by Rose Lerner
“But you disagree?”
“I don’t disagree, sir. But I would respectfully submit that any man may dissemble anything for the space of an interview, and so may his wife. Lord Lenfield has known me since his birth, and he speaks for me. I can produce further references as to my good character, should they be desired.”
The vicar steepled his fingers. “Why are you no longer employed by Lord Lenfield, then?”
John felt the prickings of something like despair. This would be the sticking point everywhere. He had been proud of having spent his whole life in service to the Dymonds. He had thought it a great recommendation should he ever wish another place, that he had given satisfaction so long. Now he could point to no other employers, no other situation but the one that had been tainted.
“I rose to first footman in the Tassell household at six-and-twenty. I became Mr. Nicholas Dymond’s valet when he went to university, served his elder brother for four years while Mr. Nicholas was in the Peninsula, and reentered his service in July. But he has decided to no longer continue the expense of a personal servant. As Lord Lenfield has replaced me, I find myself at liberty. Both brothers have given me references, and Lord Lenfield said I might tell you that he would be grateful to you for employing me.” He drew the letters from his pocket and held them out.
Mr. Summers raised eyebrows so pale and sparse they nearly disappeared into his face. “Now that was tactful. It speaks well for your discretion, if not your honesty.”
“I consider discretion preferable to honesty when discussing my employer’s affairs, sir.”
Mr. Summers threw back his head and cackled. “A Daniel has come to judgment! I see you would best me in debate, Mr. Toogood, but fortunately I am not required to justify myself to you. I don’t doubt you are an excellent servant, and were you married, you would head my list of candidates. But as you are a bachelor, I can only wish you the best of luck.”
John ought to thank the vicar and be on his way. Parliament had opened. The beau monde was in London. If he went to town now, he could surely find a situation.
Instead, he gave voice at last to what he had been turning over in his mind ever since Lord Lenfield said, He’s adamant only a married man will do. “There is a young woman…” He didn’t know how to finish the sentence.
Mr. Summers looked highly amused and waited politely.
“If I were to find myself betrothed, would that change matters?”
* * *
After a lengthy discussion of the house and staff and an inquiry into John’s experience and his opinions on a variety of subjects, Mr. Summers promised that if he returned to ask for banns, he and his bride would be granted a second interview.
As Larry escorted him out, John caught a glimpse of two adolescent girls watching from a doorway, a round-faced blonde and a scrawny brunette. Realizing he had seen them, they ducked out of sight. John’s heart gave a thump. Poor girls, waiting to discover what new tyrant had been set over them.
Sukey would be kind to them. At the thought, his heart thumped again.
He wanted very badly to put this fearful household to rights.
It was a pleasant daydream, but he had probably wasted an hour of Mr. Summers’s time with it, out of pure stubbornness. Did he really want the position badly enough to marry Sukey? Did he want to marry Sukey badly enough to take the position, and resign himself to a provincial vicarage? Then too, if he married he could never again be valet to a bachelor in lodgings, which greatly narrowed the field. He had never wanted to be a butler. Why was he even considering it?
John brushed off his hat, put it on, and went home to bake bread for his and Mrs. Pengilly’s dinner, considering it all the way.
* * *
Sukey was at the market, haggling over onions, when a deep, familiar voice at her elbow said, “Good afternoon, Miss Grimes.”
“Good afternoon, Mr. Toogood. I’m sorry, ma’am, but it’s twopence or nothing. Mrs. Humphrey’s orders.”
Fanny Isted threw up her hands. “You won’t find sweeter anywhere in Sussex. Nor cheaper.”
Sukey felt the stirrings of panic. Would she have to forage for onions too? It was bad enough she’d likely have to go nutting after church this week, when everyone knew the Devil held down the branches for a girl who picked nuts on Sunday. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said confidently. “Don’t cut off your nose to spite your face. You’ll be feeding half of those to the pigs. Market’s almost over and they’ve started to sprout.”
Mrs. Isted sighed. “You’ll have to take the ones with soft spots, then.”
Sukey felt Mr. Toogood’s hand close around the handle of her basket. Instead of giving it to him as he seemed to expect, she held it out to Mrs. Isted, forcing him to let go. “If it’s only a spot, and not half the onion. How much for broccoli?”
He stood, patient and silent, while she haggled over broccoli and cabbage, potatoes and turnips. His coat was as scrupulously clean as if St. Clement’s Day had never happened, but Sukey flushed anyway, remembering it.
“May I buy you some hot chestnuts?” he asked when she had thanked Mrs. Isted and turned to go.
“I bought myself some, earlier.”
“Some gingerbread, then.”
Sukey loved gingerbread, but it couldn’t warm the chill inside her. The new Parliament had sat yesterday. All the fine folk would be flocking to London, so that’s where Mr. John Toogood, Gentleman’s Gentleman, would go. She’d thought of nothing but him all week, hoping to see him and talk to him. It was only down to him she hadn’t already given him her maidenhead.
She refused to be a forsaken maiden in a ballad. She refused to give her heart to someone who’d put it in his pocket and go whistling down the highway. I did manage somehow before you came to town, she wanted to say, but she’d only sound childish. “No, thank you.”
“There’s a matter I wish to discuss with you.”
“As we live on the same street, I suppose I can’t stop you sharing the road.”
He tried to fall into step beside her, but his long legs kept striding on ahead without meaning to and having to fall back. A week ago she’d found it charming. Today it made her angry.
“I frightened you two days ago. I’m sorry.”
She threw him an incredulous look. “The thunder frightened me, not you.”
“I ought not to have suggested we warm each other in that manner. I hope you know that I would never take your agreeing to it as an invitation to overfamiliarity.”
But she did mean it as an invitation. That was the trouble. “Is this what you wanted to talk to me about? You can’t sleep until I tell you I know you’re not one of those men? Never you.”
“I did frighten you.”
“No,” she said flatly. “You didn’t. I’m just sick of men wanting to be petted and praised and admired only for not pushing a woman around.” She had been grateful for it. And it wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right that simple respect should feel so rare and precious.
He nodded. “I’m sorry.”
She didn’t answer.
“That isn’t what I wanted to talk to you about.”
He obviously wanted her to express interest. Well, bugger him, Sukey thought. Why should I?
“The vicar is looking for a new butler.”
Her heart began to pound. He was thinking of staying?
“Only he wants a butler who’s married.”
The conversation had now gone in two entirely unexpected directions. Sukey blinked, trying to guess the next one. “He—what? Why is that?”
“He thinks a married man more likely to be respectable, I believe.”
“Ha!”
His mouth curved. “That’s more or less what I said, but he was immovable.”
“And why are you telling me this?” The horrifying possibility occurred to her that he was alread
y married and meant to warn her of his wife’s arrival.
He stopped walking. Part of her wanted to run off and leave him there, but she waited, meeting his gaze.
“I like Mr. Summers. I like it here. I told him…” He rubbed the back of his neck, looking discomfited. “I told him that I was fond of a local young woman.”
Her heart leapt at that word, fond, even before she understood what he was suggesting. “Are you asking me to marry you?”
He spread his hands wide. “Not yet. But unless the idea repels you…” He sighed. “I thought we might talk it over. There wouldn’t be any harm in going to see Mr. Summers together, to see if the thing is a possibility. My wife would be upper housemaid at the vicarage. It’s a good position.”
Her eyes widened, thoughts of marriage flying out of her head. Why, she’d never dare apply to be Mr. Summers’s upper housemaid. The vicarage had staff, and a grubby maid-of-all-work couldn’t possibly— His upper housemaid? She didn’t know how.
“No harm?” she sputtered. “No harm? And if you decide afterwards you’d rather not, how could I ever go to church again?” Mr. Summer had baptized her. He’d baptized nearly everyone she knew under the age of thirty-five. And he had a way of gently skewering sinners that Sukey never, ever wanted turned on her.
He chewed his lip. “You’re right. I’m afraid I’m not thinking clearly. I don’t know what I want. Or rather, I do know, and it’s this. But I shouldn’t like to make a mistake.”
It was only what she was thinking herself, but the words speared right through her. “I’m never going to marry. Never.”
He didn’t react to that at all. Not with surprise, anyway. With sympathy, she thought. As if he knew she must have a good reason. “Why not?”
“You thought my father died.”
He drew back. Only an inch or two before he thought better of it, but he did. He didn’t want to marry a bastard.
“He married my mother, all right. He lived with us until I was seven.” She shifted her basket to her other arm. “He doted on me. He—” She shut her mouth on private memories of being carried on his shoulders, of being called blue-eyed Susan, of how he would sing a song over and over until she’d learned the words. “Well, he’s living in Chichester now, with a new wife and five children.”
Women talked as if you only had to be careful until the ring was on your finger, and then you were safe. But even if a man married you, if he meant to stay, if he did for a while—even if he loved you—it was never too late for him to change his mind.
“I’m sorry.” Mr. Toogood waited, but when she was silent, he said, “I don’t offer you certainty. Nothing is sure in this world, after all. I hoped you would talk it over with me, but if you’re satisfied you don’t want the position, and wouldn’t marry me to get it, then there’s nothing more to be said.”
It wasn’t his acquiescence that calmed her, but the way he said it, almost as if they were talking business. As if he was disappointed, but couldn’t resent her for deciding his venture wasn’t worth her while to invest in.
Her mother would want her to take him. Not all men are good-for-nothings like your father, she always said. Don’t marry a good-for-nothing, and you’ll be right as rain. It’s hard for a woman alone. You’ll be old someday, love. If Mr. Toogood wasn’t the farthest thing possible from a good-for-nothing, he made a very fine show of it.
Maybe as his wife, she could stop worrying about ending her life in the workhouse. Then again, he was much older than she was. All right, so she could stop worrying about her mother ending up there.
Even if he left, he’d pay Sukey a maintenance. Oh, her father never had, not after the first year. But Mr. Toogood made a good living, and Sukey thought he’d pay, even just for the sake of his reputation. She promised herself she’d go to the parish and make him if he didn’t.
If she thought of it as a business venture, and not marriage…
The road was so chilly, and she remembered clearly how warm she’d been curled up in his lap.
A very businesslike thought.
He walked along silently beside her, hands in his pockets. There was a peculiar lack of stickiness to him. Most people made you pay for it when you didn’t behave as they hoped, with pinpricks or coldness or rage. But Mr. Toogood didn’t snipe at her even though she’d just refused to marry him without so much as a thank-you. For all his airs of superiority, he generally knew how to share the road.
Indeed, the only thing he’d faulted her for yet was her housekeeping. “You’d be a regular tyrant of a butler.” She glanced at him, trying to decide how disappointed he was, and trying not to think that if she married him, he’d bed her. “I don’t know as I’d like to be a housemaid under you.”
He looked a little sad, but maybe he was just cold. “Have you ever seen the inside of a clock? Or a watch?”
“Once or twice.”
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
She nodded, even though she guessed where he was heading.
“A home can be like that, when servants do good work. You might find you liked it.”
It did sound nice when he said it like that, like being part of something bigger, being in church or having a family. But she fell asleep in church and sometimes she dreaded visiting her mother. “A home’s not a clock. There’ll always be more work than time to do it in, and there’ll always be something out of place. If the books all stay on the shelves, it been’t a home.”
He shrugged and watched the clouds.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
He shook his head. “It was a mad idea. I don’t know why I bothered you with it. Please forget it.”
But Sukey couldn’t forget it, all that afternoon.
“I think you might add a little more water.” Mrs. Humphrey stirred the cauldron. “It’s soup, not pottage.”
Any more water and the soup would taste like water. “I thought if they filled up on soup, they’d eat less meat, ma’am.”
Mrs. Humphrey gave Sukey the narrow-eyed look of one who suspected she was being managed. “Well, add some more onion then, and send it up with plenty of bread.” Bread, bought stale at the baker’s, was the only thing cheaper than soup.
“Yes, ma’am.” The soup, and then the roast, went up to the parlor, where Mrs. Humphrey would carve two thin slices of meat for each boarder and send the rest back down for tomorrow’s pie.
In the kitchen, Sukey made the oatmeal pudding for dessert, still thinking about Mr. Toogood’s not-quite-an-offer. Mrs. Humphrey had measured out the raisins and two scant spoonfuls of brandy before replacing both stores in a cupboard to which she held the only key. After an hour of soaking, the little heap of raisins was…not plump, but soft-looking, anyway.
It would only take another sliver of butter, a pinch more salt, a shade more sugar and brandy and raisins to make the pudding miles better.
An unsatisfying pudding wasn’t much to complain about. Mrs. Grimes would even say it was virtuous—always thinking of tomorrow, always preparing for want and deprivation, always making sure no one got more than her share. But this last week, Mr. Toogood had reminded Sukey how a small kindness, a moment of generosity could transform an afternoon.
It made it seem awfully mean and joyless, the way Mrs. Humphrey took care to give you just that much less than you wanted. At the vicarage the pudding tasted like something, she reckoned.
As Sukey tipped the raisins into the pudding, two stuck in the bottom of the cup. She fished them out, and temptation seized her. She tilted back her head and dropped the raisins into her mouth.
There was a gasp from the doorway. Sukey turned to ice, the flavor trickling across her tongue bringing her no pleasure at all. She swallowed the raisins near whole and faced Mrs. Humphrey.
Her mistress’s mouth had turned down so far it seemed to disappear into the lines of her chin. “Well, what do
you have to say for yourself, girl?”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Humphrey. Ever so sorry. It was only two raisins. I won’t eat any pudding to make up for it.”
She harrumphed angrily. “It was only two raisins today, but how much has it been over the years?”
Every bite she’d stolen over the years paraded before Sukey’s guilt-stricken eyes. But she earned her board, didn’t she, and dined on the boarders’ leavings? Why was it stealing to eat food that would have been hers in an hour?
She couldn’t say that. She couldn’t think what to say. “I wanted to be sure the brandy hadn’t soured.” Oh, why had she said that? It was a patent lie. She’d ought to have said… But every sentence she thought of only made her look guiltier.
Mrs. Humphrey’s eyebrows drew closer together. “And a liar too. I should have known as much, when you lied to me about why you lost your last place. I know you were sacked for your smart mouth.”
But that was three years ago! Her heart pounded. “It was only two raisins, ma’am, I swear. You can take it out of my wages.”
“Only two raisins.” She harrumphed again. “You don’t even blush. You don’t know how good you have it here, you ungrateful girl. I never tasted a raisin in my life until I was nearly as old as you.”
Shame swamped Sukey anew. How could she blame her mistress for scrimping? How could she have compared her to the vicar, who’d never wanted for anything?
“I know what’s got into you,” Mrs. Humphrey said. “It’s that Toogood fellow from Tassell Hall.”
Sukey’s racing heart stumbled. “No,” she said faintly. “He hasn’t—”
“No doubt he’s used to every luxury, and is throwing money around at Mrs. Pengilly’s as if there’s no tomorrow. I’m sure the Tassells keep raisins by the barrelful.”
For a moment Sukey was relieved. But in Mrs. Humphrey’s eyes, a spendthrift might be worse than a seducer. “I’ll do better. I’m sorry—”
“Better safe than sorry, girl. I’ve ignored your insolence and laziness because I thought you loyal and obedient. But your lateness this week has been beyond anything.” Her eyes widened in sudden dismay. “Did you really pay through the nose for spotty onions, or are you stealing, too?” She wrung her hands. “Oh, I’ve been played for a fool.”