Hollie was the first to admit that the women of his household were something of a mystery to him. Seventeen years of relatively unruffled marriage, and he still had precious little idea of what went on in his wife’s head.
And actually, that was how he liked it: not out of any careless intent, but because she was her own woman, still, after those seventeen years. He often had a good idea what she might think, but she could still surprise him, when she’d a mind to.
He did not think it was anything he’d done – or not done – that was making his wife blink so rapidly. He thought it might be to do with the reappearance of that poor wraith from his old soldiering days – but he was never sure, with Het: Hollie had left the service of Parliament, and Russell had not, and he had thought it best for the career of a junior officer who might yet go far that he not be tainted with the guilt of association of a noted rebel and Dissenter.
So it had been a while and a while, and he had very deliberately not sought to know how the boy fared. He thought it was best, that way. And then there had been news of the battle at Dunbar, and they had thought – well. Where he was. He was distinctive. They said.
Het had wanted to keep him, all that time ago. That was the thing of it. He might have been Hollie’s lieutenant, and Hollie might have seen him as a friend and a comrade, but Het had seen him as her son in everything but name. The lad had had nowhere else in the world to go and no one who’d have took him, the year of the great battle at Naseby. He must have been scared witless, poor whelp, when Hollie came to look back on it. Blinded, in a deal of pain, with no idea where he was going or how he might earn his bread if his sight never came back – ah, God, no, it was no surprise he’d been fierce and strange company, that summer. But he’d made a place for himself at White Notley, and Het had come to value him. Love him, even. Well, it had sort of been in both their heads for a while, that they might take Russell as their son, when it looked as if the Lord might not bless them with a boy of their own blood.
But you couldn’t do that. (He’d tried to tell her that, ten years ago, but she’d her heart set on it, and he could never bear to not give her what she wanted, so far as it was within his gift.) Friendship with Russell was hard work: it was all or nothing with him. You couldn’t just be a casual, pass the time of day friend, you must either love him or hate him, and he’d pushed as many people away as had took to him. Het, being a woman, and soft-hearted, had thought if someone might love him sufficient he’d have straightened up and settled down, but Hollie – well, he wouldn’t have pitied the lass as wed Russell, for he would be faithful, and he was a hard worker, no denying that. Whatever he did, he put his back into it. But comfortable? Probably not. He’d always have that odd kick in his gallop, and you’d always have to put down what you were doing betimes to go and pet him and bring him out of his sullens, when he was in that sort of mood. Het had set her heart on schooling him from what a childhood of loveless godliness had made of him, and Hollie didn’t think it was possible; but she’d brought him half-way round, he’d been something like ordinary when –
Aye. When the war had ended, and Hollie chose not to think about that time. Russell had had both feet on the road to being a handy enough lad, in time, and then the war against the King had ended, and Russell had stayed with the Army and gone to Scotland, and Hollie had not. And what frightened him now, very much, was not that the lad might have gone beyond Het’s mending in ten years away, but that the thing that might need mending might be his wife’s good opinion of him.
Het had had her heart set on a thing, and Hollie had not given it to her. And that was not so dreadful, for he had never bought her the pearls he’d promised, either. But she had looked to him to keep Russell on the straight and narrow, and he had very evidently failed in that duty. He had chosen not to keep contact with the lad, not out of a dereliction of his duties, but for fear it would harm his prospects - that the dust might settle and Russell might be allowed to get on with the business of being a commanding officer in his own right, untainted by having Hollie Babbitt’s anarchic shadow over him. But that wasn’t how it seemed, was it?
He had done what he had done for the best.
It did not stop Het from looking at him, when she thought he couldn’t see, as if he had throttled one of the kittens in front of her. She thought Hollie had seen the things the same as she: that most of the world stood in need of some repair, and that they would do it between them, one meal at a time. And now she knew he did not. And that grieved him.
She’d treated Russell as the child of her body, but he’d not been a child. He’d might have bloomed under it, but then he’d never been allowed to be a child, had he? Blossomed in her care like some spiky dark flower, and that was good, but he wasn’t their child, not truly, and all Het’s wishing and hoping would not make it so. He was Praise-God and Margaret Russell’s boy, born and brought up on Buckinghamshire soil, and he had a sister, even if she loathed him. (For all Hollie knew, the lad might have had a wife and children missing him by now – and Het didn’t know it, either, before she took him back to her bosom as the poor lost lamb.) He was not theirs to keep. They’d offered him a place at White Notley ten years ago, and he had chosen to go into the world and make his own way, on his own terms. He’d cocked it up, by the look of him, but at the very least he’d cocked it up on his own two feet. Het would have took that choice off him, and swaddled him in loving if she could – and Hollie would not. And that was going to stick like a bone in the throat, if he did not take care to mend it. “Is he all right?” he said warily, and Het had looked up with a smile that fooled no one.
“Surely, dear. I am surprised that you think it worth your notice?”
And now Thomazine had stopped sewing, with the needle poised in her fingers trying to look as if she wasn’t listening, and she was too still to be convincing. Not like Zee to be still. But then Zee was like her mother - born to manage - and she had always thought of Russell as her playmate, a boy her own age, not as a man grown. “That’s hardly fair, lass. If he’s sick –“
“Oh, little ails him,” Het said brightly, and she was cross with someone, you could tell. “Any more than not enough to eat, and too much work, and an insufficiency of sleep, on top of an inflammation of the lungs – nothing serious, Holofernes!”
And rather startlingly, she threw a rolled-up pair of stockings at him. He caught them by sheerest reflex, and he must have looked bemused, because she glowered at him over the top of her glasses and she growled, “Look at those, husband. Look at them.”
He couldn’t see very much wrong with them. They were ragged, and badly-darned, and not especially clean, but he’d seen worse. He looked obliging, because this was evidently some female piece of outrage that he wasn’t expected to know about, and his wife said, “Those are bought stockings, Holofernes. Cheap, badly-made, shoddy things!”
“I see.” – He didn’t, but it was always best to agree when she was in this mood.
“I am not surprised that poor boy is sick, husband! He must not have had a dry stitch of clothing to his name, in this cold weather, since – well, they didn’t grow so overnight! And his shirts are no better!”
So it was his fault, evidently, then. “Ye-es,” he said warily, “aye, I see that, but –“
“It is eleven years since the last time that poor boy slept under this roof, Holofernes. When he left here he was a whole, happy, healthy young man with his whole life ahead of him. And now look at him!”
“Lot of water under the bridge in eleven years, lass.” He put his hand in that ruined stocking, spread his fingers. Tried not to think what it might be like if this was your life: not having anyone who loved you enough to keep you decent. Lonely, he thought, and a little ripple of goosebumps went up the backs of his arms at the thought of such loneliness, for it was a dark place, and he had been in it, before there had been Het.
“Indeed, husband. And as I said. I do mean that he will stay here until he is mended: you know that,
don’t you?”
It was a challenge. It was the eighteenth anniversary of the night they had first laid eyes on each other and he should not have fallen in love with Het Sutcliffe quite so irrevocably had she not been the kind of woman who took in itinerant derelicts as a kind of moral duty.
It was the eighteenth anniversary of the night he had first set eyes on her and a man could feel hard-done by, deprived of the joy of his wife’s company on that anniversary by an ungrateful itinerant derelict they hadn’t passed the time of day with in over a decade. He met her gaze, and did not drop his eyes.
“Well,” Joyeux said sweetly, “what does it say in the Bible? ‘Be not forgetful to entertain strangers; for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.’”
Thomazine, recovered to activity, looked at her sister with an expression of mild astonishment. (Joyeux, at fourteen, was having one of the excessively-conventional turns that seemed to afflict her of late. And Thomazine, at not quite seventeen, was evidently stifling a desire to stuff her sister’s head into the bread oven.) “Joy,” she said, “it’s Russell. You remember him. He’s not an angel, and he’s not that strange.”
“I think he’s very peculiar,” Joyeux said with a sniff. “Coming up to people’s houses in the middle of the night that he hasn’t seen for about a hundred years, and then falling over dead on the doorstep. It is hardly reasonable behaviour, you know.”
“Is he that old?” Nell wanted to know – as well she might, as she hadn’t even been thought of when Russell had last been at White Notley. “Like Methusaleh, that kind of old?”
“It’s Christmas,” Hollie said, returning to the fray with what he fondly imagined was a quelling look at two of his children. “He must stay for as long as is required, Henrietta. After that, it is his choice.”
“I am perfectly well aware of the season,” his good wife said, with more asperity than he thought was needed. “I have my hands sufficient full already, without having the care of that poor boy as well – “
“But he’s not really a boy any more, is he, though?” Nell put in helpfully, “you said –“
“Eleanor!”
Thomazine folded up her mending, absently stroked the striped cat and set her back in the mending-basket, and stood up. “It’s all right, mama,” she said, and she smiled. “I’ll see to Russell. I don’t think I am capable of seeing all to rights for Christmas, but I do think I can manage to baste an invalid with sage oil. Assuming we don’t mistake him for the Christmas joint, and try and roast him. We’ll manage.” And then she looked at Hollie and he thought, with a sudden sense of amazement, that his firstborn was a child no longer. “Pass me that stocking, daddy, if you’re done with it. I can have it darned by tomorrow.”