Page 32 of The Mad Baron's Bride
“I’ll make a cake if you find a handful, but you might pull some greens for our dinner. The rhubarb’s at its best now, and the strawberries just coming on.” She winked at Leda. “Mrs. Wroth always did like her strawberries.”
“It feels so strange. Calling you Mrs. Wroth,” Betsey remarked, handing Leda a basket from a table near the hearth. “With Ives I call you Mrs. Toplady, as you said to.”
“I’ve been Mrs. Wroth so long that I’ve forgotten I was ever Mrs. Toplady,” Leda said. “When I hear the name now, it gives me shivers.”
She paused. “Someone at the Angel knew me, or thought he knew me. And I know him, though for the life of me I can’t recall how.”
She looked back and forth between the two women. Mrs. Blake deftly placed the cooking frame in the hearth, then pulled her roasting pans from a cupboard. Betsey tied the strings of her cloak at her throat, her mouth turning down. It was hard to believe they were all eight years older, and these women so much the same. Only Leda had changed from the inside out.
“If you forget, maybe that’s a mercy,” Mrs. Blake remarked, her cheeks pinkening as she poked the fire to life.
“But I might also make a mistake,” Leda said. “I don’t know if Toplady was looking for me, precisely. People come to Bath for the waters and the society. But if he finds me—how long till he finds you? And then what happens? We chose this place because we thought you would be safe. That Ives would be safe.”
“And he will be, until he comes of age and can claim his birthright.” Mrs. Blake straightened to stare at Leda. “That was always the plan, aye?”
Leda hesitated. Then she nodded and followed Betsey outside.
From outside, the cottage looked so neat, the wattle and daub freshly whitened, the thatch of the roof secure around a gently smoking chimney. A field of corn on one side, a stand of tall trees on the other, with the river and other houses not far away, this small plot of land seemed a corner of Arcadia. Blooming fruit trees behind the house promised a summer’s supply of apples, pears, and damsons. Bushes lining a masonry wall along one edge of the garden blossomed with currants and raspberries. A blackthorn tree dangled clutches of tiny sloes.
A pain pierced Leda’s chest, as if a spade dug beneath her ribs and turned. What a pleasant thing this was, to step out one’s own door into one’s garden and orchard. To choose the food that would appear on the table for a dinner shared with family, or the closest thing to family that she had.
Across the yard, Ives led Brancaster on a tour of the hens, introducing each one and explaining her personality and heritage. Brancaster listened, asking serious questions, which Ives answered with authority.
The strange serpent turned and writhed in her breast. Brancaster’s attention to the boy so far beneath him in stationraised a vein of feeling, sad and sweet together, that she couldn’t identify.
And the boy himself. Looking at him tapped a wave of bittersweet regret. There was no doubting his paternity, with the sun gleaming in his black hair and bright eyes. In another version of her life, he might have been Leda’s child. She might have had a husband who was kind to her and they raised a child together, tending the land and home that in time they would turn over to him.
“He’s a fine boy,” Leda murmured.
Betsey answered with a fond smile. “Aye, that he is. Hale and sprack, and never a bellock from him about his chores.”
Leda turned to the woman, once a maid in her house, a woman who, for a year and a half, Leda had simply given orders and never bothered to know. “Did we do right? To keep you here? He should be in school.”
Betsey moved to the garden and tugged at a clump of purslane. “Where’s a school about, mum? The Moravians have a girl’s school over at East Tytherton, and there’s a Sunday school runs in Chippenham now and again.”
“I cannot afford a private tutor, I’m afraid, nor one of the public schools.” Leda stripped leaves from the burnet, not yet in flower, and placed them in her basket. “But there is a Free School in Chippenham, and in Gloucester the Crypt School or Sir Thomas Rich’s. I’ve made inquiries.”
Betsey glanced at her son as if already anxious to lose him. “I suppose he’ll need schooling. If he’s to inherit his father’s estate.”
“If that is what you wish, Betsey. This is your life, and your son.”
Panic squeezed Leda’s heart in a cold fist. It was her life as well. Her penance. She had crafted a new identity on the modelof the woman she wished to be, but she could never walk away from what she’d done. Or the people who’d been hurt by it.
Betsey tore roughly at the tops of beetroot, frowning. “’Tis what it’s all for, isn’t it? The reason you were to claim him as yours. So he could have what his father would deny him.” Her voice shook.
Leda held quiet, letting Betsey compose herself. She’d forgotten, in the clutch of her own nightmares about her marriage, that Betsey had suffered, too.
And she’d known, for the ruse to succeed, she would have to deal with Toplady someday. She’d always known.
“That plan was rather hastily revised, as we know. You came here in a panic, all of you, while I was—well. Let us say, incapacitated. We have time to think now. To do what’s best for you all.”
Betsey gave a cucumber vine a savage twist, freeing the tender fruit. “I want to do it. I want to die with my son in that house, living grand as a gentleman. His rotter of a father owes him that.”
Leda fingered the small pin of a bean, not yet ready to pick. “He ought to have had it from the start, but I never accounted for Eustace. My husband’s nephew was very eager to claim his inheritance, wasn’t he? And to have me committed to the madhouse.” Leda stared at the garden beds, a bright green blur.
Betsey straightened and narrowed her eyes. “Mum. You didn’t do what he said. None of us believe that.”
“Hedoes. The judge did,” Leda whispered. She caught her breath as a new thought struck her. “What if Eustace uses that to challenge our claim? That I am…mad. He always claimed…”
