Page 81 of Tremaine's True Love
“Time to go?” Kirsten asked a bit too cheerfully.
“If you’re done with your scholars,” Nita replied.
Addy rolled her eyes, but she was smiling too.
Nita mentally added some simple books to the list of provisions she’d bring when next she visited, and soon she and Kirsten were back in their respective saddles, though they rode into the wind on their homeward journey.
“How do you stand it?” Kirsten asked before they’d reached the end of the lane.
“Stand the smell?”
“The smell, the dirt, the hopelessness. Addy isn’t much older than you, and she’ll likely die soon of the pox, cold, starvation, or sheer melancholia. I don’t want to go back there, Nita. I should be kinder, I should be braver, but I don’t want to go back there. Addy is fallen, and those children are doomed.”
Atlas plodded along, head down. The weather seemed to have subdued even Kirsten’s mare.
“I don’t want to go back either.” Nita never wanted to go back, not to a home where babies had died, not to see that infection would soon take a man’s life if he were unwilling to part with his foot, not to offer useless tisanes to an aching old woman who longed for heaven.
“Then why do you do it?” Kirsten wailed, swiping at her cheek with the back of her glove. “Why do you make yourself stare at that mean, smelly cottage, those pinched faces, that dear little baby?”
Kirsten had barely glanced at the baby.
“I thought Addy’s drinking was what had taken the last child from her,” Nita said. “I couldn’t bear for that to happen to wee Annie.”
Kirsten sniffed. “Everybody knows Addy’s drinking cost that child her life.”
“Everybody’s wrong,” Nita said. “I was wrong too. The child’s death sent Addy back to the gin. Babies sometimes die for no reason, and this was apparently one of those times. I want Annie to live. Her mother wants that too.”
Like any normal mother would want her child to live, thrive, and have a chance in life.
“While her father wanted to dip his wick,” Kirsten spat, “and then likely stand up with you or me at the assembly. I accompanied you to that household because I was curious, Nita, not because I’m prone to Christian charity. I wanted to see how low Addy Chalmers had fallen, wanted to see what became of a woman without virtue. I’m sorry.”
Nita steered her horse around a frozen puddle rather than observe that Kirsten had seen all of that on her first visit to the cottage.
“Frightening, isn’t it?” Nita said. Frightening and exhausting. “I’ve committed the same lapses in judgment Addy has, and so apparently has Suze. Suze and I suffer no consequences, while Addy has lost all.”
“Not all. She has those children, and—like half the ailing people in this shire—she has you.”
Nita urged Atlas to a trot, anxious to return to her intended. Kirsten was right though. The ailing people in the shire did have Nita, so rather than ride straight for home, first she’d pay brief calls on Alton Horst and Mary Eckhardt.
CHAPTERFOURTEEN
Tremaine liked Nita very much; he did not like having a fiancée. Old feelings, of hope and anxiety, pleasure and resentment, came with being engaged.
Also a little madness: What if Nita changed her mind? What if she went to the Chalmers cottage and never came back? What if she rode away, fluttering her handkerchief in farewell, and he never saw her again?
Fortunately, after Tremaine had spent a morning staring at correspondence, Lady Nita came striding across the snowy garden, Lady Kirsten beside her. The noon meal featured servings of good cheer along with the ham and mashed potatoes.
At table, Lady Nita had shown to excellent advantage in a gown of green velvet with a lavender fichu and matching shawl. The smiles she’d aimed at Tremaine had been soft and precious.
The hand she’d stroked over his thigh beneath the table had been pure devilment.
Dinner had been more of the same, the time spent with the ladies afterward even worse, until Tremaine had pled the beginnings of a genuine headache. He’d undressed, washed, and then repaired to bed with a treatise on foot rot that did nothing to soothe his tattered nerves.
When somebody tapped on his door, he snarled his response. “Come in.”
“Tremaine?” Nita slipped around the door, her hair in that single golden braid over her shoulder, her attire again a blue brocade dressing gown and gray wool stockings.
He rose off the bed. “I was expecting a footman with a bucket of coal.” Or perhaps George Haddonfield come to flirt.
