Page 62 of The Cornish Inheritance

Chapter Twenty-Six

At midday, Caroline ate a meager dinner with Yves and Hetty, no doubt each of them, like her, wondering in silence what might have become of Nat. Only, for obvious reasons, she probably had darker thoughts about this than her two charges did. The day was creeping past, and still the search parties had come back with nothing.

When Patience had cleared away the dinner things from the schoolroom, Caroline suddenly remembered she’d told Sir Hugh she’d return to see him that day. The trouble now was that she was supposed to be taking care of Yves and Hetty, who, if she left them alone, would probably set out to stage their own rescue party and get into difficulties themselves. She couldn’t abandon them to Patience, as neither were likely to do as she said, and the more threatening Bridget, whom they might not have dared to cross, had been co-opted into the search. There was nothing for it, they’d have to come with her.

Rodgers had not been included in the search party, and although unwilling to allow three people in at once to visit Sir Hugh, fell back under their combined onslaught. Sir Hugh shouting at her to let his grandchildren in or he’d have her fired, preferably out of an upstairs window, no doubt helped.

“You can go,” he snapped at Rodgers. “And take that bowl of pap you brought up for my lunch with you. I need beef and ale, and a bottle of port. No. Brandy. You can go and find some for me and bring it back with you later. Be off.” He waved his hands at her in dismissal.

Glowering like a storm cloud, Rodgers departed, muttering under her breath about ungratefulness, but no one, especially not her patient, cared. Hetty slammed the door shut behind her.

“Hetty, Yves, Miss Fairfield,” the old man said, his face changing instantly from irritated wrath to friendly smiles. “I didn’t think you’d come. There seems to be something going on downstairs, but that bloody woman wouldn’t tell me about it. She said it might give me palpitations. Well, if anything’s enough to give me those, it’s not being told. So, you three can tell me or take the consequences.” He folded his thin arms, a mulish expression on his heavily lined face.

Oh dear. In all likelihood the truth was indeed enough to give an old man like him palpitations. Caroline wasn’t sure she should be disclosing anything to him.

She didn’t have long to wrestle with her conscience though. Hetty stepped in. “Nat is missing. He rode out this morning on Mama’s horse, Duchess, and she came back without him and without her saddle.”

“We saw it from the schoolroom window,” Yves put in. “She was all lathered up as though she’d been galloping, and her eyes were rolling.” He demonstrated what he thought a horse with rolling eyes might look like, tossing his curly head.

Sir Hugh’s anxious gaze met Caroline’s. “Is this true?”

Yves and Hetty both opened their mouths, no doubt to object to him suspecting they might be fabricating, but this time Caroline got in first. “I’m afraid it is. Mrs. Treloar and Mr. Trefusis have organized a search party. They’ve been gone about three hours. We haven’t heard any news though. Not yet.”

“The horse came back without her saddle?” Sir Hugh grimaced. “Something must have gone amiss with the tack—the girth, most likely. But Old Pascoe is such a stickler for maintenance. I can’t believe he’d have let anyone ride out on a saddle that was unsafe.”

Hetty gave a sniff.

Oh no, was she going to resort to the vapors again?

Hetty sniffed a second time, more dramatically. “It’s like fate. Every man in this family dies in an accident and not in their beds. It’s as if there’s a curse on this family.”

Yves shook his head. “Not Grandpapa. He’s going to die in his bed because he can’t get out of it.”

Caroline frowned at him. “Yves. Don’t say things like that. It’s not polite.”

But Sir Hugh greeted it with a loud guffaw. “The boy’s right. Although both my sons were carried off in accidents, ’tis true. And my father.”

Yves leaned forwards from the position he’d assumed on the end of the bed. “Will you tell me about them? No one ever speaks of them here, and I want to know.”

Caroline glanced at the window. She felt impotent and powerless sitting here looking after these three, but they’d surely hear if the search party returned. Where she wanted to be was out there, on the moors, searching for Nat. Her heart, which had not slowed down much since Duchess’s return, ached in a way she couldn’t quite fathom. And her stomach twisted, threatening to give her a second view of her meager dinner.

What she needed to do was get Hetty and Yves away from Sir Hugh so she could talk to him in private.

But he was already settled in to telling them the stories of how their respective fathers had died. “Your father, Hetty, he went first. 1802 it was. I was quite a young man then, by present standards, and I’d been intending to go down Wheal True and take young Nat with me. But something came up, and my boy, Kenver, went with Nat instead. Nat was about fifteen, I think, no more, but used to going down the mines with me and his father. A good boy, wanting to learn the business from the bottom up.”

“How old was Hetty?” Yves asked. “Do you remember your papa, Hetty?”

“Only a little.”

“She was a little slip of a thing of five years old, pretty as a picture with her grandmother’s red hair. The only one to inherit it out of all my children and grandchildren.”

Hetty patted her curls.

Caroline’s ears pricked at the sound of voices outside.

Yves bounced off the bed and ran to the window. “Nothing. Just Old Pascoe and Dickon.”

Caroline, throwing all thoughts of etiquette aside, joined him at the window. “Perhaps they’ve found him?” She undid the catch, slid the window up and leaned out. “Pascoe!”