Page 4 of The Widower Without a Will
Not that his prospectwastaxing.He was a handsome man for their age.Martha had never looked closely upon him before, but now that she sat across from him, she was all too aware of his face, which was pleasing in every aspect, and especially his lips, which were the perfect proportion.
The perfect proportion forwhat, she couldn’t say.She simply knew that, were an artist to take him as the model for their painting, they would be pleased with the thin but firm mouth that met them.
In fact, it was not until the maid—a dark-haired, brown-skinned woman of thirty or so—presented them with a Wedgwood porcelain tea set that Martha realized the awkwardness of the afternoon came from the fact that she and Lord Preston were alone in the drawing room.
Martha wasn’t sure she had ever had reason to call on a manalonebefore.
And here, she wasn’t even calling on Lord Preston.She was moving in with him!
When the maid had withdrawn, Martha made a point of pouring the tea—or, as he had called it, tisane.It was a brew of mint leaves, and the liquid came out pale gold rather than the dark brown to which she was accustomed.“Perhaps I should have let it steep more,” she said as she watched it fill the first cup.
“It would not get any darker,” Lord Preston assured her.“Tisanes do not show their strength in color the way the tea plant does.”
Somewhere along the way, he had discarded his driving gloves, and his fingers were bare as he took the teacup from her.They were elegant yet sturdy, dwarfing the porcelain as he gripped the saucer in one hand and the delicate handle in the other.
Those fingers did not touch hers at all.
He asked, “Will you miss tea very much?Some of our newcomers experience terrible headaches when they are first deprived of tea or coffee.”
“I switched over to Mr.Hunt’s powder a few months ago.The cost of tea with the duties is too high.”The radical reformer Henry Hunt sold a breakfast powder made of chicory root that avoided the tax on tea—but most important to Martha, it lowered her expenses considerably.Ever since Kenneth had died, her imperative had been to spend as little money as possible.
“Ah.You see why I’m of two minds on those duties.I hate to make life harder for anyone who is already barely scraping by, yet they are also effective in curbing some people’s consumption of tea.”
Martha knew that Lord Preston had long since dictated that Northfield Hall would not purchase anything imported from abroad, but she was curious to hear why from him directly.“What would be achieved if we stopped drinking tea at a national level?”
Up until now, Lord Preston had been so genial that Martha had thought him perfectly engaged in the conversation.But at the question, he lit from within, as if he had swallowed the summer sun wafting in through the open windows.Leaning forward, he set aside his teacup to enumerate his points with his fingers.“If we were to end our consumption of tea, then we would no longer be in debt to China.If we were to end our consumption of coffee, we would no longer support the plantations worked by African slave labor.If we were to end our consumption of sugar and its byproducts rum and molasses, then the slave plantations in the West Indies would have no reason to exist, and we could emancipate all those people.The East Indies sugar production is no better, by the way, and so we must not substitute our purchases but end them entirely.Same with cotton: whether it is coming from the fields of South Carolina or Bengal, it is coming from forced labor.”
Martha knew he could have kept going: the American South also grew rice, indigo, and tobacco with slave labor; from Calcutta came cotton and opium of dubious labor practices; from Portugal’s colonies in Brazil came mahogany wood tainted by slave labor.
What she wanted to know was whether Lord Preston really believed that Britain could turn its back on these items, or whether, like Eve, once the apple was bitten, there was no returning to Eden.
She should not ask that question, especially not while taking tea—tisane—in his drawing room as his houseguest.Yet as Lord Preston leaned in, the posture of good manners replaced by enthusiasm for his topic, Martha could not help feeling that he would invite the question.
So she took a chance and asked it: “After all these decades of avoiding imports at Northfield Hall, do you think it has made a difference?”
He nodded once to acknowledge the question and retreated backward in his chair.His eyes lifted to a spot behind Martha—to the portrait of his late wife with her children, which hung above the mantel.“Since my marriage in 1788.Which means we have avoided imports for…thirty-five years.Strange to calculate it; so often, I still feel we are at the very beginning of this project.”
Her marriage had been longer: she had been twenty-two on her wedding day, and they had been only a month away from their fortieth anniversary when he died.
Of course, Lord Preston’s marriage had ended when Lady Preston succumbed to a wasting disease, sometime before Martha had moved to Thatcham.The lady had been gone for at least ten years, perhaps fifteen, yet the look Lord Preston sent the woman in the picture was one of a husband still in his first years of grief.
Martha wished her heart were loving enough to feel that way about Kenneth.
She returned her thoughts to Lord Preston’s great project.“Have you achieved what you hoped to by avoiding the import-export economy?”
“My chief aim was to die with a clean conscience,” he replied, “and in that respect, I hope I have been successful.The rest of Britain may have a terrible stain on its soul, but I do think that setting an example here at Northfield Hall has made others consider their purchases.Had you thought about where your cotton came from before you moved to Thatcham?”
She had—but only with regards to its quality.“I haven’t stopped purchasing cotton when I need it, however.”
He smiled kindly.“Not everyone has the luxury of building their own textile works.”
The reply sounded—not rehearsed, but perhaps experienced.He had thirty-five years of people informing him they could not join him in avoiding imports, and therefore he had thirty-five years’ worth of replies to repair the conversation so no one would leave with great injury to their dignity.Martha couldn’t help wondering what his true response was.In his heart, did he judge her for being small-minded?Did he rage that no one appreciated his ingenious vision?Did he grieve that he had been unable to sway the average Briton to care more for the principle of abolition than for their own purse?
Most likely, she reminded herself, he wrote her off as an old woman with a narrow mind who could never have made much of a change in the world even if she wanted to.
“You mustn’t feel you need to keep me company,” she said, pouring more mint tisane into her teacup even though she had barely sipped it.“I shall be happy if you treat me as you would a governess or some other servant of the family.In fact, if I may do any work at all, please put me to use.I do not know how to be idle.”
Lord Preston blinked, that sunlight disappearing from within him, and Martha realized she had rather abruptly changed the subject.Perhaps she was even being indelicate in assigning herself a role for which he was not hiring.
