Sweet Bargain (4 page)

At the height of the storm, the earl's man had arrived, evoking a flurry of hospitality which died abruptly when the man requested that Augustus Shaw come before the earl with an account of his stewardship of the Courtland estate. The vengeful spirit in Bel's mind had stirred restlessly.

She had found no opportunity to tell her father about the unfortunate meeting of his children and new neighbor, and it seemed the haughty earl was demanding her father's records because of her own folly. In defying the earl, she had exposed her father, the soul of integrity, to a stranger's scrutiny and censure.

Her father did not reveal the outcome of his meeting with the earl, but returned to his contemplation of the affairs of the poor accused villagers as if there had been no lordly summons from their arrogant neighbor. Only the little voice that whispered vengeance in Bel's ear would not be stilled. It had made her laugh, really. What could she do to the man?

Retreating clouds were spitting a few isolated drops of rain as she made her way along the drive. From the road she paused to look back at the house, shaking her head at such reflections. Contemplating with relish the humiliation of a peer of the realm was not at all the thing for the daughter of such a house to be doing. If Shaw House was not in the guidebooks, it deserved to be. It had a handsome gray stucco front with regularly spaced white casement windows across the wide upper story. Tall windows at the ends of the two protruding wings of the lower story hinted at the size and loftiness of the interior apartments. Four white columns lifted a pediment above the door with restrained and unpretentious dignity. Elms of great age and grandeur sheltered the rear of the house, and a vast green park swept from the door to the road. In short, every feature reflected the dignity and honor of the Shaws themselves.

When travelers inquired about it, as they inevitably did, Mrs. Jenner, the housekeeper, would be quick to offer refreshment and a tour of the principal rooms. And Mr. Jenner, the butler, would be as ready to tell the story of Colonel Shaw, a soldier of considerable courage in the service of the king.

Every Shaw knew the story. The colonel had expressed in the hearing of his restored sovereign the view that next to serving the crown in yet another war nothing could be so satisfying as casting his line upon a swift-running stream. Not too many years later his amused and grateful liege had settled upon the retiring soldier the large languishing estate of a man who had backed Cromwell. The colonel, in spite of his professed desire to do nothing more than fish, soon busied himself in building a house, getting a family, and improving the land he had been given.

Jenner would content himself with these revelations, of course. Pride would permit no reference to the hard times upon which the Shaws had fallen. Should the travelers inquire as to the precise acreage of the estate, Jenner would cough discreetly. There would be no need to point out that the original estate was now divided among three brothers and a son, that the Shaws had become as numerous as the rooms in their gracious home, or that dowries and settlements divided among so many for so long had shrunk to humble proportions hardly worthy of the grandeur of such a fine old house.

Bel turned toward the village, intending to lose the dismals in exercise and the beauty of the day. Ashecombe, with its three substantial dwellings, its dozen shops, fifteen cottages, inn, and church, straddled the river two miles below Shaw House. Even in the awkward pattens she soon reached the stone bridge, where a deep turn in the river separated the broad, flat reaches of meadow and field through which the Upper Ashe flowed from the deeper stretches of the Lower Ashe where it curved past the church and vicarage, Mr. Elworthy's farm, Courtland Manor, and Squire Darlington's land.

Once again her thoughts fixed on the earl's contempt for her and her family. She gazed from the bridge at the rain-swollen Ashe rushing to the deep pools that made the banks of Courtland Manor so inviting to fishermen. How maddening that she could not put the man out of her mind. His sudden appearance at the edge of the stream had been like an episode out of the oldest tales-Hermes appearing before Kalypso, Apollo before Daphne, a god descending to earth in shepherd's guise. Then, of course, the god had spoken, as rudely as any mortal Bel had ever encountered. Would that she could snub him as he deserved.

Such feelings were not much relieved by hearing that general sentiment in the village ran in the earl's favor. It was but a few steps from the linen draper's to the butcher's, yet on the way Bel had to endure the earl's praises sung in half a dozen different keys. Apparently his man was interviewing candidates for several posts at Courtland, and everyone in Ashecombe with a brother, sister, or cousin in need of a situation was full of wonder at the wages that had been mentioned.

To hear the villagers talk, Haverly's coming to Ashecombe was as prodigious and wonderful an event as the arrival of a royal personage and much more likely to bring prosperity to all. It was a shame that the earl was not about to hear himself so universally praised. The toadying of his neighbors would no doubt suit his sense of consequence. Interrupting the butcher's further encomiums on the earl's generosity as an employer, Bel completed the order her mother had requested and made her escape.

Outside the butcher's door, however, she came face-to-face with Mrs. Nye, a widow whose feelings were most likely contrary to her own. Dedicated equally to the ill of the parish and to gossip, Mrs. Nye would be sure to have something to say about Lord Haverly.

"Oh, good morning, Miss Shaw. Will you be so good as to give me your arm to cross the road?" asked Mrs. Nye. Bel complied, shifting her basket and steadying the older woman with a firm hand under one frail elbow.

Some years earlier after escorting Mrs. Nye about the village for most of a long July afternoon, Tom had unkindly but accurately dubbed the old woman "Echo." It was true that Mrs. Nye had wasted away with the years until little was left of her once-substantial person except a great deal of white hair and a shrill, many-noted voice. Still, she reminded Bel less of the classical nymph than of a determined bird singing steadily from the hedge to a stream of indifferent passersby.

"How do you like this earl settling among us?" Mrs. Nye began. "It is a great good fortune, is it not? Especially for all the Shaw girls. A single man must rely on the resources of the neighborhood for his entertainment, of course. I daresay one will meet him at dinners throughout the summer. You and your cousins will find yourselves in a much enlarged circle, to be sure. Not that you, Miss Shaw, must seek a suitor when Mr. Darlington has set his cap, but your cousin Ellen and your fine London cousins must profit."

"Everyone in Ashecombe seems eager to profit, Mrs. Nye, but I hardly think our new neighbor will enlarge his circle to include the Shaws," said Bel, helping her companion around a deep rut in the road.

"I expect the earl will give a ball, don't you, once he has Courtland Manor restored, of course," confided Mrs. Nye, as if Bel had not spoken at all. "You do know that he means to restore Courtland." Mrs. Nye went on to describe the extent of the earl's fortune and properties in Derbyshire.

Bel was amazed at the grand edifice of hopes and schemes her neighbors were building on the slight foundation of the earl's purchase of an old ruin. He was no more than a rude, selfish young man, who probably meant only to fish the Ashe for a few weeks and then return to his ton friends, but he had offended her family and set the sensible village of Ashecombe on its ear with that supreme unconcern of the aristocrat for the villager that her Whiggish cousins decried so often. Her desire for revenge was nearly choking her as she listened to Mrs. Nye's further effusions in praise of the earl.

"Mrs. Nye, even if Lord Haverly restores Courtland, he is so ill—" She stopped herself from commenting further on his manners. She could not very well do so without revealing her encounter with the earl. And to reveal it to Mrs. Nye was to reveal it to all of Ashecombe.

Mrs. Nye halted and paled at the words. "Ill—the earl ill? It's not grave, is it, Miss Shaw?"

Suddenly, Bel perceived a means of revenge so simple, so neat, so unexpectedly available to her that she could not allow the opportunity to pass her by. She would not hesitate as Hamlet had but avenge her father at once.

"It does not appear so," she said slowly, gently urging Mrs. Nye forward again. "It is only a ... fever, after all. He must have attempted the Ashe, and you know, Mrs. Nye, how hazardous to one's health it is to stand all day in a chill stream. I have no doubt that Lord Haverly will be well soon if ... he receives proper care." She paused. They were now nearly across the road. "But, of course, he has no servants about, does he? And no female member of his household, and we all know what men are in such a situation. Perhaps you should take him some of your calf's-foot jelly, Mrs. Nye?"

"Oh, I will," breathed Mrs. Nye solemnly, "and Mrs. Elworthy will want to take him some lavender water."

"Oh, yes, we must
all
be neighborly, don't you think?" urged Bel, struggling to maintain a grave countenance.

Mrs. Nye said nothing for once. Her eyes moved rapidly back and forth as if her thinking had outstripped her powers of speech. She seemed to forget Bel's presence and turned away, leaving the assistance of Bel's arm. What visions of fatal disease and restorative ministrations had seized the woman's imagination Bel did not know, but further down the street Mrs. Nye apparently recovered enough to speak to Mrs. Pence. Bel smiled and turned homeward with light steps.

Vulgar curiosity about the earl would never lead any of his lesser neighbors to disturb his peace, but solicitude for his health would bring all of Ashecombe to his door. Bel could see the scene: the haughty earl and his man receiving call after call as each of their neighbors brought some remedy or other for the earl's imaginary ills and perhaps something for his conceit. She hoped someone would bring him leeches.

WITH THE LATE afternoon sun slanting in long shafts past the library windows, Nick pulled his chair closer to the fire and stretched his legs toward the fender, propping his crossed ankles where the flames' heat could warm his toes. He had put aside Augustus Shaw's ledgers. The man was more than honest. He had clearly been resourceful and generous in his management of the property. Nick had spent the day riding about Courtland, seeing for himself just what the ledgers had told him he would find—tenants in roomy, well-tended cottages, land in good heart, modern drainage, sensible enclosures with enough common land remaining for the people to graze a cow or two of their own. How it had been managed was all there in the accounts. Antiquities and furnishings from the manor house had been sold off as allowed in the terms of the will, and monies had been invested, little by little, in a series of well-conceived improvements.

Nick's Uncle Miles would never have dreamed of such a sacrifice of the lord's house, yet of the lessons Nick had learned from his Uncle Miles those pertaining to the management of an earl's house and lands had been at first the most satisfying. In his first months at Haverly, under the guise of learning what his station in life was to require of him, Nick had opened the great ledgers again and again to the roll of servants and their wages, the list of tenants and their rents. The sums alone had been magnificent, but more wonderful still had been the regularity. Quarter by quarter the butler, the housekeeper, Farre, the stable hands, the footmen, and the cook had received their wages. Even the lowliest laundress, Grace Simpton, had been there, her four pounds per quarter duly recorded.

In his parents' household, what servants there were had come and gone with bewildering rapidity. Nick had been ten before he perfectly understood that the servants expected to be paid, resented it when they were not, and were inclined to take a bit of plate or silver with them to cover any losses incurred in the service of the Seymours.

But such lessons had not been on his mind when rain had made a sieve of the Courtland stable roof. In those moments of shifting horses, gear, and hay to protected corners of the old building, Nick had been cursing the Shaws. The encounter at the river still rankled, and he did not hesitate to lay the blame for the disrepair of his property on the man who had managed it for fifteen years. After all, if the children were not above poaching from the estate, what depredations was the man himself guilty of? Nick had insisted on seeing the ledgers that day.

Farre, assuming his most distant manner, had said, "Yes, your lordship," and "No, your lordship," and ridden to do Nick's bidding.

But with the appearance of Mr. Shaw, Nick had immediately forgotten the ledgers. As tall as Nick, of an age with Farre, Mr. Shaw entered Courtland Manor like a lion, shaking his bright, wild hair about his fiercely genial and vivid face. On Nick he leveled a gaze as warm and direct as a shaft of sunlight, in which Nick could detect no defensiveness at being called to account, as there might have been in a man who had abused his trust, nor any resentment, as there might have been in a man who had done his job well.

"So your stable's giving you a bit of trouble," said Mr. Shaw. "Do you mind if I take a look?"

A very few of Mr. Shaw's forceful strides brought them across the gravel drive to the damp stable. There they walked back and forth, examining the dripping timbers and the roof itself. At Mr. Shaw's insistence they mounted a ladder to examine the very framework of crucks and braces. Nick, arguing that certain of the timbers must be replaced, was surprised to find his new neighbor agreeing with him and offering the names of several craftsmen in the valley who could be relied upon to restore the roof properly.

The visit of Mr. Shaw had left him thinking about Bel Shaw—that is, more than he had been thinking of her. A dozen times a day fragments of their conversation at the river came back to him, and he would imagine himself saying quite different things to her. Once, staring at the rain-swollen Ashe, he had imagined himself snatching her up in his arms as the river's waters threatened to wash her away. The image had a hold on him he could not shake.