Listen to the Moon (21 page)

They both knew Mr. Bearparke wouldn’t forget. But maybe he’d think better of asking where he’d already been told no. The cook glanced out the window and went still.

There he came, picking his way through the snow-covered graves. Seeing them, he stopped to make a snowball and throw it. It spattered the window, and Mrs. Khaleel’s mouth turned up, just a little.

“You’re sure you don’t want to tell him yes?”

She slipped her cakes into the oven. “I asked your husband to speak to Mr. Summers about him.” She wiped her hands on her apron. “He’ll hate me.”

How much had Mrs. Khaleel actually told John of what had passed between her and the curate? Sukey herself hadn’t breathed a word. But now she thought maybe she’d ought to have, so John would be prepared for whatever Mr. Bearparke was about to do.

“Let him in, will you?” The cook smoothed her hair into her cap.

“Do you want me to leave you alone?”

“Don’t you dare.”

But when Mr. Bearparke brushed past her with a cheery smile and said, “Would you be a good girl and ask Larry if he’ll see to my boots?” Sukey didn’t know how to refuse him. She was a servant and he was a gentleman.

She had to do something, though. And she was abruptly quite sure that John would know what that ought to be.

She found him exactly where he was meant to be at this hour—thank God for lists!—in the cellar, decanting the wine for dinner. “Mr. Bearparke is going to propose to her again,” she said urgently. “She told him no already, on Christmas morning. I’d ought to have told you, but she swore me to secrecy. He said he’d come back on Epiphany. He’s in the kitchen with her, and she asked me not to leave her alone but he sent me away—”

He nodded. “Thank you for telling me.” He took the stairs two at a time, straightened his waistcoat, and strode directly to Mr. Summers’s study and went in.

Sukey felt immensely reassured. But that still left Mrs. Khaleel alone in the kitchen. She wavered. Larry, at this hour, was pressing Mr. Summers’s evening clothes in his dressing room.

Sukey went back into the kitchen. “I couldn’t find him, sir,” she said loudly. “If you give me the boots, I’ll take them to him.”

Mr. Bearparke straightened from where he had stood very close to Mrs. Khaleel, leaning in to murmur to her in a way that looked half commanding and half pleading. He looked past Sukey to something behind her.

She turned to see the vicar standing in the doorway, John a respectful few paces farther back.

“And here I thought my curate came to my house to see me,” he said drily. “A word in my study, if it wouldn’t incommode you.”

Mr. Bearparke flushed a dull red, spine straightening. “Certainly, sir.”

Chapter Thirteen

They all hovered around the kitchen door, wishing they could make out the low voices in the study. For once, John said not a word about idling. Time passed. Mrs. Khaleel pulled cakes from the oven and put another tray in and then, after more time had passed, broke a cake apart and handed it round.

“They might have spent a minute or two more in the oven, I think,” John said. “But the flavor is remarkable.”

The criticism ought to have annoyed Sukey, but it was such an ordinary thing to say that it reassured her instead. She thought it had the same effect on Mrs. Khaleel, who gave him a small, anxious smile.

Mr. Bearparke’s voice rose passionately. “But sir—”

The study door opened. “My key, if you please,” Mr. Summers said. “And you may consider yourself at liberty to look for another curacy. Should you wish to, that is.”

The blood drained from Mrs. Khaleel’s face. Mr. Bearparke drew a key from his pocket and handed it to the vicar with bowed head. Sukey couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. It was no fun getting the sack. “I am sorry to have disappointed you, sir. My intentions—”

The vicar raised his eyebrows. “Were honorable, yes, yes. I’m sorry too. You’re too clever a boy to make such a cake of yourself.”

Mr. Bearparke came and stood before Mrs. Khaleel, who held herself very straight and met his eyes. “You’ll regret this,” he said intently.

Sukey gasped. Beside her, John tensed. “Are you threatening my cook?” Mr. Summers demanded.

Mr. Bearparke looked aghast. “No! Good God, no. But, Nora, you’ll regret it. You’ll wish—
Think.
”

Sukey thought maybe the cook would have liked to speak. Her mouth opened and closed, her color came and went. But in the end she glanced at her watching master and said nothing.

Mr. Bearparke gave her a bitter look. “Well, if you’re content with your lot, there’s no more to be said.” He put his hat at its usual rakish angle on his head, shoved his hands in his pockets and slammed the kitchen-yard door behind him.

“Mrs. Khaleel, if I might have a word with you,” Mr. Summers said.

She nodded grimly. “Let me take my cakes out of the oven.”

“Sir,” John said quietly while she was doing it. “If I may—”

Mr. Summers sighed. “Have some faith, Toogood.”

Why should he?
Sukey thought with instinctive anger, and was startled at herself. Mr. Summers had done all right so far. But employers always wanted you to trust them as a child trusted its father, blindly, when the truth was, some fathers couldn’t be trusted and servants were old enough to know that.

She trusted John, she realized with surprise. She didn’t just want him to take care of her; she knew he would, and she knew he would know how to. He’d take care of all of them. When had she become so sure?

She almost didn’t like being sure. It felt dangerous, like walking across a chasm on a plank bridge without looking down. It might seem sturdy, but you could fall easy enough.

John subsided, but he touched Mrs. Khaleel’s shoulder as she went past and nodded at her, not caring that Mr. Summers could see him. Sukey thought maybe, even, he wanted Mr. Summers to see, and know that he was on the cook’s side. That she was his, that she was all of theirs, and they’d stick together.

“I do believe I pay you to make yourselves useful,” the vicar said with an ironic glance round, and they dispersed—but not very far.

At last Mrs. Khaleel came out. She went into the kitchen, took up a warm cake, smeared a healthy dollop of pink icing over it, and brought it back into the study. Sukey, contriving to dust the clock, saw Mr. Summers smile sadly at her.

When she followed the cook back to the kitchen, John was waiting for them. “What did he say?” he asked quietly.

“He told Mr. Bearparke he couldn’t live here. Mr. Bearparke said his intentions towards me were honorable. Mr. Summers said it would be a dreadful match.” Mrs. Khaleel laughed a little. “It was not the most flattering of conversations. But Mr. Bearparke said I would make a fine wife for a missionary to India, and Mr. Summers said he’d thought he was training his replacement here in Lively St. Lemeston, and if Mr. Bearparke meant to go to India, then he’d better start training someone else. Mr. Summers said he thought I had a right to know. And then he told me to avoid undue intimacy with unreliable young men.”

Her mouth twisted, and she hugged herself. “I never wanted him to lose his place over me. I
told
him it was no good.”

“If you told him you did not love him, that ought to have been an end of the matter,” John said. “You have nothing to reproach yourself with.”

The cook looked between the two of them. “You make things sound so simple. Thank you.”

But she didn’t sound comforted, and Sukey knew why. She’d never told Mr. Bearparke she didn’t love him. “Here, let me help you with those cakes,” she said, bumping hips with her as she came to stand by the table.

Mrs. Khaleel bumped her back. Her mouth trembled. “They need to cool before we ice them. I have some things to attend to in the pantry.” And she fled.

“Should I go after her?” John asked, sounding unsure of himself.

There was a high, muffled sound from the pantry, and then another.

Sukey straightened. “I’ll go after her. You’ll only embarrass her. Go on.”

John leaned in to kiss her. “Thank you.” And Sukey felt, despite the seriousness of the moment, rather important and very motherly and not at all as if she was walking on a plank over nothingness.

She knocked on the pantry door. No reply. “May I come in?” Another high, muffled sound. Sukey opened the door. Mrs. Khaleel sat on the floor, her face pressed into her knees and her shoulders shaking. She had not even brought a candle.

Sukey shut the door behind her, feeling her way in the dark to lean her head on the cook’s shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

They sat like that a long time.

* * *

“I’m meeting Gil Plumtree, Lord Tassell’s valet, at Makepeace’s Coffeehouse,” John told Sukey on Saturday afternoon. Having heartily admired the man since childhood—indeed, “loved” would not be too strong a word—John was glad they had finally managed to arrange a meeting before the Tassells removed to London. “He’s—well, I suppose he’s a sort of uncle to me.”

He had never said so aloud before. He hoped if she met Plumtree, she would not repeat it. “Would you like to come along and make his acquaintance?”

Her fingers slowed as she tied her bonnet, hesitating. “I don’t think so,” she said at last. “I like having Saturday afternoons all to myself. Do you mind terribly?”

“Of course not,” he said, wishing it were true.

She kissed him on the cheek and hurried out the door. By the time he’d put on his hat and gloves and followed her out, she was halfway through the churchyard, and passed out of sight before he reached Market Square.

John went on to Makepeace’s.

“Johnny, my boy!” Plumtree enfolded him in a warm embrace redolent of pipe smoke. A beanpole in his youth, he had broadened in middle age into a mountain of a man, one of the few John knew who topped him by inches. His good-humored face with its large and crooked nose beamed down at John. “It’s wonderful to see you. Is it true what everyone says?” He made a show of peering over John’s shoulder. “I don’t
see
a Mrs. Toogood.”

“She cherishes her afternoons off.”

Plumtree sighed gustily. “A woman after my own heart. It’s for the best. A coffeehouse is no place for a woman.”

The servingwoman snorted as she set two steaming cups of coffee on the table. “Good Lord, you must be older than you look.” She was the proprietor’s daughter, a pretty black woman with her hair pulled into a cluster of curls at the crown of her head. John had been buying coffee from her for years, but today the playful slant of her eyes made him think of Sukey.

Plumtree laughed. “Now, now, Miss Makepeace, I look ancient. But it’s kind of you to flatter a dotard.”

“Can I get you gentlemen anything else?”

“I believe I spied some darling little cakes when I came in? Are they new?”

Miss Makepeace smiled proudly. “You remember Peter. He’s apprenticed to a confectioner, and I finally talked Papa into selling some of their sweets here.”

“Peter? That grubby little infant?” Plumtree said with mock horror. “Good Lord, how old
am
I?”

John found he didn’t mind, after all, having Plumtree to himself. He felt comfortable in the way one could only be among people one had known all one’s life. Sipping his coffee, he listened contentedly to Plumtree and Miss Makepeace rattling on about cheesecakes and meringue. He hoped his wife, wherever she was, was enjoying her peace and quiet after a long week.

Cake and sandwiches were brought, and Plumtree steepled his fingers. “Now, my dear boy. Of course I wish you every joy. Tell me all about her.” He smiled mischievously. “I saw Maria make quite a scene.”

John covered his eyes. “Don’t remind me.”

“We’ll say no more about it. I’m only sorry you left early, for I was looking forward to seeing you. Are you quite mad for her? I hope you are, or you’ll be pining for London by Midsummer.”

John sighed. “You two would get on like a house afire. You have a similar irreverent ease.”

“Can’t keep up with her?” Plumtree said with a twinkle. “We old men—”

“That isn’t it,” John interrupted firmly. “But I—I never thought I would be a butler. I never wanted to give anyone orders.”

Plumtree laughed. “Pish tush, I never saw such a bossy child.”

John reflected unhappily that that was true. He had hoped to be a less bossy adult. He looked down at his coffee. Water had condensed on the table under the hot china cup, shimmering as he turned the cup between his hands. The oak was scarred with rings left by coffee cups past, and yet he fought an urge to take out his handkerchief.

“I don’t know how to do this,” he admitted. “I—well. I suppose you know I aspired to be like you. But I find I’m like my father after all.”

“That’s not so bad,” Plumtree said quietly. “Nor is it surprising. He sired you, and he’s a good man.”

John laughed. “Plumtree.”

The valet fussed with his meringue. “I hate to speak ill of your father to you. You’ve always been so hard on him.”

“He’s always been hard on me.”

“I know. And I suppose it’s no secret that I find him—irritating. I’ve…well, I’ve been avoiding him lately. He isn’t well, you know.”

John nodded. “Lord Lenfield said the same thing in November. But I don’t see what I can do. I can’t leave my post, and Lady Tassell…”

Plumtree rolled his eyes. “Ah, yes. I don’t know how she imagines you could have stopped Nick Dymond from thinking with the head in his breeches. And so I told her.”

John choked on his coffee. “You
told
her that?”

“Not in so many words, but of course I did. She was making a cake of herself. Does she really think her friends aren’t laughing at her behind her back over it?”

John cringed. “Did you say that too?”

“What was she going to do, sack me? Not with everything I know about that family, she wasn’t. I told her to take it out of my pay.”

John wondered if he would ever be so brave. “Meanwhile, I’m sure my father didn’t say a word in my defense.”

“I believe he has privately. I know
I
didn’t take her to task before witnesses.”

John did not put much stock in that.

Plumtree leaned forward. “Your father
is
a good man, and a good butler. A better butler than I could be. Lord, that house would be a mock-beggar hall inside a fortnight if I had your father’s position!”

John clenched his jaw. His mother and Plumtree both always insisted that John was being unfair to his father. Somehow it had been up to John to be reasonable, even when he was twelve years old and his father a grown man.

“I’m not saying that to take his side. But you’re a good man too. If you share some qualities with him, that’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

“I don’t want to be disliked behind my back the way he is.”

Plumtree raised his eyebrows. “Then don’t be.”

“I wish it were that simple. But I nag at them, I get angry…my wife finds out everything before I do.” In the end, though he had talked to Mr. Summers about the curate, it was Sukey who had comforted Mrs. Khaleel, because John would just embarrass her.

John hadn’t done much, in fact. Mr. Summers had been trustworthy after all, and his own guardianship mostly unnecessary. “I don’t want them to be afraid of me.”

“Afraid?” Plumtree looked surprised. “I suppose the henhearts among the staff are afraid of getting shouted at, but I don’t think your father is quite the Ivan the Terrible you make him out to be. It’s only natural to be a
little
afraid when someone has the power to dismiss you. You can’t expect to be their
friend
, any more than Lord Tassell can expect to be mine. If you don’t like it, you should have stayed a valet. We’re every servant’s friend. Unless they’re shits.”

Some of that was very good advice, and some of it was nonsense; John couldn’t sort out which was which. Plumtree was impervious to intimidation, but John had seen footmen’s hands shake when Mr. Toogood came in a foul mood to watch them work, and grown women burst into tears at his sarcasm.

John admitted that he had been afraid. It seemed both disloyalty and melodrama—his father, after all, was no ogre. He loved his son. But John could remember begging his mother:
don’t tell him I dropped the ice cream pail, don’t tell him I was rude to Lord Tassell, don’t tell him I was drinking, please, please don’t
. He remembered his father towering over him when small crimes could not be concealed. Much of John’s long-ago childhood was indistinct now, but those memories were etched cleanly into his mind.

What had
he
been afraid of? He had known quite well his father wouldn’t give him the sack—would not even seriously harm him. The worst he faced was the switch and a little mortification.

He had been an oversensitive child, that was all, just as he was an oversensitive adult. Knowing he was a disappointment to his father, that he didn’t measure up, had filled him with awful, hollow panic, like stepping on a rotten beam and plummeting through the floor.