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‘You are impudent,’ her aunt raised her voice to say regally, as if trying to overawe Kitty with her importance as head of a school and Kitty’s employer. ‘Nobody will believe a vagrant maid over a lady of means and standing in the neighbourhood.’
‘They won’t have to. I’ll have my money and keep my place till it suits me to leave. You won’t want me to tell the constables what I know, will you, Mrs Bartle?’
‘I changed my name to avoid being known as the widow of a depraved fool. That will earn me more sympathy than censure.’
‘You can say you’re the queen of the fairies if you want to. It’s what you did to him that’ll make them prick up their ears. I can read, you see? I wonder you never bothered to find out I was hired to keep an old woman out of mischief in my last place. She taught me to use my talents, then I learnt how stupid it was to trust anyone when she turned on me.’
‘I expect she saw you for the cunning little ferret you really are.’
‘I’d be careful what you say, Mrs Bartle. When the world knows what you did to keep your niece here and her husband’s money flowing into your pockets, nobody will believe you. Such a sweet story for the scandal sheets, I dare say I’ll make a fortune if you’re too stupid to pay up.’
Now Callie knew why Gideon warned her to stay silent. Kitty’s words seemed to echo like a clap of thunder and fell into her mind so surely she knew they were true. She managed to stifle a gasp of horror, but her senses were intent as Gideon’s as she realised everything she and her aunt had built here was a sham. With him here—the real Gideon next to her—the truth of him somehow cancelled out her aunt’s lies.
How had she believed every word Aunt Seraphina said against him until yesterday? Was he right; did part of her want to believe him guilty? Maybe it had been easier to blame their ills on her husband, but didn’t that make her a coward as well as a fool? She had hardened her heart against him and believed her aunt must love her because she was there after everyone else fell away. Every artlessly accidental comment about her appearance, Aunt Seraphina’s clever slights and well-placed reminders of all Callie had lost at the hands of a careless husband kept her locked down and hurting, but she hadn’t seen the truth because it was easier not to.
‘No one will believe you,’ Aunt Seraphina was sneering and how hadn’t Callie seen through her until today?
‘The stableman is coming to take this lumber down so the boxes are empty for my niece’s luggage and he certainly can’t read, so it will all be ashes in a few minutes.’
‘No, they stay here and I keep the keys.’
‘You couldn’t stop a fly doing what it wanted, let alone me, now could you? A fall down those awkward stairs will remind you who is mistress here and who is the servant.’
If Kitty didn’t have the sense to shiver at the casual malice behind that question Callie did it for her. ‘If aught happens to me, the landlord of the Crown in Manydown has a letter saying who to look for. Do you want him and half the county on to you for attempted murder?’ the girl said boldly and she was evidently a more subtle opponent than Aunt Seraphina thought.
‘So that’s where you’ve been sneaking off to. I should never have let my niece persuade me to give a trollop like you a chance when your last employer turned you off for chasing her sons. She never mentioned blackmail, though, curse her for a soft fool when you should clearly be in the local bridewell.’
‘We’re both bad, but you could’ve been better if you wanted. As for that milksop I worked for, I knew far too much about her spindle-shanked sons for her to risk it and they weren’t worth it, anyway. Miss Sommers is a better woman than either of us and took me in despite that woman’s spiteful tales, but you betrayed her long before I got here, didn’t you? So who will the world judge the worst rogue of us two, Madam Bartle?’
‘You spied on her for me, despite owing her a roof over your head, and blackmail is a serious crime. If you survive the little accident you’re about to have, you will regret relying on that weak sot from the Crown for aught but a roll in the hay, you know that, don’t you?’
‘He has me to put steel in him, Mrs Bartle, and I have this,’ the little maid said triumphantly and Callie heard her aunt gasp. ‘An account written by your husband of times he was ill after he ate with you and accidents he had on his way out to get drunk and not coming back as you claimed. He even knew a man you paid to murder him. They had a fine spree with the money, then you decided to do the job yourself and he went in fear of his life. He should have run instead of staying, but what a fool you were to keep his evidence.’
‘How did you get your grubby hands on such drunken nonsense?’ Aunt Seraphina whispered as if she dared not admit it existed out loud. Through the heavy stillness of the hot attic Callie could hear fear in her voice and knew this was true, as well.
‘I found the secret panel in your desk drawer I bet you wish was big enough for all the letters you stole over the years. Being bedridden herself, the old lady I was meant to keep quiet in my last position thought it a fine joke to teach me the tricks of such places and find things her son-in-law hid from his wife so she could make him do as she said.’
‘That’s where you learnt your disgraceful trade?’
‘Of course, and a cunning old besom she is, too,’ Kitty said admiringly. ‘Why else would he pay a maid to keep her happy when he hates her like poison?’
‘He still managed to dismiss you.’
‘That’s when I learnt never to trust sly witches like you and make sure I know more than they do. The old woman moved her treasures, then told her daughter I was warming her precious sons’ beds.’
‘You were lucky not to be whipped at the cart-tail,’ Aunt Seraphina scorned.
‘I knew too much, but then the old lady gossiped and I couldn’t get work. Don’t you look down your long nose at me, Mrs Bartle, I was born with nothing and make my way as best I can. You were born a lady and only took me on because I’m cheap and you thought I’d be so grateful I’d do whatever you bade me.’
‘And you would be on the parish now if not for me.’
‘Not I,’ Kitty said confidently and somehow Callie believed her. ‘I wouldn’t be set up for life neither, though, so I’m happy to tell your niece what you did if you don’t pay up. If this paper gets to the magistrates, stealing from your family and keeping a man and his wife apart all these years will be small beer next to wilful murder.’
It went so quiet in the chamber under the roof Callie could hear the crackle of paper as the girl held that damning account out of the Aunt Seraphina’s way as she did her best to grab it from her.
‘Enough,’ she whispered to Gideon, convinced the two people in that room were so absorbed in their struggle they wouldn’t notice if a town crier was standing on the stairs.
‘Indeed,’ he agreed, and somehow managed to launch himself up the last few stairs and past the partition wall as swiftly and silently as a hunting wolf.
He easily topped Kitty and Aunt Seraphina and snatched the letter from Kitty before she even took in the fact he was behind her, throwing it back to Callie. Catching by instinct, she laid it on the stair and got ready to join in if he was too gentlemanly to ward off two biting, spitting furies.
Gideon must have learnt the folly of being a gentleman with she-cats since they parted. He grabbed Kitty by the waist and lifted her off her feet so he could aim her at Aunt Seraphina like a weapon. Her wildly kicking feet landed a good few blows on Aunt Seraphina’s substantial person as the girl tried to turn in his arms to scratch and bite him. Luckily both women were soon winded and Gideon stepped back.
‘How enlightening,’ he said casually. ‘See if Biddy’s friend the groom has returned with the magistrate yet, will you, love?’ he asked Callie without turning round.
‘Of course,’ she said, carrying Bonhomie Bartle’s statement at arm’s length as if it were as noxious as the man who wrote it.
She ran downstairs, unsure Gideon’s gentlemanly instincts would let him hold those two at bay much longer. The memory of the deadly pistols he pulled out of his pocket as if he used them to hold felons up every day reassured her. For all she knew he ran such risks on a daily basis. She could see him doing exactly that when she turned her back on him. Occupied with her own thoughts, she watched Squire Evans ride up to the house as fast as his fat old cob would carry him and remembered the evidence in her hand. She darted into her term-time office and locked it in the box where she kept the girls’ pocket money. If Gideon chose to show it to the authorities she would hand him the key, but somehow she didn’t want her aunt’s downfall to be caused by a man she had despised and feared herself.
‘I still can’t take it in,’ the magistrate said after a spitting and furious Kitty was escorted off the premises with her bundle of belongings and Mrs Bartle locked in her room. ‘Mrs Grisham seems such an upstanding woman.’
‘I suspected nothing, Mr Evans,’ Callie said with a rueful shrug.
‘So why were you suspicious, Sir Gideon?’ the squire asked.
‘I just knew something was amiss,’ he said with that closed expression Callie hated. ‘I would rather our gullibility went no further, if you take my meaning, sir?’
‘Ah, yes, well I don’t see how that can be, Sir Gideon. If we prosecute the woman, we’ll need a good case and yours is by far the strongest.’
‘I intend to keep all the evidence pertinent to it in a safe place and if you return the letters Mrs Bartle used to blackmail her neighbours anonymously she will have nothing left to live on but her wits.’
‘No doubt she’d thrive, since “the wicked flourish like the green bay tree” as it says in our prayer books. Inconvenient to have all that linen washed in public, is it?’ The squire tapped his red nose with a beefy forefinger and reached for the glass of excellent brandy Aunt Seraphina kept for wealthier visitors.
‘Lady Laughraine and I will be living not fifteen miles away and I don’t want the whole world to know what fools we’ve been,’ Gideon agreed confidentially.
Apparently her husband had become a fine actor over the years they were apart. Callie suspected he didn’t care a straw what their neighbours thought, given the gossip it had been enjoying at his expense since before he was born. He was doing it for her. She shook her head to show him she could weather being thought a fool to tell the world her aunt was a thief and a liar. He pretended not to see, so she gave up and made an excuse about needing to steady the household and left the room. They would have to stay here another night at least now and, although Cataret House had been her home for nine years and she’d thought herself content here, she couldn’t wait to be quit of the place.
* * *
‘My aunt will spread all sorts of wicked gossip about us if you let her go, Gideon,’ Callie warned as they went upstairs later to assess what to take with them and what she was happy to leave behind.
‘If she tries it, I’ll find her and stop her,’ he said so coolly she shivered and believed him. ‘Never mind her, how many of your belongings do you want to take with us, Callie? I’d prefer to travel as light as we can.’
‘Exactly when did I agree to go to Raigne, Gideon?’ she challenged half-heartedly. Somehow the thought of going home was very tempting, even if she would be going to the ‘Big House’ rather than comfortable King’s Raigne Vicarage.
‘Would you rather we went to London, or somewhere else altogether then? I don’t much care where we go as long as you come with me.’
‘Raigne is your home.’
‘One you have a great deal more right to call so than I have.’
Callie shook her head, because that huge old barn of a house would never seem like home to her, but nine years of loneliness and longing told her pride would make a very poor bedfellow if she insisted on staying apart and aloof from her husband and refused to admit they might manage to remake their marriage if they both tried hard enough.
‘If I come with you, it can only be a maybe to resuming our marriage, not a fait accompli, Gideon,’ she warned, but both of them knew it was a huge concession. Callie wondered if he felt as if he hardly dared even breathe deeply lest this hope for the future shattered in their faces all over again, as well.
‘It’s far more than I dared hope when I came here, so that will do me for now. In the meantime, how much of this do you really want to take now, and what can be sent on later, my not-quite wife?’ he said with a smile that invited her to find their not-quite anything status almost comfortable.
‘I don’t have many possessions that really matter,’ she said, gazing round the shabby room as if through a stranger’s eyes. ‘One or two books are from Grandfather Sommers’s library and then there’s my grandmother’s pearl necklet and a miniature of them when they were young. Apart from my writing box, I can leave the rest without a qualm.’
‘Then pack those and any essentials and we’ll leave as soon as you’re awake in the morning. I’d like to get to Raigne before my honorary uncle is out on the estate and it will be cooler and less trying to travel early in the day.’
‘How can I stay at Raigne, Gideon? I hardly ever set foot in the place when I lived at King’s Raigne Vicarage,’ she protested, the thought of bowling up to the Tudor mansion as if she had a right suddenly felt impossible again.
‘It’s your home and heaven knows you’ve more right to call it so than I have.’
‘No, you love the place and belong there as I never will.’
‘That’s nonsense and I know Lord Laughraine wants you home nearly as much as I do. You’re his only grandchild, Callie, and he’s a good man who truly only wants the best for you. He might have seemed remote and uncaring when you were a child, but apparently your other grandfather begged him to let you grow up without the stigma of your birth shadowing your childhood. No, don’t grimace like that, love, Reverend Sommers was quite right. I might have been born within wedlock by the skin of my teeth, but it’s bad enough for a boy to be mocked and derided for what the gossips say his parents did. I would never wish it on a girl who might end up being tarred with her mother’s supposed sins before she was old enough to know what they even meant.’
‘We can’t know now, can we?’ she managed to say past the torn feelings that were threatening to clog up her throat and make her weep, not for herself but for him and all the slights and sly whispers he’d been left to cope with as best he could since he was old enough to take notice.
‘I can, but it’s quite safe to love him, Callie. Don’t turn him into a conniving monster because your aunt was one and you don’t trust your family now. It was wrong of me to drag you to London when we got back from Scotland. I should have left you at Raigne to learn to know Lord Laughraine. You were carrying our child. He and his household could have fussed over you while I was in town learning my trade. I was selfish to insist on having you near all the time. I can’t tell you how much I wish you’d known him as the fine man he is before you went through hell, Callie. You might have turned to him for love and support when I failed you then, instead of your stony-hearted aunt.’
‘If wishes were horse, beggars would ride,’ she replied tightly as she began opening drawers and pulling out books so she wouldn’t have to look him in the eye. ‘And I wouldn’t have stayed behind, anyway. I loved you far too much to be parted from you while we waited for our child to be born,’ she finally admitted gruffly.
‘You would have put up with it for her sake,’ he said and bent to pull a little trunk out of the cupboard she was staring into without seeing the old clothes and winter boots that just wouldn’t do for Sir Gideon Laughraine’s lady.
‘We don’t know that it would have made any difference if I was anywhere else. Don’t second-guess fate, Gideon. It does no good and will drive you insane if you let it,’ she said, her own struggles with that particular demon haunting her.
‘No dear,’ he said with mock humility she knew was meant to lighten her thoughts. He went out to retrieve some of the boxes the stableman had emptied ready for her departure, those that really were full of worn-out clothes and ancient account books. ‘Do you need anything else?’ he asked, seeming to accept it was best to deal with details right now.
‘I think not. Where do you intend to sleep tonight, Gideon?’
‘I could insist on sharing this room, but I’m not a fool,’ he said with a sceptical glance at the narrow bed and ancient furniture, as if he wasn’t sure it was up to the weight of a fully adult male if he stayed.
‘No, and it’s best if I do this alone,’ she said mildly, refusing to hint at her feelings about sharing a bed with him again, mainly because she wasn’t sure what they were herself.
‘Don’t forget I’m here now,’ he told her mildly, even if there was an intensity in his complex grey eyes that made her long for things she wasn’t even ready to admit to herself she wanted yet.
‘I learnt to walk my own paths while you were away,’ she warned.
‘Part of being married is learning to walk together without stamping too hard on one another’s toes, isn’t it? I’ve been without you for a very long time, Wife,’ he reminded her so softly it felt more significant than if he were to shout his frustration from the rooftops.
‘I still lived a very different life from you and it will take a while to accustom myself to yours if we find a way past the pitfalls. My aunt isn’t the sole reason we were apart these last nine years,’ she reminded him with a severe look to remind him that war wasn’t won.
And I need to work out if I can endure living with a husband who only wants to share my bed because he has no alternative without making our marriage vows a lie, she added an unspoken aside. He sighed and seemed to resign himself to her mistrust for a little longer. Then he smiled wryly to say he was tame again and there was no need to worry he was going to beg.
Chapter Seven
‘What has it been like, Callie, this life you made without me? Not being a girl, I don’t know what they’re taught or how they are before they appear in society as if sprung fully formed from the egg.’
How could she refuse to try to breach the gaps between them? It was a start if they understood each other better, she supposed, but some of the old rebellious Callie whispered, when was he going to tell her the adventures he’d had without her?
‘Much depends on the family she comes from and the one she might make one day. Grandfather Sommers’s classical education didn’t prepare me to instruct young women about the niceties of life and I left that to my aunt. I do know aristocratic young ladies have very different ambitions to genteel ones, though, and our teaching was always aimed at the latter.’
‘So what does a genteel young lady need to know?’
He surprised her by meekly handing her any items she nodded at and putting ones she rejected in neat piles as they worked in an easy harmony she would have found incredible only yesterday. It felt oddly intimate having him share the room that was her sanctuary for so long, yet he made it seem normal to silently debate over her most intimate garments and possessions in front of the man who should have shared her life, so how could she tell him to leave her alone and go back to being the outsider in this otherwise all-female household?
‘How to manage a household and control a budget, the details of her kitchen and how it is supplied. how to contrive and make do and be sure her family are in credit with the world in every way possible,’ she said as she tested that question in her head and tried it out on what she had done her best to teach her young ladies. ‘She needs to know enough of the world to keep certain parts of it out of her house and encourage other ones in with the right degree of hospitality. To record and examine accounts, visit her neighbours and be a useful part of her local community, and value truth over show, as well. I don’t know if I can really describe an ideal wife since I doubt such a paragon exists. The closest I can get is to say she should be well informed and able to care for her family, ready to love her children and support her husband’s endeavours as best she can, yet still be a woman of character in her own right.’
‘And for all that they need algebra and natural philosophy and a smattering of Greek and Latin?’ he asked, looking at the pile of books she was thumbing through to find which ones she could leave behind and which must go with her.
‘I only teach those if a girl shows an aptitude for learning and a lively curiosity about the world. Their potential husbands are taught them as a matter of course, so I see no reason to rob a girl of a chance to explore them before she has to be busy with a family.’
‘It’s a wonder you restrict yourself to a few extra lessons with your brighter pupils. Your late grandfather seems to have treated you like a student at Balliol.’
‘All that learning didn’t do me much good, did it?’ she asked, avoiding his gaze as she tried not to look back on the idealistic, impulsive girl she was when she fell in love with him. ‘I was so full of wondrous myths and legends and tales of wild adventure I couldn’t see real things as they were.’
‘What were they then?’ he asked quietly.
‘Impossible,’ she said bleakly, the gaps and betrayals of her young life piling up to remind her what a fiction her dream of perfect contentment with her hero-lover was.
‘No, it was possible. We only needed time to grow up and cope with such hot passions in the everyday world. Left to ourselves we would have found a way, Callie. You have to believe that or we might as well set up a nice little school for you in Bath and hire a law office for me on the moon.’
‘Perhaps we should,’ she said with a half-smile at the thought of him negotiating with the ancient gods of Olympus for the rights of a celestial body.
‘Don’t. It’s unthinkable to turn our backs on a last chance at love,’ he said hoarsely and there he was again, the true Gideon under all that gentlemanly self-control.
‘If we can’t laugh together, we’ll never be anything but strangers at heart,’ she warned him. ‘Half of what went wrong between us was because the intensity of our love felt so fierce. If we’re going to try again, our marriage must be rooted in real life.’
‘I expect you’re right, but could we agree not to laugh about parting again, if you want me to stay sane while we work our way round the thorns?’
‘I’ll agree to that, Gideon, but I refuse to be rushed into anything else.’
‘What do I have to do then, Callie? I warn you I’ll go down on my knees and beg if I have to sooner or later and you’ll find it embarrassing and ridiculous. Just agreeing to come to Raigne with me is hope enough for now, though, so I’ll excuse you that ordeal for as long as I can endure the temptation of you so close and not abase myself,’ he said, and how much of what he said was serious and how much a joke? She eyed his careful smile and unreadable gaze and decided it would take longer than a day to read the true Gideon under all that armour nowadays.
‘The world will still believe we’re together again,’ she said flatly and wondered if she had been stupid to agree to go to Raigne with him, after all. ‘You only came back yesterday, Gideon, we haven’t had time to get used to each other as we are now, let alone as man and wife.’
‘At least at Raigne we can be the people we really were all along.’
‘Without my aunt trying to wreck us all the time.’
‘Yes, a new start, Callie, that’s all. At least this time I won’t have to spend hours at my law books and you won’t be living in a strange city with people you have little chance to know.’
‘I see the logic of it, but what if we fail publicly this time?’
‘Would that be so much worse than not trying at all?’ He strode over to the window and back again, looking as if this cramped little room was closing in on him. It felt too small to her now; a cell built with Aunt Seraphina’s lies, and she bit back a reckless urge to go tonight, dark and dangerous thought it might be to risk travelling at night. ‘Tell me truly you only want to find another school to teach in. That you can forget the chance of a family and I will smother my hopes and promise not to trouble you again,’ he finally said as if it hurt.