Page 50 of It Takes Two to Tumble
“Somebodyhas to look after your father,” Mrs. Winston said, her hands on her hips.
“Looking after? Is that what we’re calling it?”
“None of your business is what I’m calling it,” she said.
“Diana,” the older Mr. Sedgwick said. “They’re all very testy today. This young scapegrace,” he said, indicating Jamie, “ran off and gave everyone a fright.”
“I step out for a quarter of an hour,” Mrs. Winston lamented, shaking her head.
“This is good jam,” Jamie said. “Are you going to make more with those plums?” He gestured at the basket on the housekeeper’s arm.
“Yes, but not for the likes of you.” But she put one of the greengages on the table before him.
“Quite right that it’s none of my business,” Ben said in measured tones. “Quite right. I wish you happy.”
“Benedict,” the older man said, “would you arrange for a license?”
“A license for what?”
“Marriage, of course.”
For a moment the room fell silent except for the sound of the dog’s wagging tail slapping the leg of the table.
Finally Ben spoke. “You and Mrs. Winston are getting married. The butcher’s boy and the baker’s daughter,” Ben murmured cryptically.
“We fell in love,” the older Mr. Sedgwick said with a shrug. “It happens.”
Ben bit his lip. “It dashed well does. Well. I can’t object. You’re both certainly of age. If you come to the church tomorrow morning, we’ll sort out the common license and perform the ceremony. No,” he added, “let’s say the day after tomorrow. Tomorrow I’m doing absolutely nothing.”
Phillip thought it was high time to leave the lovebirds alone. “Thank you so much for taking care of my son, Mr. Sedgwick,” he said, striving for solemnity. “I’ll always be grateful.” He grasped the older man’s hand and shook it firmly. At this close distance, he could see the resemblance between father and son: the same warm brown eyes and firm jaw. Phillip was struck by a pang at the idea that he wouldn’t get to see Ben’s hair fade to this dusty gray, his face become creased with lines.
Bollocks on that. He was going to do whatever it took to create a future where he and Ben could stay here together and could make some kind of life side by side.
He took Jamie’s hand, whistled for the dog, and looked directly at Ben when he said, “Gentlemen, let’s go home.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Ben knew it was a mistake to go back to Barton Hall. He knew he’d catch another of Phillip’s glances that seemed to say too much, that seemed to make promises that could never be kept. A part of Ben wanted to pretend, even just for a night, that the cold reality of their future didn’t exist; he wanted to shut his eyes to grim facts and only see the joy and beauty of things that never could be. Perhaps this was how his father lived, cultivating an almost honest blindness to the things he did not want to acknowledge. For the first time, Ben sympathized.
On the way down the hill, Phillip spoke to Jamie about what he referred to as “the trouble with our eyes.”
“Mr. Sedgwick and Ned are always saying I’m not stupid, but that’s what theywouldsay. You’re not stupid, though,” Jamie said, as if that settled the matter.
They talked about letters that did not behave as they ought, and instead crawled around the page, and in general both seemed quite delighted to have someone to talk to about their predicament. Ben tried to fall back, to give them some privacy, but each time he was beckoned closer, either by Phillip or Jamie or both.
Once, Phillip slid his hand through Ben’s arm, and they walked that way for several minutes, side by side, along a path Ben had walked hundreds of times. The setting sun filtered through leaf-heavy treetops, casting glinting, dappled light over everything before them.
There was a general air of rejoicing at Jamie’s safe return, and the prodigal son recounted the rather tame tale of his afternoon adventure. Peggy was quite put out, Ned exasperated, and Phillip rather too softhearted to send them all to bed at the proper hour. Even after Hartley had driven Alice back to the village, even after Mr. Walsh and Mrs. Howard had gone to bed, the children were treated with warm milk and anise biscuits in the nursery.
“Even odds Peggy turns up at your father’s house within the fortnight demanding her own jar of jam,” Phillip whispered.
They were sitting on the floor outside the nursery door, partly in an attempt to foil any attempted escapes, and partly because they had both more or less collapsed from exhaustion.
“Once rumor gets out that he has sweets and doesn’t make one do lessons, I daresay he’ll be overrun with urchins,” Ben said dryly. “The only question is whether he’ll even notice.”
“I’d venture Mrs. Winston will.” Phillip nudged Ben’s shoulder with his own.
After his initial surprise, Ben decided that the most remarkable aspect of his father’s connection with Mrs. Winston was the fact that he was bothering to marry her at all. But he knew that was unfair—his father had married his mother, and the only reason he hadn’t married Will’s mother was that it wouldn’t have been possible. Now that Ben knew something of love that didn’t align with other people’s expectations, he felt less inclined to judge his father. “I wish them happy. Mrs. Winston is practical and won’t let him spend all his money on brandy and calf-bound volumes of Greek poetry. And however negligent a father he was to me and my brothers, Mrs. Winston must be past the age where one has to worry about that.”
