Chapter 12

CHAPTER TWELVE

L eda's heart gave a small kick against her ribs as Jack clicked to the horses and the market cart rolled away from Holme Hall. It took her a moment to place the sensation: excitement. The sky stretched broad and blue gray above them, dotted with birds swooping along the shoreline and feeding in the marshes, their calls echoing in a continuing musical chorus. The scent of salt braced her senses with its bouquet of sand and cordgrass and seaweed, the wind scraping her skin. She hadn't felt this wild and alive since she sailed toward Bristol and saw if she kept going she'd reach the wide sea, leaving behind everything she'd known. Norfolk unrolled before her in the same way, like an enamel box opening to reveal treasures nestled within.

The man beside her in the driving seat had something to do with her excitement. Being near Jack brought her to attention, as if she were an instrument being tuned by a skilled hand.

"My mother took me to market in Snettisham with her all the time," Muriel announced. The girl sat between Jack and Leda, her back straight and determined, hands clasped around the small cloth pocket she carried, which she had not attached beneath her dress. The fabric, scraps of silk brocade in an elegant weave, were held together by knotted thread and showed the wear and dirt of steady use. Leda had never seen the girl without it.

"What is your favorite part of the market?" Leda asked lightly.

Muriel set her tiny chin. She was a small child, built like a reed, with her slender limbs and tufts of hair red as the bands of stone that lined the cliffs. There was no doubt she was Jack's child, with that hair, and something about her chin suggested his features as well, but her fair skin and green eyes came from her mother, or so she had informed Leda. In the two days since they had been introduced, Muriel's mother fell constantly from her lips. Leda knew it was a challenge and reminder, the girl's one defense against this stranger whom her father had brought, without her knowledge or permission, into their home.

"A peddler would sometimes come, and my mother liked to look at his buttons and pretty ribbons and pins."

"What do you want from market, Mere?" Jack asked, glancing down at his daughter.

His look sliced Leda's chest. There was something protective and hopeless blended in it, inviting her confidence, and doubtful he would be gifted with knowing the secrets of her heart.

Muriel did not return his look, but rather studied her pocket with great attention. The cart dipped into a rut into the road, and the girl stiffened and pulled away as the motion tipped her toward Leda. The slight stung. Leda was accustomed to people trusting her within moments, sometimes on sight. Muriel would not be easily won.

"Would you also like a ribbon, Muriel?" Leda asked. Not that she meant to woo Jack's daughter with treats.

The girl's attire was frightfully plain, a simple cotton frock of dark blue with only one ruffle on the short sleeves. The white tucker at her neckline and the apron at her waist were clean white linen, but her muslin cap had no ribbon to lace it, and her straw bonnet had nothing to adorn it but a strip of scarlet silk, matching her red woolen cloak. Her shoes were clean, but the leather showed scuffed and worn above a set of wooden pattens. Leda had been furnished her own set of pattens before they left—she guessed they might have belonged to the former lady of the manor—and they served a warning that the market might be a muddy as well as crowded affair.

Muriel drew a small doll out of her pocket, an oddly shaped figure woven of dried corn husks. "Nanette would like a ribbon," the girl said.

Jack stiffened and stared straight ahead. Mrs. Leech, seated in the back of the cart, abruptly stopped her stream of steady commentary and instruction directed at Grace, who nodded and took everything in.

Something about the mention of Nanette, the doll, had brought them all to swift attention. Did Muriel ask for so little?

"Then we shall look for a ribbon at market," Leda said. "Is that a corn dolly? She is pretty."

"My mother always won the corn dolly in the fall. The workers made it for her. She was the queen of the harvest." Despite the proud note in her words, Muriel stuffed the dolly back into her fabric pocket as if she meant to bury it.

"My mother was the most beautiful lady," Muriel added. "Everyone loved her."

"I am very sure they did," Leda murmured.

Jack's jaw had gone as hard as the cliffs that fell down to the beach outside his house, a hardness that could weather centuries of wind and wear.

"I'll never want a different doll." Muriel looked Leda full in the face, her expression as tight as her father's. "Never."

Leda trained her gaze on the rough track ahead of them. The wind cut through her cloak, made for the sheltered, stone-walled streets of Bath, not this wild, empty country where grass stretched out endlessly to one side of her and the other rolled to marshland dropping bare and open to the sea and sky.

"Not a different," Leda agreed. "But perhaps another, in time?"

Muriel set her chin and stared straight ahead. "No."

"She will warm to you." Jack came to Leda's side after he stopped the cart south of Heacham to inspect a brick kiln there. A chalk pit dug out a hill across the road. Leda watched Muriel wander to the edge of a pond, where shovelers and teals floated in pairs on the water. The girl looked so small, framed against the green-gray marsh.

"She is on her guard. I can understand that."

As a girl herself, Leda had been open and trusting, at least when it came to her sister. She had learned early to be wary of her mother's motives, but had for the most part found the world a hospitable place, right up until she met the man her parents meant her to marry.

Muriel had been betrayed young by her mother's death. She would not see the world as a warm and welcoming place at all.

Jack stood beside her, and Leda's stomach did that strange dance it reserved only for him. "She's usually so biddable," he said. "I've never seen her this—mulish."

Leda looked at him in surprise. "Milord Brancaster, your daughter is nothing but mulish." She had needed less than ten minutes in Muriel's company, on the occasion of their first meeting, to see that the girl was mostly hair, pale skin, and backbone. If she was biddable, it was only for her father.

Because perhaps she thought that was what he wished. Or what she thought was necessary to her survival.

Jack looked as if she had struck him, his gray eyes capturing the range of colors in the sky. He was made of this place, and belonged here. In the countryside, he didn't walk like some leashed predator, his power strapped in and contained. Here, in these wild open spaces, he was at home.

"How is she for you?" Leda asked softly. As Jack watched his daughter, she saw again in his eyes the bewilderment of an otherwise capable man who didn't know the first thing to do with the small creature placed in his care. Her heart ached for Muriel, losing her mother, and for him, who had lost near as much.

He turned away. "Today, in the cart, was the most I've heard her speak in months." He paused, his back toward her. "She speaks to you ."

"Perhaps she is still grieving," Leda said. "How long ago did her mother die?"

"Six years." He looked again toward the pond, as if it pained him to see his daughter distance herself, but he couldn't look away.

Six years was not a recent loss. Time enough for the first wounds of grief to scab over, as she knew. Some men moved on once their year of mourning was complete, or even before then. Jack's walls were as high and firm as his daughter's.

What had happened to this family, that the surviving members locked themselves away?

And what had led milady Brancaster to jump? To leave what the world would see as her comfortable home, her beautiful daughter, her handsome and no doubt quite doting husband?

Madness. Or desperation, like Lady Sydney had said.

Jack moved away, and she felt his departure like a physical diminishing. "Have you ever been in a brick kiln?" he called over his shoulder.

Leda wavered. She understood that where she chose to stand would indicate her alliance in this household. Did she move toward Muriel, standing in for governess, holding guard as the girl trailed her fingers through blooming knapweed and purple moor-grass? Or did she wait near the cart, like the servants?

She ought to keep her distance from Jack. Regard him, if not as an employer, then her employer's nephew. Family acquaintance, no more. Despite that kiss.

But that kiss had happened. Kisses. So had their dance, and their walk on Maud Heath's Causeway, and their many dinners, and shared miles and hours in the carriage, sometimes talking, sometimes drifting in a silence that felt shared and serene, demanding nothing. All of those moments bound her to him with small sure threads, tight as the knots on Muriel's pocket.

He paused at the rim of the kiln, a pit dug into the earth, and turned to her, his eyes glowing like sun rising behind a veil of fog. He rippled with aliveness, with that alert but quiet intensity she had noticed in him from the first.

"Coming? You've seen nothing like this in your West Country, I promise."

She made her choice, a declaration to the others of where her loyalties lay. An admission of sorts, for she was helpless to resist him. He lured her like the flicker of a warm hearth on an icy day, the call of a candle in the window across a heath dark and cold with storms.

He beckoned, and she followed, as if she had no sense of self-preservation whatsoever. As if he hadn't led another woman to her doom, and Leda might be next.

"Jumped," one farm wife said confidently, bundling asparagus for Leda. "Though if you arst others, they'll say pushed , tha will." She sent a glare toward another goodwife, sidling over with her apron full of cauliflower sprouts and turnip tops.

"Oi say pushed, and thas the right of it an'orl." The second woman peeped open her apron for Leda's inspection like a smuggler sporting stolen wares.

"Thassa lud a squit," a third woman announced, plunking a basket of pears on the first woman's table and leaning in. "It warnt neither. He thacked her on the lug, dint he, and tipped her ore the edge. An she never made a deen, the poor mawther, tha she dint, jes sank her down to a watery grave."

"Hold yew hard," said the first in irritation. "She warnt in the water. They found her bones all frooz the next day on the shingle."

"Who found her?" Leda asked, agog at this wealth of information. The farm wives of Snettisham didn't hold a bit with the coy crosstalk of Bath parlors or assembly rooms. The moment she had shown up in the broad dusty triangle of the market, where the sellers vied to place their carts or blankets beneath the spreading branches of a great oak, the good women of Snettisham had been talking over one another to answer Leda's questions about the mad baron Brancaster and his late, little-lamented wife.

A silence fell at this last, however. The second woman shook her head, her white cap peeking out beneath a straw bonnet. "The little mawther founder, thas her daughter, and she hant been the same after."

"And his lordship went all titchy, too," the first goodwife added. "Tha say he went mad."

"If he went mad after finding his wife dead," Leda said, "that would seem to suggest he did not kill her."

Her group of informers met this with silence, each grappling in their own way with Leda's logic.

Finally, the third spoke in a hushed tone. "Do y'spose someone else mighta kilt her and blamed it on himself?"

"She jumped, dint she," the first farm wife said firmly, rearranging the cabbage heads on her folding table. She had staked a prime place beneath the tree, sheltered by its branches but well within sights of the crossing roads, and Leda guessed she had trucked into town well before dawn, pulling her handcart with her table and wares, a Norfolk version of Maud Heath.

"I wonder why," Leda murmured. "Milord Brancaster seems the sort of husband that a woman could go on with."

The others leaned in.

"He's a masterpiece, tha he is," the second wife confirmed. "When he moved here, every mawther in the hundred set her cap for him. An he won't see none but Anne-Marie Waddelow, the only one who dint make sheep's eyes." She sighed. "Thas the way of it, hintut? We wants the ones as don't want us."

Leda's heart turned over, and she darted a guilty look about the market. It was a quiet day, vendors sparsely scattered around the open areas and along a line of beech trees that shielded some great house from prying eyes. She spotted the top of Jack's black felt hat, the hat of a common laborer, as he spoke with great animation to another man Leda guessed to be a cooper, by the casks and barrels scattered about him.

Grace idled by a woman setting out an array of colorful items, perhaps feathers and ribbons, while keeping an eye on Muriel, who was stalking a chicken. Mrs. Leech was engaged in a hearty discussion with another farm wife, shaking a bundle of watercress in her fist. Leda guessed she was negotiating the best price she could, all too aware that her budget would not stretch as far in these days.

The members of the household being out of earshot, Leda was free to gossip. She felt no compunction about mining these good wives for information.

"She was very lovely, I'll wager," Leda prodded, keeping her voice confidentially low, and that was all it took.

"As the day is long," said the first wife, whose name was Ellen. She described a dark-haired beauty with mother-of-pearl skin and eyes the color of seablite that grew along the coast. A woman who floated like a fairy and seemed untethered to earth. Every man wanted her, yet none won her from her parents until Brancaster came along with his hall and his title and his square jaw and broad shoulders, a lion among donkeys.

There'd been some whispers, some secrets that were shushed up when the young lord came calling. Leda gathered there might have been some protests on the part of young Anne-Marie, overruled by her older and wiser parents. Well she knew how such a conversation would go. So young Anne-Marie, who might have wanted more from her life than to be given in marriage to a hall and husband in Hunstanton, Norfolk, was bound will she nil she, and bore him a child in short order.

"And thas when she…" The second farm wife, Jane, twirled a finger outside her ear in a gesture Leda knew all too well. She winced.

"What were her symptoms?" She wondered at her own fascination with this woman—the woman Jack had loved, wooed and won, who became his wife, the mother of his child, the mistress of his home. She wanted to know everything about her.

How he had touched her. How he had longed for her. If Anne-Marie felt the same way when Jack kissed her—as if the top of her head were floating away, her body caught on a magnificent tide.

"Wandered the cliffs, blarin' streams of sea water from her eyes," reported the third farm wife, Mary. "They'd allus been quiet folk, but no one saw inside that house save the servants. Such a kelter she'ud get herself into. Tried agin and over to have her folks take her back, or anyone. But they allus said no and sent her back to him, dint they."

"She tried to leave him?"

"She was badly afore the babe," Jane offered. "And then the next un…" She clamped her lips together.

Leda pounced. "There was another child?"

"Naught that we're in the know of," Mary rushed in. "But she was a primmicky sort from the first. Allus puttin' on her parts."

"Botty," Ellen added. "Liked the attention, dint she. ‘Specially from the bors."

"Yet she never had folks callin, did she, not even the grand families heres about," Jane argued. "When she useter to be at all the great dews afore she was married."

Mary tapped the side of her nose. "Himself dint care to share her, I shink."

"Ah, you do run on." Jane shook her head. "She wasn't a furriner, mind, but it was us she dint want no truck with."

"She was from here?" Leda asked in surprise.

"Aye, from Hope House, she was. That great block acrorst the way."

Ellen nodded in a direction leading down the street, toward a house with the local red brick and a black tiled roof. Leda counted five bays around the central porch, framed with its classical pillars. The Waddelows were of no mean stature, it would seem. And what gentleman's family wouldn't want their daughter to reach high above their station, however she felt about the marriage.

Jack had moved on from the cooper and was deep in conversation with another man, shorter and bulkier than he was. He spoke with animation, his hands sweeping through the air as he made shapes to accompany his words. Curls the color of the dark brick of the buildings about them poked from beneath his hat, and she wanted to curve her hand over the nape of his neck. Lean close and inhale the scent of him, wood and smoke, salt and cedar.

The strangest heat bloomed in her belly. She wanted to twine her tongue with his in another soul-consuming kiss, feel his hard body pressing her against a door, as if he could mold her softness to his hard frame and each could balance the other.

How could a woman, knowing the heat of his embrace, the safety of his arms, ever bear to part from him? What could possibly have driven his wife away?

Leda cleared her throat. "Why do they call him the Mad Baron?"

Her conspirators considered this question, looking to one another for assistance.

"He's the one as drove her to it," said a new voice at Leda's ear.

Leda turned and saw a girl, barely to her shoulder, clad in a prim printed calico. Dark hair lay pinned beneath a straw bonnet, and a white tucker like a child would wear filled the neckline of her gown, but a black ribbon tied around her throat lent her a more mature aspect. Leda guessed she was thirteen, perhaps fourteen—a girl on the cusp of womanhood, and seemingly, from the unease in her stance, unsure how she felt about it.

"The mad-making baron, then," Leda said.

The girl nodded, her eyes narrowing. Their color was startling, the green of seaweed that speckled the shore. Leda had seen that color. Recently.

"You think he drove her to despair?" Leda questioned. The girl's serious demeanor roused her curiosity.

"Such a barney he had to get her," Jane said thoughtfully, shaking her head. "Then to find she's not keen to the shackle."

"Thas all mardle, hintut," Ellen said. "Nowt but gossip and talk. How you goin, Miss Nora?"

The girl raised her chin. She had a fine-boned beauty to her, like expensive porcelain. "None too sadly. It's a tidy place I have, when the missus isn't titchy."

"Nora works for the Waddelows," Mary said, hushed as if it were a secret. "In the house we shewed yew." She nodded toward Hope House.

"Where Anne-Marie grew up?" Leda asked, surprised. "Did you know her?"

The girl stiffened. "I was a babe when she married," she said. "A foundling. And the Missus said I wasn't goin with her when she married, so I'm a maid of all work now, aren't I."

"Good of Missus Waddelow, warnt it," Mary remarked, with the air of someone rehearsing a fact she didn't quite believe.

Jack lifted his head and looked over the market, searching for something. His eyes paused on Leda, and his lips half-lifted, as if he smiled despite himself. He did have a delicious mouth, that man.

Then he noticed Nora, and the smile froze.

Leda's skin prickled, and she looked around. Muriel had given up on the chicken and she, too, stared, not at Leda, but at Nora, as if the girl were a wild creature chained to a stake. Nora stared back at Muriel for a long moment, her lips tightening into a line.

A cool wind swirled through the marketplace, winter on the back of it, as if spring were yet far away. Leda was glad she had worn her flannel petticoat.

"You have some lovely ribbons on your bonnet," Leda said, struck by one of those intuitions she didn't question. "I've been searching out ribbons for Muriel. Can you help me look?"

Nora softened and started toward a table across the way, where a woman sat behind a small folding table drifted over with trimmings, feathers and buttons and bows. "That girl needs a treat, she does."

"You know her?"

"We've never spoken."

The two girls converged before the ribbon as if they'd made an assignation. They stared at one another, both with the same mother-of-pearl skin, the same light green eyes, Nora's dark hair beside Muriel's red, the color of fired clay.

"Hello, Muriel," Nora said. "Your lady friend said you wish for a ribbon."

Muriel clamped her lips together. "She's not a lady, an she's not my friend."

"That is true," Leda said, though her stomach pinched like she'd been poked with a pin. Muriel would resist even the smallest overtures, it would seem. "Our acquaintance at this point is very slight."

"And she will not marry my da and carry him off with her, howsomever," Muriel said.

"That's a caution did she do," Nora answered. "You'll want a green for your eyes, then? Or a red to go with that sash on your frock."

While the girls discussed colors and textures, Leda turned to the peddler who had come alongside. Pans hung from the sack slung across his back, and he had the weary, wizened look of a man worn down by the elements. A sparkle entered his eyes when he heard Leda's request, and in short order he had located her item within one of his many packs.

"No vonga. No money." He held up a hand as she reached for the pocket inside her skirt. "That chavi needs to smile. She is so sad."

Leda blinked, recognizing the Romani words. There'd been a caravan that came near Cheltenham every so often during her childhood, and every time she'd defy her parents' warnings and run off to spy on their camp.

There were so many currents in this place that she couldn't begin to untangle, a history piling up over her head. She felt as if she were a bather inching into the Wash, sure at any moment the sea floor would fall away.

"You know the family?"

He nodded. "Walked the Peddar's Way many times, have I. A straight old noble Roman road." The peddler sobered as he watched the two girls, with their same slender arms, same pert nose, though Muriel had Jack's forehead and the stubborn slope of his jaw. "The daj , the mother." He shook his head.

"Some say her husband drove her to it." Leda tugged three hairpins out of her coiffure and handed them to the peddler. His eyes lit, and he slipped the pins into a pocket, patting the fabric as if it held treasure. Her acquaintance with Jack was costing her many a hairpin, Leda observed.

"You can mend a pot," her new friend said in accented English. "But will it hold the same, after?"

Jack arrived at her side, and the peddler melted away. So did Nora. He appeared not to notice, focused instead on his daughter.

"You have made purchases I must pay for, I see."

"I hope you will allow me," Leda said. "It was my idea."

"I insist upon the honor. That color will flatter you, Mere."

"Did you choose one for Nanette?" Leda asked.

Jack stilled, and so did Muriel. His daughter's gaze searched his face, hers fretful, wary. He looked above the top of her head and withdrew a few coins from inside his coat.

Nora reappeared at Leda's side, holding back from Muriel now that her father had arrived. Her gown was fine for a servant's, but she kept her head bent and her hands, lacking gloves, were chapped. Leda thought of the extra cotton gloves in her bag, back at the hall. She ought to have brought them.

"At least he cares for his daughter," Leda observed, keeping her voice low.

"Who's to say he didn't care for her, too."

Leda knew of whom the girl spoke. The woman was still on everyone's mind. If nothing else, Muriel would not let them forget her.

"Maybe he never done her in a'tall," Nora whispered. "Maybe he's locked her away in the attics." Her eyes shone despite the cloudy day, her gaze sharp as the edge on a knife. "Haven't you heard the voices? The Hall is full of ghosts."