And continuing his work as Thomas Glendower.
Accepting that verdict, he pushed his chair around and refocused on the various documents piled in readiness. Picking up the letters, he sorted them, then drew out a ledger and plunged into the work. Into taking funds and legally expanding them, then using the proceeds to support those who couldn’t support themselves, the weak, the helpless, those most in need.
In atonement for the sins of his previous life, he’d devoted himself to that task.
And entirely unexpectedly had found a measure of balance, and of succor, and of guilt-free peace.
The following day rolled on much as those preceding it. Thomas spent his morning in the library analyzing the financial information culled from the previous day’s London news sheets and any communication from Drayton or any of his other sources, and reassessed and decided on any necessary adjustments to the numerous portfolios he managed, after which he wrote to Drayton with instructions to execute those decisions.
But the investment world generally moved slowly; most days he had no letters to write.
Today was one of those days. Satisfied with the current state of all his funds, he tidied his papers, then sat back in his admiral’s chair. After a moment of staring blankly at his desk, he swiveled the chair and stared, equally unseeing, out of the window.
Freed from the rigors of analyzing investments, his mind, predictably, turned to the next most intriguing and most immediate puzzle—his housekeeper and her children.
Mrs. Sheridan was far removed from the average housekeeper of a country manor, or a stately home, or even a London mansion. There was steel within her, and a directness and quickness of mind that did not sit well within any construct of servitude.
Rose. Pippin had let fall that that was Mrs. Sheridan’s name. Both children usually called her Ma, which in itself seemed odd; given their poorly concealed gentility, he would have expected Mama, but no. And the children themselves . . .
What was a small, gently bred family doing living in such a way? Why had Rose chosen this as their life, for plainly she was the driving force behind that decision?
Their determined isolation was another oddity; both children were of an age to attend school, and the local school wasn’t far, yet neither went. More, neither consorted with any other children, and, tellingly, neither expected to.
Admittedly, Homer already required more wide-ranging teaching of a higher level, the sort normally supplied by either a good grammar school or a private tutor, but Pippin was young, and would, Thomas suspected, have been happy with the other girls at the local village school . . . except for her social standing, which was definitely not “village.”
A bell jangled in the distance, drawing him from his reverie. It was Rose’s—Mrs. Sheridan’s—kitchen bell, summoning them to morning tea. If he didn’t respond and appear in the kitchen, she would bring in a tray for him.
Swiveling the chair back around, he reached for his cane, stood, and headed for the door.
He reached the kitchen on Homer’s heels; the lad had been in the dining room, which Thomas had suggested Homer use for all his studies.
Homer fell into his chair and, his expression closed and unaccustomedly moody, reached for a slice of bread and butter. Pippin was already in her chair, happily consuming a slice of bread liberally spread with raspberry jam.
Rose turned from the stove, the teapot in one hand and the milk jug in the other. Seeing Glendower, she acknowledged him with a nod. Setting the teapot and jug on the table, she reached for the cup and plate she’d left ready on a tray to carry into the library; these days she never knew whether he would join them for morning tea or not.
She set the plate and cup before him and poured his tea before filling her own cup and sitting in her chair.
Homer reached for the milk jug and filled his mug, then Pippin’s.
Aware of his disaffected state, Rose asked, as he set the jug down, “Did you finish that arithmetic?”
Homer pulled a schoolboy face. “Yes. But arithmetic’s so boring!”
Rose opened her mouth, but Thomas—Glendower—caught her eye, and she paused.
And listened as Glendower said, “In some respects, but arithmetic—all that boring stuff—is the foundation for everything I do as an investor.”
Instantly, he had Homer’s undivided attention.
“Without arithmetic,” Glendower continued, “I couldn’t make all the money I do. Any landowner, too, uses arithmetic every day—considering returns on his crops, yields over his acres, prices for his farms’ produce. Without arithmetic, no level of commerce could function. No banks, no shops, no government. And without arithmetic, you can’t build anything—no houses, railways, ships, not even roads—not proper ones.” Trapping Homer’s gaze, Glendower concluded, “If you expect to do anything meaningful with your life, you’ll need to conquer arithmetic.”
Rose could have kissed him. She looked at Homer—in time to see him pull another face.
“But I can already do additions and subtractions, and I know all my tables by heart.” Homer looked beseechingly at Glendower. “There has to be more to it than that.”
Glendower blinked, then he glanced up the table at Rose, then looked back at Homer. “There is. There’s multiplication and division using much larger numbers than in your tables—that’s what knowing your tables helps you to do. Tables come first, then those two—and then there’s many levels of manipulating figures after that.”
Rose felt her heart sink as both Homer and Glendower looked at her. She’d already reached the limit of her arithmetical education. She had hoped to be able to guide Homer at least for the next few years, but he’d already outstripped her abilities, at least in arithmetic. Under Glendower’s acutely observant, not to say piercing, gaze, she felt like squirming, but instead she held his gaze and tried to think.
As if he’d seen enough and understanding had dawned, Glendower sat back in his chair. His gaze still on her face, he said, “As I believe I’ve mentioned, I’m waiting for a summons and intend to remain here until it arrives. However, even with my investments and the repairs to this house, that still leaves me with free time—as now.” He glanced at Homer, who was hanging on his every word. “Perhaps, with your permission, Mrs. Sheridan, I could assist in furthering Homer’s studies?”
Thomas remembered what it had felt like when he had reached the limits of his tutors’ capacity to expand his horizons and engage his questing mind. How different would his life have been—how many people would still be alive—had there been someone to take an interest in him and steer him on at that point? Instead, he’d been left to find his own way forward, to forge his own path, and that had not, in the end, turned out well for either him or wider society.
Now here was Homer, in many ways similar to his long-ago self, reaching much the same point, but at an even earlier age, and Thomas had the time, and the abilities, to steer Homer on in the right fashion.
Thomas looked up the table at his housekeeper. His expression as open as he could make it, he arched a brow.
She didn’t immediately accept the offer—one that would solve what he knew she already recognized as a problem. Instead, her eyes searched his, scrutinized his expression; he could almost hear the thoughts clashing in her mind.
She didn’t want to be beholden to him. Against that, Homer and his well-being were paramount to her, something she would—and almost certainly had—made sacrifices for.
Thomas paused, then opened his hands, wrists still resting on the table, palms out, to her. “No conditions.” He glanced at Homer and added to deflect the boy’s mind from those words, “And not just in arithmetic but in all the other disciplines, too, and you’ll have to promise to work hard.”
His eyes huge, his expression stating that he hardly dared hope, Homer nodded eagerly and, with Thomas, looked up the table at Rose.
She met Thomas’s gaze, held it for an instant, then said, “If you’re sure you can spare the time??
??
Thomas smiled easily, confidently. “I am.” He looked at Homer as the boy drained his mug of milk; he’d already eaten two slices of bread and jam. As Homer lowered his mug, Thomas asked, “Are you ready to face more arithmetic—this time rather more challenging?”
“Yes!” Homer beamed and pushed back his chair.
With a nod down the table, Thomas rose, too, and followed the irrepressibly excited boy back to the dining room.
There, he got Homer to show him the last exercises Rose had set—basic and boring, indeed—then he devised a series of steadily advancing exercises that would lead Homer step by step into more challenging levels of mathematical manipulation.
Leaving Homer working his way through the first of those, Thomas reviewed the other subjects he himself had been exposed to at Homer’s age. Recalling a book that had stirred his interest in geography, he returned to the library, tracked down a copy tucked away on a bottom shelf, and, triumphant, took it with him back to the dining room.
Homer was still busy, and would be for the next hour or so.
Thomas set the book down on the table. When Homer looked up, Thomas nodded at the tome. “When I was about your age, I read that—it’s an adventure story set in Africa. You can take it up to your room or even outside—it’s not so much a schoolbook as a book that makes you want to learn more.”
Homer smiled and reached out to draw the book closer. He read the title, then glanced up at Thomas, head tilting. “Did you learn at home, like this, or did you go to school?”
“A bit of both. My parents died when I was six years old, and after that I lived with my guardian. I had tutors at your age, but, soon after, I was sent to Harrow, and, later, I went to Oxford.”
Homer’s eyes had grown round. “You were an orphan, too?”
Thomas inwardly frowned, then sought to explain, “I was an orphan, yes, because I lost both my parents—my mother died as well as my father. You, at least, still have your mother.”
Homer stared at him for a moment, then blinked. Gaze distant, he nodded, then bent over his workbook. “Yes. At least I have Ro—Ma.”
Thomas, still standing, saw Homer clamp his lips shut. A wise move.
Looking down on the boy’s shiny head, Thomas replayed the exchange.
Children rarely made good liars.
The following afternoon, Thomas hefted an axe, swung it up to his shoulder, and set out for the orchard. Enclosed within drystone walls, the orchard lay to one side of the rear garden, opposite the stables.
He still carried his cane, but more out of habit than necessity; he barely used it as he crossed the rear lawn. As summer rolled inexorably nearer, the warmer weather dulled the ache in his bones and joints, and the variety of exercise he’d been consistently engaging in ever since returning to the manor had steadily strengthened muscle and sinew.
Passing through the gap in the stone wall, he paused to survey the orchard. All eight trees within it were old, but they had been well tended, and from the buds forming on neatly pruned branches, seven were still healthy and would be nicely productive later in the season. Thomas had a hazy memory that Gatting had prized these fruit trees, and Mrs. Sheridan looked to have kept up Gatting’s work.
But the apple tree three trees along the row to the right was blighted.
Axe still on his shoulder, Thomas walked toward it, passing the two damson plum trees, and ignoring the cherry tree, two pear trees, and walnut tree in the other row.
During his years at the priory, he’d spent as much time as he could outdoors, and almost all of that had been in one or other of the house’s gardens—the medicinal garden, the kitchen garden, or the orchard. He’d learned a lot in that time, including how to spot blight and what the most effective treatment was.
Halting before the apple tree, he surveyed it, noting the dark stain of blight steadily overtaking so many of the branches.
Inwardly sighing, Thomas let his cane fall to the grass and lifted the axe from his shoulder.
Limping forward, he ducked under one of the lower branches, to where he had a clear field to angle the axe into the trunk. Setting his feet, he raised the axe—
“No-oo!”
The sound had him lowering the axe and looking toward the house.
Pippin came flying down the garden, her braids and her pinafore flapping behind her. “No! No, Thomas! You can’t cut down my tree!”
Her wail was anguished. Setting the axe-head on the ground, Thomas straightened.
Pippin rushed into the orchard. Thomas glanced at the house and realized she must have seen him from the window of her bedroom.
She raced through the long grass to fetch up near his cane. Her gaze beseeching, her expression imploring, she fixed her big brown eyes on his face. “Please, Thomas, you can’t cut it down—it’s my name tree. It gave me my name.”
Thomas inwardly blinked. After a moment, he said, “I thought your name was Philippa, or something like that.”
Pippin shook her head emphatically. “No, but I like apples, so when I had to choose a name, I chose Pippin.” She nodded at the tree. “So that’s my tree.”
“Ah.” So what was her real name? And why had she had to choose another? Thomas stared at her for a moment more, then glanced at the tree. Obviously, the most effective treatment wouldn’t be the best treatment in this case. He looked at Pippin. “It’s sick, you know.”
Her little face deathly sober, Pippin nodded. Drawing closer, she reached up to trace a diseased branch. “It’s not healthy, is it?”
“No, it’s not.” Holding the axe head down, Thomas ducked back under the branch to join her. “And if we don’t do something, it will keep sickening and eventually die—probably by the end of this year.”
Pippin faced him, her soft brown eyes, so like Rose’s, locking with his. “But we don’t have to cut it down, do we? Isn’t there something we can do to make it better?”
Thomas held her gaze, then heaved an inward sigh and turned back to the tree, re-surveying it and cataloguing how far the blight had spread. There was, just possibly, an outside chance that judicious pruning might save the tree. Was it better to try, and give Pippin possibly false hope, or should he simply insist that the tree had to come down now?
He glanced around at the other trees. “The other trees all look healthy, so this is most likely an apple-tree-only blight.” Again, he studied the apple tree, very conscious of Pippin’s gaze locked on his face, of the hope shining in her eyes, and the faith, too, that if there was a way of saving the tree, he would find it for her.
“If,” he said, glancing down at her, “we carefully cut off all the dying branches, every bit that shows any sign of going bad at all, and then take all the pieces away and burn them, then we might—and I can only say might—save your tree.”
She stared up at him, then reached out and grasped his hand. Squeezed as she said, “So can we? Please?”
We. It occurred to him that she would get more out of any rescue if she helped—and if the worst came to be, at least she would feel she had done all she could. “All right.”
She clapped her hands and squealed. Thankfully briefly.
Hiding a grin at her exuberance—and wondering how long it would last in face of the chore awaiting them—he gestured with his chin toward the stable. “Come along, then. We’ll put back the axe and get the shears and saw.”
She skipped along beside him, and he couldn’t help but smile.
After returning the axe, he collected all the tools he thought they might need, along with an old, paint-splattered tarpaulin. Letting Pippin carry the lighter shears, he bundled everything else up in the tarpaulin and slung it over his shoulder, and together they went back to the orchard.
Spreading the tarpaulin out on the far side of the apple tree, on the slight slope that ran down to the rear wall of the orchard, he lifted the two saws and the heavier shears from the canvas, laid them aside, closer to the tree, then, taking the lighter shears from Pippin, he said, “N
ow, this is how we’re going to work.”
He explained that he would cut the branches and hand them to her, and that it was her task to make sure that each and every little piece of branch taken from the tree ended on the tarpaulin. “It’s very important that every piece of bad wood ends up on our pile, and not on the grass near the tree. Then, once we’ve cut off all the diseased bits, we’ll pull the tarpaulin down to the far corner of the orchard, and we’ll make a pile there and burn all the bad wood.”
Pippin nodded. He raised the shears, but as he reached to take hold of the first branch, Pippin slipped closer to the trunk of the tree. Crouching beside it, she laid a palm against the smooth bark. “I promise we’re going to do everything we can to make you better so you can grow healthy again, and bear nice apples for us to eat.”
She patted the tree, then, rising, she came to stand beside Thomas. Looking up, she met his gaze and nodded. “We can start now.”
Entirely sober, Thomas nodded back and cut the first branch.
They quickly fell into a rhythm and worked steadily around the tree, with each successive circuit cutting deeper and deeper into the branches. Thomas lost track of time, but, eventually, with the tree branches trimmed to less than half of what they had been, he could see no lingering traces of blight.
Straightening, he stepped back and looked again, just to be sure. Pippin came to stand beside him. “Can you spot any more blighted bits?” he asked. Her eyes, after all, would be much sharper than his.
To her credit, she didn’t immediately answer but instead searched the tree carefully. But, at last, she sighed, satisfaction in the sound. “No. I think we’ve got it all.”
Thomas nodded. “Right, then. On to our next task. We have to destroy all the diseased wood.”