Page 11 of It Takes Two to Tumble
“Thank you,” Ben said, taking the dish from his housekeeper’s hands and balancing it on a fence post, “but didn’t I tell you that you might as well have a holiday while I was up here at the hall?” Her daughter was married to a brewer in Keswick, and Ben quite clearly remembered suggesting that Mrs. Winston pay a visit while her services weren’t required at the vicarage.
Mrs. Winston snorted. “As if I’d leave you and Franny Morris to see to the captain. She may know how to dress a joint, or she may not, but she doesn’t know how things ought to be in a gentleman’s house. And as for you...” She looked at Ben and shook her head in plain sorrow.
“Mrs. Morris is a very good cook.” Mrs. Winston shot him an aggrieved glance. “Not as good as you,” Ben hastily added.
“In any event, the hedgerow behind the church has more gooseberries than I know what to do with, so might as well put them to good use. Make sure that tart finds its way onto the captain’s supper table. And I brought another one for your father.” She balanced this dish on top of the other and wiped her hands on her apron.
“For my father?” Ben repeated stupidly. “Why?”
“Doesn’t he eat pie?” she asked, a hand on her hip.
“Well, yes, but—”
“Then take it to him. Your knees are twenty years younger than mine, so you can stand the walk better than I can.” Then, in a less annoyed tone, “Always did have a sweet tooth, your father.”
Ben wanted to know how Mrs. Winston knew anything of Alton Sedgwick, who surely didn’t number village housekeepers among his acquaintances. He preferred lunatic aristocrats and opium-addicted paupers but not much in the way of a happy medium. But before he could think of how to delicately frame the question, she produced a jar from her apron.
“Jam for the Farleighs. I suppose you’ll be going up there too?”
“Naturally. Do you have any other errands you require of me before I attend to my duties?” he asked, feigning more irritation than he felt.
“Hmmph,” she said, and stomped back towards the village.
Ben attempted to gather the two pie tins and the jar of jam into his arms and safely convey them into the house.
“I’ll help,” said a small voice. It was Jamie, and he seemed almost entirely composed of dirt.
“Do sweets summon you out of thin air, I wonder? Yes, take this dish, but you’ll have to wait until supper to have any. Which, you’ll notice, means you need to attend supper.”
“Doesn’t really,” Jamie said. “I can steal some later on.” He was honest, if nothing else.
“As a personal favor, please come to supper. If your father attempts to do anything drastic, I’ll help as best I can, but we need to show him that we’re all going on swimmingly and don’t need to be ordered about.”
Ben thought of Captain Dacre’s demeanor in the barnyard that morning, a reluctant good humor so plainly at war with the urge to be cold and imperious. Dacre hadn’t known what to do with himself, and Ben had seen it, and felt the power of it.
He had also felt Dacre’s gaze on him, heavy with an intent that Ben might even have understood without the context of last night’s confessions. He had felt the power of that too. He had felt the heat of that gaze on every inch of his skin, and he had been tempted to see what might have happened if he had stepped forward. But he hadn’t, and he wouldn’t, not with Dacre, not with anyone. He wasn’t ashamed of the dark desires that plagued him when he couldn’t sleep; Ben had never seen the point of shame and hair shirts. Maybe it was his unconventional upbringing, or maybe he had been lucky to meet men at university whose ideas of sin and salvation would have been thought blasphemous a generation earlier, but his susceptibility to men had always seemed a minor irritation, like a tendency to faint at the sight of blood, rather than anything concerning his soul. Nothing to worry overmuch about, especially if one avoided the situation in the first place. There wasn’t going to be any avoiding Captain Dacre, though. They’d be thrown together for the remainder of his leave.
Ben could not afford a deviation from the path he had chosen; his future and his peace of mind required a home, a family, a sense of permanence and certainty that he craved with a bone-deep longing. There was no place for heated gazes or tempting thoughts in his future, and he was determined to be absolutely content with that.
Chapter Six
Dinner went as well as could be expected, which was to say it was just this side of a nightmare.
With a bit of judicious bribery, Ben had gotten the children to the table. But once there, they had all three steadfastly refused to speak English. This was a strategy they had used with some success in tormenting former tutors. During the first few days of Ben’s residence at the hall, the children spoke French with one another until it was clear that Ben wasn’t going to force them to speak English. He understood enough French to feel confident that they weren’t summoning devils or plotting treason, so he thought that if they wanted to practice the language together, it basically counted as a French lesson, and he couldn’t complain. Of course he wasn’t fool enough to let them know that he spoke any French. That would have utterly ruined their fun and likely inspired them to greater feats of mischief in their campaign to alienate him.
Their father was evidently not of the same mind.
Peggy was cheerfully and revoltingly describing the events that transpired after she and Jamie gorged themselves on green apples, when Captain Dacre interrupted. “Speak English, Margaret,” he said, making no effort to conceal his frustration. “And do confine your conversation to more genteel topics.”
Ben suppressed a groan as the children exchanged wary looks. Really, Captain Dacre was dedicated to setting his children against him. Ben dug around in his coat pocket for a stub of pencil and a scrap of paper, and covertly scribbled a note to the captain under the table:For heaven’s sake, pretend not to speak French.He folded it into a compact square and slid his hand along the table until his hand touched the captain’s, tucking the note under the other man’s palm.
He thought he did a fairly good job of ignoring the thrill that ran up his arm at the contact. Ben had no business feeling an attraction to this man.
He tried to push those thoughts to the side as he always did, something to acknowledge only when he could no longer avoid it. That, he was fairly sure, was what a man was supposed to do with any lustful inclinations, regardless of their object: ignore them in the way a sloppy housekeeper might ignore ashes in the grate, pretending they weren’t there until their presence made it impossible to get anything else done. And then he indulged in a fit of barely satisfying pleasure before returning to his safe, predictable, orderly life.
At the slight touch of their hands, the captain went very still. Which was to say, even more stonily rigid than he had been before. But then, noticing the tightly folded square of paper beneath his hand, he did the stupidest thing imaginable. He tucked it into his breast pocket without even bothering to unfold it, let alone read it. Dolt. Ben gritted his teeth. It was a miracle England had defeated Napoleon if men with so little sense of strategy were in charge of the navy. That idiocy quelled Ben’s improper thoughts, however.
“You look cross, Mr. Sedgwick,” Jamie said.
