Page 25 of Hearts at Home

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M iss Hughes left after finishing her cup of tea, but when she heard he didn’t have anyone to massage his arm for him, she said she’d do it when she got back. He probably should not accept. Adam had offered. Even done it once or twice when he was sober. Jack could afford to pay someone, in any case.

But Miss Hughes was a farrier, and used to treating muscle injuries. On horses, but presumably her experience would count for something. Who was he kidding? He wanted her hands on him. Behave yourself, Jack. She’s a respectable woman .

Mr. Hughes slept for long enough that Jack was able to wash the dishes, clean up the kitchen and the little scullery, and hunt around to see what he could prepare for dinner. Miss Hughes had a link of sausages in the pantry, which was probably what she intended to cook tonight. No vegetables other than potatoes in a crock on the floor, but he found carrots, parsnips, and turnips in the garden. He pulled a few and scrubbed them clean.

He had a light hand with pastry, so he made a small apple pie with some apples he picked from the tree, put it in a pot, and raked some embers away from the main fire to sit the pot in, putting a shovel full of embers on top.

When the old man woke up, Jack had to explain who he was again, but after that, Mr. Hughes was quite amenable to stacking wood—Jack had noticed that more needed to be brought from the wood shed to replenish the wood pile by the kitchen door.

They sang again, old country ditties, some of which Jack had never heard before. Mr. Hughes had a rich voice with a wide range, and knew some very provocative lyrics that Jack hoped the man never sang in front of his daughter. She would probably think Jack taught them to her father, whereas the reverse was the case.

After that, Jack rescued his pie from the fire and put it in the pantry to cool. He cleaned the hearth, and then he and Mr. Hughes sat and played checkers, until Mr. Hughes got frustrated and upset the board. He had forgotten the rules, and his speech was fading, too, as the day drew on. Jack suggested a stroll in the cottage’s little orchard, and beguiled the minutes with a story about the time he and his men camped in an orchard in Portugal, and were so hungry they roasted and ate green apples, despite the sour taste.

“We all had a small portion, but in the night, we discovered that two of the privates had decided to finish what was in the pan. They were betrayed by their groans. The revenge of the green apples.”

Mr. Hughes chuckled, though whether at the story, his own memories, or because he liked the sound of Jack’s voice, who could say? The sun was about an hour from the horizon, by Jack’s reckoning. Would Miss Hughes be home by dark? Should he have dinner ready for her? Should he cook for Mr. Hughes if she was delayed? He began another tale to keep Mr. Hughes entertained.

* * *

Gwen was late home. She had been unable to finish the work at the San Sebastian stable. For one thing, they had been saving problems for her to attend to when she came. For another, she had been called away in the middle of the afternoon when a cart horse on a nearby farm threw a shoe and brought an entire team of harvesters to a halt while someone ran for the farrier.

Even if she had finished the estate’s shoeing, she’d have to return with medications that she had in her stores but hadn’t taken with her. No matter how often she reminded her customers to let her know if she needed to come prepared for any particular problem, they usually forgot to let her know before she arrived with her cart.

And now she would have to cook dinner and prepare her father for bed. He is all I have , she reminded herself, and has loved me all my life. Looking after him now is my privilege . Even if, on nights like tonight, it felt more like a burden.

She walked into a warm kitchen where her father sat nodding by the fire, clean, dry, and fed, and a meal waited for her in a covered dish, keeping hot on a pile of embers.

Captain Wrath waited only long enough to ask after her day, make her a pot of tea from the kettle that was waiting on the stove, and agree to return the next day. “We can save my treatment until tomorrow,” he said.

He was there all the next day, and every day after. It proved to be a busy week. She managed to put in two busy mornings at the farriery, with a succession of horses to be shoed or treated for some injury or illness. Otherwise, she was out in her cart, travelling from stable to stable, busy all day long.

She did not leave each day, though, until Jack—he was Jack to her now—had stripped to the waist so she could move his arm in a series of exercises and then massage his arm and shoulder.

She tried to pretend—to Jack at least—that it was no different to treating a horse. She had never reacted to a horse the way she did to Jack’s naked torso, which was a thing of beauty, for all it was covered in dozens of scars, each of which had a story.

He had a little movement in his fingers, but otherwise the arm hung from the shoulder, unresponsive. He and Dr. Wagner had devised the belt, sling, and bandage to stop it from flailing about and banging into things as he moved. He could get into the device himself, manoeuvring his arm into his shirt and jacket, and then catching the tag end of the belt in his teeth, wrapping it around his back and over the damaged arm, and placing his barely usable hand so the fingers could trap the buckle while he worked the tag into it with his other hand.

Then it was just a matter of fitting the shaped sling over the arm. What she had thought was a bandage was sewn into the elbow so he had only to wrap it across the arm and around the body, and tie it off with a couple of deft one-handed knots.

“Thank you,” he said politely the first time, when she asked if she could help, “but if you don’t mind, Gwen, I like to do what I can for myself.”

When he suggested that she call him Jack, Gwen had been unable to resist the urge to hear her name on his tongue. He is just filling in time and doing a good deed, and you are a fool to fall in love with him, Gwenillan Hughes. A great tall streak like you, doing a man’s job and too smart for your own good.

Each day, it was a pleasure to return to her peaceful house, where a cup of tea was always ready. A pleasure, too, to have a contented father, who sometimes recognized her and sometimes not, but nonetheless had been kept happy enough to welcome her, whether it was for a short break between customers or at the end of a long day’s work. Except for the first night, Jack always stayed to have dinner with them, and afterward for a second round of exercises and massage.

They were precious moments, though she took care to make sure that the door was locked and her father occupied elsewhere. Her reputation would never survive other people knowing she had put her hands on a half-naked man, and she needed to keep her good name safe. It was too late to save her heart, so she might as well enjoy his company while she had it. Her pride and dignity—those she could also keep, as long as she never gave him any hint about how she felt.

In bits and pieces, she learned about his life and told him about her own. “You have seen the world,” she said to him one evening, as she washed the dishes and he dried them. “I have seen this town and a few of the nearby villages. And Chester, once.”

Jack gave a rueful twist of his lips. “I have seen mud, dust, the rump of the horse in front of me, and the glint of a rifle barrel in the trees. All countries look the same from a column on the march. And when we sit around a fire in camp, those soldiers who are off seeing the world talk about how they yearn for their little town or their tiny village.”

“Did you?” Gwen asked.

“Yearn for the place of my childhood? Often. Familiar sounds or sights would take me home. Or scents. Scents especially. I would walk down a dusty street in a hot town, foreign birds making an alien racket in the wrong kind of trees, surrounded by people I didn’t know dressed in ways I’d never seen and talking in languages I didn’t understand. Then out of the blue I’d walk past a spice shop and catch a whiff of cinnamon and nutmeg. In a moment, I was transported to Sister Heart’s kitchen, and the spiced buns she would make as a treat when one of us went to be apprenticed.”

“Sister Heart? Was she the cook at the orphanage?”

“She was, though the other sisters took turns helping her, we older children did, too. It was not… I have talked to other orphans, and they grew up in grim places, where they were yelled at, beaten and half starved. I was one of the lucky ones. It was not an official place, just a family home that took in babies and little children, and treated us as if we belonged.”

He paused as he left the scullery to hang a pot on the pot rack, but continued the story when he returned. “While I was there, we never had fewer than twenty orphans in the house, and the Bridgemen family as well: Father, son, and four sisters. How they paid for us all, I have no idea. They must have raised money somehow. We wore cast off clothing donated by supporters and ate plain food, but we never went hungry. We slept three to a bed—five, for the littlest ones, but we were not cold. We had chores to do, but we were not worked from dawn to dusk.”

He took the second pot through and returned.

“It certainly does not sound like any orphan asylum I have heard of,” Gwen acknowledged.

Jack nodded. “We had our letters and numbers to learn, too, and those of us who showed promise were kept to our books even after we could read and do a bit of adding and subtracting.” He chuckled. “I didn’t appreciate it at the time. I was glad of it when I was first promoted.”

“A battlefield promotion?” Gwen asked, and the conversation moved away from his childhood and on to his career in the army. She already knew he had made his way up through the ranks, which was vanishingly rare.

She’d like to hear more about the Bridgemans and the orphanage, but she would take any stories of his life he was prepared to share with her.

She was a sad case.