“Martha. It’s Catherine Forster.”
She looked into the old woman’s face, lined and creased, and at her hair, mussed and white to the crown. She remembered her as a broad, strong woman, capable of controlling a room of children or humbling a man of any class. Catherine thought of how her home was only twenty miles from here. If Martha didn’t tell her something shocking, she would have to return to Edington—to see what had become of Forster House and visit the old sights that she had not seen in so long. The prospect only promised pain.
The old woman looked at her. “Dear child, do you think I am too ill to remember my favorite charge?” She sat up with great effort and when Catherine urged her not to trouble herself, she waved her off. “But what are you doing here, my dear?”
“I have come to see you. But I am sorry to disturb you. I did not know you were ill.”
“I won’t last much longer, thank the Lord. It seems that it is my time.”
Catherine didn’t know what to say in response to this blunt acknowledgment of mortality but Martha only laughed at her discomposure.
“It is fine, my child. I have lived a very long life. I was already an old woman when I took care of you. What age are you now?”
“I’m ashamed to own it.” Catherine remembered why she had always loved Martha—she could put anyone at ease. “I’m eight-and-twenty.”
“A baby. Strange how I keep getting older and you stay young. Lucky you.” She smiled at her, her eyes twinkling despite her fragility. Catherine squeezed her hand, putting into that impulse all she couldn’t say in words.
“Eight-and-twenty is hardly young.”
“It is to an old woman like me. Now tell me of yourself, my dear. Are you still with the baronet’s woman? And the little baronet? I hope they treat you well.”
“They treat me very well, thank you.”
“They have fallen on hard times, too, eh? You deserve an easy life, my girl. You have had too much hardship. Have you found a man who can give you such a life? Such a beauty as yourself, with such a good spirit, you must have by now.”
“Not yet, Martha,” she said with a laugh, but her old nurse’s eyes held levity and gravity in equal measure.
“Don’t lie to me, girl. You were never good at it. I heard a man’s voice before you came into the room.”
“Oh,” she said, shocked that Martha was still so sharp. “He’s not—he’s just a friend. Who has been kind in bringing me here.” She couldn’t lie to Martha and tell her she was betrothed when she wasn’t.
Martha shook her head. “All the way from London? A man only travels that far for love.” Catherine felt herself color. “I won’t pry into your affairs, girl, but I can assure you, if he’s come all this way with you, he loves you.”
“It isn’t like that.”
Martha patted her hand. “Sometimes, we are the last to see it. But I trust you to figure out your own affair of the heart. You are a Forster. You will find the right answer.”
Catherine felt a powerful pang of melancholy dart through her. She had forgotten how people used to say things like that, long ago, when her family was still intact. Back when being herself had meant something.
“Now, I want you to tell me why you are here.”
“To see you, Martha.” She still hadn’t gotten used to the directness of her old nurse.
“I’m not affronted, child. I have seen you only once since you left Edington, when you were traveling through Lulworth with the baronet’s woman. I know that you do not come here for nothing and that you do not sacrifice to travel all this way just to see an old set of bones such as myself. Out with it. I don’t have much time these days for feints.”
Catherine bit her lip, even as she knew that Martha wouldn’t be offended by her ulterior motive.
“I want to ask about my aunt.”
“Mary,” Martha murmured.
“After everything happened, she came to you.”
Martha nodded. She waited a moment and then she spoke. “Mary—special but wild. Wild at heart. She always was. She never would do anything that she didn’t want to do. Even as a girl. Not Mary. Oh, how her father demanded that she marry the Viscount of Brightley and how she refused. That was when she was seventeen. You couldn’t force Mary to do a single thing if she didn’t have the appetite for it. And you couldn’t stop her from doing what she wanted if she had set her mind to it.”
The old woman let out a chuckle but her face also looked sorrowful, as if she remembered other times, other incidents, that were less humorous.
Catherine’s pulse quickened at this characterization, particularly the story about the Viscount Brightley. When she was a child, no one told her tales like that. The way Martha spoke made clear that there was much that she didn’t know about her own family. She yearned to hear Martha speak at length about the Forsters. But, she told herself, that wasn’t why she was here.
