In for a Penny (21 page)

Mr. Kedge drew himself up, all twenty stone of him. “Your father was a great man, and he deserves more respect from you.
I
deserve more from you.
I
kept this place going in ’16,
I
bought up the land and planted the hedgerows when no one
else would! I have lived here, boy and man, for nigh on fifty years. And now you’ve a mind to tell me how to run my farm, when you’ve bothered about Loweston for less than two months!”

Perhaps at another time Nev would have felt the justice of that. Now he felt nothing but rage. He opened his mouth to remind Kedge just who was tenant and who was lord.

Percy was before him. “Mr. Kedge, you forget yourself! I asked his lordship to step in so that we might have done with this melodrama, not so that you could insult him. If Lord Bedlow had come into the title years ago, we would not be in this mess now.”

Nev stared at Percy.

Kedge took a step back. “Indeed, my lord, I am sorry. Forgive me my impertinence. I’ve been loyal to the Bedlows for fifty years, and I ain’t fixing to change.”

“That is very good of you,” Nev said without much sincerity. “Perhaps now you can tell me what the devil is going on.”

But Kedge was warming to his theme. “There’s some in this district as think their bread is buttered on the other side. Some as seem to have forgotten their lord and begun looking to Sir Jasper. That rat Snively, for instance, running to Sir Jasper with every bit of gossip he hears. I’m not that type. You know what I mean, don’t you, Mr. Garrett?”

Percy didn’t look at Kedge. His eyes were fixed on Nev. “Nev, I’m so sorry—”

“Mr. Garrett makes a fine show of loyalty. But he isn’t so very loyal when you aren’t watching. Everyone knows Sir Jasper is sweet on Lady Louisa. Well, he’d hardly be so eager to make a match of it if he knew what she’d been up to with the steward, would he?”

“You had better come out and say what you mean,” Percy said.

“If you please. I saw the two of them at your grandfather’s
ruin, my lord, kissing and sighing. But I kept my mouth shut, because I’m a Loweston man.”

“Forgive me if I am not more grateful that instead of coming to me, you chose to try to blackmail my steward into working against my interests,” Nev said coldly. His thoughts seemed to come from far away. “Get out. We will resume this discussion at a later date.”

Kedge got up smugly and began moving toward the door.

“And we
will
resume it.”

“Just remember. As long as I’m a Loweston man, Sir Jasper doesn’t know. If I stop being one…”

“For God’s sake, get out!” Percy said.

When Kedge was gone they stood there, staring at one another. “Is it true?” Nev barely recognized his own voice.

“Yes,” Percy said, and Nev barely recognized his voice either. “I’m sorry, Nev, I am, but I love her—”

“Oh, Christ.” Nev wondered if there had ever been a time when this news would have made him happy. Even in the midst of his horror and disbelief, he was obscurely ashamed to think that there might not have been. “Here I’ve been worrying about you and Penelope, and all the time you’ve been sneaking around with Louisa—”

Percy stared. “Me and Penelope? Nev, Penelope is your
wife
!”

“Louisa’s my baby sister. You had no problem seducing
her
.”

“I didn’t
seduce
her. I wouldn’t have—it was only a few kisses.”

That was a relief, at any rate. Nev did not feel relieved. “One would be enough to ruin her.”

“I know.” Percy looked away. “Christ, I know. I never meant for this to happen, but she was so unhappy. So very unhappy. I thought there could be no harm in spending time with her, and then—I want to marry her, Nev. I
will
marry
her, if you’ll agree to it. I may not be what she deserves, but I’m what she wants, and that’s good enough for me.”

Nev felt a stab of guilt that he had not found time to deal with Louisa’s unhappiness, and then sharp unreasonable anger that Percy had. “It’s not good enough for
me
, damn it! She’s
seventeen
, Percy. Seventeen. She hasn’t got the foggiest notion of what she wants or what it will mean to be married to you. She’s just a kid, and if it comes out she’s been meeting with you alone, she’ll be ruined! She doesn’t understand what that means, but
you
do! What were you thinking?”

“I wasn’t thinking. I just knew—she was the one for me. She always has been, I think. I couldn’t say no.”

“Are you suggesting that my sister was the instigator in this?” Nev said in a low, dangerous voice.

Percy almost smiled. “Come off it, Nev, of course she was. Louisa’s been waiting her whole life to plot an assignation.”

Of course she had. Poor irrepressible Louisa. Unlike Penelope, she had never learned not to rebel against things she could not change. Nev had wanted so badly to keep it that way, but now—“And you were right on the spot to take advantage of it, weren’t you? How do you propose to keep her, Percy? I know you never wanted to be a steward. Were you planning to take her to your lodgings and feed her off what you could win at piquet? I daresay Louisa would think it a grand adventure—at first.”

Percy flushed, a sure sign he was about to lose his temper. “Nev, please. Of course not. I never did want to be a steward, but—I’ll be honest. I’m here because when you left, I didn’t get invited so many places. People started to look at me askance. The whole thing was a house of cards, and it fell apart. But I’ve tried stewarding now, and I like it all right. We’re not kids anymore. I’m willing to settle down. I’ve been doing some translations, and that’s bringing in some money. I’d never spend a penny of Louisa’s principal, and the interest would make sure we did all right—”

“You want Louisa to live on two or three hundred a year? Why do you think I fought so hard to save Loweston and her dowry, if not so that she could make a good match and never have to worry about money again?” Nev remembered those few weeks before Penelope agreed to marry him—his grim visions of Louisa in shabby lodgings and a made-over dress, cajoling duns and hoarding tallow candle-ends, all her happy glow and piratical daydreams and enormous cherry-trimmed bonnets brushed away like the bloom on a butterfly’s wing. That was why he had worked so hard to save Loweston, for her and his mother.

And now through his own fault it was all for nothing. He should never have been such friends with Percy; he should never have let Penelope hire him. He should have seen Louisa was unhappy so she wouldn’t seize on this; he should have been paying attention and found out what was going on before Kedge. “That money was to find her a husband who could take care of her, not to go to some damn fortune hunter who—”

But that was the limit of Percy’s forbearance. “How dare you? You canting
hypocrite
!” he said through clenched teeth. “When a month before your marriage you were gossiping about your bride-to-be’s dowry with your
mistress
!”

Nev opened his mouth to make a hot retort—and saw Penelope standing in the doorway. If he lived to be a hundred, he would never forget the frozen, humiliated look on her face.

“I—” she began, and stopped. “I heard that Mr. Kedge was gone and I wanted to know how it went. I—I’ll just be going—” Her voice broke, and she turned and fled down the corridor.

Nev ran to the doorway. “Penelope!” he shouted after her retreating back. “Penelope, wait!”

“Oh, God,” Percy said, aghast. “I didn’t see her, I never would have—I know the two of you—”

Nev turned back and looked at his best friend of almost
fifteen years. “Get out of my house. Tonight. And don’t ever go near my sister again.” Then he ran after Penelope. He could hear her footsteps on the marble floor of the entrance hall a ways off. Then they stopped. He sprinted after her and stopped short in the doorway of the great hall.

She was wrapped up in the arms of a greatcoated stranger.

He walked towards them more slowly. “Penelope?”

She turned but didn’t quite disentangle herself from the stranger. Her face was streaked with tears, but underneath it was glowing. She smiled at him as if she couldn’t stop. “Lord Bedlow, may I present Edward Macaulay.”

Edward Macaulay had a broad, sensible, Scottish face, and broad, sensible, Scottish shoulders. His sandy hair was kept unfashionably short and brushed carefully back from his forehead, even though it was clear that had he allowed it to grow, it would have curled riotously in the best modern style without any prompting. He looked like a steady, dependable man, and Nev hated him on sight.

“How do you do?” Nev’s hand was more tanned and callused than it had ever been in his life; it looked like an indolent child’s clasped in Macaulay’s sturdy, ink-stained fingers.

“Very well, thank you.” Macaulay sounded downright hostile. “Yourself?” He looked Nev up and down with a scrutiny that was almost insolent.

“I’m well. Are you planning on staying long?” Wonderful. A minute into the conversation and he already sounded petty and childish.

“You’re staying at least a day or two, Edward, aren’t you?” Penelope’s eyes were fixed anxiously on Macaulay’s face.

Macaulay smiled familiarly down at her. “Since you ask me to, I am. I’ve brought your furniture too. It’s outside. There’s four carts of it. Penny, whatever did you want a great ugly
chinoiserie
settee for?”

“It was a joke,” Penelope muttered, glancing at Nev, and he remembered his suggestion that they get everything in gilt and bamboo. She had done something sweet and funny for him, and now that was spoiled too.

“Wonderful. Thank you,” Nev said, not meaning it in the
slightest. “Then perhaps the housekeeper can show you to your room while I have a word with my wife.”

Edward didn’t move. Instead, he looked to Penelope for guidance. Nev gritted his teeth.

“Yes, Edward, do go,” she said. “You’re covered in dust, and you must be dying to wash and change. When you’re feeling more the thing, we can have a much more comfortable coze.”

“Dear Penelope,” Edward said fondly. “Always sensible.”

Nev knew he must have imagined the flash of annoyance that crossed Penelope’s face.

When Edward had been escorted from the room by the housekeeper, Penelope turned to Nev. She didn’t meet his eyes. “Well, what did Kedge say?”

“Penelope, please. What Percy said—”

“It’s quite all right. It’s natural that you should have—”

“It was that night at Vauxhall. Your name only came up because I couldn’t stop staring at you.”

“Nev, please don’t.”

“Damn it, no. Not this time. You were crying, you can’t tell me—”

“I can tell you whatever I please. Was crying not enough? Or won’t you be satisfied until I’ve also admitted that I’m a silly girl who is ashamed to be caught out daydreaming? Don’t tell me pretty lies just because I’ve made it obvious that I want to hear them. Being sensible and facing the truth is all I
have
.”

“Penelope, I wouldn’t lie to you. I didn’t realize it at the time, but from the moment I saw you, you made me want to see you again. Sometimes I think I could talk to you forever and never get tired of it. You’re all I have anymore, and somehow it’s enough—”

“Stop,” she said, and she sounded frightened.

“You wouldn’t leave me, Penelope, would you?” He regretted the words as soon as they were out of his mouth; they
were plaintive and selfish. And yet he waited for her answer without breathing.

“Leave you?” She looked really taken aback. “Why on earth would I leave you? Have you done something?”

“Nothing new. I just—Macaulay—”

Her face grew very cold. “So that’s what this is all about. You’re afraid I’ll leave you for Edward. Given that your most recent mistress is currently living a mile off, I’m inclined to say that Mr. Garrett was right and you are a hypocrite. Now tell me what the two of you were quarreling over
this
time.”

It all came flooding back, and Nev could not understand how he had forgotten. “He’s been meeting secretly with Louisa. Kedge knows, and he’s blackmailing us with it. Percy wants to marry her.”

To Nev’s relief, Penelope saw at once all the horror of their situation. She put a hand on the wall to steady herself. “Oh, God, how can Mr. Garrett have been so indiscreet? Do you plan to allow the match?”

“Certainly not. Louisa is seventeen. She’s too young to know her own mind.”

Penelope nodded doubtfully, and he remembered that she was nineteen and that her parents had let her make her own choice. Well, it had been unpardonably foolish of them—only see what had come of it. Only see how miserable she was. If he had had the keeping of her, Penelope would never have got within fifty feet of a wastrel like him.

“Then what are we going to do?” she asked. “If we don’t do something to scotch the scandal, Kedge will have the upper hand of us forever.”

“I don’t know. But I’m not going to sacrifice Louisa, not even for every laborer at Loweston.”

Unexpectedly, she smiled at him. “Well, we’ve got six months to work something out before the lease is up. I’ll think about it while I’m talking to Edward, and maybe tonight we can discuss it some more.”

“You’re going to tell Edward—”

She stared at him. “Of course I wouldn’t tell Edward about your sister.”

He pulled her to him and kissed her, hard. She was breathless when he pulled away, and he rejoiced in it. “Just remember, you will find me harder to give back than I was to buy.”

“I didn’t
buy
you,” she said. But her cheeks were flushed.

Penelope’s mind was in a whirl; she found it difficult to concentrate on her conversation with Edward. Everything was so muddled and awful: those men in jail, the laborers under Kedge’s thumb, her marriage a shambles—and Nev’s sister, poised on the brink of ruin. How could Louisa have done this to her family? How could she have done this to Nev?

But Penelope, if she admitted it, envied Louisa too. Louisa who was madly in love, Louisa whom Mr. Garrett loved madly enough to throw caution to the winds.

Penelope had tried her whole life to be rational and sensible, to never make a scene, to accept the world as it was. And it had never got her respect or admiration or anything she wanted. It had only got her ignored, or worse, taken for granted.

Nev had been afraid, just now, that she might do something stupid and leave him for Edward. If Nev had ever met Edward, he would have known there was no danger of him doing anything so shocking, but that was beside the point. The point was that Nev might say he wanted to talk to her forever or such rot, but really, it was just as he said: she was all he had. She was a good partner for him, and he was afraid to lose her.

Just then Penelope didn’t want a rational, amicable marriage of equals. She wanted Nev to tell her he couldn’t live without her; that her eyes were like stars and her hands were like a flock of wild birds and a hundred other improbable similes; that his pulse quickened at the very sight of her; that he
would die without her…and he never would. Not honestly. Because he liked her but he didn’t love her, because he had married her for her money and that was all there was for girls like Penelope.

A thought struck Penelope like a blow. Mr. Garrett was here at Penelope’s insistence. Why had she meddled? It seemed as if every time she followed her heart instead of her head, she made things worse.

Edward’s voice broke through her reverie. “Penelope, is everything all right? I just asked you four times how you found the weather in Norfolk.”

“I’m sorry. It’s been a difficult week.”

“Poor Penny! Do you want to talk about it?”

“No. I want to hear about you. What brings you to this part of England?”

He looked at her in surprise. “I came to see you. Why else would I be here?”

Her face heated. She felt thoughtless, and guilty. “I thought perhaps—on business—you did not write to say you were coming—”

He looked down, fidgeting. “Penelope—”

“Yes?”

“I was passing through on business, it’s true, but I might have gone a shorter way. I convinced your father to let me oversee the transport of the furniture. I didn’t write because—I wasn’t sure of my welcome when I came here tonight. I hoped you would see me—Heavens, how I hoped—but I thought if I came in person there would be less chance to turn me away. Those engravings—how can you ever forgive me?”

She had forgotten them in the joy of seeing him. And now—in the rush of relief at the knowledge that he had been as afraid to lose her friendship as she was to lose his, in the heady sensation of being
wanted
, just for herself—she had already forgiven him. It was weak of her, but there it was. “If I
didn’t forgive you, I couldn’t talk to you, and I’ve been wanting so to talk to you.”

He smiled at her, a sad smile. “I must have been mad. I
was
mad—all those years, all our plans. I couldn’t bear it. I wanted to hurt you as you had hurt me. It was not the act of a gentleman.”

“I’m so very sorry, Edward,” she said around the lump in her throat. “It is I who am to blame, I who should beg forgiveness. I broke my word to you. And then I did not know how to tell you—it made my letters short and cold, when they should have been so much more. You’ve been so much to me, all my life.”

He reached out and took her hands in his. They were warm, capable, well-shaped hands, nearly as familiar to her as her own. Affection welled up within her at the sight, dear affection and a thousand memories. And yet there was no spark, no sense of physical recognition when he touched her. There never had been, and she had never known what was missing.

Penelope tried to imagine being married to him, sharing a bed with him. It did not repulse her; it only left her feeling blank. Would she ever have realized that something vital was absent? Or would she have gone her whole life believing that anything more—flame, fire, passion—was a lie dreamt up by horrid novelists?

“Penelope, I could forgive everything, if I believed you were happy. But you aren’t. You look like you used to on school vacations.”

She was surprised that he’d noticed how miserable and thin she had been those years at school. He had never said a word about it. God, how she wanted to tell him everything! But he would hate Nev. “I
am
happy, Edward.” Her voice sounded false to her own ears; could Edward hear it? “It’s only that there have been troubles with the tenants, and I’m tired.”

He nodded seriously. “All over the country, there’s been disquiet. That’s why—” He flushed and smiled. “That’s why I’m to be director of Mr. Meath’s woolen mill in Norwich.”

“Oh, Edward, how wonderful for you!”

His smile broadened. “I’m young for it, but Mr. Meath assures me he has every confidence in me.”

“Edward, that’s wonderful!” Penelope repeated. “But what’s that to do with the disquiet in the countryside?”

“Well, it’s not entirely an honor. They’ve been having some trouble with trade unionists. The old director stepped down because his wife was afraid for their children, and all the other candidates were family men too.”

So Edward was getting promoted because she had not married him. She wasn’t sure what to feel about that. She wished she knew what Edward felt about it. “Will it be safe?”

He smiled at her. “I’ll be all right. But will you? What has happened?”

She settled for part of the truth. “It’s only—Nev’s father did not do well by the estate, and everyone is so poor and has suffered so much here. And so much of my dowry went to pay old debts or into settlements that we haven’t the funds to do everything we need. And Edward, you should see the books—they use a sort of simple double-entry system!”

He stared. “But then how do you know when you’ve wasted money on a project, or when—”

“You can’t!” His horror made her laugh. “I knew you would understand. Here, I’ve got to show you, you’ll die—Molly, come with us, I want to show Mr. Macaulay the books.”

He put on his spectacles to read them and was properly horrified. For half an hour it was quite like old times. She found herself telling him all about Captain Trelawney, and that first night she and Nev had heard the poachers. “He didn’t seem bothered by it at all. And then he said, ‘Well, usually they don’t hit each other in the dark!’ ” she told him, giggling. She waited for him to laugh too, but he didn’t.

He stared at her with a faintly shocked expression, pushing his glasses down his nose to look at her over them in a motion so familiar she shivered. “You mean there are men running around here
shooting
each other for game? That’s hardly a laughing matter, Penelope.”

Penelope had forgotten how low Edward could make her feel, when he looked at her in that way. “Well, I know that. It was the
way
he said it that was funny…” She knew she sounded like a chastened schoolgirl and hated it. “Actually, you’re right, it isn’t funny. They’ve caught most of the poachers now, and they’ll transport them all if we can’t stop it. You should see their wives and children. And mothers: one of the villains is a nine-year-old girl. It’s dreadful. They’re half mad with grief and rage.” It all rushed back, and Penelope felt very cold. She wished Nev were here.

“Is that why you were crying when I came in?”

She looked away.

“We used to tell each other everything,” he said sadly.

And Penelope realized something else. She had never told Edward everything. There were a million things she had never told him, ways she had felt, things she had dreamed. She had never told him about wanting to run off to be a sailor. It wasn’t even that she had been afraid he would condemn her, though he would have. It was that she had condemned herself. She had never told anyone those things, until Nev. She had tried to show Edward, along with everyone else, the person she had wanted to be.

They were the same, she and Edward; they had wanted the same things, respected the same things. If she had married Edward, she would have gone on being drab, practical Penelope forever. And she would have thought that she was living her best, truest self. Never joking or crying or making love in the middle of the day. Speaking seriously on serious subjects. And the part of her that had sobbed and beaten the
pillow and wanted to be a sailor at Miss Mardling’s would have grown smaller and smaller until it faded away entirely.