“It’s our day for the vicar, did you forget?” Jane came downstairs with her sisters following.
“No, I just slept in and forgot the time.”
“Is the man still sick?” Lucy asked.
Maddy smiled. “His fever broke in the night and he’s sleeping peacefully now.”
“Again?” Lucy declared. “He’s never going to wake up, not unless—”
“Go and wash your face and hands.” Maddy gave her a little push. “Breakfast will be ready in a trice.”
“Maddy.” John came downstairs, a leather satchel clasped to his chest, his face scrunched in an emotion Maddy was very familiar with.
She sighed. “What have you done now?”
He grimaced. “It’s not what I’ve done, so much as what I haven’t.”
She glanced at the satchel. The vicar had given it to the boys for carrying his precious books to and from the vicarage. “Did you forget to do your reading?”
“No, but the vicar asked me to give you these, days ago, and I forgot.”
He handed her a pile of white garments, neatly pressed and folded.
She removed them and shook the top one out.
“The vicar’s own nightshirts,” John explained. “For him.” He jerked his head in the direction of the bed. “The thing is, Maddy, the vicar gave them to me on the first day, and told me I wasn’t to take them out in front of the girls. He said Henry and me—”
“Henry and I.”
“Henry and I should dress the man, or give them to the doctor to do it, but . . . I forgot. He said it was very important, a man’s job, that I owed it to you as the man of the family.”
“I see.” And Maddy did see.
John bit his lip anxiously. “Do you have to tell him? The vicar, I mean?”
Tell the vicar she’d tended a man—stark naked—in her bed for several days? Not likely. If he got the slightest wind of it, he’d be down here demanding the stranger marry her. Conscious or not.
As if the vicar could force a fine, strange gentleman to marry an unknown woman with five young children to care for. It would be a storm in a teacup, upsetting everyone, and achieving nothing but fuss and embarrassment and resentment.
“I won’t tell the vicar if you don’t,” she said. John’s face split with a relieved grin and she ruffled his hair affectionately. “Now, eat your porridge and be off.”
Four
“Lucy, come away from that bed.”
The little girl pouted. “But Maddy, I was just going to—”
“I know what you were ‘just going to’ do and you know what I told you about that. Leave the man alone. Now, be a good girl and sort out these buttons for me.” Maddy emptied a tin box of assorted odd buttons onto the hearthrug and soon Lucy was happily absorbed in the task, arranging the buttons by color or shape or size, according to her fancy. Maddy had played the same game, with some of the same buttons, when she was a child.
Lizzie Brown looked up from her writing task. Three times a week, in exchange for dairy products, Lizzie took lessons from Maddy in reading and writing and the skills needed by a lady’s maid. She came while the older children were having their lessons at the vicarage, the boys in Latin and Greek and the girls in painting and the pianoforte.
“What was she planning to do?” Lizzie whispered as Maddy returned to the table.
Maddy rolled her eyes. “She’s decided our invalid is a sleeping prince who’s had a spell put on him by a wicked witch. He won’t wake up unless he’s been kissed by a princess.”
Lizzie grinned. “Shame there’s no princesses around here. But he’s a fine looking man, so if you want a dairymaid-in-training-to-be-a-lady’s-maid to have a go . . .”
Maddy laughed. “No princesses?” she said in mock outrage. She pushed a homemade book across the table. “Read this.”
