Miss Lindel's Love (16 page)

“No, indeed. I am going to finish marking your hems if I die for it.” She squinted at her youngest daughter. “Maris,” Mrs. Lindel demanded, “has your sister grown
again?”

“Indeed, yes. I noticed it this morning. There’s nothing for it, Mother, but to bind heavy books to her head.” Sophie shied the one in her hand at her sister, who skipped out the door with a merry, “Missed me!”

Maris paused for an instant, out of sight, then nodded with satisfaction when she heard Sophie say, “She seems happier now we are home, Mother.”

“I hope so, dearest. I hate to see my girls moping about.”

“You needn’t worry about me, at any rate. I’m perfectly happy.”

“Even though Mr. Delmore remained in Yorkshire?”

“Even though Mr. Delmore remained in Yorkshire. I am too young to be thinking of poets. Besides, he promised to write to me and I think he will. Poets will take any excuse to put pen to paper.”

Along the road to the village, the trees were still green but with a sere tinge to their leaves that spoke of autumn’s near arrival. The hay had been gathered and stood in tall shocks, while crows creaked and called in the large dead tree by the crossroads. But the sun shone down with a friendly heat from the deep azure sky and smaller birds still hopped and flitted about the puddles in the main street.

Miss Menthrip’s white door with the iron hinges stayed resolutely shut despite Maris’s knocking. A casement window stood open a crack, a fold of the white curtain hanging within having kept the latch from closing. Maris worked a gloved finger under the opening, tugging until it swung reluctantly outward.

“Miss Menthrip? It’s I, Maris Lindel. I want to talk to you.”

She heard a gusty sigh and the thump of her walking stick as Miss Menthrip crossed the floor. A few moments later, there came the snap of the lock springing open. Miss Menthrip, her dress dusty black, her hair as tightly controlled as ever, waved her in. “I know you,” she said, her voice harsh. “You’ll keep it up until I give in so I might as well give in now.”

“Everyone’s very concerned about you, Miss Menthrip. You haven’t been to church in so long,” Maris said as she followed her into the kitchen at the back of the cottage.

“Of course, I haven’t been to church. How can I go when I can’t afford to put even a shilling in the bag? A shilling? Ha, I can’t manage a groat.”

Maris lifted the basket to the well-scrubbed table. “Why can’t you?”

Miss Menthrip laughed. “Matter of fact child, aren’t you? I can’t because I’ve no money barring the few pounds I’ve kept in the stocking’s foot. Every other farthing has been lost.” Though her voice rang with something akin to triumph, her posture slumped as she fell onto a chair.

“Yet...” Maris paused before passing on the gossip. “I’d always heard that your brother left you well beforehand with the world.”

“Talk about me, do they? Well, they’ll have plenty more to say now. Soon they’ll start to pity me. But I’ll not take charity from anyone. What’s in the basket?”

“Not charity, I promise.” Miss Menthrip’s eyes widened in their nests of wrinkles when she saw the book.

“I’ve had to let my membership in the lending library cease which was the most unkindest cut of all.”

“I met the man who wrote it,” Maris said. “Everyone calls him Pinkie but he’s really a French marquis. Or at least, his father was but he has some hopes of reclaiming his title from King Louis.”

“You’ve met a deal of grand people, I’ll warrant.” Miss Menthrip would not sink so low as to ask questions, but she was obviously agog to hear all the details.

Maris told her enough to content her for the moment, and to make the
roman a clef
more
intelligible. Then, tactfully pouring out a glass of wine, she returned to the purpose of her visit. “How did you come to such straits, dear Miss Menthrip?”

“It was that solicitor-johnny my brother made trustee. I told him that Jackie Household had a nasty, cheating, furtive eye but nothing would do for Worrel but that he give this business to his old friend’s boy. ‘His father was the best of men,’ he said to me. ‘I know this boy is just such another. He even looks like Jack.’ I tell you plain, if he looked like Jack Household, it wasn’t his mother’s fault!”

Maris did not look shocked, only pouring out a little more wine to calm Miss Menthrip’s cough, sparked by this bit of old scandal. “This Mr. Household has lost your money on the “Change?” she asked.

“Worse than that. It seemed he made quite a tidy fortune by some hasty dealing just before Waterloo. My little nest egg had grown to the size of a roc’s egg. I’d even begun to plan what I’d do with it, counting my blessings too soon, as it turned out.”

“What happened?”

“Master Jackie absconded to the Continent, taking with him not only the profits of his venture but all my capital as well.”

This was worse than Maris had imagined. She waited until Miss Menthrip stopped coughing again, disquieted by the hacking rattle at the end of the paroxysm. She wished very much that her mother were here to judge the severity of that cough.

“Surely he is being pursued?”

“Oh, yes. I’m not the only one in this basket, thank heaven. Others, who did not entrust every cent to Master Jackie, have hired Runners to go after him. But he was three days gone before anyone realized what he’d done so the trail is very cold. There are so many English going to Europe these days, there is but little hope they can find one shifty-eyed brute among so many.”

“I’m sure they’ll catch him.”

“Maybe they will and maybe they won’t. If they do, who’s to say but that he will have spent it all before they hunt him down. It’s not Jackie Household’s future that has me in a proper swivet. It’s my own.” The wrinkled hands folded on the knob of the stick tightened until the white knuckles showed but could not slow their frightened trembling.

“I shall have to go into the almshouse,” she said, her voice quavering, sounding like an elderly lady plagued by confusion instead of the forthright spinster. “I visited there once and I’ve never forgotten it. Outside the gate it said, WOODRUFF HOUSE FOR INDIGENT SPINSTERS AND WIDOWS. ESTABLISHED 1744. They all wore snuff-colored bonnets and cloaks with a large white cross on the back. You never heard anyone speak. And they were never allowed to be alone—they even slept all together in a long dormitory, bed after bed.”

“That won’t happen,” Maris said, stooping to slip an arm about Miss Menthrip’s shoulders. She was shocked by how thin and fragile her friend seemed. Miss Menthrip must be trying to support existence on the cheapest, plainest food, and not much of it either.

“You’re a good child, Maris Lindel. But I tell you plain. I’d
rather die than go to such a place.”

“I promise you; it will not come to that.”

Lucy’s eyes filled with tears as she embraced her friend as the chime of the noon bell mingled with the hysterical yapping of Gog and Magog. “You look so different,” she said.

“Do I? You ought to see Sophie.”

“I can’t quite tell what it is. An air of fashion, perhaps. Be quiet, Gog! Get down, Magog.”

“I doubt it. But look at you. Why in heaven’s name are you wearing that cap?”

Mrs. Pike, waiting her turn to greet the prodigal, laughed ironically, silencing the dogs. “Well you may ask, Maris. I have been waiting for your return so that you might talk some sense into this daughter of mine. I tell her it is ridiculous for her to throw away her youth even for a brother.”

Maris shook hands with the vicar’s wife. “Which brother?”

“Ryan, of course. He’s been asked to teach at a rather prestigious school and nothing will do but that his sister should come to keep house for him.”

“Ryan is to teach?” Maris marveled. “But he’s just a boy himself.”

“It’s a great honor, Dr. Pike tells me, to be so singled out at his age. Dr. Valega at Oxford recommended him for the post, saying that he himself had no more to teach him so he might as well teach others. Though why, in the name of goodness, he has to drag Lucy along, I shall never understand.”

“It’s only for a year, Mama,” Lucy said wearily. Maris had heard that tone in her own voice more than once this summer and knew it meant Lucy had been arguing in the same words until she was exhausted.

“If you can be spared from the household,” Maris said, changing the subject, “Mother asks if you and Lucy will be our guests at dinner tonight.”

Mrs. Pike’s eyes softened as she smiled. “I meant to invite the three of you, but I suppose those rascals of mine may fend for themselves for once. I shall inform Mr. Pike. I do not think he will object.”

“Tell him, if you wish, that we are to discuss what is to be done to aid Miss Menthrip.”

“Never say you have been to see her? Maris Lindel, you are a worker of wonders.”

“Not I, ma’am. I was merely the scouting party in advance of the main body. My mother is with Miss Menthrip now. She believes that the first order of business must be to have the doctor call upon her. I wonder if you would be good enough to ask him to do so at his earliest opportunity.”

“I’ll do so at once. Tell me, though. Is she very ill?”

“Mother thinks not, but does not like the cough that hangs upon her. There have been some reverses in her personal economy and she has been skimping on food.”

“Oh, these old women are all the same,” Mrs. Pike said, peering in the hall mirror to be certain her own cap was straight. “They will believe that they must conserve every farthing and end up spending themselves. I wonder if she would care for that pig’s cheek? I was saving it for a cold collation on Sunday, but...” She walked purposefully toward the back of the house, still talking to herself.

Lucy seized Maris’s hand and ran with her up the stairs to her room. “Hurry, before she thinks of a task for me.”

“Are you really going off with Ryan to a school?”

‘Yes, I am. He’ll never manage without someone to care for him. There are some married housemasters so I shall not be quite without feminine companionship and the masters’ chambers are charming. Sixteenth century buildings, you know.”

“Surely he can hire someone to care for him.”

“No one can do it like I can. You know how absentminded he can be when he’s studying. If I’m not there to feed him and remind him about his classes, he won’t stay long at the school. And this is such an important step for him. There are excellent Roman remains at Chitterton and Ryan hopes there may be a villa at Medley. He said that the landscape is precisely what the Romans liked. The governors of the school have given him permission to excavate when he’s not teaching.”

Lucy wore her most obstinate look, exactly like a pretty white mule. Her mother must have known it was pointless to argue with Lucy when she looked like that. “What does your father say?”

“Oh, he quotes something about laboring seven years for Rachel, which doesn’t seem to apply, does it?”

“Not very well. Is Ryan pleased?”

“Yes. When he asked me, he made it clear that he thought it a very good opportunity for me as well. There are bound to be unmarried masters and as the only single female at Medley, I should have a success even were I more ill-favored than I am.”

Maris leaned back on her elbows on her friend’s white coverlet, squinting at her. “I’ve learned a great deal in London, one way or another,” she said. “You’re not really plain at all, Lucy.”

“Oh, come. With this thin hair and crooked nose?”

“Hmmm. Take off that cap.”

“No. I’m resigned to my fate.”

“Never resign yourself to fate, Lucy. If I’d done that, I’d be Lady Danesby.”

“What?” Lucy leapt off the stool, where she’d been drooping like a wilted lily. “Tell me everything at once!”

“I shall tell you everything if you let me fix your hair. I shall anyway, so you might as well listen while I work.”

She was so enthralled by the tale Maris told that she paid no attention to what Maris was doing until the sewing scissors came out. “No, what are you doing?”

“This.” And Maris cut.

Though Lucy shuddered at each snip of the scissors and invoked the name of her mother like a sacrifice calling upon a goddess, Maris was ruthless.

With her soft hair taken out of a scraped-back topknot, a few pieces cut short and forced to curl about her forehead, her eyes looked softer, larger, and more vulnerable. The wispy curls also concealed the few spots on her forehead. A low chignon, nestled against her neck, changed the shape of her face and hid her ears.

“Let me see your dresses,” Maris demanded.

Lucy was leaning toward the small mirror, all her vicar father had allowed her, moving her head so that she could see herself. She waved toward the wardrobe and didn’t turn her attention away from her face until she heard the first rip.

“Maris!”

Maris flourished a scrap of lace tucker aloft like a savage exulting over his first scalp. “So perish all such pathetic scraps. Only spinsters and invalids wear these little lace borders anymore. For the rest, décolletage is lower than ever.”

“But what will Mama say?”

“Nothing, when she sees that I am wearing the same thing. Now, come help me rip all these off.”

“No, no. Maris, you’re going too far,” she gasped when Maris picked up another gown and began to struggle with the lace.

“Very well. Put on this one. If you don’t like it, I shall sew it on again myself.”

But when Lucy saw her figure displayed for the first time, Maris using her own sash to remodel the fit of the too-large dress (one of Mrs. Pike’s cut down), she turned and twisted, growing more excited by the minute. “There’s a pier glass in the best spare room,” she said. “I want to see all of me.”

One glance was enough. She turned to Maris with tears in her eyes. For an instant, Maris felt a burning sense of guilt. Then Lucy smiled. “You’re my fairy godmother,” she said.

“There’s nothing much I can do except spend my life in good works,” Maris answered.

“Can you never go back to London?”

Maris shook her head. “No. Not until the stories stop flying and they would only begin anew if I return. Perhaps I could go back if I found a husband of greater note than Lord Danesby, but what are the odds of that?”