by Betina Krahn
She felt a strange sliding sensation in her middle. He was so close, she could smell the warmed wool of his coat, the starch of his shirt, and the subtle spice of his cologne. Sweet sandalwood. Borne on radiated heat, his scent filled her head and seeped down the back of her throat, to fill her lungs. Her heartbeat quickened.
Against her better judgment she raised her chin and looked straight into his eyes. They were a smooth, rich brown, and except for the glow of banked anger in their depths, they were utterly unreadable. She felt them boring into her, testing her resolve and probing for something more. And in spite of the heat of the conflict between them, she shivered.
“Fine!” he snarled abruptly, giving her a start. “I’ll wear the damnable thing.” He snatched the corset from her hands and stalked back several steps. “How difficult can it be, after all, if women do it?”
Before their eyes he ripped off his expensive coat, tossed it onto the dining table, then proceeded to wrap the stern-looking corset around his middle. He shoved the laces through the metal grommets with quick, furious movements, missing a number of holes. Then he yanked the strings with brute force, pulling the binder snug around him. The cloth groaned and stitches popped, but soon he was laced in and whipping the surplus length into a hostile-looking knot at the top edge.
“There!” he declared, bracing with his feet apart and his fists jammed on his hips. “It’s on.”
It was indeed. Misaligned, ill laced, and improperly tightened … it looked a fine mess. But the fire in his eyes dared Antonia, or anyone else for that matter, to correct his use of the thing. And no one did.
“Now, where is this work I am supposed to do?” he demanded.
The course of study Antonia had planned for Remington Carr was dictated by the responsibilities that the average woman was required to assume for herself and her family. Foremost among these was providing physical sustenance: the procurement, storage, and preparation of food. Next came tasks relating to raiment and shelter: arranging and cleaning the home, and constructing, cleaning, and maintaining a family’s clothing. Beyond a family’s more immediate needs, a woman’s duties consisted of seeing to the health and education of her children, of enhancing her husband’s business or career, and of participating in the Church and charitable works.
Antonia had diagrammed it all on a large slate, which sat on an easel at the side of the dining room.
“We have selected representative duties from each of the areas, which will be overseen by the person who is normally responsible for them in our household. Molly McFadden will instruct you in selecting and purchasing food, for example, and Gertrude Dolly will help you learn what is involved in cooking it. Eleanor Booth will oversee your education in cleaning, and Maude Devine will see to it that you learn the fundamentals of laundry and the care of textiles throughout the house …”
As he listened to her reeling off that list of duties, he stared at the neatly printed words and lines on the slate. How many women of his acquaintance could do such abstract analysis, much less construct lucid diagrams of it? Good God—most had difficulty making change in the coin of the realm!
He stared covertly at Antonia, realizing that for all his foreknowledge of her contriving and treacherous nature, he still had seriously underestimated her.
She had just handed him a slice of his own male pride. But in doing so she had also handed him a challenge of irresistible proportions. As she went on, his concentration drifted from her chart to the intriguing curve of her waist, the natural pout of her lips, and the tendrils of burnished hair lying against the nape of her neck. He watched the sweep of her lashes as she glanced up, discovered him staring at her, and looked quickly back to her precious chart. It was a quick but revealing reaction to his scrutiny.
His mind filled with the way she had stared up into his eyes and with her betraying little shiver.
She was treacherous, true. But she was also a woman, and that shiver had said that she wasn’t totally unaware of him as a man. Insight struck, and he flicked a covert glance at the corset he wore, smiling privately. She was, in fact, very aware of him as a man and had attempted to reduce or at least camouflage his manliness … to bind him up … render him genderless … safe.
Ahhh, he thought, there were definite possibilities here, even while wearing a corset and carrying a feather duster.
He came to his senses a moment later to find ruddy-cheeked Gertrude Dolly standing before him with a puzzled look and the others staring at him strangely.
“I said, are ye ready, yer lordship?” Gertrude jerked her head toward the door on the far side. “We got work to do. ’Twill be dinner time afore we know it.”
He drew himself up straight and met Antonia’s warning look with a pained but defiant smile. “Absolutely, my good woman. Lead on.”
Plump, country-bred Gertrude led him along the rear hallway and down a set of steps, straight to the kitchen. It was a large stone-walled room, half underground, with oak beams overhead and two large windows set high on the walls. Iron stoves and a brick-lined oven covered one wall; cupboards and storage bins, and shelves lined with pitchers, platters, and serving dishes, covered the others. In the center sat stout worktables, above which hung racks of kettles, bowls, and utensils. At the far end he could see what appeared to be pantry and cellar doors left ajar.
He stood with his hands clasped, watching Gertrude tying an apron about her middle and snatching utensils from shelves and hooks. A moment later she halted, regarded him with a frown, then came bustling toward him and shoved a large copper bowl in his hands.
“There ye are, yer lordship. Down in the cellar with ye now. I’ll need two dozen good-sized potatoes, a shock of dried shallots, and”—she swiveled around, taking instant inventory—“a fresh bag o’ flour. An’ be quick about it. We have mouths to feed.” She flung a finger at one of the doors, then turned back to her work, missing both the look of outrage on his face and the struggle that subdued it. He glowered at the bowl in his hands and let off steam with a quiet hiss. His servitude was indeed beginning.
The stairs down to the cellar were dark; he had to light a kerosene lamp in order to see. Then, once in the cellar, he had to duck and keep his shoulders bent as he searched for flour and potatoes. He found himself oddly short of breath and realized it was the corset; the damnable thing was cutting off his air in this crouched posture. Locating a number of burlap bags of potatoes, he dropped breathlessly to one knee on the pile of bags and counted out twenty-four potatoes. The shallots escaped him until he banged his head on a beam and bashed it with his fist in retaliation. There, hanging nearby in all their pungent splendor, were clutches of the bulbs. He ripped one down and plopped it on top of the potatoes.
The flour, he discovered, came in nothing less than fifty-pound bags. Grimacing, he stooped and tried to haul one of the sacks onto his shoulder. Something gouged him sharply in the ribs, and he gasped and jerked to straighten the offended part of him, realizing it was one of the metal stays. The brief pain, a goad-by-proxy from Antonia, galvanized him. Struggling to breathe and staggering to balance the bag, the bowl, and the lamp, he trudged back up the steps.
Gertrude was waiting with a patient look and a paring knife.
“The flour goes in the barrel,” she declared, jerking her head toward several medium-sized barrels against the wall behind her. “Then ye can start partin’ them potatoes from their skins.” She hurried back to one of the stoves to stoke the fire, then began pumping water into a basin in the sink. When he stood there, scowling, she turned back and planted her reddened hands on her waist. “Somethin’ wrong, yer lordship?”
“I can see where this is going,” he said, rolling the heavy bag from his shoulder onto the floor, where it made a thud and a cloud of dust. “Where are the rest of the servants, the staff? On holiday, I presume … and I’m to fill in for the lot of them.”
“Servants?” Gertrude frowned, then her face lit with a broad smile. “We got but two in the kitchen: old Esther
, who’s abed wi’ her lumbago today, an’ a girl who comes from the orphanage each afternoon. I’m teachin’ ’er to cook. We don’t have no servants in this house, ’cept Esther and old Hoskins. Lady Toni mostly keeps him on ’cause he wus old Sir Geoff’s man … more like a part o’ the fam’ly than in service.”
“Let me get this straight,” Remington said, plopping the potato bowl down on the worktable with a smack. Gertrude had omitted herself from that list; she obviously didn’t consider herself to be in service here. “You have no servants in this huge house apart from a lumbago-ridden scullery maid and an aging butler?”
“Nary a one,” Gertrude said, eyeing the potatoes.
“Then what, pray, are you?” he demanded, scrutinizing her openly.
“Me?” she laughed, unoffended by his question. “I’m one of the widows Lady Toni took in. She calls us ’er ‘ladies.’ Invited us in to stay whilst we wus down an’ out, an’ since we wus too old to remarry, she adopted us. Like ’er aunts, we are. But we’re used to work and got to have somethin’ to do … so we take care o’ the house to keep busy. Each o’ us ’as got her own bailiwick, here. An’ we wouldn’t hear of Lady Toni hirin’ in strangers whilst we sit on our hands.”
She narrowed her eyes at his idle hands, then at the unpeeled potatoes and the bag of flour flopped upon her pristine kitchen floor. “Ever peeled a potato, yer lordship?” When he narrowed his eyes at her, she held the knife out to him and smiled. “It ain’t hard. Jus’ think of it as”—she tried to think of a male equivalent—“whittlin’.”
He snatched the knife from her and grudgingly set to work. Gertrude’s well-intentioned analogy was lost on him; he’d never whittled so much as a twig in his life. She looked at the tortured little knots he produced, declared they’d all starve, and sent him back to the cellar for more potatoes. He had just settled back on his stool when the old butler came in, carrying a tray of silver to clean. At the sight of him hacking and gouging away at a huge pile of potatoes, old Hoskins winced, wagged his head, and shuffled out through another door. Remington scowled after him, certain this time that he had heard the old fellow mutter, “Unlucky bastard.”
“My man Edgar … ’e used to peel potatoes for me,” Gertrude mused, pausing in the midst of filleting an enormous flounder intended for the evening’s supper. She smiled a bit wistfully and rubbed her nose with the back of her knife hand. “He’d sit on a stool by the table when he come home at night, and jus’ peel an’ peel.”
“Probably shortened his life by a score of years,” Remington growled.
By the time he was finished, Gertrude had a mountain of dough for him to mix, which required an astonishing amount of brute force. He set his jaw squarely and ground it into submission, scattering flour over the table, the floor, and his impeccable trousers in the process. Then there was stewed chicken to bone—messy business, that—peas to shell, carrots to clean and chop, fruit sauce to cook and strain. He squashed a number of peas before Gertrude rescued them from him and set him to peeling apples for the sauce. And then more apples for the sauce.
Time seemed to stand still as he toted, fetched, lifted, mashed, mixed, melted, and stoked fires, while being treated to a list of dearly departed Edgar’s matrimonial virtues. Worse yet, virtually every woman in the house found some pressing errand to bring her through the kitchen. One by one they eyed his progress and his person, then, with sympathetic looks for Gertrude, departed. It gradually occurred to him that the one woman he hadn’t seen during his labors was the one he wanted to see.
His features sharpened and his eyes narrowed. His responses to Gertrude’s increasingly hurried requests slowed noticeably. And by the time she ordered him to sort the scraps and empty the overflowing slops bucket into the barrel outside the back door, he just stood there, staring at her with a combustible look that made her draw in her chin and frown. It was a standoff for a long, uncomfortable moment. Then she folded her arms over her ample bosom and vehemently pursed one corner of her mouth. He made a noise of disgust, sorted out the scraps, then snatched up the greasy pail.
Conjuring in his mind a few choice words with which to confront Antonia at dinner, he yanked open the alley door and stepped outside. The reek of fermenting food scraps identified the barrel, just outside the door. He took a deep breath, grimaced as he lifted the lid, and began to pour. Turning his face away from the rising aroma, he stopped stock-still.
Standing not ten feet away, leaning against the brick wall across the alley and watching him with unholy glee, was none other than Rupert Fitch, scribbler for one of Fleet Street’s most despicable—and successful—scandal sheets. Of late he had appeared with appalling frequency wherever Remington went, but until now Remington hadn’t given it more than the cursory notice such an annoyance deserved.
He felt muscles contracting all over his body as he watched the news writer’s ferretlike eyes flit over him, first to the slops he was pouring, then to his rolled shirtsleeves and floury black vest, then down to his grease-smudged trousers and dusty shoes. Fitch’s eyes suddenly rebounded to Remington’s middle and widened with malicious delight. Remington looked down and felt his face catch fire.
The damned corset! Dirty and bedraggled though it was, there was no mistaking it for anything other than a woman’s figure improver—molded bosom holders, pink ribbon rosettes, and all.
He was standing in an alley in a woman’s undergarment, awash in slops and looking ashambles, clearly caught in something he’d rather no one would ever know. The gleam in Fitch’s eye as he tucked his writing pad into his pocket caused Remington’s stomach to sink to somewhere in the vicinity of his knees.
“Fine day, yer lordship.” Fitch tugged at the brim of his bowler and strolled off down the alley, whistling.
Chapter Six
Remington ducked back inside the kitchen and slammed the door so hard that the frame rattled for seconds afterward. And as he stood there, his fists clenched around the pail handle and his face aflame with humiliation, Antonia swept into the kitchen looking cool and prim and utterly in control.
“How is his lordship doing, Gertrude?” she asked, letting her eyes drift down his rumpled form. He could tell by the tightening of her lips that she was suppressing a smile, and it was all he could do to keep from laying hands on her there and then.
“Well enough,” the cook replied. “As long as we got plenty of potatoes.”
Antonia laughed softly, seeming to know exactly what Gertrude meant. “Having difficulty with a thin skin, your lordship?” Her eyes twinkled as she leaned across the worktable to pick up a surplus potato and the paring knife he had used. She made quick work of peeling half the potato, then held it up for him to see. “The secret is keeping your thumb at the edge of the blade.” She demonstrated despite the fact that he wasn’t near enough to see. “Close enough to guide things along and keep the peel thin, but far enough away to keep from getting cut.”
Her smile, as she emptied her hands and wiped them on a cloth, said she knew she was doing an excellent job at keeping her thumb on the edge—with both the potato knife and him. He stood mute, not trusting himself to speak. If she were to learn of Fitch’s presence in the alley, it would only warm the cockles of her icy little heart.
She went to a set of pegs on the wall by the servants’-hall doors and began to unbutton her jacket. When she looked up and caught him glaring at her, she smiled and addressed the cook again.
“Gertrude, perhaps you should make meringues for supper this evening. That way you could give his lordship some eggs to beat.”
Gertrude laughed and shook her head, turning back to the meat pies she was taking from the oven. Antonia continued unfastening her buttons with that annoying little smile on her face, and he began to feel as if time had slowed. She was taking forever to unfasten her jacket. Those seductive hand motions and that broadening expanse of white beneath her opening jacket generated an inexplicable tension in him.
His eyes fixed irritably on the lacy front
of her blouse, then her undulating hands and those parting edges of gray. There were at least two dozen small buttons down the front of her jacket, he realized. Then at last she was sliding it from her shoulders and reaching for a long, full-skirted apron to replace it. He watched her slip the ruffled bib over her shoulders and reach behind her to tie it. For one brief moment the silhouette she presented him was a perfect hourglass … curves, ripe and womanly … small waist … shoulders and breasts thrust forward. Heat surged up out of his loins, taking him by surprise and leaving him chagrined.
She said something to the cook, and Gertrude pointed to something. He turned his head and saw that it was the huge bowl of select scraps and fish parts that had accumulated while they worked.
“Time to feed the babies,” she said, gesturing to the bowl. “Perhaps you would like to come see them, your lordship.”
“Babies? A houseful of old widows … and babies?” he declared with horror.
“Not human babies,” she said, watching his reaction with a puzzled smile.
“Inhuman babies, then. I see.” He dropped the pail he was holding onto the tile floor with a clang. “Charming, I’m sure, but I’ll give them a pass. Mrs. Dolly here probably has something urgent for me to do … butchering something single-handed, perhaps … threshing a bit of grain … stomping grapes to make wine for supper …”
“Oh, I think Gertrude can do without you for a few minutes before dinner.” She was at the doors of the servants’ hall when she glanced back over her shoulder and told him: “You can bring the bowl.”
He was about to say something satisfyingly profane, when he realized that cooperating might provide an opportunity to further his plan. Brushing the flour from his clothes as best he could, he picked up the scraps bowl and followed her through the swinging doors.