Page 20 of It Takes Two to Tumble
The morning post brought a letter in Phillip’s sister’s acrobatically spiraling hand. Usually, at the cost of a headache and a good deal of patience, Phillip could make out enough of a letter to pretend to understand its contents. Ernestine’s penmanship, however, refused to stay still. The letters jumped around the page and twirled out of his brain before he could corral them into anything resembling words. By the time he gave up, he had worn the paper soft around the edges.
Thinking to employ one of his usual tricks to enlist help, he set off in search of the land steward or an upper servant. This would conveniently take him into the bowels of the house where he would be unlikely to run into Sedgwick. He hadn’t been able to slot the previous evening’s events into the category of convenient pleasure. Their kisses had been too hungry, their caresses too gratuitous, their shared pleasure too pregnant with feeling for Phillip to be able to carry on in the way he generally did—which was to ignore that anything had happened in the first place.
Somewhere along the way, his thoughts muddled by memories of the previous night, he must have missed a turn, because he found himself in the kitchens, where the cook, her cheeks red with exertion and emotion, seemed to be taking out her frustrations on a piece of dough.
“Never heard of putting wine in a suet pudding, no matter what they do in London or anywhere else,” she muttered. “My mum worked five years in the kitchens at the Priory and never saw nobody put wine in any suet pudding.” She punctuated each sentence with a slap of the dough onto the worktable. She was plump and rosy, her cap and apron equally clean and white and starchy. Phillip realized he was being confronted with a variety of human he hadn’t encountered in years: an Englishwoman in her kitchen. He had summoned the cook the day of his arrival to order that the children be sent to bed without supper, but he hadn’t yet been to the kitchens.
Phillip cleared his throat and the woman jumped backward, nearly dropping her abused ball of dough.
“Ooh,” she said, dragging the sound out to several syllables of vexation. “It’s like working in a madhouse, people coming in at all hours, stealing your pies and telling you how to make your puddings.”
“I do beg your pardon,” Phillip said, feeling genuinely remorseful. He knew better than to interrupt servants at their work. “I’m—”
“If you’re after a taste of the damson tart, yonder pie-thieving hellion—” she gestured with a floury hand towards the garden “—has already run off with it.” Phillip gathered that “yonder hellion” was meant to refer to Jamie. Her imperious air made sense: this was her domain, and she ruled it with an authority as absolute as his over thePatroclus. He knew a rush of fellow feeling for this young woman whose sensibilities about puddings had been challenged. “And what I say is that if plain suet pudding was good enough for Sir Humphrey, and he a baronet, then it’s good enough for you.”
“Quite,” Phillip replied in what he hoped was a conciliatory tone. “Mrs. Morris, is it? Were you Sir Humphrey’s cook?”
She looked at him as if he were dim. “He’s been dead these three years, and if you think I look old enough to have been his cook, then it’s only because the last two months working here have tried my soul, they have.” She was, Phillip realized, scarcely more than a girl. Twenty at the utmost. He wondered if the “Mrs.” was simply there by custom or if there could possibly be a Mr. Morris on the premises. “My da owns the Blue Boar in Keswick, don’t he. And my mum was Lady Easterbrook’s cook before she married my da. If you want puddings finer than what was good enough for Lady Easterbrook and what’s served at the Blue Boar, you can hire a grand London cook, and she’ll quit after two days once she realizes she’s cooking for a pack of bedlamites.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Phillip said hastily.
“And that old witch Mrs. Winston can keep her ideas about suet pudding—”
“Quite,” Phillip agreed, trying to forestall any further complaints on this topic. “Last night’s mutton was most competently prepared,” he said.
She stared at him. “That supposed to be a compliment? All right, then. Thank you. I suppose.” Then, in a more agreeable tone, “You can tell Mr. Sedgwick I’m making those lemon biscuits he fancies. Mr. Sedgwick, for all he’s a vicar, knows how to keep the twins out of mischief. Or at least too much mischief. Stands to reason, since he’s one of that old lunatic’s children.”
Phillip shook his head in confusion. “I don’t follow.”
“His father is the poet fellow who lives on the other side of Buttermere. Something Grange.”
Phillip had spent so little time at Barton Hall that it took him a while to figure out the girl’s meaning. “Good God. Alton Sedgwick is the vicar’s father? Didn’t he have two—” He cut himself off, realizing he couldn’t finish that sentence around a woman.
The girl had no such scruples. “Two wives!” she said in obvious delight. “He was actually married to Sedgwick’s mother, I think, but there was a French lady too. Mrs. Winston says he’s a very respected poet, for all his peculiarities,” she said, in the tone of a person who doesn’t care overmuch for poets, respected or otherwise. “Mrs. Winston also says he’s settled into a quiet sort of life these days and hasn’t gotten into anything too shocking lately.” She deftly turned the dough into a bowl and covered it with a towel before setting it near the hearth. “And the vicar is a good man,” she said, pointing her finger at Phillip as if he had suggested otherwise. “Never heard a whisper against him. He’s going to marry Miss Crawford before the end of the summer, and she’s as respectable a young lady as you’ll find within twenty leagues of Kirkby Barton.”
“Miss Crawford,” Phillip repeated. “I hadn’t realized he was to marry.” But of course he was. Vicars tended to arrive on the scene already married, in Phillip’s limited experience. He shouldn’t be surprised. Perhaps Sedgwick liked men and women equally—it happened, he knew. Even McCarthy had been known to bed women when they were in port.
“She was a niece, or maybe a cousin, of old Sir Humphrey. He was friends with the vicar’s father and took a shine to Mr. Sedgwick when he was a lad. Mrs. Winston says Sir Humphrey saw which way the wind blew and fixed Mr. Sedgwick up with his post at St. Aelred’s to make sure that his niece would marry a man with a decent income.”
“Ah,” Phillip said, his voice strained. “An advantageous match.”
“I suppose,” the cook said with a shrug, as if she didn’t deign to comment on the merits of the vicar’s marriage. “If you ask me, none of the Easterbrooks are the sort to give away anything without a fair price, but it’s not my place to judge, or that’s what Mrs. Winston says. Whichever way it happened, Mr. Sedgwick has St. Aelred’s and Miss Crawford has Mr. Sedgwick, and now you know as much as I do.”
Phillip tried to take all this in. “While I’m here,” he said casually, “would you mind reading me this letter?” He had noticed a book open on the worktable, likely a cookery book, so he knew the girl could read at least a little. “My spectacles have gone missing and I don’t want to waste a day going into Carlisle to be fitted for a new pair when the old ones might yet turn up.” He was talking too much. Better to hand the paper over to the cook, so that’s what he did.
The girl took Ernestine’s fine paper in her plump, floury hands and read the letter aloud with only the slightest hesitancy over some of the more florid language. The letter was, as Phillip expected, largely irrelevant—a stream of apologies for having fled Barton Hall in advance of his arrival, mingled with a stream of invectives against the children’s wicked ways. He might as well have tossed it into the fire unread, but of course he couldn’t have known that.
Phillip felt old familiar tendrils of shame curl around his insides at the sight of this girl, a common servant, the daughter of an innkeeper and a cook, mastering a skill he hadn’t and couldn’t and never would. On his ship, he knew how to arrange things so he’d never be called upon to read—he dictated, delegated, and when all else failed, simply ordered someone to read for him. Here, he felt like he’d be exposed at any moment as a fraud, not a real gentleman, not worthy of this house.
Those wisps of shame, flimsy and easily brushed aside on board a ship, took hold of him inside this house, the place where his father had made it all too clear that Phillip, illiterate and uneducable, was about as unworthy an heir as could be imagined. At sea, there was the comforting reminder that the Royal Navy did not promote fools or idiots to the rank of captain; the mere fact of his position was a reminder that he was competent, and there was always a task he could complete in order to reaffirm his value. Here, he had nothing to stop him slipping into a relentless eddy of drear and doubt.
He had a moment of landlocked panic, as if walls of earth and stone were closing in on him, and he desperately wanted to get back to sea.
Ben was stupidly surprised that the world was precisely the same as he had left it. The previous night, for all it threatened to set him on a course that was new and unknown, hadn’t changed the world outside his window.
He hadn’t thought something that felt so gentle and right could change everything. Twelve hours earlier he had been able to at least pretend that he was still clinging to all his old hopes and dreams. Twelve hours ago he at least thought himself an honest man.
Now, though. Now he was ruined.
