Yore stared, tried to speak, and nodded instead.
The duke broke the silence. He pulled out his watch and studied the face carefully until it swam into focus again. “Yore, it’s too late for you to go anywhere tonight. There is a spare bed down here. We can go around tomorrow for any of your possessions. I’d like to start out tomorrow for Knare, if that would suit you.”
The private grinned. ‘‘I don’t know as the other five will miss me much, Major. We can let them have my blanket. There is only my cup,” he said, nodding his head toward the tin cup that used to swing from his knapsack through quick marches across the map of Europe.
The duke picked it up. “I’d like to keep this, Yore, if you don’t mind.”
The private nodded, obviously mystified by the request but too polite to question his good fortune.
Nez turned it over in his hands. Private Yore, I will put it on the mantelpiece at Knare, right up there with the Sevres and the Ming, thought the duke, and it will remind me. I will look at it each day for the rest of my life and let it remind me how close I came to forgetting that I was a civilized man.
The private struggled to his feet. Luster hurried to his side. “Private Yore, I have taken a liberty,” the butler began. “There is a bath for you down the hall, and I remembered some clothing that the duke has outgrown.”
“I couldn’t,” protested the private. “You’ve done enough.”
The duke took Yore by the hand and nodded, with raised eyebrows, toward the butler. “I never argue with him, man, because he always gets his way. Off you go now. We’re leaving early in the morning. Pytch, did you say? I can locate Private Allenby in Pytch?”
“I think so, sir,” were the private’s last words as Luster led him toward the door.
When Yore had regained his crutch again and was navigating on his own, Luster looked back at the duke. “Sir, do you know, I have been considering your question about obliging relatives.”
“And?”
“It may not be so important. After all, your grace, you are the duke. If you can’t do what you want, sir, who can?”
“Who, indeed?’’ Nez murmured. He watched Luster and Yore make their way down the hall as he fingered the tin cup. “I have begun, Libby,’’ he whispered softly.
Tomorrow they would be on their way to Knare. The duke rubbed the cup against his cheek. I have not been home in so long, he thought. Already he saw the rolling hills and busy streams of his childhood. Knare was in need of repair. He would spend next month beginning its renovation and making it snug for winter.
Maybe by the time leaves began to turn, he would have accumulated the courage to go calling in Kent again, bound this time on a different mission.
If he could wait that long . . .
18
Anthony Cook did not write. During that first week in the rented house off Marine Parade, Libby had not expected to hear from him. The squire will take all his time, and then there are his many patients, she reasoned, as she sat in her room and watched the sun glinting off the sea. She wished herself at Holyoke Green.
Candlow wrote once, a letter that looked as though it had been labored over at length. He informed them that Aunt Crabtree had fled to London at Lydia’s request. (“I anticipate a precarious outcome,’’ he added.) Another paragraph allowed that Squire Cook was much improved and that the Manwarings had restored order to the house. “‘Jim Manwaring is painting the trim on the windows now,’” he wrote. “’I know that his next task is to plant saplings along the lane to the road, for I heard Dr. Cook asking him about that. I would say more, but surely you will hear from the doctor soon and he can tell you better than I how things are going.’”
Libby waited for the promised letter, but it never came. She knew the mail was delivered each morning around ten o’clock, and always managed to find a reason to be in the hall then, to appear only slightly interested while Uncle Ames looked with maddening slowness at each letter.
There was an occasional letter for her mother, but usually Uncle Ames pocketed them all. Libby tried not to show her chagrin, but soon the footman was casting her sympathetic glances and then going about his duties with an equally long face.
From the evening of their arrival in Brighton, Libby had said little about the events that had brought them, beyond the obvious necessity of explaining to Mama how Joseph had come by his interesting scar. She had told the whole story, and Mama had cried, sniffled and gasped, “Poor man, poor boy!”
After careful consideration, there seemed no point to elaborating on Dr. Cook’s surprising offer of marriage and her equally impulsive agreement. With each day that passed without a letter, Libby could only be grateful that she had said nothing.
It became easier and easier to stay in her room—looking out over the treetops to the sea—than to bother to promenade about. She didn’t require a novel to entertain her. It was far more pleasant to doze and gaze at the water and compose dozens of letters in her mind that she never put on paper.
She came to hate the badly spelled letters that flowed out of London from Lydia, letters almost incoherent with news of military reviews and balloon ascensions and picnics al fresco. Lydia begged Aunt Ames to come to London to help her select the material for her wedding dress and guide the hands of the modiste who would be entrusted with that exalted task. “‘I depend upon you, Aunt Ames,’” she had written in the last letter, each word heavily underscored.
“Well, I will not go,” Mama said at luncheon as she read the letter over again. “She can be guided in these matters by the Earl of Devere’s mother.” Mama glanced at Libby. “I wish you would eat something, dear. You grow more picky by the minute, and I fear a deep decline,” she teased, waving the letter at her like a fan. “And then we would have to send for Dr. Cook to bumble his way to the diagnosis.”
Libby sobbed and ran from the room, slamming the dining room door on Mama’s cry of amazement and Uncle Ames’ exclamation, “Pon my word.” She locked her door, drew herself into a little ball, and gave herself over to misery of the worst sort.
Mama knocked on the door. Libby blew her nose and opened it, averting her eyes from her mother’s white face. She waited, miserable, for Mama to scold her for her rudeness.
Mama did nothing of the sort. She settled herself into the window seat that Libby had vacated, and calmly took up the knitting that she had brought with her.
