A Secret Affair (39 page)

“This is getting almost embarrassing,” Constantine said.

“It is,” Elliott agreed. “And Stephen is probably waiting for me. Before I join him, Con, will you shake my hand?”

“Kiss and forgive?” Constantine said.

“I will forego the kissing if it is all the same to you,” Elliott said, holding out his right hand.

Constantine looked at it and set his own in it.

“As I remember it,” he said, “you did not ask, Elliott. You
assumed
. But as you remember it, you asked, and I told you to go to hell. We can never know who is right. Maybe it is just as well. But you had just lost your trust in your own father, and I was desperate to preserve Jon’s dream. We never were good at talking to each other about
pain
, were we?”

“A gentleman never admits to feeling any,” Elliott said as they clasped each other’s hand tightly. “I have to put on all the full force of my pomposity now. I’ll try not to be an ass, though, Con. I’ll try my best to get Barnes reprieved. I hope my best is good enough.”

“So do I,” Constantine said fervently.

He still felt sore that he was going to have to remain behind at Ainsley, idle and helpless. But for the moment the best he could do was let his cousins go and do what he could not. Or at least try.

And if they failed?

He would grapple with that when the time came.

When?
Not
if
?

He headed off for the farm, hoping there was some hard manual labor in which he could immerse himself.

F
OR THE NEXT
three and a half hours he was, Constantine soon became aware, the focus of attention at Ainsley. He was chopping wood beside the stable block. He had stripped to the waist and was giving the task his full attention and every ounce of strength and energy he could muster. Nothing in the world mattered except piling up enough wood to last through next winter—and perhaps even the winter beyond that.

The grooms and stable hands were all at work in the stables. None of them took a break, even when midday came and went. But every
single one of them found some plausible reason for appearing at the stable yard gate with strange regularity. No fewer than three of the women were weeding the kitchen garden even though Constantine had observed just two days ago that there was not a weed in sight. Perhaps it was the hunt for new ones that was taking them so long. Two of the boys were handing him logs to chop when one would have been quite sufficient. Millie carried out a tray of drinks and oatmeal biscuits twice and stayed to help one of the boys stack the wood against the outer wall of the stables the second time. The cook came to the side door, presumably to see what had happened to Millie. But instead of calling her to come back or returning to the kitchen after seeing that she was busy, she stayed where she was for some time, drying her hands on her apron. They must have ended up being the driest hands in England. Roseann Thirgood was giving her group of reading pupils a lesson outdoors, perhaps because the weather was warm and the wind gentle enough that it took only two hands to hold open the pages of each book. Another of the women felt it necessary to shake her duster out of a side window of the house every few minutes and to lean out to see where the dust landed.

They all knew, of course, that Elliott and Stephen had gone to talk to the judge, though Constantine had not told anyone. And they all knew why he was chopping wood so ferociously. None of them spoke to him. Or to one another, for that matter. Except Roseann to her pupils, he assumed, though he did not hear any of them.

And then everyone who had disappeared for a few moments reappeared, and everyone who was busy—or pretending to be—stopped work, and the weeders straightened up, and Millie dropped the two pieces of wood she was carrying. The cook dropped her apron. Constantine paused, the axe poised above his shoulder.

Horses.

And carriage wheels.

He lowered the axe slowly and turned.

The same ducal carriage as yesterday. The same coachman and footman, their livery brushed to a new smartness since yesterday.

Constantine even forgot to breathe for a moment. If he had thought about it, he would have been willing to wager that everyone else forgot too.

The carriage did not proceed all the way to the front doors. It stopped outside the stables. Perhaps the men inside had seen the scattered crowd and Constantine in their midst.

Stephen jumped out first, without waiting for the steps to be put down. He looked about him and then at Constantine, who felt rooted to the spot. He had not moved closer to the carriage.

“It hangs in the balance,” Stephen called for all to hear.

An unfortunate turn of phrase.

Elliott also descended without benefit of steps.

“The judge is to consider the matter,” he said, also loudly enough for everyone to hear. “His final verdict is by no means sure, but if he
does
reprieve Jess Barnes, it will be into my keeping and on condition that I take him far away from here and never allow him to return to any part of Gloucestershire.”

Constantine was almost convinced he heard a collective exhaling of breath. Or perhaps it was only his own he heard.

He set down the axe against a stack of unchopped wood and walked closer to his cousins, who were walking closer to him.

“Elliott was absolutely magnificent, Con,” Stephen said. “I almost quaked in my boots myself.”

“No, you did not,” Elliott said. “You were too busy oozing your legendary charm, Stephen. I was almost dazzled myself.”

“But the judge was not quite convinced,” Constantine said.

“To give the man his due,” Elliott told him, “he has backbone, Con. I had the impression that as the day draws closer, he is beginning to regret the harshness of the sentence but has been unable to see a dignified way out. You must have softened him up. He wants to give us what we ask, but he does not want to give the impression that he has been overawed by a couple of men with titles but really no authority over him.”

“You think he will let Jess go, then?” Constantine asked.

“Do I
think
he will?” Elliott said. “Yes. Am I
certain
he will? No.”

“Has he said when he will make his decision?” Constantine asked.

“Tomorrow,” Stephen said.

“But either way, Con,” Elliott said, “Jess will not be returning here. I am sorry. Promising to take him with me was the best I could do.”

Constantine nodded. And his eyes went past Elliott’s shoulder, past the carriage to the driveway beyond. A single horse and rider were approaching at a canter.

Everyone else had heard it too. They all turned.

The judge had made his decision?

It was a chance visitor?

But they could all see as the horse drew closer that the rider was wearing bright livery and that it was looking slightly the worse for wear. He had clearly ridden a long way, probably without stopping except for a change of horse and a quick bite to eat.

“By God,” Stephen said, “that is
royal
livery.”

There was no doubt about it. The rider was a king’s messenger.

He reined in his horse behind the carriage and looked about rather haughtily before focusing his attention on Elliott.

“I am commanded to deliver a message to Mr. Constantine Huxtable,” he said.

“I am he.” Constantine raised one arm—one
bare
arm dotted with wood shavings—and stepped forward.

The messenger looked haughtier.

“I can vouch for his identity,” Stephen said, sounding amused. “I am Merton.”

The fellow reached into his saddlebag and withdrew two scrolls affixed with the royal seal.

“I was to hand this to you first, sir,” he said, “on the express orders of His Majesty the King.”

And he handed one of the scrolls to Constantine, who looked at it as if merely doing so would disclose its secrets. He exchanged glances with Elliott and Stephen, broke the seal, and unrolled the scroll.

He felt the blood drain from his head. He licked his lips. The parchment shook in his hands. He looked up.

“A pardon,” he said in a near whisper. And then he raised his head, looked about him, and raised his voice. He held the parchment aloft. “A pardon. A
royal
pardon for Jess. The
king
has repealed the sentence.”

“If you will direct me to the judge concerned, sir,” the messenger said, “I will deliver a duplicate of that document into his hands without further delay.”

No one heard him. There was cheering and laughter and the clapping of hands. And everyone spoke at once, the volume of voices increasing as everyone realized that no one was listening because everyone was talking. Almost everyone. Two of the weeders were dancing with each other in a circle, shrieking as they did so. The cook had thrown her apron over her face. Millie was wailing openly, tears pursuing each other in rivulets down her cheeks.

Constantine shut his eyes tightly and lifted his face to the sky.

“The minx,” he said fondly.

“Well,” Elliott said, “so much for my being needed, Con.”

But he was grinning when Constantine looked at him and stepped up to him and caught him up in a bear hug.

“You were needed,” he said. “You were needed, Elliott. You are
always
needed.”

And then he embarrassed himself horribly by sobbing, his forehead against Elliott’s shoulder.

He felt Elliott’s free hand against the back of his head.

“Devil take it,” Constantine said, taking a step back and swiping the back of his hand across his wet face.
“Devil
take it.”

Elliott pressed a white linen handkerchief into his hand.

“Love is allowed, Con,” he said.

Stephen was blowing his nose into his own handkerchief.

The king’s messenger was clearing his throat.

“I was commanded to hand this to you next, sir,” he said and handed Constantine the second scroll.

Constantine stared up at the rider as he took it. But the man was a messenger, not the message.

What more was there for the king to say?
Ha, ha, I did not mean it—Jess Barnes dies after all?

Constantine broke the seal and unrolled the parchment and read.

And then read it again.

And then chuckled. And then laughed aloud as he handed it to Elliott. Elliott read it—twice—and then handed it off to Stephen before looking at Constantine and laughing with him.

“I say,” Stephen said after a few moments. “Oh, I say.”

And all three of them were laughing while everyone else looked on, wondering what the joke was.

“W
HAT
IS
IT
about time, Babs?” Hannah asked from her favorite perch on the window seat of her private sitting room. “When one is enjoying oneself, it flies by like a bird frantic to reach its nesting ground after a long winter, and just as with that bird there is no stopping it. At other times, it crawls by like a tortoise dosed with laudanum.”

Barbara worked at her embroidery.

“There is no such thing as time,” she said. “There is only our reaction to the inexorable progress of life.”

Hannah stared at the top of her head.

“If I pretended to
enjoy
not knowing what is happening, then,” she said, “I would have news of it in a flash, Babs? Could the answer be
that
simple? Please say yes.”

Barbara looked up and smiled.

“I am afraid not,” she said. “Because the illusion of time creates time itself. Our reactions are too strong to halt it altogether. We are lamentably human. And wonderfully human too.”

“You did not learn all this from your vicar, by any chance, did you?” Hannah asked suspiciously.

“From discussions with him, yes,” Barbara admitted. “And from my private reflections and some reading that Simon suggested.”

“If I cannot halt the illusion any more than I can reality,” Hannah said, “then there really is no point in knowing that it
is
illusion, is there? Or in deciding that it is, in fact, reality. And is my head spinning on my shoulders, or is
that
only illusion too?”

Barbara merely laughed and lowered her head to her work again.