Fairchild (2 page)

“Mother!” Sophy leaped across the room, seizing her by the shoulders to look at her face. Mrs. Prescott’s eyes bulged with terror, her lips fading blue, her fingers clawing at her throat.
 

“Bertha! Help me!” Sophy dropped to the ground, pulling her mother with her, pounding her back and listening for a cough that refused to come.
This isn’t working
, she thought, terrified by the way her mother had gone limp. She seized her mother’s dress, planted an elbow on her back and pulled, ripping the dress open, revealing the tightly laced stays. Sophy’s fingers didn’t shake, but the knots and lacings were taking too long to loosen. Bertha’s pudgy hands fluttered beside her.

“Get out of my way!” Sophy shouted, springing up to rifle through her mother’s painting box for the palate knife. She sliced through the laces, yanked open the stays, and pounded her mother’s back again and again. And again.
 

“It’s not working dearie.” Bertha’s voice quavered, stopping Sophy’s arm mid swing.

“There’s still time,” Sophy said, glancing wide-eyed around the room. “Run and get help. We can send for the doctor—”

“Jim’s gone for him already. It’s too—”

“It is not.” Sophy’s eyes flashed, but she could see the grey skin of her mother’s hands. “It is not too late.”
 

“Come with me.”
 

“No. I’m not leaving.”

“Sophy, love. You’ve done everything a body can do. Don’t stay around for the rest. I’ll speak to the doctor.”

Sophy clung to her mother’s limp arm and set her teeth, but Bertha had decided. “Come now,” she said, scooping Sophy up by her arms. Sophy pummeled Bertha with angry fists, but Bertha’s arms were strong. She hauled Sophy to the kitchen and wrapped her in a blanket, rocking and crooning, but she was beyond comfort.
 

Still determined, Bertha poured out a dose of laudanum and held Sophy’s nose until she swallowed it. For the rest of her life, the smell of sweet, strong alcohol would turn her stomach.
 

There was a funeral, which Sophy was not allowed to attend.

“Heavens, child! That isn’t done!” Bertha explained.

So Sophy sat in the parlor, brooding on her fate and watching a trapped fly bat against the windowpane. Remembering ghastly orphan stories from Mr. Lynchem’s repertoire of cautionary tales was easier than coping with the overwhelming panic that came when she tried to imagine life alone, without her mother. Sophy, desperately practical even in grief, believed these stories would harden her to face her inevitable future. If she imagined the worst, she would be prepared for the desolate years stretching before her.
 

After the funeral, there were visitors: Mr. Lynchem, Mrs. Upton and all the well-meaning women of the parish Sophy despised. Bertha brought up bread and butter and tea—even Sophy’s favorite seed cake—but her plate sat untouched on her lap. Eating seemed barbaric, somehow. Mrs. Upton shoved a slice of buttered bread past her square, yellow teeth. Crumbs of seed cake clung to Mr. Lynchem’s fleshy lips, twisting Sophy’s stomach. There was a tinny taste in her mouth; the visitor’s words buzzed in her ears like the trapped fly. Fred’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Wilkes, lingered after the other guests departed. When Mrs. Wilkes, soft and familiar with her lace cap and graying curls, folded Sophy into her arms, she succumbed to choking sobs. Ashamed, she pulled away, swiping at her eyes, scowling at their concerned faces.

“I’ve spoken with Bertha and Mr. Lynchem. We’ve been through your mother’s papers,” Mr. Wilkes said, glancing uneasily at his wife. He thrust his large, spotted handkerchief at Sophy. She curled her hand around it, wadding it into a ball.
 

Why didn’t I get to see them?
Sophy suppressed a flare of anger.
 

“It appears your mother was not entirely without—connections,” Mrs. Wilkes said. Sophy noticed the hesitation and wondered what it meant.
 

“Your mother chose a guardian for you, if it chanced she could no longer care for you. Mr. Lynchem has written to him.”

“Who is my guardian?” Sophy asked, watching the color sweep into Mrs. Wilkes’s cheeks. It was her husband who answered.
 

“Lord Fairchild. He lives in Suffolk.”

“I have never heard of him before,” Sophy said, swallowing.
 

There was an uneasy silence.
 

Of course you haven’t,
Sophy thought.
Easy for a Lord to pay to keep his bastard out of sight.
Her light muslin frock burned against her skin; her mother’s pretty parlor was suddenly lurid and alien.
 

“He is the one who will look after me?” Sophy looked up from her tightly clasped hands, hating the quaver in her voice.
 

“That is what we believe, yes,” Mr. Wilkes said. “Though it will be some days before Mr. Lynchem can expect a reply.”

Glancing at her husband, Mrs. Wilkes added, “Don’t fret Sophy. If anything should happen . . . if things go wrong, you have a home with me and Mr. Wilkes.”

Sophy’s throat swelled hotly. Blinking back tears, she mumbled her thanks. The Wilkes already had six children, sleeping in two small beds like pencils in a box. Mr. Wilkes, red-faced and gruff, brushed her gratitude aside.
 

“That’s enough serious talk for you today. Why don’t you go out to the garden? Let me and the missus speak to Bertha about packing up the house.”

With automaton-like obedience, Sophy descended to the garden, heading straight for the shrubbery below the parlor window. Sometime during the torturous afternoon, someone had opened the leaded diamond-paned windows, but Bertha and the Wilkes’s conversation was pitched too low to carry outside.
 

Late roses climbed the trellis leading to the kitchen garden, imparting a sweet and heavy scent to the air. Sophy licked dry lips. If Bertha was to pack up the house, it was certain she was leaving. Her eyes stung. Parting from mother’s house cut sharper than she had expected, though in all her imagined futures she went away.
 

Who was Lord Fairchild? What was he like?

She hugged her knees to her chest, burrowing her face out of sight. Whoever he was, she was certainly his bastard. She tried to reject the truth, but could not. She felt unclean, different. Everything Mrs. Upton said was true.
 

Her throat was thick and hot. There was nothing she could do. They might say what they liked about her and her mother now. She had no defense. It was hard enough, she thought, biting down on her quivering lip, being so utterly alone. How was she to bear it, with the shame as well?

“Stupid,” she told herself in a stern whisper. “You may as well get used to it.”
 

*****

Timothy, the third footman, whose real name was John, walked on silent feet over the thick library carpet, bearing a silver tray with three letters. With white-gloved hands, he placed the tray onto the gleaming surface of Lord Fairchild’s desk, the noise as he set it down no louder than a heartbeat. Viscount Fairchild did not look up and Timothy withdrew as soundlessly as he had entered.
 

The library at Cordell Hall was Lord Fairchild’s sanctuary. Tall windows looked out onto the east lawn. The heavy velvet curtains were drawn back, flooding the room with morning light and setting fire to the lone occupant’s artfully combed copper hair. His hand moved steadily across the creamy sheet of paper in front of him. Dipping his pen in the inkstand, he continued writing, each stroke precise and methodical.

Twenty minutes later, Lord Fairchild set down his pen. He sealed and franked the letter, then picked up the correspondence waiting on the tray. Two of the letters were expected: one from his son Jasper, due to return from school for holidays, and one from his man of business in London. Reading Jasper’s letter first and setting aside the second, he picked up the third, examining the direction. Though the sender’s name was unfamiliar, the name of the village, Bottom End, arrested his attention. For five seconds he stared at the missive before turning it over and cracking the seal with unsteady fingers.
 

Scanning rapidly through paragraphs of obsequious flattery and apology, Fairchild found the heart of the matter buried in the middle of the second page. His breath caught; his hand faltered. Setting the letter onto the blotter, he stared unseeingly out the window.
 

Fanny was dead.
 

He had heard nothing of her for more than ten years, since the arrival of a polite note informing him that she had borne him a daughter and named the girl Sophy. Every quarter in the course of going over his accounts, Fairchild saw the entry inked in by his clerk recording the sum sent to Fanny Prescott of Bottom End. The sum had never varied in ten years; if Fanny had ever asked his steward for more, he knew nothing of it. He had promised Fanny, and his wife Georgiana, that he would not attempt to contact her.
 

Leaning back into the chair, he returned his attention to the letter, growing increasingly irritated with his correspondent’s meandering sentences, dancing around the matter to hand—what did he wish to be done with Sophy?

It was a simple business. She could be brought here or sent to school. The writer—he flipped over the sheet to reread the name, a Mr. Horace Lynchem—had been bold enough to suggest a few. The presumption of the man was astonishing.
 

Bristling, Fairchild knew he wanted Sophy to be brought here, and not just to snub Mr. Lynchem. He wanted to see his child. Fanny, with her smooth brown hair and porcelain skin, would expect him to do his best for her daughter, as she had for his children.
 

Henrietta and Jasper had loved Fanny. Sweet and pretty, he had fallen for her too—a delirious escape during bitter, lonely days. Fanny had been delirious too for a time, but she had come back to earth first. It was guilt over the harm she was doing to his children that made her leave and confess to his wife. That and the baby.
 

Georgiana would not take well to him sending for Sophy, but Fairchild viewed that as an irritant rather than a deterrent. Let her chalk up a few grievances; their current détente served well enough she wouldn’t declare open war. Rising from his chair, Lord Fairchild went in search of his wife.
 

*****

The rectory of Bottom End was some distance from the village, set in a small park. It was a comfortable house; two and a half stories of whitewashed stone. Identical dormers blinked on the slate roof like sleepy eyes. Mr. Lynchem, the rector, had held the living going on twenty years. In spite of the machinations of local widows and spinsters, he remained unmarried. His sister Euphemia kept house for him and she defended her hearth rights with vigor. She had a comfortable home with her brother, and did not intend to lose it.
 

When the post came, she noted the letter from Lord Fairchild, written on heavy paper and embossed with his seal. The paper was too thick for the writing to show through when she held it up against the sunny window, so Euphemia Lynchem set the letter aside and dashed off notes to her particular friends, Miss Myra Bowles and Miss Honoria Sikes, telling them the expected missive had arrived. She could count on them to spread the word.
 

Her staff—she economized unnecessarily, limiting herself to a cook and a maid—knew better than to touch the luncheon she would carry up to her brother. Euphemia had convinced him he had a delicate stomach, and that only she understood properly which morsels of food he could partake of and live. So it was her alone who laid out the poached chicken breast, the arrowroot biscuits and the dish of stewed apricots with a minuscule glass of canary wine. Placing Lord Fairchild’s letter above the rest on the tray, she sailed down the hallway and carried it into her brother’s book room.

Horace Lynchem acknowledged her with a grunt, hunched over the tiny, splayed wings of a dragonfly, a magnifying glass in one hand and a pin in the other. The point hovered over the abdomen of a particularly fine specimen of Oxygastra Curtisii as he prepared to pierce the tiny corpse.
 

“The Letter has come.” Euphemia spoke loudly in his ear, startling him.
 

“What? Oh. That letter.”
 

Euphemia pointed to where it rested beside his wineglass with a skeletal finger. Horace set down the magnifying glass on the blotter, frowning over the right wing of the dragonfly, now sadly mangled.
 

“I wish you wouldn’t creep up on me,” he said. “Now this one is completely ruined.”

Euphemia concealed her smile. She had read Linneus’s entire Systema Naturae, accompanied her brother on far too many tedious net-wielding expeditions, and labelled all his specimens in her elegant copperplate script. She hated insects. Horace had cases of the nasty things, pinned in precise rows, covering the walls of the room.
 

She hovered, waiting to watch him open The Letter, but Horace made a show of sangfroid and reached for his glass, as if receiving a letter from a peer was no extraordinary event. Defeated, she returned to the parlor.
 

When the door shut behind her, Horace set his glass down in such a hurry he nearly spilled his wine. Carefully, he pried the seal with his pen knife so it would stay intact, then opened the letter with eager haste. It was disappointingly short. Lord Fairchild asked him to have his daughter ready to travel on October first. He would send a coach for her and bring her to Cordell. His man of business would arrange for the sale of Fanny Prescott’s house and furnishings. He asserted that he was Sophy’s legal guardian and Mr. Lynchem could contact his lawyers, at the address given, if he had any concerns. The letter closed with perfunctory thanks.

Horace hooked a thumb into the pocket of his waistcoat and leaned back in his chair, sitting in silence for some moments.