Miss Milton Speaks Her Mind (3 page)

For all that she was the poor relation, she had believed Blair Stover—more properly Viscount Canfield from one of their family's numerous honors—when he had put his small son in her arms, winked at her in that way of his, and said, “Janey, just keep an eye on him for a little while, won't you? Lucinda claims that if she cannot bolt to Leeds to peruse the silk warehouses, she will dissolve.”

Strange that after all these years she could remember that plea from Blair. Home to Denby from Dame Chaffee's and waiting for her first position in a household, she had been only too pleased to take the infant in her arms, enjoy the sweet smell of him, and watch him quite carefully during the day of Lord and Lady Canfield's expedition to Leeds, the first after Lucinda's confinement.

Jane looked out the window and was rewarded with the sight of dawn glowing dull red to the east. “Oh, it will rain today,” she said out loud, straightening out her legs and tucking the coverlet tighter. “Andrew will be so disappointed.”

She kept her gaze on the window, remembering that she had been sitting in the window seat at dusk with her knees up and Andrew, burped and fed, regarding her with sleepy eyes from his resting spot on her stomach, when a messenger arrived on horseback from Leeds. Not enough years had passed for her to forget Lady Carruthers' shrieks from the front hall, the long silence, and then the butler's heavy tread on the stairs.

“
I put you right here on my bed, Andrew,” she said, as though he were there. “You were six weeks old, and I laid you down right there, and opened that door to such awful news.”

The butler had been unable to speak. She thought about him, dead these several years, recalling vividly the way his mouth had opened and closed, and the way he had crumbled into tears before her eyes. Never before or since could she remember a butler succumbing so entirely to grief, and as she sat in bed, the memory made her tuck the covers tighter.

When he could not speak, she shouldered her way past him and ran down the stairs where the footman—butler now—was attempting to revive Lady Carruthers. “Stanton,” was all she said. She could still see Stanton gentling Lady Carruthers' head back to the floor and rising to grab her by the shoulders. Standing there so close to her, he told her of the contents of the note that rested by Lady Carruthers' hand, fluttering a little from the breeze let in by the still-open door.

She had heard him in shock and horror, and then released herself from his grasp to retrieve the note, as though she did not believe his words. She recognized her cousin Blair's untidy scrawl, and how the words “accident” and “near death” leaped out at her like imps.

I suppose I could have made some effort to revive Lady Carruthers, she thought, but felt no more regret now than she had all those years ago. Instead, she had pulled herself hand over hand up the stairs again, hardly noticing Lord Denby's rush down them, and then the sound of his carriage leaving the estate with the crack of a whip and the sudden grind of gravel on the front driveway. She had returned silently to her room and picked up the baby, as though to shelter him from the news that had changed his young world even before he was aware of it.

Messengers had come and gone those next two days, but she knew nothing of Andrew's young mother. Even then, Lady Carruthers had been disinclined to grudge her any civility, and she had not the heart to ask. She should have known that Lady Carruthers would later throw it back in her face that she was callous and had a heart of stone, but at the time, she only wondered and grieved deep inside herself, and held the baby.

Two days later, Lord Denby and his son returned to Stover Hall in a carriage swathed in black. Ignoring everyone, Blair had let himself into her room to hold out his arms for his son and sit with him in silence.

Jane got out of bed and lit the lamp on her bureau, welcoming the little light that forced the demons back into the shadows. She sat in the chair that Blair had sat in so many years ago with his small son resting along his legs. His voice a perfect monotone, he had told her how Lucinda, her arms full of packages, had looked both ways before attempting to cross the High Street, and then stepped out directly in front of a mailcoach.

“
She knew it was there, Janey, she had to know,” he had told her. “She was so happy to be back in the shops again! I think she just forgot what she was doing. I had turned to speak to an acquaintance. Janey, the last thing she said to me was ‘Oh, I hope it will hurry by and not spatter me with mud.' And then she just ... just walked in front of it!”

Watching the lamplight, Jane knew that no amount of years would ever dim the amazed grief in her cousin's voice. It had been forceful enough to wake his son, who stirred, made little mewing sounds, and then cried. She had taken the baby from him to caress into sleep again.

“
Why did she do that, Janey? Did she just not realize? Was she that excited?”

She had never questioned the strangeness of Lady Lucinda's death, because she knew the impulsive nature of the dear creature who had captured her cousin's heart, and both of them so young. When the rumors started about suicide and worse, Jane had simply closed her ears; she knew the truth. Wrapped up in her excitement and pleasure, Lucinda had walked before she thought, and her fatal steps so many years ago had, in their own odd way, dragged them all after her.

The worse horror to Jane was that the poor woman had lingered in such pain for two days. His own voice destroyed with grief, Blair told her how Lucy had patted her deathbed, as though searching for her baby.

“
Oh God, Jane, I remember how she used to wake up at night and pat our own bed, hunting for Andrew,” he told her. “She laughed about it, and assured me that this must be an instinct mothers had. My God, Jane, she would not stop patting that bloody bed, and then digging into the mattress with her fingers! I will hear that sound forever.”

And so I became your mother, Andrew, she thought, as she made her bed. She must have been a few moments later rising than usual, because she was still sitting on her bed in her chemise and petticoat when the second upstairs maid tiptoed in with the copper can of hot water.

“
Miss Mitten, I wish you would sleep longer!” Becky said, as she set down the can.

It was their little joke, begun when Becky arrived from the workhouse as the new 'tween stairs girl, terrified and tongue-tied, even as she had come from there herself, all those years ago. No one else would bother to put the child at ease, so Jane did, the result being that Lady Carruthers announced with some satisfaction to dinner guests one night, “It takes a servant to deal with a servant, I suppose.” No matter; Lady Carruthers' words no longer flayed her, as they once would have. Becky could never do enough for her and Andrew, and that was enough result from a little kindness.

“
You know I cannot sleep longer,” Jane replied, providing her share of the tease. “You must wake up before you ever go to sleep, to catch me, my dear!” She stood up to twist her hair into its usual tidy knot. A pin here, a pin there; she scarcely had to look into the glass, except that Becky was watching.

The maid sighed, then looked around before she spoke. “I don't care what Lady Carruthers says, miss, I wish you would not wear those dratted caps, because your hair is so beautiful.”

“
Lady Carruthers says that I need the dignity,” Jane said, as she settled her cap at its customary angle. “You are a dear, though.”

She buttoned her dress thoughtfully, mindful of the mirror as she seldom was. It was nice hair, thick and black and so unlike Lady Carruthers' thinning brown hair. No argument with her figure, either; Lady Carruthers regularly cast her glances that could only be called envious. Or her grace; Blair had even once told his ill-starred Lucinda that she could copy his cousin's graceful way of getting from room to room without mishap to furniture or dignity. (Jane had scolded Blair then, reminding him that any woman seven months gone with child had gravity troubles that would baffle even Sir Isaac Newton.)

There was a time when mirrors interested her, and she thought of it now, that year she was sixteen and completing her final year before she began to teach the younger girls. Dame Chaffee's pimply son, home from Cambridge for some infraction, had composed a poem to her “eyes of sea foam green, sprung from limping pools where Venus rose,” or some such nonsense created when he should have been repenting with his books. She was certain he meant “limpid,” but at sixteen, a poem was a poem.

By seventeen she was too busy to think about poems, and chose from then on not to give much heed to her own reflection, no matter how sea foam green her eyes, or even how glorious her skin. No more poems found their way under her door; she would have been certain they were intended for someone else, had one appeared.

But that was years ago, she reminded herself as she quit her room that morning. “No, no, Jane, do be honest,” she said under her breath. “As of next January, you will be thirty, and it will be twelve years.”

She hurried toward Lord Denby's room, intending only to look in, and see if he needed anything, but she could not face the smell of the sickroom. Instead, she stopped on impulse, looked around, and let herself into Blair's room.

To her surprise, the draperies were open. She almost exclaimed, before she thought, that it was too much light for an invalid, even if it was the October sun, which steadily lost its strength. She gritted her teeth and reminded herself that Blair Stover, Viscount Canfield, Lieutenant Colonel of the Sixth Foot, slept in the Denby family vault.

She knew that she could never perch upon that bed again, so she settled herself on the campaign chest at the foot of it. The bedding had been stripped from the mattress, and the whole thing covered with a spread, and she wondered why no one had thought to burn the wretched mattress and replace it with a new one.

Jane looked around, afraid for one irrational moment that nothing had been done since that horrid death in the early hours six months ago. She relaxed; all the bloody cotton wadding was gone, as well as the useless medications that had lined the table beside the bed, and the puny edition of
Rudge's Medicament
that she had ripped through frantically in those last moments of his life.

She knew the pillows were gone and burned, because after Mr. Lowe's early-morning arrival and official pronouncement of death (as though anyone could still be alive with what remained of his blood spread like a rug on the floor), she had marched downstairs with the sodden pillows in her arms, and quick-stepped them across the endless lawn to the fenced area where the gardener burned old leaves.

The door opened and she looked around in surprise. “Well, Stanton,” she said, “I thought I had sneaked in here unaware.”

Lord Denby's butler closed the door behind him and joined her on the campaign chest, obviously as unwilling to sit on the bed as she was, even after six months.

“
What did you do with
Rudge 's Medicament
?” she asked suddenly.

“
Burned it, Miss Mitten,” he replied just as promptly. He coughed. “Your ... your fingerprints were all over it.”

She nodded. Of course he had; she had even asked him about it before. How strange she must have looked when they found her there, Lord Canfield dead and her sitting there so calmly. She colored from the remembrance of her earlier panic that no one had seen, she who had not panicked for one moment when it mattered, especially when Mr. Lowe had told her exactly what would finally happen. He had been far too right, but this was nothing to be thinking of now.

“
And how is our difficult patient this morning?” she asked as she headed to the door, allowing the butler no choice but to follow.

“
Mr. Lowe is right now patting him here and there and checking for soundness of wind.”

“
It is so early!” she exclaimed. “We may have taken him on because of his enthusiasm for modern medicine, but I think Mr. Lowe tries too hard.”

Stanton smiled, and she knew he appreciated her humor, especially when she knew how glum she must have looked sitting there on Blair's old campaign chest. “He knocked at the servants' entrance at an obscenely early hour and informed me that he had just seen the grocer's wife through a tedious confinement and would I mind if he killed two birds with one stone before he went home.”

“
Mr. Lowe is such an economy,” she said with a smile of her own. “I cannot imagine that your master is being even slightly polite at this early hour.”

“
He is not,” Stanton agreed cheerfully. “When our good doctor is through prodding him, I will sweeten Lord Denby with an offering from the publisher.” He smiled. “It arrived last night, Miss Milton.”

“
Oh, that will be just the thing!”

This is news indeed, she thought as she followed the butler to the breakfast room. A parcel wrapped in brown paper rested on the sideboard next to the bacon. She looked at it hopefully, noticing that the string was not bound tight. Drat, she thought, after another look. There is wax and a seal; we dare not.

She carefully avoided looking at the package as she put together her breakfast from the sideboard and then smiled her thanks to Stanton, who pulled her chair out for her. She tinkered with the bacon, then cleared her throat. She was rewarded with an eager look from the butler.