Page 65 of The Lady's Companion
“No, thank God. I pray she will not.” She took his hand and pressed it to her cheek. “But she does ask me all the time now when we are going to Belgium. She talks of Brussels, and Mont St Jean, and stopping at the chateau at Hougoumont. David, is there any way we could take her there?”
“It would mean our jobs and no character references, Suzie, if the Marches found out,” he said. “No. The answer’s no. It’s what I tell her when she asks me.”
“But she keeps asking!”
“And we keep telling her no, Susan. It just can’t be.”
It was easy enough to agree with him, sitting there in the wheat, his hand on her leg, but harder all the time as she finished copying the letters, then began to write Lady Bushnell’s army experiences in the Peninsula, as the widow dictated them. After wrangling half a day over the title, they decided they would call it “A Lady’s Reminiscence in the Army of Wellington.”
“I like that,” the bailiff said one night when they were lying in bed, pleasantly pleased with each other. He kissed her hand and draped it over his chest. “Where do you start?”
“Well, you usually don’t object if I touch you here and here,” she mentioned, moving her hand and putting her leg across his.
“Silly! You know what I mean. Does she begin at Vimeiro?”
“Yes. And we’ve already covered that part where she rescued that wretched Welshman from three hundred lashes. Let’s discuss this later, David.”
“He was a wretch,” the bailiff murmured, rolling over and giving her his undivided attention.
Later, when he slept, his arms protective around her, she lay awake, thinking of Lady Bushnell. Every day now, you ask me about Waterloo, and I feel your urgency, and all I can do is shake my head and tell you no, she thought. You tell me of Bussaco, and Ciudad Rodrigo, and horrible Badajoz, and I write it all down, but behind it all, like a blaze behind a tire screen, isWaterloo and Charles. She sighed and burrowed closer into the bailiff’s warmth. Your mother’s heart has to know.
She knew better than to pester the bailiff anymore about it. “Susan, that’s enough,” he had said firmly one night on the hill. The wheat was almost up to her waist now, and she ran her hands across it as he did, enjoying the prickle of the forming kernel in the hull against her palms.
She stopped, embarrassed. “I know you have other things on your mind,” she apologized. Only last week the bailiff and his crofters had washed the sheep in the dip beside the shearing floor. He had come home so tired from picking up sheep and tossing them into the narrow trough of water that she had to sit on his back and rub his arms and shoulders so he could sleep. The shearing would begin tomorrow.
“I shouldn’t pester you,” she said as she looked at the manor beyond the wheat. “It’s just that she wants it so badly and...”
“Sometimes we don’t get what we want,” he interrupted, his voice short.
She looked at him then, really looked at him, admiring the fine-boned elegance of his face. “You did,” she said softly. “So did I.”
“Susan!” he protested. He took her hands in his, turned up the palms, and kissed them. “Susan.” He smiled at her, his irritation gone already. “I suppose we will have the most stubborn children.”
“Of course,” she agreed as she watched the storm leave his face as quickly as it had come. “There’s nothing weak about this Hampton.”
Later, much later, when she had time to contemplate the many-stranded weaving that is fate, she asked herself if saying Hampton brought on what followed. It didn’t seem likely, and she was not superstitious, but there was something in the saying. She knew it.
The shearing went without a hitch, all noise, and heat, andsmell and excitement, and crofters’ children running about beside the shearing floor where the itinerant shearers did their rapid trade. The bailiff even tried one sheep, grinning at her as he wrestled the sheep between his legs and clipped away, stripping it naked. The odor of lanolin rose and filled the stone hall, and she had to turn away, smiling to herself and thinking naughty thoughts for the bailiff to satisfy later.
Lady Bushnell had insisted on coming along for the shearing. “I am always at the shearing, Susan, so save your breath to cool your porridge,” the woman insisted. She sat ramrod straight like royalty, taking in the business of the day, accepting a glass of ale from an awed Owen Thrice.
“Is she a queen?” he whispered to Susan.
“I think so,” Susan whispered back. Most of all you are a colonel’s wife, she thought, her arms around Owen’s shoulders, a follower of the drum who did not flinch from guns, or hunger, or siege, or betrayal, or the fickleness of fortune, that tawdry slut. Dear lady, I wonder what you would do if I told you I loved you.
She had no answer, so she kissed the top of Owen’s head instead, sending him into the worst paroxysm of mingled pleasure and embarrassment. He released himself from the burden of affection by teasing a crofter’s child and making her cry.
It was a long day, and she was glad, for Lady Bushnell’s sake, to see the end of it The widow was much too tired to read any of her army letters, or eat anything beyond a few bites of gruel, which came with Mrs. Skerlong’s loving admonitions about overdoing it, and “forgetting that we’re not as young as we think we are, Lady B.”
The bailiff dragged himself in later, reeking of wool, exhausted beyond food and single-minded only about his bed. He offered no objections when Susan helped him from his clothes, and wasasleep before she extinguished the lamp. If he even moved all night, she was unaware of it.
In wordless conspiracy, Susan and Mrs. Skerlong let them sleep the next morning. They ate porridge and milk in the kitchen, listening to the thunder rumble and then fade. “I wish it would rain,” Mrs. Skerlong said as she took the dishes to the sink. “Have you seen such weather?”
She had not. The sky was gray-green and seemed to loom over the earth like a blanket, casting an eerie shadow on the Waterloo wheat. She sniffed the air, shading her eyes with her hand to watch the thundercloud rise up and up like a genie out of a lamp. It was quiet, too, with no barnyard fowl complaining; even the birds were silent.
How good that I am not given to megrims over the weather, she thought, even as she frowned at the sky and wandered from room to room, dissatisfied without being able to explain why. She looked in on the bailiff, who slept bare on top of the sheets now, sweating from the strange, wet heat. Lady Bushnell stayed decorously under the covers in her room, but she seemed troubled by dreams.
When Susan came downstairs, she noticed the letters on the small table by the entrance. They must have come yesterday while we were at the shearing, she thought, picking them up to read the directions, then dropping them with a gasp, as though they burned.
