Pride and Percabeth

Chapter Thirty -Eight

Leo saw a figure clad in black approach the forge. As it grew closer, a lady in mourning dress came into view. Several trunks lay at her feet. Leo ran outside to greet her.
"Miss Titan, I thought you'd gone back to London."
Miss Titan took his hand.
"After what happened between us the last time I was here, you could at least call me Calypso."
He looked over what she was wearing: a gown of jet-colored silk, a stable fur stole and muff, and a beaver felt hat with black ostrich feather plumes.

"I'm sorry for your loss, Miss... Calypso."
"Don't be too sorry, no one hated my father more than I did."
"Please, come inside."
After carrying the trunks inside, Leo put a kettle on the fire for coffee and Pa's tea. Miss Titan... Calypso... removed her wraps and went over to the bed to say hello to Pa, who grew stronger every day. His ox-like appetite had returned and he could now make it through a daily ten-minute walk.
When the coffee and tea began to boil, Leo joined Calypso by the fire.
"How did your father die?"
Calypso took a dainty sip of coffee.
"I was supposed to go to London but my stepmother called me to Olympus at the last minute. She revealed that my father was already dead and buried and had left every shilling to her. I had a day to get out of the house and go to the devil for all she cared."
Tears ran down Calypso's cheeks. Leo reached over and put a hand on her shoulder. How could that damned shrew be so selfish and cruel?
"Oh well," Calypso sobbed. "Living off her charity would be one of the last things I want. I had rather be a canker in a hedge than a rose in her grace."
Leo refilled her coffee cup.
"What do you plan to do next?"
"I don't know. I just came here because I knew I'd find friendly faces."
He rose from his chair and paced back and forth by the window.  Scratching his head, he tried to figure out what to do. 
He loved Calypso and after everything that had happened between them, damn it, he was obligated. He had a home and hearth to offer her but they were nothing compared to what she was used to.  Would she come to miss her former life and resent him for not keeping her in the style in which she was accustomed? But beggers had no right to be choosers.
Hang it! It was worth a shot.
"Is something wrong, Leo?" Calypso said.
Leo knelt at her feet.
"Dear Calypso, I know I don't have much to offer you but you'll have a roof over your head, food in your belly,  and a man who loves you and that's got to count for something."
She jumped up from her chair and kissed him.
"I don't have many other options, do I?"
Pa sat up in his bed. He smiled and winked at them.
"You can use your mother's ring, " he said.

The Underwoods drove Calypso and Leo to the Golden Lion Coaching Inn in Olympus. They agreed to take Pa in while they were away.
Waving goodbye to his friends, Leo braced himself for the seven-day journey north which would change his life forever.
Their destination was Gretna Green, a tiny village on the Scottish border. Both of them were nineteen, too young to marry without the permission of their guardians but such things were glossed over in Scotland.
When the stagecoach dropped Leo and Calypso off in Gretna Green, the keeper of the local inn gave them the directions to a nearby blacksmith's forge.

Leo stood in his best brown wool suit, which looked more than a little disheveled after seven days of travel, in front of the smithy's anvil.

For a few guineas, the smithy agreed to stand as a witness as he and Calypso said their vows.
The few guineas were the price of a drink with which the smithy toasted the bride and groom's health back at the inn.
Leo and his new wife sat down to a simple dinner of meat pies and ale before retiring to bed.