by Jaimey Grant
“Connor,” he said in a tone that suggested it was an argument they’d had often.
Frowning, she turned away, but Connor refused to let her dismiss him so easily. He captured her hand, his warm fingers enclosing her suddenly cold ones.
“Is it really so much to ask, Doll?”
Weeks had passed since Verena had adopted her new identity. Her name was a fanciful variation of her second name, Idalia. Doll had been her mother’s pet name for her and, until now, only two other people had ever used it, her brother and her best friend. Slightly distracted, her fingers rose to her bodice, to the simple pendant that nestled there, safe from view beneath layers of black fabric. The necklace her best friend had given her, long ago, always reminded her that no matter how bad things became, goodness still existed in the world.
“I don’t understand your determination that I do so,” she told Lord Connor, forcing her mind away from bittersweet memories. “It is of no consequence what I call you, surely.”
He drew her closer. “It matters to me. Are we not friends enough that you can humor me in this one matter?”
“Friends? You amuse yourself, nothing more.” She jerked her hand free, anger rising so quickly she could barely breathe. “When you leave here with your cynical friend, you will no more think of me than you’ll think of the peacocks who grace the lawns. I am something different in your idle life, a new conquest, a challenge. I am nothing to you, you spoiled dilettante!”
His face tightened, lips thinning and eyes narrowing. “You have a very low opinion of me.”
Verena laughed, the bitter sound sweeping out to echo in the furtherest reaches of the spacious room. She backed away from him. “Low opinion? How can I not? You spend hours with me, pretending an interest in my duties that you can’t possibly feel.”
Grimmer than she’d ever seen this perpetually cheerful young man, he observed, “Your voice changes when you’re distracted.”
“You drive me to distraction!”
His observation penetrated her anger a second after the words left her mouth. More angry with herself at that point, she stormed from the room, leaving him alone with his grim thoughts.
The time Connor spent with the maid caused much amusement for his host. Feldspar always was an odd eccentric, even going so far as to care about his servants’ welfare, a distinct difference between him and many of his contemporaries. The one conversation he’d had with Connor on the matter left an indelible mark on the young lord.
Connor and Adam had been enjoying a rare hour in the billiards room without the ladies or the gentlemen, a moment when they could speak of inconsequential matters and pretend the wall that had started between them did not exist. Connor had just been observing to himself that the ease that had once existed was probably gone forever. Saddened but resigned, he’d leaned in to take a shot when Lord Feldspar entered, his normally jovial features creased with grim determination.
“A word, Northwicke, if you please.”
Surprised to be singled out by his host, Connor relinquished his billiards cue to Adam, and followed the older gentleman from the room.
Feldspar’s study was just one door away from the billiards room. They entered, the door closed, and Connor’s host began without preamble.
“It has come to my notice that you are favoring one of the new maids with attentions. The one called Doll Rendel.”
When Connor said nothing, the portly gentleman blustered, “Well? What say you?”
“I am convinced my attentions are not unwelcome.”
Feldspar’s face contorted, his chubby cheeks growing red. “What are your intentions?”
“My intentions? What intentions could I have towards a maid?”
“I don’t allow trifling with my servants, Lord Connor. Cease whatever you’re doing and leave the girl in peace.”
“I am not trifling with her,” Connor said defensively. But if he wasn’t, what was he doing? Even he was a bit confused by how much he enjoyed her company, how much he longed to be with her when others demanded his time. It made little sense to a young man who’d taken the pleasures life offered as a matter of course. He’d never had to work for anything before and Doll’s constant aloofness intrigued him.
It was ironic that Feldspar chose now to speak to him, when he’d spent days away from her after she herself had taken him to task for his unaccountable behavior.
“If you do not trifle with her affections, why does she mope around here, spreading her misery to all and sundry?”
“I shall apologize,” Connor decided, feeling ungentlemanly joyful at the news of her misery. She missed him, surely!
Leaving Feldspar back to his jolly, undemanding self, Connor went in search of Doll that very moment to tender his deepest contrition for upsetting her.
He returned to Adam only long enough to inform that gentleman that he had business to attend to. Adam stopped him as he turned to go.
“Have you not grown bored with the company here?” he said, his tone clearly indicating just how bored he himself had grown with the company. “This party has gone on far too long and the company is deadly dull.”
“Soon, Adam, soon,” Connor assured him, edging his way through the doorway and into the corridor beyond. “Very soon,” he called again, letting the heavy oak door close on his words.
Escaping from the gentlemen of the house party was never too difficult. Connor didn’t care for hunting grouse and while riding was a pastime he enjoyed, he preferred to do so alone. Visiting the neighboring estates did not appeal nearly so much as seeking out the ebony-haired temptress he called friend.
The ladies posed a far greater obstacle. When a man was wealthy, titled, handsome, and unmarried, he was a sort of magnet for unmarried females and their matchmaking mamas. Eluding them was an art one developed with practice and Lord Connor Northwicke had been practicing almost since birth.
Adam was the real challenge. As soon as he’d noticed his friend taking up with a servant, he’d gone out of his way to protect Connor from what he called the maid’s evil clutches. Which only went to show how much the theater was rubbing off on the surly gentleman.
Unable to locate the only person whose company he craved, Connor threw caution to the winds and descended the servants’ stairs, caring little that a man in his position should do no such thing. He entered the kitchens, a wave of heat blasting over him.
Clattering pots, stern orders, and scurrying servants filled the space. Connor blinked rapidly, trying to make sense of the confusion and wondering if his mother’s kitchens boasted the same industrious chaos.
A pert maid with dark red hair and wary green eyes brushed by him, stopped, turned, and stared. Connor recognized her as one who was often with Doll, going about their duties. Mouth agape, she gestured at the other servants, her action catching the attention of one or two, whose own fevered gestures caught the attention of still more, until the room lay cloaked in silence.
Then, through the fog of steaming pots, he saw her.
Magnificent black tresses gleamed in the dim light, the absence of her usual white mobcap allowing the meager kitchen lighting to shine on her head. A few rebellious curls had escaped, no doubt due to the many duties she’d already performed that day and one of those ebony tresses lay against her cheek as she bandaged the hand of the little scullery maid. Her whole concentration centered on the child, not even the preternatural silence permeating her thoughts.
The silence finally penetrated the scullery maid’s dull mind. She nudged Doll with her free hand.
Doll’s head lifted, a sort of dazed look on her face. Then, her violet eyes widened, meeting his, every muscle in her slim body tensing in shock. “Milord! Have you lost your way?”
Just a trifle embarrassed, Connor smiled. “Indeed I have. Perhaps you can help me.”
Bobbing a curtsy, Doll followed him out, barely giving the other servants a glance. Her head bowed in the proper subservient manner, she failed to see Connor stop just as the kitche
n door closed them off from the others’ views. Connor took great delight in the sudden press of her slim young body against his but even he was taken unaware at the force with which that delectable body connected with his own.
They fell on the stair in an inelegant heap, Doll sprawling full length atop him.
Normally, finding himself in such an undignified position would have made Lord Connor Northwicke laugh. However, finding himself in such a position with a woman he viewed as easily the most desirable woman he’d ever seen, laughter was the furthest thing from his mind. No, indeed, his thoughts turned to a far coarser line of thinking, a line of thinking that grew baser with every breath she took.
Doll did not struggle up. Her face registered a shock as great as his own, greater than what she’d experienced upon seeing him enter the servants’ domain mere moments before. Then, her eyes dropping from his to focus somewhere near his mouth, Connor succumbed to a temptation too great for him to resist.
Closing the small distance between their lips, he kissed her, a very brief, butterfly caress that was over almost before it started. He had no sense of time or place, or how very inappropriate it was for him to be kissing a maid while sprawled on the stair.
And he wouldn’t have cared had the thought crossed his mind in that moment. He kissed her again, his lips lingering a moment longer than before. She didn’t pull away; she pressed closer, the fingers on his chest curling into the fabric of his coat. Her lips burned against his for a brief moment and then she did pull away, her face flushing bright crimson. The wariness he often saw in her eyes returned, greater than before. He cursed himself for the fool he undoubtedly was.
She pushed against him and he shoved himself back, rising to his feet and offering her a hand up. Flinching from his touch, she rose on her own, her eyes straying to the doorway through which they’d so recently passed.
Not surprisingly, several curious faces crowded together, mouths hanging open on the younger servants, stern disapproval twisting the features of the elders. Connor couldn’t really blame them but he did object to a few of the disapproving glances being trained on the maid.
“Go about your business,” he commanded in his best Lord of the Manor voice. The younger servants jumped, with the exception of the pert, red-haired one, disappearing into the darker recesses of the kitchen.
The butler, his disapproval almost palpable, addressed the frowning housekeeper. “Mrs. Watts, please take Doll into the scullery and set her to scrubbing pots.”
Mrs. Watts stepped forward as Doll did the same. Connor stepped between them. “I have need of this maid’s services.”
Why did some words sound less heinous in one’s head than when one spoke them? He resisted the urge to cringe and waited in expectation of the horror he knew his statement would incite. He should walk away now, before he made Doll’s life more difficult by branding her a harlot amongst her peers.
The redheaded maid stepped forward, her features contorted with a hatred that Connor found unwarranted. Mrs. Watts grasped the girl’s arm, whispered something in her ear, and the girl reluctantly returned to the kitchens, casting one last venomous glance in Connor’s direction. It was then he remembered she spent much time with Doll, their duties often placing them in the same chambers. The other maid was as disapproving of Doll’s association with him as Adam was about Connor’s association with Doll. Peas in a pod, Connor thought with an inward chuckle.
“My lord, perhaps you have taken a wrong turn. This is the servants’ stair, here to aid in the serving of the household. You can go that direction to return to the guests’ section of the house,” the butler informed him, pointing up the staircase.
And how could one argue with such a formidable personage, one who was inarguably correct? Except, Connor hadn’t lost his way at all, merely his mind and his wits.
Dropping his hand from Doll’s arm, he grimaced. “Indeed, I must have lost my way. My apologies for having disturbed the proper running of the household.”
He walked away then, realizing only in that moment that he’d failed to apologize for his earlier treatment. Had he just finished destroying the friendship he’d come to enjoy?
Friendship? He was afraid that, for him, it was much more than that now.
Scrubbing pots was the perfect penance for what she’d done. She hadn’t initiated the kiss, true, but she hadn’t stopped it either. At least, not right away. It had been too nice, too pleasurable, and such a welcome change from her past experiences with men.
Heavens! What was she thinking? Experiences? One could hardly use such a tame word for what she’d endured, always at the hands of some man.
Hours later, as the day grew later and the sun’s slow descent turned the sky shades of pink and red, Verena was released from her punishment with the warning to steer clear of gentlemen who would amuse themselves “befriending” fetching young maids.
“No good can come of it,” Mrs Watts said kindly but with a thread of steel underlying her words. “Gentlemen do not marry servants and can only have one goal in mind. You know what that is.”
Verena nodded, taking the housekeeper’s warning to heart. Indeed, what other objective could Lord Connor have? He had no idea that her father was an earl and even if he did, her foray into the ranks of the servant class made her unacceptable as a nobleman’s bride. Should it get out that she’d served her own kind, she’d be irrevocably ruined.
But what did that matter? She would gain that which she most desired: Freedom from marriage. Marriage was the worst thing that could happen to a woman. A woman lost all rights over herself, her body, and her life when a man took her as wife. She would much rather stay a drudge, slowly withering away into a ripe old age, a spinster to her dying day.
She’d much rather endure the degradation of spinsterhood than what a man would do to her.
A slight shiver crawled over her shoulders. Marriage was not for her.
Connor entered the drawing room that evening with Adam Prestwich at his side. The loose-tongued Lady Aldrich captured them, her gleeful expression positively radiant at whatever choice morsel she had managed to glean. It was mere moments before she informed them of a new arrival in the form of the Earl of Carstairs. Apparently his daughter, the Lady Verena, went missing nearly three months ago and he had tracked her to the area, stopping in at Lord Feldspar’s to inform him, privately, of the matter, as Feldspar was the local dignitary. The old woman tittered in delight at her dramatic on dit. Listening at doors for delicious gossip was Lady Aldrich’s bread and butter.
Lord Connor had to remind himself to breathe. Everything suddenly made sense. The highborn accent, the air of quiet breeding and innocence, the knowledge and intelligence of an educated lady.
The maid called Doll Rendel was Lady Verena Westbridge.
Honor
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About the Author
Jaimey Grant, a pseudonym for Laura Miller, was born in Michigan in 1979. After a fun-filled childhood interlaced with moments of emotional trauma and an insatiable curiosity about the reasons people act the way they do, she became a writer.
Primarily a Regency romance author, Jaimey has also dabbled in fantasy of a non-romance variety. A comprehensive list of works and where to find them can be found on her website, www.jaimeygrant.com. There are more Regencies and fantasies in the works.
She currently lives in Michigan with her husband and two children.
To learn more about Jaimey and her work, visit any of the sites below.
Website: http://www.jaimeygrant.com
Blog: http://jaimeygrant.blogspot.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jaimeygrantauthor
Email: [email protected]