“It’s not what you think, lad,” he said.
Marc did not reply, but he was listening with intense expectation.
“I would never take advantage of a servant girl, whatever other sins I may be charged with before my Maker.”
“You wouldn’t be the first to do so,” Marc said, remembering the rumours and whispered gossip that had titillated and scandalized the residents of Hartfield Downs.
“Two months ago she came to me. To my room. It took all my powers and the vow I’d made to my beloved Isobel to push her away. I’d not had a woman since Isobel passed on. I told Mary she didn’t have to do this, that it was wrong, that I considered her to be a fine, chaste young woman who would marry soon and raise her own family. She wept, but she did go.”
“Why do you think she came to you like that?”
“She was afraid I might send her home. You see, I have a niece in Kingston, and Winnifred’s talked about bringing her here, for company and to help out with the chores.”
“Mary could get other work, surely.” Marc was thinking of the desperate need for decent servants in Toronto.
“Easily. But still, it would mean returning home, even for a little while.”
“She was maltreated?”
Hatch grimaced. It was the first anger Marc had seen in the miller’s jovial, kindly face. “The father’s a drunken brute. He’s been in the public stocks half a dozen times. Nothing short of a bullwhip could cure him.”
“And if your niece did come, Mary would have to go?”
Hatch sighed. “She came to me again two nights later. This time she slipped in beside me, already … unclothed. I promised her she could stay on here as long as she wanted, or else see that she never had to go back to the brute that begot her.”
“And?”
“I gave in to my urges. I know it was a terrible thing to do. A wicked thing. She’s the same age as my own daughter. And the worse thing of all is, she really seems to like me. And now, though I pray every night for strength to resist, I’ve gradually, and alas gratefully, come to accept her … presence. She’s a loving little thing.” It took a great effort for him to hold back the tears that were threatening.
“Have you considered marrying her?” Marc knew full well that, in both the old world and the new, older men not nearly as robust and honourable as Hatch married girls half their age in their need for heirs or to satisfy the lusts that were expected to wane with age but didn’t.
“I can’t find the courage to.” Hatch jabbed at the fire as if he might conjure in its flames some image of Isobel that would tender absolution. “And after all, Winnifred has devoted her life to me and our business since her mother died, giving up her own chances for happiness.”
“She looks like a young woman who makes her own decisions, for her own reasons,” Marc said.
Hatch sighed. “You know, I’ve even prayed that Mary would get in the family way, then I’d have to find the courage, wouldn’t I?”
That was a wish, Marc thought, that a benevolent Deity might easily grant.
Marc and Beth sat in the cutter’s seat among buffalo robes, and James and Emma Durfee snuggled together on the driver’s bench as the team of Belgians followed the familiar road to town more or less on their own. The afternoon was clear and cold, making the runners sing on the snow and sharpening the tinkle of the bells on the horses’ harness. Emma Durfee had peremptorily refused to ride in the back with Beth, claiming, with just a hint of humour, that a woman’s place was beside her man. Forty minutes of steady progress would see them in Cobourg.
“You’ve spent most of your time here firin’ questions at me,” Beth said, drawing one of her furs more closely about her throat, “but you haven’t exactly told any of us your own life story.”
“There isn’t much to tell,” Marc said. Their shoulders were touching fraternally through several layers of animal skin. “I was orphaned at five years and adopted by my father’s … patron.”
Beth looked puzzled by the word “patron” but continued to nod encouragingly.
“I soon learned to call him Uncle Jabez. He was unmarried, so I became the son he never had. I was raised on his modest estate in Kent, among gardens and hedgerows and thatched cottages. Next to us resided the shire’s grandest squire, who befriended my uncle and me. Hartfield Downs was magnificent, both the Elizabethan house and the vast farmland surrounding it. I was permitted to play with the Trelawney children, who thought themselves the equivalent of princes and princesses.”
“Which kept you humble,” Beth said dryly.
“Uncle Jabez brought in private tutors who saw that I learned even when I didn’t particularly want to.”
“The distraction of all those princesses?”
“Horses, mainly. I loved to ride and be outdoors. I worshipped my uncle Frederick, my adoptive father’s younger brother. He was a retired army officer who had fought with Sir John Colborne and the 52nd on the Spanish Peninsula.” When Beth made no response to this news, he continued. “Uncle Jabez had been a solicitor in London, but when he inherited his father’s estate, he moved back to the country and took up the role of gentrified landowner. He sent me to London to article at law in the Inn of Chancery, which means six days a week with your head buried in conveyancing papers. But I spent all my free time at the Old Bailey envying the barristers in their grand wigs and robes-strutting about the court like tragedians on a stage.”
“And poor you with no horses to ride or foxes to assassinate?”
“More or less. What I secretly longed for was action, excitement, some challenge to the manly virtues I fancied I possessed in more than moderate measure.”
“Your drudgery left you little time for dalliance, then?”
Marc tried to catch the look that underlined this remark, but failed. “I have seldom found women unattractive,” he said.
Beth laughed. “Nor they you,” she said.
Emma turned around and, for several minutes, engaged Beth in conversation about a proposed shopping venture and plans for a joint charity clothing drive among the Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Methodists, and, surprisingly, the Anglicans. This interlude gave Marc time to reflect on how he was going to reopen the interrogation of the woman sitting close enough that he could feel the heat of her breath.
“It must have been hard for an upright, honourable, and religious man like your Joshua to have accepted his son’s suicide,” he said as soon as Emma had turned back to her husband and the road ahead.
Beth shifted ever so slightly away from him. “Of course it was. He loved Jess, even though they weren’t together much after we got married. And Jess was no weakling. He was strong and independent, or else he couldn’t’ve left home like he did or started the farm without a lick of help from anybody.”
“Did Joshua press you for answers? Reasons? Your own opinion of Jesse’s state of mind before he died?”
“Not directly. That wasn’t his way. But when I told him Jess was feelin’ low, I also explained about the state of the farm and what the future looked like to him back then. One day, Father just asked me to take him to one of the rallies. So I did. And he listened, as I already told you.”
“He didn’t hint in any way that he thought Jesse might have been tempted by more radical forms of action?”
“No.”
“And you have no recollection of him remarking on anything unusual or suggestive that he might have found among Jesse’s effects or heard about Jesse from some third party?”
“I was the one that sorted through my husband’s effects.”
“Still, it’s difficult to believe that you and your father-in-law did not have, from time to time, some moments of severe disagreement. After all, he was accompanying you to Reform rallies, and presumably listening to their arguments, but, as you’ve pointed out, he remained a Tory and a supporter of the government you despise.”
Beth didn’t answer, but he could see she was deep in thought.