Carla Kelly (14 page)

He thought a moment, and the answer surprised him. “Two people I suppose, Sophie: One is Luster, and the other is Miss Valencia, too.”

“It makes me feel lucky,” she said after another long silence.

“Me, too.”

“I don’t understand why, though.”

I do, he thought.

Chapter Eleven

He asked for dinner on the terrace, ate with Sophie, and admired Mama’s gardens. Oh, Mama, you were so wrong about some things, and so right about others, he thought as he ate and listened to his niece’s chatter. Is that the way we are? Does it all balance out in the end somehow?

He couldn’t answer his own questions, so he listened to Sophie, and then sent her off to play, when Juan came onto the terrace and requested her presence in the stables. “The groom says there are kittens,” he announced, and that was enough for Sophie. He watched her go with some amusement, and resisted the urge to join them. He liked kittens, which only served to remind him of Audrey’s preference for dogs, and her suggestion that he might take up the hunt. He put down his fork.

Once Sophie was gone, there didn’t seem to be much point to eating. After telling himself that he only went belowstairs to find Luster, he went beyond the green baize doors and soon found himself sitting beside Luster, who had taken to his bed. His butler tried to rise, but Nez shook his head. “You’re tired,” he said.

“Alas, Your Grace, I also fear that I am old,” Luster said.

For a long moment Nez contemplated the man lying in the bed. “Perhaps it is time for me to pension you off,” he suggested. “You could name a place you’d like to live, and I would happily provide you with the means to do so comfortably.”

“This is my home, Your Grace,” Luster said, and Nez could sense his agitation, even though it did not show through his perfect butler’s demeanor. “I was born here at Knare. As you were,” he added.

“So we were,” Nez said, startled to see tears in Luster’s eyes. “I didn’t mean to upset you.” He thought a moment. “That can keep. Liria . . . Miss Valencia . . . tells me that you have been teaching her all about this estate. Thank you.”

“Truth to tell, Your Grace, there isn’t much I need to tell her about running a place such as Knare. I don’t understand it; perhaps she has an intuition about the matter.”

“It’s . . . it’s rather more than that, I think, although I am not at liberty to say,” Nez told him. “Indeed, I do not know any more.” He stood up. “I do know that I have no cause to regret my impulse in declaring to my sister that I had already hired a housekeeper.” He laughed. “We just didn’t know how true that was, did we?” He hesitated, then remembered his conversation with Sophie that afternoon. He reached down and gently squeezed his butler’s arm. “Luster, I will think of something. I do not like the idea of you ever leaving Knare, either, even though I think you must be kinder to yourself.”

He went into the servant’s hall again, but Liria was not there. Disappointed, he went upstairs and back to the terrace. His heart lifted to see her there, supervising the removal of his partly eaten dinner. “Aha! I trust you will not tell the chef that Sophie thought his trout less than tasty, and I lost my appetite,” he said from the French doors. “I didn’t mind facing
chasseurs
in Spain and the Imperial Guard at Mont Saint Jean, but I confess to some terror around my chef.”

To his relief, she did not seem startled by his sudden appearance. “What I will do is suggest that he leave the head off next time,” she assured him. “There is perhaps not a child alive who would look a fish in the eyes.” She turned to him, her hands folded at her waist in that pose he had come to like. “Would you wish me to leave the table right here? Dinner on the terrace in summer is a good idea.”

“Yes, do,” he said. “If the traveling visitors gawk, I can throw a bun at them.”

“Or invite them to join you, Senor,” she said, amused.

“Only if they are sparkling conversationalists, so I do not have to say anything beyond an occasional ‘H’mm,’ or ‘Really.’” He came closer when the maids left. “Stroll with me through the garden, Liria. Mind, if you say no, I will have to wonder how I am offending the fairer side of the population. Miss St. John already turned me down flat.”

“Then, I would not dream of disappointing you, Senor.”

“Audrey says the flowers make her sneeze,” he said as they walked down the steps. “She would like me to plow under the blooms and put a show horse arena in my backyard.”

She looked at him with wide eyes, but said nothing. When they reached the bottom of the shallow steps and he offered his arm she hesitated, then took it. He had no difficulty adjusting his stride to her gliding walk. There was no need to say anything, and he was content to see what else had bloomed since his last walk in the garden. He had strolled with Liria then, too, although they had not stood so close.

“She means to manage me,” he blurted out, and then was ashamed of himself for dumping his concern on her. “Oh, never mind that,” he said hastily. “It’s not your worry.” He stopped. “Liria, does everyone on this place bring their troubles to you? Is this all part of Sergeant Carr’s method of managing Battery Nineteen?”

“He did listen to anyone who had a complaint,” she agreed. “Invariably they would talk, and solve their own problems.”

He could tell the memory pleased her, and he was grateful. “Liria, everyone is telling me what to do, except you, I think! ‘Think of others, Nez.’ ‘Find a wife right away!’ ‘Stay out of the wine cellar.’ ‘Do good deeds.’ ‘Change yourself.’”

He stopped by the roses, letting their peppery fragrance fill his head. “Liria, when the war ended after Waterloo, I was a drunkard. It’s true. I neglected my surviving men in hospital, and some may have died because of that neglect; I do not know for sure. I fell in love with a wonderful lady who had no rank, and generously offered to make her my mistress. Oh, yes! My . . . my mother died last winter, and I didn’t even mourn her until a month or two ago. I have been instructed to make amends with my sister, and I cannot seem to get it right. I . . .” He stopped and looked at her then, and realized that he had struck a deep chord. She bowed, her forehead nearly touching his arm where her hand rested. “Oh, Liria! I have said something else that is wrong, haven’t I? I can’t get it right!”

As he watched in horror, she gathered herself together with that strength that awed him, and then looked him in the eye. “Your sister? I have a sister . . .” Her voice trailed off. Carefully she extracted herself from his arm, curtsied, and turned away to walk swiftly back up the garden path. He watched her go, his heart heavier than he could remember since his horrible mistake with Libby Ames.

Stay out, Benedict, he told himself. You know she had sisters. This is not something you can meddle in and fix, more like. But he could not stay out. “Wait, Liria,” he called, “please wait!”

She slowed down only slightly, and he ran to her, surprising the gardener weeding the alyssum by the path, who stared at him. He walked beside her, said not a word, but took a deep breath and clapped his arm around her shoulders, matching her longer stride now as she hurried toward the house. She flinched and tried to draw away, but he would not let her go. “I will never hurt you,” he said in a low voice, “but it stands to reason that you do not have to hurt alone.”

She stopped then, not looking at him, but shivering in the warmth of the late June evening. She said nothing, only let him clasp his arm around her shoulders there in the middle of Mama’s herb garden. “The war is a long way from here, Liria,” he said at last. “I have to realize that, and I think, so do you. Go on now. I hope I did not frighten you. That is never my intention.”

He let go of her then, and for a moment she remained where she was. For the smallest fraction of a second, he thought that she might talk to him, but then she turned to him, curtsied again, and hurried into the house without another glance behind her.

He stood a long while watching her, then turned around to see the gardener still staring at him. He shrugged, then knelt beside the gardener. “Which ones are the weeds?”

“These, Your Grace,” he said when he collected himself. “And those.”

“I’ll finish this bed, then.” He looked at the gardener, who seemed to be holding his breath. “Carstairs, isn’t it?” The man nodded. “And when I’m done here, I think I will go to the stables. I hear there are kittens.”

The gardener grinned, at ease now. “A little hot to go inside now, Your Grace?”

Nez laughed. “Yep. I’ll wait until I am certain she is belowstairs. I really can’t afford to lose a good housekeeper.” He pulled a weed. “Like this?”

“Almost. Grasp it a little closer to the roots. That’s it, Your Grace.”

He weeded the bed, happy to concentrate on nothing more important than making sure he did not tug up alyssum. When it was too dark to tell the difference, he brushed off his trousers, wiped his hands on them, and walked slowly to the stables. Sophie and Juan were already gone, and he hoped, in bed by now. He admired the new kittens, blind little lumps of fur, and watched them root around for their mother’s teats. She did allow him to scratch her under the chin, and he stayed there in the hayloft, resting his chin on his hand and listening to the cat purr. I won’t meddle again, Liria, he thought.

***

He spent the early part of July in the saddle on most days, riding from field to field, and listening to his bailiff, who made remarkable good sense. It gave him real satisfaction to know that his land had a good heart in it, and that his father had employed only the finest agriculturists. He thought long and hard about the querulous father he remembered, the one who railed at him for drinking so much even before he went to Spain, who wrote chastising, moralizing letters which occasionally reached him on Spanish battlefields, but which always piled up at Torres Vedras, almost daring him to read them when Wellington withdrew behind his Portuguese lines. He wished now that he had known this side of his father better.

More often than not, Juan would accompany him to the field. It had started simply enough. Juan, who didn’t feel Sophie’s attraction to Liria’s domestic duties, followed him to the stables. The boy was small and light, so it was a simple matter to swing Juan up in front of him on his horse and take him into the fields, or to the pastures where he liked to sit and draw sheep while Nez talked to his shepherds.

Nez spent nearly every afternoon at Ash Grove. He already had a high regard for Audrey St. John’s excellent qualities, and could see all around him the results of her firm management. He could argue with none of it, except that he had a nagging suspicion that the St. Johns’s staff toed the line because of a certain fear, rather than a wholehearted desire to please. He chided himself for his own suspicion, and wondered why, each day, he felt less and less like proposing. He knew that Audrey was beginning to regard him with amusement, even as her father fumed in the book room, where he regularly retired, to give Nez full opportunity to express his feelings to his daughter.

“Sir Michael is going to demand an account of me soon,” he told Liria one night after the household was shut down, Juan asleep, and only him, Luster, and her in the butler’s small sitting room. He never tried again to pry or intimate any knowledge of her family, and she gradually relaxed again in his presence.

“You can hardly blame him,” Liria said. “Didn’t you tell me that you had already secured Sir Michael’s permission to court Miss St. John?”

“I did, and I don’t blame him,” he replied. Liria—or was it Luster?—had set him to work polishing silver. He rubbed a fork to a fine finish and dumped it in the warm water. “Miss Valencia, we all tell you our troubles. What am I to do?”

She handed him another fork. “And how many times have I told you that Sergeant Carr always let the battery talk and figure out their own solutions! You have to come up with your own answers.”

And there it sat. Beyond the rides with Juan, his pleasure at the crops, and the evening’s relaxation belowstairs, his greatest enjoyment came in hearing traveling visitors exclaim over his mother’s gardens, and increasingly, visit his armory. Walking with his visitors, mainly veterans, he could forget his own difficulties in their enjoyment of the Nesbitt-Knare family’s collection of weapons through the ages. Rarely a day began or ended without unfamiliar carriages in the driveway, the ladies to admire his mother’s gardens, and the gentlemen to walk among the swords, arquebuses, longbows, and modern weapons that Amos Yore had lovingly restored and now handsomely displayed.

I have done something right, he thought one afternoon as he stood on the front lawn and watched a barouche come up the long lane and circle into the driveway. “What do you think, Juan?” he asked the boy, who seemed to follow him everywhere now. “Are they here for the flowers or the guns?” They watched as four men got out of the carriage.

“They are here for guns.”

Nez turned around at her voice. Liria stood at the top of the steps, the open door behind her, ready to greet the newest traveling visitors. He knew this was not her favorite occupation at Knare because he had watched her greet visitors, her hands clasped in front of her waist as usual, but bound tight together, and the knuckles often white, especially when the visitors were men bent on visiting the armory.

I can at least relieve her of this concern today, he thought. “Liria, I will be happy to greet these gentlemen.” He took a longer look at his latest guests and laughed out loud. “Indeed, I insist! These are officers from my own division. Do this for me, Liria, if you will,” he said over his shoulder. “Set four more places for dinner.”

“As you wish.”

“Welcome!” he said to the four men. “We meet in much more pleasant surroundings, eh? Gentlemen, are any of you still in the trade?”

Captain Dowling, Twenty-third Foot, came forward first, his hand extended. “I suppose I should show a little more deference to a duke, Nez, but would you ever be appreciative?”

“Of course not,” Nez said, and shook hands.

“I am yet in the trade, sir,” he said, and indicated the next man to leave the barouche. “So is Harcourt here, of your own brigade, if you will claim him. We don’t,” he joked.

He barely remembered Harcourt, a replacement after Cuidad Rodrigo. He shook his hand, then turned to quiet Captain James Geddes behind him, and Major John Leakey, eager to clasp his hands on their shoulders. “I cannot imagine that either of you are still in the trade. Doesn’t the army have higher standards in peacetime?”