Stolen Lives (The Alice Chronicles #3)

44

S o I don’t suppose I shall receive a supper invitation from Lady Harcourt after all.’ Alice chuckles, recounting to Ursula her conversation with Sir Thomas. ‘Tom has escaped for now, but will doubtless be instructed to cut someone else’s wheat.’ And not Ursula’s either. With Wat shortly to marry, any residue of rumour must have turned to vapour, and along with it, Sir Thomas’s hope of manipulating Ursula into the safety of a match with his eldest son.

They sit after supper in Ursula’s private parlour, Ursula needle in hand as usual, while Alice looks out at the garden in the late sun, at the rainbow colours of Ursula’s wools, at a shaft of evening light illuminating the parted waves of the woven Red Sea.

‘Tom could be a good match for you, Alice,’ Ursula reminds her.

‘A good match or a good catch? Remember, they regard me as of inferior stock.’

‘Oh, I feel sure they don’t!’

‘Of course, I have two properties, which makes me just about acceptable. You will agree, I think, that it’s my acres they would want?’ Another thought occurs to Alice. ‘But you know, a prudent man would have held back for a few months. After all, the Harcourts would just about accept Sam, given that he’s adopted, but I doubt they’d want Henry’s baby complicating matters.’

Ursula stops dead in the middle of a stitch. ‘Say that again?’

Alice gasps, her hand flies to her mouth. ‘Oh, Ursula! I’m so sorry! With everything that has happened, I completely forgot to tell you.’

‘How long have you known?’

Alice laughs. ‘Luella’s mother told me in Bristol. I thought it was just city sickness. Forgive me, Ursula. You should have been one of the first to know. Well, in truth, you are one of the first. Robin and Jay guessed, but no one else knows.’

‘I ought to be so angry with you, Alice! There you were, ignoring your state, riding all over the countryside, subjecting yourself to night airs, rowing across the sea—’

‘I didn’t row, I only pulled on the rope.’

‘Just as bad. Jumping into the sea. Scaling Portland Castle—’

‘I promise I didn’t, I went in the door like anyone else.’

‘Galloping up to the dye houses. Getting drenched in the rain. Lifting Sam into the saddle and walking all the way back. What next won’t you do?’

At that, Alice laughs again. ‘It’s very early days, and apart from the mornings I feel so well.’

‘You’ll go back to High Stoke and dig that wretched potager of yours!’

‘No, I promise you I shall not. Allan took it on, before I left. He did my herb garden in the spring and made such a good job of it, he now has charge of the vegetables too.’

‘You’ll do something foolhardy, I know it,’ Ursula warns. ‘It would be useless in me to urge you to take up sewing.’

‘Quite useless.’

‘At least promise me you will not involve yourself in the wheat harvest.’

‘It’s barley up there,’ Alice replies, and recalling Olivia’s advice to “let them get on with it” she adds, ‘but I solemnly promise you I shall not.’

Her sudden compliance startles Ursula into a short, ‘Oh!’

‘And as I rely on you absolutely for the arduous task of sewing, I give you due notice that I expect a beautifully worked coverlet for the cradle!’

At last Ursula smiles. ‘You shall have your coverlet. And baby shall have a blackwork cap. I am delighted for you, Alice. I wish you would return here for your confinement, and I could see you properly cared for.’

‘I thank you Ursula, but I think it right that Henry’s child be born in Henry’s house.’ And that, she thinks, is the first time I have thought of Henry for several days. I no longer wake angry with everything and everyone. ‘You know,’ she goes on, ‘at High Stoke I was feeling unwelcome those last weeks before coming down here, but I see now I was so anxious, I was interfering in everyone’s work. Telling them how to do their tasks, which most of them know perfectly well. Olivia warned me, but I only half believed her. She was right, they resented my lack of trust in them. Inviting me here,’ she says, ‘you have done me a world of good, in more ways than one.’

‘I’m glad.’

And there, Alice thinks, you have Ursula. She has not seized the opportunity to lecture me, as so many would, on how I was wrong, why others were right, and what else I should do for my own improvement, humbling me and souring my good intentions. She understands the difficulty of confessing weakness, and is content with my small admission.

For a while there is a companionable silence, until Alice rouses herself. ‘Well, what a great deal came from a discussion of poor Sir Thomas’s thwarted ambitions. But I hope I can say like you that Sir Thomas will still be my neighbour tomorrow – my neighbour as opposed to my new father.’

Ursula glances at her, catching the smile she is trying to suppress. ‘It might be wise in you to be a better neighbour and not to enjoy antagonising him quite so much?’

‘You have the right of it, Ursula. I should mend some fences.’ Alice thinks a moment. Her eyes sparkle. ‘I know; I shall write to Lady Harcourt to tell her of the baby.’

‘An excellent idea!’ Ursula enthuses.

‘It will accord them both such relief that neither son has yet offered for my hand, for if it is a boy, of course, their expectations would be cruelly dashed.’

‘You persist in laughing at the Harcourts.’

‘Not at all. If it is a girl, they can always try me again next year.’

Ursula declines to be drawn. ‘Talking of mending,’ she says, ‘the maidservant was garnishing Martyn’s and Helena’s chambers after they left, and she tells me that one of the windowpanes has been broken in Martyn’s chamber. He might have told me he’d had an accident, instead of sneaking away without a word. Perhaps he hoped she would be blamed; it was she he made that ridiculous complaint about.’

Alice is silent, smiling to herself. So Wat and Luella took their opportunity and have smashed into slivers the menace scratched by Rupert Cazanove.

‘I’ll get it repaired along with a couple of other breaks around the house,’ Ursula is saying. ‘While they are about it, do you have any glass at Hill House needing repair? Or any other small jobs that need doing? I can send the men up there before Wat and Luella move in.’

‘That’s kind in you, Ursula, I will go up and check. I feel sure there are one or two things that ought to be seen to.’

‘I wonder what finally induced Luella to make her peace with Wat,’ Ursula muses. ‘She was so adamant, and then suddenly everything changed.’

Alice shrugs.

‘Perhaps we shall never know how they resolved it,’ Ursula says.

A thousand shivered shards are all that remains of the malice of Rupert Cazanove’s polluted soul that spawned the idea of dangling Wat before Goldwoode to milk the merchant of a steady supply of expensive dyes. And keeping Wat alive like a bottled insect to further that end. What bitterness it would have occasioned Cazanove, Alice reflects, to know that in engraving Wat’s doom, he had encoded the key to Wat and Luella’s life.

Alice smiles. ‘In the end, it seems she found the right words.’