Page 45 of The Cornish Inheritance

Chapter Nineteen

The following morning, Yves wanted to know all about the ball, delaying the start of their lessons, which was no doubt what he intended. “Patience gave me the medicine, just like Bridget does. She said Bridget insisted she had to give it me, or she’d be in deep trouble.”

“Did it taste the same as normal? I mean, like my medicine, not Bridget’s?” Caroline still nurtured the fear that Bridget or Mrs. Treloar might decide to add more laudanum to the bottle, unbeknownst to her.

He nodded. “Just the same as yours. But I pretended I didn’t like it, just like you said. I didn’t have to pretend all that much because it still doesn’t taste nice, only in a diff’rent way. Patience got cross and threatened to tell Bridget how naughty I’d been if I didn’t take it.” He chuckled. “So, I took it in the end, but only after I’d made a big fuss.”

They were eating a later than usual breakfast together with Mrs. Teague and Dash, who sat under the table awaiting the scraps from Yves’s plate.

Yves passed the dog the rind from his bacon. “Can I bring Dash upstairs to the schoolroom today? He doesn’t like being left down here.”

Caroline laughed. “You know that’s not a good excuse. He loves being down here with Mrs. Teague, getting all the tidbits she gives him.” However, she wasn’t in the mood for an argument after barely two hours sleep. “But, as a special treat, he can come upstairs with you. So long as he sits quietly by your feet while you do your lessons.”

Yves bounced in his seat. “Yes! Thank you, Caroline. I’m sure he’ll help me concentrate really well on my Latin verbs. He’s a very classical dog, you know.”

Caroline snorted. “I’ll believe that when I see it.”

Dash’s presence, of course, did not lead to the best of concentration from her pupil, as he would keep bending down to pet Dash. However, Caroline, who’d been brought up around dogs and liked the little spaniel, chose to overlook these lapses. Yves was an intelligent child with an aptitude for study, so what did one day of digression matter?

The clock on the mantelpiece at last struck midday, which marked the end of lessons, and from outside on the corridor came the patter of Patience’s footsteps carrying up the dinner tray, the crockery rattling as she hurried. It would probably be something small accompanied by more boiled cabbage, a vegetable Mrs. Treloar seemed convinced promoted childhood growth. However, with a substantial plate of bacon and eggs inside them both, that didn’t matter.

Yves began to put his books away in his desk.

Caroline waited until he’d finished, which wasn’t long as he was shoving them in pell-mell. She cleared her throat. “Yves?”

He looked up, a little worried frown on his forehead as though he suspected she might be about to delay his rush for food, meager and uninteresting as it was. “Yes, Caroline?” Of course, as the lessons were over now, he could call her by her first name.

“Do you often visit your grandfather?”

He closed his desk with a bang. “Quite often. He likes me to read to him. But I haven’t been up to his room since you arrived, and he hasn’t sent for me.” He paused. “He sleeps an awful lot.”

Of course he would. The laudanum to add to Yves’s medicine had come from his room. From his nurse perhaps, as he was being dosed with it as well.

Feeling a little manipulative, Caroline continued. “I would very much like to meet your grandfather, as I’ve now met everyone in your family but him. Do you think you could take me up and introduce me to him after we’ve taken our dinner?”

He pulled a face. “I was thinking we could walk down to the stream and sail my boat.” He fished a small wooden boat with red sails out of the desk where he must have been hiding it all morning. “It’s a smuggler’s boat loaded with tea and brandy, you know.” He tried a winning smile. As he was a handsome little boy, the effect was comely.

“Perhaps a short visit to your grandfather beforehand?”

He shrugged. “I suppose so. He’s prob’ly been missing me. He says I make him laugh. He says he only laughs with me. He’s very old, you know. Nearly as old as Aunt Agnes and she must be at least a hundred.”

“I don’t think many people get to be a hundred, so I doubt if your Aunt Agnes and your grandfather are that old. In fact, I’m sure someone mentioned that your grandfather was nearing ninety.”

He shrugged. “Aunt Agnes is a bit… well, she’s a bit odd.”

“She’s just old. Er, is your grandfather at all like that?” She needed him to have his wits about him if he were to render her any help. If he could, that was, from the confines of his bed. How much under Mrs. Treloar’s control was he?

Yves screwed up his nose. “And she’s a bit smelly. So is Grandpapa. He has a nurse to look after just him, all the time, that Aunt Ruth got for him. Rodgers. But she’s horrid, like Bridget, and I think she might be a man in a dress. She doesn’t like me coming to see Grandpapa.” He paused, head tilted to one side as though listening, and Caroline smothered a chuckle at his thoughts on the unfortunate Rodgers. “D’you think Bridget might be a man, too? She walks like one and she has a bit of a mustache. I don’t think Rodgers looks after Grandpapa properly otherwise he wouldn’t be smelly. When Roskilly’s mine, I’ll make sure he’s looked after properly.”

Caroline, still fighting the impulse to laugh, forbore pointing out that for Roskilly to belong to Yves, his grandfather would have to be dead.

“Come along,” she said, rising to her feet. “We’d better go and eat our dinner or it’ll be cold and the tea will be stewing, and Patience will be taking it all back downstairs.”

After dinner was eaten and not a speck remained nor a drop of water in the teapot, Yves led Caroline, with Dash padding at their heels, out into the main house. All was quiet with no sign of any other member of the family. Presumably they were eating either in the dining room or the parlor, as their midday meal would only be a light luncheon, with their dinner in the evening, when Yves would get another helping of bread and butter for his supper. Or maybe an egg if he were lucky and Mrs. Teague could smuggle one upstairs past Bridget’s eagle eye.

Yves took Caroline’s hand. “This way. Grandpapa’s room is down here.”

She let him lead her down another corridor past several closed doors until they reached the end.