Listen to the Moon (32 page)

He went on his knees to pick it up, examining it for scratches.

The room blurred. She blinked back the tears so he wouldn’t see them. Crying just hurried men out the door that much faster. “Give me my boots. I’m going home.”

“They’re not ready.” He came around the table, taking her by the shoulders. “Please, Sukey—”

She stood stiffly in his grasp, unable to look at him. “Bring the boots when they’re ready, then. And tell Mr. Tomkin I want to go back to Chichester. Now.” She said the cruelest thing she could think of. “I’ll spend the night at my father’s and catch the coach in the morning.” And she stomped out.

The crowd of servants was gathered around, watching the door. She wondered what they’d heard. Although once again, she’d been the only one being loud. “Don’t bother toadying,” she said, raising her voice so John could hear. “I’m not staying.”

* * *

John sat without moving, waiting for the tallow to dry on Sukey’s boots. Perhaps if he moved them farther from the fire, it would take longer.

That was it, then. The end of his independence and his happiness. He had thought he’d neatly escaped the lot planned for him by his father, but here he was.

She just wants you to ask her to stay at the Hall. You might see her, and dine with her, and sleep with her at night. You might even be happy here, if she were here with you.

Yes, he might be happy. He might squeeze from her whatever happiness she had to give him, with no regard for her own. He might behave like his father, considering it his wife’s duty to care for and comfort and cheer him, and when she said,
You never have time for me, we never talk to each other, I’m unhappy, you aren’t kind—
then he would say,
Can’t you see the strain I’m under in my work?

He could do all that, but he wouldn’t. He refused to. Servants at Tassell Hall didn’t sing while they worked. He wanted to know that she was somewhere, singing.

He went to the stables to find Abe. “I’m very sorry to bother you again so soon, and on such short notice, but would you harness the carthorses? Mrs. Toogood wishes to return to Chichester.”

Abe frowned. “What’s the matter? Has she had bad news from home?”

John turned away. “She can tell you all about it on the journey.”

Chapter Nineteen

When Sukey finally put on her pelisse and bonnet and ventured back to the kitchen with her bandbox, there was a neat stack of traveling gear by the door. None of it was hers. She watched, bones aching as if she had the influenza, while John settled an enormous hamper in the back of the cart.

He gave her a purse full of small coins next, enough for four such journeys. She’d have liked to refuse it, but arguing would make her headache worse, and besides, she had only a few shillings of her own and probably no position when she got back to Lively St. Lemeston without him.

Last he handed her her boots. She knotted the laces hastily and climbed into the cart, eager to be off. But he arranged hot bricks under her feet and handed her up a worn velvet muff. “Don’t go,” he said. “It isn’t safe for a young woman to travel alone.”

She put her hands into the muff, astonished at how warm they at once became. She felt about and found a hot water bottle at the bottom of it. “Whose muff is this?” She’d ought to give it back. She hadn’t ought to take anything from him.

“I bought it from one of the maids.” He wound a bulky shawl round her shoulders. She started violently when his hand brushed her breast, her eyes stinging anew. No, no, if she cried the tears would freeze.

“Sleep with your money on you,” he said. “And don’t let anyone see where you keep it. Don’t give the coachman and the guard a tip of more than a shilling for every stage of thirty miles, no matter what they say, and when you stop at the inn, the chambermaid should get sixpence—”

“I’m
not a child
,” she hissed.

He pressed his lips together, more advice clearly humming on his tongue. “Will you send me word that you’ve arrived safely?” he said at last.

Why should I?
But the driver was standing by, and she didn’t know what John had told him. She nodded once.

“Be well,” he said quietly, and kissed her. It was a sad kiss, as full of goodbye as the stiff way he held himself, but she could smell his shaving soap and she wanted it to last forever. Instead it lasted about a second and a half, and he went into the house.

Her hands and feet were toasty warm but she felt numb, numb and spongy, as if a poking finger would go right through her. Surely this wasn’t happening. In a moment he’d come running back outside and beg her to stay.

But he didn’t, and she sat carefully straight as Mr. Tomkin clucked to the horses and sent them down the drive, away from the house.

* * *

She was gone. John shut himself in the tiny room they’d shared, hoping no one would come and try to talk to him. But at last, as the afternoon wore away, his mother knocked on the door. “Let me in,” she said peremptorily.

John, who had been lying on the bed, sat up and rubbed at his temples. “Come.”

She carried a tea tray. “What happened?”

He shook his head at a cup of tea, then a biscuit, then a piece of toast. “She left,” he said flatly. “What else is there to say?”

His mother frowned, setting the tray on a chair and sitting beside him. “She left you because you wanted to help your father?”

“No, because I told her I wanted her to live in the village instead of the Hall.”

His mother’s eyebrows went up. “And she didn’t take it well?”

“She thought I was embarrassed by her.”

His mother’s mouth quirked as if to say,
What did she expect?
“And here I thought you’d leapt to her defense at every opportunity. She didn’t make much of an effort to change your mind, did she?”

John remembered well the long-fought campaigns his mother had led to change his father’s mind. Weeks or months of murmured conversations in the butler’s pantry, occasionally punctuated by shouting, tears or both.

The words sprang at once to his tongue, to tell his mother that a marriage shouldn’t be like that. A loyal but determined courtier, intriguing endlessly to alter the king’s course by a hairsbreadth, powerless if he refused…

Because his word was law.

“I told her my mind was made up.” Like his father. Even when he tried not to be his father, he ended up behaving just like him.

What would his father
not
do in this situation?

Walk away from Tassell Hall.

That was the one thing his father would never, ever do. Go live quietly and happily with his wife? God forbid! And it was all John wanted. He wanted to go back to the Lively St. Lemeston vicarage and lay out the vicar’s clothes and have dinner with Mrs. Khaleel and Molly and Thea and Larry.

He also had responsibilities to them, responsibilities he
wanted
to fulfill.

He looked at his mother, her face tight with concern and sympathy. He loved her so much. How could he tell her no?

You don’t have to take the position if you don’t want it, only because your father isn’t well,
Molly had told him. She’d said it because he’d said the same thing to her. He believed it about her, but when it came to himself— He knew in his heart that he did have to take the position. That he’d be a bad son if he didn’t.

So you’re obliged to work sixteen hours a day for the rest of your life in a job you don’t want, or you’re a bad son? You’re obliged to turn your back on your own wife, or you’re a bad son?

What kind of example would he set for Molly if he stayed? What kind of husband would he be to Sukey?

He took a deep breath. Yes, he had it in him to behave like his father. But he’d never believed in destiny. He believed in care and hard work, and with care and hard work, he could behave differently.

“I don’t want this job.”

His mother drew back. “But, John, you promised me—”

“I know, and I’m sorry. But I never wanted it, and I don’t want it now. It’s too much strain, too little leisure, too long hours, too much supervising others and not enough using my hands.”

“But if you don’t take the post, your father won’t leave it.”

“You married him, Mama,” he said gently. “That’s up to you. If you can’t make him retire, Lady Tassell can. Write to her.”

“He won’t forgive me for that.”

“After everything you’ve forgiven him? He’d better.”

She didn’t return his hug. It felt awful to stand up and leave her sitting there. Who was he, if he wasn’t a good son to his mother? Who would be proud of him if she wasn’t?

“I love you,” he said. “And I love him. But I’m going after Sukey.”

He hadn’t wanted to love Sukey, because he’d felt somehow that it was selfish, that love overpowered and dominated and demanded. He’d held himself back all this time because he didn’t want to burden her.

He’d treated her like a child, just as she said. But he
wasn’t
her father—or his. He was her husband and she was a grown woman. They were helpmeets, and it wasn’t wrong to ask her to share his burdens.

He could ask her for whatever he liked, and she’d decide for herself whether to say yes. He’d have to accept her answer, that was all.

He’d start by asking her to forgive him.

“Take a night to think it over. Don’t decide right away.”

“No. I’ve thought it over long enough. If Abe can be bribed to take me, I’m going as soon as he gets back.”

“You’re as stubborn as your father,” she said despairingly.

It occurred to him that she’d always said that when he argued with her. “I do listen to you. I thought very carefully about what you had to say. I nearly stayed. But listening doesn’t always mean agreeing. Neither of you have ever understood that.”

She sighed. “Do you want me to give him the news?”

She’d been their go-between so often over the years. So many times she’d shielded him. “No. I’ll tell him myself. But thank you.” He wondered, suddenly, if he’d ever complimented her. “You’re the best of mothers.”

She shook her head, laughing a little. “Oh, don’t. I know I’m not.”

“And I know you are.” He kissed her hand. “Thank you. I’ll visit you at the Rye Bay house as often as I can.”

* * *

Sukey didn’t really go to her father’s. She went straight to the coaching inn and bought her ticket for the next morning and space in a bed, huddling in it all afternoon with her hamper instead of venturing to the coffee room. She dined on pickled tongue and rolls that were only a little stale, conscious of stares of envy from the other women in the room. She thought of offering to share, but sadness made her closefisted.
Get your own food
, she thought, touching everything in the hamper like a miser caressing his gold. There was a roast chicken, a packet of biscuits, a little hard cheese, a small basket of roasted eggs—even a whole seedcake nestled in brown paper in a corner, round and golden with a crisp layer of baked sugar flaking off the top.

Tears blurred her eyes.
Pitiful
, she told herself.
Crying over a lousy seedcake.
It’s not as if he’ll miss it. His mother will bake off fifteen more tomorrow.

But she gouged out a piece of cake with her thumb and put it in her mouth, its pungent sweetness making the tears leak down her cheeks.

“Would you like a handkerchief?” an adolescent girl in a neighboring bed asked shyly. Her bronze skin, strong nose and deep brown eyes reminded Sukey of Mrs. Khaleel.

Sukey shook her head, sniffling. “I’ll stop crying any second now.”

“What’s wrong?”

She glared suspiciously. “I’m not going to give you any cake.”

“I can’t eat your cake,” the girl said scornfully. “Christian cake always has brandy in it.”

“Not
always
,” Sukey protested, startled. What difference did that make anyway?

She gave the cake a dismissive glance. “So why are you crying?”

“My husband left me.” Sukey stopped. “Well, not exactly. I suppose I left him.”

“What did he do?”

“He took a swell job and then didn’t want me to live with him. I expect I’m not swell enough.”

“Muckworm,” the kid said. “Can you at least make him send you some of the money?”

She didn’t want or need his money. She wanted
him
. She needed
him
. He’d given her a ring that said,
Let us share in joy and care
, and then he’d refused to let her share in either. And he’d refused to even admit he was doing it! “I don’t need him or his money,” she said sharply.

The girl shrugged. “He cared for money over you. So take what he’ll miss most.”

Sukey looked at her beautiful seedcake with an ugly thumb-hole in the top. “He didn’t care for money over me. That’s not fair. The job’s his father’s and his father hasn’t been well.”

She knew that. Oh, he loved the house, just as he loved his father, but he hadn’t had a nice thing to say about either of them. She’d said he wanted her out of the way, but…

She admitted to herself that it wasn’t the truth. She’d said it to hurt him, because his mind was made up and she couldn’t change it.

This house will eat you alive
. He’d said it so intensely. A sharp pain had stopped her breath, to see him so convinced she didn’t belong there. With him. But if she’d paused to think, she’d have seen straightaway that he expected the house to eat
him
alive.

You couldn’t be happy here,
he’d said
. You hate it.
But really,
he
couldn’t be happy there.
He
hated it. That, he didn’t know how to say. If she was honest, she’d understood that all along. But she’d been so angry at his stubborness, his eagerness to get rid of her. He’d made her feel…

Like a child, powerless in the face of her father’s decision to leave. That drowning feeling she’d told him about had poured up her throat, and she’d panicked. But a feeling couldn’t really drown you.

As a seven-year-old girl, she couldn’t understand what was happening. Her father had been half her world and there’d really been nothing she could do. She wasn’t a child anymore. John
had
treated her like one, but she’d acted like one too. She hadn’t tried sincerely to change his mind. She’d thrown a tantrum and left him, while he begged her to stay and gave her a basket full of cake. And what had she proven? That she was grown now and she could leave too? Did she really think that was news?

Nothing is sure in this world
, he’d said when he first proposed. But you had to muddle on anyway. There was one thing she was sure of: John loved her today. He’d said so, and she believed him.

And she’d left him there. He’d tried to save her from the responsibility that was drowning
him
, and she’d abandoned him to it. She’d said she wanted to be his helpmeet, to take care of him, and she hadn’t tried to help him at all.

He might leave her someday, yes. He might stop loving her and he might die tomorrow—

Sukey was filled with horror. She had to get back to him. She had to get back right away. He could fall down the stairs or be trampled by a horse at any moment and she’d left him!

“I’m going back,” she told the girl. “Is there anything in here you
can
eat?”

The girl peered into the basket. “Ooh, eggs!”

Sukey let her fill her handkerchief while she buttoned her pelisse and jammed her bonnet on her head.

* * *

“You’re going back to that poky vicarage when you could have all this?” Mr. Toogood was at his desk in the butler’s pantry, so the sweeping gesture (with his uninjured arm) mostly encompassed his notebooks and the big silver chests and china cabinets. Maybe that was all he meant: not the great and beautiful house, but this small headquarters.

“You had the right of it,” John said, determined to be civil, even kind. “I wasn’t fully employing my talents as a valet. I enjoy being a butler. I enjoy having people who depend on me, and on whom I depend. I enjoy managing a household. I only don’t want to be butler here. I want more peace and quiet than that. I’m sorry.”

His father slammed some ledgers on their ends on the table, probably more to make an angry noise than to align their edges. “How any son of mine could have so little ambition!”

“I do have ambition. I want to be the best at what I do. I want to be the best man I can, and the best husband. And I want—” He almost said he wanted to make Sukey happy. But he was more ambitious even than that, his desires more lofty, reaching for all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them, and not caring that it was sacrilege. “I want to be happy.”