Amy Lake (7 page)

  * * * *

The second Ashdown sister, Edwina, was the family terror.

“My parents were not often around,” Colin told Fiona. “And as Evelyn was so much older she was nearly gone before Eleanor and I had left the schoolroom. Edwina— Eddie raised the two of us, I suppose.”

“Eddie?”

“She hates that nickname,” admitted Lord Ashdown, with a smile.

“Is she married as well?”

“No. Edwina is . . . very particular.”

“And the youngest?”

She saw a look of warm affection come to Lord Ashdown’s face. “She is currently enjoying London society as an unmarried miss. I actually think no-one has ever enjoyed London society as much as Eleanor.”

“She must take pleasure in dancing, then,” said Fiona, who had heard stories of London society. “I understand there are a great many balls and such.”

Colin smiled. “There are, indeed.”

“It’s hard to imagine. It seems too much like work to me.”

He laughed. “Why?”

Mrs. Marwick was thoughtful. “Staying up to all hours of the night, I suppose. I enjoy my mornings.”

“I do as well,” said Lord Ashdown.

Of his own life—in London or elsewhere—Lord Ashdown said little more, but he did ask about Fiona’s own situation. He was very hesitant, and had obviously been talking to Dee.

“I understand that your husband died some years ago,” he said one evening, as she was cleaning the dishes.

“Yes,” she replied. “Not too long after Maddie was born.”

“I’m very sorry.”

“’Twas the grippe,” said Fiona. “And ’twas swift. He suffered little.”

“Ah.”

She told him some of the circumstances, saying nothing of her own pain. “Dr. Fischer did everything he could. But the fever was too strong.”

“I’m well impressed with the doctor’s work.” A short pause. “Madelaine must greatly benefit by his presence.”

Lord Ashdown was watching her carefully, Fiona realized. Could he be curious about her relationship with the doctor? Nonsense, she told herself, but she still could not resist the temptation to clarify the matter.

“Very much,” she told Colin. “He has been like a brother to me. The village doesn’t quite understand that, but—” She shrugged.

“Ah.”

It was entirely her imagination, of course, that his lordship seemed rather glad at this news.

  * * * *

 The older two sisters were tall and dark-haired, whereas Eleanor had taken more after her maternal grandmother, and was a rather petite blonde. All the Ashdowns were energetic and healthy, from what Mrs. Marwick had learned, but Edwina required spectacles in order to read.

“She hates them so much that she is forever putting them down and losing them,” said Colin, “and having to purchase another pair. I believe with a thorough search of the home we could outfit most of the poor-sighted of London.”

“Does she read so much, then?”

“She loves to.”

“Maddie does, as well,” commented Fiona.

His lordship seemed surprised. “Has she been schooled?”

“Of course,” she replied, rather shortly, but she knew that the question was a fair one. Most of the children of the village did not, in fact, go to school. When her father was alive he had seen to it that anyone who was willing to spend time after a Sunday service would be taught to read; the current vicar of Saint Thomas-the-Apostle was, unfortunately, less interested.

“She is as well educated, I imagine, as any girl or boy of her age. She reads English, of course, and Dr. Fischer is teaching her maths and . . . Greek.”

She hesitated on the last word, knowing that it probably sounded ridiculous.

“Greek!”

“Yes. Dr. Fischer is a great believer in the language,” she said, unable to keep her nose from tipping just a degree higher. “He says it organizes the mind.”

“But—”

He hesitated, and Fiona looked at him sharply. But what? she wanted to say. But she is a village girl, and will never have need of such knowledge? Fiona did not add that she was learning classical Greek herself, and was making her way slowly through Xenophon. For Maddie it was, perhaps, a game. The girl seemed to soak up every new word and never forget. For Fiona, it was something different. Difficult, yes, but each sentence of the ancient authors was as bracing as a gust of chill air, and the clarity of the writing seemed to make her own life clearer.

When she read Greek she could relax and forget everything else.

She was not sure Lord Ashdown would understand. How could he know that that this was her greatest worry, that Madelaine—who was as bright and intellectually curious as any child she had ever met—would never find a life where these traits were valued, would never find a
person
to value them?

But his lordship’s next words surprised her. “That’s extraordinary,” said Colin. “I have some knowledge of the subject—”

Of course he had.

“—and I would love to read with her.”

A comment which gained him a wide smile from Mrs. Marwick.

  * * * *

Lord Ashdown was always perfectly polite to Mrs. Groundsell. They shared suppers with the woman, a circumstance made more bearable, and indeed almost amusing, as long as Dee was present. Agnes would begin a long-winded bout of flattery and obsequiousness directed at his lordship—whose eyes sometimes glazed over, Fiona thought—when the doctor would interrupt to ask her about some ache or pain that she had recently complained of. One could almost see the conflict within Mrs. Groundsell’s mind—the lord or the doctor?—and she usually settled on complaints.

“You are a martyr to the cause,” Fiona said to Dee after one such meal.

“’Tis only from concern for my patient. My reputation would suffer if Lord Ashdown died of boredom after we’ve worked so hard to heal his leg.”

But suppers were about as much as a recently-injured gentleman could bear. His lordship made the habit, with Maddie on patrol outside to give fair warning, of being at rest in his room whenever Agnes Groundsell returned from her day of tea-drinking and gossip at the post office. So he was not there to notice that one day she brought Mrs. Marwick a letter.

“Oh,” said Fiona, frowning at the envelope. She had gotten only a handful of letters in her life, most of them notes of condolence sent after Joseph’s death.

She couldn’t imagine who it was from—the handwriting was unfamiliar, and there was no return—and she did not wish to read it with Mrs. Groundsell hovering nearby. “Thank you,” she told Agnes firmly, putting it aside. “I must see to our dinner.”

There was nothing the woman could say to that and she left a few minutes later, as Fiona knew she would. Agnes disliked the kitchen, Mrs. Marwick had decided, a place where someone might expect her to peel a potato. Fiona waited a few minutes, curious all the while, until she was sure that Mrs. Groundsell had taken to her room. Then she slit open the envelope and glanced over the letter quickly, looking first for the signature.

Wilfred Thaxton.

She did not recognize the name. The salutation was even more baffling.

My dear cousin Fiona—

Mrs. Marwick had no cousins still living, and Joseph’s family had been even smaller than her own; there had been an aunt, but she had died a spinster.

Fiona sat down at the kitchen table and read through the letter, a difficult process owing to the tiny script and ill-formed letters of the correspondent. When she had puzzled it through, and was sure she understood the contents, she carefully re-folded the sheet and returned it to its envelope.

Her heart was pounding and she wanted to cry, but she would not.

She must talk to Dee.

Chapter 11: Lord Ashdown’s Reasons

The marquess propped himself up on Hobbs’ crutches and took a careful step. The procedure was becoming easier, and the pain under his arms was enough to take his mind at least partly from his leg. He remembered Dr. Fischer’s instruction not to move from the bed without someone’s help, but Dee was gone for the afternoon, and Madelaine—he supposed—had taken the Bath chair.

He could not stay in the room, alone, any longer, especially since he could hear Mrs. Marwick in the kitchen, no doubt occupied with another batch of soup. He could see her cutting carrots and parsnip, adding pinches of herbs and spice now and then, and bending over the fire.

The kitchen, then, was his goal.

Lord Ashdown was finding it difficult to remember why it had once seemed so important to maintain a prescribed pattern of life. Under normal circumstances he would be in Kirriemuir, waking at dawn to drink a scalding cup of coffee and heading up into the moorland with a beater and dogs. The autumn weather would be crisp, the smells of bracken and heather sharp and clean against the fading wood smoke of the lodge.

They would walk the moors for most of the day, and he would return home to find the fire re-kindled, his small study comfortable and warm, and an entire evening to enjoy, an evening by himself. Lord Ashdown preferred hunting alone. He was not like some of the gentlemen of his acquaintance, for whom the grouse hunt was a matter of male company and drinking, the more of each the better, and who would shoot until there were no more birds. He shot what he could eat; if there was an extra bird or two it went to his neighbors. He found his bed early, and he slept well.

He should be itching to get back to his usual activities. He was not.

Gods knew what his sisters thought he was doing. Colin’s note to his man of affairs had said only that he had been unavoidably detained, and would most probably miss the house party entirely. His family was not to worry, and he did not think they would. Evelyn was annoyed, no doubt, that he had failed to attend her birthday party, and that she could not show off her brother, the Marquess of Carinbrooke, to her guests—but Lord Ashdown doubted that a serious injury would ever cross her mind. That sort of thing only happened to other people.

The Ashdowns, as a group, were not much given to self-reflection. They were active as individuals, and if there was any hesitation, self-doubt or questioning to be done, ’twas best that other people do it. And perhaps the marquess had maintained the strict order of his days in order to avoid exactly his present sort of muddle. He was dawdling. He hesitated.

And he knew why.

The reasons were two, albeit related. The first was Fiona Marwick, who charmed and intrigued him. She was beautiful beyond any woman he had ever met, but by now it was much more than that in Colin’s eyes. She was . . . interesting, although ’twas a poor word for everything he felt about her. A village woman who was educated and well-spoken, who did not scream or giggle at the slightest provocation, who had intelligent opinions and expressed them clearly. A fine mother and cook, which impressed Lord Ashdown, who was accustomed to see children and cooking left to the servants.

And the possessor of a lovely, rounded body, which the marquess tried to avoid thinking about overmuch, although there was nothing he could do about the vividness of his dreams.

No, Mrs. Marwick was definitely worth taking pause. He had enjoyed himself more during these past few weeks at Tern’s Rest than he could remember doing in years.

The second reason—

But he did not want to think about the second reason right now.

  * * * *

“Mrs. Marwick,” said the marquess, as he reached the kitchen.

She turned and her beautiful eyes narrowed. “I thought you were to call for help first,” she said.

He grinned at her. “I know,” he admitted cheerfully, and reached for one of the kitchen chairs.

“Oh, heavens, stop.”

She hurried over to the marquess and helped him into the chair. The touch of her fingers on his arm stung like fire.

Chapter 12: Cousin Wilfred

Dr. Fischer was as confused as Fiona.

“Wilfred Thaxton? I’ve never heard of the man.”

Dee’s family had lived in Barley Mow for generations. His own father had done what doctoring was possible thereabouts without an education, and the Fischers, generally speaking, knew everyone.

A cousin, of course, might not be from the area. A distant cousin might live anywhere.

My dear Mrs. Marwick—

Wilfred Thaxton claimed to be the eldest son of one Phillip Meyer Thaxton, who was in turn the son of the aunt of her husband’s great-grandfather Bertram. He lived in Croydon, near London, and had only just learned of the sad death of Joseph Marwick.

“That makes no sense,” said Dee. “Joseph has been gone for years.”

Fiona agreed, but there it was. Mr. Thaxton was married, had three children, and was arriving soon—the precise timetable was not made clear—to investigate the state of Tern’s Rest. His own property.

I hope this does not inconvenience you excessively. The house and land were entailed,

of course, and I must admit to being surprised that I was not notified earlier of your

husband’s death. I will be happy to allow an adequate period of time for you

to locate another residence.

“The man can barely write a legible script,” commented Dee. “Fiona, this must be a mistake.”

But both of them had worked through to the end of the letter, in which Mr. Wilfred Thaxton assured Mrs. Marwick that he would bring with him all the documents and proofs of identity that she might require.

“An entail! Joseph said nothing of such a thing. The will left the property outright to me and to Madelaine.”

Dee looked thoughtful. “Perhaps,” he said slowly, “we should ask Lord Ashdown.”

Fiona was horrified. “Lord Ashdown! Why?”

“I would have said that entails are the province of wealthy families—or titled ones. Perhaps he knows more of the law.”

Fiona would not hear of it. She could not bear the thought of having Colin Ashdown learn anything of her impending humiliation and once again she fought back tears. Joseph had said nothing, had given no hint that the cottage was anything other than her own. But this man—this
cousin
—claimed to have the necessary documents.

The position of a woman in these matters was always weak.