Page 43 of The Wordsworth Key (Regency Secrets #3)

Chapter Twenty-Four

D arkness was falling as Jacob and Alex approached the shepherd’s cottage.

No lights were visible and the windows were shuttered.

From the thistles growing out of the cracked front step, it had been abandoned for some months, if not years.

In contrast to the glow of his own home across the valley, this looked a desolate place, as sad as the family that had come to grief there.

Jacob tried the door, but it was locked. The bottom gave a little but it appeared to be bolted at the top.

‘Round the back?’ suggested Alex.

The gate squeaked as they let themselves into the rear garden. A shed, probably once used for lambing, slumped in a corner, the roof collapsed into the building. The flagstones were barely visible under the weeds that had been left to riot.

‘Who owns this, do you know?’ Alex rattled the backdoor.

‘The same farmer as owns mine. He lives over at Elterwater.’

‘It seems a shame to let the place go like this. A few more winters and it will have fallen down completely.’

‘If it’s got a bad reputation, he might not think it worth maintaining.

Cheaper to build a new cottage somewhere else on the hillside.

’ Jacob tried the shutters and found one that swung open.

‘Here– there’s a way in. The window isn’t fastened.

’ He prised it open with his fingernails.

Once this was done, he could easily reach in to open the other window, making a big enough space to climb through.

It led into the old scullery with a stone sink.

‘Well now– there’s scuff marks and mud on the basin.

We’re not the first to come in this way.

’ Holding on to the top of the frame, he climbed inside. Alex followed.

The ground floor of the cottage had been stripped of furniture. Anything of any use or value had been moved elsewhere and even the grate had been taken from the kitchen fireplace. It smelled damp and muddy. A water stain browned the corner of the main room, proof of a serious leak above.

‘I think even the mice have moved out,’ said Jacob.

Alex grimaced at the wooden steps leading up. ‘I suppose we have to check now we’re here, but it doesn’t look a very good place to keep anything.’

Jacob’s eye was caught by some marks on the doorframe.

A child’s height had been noted against their age.

It ended at about the height of the adult Luke Knotte.

His father’s height had been noted at the top, and his mother’s below– she had been no more than five feet tall.

Luke had grown to be between the two– a small glimpse of what should’ve been a happy, modest family life of simple folk from these parts.

‘He spoiled all this by getting it lodged in his head that his father wasn’t his father,’ said Jacob.

‘Perhaps someone should tell him that the man who raises you is your father. The rest is an accident of birth,’ said Alex.

‘Somehow I don’t think he’d be impressed by such reasoning.’ Jacob opened the shutter on the lantern they had brought with them. It cast a narrow ray of light up the stairwell. ‘You can stay down here. Try and catch me if I fall through those very unpromising-looking rafters.’

‘Sorry, my friend, but my hero days are over– I’ll be moving out of the way pretty sharpish. However, I’ll bravely shout if I see any new cracks.’

‘I’ll make sure I mention that in dispatches– get you a medal.’

Deciding that was as good as he was going to get, Jacob headed up the stairs.

The treads creaked but had been solidly built.

They might be the last thing to go in this building.

Two small bedrooms opened out at the top, one on the left, the other on the right.

The right-hand one was above the leak and was badly water damaged. The left-hand one though…

‘So this is where you’re keeping your things,’ murmured Jacob.

This room was clean and relatively dry. A trunk stood on the bare boards by the window but he had to negotiate his way across the rotten floorboards.

When one sagged alarmingly under his foot, he backtracked and edged around the margin of the room, hoping where the joists met the wall would be stronger.

Arriving at the trunk, Jacob opened the shutters so he could look at the contents in what remained of the daylight.

He’d left the lantern at the top of the stairs to light the way down.

‘I’ve found Luke Knotte’s college trunk!’ he called down to Alex.

‘Do you want me to come up?’

‘I don’t think the floor will support two people.

Keep an eye on the road, just in case Knotte decides to visit tonight.

’ He undid the straps securing the box and lifted the lid.

A neatly ordered personal library of six books and a stack of notebooks and papers lay within.

It was going to take a while to read everything, so Jacob decided to get a feel for the man first by seeing the kind of thing he was writing. He picked up the topmost.

Poems of Places, by Luke Knotte, 1812.

This must be the master copy of the work he’d sent out to the publishers.

Jacob scanned the titles of the poems, all taken from local landmarks.

Cockermouth School. Bridge House, Ambleside.

Elter Holme, Esthwaite Water. Brathay Hall, Windermere.

Slate Cave, Rydal Water. Chapel Holm. Latterbarrow.

And so the list went on. Using Wordsworth as his pattern, Knotte set an encounter with a colourful character– a beggar, or a pedlar, or a soldier on half-pay– in each of these locations; the narrator Knotte imagined as a thoughtful shepherd lad with a book of verse in his pocket and crook in hand, a barely disguised self-portrait.

Jacob read a few lines:

Not seldom do I stray about the fields

O’er powered by a desire to meet the dawn

With my woolly flock of faithful followers…

It was a pale imitation of Wordsworthian blank verse, spoiled by hackneyed epithets.

‘Not seldom’ was a poetic tic that Jacob recognised from the older man’s poems. He was overly fond of it and terms like ‘oft’ which grew annoying once you noticed them, but unlike the Grasmere man, Knotte just wasn’t a very good poet.

‘Woolly flock’ felt like something from the previous century, not the new.

Jacob had half expected an insane rant, something that showed a volatile person who could erupt into murderous acts of violence; instead, he found mediocrity.

Knotte would never amount to much unless he moved beyond imitation to find his own voice.

He scanned other notebooks and found more of the same.

What a tragic waste of Knotte’s talents.

Anyone who had encouraged him to think he was something special when it came to literature had done him a disservice.

He next looked at the books. In his things at Barton’s cottage, Knotte carried Robinson Crusoe with him, a treasured childhood tome.

Also in his possession here was a copy of Paradise Lost , Volney’s Ruins of Empire , Burns’ Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect , Dr Johnson’s Rasselas and Scott’s Marmion .

The last made Jacob smile grimly. At least Knotte did his fellow poet the courtesy of reading his poem before dismissing it in favour of Wordsworth.

Dora said he also had a copy of Lyrical Ballads with him when she went with him to Michael’s Fold.

Seven books: that was a decent collection for an impoverished man.

Most households only had the Bible and The Pilgrim’s Progress if they were lucky.

Yet neither could it be considered a collection of revolutionary works.

There was no Voltaire, no Rousseau, no Tom Paine.

Jacob’s own library was far more radical than this collection– not that he would tell Moss this.

Volney was the most extreme, criticising all established forms of governments and advocating their abolition, but he was French and philosophical, so no one took that seriously as a threat.

Replacing the books and papers as he found them, Jacob closed the lid of the trunk.

Tempting though it was to take them back with him for closer scrutiny, he couldn’t justify it.

Their suspicions were only that– an idea that Knotte might be guilty of something terrible and no proof of such.

If all he had in the world was this trunk and its contents, who was Jacob to deprive him of that?

Picking up his lantern, he careful negotiated the creaking stairs.

‘Anything?’ asked Alex.

‘Evidence that he’s a bad poet but that’s not a crime.’

Alex climbed onto the sink and jumped out the window. He turned to help Jacob by taking the lantern from him. ‘Maybe not, but sometimes I wish it were.’

* * *

Stowing Alex in a guest room, Jacob slipped into bed beside Dora. Drowsily, she turned to snuggle up to him. She’d stayed up to see them safely back but had been yawning so he’d sent her on to bed while he made up the spare room.

He put his arms around her and delighted in her scent for a few deep breaths. What had he done to deserve such a fine woman in his life?

‘You’re thinking,’ she murmured.

‘I am.’

‘You should stop that if you want to sleep.’

‘I should but it’s hard to turn off my thoughts. Do you want to distract me from them?’ It was bad of him to encourage her to wake up when she was already on the slide to sleep.

‘I could.’ She kissed his chest. ‘If you like.’

‘I always like.’

She raised her hand to caress his scratchy jaw.

‘Do you want me to shave?’

‘Now? Too much bother. Besides, I quite like it like this. You look like a pirate.’

He chuckled at the ridiculous image. ‘I’ll be careful.’

She paused in her stroking. ‘Are we being careful? I was thinking about Ruby and her predicament. What if…?’

He went up on an elbow to look down at her.

There was no moon so only the faintest glow of starlight penetrated the darkness of the bedroom through the gap in the shutters.

He could barely see her, just a darker shade against the white of the sheets.

They were communicating in touch and scent and sound.

He felt the curve of her shoulder under his questing fingers, the heat of her skin.

‘What if we made a child together? As a doctor I have to say we are doing what usually produces one eventually. I apologise. We should’ve discussed this before. ’

‘And?’

‘And we can be as careful– perhaps more careful– as we have been to avoid that happening too soon.’

‘And if that fails?’

To shout ‘huzzah: you marry me and we live happily ever after!’ would be about as popular with her as oversetting a hive of bees in the breakfast room. She’d run out pretty sharpish, as Alex put it earlier. Jacob knew this was an important test for him to pass.

‘Then we welcome it. We enjoy seeing our child grow in you, we look after you both for the lying-in, and then love and cherish our child once it is here. I’m not going anywhere, Dora. Being a father doesn’t scare me.’

‘It should.’

‘Well, I suppose it does in some ways, but not the fact of making a child to raise with you. I think we will make excellent parents.’

‘We can’t be worse than mine.’

He huffed. ‘And we can be a hell of a lot more demonstrative than mine.’ The grief he’d been keeping at bay came back in sudden storm– damned inconvenient when he’d been intending to seduce her. His chest tightened and his eyes pricked with tears. His breathing turned ragged.

‘Oh, my love.’ Ever sensitive to his moods, Dora pushed him gently down on the pillow and kissed his eyelids. Jacob felt the tears escape and he tried to swipe them away.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said gruffly. ‘I was wanting to show you how much I adore you.’

‘Don’t be sorry. Tears are the coin we pay for love. I’m happy for you that you loved your father– I’m sad for you that you miss him.’

Letting go of the reins he kept on his emotions, and in the privacy of their room, Jacob mourned as Dora held him. Then, when that passed, they celebrated life and love with tenderness, reaching a new height of intimacy. It was an unforgettable night.

If the world did not want him to have Dora in his life, then it was the world that needed to change, Jacob vowed.