Page 34 of A Kiss Gone Wylde
Mrs. Turley looked down at her hands which she folded primly in her lap. “I believe you were the cause. He knew that she’d upset you… now, I don’t condone gossip in this house. That maid of hers, Somers, was the worst for it. She came down to the kitchen in a full state, I tell you, because of it all. And the dowager was in a temper to be sure. Tis lucky you did not encounter her before she left the house.”
He hadn’t said a word. Benny recalled the moment he’d caught her snooping in his study. She had thought she’d covered it well, but did he know? Did he know that she’d gone in there to find the portrait of the late Miss Bardwell?
“Mrs. Turley, did you know Miss Bardwell?”
The housekeeper nodded. “Indeed I did. She was a lovely girl.”
Of course she was, Benny thought morosely. Lovely. Perfect in every way.Not at all like her.
“But she’d never have done for his lordship. In two years, he’d have been bored out of his mind with her. And she… I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead, ma’am. But she didn’t have spirit. So long as life was going her way, she’d have been just fine. But the minute life got hard or things became difficult, she’d have fallen apart. Because she was just as I said… a lovely girl. His lordship doesn’t need a girl. He needs a woman.”
Benny looked down at her flat chest, boyishly slim hips. In truth, she wasn’t much taller than most children. “I hardly look the part, Mrs. Turley.”
“Doesn’t matter how you look, m’lady, though there’s nothing wrong with having a slight figure. It’ll do you well enough later on in life, that I can promise. What matters is what you are… and you, my lady, are a woman. A woman of spirit and character. If you can take nothing else from the events of yesterday, take that. Most would still be abed weeping or sipping laudanum to soothe their overwrought nerves. But not you. You’re made of much sterner stuff than that. So do not let what a bunch of fools tell you determine your future happiness.”
“It wasn’t just the dowager. It wasn’t even just Lord Wainwright,” Benny said. “By his own admission, Payne has spent ten years obsessed with vengeance.”
“Bollocks.”
“Mrs. Turley!” Benny was scandalized by the woman’s language. She was also a bit jealous. Bollocks certainly conveyed the woman’s disdain for her statement with far more alacrity that anything she herself might have uttered, such as ‘pish posh’ or a heartily expressed ‘nonsense’. Adding the task ‘learn how to properly curse’ to her mental list of things to be done, Benny waited for the woman to explain.
“You’re a married woman, my lady. Might be improper to say so, but if you’ve had to see a pair of bollocks, I cannot understand why you cannot say the word itself. And it is bollocks. He was not obsessed with vengeance for that girl. He was driven by guilt. Guilt that his mother poked, prodded and stoked to life again day after day. Just when he’d be ready to lay it down and start living his life again in earnest, she’d start up talking about ‘poor, dear Anne’. She’d remind him of how his selfishness had left the girl unprotected and ripe for the picking for any villain that crossed her path.”
“Why did he tolerate such treatment from her?” Benny asked.
“She’s his mother,” Mrs. Turley offered with a nonchalant shrug. “Relationships with mothers and sons are always complicated. She’d take on so… having a spasm of the heart, or a fainting spell, or some seizure of the lungs that would leave her too weak to even get out of bed. At even the hint he’d ask her to leave, she’d begin to carry on in just that manner. Spent a fortune on private physicians for her. He’d have done better just to keep an actor from Drury Lane on staff. They’d have been able to do just as much for the Dowager as any true medical man could’ve. What good is a physician when she’s healthy as a horse?”
“That’s terrible,” Benny said, beginning to feel slightly guilty herself. Perhaps she’d been a bit hard on him at breakfast.
“Poor, dear boy,” Mrs. Turley agreed, clucking her tongue sympathetically.
She shouldn’t have been gossiping about her husband. And regardless of Mrs. Turley’s assertions that they didn’t tolerate gossip in that household, that was precisely what they were doing. Still, she couldn’t very well ask Payne, could she? “You’ve known him since he was a boy?”
“Yes, I have,” the older woman said, smiling fondly. “He’d just been born when I came to work here as a scullery maid. Always a sweet boy. Stubborn, to be sure, as all men can be, but still sweet. Kind hearted. His father was like that. Kind. Always kind.”
There was something in the way that Mrs. Turley spoke of the late Baron that alerted Benny to the fact that perhaps their relationship might have been more than simply that of a servant and her employer. “You cared for him.”
“Oh, not like that. The late baron was a handsome man, but he’d never have indulged in something so tawdry as an affair with a maid, though I’ll not be so proud I won’t admit that I would have. And gladly. But he was all that was proper and kind. He didn’t love his wife, though I believe he certainly tried. She made it very difficult for him to love her. He was a very lonely man. Not physically… no. He kept a mistress as most do. Discreet. In the proper way of things. But still he was very much alone. Married to a woman who held other things more dear to her than her husband or her son. This house. Her position. Her possessions. That was all that ever mattered to her.”
“Mrs. Turley, you surely don’t think that I married Payne for those reasons,” Benny said.
“No, ma’am. Not at all. I know yours wasn’t a planned wedding, or planned anything at all, for that matter. But for a man like your husband, who has been raised by a woman such as her and who has viewed how callously she treated others? A bit of patience may be in order,” the older woman sighed. “Now, I’ve been impertinent enough I think. Any other employer would turn me out for having said such things. But it’s not fair to be thrown into the middle of a thing without knowing where it all started.”
Benny realized in that moment just how little privacy they actually had. Every servant in the house knew precisely what was going on between them and between every other person in the household. But in that exchange, something else was apparent to her, as well. “You think I am being too hard on him.”
“Oh, no. I think you’ve got to crack an egg’s shell before you get to what’s inside it,” the housekeeper answered. “He’s a man, ma’am. And, you’ll forgive me for saying so, but a more hard headed lot you’ll never meet. Just telling them a thing—well, you might as well find a wall and beat your head against it. You do what you have to do. Just don’t lose sight of what it is you’re hoping to achieve.”
“What do I want to achieve, Mrs. Turley? I’m not even certain I know anymore,” Benny replied despondently.
“Love, ma’am. You can have the finest house, the most beautiful of gowns, and you can attend every ball in London… but if you do not have love, what meaning does any of that have?”
“What if he doesn’t love me back?”
Mrs. Turley smiled kindly at her. “That’s the risk every person in love must take at one time or other. To be the first to say it… to place your heart in another’s hands and see if it will be treasured or discarded, that’s a thing that takes courage. And it may be that this time you’ll have to be brave enough for the both of you.”
21
Payne entered his club and immediately saw Gordon seated at a small table near the back. The man had sent a missive that morning inviting him to join him. It had arrived just after the disastrous breakfast with Benny and any excuse to get out of the house and stop obsessing over how to fix a problem he didn’t fully understand had been welcomed.
