Judith Ivory (3 page)

The assistant personal secretary stood with the bank draft in his fingers, dangling between himself and Emma—signed by Mr. Blainey himself, she noticed, a power with which she herself would not have trusted him. Though less smug than the butler, more weathered in the face, for all his conservative polish—his spotless gloves, small-brimmed hat, and white, starched collar—Mr. Blainey didn’t come off quite the dignified Englishman he seemed to want to portray so much as unctuous, almost wily. It was something in his posture, his expression.

Emma kept her back to her own front door, not allowing him to see inside her home, while she finished dusting flour from her fingers—she’d been making bread, something she did for the entire village on Saturdays to bring in extra money. She eyed the viscount’s man, waiting to see if he was authorized to offer any further suggestion.

He must have thought she was cleaning her hands in preface to examining the draft at least. When she finished, she tucked the rag into her apron, then said
no
more firmly by folding her arms over her chest and asking—it occurred more out of curiosity than anything else—“Why is it this rich man keeps offering me money in forms that are actually rather difficult to turn to cash?”

This draft, while at least in English currency, was still on the Bank of England, which had no rural branches. It would take a goodly time to make its way through a clearinghouse, unless she wanted once again to board a train for London.

“Not that I would take it,” she continued, “but why not simply offer a ten-pound note? A viscount must surely be floating in those.”

Interestingly, Mr. Blainey’s expression faltered. He even looked a little unsettled then, a nervous mannerism, once more cleared his throat. There was a reason! Though he wasn’t going to tell her. He said instead, “Take the draft. It will be good a week from Monday.”

She laughed, involuntary. “It isn’t even good?”

“It will be.” He looked a little sheepish, then volunteered, “And any amount larger, of course, wouldn’t be honored for a while longer, till his lordship finalizes the larger transactions of the account—”

“Is the viscount in financial trouble?”

“Yes.” He blinked. “Well, no.” He shook his head and shrugged as if a straight
yes
were a foolish answer. “He’s rich as a tzar. It’s just that all his money is coming from foreign banks. And then there was the business with his uncle—”

“His uncle?”

Mr. Blainey was nonplussed for a moment. He’d put his foot in it somewhere, which fascinated Emma. The small man stood straighter and for the third time in two minutes cleared his throat once more.
“Ahem,
his lordship’s finances are complicated…” He mumbled something more, but his voice trailed off.

Emma put on her most sympathetic face and shook her head. “It’s that uncle,” she said. “How awful.” What uncle?

Mr. Blainey waved his hand, as if he could wave away any mention of an uncle-bunkum-any-relative. “Oh, no, that problem’s over.” He added quickly, “Not that it was ever a
true
problem. There was never any question of the title the moment his lordship set foot on English soil again, no, no.” He denied something—though she wasn’t sure exactly what—vehemently.

“Of course not,” she agreed and puzzled over all that was left out.

“In any regard, that’s the reason for the formality of a particular and peculiar signature for large amounts.” He indicated the cheque. “And why the accounts are so difficult to set up. His uncle opened so many. Money went the wrong places. And now there are these debts and questions as to whom they belong to, with creditors trying to levy against accounts before they are even open. It’s a mess.”

“Oh, dear, yes. I can see that.” Not clearly, but she was getting the drift. An uncle had laid claim to the title with his nephew out of country. There were double accounts.

The secretary sighed, grateful for the understanding, then shrugged again, completely without remedy for Emma herself: a situation quite beyond his control. “So you see, it’s impossible for me to offer a draft for a larger amount, since anything over ten pounds will require the viscount’s particular signature”—he left a small, rather awestruck pause—“that only his lordship can produce.”

Really? Emma, when she’d been “daft,” had briefly gotten by on an odd little gift she had for reproducing almost any signature. She had in fact, in her youth, fallen in with some men and women, Zach among them, who “prospered on the fundamentally dishonest nature of their fellow men”: that is, a group who earned their living through various bits of quasi knavery in London. At fourteen, she’d discovered that a girl
on her own there had three choices besides outright crime: the gray life of factories, out-and-out selling herself on the street, or the borderline fringe of legality called confidence games. The choice of how to support herself had not required a lot of thought—and resulted in acquaintances in London who would have loved Mr. Blainey.

Men like Mr. Blainey, who thought themselves right-minded, always made the best marks. They never questioned themselves when, faced with the “deal of a lifetime,” they sold off any scruple they might have possessed.

All the more reason not to deal with him. Emma said good day firmly. He fussed a moment more, woe-faced, declaring her to be making a grievous error. “His lordship does not
have
to do anything. That is what I am saying. I take care of small matters.”

“I would like to become a larger matter then,” she told him and took childish pleasure in stepping back, ready to close the door in his face. Then couldn’t. More civilly, she said, “It appears this matter cannot be settled between us. Tell his lordship I shall file a legal complaint and let English justice determine what is right. Good day again.”

She watched him go—with his displaying such sad, headshaking reluctance it bordered on the histrionic. What malarkey. She had the keenest feeling that, if faced with, say, a person who confided a sad story, a widow with her life’s savings, for instance, buried in a ditch, money she was willing to split with anyone who’d simply help her dig it up: the man would grab a shovel, run, beat her to it, and take it all.

Not that it was any of her business, but she hoped the viscount was aware of the man’s character. It sounded as though “his lordship” had a bit of a sticky situation to sort out, and this Blainey fellow would take advantage if advantage came his way.

Then she realized she was worrying over a man who could run over a lamb and leave it to die in the road, not
blinking: fight about it, in fact. At which point, she went back to her bread and stopped fretting for the Viscount Mount Villiars altogether.

John reluctantly explained to Emma how and where to file. In mid-December, the case came up before him and Henry Gaines, the other sitting magistrate, in the Petty Session of the borough court held quarterly in the church vestry. A little alarming, a London barrister showed up on the viscount’s behalf, explaining he was staying up at the castle and present “merely as a courtesy” to the viscount.

Overall, the proceeding was more tense than Emma had expected. No one, not even John Tucker, very willingly ruled against an English “lard and gen’leman,” as John kept calling him, who had “no rec’lection of hitting nought.” She had to fight them all, but she did it and was proud of herself for it.

She simply insisted at every turn, “It was
his
carriage, the crest plain, shiny, and new. I saw it with my own eyes. The Viscount Mount Villiars’s coach struck and killed my lamb in its wild hurry.”

The barrister’s chief argument was, of course, that the only witness was a woman who would turn a handsome profit from her version of the facts. John and Henry listened, unflappable, while Emma sat there, feeling the lonely bearer of truth in a roomful of doubters. When the barrister grew bold enough, however, to use the word
opportunistic,
John pulled his mouth sideways and held up his hand. “Sir,” he said, “Emma Hotchkiss’s honesty in this riding be unquestioned. She’d not mek anything up.” He let out a long sigh, looked face-to-face around the vestry, then said, “If the vee-count’s coach hit the animal, even if he weren’t in it, there be the matter of responsibility.”

He then explained to the lawyer the Yorkshire codes and legal precedents regarding the killing of another man’s, or woman’s, sheep—something with which the Londoner was not
well acquainted. John and Henry conferred briefly in murmurs.

And awarded fifty pounds to the plaintiff—her! Emma realized—explaining they hoped the viscount understood that under the circumstance this was a modest sum. Via his barrister, they sent an admonishment to drive more slowly. The area was a patchwork of meadows stitched together with hedgerows and ancient walls. “It might be worse than a lamb kilt next time,” John said.

Fifty pounds! Emma walked out of the side room of the small church (the room where Zach had once put on all the raiments and robes they had both liked so well) and into the sunshine.
Ah
, she thought,
over at last. I have satisfaction
. Fifty pounds would go a long way in making up for the lost income, the lost productivity. Good then.

Four days later, however, she received a letter. It read:

The viscount could speak! Or dictate at least! He had a mouth, though not a very nice one. Her nervy bum, indeed!
Still, a personal response thrilled her for some reason. Her nemesis had acknowledged her. Though only in dictation. He hadn’t signed the letter. But still….

Her pleasure was short-lived. The same day that brought the letter the sheriff served Emma with a rolled, ribboned sheaf of legal pages. When she opened them out, she found that her Yorkshire verdict had been referred to a Quarter Court for revision in appeal. This higher court could not hear the case for another month and a half. Until then all fines and recompense were withheld.

Then, worse, a day later more legal documents arrived, the gist of which was that the Quarter Court had referred the case to a new jurisdiction. It would be heard in London at the Old Bailey. The viscount’s barrister had been busy.

“What does this mean, John?” Emma asked as she accepted the papers back into her gloved hands, then gave the stupid packet of pages a little shake. She and John stood outside on a cold day, having met halfway across his field, him on his way to town, herself on her way to show him her latest outrage.

John scratched his head with a crooked knuckle that protruded from his knit, open-fingered gloves. Winter was bearing down on them, near full force with Christmas—the bleakest, it seemed, she would know in years—only days away now. “It means ye’ lost, Em.”

Emma, in her heaviest coat, stomped the ground to keep warm, clomping up and down in Zach’s boots, well padded with thick-knit stockings. “I won. At the very least”—she shook one of the pages, wrestling the wind for it—“this letter puts him in contempt.” She tugged at the shawl she wore up over her head and tied about her shoulders, pulling it up against the blast of wind.

“It ain’t contempt to take a case further, though I give ye that: The letter be rude. Still, his secret’ry’s words be hearsay; he dint write ’em; he dint sign it. Ye’d hafta find a
magistrate willing to hold him in contempt, and ye no’ be looking at one, Em.”

She sighed and let her hands, the legal documents with them, fall against her coat. “Why would he go to so much bother?”

“No bother to him. Ye be a gnat in the big soup of his bringing hi’self back to England. I hear he been to all sarts of fareign places. He picks ye oot and keeps going.” Her neighbor paused, his crinkled old eyes wrinkling further for having to squint into an icy draft of air. “Em, he’s offered ye money, off the coort record, when in all likelihood he won’ hafta give ye a farthing.”

“I won’t take the draft to the bank. It’s short of what I won.”

“Then ye’ll hafta find yerself a solicitor and barrister and go to London to make yer case.”

She frowned. “You know I can’t afford—” She broke off, staring hard at the horizon at the far end of the pasture. The chestnuts and oaks that dotted the meadow were leafless. Beneath them and around, the grass was sparse but mostly green; it gave way only occasionally here and there now into the remains of white drifts, the first heavy snow of winter half-melted, half-hardened to ice.

“Em.”

She looked at her neighbor’s stooped form as he scratched the back of his neck again with a gnarled finger. He said, “Several of us feel right sympathetic with ye. We wanna pitch in. Margot says ye kin take o’er the books at church. Ye be good at it, an’ye can take the assistant’s Saturday tithe fer yer bother. Ross says ye kin do his and his missuss’ sewing. We all got t’gether a promise: You kin borra’ anyone’s ram for nought—”

“You all knew this would—”

“Naw, but I suspected. We talked aboot it, ’case it turned bad, ye know? Ye’r oot a’yer class, tha’s all. Enoof. Don’ nettle Mount Villiars any moor. We mus’ live beside him—”

“Precisely.” She lifted her chin. “How are we to live beside such a tyrant?”

“Gently,” he said. “Till we know moor aboot him. Till we’ve all taken our hats off and nodded to itch other under more conginnial circ’nstance. We should see that he knaws he’s welcome a’ church, include him with high honors a’ the New Year’s Day Fair—”