Miss Lindel's Love (2 page)

“It’s not some low haunt of vice, you know. Mr. Granger is on the parish committee; you’ve known him for years.”

“But I’ve never been inside his place of business.”

“High time, then. Come on.” It was easy to be the braver one when Lucy grew more timid and more anxious with every year. Maris wondered if she’d be half so confident in town without Lucy to coax and convince. On the other hand, Lucy might find some courage of her own if she were not there to encourage her so often.

“What about the dogs?”

‘They’re in the barn. We’ll get them when we go.”

She led the way, head held high, into the dark, clean-smelling inn. The red tile floor in the entrance gleamed with years of hard polishing to clean away years of dirty boots. Lucy sighed in relief as soon as she stepped inside. “It’s not so bad,” she whispered.

“What did you expect?” Maris asked with a smile as she put her umbrella by the door.

From somewhere deep in the building the girls heard the rumble of male voices and an uplifting sound of laughter. “The meeting must be breaking up,” Maris said. “Maybe we should wait. I don’t want to miss...”

“Oh, let’s hurry. I should hate to run into him in the hallway.”

“Mrs. Granger’s probably in the kitchen.” Maris started down the dark hallway that bisected the ancient building, finding her way by following the smell of freshly baked bread. A stairway ran to the next floor on her left, the banister rails bluntly squared off by swings of a long-rusted ax. Some folks suggested that the name of the inn came not from Charles the Second’s hiding in an oak tree but from the illegally harvested trees the inn’s first owner had used to build it. Danesby had been near a royal forest once and the inn was at least five hundred years old. And the Grangers had been masters through all of its history.

“Mrs. Granger?” Lucy asked. “That’s all right then. I thought you needed something from Mr. Granger.”

“A barrel of beer, perhaps? For the three of us? There’s very little carousing goes on at Finchley Old Place.”

Lucy tittered. “I suppose not.”

To reach the kitchen meant going past an open door from which all the masculine noise and a glow of many lights emanated. Maris walked past quickly, not so daring that she glanced inside. Lucy, however, hesitated, made a false start, and then tried to rush past. With disastrous timing, she darted in front of the opening just as a man came out. And not just any man, but Lord Danesby, the fifteenth viscount, himself.

Maris turned back at the surprised sounds of their impact. He had Lucy by the arms, preventing her from toppling over. “I beg your pardon,” he said in a low yet powerful voice. “I didn’t see you.”

“Oh!” Lucy breathed. “Oh, no.”

Feeling keenly her friend’s embarrassment, Maris hastened back. “Lucy, what happened?”

“It was my fault,” Lord Danesby said. “Coming out into this dark hallway, I didn’t see Miss Pike.”

Kenton Danesby looked up as he spoke and saw the other young lady very clearly. She had just stepped into the light shed from all those candles in the main taproom. Young, taller than average, and remarkably pretty with a warm, full mouth, she was also slightly damp about the shoulders and hem. She wore no hat and her blond hair, made curly perhaps by the rain, escaped in wisps from a too-tight chignon, giving her face a nimbus of gold like a halo. For one foolish instant, his heart caught. “Miss ... Miss Lindel, isn’t it?”

Then, even as he watched, the angel blushed, stammered something inarticulate, took hold of her tottering friend, and hurried away. Damningly, a giggle floated back to him. Lord Danesby shrugged and headed out to his waiting coach.

Maris hurried back through the wet grass to Finchley Old Place, her hand pressed against her side under her cloak. A bundle of letters sheltered there against the now-and-again rain that still sprinkled the countryside. A rainbow glowed in the mixture of rain and sun, but Maris only frowned at it. She tried hard not to think about the meeting in the passage. Every time she did, she wriggled in shame. She hadn’t even spoken to him, not a word! So much for her fine dreams.

Her mother called to her as she started up the stairs to her room. Maris hesitated and turned back. She took up the letters again from the gleaming table in the hall. Some sprays of cherry blossom from the orchard were upright in a tall vase. Her mother was always bringing bits of greenery into the house despite the housekeeper’s contention that they made the place untidy. Maris brushed her fingers over the pale pink flowers.

It was said in the village that Lord Danesby kept a splendid greenhouse up at the manor and that he had fresh fruit and flowers even in the deepest parts of winter. How magical and wonderful it must be, she thought, to be able to give your mother a lapful of roses in January, though she herself preferred the wild disarray of flowers growing by hedge or bank.

With this thought in mind, she went into the drawing room. The mulberry-colored curtains were thrown wide and Mrs. Lindel sat in a pool of sunshine. Around her on every side were trunks, carried down from the attics and up from the lumber room. Spilling out of the trunks, like a rainbow on the floor, were great swaths of fabric.

“There you are, dearest,” Mrs. Lindel said, putting up her cheek to be saluted. “Did you ask Mrs. Granger about the tonic?”

‘Yes, Mother. She’ll send a bottle over once it has cooled.”

“Oh? Did she make some up fresh?”

“She didn’t quite like the color of the last batch. She thought it would lack strength.”

“Excellent. Poor Mrs. Cosby’s in a very bad way. Her sneezing is fit to carry off the roof and her poor eyes are so red there’s not a soul alive who wouldn’t believe she’d been stealing the port.”

“Poor Mrs. Cosby. Every year her rose cold seems to grow worse.”

“Mrs. Granger’s tonic will set her to rights. What’s that? The post?”

‘Yes. There’s a letter from Uncle Shelley. I hope nothing is wrong in Sheffield.”

Mrs. Lindel reached in her pocket for her magnifying lenses. As she slipped the point of her scissors under the flap, she commented on how ruinous this was to them. “I do wish John had been more attentive at school. His hand grows ever more difficult to distinguish.”

Maris smiled, trying to picture her mother’s brother as a small boy laboring to form perfect loops with an uncooperative pen. Now he was broad-shouldered, though not tall, gray-haired, and proprietor of the most luxurious white mustache in the North of England. He had no children of his own, having only recently married for the first time to a young widow. He’d spent his early life building up a prosperous business, creating and importing the copperware which was then silver-plated in the great workshops of Sheffield.

“What does he write?” Maris asked when she saw the smile awakening on her mother’s face.

“He can send the coach for us, but only as far as London. So Sophie will be able to make the journey north in greater comfort as well as saving us the price of a fare for her and a maid.”

“Best of all,” Maris added, “Sophie will be able to spend a few days in London. She’ll be in alt when she finds out. Where is she?”

“Reading, of course. But come,” Mrs. Lindel said, rising to her feet. “We’ll tell her the good news later.” Leaving the letter on her chair, she pulled out from an opened chest an unraveling length of thin white silk.

“What is all this, Mother?”

“Dress lengths, goose.”

“So I can see,” Maris said with a smile on the edge of laughter. “What are they for?”

In one voice, they answered, “Dresses.”

Maris’s younger sister entered the room as they laughed. She raised her head from the book held open a few inches in front of her nose, showing a face very similar to Maris’s own. Her hair was darker, shading into brown rather than her sister’s honey tones. As though to compensate, her eyes were a deeper blue, when one could see them. Most of the time, they were down, unceasingly tracing over lines of print. Furthermore, her cheeks were slightly plumper and lit by a pretty shade of rose.

“There you are, Sophie. Good news.”

“Oh?” Her reaction to the treat in store was typical. “Ah, excellent. I shall be able to visit the bookshops.”

“You are such a bluestocking,” Maris said, giving her sister a squeeze round the shoulders. “What about plays? Milliners? The fascinations of bazaars and pantheons and emporia?”

“Those too,” Sophie agreed. “But first, the bookshops. I can’t think what Father was about to purchase only the first two volumes of so many three-volume books. And not only novels, though they are perhaps the most frustrating.”

“It wasn’t your father’s fault,” their mother said. “When your grandfather died, the books were divided among his heirs.”

“What a foolish arrangement,” Sophie said bitterly. “They should have all been left to me. I’m the only member of this family who reads.”

“You weren’t born yet, dearest. Besides, you know perfectly well you never looked at a book until two years ago.”

“Well, I like them very much now.”

Maris gave her sister another hug. Scarcely more than a year apart in age, they had grown up with a special kind of closeness, second only to twins. When, two years ago, a particularly violent fever had laid hold of Sophie, everyone had despaired of her life. This illness, coming so soon after Mr. Lindel’s death, had rocked the foundations of their lives.

When she’d emerged from her illness, she’d been much changed. Wan, weak, easily tired, she could scarcely bear the effort of even a desultory conversation. So Maris had begun to read to her. Her former impatience and quickness of thought translated itself into a fierce eagerness to learn the end of the story before Maris could possibly read the whole thing. As soon as the doctor approved, she’d begun reading everything in the house, despite her mother’s fears for her eyesight. Yet in other ways, she remained the same.

Therefore, when her mother began to display the various fabrics stored in the trunks, she put down her book and took full part in the selection. Mrs. Lindel draped and pinned, deciding a dark blue silk was too heavy for Maris, but right for Sophie, or that the cherry blossom pink washed out Sophie but brought out Maris’s golden highlights.

“Must all mine be put away until next year, Mother?” Sophie asked plaintively as they folded up the pieces, almost dancing as they came together and parted, shaking out and flattening down the material.

“I think Sophie should have a few new dresses, Mother,” Maris added. “She’s grown quite another inch and there’s next to nothing more on her hems to be let down.”

Sophie flashed her sister a look of gratitude. Mrs. Lindel wavered. “Well, I suppose ...”

“She may very well be invited to attend a dinner at Uncle Shelley’s house. I imagine our new aunt entertains guests on a regular basis. I don’t want my little sister looking like a poor country cousin amid all those silver-plated nabobs.”

“Oh, no, certainly not. We’ll make up the blue shot sarcenet for a dinner dress and then the bronze green poplin for a new afternoon dress. With the Indian shawl I have laid by, it will be vastly pretty.”

Maris squinted at Sophie, picturing the gown in her mind’s eye. “What happened to that length of gold braid, Mother? I’ll give her old cloak a new touch with that.” Maris had become a notable seamstress through sheer necessity. Not only did their present finances preclude hiring a dressmaker, but the nearest one to Finchley, unless you counted old Mrs. Williams who did plain sewing, was thirty-five miles away.

Later that evening, the women put on their pattens and stumped along on the two-inch high metal rings into the village. Mrs. Lindel had dithered over taking the carriage or walking, but her daughters’ desire for exercise overcame her objections. Maris thought her mother looked quite five years younger with her cheeks flushed and the rigid waves of her hair slightly loosened at the edges of her cap. Several of the other guests commented on her fine looks and as usual, Mrs. Lindel deflected the compliments onto her daughters.

“You are too kind but a woman cannot be thinking of herself when she has two daughters such as mine. Sophie’s hair has quite regained its former curl—such a relief to my mind.”

Sophie soon left Maris’s side to go argue companionably with Ryan Pike. Though he was a scholar, she had read more widely than he, if not as deeply. Though Mrs. Lindel might sigh and shake her head over Sophie’s “blue” qualities, Ryan referred to her as the only “girl of sense” he knew. Looking at the serious, too-thin young man as he towered over Sophie, her arms crossed as she shook her head at him, Maris wondered if Ryan had ever noticed that her sister was never more beautiful than when she made a valid point. Probably not. Ryan thought nothing of living beauty, for his heart was given to old bones.

Mrs. Pike bustled up, a nervous and distracted hostess in blue damask. “Ah, there you are, Ellen. I made sure I should hear the carriage.”

“We walked, Margaret.”

“Walked? Gracious, how intrepid. I vow I have hardly stepped foot outside today, what with the preparations and those children of mine driving me to distraction. Here’s Ryan having all but outgrown his evening wear—again! And I don’t know what Lucy thinks she’s doing. I have asked her half a dozen times to come down—” She turned abruptly to Maris. “She’s in her room. Will you ask her to join us please? She must play the pianoforte for Mrs. Robinson’s flute.”

“Certainly,” Maris said with a bobbed curtsy. What could be wrong with Lucy? She’d been perfectly all right when they’d parted this afternoon. She had not forgotten to bring her copy of the
Ladies’ Magazine
to show Lucy.

She called out, “Lucy? It’s Maris,” as she rapped gently at the white-painted door. The sound of more arrivals floated up the stairs behind her. This was the first evening party of the spring and all the Pikes’ friends and the more superior of the parishioners had accepted the invitation. The winter had been long and dreary with endemic colds sweeping through the local population with extraordinary vehemence.

Mrs. Lindel had kept Sophie at home more often than not, fearful of a return of fever. The weather had turned so brutal by the New Year that they’d been unable to go to even the local entertainments. Party after party had been canceled and even church had been a struggle. Maris couldn’t imagine why Lucy wouldn’t be downstairs, greeting all the people she hadn’t seen for at least two months.