Elisabeth Fairchild (15 page)

Chapter Twenty-two

Patience stood stunned.

Richard turned his back abruptly on the drive, and with a crunch of gravel took the pathway that led around the house, his long-legged stride too fast for her, too furious. She had to take two steps for his every one.

“What do you mean?” Breathlessly she ran to catch up, her heart racing, trying to make sense of it.

“I mean,” he said curtly, coming to a halt, looking about him as if afraid he might be overheard, his every movement abrupt and angry—most unlike the Richard she knew so well. He lowered his voice and spoke with a simmering sort of rage that frightened her. “Chase has swallowed an entire vial of laudanum. After casting up accounts all over the bed he has fallen into a senseless stupor he well nigh may never wake from.”

He set off again, every line of him angry.

What? Suicide?
She could not believe it. “But he will not be laid to rest on hallowed ground! His estate reverts to the Crown if—”

“I know.” Richard turned the corner of the house, the gardens stretching before them in a sudden wash of color.

He closed his eyes and bowed his head, as if to shut out the beauty. Jaw clenched, he shook his head.

Patience had read an account in last week’s paper detailing the ritual suicide burial of a Captain Peters at a crossroads in Surrey, a stake driven through his body that his spirit might not wander. Such an ignominious end to her son would break Lady Cavendish’s heart.

“Mother has yet to be told,” Richard said abruptly, as though he read her mind. His gaze sought out the movement of both their mothers at the far end of the garden.

“No!” she said, and grabbed at his arm. “You cannot tell her he attempts to take his own life. Must not tell her. It will break her heart.”

He shook her off and set off, grim-faced, among the rows of flowers, butterflies rising in dancing clouds before him.

***

She did not follow him this time. She did not think it appropriate. Richard looked so tall and straight-backed, his features set in hard lines as he approached his mother, as he took her hand in his and spoke. Lady Cavendish dropped her pruning shears, dropped the basket of flowers, fragile blooms exploding color and petals as it hit the grass.

She turned at once and ran to the house, skirts held high, her manner wild-eyed and windblown as she charged up the garden steps and along the walk. Richard followed, his face a picture of concern.

He did not look her way. It pained her that he did not so much as spare her a glance.

Her mama bent to gather up the basket, the flowers, the garden shears. Patience went to help, tears scalding her eyes, tears she would not allow to fall.

“You have heard?” her mother asked as her shadow fell upon the flowers.

Patience nodded. She could not speak, knew she would burst into tears if she made the attempt.

She knelt, her hands seeking the fallen blooms, plucking up the few resilient survivors, her gaze drawn to the house.

“He told you first?” her mother murmured, brows arching, as if that were in some way remarkable. “Before his own mother?”

She nodded again, more flowers in her hands, most of them ruined, bent, or scattered by the fall. So fragile life was. So beautiful. So violent. So unexpected.

“Is Richard Cavendish in love with you, my dear?”

That brought her head up with a gasp, the flowers forgotten, gripped too tightly, their perfume suddenly overwhelming.

“What?”

Chapter Twenty-three

For a moment Patience was struck speechless. Then in a rush she blurted, “Richard and I are no more than friends.”

It had sounded so very silly—Richard in love with her. “To be sure, the very best of friends,” she went on, and then the idea began to sink in, to tumble about in her mind with substance and force. Could it be true?

“I see,” Mama said, her emphasis on those two words such that it sounded as though she saw something far deeper, far more intriguing. It made Patience want to protest even more vehemently,
We are only friends!

“We must leave at once,” her mother said as they walked back toward the house. “Unless they require our assistance in some way.”

Preoccupied by her mother’s question, by the very suggestion that Richard loved her, Patience murmured agreement. “Of course.”

They were not needed.

There were more than enough helping hands to set the world in order at Cavendish Manor. And as their carriage was brought round, as a footman opened the door for their leave-taking Richard hurried out to play the good host in saying farewell.

He walked them to the carriage, his eyes on the drive, on the road down which he had sent a lad racing. “Thank you for coming,” he said absently as he helped her with the step. “Both of you,” he said fervently, and at last he glanced at her, and by way of the step they stood eye-to-eye, so tall was he.

In the instant that their eyes met, Patience wondered about her mother’s outlandish suggestion. Was Richard in love with her?

He looked away again, such tension in his jaw, in the pucker of his brow, such a glimpse of near panic in his eyes that, struck by a sudden impulse, she kissed his cheek.

He blinked, surprised, and turned his head, and she, meaning to kiss his cheek a second time, bussed him swiftly on the mouth—a glancing kiss, no more than a brush of the lips, and yet it startled her, startled him; she saw his eyes widen, his brows unknit themselves a moment to rise.

She could not look at him then, could not reconcile the sudden yearning within her to kiss him yet again. Were these the kisses of good friends?

Words tumbled from her mouth to ease the moment, to bridge the gap between them that her eyes could not vault.

“I am so very sorry,” she said.

He mistook the reason for her apology, said at once, hurriedly, “Not at all.”

“It started out such a good day,” she went on.

“It did, didn’t it?” He spoke as swiftly as she, their words stumbling over one another, and then she was in the coach, and he shut the door, and all the while his gaze was fixed on her, curiosity there, a question, and she had no answers, only surprise and a sense of disbelief, and an odd, disjointed wonder that seemed all wrong for the moment.

“What happened today?” her mother asked as the horses were clucked into motion and Richard lifted a hand to wave. “I thought the three of you meant to play games.”

“We did,” Patience said, her gaze finding Richard’s once again, dear, dependable Richard, whom she saw as if for the first time as he turned away to deal with his brother’s dreadful choices. “We played Hazard.”

Chapter Twenty-four

Patience met the news, when it came two days later, without dismay.

Never revived from his stupor, Chase had gotten his final wish, achieved his final end. The physician pronounced his death an inflammation of the liver, a condition prompted by recent injuries in the fall from his carriage.

Patience knew better. She had asked her mother if a person might die from drinking too much laudanum. Mama had looked at her astounded, as if to ask why in the world she would ask such a question, but then she had closed her mouth, biting down on her lower lip a moment before saying, “Yes. Especially when one is not in prime health to begin with.”

The funeral followed at Cavendish Manor almost immediately thereafter. The body, carefully painted a color somewhat less yellow in hue, was displayed in state for three days, the house shrouded in black crepe, the body attended by a member of the family at all times. Distant cousins, long-forgotten drinking mates, and absolutely everyone in the neighborhood traipsed in and out of the house to pay respect, all clad in mourning blacks, all ready with a tale of the last time they had encountered the deceased.

Pip told Patience about it the day he came in his carriage to take her, her mother, and her elder sister, Prudence, to the memorial service.

“An admirable turnout,” Pip said as they followed the nodding plumes of the hearse to the chapel and found themselves delayed by a long line of crepe-draped carriages that had arrived before them.

“I did not know Chase was such a well-liked fellow,” Patience’s mother remarked.

“He was not,” Pip said flatly as he peered out the window, and when he turned to find his party eyeing him with some surprise, he explained away his callousness, saying, “To be sure, we shall see a good many of his racing, gambling, and drinking cronies, but there will come those, too, who mean to ingratiate themselves with the new earl by way of an excessive show of sorrow.”

“They will fall over themselves currying favor. Just you watch.” Chase’s voice sounded in Patience’s head. He had known! Of course, he had thought she meant to curry favor with his brother. A bit of nonsense. She viewed Richard no differently now that he was a moneyed earl, did she? He was still her dear, dependable Richard, just as he had always been.

He greeted them with solemn politeness, looking no different than before, except for the drawn lines of his face, the dark circles under his eyes. He took her hand in a firm grip when she followed her mother through the door.

“Patience. A moment, if you please.”

“Of course,” she agreed.

Cupping her cheek in a black-gloved palm, a gesture so gentle and unexpected it took her breath away, he said, “Dear Patience.” He drew from his pocket a jeweler’s box.

Something in his eyes gave her the impression he meant to kiss her, which startled her so much she fell back a step. Panic and fascination warred within her breast. She did not know what to do if Richard should kiss her here, in front of Pip and everyone.

She had imagined kisses, of course, all kinds of kisses, especially since her lips had brushed his at Cavendish Manor, but in her imaginings it was always Pip she was kissing, not Richard. Pip, who stood watching them now.

She did not know what to do with her feelings, did not know how to respond to Richard if he wished to, in a moment, transform their lifelong relationship. The moment terrified her.

She need not have worried.

Richard kissed her in a brotherly fashion, his lips pressed to her forehead, his hand cupped beneath her chin. Such warmth, such comfort in the gesture. A brotherly kind of kiss—short, sweet, no unnecessary lingering. She was relieved, and touched, and at the same time a little disappointed—she could not have said why.

He pressed the jeweler’s box into the palm of her hand and stepped back with an expectant look, waiting for her to open it.

Inside nested a mourning ring, a pretty little pearl that gleamed like a fat tear against her lusterless black chamois gloves.

An unexpected honor. Mourning rings were usually given only to family members or lifelong friends. And so she was—if not to the deceased, to Richard.

“Did not think you knew Chase that well,” Pip said, surprised, as Richard lifted her hand and placed it on her gloved finger.

She and Richard shared a look.

“You knew him at his worst,” Richard said. “And managed to make him laugh when I thought him beyond all laughter. You allowed him to cheat at dice without complaint, to insult you to your face with what he considered his wittiest barbs, and thus he had a good day, his last day. He would have wanted you to have this. And if he did not, I do.”

How chill his black-gloved hands in slipping on the ring. She longed to warm them. “I am deeply honored,” she said.

As Pip waved her ahead of him into the pew, brows raised, she said, “You should have been there that day, Pip.”

“You know how I felt about Chase,” he said under his breath.

“Not for Chase,” she chided. “For Richard!”

***

The service was short, but well delivered. A group of angel-voiced, ruddy-cheeked choirboys sang the coffin and pallbearers out to the hearse.

Pip gave her a nudge. “Richard’s brats have come all the way from London to sing for more suppers.”

“What do you mean?” She frowned at him. He seemed to have little understanding of how to comport himself at a funeral.

“Richard’s lambs, I should call them. He always refers to them as such when wheedling alms for them. Convinced Chase to send them Christmas turkeys every year.” He chuckled. “He has strong-armed me into sending them mincemeat pies and a goose or two, and of course there are the paintings we have had to buy.”

“Paintings? Pies? What are you talking about?” she insisted, more confused than ever. Richard had never said anything of this to her.

“Lost lambs. Orphan lambs. Coram’s Foundlings. Has he never taken you to see the paintings at the hospital? Raises money for the little ones annually, our Richard does, assisting them with their Christmas concert, and morning teas, and an artwork auction. He must think kindly of you, indeed, if he has not begged a contribution or two.”

She had no idea what he was talking about, no idea just who her dear friend Richard really was, it seemed.

Only family and close friends followed the hearse to the cemetery after the service.

They stood waiting in line to offer condolences to the family, Pip restless to be done with the thing, fretting under his breath with acid sarcasm, as if to laugh at death, “What can one say about the death of someone one despised? It is a shame his life was cut short? Oh, how I shall miss him? What a fine fellow he was? Lies, all lies. A game of grief and commiseration I will not play.”

Patience lost patience with him, snapping out, voice low, “You could say you are sorry for their loss, for the lost potential of a loved one’s life cut short. You need not have loved him, but without a doubt his family saw something in him to admire, if only the memory of what he once was as a lad, and the dreams they had for him.”

Pip eyed her askance a moment. It was not often she spoke thus to him.

“Calm down, my dear,” he said. “You are quite right. I do thank you for precisely the right phrase. I can honestly make such utterances with complete conviction.” He then practiced how he would say the words, altering his emphasis on different parts of the sentence before deciding on exactly the proper inflection.

Still put out with him, Patience studied the crowd of mourners, looking for familiar faces. “I must say I am surprised Lord and Lady Wilmington are not here today,” she remarked when Pip had flawlessly delivered his line to Lady Cavendish.

He cast a startled look her way. “Have you not heard?”

“Heard what?”

With a troubled expression he pulled her aside and said in lowered voice, “Wilmi has suffered a bad bout of heart palpitations.”

“No!”

He nodded, sadness in his eyes. “The day after Chase popped off. He ate a bowl of fruit as he and I were playing a game of billiards. He remarked on how very good the cherries were, said that his aim was off, and without another word dropped like a sack of potatoes. I was certain from the gray look of him that he was stone-cold dead.”

“You were there!”

“Indeed. It was a dreadful moment, as you may well imagine. His heart, the quacks say, must have spasmed mightily. Melanie will not leave his side.”

“How awful!”

“Yes. He is weak as a kitten. I fear we may be attending another funeral ail too soon.”

“What a comfort it must have been to Melanie that you were there.”

He nodded. “I did my best to calm her, to arrange that Wilmi be made comfortable in his bed, and saw to it the local physician was called—even sent for the vicar. In case . . . well, just in case.”

Like Richard
, she thought. How very like the day she had spent with Richard.

“It has been, I think,” he said haltingly, “a week of events most odd and terrible and wonderful all at once.”

“Wonderful? In what way wonderful?”

“I do not mean to sound unfeeling, but would you not agree it timely that fate should see to removing impediments to the future happiness of two whom I love most dearly before I commit myself to marriage?”

“Whatever do you mean?”

“I mean I know that Melanie, as much as she loves her husband, loves another more, and now that Richard is Earl of Cavendish he need no longer hesitate to declare himself to the one he loves. We may all be happy now.”

Patience pursed her lips. “I do not think a funeral the appropriate time or place to speak of such happiness,” she said glumly.

She found nothing to cheer her in the prospect of losing both of her childhood companions to marriage. She had no marital prospects in her own foreseeable future—a future that seemed foreshortened and trivialized in the face of death.

“Will you do me a very great favor?” she asked Pip.

“Depends on the favor.” He nudged her playfully in the ribs.

“Will you take me to see Richard’s lambs?”

He blinked at her, amazed, and with a frown of distaste asked, “Whatever for?”