“And I need to tell you what you already know?” Robin shook his head. “You work it out between you. She’s not been here long, I will tell you, and I should have dealt with her when she first appeared, but—” he scratched his head, and grinned one of those day-brightening grins, “—but there was birds to gossip with, and calves to tease, and goats to ride, and I just forgot.”
Nan snorted at the evasive answer, but Sarah smiled. “You never will answer anyone straight up, will you?” she asked with a sidelong glance.
“It’s not my way, Missy Sahib,” Puck replied, and tickled her under the chin with a buttercup that suddenly appeared in his hand. “Now go you back and not a word of this to your schooling dame. Just your bad luck that two things came together and you as the third made some things happen that might not have, otherwise. That was bad for you, but good for the little mite. Then came your good luck, that it all made a mighty big stir-up of the world, and that got my attention. And me knowing you, that called me. An hour one way or the other and this would never have happened. The shadow would have claimed the mite, and no doubt of it.”
Nan could well believe that. And she also had no intention of telling Mem’sab about it.
But she was going to find out what that shadow lady had been, and why she was at the bridge.
No one had missed them by the time they got back, and evidently there was no sign of their misadventure clinging to them either. Nan and Sarah stood in the garden doorway for a moment, assessing the mood in the manor, and exchanged a look.
“Think I’m gonna talk to th‘ kitchen maids,” Nan said thoughtfully. “If there’s gossip about, they’ll know it.”
“I’m going to see if Robin was right about the Hunt being in books,” was Sarah’s answer. “There are a lot of oddish things in the library here.”
With a nod, they separated, and Nan ensconced herself, first in the kitchen on the excuse of begging toast and jam and milk, then in the laundry, then in the dairy as the two dairymaids finished churning the butter out of the second milking, and turned the cheeses as they ripened.
By that time, the bell had rung for dinner, and it was too late to talk to Sarah about what she’d found out. She could tell that Sarah was bursting with news, though, and so was she—
The news had to wait. After dinner came the nightly chore Mem’sab had set Nan to doing, helping put the littlest ones to bed. And Sarah went to help Tommy catch fireflies—he had a scheme to put enough in a little wire cage he’d made to read under the covers by, but he couldn’t get the wire bars close enough and they kept escaping, much to the delight of the bats that flew in and out of their open windows at night—
That had been something that had shocked Nan the first time it had happened.
The children from India were all used to it; the same sort of thing happened in their Indian bungalows all the time. But Nan hadn’t ever even seen a bat before, and the first time one had flitted in the open window and fluttered around, she hadn’t known what it was. A lot of the maids hated them, and shrieked when they were flying around a room, pulling their caps down tight to their heads (because bats allegedly would get tangled in your hair). The bravest of them whacked at the poor little things with brooms, and all of them kept their bedroom windows shut tight all night long. But Mem’sab told the children that sort of behavior was silly, so they kept their own windows open to the night air. The children all rather enjoyed the tiny creatures, and eventually even Nan got to liking the way they swooped around the room, clearing it of insects, then flitting out the window again.
Tonight the little ones were full of mischief, and each had to be put to bed half a dozen times before they actually stayed in bed. Weary, but relieved, Nan trudged up the stairs to the room she and Sarah shared, to find Sarah, Neville, and Grey already waiting for her. Nan changed into her nightgown and hopped up to sit cross-legged on her own little bed and looked at her friend expectantly.
Sarah laughed. “You first,” she said.
Nan coughed, because a great deal of what she had heard was not the sort of thing that you told a “nice” girl like Sarah. Country folk were earthy sorts, and they had no compunction about calling a spade a spade, and not an “earth-turning implement.” The maids had certainly filled Nan’s ears, particularly when the cook was out of earshot.
“There was a gal down to the village that put on a lot of airs,” she said, heavily editing out a great deal. The whole truth was that this particular young lady was a lot like Becky Sharpe in Vanity Fair; she wanted a husband with money who would let her buy whatever pleased her; if she could get one, she wanted a husband with a title too, and she was perfectly willing to use any and every means at her disposal to get it.
“She set her cap at this feller, this captain, what showed up here at one of them hunting parties,” Nan continued. “Friend of a friend, the maids said, not some’un the master invited himself. Man didn’t make himself real popular; I guess he broke a lot of shooting rules right from the start.” The maids had been vague on that score; they didn’t understand the shooting rules either. What they hadn’t been vague about was that the shooting parties started forming up and leaving without the captain, as the guests tacitly organized themselves to be off when he was busy doing something else. Part of that “something else” had been to flirt with the ladies, and the maids had no doubt that if he’d had his way, there would have been more than just flirting going on. “There weren’t no single ladies at this party, an’ when he made himself unwelcome, he’d take himself down to the pub in the village sometimes, an’ that’s where this gal saw him and decided she was gonna get him.”
And she hadn’t scrupled as to means either. According to the maids she had brazenly hopped into bed with him practically from the time he first appeared.
“So she’s canoodling with this feller, an’ wouldn’t you know, next thing he’s caught cheatin’ at cards up here at the party. There’s a big to-do, an’ he disappears in the morning, an’ his friend don’t feel too comfortable here neither, so he leaves early, too, that same afternoon. Gal at village don’t find out about this till they’ve both been gone two days.”
According to the maids, there had been a “right row” about that, too, complete with the abandoned girl in question storming up to Highleigh, demanding to see the master, claiming the captain had promised to marry her and insisting that the master of Highleigh make it all right.
Except, of course, she never saw the master. The butler handled it all with an icy calm that intimidated even the girl. He had made it clear to her that the man in question—“no gentleman, young person, I assure you”—was neither a friend nor even a casual acquaintance of the master, and that the master had no idea where the cad was, or even if he had a right to the name and title he had claimed. “She got sent away with a flea in her ear,” the dairymaid had said maliciously. Nan had a feeling there had been some bad blood there…
“So come Christmas, seems the gal has another problem, an’ by spring, she’s got a baby an’ no husband.”
The maids had been full of stories of how the girl had tried to seduce her way to a marriage license with anyone at that point, but of course, everyone in the village knew by that time that she had a big belly and nothing to show for it, and not even the stupidest farmhand wanted himself saddled with a child that wasn’t his and a wife that wasn’t inclined to do a bit more work than she had to. She had the baby, and though her family didn’t disown her, they made it clear that she was a living shame to all of them and really ought to show her repentance in quite tangible ways…