Page 90 of Wild Lily
“In the village, is there a chemist?” she asked them.
“Among us?” Richards asked like she might be hallucinating.
“No,” said the boy.
“Where is the nearest?”
“Ashford,” said Richards.
“Far away, is it?” she asked.
“Two hours ride,” Richards told her.
“Not bad. Well, you see, I’ve nursed many sick people before. I’d like to help.”
The two men stared at her as if she had two heads.
She might be the new marchioness and a new bride, but she was not without skills or brains. Or persistence. “Could you take me to the cottages? Please?”
Richards was more than skeptical. He scratched his shaggy hair above his ear. “In the rain?”
“You walked here. So can I.”
He shot his bushy brows together. “‘Is lordship may not like it.”
“To give help to his tenants who are ill? Of course he will like it. Tell me where they are. You needn’t come with me, if you don’t like. I take my own responsibility.”
He pulled a doubting face.
“I do. Always,” she assured him.
* * *
Phillip Leland was a handsome frog, what with his overly large green eyes and brilliant hair, the color of old gold. Tall and thin, he had an aristocratic bearing that told her he must have come from a very good family who lived beneath their station. When Julian had told her that the two of them were second cousins through his father’s family, she understood how the two men, so divergent in class and occupation, got on so well together. He was a relative.
He had told her his father had earned a living at writing novels in installments much like Charles Dickens had done. “At first, he wrote novels suited for social commentary. But when he did not become as popular as other authors, he began a series of books for children. He created a character who was a mouse in the house of a duke,” he said as the three of them sat in the purple salon after their dinner.
“The mouse stole cheese from the larder and books from the library,” Julian said with a chuckle.
“And raised his sons to become barristers and his daughters to become physicians,” Leland added.
Overjoyed, she clapped her hands together. “Disregarding class and gender?”
“True revolutionaries,” Leland said with a rueful grin.
“In America we would applaud that,” she said.
“Here,” he said, “we take our revolutions a bit more slowly.”
“And how did you decide on the law? Was it your father’s stories of his little mouse that inspired you?”
“I confess it’s true. But what I’d really like to do is write a novel. I’ve penned a few shorter stories that a London publisher considers.”
“That’s wonderful,” she said. “I like to see people engaged in what delights them. My cousin Marianne takes comfort in drawing and painting.”
“Is that right?” Julian asked as he took a chair opposite her. “I had no idea she did that.”
“Has she shown her work?” Leland asked.
