Page 21 of The Lady's Companion
“You promised! If I can find out what she’s like, perhaps I can please her. Surely you will help me. After all, you did ask me to marry you ...,” she wheedled, well aware of the growing look of stubbornness on his face.
He got up and brushed off the straw. “I have a feeling that this is going to come before many a negotiation with you,” he told the cattle byre in general.
“Probably,” she allowed. “You did offer your help.”
“But you didn’t accept,” he pointed out, even as he looked away from her and smiled.
“True,” she agreed, her tone reasonable, “but that doesn’t mean I won’t use you.”
He laughed out loud and helped her to her feet. “Well, you’re an honest piece,” he admitted, reaching for his coat and putting it on again. “Come on, I’m not through yet.”
Neither am I, she thought as he took her hand again and they faced into the wind. I have a lot of information to pry out of you tonight.
She thought they were going back to the kitchen, but the bailiff led her instead to the long, many-windowed succession house that stood apart from the other outbuildings, away from the shade of trees. The building was dark inside, but there was sufficient light through the windows for David to light a lamp and set it by a draftsman’s desk, and then light other lamps.
Susan looked about her with interest, removing Mrs. Skerlong’s coat because the long room was warm. There along the south-facing wall were several mounds of cucumbers and cantaloupe with large, healthy leaves and blossoms indicating fruit to come.
Catching her attention were the long rows of grain in full growth on the tables down the middle of the succession house. She didn’t know what kind it was—one grain was much like thenext to her, and always had been—but the renewal of coal in the furnace had set off more warm currents of air that stirred the greenery in front of her fascinated eyes. “It’s beautiful,” she said softly, and found her heart aching for spring and summer and warmth again. And all from rows of grain. She wondered why Lady Bushnell would want grain in her succession house, when she could have hothouse fruits and flowers.
“Nice,” she said to David Wiggins, who walked past her carrying a coal shuttle.
“I think so,” he agreed.
She watched the bailiff shovel coal into the small furnaces at opposite ends to the succession house, then admired the white and yellow-middled strawberry blossoms blooming in their own bed.
“Strawberries in winter.” She sighed. “How I should like some dipped in sugar and cream.” She looked down at the cat at her feet and patted the tall draftsman’s stool beside her. The cat meowed and paced back and forth, but did not leap up. “Oh, goodness, you’re a lazy creature,” she said as she picked up the cat and set it on the table.
“No, she’s just in the family way, and not given to leaping about,” the bailiff said as he joined her. “I’m sure you would feel the same.” He patted the animal’s bulging sides. “Thank goodness cats do not require the attention of cows.” He rubbed the cat under the chin, set her gently back on the floor, and pulled out a ledger. “She’s a good mouser and that’s why I keep her in here, but she does like the toms.”
Susan smiled, wondering what Aunt Louisa would make of such a conversation. She looked over his shoulder at the rows and rows of careful entries. “What do you have there?”
“Something to occupy you while you pummel me for information about a rather private lady I would just as soon not discuss.”
Wiggins took off his coat and picked up a ruler on the desk. “I’m going to call out numbers. I want you to locate the number, then look for a, b, c, or d. I’ll call out inches to you, which I want you to record next to the date. What is today?” he asked, more to himself than to her.
“January 15th, 1820,” she said promptly.
“I know the year!” He nudged her over to get the pencil out of the drawer under the drafting table. “Pencil in the date by each number group.”
“Very well. The things I must do to get information,” she grumbled as she tried to find a ladylike way to climb onto the stool.
Without a word he picked her up and set her squarely in the middle of it, then looked over her shoulder at the neat entries of dates and inches before starting down the row. As he approached the first row of grain, she noticed that it had been subdivided into smaller boxes. A, b, c, and d, she decided as she took up the pencil and carefully wrote in the date.
“Fifty-nine a,” he said, then stood the ruler next to the grain shoot. “One quarter inch.”
She recorded the measurement, then put the pencil on the b entry.
“Fifty-nine b. One quarter inch and a plus.” He looked up at her. “It’s not quite half and I don’t have a better ruler right now.”
She wrote in the inches he dictated to her as he went efficiently down the row, wanting to know what he was doing, but mindful of breaking his concentration. When he finished the row, he looked up at her.
“This is such a help to me. Usually I get Matthew Beverage— he’s my underbailiff —but he got married at Christmas and can’t get the bed off his wife’s back.”
Susan grinned over the figures, wondering what else he would say. No subject seemed too sensitive for the bailiff. “And youassured him you could do all his work, too?” she said when she knew she wouldn’t laugh.
“Why not?” he countered. “It’s winter, and Matthew’s got to keep his wife’s stomach warm. He and his bride will be back in a few weeks. She usually helps Cora with the milk and the laundry.”
He came around to the other side of the wooden tables and began to go up, calling out numbers and inches as she recorded them in the right slots. “Eighty-three d, one inch. Damn, that’s good.”
