A Return of Devotion Read online

  A smooth hand with long, thin fingers came into view. Rough calluses were visible as one finger extended to point to a particular area of the desk. “It would be easy enough to make individual spaces for them. They could be shelves or vertical slots. If you put it in the middle of the upright portion it won’t, um, it won’t take away the space needed for these side cabinets.”

  William had initially thought of only two other requests for the desk, but as they talked he found himself coming up with more. Not only because the more the boy talked about furniture the more confident and relaxed he appeared, but because his unique and creative ideas kept spurring more fascinating options until William was ready to have the boy redesign the office at every single estate the marquisette owned.

  Eventually there was nothing else to discuss on the desk. As Benedict straightened from the design, a bit of that lost, shattered look crept back across his features.

  So William blurted out a request for a new sideboard in the dining room.

  Young blue eyes blinked at him for a moment. “A sideboard.”

  “Yes.” William swallowed. Did the boy suspect the request had been born of some sense of guilt or pity? Perhaps it had, but there was no question that William had to replace the furniture in the dining room. Why not give the commission to the boy and Mr. Leighton? They were local, skilled, and a project may be just the thing to help everyone find a way to live with their new knowledge.

  “Yes,” William said again, a bit firmer. “Have you seen the furniture in there? It’s atrocious.”

  “And heavy,” the boy murmured. He then reached for a piece of paper and slid a pencil from his pocket. His hands moved across the paper in sure strokes, sketching the lines of an elegant sideboard and asking William questions that no sane man could answer about something intended to hold cutlery, plates, and food.

  William simply murmured in agreement after every suggestion Benedict made. Honestly, even if the piece turned out unusable, William wouldn’t mind paying for it. The image being revealed on the paper, though, was magnificent. A bit much for a small country dining room, perhaps, but magnificent nevertheless.

  By the time they shook hands and discussed wood selections for both pieces of furniture, the boy was actually smiling.

  Benedict was likely to remember later that he felt gutted, but for now, his life was good, and William felt a bit like a conquering hero for helping him find that peace, if only for a moment.

  Daphne paced beside Mr. Leighton’s wagon, waiting for her son to emerge from the house. He’d been in the library with Lord Chemsford for almost an hour now. What were they doing? What were they saying? She wanted more than anything to go after Benedict and hold him like she’d done when he was a boy and scraped his knee climbing a tree.

  But he wasn’t a boy anymore.

  And this was far from being as simple as a scraped knee.

  Finally, a door banged closed, but it wasn’t the servants’ entrance into the kitchen that he normally used. He’d come out the back door of the house, out onto the porch overlooking the lake and grounds.

  He’d been avoiding her.

  Not just her, but everyone in the house. Jess and Eugenia would surely have been in the kitchen, and at this hour, it was possible Sarah or Reuben would have been there as well.

  He shuffled around the corner of the house and stopped when he saw her standing there. His gaze met hers for only a moment before sliding away to stare at the ground.

  Daphne held her breath, waiting for him to make a move. Would he turn away from her? Choose the long walk back to town instead of coming near her?

  Relief made her limp as he finally continued walking toward the wagon. Mr. Leighton had already hitched up the donkey and sat on the simple plank seat. He hadn’t said much after Benedict and Lord Chemsford departed the dining room, simply set about packing up his tools for the day.

  Daphne had stuck to his side, helping him carry the tools to the wagon, knowing eventually Benedict would seek out the Irishman. She wished she had as much confidence that he would come to her for comfort, but she didn’t. If the way he was currently not looking at her was anything to go by, her instincts had been correct.

  He said nothing as he climbed into the wagon and sat beside his master. “I appreciate you being willing to stop work a bit early today.”

  “Sometimes a man just needs to rest his hands so his mind can do the work,” Mr. Leighton said softly.

  Benedict nodded. “He’s commissioned a sideboard as well as the desk. I’ll have to do some work in the shop in order to complete those.”

  “We can hire a man or two to help with the basic labor.”

  Daphne couldn’t take it anymore. She placed a hand on the wagon and leaned a bit into it. “Benedict, are you all right?”

  He sighed and looked at her, his eyes flatter and more lifeless than she’d ever seen them. “I’ll have to be, won’t I? It might take me a day or two, though. I’m not . . .” He ran his hands across his trouser legs and nodded to where she was gripping the wagon. “You might want to step back. I don’t want you getting a splinter when the wagon moves forward.”

  Daphne snatched her hand back and pressed it into her chest. She could give him that day or two. That was a fair request. He’d learned something very difficult today and he wanted to think about it. Whatever pain it caused her was nothing she didn’t deserve.

  That didn’t mean it hurt any less as the wagon rattled away.

  Chapter sixteen

  Three days later, her son still wasn’t speaking to her.

  Daphne clutched the sheet she’d pulled from the drying line to her chest and buried her face in it. For nearly half of her life, Benedict had been the spot of sunshine in her day. From the moment he first stirred and she felt his presence, he’d made her happy simply by being in her life.

  Each morning when she had peered over the edge of his bassinet, he had smiled at her. Every time she’d washed out a scrape or accepted a ragged flower, he’d smiled at her. Over breakfast, or after caring for the animals, or when she handed him a stack of freshly washed linens, he would smile. There hadn’t been a day in almost thirteen years her heart hadn’t been fed by the joy of the boy she couldn’t completely claim.

  She’d thought the loss of his daily smiles when he went to work with Mr. Leighton would be the worst thing that could ever happen.

  Oh, how wrong she was.

  The worst thing was having him here, in the house, and her not receiving those smiles. In fact, since she’d watched him drive away, she’d seen nothing but the back of his head. He didn’t stroll through the kitchen to greet her and didn’t seek her out when he took a break. She tried to be grateful that he was still working, perhaps more than ever, and that Mr. Leighton hadn’t sent him away or confined him to the shop.

  But her selfish desire for his joyful smiles limited the thankfulness she was capable of feeling. Her worry for him trampled the rest. She’d thought once he had a day or two he’d come talk to her, but he hadn’t. Should she send Jess? One of the other children? Perhaps ask Mr. Leighton if he’d talked to Benedict?

  “Mama Daphne?” Sarah asked quietly as she tugged a bit on the fabric being crushed in Daphne’s arms. “Shouldn’t we be folding that? It will be much harder to press if you keep squashing it.”

  Daphne looked at the young girl, so like her she could have been Daphne’s daughter. Not in appearance, of course, as Sarah resembled a lithe woodland nymph while Daphne had been born with the shorter, stockier build of a good country lass. But they shared many other traits, such as love of music and insistence on seeing the good around them—or, in Daphne’s case at least, ignoring the bad.

  “Yes.” Daphne swallowed and carefully unwrapped her arms from the bundled sheet. “We should fold it.”

  She forced herself to focus on turning the sheet into a neat square of folded linen and then moved on to the next one.

  As they brought the corners together, Daphne cleared her throat an
d allowed her desperation to know how Benedict was doing drown out her need to not concern the other children. “I don’t suppose you’ve spoken to Benedict today?”

  The young girl seemed a bit confused but nodded. “Of course I did. He came in with Mr. Leighton this morning.”

  So it was only Daphne he was avoiding, then. And, she had to assume, Jess. Her friend would tell her if Benedict had said anything, wouldn’t she?

  With the last of the sheets lying neatly in the basket, Sarah set about pulling down the smaller lengths of toweling and pillowcases, talking without looking up. “He’s been a bit touchy lately. He told me he’d finally met the new owner and asked me why I hadn’t warned him.” Sarah dropped the towel into the basket and folded her arms around her as she looked up at Daphne, eyebrows drawn close together. “I didn’t know what to say, so I told him the truth—that I wasn’t sure if he wanted to know where he came from.”

  Agony swept from Daphne’s heart to her toes and out to her fingers. It was almost painful enough to send her to the ground beneath the fluttering strips of linen. “What did he say?”

  “That I was right. He didn’t want to know. And that if I spent any time and energy wondering about where I came from I should try to forget it. I was better off not knowing.”

  Daphne’s eyes slid closed, trying to block out the pain as easily as she blocked out the sun. What sort of thoughts were going through Benedict’s mind? He’d always been confident, so sure of his abilities and what he wanted to do with them. From the first time he’d realized a knife could cut into a piece of wood, he’d been fascinated.

  That first wood had been the kitchen worktable, and sometimes Daphne still ran a finger over the gouged-out corner and smiled.

  From that point on, simply holding a piece of wood and considering the potential had brought him joy.

  Had the confrontation with Lord Chemsford stolen that? Or was it having to face the fact that Daphne knew so much more than she’d ever told him—that she’d deliberately kept him from knowing any of it? Perhaps it was simply having to face the specifics of something he’d only ever known in a vague, general sense.

  Whatever it was must be torturing him for him to say what he’d said to Sarah.

  “Mama Daphne?” Sarah broke into the fog surrounding Daphne’s brain. “Why would he say I was better off not knowing?”

  “I suppose,” Daphne said through a dry throat, “he meant you shouldn’t worry about it. The past isn’t what matters, it’s the future.”

  “But you’ve always told us the past can be the stone that weighs you down or the foundation you build upon.”

  She did say that. And she meant it. Daphne had built this patchwork family of children on the firm belief that something good could come from her mistake, that God’s grace could still pour out on her life and let her do a good work for Him in spite of everything else.

  Only now those good works seemed to be falling apart around her.

  Had she used up the grace God had given her? Or somewhere along the way had she veered from the path once more and thrown a new stone at her rebuilt life? She had been lying to her son for more than twelve years. Perhaps God was now calling that sin into account.

  “Are you sure Lord Chemsford isn’t Benedict’s father?” Sarah asked with a matter-of-fact lightness Daphne couldn’t quite grasp.

  “What?”

  “I know you said he wasn’t and Benedict says the same thing, but . . .” Sarah bit her lip. “If he’s truly not, then looking so much alike must be uncomfortable. For both of them.”

  “I am entirely sure,” Daphne rushed to assure her. “He’s not Benedict’s father.”

  “Oh.” Sarah was quiet for a moment and their folding was accompanied by nothing but rustling breeze and birdsong.

  As they piled the laundry into the baskets, though, Sarah said in a small voice, “We wonder, you know? We used to talk about it, back before . . . before those families were found for the younger ones. We’d talk about what we thought our families were like.”

  How had Daphne not known about this? She’d been surrounded by children for years. She’d slept between their rooms. When had they had such serious discussions? “I didn’t know.”

  Sarah nodded and picked at the edge of the towel still in her hands. “It’s natural, isn’t it? Because somewhere out there we all had—or have—a mother and a father, but life didn’t work out for them. At least, not in a way that would include us. That’s why we stayed hidden. Because life hadn’t gone the way it was supposed to and we had to grow up a bit and try again from a different point.”

  Daphne didn’t remember saying that to the children, but she supposed at some time she probably had. She’d certainly thought something similar many times. It had been necessary to hide the children and to impress upon them the need for secrecy back when she and Kit were taking care of the children and forcing their parents to pay for their upkeep and disappearance.

  In the ways of children who’ve been told something from birth, they didn’t question it for years.

  As Benedict and Sarah had gotten older, they’d pressed Daphne for more. Eventually, she’d been forced to share part of the truth—that they were illegitimate and that the world wasn’t kind to those born outside of society’s expectations.

  Of course, once the secret was out, all the children soon knew. Since they’d never known anything different, they’d simply accepted it as normal. But now they weren’t as sheltered, weren’t as cut off from the world, they would all know that it was anything but normal.

  “Did, um, Benedict say anything else?” Had he said anything about Daphne?

  Sarah shook her head and hefted one of the baskets onto her hip. “Not really. He said when we’d thought the wondering would be more agonizing than the knowing, we were wrong. He said knowing that someone else knew more about us than we did was worse.”

  Daphne made a noise in the realm between a grunt, a moan, and some sort of wounded animal dying a slow, painful death in the middle of the woods.

  Sarah took it as a sound of agreement. “I suppose that’s true. It would feel like a lie, wouldn’t it? If someone knew something about you but never told you.”

  “What if they wanted to protect you?” Daphne choked out.

  “At some point, I suppose I’d hope they thought I was strong enough to handle it.”

  Daphne stopped and set her basket down before she dropped all the clean linen in the dirt. Sarah walked a few paces and then turned around, a question on her face.

  “Do you want to know?” Daphne asked the young girl who was so quickly turning into a woman. Soon Sarah would be making her own life.

  “No.” She smiled at Daphne. “But thank you for letting me decide.”

  Sarah turned and walked the rest of the way to the house, leaving Daphne standing alone on the lawn. Was that what Benedict was wanting? Was he hoping Daphne would let him decide if he wanted to know where he came from . . . and who his mother was?

  She’d made the offer to Sarah, but making it to Benedict was so much more difficult. Because in this case, the answer would only make the situation worse. He would see it as a betrayal. And in a way, he was probably right.

  But Daphne couldn’t live wishing she’d made other decisions. She couldn’t. If she did, she’d spend her entire life imagining a different past and it would become the weight that dragged her to the bottom. She would sink and never come up for air.

  So she would look to the future. It wasn’t as if today could get much worse.

  “I’m expecting guests this afternoon.”

  Daphne clutched the freshly ironed sheet to her chest, filling it with wrinkles once more.

  The day had just gotten worse.

  Of all the reasons Lord Chemsford could have summoned her to the library, this was not on the list of things she’d expected.

  He narrowed his gaze at her. “You are familiar with the concept of guests, are you not?”

  “Of course I und
erstand the concept,” she bit out. “But I don’t understand how you could bring them here while the place is a shambles.”

  It wasn’t truly a shambles, but in addition to Benedict and Mr. Leighton, a crew had arrived that morning to begin work on the roof and garret rooms. Surely that, combined with how horribly out of date the house was, would be enough to discourage him from having visitors. It didn’t matter that people of his class were accustomed to ignoring the staff, they still expected a certain level of comfort.

  They still interacted with the housekeeper.

  She couldn’t face his guests. She had to convince him the last thing he wanted to do was entertain.

  “I’m not entertaining.”

  Daphne blinked. She hadn’t spoken out loud, had she? No, his entertaining guests was just a common expectation. He was simply drawing the correct conclusions. She hadn’t blurted out something ridiculous and uncomfortable.

  Again.

  The marquis continued, “We’ve plenty of usable bedchambers upstairs, and the library is in entirely adequate condition to discuss business matters. I don’t think they’ll be here more than two days at the most.”

  Daphne blinked as surprise and the slight hope of relief flooded her. Businessmen wouldn’t care about the housekeeper as long as food was plentiful. “Two days? That seems a rather short trip.”

  He shrugged. “They’re free to stay in Marlborough if they wish to extend their sojourn in the country, but my business with them shouldn’t take more than a day or so. The house is hardly in the condition for an extended visit.”

  Words formed on her tongue, but she managed to stop herself before uttering them. She’d acted without thought in her attempts to keep him and Benedict away from each other, and look where that had gotten her. Did she dare make a suggestion? Yes. Yes, she did. Because even though the secret was out and Benedict’s parentage, or at least his paternal pedigree, had been revealed, no one in the house was any more relaxed than they’d been before.