Page 26 of Counting on Love

Help? He was mad. “Jasper, we cannot have guests. They are burning toast in the kitchen. And oh! The Earl is bedridden, in case you’d forgotten.” His earlier fury returned. “Why would you do this to Mother?”

“The guests are the Duchess of Hovington, Lady Georgiana, and her cousin, Alexandra. Agnes. Something like that. Oh, God, my mind is going. I don’t forget names. I can’t.” He put his head in his hands, elbows on the desk. Then he ground out, “Alice. Miss Alice Fogbotham.”

Reginald swallowed. Jasper’s guests included the young lady he wished to court. His brother was no fool. He was not blind to the household circumstances. If he was nevertheless determined to pursue this course, despite the obstacles, he would need his family’s support.

“And you’re sure about Lady Georgiana?”

“I’m sure about her name.”

“But you are not rushing into something you’ll regret? Or that she’ll regret?”

“I don’t know, Reg,” he groaned. “Do you think Cupid shot me with an arrow? But people of our station marry one another all the time. It isn’t the end of the world. People speak well of her. They speak well of me. I’m sure we’ll manage to rub along just fine. They’ll be here in two days. Try to make yourself pleasant.”

*

Reginald balanced two rolls in one hand, picked up his steaming cup of coffee with the other, and set off for the library. Their guests would arrive sometime today. The funny thing was, it did help, inviting people. Cook had snapped back to form, and the kitchen staff seemed relieved to have her hounding them again. Mrs. Hardy, the head housekeeper, set the maid to dusting and sweeping and washing as if the house had been dirty, which of course it had not.

They had had two days of fine weather, so Jasper rode about Iversley, paying calls on the tenants. Reassuring them. By nature, people hated change. The Earl had been a good lord to his people, demanding but fair, generous but not gullible. Reginald would not call him kind, but he would never be cruel to those in his care. Jasper was more likable, certainly, but tenants did not necessarily want their earl to be likable. It was good for them to see that Lord Taverston was reliable and steady. And here.

Crispin had, reportedly, blown in with the wind sometime last night or early morning. Mother, who had been sitting up with Father, had seen him, but apart from the porter who opened the door, no one else had. It would be interesting to see how he took the news that the future countess was about to arrive to be courted in their presence. He hoped Crispin would make himself pleasant.

Reginald carried his breakfast into the library.

This should be his favorite room in the old house. Everyone probably assumed it was. But Reginald was particular about libraries and this one fell short. It was partly the architecture. It sat under the east end of the second-floor ballroom. So, back in the remote days when the Countess used to hold balls, if one happened to be a school-age boy home on holiday who wished to spend his unsupervised evening hours reading, one had to block out the sound of stomping feet and music.

Moreover, the shape of the room echoed that of the ballroom. Instead of being sensibly rectangular, with small, well-placed windows and great expanses of shelves, it was box-shaped with two…excrescences. Cubbyholes with bay windows. It made one wonder if the architect had ever seen a library before or understood how they were to be used. They were not even symmetrical excrescences, and so offended the eye. The smaller one held a tiny table with a painted-on chessboard. Two chairs were tucked beneath it. For show, he supposed. The “boys” had never been chess players.

The larger one contained a decent writing desk and a chair that could pivot back and forth. There must have been rhyme or reason for such a design, but it put Reginald in mind of a child’s rocking horse. The best thing about the “cubbies” was that each could be closed off with a heavy velvet curtain, hanging from rings on a rod attached to the ceiling. The ceiling, by the by, was too low for a library. One could reach the top bookshelf with the aid of a simple step stool.

And the less said about the books, the better. It should be enough to note that the bulk of the glass-enclosed shelves along the left wall contained old ledgers. And much of the shelving on the right contained Bibles and religious tracts.

Should one’s eyes happen upon a middle shelf on the right wall, where a gap between grandfather’s dusty histories had been partly filled, with no regard for order or good sense, by a few of Mother’s novels, one would find the newest additions to the family book collection: Woodhouse’s The Principles of Analytical Calculation, Maclaurin’s Fluxions, and, of course, Newton’s Principia. He’d thought himself clever in mathematics, taking a first, until he’d spent an evening in a Cambridge pub with a fellow named Babbage. It wasn’t the ale that had befuddled him. Now he’d consigned his mathematical schoolbooks to the Chaumbers’ library and recommitted himself to ancient Greek.

Reginald strode to the desk, set down his bread, and pulled shut the curtain. Two more hours, he would give it today. Then, after luncheon, he would permit himself to work on his translation until their guests arrived. Unless Crispin disturbed his plans.

He perched on the “rocking horse” and spread open the ledger. He had been approaching the task logically. Rather than diving straight in, he had first gone back to a ledger five years old, starting from the assumption that Bradwell had still been in his best form, and studied the man’s system. It was not difficult to get the sense of it. There was a repetitiveness to the entries, though not all expenses were recurring ones. Five years ago: that was the year that there should have been a rather large layout for Crispin’s commission, but of course, there wasn’t. He wondered if Father regretted that. If Crispin did. Well, that was their business. Neither was ever going to say.

When he felt he understood it well enough, he checked himself with another ledger from two years ago. The system was unchanged, as were many of the recurring expenditures. Only Bradwell’s handwriting differed. It had become shaky. That hurt to see.

He had then acquired Peters’ basket. He arranged all the scraps in chronological order and began entering them according to Bradwell’s system. Some were marked paid, and he took that at face value. He had decided to make two lists of the others. One would be those he was sure would have been attended to even if they were unmarked. The others, he had no idea. He intended to send the lists to Father’s man of business. If he didn’t know, Reginald hoped the bank would.

It would upset Jasper, not to mention Mother, to have creditors banging on the door the day after Father’s funeral—which wouldn’t happen for some time yet, God willing—fearing they would never see their money. If necessary, he would pay something twice and leave it for Benjamin to sort out.

He had retrieved a second set of books from Wentworth, whose sole job it was to ensure rents were collected. And they had been. Reginald spent the morning transferring recent numbers to the main ledger, since that was how it had always been done. He did note that two tenants were a month in arrears. He would have to question Wentworth about that. And a third tenant was four months behind. But that man’s name was circled, and the balance marked zero, with a note: Death of babe. He paused over that.

A policy of Father’s, no doubt. Did Jasper know about it? He must. But it was important that he did, so as to continue the tradition. Reginald sighed. So he would have to tell Jasper and have his head bitten off because, of course, Jasper would already know.

He shut the ledgers and set them aside. He stood, stretched his neck, flexed his fingers, then pulled open the curtain. It was later than he’d thought. Yet no one had fetched him for luncheon. He decided to stroll to the kitchen and see when it would be served. But when he exited the library, he heard voices echoing down the hall from the billiard room. His brothers. They were not arguing, but neither were they laughing.

For a moment, his feet would not move.

Crispin had been different, harsher, when they had last seen him, just after Father’s first fit. He had been granted only two months’ leave, though surely his commander would have given him more if he’d requested it. And, when he saw that Father was recovering, he appeared almost peeved to have been sent for at all. Although they knew his regiment had been on the Peninsula, and that things were not going particularly well there—that much the War Secretary could not keep quiet—that was all they knew. Crispin would not talk about what he had been doing. Yet it had seemed he would have rather been there than here.

Of course, Crispin was always more or less harsh. Except for brief spurts when he wasn’t. His letters to Reginald were always funny. And if one was to read a portion of his letters to Mother, it was as though a different man entirely was writing home.

Well, thank God he was back at any rate. They needed him.

Lud. He hoped Crispin had not heard about Annie and Plodgett. Reginald rubbed his jaw. He’d shaved this morning. One less thing for Crispin to poke him for. He was acceptably dressed: not as fashionably as Jasper, but not like a preacher either. He cocked an ear toward the billiard room to listen for the clink of balls bouncing off one another, but it didn’t seem they were playing.

Well. Onward. Reginald was the buffer between them, and so, naturally, he would be knocked about a bit. That was his role. At least they had given him one. He just hoped Crispin would look less cadaverous than he did the last time he was home.