At the approach of Easter, Touch went home for a whole week and even Carrot left for a similar time. Though he would not tell me where he was going, I assumed he was spending the days with his mother, to whom he wrote every week. By then I had been at Black Hill three weeks and would have been glad of a trip back to Thornfield to play again in the woods, employing my new warlike skills, and to tell Knox and Cook about my new friends. Indeed, as I watched Carrot and Touch prepare to leave, I asked Mr. Lincoln if I ought not to prepare as well, but he told me that there was no point in it, for with my father and brother gone to Jamaica, the place had no doubt been closed up. No one there? I thought. Surely that cannot be. I could not imagine the Hall closed and empty, and that first night, alone in the bed, I held my breath and forbade myself any pity.
Mr. Lincoln suspended studies in the absence of the others, and indeed he himself journeyed to Skipton for the holiday, leaving me in the care of Athena. Though I asked to eat in the kitchen with her and North—the man who had fetched me from the Four Bells, and who served as a man-of-all-work around the little house and grounds—she insisted on bringing my meals to the table as always, and I was left to eat alone. I amused myself those days with inspecting the bookshelves, picking out books at random. Or I unrolled maps and made my own war games, playing one side against the other. Often I wandered in the fields and marshes and woodlands beyond the little cottage. I assumed everyone would return by sunset on Easter Sunday evening, but when darkness fell and I was still alone, I clomped up to bed feeling more dejected than I had the first night they were all gone. I told myself that surely on Monday someone would return. There was a time, before Black Hill, when I had preferred being on my own to being shut up in the schoolroom with a governess, but now that I had known friendship, I missed Carrot’s bold ventures and Touch’s inventive tales.
The next morning from a window I caught sight of Mr. Lincoln, home at last, squeezing his large self out of a hackney coach and standing before the cottage as if he were surveying it for the first time. I felt a surge of resentment. I thought to ignore his arrival, letting him know I did not at all care that I had been left on my own, but my excitement got the better of me and I was unable to resist opening the door and calling a greeting. “Ah, yes,” he responded distractedly. “Jamaica. You’re here, then,” he added, as if he had expected me to be elsewhere.
Touch came back midafternoon, rosy faced from the exertion of his walk. In the pack he carried were cold lamb left over from Easter dinner and a few currant buns, which he kindly shared with me. I could not stop smiling, so happy was I to be back in the warmth of his presence. I asked him about everything he did while he was at home, and he told me in his usual froggy voice that it was nothing different from any of his other weekly visits, just longer.
“Do you play at war with your brother?” I pressed.
“Oh no,” he responded, “we would never do that.”
“Do you explore in the woods?”
He shrugged. “Sometimes we hunt for ramps.”
I studied his mild freckled face in dismay, and I suppose he sensed my disappointment. “It’s nothing there, Jam, really. It’s much more fun here,” he said. But he had no idea how I pined for a real home, with a real family.
Carrot was the last to return, the candle lanterns of his carriage announcing his arrival long before we could hear the thud and scrape of the horses’ hooves. He walked in grinning, trailing a footman carrying his trunk. He seemed to have grown a foot taller in the ten days he had been gone. He laughed and joked and carried on until it was time for bed, and even in bed he was restless and could not stop talking. I asked again where he’d been, and he chuckled. “Well, Jam, I’ve been to York,” he said. “Would have gone to London, but my father was in York on some matter or another.”
He had never spoken of a father; I had assumed his mother was a widow. “I didn’t know you had a father,” I said, stupidly.
“Oh yes,” he responded, his voice full of mirth. “And he’s the Duke of—”
“Duke?”
“Well, I was born on the wrong side of the blanket, but there you are. And the thing is”—he laughed a little—“he may put me aside for now in a place like this where no one can see me, but he can hardly deny me. I have his hair, you see.”
Carrot was far wiser in the ways of the world than I. I had no idea what he meant, and hard as I might try, I could not imagine what difference the placement of a blanket could make, but it didn’t matter. I was just happy to have the two of them, as dear to me as brothers, back where they belonged.