Learning to Waltz (6 page)

“Yes, it is his.” Her voice was strained. He studied her, a crease between his eyebrows.

He took her hand. “What is it? Bad news?”

“No—I don’t know yet.” It was humiliating to find herself in need of a knight, but she asked anyway. “Would you step upstairs with me, Mr. Haverfield?”

His brows rose. “Of course, ma’am, if you wish it.”

He looked baffled. She was sorry for it but could not possibly explain. She preceded him up the dark, narrow stairs.

They nearly collided with Molly, who was leaving the bedchamber with a reeking chamber pot filled with soiled rags. Entering the room, they found Doctor Overley peering into the little mirror over her dressing table, shaking out his lace cuffs, and straightening his complicated cravat. He smiled at Deborah’s reflection as she came through the doorway, but it was quickly replaced by a frown when he saw Mr. Haverfield behind her.

“Ah, there you are, my dear.” He took hold of her elbow as though he had some claim on her, in case Mr. Haverfield had misunderstood the endearment. “If I might confer with you downstairs, Mrs. Moore?”

“Mr. Haverfield is a friend of the family, sir. I depend upon his experience and advice.”

The doctor dropped his hand, his manner shifting abruptly from ingratiating to glacial—a decided improvement.

“I see. Are you a physician, sir?”

“No.”

“Well, then.” He dismissed Mr. Haverfield with a wave of his hand. “Madam, I must tell you that I see no improvement in your son’s condition. On the contrary, I find him in a considerably worse state than yesterday. His lungs are extremely congested, and I am sure you have taken note of the blood in his phlegm.” Deborah drooped but said nothing. Mr. Haverfield laid a hand on her back. “I must tell you that without releasing the poisons through bloodletting, there is very little likelihood of recovery.”

If he was trying to punish her, he had the perfect means to do so. He must love playing God. Her hands hurt, one gripping the fist of the other inside it. She pressed them against her lips and turned toward the bed.

Mr. Haverfield stepped past her, shielding her from the doctor’s gaze. “Surely there’s some alternative, Overley,” Mr. Haverfield suggested. “Some new medication, or—”

“There is not.”

Deborah’s hands fell to her sides and then spread wide in submission. All night she had dreaded this, braced herself for it. But she did not feel braced at all.

“The surgeon will come in the morning, then. Now, Mrs. Moore, if you’ll just—”

“I will see you out, Overley,” Mr. Haverfield said, propelling him out of the room as the doctor shot an indignant look over his shoulder.

You should be relieved, Doctor,
Deborah thought.
I might kick you down the stairs, watch you roll to the bottom, and brush my hands at a job well done.
But then she’d have to walk back into the sickroom, and there would be no doctor to call on.

Every nerve stretched to breaking point, her stomach roiling, she clung to the bedpost, listening for the door downstairs.
What could they possibly be doing?
She waited for what felt like an hour, and finally it snapped shut.

She exhaled. Smoothed the hair from Julian’s forehead. Tucked his arms under the covers. Straightened the sheet, then the blanket, and pulled them to his chin.
A man’s footsteps on the stairs.
She turned to the table beside the bed and lined up the medicine bottles in order by height. Wiped a wet spot with her apron. Shifted the doctor’s written instructions so they lined up perfectly with the edge of the table. Picked out the bottle she needed and slid it out of its military formation.

Mr. Haverfield must have been watching her because he prodded from the doorway, “What is it?”

Oh, why hadn’t he gone away? She wanted to scream, cry, break something. But he was standing there, watching her. “I… oh, he is so detestable! I cannot stand to be in the same room with him.”

“I’d find him rather laughable in different circumstances. But he upsets
you
, which is reason enough to…  I wasn’t sure what you wanted me to do.”

“It’s enough that you were here.” She’d have liked him to throw the man out the window, but she could hardly say that. It would make her sound as irrational as she felt.

She poured a draught for Julian, but he roused himself to fight the vile stuff. Half of it ended on the boy’s chin and half on the sheets. Deborah’s hands shook as she swiped at the tears that rolled down her cheeks.

Calmly Mr. Haverfield held out his hand for the spoon. “Let me see what I can do.” His voice sounded hoarse.

She measured out another dose and watched with resentment as Julian swallowed the medicine with only a muttered complaint. He might as well have said “Yes, sir.”
She
was his mother—why should he obey Mr. Haverfield? She could not even tell that he recognized the man, yet he graced him with a wan smile as they laid his head back on the pillow.

Mr. Haverfield took his leave a few minutes later. Finally she was alone again, alone with her nightmares.

“Mama!” Waking in her cold room from a restless, fevered sleep, it felt as though she’d been calling forever. Why didn’t she come?

She focused on the familiar furnishings so she wouldn’t have to think about the shadows in the corners. There was the little table with its child-size chairs where they sat to do lessons when Mama had the time. There was her little window seat where the cold winter moon peeked in. There she would put her bed pillow for a cushion and sit for ages, looking out over their wild little garden, and beyond that the pasture where Mr. Johnstone kept his dreadful bull. Beyond the fence lay a piece of moorland, and away beyond that a glimpse of the very top of Lydford Castle where Papa said naughty children were put in prison and made to drink molten tin. Mrs. Maddox said that wasn’t true, they were criminals and it was hundreds of years ago, but it haunted her, nevertheless.

There, hung on the wall, was the little pouch Mrs. Maddox had sewn from the fancy brocade they’d used for the draperies in Papa’s library, and in it, “for better luck someday, child,” a real penny from the ancient Lydford mint. There on the shelves were her two books, dog-eared from use; and filling the space, all her treasures collected from the outdoors—dried flowers and pine cones, some rocks, a butterfly wing, half of a blackbird’s egg, feathers from robin, chaffinch, and kestrel, a wren’s nest, even the skull of a mouse or some similar creature. Mama didn’t like that one at all.

“Mama!” Why didn’t she come? Her rushlight had gone out, and the room was all shadows now. The bed was wet with sweat and urine, her pillow was wet with tears. It was so cold. Turning the pillow over took all the energy she had. Too weak and dizzy to get up and strip the sheets, she curled up small in the driest corner, pulled the blanket up to cover everything but her eyes and nose, and lay staring blindly at the boarded-up fireplace where the good-luck penny hung, waiting for daylight and Mama.

Deborah awoke with a start and turned to check her own sick child, tossing in the bed beside her. Had Julian cried out as she had in her dream? His eyes glittered strangely in the dim light from the fire. She got up and stoked the smoldering coals back to life. Then she lit the candle by the bed and looked at Hartley’s watch that she kept on the table there: half past three. She had slept for two hours, the longest stretch in the past two days, though it could hardly have been called restful. Thirty minutes yet until the next round of medicines was due.

Julian called out plaintively. She lay down again on her side and drew him into the curve of her body, kissing his lank hair and murmuring in his ear until he relaxed again into a half sleep.

Her thoughts returned to the dream. One of many nights, hidden for so long yet remembered still, accurate to the last detail. The feeling of desolation came back, still excruciating, though she understood her mother better now. Their shared torment had not made them intimate. Rather, it seemed each of them had found it necessary to set herself apart from the other’s pain. Since Deborah became a mother herself, she’d come to recognize the sacrifices her mother had made. She could see now how her mother had drawn her father’s anger to herself, as a rabbit leads the fox away from its burrow to protect its young, even at the risk of its own life. She never knew why Mama had not come to her sickbed that particular lonely night, but no doubt there had been reasons, probably painful ones.

Her father’s hatred had been a mystery to her. At six, she had only known that as a female, she was less than worthless to him, and that staying quiet and out of his way gave her the best chance of avoiding his wrath. She was Jack, hiding in the cupboard, and he was the giant, the ogre, beast without hope of redemption. If she had thought about it, she might have supposed that all children lived as she did, isolated and apprehensive, carefully scouting each corridor before entering it, always ready to bolt for that safe place where the giant could not penetrate.

Gradually she became aware that some families behaved differently, that other children laughed and ran and climbed trees and went on outings and were taught to ride by indulgent fathers. That knowledge came from the conversation of the household servants and, most glaringly, from the very different treatment accorded to the boy Robert after he came to live with them. Deborah rarely met him face-to-face, for he lived in the front of the house and she in the back, but she saw him from her window, playing with the dogs or riding his pony, and she heard him below, running up the stairs and banging doors, making all the noise she dared not make.

Oh, the giant took a cane to Robert on occasion too, but from the age of three he slept in his own bedchamber in the main part of the house, with a working fireplace and his own nursemaid, and was allowed privileges Deborah never imagined. She felt no jealousy, though she watched wistfully. Taught always to refer to him as her brother, she knew always that he was not quite. She’d learned much later that her father had sired him by one mistress or another and foisted him onto society as his heir.

It might have been better for them all if her mother had died in childbed, taking her feeble little daughter with her, enabling him to marry again. They survived, but the attending physician sealed their unhappy future when he informed the impatient father that Mrs. Carlington would bear no more children. She had been moved to a bedchamber far from her husband’s, and he never touched her again except in violence. Deborah was relegated to nursery and kitchens until she was old enough to help with the household chores.

That experience as housemaid and kitchen maid and laundry maid had become quite useful since Hartley’s death. She knew how to cook, to use the common kitchen equipment, to grow a few vegetables, and to scrub with the best of them. Not for a moment would she trade her own life, difficult as it was, for the torturous existence her mother had led for the past twenty-eight years.

The people of Lydford probably thought Mrs. Carlington fortunate. They saw the new carpet in the drawing room, the silver epergne on the dining table, and the fashionable clothes her mother wore. They did not see the family’s private rooms, stripped of everything saleable, or the clothes Mrs. Carlington changed into as soon as they left. And they did not see, as Deborah did, the bruises and scars her mother wore under those clothes.

Deborah was trapped as well, but she no longer had to hide from the giant, or listen to her mother’s stifled tears, or check to make sure her sleeves covered her own bruises. Her snare was financial rather than emotional. She might never be able to leave Whately, for the squire’s generous terms on the cottage made her budget tenable. Since her marriage, there had been disillusionment and sickness, death and solitude, but all of these paled beside the haunting memories of her childhood. No, so long as she had Julian and funds enough to keep them both after some fashion, she would have no regrets.

She rose to prepare the boy’s medicines. He was limp and lethargic, without the energy to do more than cry weakly in protest. Later in the day she supposed—almost hoped—he would fight her as he had the previous afternoon. He’d been so docile with Mr. Haverfield—while
she
had been criminally ungrateful. Regardless, she could hardly expect Mr. Haverfield to stand in as nurse. The thought was laughable. Seductive. Perilous. Impossible.