Listen to the Moon (29 page)

“I beg your pardon, sir. It’s just strange to think of you and Mother working together before your marriage.”

“The situation had charms of its own.” A reminiscent smile briefly illuminated his face, rendering it curiously soft and amorphous. Only when he frowned did the features come into focus, the broad planes of his cheeks and forehead acquiring shape and purpose. John wondered if that was innate to their shared lineaments, or if over time an accustomed expression had engraved itself. “Which is not to say we didn’t get impatient from time to time. Still, you might have learned from our example.” Mr. Toogood turned back to his boxes, pulling out a roll tied with ribbon. “This is—”

“Father, I’m forty. How long was I supposed to wait?”

“Until you were established in your profession! At least you might have chosen someone who wasn’t a hindrance to your advancement. It’s plain you got her with child, but I shall undertake to act surprised when you break the news to your mother.”

“Sukey is
not
with child. And she
has
helped me to my present situation, and in it. Our employer adores her.”

His father shook his head, looking sorrowful. “I’ve always been so proud of your levelheadedness, your ambition, your love of good hard work. And now to see you risk what you’ve worked for… Marriage is the gravest decision a man makes in his life. I don’t want you to see you regret yours.”

“
Proud
of me? When were you proud of me?” He swallowed the rest. Forty years old, and he still allowed his father to provoke him. Perhaps they were too similar, too quick to quarrel and too eager to be in the right.

Mr. Toogood sighed. “I know I’ve been hard on you. I haven’t enjoyed it any more than you have, but I never shrank from it, because I knew it was all to your good. The proof of the pudding’s in the eating, John. Look at you. Not every man could take this over, but you’ll do it superbly.”

John felt, all at once, an overwhelming sadness at the decisions his father had made, and their consequences. A man’s son should be a comfort to him when he was old. But while John did love his father, it was not much like the way he loved his mother or Plumtree or Sukey. It had little of joy in it, no rushes of affection or desire for nearness.

I’ve always been proud of you.
His father had never said it when it would have mattered; now John felt nothing when he heard it. He remembered Sukey sobbing and railing,
I want him to say he loves me.
But it was too late.

Yet Mr. Toogood was no monster. He was just an old man who’d valued perfection and correctness over people. A man who had thought he could turn a home into a clock.

It hadn’t been easy to be his son, to hope for his love and pride. After a while, John had kept himself braced for the criticism or anger he knew would come eventually, unable to adapt himself to his father’s moods the way his mother did.

But plenty of the other servants, even, liked Mr. Toogood, leavened with casual wariness and a wry acceptance of his faults. They shrugged and said,
That’s just his way.

And John remembered now—his father was at his worst when the Tassells were in residence. He’d forgotten, because from the age of fifteen he had traveled with the family and come to the Hall with them, but in between the strain and bustle of public days and balls and house parties were periods of calm and kindness, punctuated only by occasional outbursts.

He might like to think that he had become the man he was in spite of his father, but it was far from the truth. His father had taught him discipline, and the quest for beauty in small things. He had taught him how to perform domestic service, and that there was honor, even glory in it.

“I know I owe you a great deal,” John said quietly. “I love this work that we do.”

His father clapped him on the back, and he tried not to wince.

He thought of Mrs. Khaleel and Molly and Larry and Thea, of how happy it made him to have earned their trust at last. The house was cleaner and more cheerful now that they worked by lists they had written themselves. The difference had been immediate and palpable. The only place in Tassell Hall that felt like that was the kitchen. His father had never experienced it, and John wished—he wished he could show him what it was like.

I could bring that to the Hall,
he thought suddenly.
I could make it shine.

But could he? Or, shut up in this pantry surrounded by plans and papers, putting on dinners for two hundred on which rested the fate of the nation, would he grow ever more crabbed and disappointed and fanatical until there was no generosity left in his heart?

* * *

Sukey could not stop watching John’s parents at dinner. Mr. Toogood made up his wife’s plate with the fussy deliberateness of an old man and handed it to her with the devotion of a lovesick youth. They clinked glasses before drinking their wine, finished each other’s sentences and smiled at each other with the matter-of-fact comfort that came from loving each other for…well, at least since John was born forty years ago.

Sukey stole a glance at her husband, who didn’t look much moved by his parents’ affection. He took it for granted, she supposed. No—now he sighed with impatience, his forehead wrinkling. He was annoyed by it.

In forty years, where would she and John be? She supposed if they strove for it they could be right here, clinking wineglasses. But she couldn’t believe in it. John, for all his flowery speeches, had never said so much as one word about the future, until he said that if he went to Tassell Hall, they could live separately.

Would she want to live here anyway, amid this grandeur? John seemed to view it as she did the woods near Lively St. Lemeston, lofty and pleasant but naught to wonder at. He’d walked past gilt and painted ceilings, tapestries and marble floors, and seen only the dust. His mother had shown her a vase worth three years’ wages. How could Sukey dust a thing like that?

“This is very fine,” she lied, swallowing another bite of asparagus on toast. “What’s in it?”

“Oh, it’s just a light fish béchamel. With poached eggs, obviously. I like the undercooks to practice their techniques while the family is away. I hope your asparagus isn’t mushy.”

Sukey didn’t like asparagus, mushy or not. She’d never heard of béchamel, but supposed it was the white, fishy sauce coating her tongue. She gulped the mouthful down. “No, it’s perfect.”
I just hope I don’t get indigestion.

At Tassell Hall, there’d be a parade of sophisticated French ladies’ maids under John’s nose, whose accents were elegant and who liked eating fish sauce. What if he… She couldn’t even think about it.

I want to go home,
she thought.
Take me home. I want
my
mother, who serves me penny pies for dinner.
But not every responsibility could be pleasant and a source of saintlike rapture. John had come with her to see her father. She had to stick it out here, not push him to turn his back on his parents and a small fortune besides.

Would he even do it if she asked him?

* * *

“The other day I was cleaning Lady Tassell’s portrait by Sir Joshua—I clean the best paintings myself, and I learned that from harsh experience, I promise you—and the cramp in my foot put me in such agony I nearly tumbled off the stepladder. I’m just glad I didn’t pull the painting down.”

The blood froze in John’s veins. He set down his forkful of poached egg. “You were on a stepladder?” His father had been catching John up on everything that had happened to annoy him in the last six months, ranging from his favorite pencil manufacturer going bankrupt to a nasty pamphlet written about Lord Lenfield during the recent county election.

“I’m sure her ladyship would rather pay to repair the painting than your skull,” Mrs. Toogood said sharply. “That’s false economy if I ever heard it.”

Mr. Toogood waved this away. “You worry too much.”

“My grandmother was a martyr to cramps in her foot,” Sukey said, as if oblivious to the tension in the air. Ever the peacemaker, his wife. “She found that folding a strip of red flannel seven times and wrapping it round her next biggest toe did wonders.”

John winced inwardly, knowing how his parents would take this.

Mr. Toogood regarded her blankly for a few moments. “That’s an old wives’ tale, my dear. I don’t credit it in the slightest.”

John opened his mouth to defend her, but before he could speak Sukey said, “Oh, no, but it cured my grandmother. There’s naught magical in it. She said it made her hold her foot differently.”

“Then why must it be red?” Mr. Toogood inquired sardonically.

Sukey paused, then laughed good-naturedly. John was in awe at her restraint. “I suppose that part is superstition. I never thought on it, for it’s the easiest color to get anyway. The grocer sells bits of red flannel for just such a purpose. If you want to hear real old wives’ tales, I could oblige you! My mother’s aunt, you know, saw a friend cured of a wen on her neck by the touch of a hanged man’s hand.”

“And was she really cured?”

Sukey grinned. “Well, everyone said it was much smaller afterwards.”

Mr. Toogood snorted. “Amanda, do you remember when your sister gave Johnny powdered mouse ash in his jam?”

Since that was a traditional remedy for pissing the bed, John flushed and put a hand over his eyes. When he dared to look at Sukey, she was watching him, eyes dancing.

“I was five,” he said hopelessly.

Mrs. Toogood shook her head ruefully. “Well, it didn’t do him any lasting harm.”

“Tell that to the marines, for the sailors won’t believe it! The poor lad had nightmares for weeks that the mouse was crawling about inside of him. Of course you helped matters splendidly by pointing out that he ate cows and chickens all the time.”

John had forgotten that until this moment. But now he could clearly picture the cedar wainscoting in the chapel, and hear his father’s voice explaining with absolute authority that no matter what anyone said, there were no ghosts; souls went to Heaven or Hell. A mouse once dead could not be resurrected except by the direct intervention of Christ, and Christ would not put a living animal inside a person. No, not even if they were very sinful.

It was startling to remember that his father’s firm assurances had once been enough to quiet any doubts. John had ceased fretting over the mouse that very hour.

“Since none of them had ever crawled about inside him yet, you can see how I thought it would reassure him,” his mother said, laughing.

“You thought? Ha! You said the first thing that came to your mind, as always.”

John had decidedly not missed family meals. “Leave her alone. Don’t you ever get sick of being right?”

“Oh, don’t mind your father,” Mrs. Toogood said. “He can’t help himself.”

“He might help himself, if you didn’t take his side.”

Below the table, Sukey put a restraining hand on his leg. “Don’t speak to your mother that way,” Mr. Toogood snapped.

Your hypocrisy beggars belief,
John thought.

After supper, they sat eating Portugal cakes with hot cider. John tried to include Sukey in the conversation, but despite his best efforts and her heroic readiness to try again after each rebuff, talk kept turning to the past or to news of mutual acquaintances. When her cider and two cakes had vanished, Sukey pushed back her chair. “I beg your pardon, sir, ma’am, but I’m asleep on my feet.”

John stood, but Sukey gave him a wan smile and said, “No, no, you stay.”

“Yes, do stay, John,” his mother said. “It will give us a chance to get reacquainted without boring your wife to tears. Do you remember which room you’re in, dear?”

Sukey nodded.

“If you need anything, Tamar and Camilla’s room is just down the hall. Some of the girls are in the habit of sewing there in the evenings.”

John was about to insist on accompanying her, at least to unlace her stays—but he caught her relief as she headed for the door and hesitated, afraid she might be eager to escape him as well as his parents.

The door closed behind her, and her footsteps retreated through the kitchen. John knew he should go after her, but he felt ashamed—of his parents, and of himself for not knowing how to manage them.

“Poor girl, she’s so intimidated by the house,” Mrs. Toogood said. “I tried to make her feel at home, but I know it’s not at all what she’s used to.”

“I suppose not many people
are
used to a house like this. You like her though, don’t you, Mother?”

“Ye-es. Of course I do. She seems a very sweet, well-meaning girl.”

“Mother.” They both knew that in Mrs. Toogood’s lexicon, that translated to
It’s not her fault she’s empty-headed.

“I just always imagined you’d marry a bluestocking.”

“
Mother
.”

She shrugged resignedly. “I suppose I was naive to think I’d brought up a boy who would care about his wife’s
mind
.”

John set down his Portugal cake, queasy. “Sukey isn’t stupid. Don’t be snobbish.”

“I don’t care about her accent, John,” his mother said indignantly. “You know me better than that. But she doesn’t
read
. And she’s so young. A man doesn’t—” She stopped talking. “Never mind.”

“Yes?”

“A man doesn’t marry a woman half his age because he imagines her his intellectual equal,” she said flatly. “You never said she was so young in your letters.”

She isn’t half my age.
But the calculation was only off by two years. “You—” John tried to clear the fury from his voice. “You think I just married her to have someone to feel superior to?”

Her eyes widened. “Of course not. That isn’t what I said at all.”

“Isn’t it?”

“You tell me why you married her, then.”

“Yes,” his father said. “Enlighten us.”

He didn’t know what to say. If he told them about Mr. Summers and the job, it would hardly be the defense of Sukey he wished. If he tried to explain that she was beautiful and witty, that she’d looked like a fairy and made him feel that life could be exciting, it would only sound to his mother exactly how she imagined it: that he had married a pretty girl out of lust and a pitiful desire to feel young and looked up to.