by Mary Balogh
3
It was the damnedest thing, Lucius thought when he was left alone, getting to his feet and going in pursuit of more ale.
She was clad quite hideously in a brown dress a few shades lighter than her cloak. It was high-waisted, high-necked, and long-sleeved and about as sexless as dresses came. It draped a tall figure that was slender almost to the point of thinness. It was a figure that was as unvoluptuous as figures came. Her hair was much as he had expected it would look when she still wore her bonnet. It was dressed in a purely no-nonsense style, parted ruthlessly down the middle, drawn smoothly back at the sides, and coiled in a simple knot at the nape of her neck. Even allowing for the flattening effect of a bonnet, he did not believe she had even tried this morning to soften the style with any little curls or ringlets to tease the masculine imagination. The hair was dark brown, even possibly black. Her face was long and narrow, with high cheekbones, a straight nose, and a nondescript mouth. Her eyes were dark and thick-lashed.
She looked prim and dowdy. She looked—and behaved—like the quintessential governess.
But he had been dead wrong about her, nevertheless.
For some reason that he had not yet fathomed—and it had to be the sum of the whole rather than any of the individual parts themselves—Miss Frances Allard was plain gorgeous.
Gorgeous, but without anything in her manner that he found remotely appealing. Yet here he was, stuck with her until sometime tomorrow.
He ought to have been happy to leave her alone in the kitchen, since she seemed content to be there. Certainly she did not put in any further appearance after drinking her tea and then clearing the table. Fortunately, she appeared to have taken just as strong an aversion to him as he had to her and was keeping out of his way.
But after half an hour he was bored. He could go out to the stables, he supposed, to discover if Peters and the other coachman had come to blows yet. But if they had, he would be obliged to intervene. He wandered into the kitchen instead—and stopped abruptly just inside the door, assaulted by sights and smells that were totally unexpected.
“Good Lord!” he said. “You are not attempting a beef pie, are you?”
She was standing at the great wooden table that filled the center of the kitchen, her sleeves rolled up to her elbows, a voluminous apron wrapped about her, rolling out what looked suspiciously like pastry.
“I am,” she said as he breathed in the aroma of cooking meat and herbs. “Did you think I was incapable of producing such a simple meal? I shall even contrive not to give you indigestion.”
“I am overwhelmed,” he said dryly, though really he was. Poached eggs had never been high on his list of favorite dinnertime fare.
There was a smudge of flour on one of her cheeks—and both the cheeks were flushed. The apron—presumably belonging to a very buxom Mrs. Parker—half drowned her. But somehow she looked more appealing than she had before—more human.
He reached out and picked up a stray remnant of pastry from the table and popped it into his mouth a moment after she slapped at his hand—and missed it.
“If all you are going to do is eat the pastry when I have gone to the trouble of making it,” she said sharply, “I shall be sorry I bothered.”
“Indeed, ma’am?” He raised his eyebrows. He had not had his fingers slapped for at least the past twenty years. “I shall pay you the compliment of returning the beef pie untouched after dinner, then, shall I?”
She glared at him for a moment and then . . . dissolved into laughter.
Lord, oh, Lord! Oh, devil take it! She suddenly looked very human indeed, and more than a little attractive.
“It was a foolish thing to say,” she admitted, humor still lighting her eyes and curving the corners of her lips upward so that he could see they were not nondescript at all. “Did you come in here to help? You may peel the potatoes.”
He was still gawking at her like a smitten schoolboy. Then he heard the echo of her words.
“Peel the potatoes?” He frowned. “How is that done?”
She wiped her hands on her apron, disappeared into what he assumed was a pantry, and emerged with a pail of potatoes, which she set at his feet. She took a knife from a drawer and held it out, handle facing him.
“Perhaps,” she said, “you are intelligent enough to work it out for yourself.”
It was not nearly as easy as it looked. If he cut the peel too thickly so as to obtain a smooth, clean potato, he was also ending up with very small potatoes and a great mound of peelings. If he cut it too thinly, he had to waste another minute or so on each, digging out eyes and other assorted blemishes.
His cook and all his kitchen staff would have an apoplexy apiece if they could see him now, he thought. So would his mother and sisters. His friends would not have an apoplexy, but they would be under the table by now, rolling around under there with mirth and holding their sides. Behold Viscount Sinclair, the consummate Corinthian, singing for his supper—or at least peeling potatoes for his dinner, which was even worse!
At the same time he kept more than half an eye on Miss Frances Allard, who was lining a deep dish with the pastry, her slim hands and long fingers working deftly, and then filling the shell with the fragrant meat, vegetable, and gravy concoction that had been simmering over the fire, and finally covering the whole with a pastry lid, which she pressed into place all about the rim with the pad of her thumb and then pierced in several places with a fork.
“Why are you doing that?” he asked her, digging an eye out of a potato before pointing the knife at the pie. “Will the filling not all boil out?”
“If there were no outlet for the steam,” she explained, bending to put the pie into the oven, “the pastry lid would quite possibly blow off and we would be scraping half of both it and the pie’s contents off the roof of the oven and onto our plates. Onto your plate, I should say. I would have whatever was left in the dish.”
And speaking of lids blowing off . . .
She probably had no idea what an enticing picture she presented as she bent over the oven, her derriere nicely rounded against the fabric of her dress—proof positive that she was certainly not unshapely. She certainly had not gone out of her way to entice him since they had met. Indeed, her very first words to him, if he remembered correctly, were that he deserved to be subjected to any number of ghastly terminal tortures.
But there—he had just been proved wrong again. First she had seemed shrewish and prunish. Then she had appeared gorgeous but unappealing. Now he was feeling as if the top of his head might blow off at any moment.
“Have I peeled enough potatoes to please you?” he asked irritably.
She straightened up and looked, her head cocked a little to one side.
“Unless each of you men eats enough for a whole regiment instead of just half, yes,” she said. “This is the first time you have done this, I suppose?”
“Strangely, Miss Allard,” he said, “I do not feel unmanned in admitting that, yes, indeed it is—and the last time too, I fervently hope. Who is going to wash all those dishes?”
A stupid question if ever he had asked one.
“I am,” she said, “unless I have a volunteer helper. I doubt it is even worth asking Thomas. And I sent Wally away to shave. I daresay that task will occupy him for the next hour or so. That leaves your coachman or . . .” She raised her eyebrows.
How the devil had he got himself into this ridiculous situation? She was not seriously expecting . . . But of course she was not. There was undisguised ridicule in her eyes.
“Do you want me to wash or dry?” he asked curtly.
“You had better dry,” she said. “You might ruin your gentleman’s hands if you had to keep them submerged in water for too long.”
“My valet would weep,” he admitted. “He went home ahead of me yesterday. He would refuse to leave my side ever again.”
This was turning into a stranger day by the moment, he thought as they proceeded to wash and dry the dishes while
the potatoes bubbled merrily in their pot and the smell wafting from the oven caused his stomach to groan in protest at being kept waiting for its dinner. It was a day unlike anything else in his previous experience.
He never ever stopped at any inn but the very best. He rarely traveled without his valet, but Jeffreys had had a cold and Lucius had not been able to bear the thought of listening to his self-pitying sniffs all the way home in the carriage. He had not set foot inside a kitchen since he was a child, when he had visited frequently and clandestinely in order to beg tasty morsels. He liked his creature comforts, or, if he did give them up, in order to go out riding on a rainy day, for example, he liked to do so voluntarily and in pursuit of an activity he enjoyed or considered worthwhile.
This day had been a disaster ever since Peters had overtaken a carriage so ancient that Lucius had wondered if the snowstorm had somehow catapulted him back in time. And the day was not getting any better.
It was strange, then, that he was beginning almost to enjoy it.
“You do realize, do you not,” she said as he tossed down the wet towel on top of the final dish after drying it, “that there will be this to do all over again after dinner?”
He looked at her with incredulity.
“Miss Allard,” he said before making his escape back into the taproom, “has no one ever explained to you what servants are for?”
By the time they had dined and Mr. Marshall had assigned Wally and the two grooms the task of washing the dishes, Frances was feeling tired. It had been a long, more than strange day, and the darkness of the winter evening made it seem later than it was. The wind that rattled the window of the taproom and moaned in the chimney, and the heat and crackling sounds coming from the fire were lulling. So was the hot tea she was sipping.
She sat gazing into the fire, drinking her tea and watching with her peripheral vision the supple, highly polished leather of Mr. Marshall’s Hessian boots crossed at the ankle and resting on the hearth in an informal, relaxed pose that somehow made him seem twice as male as he had seemed before.
Dangerously male, in fact.
She dared not excuse herself and go up to bed. She would actually have to get to her feet and announce that she was going up there, to the room next to his. There was not even a lock on the door, she had discovered. Not that she suspected him of fancying her. But even so . . .
He sighed with apparent contentment.
“There was only one thing wrong with that beef pie, Miss Allard,” he said. “It has spoiled me for all others.”
It had turned out rather well considering the fact that she had never before cooked unsupervised and had not cooked at all for several years. But the compliment surprised her. He did not seem like the sort of man who handed out a great deal of praise.
“The potatoes were rather good too,” she said, provoking an unexpected bark of laughter from him.
Their acquaintance had started very badly, of course. But there was no point in keeping up an open hostility just for the sake of being nasty and provoking nastiness, was there? Somehow, by unspoken consent, they had laid down their weapons and made a sort of grudging peace.
But how strange it was to be sitting thus, alone with a very handsome, masculine gentleman, who was slouched in his chair, totally at his ease. And to know that they would spend the night within a few feet of each other, alone together on the upper floor of the inn. This was the stuff of fantasy and daydreams. But such fantasies were not quite as comfortable when they became reality.
Good heavens, for the past three years she had lived and consorted with none but females, if one discounted Mr. Keeble, the elderly porter at Miss Martin’s school.
“Your home is in Bath, is it?” Mr. Marshall asked her.
“Yes,” she said. “I live at the school where I teach.”
“Ah,” he said, “so you are a teacher.”
He had guessed it, had he? But it was not surprising. She was obviously not a fashionable lady any longer, was she? Even the private carriage in which she had been traveling was shabby despite the wealth of her great-aunts.
“At a girls’ school,” she said. “A very good one. Miss Martin opened it nine years ago with a few pupils and a very small budget. But her reputation as a good teacher and the help of a benefactor whose identity she does not even know enabled her to expand into the house next door and to take in charity girls as well as paying ones. She was also able to employ more teachers. I have been there for three years.”
He sipped from his glass of port.
“And what does such a school teach girls?” he asked her. “What do you teach?”
“Music and French and writing,” she said. “Creative writing, not penmanship—Susanna Osbourne teaches that. The school instructs girls in all the accomplishments they are expected to acquire as young ladies, like dancing and painting and singing as well as etiquette and deportment. But it also teaches academics. Miss Martin has always insisted upon that, since she firmly believes that the female mind is in no way inferior to the male.”
“Ah,” he said. “Admirable.”
She turned her head sharply to look at him, but it was unclear to her whether that judgment had been spoken ironically or not. His head was resting against the high back of his chair. He looked sleepy. His short curly hair looked somewhat rumpled. She felt a strange little fluttering in her lower abdomen.
“I like teaching there,” she said. “I feel that I am doing something useful with my life.”
“And you were not doing anything useful with it before three years ago?” He rolled his head around to look at her.
Her mind touched upon the two years following her father’s death, and for a moment she felt that she could weep. But her tears for those distressing, bungled years had all been shed long ago. And she had never been sorry for the choice she had then made to teach instead of running off abjectly to the sanctuary of her great-aunts’ house and support. If she could go back, she would do the same thing all over again.
Independence was a marvelous thing for a lady.
“I was not happy three years ago,” she said. “Now I am.”
“Are you?” he asked, his eyes moving lazily and disconcertingly over her face and neck and shoulders and even down to her bosom. “You are fortunate to be able to say so, ma’am.”
“Are you not happy, then?” she asked him.
“Happiness.” His eyebrows rose in obvious scorn. “It is a foolish word. There are enjoyment and sensual gratification, and there are their opposites. I cultivate the former and avoid the latter whenever I may. It is, you may say, my philosophy of life—and of most people’s lives if they are honest with themselves.”
“I spoke unadvisedly,” she said. “I used the wrong word. I ought to have said that I am content with my life. I avoid either of the extremes you named for the sake of greater peace. It is my philosophy of life, and I believe many people have discovered that it is a wise way of living.”
“And also dashed boring,” he said.
And then he did something that caused far more than flutterings within her. It took her breath away for a moment and left her almost panting.
He grinned at her—and revealed himself as a very handsome man indeed.
She reached for a reply, failed to find one, and ended up gazing silently into his eyes and feeling heat rise in her cheeks.
He gazed back, equally silent, his grin fading.
“I think,” she said, finding her voice at last, “it is time for bed.”
If ever she had wished to recall words after they were spoken, this was the occasion. And if ever she had wished for a black hole to open at her feet and swallow her up whole, this was the time.
For a few ghastly moments she could not look away from him, and he did not look away from her. The air between them seemed to sizzle. And then he spoke.
“I presume,” he said, “that you mean alone, Miss Allard. And you are quite right—it is time for bed. If we were to sit here much longer,
I daresay we would both nod off only to be awoken later when the fire had burned down, with cricked necks and frozen toes. You go on up, and I will see to banking the fire and putting the guard across it. I’ll check the kitchen fire too, though I daresay Peters and your Thomas will be playing cards in there and grumbling darkly at each other for some time to come.”
He got to his feet and bent over the fire even as he spoke.
She wondered as she rose from her chair if her knees would support her. What a ghastly slip of the tongue! She should have made her home in the kitchen after all.
“Good night, Mr. Marshall,” she said to his back.
He straightened up and turned to her, one mocking eyebrow cocked.
“Are you still there?” he said. “Good night, Miss Allard.”
She fled, stopping only long enough to take up one of the candles from the counter. She hurried upstairs to her room, where she was surprised to see a fire burning. Although Mr. Marshall had said earlier that he would get Wally to light one, she had not heard him give the order. She undressed and made her other preparations for bed quickly even though the room was not cold, and dived beneath the covers, pulling them up over her head as if to shut off her thoughts.
There were feelings, though, as well as thoughts—and they were definitely not the feelings of one who cultivated calm contentment in her life. Her breasts felt uncomfortably tight. Her lower abdomen throbbed. Her inner thighs ached. And she was not such an innocent that she did not recognize the symptoms for what they were.
She desired a man she did not even know—and probably would not like if she did. She had even despised him for a few hours. How mortifying!
She waited tensely beneath the covers for the sound of his footsteps coming up the stairs and entering his room.
But though she did not fall asleep for a long time, she did not hear him come.
The snow had stopped falling by the time Lucius got up the next morning and peered out through a small circle he cleared with his warm breath on the window of his bedchamber. But a great deal had come down and the wind had blown it into massive drifts. In addition, the sky had still not cleared off, and if the temperature of his room was anything to judge by, there was not going to be much melting for a while.