In for a Penny (15 page)

His face went blank with shock, and inwardly she shrank back—but there was no way out of this but forward. Her father had told her once that if you bullied a man into a deal, you’d better get the papers signed straightaway: give him time to think it over and he’d weasel out somehow.

He had also said that you should never expect to deal with that man again. Penelope didn’t think about that. “Do you think he can’t do it?”

“That’s not the point!”

“What else
is
the point? Do you think he can’t do it?”

“He can do it.”

“Do you think he’ll cheat us?” Penelope pressed him.

Percy sucked in his breath. She saw with surprise that he was not sure of Nev’s answer.

Nev heard it too. “No. He’d never cheat us.”

Penelope wanted to put her arms around him, but he would have pushed her away. “Then we have to hire him. It’s the responsible thing to do.”

Nev and Percy locked gazes. “Fine,” Nev said.

“When can I get my money?” Percy asked in a strained voice, as if he couldn’t wait to have this over with.

“If you stop by here tomorrow, my father will give you a bank draft,” Penelope said. “How soon can you be at Loweston?”

“Within a few days. Where do you want me to stay?”

“You’ll stay in the steward’s room, of course,” she said,
pretending there had never been any question. Nev said nothing.

Percy got up and walked out; Nev abruptly started forward and followed him into the hall.

“Are you all right?” she heard him say in a low tone. “I know you never wanted to be a steward. If you need help—” His concern was clear through the stiffness, and Penelope was violently, nauseatingly jealous.

“You’re my employer, but that doesn’t give you the right to pry into my affairs,” Percy said.

“I’m
not
your employer. She is.”

Percy spoke so low she almost didn’t hear it. “Indeed. You traded us in for
that
?”

Penelope sat at her father’s desk, where she had once been so comfortable, and tried not to cry.

They still weren’t speaking when the Browns picked them up for the promised evening at the theater. By tacit agreement, they pretended cordiality in front of her parents, but Penelope’s laugh was brittle and her fingers were stiff on his arm. Nev had not realized how friendly, how almost comfortable he and Penelope had become together until now, when it was gone.

He thought she would have apologized given an opening, but he did not want to hear it. He did not understand what had happened that afternoon. He did not want to.

Of course it had been a shock to see Percy, a miserable shock, but oddly, it hadn’t been that which had lingered with him throughout the day. Rather, it had been the harshness of Penelope’s voice and the cold, insulting logic of her words.

He and Penelope didn’t know each other well; they had had to struggle to get along together. But they had been patient with each other. She had been patient with him—with his mother’s insults and his poor head for business and his
ruined estate. And in that room, at that moment, it had seemed as if all at once she had lost patience, and all that had been left was someone who resented and despised him.
I don’t intend to see Loweston ruined for your sensibilities, not after I pulled you out of the River Tick
. Nev did not know how he would live for the rest of his life if Penelope thought of him like that.

He was barely listening to the play when a very familiar voice echoed through the theater. He looked at Rosalind, and sure enough, the actress was Amy.

His first anxious thought was whether the Browns would recognize her. They had seen her with him at Vauxhall—at least Penelope had. Would they say anything? Of course a lady or a gentleman wouldn’t, but the Browns might. Would Penelope think he had arranged this?

Nev was so tired of worrying. He looked at Amy, standing in the footlights reciting in her clear voice, and thought,
A year ago I would have been here with Percy and Thirkell
. Now there would be no celebration with Amy and his friends after the show. Instead, there would be more awkward small talk with his mother- and father-in-law, and then he and Penelope would go back to their hotel room and not speak to each other. Tomorrow he would go back to Loweston and not speak to Percy and watch people who depended on him starve by inches, and Penelope would watch it too and hate him. He stared at Amy, and was seized with such a violent longing for his old friends, his old
life
, that it almost choked him.

Penelope could barely believe it. She ought to have known, she ought to have prevented this somehow—but how could she have? She hadn’t even known the girl’s name (Amy Wray, her program told her). She looked at Nev. He was staring at Miss Wray with an expression of hopeless yearning. Penelope’s stomach twisted viciously.

She darted a glance at her parents; she could not bear it if they saw her humiliation. But her mother was absorbed in the play, and her father had settled in for a nap. Penelope was fiercely relieved that she hadn’t pointed out Nev and his mistress that night in Vauxhall. That night had seemed so far away the day before; now it was apparent that nothing had changed.

Every minute of the play was a torment. Penelope longed for it to end, and yet she could not bear to think that it would end, and she and Nev would go back to their room and not speak and not make love, and Nev would be silently longing for Miss Wray. Then, as if Hell felt it necessary to devise yet another torment for her, Miss Wray opened her mouth and a pure, lovely soprano came forth. Penelope thought she would cry. Penelope had told Nev she had got over wanting to be a soprano; it had been a lie.

After a moment, Penelope admitted that Miss Wray’s voice was not well trained, nor powerful enough to fill the house. The girl had an unfortunate tendency to embellish the melody, and she did it without real taste. In fact, Penelope noted with mean satisfaction, as the song went on, the actress’s voice lost body and she began to pause awkwardly to draw breath.

Penelope started forward—this was more than poor singing. The actress’s voice trilled high on the last line—and cut off abruptly. Miss Wray fell to the ground in a dead faint.

Nev shot to his feet, leaning over the balcony and craning his head out to try to see closer. Fortunately, people all over the theater were doing the same thing. Penelope hoped her mother had not heard him cry “Amy!” in tones of shock and fear as he rose.

“Can you see anything?” She was sorry for how cold she sounded—the result of trying too hard not to sound jealous.

He struggled gamely for nonchalance. “They’re carrying her offstage. I don’t think she’s woken up.”

“Then it should be a while before the performance starts again. Do you think you might fetch me some lemonade?”

His gaze shot to hers. Penelope nodded once. Gratitude flooded Nev’s face. She pressed her lips together. She would not cry. She blinked, and he was gone.

Mrs. Brown turned to her. “Well? What’s the matter?”

“Nothing’s the matter.” Penelope tried to sound surprised. Onstage, someone was announcing an intermission.

“What are you and he quarreling about? You’ve barely spoken a word to each other all evening, and just now you took the first opportunity to send him away. Lord knows he looked happy enough to take it.”

“How do you know I didn’t just want lemonade?” Thank God her mother had no idea Nev had rushed off to his mistress’s side.

“Because I’m your mother. You can’t fake a smile and expect me to think everything’s roses, even if that works on that boy you married. Now tell me what’s wrong.”

Penelope could not talk about Nev and Miss Wray, and she did not want to talk about Mr. Garrett, so she began to tell her mother about Loweston. When she had got to the end of it all, had tried to explain about the Poor Authority and enclosures and Agnes Cusher and What Happened In ’16, she watched her mother, hoping that Mrs. Brown could tell her what to do.

“Oh,
Penelope
.” Her mother looked aghast. “I wish we could do something. I’m sure your father and I could pay to start a school for those poor children, if you’d like.”

Penelope stared. It seemed like such a tiny answer to such an enormous problem. “Mama, they cannot afford to send their children to school. They need the money the children earn.”

“But surely they could not be so selfish as to value a few pence a day over their children’s welfare!”

Penelope was not even sure anymore that a school would
be in the children’s best interests. Would education bring them more than learning young how to bind wheat into sheaves or find the best grass seed? Their people needed jobs, not a school. But Penelope knew without saying it that her mother would never believe or understand that. Mrs. Brown’s greatest regret was that she had never been to school.

Being a landowner, Penelope realized, was different from being rich in the city. True, her mother felt herself in some way responsible for Mr. Brown’s employees; she was well-known at the brewery for her soft heart and willingness to help if one of the workers had family trouble or an expensive illness. But in London, Mrs. Brown could found a free day at the British Museum and trust that someone else would found a pauper’s kitchen, that if Mr. Brown did not give someone a job, they could find one elsewhere—and if they couldn’t, it was not her fault.

At Loweston, if a man who had lived there all his life could not find work, it was because Nev had not hired him. If a child starved it was because Nev and Penelope had not given her food. At Loweston, they were answerable for all those people.

Her mother didn’t understand, and Penelope would have to work things out on her own. She was a grown-up now.

Then Nev walked back in, and Penelope forgot all about Loweston. He looked pale and unhappy, but he had remembered to bring her a lemonade.

She wanted to ask after Miss Wray but was afraid she could not do it with sufficient nonchalance to fool her mother. Fortunately, it was the obvious question, so Mrs. Brown asked it for her. “Did you hear anything about that poor girl? How is she? Is she going to come back on?”

“She said—I heard that she told the manager she is fine.” Nev didn’t look at Penelope. “It was just the heat of the limelights, and she hadn’t eaten dinner, is the story that’s going about. They should recommence the play in a few minutes.”

Mrs. Brown clucked in concern. “Poor girl. She ought to take better care of herself. She looks familiar—where have I seen her before?”

Nev blinked, looking cornered and guilty. Penelope knew he was thinking the same thing she was—
had
her mother seen Miss Wray with Nev, that evening in Vauxhall?

“She was in that production of
Twelfth Night
we went to, Mama, you remember,” Penelope said.

“Oh, yes, of course. I do hope I’m not entering my dotage. It’s funny, though—I remember thinking at the time that I’d seen her somewhere before.”

The curtain went up and the play continued, but Penelope did not enjoy a moment of it. She could do nothing but watch Miss Wray for signs of a relapse and speculate as if by compulsion on what the actress had said to Nev, and what he had said to her.

They were silent on the carriage ride to the hotel, and though Nev wished it were a more comfortable silence he was glad of it.

He was sure that Amy was not fine. She hadn’t wanted him backstage, that much had been plain. He thought the only reason he had not been barred the door was because it had never occurred to her he might turn up. “I’m fine, Nev, truly.” She had frowned at herself in the mirror, repairing her thick stage makeup. “I didn’t eat dinner, that’s all, and the lights were hot. Please, go back to your father-in-law’s box. You wouldn’t want Lady Bedlow to think you’re breaking your promise.”

Despite his worry, the unfairness of that smote him. “Penelope said I might come and see how you did. And you shouldn’t have fainted just from missing dinner.”

“That was very generous of Penelope,” Amy had said viciously. “If you must know, I have a hangover. I was up late last night with my new protector.”

It wasn’t like Amy to drink the night before a performance. Nev had been opening his mouth to say so when some rakehell had burst in, a man Nev recognized as one of Percy’s pigeons in piquet. Amy had turned to him with a warm, reassuring smile—“Lord Bedlow was just leaving, Jack. I promise you, I’m quite all right”—and Nev had had no choice but to go.

She had talked to Jack just as she had always talked to Nev; he saw now that it was false. She had not felt warm or reassuring. He realized he had not seen Amy out of temper above once or twice, in the whole year he had kept her. She had never let him see anything she thought he might find unattractive. Probably she had not dared, for fear he would tire of her and stop paying her rent. And now something was wrong, very wrong, and he had not the slightest idea what it could be.

Instead of staying and shaking her and insisting on the truth, he’d had to go back to the Browns’ box and pretend that everything was fine, because to do anything else would have been scandalous and awkward, and humiliating for Penelope, and besides they needed to borrow money from the Browns.

He was still worrying as they pulled up at the hotel and went silently up the stairs.

He turned around to put down his gloves and his hat, and when he turned back Penelope was standing with her back to him. She was hugging herself, and her shoulders were shaking.

He knew what he would see even before he walked around to look at her face. She was crying—silent little heaves that she was trying desperately to control. Her lips were pressed tightly together and her eyes were screwed shut, but tears were leaking down her face nevertheless.

It shocked Nev deeply. He knew Penelope disliked displays
of strong emotion, and it was so evident that she hated doing it that she must be miserable indeed to succumb.

“Penelope, what’s the matter?” He didn’t know if he should go to her. She hated that he was seeing her like this, he was sure of it.

Her eyes were dark and wet when she opened them. “I’m so sorry, Nev.” Her voice was rough with tears. “I’m all right—just tired. I tried not to—I didn’t want you to have to deal with a hysterical wife on top of everything.”