Marion had discovered was actually “Philip, Earl of Lampton.” It seemed Lord Lampton was to be married on the seventeenth of March, and the entire Jonquil family, which she was given to understand was quite vast, was to descend upon the neighborhood shortly, Lampton Park being the estate directly northeast of Farland Meadows along the river Trent. Thus, “the coming events” had the household in something of a frenzy.

Caroline had been promised a new dress specifically for the occasion, something Marion was sure sped her recovery along. Marion had decided to buy herself a dress length of muslin in town in honor of the occasion. She did have an extra quarter’s wages waiting to be squandered. Furthermore, for some unaccountable reason, she found herself wishing again and again since the night she and Mr. Jonquil had held vigil at Caroline’s sickbed that she looked more presentable.

A week ago, she’d walked into Collingham on the pretense of obtaining a few medicinal herbs for Caroline, which she
had
obtained, and chosen a length of deep blue muslin. It was dark enough to not be entirely inappropriate for a governess, but it wasn’t black or gray, which she thoroughly appreciated. She looked to be in a perpetual state of mourning in her current attire. She had no ill-founded expectations of being invited to the wedding, but she wanted to look nice just the same. She would be the most fabulously dressed female in the nursery, which was, she admitted, a rather pathetic accomplishment—but still an accomplishment.

“Do I dare ask what has you so obviously amused?”

Mr. Jonquil! Why did his sudden appearance make her heart flutter? She thought of Mr. Jonquil’s story about his father’s heart spasms but quickly squelched the panic that thought pricked.

“I was thinking of your brother’s wedding,” she said.

He looked at her with obvious curiosity. “Philip’s wedding?” He leaned against a nearby tree, folding his arms casually across his chest. “Whatever for?”

“It will be very festive.” For some unaccountable reason, she couldn’t bring herself to admit to her delight in her new dress. “Caroline is already beside herself with anticipation.”

Mr. Jonquil smiled ever so slightly. “Let us hope she doesn’t work herself into another fever.”

“Nothing of the kind,” Marion answered with a little chuckle. “It has been the greatest tool in getting her to remain in bed at nap time and retire a little early at night. I simply tell her that if she is sick for the wedding, she’ll miss it entirely.”