Elizabeth Mansfield (18 page)

With a shudder, he fell down on his knees in the dust, his legs seeming to give way beneath him. He sat there for a moment while he caught his breath, but the sound of sobbing from the carriage quickly shook him into action. He got unsteadily to his feet. With every muscle quivering, he unbound his wrist and ran to the carriage door. The moment he opened it, two weeping little girls threw themselves into his arms.

He could see, behind them, that their governess was slumped into a corner in a swoon but apparently unharmed. Pippa, her slim little body shaking, was clutching him tightly round the neck and sobbing into his shoulder, while Sybil, on his other side, was staring at him through red-rimmed eyes, her childish mouth agape and her lips trembling pathetically. He hugged the children to him with a convulsive groan of relief. Dropping down on the carriage step, he rocked them silently in his arms. It was a long time before any of them could speak.

***

By the time the carriage drew up at the door of the house in Upper Seymour Street, it was long after dark. Camilla flew down the steps, fire in her eyes, She’d spent three anxious hours pacing about the drawing room, the last one occupied with rehearsing the furious epithets she would hurl into Thomas’s insolent face, for she had no doubt that whatever had happened was his fault. But the sight that greeted her eyes drove everything else from her mind.

First she noticed that there was no footman at the back of the coach. Next, Sybil’s head appeared in the window, her bonnet askew and her hair alarmingly disheveled. Then she saw that it was Thomas on the coachman’s seat instead of the coachman … a Thomas who’d been shockingly impaired. His livery was ripped and torn, his hat was gone, his nose mangled and bloody, and one of his eyes hideously blackened. “Oh, my God!” she cried out, “what’s
happened?”

Pippa opened the carriage door, jumped down and ran into her mother’s embrace. “He saved our lives, Mama! You wouldn’t have believed it could be done, but he really did it. He saved our lives!”

Sybil tumbled out close behind her. “It’s true, Lady Wyckfield.” she exclaimed excitedly. “Egad, I’ve never seen anything like it!”

Miss Townley tottered from the carriage and added her exclamations to theirs. Everyone was speaking at once. While Camilla tried to piece the story together from their incoherent ravings, Thomas slid down from the box and went round to the back. He ached in every bone and wanted only to stretch out on the bed in the narrow attic room that was his temporary home.

How he managed to climb the stairs he never knew. He let himself into his room, pulled off his ruined coat and threw it in a corner. He also tried to remove his shoes, but the effort proved too much for him. Gingerly, he laid himself down on the bed and shut his eyes. He thought fleetingly that he ought to wash himself and examine the extent of his wounds, but he didn’t move. Of all the aches and pains he
was aware of, he decided that his nose hurt him most. He wondered how badly mangled it was, and if he’d be disfigured for life, but he realized with surprise that he didn’t much care. In truth, he felt wonderful. There was considerable satisfaction in having faced disaster head on and defeated it.

His mind roamed over the events of the day. Everything was quite clear except the struggle with the horses. That part was nothing but a blur. But the rest … the feel of the little girls’ tears on his neck, the tension of the search for Russ in the hedges along the road, the relief when they’d brought him to the doctor in Aldershot (who’d said the coachman had had a heart seizure but would undoubtedly recover if he could remain in Aldershot in complete rest for a fortnight or so), the look on Camilla’s face when her daughter had run into her arms … these were memories that would always give him a feeling of pride.

He was just drifting into sleep when he heard a tapping at his door. “Come in,” he said, his tongue strangely thick.

The door opened, and Camilla, carrying a branched candlestick, came into the room, followed by Betsy who carried a basin and a small pile of clean cloths. While Camilla placed the candlestick on the room’s one table, Betsy grinned at him from the foot of the bed. “We heard ye acted the hero again, ye cawker,” she whispered fondly.

“Oh, good heavens, look at his poor face,” Camilla moaned, staring down at him in horror. “Betsy, let’s have the basin, quickly!”

Ignoring his thickly muttered objections, they bathed the blood and dirt from his face. There were several cuts and bruises, and the nose was undoubtedly broken, but Camilla doubted that there would be permanent disfigurement. They were just about to leave and send Daniel in to undress him when Betsy gasped, “Oh, my lady, just look at his wrist!”

Camilla sank down on the edge of the bed, lifted his arm to her lap and pushed back his shirtsleeve. The sight of the raw wounds made her wince. “Oh, Thomas!” she whispered, the tears filling her eyes.

“Don’t make a fuss, ma’am,” he said tiredly. “They’ll heal.”

“Betsy, run and fetch the herb ointment in my m-medicine drawer. And I think we shall need some more b-bandages.”

Betsy scurried out. Camilla sat staring at the lacerated wrist in her lap, the tears rolling down her cheeks. Tom, feeling a drop splash into his palm, pulled himself up on one elbow and stared at her. “Are you crying over me?” he asked in amazement.

“Yes, I c-certainly am,” she stammered with a little sniff.

“But there’s no need. I’ll mend soon enough.”

“I kn-know.”

“Then, why—”

She turned to him, her tears sparkling in the candlelight. The look in her eyes gave him a twist of pain so strong that it made his broken nose seem like a tickle. “I was s-so cruel to you … and you have g-given me the greatest gift,” she said tearfully. “I am more beholden to you than to anyone in the world. I d-don’t know what you did for D-Daniel, but if it was something like this, I now fully understand why he is so loyal to you.”

He groaned in disgust and threw himself down on his pillow. “I don’t want your gratitude, nor Daniel’s either. Gratitude is a … a damned
puny
little emotion. That’s not what keeps Daniel and me together. It’s something much stronger, something not possible between you and me. So don’t waste your tears, ma’am.”

She got up, placed his arm gently at his side and gazed down at him. “If not gratitude, what is it you
want
me to feel, Thomas?” she asked softly.

He stared up at her, his eyes lingering on the wet cheeks, the curve of her throat, the glow of the
hair that had fallen over her shoulder. But after a moment, he shook his head and smiled the ironic smile she’d seen so many times before. “No, I won’t tell you now. In your gratitude, you might offer it to me, and it’s something that goes ill with gratitude.”

Slowly, with trance-like gentleness, she reached out a hand and touched his cheek. Tom, with every intention of brushing it away, put his hand on hers, but before he realized what he’d done, he’d lifted it to his mouth and pressed his lips into her palm. The skin of her palm was soft and incredibly sweet-smelling, and his heart began to pound. He heard her make a small intake of breath, and he knew that, whatever the cost—in physical pain now and in anguish later—he was going to take her in his arms.

But the door banged open, and Betsy bustled in, Daniel at her heels. Camilla, shaken back to her senses, snatched her hand away. With eyes lowered, she sat down beside him and applied the salve to his wrist. While she busied herself bandaging it, Daniel chortled with such pride over his friend’s performance that Tom growled at him to stop making such a bother.

The wrists bandaged, Camilla and Betsy went to the door. “You do realize, Thomas,” Camilla said, pausing in the doorway, “that, under the circumstances, it will be quite impossible for me to sack you now.”

Thomas lifted himself up on one elbow and fixed an enigmatic eye on her. “Will it, ma’am?”

“Of course.” Her voice was unexpectedly choked and unsteady, and her eyes wavered from his discomfitting look. “You may remain in my employ for as long as you like.”

There was a moment of awkward silence, during which Thomas peered at her outline silhouetted in the doorway. The candles at his bedside shone in his eyes, setting up a smokey barrier of light that obscured her face. He yearned to see her expression—to learn if a last, tiny remnant of that look he’d seen in her face a few moments ago still remained. But he could see only the halo that the light from the corridor made of her hair.
Damnation, he thought, it’s the second time I’ve lost the opportunity to hold her in my arms
. He wondered if life would ever offer him another. The answer came to him in a wave of crushing despair; when, even if he remained in her employ forever, would there come another night like this?

Betsy, who’d been watching her mistress in immobile fascination, was the first to move. She made a motion of her hand to a puzzled, gaping Daniel to start taking off Tom’s shoes. While Daniel bent to his work, Camilla raised her eyes and fixed them firmly on Thomas’s face. “I shall bid you goodnight now, Thomas, because I … I don’t know what else to say. But I hope you know that you will always have my gratitude … always … for what you did today … whether you wish for it or no. You may find it a puny emotion, but I am so … so filled with it that it doesn’t seem at all puny to me.”

She left the room, and Betsy followed, closing the door behind her. Tom fell back upon his pillow and stared up at the ceiling, letting Daniel remove his clothes and chatter away unheeded.
Gratitude
! he thought in disgust. She might be filled with it, but he didn’t want it. Compared with what he wanted her to feel for him, gratitude was a crumb, a mote, a nothing!

She had offered it to him with a gentle, sweet generosity, and more than once. But the last time she’d offered it—there at the door, where he couldn’t even see her face!—he recognized even without seeing her eyes that she’d bestowed it as a barrier—a wall she’d hastily erected to prevent any other emotion from finding its way inside her.

Well, he knew better than to butt against a wall. But as for her substitute of gratitude … let her keep it!

In the warming room, Pippa sat up on the table swinging her legs and reading aloud from her very own collection of the plays of Mr. William Shakespeare, while Thomas performed his Wednesday afternoon chore of polishing the silver. He had read some Shakespeare in his youth and had always carried a dog-eared copy of
The Tempest
in his seabag, but he’d never seen a performance on the stage. The precocious child, perched on the table next to him, was reading aloud from
King John
with an enchanting dramatic verve, and Thomas’s polishing cloth grew still very often as he paused to watch the girl with amazed and admiring enjoyment.

“Then King Philip says,
‘How much unlooked for is this expedition
,’” Pippa declaimed in tones of convincing alarm. “And then the King of Austria answers,

By how much unexpected, by so much

We must awake for defense,

For courage mounteth with occasion.”

She paused, looked up over her spectacles at the footman thoughtfully and asked, “What do you suppose he meant by that?”

“That courage mounts with the occasion? I suppose he means that one manages to act courageously when the situation demands it.”

“Is that why you acted so bravely that day when we came home from Wyckfield? Because the situation demanded it?”

“Of course. Why else?”

“I don’t know. It seems an inadequate explanation.
I
was in the same situation, and
my
courage didn’t mount with the occasion. I was frightened to death.”

“So was I, Miss Pippa, so was I! But you were much too little to do anything about the situation, and you knew it. I, on the other hand, am a rather big fellow—and I knew I was the only person on the scene who
could
do something. So I did it.”

“Are you saying that
everyone
in such a situation would have acted as you did?”

“Most everyone. Isn’t that what Mr. Shakespeare is saying as well?”

“It’s what Mr. Shakespeare is saying that the Duke of Austria is saying. I don’t believe that most everyone would have done it, and I don’t think Mr. Shakespeare would think so either. After all, Miss Townley is a very good person, and
she
fainted dead away.”

“That’s not at all fair. Miss Townley was as helpless as you were,” Thomas pointed out. He returned to his polishing with a troubled frown. “You mustn’t make a hero of me, Miss Pippa. Heroes are for story-books, not for real life.”

Pippa grinned. “You’re heroic to be so modest about it, you know.”

He shook his head. “No, I don’t want to joke about this. I think its important that you understand. If
you make an ordinary man into a hero, you’ll expect him always to act heroically. But, since he’s only ordinary, he’ll be bound to let you down.”

“You’re not ordinary, Thomas. And you won’t let me down.” The little girl smiled at him with serene confidence and returned to her reading. But Thomas could no longer concentrate on her rendering of the drama. He was filled with misgivings. He didn’t like being made a hero … not by Pippa nor by her mother. It made him deucedly uncomfortable. How would they feel if they knew the truth—that their hero was an escaped criminal with a charge of murder hanging over his head?

***

As the winter settled in with a dogged determination to keep the populace close to their firesides, the house in Upper Seymour Street became the quiet, comfortable haven that Camilla had envisioned. Callers stopped by when the weather permitted, and she and Pippa paid occasional visits to their new friends, but their social life was not as demanding as it had been during the holidays. As far as Camilla was concerned, this was just what she liked. Although the young Lord Earlywine still called more frequently than she wished, she’d learned that she could tell him flatly to go away, and the fellow would take himself off without offense. On the other hand, Sir James’s attentions were just right for her purposes, for he was delighted to escort her to the theater and to parties without wishing for—or expecting—a real romance to develop between them. With Georgina as a friend and Sir James as an escort, Camilla’s social life was as full as she wanted it to be.