Currents Page 7

Bess remembered when she’d tackled her sister last week when Bess had been a British soldier and Sarah had been the Russian enemy soldier. Sarah had flopped facedown on the grass, and Bess felt bad that she still had scabs on her knees.

  But the game must carry on anyway. Bess cocked one eyebrow and gave Sarah a wicked glance. “I suggest, my pretty, that you don’t get caught.” Bess buried her head in her knees and began. “One, two, three . . . Go boldly, Sarah!” She snickered. “Four, five . . .” Listening carefully while she counted, she made note of which direction her prey ran. “Ninety-eight, ninety-nine.”

  Straightening up, Bess took in her surroundings with confidence. She had twisted her long black hair up into a bun and fastened it with barrettes to keep it out of her way. They had left Sunny Girl in the house. It would be too easy to find one another with the dog’s keen nose. That would have taken all the sport out of it.

  The field, dotted with ancient apple trees and tall, dark-green yews, stretched out nearly flat in every direction. Sarah had taken off running to the east, but Bess was too clever to be fooled by this ruse. Chap had told her that when giving chase, expect your prey will try to throw you off by first heading in one direction only to change course when they are out of sight or earshot. Bess learned a great deal from her seafaring friend, which she, in turn, had taught Sarah. She figured that her sister would have run for no more than a minute in one direction, and then turned and gone a different way. Leading with her branch-rifle, she walked purposefully toward the west. It wasn’t long before she spotted a freshly twisted chamomile flower on the ground. She smiled to herself.

  She would march on to the edge of the field and scout the perimeter, searching for more evidence of where her prey might have entered the woods. She had barely reached the edge of the field when she heard the sound of her sister’s bloodcurdling scream. She spun around and looked out toward a lone apple tree twenty yards ahead, where she saw Sarah waving her arms high up in the tree. Sarah crashed down through the lower branches and landed with a thud on the ground below. She jumped up, still screaming, and began to run. A dark wave of angry wasps surrounded her and dived at her head—each blistering sting provoking another howl. Bess ran toward her sister, and by the time they reached each other, the winged tormenters had turned and retreated back to their hive in the apple tree.

  Red welts had already begun to spring up on Sarah’s face and hands, and her hysterical crying filled the field and carried toward the house.

  Gertrude and Mrs. Dow, skirts flying, dashed out the kitchen door. Gertrude was wielding a rolling pin like a weapon above her head. The stable master, who had been down grooming the horses, dropped his brushes and came running, too.

  When everyone reached Sarah, her eyes were wild and rolling, and she was gasping between sobs. She looked up at her sister, pulled the feather from her headband, and threw it at Bess. “See what you’ve done! Stupid Indians!”

  All eyes turned toward Bess, and her face flushed. “I didn’t tell her to go up into a tree with a wasp nest,” she said.

  “I do regret your experience,” she went on. “But you have clearly survived and will perhaps be a stronger woman for it.”

  There was a collective groan from the adults as they hustled the whimpering Sarah off to the kitchen to be treated with salves and cold wet cloths.

  Once Sarah’s stings were tended to, Gertrude poured cups of tea for all of them.

  “I’m sorry. I truly am.” Bess felt worse as her sister’s face continued to swell.

  “We know that, my dear,” Mrs. Dow said in a calm voice. “But you need to be more careful on your adventures, especially when you have your younger sister with you. I needn’t remind you of the frightful spill you both took when you were out lumbering around on those wooden stilts.”

  “Rest assured that in the future, I will indeed be more cautious. I’m sorry for all . . . ,” Bess said as she waved her hands over her sister’s head, “. . . all this.”

  “I forgive you,” Sarah said with a gallant smile.

  “There, now,” Mrs. Dow said to Bess. “You have apologized, which is good for your soul, and Sarah has accepted your apology, which is good for hers. The matter is closed.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Elsie tapped her nail on her list of things to do that day.

  “Mrs. Dow, please take the girls into town this morning. Have them fitted for and order new shoes for both of them. New boots for winter, too.”

  Bess scowled. She was anxious to check on the bottle and take it to Chap to examine. “I was thinking of going to the library,” she said. “I have some books that—”

  “Well, you can do that another day,” Elsie snapped. “Besides, every time you come back from the library you smell like an old fish! What in heaven’s name are you doing at that library?”

  “After I get my books, I walk home along the beaches,” Bess replied.

  “I suggest,” Elsie said, scowling, “that you stick to the paths and the lanes, then.”

  Within the hour, Eldridge, the driver, pulled the carriage up and helped the two girls in before holding his arm out for Mrs. Dow.

  “It’s a pleasant day for a ride.” Mrs. Dow leaned forward. “Let’s go the back way so we pass the Queen’s property. It’s so lovely at this time of year.”

  Only a few miles of narrow lanes and curving bays separated Attwood from Osborne House, where Queen Victoria and Prince Albert summered with their eight children.

  They passed by the pastures that held the Queen’s grazing sheep, gravel crunching under the carriage wheels. Stone walls crisscrossed the estate, and at one crossroads, four men were busy repairing a section of wall that had toppled over. Eldridge tipped his hat to the workers, who looked up and waved. Three of the workers were older, but one was a dark-haired boy who looked to be around Bess’s age, and she nodded politely when she realized he was staring at her.

  “Put your back into it now, Harry,” one of the older men admonished the younger one. The boy called Harry snapped to attention and bent down, but not before smiling broadly and tipping his hat to Bess.

  After they finished their errands in the village, Bess was quiet on the carriage ride home. As they rounded a curve near the crossroads, she kept an eye out for the group of stonemasons repairing the Queen’s wall. Just as the carriage pulled around the bend, one of the men brought his sledgehammer down to split a boulder. The sharp, loud strike startled the horses, and despite Eldridge’s best efforts, they bucked, flipping the carriage and tossing all the passengers onto the road.

  Eldridge jumped up from the ground, and along with the stoneworkers, rushed over to help Mrs. Dow and the girls. The boy, Harry, rushed to the side of the frightened horses, grabbed the harnesses, and calmed them with a soothing voice.

  “Good heavens, Mrs. Dow,” Eldridge cried. “Are you hurt? My ladies, are you injured? I’m so sorry, I couldn’t control—”

  “It’s all right,” Mrs. Dow said, although she was clearly shaken. “I think we are unharmed.”

  The horses quieted, Harry leaned down next to Bess and gently rested his rough hand on her shoulder. “Are you all right, Miss? Does anything feel broken?”

  “No, no,” she managed to utter. “But my sister. Is she hurt?”

  “No, Bess, I’m not hurt,” Sarah said, but she began to cry, and Mrs. Dow wrapped her arms around her.

  “Should I go for help?” one of the older stone masons asked.

  “No, that won’t be necessary. We are just a bit shaken,” Mrs. Dow said, gathering up her skirts and allowing one of the men to help her and Sarah to their feet.

  “We didn’t hear you coming,” another man said.

  “Of course not—it was an accident. Are the horses all right?” She turned to Eldridge.

  He assured her they were, and three of the men got on one side of the carriage and righted it while Harry held firm to the horses’ reins, lest they be spooked again. At the sound of the carriage landing, one of the horses sn
orted and shook his head and caught young Harry on the side of the face. He jumped back, and his hand flew up to his eye.

  “Ouch!” Bess exclaimed sympathetically. “Is your eye injured?”

  “No. It’s fine,” he said. “And besides, I have another one,” he said, smiling. “I’m Harry Fletcher, by the way.”

  “I’m Bess Kent,” she said. “You’re sure your eyesight hasn’t been impaired?”

  “Not at all, it seems. I can see you perfectly. As a matter of fact, I think I’ve seen you before. In church, perhaps? Don’t you live at Attwood Manor?”

  “Why yes, I do.” She had never noticed him before. He was tall, with dark, wavy hair a bit too long in the back and intense blue eyes. She guessed he was a few years older than she. She was certain she would have remembered if she had ever seen him.

  “Your mother has the, ah, red hair,” he said.

  “She’s not my mother, thank you,” she said quickly.

  “Come along, Bess,” Mrs. Dow said as she settled herself and Sarah in the back of the righted carriage.

  “Nice to meet you, Lady Bess,” Harry said. “I’ll see you in church.”

  “Just Bess,” she said. “You can call me Bess.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Mrs. Dow sat in the velvet wing chair by the south-facing window next to Bess’s bed. The light was better there. Her eyes were not what they had been when she first came to fill the position of housekeeper at Attwood years ago.

  With careful, tiny stitches she sewed the seam back together on Bess’s mother’s nightgown, the way she did every time it pulled apart.

  “It’s becoming quite threadbare,” Mrs. Dow commented. “I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to repair it.”

  Bess put down her knitting and rested her cheek on the pale blue nightgown. “I wear it every night.” She lovingly rubbed the material between her fingers.

  “I know.” Mrs. Dow looked up over the wire spectacles that sat on the tip of her thin nose.

  “It reminds me of Mummy,” Bess said. “There’s so little I have left of her now.”

  “I know that, too.”

  “I understand that Mummy has gone to heaven,” Bess said, moving her head to Mrs. Dow’s lap. “Everyone says so. And I include her in my prayers every night. It’s just that I hadn’t realized that she would be gone for so long. Day after day after day. That’s the thing, I guess. I didn’t realize how long forever was going to be. It just keeps going on, and there’s no end to it.”

  The next morning, Bess sat cross-legged on the floor of the drawing room, carefully picking out the knots from her doll’s hair and then dancing her across the carpet.

  “I look wretched,” she said as she pretended to speak for her doll. “I didn’t get in from the ball till way past midnight.”

  Sarah’s doll lay stretched out, facedown. “Get up, lazybones! We have to wash and dress and get off to the market.”

  Sarah slowly rolled her doll over, making her groan and reply, “Oh, all right. I am getting up. Fetch me some tea and scones with lots of jam.”

  Next to their father’s study, with its huge globe of the world and stuffed tiger, the drawing room was the girls’ favorite room to play in. They would line up their dolls and sit under the enormous oil painting of their mother. She had posed for the portrait when she was pregnant with her third baby. She and the baby had died in childbirth less than six months later. But in the portrait she looked young and vibrant as she leaned back, lovely in a cream-colored satin gown, her daughters sitting at her feet and Bess’s arms crossed over her lap. Their mother’s black hair was spun up on top of her head, and a gardenia was tucked behind her ear. Sarah’s hair was dark, but Bess’s was as black as a moonless night, just like her mother’s. And Bess had the same flashing dark eyes as her mother that softened instantly when she was around her father, Sarah, or the dog.

  Suddenly the door flew open, and Elsie appeared in the threshold.

  “Good morning, girls,” she said and waited for the reply she had insisted they give her when she addressed them.

  “Good morning, Mother,” they managed to squeeze out through gritted teeth.

  Elsie was dressed in one of her poufy purple dresses, purple being her favorite color. Since she had married the duke, Bess noticed the color had begun to sprout up like weeds around the house. If a chair needed re-covering, it would suddenly reappear from the upholsterer covered in an eye-popping purple instead of the soft, lovely fabrics her mother had always chosen. When the sitting room off the kitchen needed repainting, it was finished in a color that Bess described as miserable mauve. No one sat in that room anymore except Elsie.

  “I am off to the shops this morning,” Elsie announced, adjusting her feathered hat. “What are you two doing?”

  “Just playing,” Sarah said. They fussed over their dolls, avoiding her chilly stare. Bess was eager to get back to the bottle and finally get it to Chap, but it had been raining hard all morning, and she knew Mrs. Dow wouldn’t allow them to go out in such weather.

  “Look at me when I speak to you,” Elsie said.

  The girls slowly raised their eyes. She wasn’t a pretty sight. There was Elsie’s explosion of bright red hair rising high above her chalky powdered face. Her small, pale blue eyes, set too close together, peered down at them.

  She squinted hard at Bess’s doll and a cool shadow of displeasure fell over her face. “What is that around her neck?” she asked.

  “A cross.” Bess tossed her dark braids back defiantly.

  “I can see that. I’m not blind. Where did it come from?” Elsie demanded.

  “It was my mother’s. It’s to be mine to wear when I’m eighteen. You know that.”

  “Yes, I do. And so do you. And last time I checked, you were twelve, not eighteen. Did you get into the family jewelry box and take that out?” Her voice rose as she frowned hard.

  “I didn’t think anyone would mind,” Bess said.

  “Well, I do mind. Give it to me. Now.” Her voice rose and little red dots, the same color as her hair, appeared on her neck. “How dare you take jewelry out of the family box. How dare you, I say. Give it to me.”

  Bess’s eyes filled up as she quickly slipped the gold cross off her doll’s neck. “I’ll put it back,” she whispered and stood up.

  “You’ll do no such thing,” Elsie insisted, sputtering and snatching the necklace from her hand.

  “I won’t have you anywhere near the box,” she ordered, frowning at the necklace. “What happened to the pearl in the middle? It’s missing. There are only thirteen pearls here, and there should be a fourteenth in the center.”

  “It’s always been missing as far as I know,” Bess said. “Papa meant to get it replaced. I guess he hasn’t had the time yet.”

  “Well, that’s typical of your father,” she said. “I’ll deal with this. I won’t say anything to your father this time, but if you do this again there will be serious consequences.”

  Gripping the cross, Elsie turned and spun out of the room, leaving behind only the scent of her perfume.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The next time Bess saw Harry Fletcher, he was bouncing along atop a horse-drawn cart piled high with fresh hay. When he spotted Sarah and Bess marching up the drive to Attwood Manor, he pulled the horses to a stop along the road.

  “Hello there, Ladies Kent!” he called out, tipping his hat.

  “Harry! What are you doing up there?” Sarah shaded her eyes from the sun.

  “Your groundsman hired me and two other lads from town to help him cut your fields.”

  “I thought you were a stonemason,” Bess said.

  “My father is a stonemason, and he’s taught me well. But in these times, a fellow has to have a few trades if he’s going to survive. You want a ride?” He patted the seat next to him.

  “Won’t we get all dirty?” Sarah started to complain, but Bess was already pulling her up with her.

  “Well, the view is quite n
ice up here.” Bess sat next to Harry, and she wiggled over to make room for her sister.

  “Yes, and I can see it a bit better now that my eye has healed,” he said with a grin on his face.

  “Ah, well, that’s good to know.” Bess tilted her head pleasantly. “Take us back up to the house, and I’ll give you some tea for your trouble.”

  “After a long day in the hay fields, tea sounds like a fine idea,” he quickly agreed. He looked her up and down and said, “I’m relieved to see you look none the worse for the carriage accident.”

  “Ha!” she exclaimed. “We Kents are a hardier bunch than that!”

  Gertrude was busy polishing some items when they settled in the kitchen. She stopped what she was doing, washed her hands, and laid out warm scones, clotted cream, and a scoop of honey.

  “Gertrude, you spoil us!” Bess gave the cook a loving squeeze while Sarah poured the tea for all of them.

  “Gertrude,” Bess said suddenly, eyeing the object the cook was buffing. “What are you doing with that?”

  Freshly polished and hanging from the cook’s fingers, Bess immediately recognized the pearl-encrusted cross that Elsie had taken from her.

  “Just finishing up what Her Grace asked me to—”

  “No. I mean the cross.” Bess interrupted, waving her hand dismissively at the other items. “Why does she want you to polish that?”

  “No special reason, my lady.” Gertrude showed her the velvet box that she was to return it to. “I think once I’ve cleaned these things up, she wants to wrap them and put them back up in the attic and in the jewelry box. They were getting dirty and musty.”

  “All right,” Bess said. She took the cross from Gertrude and laid it on the kitchen table to show Harry. “This was my mother’s before she died,” she announced proudly. “It’s to be mine to wear when I’m eighteen. I treasure it.”

  “It’s beautiful,” he said, picking it up to examine it. “What do the letters engraved on the back stand for?”