Page 55 of The Mad Baron's Bride
Muriel moved along the ridge, her small frame nearly swallowed by the waving meadow grasses, red curls a banner down her back. The sun retreated behind the clouds again.
Jack looked to Leda. “She laughed with you.” Something had shifted between them; something had lightened Muriel’s gloom and drawn her to Leda, if only for a moment. But she wasn’t about to yield the same softening toward her father.
“A first.” Leda moved closer to him. He smelled blossom, then her beneath, the almond scent of her skin. “I doubt she’ll allow it to happen again.”
Jack turned and walked back to his frames and pots. “She laughed all the time as a baby. Constantly. Everything I did made her giggle.”
“Losing her mother would hurt. Would still hurt.”
“It was well before that when she stopped. She learned young to tiptoe around Anne-Marie. To take on her sadness. We all did.”
Leda waited a moment. He appreciated that. She didn’t press him. She didn’t utter platitudes. She didn’t try to chivvy him out his grief or momentary despair. She simply let the confession float between them, let him understand for the first time how much of his own happiness he had held in reserve, tamped down, put aside, because Anne-Marie was always so distant and sad.
She touched his arm, and her steady warmth flushed through him as if he were a sponge drawing water. “Show me what you’ve done.”
She took an interest in everything: in the kiln he had, after the pattern of the one at Heacham, cut into the side of the ridge,with a space alongside for the ovens that would heat the bricks. “I’ll make these first bricks extra hard as they’ll provide the walls and insulation. I’ve spoken to a man in Snettisham about getting a cast iron door for the furnace. For the time being I’ll cover the roof with wooden planks, as that gives me options for ventilation. Later I might build a brick roof, like the lime kiln at Thornham. The gravel in the barrow there is for lining the floor.”
“And you simply put the bricks in here to bake them? How long does it take?”
“A day at least to get the kiln hot enough, sometimes two. A day or two of keeping things hot. You arrange the bricks in columns to create chimneys that will move the air and distribute the heat. Then another day or so to cool, and your bricks should be ready.”
“And then what?”
“I sell them,” Jack said. “And feed my household on the income until this agricultural depression is over, if it ever is.”
She peered into the square hole in the ground, where the boys he’d hired to help him were gleefully hardening the dirt floor of his kiln by tramping about, cuffing each other or mock wrestling as they passed.
“How will you fire the bricks to line your kiln? I imagine they need to be especially hard.”
He grinned, something joyous loosening and rolling in his chest. She was interested. In him. In his plans, his creation. “I’ll fire those bricks in Heacham, or see if the old kiln by Thornham is still working. But I want my own kiln so I can experiment.”
“Experiment how?”
He led her to his workstation, where he had labored all morning. Muriel dallied along the ridge, glancing now and again at the men building the shed, seasoned laborers with their jackets shed and sleeves rolled up as they hammered and sawed. They’d softened their language when Leda arrived, but hadn’tmoved to dress, and Jack wasn’t going to demand it. Leda nodded pleasantly at the men and didn’t seem anywhere near fainting at the sight of male forearms bared to the air.
She hadn’t fainted when Jack kissed her, pressing her body against the door of the dining parlor in Swindon. She’d pressed back, fitting her hips to his, melting that delectable bosom against him, drowning him with her delicious mouth. A tight heat shot to his groin, pure want, as she bent to peer at the piles he’d made. The breeze molded her skirt to her legs and a sweet rump he wanted to curve his palm around.
Time to get a rein on his animal instincts. His daughter was present, for God’s sake.
“What’s all this?”
“I need to find the right mixture for my bricks. I’m testing whether this is brick earth.”
She leaned over and sniffed the mass of reddish earth. He loved her curiosity. He wanted to pull her into his arms and wrap his body around hers. Absorb her into him and hold her there. Keep her always.
“You’d think there would be experts about who would want to share their knowledge, but they’ve been hard to come by. The only one I’ve found who will talk to me is the bricklayer who helped Rolfe rebuild Heacham Hall a few years ago, but he can only advise me on technique, not the recipe. The masons here are more interested in cutting and using the local carrstone than in making bricks of their own. I’ve been in touch with some from my old apprenticeship program in Norwich, though, and they’ve helped somewhat.”
Leda put her hands on her hips, like a housekeeper surveying the items she would assemble into a feast.
“That’s brick earth?”
“I hope.” He scooped a handful of the clay soil. “Brick earth needs no mixing, can simply be tipped into molds and fired.I’ve heard they have it around here, but so far, all the areas I’ve tested have yielded what you saw the day we arrived. Failed experiments.”
He rolled the earth around in his hands, learning the texture. “You start with clay of the right consistency. Soft enough to be molded. A bit of give when you poke and prod it. You can feel when it’s right.”
Without hesitation Leda stripped off her leather gloves and sank her clean, dainty fingers into the red earth. “Indeed you can,” she murmured.
Jack swallowed. “The right mixture will have a trace of sand in it to give the right shape and texture. There needs to be a bit of lime as well to help the sand melt and fuse when fired. The earth around here is mostly clay, you can see, but with the chalk layer, it often contains its own lime and silica. I may need do nothing more than fill my molds and have all the bricks I could want.” As if anything in his life turned out as he wished.
