Page 36 of Libby's London Merchant
Again the duke had to turn away for a moment to examine the intricacies of the carpet pattern until his own vision cleared. “Is that what you have been doing? I have not seen you in several days,” he said, his voice husky.
Joseph nodded, his eyes shining, his voice eager. “It took me a week, sir, but I found it this afternoon, just as the light was growing dim. I think it must have fallen off when your gig turned over the first time, and then bounced on down the hill. It was under a bramble bush. I got scratched up, but Libby said she was proud of me.”
His face pokered up then. With an effort, the boy mastered his emotions. “I’m truly sorry. It is in such wretched shape, sir. I don’t suppose there is any hope for it.”
Nez clapped his hand on the boy’s shoulder and gave him a rallying shake. “I can get another, easy as pie, now that you have restored this one to me,’’ he said, perjuring his soul with no remorse whatsoever. “Copley would have cut up stiff if I had come back empty-handed. Thanks to you, Joseph, I can turn this one in and receive another just like it.” He leaned closer. “There is probably a reward in it for you, too.”
Joseph shook his head. “I couldn’t accept anything. Well, I do like chocolate. We all do, sir.”
“Chocolate it will be, then,” said the duke, “as soon as I return to London.”
Joseph grinned. “I’m glad, sir,” he said softly, and then added, “Do you know I wish I had employment like you. Libby and Mama tell me that I am not a burden to them, but I know I am.” His cheeks burned with sudden color. “I wish I could support myself, as you are doing. It must be a very satisfying feeling, Mr. Duke.”
Benedict Nesbitt, whose only exertion, after Waterloo, consisted of betting on the horses at Newmarket, nodded in perfect understanding. “Yes, there’s nothing as satisfying as earning a living. No feeling quite like it. I really can’t even describe it.”
“I thought that was how it would be,” Joseph said simply. “I would like more than anything to lift the worries from Mama’s shoulders, and Libby’s too.”
What possible worry can you have with thousands in the Funds? the duke thought, remembering Eustace’s breathless admiration of the Ames fortune. What earthly difference can it possibly make if you never earn a farthing of your own? He nearly asked the question out loud and then realized it would be pointless. Obviously some little comer of Joseph’s mind harbored the absurdity that the Ames household teetered on the brink of financial disaster.
He returned some inanity that seemed to satisfy Joseph, who bid him good night and retired, leaving behind the ruined sample case.
“And now I suppose that dratted sample case will just stay there as a reproach to me,” he said out loud. “You deserve it, Nez.” He flopped back in bed and stared at the ceiling. “Nez, old boy, I wonder if any of your tenants at Knaresborough and wherever-the-hell-else have any idea what a lazy chufflehead you are?”
It was a good question, and one that he had never bothered to ask himself before. Whenever he had been troubled by matters weightier than which waistcoat to wear, or what horse to buy, he had reached for the bottle. Now he lay in bed thinking about himself and wondering where the Benedict Nesbitt he vaguely remembered had really gone after Waterloo.
As he lay there, considering his own flaws, he heard Libby Ames crying.
It could have been a housemaid, but surely the maids slept in the attic or belowstairs, he told himself. It wasn’t Joseph, who had left his room in a decidedly more cheerful frame of mind. It could only be Libby.
He got out of bed, tugged down his nightshirt until it covered his ragged knees, and went into the hall. A single lamp glowed at the end of the hall near the stairs. He walked toward it in his bare feet, careful to stay on the carpet runner that traveled the length of the hall, listening at each door until he found Libby Ames’s room.
He raised his hand to knock, but only stood there and listened to Libby Ames crying as if her heart were being squeezed dry.
He stood outside her door until she blew her nose, sniffled a bit more, and the room was silent. Without a word, he tiptoed back to his own room and crawled into bed again.
“What can you possibly have to cry about, my dear Miss Ames?” he asked the ceiling, until his eyelids drooped and he slept.
8
As she lay in bed the next morning, Libby Ames took the time to give herself a silent scold and a mental shake.
I am turning into an air dreamer, she thought, recalling with some embarrassment her noisy tears of last night and wondering again why she had spent the better part of the evening flung across her bed, sobbing like some character out of one of those feverish novels that Papa always growled about
She had been too agitated then to attempt an analysis of her mood. As sunlight spread its warmth across her bed, she attempted to understand her own mind.
With a sudden smile, Libby quickly dismissed the crack- brained notion that she was in love with Dr. Cook, as the London merchant had said. The very thought made her roll her eyes and laugh out loud.
Her misery was wrapped up in her own words, her announcement to Mr. Duke that she wasn’t good enough for the squire’s son. Not that she wanted the squire’s son, she reminded herself quickly, for she did not. It was just the idea that burned.
I am a poor match for anyone, she thought. The words did burn, so she said them out loud, letting her ears and heart get used to the blunt reminder.
It would be so easy to blame Papa, cheerful, handsome Papa, who always looked so grand in his regimentals, even if the cuffs were twice-turned, the gold braid faded, and his trousers too shiny. He was one of the few officers in Wellington’s army forced to support himself and his hopeful family entirely on army pay, and it was never enough, even for the most careful economizers.
Libby sighed. Dear Papa was a dashing kind of man who would catch the eye of any number of susceptible females, even a tobacconist’s daughter. No one but impetuous, thoughtless Thomas Ames would have courted her and married her, secure in the knowledge that because he loved beautiful Marianne Gish, others would, too, his father included.
But Grandfather Ames had turned them away from his door. Mama used to tell the story, and her dark eyes flashed with anger at the memory, then clouded over with the humiliation still burning like phosphorus, long after the event was past. “When Papa announced to his father that he wanted to marry me, his father took me by the collar and pointed me toward the door,” Mama said during their Channel crossing with Papa’s coffin in the ship’s hold and Joseph lying seasick across both their laps. “As though I were a dog that had wandered on the place by mistake,” she finished softly, the pain no less, even though the incident was twenty years gone.
The rest of the story Libby had heard from Uncle Ames, dear Uncle Ames, who had witnessed the blow that Thomas Ames struck his father. Uncle Ames, in hushed tones, had told how the old man had risen from the floor as though pulled by invisible strings, and ordered his son and future daughter-in-law from his presence forever.
