She took a long breath, blew it out gustily.
Life might not precisely be spiked on all sides anymore, but suddenly the tension of being a woman, and being alive, and being young, and longing to be seen as beautiful and charming made her feel three times larger and the box three times smaller and the torment three times more intense, because Lavay was . . . well . . .
“Dear God, if this is your idea of punishment for my sins, I must congratulate you on your originality.”
She liked to think God had a sense of humor. Despite everything.
And she would like about five minutes of amnesty from the need to be brave.
And perhaps another five minutes of leaning against a hard chest, and hearing a kind voice, a deep voice, a voice she trusted implicitly, murmur against her hair that everything would be all right.
Jack had his dreams, she had hers.
She climbed into bed and slid beneath her blankets, prepared to dream about just that. She shoved her feet down, then yanked them back with a yelp when they met something sharp.
She turned up her lamp and threw the blankets back, and investigated.
Chestnuts in their hulls. Spiked all around. At least five of them.
The staff, of a certainty, had done it.
She plucked them one at a time with a sigh.
“Oh, honestly,” she said crossly, It wasn’t so much the attempt at sabotage as how unimaginative it was.
Chapter 7
THE NEXT DAY, SHE realized the prevailing sound of her new life was jingling.
The keys she kept on her hip, which now and again startled her, and sometimes made her feel like a jailer, and other times made her feel like a prisoner who hears the jailer happening by.
She personally roused her staff before dawn. which was not among a housekeeper’s usual duties, but she’d decided they would take meals together. After instructing Mary to tend to Lord Lavay’s fire, she gathered them for a communal breakfast of buttered bread served with an inordinate selection of preserves—
—and toasted chestnuts.
She’d personally toasted them even earlier and arranged them neatly in a little china bowl.
She didn’t say a word about them, unless “Mmm, delicious,” counted as she helped herself. She simply coolly watched faces—Dolly’s unblinking and impassive and Kitty’s eyes downcast and Mary’s gaze darting between Elise and Dolly and back again, and Ramsey and James still too bleary-eyed to care, slurping down cheap black tea. She would buy better tea.
“I’d like each of you to go through every room in the house and do precisely what you did to the prince’s study. Clean it until everything squeaks and blinds the eye. Beginning with the drawing room in which guests are received. Windows included.”
“That will take at least a week to move the furniture and roll the carpets and . . . and if it rains we canna beat the carpets . . .” Dolly expounded.
“It will take as long as it takes,” Elise said pleasantly. “And I will inspect every room that you declare finished, and I will decide if and when you are finished. Begin now, please.”
And so her day began to the promising rhythm of beaten carpets, which she heard through a partially open window in the kitchen.
Afterwards, she roused Jack, scrubbed his face, and sent him off with a kiss and jam and bread and apple tart to the vicarage, along with Liam and Meggie Plum, who worked at the Pig & Thistle. Her entire life was an intricate relay.
She fished through the keys on her immense key ring and began to explore the cabinets where the linen and silver and china were kept, as well as the dearer foods, like sugar.
In the linen cabinet she found a stack of fine linen sheets gone ivory and buttery soft with age and laundering, now musty. She wondered if they belonged to Lavay, and if he’d had them sent.
She touched one, and as surely as if it opened a portal in time, she was transported to yesterday morning, and sheets spilling from a vast shoulder and drowsy gold-brown eyes and—
She yanked her hand away immediately.
Perhaps she ought to be allowed to touch only sackcloth or bristly things.
Although Lord Lavay was a bit like sackcloth in human form, given that every encounter brought with it fresh punishments to endure.
And bristly things only made her think of the gold glints of his whiskers.
Her heart lurched when she considered what she intended to do today, and the likelihood of his responding with anything like gratitude.
She drew in a long breath.
She knew, quite simply, it was the right thing to do. Perhaps the only thing to do, for the sanity of everyone in the house.
She’d already put the coffee on. After dropping a few isinglass chips into the pot, she pulled down a china cup, shook her paper of powdered willow bark into it, and poured over it the rest of the boiling water in the kettle. It would need to steep for a half hour at least.
Time to see to the silver.
She pried open one large shining case of silver, which creaked like a sarcophagus.
Which was all well and good, she decided; the sound could wake the dead and betray any attempted thievery.
Inside was an exquisitely simple set of tableware, the handles engraved with filigree initials and the most delicate imaginable fleur-de-lys—knives and forks and dessert and table and serving spoons and ladles, marrow scoops and grape shears, asparagus and sugar tongs, and a half dozen different types and sizes of forks and skewers, the purpose of which she could only guess. She imagined they’d all been accessory to generations’ worth of laughter, arguments, cold silences, hangovers, romances. She half smiled.
The last time she’d seen her parents had been over breakfast on the day she’d told them the news about Jack. Her father had been aiming a forkful of scrambled eggs at his mouth, but he’d missed it and stabbed it into his cheek instead, sending egg shrapnel flying everywhere.
But her mother had very, very slowly and very, very carefully lowered her fork, the forks the family had used daily for as long as Elise remembered, and laid it back down beside her plate, as if doing that could restore everything back to the way it should be.
Elise squared her shoulders and gave her head a toss, as if shifting a burden she was bearing.
The rest of the silver collection was comprised of voluptuous tureens of varying sizes and vintages, a punchbowl, several teapots, and serving trays and platters. All of it wanted polishing. And by the time they’d finished polishing it, they would need to start over at the beginning.
She’d begun to feel like Sisyphus.
Elise dutifully counted and noted each and every piece.
She sifted through her great wad of keys until she found the one that opened the china closet. Plain, everyday plates and saucers and cups were stacked on shelves in the kitchen, but the truly fine things were locked away.
She yanked open the door handle, and something small and soft swung violently out at her and thumped her forehead.
Something hanging from a string.
She shrieked and swatted at it, doing her best not to whimper like a child, and leaped back with her hand clapped over her heart.
When it didn’t seem to want to attack her, she peered at it.
A dead mouse had been tied by its tail to a length of twine, which was affixed to the door frame.
It continued to twist and swing to and fro like a macabre little pendulum.
Once she knew precisely what it was, she was furious.
“For the love of God. The least they could have done was fashion a little noose for it. I would have found it infinitely more sinister.”
She gave the twine a yank, and it broke free. “I hope you met a more or less natural demise, Mr. Mouse, before you wound up at the end of a rope,” she said grimly. She transported the late mouse across the kitchen and
laid it down gently on a scrap of sacking one of the maids had been using to scrub. They certainly didn’t need mice in the storeroom, anyway. Perhaps they ought to get a cat. Jack would like that.
She’d been raised in the country, and barn cats routinely deposited gifts of dead mice in all manner of surprising places. She didn’t precisely cherish them, but it was certainly nothing alarming. The schoolteacher in her was growing increasingly furious at the servants’ lack of . . . well, ingenuity.
How had they gotten into the locked porcelain cabinet? They must have gotten hold of the keys before she’d arrived.
And now that her heart had slowed to its usual pace, she began inspecting the porcelain.
Some of it was exquisite—a few pieces of delicately painted Sevres, pieces enough to support a small dinner party, but most of the china was merely serviceable. She wondered if any of it belonged to Lavay.
And then she saw the robin’s-egg blue sauceboat, painted in pale blooms, and she just knew it was his.
Her bell suddenly jangled.
She gave a jerk, and the sauceboat jumped right out of her grasp. She dove for it, then spent a horrifying three seconds juggling it from hand to hand before she managed to successfully grasp it to her bosom, a full year shaved from her life.
How ironic that the bell, and the man on the other end of it, could make her do what a swinging mouse couldn’t: nearly jump out of her skin.
With great delicacy, she lowered the sauceboat back into its pride of place in the cupboard, which she quickly locked. Then she locked the linen cupboard and the silver, but not before ducking to review her reflection in the side of a gracious silver tureen.
Yes, every hair in place.
And she did look well in dove gray.
Not that it mattered. Not that it mattered at all.
She arranged the tea and tart and coffee on a tray and squared her shoulders like someone heading into battle.
“THANK YOU FOR arriving so quickly, Mrs. Fountain.”
“I should dislike for you to need to ring twice, Lord Lavay.”
He threw her a quick narrow-eyed look.
She gave him only studied innocence in return.
She knew a minute pang of disappointment that she would not be bringing an apple tart and coffee to him in his chambers. He was already dressed and booted and apparently roaming the perimeters of his study.
From her vantage point now she could see the underside of his hard jaw and a line of whiskers he’d missed with his razor. It seemed terribly wrong that someone so proud should walk about not knowing he’d missed a row of whiskers.
Clearly he was right-handed. She could see now that his right hand was the one he favored. It must have been injured.
Her resolve redoubled. But the tray in her hands was heavier than she’d anticipated, and combined with her nerves, it began to rattle just a bit . . .
“I wished to give you a revised budget before you go into town to do the marketing today, Mrs. Fountain. A cart and horse are available to you for that purpose.”
He extended a folded sheet of foolscap, and she took it.
“And I had grown so fond of the first budget, my lord.”
“Then I suggest you have it framed as a memento. Perhaps embroidered onto a pillow.”
She would have laughed in other circumstances, if her nerves weren’t currently stretched tauter than violin strings, if he’d been someone else, and perhaps a bit less testy.
“You will not find livery in it,” he added, a challenging glint in his eye.
“Of course not, my lord,” she said soothingly.
His eyes flicked to the tray she was holding.
“I recognize the coffee and the apple tart. What is that?” He eyed the steaming cup grimly. “I didn’t call for that. ”
“No. You didn’t. It’s . . . it’s a cup of tea.”
Good heavens, her voice sounded frayed.
“You are not in my will, Mrs. Fountain, so poisoning me seems rather pointless. Unless someone has paid you to do it. If so, perhaps we can negotiate.”
Again, almost witty.
“My salary is sufficient, thank you, and I know a dozen ways to poison you effectively, but this willow bark tea won’t finish you off. At least not at this strength.”
He stared at the red-brown liquid. It did bear an unfortunate resemblance to diluted blood, at least in this light.
“Why have you brought me such a thing?” he said gruffly.
She drew in a breath, gathered courage, and said:
“It’s for pain.”
He went as rigid as a pike driven into the ground.
And then something that might have been guilt flickered across his face, as though he’d been caught in the act of a crime.
The usual hauteur returned.
“I do not need—”
She sucked in another audible, fortifying, very impatient breath, which clearly astonished him, judging by the launch of his eyebrows. She settled the tray down on the table, and everything clanked. “If you’ll pardon my insult to your vanity, Lord Lavay, you haven’t been sleeping well, and it shows.” She pointed beneath her eyes. “You’ve hollows here. You cannot bend without pain, and so you ring for your housekeeper to fetch up quill pens. And you cannot write properly with your right hand, so your correspondence has begun to heap up. I do not know precisely what happened to you, but I suspect being attacked hurts rather a lot, and continues to hurt for some time after that. Unless, that is, one is made of stone. I beg forgiveness for the presumption, but my father is a doctor. I recognize pain.”
A wondrous cavalcade of emotions chased each other across his face as she spoke. Astonishment gave way to indignation, stubborn pride had its moment, a hint of amusement, fury, a cold, cold disdain that boded ill for her future here.
He opened his mouth.
She braced for something scathing.
He closed his mouth again and stared at her. Right through her, or so it seemed.
He was so utterly tense that she suddenly had an inkling of what he might look like poised for attack, and she thought she might have lost another year from her life just then.
And then he sighed.
It sounded like surrender.
Something like relief began to tentatively creep in to shoo away her nerves.
She was shaking a little from the risk she’d taken, and she hoped it didn’t show.
“Contrary to rumor and to my own chagrin, I am indeed made of flesh and bone,” he admitted. “More’s the pity.” His mouth quirked at the corner.
Chagrin. God, but the word was beautiful the way he said it. Chagreen. His voice was quiet, too. Lilting, almost amused. Not his usual precise arrogance, as if every word had been carved from a diamond. She suspected it was a relief for him to admit to pain.
“I do not know what you have heard, Mrs. Fountain. But I am not a young man anymore—not a very young man, anyhow,” he said with a rueful upward flick of his brow, acknowledging his own vanity. “And I do not recover in a day or two, as before, like that.” He snapped his fingers.
“It is difficult to recover fully when the pain won’t allow you to properly sleep . . . or properly bend. Or properly write. Or, I suspect, ride a horse. And however will you waltz again or reel? Or leave this . . . ‘godforsaken corner of Sussex’?”
He was watching her with great bemusement. She could see that he thought he ought to be angry but quite simply was not.
“Mrs. Fountain, I can find no fault with your priorities.”
She suspected he might actually be teasing her.
“Surely the credit belongs to you, as you were merely exercising your faultless instincts when you hired me.”
He snorted at this. “Clever, Mrs. Fountain. The trouble with clever people is that they often assume th
at no one else is as clever as they are.”
Which sounded like a warning. Then again, it wasn’t one she hadn’t heard before.
She mutely lifted the cup of tea and extended it to him.
And then, in resignation, he took it from her, lifted it to his mouth, and paused, peering at her from over the brim of the cup.
“Any last words?” she risked.
The corner of his mouth twitched. He raised the cup to her. “À votre santé, Mrs. Fountain.”
He took a sip.
Rolled it around in his mouth thoughtfully, as if sampling a wine, and swallowed, then made a smacking noise. “Presumptuous. Cheeky. Managing. Meddling. With notes of une je-sais-tout.”
“You forgot fearless.”
“Ah, yes. An oversight, of course. Thank you. Trust Madame Je-sais-tout to point it out.”
A “je-sais-tout” was a know-all. But the words lacked rancor.
He was really rather amusing, in a dry and prickly way that reminded her, strangely, of herself.
She smiled at him, tentatively.
He didn’t return the smile. But she liked that faintly troubled way he looked at her when she smiled perhaps a little too much. As if he was peering at something in the distance with a spyglass and it was slowly coming into focus, and whatever he saw was unexpected and disturbingly pleasant.
“Shall I leave the tea with you, Lord Lavay?”
“You may leave it,” he said abruptly, his usual dismissive hauteur restored, and he turned his back on her. “And you may leave me now.”
ARGH. YOU MAY leave me now.
She didn’t know if she’d ever get accustomed to being dismissed so abruptly. Her ears rang from it, as if suffering through the echo of a slammed door. She surreptitiously dragged her hand across the top of the brown chair on the way out, for luck, and because the velvet was such a pleasure, and she took her pleasures where she could.
On her way down the stairs again she paused, exhaled resignedly, and unfolded the budget and quickly scanned it.
And at first it seemed identical to the original.
It Started with a Scandal Page 8