For Kate, time the next few days became a curious blend of routine and waiting during the day, and sheer bliss every night. On Sunday, the Reverend Mr. Packwood read the banns for the first of the requisite three readings to announce to all and sundry the forthcoming marriage of Katherine Emma Newton Gardiner and Jeremy Michael Chilton, Seventh Earl of Kenrick.
She felt a twinge of sadness as she sat in the church pew listening to the formal words. She remembered sharing the secret of her elopement years ago with her sister Beatrice and would have welcomed sharing her happiness with her again. After the service, she and Jeremy were besieged by well-wishers. On the way back to the Hall, they shared the carriage with Lady Elinor and Ned and Cassie. Then there was dinner to which the Packwoods and Dennisons had again been invited, so that, what with entertaining guests and seeing to the welfare of the children, she and Jeremy had scarcely any time together. The entire household had finally retired when she let herself into Jeremy’s room. Both of them were already dressed for bed.
“Hello, stranger,” he said softly and hugged her close.
“Hello, yourself.” She lifted her face for his kiss.
“Come. I’ve poured us some port.” He nudged her toward the couch. Two glasses of wine sat on a low table in front of it, the dancing light from the fireplace shining through the red liquid. He sat next to her, his arm loosely draped over her shoulder.
“What is it, Kate? Something has been bothering you all day.”
“Oh, nothing, really.”
“Yes, there’s something. I sensed it in church this morning. I do hope you are not harboring doubts about—about us.”
She smiled, aware that there was little gaiety in her expression. “No. No doubts about us.”
“But?”
“It—it’s so foolish.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“It’s just that this is the second time I will have married with none of my family in attendance. Arthur and I eloped, you know.”
“You miss them, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do. You’d think after all these years . . .”
“Some things do not change greatly just because time keeps ticking away.”
“Thank you, Jeremy, for understanding.”
“What are husbands for?”
“You are not my husband yet.”
“Lovers, then. Speaking of which . . .” He stood, pulled her to her feet, and nudged her toward the bed, where they managed to banish the troubles of the day.
In addition to a wedding, the Earl of Kenrick, his family, and his guests were also waiting for the wheels of justice to grind inexorably on. Phillips and Lawrence were anxious to return to their respective homes, but they felt obligated to stay until the magistrate’s hearing regarding the duke’s attempt to abduct Ned and Cassie. Kate and Jeremy both wanted a sense of closure on this chapter of their lives. In the end, the hearing was both dramatic and anticlimactic.
Interest in the case ran high because it involved such a high-ranking member of the peerage, so it was moved from the magistrate’s usual domain—a room on the first floor of the town hall—to the assembly room on the floor above. Getting the duke up two flights of stairs had posed a bit of a problem, but the blacksmith and the duke’s valet managed to get his wheeled Bath chair into the temporary courtroom, with the chair’s occupant complaining all the while.
The Kenrick party—Jeremy, Kate, Robert, Lady Elinor, Phillips, Lawrence, and Rosie—had followed Wynstan’s slow progress up the stairs. Chairs had been arranged in rows on the dance floor. The magistrate’s desk, along with a small table and chair for the court recorder, and a witness chair, were arranged on the musicians’ dais.
Twenty minutes past the announced time for proceedings to begin, the magistrate finally rapped his gavel and said, “One man is dead, another and a child were seriously injured, and the lives of several have been profoundly disrupted as a result of actions taken by the principals in this matter. Therefore, this hearing is instituted as an investigative procedure to determine whether further legal action might be or should be undertaken and against whom such action should be directed.”
The Kenrick party sat behind a table manned by Mr. Phillips and Sir Frederick Dunbar, a barrister with whom Phillips often worked in London. Dunbar had arrived two days before and stayed closeted with Phillips in the Kenrick library most of that time, though often conferring with members of the household. Wynstan too was represented by able legal counsel from the city, chiefly his barrister, Sir Algernon Stephenson.
“The barristers have both been knighted. That helps keep them on equal footing,” Lawrence observed when Squire Dennison, in his capacity as magistrate, read out their names.
Dunbar quickly established the facts of the case to which Wynstan’s counsel acceded, but insisted they were irrelevant as the duke was merely asserting his time-honored right to protect his heir. Dunbar overrode this argument by calling upon Lawrence, Phillips, and Kate to establish that the boy’s father had clearly provided otherwise. Moreover, the duke’s intentions regarding his grandson in no way made him less culpable in the abduction of Lord Kenrick’s daughter. The legal questions then turned on who was culpable in terms of the overall picture—that is, who knew what, when? To this end, Sir Eldridge Mortimer was called to explain his involvement.
“My involvement?” he expostulated. “I had nothing whatsoever to do with this mess. I merely extended the hospitality of my home to the Duke of Wynstan when he was stranded in our neighborhood.”
Dunbar took a different approach. “Wynstan’s codefendant here, Miss Cranstan, has been with you for many years, has she not?”
“Yes.”
“Practically a member of the family, would you say?”
“Why, no. She was a paid employee, that’s all.”
“She says otherwise.”
Mortimer shifted in the witness chair. “Well, she is either lying or laboring under an insane misapprehension.”
Miss Cranstan burst into loud sobs in her seat near Wynstan’s wheeled chair. “Oh, Sir Eldridge, how can you be so cruel?”
The spectators murmured and the magistrate rapped his gavel for order.
Mortimer went on without looking at Miss Cranstan. “She abused my trust. Servants sometimes do, you know.”
“But you encouraged me to help the duke. I was the only one who knew the plan of Kenrick Hall,” she said, sending a gasp through the room.
The magistrate pounded his gavel again. “Miss Cranstan, it would be in your best interest to restrain yourself.”
She subsided to whimpering sniffs, her head down, a handkerchief pressed to her face.
“See?” Mortimer said. “She is delusional. I have no vested interest one way or another in his grace’s relations with his family.”
“Miss Cranstan is employed by you, is she not?” Dunbar asked.
“Not anymore. I cannot have my name—my family—tainted by such sordid, not to say criminal, behavior.”
Miss Cranstan jumped to her feet, raised her fist, and cried in obvious frustration, “Oh. Oh. You—you—”
“Miss Cranstan!” the magistrate said, “sit down and be quiet or I shall have you removed from these proceedings.”
“You’re not helping,” the duke told her.
She sat back down and wiped her eyes and her nose, presenting a caricature of abused womanhood. When it came her turn to testify, she admitted her role in helping a respected member of society to secure what he had convinced her was rightfully his: custody of his grandson.
“That certainly provides a reason—of sorts—for your willingness to be a party to the abduction of Lord Spenland,” Dunbar said, his tone deceptively mild. “However, we are left wondering what possible motivation you might have had for your crass indifference regarding Lady Cassandra.”
“I meant the child no harm.”
“No harm, eh? But the maid, Rose Davis, told us you suggested the child could be sold. Is that what you mean by ‘no harm’—sell a little girl to God knows what kind of fate?”
A murmur of pure outrage sounded among the spectators. It was merely an echo of the horror and anger they had directed at the erstwhile nurse when Rosie had first testified to that stage of the events.
The duke’s barrister jumped to his feet, protesting the “prejudicial language” of his adversary.
The magistrate pounded the gavel again. Kate wondered if his desk had dents in it.
Miss Cranstan swallowed a sob and made a show of shrinking away from her interrogator. “Rose Davis does not like me. She wanted my position—and she has it now. I never suggested—I would never—I have devoted my life to caring for children. Please, you must believe me.”
Dunbar turned away in a show of disgust. “Methinks the lady doth protest too much.”
Stephenson, the duke’s barrister, rose to request a short recess. His client, he said, still suffered great pain as a result of an accident caused by reckless and irresponsible pursuit of his carriage on the day in question. Dunbar agreed to a recess so long as the phrase reckless and irresponsible was stricken from the official record of these proceedings. So far as Kate and Jeremy could tell, the request for a recess was a ruse to allow the legal experts to confer among themselves. Phillips rejoined the Kenrick party to confer with them.
“Stephenson, of course, just wants this to go away with the least possible damage to his client,” Phillips said.
“Any damage is his own doing,” Robert asserted.
“True enough,” Phillips said, “but I am instructed to find out what your wishes are, Kenrick—you being the chief plaintiff in this matter, since neither the child, as a minor, nor his mother, because she is a female, is authorized to be such.”
“A remarkably unfair aspect of English law,” Jeremy said with a sympathetic look at Kate.
Phillips smiled briefly and said, “You can take up the issue of women’s rights later, my friend. What do you want me to tell Dunbar and Stephenson?”
Jeremy took Kate’s hand in his. He looked at her questioningly and she nodded. “We too just want to this behind us. Wynstan’s punishment seems to have been taken out of mortal hands. The Cranstan woman deserves to be transported—or worse—for what she intended toward my daughter. But, frankly, I do not care at all what happens to her.”
“She’s been deserted by those she thought of as her family,” Kate said. Jeremy squeezed her hand.
“Perhaps that truly is punishment enough for her,” Lady Elinor said.
Robert snorted. “Hardly. But if she is to be free, can you not at least stipulate that she never show herself within, say, ten miles of either of the children she tried to harm?”
Phillips thought about this for a moment. “That seems reasonable—and most generous. I am sure the magistrate will agree.”
So, by means of a good deal of obscure and legalistic language, the hearing ended with indeterminate findings: the carriage driver’s death was an accident in which his own skill as driver was possibly a contributing factor; the children had been taken against the will of their parents, but said parents were not pursuing the matter further as a legal issue so long as the perpetrators of the deed maintained an established distance.
Two days later, Mrs. Packwood delivered the epilogue of the story during one of her regular visits to Kenrick Hall where, on this day, she had tea with Lady Elinor and Kate in the family drawing room. Rejected by the Mortimers, Miss Cranstan was to become Nurse Cranstan again. Instead of seeing to bathing, dressing, feeding, cleaning soiled linens, and generally seeing to the intimate needs of children, she would be performing these duties for the demanding, cantankerous Duke of Wynstan.
“She truly had no choice, you know,” Mrs. Packwood confided. “The alternative would probably have been a workhouse. Her parents are long dead and she has never associated with any other relatives—if she has them. She has no one. At her age, few would see her as able to manage children.”
“Luckily, Wynstan has a valet,” Lady Elinor said.
“Not at the moment. He left the duke’s service,” Mrs. Packwood informed them. “He said he did not hire on to take care of an invalid—especially an ill-tempered one.”
“Oh, dear. It just gets worse and worse for Cedric,” Lady Elinor said, “but it is hard to feel truly sorry for one who was so much the agent of his own misfortune.”
“I agree,” Kate said, “and I think it applies to both the duke and his new caretaker. Still, it is hard not to regret what might have been. My son does not know his grandparents on my side and now has only negative memories of his father’s father.”
Lady Elinor patted her hand. “Never mind, my dear. I shall happily fill that generational role for both Cassie and Ned. The Good Lord knows that Jeremy’s stepmother, the current countess, is unsuited to such a role. So . . . you have me.”
“To spoil them, you mean?”
“Is that not the proper role of grandparents?”
“I suppose it is.”