Page 8 of The Virtues of Christmas
“Mordecai MacFergus, as I live and breathe. What are you doing so far south of a proper Scotsman’s home?”
Despite the cold, the stingy innkeeper, and the dodgy off-leader, MacFergus’s heart lifted at the sound of his native Strathclyde accents.
“If it isn’t wee Liam Logan,” he said, extending a hand and striding up the aisle of the stable. “How long has it been? Two years since I laid eyes on your ugly face?”
Logan shook hands and offered his flask. “At least, and we were on the Great North Road, God rot its ruts to hell. Tell me how your family goes on.”
In the relative warmth and privacy of the stable, they caught up, as two coachmen will, passing the time happily with news of home and news of others who plied their trade. Like most coachmen, Logan was a healthy specimen, his cheeks reddened by the elements, his face weathered, and his grip crushing.
“So who’s the fancy gent?” MacFergus asked as the horses munched hay and winter breezes stirred bits of straw in the barn’s dirt aisle. The smell of the stable would ever be his favorite—horses, leather, fodder, and even the occasional whiff of manure.
Nothing fertilized a garden like good old horse shit.
Logan made a fancy bow. “You see before you the coachman to Michael, Baron Angelford, and he’s anything but fancy. I’m working for an Irishman, MacFergus, one with a proper estate not forty miles on and a proper title, though he’s an Irishman among the English.”
The English and the Scots had an uneasy tolerance for each other, while the Irish, who’d attempted a rebellion as recently as 1798, didn’t fare as well on English soil. They had their peers and grand estates, but in the hierarchy of peerages, the Irish duke ranked below his English and Scottish counterparts and was seldom allowed to forget it.
“Lonely business, being Irish among the English,” MacFergus said. “My lady is no stranger to loneliness. I’ve been driving for Miss Whitlow since she acquired her first coach and team, nearly eight years ago, and you never met a better employer.”
Logan tipped his flask up and shook the last drops into his mouth, then tucked the empty flask into his pocket.
“That’s always the way of it, isn’t it? Them as the Quality disdain can be the most decent, while the earls and dukes will leave good horses standing in the cold for hours outside the Christmas ball.”
A gelding two stalls down lifted its tail and broke wind in staccato bursts.
“Caspar agrees with you,” MacFergus said. “Your baron was right considerate of my lady, despite Murphy’s pernickety airs.”
A barn tabby leaped down from the rafters, strutted along a beam, then hopped to a manger and to the floor. Logan picked up the animal and gave it a scratching about the ears.
“So it’s like that, is it?” he said. “My Mary got by as best she could before we married. Many a village girl does when she comes to London. Many a Town girl does too, and some of the goings-on at the house parties, Morty MacFergus, would shame the devil.”
Miss Henrietta did not attend house parties, and her household conducted itself properly, but for the comings and goings of the gentleman with whom she’d contracted a liaison. Those comings and goings were undertaken discreetly, which Lucille claimed was a written condition signed by both parties.
“My lady was a good girl, from what I hear,” MacFergus said, “and then she went into service. Been some time since a gent treated her proper.”
“A pity that, but the baron’s no stranger to them with poor manners. His own family can’t be bothered to join him at the holidays. He’ll be all alone in the great hall come Christmas morning, and that’s just not right. I’ve had more than a few wee drams with my lord over a hand of cards, though you mustn’t tell any I said that.”
Coachmen were privy to an employer’s secrets. They knew who called upon whom and who was never at home even when they were clearly within the dwelling. They knew who was invited to which entertainments, who skipped Sunday services, and which gentlemen paid very-late-night calls upon the wives of friends.
A baron sharing a flask and a frequent hand of cards with his coachman, though… Not the done thing.
“My lady travels to see her family at the holidays,” MacFergus said, “and they barely welcome her. She stays at an inn rather than with any of them and calls on her brothers as if she were some distant cousin. Her own father won’t stay in the same room with her, though my lady never complains of him.”
Lucille, usually as taciturn as a nun, ranted about Squire Whitlow’s treatment of his daughter. As the holidays came closer, Lucille became more grim, for nothing would dissuade Miss Henrietta from her annual pilgrimage to Oxfordshire.
“Damned rotten English,” Logan said. “My oldest—you recall my Angus?—has three girls. He’d never treat one of his own so shabbily, much less at Yuletide, or my Mary would serve him a proper thrashing and I’d cut the birch rod for her.”
Quiet descended, underscored by the sound of horses at their hay and the cat purring in Logan’s arms.
“Logan, we’re a pair of decent, God-fearing men, aren’t we?”
Logan set the cat down and dusted his hands. “You’re about to get me in trouble, Morty MacFergus, like that time you suggested we put that frog in Mrs. MacMurtry’s water glass.”
“You’re the one who came up with that idea.” Always full of mischief, was Liam Logan. “Your baron is lonely, my Miss Henrietta is lonely, and they’re rubbing on well enough as we speak. All I’m suggesting is that we take a wee hand in making their holidays a little brighter.”
“No coachman has wee hands.”
“And nobody should be alone at Christmas.”
