Chapter Thirteen

G eorge’s friend Potter, who had five older sisters, liked to say that women were incomprehensible. He used this theory to explain everything from the vagaries of fashion, to the scandals in the society pages, to improbable plot elements in the works of lady novelists. George had never concurred with Potter. In his experience, the women in his life—his mother, sister, cousins, and friends—all made about as much sense as the men. Which was to say, not that much. Other people’s thoughts and motives often were unintelligible to George, but their opacity had nothing to do with gender.

But as he held his weeping bride, George reconsidered his earlier stance. He had no idea why Belle was crying. Having seen how much travel exhausted her, he’d expected her to be happy, or at least relieved, that they had reached their journey’s end. He’d hoped she would be pleased with this house. He knew that he saw Dogwood Cottage through nostalgia-colored lenses, but surely it wasn’t as bad as all this?

He studied the room, trying to see it through Belle’s eyes. Everything about it looked clean, tidy, and in good condition. The only flaw he could see was that the wallpaper was a couple of decades old. Personally, he thought it still looked charming, but perhaps his wife would prefer something more modern? Brides often did like to redecorate a house when they married. He’d forgotten that.

George sighed as he wondered how much it would cost to repaper some of the important rooms. The dining room and parlor retained the paneled walls of days of yore, but surely that could be changed if necessary.

Belle drew away from him and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. By now, George had learned that he needed to keep more than one clean handkerchief in his pockets. He pulled the first one out, intending to wipe Belle’s eyes. But she took it away from him and wiped her face herself.

He cleared his throat. “I hope you understand that we can afford to replace the furnishings in here if the chamber is not to your liking. I know the paper on the walls is old-fashioned, but—”

“What?” Belle stared at him with wide eyes. “I love that design, and the colors! I have no desire to change it.” Her eyes roved about the room again. “The whole room is quite charming. Your aunt had good taste.”

He heard an implicit “but” following that praise. He waited for her to explain her objection, but she only lowered her gaze, staring at the toes of her half boots. He cautiously cupped her face in one hand, afraid that she would pull away from him again. Instead, she leaned her head against his hand and sighed very softly.

“Can you explain to me what’s wrong, then?” George might not be a particularly observant man, but it did not take much perspicuity to see that something had upset his wife.

“I am merely tired out from travel,” she murmured. “You know how delicate my nerves are, don’t you?”

George might have believed her if she’d said that while looking him in the eye. But the way Belle kept her eyes fixed on the floor suggested she was keeping something from him.

“Is that really the only problem?” He didn’t want to push too hard, but he felt certain this was more complicated than mere exhaustion.

“The thing is... what I mean to say is… the fact of the matter…” Belle twisted her hands together as she stammered over her answer. “The fact of the matter is that I am used to having my own chamber. To go when I need time alone, I mean.”

George drew his brows down. “Your own chamber?” It took a ridiculously long time to make sense of that. “Oh! You wanted your own bedroom?” That would never have occurred to him. His parents shared a bedroom, of course, the vicarage was much too small to have separate rooms for the vicar and his wife. “If you prefer, I can move to one of the other bedrooms, and leave this one for you. Or I can put a bed in the dressing room.”

He walked across the room and opened the door into the dressing room. “See? There’s plenty of room.” He stepped aside, giving her space to take a look. The dressing room was at least as large as most servant’s bedrooms, though it was narrower than it was long. A rather worn-looking chaise longues lined the longest wall, and there was a comfortable chair in front of the dressing table, but apart from that, the room had been furnished with utility in mind.

Open storage shelves and a narrow closet had been built into the shortest inside wall, and there was a window seat with storage beneath it along the outside wall. An old-fashioned close stool had been tucked into one corner, though Uncle William’s updates to the cottage included a modern water closet downstairs. Perhaps most surprisingly, the room contained a small fireplace that shared a chimney with the adjoining bedroom.

“I could sleep here if you prefer,” he suggested.

Belle peered through the doorway. She twirled a strand of hair around her index finger as she studied the room. “I could see myself using this room. That window seat might be a good place for reading or drawing. And one could write letters at the dressing table.”

“I suppose so,” George said doubtfully. He preferred to do his writing in a room large enough to pace in. Sometimes he could only get his mind working properly by walking back and forth, much to the annoyance of the gentleman who lived in the flat below his London chambers. “If you like, we can replace the chaise longues with a proper daybed.” He looked askance at her, wishing he knew what, precisely, she was thinking. “That way, you could sleep alone when you wanted.”

“Oh, it’s not so much the nighttime that’s the problem,” Belle clarified, “but rather the daytime hours.” Belle drew a deep breath and gave a final tug to that poor abused strand of hair. “Sometimes I need to be alone. I don’t know why, but I need a quiet space where no one will interrupt me. For when I’m working on my art, or when I need to... collect myself.”

“Ah!” George finally got it—at least some of it. He didn’t understand what she meant by “collecting herself,” but the rest of it made sense. “I can’t work when people interrupt me, either. I snap at people if they bother me.” Especially when he was working on one of his secret projects!

“Good to know.” A tiny smile briefly lit Belle’s face, like a stray sunbeam breaking through gray clouds.

Seeing that promise of sunshine, George breathed more easily. “This house is not big enough to have a private sitting room for its mistress, but you are welcome to furnish one of the other bedrooms as your work room. Or you could have the study downstairs, and I could take this room—”

“No. Let me have this room, if you please.” She walked past him to peer out the window. “This window faces north, so it would provide good light. And I like the window seat. It would be a comfortable place to curl up with a book, a cup of tea, and a plate of biscuits.” This time, the smile that crossed her face lingered longer.

George wrinkled his nose. “When I eat biscuits at my desk, I end up getting crumbs everywhere! On the papers. On the floor. Even in the inkwell.” His charwoman had often expressed her distaste for his snacking habits.

Belle glanced back over her shoulder, looking on the verge of laughter. “How do you even get crumbs in an inkwell?”

“It’s a gift.” He shrugged his shoulders and tried to look modest. “But if you want to use this room for your work, you are welcome to it. I can move a wardrobe into the bedchamber for my clothes.” He did not have as many clothes as she did, anyway. “Would you like to see the rest of the house, or should I leave you here to recover from the journey?”

“I had rather have some time to myself, thank you.” She spoke as formally as if they were strangers. Another time, that might have annoyed him, but just now, he found it endearing.

“I shall leave you to it, then.” He stepped forward, intending to kiss her on the cheek, but she flinched. It was so slight a movement that he might have missed it if he had not already been concerned.

George drew back immediately and a puzzled furrow formed between his eyebrows. He opened his mouth to ask what was wrong, but then he thought better of it. His wife had already made it clear that she needed to be left alone. He ought to do as she asked. So he turned and walked away, though a niggling voice at the back of his head wondered if he had done something to displease her. They were still in their honeymoon. What would he do if she took a dislike to him so soon?

He worried about that all the way down the stairs, but when he got to the ground floor corridor, a delicious smell diverted his attention to the kitchen. As children, both he and his sister had been quite at home in this room. Caro had often “helped” Cook with the baking. George had limited his work to taste testing. The kitchen had changed little in the intervening years.

He found Mrs. Hastings seasoning a chicken in preparation for roasting it. The good smell he’d detected came from the bread oven, where a cake of some sort was currently baking.

“Is that a seed cake?” he asked hopefully.

“Currant cake,” Mrs. Hastings said. “But I daresay you’ll like it, Mr. Kirkland.” The smile on her face slowly faded into a frown. “I really must ask you to stay out of the kitchen while we are working, sir. We don’t want you getting hurt.”

And they probably didn’t want him getting in their way, George reasoned. Fair enough! He wouldn’t like it at all if Mrs. Hastings or one of the maids wandered into his study while he was writing.

He turned to go, then paused to stare at the wall surrounding the bread oven. “What on earth happened to the plaster?” A series of deep holes, spaced at roughly equidistant intervals, ranged more than halfway up the wall.

“Near as we can tell, someone poked a bunch of holes into the plaster, hoping to find something hidden behind the wall.” Mrs. Hastings wiped her forehead and scowled at the wall. “Don’t have any idea how they got into the house without breaking any windows or unlocking any doors.”

George gaped as he stared at the wall. This must be the damage Uncle William had mentioned, but it was worse than what he’d imagined.

“It’s lucky they didn’t bring the whole wall down!” He shook his head, awed by the lengths someone had gone to in attempt to find treasure that did not exist. “How did they get away with this? Was everyone out of the house?” He could not imagine why the servants would be away all at once, unless perhaps to attend church.

Mrs. Hastings shook her head. “We were sound asleep upstairs and didn’t hear a peep!” Unexpectedly, she chuckled. “I suppose if I can sleep through Ezra’s snoring, I can sleep through anything, so perhaps I ought not be surprised.”

“Ah.” George glanced up at the exposed ceiling beams, as if he expected to see all the way to the attic rooms the servants occupied.

“But you need not worry, Mr. Kirkland. We’re taking precautions now.”

“Oh? What kind of precautions?” Did she force Mr. Hastings to sleep in the kitchen so his snoring would frighten away treasure seekers?

His guess proved disturbingly close to the truth.

“Young Peggy there beds down under the kitchen table.” Mrs. Hastings jerked her chin in the direction of the kitchen maid busily chopping onions. “She’s a light sleeper. If anyone starts pounding on the walls, she’ll hear.”

“’Deed I would, sir.” Peggy looked up from her work and grinned at George, displaying crooked front teeth. “At home, my ma always said I could be woken by a kitten’s sneeze.”

“Let us hope there are no sniffling kittens about the place.” A frown formed on George’s face as he studied the hard paving stones beneath his feet. “Isn’t it rather an uncomfortable place to sleep, though?”

“I s’pose so,” Peggy agreed. “But there’s folks what don’t have a roof over their head, aren’t there? So I can’t complain.”

“I see.” Privately, George thought she had plenty of grounds for complaint. The existence of less fortunate people did not make her suffering more tolerable. There must be a better way to secure the kitchen from intruders! “I think we must add a bolt to that door,” he decided. “The lock is clearly not enough.”

“Aye, that’s a good plan,” Mrs. Hastings agreed. “We can’t have riffraff breaking in now that the family’s back.” She pronounced the phrase “the family” with a distinct note of pride.

Did it make so much of a difference to have the cottage occupied? George did not quite understand why. The Hastings lived here year-round, regardless of whether any Kirklands occupied the cottage. Their safety ought to matter just as much as George and Arabella’s. Though, naturally, he did not want to put his wife at any risk.

“I will think on the problem,” he promised Mrs. Hastings. “There must be other security measures we can take.” It ought not be so easy for anyone to wander into the house and chip away at the walls! Such destruction ought to be reserved for the youngsters of the Kirkland family.

George found himself grinning as he remembered some of the trouble he and Caro had gotten into back when they were young. He had not realized it at the time, but Aunt Helena must have been a saint to tolerate their hijinks as she did. Some years, Vincent and his sisters had visited too, and the house rang with children’s voices from morning to night. Uncle William had occasionally grumbled about the noise, but Aunt Helena rarely lost her smile. George supposed she must have loved her nieces and nephews all the more because she had no children of her own.

His grin faded as he looked back over Aunt Helena’s life and wondered if she’d been lonely. She’d always had rather poor health, at least as long as he could remember, and Uncle William believed that living in the country was better for her than living next to his factory. But that meant she spent many long days alone, often seeing her husband only on the weekends. No wonder she had been so happy to have guests staying for extended visits!

Well, there might be children disrupting the quiet cottage soon enough. If nothing else, George hoped to persuade Caroline to visit once she was past the worst of her morning sickness. Having Charlie about would certainly liven up the place! Perhaps someday there would be other young Kirklands in the cottage, undoubtedly making a mess as they tried to catch the family ghost or find the legendary treasure. He could only hope.