Chapter 46
Agnes did not protest, but allowed her aunt to lead her back toward
the house. She turned over in her mind what it would be like to see Phillip
again and felt a swarm of conflicting emotions fill her whole body. But as they neared the house, she was distracted from her reflections by
a cab parked in the porte cochère. Coming closer, they heard Fettles’
voice rising in pitch. As they rounded the cab they found the butler standing
in the drive, facing a cabdriver. The driver was a crude-looking lump of a man,
who stood in an immovable stance with his chin thrust out. More important, the
driver held in one dirty hand the leashes that led to the thin necks of two
dogs in matching black jackets—two greyhounds, in fact, one with a jeweled
collar.
Vera and
Agnes looked at each other. Surely not, their eyes said. “Fettles, what is
going on?” demanded Agnes, stepping forward.
“Madam,
it’s incredible. Incredible! The dogs—this man insists that they were sent here
and he’s delivering them from the train. And he is asking for payment. I told
him that this is impossible, but he will not budge.”
“But it’s
Empress and Napoleon!” cried Vera. At this the dogs raised their heads and
looked expectantly at her.
Agnes
addressed the taciturn driver. “Where did these animals come from?”
The man
unfolded a limp piece of paper. “Says here Philadelphia. Going here. This is Brookside estate, ain’t it?”
“It is.”
“Well then
my job is done. And that’ll be a dollar for bringing ‘em up from the station—nobody’s
paid for that. I should charge more for animals, but they was well behaved, so
I’ll leave it at a dollar.”
The three
recipients looked at one another, at the dogs, at the driver. Finally Agnes
said, “Fettles, please pay the man. This is not his problem.”
“But,
madam, we can’t accept these animals! Why did we sell three excellent horses if
we are going to start taking in homeless dogs? Dogs which are being forced upon
us?”
“We’ll find
another home for them. For now, just pay him the fare,” Agnes said testily. “We
can’t stand here the rest of the day.”
Fettles
produced the money, and the driver handed the leashes to Agnes. As he climbed
onto his cab he paused. “Oh, I almost forgot.” He pulled another rumpled note
from his pocket and handed it to her. “This came with ‘em.” Then he fell into his
seat, slapped the reins, and rode away, leaving behind his distinctive scent.
Fettles and Vera drew close to Agnes and looked intently at the paper as she
unfolded it. In a tight, masculine hand was written simply,
To
Brookside Estate, Duchess County, New
York
Agnes,
If
you get this message it means that Montefiore is in other hands now, and my
butler was unable to keep the animals himself. I cannot take them with me,
although they are probably the only living things I care much about. Please
take care of them one way or another. I would not add this to your burdens but,
cousin, you are after all one of the only decent people I know.
Wilbur
How
interesting, Agnes reflected, that a cretin like Wilbur actually did esteem
her. Somewhere in him he knew right from wrong, good from bad. He recognized in
her a decent person, but this did not stop him from squandering her entire
inheritance and leaving her without a roof over her head. How did he become
what he was, a man with no heart for even his own family, who stopped at
nothing to save his miserable skin, whose sense of duty warmed only toward
these dimwitted dogs?
Agnes handed
the animals over to Fettles with instructions to have Isaiah give them
something to eat and take them for a walk. They had, after all, probably been
cooped up in crates for some time. They would take up residence in the kennel
until a home could be found. Fettles led them away, muttering uncontrollably.
Agnes went
inside and checked her hair, exchanged her shawls for a heavy silk jacket, and
pulled on a pair of gloves. Marie pinned a sober black hat on her, and the
ladies were ready. Ned had hitched up the horses to the open buggy as Vera had
requested, feeling that the cool air would do Agnes good. As they rolled up the
road to Fellcrest, Agnes thought of asking her aunt why exactly they were
making this trip. The thought of seeing Phillip frightened her, but at the same
time she thrilled at the idea. She said nothing and watched the countryside
instead: the patches of wild woods, the farmers’ fields tall with sturdy corn
ready for harvest, here and there a fallow field waiting its turn to grow
another crop. She recalled Phillip talking about buying land and trying his
hand at agriculture. She had no trouble picturing him plowing fields like those
they were passing, reveling in the scent of freshly turned earth and dancing at
the sight of emerging barley shoots.
Fellcrest
was set unusually close to the road. Just a few yards up the driveway a pair of
tall iron gates obliged visitors to stop, open, and reclose them. Ned, a man
not usually given to grumbling, found this procedure irritating and unnecessary
and let his feelings be known. Agnes knew that the gates were put up by the
previous owners, but did wonder why the Duke kept them in place despite
repeated promises to remove them for being singularly “undemocratic.”
A buggy was
parked in front of the house, and some sort of activity that sounded not
altogether agreeable was going on around it. Agnes and Vera leaned forward as
they approached. “It seems to be our day,” Vera murmured to Agnes, “for
witnessing dramatic arrivals or departures!”
They watched as Lord Phillip held
the buggy’s door open for a young woman who climbed in roughly and sat herself
down in a defensive posture, clutching a small bag in her lap. Mrs. Morgan, her
face a collection of anxious lines, stood to one side with the baby on her
narrow hip.
“. . . have
already been paid more than you deserve,” was the first fragment the ladies
could distinguish, uttered by Lord Phillip as he slammed the buggy door shut.
“Your
little bastard doesn’t deserve a decent nurse like me,” sputtered the woman.
“You took advantage of a girl in need of a position. I quit, you understand, I
quit!”
Phillip
noticed the visitors. “Take her back,” he shouted to his driver. “Take her back
where she came from.”
As the
indignant girl was driven away, Mrs. Morgan turned to Phillip. “She won’t be
easy to replace, you know. Nurses are hard to find.”
“I don’t
care,” Phillip cried, leaning toward the startled housekeeper. “I won’t have
this child mistreated. I’ll feed him goat’s milk first. I am surprised that you
could let this go on, Mrs. Morgan.”
“This child
has no business being here—either in this house or in this world,” snapped the
housekeeper.
Phillip,
clearly stunned, stood staring at her for a moment. Then he reached out and
took the child from her. “We may not know this child’s earthly parents, Mrs.
Morgan, but we know one thing. God made him, and with some purpose. Now that I
understand your feelings, I relieve you of any responsibility toward him.”
Mrs. Morgan
clenched and unclenched her hands, but having no defense, she pressed her thin
lips together and walked briskly into the house.
A warm rush
of admiration washed over Agnes as she was reminded of why she loved this man.
Chapter 47
With his one free hand, Phillip helped the ladies down. He
smiled politely at Agnes, then turned to Vera. Vera took the lead, and avoiding
any reference to the unpleasant scene they had just observed, chattered about
how long it had been since she had visited Fellcrest and what a handsome home
it was. Phillip glanced periodically at Agnes, but she was not ready to speak.
She stood with her hands clasped—tightly, she suddenly realized—observing the
natural way Phillip held the child. He took on a different light with this baby
in his arms. It was as though another Phillip had joined the one she knew,
making him doubly attractive. This is what being a father looks like, she
mused. And does a man, when he sees his wife with their new baby, observe the
same thing? Does she shine in a wholly new way? Agnes glimpsed for the first
time how a couple magically expands, in a way she never imagined, when they
become parents.
She stepped
closer to Phillip and extended her arms toward Henri. She saw the surprise on Phillip’s
face, but he handed him to her. Agnes marveled at the baby’s flawless skin, so
dark and creamy. She took his smooth little arm in her hand and let him grip
her fingers. His shiny hair was already waving about his neck and forehead. He
looked up at Agnes and stretched out a hand to pull at the netting of her hat.
Phillip stepped in to loosen his grip, while Vera unpinned her niece’s hat to
remove it from danger. Agnes thought she saw Phillip in the child’s brow and
nose but, after all, this was a baby’s face and subject to change.
“I have
been negligent,” Phillip was saying. “I have not come by to check on you in
some time.” He observed her thin face and the dark patches below her eyes. “You
look very well, though.”
“You are
being kind,” Agnes replied, combing the baby’s hair with her fingers. “I am
quite well, but I have looked better. These last few weeks have been rather
difficult.”
Vera and
Agnes accepted Phillip’s invitation to lunch. Phillip handed Henri to a young
servant with instructions that he was not to be given into Mrs. Morgan’s care
under any circumstances. The girl beamed with the baby in her arms and hurried
off toward the kitchen.
Phillip
showed the ladies into the front parlor, a room whose tasteful decoration could
not disguise the fact that a woman did not manage the home. The gold wallpaper
was growing dingy, the furniture had been arranged in a practical but
unappealing way, and the room had a lifeless quality unrelieved by even a vase
of flowers or pictures of family.
The Duke
was in Albany
for the week, and Phillip was managing the newly complicated household without
him. It took little urging to get from him the story of the dismissed wet
nurse. Phillip had noticed the small bruises on Henri’s tender legs just that
morning, and Mrs. Morgan had informed him when questioned that she had seen the
nurse “encouraging” the child to feed more steadily with “gentle” pinching. A
quick survey of the other servants revealed that the nurse had several times
left the child unattended while she went down to stuff herself in the kitchen
and was seldom known to change his diapers.
“What will
you do now?” asked Agnes.
“I’ve been
asking myself that all morning,” replied Phillip, moving a crepe to his plate.
He had taken advantage of his father’s absence to request French crepes of
their cook. They were among her specialties, but the Duke forbid them on the
grounds of their Frankish origins. Phillip also took the liberty of having
their meal served in the parlor because, as he explained it, the dining room
wallpaper—a dark, peacock-laden pattern selected a few years earlier by Mrs.
Morgan—robbed him of his appetite.
“It crossed
my mind that your visit is no coincidence, and I dared hope that you both might
help me think of something. Of course, there is the orphanage at Newbury but I
know nothing about it.”
“Could you
do that?” Agnes wondered aloud.
“Well, I
assume they must take in any child who has no parents.”
Vera
stirred her lemonade. “Of course, since the child is not yours, you have no
actual responsibility toward him. But we might wonder if the orphanage is the
right place for him.”
Phillip put
down his food and waved his arms. “I have no other resource! I trust no one
here to look after him properly. I wish there were someone I could give him to,
but whom? He is of unknown but obviously mixed parentage. Not much of a
pedigree there, poor little devil.”
“Speaking
of pedigree,” put in Vera, changing direction, “we have our own unexpected
charges just arrived at Brookside.” She told
about the delivery of Empress and Napoleon that morning, which led to (with a nod
from Agnes) a summary of where they stood with the disposition of Brookside, its contents, and its staff. As Vera talked,
Phillip reached for Agnes’s hand. Feeling the pressure of his consoling grip,
tears formed in her eyes. How often it happens that strong people can trudge
through terrible trials dry-eyed, but let someone squeeze their hand or enclose
them in a simple embrace, and the sorrow spills out. Phillip wrapped an arm
around Agnes’s shoulder as she wept quietly.
“It seems,”
he observed as Vera concluded, “that we are both of us mired in crisis.”
“But
yours,” Agnes managed, struggling to recover herself, “is more immediate than
ours. The child needs to be fed today.”
“I see only
one solution, although it is a temporary one,” Vera said boldly. “You say there
is no one you trust him with in your household. Well, would you trust us? Just
until you can make proper arrangements for him, of course.”
Agnes
looked at Vera with a mixture of joy and terror. Phillip looked from one to the
other.
“Are you
sure?”
“Well, I’ve
given this no thought. It simply struck me that little Henri needs someone and
we are here. It might not work at all. Neither Agnes nor I have any first-hand
experience with babies, and neither does Stella. However, I am sure we can
count on someone at our house who will know just what to do, and that is the
indomitable Mrs. Williams.” Vera looked triumphantly at Agnes.
Brookside’s head housekeeper possessed knowledge that
stretched beyond the boundary of keeping a mansion clean and beautiful. She had
lost her husband in the war after only two years of marriage and no children.
Her grief drove her to action, and she poured herself into ministering to
mothers struggling through those years without their husbands. After a brief
course in home nursing, she busied herself making the rounds of households run
by overwhelmed women, dispensing instruction on efficient household management
and proper hygiene and rocking fussy babies while their exhausted mothers
slept. After the war ended, she accepted the position at Brookside,
but continued her home visits to struggling families every Saturday by Mrs.
Somerset’s leave. Only recently had she given up this mission as her aging back
made it too difficult to ride around the countryside in all weather, climbing
in and out of carriages and picking up sturdy children.
“This would
be magnificent,” beamed Phillip. “I did not dare ask such a thing of you. It
will put you in a delicate situation to take this child in. You know how people
are.”
“At this
point,” smiled Agnes, rising, “we haven’t much to lose, have we? Let’s take the
little thing with us and see what we can do.”
And so
Agnes and Vera left Fellcrest with baby Henri, a pile of cottons that the staff
had cut for diapers, and the few gowns they had so far been able to sew for
him. The cook provided a hard biscuit dipped in molasses for the baby to suck
on and, bundled in a light blanket, he took his place on Agnes’s lap for the
ride to Brookside.
“God bless
you both,” said Phillip. “I will come to see you tomorrow.” The ladies left with full hearts and a rush
of purpose, so different from their faltering spirits of only that morning. As
for Phillip, it did not strike him until he was waving goodbye that he had
already broken his promise to himself to stay clear of Agnes and not burden her
a moment longer with himself or his trouble.
It was
nearly three o’clock when the ladies got home with their new acquisition, found
Mrs. Williams, and told her what had happened. “I’m going into town!” cried the
housekeeper. “Get the carriage ready, and don’t lose any time,” she barked to
Fettles. While bustling to fetch her hat, gloves, and purse, she explained that
she meant to find in the Chesterton shops some of the new infant formula they
had started making. “Not as good as mother’s milk, of course, but he’s not
ready for cow’s milk. I believe we still have a baby bed?”
“Oh, yes,
mine is in the attic,” said Agnes, letting the baby chew on her finger. The
biscuit had not lasted long. “We can set up the nursery again, but we’ll need
bed sheets.”
Mrs.
Williams promised to get everything necessary. She left them with instructions
to take an old handkerchief, fill a narrow bit of it with chopped apple, tie it
off, and let the child chew on that. “And for heaven’s sake,” she ordered over
her shoulder, “change that diaper and oil his bottom!”
To be continued . . .
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