Page 63 of Unlikely Heroes
“Able is that way, too,” Meridee said.
Mrs. Munro managed a smile. “Difficult, isn’t it? Did he have as much trouble finding tutors?”
“Remember, Mrs. Munro, he ended up in a workhouse in Dumfries.”
Mrs. Munro’s smile disappeared. “If only we could have found her in time!” She savagely ripped a strip off the handkerchief. “When Mr. Carmichael drove the count away, I thought Mary would do herself an injury.” The tears came again. Grace gave her another handkerchief. “Mr. Carmichael insisted we send Mary away to my brother, William Munro, who had a large manor between Glasgow and Edinburgh. My husband” – she nearly spit out the word – “shamed Mary and cursed her ruin.” Mrs. Munro hugged herself, playing out the whole ugly scene again, if her restlessly moving eyes were any indication. With a shock of recognition, Meridee thought of all the times she had put her hands over Able’s eyes to slow him down.
“Scotland,” Grace murmured. She picked up Georgie, who was starting to squirm on the settee. “Do you mind?” she asked. Mrs. Munro shook her head, so Grace opened her bodice.
“What happened?” Meridee asked. “Dumfries is some distance from Edinburgh and Glasgow.”
“I doubt we will ever know,” Mrs. Munroe said, calm again after her outburst. “I knew when Mary was due to be confined, but I heard nothing. I waited and waited.” She shook her head in dismissal. “Mr. Carmichael yammered on about no news being good news until I wanted to…” She rubbed her shoulders, even though the room was pleasantly warm. “Mr. Carmichael received a letter in mid-March from Will’s solicitor, announcing his death in January from pneumonia. There…there was no mention of Mary, but William had pledged not to tell anyone about her.” Her voice hardened. “Mr. Carmichael refused to make any inquiries.” Her eyes went to Ben, just finishing his milk. “I had no idea what happened to my daughter, and here I have a great-grandson. Tell me, Mrs. Six, where is my grandson?”
“He and some of the students from St. Brendan’s are delivering dispatches to the Channel Fleet and the Mediterranean Squadron,” Meridee said. “We expect him home in a few days.”
“You’ll bring him over as soon as he makes port,” Mrs. Munro said.
“I promise you, Mrs. Munro,” Meridee said. She hesitated, and the widow noticed.
“Are you wondering why I call myself Munro?” she said. Thomas Carmichael’s widow rose and walked to the window. Meridee followed her. The view held no sight of the busy harbor, with warships coming and going. She wondered how much Mrs. Munro hated any mention of the navy of any country.
“My husband was ill for a long time,” she said, her voice calm, normal even. “I listened to all his rantings and complaints without a murmur, as I had always done, secure in the knowledge – relieved – that I was going to outlive him. What else can ladies do? As soon as he died, I took up my maiden name. I am Amelia Munro to the world, and so I shall remain.” She bowed her head. “Where did my lovely Mary die? In an alley, you say? All alone?” She shuddered and began a low, relentless keening that made Ben leap up from the table, scattering crumbs, as he ran to Meridee in terror.
She picked up her son, holding him close, as the widow rocked back and forth and keened. “I want to go home, Mama,” he whispered into her neck. “Now!”
“Soon, my love, soon,” Meridee whispered back, chilled to her heart. Was now the time to say that the count waited outside her doorstep?
“Let me sit you beside Georgie’s mama for a moment. Shh, shh, you will be fine.” Ben wasn’t happy, but Grace gathered him close, too.
Meridee went back to the window, unsure what to do, until she asked herself whatshewould want, were she a widow who had lost everything in the disappearance of her pregnant daughter and despised her husband. She put her arms around Mrs. Munro, who stiffened, then rested her head against Meridee’s shoulder.
“Mrs. Munro, the count is waiting in that carriage outside your house,” she said finally, not knowing if it was the right thing to do, unsure of herself, wishing Able were here.
“He’s here?” Mrs. Munro asked, alert. She sniffed back her tears then held herself off from Meridee, the grip on her shoulders nearly painful. “My dear, I have wanted to apologize to him for years! I want to tell him that I never felt the way my husband did. I want him to know that had I the resources – oh why do women count for nothing? – I would have scoured all of Scotland until I learned something.Anything!”
“Tell me now, dear lady,” they heard from the doorway. “I could not wait another moment in the carriage.”
They turned around to see Francisco Domingo y Guzman. He opened his arms. With a cry, Mrs. Munro crossed the room and embraced him. They clung together, two comrades in sorrow so wrenching that Meridee knew she would be awake and pacing the floor tonight. She sat beside Grace, who was burping Georgie. Ben didn’t waste a moment getting into his mama’s lap. She held him close.
“Mama, what is happening?” he asked, his hands on her face, commanding her attention.
“We’re watching a family come into being,” she told him. “Our family.”
Chapter Twenty-eight
TheMercurymade port in four days. Each day, Meridee sat with Mrs. Munro and the count, answering questions. It touched her heart how they wanted to know every detail of her husband’s life, no matter how minute. Ben was there to translate, but less as Francisco Domingo y Guzman’s rusty English revived. Her boy was content to eat his great-grandmama’s cream-filled buns.
Ben thought they should tell Mr. Bartleby about the buns, but Meridee thought not. “He will wonder where you have picked up such culinary decadence.”
Ben turned philosophical. “He might think I am not a loyal customer. He will think I am a gut-foundered parvenu.”
“That is it,” Meridee said, hard put not to howl with laughter at the incongruity of dockside slang mixed with French, coming from a charming lad not even two years old, a well-fed, nurtured and loved little genius.
Mrs. Munro understood her laughter. Her eyes lively now, and not dead with the bleakness of too much life still to live, she told her visitors of Mary’s quirks. “For all that she could do quadrilateral equations when she was three, even at age fourteen she got lost between our house and the church, a matter of three blocks.” She turned wistful then. “Does my grandson do better? One should hope, if he is a sailing master.”
“Actually, he never gets lost.” Meridee laughed. “What he can’t do is tie a neck cloth properly or manage the simple arithmetic of grocer’s bills. Mrs. Munro, I think their minds are too large for the simple things that never baffle the rest of us.”
In her own loneliness, Meridee discovered that she craved the chance to tell two people about the man she adored. She left the most private moments private, but found there was plenty to tell them, from her first view of him, wet from a downpour while walking to Pomfrey for a chance to work for her brother-in-law briefly as a tutor.
