She sprang to her feet and peered into the little room adjoining hers.
Jack was standing on his bed, his knees bent in preparation for a good bounce.
He froze when he saw her.
“It would be such a shame to break the bed when you’ve only just arrived, and then to have to sling you up outside in a hammock. Perhaps you oughtn’t bounce?”
He grinned at that. “All right, Mama. Could I really sleep in a hammock?”
“Only sailors sleep in hammocks. You have a comfortable bed. Pretend you’re sleeping in a cloud in the sky, because I’m certain you will feel just that way.”
He mulled this over. “Could I sleep in the barn? In the straw. I saw the barn.”
“You could if you were a goat, but sadly for you, you were born a boy.”
He laughed. “You’re funny.”
“I am. I really am,” she agreed. “We’ll build a fire, Jack, because it’s a bit cold up here in the clouds. One day soon you can help the maid do it. Every boy should learn how to build a fire.”
“Hurrah!” he exclaimed. He dropped to his bottom and mischievously bounced a bit on the bed, then sat obediently still when she raised her eyebrows in warning.
“Well, my darling son, do you like your room?”
It was very like hers, only much smaller and less drafty, mercifully.
He looked around coolly. “It’s grand,” he said loftily. It was his new favorite word. Everything was “grand.” He thought it made him sound very adult. “When will I see the giant?”
“The giant will stay in his part of the house, and we shall stay in ours. You’ll be far too busy having lessons and helping the vicar, who may even allow you to ring the bell, to see Lord Lavay. And we mustn’t ever bother him. Promise me, Jack?”
“Oh. All right, Mama. Because he’ll eat us? I can run fast. Faster than Liam.”
He didn’t seem worried about the possibility of being eaten.
The vicar’s wife’s sister had told her that little boys often passed through a period when they considered themselves utterly invincible.
“He has plenty to eat, so he doesn’t need to eat people.” Not literally, anyway, Elise thought. “All the same, it’s best to give him a wide berth so he can go about his important business.”
Whatever that was. She thought of that crumpled-then-smoothed letter on the table, the heaped correspondence, the smashed vase.
Jack sprang from the bed to the window. “I can see the church from here! And a cow! And someone on a horse, and a carriage, and a . . .”
“ . . . and you can see Meggie and Liam Plum coming to fetch you off to the vicarage for lessons. See those little dots in the distance?”
“Hurrah!”
And with that, Jack scrambled back down the stairs, Elise following him at a more dignified pace.
They both had lessons to learn today.
Chapter 3
IN THE KITCHEN, ELISE found a cluster of people sitting around a great long slab of a table, each of them holding a hand of cards. Cheroots dangled from the lips of two of the women. Smoke rose spectrally.
The stink of unwashed dishes wafted in from the scullery. A light scum of dust and grease seemed to have settled over the entire kitchen, which clearly hadn’t been sprinkled with sand or swept in some time. It was appalling, and grand, because she loved nothing better than an opportunity to improve things.
She gave her impressive cluster of housekeeper keys a portentous jingle.
Not one of them budged. One of them slapped down a card, and the others muttered. They were transfixed by the game. Someone shoved over what appeared to be pennies.
Elise aggressively cleared her throat.
They all pivoted in startled unison.
“Five-card loo, is it?” she asked brightly.
They stared at her, slack-mouthed and blank-eyed, apparently at a loss as to how to answer this question despite the fact that it was, of course, five-card loo.
“Wots it to yer?” a woman finally drawled around her cheroot, which bobbed on her lips. Her face was broad and impassive, her forehead vast enough to project silhouettes onto, and one could have yoked her to a plow. Elise was impressed. She hoped this was the washerwoman, because this woman would beat and slap the very devil out of the linens, and Elise suspected they were all going to need it.
“Good afternoon. I’m the new housekeeper, Mrs. Fountain. That is what it is to me.”
In unison, five pairs of brows went up. The large woman narrowed her eyes.
What Elise wouldn’t have given to know what they were thinking.
The large woman extracted the cheroot from her mouth and gestured with it languidly. “Well, ‘ow do ye do, Mrs. Fountain. Ye’ll need to throw in a shilling if ye’d like to join the game.” She gave a slow smile. Her eyes were hard and assessing.
“I beg your pardon?” Elise said tautly.
“ ’is lordship won’t be ’ere but a few months. We servants ought to stick together. Come, ’ave a seat, Mrs. Fountain. Kitty, the teapot.” She pushed out a chair with one of her legs while the one called Kitty shoved over the teapot and what looked like a flask of whisky.
“This will be the easiest job ye’ve ever had.”
We servants was still echoing in Elise’s head.
I’m one of them. She looked at the soiled caps and aprons, the sleeves shoved up to work-roughened elbows, the pasty complexions resulting from a life spent toiling inside.
Heat climbed her neck, and she prayed it wouldn’t travel as far as her face.
I can’t I can’t I can’t.
She felt as though she was pinned down by those words. We servants.
Begin as you mean to go on, Elise, her father always said.
And nothing else mattered, she reminded herself, except Jack.
“Yes, we ought to stick together,” she said firmly. “And now you will stand, if you please. All of you. Now.”
The queen herself had never sounded so uncompromising and certain of being obeyed.
“Beggin’ yer pardon, Mrs. Fountain. We will do what?” The woman’s voice was idly sinister.
“You will stand and curtsy when you greet me, and I shall return the courtesy. Anyone who wishes to keep his or her job will anyhow,” Elise said pleasantly, but it was etched in steel. “And as you make your bow, kindly state your name and position in the household so that I may come to know you.”
Their gazes ricocheted among each other like billiard balls. Some kind of silent communication was taking place.
They all settled on the large woman, who appeared to be the default leader. A position she had perhaps won through arm wrestling.
“Perhaps later, Mrs. Fountain.” She mimicked Elise’s pleasant tone but managed to make it sound a bit sinister. “We was just takin’ a bit of rest, now, as ye can see.”
“A rest from what, pray tell?” Elise asked, even more sweetly.
They were going to outdo each other in fake sweetness.
“Why, the strain of losing pennies to Ramsey. It fair shreds my nerves, so it does.”
Judging from the direction all their eyes took, Ramsey was the man with the stack of pennies.
There was laughter that trailed into coughing when Elise trained her cold eyes on them and quite pointedly did not laugh.
“Come now, Mrs. Fountain. We came wi’ the house, like. We’re fixtures, like the furniture. We’ve always taken care of it.”
Fixtures, her hindquarters. They were less a staff than an infestation.
“Ah, if you’re like the furniture, that must mean you haven’t been cleaned adequately in some weeks?” Elise said this brightly. “Or that perhaps you’re all dim, like the hallways? A bit greasy, like the hearth here in the kitchen?”
And now five sets of decidedly unfrie
ndly eyes were regarding her with unblinking hostility.
Elise returned the stare evenly. She was outnumbered but she was angry now, and she was as motionless as a stalking cat. She knew how to intimidate in precisely the same way a cat did. No one knew what a cat was capable of.
“Heh heh,” one of the maids said uneasily. Some hybrid of laugh and grunt.
Clearly they couldn’t decide where she got her confidence, and it was the reason, for instance, cats were able to intimidate larger, blustering animals. They possessed surprisingly sheathed pointy ends.
On the one hand, a good battle was precisely what she needed, and she would be damned if anyone would prevent her from keeping a roof over her head and Jack’s.
On the other hand, her heart was knocking against her breastbone again. Surely she’d wear it out early at this rate. It hadn’t experienced this much activity since she and Edward . . . though this wasn’t the time to think about that.
She thought quickly. Lord Lavay had been right about one thing: skilled and loyal servants were rarer than hen’s teeth. But she also knew from experience that hierarchy died hard among servants, and perhaps this lot had simply been jarred loose from the natural order of things through neglect and the absence of someone at the helm, the way old fence posts will start to lean every which way after a time.
She gave the keys an insinuating jingle.
“Come now. We servants deserve respect from each other, don’t you think? And respect starts with a bow and a curtsy. Shall we at least begin that way?”
She looked to the maid who had given the tentative laugh. Her face was pale and pinched beneath a floppy cap, and her eyes were enormous. She looked eager for approbation. She stood and curtsied. “I’m Kitty, mum, Kitty O’Keefe. A parlor maid. Pleased to meet you.”
Elise nodded serenely and curtsied.
The man who appeared to be winning all the pennies lumbered to his feet. Tall and lanky, his eyes were pale gray, his nose like the prow of a ship, which lent him some dignity he probably didn’t deserve.
“Ramsey, William Ramsey. Footman.” He bowed. Hmm. Not a bad bow, really. An elegant footman might be hiding in there somewhere.
“Mary Tamworth,” said another woman. Fair hair straggled from beneath her cap, and she was tall and angular, with long arms and bony wrists. Perfect for reaching into candle sconces and trimming wicks, Elise thought.
“James Pitt, footman.” James Pitt stood as tall as Ramsey and, on the whole, wasn’t bad to look at, with even features and lively dark eyes. He appeared to possess all of his teeth. And he bowed elegantly, too.
“Excellent,” Elise said brightly, as if they’d been eight-year-old girls who could be refined through a good dose of discipline, encouragement, and by distracting them with an endless stream of things to do.
The compliment seemed to mystify them more than anything. Mary Tamworth looked vaguely pitying. As if Elise was a slow child who hadn’t yet caught on to the rules of the game, and they were all humoring her.
Elise turned to the large woman.
It threatened to become a staring contest until “Dolly Farmer,” she muttered, ironically, around her cheroot. It was more a pronouncement than a statement. As if she’d been reciting the name of a famous battle, which Elise had begun to suspect this would become.
And then she rose from her chair.
And rose and rose.
And rose.
Upright, Dolly was nearly as tall as she was broad, her arms as broad as bread loaves, her bosom a mountain range.
She looked down at Elise with hard, amused eyes.
“I be the washerwoman and cook, Mrs. Fountain.”
She executed a dainty, mocking curtsy.
“And rug beater I should think, Mrs. Farmer. We’ll be doing a good deal of that in the days ahead. Beginning today.”
“D’yer think so, Mrs. Fountain?” Dolly sounded almost amused.
“Yes.”
She stared the woman down in silence, until the woman’s feet actually began to shuffle.
“Now, perhaps you haven’t had the proper training to care for a gentleman of Lord Lavay’s stature, but we can set that to rights straightaway. Has the house been empty long, then?”
“Canna be empty if we’re all in it now,” Dolly said laconically.
Several of them snickered.
“Empty of a tenant like Lord Lavay,” Elise repeated evenly. “You are all, of course, here on his sufferance, and now mine.”
That quieted them.
Suddenly the servant’s bell jangled violently.
Elise jumped. And then spun about.
She would have thought to have heard more snickering.
Instead everyone froze.
“His lordship is calling for you, Mrs. Fountain,” Kitty O’Keefe whispered. “That be your bell.” And then she actually crossed herself.
“Oh, honestly. I’m not going to the front, for heaven’s sake. He might be a prince, but I daresay he puts his trousers on the same way as every man you’ve ever met, one leg at a time. I’ve met him and discerned that no spiky tail protrudes from them. And one cannot wear Hessians if one is sporting cloven hooves.”
Too late she realized this made it sound as though she’d reviewed the back of his trousers, which she had not.
She had, however, reviewed the front of them long enough to note that his thighs filled them out eloquently.
Inconveniently, this is what filled her mind’s eye now.
Dolly Farmer was eyeing Elise as though she read every one of those thoughts. Her eyes were glinting.
“He does go on in that Frog language when ‘e’s angry, which is always. He doesna blink when he talks. He shouts. Asked Mrs. Gordon if she was stupid as easy as if he was askin’ ‘bout the weather.” This came from Mary. “Insultin’, that. Hurts a body’s feelings.”
And he also throws things, Elise almost added with a sort of grim cheer, picturing that stare of his. He’d probably aimed it at subalterns to get them to tell the truth.
“I would shout, too, if the candles in my hallways weren’t trimmed and replaced, and the fires were out, and the house was dirty. I speak a number of languages. I imagine I can carry out Lord Lavay’s wishes regardless of how he chooses to express himself. And his wishes, my good people, are our command.”
The bell jangled again, vehemently.
The sound her nerves would no doubt make if people could hear them.
She cleared her throat. “Very well. When I return—”
“If,” someone muttered.
“I expect the scullery to be so clean, or on the way to being so clean, that we’ll all be happy to eat off the floor there. I’ll share my receipts for soap—”
“We use sand and the like to clean.” Dolly crossed her arms across her chest like bandoliers.
Elise fixed her with a look so quelling that Dolly at last blinked.
“So you do know how to clean.” Elise clasped her hands together in feigned delight.
Dolly narrowed her eyes and tipped her head back, peering down at Elise, assessing her.
“I’ll share my receipts for soap,” Elise repeated precisely, as if she hadn’t been interrupted. “We’ll be using soap from now, as we don’t have to fetch water from a well. But for now, sand will do to clean the kitchen and scullery if we haven’t enough soap. You all look the sort who take pride in a job well done, so I know I won’t have to ask you again.”
This was patently a lie and quite the risk, but Kitty, for one, clearly fancied this version of herself—she stood a little taller, smiled a little, hiked her chin—and this was what Elise was counting on. All she needed was one malleable link in the chain in order to bend the rest into her idea of order. She knew this from experience with classrooms full of girls.
“Aye, Mrs. Fountain
,” Kitty said. Curtsying again, superfluously.
“And while Dolly and Kitty are cleaning the scullery, I want the candles trimmed, replaced, and lit in the sconces of the main hallway. This place is as dark as a tomb, and whilst we needn’t be extravagant, it ought to be welcoming to visitors, not to mention all of us. This I leave to you, Mary. James, Ramsey, I’d like you to build fires in the main rooms and in my rooms, and if the hearths need cleaning, do it. There is no reason for any of us to remain in a cold, dark house. I shall review your performance upon my return. I know you won’t disappoint me.”
Dolly Farmer slowly took her cheroot from her mouth and ground it slowly into a saucer of what looked like Sevres china. Elise imagined that Dolly was picturing Elise’s face.
“Anything you say, madam,” she purred.
“IN THE FUTURE, I do not want to ring more than once, Mrs. Fountain,” Lord Lavay said by way of greeting. He hadn’t even turned to face her, so he must have heard her slippers on the hallway.
And then he did turn.
Slowly.
She wondered if he did that for effect. Perhaps he understood that the common, mundane female of the serving class, such as herself, would need time to prepare herself for his impact, and it was an act of generosity.
But learning to withstand his presence was going to take every bit of her hard-won fortitude. His impact went right to the base of her spine. The effect was something baser, an unnerving and unwelcome reminder that she was a woman, perhaps above all, and still young.
The filtered sunlight coming through the window contrived to outline him in gilt and showed her fine lines raying from the corners of his eyes. He either squinted down the barrels of rifles or spyglasses or smiled on occasion, and she was counting on the former. He probably wasn’t quite forty years old, but he was older than thirty, she would wager on it.
It Started with a Scandal Page 3