His Wayward Bride (Romance of the Turf Book 3) Page 15

  “I was hoping you’d offer me a place to stay!” Victor grinned. “I’m new in London and haven’t got lodging yet. And of course there’s nowhere I’d rather stay than with my beautiful wife, my precious son, and my beloved daughter.”

  Laurie turned pleading eyes toward Irene and Jonah. “Can—may he?”

  “Actually, this is my house,” Sir William said. After a pause, he added, “Not that I’d deny room to any family who came to visit.”

  Victor nodded his approval. “Everyone has their own room, then? A good move. It was for the best that you left that lodging. This is a better neighborhood.”

  “It’s much farther to my work.” Susanna sounded different. More American, her accent tilting toward Victor’s.

  “You needn’t work now that I’m back.” Victor laughed. “I’ll always take care of you.”

  “But you haven’t,” Irene pointed out.

  “I never thought you were hard-hearted, Irene,” replied her father. “How long will you hold a man’s past faults against him?”

  “More than a week,” she countered.

  Victor looked sorrowful. “I deserve that. I took it all for granted, and I’ve been trying to make it right. But I haven’t been doing enough, or well enough. I’ve disappointed you.”

  Irene bit her lip. What did it all mean, the it all he took for granted? The it he wanted to make right? So vague, yet so reassuring. Her mother was shooting her keep-the-peace looks, and further words caught in Irene’s throat.

  “Now, where can I settle? With my dear wife?”

  Susanna hedged. Irene knew she was thinking of the hoard crowding her bedchamber. Only one person could sleep in the bed, covered as it was.

  “Well, we’ll sort it out, my dove,” Victor said heartily at the end of a too-long pause.

  Victor’s eyes met Susanna’s, an unspoken communication Irene could not interpret.

  This was…strange. It was all strange. Experience told Irene not to believe him or trust him, but experience held no conversations similar to this. Admitting fault? Never before. Stating the desire to make amends? This was a first. A professed wish to be with the family? Unprecedented.

  It was like hearing someone else speak in her father’s voice.

  “Excuse us for a moment, please,” Irene said and drew Jonah from the dining room into the entry hall of the house.

  “Your father is quite something,” Jonah said dryly.

  “So is yours. Though I don’t think we mean it in the same way.”

  “Probably not. You’re having a conversation with your father that I don’t understand. There are broken promises beneath every sentence.”

  “Yes, but he doesn’t seem aware. I don’t know what he wants.”

  “He said he wants to stay here. I’d guess he’s out of money.” Jonah stretched out his arms, almost spanning the small area. “I don’t really care what he wants. What do you want?”

  Irene fumbled for words. “To do what’s right.” Whatever that was.

  Jonah let his arms fall, then leaned against the wall. “I can’t tell you what’s right in this case. The last time I met him wasn’t the most pleasant conversation I’ve ever had.”

  The day they were wed. Right. Irene didn’t know what had passed between the two men, but since Jonah had gone ahead with the wedding, she’d allowed herself to dismiss the interaction as insignificant.

  But it hadn’t been, had it? “You don’t trust him.”

  Holding Irene’s gaze with his vivid hazel eyes, Jonah shook his head slowly. “I don’t.”

  Irene let out a deep breath. She’d known Jonah wouldn’t lie to her, so she must have wanted the truth. “Do you think people can change?”

  Jonah pulled a coin from his pocket. “They can if something significant makes them. Did he survive being struck by lightning? Did he meet the Pope?”

  “I don’t know. But as long as he is here, and under my eye, I know what he’s doing.” Yes. Maybe it was for the best he was here. When she’d promised to watch over him—as if he were the child and she the parent—and instead she’d let herself be courted and won by Jonah Chandler, that was when Victor had defrauded the village of Barrow-on-Wye.

  Irene pressed at her temples. “I don’t want him here, particularly. I don’t trust him. But look how happy Laurie is.”

  “I’ve noticed. He’s very attached to your father. It’s hard to deny a smiling child.” Jonah flipped the coin with his thumbnail, sending it flying several feet into the air. “What does your father hope to gain?”

  Irene snatched the coin from the air. “Our company? Our goodwill?”

  “You don’t credit that.” He sighed. “But you want to.”

  Irene hardly knew how to explain it. “He talks people into things. He makes them feel anything is possible.”

  “I know that well enough,” Jonah said. “Before our wedding, he found me. I recognized him as the pale fellow who’d been picking pockets, and he asked me for money. Said he had a good line on a rabbitry.”

  Irene groaned. “Those cursed rabbitries of his. Did you give him the money?”

  “Of course. I didn’t believe he’d do any good with it, but he believed it. And I wanted to believe it.”

  Groan again. Double groan. “Just as he did with Barrow-on-Wye. He had that village convinced that he’d make their fortune with rabbits. But the only fortune made was his—and then he lost it, gambling in some way. He did all that while you and I were courting.”

  Jonah tilted his head. “And that’s why you scrimp to pay back their losses?”

  “I’ve always promised my mother that I’d keep an eye on my father when she couldn’t, and I didn’t do it.”

  Again, that hint of a smile. “Because you were an adult woman living her own life?”

  “I try not to feel guilty about it, because I know I shouldn’t. But repaying Barrow-on-Wye is rather an indulgence of mine. It salves my conscience, and it has never endangered anyone else before.” She swallowed, remembering. “Not until that day the rent was due, and I had to pawn my wedding ring.”

  “I regret that very much,” Jonah said. “I know you don’t help your father for his own sake.”

  “No. It’s always for the sake of the people he hurts. Getting their money back a bit at a time isn’t as good as never having lost it, but it’s all I can do.”

  “But you’re still giving your time to solve a problem you didn’t create.”

  Irene started to protest, then halted. “Huh.”

  Jonah was right. When Victor turned up, he’d a way of making everyone think he had a fistful of brilliant ideas that would solve problems they didn’t know they had. Instead, his ideas created problems that hadn’t existed before. And who solved them? Usually Irene, if they were solved at all.

  But that was the nature of her work for Mrs. Brodie as well: solving problems she hadn’t created. “I suppose,” she said slowly, “I’m trying to make the world a bit better.”

  “Ah. You humble me,” Jonah said softly. “There’s no worthier goal.” He took Irene’s hand—the one holding the coin—in a grasp all the more gentle for the strength she knew lay in his blunt and callused fingers. “I bear your father a grudge for the hardship he has caused you. But I owe you better than a heart that holds a grudge.”

  “I’d rather not have him here. He brings chaos and debt. But maybe,” Irene added doubtfully, “he has changed. He’s never spoken like this before, asking for nothing but time with his loved ones.” The last two words tumbled awkwardly from her tongue. “He’s always been so frank before about what he wants and how he intends to get it. If he’s still being frank, then…maybe he only wants to be here.”

  “Maybe. Any horse can be broken of bad habits.”

  “And people and horses have much in common, as you taught Eli and me yesterday,” she said. “We’re all creatures of habit.”

  Perhaps all the old strife with her father was a habit. Perhaps they could break it and start anew.
Perhaps everything he’d said was true. He had seemed to believe it.

  Of course, he’d believed in the rabbitries too.

  Her father talked about ordinariness as if it were disgraceful. But if one’s heart was closed to the ordinary—the weddings, the new babies, the first snow of winter and buds of spring, a hot cup of tea or a cool hand on a fevered brow—what was left in life? Victor Baird left a trail of emptiness. Empty promises, empty days, empty dreams that failed to inspire.

  Victor liked to tell Irene how similar they were, but he was wrong. She wouldn’t be the same way. He believed he never had to follow the rules. He didn’t stay.

  Oh God. She really was like him, wasn’t she?

  For Mrs. Brodie, she didn’t always follow the rules. She took papers that didn’t belong to her. She went places she hadn’t been invited. Not following the rules was how she’d lived her life. Not staying with her husband was how she’d spent her marriage.

  So how could she fault her father when what he said of her was true?

  Chapter Fourteen

  “You shouldn’t have bought that horse. I sold him for a reason.”

  At the sound of his father’s voice, Jonah turned from Bridget’s Brown. “Hullo, Father,” he acknowledged, then returned his attention to the horse.

  In the leisurely hours after breakfast—or whatever that strange introductory meal had been—he’d had an idea for repairing the gelding’s cracked hoof. The grooms had taken the other horses from the space for a short while, giving Jonah more room to work. As he’d hoped, the quiet had also calmed the usually fractious horse.

  Sir William wheeled his chair into the snug space in front of the mews stalls, facing the tethered gelding. “Oh, Bridget. What trouble you’ve caused.”

  Jonah had already removed the horseshoe, setting it and its nails safely on the shelf of grooming tools. Now he cradled the hoof, clipping at the grown-out toe around the crack. “He’s no more caused trouble than I have.”

  “Interesting comparison, as you’ve caused your fair share of trouble.”

  Jonah wanted to roll his eyes, but he kept them fixed on his work. “You can’t lay more blame on me for Coneflower’s death than I already have. But if you want to try, please also keep Bridget still while I work on his hoof.”

  Sir William made a disapproving sound, then said, “Carrots, wasn’t it?” He backed his chair neatly through the doorway. As Jonah cut away more hoof with the nippers, Bridget shifted and snorted, working his foreleg in Jonah’s grasp.

  “All right, take a break.” He released the leg just as Sir William wheeled in again. He’d placed a bunch of carrots in his lap. Halting his chair a few feet from Bridget’s Brown, he held one out. Not to the horse, but to Jonah.

  “If he deserves this, give it to him.”

  “Of course he does. He hasn’t tried once to kick me.” Patting the horse’s neck, Jonah fed him the first carrot.

  “You’re sure you’ve got Bridget’s Brown, then?” Sir William quipped. He folded double, squinting at the left foreleg. “You’ve clipped out too much hoof. You’ve made a notch there.”

  Indeed, Jonah had cut a vee shape into the tough fingernail-like toe. “His crack isn’t going to grow out if we trim it straight across. Especially if it’s cracked because of infection, which if you feel the leg”—he indicated the suspicious warmth about the cannon bone—“might be the case. I cut out what I could.”

  Sir William stroked the foreleg with one hand, pushing away Bridget’s nipping head with a practiced gesture. “You’re right. It goes beyond the hoof.”

  “I know I’m right.” Jonah gave the gelding another carrot. “Bridget, good job not kicking Sir William in the face.”

  “You almost sound as if you mean that.”

  “I almost do.”

  Sir William sighed. “Where are my other horses?”

  “You mean, ‘Where are my horses,’ as this one isn’t yours. One of the grooms has ridden Jake to a chemist’s, if they can find one open today. Scintilla and Commonwealth are being exercised.”

  “What do you need at a chemist’s?”

  “I’m going to try an experiment with Bridget’s hoof.” Jonah debated reshoeing the horse, then decided against it. “Copper salts kill plants, right? Up inside the hoof, when I cut away the cracked toe, it’s patchy with what looks like mold. I want to pack the hoof with copper salts to see if that cures him.”

  Jonah patted the gelding on the shoulder, then coaxed him back into his stall with another carrot.

  “I told you I didn’t want that horse bought. I sold him because he wasn’t sound.”

  “No. You retired him from the track because he wasn’t sound. You gelded him when he showed too much temper. And you sold him when I nursed and trained him back to health.”

  Sir William had to grant the truth of this. “Much good did it do. He’s unsound again.”

  “It’s not his fault.” Jonah tidied the hoof clippings, then took up a cloth. Leaning against the door of Jake’s empty stall, he cleaned the used hoof-pick and nippers. “Anyway, I bought Bridget’s Brown on my own. I didn’t spend any of your money.”

  “And where did you get money?” Sir William held up a hand for another cloth, and Jonah tossed him one.

  “Same place I always get money. Saved my allowance, invested in funds. Used the interest.”

  Jonah was grateful for every penny his caution had earned over the years. Money represented potential and possibility, and it might be needed soon to pay the Harton school fees for Laurie Baird. Despite Victor Baird’s assurances, he didn’t trust the man to provide for his family.

  Which, come to think of it, was also Jonah’s family.

  With the cloth, Sir William rubbed at the already shining stall door hinges. “I give you too large an allowance.”

  “Would you feel better about it if you thought of it as a salary, paid to me because I work for you on your stud farm and personal errands one hundred percent of my time?”

  Sir William grumbled, then said, “Everything I have will be yours one day.”

  Jonah returned the tools and cloth to their places. “I’d rather you split your resources between the four of your children. Hannah and Bart do as much for the family as I do.”

  “You’re damned right they do. And they’ve never killed one of my horses.” The baronet twisted the cloth in his broad hands. “We need to talk about this. I want to know why Coneflower and her foal died, and I want to know it won’t happen again. And in the meantime, your sister will manage the foalings.”

  If he’d punched Jonah in the jaw, he couldn’t have done a better job of sending him reeling. Yes, Jonah blamed himself for the broodmare’s death, and that was a terrible burden. But it was all the worse knowing his father blamed him too.

  “The foal was too big,” he muttered. “She couldn’t deliver it.”

  “That’s not an acceptable answer.”

  “Don’t you think I know that?” Where Sir William became louder when angry, Jonah grew quieter. He squeezed his resentment down, down, until his shoulders were tight with the strain and his voice was like an overtight string. Taut and choked, he replied, “I’ve thought about it time and again, what I could have done to save her and the foal. Forceps, maybe? Not that we had them, but…we should.”

  Struggling for calm, he drew a deep breath. “I know you’re angry,” he added. “I’m angry too.”

  “You’re damned right I’m angry. You lost an Arabian mare and her colt foal, and you bought this lame gelding in their place.”

  “He doesn’t take their place,” Jonah retorted, but then rubbed Bridget’s Brown’s long nose, wondering.

  He hadn’t realized he’d been thinking of Bridget’s Brown that way until now, but so it was. If he could rehabilitate the former racehorse, he’d have made amends for Coneflower. If he could show Irene what satisfaction was to be gained from caring for horses, she’d want to do it too.

  This horse was supposed to heal ev
erything. But that was too much weight for one horse to carry.

  “What about your scheme for breeding jumpers?” Sir William added. “Working with your sister Biggie? If you bought any horse, I thought you’d buy a hunting stallion. Not this…”

  “Clutter,” Jonah finished his father’s sentence.

  Sir William sighed. “You think I’m harsh. But he’s a lame gelding, no good for the track or the stud farm.”

  “He was the horse that needed to be bought,” Jonah said.

  Maybe Jonah didn’t need Bridget, but Bridget needed him. And that wasn’t to be ignored or treated lightly.

  It was always a titter-totter, being around his sole surviving parent, trying to win Sir William’s approval, but also act independently. Jonah was a damned adult, but his entire livelihood was tied up in the family business. Not only that, his entire life. Or so it had been for years. Buying Bridget’s Brown was a step out on his own.

  He scrubbed a hand over tired eyes. Last night with Irene seemed ages ago. “I’m glad everything went well in Newmarket.” He tried to turn the subject. “If you’re pleased by anything I’ve done here in London, you might say so.”

  “Should I be pleased about the stranger flinging rubbish around my house? The one who uses my lift all the time and has Bright in the palm of her hand?”

  “You seem to have noticed a lot about Irene’s mother. She also has a brother and a father here.”

  Sir William reddened. “Should I be pleased about that?”

  “I don’t really care,” Jonah decided. “I did what I thought was right, bringing them under this roof.”

  A rap sounded at the doorframe. “Hullo, Chandlers. Sorry to interrupt your manly discussion, but I’m looking for Eli.”

  It was Irene, lovely in her gown of dark blue. Jonah wanted to swoop her up in his arms and leave Queen Anne Street for good, leave their relatives behind.

  But he didn’t. Mindful of Bridget, skittish and aggressive, he moved toward her slowly. “Eli’s not in here. We’re trying to help Bri—”

  A sharp bark cut him off, and Mouse bounded through the doorway. Jonah froze, watching the gelding for signs of temper, but Bridget’s ears pricked with interest, and he came forward in his stall. He nosed at the door, found it latched, then craned his neck over the stall door.