Page 73 of The Mad Baron's Bride
“Aye, mum. I hear them singing at dusk. A sight we’ve never had in Wiltshire, I do say. Will the young ladies help me find raspberries?” She held out a pair of small baskets.
Muriel took hers cautiously, Ellinore with a cordial, “Of course.” The three of them turned and walked along the sheltering wall of the back garden to the thicket of bushes near the orchard.
Leda wasn’t included, though she loved raspberries. Perhaps Grace thought Leda would spend her afternoon out again, making calls, and that was why she was not invited.
Leda dallied back to the house, which stood hunched in its red stone against the cool spring air. Away on the fringe of the sky, to the east, was a lightening, but Holme Hall would lay a while longer under clouds. Jack was around here somewhere, digging in random places about his land, testing the earth, testing if his experimental bricks could hold against strain and weather.
How lovely it would be to walk the beach with him, her hand in his, his firm body her shield against the wind, his deep voice speaking to her of the thoughts in his mind and heart.
Somehow she had no interest in visiting today and asking the families about for likely governess candidates.
Her heart tugged in her chest, like a sheep caught on a bramble bush. She wanted to stay with Jack.
Her footsteps echoed on the wooden stairs as she climbed to the first floor. She must be sensible. She could not stay and be governess herself, not after she’d been in his arms. She’d never resist him, even if she took a salary from his hands, and she could not set that example for the girls, could not conduct herself in such a fashion beneath his roof. She could not stay and be his mistress.
She could set herself up nearby, find some way to support herself, and then she could be his mistress. She wouldn’t care about talk. She would care only about being with him.
She would care, deeply, when the talk led to cuts for Ellinore and Muriel. When they were looked aslant in circles where they had the right, as the daughter and ward of a baron, to hold their heads high.
Leda set her cap on the dressing table, then the mermaid’s purse, and sat on the side of the bed with a sigh.
There was nothing left of Anne-Marie in the dressing table or in the room, unless she had chosen the deep green brocade for the curtains and the patterned rug for the floor. The small Sheraton dressing table with its satinwood inlay was bare of the personal trinkets Muriel had said her mother kept. Jack, or the servants, had swept the room clean of memory.
There was no art that gave her insight into the woman, either. No bridal portrait with a delicate glow, no wedding portrait of the couple, no lavish oil of a young mother doting on her infant. No samplers on the wall with trite marital versesor sentimental adages to bear her through the day. There was nothing of Anne-Marie here at all.
A hard edge dug into her hip and, with a huff of exasperation, Leda turned on it. The flaw in this mattress had chafed her on more than one night; she would have it out once and for all. She considered reaching for her sewing scissors to cut a slit in the fabric, but saw that a slit already existed. She thrust her hand inside, among the goose feathers, and jabbed her fingertip against a hard surface. A book, the wooden cover bound with leather.
She pulled it free. The front cover bore no words, only a floral design tooled into the brown calf. The flyleaf bore the declaration, in faded brown ink:Anne-Marie Waddelow. Her diary.
Astonished, Leda turned to the first page. It was dated the fourteenth of June, 1786.
Dear diary: Today my life begins. Today I met Bohamos.
Leda could not have stopped reading to save her life, even if she were intruding on the private thoughts of a dead woman. Anne-Marie was sixteen. She had never been more than a few miles outside Snettisham, save for the one time her father took her to Norwich to buy her fabric for her first evening gown. She knew of her parents’ hopes for her, beautiful as she was, their only and cherished child. She was restless and unhappy in her tiny town, when such places as London existed in the world.
And then a caravan came through the Peddars Way, on their seasonal circuit. There was a man among them, a real man, over a score of years, nothing like the green boys who blushed and stammered when they tried to speak to her. He wore a red scarf at his throat and had a scar by his brow from tumbling against the edge of his family’s caravan one day when he was a boy. He taught her how to fish in the River Ingol and how to catch plover with a weighted string. He taught her the names of theconstellations as they lay on their backs in the meadows on a bed of saxifrage.
He kissed me. And more. And I became stardust.
Yes.Leda thought of Jack.Yes, that is exactly how it feels.
She would have read the whole way through, pulling on the strings of Anne-Marie’s life for answers, but the singing came again from the nursery, low, mournful, lacking words.
He vows he loves me, and he knows I love him. But he is promised to a girl of his own kind. It will cost him his place in the family if he refuses. And he says I must marry my own kind also, a barbarian, an Englishman.
I never will. There will never be any man for me but Bohamos. Nothing about our love is wrong. And no child of our love can be wrong, either, no matter what the neighbors say. I will love him unto death.
A giggle broke the low hum of singing, and it broke Leda’s spell. She set the book on the dressing table and followed the siren’s call.
The girl sat on the window seat playing with Muriel’s doll. She was no ghost. She wore a small tucker and apron and had pushed off her shoes. A smear of jam marked the crest of her sweetly curved cheek. She might have been four or five, tiny, her face and frame turning from baby to girl.
She swooped the corn dolly through the air, crooning to it. Her voice had a closed-off sound to it, coming from her nose and far back in her throat. It was a sound Leda had heard from others in the madhouse, those who had stopped speaking, or had never spoken real words.
“Nanette?”
The child didn’t look at her, only continued her tuneless hum. Leda walked across the floor, the heels of her boots drumming the planks. The girl’s chin snapped up and her eyes flew wide.
This time, Leda wasn’t imagining things. The girl was as real as day, as solid as the bench beneath the window.
