Page 93 of The Heir
“I have warned you against too much sentimentality, Victoria,” said Mama. “Especially toward your father’s family.”
“She may seem a harmless old thing,” added Sir John, “but she has all their spirit, and their ill feeling toward your mother and toward you.”
Then why are you handling her money for her? Why do you call yourself her champion?
“Please, Mama. This once. I will ask for nothing else all day. I promise. Please.”
Mama was looking at Sir John again. Victoria bit the inside of her cheek to keep quiet. She hated begging like a child, hated having to gain permission just to leave a room in her own home. But it worked. Sir John must have signaled some sort of approval, because Mama threw up her hands.
“All right! All right! But you will take Lady Flora with you. I need Lehzen here.”
Mama needed Lehzen? That could not be. Mama did not like her and definitely did not trust her.
Mama was making lists of the families they were to meet on tour. Mama was keeping Lehzen away from her with flimsy excuses.
Something is happening.Victoria felt suddenly torn. But having successfully pleaded her case to go see her aunt, she couldn’t suddenly decide to stay so she could eavesdrop.
She had no choice now but to leave Mama and Sir John to their own devices.
Chapter 41
Susan was home.
All was as it had been the last time Jane arrived at the cottage’s doorstep. The two old men sat on their wooden bench beneath the eaves with the jug between them. They watched with interest as Jane knocked on the door and Susan opened it.
“Thought I should see you again sooner or later,” Susan said, wiping her hands on her apron. “You’d best come in.”
Betty stayed in the foyer. Susan took Jane through into the low, cramped kitchen. Despite the fire in the hearth, the gloomy day filled the place with an unseasonal twilight. Susan waved Jane toward the long wooden bench. Jane sat down and took off her damp bonnet and set it on the end of the thoroughly scrubbed board table.
Susan folded her arms and rubbed her raw elbows. “Is there work?” she asked. “Or is it something more about that doctor fellow?”
“It’s about Ned,” Jane told her.
Susan’s expression turned thunderous. “You ain’t about to say I was up to no good with him again, are you? Cuz I already told you—”
“No, no, it’s not that. I just wanted to ask if you ever knew Ned to have any dealings with Dr. Maton? Not Gerald Maton. I mean his father. Were they ever at the house together that you saw?”
Jane watched Susan screw up her face, watched her get ready to lie. Or perhaps to order Jane out of the house.
“I wouldn’t be asking, but the princess needs to know,” Jane added hastily.
She felt like she was being unfair somehow by invoking the princess. Perhaps she was, but it did work. Susan’s expression softened, and she sat down across the table from Jane. She ran her hands across the pitted surface, as if smoothing an invisible cloth.
“We wasn’t friends, me and your brother,” she said. “Not real ones. He wasn’t as bad as some, I’ll give him that much. He teased, and he pinched a bit, but nothing worse. And when he found out my uncle”—she nodded toward the foyer, and Jane realized she must mean one of the two men on the bench outside—“had drunk away the rent, again, he gave me the money and asked for nothing in return.”
Jane found herself staring. Ned had done that? Careless, drunken Ned?
“And, well, he talked,” Susan went on. She rolled her eyes at Jane’s fresh confusion. “It’s that way sometimes. The family, they’ll say all sorts of things to a servant, because they think you don’t matter, and they believe you’re somehow too loyal or too stupid to tell anybody important.” She shrugged. “So, I knew about his going to the gaming parties, and I knew how he said he lost so much money only because the other gentlemen cheated and . . .” She shrugged again.
“Well, one morning I’m bringing up the coal so I can lay the fires in the parlor, and there’s a great banging in the scullery and the door flies open and there’s a man in a black coat with a doctor’s bag. He and this other gentleman are dragging Mr. Ned between them, and his shirt’s all covered in blood. They’re yelling at me to bring hot water and clean towels, only I’m not to wake the house. I don’ t know what’s happening, but I fetch what I’m told to, and they lay him out on the kitchen table, and . . .”
She shuddered. “Well, they asked me to stay while they sewed him up, in case they needed anything. And I gathered from their talk that there’s been a duel and Mr. Ned was wounded. Bullet grazed his side. Not serious, the doctor didn’t think. Just messy. They could get him patched up. But they said that other man, the one Mr. Ned shot at—he was killed.”
Jane’s mouth went dry. There was a roaring in her ears. The sensation of lightness had returned. This time, she wished she really could just float away. But she remained tethered here, forced to hear what Susan said next.
“That doctor? It was Dr. Maton?” asked Jane.
Susan nodded. “It was after that, that Mr. Ned started giving him money, too.”
