The LadyShip (12 page)

“Shall we finish her now, sir?” Nash asked.

Ned gazed at the still-stylish lines of her ladyship for a
moment without speaking. “Yes, Nash, we’ll finish her,
but
...”
He gave the eager Nash one of his engaging
smiles. “I’m afraid she’ll have to wait just a little longer. I
haven’t mentioned this to my sisters yet, but I’ve got to go
away again for a short time. That’s just between us, you understand, Nash—I didn’t want to bring it up the very week I
got home.”

“I understand, Mr Edward,” Nash said loyally, not really understanding but perfectly willing to do anything that was
asked of him. After all, he told Ned stoically, after four years
he could wait a little longer.

Thus it was that at least some of Elinor’s fears were con
firmed. She had sensed that her twin was restless, as if he
had unfinished business he did not wish to discuss with
her. That night, having opened his budget to Nash, he felt
obliged to disclose his plans to Elinor, too.

“It’s one of the men in my company, you see, Nell,” he
told her after dinner when the two of them were sitting companionably together by the fire in Ned’s room. Ned
had already made this chamber his own, removing the dim
ity curtains from the windows and covering the bow-
fronted mahogany chest of drawers with his hairbrushes
and shaving kit, and the small writing-desk with old letters,
newspapers, and tradesmen’s bills that, out of businesslike
habit, he tended to squirrel away in case they should be wanted one future day. The maids had to clean the carpet around the discarded contents of his saddlebags, and the
canopied bed rarely looked freshly made, because of his
habit of tossing his clothes on it as he discarded them dur
ing the day.

“He was wounded at Waterloo and invalided home,”
Ned went on, picking up one of his boots from under a
chair and thoughtfully examining a scratch on the heel. “He’s still there, recovering. I wrote to him, but he made
me promise I’d come to see him if I got leave or sold out. I
had to come here first, of course—God knows, I couldn’t
have stayed away much longer—but I must do this thing,
Nell.”

“Indeed you must, Ned,” Elinor said, wondering why he
should feel the need to apologise to her for it. “Was your friend badly wounded? Where does he live? Will you be away for long?”

“I don’t think so—that is, yes, it was a serious enough
wound, and he lives in—in Gloucestershire —some small
village. I’ve got the name written down here somewhere.
But I’m afraid I can’t tell you how long I’ll be gone.”

Elinor frowned at the odd tone of Ned’s voice. “Will you
be back for Christmas, do you think?” she asked, trying not
to appear unduly inquisitive. “As I mentioned to you the
other day, Lucy has been invited to the Lorimers’. I think it
would be an excellent thing for her to go, if she could, but
she need not if you will be here and want her with us.”

“Of course she should go, if she wants it. But look here,
Nell—I’ll be back before that, if I leave tomorrow. We’ll
talk about it then.”

“Whatever you say, love.”

Elinor smiled and gave Ned a sisterly hug, knowing it
would be useless to worry him further just now. Instead,
she took him good-naturedly to task for the shocking state of his room, protesting that he could not have advanced in
the army as far as he had if he’d kept himself in such disar
ray on the march.

“Well, to be sure I didn’t!” Ned declared in his own de
fence. “For one thing, I never had this much room to
spread myself around in. And for another, I had to carry
most of what I owned on my back—lowly lieutenants don’t
rate bâtmen, you know—so nothing heavy lasted longer
than a short march. In fact, most of us got so we could fin
ish off a bottle of wine within half a mile.”

“And used the empty bottles for target practice, I daresay.”

“Why not? Bullets weigh a good bit, packed in quan
tity.”

Elinor laughed and stood up to make an attempt to
straighten the blizzard of papers on Ned’s desk—which de
sign he immediately frustrated by objecting that he would
never find anything there if it were neater.

“Oh, very well, then, you abominable shagrag! What do
you want to do with these saddlebags? May they be removed to the stables? What about this haversack and this
little chest—and whatever are you carrying in
this?”
Elinor
asked, holding up an oddly shaped container that Ned ex
plained was a violin case he’d found abandoned on the
road out of Vitoria and had used to carry cheese and fruit
acquired along the march.

“The haversack’s mine as well, but the chest isn’t. I think
that was in this room when you made it up for me the other
day. It’s locked.”

Elinor discovered this to be true, but found that although
there was something inside the elegant little brassbound
case, it was not very heavy. She picked it up and tucked it
under one arm.

“I’ll see if I can’t find the key to this,” she said. “Mean
while, love, I suggest you put anything you value away out of sight of the maids, because while you are away, they are
going to give this room a thorough cleaning. Anything they
can’t identify or launder will be burnt or buried!”

Ned roused himself from his comfortable seat by the fire
to hug his sister and stigmatise her as his darling meddle
some girl.

“Well, never say you are not more highly regarded here than you were by the army,” Elinor told him. “Here at least
you are entitled to your own bâtman!”

At that, Ned stepped back and surveyed her with a criti
cal eye. “Nell, you know I can’t let you go on waiting on
me for ever, and wondering about Lucy’s future more than
your own,” he said. “Have you never thought about...
well, marriage for yourself?”

Elinor laughed, but did not meet Ned’s gaze. “I don’t know why everyone imagines that I desire nothing more
than to wait on only one person for the rest of my life! On
the contrary, I am destined to be a maiden aunt and slave to
your and Lucy’s many future progeny. In any case, it is
Lucy who attracts all the suitors, while I have nary a one—
well, excepting perhaps the squire, but he is such a cheese-
parer when it comes to something he thinks he can get just
as well at home, that he stretches a tankard of ale through
an entire evening in the tap-room. Surely you will not con
demn me to a lifetime with a man who will never buy me a
new cap?”

“You don’t wear caps, goose!”

“That is entirely beside the point. If I were to want one,
where should I go for it? Here I may order me up a dozen if
I should fancy them, and like any noble lady I have maids
to attend me and footmen—or at least ostlers—to escort me
wherever I may wish to go. I am perfectly contented with
my lot, I assure you.”

“Is that true?” Ned asked, in a tone that demanded a reply.

Elinor unclasped Ned’s hands from around her waist,
saying, “Of course it is! But I have a great deal more to do
than wait upon you, love, let me also assure you! You may
go away with my good will, and let me attend to more im
portant business!”

“Well, I’ll go, then—but I warn you, my girl, I shan’t be
long this time, so mind you behave yourself!”

Elinor smiled. “Oh, I will! What choice have I, pray?”

And so, Ned had not been home above a week before he was gone again, departing with the briefest of farewells for
each of his sisters and an increasingly preoccupied look in
his dark eyes that belied his ready jests. Lucy cried quietly
as she waved good-bye, but Elinor was more conscious of a
feeling of vague disappointment than of sorrow. She had had so little opportunity to talk alone with Ned—at least
about anything that mattered. She could not feel certain
that she had impressed on him that her management of The LadyShip
was all that he could have wished—not that he
had made any complaint, or indeed even noticed the im
provements that were not expressly pointed out to him,
and if he had taken any heed of anything that went on out
side the stables, she would have been surprised at it.

More
over, they had come to no understanding about Lucy’s future—as much perhaps through her own reluctance to
broach the matter to him as his to listen to it. Observing the
changes in Ned, she had become aware of some in herself
that she did not care for. She now saw her high-flown ambi
tions for Lucy as scheming and perhaps not altogether admirable. It would have been a help to talk all these things
out with Ned, but now it was almost as if he had never
come home at all.

But no, not quite that, Elinor knew. Suddenly, although
Ned had changed nothing yet, nothing was quite the same. She viewed things differently now, and not half so compla
cently as she had done barely a week before.

It had been
brought home to her that her days as an innkeeper were
numbered. Ned would take over The LadyShip as compe
tently as he now seemed to do everything else. She ad
mired him for his assurance, but at the same time was glad to put off its consequences for just a little longer, for when
he came back for good—what would become of her?

Elinor walked slowly back into the inn after seeing Ned
off and went into her little parlour to think. There, how
ever, she found the small brassbound case, which she had brought down from Ned’s room, and remembered that she
had intended to try to open it with one of the several
unidentified keys that had been collecting in her desk. Ab
sently, she picked up first one and then another of these
and attempted to fit them to the lock. She thought the trunk
must have belonged to her father, for he had enjoyed a
taste for costly little oddities like this and had indulged
it to an excessive degree. The LadyShip had, in fact, been
running for some years at the edge of financial disaster ow
ing to James Bennett’s expensive tastes, as Elinor had dis
covered in going over the books shortly after his death.

James Bennett had been famed in his profession as a host
of enlarged views and open hospitality. He had at the start
of his career as a landlord horsed the mails out of The LadyShip
, which had begun life in the first part of the previous century as a modest brick-fronted public-house. Later he
had enlarged the building, stuccoed over the brick, and
added extensive stabling at the rear of the premises in order
to accommodate the blood stock he had a fascination with.
He also owned a large interest in a nearby farm that
supplied hay and corn for his horses. His knowledge and
skill became well-known, and he talked late into the night
over the taproom’s best brandy as an equal not only with
the local squires, but also with the land-owning lords who
stopped at his inn on their way to their country seats.

Unfortunately, like many a London dandy who grew
over-confident at the hazard table, James Bennett had ulti
mately over-extended his resources. When he died unexpectedly of an inflammation of the lungs contracted after
he had been sitting up all night with a sick horse, Elinor was
obliged to sell both the interest in the farm and the thor
oughbreds in the stables, and to attempt to maintain The LadyShip
’s reputation by means of the quality of its service
rather than the quantity of its ancillary operations. She did
not go so far as to dismiss any of the staff, however, or to
raise her prices without first ensuring a comparable rise in
the quality of the goods offered, and it was thus nearly two
years before she could call the business her own by virtue of having made a success of it solely through her own ef
forts.

Elinor tried a tiny brass key in the lock of the chest and
was somewhat startled to find that it fit. She lifted the lid
and looked in, only to become even more mystified on dis
covering the contents to have belonged, appar
ently, not to her father, but to her mother. It must have lain
undiscovered for some years in that cupboard in Ned’s
room—she must remember to ask the maids if it had always
been there. She took out several slim volumes of verse, in one of which was pressed a faded rose, and then a pair of
long kid gloves, never worn, and a baby’s pinafore.