Page 46 of A Delicate Deception
Dearest Amelia,
I’ve gotten the post and am now the head engineer of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, despite having sat through the interview with a dog asleep at my feet. Look forward to my building a scale model of how one goes about laying a road over a bottomless pit.
I spent the morning inspecting the new whitewashing at the house I hired the last time I was in town. The house is neat and clean, with flowered wallpaper in the dining parlor and a tidy nursery for Leontine at the top of the stairs. There are no mysterious noises in the dead of night, no creaking floorboards, no leaks, no damp, no hedgehogs. I should be quite pleased. I can’t understand why I find the place entirely unlivable.
That’s a lie. I know why I find it unlivable, and it’s because I can’t quite imagine you here. I’d ask you to tell me this is merely a failure of imagination on my part, but we both know it isn’t.
Yours ever,
Sydney
13 September, 1824
Dearest Amelia,
Damn it, I went about that all wrong. What I’m asking is—oh, never mind, there’s a reason this sort of thing is done in person, isn’t there?
S
Chapter Nineteen
As Sydney descended from the coach at the George and Dragon in Bakewell, he felt that he was in a strange in-between space, straddling two separate lives, two different versions of himself, and he didn’t want to choose between them. He wanted to live in this liminal state, like dusk or dawn, neither here nor there, but temporary, transient, never quite real.
He tried to imagine Amelia as his wife. That was what he had been getting at in his last letter, unhinged and illiterate as it was. There really was only one thing to do with a person one loved, and that was marry them. Well, unless they didn’t want to marry you, in which case you left them in peace. And this was all supposing one was legally able to marry the object of one’s affections—he supposed the case would alter if he and Amelia had been of the same gender. But the fact was that they were both free to marry, and fond of one another, and Sydney was conventional enough to think this settled the matter. Except, he was starting to suspect that it didn’t. Maybe they didn’t need to let convention settle their fates for them.
He readjusted his satchel across his chest as he passed the stile and made his way along the lane towards Crossbrook Cottage. The only time he had ever proceeded beyond the gate was when he attempted to apologize to her, and he had been too angry and ashamed to get a good look at the place. It wasn’t a proper cottage, he saw at once, but what had once been a farmhouse or a small manor house. It was made of the pale honey-colored limestone that was common in the area. Morning glories climbed up one wall, and the path to the door led through an artfully chaotic flower garden. Sydney smiled to himself as he realized that this was exactly what a pair of gently-reared London ladies would fancy as their country cottage. He peered around the back of the cottage and saw a small stable, a neatly trellised kitchen garden, a well with what looked like a new pump, and outbuildings that were decorously screened by a shrubbery. Yes, this was the precise level of rustication that he expected from Amelia Allenby and Georgiana Russell. He imagined Amelia choosing this house—near her friends, accessible by good roads, modern roof, newly glazed windows. He really wanted a closer look at that pump handle though. It had an unusual design. Was it cast iron? Wrought iron? He stepped closer. “Come, Fancy,” he said, not even bothering to check over his shoulder for the dog he knew to be in his shadow. “Let’s have a look.”
“Stop there,” said a gruff voice.
Sydney turned to face a man of somewhere between forty and fifty, with close-cropped gray hair and the attire of a groom or stable hand. Amelia had referred to a Keating—an old family retainer or something of the sort.
“I’m here to call on the ladies of the house but I’m afraid I got carried away admiring the garden. Are you John Keating?”
“Depends on who’s asking.” He had his hand on the hip in a way that made Sydney strongly suspect that he had carried a sidearm or at least a knife of some kind. He ordinarily didn’t much appreciate encountering rough-looking men who carried weapons but he found that he was glad Amelia had on hand a man who was willing to spill blood for her.
“I’m Sydney Goddard.”
“The duke’s friend,” Keating said suspiciously. “You’re supposed to be in Manchester.”
“I only now returned.” He gestured to his satchel. “And I have parcels for the women.”
“Miss Allenby’s indoors,” Keating said, with a strongly impliedI’ll be watching you.
“Keating,” came a high, clear voice. “I found this interloper being frightened out of his wits by Georgiana’s cat.” Nan trailed rather sheepishly behind her mistress. Beside Sydney, Fancy’s ears pricked up. “She was hiding under the sofa.”
“Not my dog, not my problem, miss,” Keating said, very much with the air of a man who has had the same conversation many times.
“Keating,” Amelia protested, laughing, “she has to be somebody’s dog.” She was dressed in one of her plain walking dresses and her bonnet was under her arm, her hair in a neat knot at the back of her head. He wanted to memorize the sight of her, learn her entirely by heart, so he could think of her the next time he was away.
“She’s her own dog,” Keating said, but the dog had already gone to hide behind his legs. “You’ve got company.” He shrugged a shoulder in Sydney’s direction.
Her face broke out in a smile before Sydney could explain that he was only stopping by and would leave if she didn’t like it. He had seen a dozen varieties of her smile and knew them all by heart, and he knew this one to be genuine. He smiled back.
“We didn’t expect you until tomorrow,” she said. “And what have you done with your face!”
“I shaved before my meeting,” he said, absently running a hand over the stubble that had already grown in on his jaw. “I finished my work early and—” And he couldn’t stay away, that was the bare fact of the thing. “I have half a bolt of nankeen and three books,” he said, taking off his satchel.
“Bring it indoors,” she said. “Georgiana’s at Pelham Hall and I’d love to give you tea instead of doing any work. I have scones! Janet made them with the good sugar. The fair sugar. Free sugar? The sort that’s mentioned in your mother’s book.”
