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Rob reluctantly brought his wife to meet his uncle Ned, knowing that she would dislike him on sight as a workingman, and an exiled Cromwell soldier, and that Ned would dismiss her as an idle woman of fashion.
Alinor watched from her high bedroom window, as the wherry carrying Rob and Julia bobbed at the Horsleydown water stairs, and then she crossed her room and called down the stairs. “Susie, open the front door. The doctor and Mrs. Reekie are here.”
Instead of Susie, she saw Rowan’s dark crown and then her smile as she looked upwards through the well of the stairs. “Susie’s out in the yard. Shall I open the door?”
“Lord, no.” Alinor laughed. “Mrs. Julia would take a fit. Send Tabs, and you keep out of her way.”
Rowan nodded and called Tabs, who surged out, wiping her hands on her apron.
“Hello, Tabs,” Rob said, as his wife flinched at the cook opening the front door. “We’ve come to see my ma.”
“Upstairs,” Tabs said shortly, heading back to the kitchen. “And Mrs. Shore is in the countinghouse,” she called over her shoulder.
“Oh, I want to see Alys,” Rob remarked and turned into the warehouse, ignoring his wife’s touch on his arm.
Julia mounted the stairs slowly, braced herself before the closed door to Alinor’s bedroom, tapped on the panel with one gloved hand, and entered. “Mother Alinor,” she said faintly, brushing a kiss on Alinor’s cheek and sinking down on the sofa.
“Dear Julia,” Alinor replied. “How are you today? I’m sorry you weren’t well enough to come yesterday.”
“It’s my head.” Julia loosened the ribbons and took off her hat, as if the weight of feathers was too much for her.
“I should give you a tisane.” Alinor gestured at the muslin bags that were spread over the table before her chair, as she sewed them for herbs for tea.
“Rob gives me laudanum.” Julia averted her eyes from evidence of Alinor’s work. “It’s the only thing that helps me.”
“Surely not every day?”
“Without it, I can do nothing.” She smiled, as if it were an achievement.
“I have to be doing something.”
“I wasn’t raised to it,” Julia said flatly.
Alinor nodded, gritting her teeth on a retort. “I know that, mydear,” she said. “How is Hester? I am sorry you didn’t bring her. I haven’t seen her for a long time.”
“If only Rob would set up a proper carriage…” Julia’s soft complaint died away. Her daughter, Hester, wore a metal brace on her left leg to straighten her club foot, and Julia had established early on that she could not allow the child to cross the river on a wherry boat. She had asked Rob to set up a carriage on her wedding day, and plaintively repeated her request every month of every one of the fourteen years, ever since.
“Well, I shall have to visit you,” Alinor said cheerfully, avoiding the perennial question of the carriage.
“Surely it’s too far for you? If we had a carriage, I could send it to fetch you.”
With a sense of relief, Alinor heard a heavy footstep on the stair. “That you, Ned?”
Ned’s first thought on coming in was that Julia Reekie must be quarreling with her mother-in-law, her face was so sulky. She did not rise to greet him but leaned back on the arm of the sofa as if exhausted. Then he saw the pallor of her powdered skin and the rich sheen of her silk dress and realized that she was copying the languor of the ladies of the court, and his nephew, Rob, had escaped a false marriage with the adventuress Livia Avery, who never stopped scheming, for the safety of a woman who did nothing.
He took her gloved fingertips. “Honored.”
“Do sit down, Ned,” Alinor urged.
He took a chair opposite her at the worktable. “Did Rob come with you, Mrs. Reekie?”
“He went to the warehouse to see his sister, Mrs. Shore,” she said. “I can’t bear the noise.”
Ned took care not to exchange a glance with Alinor. “Can’t you?”
“Will you take a hot chocolate, Ned?” Alinor asked.
He rose from his seat. “Nay, I’ll have a small ale with Rob in the countinghouse. But I’ll send up my lad with your cups.”
