“Mrs. Peese, if you would excuse my…sister and me briefly?”
“The door is to remain open,” Mrs. Peese said. “Yolanda, Miss Snyder is across the hall in the guest parlor if you need her.”
Mrs. Peese inhaled through her nose at Kettering, a warning of some sort. He was male and, in her world, no doubt suspect on that ground alone, and then he was alone with a young female whose nose and chin bore an odd resemblance to his.
“What is your scheme, miss?”
In response, she began to recite the succession of the Grampion earldom right from the first baron, a wily young fellow who’d turned Good Queen Bess’s head, or so the story went. Generation by generation, the girl had it right.
“So you studied the Kettering line, because our looks resemble yours.” Kettering took a seat and gestured for her to do the same. “That hardly makes you my sister. I’m what? Twenty years your senior?”
“Not quite sixteen years older than I. A portrait of your mother hangs over the mantel at Grampion Hall. Our father had it painted when our brother was a toddler, but it still hangs there, unless Hess has moved it.”
“Hessian, who has conveniently decamped for points north, somewhat in advance of grouse season.”
She worried the signet ring with her thumb, a habit Kettering himself still exhibited when vexed.
“In the painting, your mother wears a blue turban, like the girl in the Vermeer, and she has only one earring. The earring hangs on her right ear, the left one as you face the portrait.”
“Anyone who has been to Grampion could describe that painting to you.” He’d forgotten about the painting, though her recitation brought the image to mind. “You’ll have to do better than that.”
Over years and years of dealing with the law and those who broke it, Kettering had developed a good instinct for who was telling a desperate lie and who was telling a desperate truth. Despite his impersonation of an ill-tempered prosecutor, his instincts put this girl in the latter group.
“Hess cannot be bothered,” Yolanda said. “He’s hunt mad and must be off tramping the grouse moors until cubbing starts in September. No one matters to him more than his hunters and his hounds, and the library will smell of dog all winter.”
Kettering rose and resumed pacing, because this would have been true of the old earl as well—and Kettering had also forgotten about the odor of hounds in the colder months. “So you’re my sister and we’ve never met, and now the school has sent for me. What do you want?”
“Do you believe we’re related?”
“Not for a moment,” Kettering said, not that he would admit, in any case, because with great wealth came great caution. “You’ve neatly boxed me into the classic riddle of having to prove something in the negative. Why summon me now, when I had no clue as to your existence?”
“Because you must take me away from here.”
“Must, Miss Yolanda?” Most females knew instinctively not to attempt imperatives where Worth Kettering was concerned.
Yolanda’s chin came up, and yet she remained seated—a lady’s prerogative. “I have nowhere to go, sir. Hess is off to the wilds of Aberdeenshire, and Mrs. Peese does not run a charitable institution. My continued presence here has become untenably awkward.”
Her bravado faltered as she twitched at her skirts, and that was when Kettering saw what the unseasonably long sleeves of her dress had kept hidden: bandages around her left wrist. Thick, fresh bandages.
At her age, he’d been hopelessly prone to histrionics.
“Perhaps you’d walk with me in the back gardens?” He put the question neutrally, for some stiff-rumped minion of Mrs. Peese’s was listening to every word from across the hall. “The day is pleasantly warm, and I have more questions for you.”
Without touching him, without even acknowledging his proffered arm, Yolanda led him through the French doors to the walkway outside the headmistress’s office.
He gestured away from the building and put her hand on his sleeve. “This way. Now, who are you really?”
“I’m your sister, Yolanda Kettering.”
“Half-sister?”
“Yes. Our father became my guardian when Mama died. I was in Papa’s will, and Hess has never questioned my paternity.”
The back gardens were surprisingly extensive and also well tended—a testament to the exorbitant sums charged for tuition, no doubt.
“Now you’re Hess’s responsibility?”
“I am not legitimate,” she said through gritted teeth. “I am acknowledged, though, and I am your half-sister. Papa assumed guardianship of me because it was the best way to secure my future when Mama died, and Hess has done his duty by me as well.”
“So, here you are, at one of the most exclusive boarding schools in the Midlands, and you developed a sudden urge to see your long-lost brother?”
She tugged the cuff of her sleeve down. “I don’t know you, sir, but my options were limited. They’re watching me all the time.”
Yolanda spoke quietly, though Kettering had escorted her a good thirty yards from the building, where only roses, giant topiary hounds, or the occasional bee might overhear her.
“They are watching you?”
“The teachers, the other girls, the staff. If I try to escape again, they’ll peach on me, and then they’ll tell Hess. I know what happens to people like me.”
“Dear girl, young ladies who tell great bouncers are usually thrashed soundly and given a few days of bread, water, and Bible verses.”
“I’m not lying.”
She wasn’t telling the entire truth, either.
“Prove you are my sister. Tell me something only family would know.”
She was drawing him in, just as his late sister—his late full sister—had drawn him in, until it was too late, until he’d been too far gone by fraternal sentiment and his heart had held sway over his common sense.
“Your full name is Worth Reverence Kettering,” she said. “Your first pony was Archibald, a piebald Shetland you were given at age six. Your second was Bucephalus, whom you were given at age nine because Archie came down with colic, and you insisted on staying at his side when Papa put him down. You told Papa you didn’t ever want another horse, but grew weary of walking everywhere by the end of that summer.”
“My third?”
“Ambergris,” she said, as they passed a bed of tall daisies. “You rode him until you turned seventeen, when you walked away from Grampion, vowing never to return.”
“I didn’t vow to anybody who’d recall such folly.” He hadn’t even made that vow out loud. “You found my journals.”
She flashed him a smile, one that exposed a terrible, winsome beauty in the near offing. “You were a dramatic young fellow.”
He’d been a heartbroken idiot. “I’m not sure you’re my sister, but I believe you’re in difficulties. Be honest with me now, and I’ll try to help you. Why do you need out of here so badly?”
“They’re kicking me out,” she said. “Some duke is thinking of putting his daughter here, and my unfortunate origins mean I’m de trop. If you can’t take me off Mrs. Peese’s hands, she might arrange for me to go to some sort of private sanitarium—the girls have been whispering about it all week.”
Whispering where they knew she could overhear, no doubt. The compassion of rich little girls hunting in a pack was a dismaying prospect, though Kettering didn’t believe for a moment the duke’s daughter was the sole explanation for the present situation.
“If a place like that gets hold of me,” Yolanda went on, “I’ll lose my reason in truth. In the alternative, if you walk out of here today without me, Mrs. Peese might put me in a coach with Miss Snyder and deliver me to your doorstep tomorrow. She isn’t about to send Miss Snyder all the way to The Lakes merely to see me safely home.”
Mrs. Peese appeared at the French doors thirty yards away, her demeanor that of a warden anticipating an escape from her population of felons.
Be damned if Kettering
would leave any young female to Mrs. Peese’s tender mercies. “Are your reasoning powers intact, miss?”
“Not quite, but I’ll bear up long enough to impress your fraternal obligation upon you.”
She lifted her left hand to touch a single white rosebud, saw his gaze light on the bandages, and tucked her hand out of sight immediately.
“Pack your worldly goods,” Kettering said, “and be ready to leave this afternoon when my town coach arrives.”
* * *
“Mrs. Wyeth!” Simmons, the butler, tapped once on the open door of Jacaranda’s private sitting room. He tottered in, waving a piece of paper, his old-fashioned wig already askew at not even nine of the clock. “The most extraordinary thing has happened. Most extraordinary!”
Jacaranda gestured to her little sofa. “Please have a seat, Mr. Simmons. You must not excite your heart.”
“Sound as the day I was born.” He thumped his bony chest with his fist, then fell more or less bottom first onto the sofa. This was his typical method of taking a seat, the referenced natal day being a good eighty years past. “Best ring for your hartshorn, dear lady. This might overset even you.”
A cat peeing in the servants’ hall was enough to overset Simmons, and Jacaranda had never owned a personal stock of hartshorn, not even when she’d made her come out.
“Have some tea, sir, and calm yourself.”
“We’re to be visited, Mrs. Wyeth.” He flourished the letter again. “Visited!”
She passed him his tea. “By whom?”
The vicar occasionally rattled out this way when he was in need of fresh air and a good game of chess. A weary traveler might stop at the kitchen door for a meal or a drink. They had visitors from time to time, of a sort.
“Himself!” Mr. Simmons waved the letter again. “Mr. K! In person! He’s coming to visit, here, at Trysting!”
News, indeed, for Mr. Kettering hadn’t graced his country estate with a visitation in the entire five years of Jacaranda’s tenure there. Good news, in fact, for Jacaranda would enjoy at least one occasion of tending to her employer before she left her post. “Does he say if we’re to make ready the family rooms?”
“Bedrooms are not a butler’s concern, Mrs. W. Here, if you must have details.” He passed her the letter.
“He says to prepare the family quarters.” Knowing the state of Simmons’s sight and the more significant of Simmons’s agendas, she read the entire note aloud, “‘Please ready the private family rooms, for I will be in residence starting the first of the week. Alert the staff and lay in appropriate stores for an extended stay.’”
“Well, madam.” Simmons set down his tea cup, having drained it in one swallow. “You’d best get busy.” He reached for one of the three tea cakes Jacaranda had set out on her own plate, revealing a second and no less familiar reason for disturbing her morning break.
“Busy, Mr. Simmons?”
“Preparing the bedrooms, dusting the parlors, cleaning the windows, turning the sheets, polishing the silver, whatever it is you do.”
“That’s all done regularly, Mr. Simmons. You know the routine here.”
He looked disgruntled, as if somebody had stolen his mug of grog.
“The andirons might need blacking,” she offered. “Though that falls to the footmen, and they are strictly your province. I’ve no doubt you already have your fellows dusting the library and the estate office, cleaning the outside of the windows, and sanding and beating the rugs?”
He spoke around a mouthful of tea cake. “Of course, of course. Don’t suppose you could make me a list? In the excitement, a detail or two might slip from their lazy minds.”
She jotted him a list—in a large, printed hand—and made him finish another cup of tea before he tottered off with his list in one hand and a second tea cake in the other.
She would miss even Simmons when she left Trysting. Simmons was a dear, and no doubt a contemporary of old Mr. Kettering, whom she envisioned toiling away in the damp and chilly confines of the Inns of Court, a muffler around his neck even in high summer.
Surely Mr. Kettering had seen at least his three-score and ten years. Why else would such an otherwise modern estate sport an octogenarian butler?
* * *
“Such wretched, wretched news!” Mama set Jacaranda’s latest epistle aside and dabbed at the corners of her eyes with a lacy handkerchief.
“Is Jacaranda ill?” Daisy asked, though Jacaranda was something of a geological formation in human guise. She never took ill, never flew into hysterics, never hesitated once she’d made up her mind.
While Mama never enjoyed consistent good health.
Or a pleasant mood.
“The dratted girl reports that she’s quite in the pink, but she has put off her return home to spend her summer dusting a lot of chandeliers and counting drawers full of tarnished silver. Her employer is leaving Town to ruralize at Trysting, and nothing will do but she must remain in Surrey to ready the house for him. Again, she disappoints me, and for what—to sweep mouse droppings from some old man’s pantry!”
Readying the house was what a housekeeper generally did. Jacaranda probably even enjoyed doing it, and no mouse would dare set a paw in any pantry of hers.
“Would you like to hold the baby, Mama?”
Her ladyship rose, tucking the handkerchief into her bodice. “Keep that infant away from me. Children harbor illness, and my nerves are delicate right now. If Jacaranda won’t come home, I simply do not know what I will do.”
Daisy knew: Her ladyship would lament the disloyalty of a girl whom she’d raised like one of her own, ignore the requirements of a household much in need of a woman’s civilizing influence, and expect Daisy to sympathize by the hour.
While all Daisy wanted was a nap.
“You could mention this letter to Grey,” Daisy said, though her brother would wring her neck for that suggestion. “He misses Jacaranda, too.”
They all did, even Daisy. Maybe Daisy most of all.
“Perhaps I shall do that very thing,” her ladyship said, pausing in her pacing to inspect her reflection in the mirror over the parlor’s fireplace. She was tall, had a fine, sturdy bone-structure, and dealt ruthlessly with any dark hairs attempting to turn gray. “No one will believe I could be a grandmother, much less three times over. I bear up remarkably well amid the chaos and strife of your brother’s household, don’t you think?”
“You are a marvel, Mama.” Daisy had married five years ago and since saying her vows had presented her husband with two sons and a daughter. Mama had borne the late earl six children in nine years, which, as far as Daisy was concerned, qualified the countess for marvel status, at least.
“I must be going.” Mama swept up to Daisy’s seat and presented a smooth cheek for Daisy to kiss. “I vow this situation with your sister requires a resolution before I’m prostrate with nerves. Five years is far too long to indulge Jacaranda, and your brother will agree with me on this.”
Daisy rose, the baby feeling as if she weighed five stone in her arms, for all the child was only a few months old. “I’ll see you to the door, Mama. Please give my regards to the boys.”
“Hermione Swift asked after you in her last letter. She still hasn’t married off her youngest.”
Mama struck the perfect balance between commiseration and gloating, as the hordes of women with whom she corresponded probably did about poor, dear Francine’s step-daughter.
That headstrong Jacaranda, gone for a housekeeper, of all things!
“You must have a care for your appearance,” Mama said, as the butler held her ladyship’s cloak for her. “You are a bit pale, my dear, and that will never do. Eric deserves to find a pretty wife waiting for him when he comes home from his labors at the end of the day, not some drudge with”—she peered at Daisy’s sleeve—“preserves on her cuffs. Pray for me, dearest. My nerves are not strong. If Jacaranda must waste what remains of her youth counting silver, she should at least count ours. We are her famil
y, after all.”
Another kiss, and Mama was off, the butler closing the door silently in her wake.
Daisy nuzzled the baby’s crown and started up the steps. “We’ll take a nap,” she whispered to the child. “We’ll dream sweet dreams and say a prayer for your Auntie Jack, because I may have just unleashed the press-gangs on her.”
* * *
The difficulty with having a household of elderly retainers was that one had to do many jobs without appearing to overstep the post for which one was hired. Jacaranda could point out to Cook that raspberries had a very short season and if not picked when ripe, the entire year’s opportunity for jam and pies was gone.
That way lay at least a week of cold soup, runny eggs, and weak tea.
So Jacaranda suggested the maids might enjoy a day outside and intimated that she herself would delight in the outing as well. Thus, she earned hours in the heat, keeping a half-dozen giggling, romance-obsessed girls at the task of picking berries.
Come winter, the raspberry jam would be worth the effort. At present, though, harvesting raspberries was a hot, buggy, thankless job, one that would tempt a devout Methodist out of her stays.
Jacaranda was neither Methodist nor especially devout, though on Sundays she was known to be sociable in the churchyard.
“I think that’s the lot of it,” the oldest of the housemaids said. “We’re for a swim now, Mrs. Wyeth. You promised.”
“I did promise, but keep quiet. You know the fellows will try to peek.”
“So tell old Simmons to give the good-looking ones a half-day.”
The women flounced off, teasing and laughing, and Jacaranda let them go without a scold. The day was broiling, and they’d picked a prodigious amount of fruit in a few hours. They’d done so, of course, because they’d been given an incentive for making haste.
With the maids off to splash about in the farm pond, Jacaranda hitched the pony grazing in the shade into the traces of the cart. She’d have to walk the little beast more than a mile to the manor house, a pony trot being a sure means of bruising fruit. The raspberries would be put up that afternoon, for even half a day in the pantry would see them mold.
My Favorite Rogue: 8 Wicked, Witty, and Swoon-worthy Heroes Page 45