Tears pricked her eyes, and she quickly changed the subject. “What was it you wanted to be as a boy?” She studied his face as though the answer might be written there.
He looked away, uncomfortable. “Be? I wanted to be who I thought I was.”
“Do, then. What did you want to do?”
It was his turn to shrug. “Gentlemen are not expected to work at much of anything. I was not born with a burning desire to accomplish something great soli deo gloria, like Bach or Beethoven, Rembrandt or Copernicus.” He paused, thinking. “I did look forward to being Earl of Brightwell someday—peer of the realm, member of parliament, and all that—though why I looked forward to it, I could not say. I suppose because it was what I always expected to do.”
He repositioned himself on the chair. “May I ask. Before you came here, what were your plans? Were you really going to teach at that little school in St. Aldwyns?”
“I hoped to.”
“That was the dream I have kept you from?”
“No, my lord. A stepping-stone at best.”
He looked at her expectantly.
“You will laugh.”
“I will not.”
“Very well. My dream is to have a school of my own one day. Ideally, with my mother as partner, though I have always known it was unlikely my father would allow her to do so. And now . . .” She clasped and unclasped her hands, taking a deep breath to steady herself. “But even on my own, I believe I could be mistress of a school one day. And I would love nothing more than to open its doors to all girls, regardless of their ability to pay.”
One corner of his mouth lifted. “Only girls?”
“There are many more schools for boys, and as someone has so kindly pointed out to me, teaching boys is not my forte.”
“I am sorry I said that.”
“You were quite correct. At the time. But I believe Andrew is getting on famously these days.”
“I believe you are right. What would we have done without you, I wonder.”
She felt her cheeks heat. She had not meant to praise her own abilities. “No doubt some other governess would be performing as well, if not better. Never fear, I do not think myself irreplaceable.”
He looked at her intently. “Oh, but there are those who would argue that.”
She did not ask if he were among them.
Once Miss Keene had taken her leave, Edward resumed his seat by the fire, staring at the orange embers and the occasional flame that tongued to life. What he had said to Miss Keene was true enough. He felt no burning desire to do anything specific. Yes, he would have enjoyed the prestige and privilege of being lord of the manor—the running of the estate, investing in the property, and seeing the rewards of careful management. But even then, he would actually do very little. A clerk and perhaps a new steward would manage the daily affairs, while his tenants, workmen, and servants accomplished the actual work.
He did not enjoy managing people, and tensed whenever Mrs. Hinkley or Walters brought to him some concern with a servant or tenant. He did not mind hearing the problem, nor offering solutions, but was uncomfortable with tears and excuses.
He took well to his new role as village magistrate, which had seemed good practice for his service in the House of Lords yet to come. He had also enjoyed reading law at Oxford, though as a gentleman and future earl, he had never considered taking up the law as a profession—nor any profession for that matter. But now?
Miss Keene had said that she knew she wanted to be a teacher like her mother since she was a little girl. Charles Tugwell, a clergyman like his father before him. Was it not natural that he had planned to follow in his father’s footsteps as well?
The only actual work he had enjoyed as a boy was building things with Mr. Matthews. The old steward had not been keen on accounts, but could repair a carriage wheel or a window casing with equal aplomb. He had often given Edward and young Felix scraps of wood, bent nails, and wooden mallets and had let them build whatever they willed. Felix had turned out boards with bent nails. Edward, a bench which stood in the stable yard to this day and a humble three-tiered bookcase, which had graced his bedchamber for several years, then disappeared while he was away at school. Become so much kindling, no doubt.
Mr. Matthews had built with stone or wood. From a drawn plan or from a scheme in his mind. And Edward had found great satisfaction in assisting him, especially during those long months his father was away.
But Edward had only helped, and boasted few real skills to speak of. He had given it all up as a young man. Carpentry and building had no place at Oxford. Architecture, perhaps. But he had no lofty dreams of building cathedrals or palaces. And he could not go into trade—building benches, bookshelves, and doll’s houses—could he? How his supposed friends, even the villagers and his tenants, would scoff at the thought of Edward Stanton Bradley in such a humble profession.
Were other men so directionless? Of his peers, decidedly so. But, he reminded himself, they were his peers no longer.
Chapter 28
In every town you go through, you may see written in letters of gold,
“A Boarding-school for Young Ladies.”
—CLARA REEVE, 1792
The roads were slippery, muddy, and full of deep ruts. Olivia gripped the strap above the seat and hung on tightly as the carriage jerked and swayed. She had thought Lord Brightwell had been exaggerating the road conditions in order to put off this trip, to delay the inevitable disappointment he felt sure Olivia would suffer. Now she was suffering indeed on the tooth-jarring, stomach-churning journey, which seemed far longer than the sixteen miles it was. When Talbot stopped to water the horses, Johnny Ross let down the step so she and the earl might stretch their legs. Looking away from Johnny’s cold glance, Olivia noted with dismay the mud-splattered coach and horses.
On their way once more, Olivia watched from the window as they passed through villages which became increasingly familiar with each mile. Fossebridge, Chedworth, and finally the outskirts of Withington itself, a grey-stone village on the river, sitting high on the Cotswold uplands. The closer they came, the closer her heartbeats seemed to sound until they were almost one atop the other in an erratic drumbeat. Beside her, Lord Brightwell squeezed her gloved hand.
When the carriage halted, Johnny once again lowered the step, opened the door, and gave her a hand down. She needed his assistance more than usual, for her legs felt suddenly weak and weightless. She looked about her and saw little had changed, except that the trees sported new buds where leaves of yellow and brown had been when she left. There stood the old mossy-roofed Mill Inn and, across the river, the Crown and Crow. And there the sleepy, slanting churchyard of St. Michael and All Angels.
Not ready to contemplate the churchyard, she quickly turned away. The cobbler’s door was propped open to allow in the temperate breeze. And there, their low stone wall, her mother’s bit of garden, their cottage of blond stone with its green door. The place looked much the same as ever, yet different somehow. Forlorn. No smoke rose from the chimneys, no welcoming light shone from the windows.
Olivia walked up the stone path and tried the door. Locked, as it rarely had been. She bracketed her eyes with gloved hands and, peering in the windows, saw that the place looked tidy but unlived in. No vase of early spring blooms graced the table, no kettle sat on the stove, no log glowed in the hearth. No . . . life. Her stomach twisted. Perhaps her mother really was dead.
“Have you a key?” Lord Brightwell asked. “Or perhaps a neighbor might?”
She shook her head. “Never mind.” It was people she wanted to see, not empty rooms.
She crossed the lane and knocked on Muriel Atkins’s door, but no one answered. Asking Lord Brightwell to wait for her, she walked across the village in hopes of seeing Miss Cresswell.
At the school, she let herself in and found the woman answering correspondence in her office. Olivia was relieved not to have to go looking about the schoolrooms for her. She was not ready to face her
former pupils, nor to answer awkward questions.
“Olivia!” Miss Cresswell exclaimed upon seeing her. She rose quickly and hurried around the desk to embrace her. “My dear, how pleased I am to see you. I must tell you how relieved I was to receive that character request or I would never have known what became of you. Why did you leave so suddenly? I feared I had offended you somehow.”
“Never, Miss Cresswell.”
“You and your mother just seemed to disappear overnight!”
Olivia felt suddenly winded. “When did you last see her?”
“Not since you left in the fall. I thought . . . hoped . . . the two of you might have gone off together.”
Olivia shook her head. So her mother had left . . . or been killed, right after Olivia fled?
Miss Cresswell’s countenance dimmed, and she once more sat behind her desk, gesturing Olivia into the chair before it. “I was afraid to ask in my letter, not wanting to alarm you, in the event you did not know.”
“Is it true what people are saying?” Olivia asked. “About the new grave in the churchyard?”
Miss Cresswell reached across the desk and touched her arm. “Oh, my dear. I had hoped you were spared that rumor. I avoided mentioning it when I wrote to you. The churchwarden will not say who is buried there. I believe Muriel may know, for she has been acting devilish queer for months, but she has told me nothing. You might ask her, but she is off attending a lying-in somewhere out in the country. I know not where.”
“Where is my father now?”
Lydia Cresswell hesitated. “Have you not heard? There is a warrant out for his arrest.”
Olivia swallowed. “For . . . murder?”
Her old mentor looked at her askance. “Murder? My dear, why would you think that? The specific charges have not been made public, but the rumor is embezzling.”
“Embezzling?”
“That is what they are saying. Though some people still insist it relates to his part in your mother’s disappearance, which I for one do not credit.”
“I don’t understand. . . .”
“You do know your father had been managing the spa Sir Fulke is developing near Cheltenham?”
Olivia shook her head. She knew her father clerked for a new employer, but not that he had been given such great responsibility. “I heard he fled the village to avoid arrest after he . . . after I left.”
Lydia Cresswell pursed her lips in thought. “That was the rumor, but the warrant has only recently been issued. I believe he lived out at the construction site all winter. Though now . . . as he hasn’t been seen there, nor here, for nearly a fortnight, he may very well have left to avoid whatever charges Sir Fulke is bringing against him.”
Miss Cresswell interlaced her fingers on the desktop. “I gather Sir Fulke requested the charges be kept private, because if it is a case of mismanaged funds, and his investors hear of it, there will be a terrible scandal and they might all bail out.”
Father, steal? Why could she not believe it, when she believed him guilty of far worse?
Olivia squeezed her eyes shut to clear the whirling confusion, then looked up at Miss Cresswell once more. “When you see Miss Atkins, will you ask her to write to me? With any word of my mother. Even . . . bad news?”
Lydia Cresswell squeezed her hand. “Very well, my dear. May I ask about your situation. It goes well?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“And being a governess, it is to your liking?”
“I cannot say I would not prefer to be back in a school, but it is a satisfying, if sometimes lonely, post.”
Miss Cresswell nodded. “I am afraid I have hired Mrs. Jennings, as you left with no word of returning, but if you are in need, perhaps—”
“Thank you, no, Miss Cresswell. You are very kind, but I am satisfied where I am. For now.” She rose, and Miss Cresswell followed suit, promising to write and let Olivia know if she learnt anything new.
Olivia next visited the constable—ironmonger by trade. How strange to seek out one of the very men she had feared might come looking for her not long ago.
When she entered the shop, the tall bald man looked up from the nails he was sorting. “Miss Keene! It’s glad I am to see you. We was worried some dire fate befell you as well.”
“As well, Mr. Smith?”
He looked sheepishly troubled and pushed paint-stained hands into his pockets.
Olivia pressed her lips together. “I am well as you see, Mr. Smith, I thank you. But I am looking for my mother. Have you seen her?”
He shook his glistening head. “You ain’t the only one. Several folks were here askin’ after her last fall. Your own father amongst ’em. Devilish sorry to tell you he is a wanted man, miss. Did you know it?”
“I have just heard. Who else has been trying to find my mother?”
“Oh, there was a liveried man here some time ago, inquiring on behalf of a Lord somebody I never heard of, or so he said. I sent ’im on his way sharp-like. Sir Fulke asked after ’er as well. Seems yer mum did sewing for his missus or some-like. Took a hard fall down the stairs he did. Ears still ring fierce, I gather.”
“I am sorry to hear it.”
“Are you? Never liked the man myself. Surprised you would, after what he did to you and yer father.”
“Do you mean, accusing Father of . . . some crime?”
“That too, but—do you not remember? In the Crown and Crow, that wager twixt you and his Harrow boy?”
“That was Sir Fulke?”
“Aye. Sir Fulke Fitzpatrick. Did you not know it?”
Fitzpatrick . . . Lord Bradley had been right. “We never learnt the gentleman’s name at the time, and I have had little cause to see the new owner of Meacham’s estate. He must not have recognized my father or he never would have kept him on as clerk.”
“Oh, ’twas his steward what kept ’im on. Sir Fulke hasn’t much to do with the day-to-day running of things.”
“And his son, Herbert. Is he here as well?”
“He comes to visit his mother every month proper, but lives to the north somewhere, managing some interest of his father’s.”
Lord Bradley had been right again.
“I see.” But Olivia didn’t see. Her mind was whirling. Could it really be? That snobbish gentleman and his son who passed through the village more than ten years ago, had returned to the area, purchased Mr. Meacham’s estate where her father worked, and kept him on as clerk, never knowing he was the same man he had humiliated before his peers? Accused as a cheat?
Had her father not recognized him? Surely they would have crossed paths at some point, even if the steward hired him. A chill prickled up Olivia’s neck and scalp. Had her father recognized the gentleman all along, and kept the knowledge to himself, planning his revenge in the form of financial ruin? As logical as it sounded, something within Olivia rebelled at the thought.
“And Miss Cresswell was lookin’ for you as well. Seemed fiendish odd that you would up and leave town without a word to yer father or your employer.”
“I . . . needed to leave quickly.”
His brows rose. “And why was that?”
Ignoring his question, she asked, “Did my mother . . . disappear . . . the same day?”
“I couldn’t say, as I don’t exactly know when you left or when she left, only that yer father first reported you both missing on—” he stepped to a corner desk and consulted a grimy notebook—“the second of November.”
Olivia had left on the eve of the first, if she remembered correctly. “Morning or afternoon?”
“Evening, though I don’t recollect the specific time. I gather he came home the night before and fell asleep, not knowing the house was already empty. He did not see either of you next morning, but thought maybe you’d gone out. And since he had to hurry to his post, he did not report the two of you missing until that evening. Sober as a puritan he was too. I remarked upon it at the time.”
“Did you verify that—that he spent the day at hi
s post?”
He narrowed his eyes. “Why would ya ask that? Suspect yer old man of having somethin’ to do with yer mum’s disappearance?”
Did she not? She shrugged. “Is not a spouse always suspect?”
He slowly shook his head, dark eyes glittering. “The man loves yer mother. I for one cannot imagine ’im harming her. You ought to have seen ’is face when he come and reported the two of you missing. Devilish white-faced, he were. Worried some evil had befallen the both of you.”
Had Simon Keene been shaken to find his wife missing? Or because of what he had done to her?
“Yer tellin’ me the two of you did not leave together?” Smith asked.
“No, sir,” Olivia said. “She was still at home when I left.”
“You still haven’t told me why you had to leave.”
Dare she tell him the whole truth? Would she be in trouble if she confessed striking her father in defense of her mother, even though she had not killed him as she once feared? Her father was already a wanted man. Did she really want to be responsible for suggesting him guilty of worse? To be responsible for his hanging? When she had not witnessed anything more than assault? When, in fact, Simon Keene had lain unconscious on the ground when last she saw him?
“I left for a post, sir. My mother thought I might obtain a place in a school she was familiar with in St. Aldwyns.”
“That where you are presently?”
“No. But nearby.”
“With that gentleman who accompanied you into the village?”
He evidently saw her surprised look. “Ah yes. I have eyes and ears everywhere, I do, miss. Had them that night as well.”
What was he implying? That he knew or guessed her part in that night’s violence? Or that he knew something else?
“Yes. He is my employer.”
He proffered his notebook. “If you would be so good as to give me ’is name and direction? In case I have any further questions or hear anything about Mrs. Keene?”