Page 13 of The Lady's Companion
“Big drifts,” was all he said as he tugged her along.
She opened her mouth to protest his ill usage, then closed it again. He didn’t seem so much impatient with her, as he was eager to get somewhere. How can I protest, she thought, when you look so tired?
“You know, you didn’t really have to get me tonight,” she said, out of breath from hurrying.
“This morning,” he corrected. “I told Lady Bushnell I would.”
And that was that apparently. He had nothing else to say and it was pointless to waste her breath. This is a man stingy with words, she realized, as she grimly hung on to his arm and let him help her over the deepest drifts.
After another silent stretch, in which they seemed to be steadily climbing, they broke through the last of the deep snow. David Wiggins let go of her arm, but she did not follow him toward the gig and blanketed horse tethered to a tree. Instead, she clasped her hands and looked around, enchanted by what lay before her.
They stood at the head of a valley all tucked in tidy andprotected from the deepest snows behind them. The moon was up now, casting a brittle light on the snow that illuminated the valley as though it were day. She could clearly make out the dark coil of a river and a fringe of woods offering some shelter to fields asleep now, but outlined by fence and furrow only partly snow-covered. She could not see Quilling Manor itself; it must be beyond the trees.
Lovely, she thought, stamping her feet. She cast a guilty glance for delaying Wiggins, who tossed the blanket in the back of the gig and climbed onto the seat. She started toward him then, waiting for him scold her to hurry up. He surprised her. Reins slack in his hands, he nodded. “It’s beyond beautiful in the summer,” he said, his voice warm.
Like all his few words, these were quietly spoken. She hurried to the gig now, buoyed up by his obvious affection for the view. Someone who has a fellow feeling for his land can’t be all prickles and rabbit pebbles, she decided as he tucked a lap robe around her and spoke to the horse in a language she did not know.
“Welsh pony. He understands me,” he allowed, and that was all the conversation between them as they crossed the sheltered valley.
Lord, I am weary, she thought as she sat so firmly upright or the seat beside the bailiff. She tried hard not to touch him, but it was a narrow seat, and he was the kind of man who overlapped. He sat easy, his eyes on the road in front of him, almost as though she were not there. He seemed relaxed, except that he kept tapping his feet, as though he could speed the passage. I suppose there is a sleepy wife somewhere and a warm bed, she considered.
“I don’t think the world would end if you leaned back and rested yourself.”
She shook her head, surprised that he had noticed. Heshrugged and turned his full attention to the road again. Or he seemed to, at any rate; she couldn’t tell.
Susan closed her eyes once or twice as they moved slowly across the valley, opening them before she felt herself leaning toward the bailiff. She must have had them closed longer than usual, because the next time she opened them they were stopped in a barnyard.
How did that get here? she thought stupidly, staring wide-eyed at the stone bam that looked as though it had been there since the Romans. Her mind sluggish and starved for sleep, she waited for the bailiff to help her down. To her dismay, he knotted the reins, climbed from the gig and hurried on a half run into the barn without a look over his shoulder at her. “Worse-than-useless man,” Susan muttered out loud as she helped herself from the gig.
She wouldn’t have followed him into the barn, except that the wind was teasing her ankles and lifting her skirts. She followed him inside, careful to watch where she walked. She sniffed the air and looked around her. They were in a cattle byre, pungent of cow and timothy grass. So this is where you were before you came for me, Susan reflected as she moved quietly down the stalls toward a lamp hanging on a far wall.
David Wiggins sat cross-legged on the hay-covered floor, a calf of ravishing beauty across his legs. He rubbed her down with a piece of sacking, speaking low in Welsh. He looked up at Susan and motioned her to join him. He nodded toward the fawnlike creature before him.
“This is why I was late, discounting the snow, Miss Hampton,” he explained. “I had to blow into her mouth to get her going, so I figured you could wait.”
Susan came inside the loose box and sat on an overturned bucket, her eyes on the cow, a Jersey who gazed back mildly without missing any rhythm as she chewed her cud. Susanlooked at the slimy rope on the hay beside the cow. “You had a hard tug of it,” she commented, leaning forward and resting her chin on her hands.
“I did,” he agreed. He lifted the little thing off his lap, smiling as it raised up on back legs and pitched nose first into the hay. “You come to a hard, cold world, lass,” he said, his voice soft. He leaned back against the partition, content to watch the animal struggle, fall, struggle, and rise, wobbly but on all fours.
David got up, too, wincing as though he ached everywhere, and prodded the cow to her feet. “Cush, lass, cush,” he crooned, “there’s work afoot.”
The calf knew what to do. In another moment, she had found her way to the udder, nudged it and settled to business. David sighed and rubbed his back.
“Now to you, miss,” he said, turning to Susan.
“I’m tired, not hungry,” she said. It was only a very little joke, but he smiled and held out his hand. She allowed him to haul her to her feet. Her eyelids felt weighted down with lead shot and grainy in the bargain.
‘There’s a place in the house for you,” he said, pulling her along the passageway. He chuckled. “I misdoubt it’s still warm from the last lady’s companion!”
She looked at him, her eyes narrowed, but his face was bland and smooth again and his dark eyes completely unreadable.
The wind braced her and woke her up again as they crossed the barnyard and came to the back entrance of the manor, solid stone and hunkered down to outlast any kind of winter thrown at it. I can admire it in the morning, she told herself, as her mind turned to porridge.
David Wiggins took off his boots inside the back door, put his finger to his lips. “It’s dark. Give me your hand,” he said. He led her up the stairs and paused outside a door. “I’ll have your trunk here by noon,” he whispered as he opened the door, “providedyou’re of a mind to stay.”
She stood up straighter and glanced over his shoulder at the welcome bed beyond. “I have to stay, Mr. Wiggins,” she said, not bothering to pull hairs with this man. “I don’t have a penny to return to London on.”
“So we’re stuck with you?” he asked, and it didn’t sound unkind. But how was she to know, with her mind already telling her how good the pillow was going to feel, if only she could get to it?
