“I should like to outfit the footmen in livery.”
He stared at her blankly.
“Livery?”
“Yes.” Her spine had gotten straighter, as if she were a tree preparing to withstand a storm.
“Livery,” he repeated flatly, his tone suggesting that he was giving her one more chance to apologize for a grave insult before he challenged her to a duel.
“Yes.”
He was stunned silent.
“Next you’ll be asking me to supply them with whores and liquor.”
“Well, no,” she said.
“Why on earth do the footmen need to be more decorative than they are? They are merely functional, and barely that. I scarcely even need two of them. This is not the ark. We are not about to embark on a journey requiring a matched set of every kind of servant.”
“Because people who take pride in their work will do a better job for you, and livery will help them take pride in their work.”
His temper began to sizzle. “Thank you, Mrs. Fountain, no one knows this better than I. I was the first mate of the Fortuna, and I have employed staff. Besides, God only knows the rewards I’ve received for the things I’ve bought for mist . . .”
. . . resses remained unsaid, but it was another syllable that pulsed silently in the morning air.
An infinitesimal nonplussed silence followed.
But the momentum of indignation and zeal for her mission carried Mrs. Fountain forward. “Yes, sir. Which is why I am puzzled you required an explanation for the livery.”
His eyebrows shot up in warning.
He had a sense the words had slipped on through the frayed hammock of her control.
Because in the silence that followed, he could almost hear her silent bloody hell.
“ . . . given that someone of your prestige and rank, and the house, deserves to be served and represented in elegance and style, as do your guests,” she concluded adroitly. “And if you begin by providing the footmen with livery, they’ll think you think they matter to you, and it is very difficult to put a price on loyalty. Though perhaps you know its price. I did not see ‘loyalty’ in your budget.”
He ought to be furious. It was perilously close to insubordination.
But damned if he didn’t rather admire it quite a bit.
And at least it wasn’t dull.
Some trees toppled when continually battered by storms. Others just grew deeper, stronger roots.
He suspected he knew which kind of tree Mrs. Fountain would be.
“Nicely saved, Mrs. Fountain.”
She smiled a tight, demure smile.
He sighed. “Very well. You may decorate the footmen. In fact, your arguments are so persuasive I now request that you decorate the footmen. But I will not release additional funds in order for you to do it, if that’s the reason you’ve come to see me. Consider it a test of your ingenuity.”
He watched her face, which was more expressive than she probably hoped or realized, as realization set in. Rather the way an anvil sets in when you drop it on your foot.
“Thank you, Lord Lavay. There’s nothing I enjoy more than a test of my ingenuity.”
“And God only knows, I shouldn’t be able to sleep nights if you didn’t enjoy yourself, Mrs. Fountain,” he said softly.
In truth, he was rather perversely enjoying himself.
A feeling that lasted all of twenty seconds, eradicated by a single mistimed glance at the table at the unanswered letter from Marie-Helene, and one from his solicitor in Paris that he’d perhaps been dreading most, and one from his grandfather.
He felt his spirits darken as surely as if another of those thunderclouds had rolled through.
She saw the glance and cleared her throat.
“If you’d like to throw something, Lord Lavay, I will send in Mary to sweep up the wreckage. But I feel I must tell you that it would require approximately fifteen minutes of her time, including searching out little shards that may cling to the carpet or draperies, and given her salary, the cost to you would be . . .” She tipped her head back to think. “ . . . a shilling ha’pence.”
He stared at her, astounded. “I see you’ve familiarized yourself with my budget.”
“It is truly a thing of beauty,” she said with every appearance of sincerity.
“And you performed those calculations rather quickly in your head.”
“As I claimed in my original interview, I have a very good brain. I wouldn’t dream of lying, Lord Lavay, as I know how you dislike liars,” she said gravely.
“Oh, I do,” he said just as gravely. “I do.”
While the rest of her face was very solemn and deferential, serene as a nun’s, her eyes gave her away. That shine might very well be caused by the light coming in the window, but as he hadn’t been born yesterday, he recognized wicked humor when he saw it.
He wondered how long he’d tolerate this exchange if those soft eyes weren’t aimed at him.
This was a woman capable of immense charm, he suspected. But it was pinned in as tightly as her hair. She fair crackled with the effort of restraint.
She was, in fact, an altogether pleasing study in contrasts: the dark, dark eyes, the pale, pale complexion, her lips red and rather plush, her brows slim black slashes, like punctuation marks.
She had been a schoolteacher, after all.
He saw that her dress had been turned and restitched, skillfully, but the faintest faded line remained at the hem. He noticed those kinds of things. And because he thought he was coming to know his housekeeper, he was certain she would prefer he didn’t notice those kinds of things. She was proud.
“I do like the flowers,” he said, almost gently.
She swiveled toward them, then swiveled back to him, flushed and pleased.
“I’m so very glad, my lord. I must point out you haven’t room in your most excellent budget for flowers. Since doubtless fresh flowers cannot be obtained when one is at sea on a ship, you did not consider them. Although, I feel I must point out we are not precisely at sea here.”
He was perilously close to being amused by how ingeniously Mrs. Fountain was conducting what amounted to an epic power struggle in the most passive manner conceivable. She was, in fact, attempting to take the piss out of him without him realizing it.
Except that he was fairly certain she was aware that he did realize it.
“So many things you feel the need to point out, Mrs. Fountain,” he murmured.
She looked uncertain at that.
“How were they obtained?” He was genuinely curious.
“Ingenuity, my Lord.”
“Is that so, Fountain? You must be positively savoring your new position, then. So many opportunities for ingenuity.”
He fancied he could hear the wheels of her very good brain rotating in search of just the right response.
“My position is everything I’d hoped for,” she said bravely at last.
And this seemed sincere, too.
He sighed. The familiar ache had begun to sink its claws into him, and he sucked in a sharp breath. He glanced at the brandy snifter. One glass, surely? Even though it was only midday.
He didn’t want to become that sort of man.
“Very well. Obtain livery for the footmen. And if that is all, Mrs. Fountain, you are dismissed.”
“Thank you, Lord Lavay.”
He watched her go. The swift way she moved and the line of her—slim shoulders, slender waist swelling into what appeared to be a neat little arse, a sliver of pale skin between what he suspected was a turned lace collar of her dove-colored dress—reminded him of a little songbird.
She stopped and pivoted, as if she knew his gaze had been transferred momentarily to her derriere.
He lifted his eyes swiftly but unapologetically.
> For a confusing instant their gazes met and held.
She cleared her throat. “If you will allow me to ask—”
He sighed gustily. “It seems she has more questions,” he said with theatrically taxed patience and outward flung hands to the room at large.
“Do forgive me,” she persisted, apparently inured to theatrics. She was nothing if not persistent. “The footmen, Lord Lavay . . . what color would you like to dress them in?”
“You’d like me to choose a color?”
“Colors,” she revised. “Plural.”
He raised a hand irritably, prepared to wave her away dismissively.
His hand froze midair when his eye caught the bouquet of lavender and hyacinth.
It was just. . . . these were the things . . . hothouse flowers, the intricate turns in the legs of his chairs, the heft of a beautifully crafted silver spoon. Ormolu and Gonçalo alves, marble from Carrera, Sevres porcelain, Savonnerie carpets. Grace notes, emblematic of privilege and a way of life that stretched back centuries. He would be damned if everything that made him who he was, everything his ancestors had fought and died for, would be lost, even though it had been violently taken from them. He would not be the one to allow it to vanish.
And why quibble, when he always knew what he wanted?
“Blue, Mrs. Fountain. A rich, deep shade. Picture a clear midnight sky over Pennyroyal Green. Perhaps silver trim, for a bit of dash.”
They were the colors of his family livery at Les Pierres d’Argent.
He said this almost impatiently. As if this should have been the most obvious thing in the world.
“Blue and silver . . . it will be like stars in a midnight sky.” She almost breathed it. As if she was enchanted by this vision.
He rather liked how the notion lit up her face and made her eyes dreamy. Imagine a woman who was easy to please.
“If you wish,” he said shortly.
The light in her face faded when realization set in. “It’s a very particular color, my lord.”
“I’m a very particular man. That will be all, Mrs. Fountain.”
THAT NIGHT, ELISE plopped down on the bed next to Jack and looped her arm around him.
“What did you learn today at the vicarage, Jack?”
“When I hang from the bell rope, nothing happens. I don’t weigh enough. So Liam has to hold onto my legs while I’m up there to get the bell to go. And then when he did hang on my legs, my trousers came off.”
Like every little boy his age, his trousers were usually buttoned to his jacket, so she would probably need to do some buttonhole repairs.
“Well, I suppose there’s a physics lesson somewhere in there,” she said dubiously, imagining with some alarm the two of them swinging from the bell like a huge clapper.
“I got my trousers back on.”
“Clearly.”
“You have to kick out to get the bell to swing,” he said authoritatively. “The vicar said something about force and mass and vocity. I need to grow faster, Mama,” he said plaintively. “Oh, and I learned Greek, a lot of prefixes. Ab- means ‘against.’ Pre- means ‘before.’ ”
The vicar had gone to Oxford and had had a rigorous classical education. It was evident that he wasn’t going to spare his students the same thing.
“Well, that’s all well and good then, if you learned something as useful as that today. And it will be, my love, mark my words. And the word is ‘velocity,’ Jack.”
“Velocity,” he repeated dutifully. “There were seed cakes with lunch from Mrs. Sylvaine. This was ‘’pre’’ the bell ringing. I was ‘ab’ the marmalade, though. Henny made the seed cakes. I like Henny, she’s funny.”
Jack was usually in favor of anyone he found funny.
“I like Henny, too,” she said cautiously. Henny was an alarmingly—or disarmingly, however one wished to view it—earthy and energetic maid who had arrived in Pennyroyal Green with the vicar’s now wife, the former countess, actress, and courtesan Evie Duggan. Jack would probably learn as many colorful words from Henny as he’d learn from Liam or Seamus.
Speaking of colorful words: bloody hell. She didn’t know how she was going to manage the midnight blue and silver livery she was now required to produce.
She sighed. Miss Marietta Endicott had admonished her about her reach exceeding her grasp, about the pitfalls of pride and boldness. She had accomplished wondrous things with difficult pupils; she had spoken up when she’d felt strongly about something. She’d succeeded so often. When she failed, she failed spectacularly.
“Mama, will you read the one about the lion with the thorn in its paw?”
“Here, why don’t we read it together? You know it as well as I do.”
She pulled the book of Aesop’s fables from the little selection of well-worn, much-loved books on the desk and handed it over to Jack, who fanned it open.
Jack was always greatly sympathetic to the poor grouchy lion who turned out to be grouchy because he had a thorn in his paw, and greatly impressed by Androcles, who was brave enough to take it out and was then saved by the lion.
“I wish I had a lion.”
“We’d have trouble finding things for it to eat. I think it’s more likely the lion would have you.”
Jack giggled. “He’d eat you first! You’re bigger! And slower.”
She ignored this insult. Because damned if an epiphany hadn’t sounded, clear as a church bell, in her head.
I do have a lion.
Well, she supposed it was less an epiphany than something that had been coming into focus bit by bit.
Lord Lavay was in pain.
Fairly severe pain.
It was probably why he moved slowly, and why he’d rung for her to pick up a quill pen of all things: it hurt to bend. His hand must have been injured—he favored it, she’d noticed—and it probably made it difficult for him to write. Who knew what else was injured beneath his clothes? And the taut skin, the shadows beneath his eyes, the whiteness around his mouth . . . why hadn’t she seen it? He was too proud to show it. He obviously didn’t want a head fogged by laudanum, and he hadn’t touched the refilled brandy, because he probably didn’t want to be drunk, either.
This was a man who was accustomed to being in control. Of himself, life, and everything around him.
She supposed she hadn’t fully seen it because he was beautiful and fascinating and frightening and very, very difficult. He’d been an object to manage, an object of beauty. Not a person.
She shifted restlessly, imagining what he must be enduring.
She was ashamed of herself.
But men . . . Men were such fools that way.
She blew out a long shuddery breath, resigned.
Damnation. And this was what her father, a doctor, had bequeathed to her. She never could bear anyone’s pain. She never could stand by without doing something about it, if it was in her power to do it.
It was up to her to be as brave as Androcles.
“And what does this story teach us?” She always asked this of Jack. She was talking a bit to herself at the same time.
“We should always help. Even dangerous lions. We should always be kind.”
“We should always help,” she agreed and gave him a squeeze. “Even lions. And we should always be kind.”
Even when being kind was terrifying. Even when being kind didn’t guarantee that you wouldn’t be eaten by a lion.
Figuratively speaking, of course.
What would Lavay be like without the thorn in his paw?
“Sing a song about the lion, Mama.”
“Oh, very well. Let’s see . . .” She threw her head back and thought for a moment.
The song changed a little bit every time.
There once was a lion and his paw was sore, oh!
And
if you came near oh how he’d growl and roar, oh!
But guess who arrived to pull out his thorn?
The bravest and kindest man ever was born.
Ohhhhh Androcles! He helped that poor lion as bold as you please,
And now they’re the very best of friends
and the lion saved
Androcles in the end . . .
Not her best work. A bit awkward rhyming “end” and “friends.” But Jack’s lids were already closed, his absurdly luxurious and precious long lashes shivering on the curve of his cheek, and his faint smile was fading.
Good Lord, to be able to fall asleep like children did. Instantly and with such sacklike abandon.
“Good night, Mama. I love you, Mama,” he slurred, already half in dreamworld.
“Good night, Jack. I love you, Jack.”
She waited until his breathing was even, and she kissed that velvety skin between his eyes.
She leaned back against the wall, slumping in a way she’d never allow anyone to see, and swiped her hands wearily over her face. Then she sighed and gave a short laugh. Half despair, half amusement.
In the little mirror on Jack’s wall, she could see her bed, the blankets turned down.
And because she had learned to take her pleasures where she could, she allowed herself a moment of indulgence and superimposed Lavay there, the white sheets slipping from a body warm from sleep, the gold glints of the start of a beard on his chin. Not in any of her wildest dreams could she have conjured such . . . casual magnificence. He wore his beauty as if it was of no consequence. As if it were simply something that served him and king and country. As if it were not a weapon that could stun armies into submission, if all those armies were comprised of women.
In the air now, tentatively, and then with more certainty, with a single finger, she slowly traced the outline of him as she saw him in her mind’s eye: the sloping curve of that vast shoulder, the chest etched in hard quadrants of muscles. She could feel her body reacting, stirring in a way it hadn’t for so long, and in a way she didn’t feel she had a right to.
Edward had certainly not looked like that underneath his clothes.
She’d also seen a pink slash over Lavay’s skin, and she did wonder how much of that beautiful body it traversed, and how deep it went, and she felt her own stomach muscles contract at the thought.
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