The Moonless Night (17 page)

His arranging a tidy private cottage for Madame Monet was of course known to Biddy. She approved. It had nothing to do with his carrying on with her—it was pure humanitarianism. The fellow was so big-hearted he even cared for Napoleon Bonaparte. Like his Whiggishness, this rampant philanthropy would be cured with maturing. Meanwhile it removed the possibility of Madame billeting herself at Bolt Hall, which was no small benefit. Biddy set out on a campaign of urging Sanford on Marie, who took every opportunity to insult him.

He returned early from Plymouth one afternoon, complaining of a little pain in the liver, an organ that had hitherto given him no trouble. “I can’t think what caused it,” he said, frowning, “for I never touch brandy, and haven’t been over-indulging in wine, either. What do you think, Miss Biddy? I had some shellfish at Madame Monet’s that tasted well enough, but was done in a peculiar sauce. Spicy.”

Biddy knew French sauces for culprits. “It’s the cream,” she informed him knowingly. “Full of hot spices and cream and unnatural herbs, those French gravies—why, if there wasn’t brandy in it you’re lucky. French sauces have inflamed more pancreases than you can count. I’ll relieve it for you at once.”

He foresaw a posset, and began recovering. “I really don’t think curdled milk…”

“Curdled milk? No such a thing. It would destroy a pancreas already saturated with cream. You want vacuum relief. I’ll get out my hood.”

He listened, transfixed. “A nice high hood I have got ahold of from a medical friend,” she told him. “They are using it in Scotland with excellent results. The Scottish doctors know what they are about, say what you will.”

A tin affair, shaped like a very deep bowl with a vaulted bottom was soon being brought in, along with the movable spirit lamp. She heated up the cavity of the hood and the metal while she ordered Sanford out of his jacket and shirt. She likewise commanded Marie from the room, for of course an innocent young female was not to be exposed to masculine flesh on such a wicked part of the anatomy as the torso. She rather wondered if she should have let her see his bruised ankle—it had been a particularly attractive bruise.

She explained that the hot air in the hood would create a vacuum when it cooled down. She got it as hot as his skin could bear, and clamped the hood on him, forming, in theory at least, an hermetical seal. “The vacuum draws up the flesh and relieves the pressure on the pancreas,” she told him. She held it on tightly with both hands while it cooled, giving him a discourse all the while on her leeches. Sanford had owned up that his mother was fond of a leeching.

“How’s that?” she asked after the tin hood had achieved room temperature.

“That feels remarkably better,” he told her. “Wouldn’t the vacuum be even stronger if you put very cold cloths over the hood? The lower temperature would contract the trapped air even more.”

“Well now, I never thought of that! It was not mentioned in the instructions that accompanied the hood, but it sounds very likely. I think you’ve hit on an excellent idea, Sanford.”

“Yes, and if we could mask the lip of the hood with some material such as cloth, you could make it hotter, too. The tin is a conductor of heat—you can’t get it any hotter than skin can stand.”

“I wonder it wasn’t thought of sooner. I’ll glue a band of cotton around the lip of it before I use it again, and use cold cloths on it, too. It would double the hood’s efficiency.”

She had already liked him better with every affliction; this entering into improvements in machinery was pure delight. Together they could pioneer new techniques, advance the frontiers of medicine. She determined that this patient should not slip irretrievably through her fingers. Marie must be made to have him.

“We’ll do as you suggested, and give you another treatment tomorrow if it recurs,” she said happily, hoping that a recrudescence, a very slight one, might occur.

“You ought to set up your shingle,” he told her, buttoning his shirt. “All doctors should be women. They have such a soft touch, not poking at you with ice-cold fingers like the male doctors. It is a great pity a woman like yourself must remain a talented amateur, Biddy.”

This was the first time he had addressed her without the Miss, and while she abhorred forward manners in the young, she was pleased. Their relationship was exceptional enough to warrant the familiarity. “I enjoy dabbling in it,” she admitted.

“Dabbling! You use the wrong word. You are an expert. I wish I could take you along to the Isle of Wight with me. How Mama would adore to meet you.”

“I have never been to Wight,” she answered, not disliking the idea at all, and also seeing the possibility of pushing Marie forward. “I should like to go some time. Marie has never been there, either.”

“Perhaps you will both do me the honor of going there with me a little later on, when Boney is dispatched.”

“I doubt we would want to go if he is there,” she said.

“Bonaparte? What the devil would he…”

“That is your hope, is it not? To get him to Wight.”

He laughed deprecatingly. “Say dream rather than hope. It would never be allowed. But how useful you would be if he should come to me.”

Her dreams of glory soared to new heights. To be physician to the Emperor! “Oh, my!” was all she could say at the moment, her heart fluttering and her face pale. From that moment onwards, her declared aim was to get Marie and herself to Wight, and to make Sanford her nephew-in-law.

To this end, she began besieging Henry to hold a party, an out-and-out ball. There was nothing so romantic as a ball in her view. Her own sole offer of marriage had come at a ball, and while she had felt not the least inclination to accept the offer, still a ball featured in her daydreams of romance.

“A ball, at a time like this?” David asked when he heard of it, and looked to Ev to see what the master thought of this frivolity.

“When?” Benson asked.

“Pretty soon—before Boney is taken away and all the crowds have left,” David answered.

“It must be later,” Biddy pointed out. “There’ll be no moon to speak of then. It is a nuisance to have to go out in a carriage at night when there is no moon to light the way. Here in the country the roads are pitch-black on a moonless night.”

“Yes, but if we wait, everyone will have left, and we don’t want to throw a ball after the crowd is gone,” David pointed out.

It was Biddy’s ball, and she pointed out the number of other activities that cluttered up the next week’s calendar. Still she realized that if Lord Sanford, too, had gone, there would be little point in throwing a ball.

“August the fifth we have free,” she said, thumbing through a book of engagements. The other busy nights were occupied with such revels as meetings of the parish board and her own church board monthly assembly.

“Let us make it August the fifth then,” Benson suggested.

His was the last wish to be considered, but David took the idea up strongly, and August the fifth was set on as the date. Plans for the ball had to be rushed forward with an unaccustomed haste, tearing Marie away from Benson and David with the writing of invitations and preparations, but there was little enough going on in any case. David continued spending some hours a day at the telescope on the point, while Benson tried his hand at becoming seaworthy, or at least conversable with a knot and the working of the winch and chain. He spent a good deal of time at the dock and in the winch room, where he was making a scale drawing of the mechanism to show some friends. This pleased Sir Henry, who foresaw future glory in it. Benson spoke of a scientific journal he subscribed to that might be interested in publishing an article on it. Biddy advised Marie it was all an act on Benson’s part to continue his stay at Bolt Hall, for he had no real reason to do so now that they knew he was penniless.

This continued to plague Marie, but at least her would-be lover confessed his predicament to her. It was on a particularly warm night in early August, when he went out into the garden just before dinner. With David usually dogging his steps, she had very poor access to him, but David had not yet come down to dinner, so she went out after him. The letter in the
Morning Chronicle
had been published and reached them that day. It was much discussed.

“Do you think there is any chance of the habeas corpus succeeding?” she asked him, as a prelude to more personal conversation.

“Certainly not. It is foolishness on someone’s part to try to stop anyone from taking a more desperate action to free Napoleon. The government itself might well be behind it, with no intention of carrying it through. I wonder if it will work.”

“I suppose you hope it will,” she ventured.

“Certainly I do,” he said, then smiled, looking much younger. “No, I don’t, though. It would be fun to go after him, wouldn’t it?”

She was happy to see he was not only a clever agent, but also a human being, with sentiments similar to her own secret ones. “I expect you have had many exciting adventures in your work.” David had given tantalizing hints of exotic scrapes in Europe, but she had heard nothing firsthand.

“I have been involved in a few escapades,” he admitted modestly. “There were some intrigues at the Congress of Vienna, as you may imagine. That old devil Metternich gave us a rough time.”

“How interesting.”

“Still it has caused me some personal hardships. My being caught up in this work leaves me little time to manage my own affairs at home. The fact is, Miss Boltwood, that while I was in Vienna, my man of business was so foolish as to set an enormous mortgage on Oakhurst, my place in Devon, where I am a neighbor of Lord Sanford. My man did it to pay some outstanding debts. I had given him my power of attorney as I was not able to keep in close touch with him. By the time I got back, the affair had gone too far for me to do a thing about it. The mortagee had foreclosed, taken over my place, that had been in the family for three hundred years. It was an infamous thing, but my own fault entirely. I could easily have raised a loan, for I am not quite without prospects and friends, but on the day the mortgage was due, Lord S—the mortgagee—foreclosed on me, without giving me a chance to make other arrangements.”

“Could you not buy it back?”

“No, he would not sell, or not at a reasonable price in any case. So I have lost my home, and…” He came to a stop, while she listened eagerly, her heart going out to him.

“Well, in that circumstance, you know, I cannot say to you what I should like to say. Oh, not that I am completely in the basket—far from it. Considerable cash came to me after the sale, after the mortgage was paid off, and I stand to inherit something from relatives, but a man without a home to take a bride to has no business taking a wife.”

Her heart was hammering. It had bothered her, that one fact of his having lost his home, and not told them, but now he had done it, and the facts were not so desperate as she had feared. He had something—one could always buy another home. “That would make little difference to some ladies,” she told him, hoping her tone let him know she was amongst those uncaring of a roof over her head.

“It would always make a difference to me,” he said, looking away across the rolling lawns, while he heaved a deep sigh.

“The case is not desperate. If you married a lady who had some money-in her own right...”

“Never! I don’t wish to stand accused of fortune-hunting, have no desire to live off my wife. Till I bring myself around, I have no right to be courting anyone. Indeed, I have no right to be here at all,” he said.

That he was here despite not having any right occurred to her, of course, but she had the answer to that. He had come as a spy, and ended up a reluctant lover. She wanted to assure him she understood, appreciated his scruples in telling her how he stood, and proceeded to do so.

“I can’t think how anyone would be so low as to take advantage of your absence to cheat you out of Oakhurst,” she finished up. “Who was the man? What was his name?”

“The name is no matter. He was a neighbor who coveted my place. A noble gentleman, one even with whom I am well acquainted. It was all legal, however, and I cannot blame him for snapping up Oakhurst, despite his having twenty-five thousand acres of his own, and that is only at Pais—only one of his estates. He has others.”

The whole dreadful truth slowly descended on Miss Boltwood. The unsaid name, Lord S, the unnamed property, Pais—Sanford being a noble neighbor, in possession of other estates. “Well I think that very underhanded of Lord Sanford!” she exclaimed, her nostrils flaring with anger.

“I didn’t say Lord Sanford! Where did you get the idea it was he?” Benson asked in open chagrin.

“You were too much the gentleman to say it, but I see it all now. No wonder he was so intimately acquainted with your position. He put you in it himself, then went prating to me of poor management on your part!”

“Did he say so?” Benson asked, offended. “Now that is doing it a bit brown, when he had a pretty good idea why I was at Vienna. But pray, say nothing to him. He is your father’s guest, and I wouldn’t have any unpleasantness under your roof for the world. I have pretended not to understand his little slurs.”

“I shall certainly tell him what I think of him. Not that he doesn’t know!”

“No, please, you must not. I wouldn’t have it happen for any consideration. The matter was legal, there was no wrongdoing in his foreclosing the mortgage. He was well within his rights. I wouldn’t satisfy him to think I held a grudge. You must promise me you will say nothing. Please, Marie,” he asked, grabbing her hands. “Do it for me.”

How could she resist such an appeal, with her given name used in his emotional state? How could she resist such a gentleman, who forbore telling her he loved her because Sanford had stolen his property, who forbore even being nasty to his victimizer, or allowing her to be? Such magnanimity went beyond anything she had ever encountered or even imagined. Somehow while she looked at him, with her two hands held firmly in his, they moved a step closer. They were in the privacy of a bower, with no chance of being discovered unless someone should enter the library at the unlikely moment of ten minutes before dinner. Their eyes were locked, Marie’s heart beating wildly against her rib cage. Soon their lips were approaching the touching point. She closed her eyes, anticipating the inevitable embrace, when suddenly she felt Mr. Benson stiffen and drop her hands. She opened her eyes in surprise to see Lord Sanford smiling at her mockingly from the edge of the bower. How had he got there without being heard? He had sneaked up on them silently as a cat.