Regina Scott - The Courting Campaign

Alice was still gazing up at him as if equally surprised he hadn’t figured it out.

“I can see you are playing a game,” Nick replied. “What I don’t understand is why you must play it here.”

“Don’t you like games?” Alice asked.

That was not the issue, but he didn’t think her nanny cared. Indeed, the look in Miss Pyrmont’s muddy eyes as she stopped in front of him was nothing short of challenge.

“Games can be enjoyable,” he started, when Alice dropped her battledore and seized his nearest hand with both of hers.

“Oh, good!” she cried. “Come play!”

He took a stutter-step forward to keep from bowling her over. “No, Alice. Not now.”

He had meant the tone to be firm, but not sharp. His daughter obviously had a different interpretation. She stopped and dropped his hand, and her lower lip trembled. “I’m sorry. I thought you wanted to play with me.”

How was he to answer that? Alice could not understand what drove him. She was too little to remember her mother’s death much less the recent tragedies associated with his work. She couldn’t know the depth for which he needed to atone. Only God knew how much Nick had failed, another reason he found it hard to take his concerns to the Almighty.

Miss Pyrmont had reached their sides. She knelt, brown skirts puddling, and took Alice’s hands in hers. “I’m sure your papa would love to play with us, Alice. We simply caught him at a bad time.” She glanced up at him. “Isn’t that right, sir?”

Nick blew out a breath. “Yes, just so. Thank you, Miss Pyrmont.”

She gave him a quick smile before returning her gaze to Alice, whose face was still pinched.

“Your father has important work to do,” she explained. “We wouldn’t want to keep him from it.”

“Noooooo,” Alice said, the length of the vowel proclaiming her uncertainty.

“Thank you for understanding, Alice,” Nick said. “I’ll be done soon, and then I’ll have more time for games.”

Alice brightened again. How quickly she believed him and with no evidence. A shame his colleagues didn’t have such faith in him. A shame he’d lost such faith.

Miss Pyrmont rose, all smiles, as well. In fact, he noted a distinct change in her appearance when she smiled, as if she somehow grew lighter, taller. The change seemed to lighten his mood, as well. Curious.

“I’m so glad to hear you’re making such progress, Sir Nicholas,” she proclaimed. “Do you think you will be done today, then?”

He could not be so encouraging. In fact, her brightness suddenly felt demanding, asking things of him he knew he could not achieve. Nick took a step back. “Not today, no.”

“Tomorrow then?” she persisted, following him.

“I cannot be certain,” Nick hedged, glancing over his shoulder for the safety of his laboratory.

“The next day, then,” she said with an assurance he was far from feeling. “We should celebrate over tea.”

“You’ll like tea, Papa,” Alice said as if he would be experiencing the brew for the first time. “The bubbles make kisses.”

Kisses? Though he knew for a fact that tea and kisses did not equate, he found his gaze drawn to the pleasing pink of Miss Pyrmont’s lips. As if she’d noticed his look, she took a step back, too.

“What time should Alice and I be ready for you to join us?” she asked.

She seemed to assume his agreement this time. Assumptions were dangerous things, to be used only when no source of direct observation or calculation was available. He did not think it warranted in this instance. Surely Miss Pyrmont had observed that he was too busy for a social convention like tea.

“I fear I cannot give you a precise day when I will be finished,” he told her. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I should get back to my work. I suggest you find somewhere else to play.”

Alice seemed to crumple in on herself, and he felt as if a weight had been placed on his shoulders. He wished once more he knew how to make her understand. Perhaps she would appreciate his work one day, when she was older. He could imagine having her sit beside him as he explained his process, his hypotheses. She could help him think through his logic, question things he’d perhaps taken for granted. It seemed he needed someone like that in his life, or he would never have overlooked the mistakes in his calculations, much less his wife’s illness.

But as he turned to go, he caught sight of Miss Pyrmont’s face. Her chin was thrust out, her eyes narrowed, as if she could not understand him. She was certainly mature enough to realize the importance of his work, might even have been of some use to him in furthering it. But if possible she looked even more disappointed than Alice.

With him.

Chapter Five

“He wouldn’t even take tea with her,” Emma lamented to Mrs. Jennings a short while later. “You’ve seen Alice’s face when she wants something. How can anyone refuse?”

Mrs. Jennings tsked in sympathy. She and Emma had snatched a few moments’ reprieve in the servants’ hall behind the kitchen. Under Ivy’s watchful eye, Alice was taking her afternoon nap upstairs, though the little girl generally protested.

Now Mrs. Jennings sat on a high-backed chair at the table that ran down the center of the hall, flanked by benches. Ivy had confided it was the only place Mrs. Dunworthy hadn’t supplanted the cook when Sir Nicholas’s sister-in-law had come to manage things. Seeing Mrs. Jennings sitting in the chair, one competent hand thumbing through her recipe book by the light from the fire and the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the peaks, Emma thought the cook still looked like the queen of this castle.

“You say no to Miss Alice when it’s not in her best interests,” Mrs. Jennings pointed out, eyeing a recipe with a frown as if doubting it was good enough for her master.

Emma began casting the next row of stitches on the sock she was knitting for Alice. “How could spending time with her father not be in Alice’s best interests?”

Mrs. Jennings flipped the page in her recipe book. “Poor man. Sometimes I think she reminds him too much of Lady Rotherford, God rest her soul.”

Sir Nicholas being a knight, there could be only one person the cook referred to: his late wife. Emma sobered. “I never thought of that. I was told she died when Alice was a baby.”

“Three years ago now, it was,” Mrs. Jennings confirmed, gaze going out the window as if she saw that day again. “She was such a pretty little thing, like Alice, though more fragile, mind you.”

Sometimes she thought Alice was fragile enough! The sock Emma was knitting for her would almost have fit Lady Chamomile’s porcelain feet.

“How did Lady Rotherford die?” Emma asked.

“Consumption.” The cook shivered as if the memory chilled her and refocused on her recipe book. “Started with an occasional cough. None of us paid it any mind. But then Millie noticed blood on her ladyship’s handkerchief when doing the laundry, and it seemed her ladyship just got weaker and weaker until there was nothing left of her.”

Now Emma felt the chill and wished the wool she was using had already been fashioned into a shawl. “Thank the Lord, Alice was spared.”

Mrs. Jennings nodded, tagging down a corner of one page in her book. “We were all thankful. But Sir Nicholas, oh, it broke his heart. They had been promised since they were children, you see. Everyone said it was a love match.”

A love match. Emma nearly sighed aloud at the thought of it. The books she’d borrowed from her foster sisters were full of stories about love denied and ultimately triumphant. She wanted to believe men and women could come together out of love, that someday she’d meet a man willing to overlook her lack of family and fortune and appreciate her for herself. That sort of love seemed entirely too rare.