Seven Minutes in Heaven(53)
It took four or five tries, but Lizzie was an excellent mimic. Ward leaned against the mantelpiece and watched. Lizzie was ordinarily a somewhat reticent child, but this morning words poured from her.
“I didn’t like her because she fainted,” she was explaining.
“I expect that Miss Lumley didn’t have the fortitude to deal with a dissected rabbit,” Eugenia said.
“We have guts too,” Lizzie said. “A cow’s insides could stretch all the way down the drive.”
“Ladies don’t say guts,” Eugenia said.
“Why not?” Lizzie demanded.
Ward had the distinct impression that Gumwater’s entrance rescued Eugenia from a question she wasn’t prepared to answer. Though how could that be, if she was once a governess?
Somehow, now that he knew her better, he simply couldn’t accept that she was ever a governess, or indeed, an underling in any household.
Once in the carriage, Lizzie kept Eugenia entertained by pointing out all the sights—a tumbledown house supposedly haunted by the ghost of a nun, the great oak that housed a family of owls, and then, when they reached the village of Wheatley, the shop belonging to the irascible butcher, Mr. Biddle.
When they arrived at the parish church, Ward stepped down, turning to assist Eugenia. Once on the ground, Eugenia held out a hand and Lizzie jumped to her side as if she were iron and Eugenia a magnet.
“I’m ready!” Lizzie said cheerfully, and they marched toward the church without looking to see if Ward was following.
Was this what it was like to have a family?
He strolled behind, thinking about that.
Chapter Twenty-one
The Parish Church and Vicarage
of St. Mary the Virgin
Wheatley
“I don’t believe in magic,” Hirshfield Chatterley-Blackman, the Bishop of Oxford, grumbled at his manservant, Rowland. “I never have. All that business about getting naked out on the heath in the rain. The women I know wear at least ten articles of clothing at any given time.”
Rowland was kneeling at Hirshfield’s feet, buttoning up his gaiters. He coughed an assent.
“In fact, make that twenty. You wouldn’t catch my sisters going around in puris naturalibus, would you? No one would do it, not even imbeciles like Howson. Do you know how much trouble that man has caused me?” The grumble escalated to a bellow.
“England is full of nice, quiet parishes, thick with vicars who do no more than shag the occasional parishioner or fall into the ditch, cock-eyed on drink, but I am the one who ends up with Howson. The man won’t listen to reason. Not a bit of it. This is as mad as that supposed brothel he discovered a few months ago.”
Rowland murmured something before he came to his feet with a slight creaking of joints.
“I suppose he thinks that the gal is out at night lopping off toad fingers and hedgehog whiskers and all the rest of that rot that’s supposed to go into a cauldron,” the bishop—known to his intimates as Chatty—moaned. “At nine years old!”
Rowland said something, the clearest word of which was “earl.”
“That’s bloody right,” Chatty said, twitching his tippet out of his man’s hands. “Let go, that’s good enough. Reeve may be illegitimate, but he’s the by-blow of a peer and that makes all the difference. That’s the sort of thing Howson doesn’t understand. You don’t interfere with nobility.”
He tramped gloomily along a passage leading from the vicarage to the church’s vestry behind the chancel, trying to remember where he’d hidden his flask the last time he had to visit, during the orphanage debacle. It was in the vestry room somewhere.
Hurried footsteps sounded in the passage, and Rowland interrupted his search. “My Lord,” he panted. “You forgot your cross.”
“Right,” Chatty said testily. “I’ll put it on.” Whenever he had to face a mad churchman, he always wore a great Palatine cross that some long-ago ancestor had brought back from the Crusades. It had a ruby at the top that winked in the light.
He fancied that it gave him an air of authority.
There was no getting around the fact that Howson had a way of commanding the stage. Taking up all the air in the room.
It was all that bloody zeal of his. Zeal was a dangerous thing. Howson’s brain sizzled like a pan of sausages. That energy gave him authority, not to mince words.
“I’d like to mince him,” Chatty muttered to himself.
He headed toward the side door that led into the central nave. The curate stood at door, looking nervous. “Is everyone present?” Chatty asked testily.
“Yes, My Lord Bishop,” the curate said, nodding madly. He pushed open the door and announced, “The Right Reverend Hirshfield Chatterley-Blackman, the Lord Bishop of Oxford.”