Page 64 of The Lady's Companion
He stroked the mother cat who wove herself around him. “I also promised a broken hulk of a man at the bottom of a gorge that I would take care of her, no matter what, my love. I don’t think he meant for me to break her heart again. Now you tell me what to do.”
She was silent, looking down the row of boxes in front of her.The bailiff had uprooted the experimental wheat, and only the bare soil remained, ready to receive the next strain. We tried so hard not to let her daughter-in-law kill her with kindness, but I wonder, are we being any fairer? she asked herself.
The bailiff came to the drafting table, draping his arm over her shoulder. “What? I know you mean to say something. Say it, please.”
She leaned back against him. “Perhaps Lady Bushnell is the best judge of what she should know. He was her son, after all.”
It was his turn for long silence. He kissed her neck finally with a peremptory smack then went back to the wheat in the sack. “We’ll have to differ in our opinion, then, Suzie. I choose not to tell her, and I hope that you will respect my wishes.”
“Certainly I will,” Susan replied, getting off the stool to rescue a kitten determined to explore a grain bucket. She saved the baby teetering on the edge and returned him, squeaking, to his mother. “As a woman, and I hope, a mother someday, I will always want to know the minds and hearts of those I love,” she said, her hand on the bailiff’s head as he knelt by the sack again. “But I respect your wishes in this matter.”
He smiled up at her and poured a careful handful of the experimental grain in the leather sowing sack. When he finished, he sat back on his heels and regarded her with such animation in his eyes that she blushed and looked away, feeling again the tension so little understood yesterday, but a permanent part of her emotions today.
“I sent Tom the cowman to stay with Ben and Owen tonight,” he said as he stood up and hung the sowing sack on a hook out of the reach of any mice. “That means I have to get up early and milk, and begin the sowing.”
“And? And?” she teased.
“And I thought you wouldn’t mind if I sowed a little tonight,” he concluded, taking her by the hand and leading her fromthe succession house. “Or a lot” He kissed her then, and she wondered if they would even make it as far as the first-floor landing, if they even got as far as the house.
“Mrs. Skerlong told me once that farmers don’t really have time for this sort of thing in spring,” she murmured as he hurried her up the stairs.
He pulled her into their bedroom and started on his buttons. “I’ll have you know that old Lord Bushnell himself once complimented me on my organizational skills. Don’t just stand there laughing at me, Suzie. Take off something!”
She decided in May that Mrs. Skerlong, estimable woman in so many ways, was certainly wrong about farmers and wives in spring. She also discovered that the odor of lanolin had the curious effect of making her look about for the bailiff, or start counting the hours until they could decently excuse themselves for bed. It was knowledge she chose not to pass on to the bailiff. He already has enough power over me, she told herself as she rested on him after one particularly passionate interlude. I would have to be stupid to tell a sheep grower that lanolin makes me randy.
She discovered that other things did, too, even some of the letters she was copying over now for Lady Bushnell, the little packet she had hidden away in the bureau with Charles’ Waterloo medal. They were love letters the old colonel had sent to Calcutta from Lucknow, when he was engaged in the field and she was awaiting the birth of their son from the safety of the city. While Lady Bushnell dozed in her bed—as she did more and more now— Susan sat at the desk by the open window, fanned herself, and told herself she was ridiculous to squirm over the colonel’s frank expressions of longings for his wife. Just copy it, Susan, she told herself.
She finished two letters in her large, careful printing, made sure Lady Bushnell was soundly asleep, and went in search ofthe bailiff. He was never hard to find, and never too difficult to distract, either. Other than a simple admonition to lock the door of the succession house, and then the calm observation, twenty minutes later, that they must have scared the kittens into hiding, he was eager to let her have her way.
“Just as long as you leave me to worry over the major decisions, Suzie, I am ever so obliging,” he told her as he helped her back into her dress and did up the buttons.
“And what constitutes a major decision?” she asked, contented enough now to return to the copying of letters.
“Oh, whether we go to war with the United States over tariffs, or, let me think, whether I’ll make a profit on this year’s wool clip. I leave the rest to you.”
He didn’t, of course. There were times when he came in search of her, giving Lady Bushnell such flimsy excuses that Susan could only roll her eyes and look everywhere but at her employer. Lady Bushnell’s earlier comments to the contrary, he was never gentle with her then. She couldn’t have cared less. Her own fervor amazed her, and she had to agree with the bailiff when he had said after their first night together that all they needed was practice, and lots of it.
She discovered that she also treasured those times when they just strolled the hillside in the evening to stand among the Waterloo wheat. Being with the bailiff, in bed or out of it, was its own reward. If she could have taken out her heart and handed it to him, she would have.
“‘Why did you plant the wheat on a slope?” she asked one evening before the sun went down as they stood in their usual spot on the hillside.
“It’s how I remember it, Suzie, sloping like that to Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte,” he said, squatting in the field to run a practiced hand over the grain, measuring its height “Only after that first night when we dug in, and it rained so hardthe field was a trampled mess.” He shook his head as though trying to clear his brain of the memory. “Then at the end of that endless day, it didn’t look like a field at all, but a cemetery where the ground had been turned over and all the corpses flung out on top.”
He smiled up at her, something of embarrassment in his expression. “I guess I want to see it this way, and not muddy and bloody.” He shrugged and looked over the field toward the manor house. “I think every soldier has his way of dealing with battle; this is mine.”
Tears came to her eyes, and she sniffed them back.
“Don’t cry, Suzie. If it’ll make you feel better, I also look at this field and think how lucky I am to be a steward over my Waterloo wheat. It’s good grain, and it will make us a seed farm, someday,” he said as he tugged her down to sit beside him. She leaned against his shoulder, secure in the knowledge that she was the most fortunate woman in the British Isles.
It was easy then to tell him of her increasing fears for Lady Bushnell. She had never been around someone dying before, but she knew in her heart that Lady Bushnell was facing death, and soon. Dr. Pym never told her. He came three times a week, full of town gossip and good cheer, and more potions that Lady Bushnell only shook her head over. “My lady, we’ll see you well and hearty before harvest,” he said, concluding his most recent visit.
When he closed the door behind him, all bay rum and bluff humor, Lady Bushnell only looked at Susan, and they both knew.
“Promise me you will never lie to me, Susan,” was all she said. “Let me know straight up what is going on.”
“I cannot fool her,” she told the bailiff on the hillside as May slipped into June.
He massaged her knee thoughtfully. “Has she asked you about Charlie?”
