Forever and Ever (5 page)

Declining Tranter’s invitation to join him for a wee drop at the George and Dragon, Connor tramped back to the small, thatched-roof workingmen’s cottage he and Jack were leasing. There was a scullery off the kitchen where the miner tenants washed and changed after work. Stripping off his mud– and tallow-stained work clothes, he scrubbed himself in cold water and soap over the shallow basin, rubbing the new bruises on his ribs gingerly, thinking it was lucky he wouldn’t be here in the winter or he’d freeze to death trying to keep clean. Dripping, nude, he padded down the short passage to his bedroom and put on clean trousers and shirt, socks, shoes, his waistcoat. Jack’s room was on the other side of the thin wall beside his bed, and once he stopped, listening, thinking he’d heard a laugh. But the sound didn’t come again; it had probably been Jack coughing.

His stomach growled; he was starving, and the girl didn’t come until six o’clock to cook their meal. His lumpy, narrow bed looked tempting; he considered lying down for a nap. But his exhaustion was too deep: if he slept now, he probably wouldn’t wake up until morning. He’d go talk to Jack, then.

The door was closed. But Jack hardly ever slept—insomnia was one of the scourges of his disease—and so, after two quick knocks, Connor walked in.

And backed out instantly, face flaming, too shocked to mutter anything but an inaudible “Excuse me,” and ducked back into his own room.

He went to the one small window that overlooked a weedy kitchen garden and cranked the casement open. He peered out, but he wasn’t seeing the drooping, unkempt plants or the dilapidated birdhouse hanging lopsided on the trunk of a seedy locust tree. All he could see was a woman’s enormous white rump rising and falling energetically over his brother’s hairy thighs, the two of them seated in a chair, she straddling him, Jack’s hands trying to cover her great heaving breasts.

Jack had women all the time; they were like a hobby to him—but Connor had never before observed him with one in flagrante delicto
.
He liked to think of himself as reasonably worldly, but—he was shocked. It wasn’t an everyday sight. Nor one easily forgotten. The girl hadn’t even been pretty, but he couldn’t get out of his mind the image of her dimpled, thrusting buttocks or her blinding white bosom. And Jack . . . that intent, considerate, watchful look on his face, the gentleness of his hands on the woman’s breasts, the attentive half smile that froze when he saw Connor in the doorway. It was too exquisitely private, and Connor felt guilty not only for disturbing their lusty tryst, but for being aroused by it. Definitely aroused by it.

Some time later, he heard the door open and close, and the sound of footsteps hurrying away. A few minutes passed. Jack’s door opened again, and a second later there was a knock at Connor’s. “Come in.” Jack came in.

He was fully dressed, overdressed, really, with his jacket on over his old wool waistcoat and a tie knotted in haste around the frayed collar of his shirt. But he’d forgotten to comb his hair. That one small omission ruined his attempt to look innocent, or at least nonchalant, for whoever his afternoon lover had been had combed his hair straight up with her ardent fingers. He looked exactly like the rooster he was trying so hard not to resemble.

Connor started it by smiling. Jack grinned back, embarrassed but tickled, and pretty soon they were both laughing, reveling in the knowing, infectious sound, egging each other on with it. Jack collapsed on the bed, holding his sides. A coughing fit brought his hilarity to an abrupt end, and afterward he lay on his back, alternately wheezing and chuckling, wiping tears from his temples.

“Who was she?” Connor said. “If I may ask.”

“Why, she’m the gel I telled you about, the one who serves at the George. Rose, ’er name is, although I calls ’er . . . ah, well.”

“Ah, well,” Connor agreed. “Next time I’ll be more careful before I walk into your room. In broad daylight on a Monday afternoon,” he added pointedly.

Jack grinned, sheepish. “You do that. So,” he said, to change the subject. “Tell me how yer day went, counselor. Ee’re looking a bit fagged. I’m startin’ to despair o’ us turning you into a real miner, Con. Sad t’ say, ee just may not have the stuff.”

Connor dropped down in the room’s only chair, too tired to joke back. “Guess who owns the mine, Jack.”

“Who? Some woman, you said.”

“Sophie Deene.”

Jack’s mouth fell open. “No.”

“Yes.”

“No! That girl? On the green, the one wi’ the children?”

“That girl.” He rubbed his eyes. “And she doesn’t just own it, she
runs
it. She’s the bleeding
manager
, she comes in to her bloody office every day and sits down behind her great bleeding
desk.
”

Jack sat up on his elbows, and gradually his face changed from amazement to amusement. “Uh-oh,” he said knowingly.

“Stow it, just—”

“Uh-oh, uh-oh. Now what’re ee going to do? You fell in love wi’ her on Saturday, and now—”

“Don’t be an ass.”

“—Now ee’ve got t’ go behind ’er back, pickin’ out all the flaws in ’er mine, rattin’ on ’er to the Rhads, and her the gel ee’d most like to—”

“Jack, would you just sod that?”

Startled by the anger Connor couldn’t hide, Jack held up his hands. “Right you are,” he said placatingly. “It’s a pickle, I can see that. Oh, I forgot to give you this.”

“What?”

“Letter from the Rhads, I expect. Another one o’ the blank envelopes, lest yer dark ties to their socialist coven be found out.”

Connor chuckled in spite of himself, and reached for the envelope Jack had taken out of his pocket. Inside was a letter, short and to the point. “Good,” he muttered when he’d read it. “Fine with me.”

“What?”

He looked up. “They say the reform bill may be brought in sooner than they’d expected. Now their man Shavers wants all of my reports by the end of this month or he might lose his chance to offer the bill in the Commons this session. It means we won’t have to go to the mine in Buckfastleigh after I’m through here.”

“Shavers,” Jack muttered, not bothering to hide his disgust. “That flamin’ fomenter. Why you care to hook up wi’ a lawless jack-rag the likes o’ him is a myst’ry to me.”

“I haven’t hooked up with him. I’ve never even met him.”

“Well, I heard ’im speak onct—”

“And he incited a crowd of tin miners in Redruth to walk out on strike. I know, you’ve told me a hundred times. What I can’t understand is why that makes him the devil incarnate as far as you’re concerned. If anybody—oh, hell.”
If anybody ought to be in favor of mining reform
, he almost said,
it’s you.
But he and Jack had had this argument too many times, and the irony of their reversed positions on the subject no longer entertained them. “Anyway,” he finished tiredly, “it seems we won’t be in Wyckerley for as long as I thought.”

“Which is fine wi’ you. On account o’ that lady who’m now yer boss.”

Connor started to deny it, then didn’t. “You ought to see her, Jack, sitting behind this huge desk, looking—well, you know what she looks like—issuing orders right and left, like a . . .”

“Like a man. Bloody right. Puts yer back up, don’t it?”

“No. No, that’s not it. I don’t care that she’s the boss.” He could even concede, from the little he’d seen, that she was probably good at it.

“Well, what, then?”

“I won’t be able to say much good about her mine in my report.”

“What’s wrong wi’ it?”

“The same things that are wrong with all of them—low wages, bad air, unsafe conditions, no contingencies for underground emergencies. Today I heard Jenks, the mine captain, talking about the loss of two or three miners a year as ‘natural wastage.’ ”

Jack sighed. “And so it is.”

“Now
that’s
the attitude I can’t abide. That’s the
very
—”

“Oh, Con,” Jack said, getting to his feet laboriously, “let’s not do this one again, eh? Not just now, anyways, whilst I’m this thirsty and in need of a sip. Come, let’s go and have our supper at the George.”

“The George? But Maura’s coming in twenty minutes to fix our meal. Why—”

“Yes, but she’m ugly as a hedgehog. Last night she spoilt my dinner just by lookin’ at it.”

Connor snorted. “She’s not ugly, you randy old goat. All that’s wrong with her is she keeps her legs together. So far. Not like
Rose.
”

“All? You can say
all
? Oh, my boy, ee’ve been working too hard and too long. Come wi’ me now,” he urged with mock solicitousness, “let ol’ Jack show you how to ’ave a good time.”

But Connor shrugged away. “Leave off, I’m not going with you.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m tired, because we’re paying this girl two shillings a week to cook for us, and because I’ve got work to do.”

“Rhad work, is it?” Connor nodded, and Jack let go of his arm. “Con, Con, I’m that worried. What ee needs is a woman, in the very worst way. If ee had a warm body in bed of a night, ee wouldn’t be ruinin’ yer health by readin’ books and writin’ dull tracts for yer maniac socialist cronies.”

Connor managed to laugh at that. But after his brother had gone, he couldn’t help thinking that he wrote his “dull tracts” for people exactly like Jack, workingmen and –women throwing away their youth and health just to stay alive, while their labors swelled the profits of adventurers and speculators who wouldn’t know a copper mine from a colliery.

Still, Jack had a point: there was something to be said for a warm body in bed of a night. What irritated him was that the picture that instantly sprang to mind at the phrase was the warm body of Miss Sophie Deene.

IV

It took time, but eventually nine hours of battling solid rock and bad air every day no longer reduced Connor to utter exhaustion. On Friday, when Jack issued his nightly invitation to step over to the tavern with him, he said yes.

One of the draws of the George and Dragon, besides a supper prepared by someone other than the spectacularly incompetent Maura, was a chance for Connor to see Rose again, although with her clothes on this time. She was a big-breasted, black-haired girl of twenty or so, with a cast in one eye and a great, booming voice. She was fond of smacking customers on the back and laughing raucously at their jokes, or hers. But he noticed that when she spoke to Jack, she softened her tone and touched him with great gentleness.

Although they’d been in the village for less than a week, Jack had already made friends with most of the regulars at the George. Many were miners at Guelder and Salem, but others were tenant farmers for Lynton Great Hall, Wyckerley’s manor house and the seat of its most exalted residents, Lord and Lady Moreton. The atmosphere was friendly and warm at the George, and even though the Pendarvis brothers, being newly arrived in a village that rarely saw new arrivals, were an object of much interest and speculation, no one pried into their personal histories or held them at a wary distance because they were strangers. In Connor’s experience, the local squire and the minister were the two individuals most responsible for setting a tone of welcome—or otherwise—in small, provincial villages. In the case of Wyckerley, those two were Sebastian Verlaine, the Earl of Moreton, and Christian Morrell, the vicar of All Saints Church, the man Connor had mistaken last week for Sophie Deene’s husband. He heard the names of the vicar and the earl mentioned frequently among the drinkers at the George, and always in affectionate and approving terms.

“Oh, yes, the vicar am a fine, fine fellow,” Tranter Fox opined, and launched into a recitation of the time he’d gotten pinned under a piece of fallen machinery at the seventy level and been given up for a lost cause. Connor, who had heard it six times already, had to listen again to the story of how Reverend Morrell was the only man brave enough to go near Tranter, and how he’d prayed and sung hymns with him until the gallery in which they were trapped collapsed on top of their heads. “Bleedin’
miracle
when the roof caved in on the stamp rod and I were set free. Bloody blinkin’
miracle.
” All the men gathered around the cold hearth in the smoky, low-ceilinged public room nodded and muttered in tired agreement, and Connor suspected they’d heard the story even more often than he had.

“Say, Tranter, why aren’t you at the penny reading this evening?” asked Charles Oldene, one of the tributers at Guelder. “You know who’s reading tonight, don’t you?”

General laughter; Connor was surprised when the little Cornishman ducked his head and stuck his nose in his mug of bittered ale to hide a blush.

“What’s a penny reading?” Jack asked.

“They have ’em at the vicarage on Fridays,” Oldene answered. “’Twas the vicar’s idea, or maybe his wife’s, I forget. Every week somebody reads from a book out loud to those who’ve come to hear.”

“What kind of a book?”

“Oh, any kind. Onct Mrs. Morrell read out one about a fellow stuck in a dungeon for years and years.”

“The Count o Monte Cristo,”
supplied Tranter. “Say, weren’t that a corker?”

“A right cracker,” agreed Oldene, signaling Rose for more ale.

“So who’m reading tonight?” Jack wanted to know.

“’Tis none other than our own Miss Sophie,” said Moony Donne, trying to nudge Tranter in the ribs with his elbow. The miner squirmed away and swore at him, which only made the men laugh again.

“Now, Tranter, don’t go on being bashful. We all know you’ve got your heart set on Miss Deene.”

“I ’ave not. Shut up, Charles, by Jakes, ee’re a bleedin’ nitwit.”

Oldene chortled with glee. “She’s readin’ right now, right this very minute, in that low, soft voice o’ hers. Sends shivers down your arms, don’t it? Eh, don’t it? Why’nt you go and hear ’er, Tranter?”

“Because I don’t care to,” he answered with stiff dignity. “’Tisn’t my kind o’ book, if ee must know. ’Tis all about
faymels
; I heard some faymel even writed it.”

That made sense; the men nodded and puffed on their pipes, in sympathy with Tranter’s decision.

Connor had caught glimpses of Sophie Deene during the week, quick sightings early or late in the day, always from a distance, and with no sign from her that she’d seen him. Except once, when he’d caught her eye and she’d had no choice but to acknowledge him with a brief nod. The memory of that instant of awareness and interest in her face, gone in a second and replaced by studied indifference, had nettled him ever since.

He stood up.

“Not leaving, are you, Jack?” said Jack. The bitter he’d drunk had put color in his sallow cheeks; he looked deceptively healthy.

“Yes, I’m off. Don’t stay much longer,” Connor said lightly, touching his shoulder. “The smoke’s not good for you.”

“Too right. I’ll just have this last and be away,” he promised—and Connor knew he would still be here when the barman locked the door.

“Where’re you bound for so blinkin’ early?” Tranter wanted to know.

Connor laid a shilling on the white-ringed table. “I find I’m in the mood for a good book.”

Jack snorted. “Might’ve knowed it. Ee can’t set still and do nothin’ for even one night. Ee’re worse off than I thought! Ee’ll ruin yer eyes!”

Connor turned back in the doorway. “I guess it’s a chance I’ll have to take,” he said with a straight face, and walked out into the night.

***

“‘If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more. But you know what I am. You hear nothing but truth from me. I have blamed you, and lectured you, and you have borne it as no other woman in England would have borne it. Bear with the truths I would tell you now, dearest Emma, as well as you have borne with them. The manner, perhaps, may have as little to recommend them. God knows, I have been a very indifferent lover. But you understand me. Yes, you see, you understand my feelings—and will return them if you can. At present, I ask only to hear—once to hear your voice.’ ”

Sophie looked up from the book to see twelve ladies smiling back at her. No words were necessary; after hundreds of pages read on seven consecutive Friday evenings, they had finally come to it, the perfect moment, the consummation (figuratively speaking only, of course) of the tender attachment of two most beloved characters: Emma Woodhouse and Mr. Knightley. The women seated on long Sunday school benches in the vicarage meeting hall were all misty-eyed, and as enchanted with the love scene as Sophie could wish. It was a relief, for although
Emma
was one of her favorite novels, she had worried a little in the beginning that the ladies of Wyckerley might not altogether approve of its proud, rather willful heroine.

She resumed. “‘Her way was clear, though not quite smooth. She spoke then, on being so entreated. What did she say? Just what she ought, of course. A lady always does. She said enough to show there need not be despair—and to invite him to say more himself.’ ”

A soft noise from the back of the room distracted her. She looked up to see all heads turned and every eye focused on the man who was muttering, “Excuse me, beg your pardon,” as he tried to climb over Susan Hatch’s knees to an empty place in the middle of the last bench.

“Mr. Pendarvis,” Sophie exclaimed after a shocked second. “Are you— Did you— Do you know that we—”

“Isn’t this the penny reading?” His face was all polite interest.

“Yes, but—we’re reading Jane Austen’s
Emma
,” she explained, acutely aware that she was blushing. “In fact, we’ve only a few pages left.”

“
Emma
! What a coincidence—it’s one of my favorites. Especially the last few pages.”

“Is that so?” Ignoring the titters, Sophie narrowed her eyes in suspicion. “How does it end?”

Mr. Pendarvis looked disconcerted, but only for a second. He help up one finger. “They live happily ever after.”

Cora Swan, the blacksmith’s daughter, muffled a laugh into her handkerchief; her sister Chloe echoed it. Mr. Pendarvis sent them a ravishing grin that had them huddling against each other, giggling uncontrollably. Seated now, he folded his arms and looked blandly back into Sophie’s scowl, his eyebrows raised expectantly.

Rattled, she glanced around. The women were looking interestedly back and forth between Mr. Pendarvis and her. What she longed to do was order him from the room; but if she did that, the ladies’ curiosity would instantly turn to speculation.

Trapped.

Clearing her throat, she found her place and took up the story again. But now her pleasure in the sweet, elegant ending was completely gone, replaced by self-consciousness. What was worse, she heard herself stumble over words, lose her place, skip whole lines—she who was
famous
at the penny readings for her fine, smooth delivery! By the time she turned the final page and read the last eloquent paragraph, she felt as tightly wound as a top.

But another survey of her audience—dreamy-eyed again, half smiling, utterly satisfied—helped to restore her composure. “Well,” she said, closing the book with a quiet snap and laying it on the desk at her back. “How did you like it?” She leaned against the desk casually, to signal the start of the informal discussion period that always followed the readings, especially when a book was finally finished.

“Oh,” said Cora Swan, “I loved it.”

“Oh, yes, it was
sooo
nice,” echoed Chloe. “Do let’s read it again right now.”

The ladies laughed gently at that, while a few nodded in wry agreement.

“What did you think of Emma?” Sophie prodded.

“Well, I liked ’er ever so much,” said Susan Hatch. “She was so handsome and clever, and smart as any of the men, except for Mr. Knightley.” Susan was a parlor maid at Lynton Hall, but she had hopes of one day being the housekeeper; she appreciated smart heroines.

Mrs. Ludd, the Morrells’ housekeeper at the vicarage, said, “I thought she got just what she deserved—a handsome husband and all that money.”

“I was glad when she decided to stay with her father until he passed on,” offered Mrs. Nineways, the churchwarden’s wife. “Whatever else, she always did her duty by her father.”

“That’s true,” said Mrs. Thoroughgood. “She was a very dutiful daughter.”

“I suppose she made some mistakes,” Susan acknowledged, “but it all come out right in the end.”

“That’s right.” “Yes, indeed.” “Right in the end.”

“She was a snob.”

Heads craned; breaths were drawn in. Everyone in the room looked at Mr. Pendarvis in amazement, as if he’d just called Emma Woodhouse a prostitute.

He softened the piercing, gray-eyed stare he’d locked on Sophie and smiled at the ladies, suddenly boyish and self-effacing—and almost immediately they smiled back at him, charmed. She noticed he had on the same dark coat and trousers he’d worn the day they’d met, with a clean white shirt and no necktie. And she could feel herself falling under the same spell as before, responding to the same potent male energy he radiated with such effortlessness. If she hadn’t known otherwise, she’d have made the mistake of thinking he was a gentleman, engaged in a gentleman’s profession. Which certainly proved the wisdom of the adage about judging books by their covers.

“Are we to assume from that remark,” she asked coolly, “that you truly are familiar with
Emma
? With something more than the last ten pages, I mean,” she added with false sweetness.

“Well . . . no, ma’am,” he admitted, and his candor, she saw, had the effect of endearing him to the ladies even more. “I got the gist of it, though, and I’d say the lady’s a snob. And a busybody.”

“Oh?” Sophie pushed away from the desk. “And why is that?”

“Well, take this Harriet character, for instance. Isn’t she supposed to be a friend of Emma’s?”

“Yes, but she—”

“Then why did Emma talk her out of marrying what’s-his-name, the farmer who was in love with her?”

“Robert Martin,” she said tightly, hiding her annoyance behind a patient expression. “Because she didn’t think he was the right man for Harriet.”

“Because he was a farmer?”

“A yeoman, yes, and although Harriet was illegitimate, Emma believed her father was of noble birth—mistakenly, as it turns out, but—”

“So
then
it was all right for her to marry a farmer? Because her father turned out not to be a lord?”

“She—yes—but the point is—”

“What business is it of Emma’s anyway?” he pursued, still in the smiling, courteous, self-deprecating style that hid, she was sure, a world of antagonism. He’d drawn one boot up on the bench and was clasping his knee, seeming completely at ease. The more relaxed he looked, the tighter her nerves stretched. “She’s a bit of a meddler, isn’t she, Miss Deene? Horning in on other people’s affairs?”

“She did cause a lot of trouble,” Mrs. Thoroughgood admitted thoughtfully. “And she wasn’t very nice to Jane Fairfax.”

“She was jealous of her,” Susan Hatch realized. “She didn’t want anybody in the village being more important than her.”

The ladies were looking at Sophie expectantly and—she fancied—a trifle worriedly, as if their rock-solid faith in her judgment had been given a slight nudge.

She held out her hand, imploring their understanding. “Yes, she did meddle, but she always meant well. She fancied herself a matchmaker, and it’s true she wasn’t very good at it, but she
reformed.
Once she realized she’d blundered, she swallowed her pride and set out to make things right.”

“That’s right,” said Mrs. Nineways, “she did,” and Miss Pine said, “True.”

Sophie said, “And after she pokes fun at poor old Miss Bates at the Box Hill picnic—”

Mr. Pendarvis dropped his boot to the floor. “She makes fun of an
old lady
?”

“
Gentle
fun, unintentionally, and she’s ashamed of herself afterward, and apologizes sincerely—”

“I should think so.”