The murmuring of voices and the movement of bodies filtered through James Redwood's senses for some time before he realized he was awake and not alone. He tried to open his eyes and found them gummed together. Then his ears, in better condition, discerned one of the murmuring voices to be his mother's, and he lay very, very still.
"If no permanent damage is done, then we have something to be grateful for. Perhaps this will even knock some sense into him."
"Judging by his injuries, whatever happened could hardly be his fault." A deeper, masculine voice, unfamiliar to James.
"I find where James is concerned, it is always his fault."
There was a brief, awkward silence. There often was, after Mrs Redwood had spoken.
"Assigning blame will not help him recover," the stranger said tentatively.
"Nor will it hinder. But come, Doctor, your carriage is ready, so I will see you out."
The voices faded away and James relaxed. He crawled one hand painfully over the blankets to his face and rubbed. That hurt, but he managed to get one eye ungummed and found himself looking at the ceiling of his old bedroom in his parents' house. The constellation of ink-stains still marked the ceiling from the time he had occupied himself in punitive detention by playing darts with his quill. He had earned another punishment from his mother for that. He propped himself up on shaking elbows and squinted around the room. The plain oak furniture and white-linen dressings his mother favoured were exactly as he had left them five years ago. What on earth was he doing here?
Pain snaked hotly down the back of his skull and memory returned to him: the men approaching him on Kew Bridge, blocking his curricle from passing. How many had there been? Four? Five? Too many for him to resist when they had dragged him down onto the damp, cold stones. Too many for him to do anything but attempt to crawl away as they had thrashed him with cudgels and whips until he could not move. Then they had gone, and left him whimpering on the ground until unconsciousness had claimed him.
At least, James told himself, he was alive.
On the other hand, judging by his mother's tone, death might have been preferable.
He slid his feet tentatively to the floor and tested his weight on them. It took two tries before he could stand, but evidently no limbs were broken. He thought his ribs might be though, and the throbbing ache about his nose did not bode well.
He limped to the dresser and peered at his reflection. Even with one eye shut and his vision blurred, it was only slightly less than monstrous. His fine, regular features were lumpy and misshapen. A plaster was pasted over his nose, which was at least twice the size he remembered it having been. The flesh around his right eye was purple and swollen shut. His left was merely puffy and red, weeping slightly from a cut that cleaved his eyebrow and ran down onto his cheek. He bared his teeth and counted them anxiously. They were all still there, very white and neat. One faint mercy.
Above that misfortunate vision, his fair hair was matted with mud and blood and sweat. James opened the top drawer of the dresser, found an old hairbrush, and set gingerly to work. With only one eye and his limbs stiff with pain, it was hard going. He was trying to reach the hair at the back of his head when there was a sharp footstep in the passage and his mother opened the door — as always, without knocking. She stopped in the doorway and gaped at him. James ignored her.
"What do you think you're doing?" Mrs Redwood demanded.
"Brushing my hair, Mother."
"Go back to bed this instant!"
"But my hair!" James patted at his forelock. It was rather good hair, thick and glossy and very fair. Women were fond of it. He was glad the men had not thought to rip it out when they had attacked him.
"Bed, James!"
James eyed his mother warily. As long as he kept her at a distance, he was able to remain quite fond of her. But he wished she would learn not to give him orders in that tone, as though she were talking to a misbehaving dog or a truculent nag rather than a full-grown man of twenty-seven with an intelligence of his own.
However, his limbs were trembling and fragility might give him an excuse to escape a confrontation with his mother. He limped back to bed and slumped onto the mattress, pulling the covers over his face so he could not meet his mother's eyes.
Mrs Redwood took no notice. "Do you know who did this to you?" she barked. "Your father's going to sue."
"I am not in the habit of maintaining acquaintances with highway men."
"They stole nothing. Ergo, they were not highway men."
"Perhaps they were unskilled at their profession."
"Don't be silly, James." Her voice curled with familiar contempt. "It was clearly personal. And I can't imagine there's short supply of men with grudges against you."
James could name at least three without stopping to think. A darker possibility was that it had been no man at all. Henrietta had sworn revenge on him when he had ended their affair. He had been properly in love with her for at least a week. He did not wish to believe she was capable of hiring thugs to beat him.
"James?"
"I don't know who it was. And if I did, you know I wouldn't tell you." He wrested his head above the covers and opened his one good eye. "Whoever it was, I think they must be satisfied and won't do it again."
Mrs Redwood's eyes narrowed to snake-like slits. "This is not over, James. We are not satisfied."
"You never are," James muttered. "Now let me sleep."
James was at his parents' house for a week before he could think of returning home to his London townhouse. Over the course of that week, his face returned mostly to its normal shape and colour, though his nose, he thought, would always veer to the left now. His parents had not brought up his beating once. He suspected his mother was giving him the cold treatment, which was far more preferable than her direct criticisms, and as for his father, James assumed the absence of his usual biting witticisms signified a silent sympathy.
At dinner, he announced that he intended to take his curricle back to London the next morning. His father, spare and scholarly-looking, once tall but now hunched with age, looked up from inspecting the contents of his soup bowl.
"You cannot."
"I did not ask permission," James said.
"I was not denying it. It was a statement of possibility." Mr Redwood trailed his spoon through his soup, found it satisfactory, and took a minute sip. "You cannot take the curricle because it has been sold."
James stared at his father. "It's my curricle!"
"No more."
"Then I'll bloody well walk."
"James! Language!"
"Sorry, Mother." James breathed out slowly. "You have no right to sell my things, and you know it."
Mr Redwood raised one hunched shoulder in a lopsided shrug. "It seems you have forgotten, James, that it is my income which grants your allowance and your independence. If you are content to indulge in the privileges of being the only son and heir, you must likewise uphold the responsibilities."
It was a not unfamiliar lecture. James swigged his wine and suppressed the urge to sigh. He knew very well the depth of feeling underlying his father's dry speech. Three sons and a daughter had been born before him, and all had died in their infancy. James, born last, born very unexpectedly when Mrs Redwood had thought she was past the age of childbearing, carried the weight of all past hopes and all past sorrows.
His being thrashed on the street would have caused his parents more than the expected distress. It would have brought their old anxieties — quelled in recent years by James's robust good health — bubbling back up. He set down his wine and waited for his father to finish his lecture.
"...passed the age where flitting about town gambling and drinking and flirting can be considered a mere indulgence. Indeed, you seem to have taken up flirting as an occupation, with the natural tax for such income seen in the bruises on your face."
"I'm not such a libertine as that," James protested. "I indulge no more than anybody else my age, and a good deal less than many. And I don't think selling my curricle is very fair."
"Nothing in this world is fair," Mr Redwood said. "Certainly, it is not fair that for the past four years you have enjoyed an independence in town at my expense and done nothing to earn it."
"You are very generous to me and I am very grateful, Father."
"I was generous."
James waited, but his father said no more, instead sifting through his soup for morsels of chicken to swallow. His digestion had troubled him for as long as James could remember. Warily, James looked to his mother. She, stout and healthy despite her advancing years, had already finished her soup and was waiting patiently for Mr Redwood to be ready to carve the fowl. James speared a boiled potato from the dish in front of him and ate it off his fork. His mother narrowed her eyes.
"Your father and I have been talking lately," she said. "We see now that we have been too generous to you. We have imposed too few restrictions."
James, remembering his mother's exacting discipline during his childhood, did not think that was quite correct. Her strictness had only made him more inclined to rebellion. If she forbade him from trying to ride Farmer Perry's lazy draught horses bareback, he was sure to attempt his father's hunter instead. If the village alehouse was barred to him, he was sure to sample the brandy in his father's cellar. There had been constant arguments, devolving far too often into loud, savage fights. Only after he had left for university and later inveigled his father into allowing him the use of the London townhouse had relations eased between him and his mother. Absence did make the heart grow fonder, it seemed.
"Where is this conversation going?" James asked. "You have sold my curricle. What else have you done?"
"We have decided to cut off your allowance." Mr Redwood set his spoon in his half-finished soup and pushed it aside. At that signal, the maid stepped forward and cleared the soup plates from the table. The clatter of dishes and spoons gave James time to compose himself.
"You have?" he said lightly, as though it did not matter at all.
"We have. What you received midsummer is to be your last."
It was midway through September now. James was getting to the last of his quarterly hundred pounds. He smiled through the pain of the equations running through his mind. That new coat — he would have to cancel the order and incur the wrath of his tailor. The visit to Brighton he had planned for the winter — that could not go ahead. His servants' wages, due at Michaelmas — that would take the bulk of what he had left.
"Am I to be so restricted forever?" he enquired as his father made the first cut in the roast goose and then handed the carving knife to the footman to take over.
"When we are convinced of your commitment to your own future, we will reconsider matters," Mrs Redwood said. "The wing please, Jason. My son will have the wing."
The footman, who had been carving the breast of the bird, turned the knife to the wing. James suppressed his irritation and with it his appetite.
"What would such a commitment entail?" he asked when his plate was back in front of him. He piled it high with potatoes. "Good behaviour for three months?"
"Terms as vague as that would not make for a proper contract. Besides, you would no doubt regress once your three months were up. No. You need a more permanent inducement." Mr Redwood picked at a sliver of goose breast. "And there is only one inducement of absolute permanency for a man: a good wife. Upon your marriage, we will naturally help set up you and your wife in perfect comfort in London. But, until that day, you will live at home and receive nothing."
That made James's appetite disappear altogether. He liked women — perhaps more than he ought — but the idea of marriage made his blood run cold. He had seen his best friend, Anthony Locke, suffer for five years under a cruel and unfaithful wife. He had seen his own father suffer his mother's cold, hard temper. And his lovers had all been perfectly complacent about their infidelity to their husbands. No. Marriage was yoke James was not prepared to bear. He hid his feelings with a smile.
"In such circumstances, I might be tempted to run off with the serving maid." He glanced up at Jenny, the faithful maid who had been with the family since James was a boy. "What do you think, Jenny dearest? Shall we make a go of it?"
Jenny glared at him as though she wished she could whack him with the serving spoon.
"Don't be stupid, James!" Mrs Redwood said sharply. "Any woman might take you at your fickle word."
"And if any woman may rescue me from penury — or at least the threat of having to wear three-year-old suits — I might let her."
"Any woman might not," Mr Redwood said. "It is Grace Follet whom you must marry."
Cold surprise curbed the growing heat of James's temper. He stared at his father. Mr Redwood was calmly dissecting his goose breast. It was not one of his strange, dry little jokes that nobody ever understood but him. The almost imperceptible grin in his eyes was absent. No. He was serious. It had been a statement of plain fact.
James rubbed his temples. "Who is Grace Follet?"
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A/N 2021-24-04: I was not planning on releasing this story on Wattpad til I'd finished it completely, but honestly... I'm stuck! And you guys have always been so helpful in the past at getting me unstuck (by bugging me for updates) that I figure it's worth a try to get this one completed.
For the curious, this is a sequel to An Impossible Deception, which is about the Anthony Locke James mentions a few paragraphs up, but as it's about separate characters you don't need to read that one to enjoy this one :)