The Arrangement (29 page)

All of the children, girls as well as boys, were going to spend the morning fishing on the river, and this seemed to me a quiet enough activity for a boy who had recently suffered a head injury. Raoul had promised me last night that he would assign one of the younger, larger footmen to keep an eye on Nicky, so I felt easier in my mind about my son’s safety. I would have accompanied the children myself but I was feeling guilty about leaving Ginny in the sole company of Harriet.

Poor Ginny. Not only was she feeling the discomforts of pregnancy, but now she had the added worries of a house whose bedroom wing had burned down and needed to be rebuilt. All of this with a husband who was at a scientific conference in Heidelberg!

“Let’s go for a drive to Henley,” I said when I found her sitting glumly in the Little Drawing Room staring distractedly out the window at the lovely summer morning. “You need a change of scene and we can do some shopping and get some ices at that ice cream parlor you told me about.”

Her face brightened like a child’s who has been promised a treat. “What a good idea, Gail. I am so despondent about Austerby. Just the thought of having to rebuild the whole east wing makes me sick. Is Raoul free to drive us, do you know?”

Raoul was nowhere to be found, however. Powell told us that he had gone to inspect some work that was being done at one of the tenant’s farms and was not expected back until much later. Roger was gone also, along with his phaeton, so he could not drive us. Mr. Cole and his carriage were also missing from the stables, but since neither Ginny nor I would dream of asking Mr. Cole to drive us around the corner, his absence did not make any difference to our plans.

“I’d drive you but I have a whole series of appointments this afternoon,” John told us.

Ginny and I looked at each other gloomily.

“Do you know, Ginny, I am perfectly capable of handling Raoul’s grays,” I said. “Do you think he would object to my borrowing them so we could go to Henley by ourselves?”

Ginny looked uncertain. “I am just wondering if it would be proper.”

“We’ll take a groom,” I said.

Ginny said in a rush, “To be honest with you, Gail, I am feeling so low that the thought of a drive to Henley is like heaven. I am sure it will be perfectly proper for us to go by ourselves if we take a groom.” She added recklessly, “And if it isn’t—well, who cares!”

I repeated the question that was my real concern: “And what about Raoul letting me use his grays?”

Ginny gave me a look that held a combination of speculation and amusement. “Raoul would probably let you use the sacred Savile sword if you wanted to, Gail. His grays will be as nothing.”

I blushed. “It is true that he is a very generous man.”

“Yes, he is. But that is not what I am talking about,” came the enigmatic reply.

In the end we decided to go to Henley by ourselves. There was no objection in the stables when Ginny asked for Raoul’s grays and the low-slung phaeton to be brought around and we drove off in the peace, sunlight, and warmth of a perfect July morning. Ginny wore a big-brimmed straw bonnet trimmed with green satin ribbons to shield her eyes and her complexion from the sun. I didn’t own any bonnets like that since I was accustomed to driving and needed my lateral vision, so I perched a little dab of ancient black straw on my short locks for convention’s sake and off we went over the causeway.

The grays were lovely to drive, well broken and willing to move right up into their bits. There was very little traffic on the road, and Ginny spent most of the time telling me about how she was going to redecorate each room at Austerby when the new wing was built. I made noises to indicate that I was listening with breathless attention, and by the time we reached Henley she was feeling very much better.

She did have to use a water closet, however, so I stopped at the Black Swan.

There was a lull in the inn’s usually busy stable yard, and the first thing we saw, standing by itself, was Mr. Cole’s old-fashioned carriage.

“Good heavens,” said Ginny. “I wonder what that odious Cole is doing here.”

I answered, “Perhaps he is meeting a business associate. After all, he can hardly bring the sort of fellow he must do business with to Savile, can he?”

Ginny wrinkled her elegant Melville nose. “That is so.” She looked around. “I hope we don’t meet him, Gail. Imagine having to acknowledge a man like that in a public place.” She shuddered delicately.

We went into the parlor and Ginny got a maid to take her upstairs so she could use the water closet. I didn’t want anything to drink, so I went to look at the pictures hung along the dark wainscoting of the parlor wall. I was still standing there, with my back to the room, when Albert Cole came in with someone whose voice sounded oddly familiar tome.

Remembering Ginny’s wish not to meet Mr. Cole, I kept my back turned and so was an unintentional eavesdropper on a very interesting conversation.

“I’ve told you that I’ll need some proof of what you’re telling me,” Cole said. “I’m not one to shell out the nonsense without I’ve got proof that the information you’re selling me is true.”

“Oh, it’s true all right. It’s like I told you in London, Cole. I know where it is, I just have to convince the party holding it to give it up to me.”

Suddenly I recognized the voice. It belonged to the man who had thrust himself on me when I had come to the inn with Roger. Wickham, I think he had called himself. I had thought that perhaps he was the man with whom Raoul had found Roger gambling.

It now seemed that Wickham had been hanging around waiting to meet Mr. Cole, not Roger.

Mr. Cole said, “Well, I don’t deny that I’m mighty interested in that information, Mr. Wickham, mighty interested. But I have to see it before I’ll pay you a cent.”

“But don’t you see, I need money to convince the party holding the information to give it up to me.” Wickham sounded very frustrated, as if this was a point he had been making again and again.

“Well, don’t it beat the Dutch,” said Mr. Cole in amazement. “You want me to pay you money for information you say you know someone else has? How am I to know that this ain’t all one big bamboozle and you’re not going to take my money and run away with it?”

“Because I won’t!”

Mr. Cole’s laugh held genuine amusement. “No, no, sonny,” he said. “If you want me to pay you for that information, then you bring it to me. Otherwise you get nothing.”

The conversation continued in this vein for a few more minutes, while I studiously gazed at the pictures of hunt scenes that lined the dark walls of the parlor. At last the two men moved out into the inn’s entryway and I heard them parting, Mr. Wickham still without the money he had come to collect.

I wondered a little worriedly what kind of information he was trying to sell to Mr. Cole. Wickham didn’t seem the sort to have inside information on investments or things like that. Could this interview have anything to do with the dangerous happenings at Savile Castle?

Although I didn’t like Mr. Cole, could I seriously think he would be interested in harming Nicky? The money Nicky had inherited from George was nothing to a man like Cole.

Then Ginny came back into the parlor and I banished the odd meeting from my mind as we prepared to continue on to Henley.

Ginny had a wonderful afternoon. She met a number of people whom she knew, and telling her tale of woe about the burning of Austerby perked her up tremendously. Added to that, the phaeton was filled with her purchases by the time we started for home. I spent the afternoon mainly trailing in her extravagant wake, but I did make a single purchase—a set of marbles for Nicky that I thought he would like.

Once or twice Ginny pointed out a dress that she thought would look well on me, but I shook my head. “I know you must be growing very tired of my two evening dresses, Ginny, but I cannot afford a new one,” I said firmly after she had tactfully pointed out the second dress. “Money is extremely tight with me at the moment and it will continue to be tight until John finds a place for me to start up my business again.”

She started to say something, then stopped abruptly, and I thought the subject of my lack of money was safely dropped. On the way home, however, she raised it again.

“Gail,” she began, “I don’t mean to pry, but why have you never married again? Surely that is the most obvious way for you to escape your financial difficulties.” Before I could answer, she added quickly, “And don’t tell me that you have never had any chances, because I won’t believe you.”

I looked thoughtfully at the matched set of powerful dappled gray haunches moving in an easy trot in front of the phaeton. One of the horses flicked his tail to swish away a fly, and I said to Ginny, “Finding a husband is not as easy as you may think when one is poor and has a child to support.”

“Are you saying that since your husband’s death no man has ever asked you to marry him?” she demanded.

“Well…” I dragged the word out reluctantly. “No, I am not saying that.”

“I didn’t think so,” she said triumphantly. She turned her head so that she could see me around the edges of her bonnet, folded her arms across the bosom of her green walking dress, and demanded, “So—why?”

I sighed. “I suppose I didn’t want to give up my freedom,” I said. “Surely you can understand, Ginny, that it is one thing to be married to someone one loves and quite another thing to be married to someone one only tolerates. That is why, as long as I could keep Nicky fed and clothed, I preferred to do it on my own.”

There was quite a long silence. A gig was coming down the road in the opposite direction and I drove Raoul’s beautifully mannered grays past the single brown gelding pulling the gig with no trouble. The driver, who looked like a farmer, tipped his hat to Ginny and me.

Ginny said, “I do not know many women who would have had the courage to do that, Gail.”

We came around a sharpish turn and found that a big lumbering farm cart piled high with hay was in front of us. I slowed the grays to a smooth walk.

“These are the loveliest horses,” I said with enthusiasm.

We walked slowly behind the cart for another hundred yards or so and then the hay cart turned to veer across the fields. I increased our speed to an even trot.

I could have driven those horses all day.

I tried to explain my actions to Ginny. “I was brought up to be independent, you see. My parents died when I was quite young, and my sister and I were sent to live with my mother’s sister in Hatfield. As Aunt Margaret suffers from an illness that makes her afraid to leave her home, Deborah and I had a great deal of freedom.” I turned my head to give Ginny a brief smile. “It was not that Aunt Margaret did not love us. She did. But she was definitely…odd.”

“This is the woman whom Harriet keeps referring to as a witch?”

“Yes. She is very interested in herbs. I would trust her over any doctor when it comes to illness.”

“It does not sound like an ideal childhood,” Ginny said in a noncommittal sort of voice. “No mother, no father, and an aunt who spends all her time in her herb garden and is afraid to leave her property.”

I shook my head in decisive negation. “It was not a bad sort of childhood at all. Deborah and I had each other, you see. We made up to each other for whatever else and whoever else we might have lacked.”

“And where is Deborah now?” Ginny asked.

With those words, the pain struck, the pain that would never go away when I confronted the loss of Deborah.

“She died,” I said woodenly, staring once more at the gray haunches in front of me.

“Oh, Gail,” Ginny said with ready sympathy. “I am so sorry. How very dreadful for you.”

“Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”

Silence fell between us.

“Life has not been easy for you, I think,” Ginny finally said in a quiet voice. “You have lost a mother, a father, a sister, and a husband, and you are—how old?”

“Twenty-seven,” I said. I lifted my chin. “But I have my son. Many women do not have as much.”

Ginny straightened her bonnet. “Nicky is a darling child,” she said, and I gave her the smile that praise of my son always drew from me.

“I wonder how the fishing expedition went this morning,” I said, and once more we fell back upon the safe subject of our children.

* * * *

The fishing expedition had been a success and the nursery party got to eat the fruits of their labor for dinner that evening. Our family dinner was not half as pleasant as I was certain dinner in the nursery had been.

The trouble began when Roger appeared in the drawing room with eyes too large and too bright, and the first thing Raoul said to him was, “Have you been drinking?”

“I?” Roger demanded with exaggerated surprise. “How can you ask such a question, dear cousin? You of all people must know that I cannot afford to buy myself even a drink of blue ruin at a local tavern.”

“That’s so,” Mr. Cole said bitterly. “You’ve taken my money, the money Devane set aside for you as his heir, and you’ve spent it all. Once my grandson is born and you’re booted out of Devane forever, the devil knows or cares how you’re going to live.”

Roger leaned against the wall next to the fireplace near the statue of King James, folded his arms, and regarded Mr. Cole with infuriating superiority. “Harriet hasn’t a very good record for producing boys, Cole,” he said nastily. “Allow me to tell you that the betting at the clubs is heavily on another girl.”

Mr. Cole’s face turned a molded red and he gripped the carved arms of the oak chair he was sitting in. “After three girls, the odds are the nipper will be a boy! And I’ll tell you this, Mr. Roger know-it-all Melville, once you don’t have the prospect of inheriting Devane behind you, all your creditors are going to come calling. I’d be mighty interested to see how you’re planning to pay them off!”

Raoul said, from his place next to me by the window, “That’s quite enough, both of you. You’re upsetting the ladies.”

“Ladies? There’s only one lady here as far as I can see,” Roger said nastily.

Harriet said furiously, “Papa!”

Raoul said in a voice that would have frozen hell, “Roger, apologize this instant to Gail and to Harriet.”