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‘Darius has always been as grumpy as a bear whenever he feels he might be in danger of being thanked for some kindness he has carried out,’ Marianne told Fliss after her brother left as if he was impatient to be done with Fliss so he could get on with more important matters, such as his sheep and fences.
‘Darius,’ Fliss said thoughtfully, trying to divert herself from his brusqueness when he really must be very busy with several farms to get back in profit and this old house to rescue from neglect and decay, ‘what an unusual name.’
‘My father admired Herodotus’s description of Darius the Great as a man with great courage in battle and determined to pursue justice for all under his rule. My brother was mad for the army as a boy and hates injustice to this day.’
‘He told me he had seen enough of soldiering in the late wars,’ Fliss said a little bit too quickly to be truly uninterested in dashing Captain Darius or intriguing Farmer Yelverton and his sister was sure to notice her eagerness to talk about him if she wasn’t more careful.
She tried not to think about the terrible dangers and appalling sights he must have suffered from and seen. Now he was out of the way the horrid notion he could so easily have been killed on one of those far-away battlefields was haunting her like a bad smell and she shuddered and felt the pull of dry mud all over her skin. She had her own bad smell to worry about, now she came to think about it; the strong aroma of stagnant mud she had brought into her new friend’s otherwise immaculate kitchen would carry into the shady and shuttered room on the other side of the oak-panelled hallway as soon as she could nerve herself to spoil that pristine tiled floor and run towards that bath. Despite her shame at making her new friend’s home so noxious, she could hardly wait to get as much of the mud and stench off her person as possible.
‘As well he might,’ Marianne said with a sad shake of her honey-blonde head. Fliss hoped she had not reminded her new friend of her own hardships and loss when she followed the drum, but of course she must have done. Such a deep and desperate grief must always be with her now she had lost the husband she had clearly adored. ‘The water will be too cold to get all the dirt off if you don’t hurry up and get into your bath,’ Marianne said bracingly, as if that was enough of that sad subject and they had the here and now to worry about. ‘As there are no men about to see you it might be best if you stripped off in here so you don’t have to smell your filthy clothes while you bathe. I can put them in the copper to boil once everyone has had their baths and washes and maybe something can be saved from the wreckage.’
‘I doubt it,’ Fliss said as she looked down at the mud and green slime and knew all too well it had soaked right through to her skin underneath. She felt shy of stripping naked even in front of another woman, but Marianne was right. And it took her new friend’s help and encouragement to prise her out of her stiff-with-dirt clothes and never mind worrying about maidenly modesty. By the time they peeled away Fliss’s stiff and filthy cambric gown, the no-longer-fine lawn petticoat underneath it and her ruined corset and chemise, she was so glad to be rid of them she forgot to care she was all but naked as the blessedly cool and fresh air from the half-shuttered windows caressed her muddy and overheated skin. It even seemed funny when Marianne had to steel herself to cut through the knots of her mud-tightened and already ruined garters and Fliss’s torn and no-longer-in-the-least-bit-white-cotton stockings could finally come off.
‘Now I will have to try to scrub myself clean,’ Fliss said with a rueful glance down her mud-streaked and filthy legs.
Luckily Marianne’s tales of her own misadventures in Portugal and Spain when she was following her husband on the march made this feel almost run of the mill, but Fliss still felt vulnerable and a little bit sinful when they crossed the hall to that shadowy parlour. The muted sunlight inside the house made the shadows seem inquisitive, as if the ghosts of the past were curious about this filthy and scandalously nude visitor to their ancient home. ‘My uncle said I was not to be pampered with help dressing or undressing when I was growing up as I would have to earn my own living one day,’ she explained to Marianne. ‘So I am not used to being stark naked in company.’
‘And our maids would have looked startled and asked what was wrong with our hands if we had expected them to dress or undress us, but at least I had a sister to help me if I needed it, when she was not being an annoying little brat.’
‘I would have loved a sister. My cousin is only a month or two older than I am, but she was always so jealous of her position as the daughter of the house that she all but ignored me while we were growing up under the same roof.’
‘Are you an orphan, then?’
‘Yes, my parents died in an explosion on board ship when I was nine. An unlucky shot at the powder magazine or some mistake or dreadful accident, I suppose. I never wanted to know all the details since nothing was ever going to bring them back.’
‘Best not to know,’ Marianne said dourly.
Losing her parents had been terrible enough, but to find your husband’s corpse after such a notoriously bloody siege must have been appalling. There were no right words to say about a loss like that. And at least worrying about Marianne’s grieving heart had got Fliss inside the little parlour and that blissful bath without worrying about being in a state of nature and she was very glad of the other woman’s help with scrubbing every last speck of mud off her filthy feet. Thank goodness the rest came off more easily or she might be bright red all over before the stench was finally off her wincing skin. Marianne insisted on more gentle treatment for her grazed hands and knees and even stayed to help her wash her hair. She worked the mud out of it far more patiently than Fliss would have done. Then they rinsed it and the rest of her with cold water, since the bath water was far too dirty to be any help by then. Shivering, but feeling clean again at long last, Fliss was almost her old self again as she stepped out of the now-filthy bath water. Once she had dried herself off as best she could and wrapped a towel around her soaking wet hair Marianne passed her a fine linen shift that looked ancient but spotless and she shrugged it on with a blissful sigh. Marianne must have resurrected it from a long-forgotten chest at some point over the last few weeks and she was very grateful for its clean softness, even if all the washing and hanging out in the sun could not quite get the beautifully embroidered undergarment white again.
‘Were you planning on making it into something for yourself?’ she asked.
‘No, I simply could not bring myself to throw it away. There is so much here that was cast aside and forgotten it seems criminal not to use anything that could be useful again and at least this time I was right. I must remember to tell Darius so when he teases me about hoarding things nobody has had a use for in all the decades it has been sitting here forgotten.’
‘In this instance he is quite wrong,’ Fliss said. ‘I am very glad you rescued this and had it laundered. I feel gloriously clean and almost decent again.’
‘You are very welcome to it then, Miss Grantham.’
‘Please do not call me so after you have helped me rid myself of so much mud and grime and been so kind. I hope we can consider ourselves friends now, even if we have only just met. You have seen me naked and not even my former governess has done that and she has been my friend for years. And my given name is Felicity, but my parents and now my friends call me Fliss.’
‘Fliss is a pretty name, but are you sure?’
Fliss nodded, sad that her new friend must have been slighted by far too many narrow-minded ladies after her unequal marriage for her to be so diffident about an offer of friendship. ‘I should not have said so otherwise,’ she said.
‘Very well, I will call you that as well then. I always thought the name Felicity sounded like a reproach to those of us who are not quite so felicitous. Was your father the son of a preacher to give you such a virtuous name?’
‘No, it was his mother’s name. He asked my mother to have me christened with it if he was still away from home when I was born, since she did consent to be left behind when he sailed just that one time since she was expecting me. She used to tease him that she wanted to call me Titania after the Queen of the Fairies from A Midsummer Night’s Dream as I was born on Midsummer Day, but a promise was a promise. At least I think she was joking, but I am glad he got his way in case she was serious for once.’
‘She sounds like fun,’ Marianne said rather wistfully.
Fliss supposed Mrs Yelverton was not and felt blessed to have such happy memories of her own mother, even if she had lost her far too young. ‘She was; they both were. They had to elope together because my grandfather had a very grand marriage planned for her and Papa was an orphan as well, but we were all very happy on shore and aboard ship.’
‘You went with them?’
‘Yes, at first I was too young to be left behind and apparently I travelled the oceans before I was old enough to know a midden from a topsail. Papa always used to say I was born with sea legs.’
‘All I recall of the sea is being tossed about on it like a cork through the Bay of Biscay. It was rough all the way to Portugal and back again and I doubt if I would ever grow used to it if I had to stay aboard ship for years.’
‘You would in the end; Lord Nelson used to suffer from seasickness until he got his sea legs again and look what a great admiral he was. I expect troop ships are lubberly sort of craft and not a bit like the fine frigates we used to sail on. They would seem to dance over the water as much as sail it when there was a fair wind. Flying before the wind was something I missed so badly when I had to be quiet and good in my uncle’s house after my parents decided I was too old to go to sea and needed an education. They were killed soon after that and I sometimes used to wish they had taken me with them when my uncle made it clear what a burden I was to him and life seemed so grim, until Miss Donne made me realise I was not alone after all. I suppose she has been my family ever since.’
‘And I am very glad you are still here, even if I cannot quite understand how anyone could love being at sea,’ Marianne said with a shake of the head.
‘Never mind my odd ways now, do you have anything else I could borrow for our trip to Broadley?’ Fliss asked wryly, waving a hand at her barely covered body.
‘Nothing of mine would fit you. I suppose we could cut the skirts of one of my gowns down and try to stretch out the bodice with the bottom six inches we had to cut off,’ Marianne said, gesturing at her own tall and rather willowy figure. She shot Fliss a measuring glance and shook her head. ‘We could not make it work without a lot more time to fit it to your figure,’ she added regretfully.
‘No,’ Fliss said, comparing Marianne’s elegant figure with her own and wishing she was tall and gracefully curved rather than full-figured and dumpy.
‘My sister Viola is much more petite than me and she left two of her best muslins with me for safekeeping, since she thinks them much too fine for a governess to wear even on high days and holidays. If she had left them in Bath with our mother, she would be sure to cut them up to make christening gowns for the poor. Mama cannot put aside thirty years as a vicar’s wife even now my father has had to retire for the sake of his health and never mind what Viola would wear at the Upper Rooms when she came home. I have the gowns stored in the bedchamber I have finally managed to get clean and ready for her to use if she can ever manage to come and stay. She would be the first to insist you wear one of them rather than go about in a flour sack or wrapped in my cloak to hide your nakedness on such a hot day.’
‘My very sincere thanks to both of you then, since I really do not want to arrive back at my friend’s house in a shift or a sack and I would roast in your cloak by the time we got to Broadley as well as looking like a figure of fun. I promise I will take great care of your sister’s good gown and I am sure that my friend Miss Donne will stand over her long-suffering maid and see that it is laundered very carefully indeed before we return it. I am sorry your father had to give up his living, by the way.’
‘So is he; my parents were very well suited to their busy lives at the centre of a wide parish, but they do not go on half so well now they have not got much to do or much of a pension to do it with. It seems that middling folk who go to live in Bath for the benefit of their health must amuse themselves with gossip, tea drinking and taking the waters if they are not to be run off their feet and land in the sponging house. Mama seems to have taken to it all like a duck to water, but I know my father misses his parishioners and our rambling old vicarage as well as his study full of books and the pupils he used to take in to supplement his income.’
‘Idleness can seem far harder to endure than being too busy at times,’ Fliss said. Her own doubts about her new life, if she did not marry and have Lord Stratford’s heirs and spares to keep her occupied, resurfaced. But never mind her personal dilemmas, Marianne must have felt even more grief stricken for her husband once she was back with her parents and living such a confined life, especially since her mother and father had not approved of her choice of a husband in the first place.
‘That sounds like the voice of experience,’ Marianne said lightly.
Fliss concluded she did not want to talk about that dark time in her life now she was busy again and from the state of this old house looked as if she would be so for a very long time. ‘Perhaps, although I doubt I was as busy as you are here. I am having a holiday from being a governess. I am between positions and it feels very odd not to be busy teaching my former pupil or planning lessons and activities to keep such an acute young lady out of mischief,’ she said with a shrug and felt guilty about hiding her good fortune from most of the world. She had resolved to keep it secret until she was certain what she wanted to do about Lord Stratford’s proposal, since news of her inheritance would attract fortune hunters and she was not quite free to be courted by anyone until she had given him an answer one way or the other.
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