Fairchild Regency Romance Read online

  The second time he mounted the nursery stairs he found Sophy alone.

  She was hunched in a straight back chair, her bread and milk untouched on the table beside her. The floor creaked under his foot and she spun around, a battered book in her hand.

  “Miss Fairchild said I might look at the books,” she said, setting it on the table.

  “Who?” he asked. “Do you mean Henrietta?”

  She nodded.

  “Her name is Henrietta Rushford,” he explained. “Fairchild isn’t my name, you know, just my title. My name is William Rushford.”

  “Oh.” Embarrassed, she turned her eyes away from him to the window.

  “I’m sure Henrietta no longer wants the books,” he said. “They are yours now.” She said nothing. “You aren’t hungry?” he asked, his eyes flicking to her untouched supper.

  “No.”

  “You must be tired, after such a long journey.”

  “Not really,” she said.

  “May I sit down?” he asked, after an uncomfortable pause. He didn’t know how to begin.

  Crimson rushed into her cheeks and she gave a tight nod. There were two large chairs by the fire, but he wanted to look at her, hoping being near her would help him cross the distance he felt stretching between them. Unsuccessfully, he tried to fit himself into the other child-sized chair at her table. He turned the chair backward and sat astride it, folding his arms over the back.

  “Do you . . . Is there anything you would like me to get for you?” he asked.

  “No, thank you.” There was no sign of her baggage. The maids must have put it all away.

  “Why do you not send me to school?” she asked. Her hands, brown and freckled, twisted in her lap.

  The question surprised him. “I want you here. Surely you will prefer Cordell.” Seeing that she didn’t, he faltered. “Here, you may learn to ride, and . .” What else did small girls do? “There are dolls for you to play with.” He swept one hand wide, indicating the shelf where Henrietta’s discarded toys lay.

  The toes of her boots were scuffed. Though he looked at her with open curiosity, she studied him covertly, never meeting his eyes. “I have often wondered about you,” he said. “How you and your mother were faring.”

  Sophy blinked and met his eyes. “She always told me my father was dead.”

  It hurt that she had known nothing about him. He wished Fanny had told her his name at least. “The truth must have come as a surprise.”

  She nodded, her half-undone hair ribbon swaying with her copper curls.

  “You were well, living in that village?”

  Another silent affirmative.

  “Was your mother well?” he asked.

  “Until she died, sir.”

  “How did it happen? Was she ill?” Why had Fanny not informed his man of business? He would have paid for doctors and treatments.

  Sophy’s throat contracted. “No, sir. It was an accident.” He waited for her to continue. “She—she choked on something.”

  “I am sorry,” he said, looking away. What a ghastly way to die.

  The shadows on Sophy’s face told him Fanny’s death was still too raw a wound for probing. Looking away, his eyes caught on two paintings, propped against the wall above the wainscoting. He frowned. Henrietta had never drawn like that.

  “Are those yours?” he asked. They were remarkable for a ten-year-old, but perhaps that was not surprising—

  “They are mine, but I did not draw them,” she said.

  “Did Fa— are they your mother’s?”

  “Yes.”

  He smiled. “She was a wonderful artist. She made beautiful pictures, didn’t she?”

  Sophy looked at him, revealing a hint of a smile. “I have others, too. Bertha helped me put them into a book, so I could have them always. But I left these two out, so I could see them everyday.”

  “May I have them framed for you?” It was the right question. Sophy’s tentative smile grew, transforming her solemn face.

  “I should like that.”

  “I will have to send them away,” he explained, “but it will not take long. And you will still have the book while you wait.”

  “Should you like to see it?” she said at last.

  “Please.”

  With lighter steps than he had seen her use before, she crossed the room to retrieve a thick album from the drawer of the bedside table. She carried it back to him wrapped in her arms and spread it open before him, moving her untouched supper aside.

  “My mother didn’t have a lot of time for painting and sketching,” she explained, turning the first pages. “But when she had a free afternoon with good light, there was nothing she liked more. She was the teacher at the village school, you know.”

  He hadn’t.

  “This is you,” he said, pointing to a pencil drawing that was unmistakably Sophy, though some few years younger. “How old are you in this picture?”

  “Eight, I think. Often she did likenesses of our friends.”

  “Did she do her own?” he asked, looking up quickly.

  “No.” Sophy turned the page.

  Sometimes she said nothing, letting him look at the picture himself. Sometimes she would tell him something of the subject: whose cottage or garden it was or when the picture had been done. He liked watching her, her head bent, showing her mother’s drawings with obvious pride.

  “Wait,” he said, stopping her as she made to flip quickly past one page. “I must see this one.”

  Pulling the book closer, he smoothed the page with his fingers, staring at the picture of a ruin of grey, tumbled stone, set in a garden. His garden.

  “Your mother painted this?”

  Sophy nodded, confused by his close questioning.

  “When?” The precise detail of the folly and the garden stunned him, rendered almost more beautiful than it had ever looked in life. Sunshine gilded the edges of the stones; despite the ruin in the foreground, it was not a gloomy scene.

  “Do you remember when she made this picture?” he asked again.

  Sophy looked away, her hand twitching in her lap. “She made it the day she died.”

  He closed his eyes. She had remembered Cordell then, until the very last. Perhaps she’d recalled the place fondly, if the feel of the picture was any guide. He swallowed.

  Sophy was staring at him. “It’s incredibly like,” he said.

  “No.” Sophy shook her head. “This is an imagined scene.”

  William smiled. This picture was a benediction, confirming that Cordell was the right place for Sophy, giving him the absolution and the answers he had scarcely dared to hope for. “It’s real, Sophy,” he said, standing. “Come, I’ll show you. This is my garden.”

  “Yours?” Sophy froze, ignoring his outstretched hand. “I don’t believe you. Why would she paint this place?” Her eyes were dark and full of disdain. He reeled, as if she had struck him with her hard little fist.

  “You’re tired,” he said at last, mastering his galloping anger. “Eat your supper.” He would excuse her today. She was merely a ten year old girl who had lost her mother. He should not expect her to immediately understand, or to like him. And yet it infuriated him that she didn’t.

  Bidding her good night, he left the room, telling himself she needed time. Halfway down the stairs, he heard the sound of tearing paper. He froze. Anger surging again, he rushed back up the stairs, throwing open her door. “Stop that!”

  She jumped, the heavy paper falling from her hands.

  “Wicked girl!” Long strides carried him to her; her eyes were wide, opaque. He reined in the urge to shake her. Fanny’s drawing—his drawing—was already torn free from the book and rent down the middle. “I’ll take these.” Tight-lipped, he slid the torn painting between the other pages of the book. Fitting the book under his arm, he plucked the remaining two pictures from the wall.

  “Those are mine!” Sophy cried, trying to snatch them away. He held her back, laying a hand on her shou
lder. Immediately she stilled, but there was brimstone in her eyes.

  “I will not let you destroy these,” he said. “Someday you will regret damaging this. In the meantime, I will keep them safe. When I can trust you will not cut them into curling papers, or chuck them in the fire, I will return them. You will stay in this room tonight, and consider your apology.”

  With that, he stalked away, carrying the pictures to the gun room, since he hadn’t retaken his library. When evening fell, he was still looking through the album, returning to thumb the torn edges of Fanny’s last work again and again.

  You gave your girl a wicked temper, Fan, he thought, reliving the scene with Sophy. Fanny too, had defied him at the end.

  He thought he heard a faint chuckle in reply. Your own temper, morelike, she whispered. Be good to our girl.

  He sighed. He would have the damaged picture mended. Someday, he would return the others, but this one was his.

  Chapter Five

  A Boy's Life

  Scarcely more than a mile from Cordell Hall as birds fly, stood another Tudor house. Chippenstone had turrets, steep roofs, and towering chimneys like Cordell, but Chippenstone was also surrounded by a rectangular moat. A narrow bridge, skipping across the water in three arches, gave access to Chippenstone’s geometrically perfect island.

  Unlike Cordell’s gently weathered brown, Chippenstone was built of cheerful red brick, with contrasting white stone around the windows. Few could look on the house and not smile, for it was exactly that warm color that reaches the toes, even through a heavy rain. In the summer sun, the warm facade conjured that delicious feeling of discovering chance-found strawberries or entering a room heavy with the aroma of fresh baked bread. Few homes could hold themselves next to Chippenstone and not retreat with a shamed blush. Palladian mansions looked starved; Norman buildings austere and uncomfortable; Stuart houses looked simply rude. But like those ancient goddesses competing for the prize to the fairest, Chippenstone was a problem for the homes in the neighborhood. It was an unlucky house.

  Both Chippenstone and Cordell were built in the early sixteenth century. Unlike the Rushfords, surely propagating to infinity, Chippenstone’s family lasted only a century and a half. When the last one died, the home passed through a succession of lawyers, every one of them unable to sire a dynasty and keep their wealth more than a generation. The house was regularly plagued by scandal; one wife was divorced after having criminal conversation with the estate steward; one daughter eloped with a tradesman; at least two of the owners lost the house because of enormous gaming debts. After twenty years of tenants, the final insult came when the mortgaged property was bought by a merchant, a chandler’s son from Liverpool who’d made a fortune in the Canadian colonies. He had lived in the house for two years, but was still quarantined by his neighbors. Lady Fairchild would not admit to knowing his name.

  That name, never spoken by the county families, was Bagshot.

  Like his house, Henry Bagshot was genial and red-faced, his cheeks roughened by wind, sun and cold. As a young man, he’d decided there was not enough scope for his talent in the candle making business. He converted his humble inheritance into tea and tools and other supplies. He could sell anything, and he intended to sell these goods for a healthy profit across the Atlantic. Before he left, he sold his ambitions to Sally, the buxom innkeeper’s daughter he’d been walking home from Sunday meetings for six years. They married a week before he sailed, and though they exercised their marital rights enough within those days to carry them through two years apart, Sally welcomed Henry back alone, no baby balanced on her hip. Henry remained in England long enough to sell the furs he brought back, buy a share in a ship and take on new cargo. Twenty years they lived like this, and though they loved frequently during Henry’s visits, they were never given a child to fill Sally’s loneliness. Henry bought his first ship, then a second. He bought into a mill and then a steel foundry, still feeling like he had failed his wife until, like Abraham and Sarah, they had their miracle.

  Henry was forty-four, Sally nearly forty when she listened, disbelieving, as her physician explained she was going to have a baby.

  Henry sold out of most of his business ventures. He sold the giant house he’d built in Liverpool, and took his wife to London to the best doctors. Six of them were consulted in Sally Bagshot’s care, but after two days of labour she lost her awe for them, and her patience. Sending them to bite their nails outside her door, she summoned an illiterate midwife. Despite the grim prognostications of the doctors, she safely delivered a son.

  They named him Thomas, and Henry swore that his son would have everything. A sickly infant, little Tom was gowned in lace, with two nurses and his parents at his command, all watching anxiously, lest his foot dash against a stone. He contracted measles, scarlet fever, and pneumonia—twice—gouging deep lines of care across his father’s face.

  Henry decided his son would be a scholar, that he would lead a gentleman’s life, suited to his frail constitution. But blood runs true.

  Tom was not made for study, and laid waste to the string of governesses, tutors and pedagogues hired by his father at enormous expense. He had to pay a premium, first to lure them into his bourgeois household, and then to convince them to stay past the first week. Many could not be persuaded at any price.

  Tom rode indifferently, saw little point in study after mastering his letters and numbers, and displayed an alarming propensity for commerce. At six, his father had to yank Tom by his collar off the street, where he was hawking sweet buns made by the cook. At eight he began manufacturing slingshots, selling them to other children in the park, usually girls.

  “I’ll give you money,” Henry said, exasperatedly running his hands through the remaining strands of his grey hair.

  “I want my own,” Tom insisted.

  One of the doctors recommended country air, so Henry bought Chippenstone, and Sally, who’d never lived outside a teeming city, set her mind to becoming the lady of the manor. The house was still a hive of carpenters, upholsterers, and plasterers, when Henry decided it was time to send Tom to school.

  The current tutor was near to breaking, and Tom needed a gentleman’s education. Moreover, he needed to meet the sons of gentleman and he wasn’t going to meet any of them in Suffolk. They couldn’t even hire locals as servants and had to import all their domestics from London.

  Tom raged, sulked, and begged, but he was packed off to Rugby nonetheless, accompanied by the shattered remains of his tutor and a generous bribe for the headmaster.

  The tutor left Tom in the hall; the headmaster pocketed the bribe and promptly dropped Tom into the snake pit that was the first form of boys.

  These little serpents knew immediately that Tom was not of their kind and so they made his life hell, as only boys can. No one spoke to him, unless it was in mockery; the name they gave him was more commonly used for excrement. Under his clothes, Tom’s spindle-shanked body was a lacework of bruises.

  Tom’s letters home made his mother weep, and though his father wanted to bring him home, he could not. What if he had given up the first time he encountered an ocean storm, sold goods at a loss, or lost a cargo? Tom must persevere. The time for indulgence was past.

  In his second year at school, Tom gave up on Latin and learned to sneak away to the village instead, where he could sell his possessions for real food. Even if his schoolmates allowed him to keep his portions, the food at school was terrible. In six months Tom sold nearly everything—his books, his jackets, all but one pair of stockings—and ate better than any of the thieves who shoved him in the hallways and twisted his arms until he gave up his meals. Tom grew six inches and made friends with the village smith, the local boxing champion. That was a turning point. After Tom knocked an older boy unconscious, no one challenged him. Not alone, at any rate. Tom learned to trail close to crowds everywhere he went. His friend the smith taught him to bar his door by wedging a heavy stick between the door and the wall.

  They
caught him anyways, leaving him with a split lip and a black eye. That night, Tom ran away.

  It was an impulsive, ill-planned flight. Three days later Tom was pulled out of the stagecoach he was riding by two solid looking Bow Street Runners, hired by Henry Bagshot to track down his son. They hauled him back to the village, where his father and mother were waiting at the local inn. Once he was sure of Tom’s safety, Mr. Bagshot’s panic gave way to wrath and he blasted Tom with spittle and invective for a good five minutes.

  “You frighten your mother again like that and I’ll skin you alive! You will not leave that school. You’ll face them and win!”

  Sally interrupted her husband by handing him a glass of water. Her husband’s face was scalding red, and his doctor had warned him against such fits of temper.

  “Must he go back?” she asked.

  “Yes, dammit! I’ll see my son a gentleman while I live—”

  “I’ve told you what it’s like—” said Tom, but he hadn’t, not all, for the truth hurt his pride. “You still want me to go back?”

  “I want you to have this. It’s the only thing I can’t give you. The one thing you must claim for yourself.”

  “I don’t want it. You do,” Tom said, and Henry, who’d calmly accepted a lifetime of insults and snubs, exploded.

  “Yes, I bloody well do! My son will not be sneered at. My son will be welcomed at their clubs and their frippery parties and—”

  “Fine. I’ll go now.” Betrayed and furious, Tom stormed out of the inn’s parlor and flung himself outside into the stable yard. His arms were inflexible iron at his sides, but if he looked at his father for one more second, his rigid control would break.

  Another word, and I’ll knock your daylights out. Silently, he heaped insults on his father. If his classmates had been flinging them, he’d have broken their teeth.

  Mr. and Mrs. Bagshot returned Tom to the headmaster, and though Tom suffered his mother’s teary caresses, he wouldn’t meet his father’s eyes. Mr. Bagshot’s warning, that he would not tolerate his boy being bullied, earned only contempt—from Tom and the other boys. It made Tom look weak, and he knew he wasn’t.