Harriet nodded at Sarah as the maid stepped back and opened the door wider. A short hall led to a small parlor on the right, where Sarah made the introductions in a careful voice.
Mrs. Wraxhall had the same mouth as her daughter. She worried her lower lip as her hands worked stitches in a purse, the hook so fine it looked like a needle. Dr. Wraxhall had his son’s good looks but wore them sternly, without Peter’s lightness or openness. “How can I help you, Mrs. Boyne?”
Harriet put on her most presentable manners. “My friends and I have just taken possession of Thornycroft Hall, sir. Yesterday I had the good fortune”—ha—“to meet your daughter Lydia. But your family was already known to me: your son was in the same regiment as my late husband, whom I followed to the Crimea.”
The doctor’s eyes didn’t soften in the slightest, but his wife’s hands stilled. “You knew our Peter?”
“I did, ma’am. Please allow me to offer you my sincerest condolences for your loss.”
Mrs. Wraxhall’s eyes instantly went shiny with tears. Her gaze flew to a lithograph above the mantel, and Harriet’s followed—oh, good God, not that picture again. A dead soldier’s body dangled like a noodle beneath an equally noodlish woman, weeping in a beautiful sort of way that caused Harriet to bristle and bite back curses. The Field of Battle, they called it, a reproduction of a painting by the princess royal herself. Sold to benefit the Patriotic Fund.
One of the most insipid visions of the war that Harriet had ever seen. And it had pride of place here.
Dr. Wraxhall stepped forward to put a heavy hand on his wife’s shoulder. The other fingered his watch-chain. “As you see, our family is not churlish in our patriotism. I like to think that in some small way, we helped Sevastopol to fall.”
Harriet’s face didn’t move, frozen with a chill so cold it burned. She’d seen Sevastopol. The siege had begun with the ships in harbor—Harriet and Mrs. Marwood were on the Cyclops then. Harriet’s husband was dead, and Marwood would soon follow, but not before his wife gave birth to their child as the bombardment roared around them.
It had taken nearly a year of shelling and starvation, disease and death, before the city had surrendered. Thousands of soldiers had fallen in the worst ways. Peter had died. The child had died, and Mrs. Marwood had turned her face to the sky and slipped into a six-month silence.
And for all this, Dr. Wraxhall wanted his share of credit.
He was welcome to it. His wife was still watching the lithograph. As though that amateur’s reproduction of a war some princess had never seen could make up for the loss of a real and living son.
Harriet forced words out through a choked throat. “Is Miss Wraxhall in, sir?”
The doctor blinked. “Oh, I’m sure she’s out back with those chickens of hers.”
Harriet made as polite a farewell as she could, and escaped.
Outside again she breathed easier. She found Miss Wraxhall in the farthest corner of the back garden, beyond a turn in the carefully manicured hedges, where a wire fence separated the chicken yard from the part of the garden that was purely ornamental.
Not that the chicken yard wasn’t pleasing to look at: it was a cozy patch of land, hidden at the end of the property and almost extending into the wood. Miss Wraxhall’s coop was a tall six-sided cylinder, with star-shaped windows and a well-shingled roof and a weathervane in the shape of—what else—a rooster. The real rooster was close beside his mistress’s dark skirts, scratching happily at the ground.
The six silvery hens from yesterday were in a wire pen in the center of the yard. The rooster occasionally wandered over to chirrup a hello, but should one of the other hens venture close the hens made warning sounds.
They made more of those sounds, even louder, as Harriet strode toward them. “You stole my chickens, Miss Wraxhall.”
“I did no such thing.” The woman’s dark-and-silver head lifted. She smiled, utterly unconcerned over Harriet’s wrath. “I lured them. They followed me because they wanted to.”
Did her tongue linger a little over the vowel in lured? Or was Harriet simply imagining the mischievous undertone? “They followed you because you’d fed them.”
“Are we meant to blame them for that?” Miss Wraxhall returned. She reached into a pocket and cast another, deliberately provocative handful of grain to the caged grey hens. “Would you rather have them starved? In winter, no less?”
“I would rather have the three hens we agreed on safe at Thornycroft Hall.”
“Do you have the facilities for them?”
“Certainly,” Harriet lied.
“Describe them, then.”
Harriet scowled. “A small run, with a coop.”
Miss Wraxhall smirked. “What kind of coop? How many birds will fit? Straw or wood shavings for litter?”
“I’m sure I don’t have to tell you.”
“You’ve no idea, do you?”
