Page 56 of The Mad Baron's Bride
Leda’s eyes gleamed, the color capturing the endless blue gray of the sky and reflecting it back as violet. “I want to make a brick.”
“You’ll get soil on your hands.”
“I want tomakesomething.” She unfastened the button that wrapped one end of her spencer over her bodice. The cherry red brocade with its fur trim fell away. “I want to shape something with my own hands that will be useful. I want to build something thatlasts.”
Again he took that sharp blow to his chest. “That is exactly what I want.”
She pushed back the ruffles at the edge of her short sleeves. “Show me.”
“It sticks enough that you can simply make a ball with your hands.” He shaped and pulled a large handful of clay from his pile, about knee height.
“Not that pile,” he called as she went to a far mound. “That has to be sifted yet to shake out the pebbles.”
She bent and took from his pile, inhaling the scent of rich earth. “I love this smell.”
He loved that she was doing this, diving without a qualm into his world, his interests. He moved to the table he’d built of a few planks. “Then you press the earth into molds.”
He showed her, tamping the reddish clay into the wooden frame. He’d built these, too.
“It’s like bread dough,” she said, her voice lilting with delight. “You want it to have enough pull that you can coax and stretch it. If it’s stiff, you’ve teased it too much.”
He grinned at her, catching her enthusiasm, alight with it. This woman fired him like nothing else. “I suppose the same is true here. Too much lime, and the brick melts in the kiln. If the lime is not powdered enough, it will swell when moist and break the brick apart. It’s the rich red color that tells you the mix is right. Too much iron, and the bricks will be black or dark blue. They turn up yellowish, and you know they will shatter at the first blow.”
He showed her how to tamp the earth into the corners of the mold, then scrape the top flat. “If there is anything alkaline in your soil, like soda or potash, the bricks will twist and warp when you bake them. Any vegetation that works its way in will catch fire in the kiln. Pebbles will make your brick weak and porous. It will soak up moisture and crumble, or swell and break after the first frost.”
“There’s so much to account for.” Leda followed his example and scraped extra clay from her brick, leaving the top smooth and flat. “How does one ever find the right recipe?”
“Trial and error,” Jack said. “A great deal of it. Do you wish a pattern in your brick?”
She raised her eyebrows. “Might I?”
“There are many ways to dress a brick. You’ve seen them in town. Most of the time the mason breaks bricks in half to make that smooth facing. When the bricks alternate color, as you’ll see on some of the grander houses, that’s Flemish bond. You can carve lines into the facing side, or create all sorts of wonderful designs. The chimneys at Hampton Court Palace are an example. Once the substance of your brick is right.”
“I’ve never seen Hampton Court Palace,” Leda said. “I want a plain red brick. Simple and serviceable.”
He smiled, glancing at her from the corner of his eye. Nothing about Leda Wroth was simple or serviceable. She watched as he tapped the red clay out of the molds onto a plank that topped a wheeled hand cart parked alongside his table. Perfectly symmetrical they were, side by side. Evenly matched.
“I’ll fill this plank with bricks, then wheel them into the drying shed, which the men are building.” He nodded in their direction. “In some climes they let their bricks dry in the open air, but I wouldn’t dare that here. When the clay dries, we’ll stack them in the kiln.”
“And have sound, strong bricks for building,” she murmured.
“God willing.”
He handed her a rag, and she wiped her hands clean, digging under the nails to remove clay.
“You adore this,” she observed. “This is a passion for you.”
He opened his mouth to object—the wordpassiondidn’t fit him. He was not, never had been, passionate about anything.
He closed his lips on the denial, considering. He needed this to work, and he was more desperate than he allowed her to see. Masonry was his one skill, the trade he’d trained for. A tether to the life he’d had, and the future he’d been building before the black-edged letter reached his mother and a title he’d never thought of came along with it.
There was a world a baron was supposed to dwell in, he knew, a gentleman’s world of horses and hunts and card parties and debates in the House of Lords. But Jack only wanted this: the Norfolk countryside, a task that occupied his mind, something he could build with his bare hands. A safe home for his daughter, food on his table, an estate that yielded enough to keep everyone upon it alive.
A woman like this beside him, working with him. Standing here so lovely with the breeze blowing her gown against her curves, teasing dark locks from beneath her hat, her hand to her brow as she watched Muriel. She didn’t shiver in the cold or shrink from the sun. She played in the dirt with him, then rebuttoned her spencer, inspected her fingernails, and pulled on her gloves, reassembling her ladylike attire as if she’d never shed it. Not a veneer at all, but a sign of the grace that ran deep within her, and the easy way she adapted to any place, any circumstances.
“Will you clean yourself up, then?” she teased. “We oughtn’t show up filthy if we’re to call upon the Stylemans. They are quite the family in this area, I understand.”
Jack wiped his fingers and cleaned his nails while Leda went to the cart and pulled out several packets wrapped in oiled paper.
