BVC Announces Meeting at the Cricket Pitch by Alicia Rasley
Meeting at the Cricket Pitch
Regency CSI #2
by Alicia Rasley
More dangerous than their secret liaison is the promise of a public future…
More dangerous than their secret liaison is the promise of a public future
Surrounded by their children and the chaos of a cricket match, Natasha and Matt realize that more dangerous than their secret liaison is the promise of a public future.
A fortnight after the events of Murder at the Brighton Inn, Matt and Natasha meet at their late spouses’ childhood home, which they now jointly own. But this time, their intimacy is constrained by the presence of their children, another mystery, and a poignant reminder of their shared tragedy.
Regency CSI #2
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Had she a choice, Alicia Rasley would be living in an English village in 1816, writing with a quill pen, and solving mysteries. Unfortunately, she actually lives in Indiana in the 21st Century, types on a laptop, and teaches college students the mysteries of grammar. Her books have received numerous awards, including the RITA for Best Regency Novel.
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Chapter One
Waycross, East Sussex
May 27, 1826
Matt was already here.
Natasha Danford knew it. She didn’t know how, but she knew it. What she didn’t know was whether she was glad or wary. Maybe she was both.
Soon enough, she’d have to decide. But for now, she let herself enjoy the anticipation, imagine the moment, and set forth towards it.
As her son Will ran ahead, she stepped down from her carriage, scanning the sun-drenched road for a glimpse of— Well. They would find each other. Waycross was just a village, and both of them had lived here years ago, and knew every lane and green and bend of the brook. He couldn’t be very far away.
And, after all, the annual village cricket match was set to start soon, and her – her what? Her brother-in-law wasn’t precisely true. Beau—well, she wouldn’t call him that either, as they weren’t young any longer, both of them widowed, neither of them seeking. She had better just go with Matthew. Her… Matthew.
At any rate, Matthew was probably already at the cricket pitch. He’d been a sailor, and sailors did love their traditions, and the Waycross-Calder cricket match was certainly a longstanding one. If there was any landlocked tradition as rule-bound and ritualistic as the Navy, it had to be cricket.
Not that Matt would see himself as traditional, now that she considered it. A man of medicine and science, as he would no doubt want to be known, he had to put up with all the Royal Navy ceremonies and rituals. But he’d never loved them the way most sailors did. That was something they’d had in common, even back in the early days of their acquaintance, when they hardly had anything in common—neither Matt nor Natasha truly appreciated the Navy pomp.
She turned back to the coach to get her reticule, and found that her maid Tilbert already had that, a fashion magazine, and sketchbook kit in hand. “I shall have to go back for the picnic basket, milady,” the maid said in a significant tone that was hard to miss. “That is all. Just the basket.”
Natasha came to the understandable but perhaps incorrect interpretation and glanced back to make sure the coachman was aging and already asleep in the sun. (Tilbert had an unfortunate penchant for the younger drivers, and had clearly determined to do penance for her most recent indiscretion.) “Yes, and meet us at the cricket pitch,” was all Natasha said, stuffing La Belle Assemblée into the bag with the sketchbook. Then, taking a determined breath, she started down the overgrown path.
Ahead was the house she remembered, Waycross Grange. It was not much of a manor; in fact, it was just a jumped-up farmhouse with thirty acres of farm behind, and in front, half an acre of overgrown garden, a gravel drive, and wide staircase leading to a limestone block.
It wasn’t beautiful or gracious or stately, but as she looked up at the gray façade, her heart quickened. This had been her first home in England. She had come here as a bride in 1813, escaping from Russia and the war. This wasn’t actually her house, but the house her husband Charlie had grown up in with his twin sister Amy. He’d lived here between voyages, until he inherited the title and the big estate in Hampshire.
After that, Waycross was Amy’s family house, and that was where Charlie had brought his new Russian bride. Amy had welcomed her like a sister, Amy’s husband Matt not quite so warmly. But Matt was gone soon, he and Charlie both, for they were sailors, and the war was still on. There was always another voyage, always another battle, always another farewell.
So here she lived those first months with Amy and little John Charles, learning English and English ways. By that time, Natasha was expecting Will, and glad for Amy’s solid loving guidance in this new place, and in this new condition of her new life.
Will was born here, and learned to walk there in the garden. Eventually Natasha had gotten brave enough–- actually, Charlie had insisted— to move the family to the Hampshire estate and taken up her neglected responsibilities as the lady of the manor. That role had its pleasures. She felt very adult and important for a while in the opulent Danford Park. But Will pined for the ramshackle Waycross house and his little cousins. So did Natasha, and she made sure that every holiday, the family gathered there to celebrate together.
They were there for Christmas, in fact, that year after the war ended. And two years later, that was where Amy and Charlie had died both on the same day, in that deadly influenza epidemic that swept through the south coast.
Involuntarily, she glanced up at the window of the room where her husband had died. His last words had been typically optimistic— “I shall be shipshape in the morning!” They hadn’t told him about his sister. Just as well. Charlie died the same way he lived, optimistic and buoyant and certain of the benevolence of fate.
Once Amy was gone and Charlie too, so was much of the happiness of those early days. Every room, every corner of the garden, seemed to echo with emptiness. So she didn’t protest when Matt made the decision to hire an agent and lease the house out, and neither of them had ever moved back.
Now Waycross Grange was empty, and looked sad and abandoned, and she and Matt— Amy’s widower, and suddenly something more— had to make a decision about it.
After all that sorrow and loss and dislocation, she and Will were back here, and for what? A cricket game. Of all things, a cricket game. She would never have imagined practical Matthew making a special trip to play this annual match, but he usually did, and this year she came too. They had to make a decision about the house, she told herself. And seeing him–- and the children of course— was surely worth sitting through a bout of that incomprehensible and all-too-English game.
Will came back down the path, his handsome little face concentrated in thought. “I thought John Charles and Nori would be here.”
She hardly had time to reassure him when around the corner of the building came a girl in a blue pinafore. The girl kept running, right into Natasha’s arms. “Auntie Tasha!”
It was Nora, her little niece, and Natasha embraced her and smoothed back her fair hair and with impressive effort managed not to ask where Nora’s papa was. “Where is your brother?” she said instead.
Nora squirmed free. “He said he’d be scouting the territory,” she said, mimicking with a little sister’s contempt, and gesturing back to the field west of the house.
Will cried, “There’s Uncle Matt!” and he took off towards the man walking towards them, in cricket whites, carrying a bat as easily as if it were a sword or a scalpel or some other weapon he more customarily used.
There he was. And as he caught Will up and then set him gently down, he looked over and gave her a smile, and in that way of most of his smiles, it said everything was all right.
It wasn’t that she was worried. But after their day and night at the Brighton Inn, where there was life and death, and a bit of love too, she couldn’t be altogether certain what the relationship was now. They certainly weren’t enemies anymore, if they ever had been. That was an advance, at least.
They exchanged glances, quick so that the children didn’t notice. These were the more sensitive of their children— Nora with her sudden insights, and Will with his focused attention on just this moment. They needn’t worry with Matt’s elder child, John Charles, who came up now, talkative and blithe and, now that he was thirteen, imperative and self-important.
“You’ve gotten so tall,” she said, for she had to reach up to kiss him. I remember you as a tiny baby here at Waycross, she wanted to say, but of course that would embarrass him.
The children ran off ahead, and Natasha had to decide what to say to this man. He was… what? Once he’d been her dearest friend’s husband—and if that weren’t enough, her husband’s best friend. And now he was something else. They just hadn’t had time to figure out what that “else” was.
There’d been little chance to talk in the fortnight since they’d met at the Brighton Inn, only a few hurried notes arranging this meeting. And this meeting wouldn’t be, she reminded herself, the sort of intense interlude they’d had at the inn. They had their three children here, after all.
Matt was not one to waste time on indetermination about the future or reminiscence of the recent past. He said, “Natasha, we have to make a decision about the house.”
She had been expecting this, of course. Well, she had been expecting perhaps more than a significant glance and a brush of the hand before he launched into their business dealings.
Amy’s house, as Natasha always thought of it, had been let since her death to a shipping broker and his four sons. Now that the four sons were off at school, the broker had married a woman in Southampton and moved there. And the house was empty again.
She replied in the same even tone, “We should be leasing it again.”
Matt shook his head. “It requires too much work to get it in any condition to lease. Fuller left it in a sad state. We should sell it.”
Just as firmly, she countered, “No, we shouldn’t sell Amy’s house.”
“It is not,” Matt said levelly, “Amy’s house anymore. I own half, and your son owns half. And neither of us is likely to want to oversee a year’s renovation.”
“Of course not. Will is only twelve. But you could—”
Matt shook his head. “Not in my ability, nor my inclination.”
“I don’t want to sell it, Matt.”
He said, “It makes no sense to have it sit here empty.”
“Well, you could move back in.” She knew what he was going to say, that his moving would be illogical, and he was, in most things, obnoxiously logical.
“My practice requires me to be near the London road. You know that. And my caretakers are there in Trome, so they can come to stay with the children when I am away on a case. It is not practical to move.”
“But the farm—”
“I am no farmer. I wouldn’t know what to do with the farm.”
“But Amy left half of it to you. It’s where she and Charlie grew up. You spent much of your childhood here.”
“That was decades ago. Everyone—everyone was still alive then.” He shook his head. “It’s just a burden now.”
“Then,” she said, “We could live there, Will and I.”
Matt didn’t even hesitate. “And then who is going to take care of Danford Park? Four hundred acres in Hampshire, as I recall.”
“This is nearer to town. It could be our second house.”
“You already have a house in town. And it would cost 500 pounds to make this place livable again, after those Fuller vandals trashed the place.”
She said, “We have the money, Matt.”
“You might have the money, my love, but I certainly do not, not to waste on this old pile.”
She was so distracted by the endearment that she didn’t immediately object. Now he was explaining in that reasonable tone that it only made sense for them to sell the house, take the money, and put it into the funds.
“But perhaps John Charles could inherit it someday. From his mother.”
Matt said, looking ahead at his older child, “I think John Charles won’t be a farmer either.”
“Then Nora—”
“I doubt Nora wants it either. Anyway, she’s naught but eleven. She won’t be leaving home for a very long time.”
“But—” Natasha was annoyed again by his cool logic. She had no logic, it was true, nothing but sentiment to counter his objectivity. He didn’t have her memories. She thought now that he didn’t want them.
She was the only one who remembered, the only one who felt the happiness of this house, those days, those memories– she and Amy together with their babies pottering about the garden, embroidering on the terrace with the gardener trimming the roses below. And then Matt and Charlie coming home from another voyage, windburned and sunburned and always seeming too large and loud for this house.
True, it wasn’t really a man’s sort of house. It was too small, too fussy. But Amy had left her share to Matt. And presumably that meant he had the right to decide what to do with it. She almost wished that he were more sentimental– but then, of course, he wouldn’t be Matt.
The argument, such as it was, had come to a stalemate by the time the children came peltering back, their hands full of biscuits. Will was curious as always, and demanded to know why Matt was in cricket costume.
“I’m playing for Waycross, the village team.”
Natasha patiently reminded Will that this was an annual affair, Waycross in East Sussex against the West Kent village of Calder. “Your father and your Aunt Amy were born here, you know,” she said. “And your Uncle Matt was born in the village.”
“I don’t know why I can’t play on the team,” John Charles said.
Matt said, “You must be fourteen to play on the team.”
John Charles, predictably, stuck out his lower lip like a much younger child. “I’m almost that old already.”
Natasha said quickly, “So, John Charles, next year, you’ll be old enough to play.”
Nora looked up at her father. “Papa, did you and Uncle Charles play with the village team when you were 14?”
Matt was watching the distant cricket field, where a team was gathering. He said distractedly, “No, sweeting, we’d both been out at sea most of the year by that time.”
Natasha was newly disposed to think the best of Matthew, but sometimes, really, he just didn’t think. John Charles, predictably, looked up and said, “You were in the Navy by my age?”
She broke in, “There was a war on, remember!”
Matt added, “And we were both almost disowned by our fathers. I can hardly blame them—we were children. Like you.”
“I am not a child!” the boy began, but Natasha, quick as she could, intervened.
“Think of it, John Charles!” she said brightly. “Next summer, you shall be able to play in the next annual cricket game. You’ll have to practice all day, then, hitting, and—and tossing?”
“Bowling,” Matt supplied, coming closer. “Come, son, you can watch the practice, and be our scout, tell us what strengths the Calder team has.”
John Charles hung back, but Matt tossed him the ball, and together they started towards the cricket team.
But by the time she and the younger children got to the pitch, John Charles was hitting the ground with a bat and arguing again, this time on a much more difficult subject. “Why can’t I go to sea, now I’m 13?”
“You are too young,” Matt said, reasonably enough.
Natasha agreed with him, but wished Matt would add something sentimental and persuasive about how they would all miss John Charles much too much to let him go. Judging from the gritted-teeth patience Matt was exhibiting, she supposed she was expecting more than was warranted.
Before she could voice those sentimental sentiments herself, John Charles was protesting predictably. “But you said you and Uncle Charlie were younger than I am!”
“And there was a war on, so there was more need for us, as your aunt pointed out.”
Natasha wasn’t sure if she wanted to be dragged into this, but Nora tugged at her hand and whispered, “There isn’t a war now, is there?”
“No,” Natasha assured her, but John Charles had an idea of his own.
“There’s war now! What about the Barbary Pirates?”
“Mostly subdued, I hear,” Matt said, tossing the ball up and catching it in the other hand.
“Then what about slavers? You support our action against slavery, don’t you?”
“A laudable aim,” Matt said. “But not one that requires a navy the size of the one that went against Napoleon.”
“But Papa—” The boy’s voice went plaintive. “I want to go to sea. I want to be a sailor. Like you.”
“I was a ship’s physician. Perhaps you should go to Guy’s Medical College first, and then consider the Navy.”
“You went to sea first! And I don’t want to be a physician. A post captain, like Uncle Charles. In—in his honor.”
That was, of course, quite unfair, and Natasha could see that the plea made Matt waver in a way that none of the arguments had. Then he shook his head. “Not now, Johnny. We can talk about it in the winter, when you’ll be fourteen.”
Fourteen! He would still be too young! Natasha almost protested. But what could she say? John Charles wasn’t hers, though she’d been there in his babyhood, had seen him take his first steps, had comforted him when his mother died.
She reached out and took her own son’s hand. But he pulled away too, as boys would, gathering himself and making a run onto the pitch. “I want to bowl, Uncle Matt! Let me!”
She was left there on the sidelines with Nora. It was the lot of the ladies, she supposed, to stand aside and let the men go to war. Or to the cricket, in this case.
She watched the boys run towards the pitch, Matt striding after them. She’d been long used to seeing him in his doctor garb, and even in formal dress on the occasion of a family wedding or funeral. But this dazzling white of the cricket dress recalled a decade ago, when he wore the naval uniform—plain, certainly, compared to the ridiculously extravagant post-captain outfit her husband Charlie had worn. Matt, as ship’s physician, was merely a warrant officer, with a gilt-less blue coat over bright white like this.
Oh, it was coming back to her, those last days— of the war, of the victory, of Charlie and Amy. The last of all their days in this house. Resolutely she reminded herself– That was all done. The memories were enough. They had to be.
She glanced back at the house, so ramshackle and dear across the field. Matt could let it go. He was like that. But she had so little in the way of happy memories, and that house held so many of them. And if she lost this house— well, she might lose the memories too.
She glanced down at Nora, who was eying the distant tent speculatively. “We don’t get to have adventures, do we, Auntie? We girls.”
Natasha was quick to deny this, and started to bring up the names of a dozen or so females who got to have adventures. Lady Hester Stanhope! Mary Shelley! But what if Nora asked her to name her own adventures? What were they, except a few romantic moments, as when she eloped with Charlie? And this month, when she and Matt— well, she couldn’t mention that adventure, not to Matt’s little daughter. And it was sad, wasn’t it, to have two romantic moments be the sum of excitement in her life.
But she wasn’t going to limit her whole gender to her own limited experience. “What about—” and then the name came to her, for she had just read a biographical essay, rather scandalous, in The Literary Lounger. “Anne Bonney!”
Nora tilted her head. “Who is that?”
“Oh, my dear, she was the most adventurous of ladies! Well, perhaps not a lady. She was a pirate!”
“A pirate? There were lady pirates?”
“Yes, several. And Anne Bonney was the best— or rather worst of them.” The rest of the story came to her memory. “She married a man named Calico Jack, and they took to the sea, and she was known to relentlessly board and take ships, even ships of the Royal Navy!”
Too late she remembered that they were, after all, a Royal Navy family, and that Matthew had an aversion to pirates, even long-dead lady ones. She said with a laugh, “Best not to tell your father I praised a pirate.”
Nora accepted this without comment. She was, all in all, an astute girl.
To change the subject, Natasha said, “Someday, dearest, I’ll introduce you to Lady Hester Stanhope, who dressed in men’s clothes and traveled on a camel through Arabia.”
“Have you ever ridden on a camel, Auntie?” Nora asked in her intent way.
“No, but I’ve seen one.” At least Natasha could claim that much excitement, having visited the menagerie at the Tower of London with Will last year. “A dromedary.”
Nora gazed up at her with gratifying admiration. “Did you really? Oh, I wish I could see a–-” She took a deep breath and added, “A one-humped ungulate.”
“Ungulate?”
“A hoofed animal,” Nora said, casually, as if such facts were nothing noteworthy, even from the mouth of an eleven-year-old.
She was, Natasha thought, so very smart. And well-read. And— well, she would have to mention to Matt that Nora, far more than her brother John Charles, would enjoy proper schooling. It was sad that there wasn’t really any proper schooling, not for a bright girl with a scientific bent, just finishing schools and ladies’ academies.
“You know,” she remembered, “I wonder if there are still books in the library. Shall we look?”
Nora agreed happily, and as they walked back towards the house, Natasha could feel Matt’s gaze on her. He was watching them leave. She didn’t know how she knew, but she felt that. Felt him. Again.
Nothing had changed. They were still here at Waycross Grange. They still had these children. They had these memories. They still had these conflicts.
But everything had changed.