He hesitated too long. Mrs Hoswick’s head drooped a trifle, and she sighed.
“I knew it. Her letter was all too silent, poor lamb.” She tutted for a moment, sipped her tea, and then looked up, suddenly brisk. “Well, and what do you want of me, my lord?”
On impulse, Raith reached out to touch one of the work-roughened hands. “Your help, Mrs Hoswick. I am as anxious as you are for Rosina’s happiness.”
She allowed his hand to rest upon hers for a moment without speaking. He removed it, and she stood up. “Will you allow an old woman a liberty, my lord?”
Raith shot a glance at Ottery, who shrugged expressively. “Of what nature?”
“Let me feel your face.”
Instinct caused Raith to shrink inwardly. What had Rosina told her in that letter? The thought of those pudgy hands playing over his scarred face was acutely uncomfortable. But if that was what it was going to take? He looked at his lawyer, whose features were creased with concern.
“It is a blind person’s way of seeing, my lord,” he murmured, setting down his own cup, and mouthing further on a whisper, “Will you risk it?”
Raith drew a breath, and mouthed back, “I have no choice.” Ottery nodded, and Raith turned back to the nurse. “Very well.”
She moved around the table, obviously so familiar a motion she did not need to use her hands. Raith shifted his chair, and waited, rigid with tension, as she stood before him.
The fingers that came to rest upon his face were gentle.
He had an immediate vision of Rosina under these hands as they stroked comfort. The touch was featherlight, and his rigidity lessened, until it came in contact with his disfigurement, and hesitated. Unlike Rosina, whose finger had traced the line, the nurse’s played a rhythmic stroke back and forth across it, at the same time as she did as much on his other cheek.
He sighed out his breath as her examination ended, and saw her nod. “You’ll do.”
Raith was betrayed into a laugh. “I thank you.”
Ottery intervened. “Do you feel inclined to help his lordship, ma’am?”
“I’ll tell him only where to find out what he wants to know.”
Raith could take this no longer. “How do you know what I want? How did you know it was I?”
The nurse laughed comfortably. “Ah, you mustn’t run away with the idea that I’m a seer, nor nothing like that. Deduction, my lord. You weren’t him, I’d take my oath. He’d not have come here with no pleasant words for such as I, he wouldn’t. Nor he wouldn’t bring no one with him, unless it were t’other. Him I’d know, though we ain’t met. One whiff of his breath is all it ’ud take, my lord, and that’s a fact.”
So that was what she had been doing on the doorstep. Sniffing at them. He glanced to his lawyer and found the same deep appreciation upon his features. But this passage had been all too confusing, besides sending a riffle of that jealous flame burning through him. Two of them. Which of these was the man whose throat his itching hands sought to surround and strangle?
“I pray you, Mrs Hoswick, could you sort out one “him” from the other?”
There must have been an indication of his unquiet thoughts in his voice, for she shot her face towards him, and a frown creased her brow. Raith felt impelled to reassure her.
“Don’t be alarmed. I have need of this information. I will not use it ill, I promise you.”
Mrs Hoswick clasped her hands together on the table. “The only thing I care for, my lord, is that my Rosy is safe. Now, if you can’t make her so, then you’d best bring her back to me.”
“I want to keep her, Mrs Hoswick. Only I cannot, if I do not...” He faded out, unwilling to put into words the hideous truth of his intended findings. He wondered how much she knew. He dared swear she would not say.
“I can’t tell you nothing, my lord,” said the nurse, folding her lips together, and rising. “You’d best go now.”
Raith leapt up, casting an anguished glance at his lawyer. To his relief, Ottery took over. Rising, too, he moved to lay a hand on the nurse’s shoulder. She must have heard him approach, but she flinched, throwing it off.
“His lordship is anxious to find out the truth, ma’am. You cannot wish for Lady Raith — I mean, for your nurseling, for that is now her name — to find herself back in the hands of the man whom she fears above all others.”
For the first time, Mrs Hoswick began to look anxious, kneading her hands in her apron. “If only I knew what to do for the best.”
“She is my wife, ma’am,” said Raith, anxiety rife. “Neither of us knew, when we wed, that we would find ourselves with a marriage utterly other than that we had planned. But it is so. Help me to make it safe for her.” He hesitated, watching uncertainty ripple across the elderly dame’s features.
“I don’t know, my lord,” she said, the sightless eyes shifting with the uneven tenor of her thoughts.
