Page 15 of It Takes Two to Tumble
The twins giggled, but then Jamie caught sight of Phillip, nudged his sister, and the two of them dropped their rakes and vanished into the stables. He heard rustling and creaking and supposed they were hiding in the loft. Ned, looking over at the commotion, saw his father and immediately stiffened.
“Hullo!” Sedgwick called, waving his hand and smiling like an idiot, like someone who was genuinely glad to see him. Liar. Phillip knew it was all for the children’s benefit, that Sedgwick was behaving with exaggerated friendliness so the children might follow his lead. This only made Phillip resent the man more. The vicar seemed to have his own personal ray of sunshine following him about, casting light in his path and drawing people to him, while Phillip was ever under a storm cloud.
“Good morning,” he said tightly.
“Good day, Captain Dacre. Did you come to assist with our history lesson?” the vicar asked with a smile that let Phillip see a mouthful of teeth.
Phillip very nearly responded that as far as history lessons went, this was perhaps the least adequate he had ever conceived of. A list of monarchs—an incomplete list of monarchs, no less—without any dates or events. Even Phillip had managed to learn more than that at school, not that he could remember any of it now. Not that he’d want to. For a moment he questioned the wisdom of expecting his young children to master facts he had forgotten two decades since, but then thought better of it. Children were supposed to learn these things, and it wasn’t for Phillip—or the vicar, damn him—to decide single-handedly what children were and weren’t supposed to do.
Phillip couldn’t believe he was going to put his trust in a man who had straw in his hair, a foal nuzzling his pocket, and no knowledge of the—ha!
“It’s the Great Northern War,” Phillip said in triumph. “The one that didn’t involve France during the period you were discussing.”
“Oh, there’s a good half dozen,” Sedgwick said airily. “All those dos involving the Dutch and the Portuguese, to start with. Peg will look it up and by dinner she’ll know the belligerents and the casus belli for all of them. And then she’ll tell the rest of us and we’ll all be the wiser. She’s a wizard with that sort of thing.”
Phillip now felt very stupid, first for not knowing all the Dutch wars and second for not having grasped that the vicar had manipulated the twins into doing the research on their own. “Ah,” was all he said. “And what of Ned?”
“Who do you think told me about all those Dutch wars in the first place?” the vicar said cheerfully. He had too many freckles, and he was only going to get more if he stood out here bareheaded. “Also, he’s been working with Mr. Smythe on estate matters. Mr. Smythe has a passion for drains and is cultivating in Ned a proper appreciation for them as well.”
This was, in substance, unobjectionable. Phillip was rummaging through his brain in search of some objection, and came up empty-handed. “I thought you’d be at church this morning,” he said instead. “It’s Sunday.”
“It’s hardly eight o’clock. But I ought to go clean up, I suppose,” he said, glancing sheepishly down at his clothes. “Can’t be trailing hay into the church, can I? If you’re looking for a way to amuse the children, promise to read themRobinson Crusoeat teatime.”
Fat chance of that. “You’re going?” Phillip asked, frowning. “You don’t take them with you?”
“You can manage it on your own,” Sedgwick said, his cheerfulness undimmed. And then he walked into the house.Whistling.
By the time the clock struck noon, Ben had hung up his cassock and put on a sturdy pair of boots to walk the distance to Fellside Grange.
He made the journey as seldom as possible. He had a litany of excuses—he didn’t like to borrow a horse to go over such uneven ground, his duties kept him near the parish, he hated to intrude on his father without warning—but the truth was that he much preferred life on this side of the lake.
His parishioners might hear tales of his father’s doings, but nobody repeated a word to him. After all, there was nothing he could do. He had spent most of his life trying to get his father to act reasonably—respectability and responsibility were beyond hope, but the man could have aspired to reason—and failed at every turn.
It was a hot day, and Ben shed his coat before he had gotten a quarter of the way around the lake. The path was steep in places, rocky in others, and familiar throughout. It was much easier to reach the grange from the other side, from Keswick or wherever his father’s many admirers disembarked from the stagecoaches they had taken to visit the old man. So very many admirers. And creditors, acolytes, partners in failed business ventures, spurned lovers, illegitimate children, legitimate children, and prospective lovers.
The grange had seldom been empty.
He paused halfway up the crag, in a place where a few convenient boulders made a place to look down at the lake and eat the sandwich Mrs. Winston had wrapped for him. He had always felt that at this elevation everything looked manageable. His father had written a dozen or so poems about the wild beauty of the lakes and mountains, but for Ben, all the wildness was confined indoors. Out here, high above the village, Ben could very well believe that all he had to do was walk the distance from the grange to the orderly white buildings of Kirkby Barton and find safety.
Which wasn’t to say that his father’s house was precisely unsafe. Everyone was perfectly kind. He might have had to forage in the woods for mushrooms to eat and the roof might have perpetually leaked in the attic room he shared with his brothers, but nobody wanted to harm him, at least. The general sentiment among Alton Sedgwick’s disciples was that the Sedgwick children were beautiful and picturesque, much like the sheep that dotted the hills. Ben and his brothers had a handful of mortifying poems written about them, not that anyone had seen fit to ask for their permission.
Alton Sedgwick hadn’t had much to do with his children beyond siring them and sometimes conscripting one of his friends to serve as occasional tutor. But none of Ben’s resentment had to do with that. What fueled Ben’s bitterness was how little his father had prepared them to live in any way other than his own mode of living—scrounging, scraping, borrowing, occasionally cheating. If any of the Sedgwick boys wanted a more commonplace life, it had been up to them to figure it out on their own.
He finished his sandwich, drained his flask of cider, and continued up the hill until the path curved and he saw Fellside Grange, with its ivy-covered gray stone and the mullioned windows that were scattered across the front with no apparent rhyme or reason. He hesitated there, wanting to enjoy the last few moments of the house still seeming benign, wanting to preserve his sanity for that extra half minute.
His father answered the door himself, and then seemed surprised to find a person standing on his doorstep, as if he had forgotten how doors and knocking worked.
“Father,” Ben said.
“Good God, is that you, Benedict?”
Ben wanted to protest that he didn’t visit so very seldom—he had been here twice since Easter, he was quite certain. Instead he stepped into the house and pasted on the smile he used when the sexton was being difficult. “My housekeeper made you a tart.” He produced the dish from his satchel and placed it on top of a stack of books, which seemed the only available flat surface. “So I thought I’d pay a visit.”
“I’m glad you did,” Ben’s father said. “I’m quite alone.” He hated being alone; after all, he had written an entire sonnet on the theme of solitude. “Norton and his—ah—lady friend have gone traipsing through the hills and I haven’t seen them since last night.”
Ben widened his eyes in alarm. “Do you need help assembling a search party, Father?”
“A what? No, no, they’re sleeping beneath the stars, my boy. And stop calling me Father. You know I can’t stand it.” Ben did know, which might have partly been why he reverted to using the title. “Now sit down and we’ll see if we can find something to feed you with.”
