The Slightest Provocation

Chapter Fourteen

It was an awful lot of work, when the chances of her coming were so small. Probably nonexistent, Kit thought. Still, once he’d written a report and some recommendations to Lord Sidmouth, he couldn’t think of much else to do. Anyway, he didn’t mind the labor of carrying firewood over to the cottage. Rather like in Spain, during some moments when officers had had to help with various duties around camp. More difficult, though, to do it so that no one noticed the marquess’s brother hauling firewood.

Luckily, Mr. Greenlee hadn’t evinced any curiosity about it when Kit had wandered down to his workshop. In fact, the estate carpenter had appeared to think it the most natural thing in the world, that Lord Christopher might want a fire in the old hermit’s cottage in order to be alone there with his… thoughts. And that, wanting to be private, he was willing to do the physical labor himself.

Help yourself, my lord, there’s plenty of scrap wood, ash and oak; it will burn quite well-and here, take these smaller bits and shavings. You do remember, don’t you, that you’ll need kindling? Kit assured him that he did still indeed remember how to build a wood fire in a grate, and he was obliged to Mr. Greenlee for having taught him how, more than a decade ago…’Pon my honor, how the time flies by, don’t it?

After which-Mr. Greenlee having packed up the wood in strong canvas sacking-they’d spent a pleasant hour smoking clay pipes and whittling away at some nicely shaped bits of ash wood, saying very little once Kit had expressed his condolences about the recent lingering death of Mrs. Greenlee. His mother had told him about it in France, where it seemed she maintained her knowledge of domestic matters back at Rowen. Mrs. Greenlee had always been sickly; too bad the couple hadn’t had any children.

And her ladyship, your mother, the carpenter had asked, I’ve heard she’s expected back in England. I trust she enjoyed her tour abroad.

Enjoyed it famously, even gathered a bit of a salon around herself in Paris. Kit had laughed. But you know how she is. She doesn’t change.

No, Mr. Greenlee had agreed. My lady doesn’t change.

Nice old fellow. Quiet, unprepossessing, but at hand when you needed him-even to answer a few very confusing questions, in a straightforward but comforting way, when Kit had been six years old and very seriously attending to the activities of the breeding stallions in the paddocks.

The other task he’d set himself to was to find a sheet and perhaps some blankets. She’d brought the sheet the first time, but since she hadn’t committed to anything, he thought he should now. Anyway, he knew where to find it. For he’d had hiding places all over the house when he’d been little, and some of the best of them had been wardrobes.

One of them in the nursery wing, where some serving maids were taking care of baby Georgy. Kit had just had his sixth birthday, and he’d thought that one of the serving girls was awfully pretty. Her name was pretty, too-Jemima; he liked the long I sound of it. It sometimes gave him a funny feeling in his belly-sort of like when he was hungry, only much better-to breathe her name while he watched her, especially when she loosened her gown and, ah yes, her stays, as the nursery maids sometimes did while they were working. For it had been an especially warm and sunny July, the year his youngest brother Georgy was born.

And since the wardrobe had a rather large keyhole in its door, and since he’d been the sort of child who could fit himself into the smallest spaces, it had been rather wonderful, and quite enlightening too, to see Jemima going about her work, and even better when she took a rest now and again.

Were all little boys so curious about these things?

But at the time he’d been curious about everything, though none of the answers he found ever seemed any good. Probably because he hadn’t known what he was looking for-and hadn’t recognized it that particular day, even when it had hit him on the head and knocked him down.

He’d hardly been listening to what she and the other maid had been saying, so intent had he been on Jemima’s outstretched legs and the way her dress hung. But then he had picked up a few words. What, he wondered, could they be saying about the king?

Wait, no-he’d got that wrong-not the king, after all. King George was called His Majesty… He thought of the engravings on the wall of the schoolroom he shared with Belle. He knew that Jemima and the other one didn’t mean King George because they’d said His Highness, not His Majesty, and His Highness was the Prince of Wales-who was also George, of course; so many Georges, including the big red-faced baby who was his newest brother. She was holding up the infant in front of her now; his fat little legs dangled, and she kissed him a loud smack on the cheek.

“Just look at ’im, as like to ’is Highness as like can be, ain’t yer, little Georgy?”

They’d both laughed at that, and the other maid, the one who didn’t give him funny feelings, had replied, “Oh, but she’s a sly one, my lady Rowen is… With little Belle and Kit so like her that you couldn’t know who their dads are-if you didn’t see the Viscount Bevington so taken with the little girl when he comes every year for the hunt. Quite spoils ’er with ribbons and candy.”

They’d laughed even louder at that, and then went about their work for a time, their laughter so wild and so loud-so frightening, in a way-that he probably wouldn’t have bothered to try to decipher what they were saying. Except that he could hardly help attending to what-well, who-Jemima was talking about now.

“But as to the little dark imp, her brother just out of petticoats, all stick arms and legs and angel face on ’im, if you can find it below the mop of hair that always needs brushing… well, he’s my lady’s secret, and a dark secret too, I reckon… But no one much cares these days to unriddle it, everybody so interested about the dad she found for the next one.”

He might have found out a bit more about it if the housekeeper hadn’t shooed the girls away and swept Georgy up to be dressed in a fresh lace gown and taken to his mother’s bedchamber, where she sat up against the embroidered pillows and showed him off to company.

The queer thing, as he’d told Mary, was that he hadn’t been bothered very much by it at the moment it happened.

(How old had he been when he’d told her about it? Almost fifteen, probably. He’d been doing Ovid that school term; by that time she’d made something of a Latinist out of him.)

But it wasn’t school right then. It was summer and he’d been on the long holiday. They’d been out in the forest together. The warm air was still and almost too sweet. Little brown butterflies were making themselves drunk on honeysuckle. The brook was high and flowing quickly.

At first, he confided, he felt rather gratified by what he’d overheard. For hadn’t the pretty maid said he had an angel face? And then he’d felt a bit insulted-because he wasn’t “just out of petticoats.”

“I was six, after all. Hadn’t worn petticoats for a year at least.” He and Mary had both laughed at that.

He’d thought a lot about what he’d heard. Though it took him a while to figure it out.

“Well, I’d still thought the marquess was my father then, you see. I mean, I called him Papa-what else could he be? Never occurred to me that there was more to being somebody’s father than a name.”

She giggled nervously, and he wondered whether it was wise-or even decent-to continue telling her such things. Too late to stop, though.

“I went out to the farmyard, and then to the paddocks where the horses, the stallions… well, you know.”

Her eyes had gotten very large and her mouth very round.

“I… I found it pretty frightening. Lucky for me that Mr. Greenlee happened by, to answer my questions.”

Had she ever had such questions, he’d wondered? Did girls worry about things like that? Well, it would be easier for them, wouldn’t it? Just lie back…

Was it wicked to be talking about it with a girl? Or thinking about it, even…

Easier to turn his mind to something he could control.

“And if anybody tries to insult me over it,” he told her, “or my mother either, they know they’ll get a good pounding for their trouble, like the time my nose got broken, and the other boy got much worse. But I never thought that maid was very pretty after that.”

Nor got that funny feeling again until just recently, spending so much time out in the forest. Of course, he knew what it was now; it was just that he preferred to have it in private, where he’d be more in control of things.

They were by the side of the stream when he’d told her all that. Their boots were muddy, from rambling about; they’d been trying to clean them with leaves. But one of her boots had a hole in the sole, and the mud had leaked in.

“Dash the nursery maid,” she said suddenly. “I hate that nursery maid,” she added.

She was staring at him; he couldn’t do anything but stare back; it would have been rude to look anywhere else. Though he’d wanted to, because she was unbuttoning her boots. From the corner of his eye, he could see her pulling off her black stockings. Stretching her legs as wantonly as the nursery maid he’d spied upon, she plunged her feet into the stream to wash them.

He watched helplessly while she dried her feet with her handkerchief, letting them dry for a while in the sun, and then putting back on her stockings and boots.

“A pity to have to put them on while they’re still muddy,” she said softly. “But it’ll be worse if I try to walk home without them.”

And when they met the next day, it was as though he’d dreamed it. For surely she’d never have shown him her bare feet and ankles.

Except that he hadn’t dreamed it; he couldn’t have, because he’d been up all night, fevered, trembling, and less in control of… things than ever before in his life, his mind’s eye all amazed by images of white feet and black stockings, rainbows glancing off icy, quickly moving water.

He yawned (angry at himself-could she see that she’d kept him up all night?). She yawned as well (for she hadn’t slept either, which she’d only confessed much later), and then she kissed him.

And now-a marriage, a separation, and a war later-he spied her waiting for him, framed in the doorway of the cottage, next to the brook at the no-longer-disputed edge of the property of the Marquess of Rowen.