Lady X's Cowboy

by Zoë Archer

  “What...?”

  “...Maddox...”

  Crawcook and Len traded looks of gleeful shock. Not Maddox! The man was well-known even to servants of the gentry. He was a horror, a monster, high-priced and ruthless.

  And then the servants had to scatter into the recesses of the house, because the old countess was coming down the hall. They dove into a nearby hallway and listened carefully. The countess rapped on the door to sir’s study.

  “I say, George, we must leave immediately if we are to make the Duchess of Walford’s tea party,” she called.

  “I’ll be along shortly, Mother,” sir answered after a pause.

  “Now, George,” she said in a voice that Crawcook and Len both knew too well. She sailed off back towards the front of the house, and both the valet and the footman pressed up against the wall to keep from being seen when sir jerked open the door of his study.

  “I’ll deal with you two later,” he barked to the men in his office, “so leave by the servants’ entrance and never come into my house again.” He stalked away, and shortly after the grumbling and swearing East Enders vanished.

  Both Len and Crawcook had to suppress the giggles that rose up in their throats. They must wait until sir and his dragon of a mother were out of the house before scampering belowstairs with their story. And it was a marvelous story. Who would ever believe an earl’s son mixing with blokes from Whitechapel? And who, exactly, was the disgusting American and the trollop of a widow? And what was sir summoning Maddox for? These were mysteries the servants would ponder for hours.

  “You have heard so much about this place, perhaps it is time I showed it to you,” Olivia said as she and Will entered the brewery. “Here is Mr. Huntworth, the esteemed manager. How are you today, Mr. Huntworth?” she asked as a round, alert owl of a man approached them, blinking behind thick spectacles.

  “Much better, thank you, Lady Xavier, since you and your associate solved our distribution problem,” he answered brightly. He ran his sleeve over his smooth forehead. She made quick introductions, and outside of a fast, considering look the manager gave Will, no one seemed to question Will’s presence either with her or at the brewery. Which was very well since she wasn’t quite sure of herself around him anymore.

  She had been so glad to see him returned unharmed from his delivery; it had taken a considerable self-control to keep from launching herself at him and covering his face with kisses. Perhaps having him assist with the protection of the brewery wasn’t such a good idea, after all. She was beginning to like him too much. Yet the weariness that had been beleaguering her for so long was beginning to lift, largely due to Will Coffin. He helped her face down George Pryce, and he didn’t question her right to run a business—unlike most people she knew. Such relief.

  But Will couldn’t be more distant from her—socially, financially, geographically, and just about every other way she could imagine. He was temporary, nothing more. And eventually, she would go back to running Greywell’s alone. The prospect wasn’t as cheering as it had been only a few days ago.

  “I shall take a look around, Mr. Huntworth,” she decided. “Just to make sure everything is running smoothly.”

  The manager seemed used to the idea. “As you wish, Lady Xavier. Let me accompany you.”

  “Why not come along, Will?” she found herself asking. “At the very least, you can see how beer is made.”

  He hesitated. He hadn’t decided whether to help her or not, and Olivia herself was torn. His assistance would be invaluable—he had scared off Pryce’s henchmen several times and seemed to know how such wars were waged—but the more time she and Will spent together, the more he intrigued her. And, Lord, she didn’t need more of society’s disapproval. Running the brewery had made life difficult enough as it was.

  But she would lose Greywell’s without him. He needed to stay.

  “Sure,” he said at last.

  She made her inspection with Mr. Huntworth and his omnipresent clipboard. Will stayed beside her and gazed around at the enormous rooms and machinery.

  “This spread you’ve got sure is considerable.” He whistled.

  “I thought so, too,” she admitted. She checked the pressure on a boiler and nodded in satisfaction to Mr. Huntworth. “When I found out that David had left me the brewery, I didn’t know the first thing about making beer. So I took a tour of Greywell’s and was absolutely astonished. The first thing I noticed was the smell.”

  Will took a deep sniff. “Like a big loaf of bread.” He sniffed again and made a face. “A big, angry loaf.”

  She laughed. “I don’t notice it anymore, or so I tell myself. I can only wonder what I must smell like.” And then she remembered that Will did know what she smelled like, he’d told her so the second time they had met, and it brought back the same rush of intimate awareness she’d felt that day.

  Will must have felt it, too, because he abruptly turned and pointed to the giant tuns in the middle of the room. “What’re these?”

  “Mashing tuns,” she explained, grateful that neither of them had spoken any further about her personal scent. “We mix the ground malt with liquor—that’s what we call water—and then mash it for two hours.”

  “Lady Xavier had the tuns fitted with steam-heated jackets to keep the temperature exact,” Mr. Huntworth said proudly. “The latest in modernization. Come and see.”

  Greywell’s was a smaller, local brewery with only one brew house, but Olivia could see that to many unfamiliar with the process, and with industrialization in general, the six-story structure could look like a castle built of copper kettles and huge fermenting vessels. In his clean, worn Western clothing and Stetson hat, strolling past enormous refrigerators and fermenting vessels, Will looked incongruous, a wilderness spirit rattling amongst the man-made. He had such an outsized wildness about him, even at rest, that the machines hissing and humming around him emphasized rather than diminished.

  How absurd all this must look to him, she thought as Mr. Huntworth demonstrated a specialized thermometer. How prideful and transitory, compared to the mountains where he came from.

  But Greywell’s was impressive, too. She’d worked hard to make it one of London’s most modern breweries. There were rooms and rooms, some with giant copper drums, and others with long, open coolers where fans created breezes to bring down the temperature. And there were her many employees, men and women, all as invested in the success of the brewery as she.

  “Let me show you the pride of Greywell’s.” She led him towards their covered well. “Water is the most key component of brewing,” she explained, as Huntworth lifted the wooden cover. “We are lucky enough to have our own well.”

  “It goes eight hundred and fifty feet deep,” Huntworth chimed in.

  Will peered down into the dark expanse of the well and yodeled, then laughed at the echo. “That’s halfway to China.”

  “Australia,” she said, also laughing. “Every day we do a chemical analysis to make sure that the mineral content is exactly what we need for our different beers.”

  “I thought beer was beer.”

  “So did I, but I came to learn otherwise. We make five here. A porter, a stout, a strong, and mild and pale ales.”

  “All Londoners drank stouts and porters,” Huntworth said, “or so we thought. We weren’t making much of a profit when Lord Xavier bought us, but when Lady Xavier took over, she had us add gypsum to the water so we could produce the Burton ales everyone’s become so fond of lately.”

  “They’re lighter and brighter than heavy porters, and easier to drink,” Olivia explained.

  “Can’t be a brewer anymore without making a pale ale,” Huntworth concluded. “And Lady Xavier knew it, even if we didn’t.”

  She shrugged to dismiss his praise, even though Mr. Huntworth’s compliment meant quite a bit to her. Winning Lawrence Huntworth’s good opinion had been an uphill battle at the beginning. Getting anyone to listen to her had taken every ounce of strength and determinati
on she had possessed, and even some she didn’t but had to pretend she did. And after she had won over the people at Greywell’s, she’d had to weather the storm of public opinion. And now the threat of George Pryce.

  Glancing over at Will, she saw frank admiration in his crystalline blue eyes, heating her as much as a steam-powered engine. He had not questioned her role at Greywell’s, but she still enjoyed earning his respect.

  Huntworth waved them ahead as he stopped to talk with one of the workers.

  “You sure know a lot ’bout brewin’,” Will said as they moved away from the well. His boots rattled the floorboards, sending tiny vibrations through Olivia’s own feet and up along her spine. “Didn’t know that ladies did that sort of thing.”

  “I had to spend two years in mourning for my husband,” she said. “One year in deep mourning and another in half mourning. I had to refuse all invitations, and see no one except close relatives. That’s what society dictates.”

  “Society!” Will said with a snort. “What the heck is that? Just a bunch of stuffed shirts sittin’ on their inbred hindquarters. Can’t even wipe their own noses. “

  She shook her head. “That’s not true. If I go against society, the consequences could be horrible. Absolute social exile. No one would see or speak to me, and I couldn’t travel anywhere without scandal following me. It would be like becoming a ghost—completely invisible to everyone, but doomed to wander the earth.” She shuddered. “I chose two years of inactivity rather than face that fate.”

  “That sounds duller than a week-long Bible meetin’.”

  She shot him a quick, secretive grin, and said on a whisper, “It was! I missed my husband, but I found myself just sitting, day after day, with nothing to do but contemplate my solitude. It was as though”—she glanced around, careful to be sure that no one was listening—“I had been buried, too. Buried alive.” She pressed a gloved hand to her pale cheek. “I’m not supposed to say things like that.”

  “It’s the truth, ain’t it?”

  “Perhaps that is what makes my feelings so unforgivable.”

  Will faced her, right in the middle of the floor of the brewery. “It ain’t right to take a healthy, spirited woman and stuff her away like an old horse blanket,” he said, seeming to surprise them both with the heat of his voice. “The Navajo Indians mourn for four days, then they wash their hair with water and yucca root. Then mournin’ is over. They can join the rest of the world. Doesn’t sound so bad to me. And I don’t give a flyin’ fig for what anybody else thinks ’bout that. Especially society.”

  Several of the brewery employees stopped what they were doing and stared at Will and Olivia. She, herself, was stunned by the vehemence of his words, the angry, crackling energy that filled his rangy body standing so close to hers.

  She took hold of his arm and began to lead him forward, away from the ogling employees, and felt his muscles bunch underneath her gloved hand. A strong one, Will Coffin. Stronger in his convictions than most people she knew, and unafraid to speak them. But what was his anger right now directed towards? Society? Or the thought of her in mourning for David? She wasn’t entirely certain.

  “All the same,” she continued, “I knew that, in addition to my settlement, David had left me a brewery. So I began to read about them when no one was around. I had a good deal of time, so I read everything I could about the history, the latest technology, trade publications, all of it. When the time came that I could leave off my mourning, I had resolved to take a struggling little brewery and turn it into something profitable.”

  “And she has,” Huntworth put in, coming up behind them. “We were skeptical at first, but Lady Xavier has tripled our earnings.”

  “All luck,” she said with a self-deprecating shrug.

  “No, Lady Xavier,” Huntworth said, politely shaking his head. “Though I would never had admitted it before, a woman may possess more talent than she is given credit for. But,” he added hastily, “I would never say such things to those radicalists.”

  They had reached the end of the large room, and stood in front of a frosted glass door with the word laboratory painted in gold on the front.

  “This is another of Lady Xavier’s innovations.” Huntworth opened the door. Long shelves lined the small room, each covered with scientific equipment—tubes and microscopes, glass cases and scales. Two men in long white coats tinkered away with the equipment. Will looked even more incongruous here, amid the fragile laboratory equipment and harbingers of the modern world.

  “Mr. Maidford,” Olivia said to one of the men, who looked up quickly from the experiment he was conducting, “how fares your research?”

  “Very well, Lady Xavier,” he answered readily. “I almost have this strain of yeast isolated. In a few more days, I believe I will have a new species ready.”

  “We’ll beat those chaps at Carlsberg,” Mr. Huntworth said. He added, for Will’s benefit, “In Denmark, just this year, they have already introduced the first absolutely pure brewers’ yeast culture, but we aren’t far behind, are we, Lady Xavier?”

  “Thanks to Mr. Maidford’s assistance,” she answered.

  Will whistled softly. “I didn’t know that chemistry had anythin’ to do with beer.”

  “Brewing is all chemistry.” She bent down and put her eye to the lens of a microscope, then motioned Will over to do the same. He pushed his hat back and looked, then jumped back in astonishment.

  “It looks like an empty blob of water,” he said, flabbergasted, “but it ain’t. Tiny critters live in there.”

  “Several years ago Louis Pasteur wrote a fascinating book on the subject, Études sur la bière. He’s doing amazing work with yeast and the reproduction of microscopic organisms.”

  “We’ve all read it,” Maidford said before diving back into his work.

  Will picked up a test tube, which looked like a toy in his hand, and studied its contents. “Funny,” he murmured, swirling the yeast sample around. “A cowpuncher doesn’t know about half this stuff when he bellies up to a bar and orders a beer. He’s just hot and thirsty. And then there’s all this”—he gestured around at the spotless laboratory—“makin’ that drink possible.”

  “Science and progress is amazing,” she said.

  More carefully than she would have thought possible, Will replaced the phial in its holder. Ruefully, he said, “Yeah, but science and progress is also puttin’ guys like me out of work.”

  “I never realized,” she said, surprised.

  “They don’t write ’bout that in dime novels.”

  “If you’ll excuse me, Lady Xavier.” Huntworth gave a respectful bow. “I must return to the brewery floor.”

  “Of course. Mr. Coffin and I will see ourselves out.” Once the manager had gone, she and Will left the laboratory and began walking through the lower rooms towards the front gate.

  “You’re a gambler, all right,” Will said after a pause. When she looked mystified, he explained, “It looks like this whole place has been one big roll of the dice for you.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it that way,” she murmured thoughtfully.

  “This is a fine spread you got here. And it looks like you really made the place.”

  “Mr. Huntworth exaggerates my contributions.”

  “Doesn’t sound like it to me.”

  “Well,” she conceded, “I did invest a good deal of time and energy into Greywell’s. At first, I did it to fill my time, give myself something to do with the long hours and endless days. But in time, I came to love my work. I felt, at last, as though I had found a purpose. If I were to lose all this...” Her voice trailed away as her brow furrowed.

  “Olivia—”

  “Pryce wants Greywell’s because he believes brewing is easy money,” she said, interrupting him. She burned with outrage, incensed, forceful. “That’s what he told me at our first meeting. He just wants cash. And I also think he wants whatever isn’t his, like a child. If you have something that he doesn’t, and you w
on’t give it to him, he throws a tantrum.” She shook her head. “A dangerous tantrum that could ruin me.”

  Will sighed and stopped walking. He leaned against the wall and looked out the large window into one of the yards that surrounded the brewery, arms folded across his chest. Men were unloading empty barrels from wagons and rolling them down the pavement to be filled up again inside. She watched the activity, too, standing beside him. He’d withdrawn, and she could almost see the furious activity of his mind as he absently watched the yard. He might not have the education of the men she knew, but Will Coffin was just as intelligent, if not more so, than those men.

  “Will?”

  “Aw, Liv,” he muttered, and the shortening of her name glimmered through her, “you’ve got me in a bind.” He turned to look at her, and the pale gray light sculpted his face like an artist. The square line of his jaw worked reflexively in thought. “I ain’t keen on takin’ up someone else’s fight. It makes a body’s life too messy.”

  She tried to mask her disappointment, and said levelly, “I see,” but it was a failing struggle. Her throat tightened. He would leave. She would face Pryce alone. The tiredness that afflicted her began to seep back into her bones.

  He turned to look back at the yard, still full of activity. His eyes moved restlessly, not lingering on any one thing too long. “But,” he continued, “life’s messy, no matter what.”

  A stab of hope, almost painful, pierced her. “What do you mean?”

  Will shifted his gaze again to her. “I wouldn’t be much of a man if I saw a lady in need and turned my back on her. I don’t want to turn my back on you, Liv. It’d be wrong. And,” he added with a wry smile, “I wouldn’t be worth my salt in those cowboy books you read if I didn’t hold to the ‘code of the West.’ I’m a better man than blowhard Bill Cody, that’s for damned sure.”

  For a moment, she only stared at him, and then she threw her arms around him. “Thank you, Will,” she breathed against the side of his neck. First, she only experienced pure, unadulterated gratitude. Her exhaustion slipped away. And then, she became aware of something else. She smelled him, through her mouth and nose. Soap and tobacco and the warm undercurrent of male skin. She was seized with the desire to run her tongue along the strong curve of his neck, discover what he tasted like, too. But then she remembered.