Page 39 of The Untamed Heart

“Quite so,” Sheringham agreed. “They are a blessed nuisance, but we all have them.” He regarded Lucius doubtfully. “Well, most of us do. You realise it would help you in your endeavours if you learned not to trample them with quite such aplomb.”

Sherry watched as Lucius tugged at his eyebrow.

“I believe you are angry with me,” he said after an interval.

Sherry snorted. “No. What would be the use of that? Just try not to get me killed, at least. This face is too pretty to suffer such abuse,” he said mournfully.

Lucius’s mouth tilted upwards. “You are terribly vain,” he said with a huff of laughter.

“Well, obviously. You mean to tell me you have a brain the size of a continent and you’ve only just figured that out? Pfft,” Sherry said in apparent disgust, making a show of picking an invisible piece of lint from his immaculate coat sleeve.

Lucius laughed, which seemed something of a victory, for he seldom showed anything resembling an emotion, certainly not the lighter-hearted ones.

“Sorry,” he said. “For….”

He gestured to Sherry’s rapidly swelling eye.

Sherry shrugged. “Think nothing of it. I got my own back. I enjoyed that part, at least, and we did get our directions to the mill.”

Eventually.

“You have an adequate right hook,” Lucius said, which he evidently believed to be a great compliment.

Sherry sighed. “I am overwhelmed by your approval.”

Lucius nodded, and it took Sherry a moment to realise he’d taken his words at face value. Shaking his head in wonder, he returned his attention to the passing countryside.

“We must be almost there,” Sherry said, some twenty minutes later.

Lucius had been deep in thought, and Sherry braced himself, for he was coming to understand that long silences were often followed by a form of verbal diarrhoea that could cause feelings of acute distress in the listener.

“Paper is very interesting, you know,” Lucius began with the expression of one who found the subject endlessly fascinating.

Sherry suppressed a groan. “You don’t say.”

Lucius sat up straighter, his expression lit with interest. “Oh, I do. There are the paper engines for the preparation of the pulp. Then the single sheets are prepared in a huge vat upon a large frame. The sheet is then carefully transferred or couched upon a woollen felt, of which there are between seven to nine quires in a post.”

“Kill me now,” Sherry murmured under his breath, praying they were as close as he thought they were as the carriage rattled down a narrow high street. Through the open windows, the air, which had previously brought with it the clean, sweet scent of the Kentish countryside, now grew heavier, with a pungent odour that was far less pleasant.

Lucius carried on, oblivious to his companion’s dazed expression, one produced by many hours of such lecturing. Sherry had learned things he’d never imagined knowing and felt certain he had no use for whatsoever.

“It’s an expensive business, for it takes two men and a boy half an hour for each post. They can manage around twenty posts a day. It takes about three weeks for the entire process and is hard work indeed. The heat from the vats, and the rather odd, stooping posture required from the vatman and coucher in intensely steamy conditions make it an unenviable method of earning a wage.”

“We’re here!” Sherry exclaimed joyfully and threw himself out of the door before the carriage had fully come to a halt.

“But don’t you want to hear about—”

“No!” Sherry cried, and practically ran towards the mill.

Seagull Heights, Little Valentine, East Sussex, 25th September 1816

Marcus stretched his back out with a groan, looking around with pleasure at the neatly turned earth, the cleanly swept paths, and a kitchen garden that no longer looked abandoned.

Hawkney’s words about Keller nagged at him, but he refused to let the bastard who’d been a thorn in his side throughout the peninsular campaign spoil this.

He looked over to where Neil was harvesting the ripe pears and realised the lad did not know how to treat the fruit.

“Not like that,” he called, only to realise his mistake as the lad snatched his hand away from a pear and turned to stare at him in alarm.