Keeping the Castle - By Patrice Kindl Page 0,70

dog as he ran.

“What is it?” I asked, as he seemed to have dropped the subject.

“What is what?”

“The ‘something else’ that might have an effect on the Marquis marrying my mother and adopting my brother,” I reminded him.

“Oh yes. Well . . . my marriage. I’d never intended to marry, you know, but lately, I have been thinking I might, if the lady were willing, at any rate.”

I fell silent. Was he confiding in me about Miss Vincy? How could his marriage to her affect my mother’s to the Marquis?

The wind was picking up, and tendrils of hair blew across my face. I used this as an excuse to shield my eyes from his gaze with my hand. The silence stretched out, longer and longer. Fido barked off in the distance.

“Marriage to whom?” I said, at the exact same moment he said, “Damn that dog! He’s far too close to the edge.”

I rose from my seated position in alarm and looked where he was pointing. True enough, Fido was perilously close to the insecure rim of the precipice.

“Fido!” I cried, “Come back here at once!”

Fido paid no attention to this admonition whatsoever, as he was barking madly at a squirrel in a tree.

“Fool dog!” Both Mr. Fredericks and I said in unison. We broke into a run, calling his name in angry tones. At length, unable to see the squirrel any longer, he ran back to us, wagging his tail amiably.

Mr. Fredericks found a length of string in his pockets which he used to secure Fido, and we walked back to the rock where we had been sitting. Some of the tension of our conversation had dispersed.

“Idiot beast,” he observed. “I ought never to have given him to you. He’s a perfect nuisance sometimes.”

“Mr. Fredericks,” I said, gathering up my courage, “you were speaking of your . . . your possible marriage.”

“I was,” he admitted. “Look, you’ve led a sheltered life here in this small village out in the middle of nowhere, Miss Crawley. You may not realize the difference that money makes.”

My jaw dropped open. “I? I may not realize the difference that money makes? I?”

He looked at me uneasily. “Perhaps you do, then,” he muttered. “It’s only that, marriage, you know, requires—”

My patience snapped. “Are you attempting to say, in your inimitable fashion, sir, that you cannot offer for my hand in marriage because I am too poor? If so, I beg you will desist, because—” Here I broke off and began to sob noisily.

“What? No! Oh, in the name of all that’s wonderful, she’s crying again! Stop that at once, I tell you!”

“I will not!” I shouted at him, tears splashing down my cheeks. “And what do you mean that you ought never to have given me Fido? You didn’t! The Baron gave him to me.”

“He most certainly did not!” Mr. Fredericks roared, growing red in the face. “I chose that pup, and paid a pretty penny for him, I might add. I paid! I always pay! Haven’t you worked that out by now?”

I stopped crying and stared at him.

“Yes, you . . . you great booby! Everything at Gudgeon Park that is new or beautiful or even useful is there because I have paid for it. Every chair, every carpet, every silver candlestick, every kitchen knife! Boring’s a bit short of the ready, didn’t you know? The pair of them have hardly a pound I haven’t given them.”

He picked up another stick and began to slice at the grass with it. “Not his fault, really,” he said in a more composed tone of voice. “His uncle didn’t leave him much scratch to begin with, and then that mother of his is an inveterate gambler. The money that woman has run through! He was most thankful to get her away from London, up to the country where gambling stakes run more towards shillings than pounds.

“I let people believe it was his money behind the Park. Why not? I had no house myself and didn’t need one. In fact, I’ve mostly preferred people not know my income and influence. And he was good to me when we were boys, at a time when he need not have been kind. But he has barely enough money to pay the servants, let alone refurnish the place. That’s why . . .” he broke off, and raised his eyes to mine for one brief moment, and then dropped them again.

“That is why,” he continued, prodding at a stone with his stick