Page 16 of It Takes Two to Tumble
“You look well,” Ben said when they were settled in the book room, eating a random assortment of fruits. Alton Sedgwick was only fifty, and he didn’t even look that old despite the bushy gray beard he had allowed to grow. Ben supposed that blithe indifference to everyone’s well-being other than one’s own let a man sleep well at night. He tried to sweep aside that uncharitable thought. It wasn’t that his father didn’t care, he told himself, but that he had his own notion of what was worth caring about. His own frustrating, impossible, largely fictitious notion of what mattered.
“Are you still marrying that girl?” his father asked.
“Alice Crawford. Yes. Later this summer.”
His father narrowed his eyes. “Then there’s still time for me to tell you what I think.”
“You’ve already done so.” Ben sighed. “Please spare yourself the trouble.”And spare me the embarrassment, he wanted to add, but that wouldn’t have mattered. Alton Sedgwick was beyond such mundane concerns as embarrassment. He was also beyond concerns like imprisonment, defrocking and pillorying. “Please tell me the servants are out,” Ben said quickly, before his father could start in.
“Servants?” he asked, as if the concept hadn’t occurred to him. “The woman isn’t here today. She comes in when she comes in.” He gestured in a direction Ben supposed was the direction from whence “the woman” came when the spirit moved her to do so. He wondered if she was motivated by wages, more esoteric forms of remuneration, or sheer pity for a dotty old man. “You cannot shackle yourself for life to a person you don’t love.”
“I do love Miss Crawford,” Ben said evenly. Truthfully.
“You’re being deliberately obtuse. If you wish to hear a lecture on the different varieties of love, I can hold forth—”
“That won’t be necessary.”
“I didn’t think so. You cannot marry someone you don’t wish to take to bed.”
Ben winced at this frank speech. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t wish to take advice on this topic from a man who believed he could live as man and wife with more than one woman at a time,” he said primly, and then immediately regretted it.
Alton Sedgwick waved his hand dismissively. “That arrangement suited me and your mother and dear Annette perfectly fine.” He was right, of course; Ben wished he could have cast his father as a seducer and betrayer of innocent women, but the three of them had been as happy as larks with their arrangement. “Better than your marriage will suit either you or Miss Crawford.”
“You can’t know that.”
“Does she understand this to be a marriage of convenience? Or does she think she’s marrying a man who might have a use for her in his bed?”
“I didn’t come all this way to be lectured by my father about what I do or don’t do in my bed. I don’t know why you’re so certain my marrying Miss Crawford would be any different from any other marriage.”
“Because you and I both know what I caught you doing in the hayloft with Robbie Briggs.”
Ben sighed. The hayloft incident had been a source of extreme mortification, mainly because his father had taken it as an opportunity to tell sixteen-year-old Ben about the Greeks. Ben had wanted to sink into the earth, not have his private matters become the subject of his father’s vague musings. He supposed his father’s reaction had been better than what he might have expected from a more conventional parent, but it had been embarrassing in its own way. “For all you know I sneak into haylofts with women all the time,” he said, trying to lighten the conversation.
“Do you?” his father said with a skeptically raised eyebrow.
“Of course not. I’m a clergyman.”
“That’s a subject for another day.” Alton Sedgwick did not have much use for the Church of England.
“I got a letter from Hartley,” Ben said, trying to change the subject. “He says the heat in London is becoming unbearable and he might visit us this month.” Hartley was the brother nearest to Ben in age. His godfather, Sir Humphrey Easterbrook, had left him a bequest that amounted to what Ben understood to be a modest competence. Ben winced at the realization that Hartley’s inheritance, however small, must be more fuel for Martin’s grudge against the Sedgwicks.
“What about Will?”
Ben’s fingers tightened around his mug of cider. “It’s rather hard to say. His letters... meander. But I’ve had letters from Percival and Francis.” Ben’s youngest brothers were both training to become solicitors, no thanks to their father.
His father furrowed his brow, as if trying to recall who Percival and Francis were and why they mattered. Ben resisted the urge to draw a family tree.
“At any rate, most of your children are doing well.”
“Debatable,” his father said, frowning. “I still don’t like this marriage.”
“Happily, it isn’t up to you.” Ben didn’t need his father’s approval, and in fact was fairly certain that this father’s disapproval in itself constituted a reason to go forward with any plan.
The sun was lower in the sky but still shining brightly as Ben made his way down the hill. He bypassed the village and headed directly to Barton Hall, and at no point during the trip down did the landscape arrange itself into something that looked manageable and orderly.
Chapter Eight
Phillip had experienced summers on all seven seas and in cities circling the globe, and very few at Barton Hall, so he was surprised that the combination of scents in the air registered in his mind as precisely what summer ought to smell like. There were roses, of course, but also other flowers the names of which he’d never bothered to learn, knowing he’d only leave before the next time they bloomed. A soft breeze blew in across the lake after wafting over fields of clover. Somewhere in there were less pretty smells—sheep and manure and sweat—but they only threw the rest of it into relief.
