Page 33 of The Mad Baron's Bride
Her throat closed as the old nightmare rose up, darkening her vision. The house in shadow, quiet as death, only the ticking of the case clock as she padded barefoot across the carpet. The blood dripping from her hands, soaked rust-brown into hergown. Nothing alive, nothing moving, save for her and the knife she held.
“Mum. Mrs. Wroth. Caledonia.” Leda snapped out of her trance to find Betsey before her, lightly shaking her arms. “Gor, you gave me a turn. Are you poorly?”
“No, just muddled for a moment.” Leda gripped the other woman’s forearms. “I promise you, I am not out of my mind.”
“None of us believed you were, even when you went to that place.” Betsey turned to examining peas. “Though how could we blame you, not us that’d seed what you went through. ’Twas a scramble setting up here at first,” she added, “but now we muggle along the three of us. Watching Ives grow.”
Waiting for the day of reckoning, Leda thought, then realized she’d spoken aloud when Betsey nodded.
“Aye. When that old garley-guts mucker gets his due. And the nephew, too.”
Leda laughed at her friend’s savage tone and blinked her eyes quickly to clear them. “I shall be proud to visit you both at the Hall when that day comes.”
“Nay, mum, you’ll live there in splendor too, won’t you? As his mother?”
“That is your right, Betsey. I am only his mother to the world; you are his mother in truth. Unless you find some handsome man to set up your own household.” She winked.
Betsey loosed a yip of merriment. “Get on, you! We’ll all of us live off the lad, like three harpies, vexing him to keep us in style, as merry as the day is long.”
Leda nodded, the twinge in her chest pulling again. She wanted that. Lady Plume had softened her, spoiled her, smoothed out the rough, ragged marks that years of despair had left on Leda’s soul. She could spend her twilight years in company, in a warm household filled with laughter, ruled not bythe whims of a fickle employer but the care of children and one day grandchildren. Not of her own body, but close enough.
She swallowed the lump growing in her throat. “It’s been so long since I’ve been in a garden, Betsey. Do I take the outer leaves of the Silesia lettuce, or pluck it whole?”
“Here, Mother. I picked these for you. Them’s gillyflowers.”
Leda blinked at the cluster of wildly pink blooms with their feathery petals. Ives watched her with an anxious expression.
“Why, thank you, Master Ives. These are beautiful. You would say ‘They are’ gillyflowers, but the thought is lovely nevertheless.” She took the bouquet from him with a heartfelt smile. “And how lovely to hear you call me mother.” The word felt as strange on her lips as it had sounded on the boy’s.
Jack studied them closely, his eyes moving back and forth. Did he see there was no resemblance, no sign Ives bore her blood? Would a magistrate see the same?
“You’re to pick the green gooseberries for a pudding, and get them as ripe as you can find,” Betsey advised, handing Ives a basket. She faltered when she glanced at Brancaster. “Your lordship may do as he pleases.”
Jack took the basket. “I’ll hold the basket and you fill it,” he suggested to Ives. “Can you believe I’ve never tasted a gooseberry?”
“Don’t eat ’em raw!” Ives advised, leading his new friend to the bushes draping the garden walls and forming a stand beneath the canopy of trees. “They’ll taste fine in a pudding. The currants ain’t ripe yet, neither.”
“Are not ripe yet, either,” Jack murmured, and Ives dutifully parroted the correct speech before continuing his lecture on what they might and might not eat.
Leda tried to decipher the look Brancaster flashed her and could not. An English lord, a peer of the realm, the most intriguing man she had ever met, picking gooseberries in acottage garden. Beside the bastard son of a man dead in his prime, a boy being raised as a pauper in rural Wiltshire.
The bastard child Leda meant to pass off as a gentleman and a gentleman’s heir, no matter what it cost her to make the lie real.
Eustace Toplady was looking for him. For her. She knew it in her bones the way she had known, when her parents introduced him as her husband to be, that Bertram Toplady was cruel. And she feared his nephew might be even crueler.
She and Betsey took their gatherings inside to help Mrs. Blake prepare the dinner. Leda laid the table with their best cloth and arranged the gillyflowers in a vase in the center. Betsey passed over the pewter dishes and brought out the tin-glazed earthenware and pewter cutlery for the table, giving the elaborately painted faience plate to Brancaster. “Our one fancy plate,” she said proudly. “Le—Mrs. Wroth sent it us a bit ago.”
“And thank goodness it wasn’t broken in the mail.” Leda set the table. “Lady Plume has asked me once or twice who my friends are in Wiltshire, as she knows I lived in Gloucestershire, but thankfully she is not too curious.” She flicked a glance at Brancaster, who had come inside with Ives to deliver gooseberries. “One of her many kindnesses to me, I should add.”
“Let me help.” Brancaster went to the hearth, where Mrs. Blake was wrestling a pan of roast birds in one hand and a stewpot in the other. She gave him a grateful smile as he wrapped his hands in a rag and took the stewpot.
“Your sprawny’s a good one, to be sure,” Mrs. Blake said to Leda.
Leda laid out the pewter spoons. “He is not my sweetheart.”
“That is interesting brick in your hearth,” Brancaster remarked. “I haven’t seen that red around here.”
“’Tis made here in Kellaways, or close about,” Mrs. Blake said. “You’ll see it in many a kitchen.”
