“I beg your pardon?” The phrase seemed to be passing her lips a great deal lately. It was just that she’d been on the brink of revealing a shameful truth—she’d hated her job, even though she’d been lucky to have it—but the opportunity to do so had apparently passed.
“The fish we purchased at the market, remember? The one you insisted could not be brought into the home of an earl? We have to cook it, do we not?”
“I thought you were the man of the people, not above doing your own marketing,” she said, still trying to catch up to the fact that they had moved on from the interrogation of a few moments ago and were apparently now bantering about a fish.
“True. Not above it, but that doesn’t mean I do much of it. On my woman’s day off, I usually eat in a pub. Or make do.”
She tried not to smile. “So what you’re saying is that we are in possession of a trout, but not of the skills to cook said trout.”
“Apparently so. I can clean the damn fish, of course.” He gestured toward the stoves. “But I’ve no idea how to use one of these things.”
“We lived by our wits for years, did we not? How hard can it be?” Squatting next to the nearest stove, she examined its inner workings, opening and closing the small door. Then she glanced around, her eyes alighting on the hearth. “I do know how to light a fire. That’s how we cooked the odd fish we were lucky enough to get back in Seven Dials.”
He grinned and pulled a heavy pot down from a rack.
Half an hour later, they sat on stools at the counter, enjoying the hard-won fruits—the hard-won trout—of their labor. “I think food one has made oneself tastes better than food one purchases ready-made, don’t you?” he said through a mouthful.
She wanted to say that she didn’t want to be a governess. That she wanted to be her own woman, free to speak and move as she willed. That she wanted to invite the Countess of Blackstone to the next meeting of the Ladies’ Society in Support of Mrs. Wollstonecraft, because then things might actually start to happen. That she wanted to live in a world where women were considered autonomous persons worthy of respect. But she didn’t quite have the nerve. He was moving mountains to find her a new situation, after all. So she merely said, “Thank you.”
He looked startled. “Come now, I’m being hyperbolic. The fish isn’t that good.”
“No, not for the fish. For taking me in.” It needed to be said. As uncertain as she felt around him, she was grateful. If he’d turned her away, she might be dead by now. “For helping me when things were at their most awful. You did it before, and you’re doing it again.”
He surprised her by reaching a hand out and touching her neck. It was as if his fingers were bewitched, for the skin beneath began to prickle and heat. Immobilized, unable to speak, she watched him. His eyes had followed his hand, and now it moved to pluck the jade off her chest. She’d worn it as a ring in Seven Dials with the stone turned inward, so she was less likely to be a target for thieves. But, after she left, she’d transferred the ring to a chain she wore around her neck. She hoped he wasn’t offended that she kept it hidden, but the teachers at Miss Grisham’s would have taken it from her, as any jewelry beyond a simple cross was deemed ostentatious.
The chain was short, so he wasn’t able to lift the ring very far. He held it between thumb and forefinger and stroked his thumb over its surface. “We are bound together, Lucy Green.”
He used her old name. She wanted to correct him but found herself under some sort of enchantment that prevented her from doing anything but breathing and hoping to God she wasn’t blushing. She wasn’t prone to blushing, but then again she wasn’t prone to having her neck touched by handsome gentlemen, either.
“We are bound together.” Then he lifted his eyes from the stone to meet hers. “Why would you ever think otherwise? Why would you think I would do anything other than help when you asked?”
It was like an ax to her chest. This was the kind of help an independent woman did not need. The kind of help she could grow to depend on, as she had in their childhood. And if her study of Mary’s life had taught her anything, it was that trusting men only led to heartbreak. Gilbert Imlay, the father of Mary’s first child and object of her great love, rejected her and ultimately drove her to the brink of suicide. Later, her husband William Godwin, as well meaning as he might have been, ruined her credibility and reputation by publishing those blasted memoirs.
Still, as much as she hated it, she needed Trevor. So instead of correcting her name or throwing his sentiment back in his face, she merely leaned back a little. Almost infinitesimally, in fact.
It was enough. He dropped the ring, stood, and began clearing their dishes. “The problem with the enormously satisfying act of cooking for oneself is that it is inevitably followed by the considerably less satisfying act of wiping one’s own dishes.”
They worked in silence for a few minutes, clearing up and tamping down the fire.
“I need to make a trip—a business trip,” Trevor said as he dried his hands. “I’ll be gone for a week, perhaps two. I’d like you to stay here, keep an eye on the place.”
She blinked, startled. “Pardon?”
“I’ve got to go to Cornwall. I’m overdue—I was supposed to leave today. I’ve some copper mines to inspect.”
“Because you’re a mining magnate, too.”
“Yes.”
She’d been jesting, but apparently in addition to being a merchant and a hotelier, he was a mining magnate. “And you want me to stay here.”
“Yes. Blackstone and Emily are going to begin asking around, looking for a new situation for you, but it will take some time. Blackstone was going to have to come by and look in while I was gone. If you’re here, he won’t have to.” He fiddled with the dish towel. “Look, I’ll admit that I’m not rational about this place. I am more devoted to it than some mothers are to their children or some gentlemen are to their horses. I know that nothing will happen if I’m absent a week or a fortnight, but…”
“The Jade is everything you’ve worked to build.”
“Yes.” After a pause in which he seemed to be staring into her soul, he said, “The labor is done. Now it’s all about furnishing the interiors, hiring staff. It can all wait till I get back. It will wait, because even though I like to pretend that the Countess of Blackstone is driving this, I am driving this.”
“Of course.” She understood. She knew him. This wasn’t a mine in Cornwall. It might have been an investment like the mine in Cornwall, but it was also his hard-won home. “Everything has to be right.”
He narrowed his eyes. “Exactly.”
“I’d be happy to look after it for you. Honored, in fact.” It was true. Sentimental, but true.
He smiled then, an honest-to-goodness smile, blossoming slowly but decidedly. He looked like a child being presented with a sweet. “I have a woman who comes in every day but Fridays. She leaves food, tidies the kitchen, and will take away laundry—speaking of which, a modiste is coming tomorrow at two o’clock. Order whatever you need. Consider it your payment for stewarding this place in my absence.” He hung the now-clean fish pot back on a hook near the fire. “You will, won’t you?”
It sounded like a fair trade to her. “Yes, thank you.” Then, wanting to put him at ease, she teasingly added, “I shall order a dress for every day you are gone.”
He furrowed his brow. “I wish you would.”
He hadn’t recognized it as the jest it was. “What else do I need to know? Will you give me a key?”
“Yes! I will give you a key!” He looked suddenly like a boy who had been told he could abandon his lessons. “And you should know about the library!” He grabbed her hand. She noted that he didn’t offer his arm in the formal fashion he had earlier. No, he took her hand in his, like he had when they were children, and tugged her up and out of her seat.
Up, up the stairs they went. She was beginning to see that as long as she stayed at the Jade, this was going to be a feature, these long, silent
treks up and down the four flights of stairs to his fifth-floor apartment. But this time, the mood was different. The first time she followed him up, she’d noted that Trevor had grown into a handsome, powerful man. This time, the boyishness of his youth was in evidence. She panted keeping up with him as he took two stairs at a time, his long legs striding effortlessly upward, eventually leading her through the door to his private lodgings.
Today, absent the forgiving glow of candlelight, she noticed how—well, she hated to say it, but how dirty everything was. He’d noted with pride that no one ever came into his private apartments, but perhaps someone—and by someone she meant a maid—should.
They passed the door she knew led to his bedroom, and he led her back into the room where she’d dried her clothes by the fire last night.
“This is the library,” he said excitedly. “Or it will be.”
In the light of day, the room looked like a library that had been torn apart by thieves. There were books, yes, and there were shelves—floor-to-ceiling shelves lining three walls with an interruption only for the fireplace. Books were stacked everywhere—except on the shelves. They stood on the desk that graced the middle of the room and they perched in precarious piles all over the gleaming wood floors, so much so that a person had to navigate a kind of maze in order to walk from one end of the room to the other.
The hotel was brand new. So she knew the library couldn’t have been more than a few months, or even weeks, old. Yet it looked as if it had been here forever, just that someone had forgotten to mate the books with the shelves.
“I haven’t yet had time to devise a cataloguing system, or to set things to right in here.”
“You don’t say.”
He smirked. “But please do make yourself at home. Read whatever you like. If you can find it.” Striding to the far corner, he began shuffling through a stack of volumes. “Aha!” He held out his prize.
It was Mary’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men. She smiled. “That would be the one you’d be drawn to, wouldn’t it?”
“I admit I have not read her vindication of the fairer sex, but what makes you say that?”
“She reveals herself as a republican in this one. It’s an attack on the aristocracy, is it not?”
“I suppose it is.”
She looked around, an idea forming. She did love a project. “How long will you be gone?”
“A fortnight at most, perhaps less. The trip is poorly timed, but it can’t be avoided. The hotel is meant to open in a month, which doesn’t give me much leeway when I return to get it up and running.”
“It isn’t just about hiring staff, you know. You’ll have to train them, too.”
He scowled. “I hadn’t thought of that, but of course you are correct.”
“Ideally, you’ll hire a butler and a head housekeeper first, and they’ll train the understaff. I imagine it’s not unlike the way a grand house is run, except on a larger scale. Your countess can help.”
“I suppose, though she is new to grand houses—that wasn’t the life she had before she married the earl.”
Lucy smiled. She truly did love a project. “I’ve lived in a few. I’ll help you.”
Chapter Five
Once Trevor was gone, Lucy was annoyed to find herself unable to stop thinking about him. The boy who had sent her away. The man who was preparing to do so again. Both of these versions of him at once, jumbled together. He may as well have been haunting her from Cornwall.
She felt his absence, and, maddeningly, it wasn’t merely some abstract knowledge that he was missing. No, she felt it in her body. Her throat itched beneath the jade, where he had touched her. When she sat up in bed that first morning after he’d left and slid her feet over the edge onto the floor, she’d been hit hard by the image of his feet, large and strong as he climbed the stairs ahead of her in the candlelight. When she stooped to light the fire in the kitchen, she felt the proximity of his bare arms, just like when he’d rolled up his sleeves to help her cook the trout over the flames. Baking in the kitchen, where she’d begun trying to recreate the much-loved lemon biscuits of their youth, she would sink her teeth into an attempt and be transported back to childhood.
What was the matter with her?
She sneezed, her nose irritated by all the dust she’d been stirring up. It had the effect of pulling her out of her reverie by knocking some sense into her. “That is quite enough,” she said into the empty library. She couldn’t afford to be distracted by a man. She would be most grateful for the help he could offer, and then she would be on her way. Back to her independent life.
She resumed her dusting with a vengeance. She knew better than this, had seen it too many times. A woman, whether highborn or low, indulges a passing attraction to a man—it didn’t matter if he was a footman or her employer. Or a handsome, wealthy scion of industry. It never turned out. Even when it did turn out, it didn’t. She thought back to the Viscount Galsmith. He had a perfectly lovely wife, a kind, pleasant woman who loved him with all her heart. And he repaid her by attempting to force himself on the governess?
And look at Mary: two suicide attempts on account of a man.
Despite her resolve, a rogue thought crept into her mind: Trevor was as different from the Viscount Galsmith as it was possible for a man to be. And from Mary’s unworthy paramour Gilbert Imlay. Beneath his gruff exterior, he was kind, and selfless, and—
No. Independence was the only way to be truly at home in the world. To be truly at home with one’s self. She must be ruthless with her unsettled mind.
This was why it was important to have projects. Lucy was devoted to self-improvement and to seizing any opportunity for education. It started with her wanting to set a good example for the children in her charge, but that was only part of it. Learning to sing, or translating a book from French to English—these were worthy endeavors in and of themselves. Making a contribution to the world, however small, was always a noble pursuit. So was self-betterment, even if only for its own sake. It reminded a woman that she was a whole being, capable of many things and worthy of self-respect.
Projects also helped occupy a distracted mind. And the coming days would be full of projects. Having finished the shelf she was working on, she began moving the books over. She’d already sorted them and written a concordance of sorts that would guide any user of the library to his or her preferred volume. All that remained was to place the books.
She was enormously pleased that she’d made such rapid progress. She glanced at the window. Twilight was setting in. She’d finish with the books and take herself to bed early. Tomorrow she would tackle the sample room. And more importantly, tomorrow her society would reconvene. What a relief it would be to set aside the nonsensical whirling of her mind and get back to the higher mission that motivated her, that kept her putting one foot in front of another: rehabilitating the reputation of Mary Wollstonecraft.
“It is my pleasure to convene the July meeting of the Ladies’ Society in Support of Mrs. Wollstonecraft.” Lucy beamed at the women who had managed to make it to the hastily called meeting. Since most of her members were governesses, it was difficult to ensure that the day lined up with as many members’ days off as possible. And she hadn’t been able to conduct her usual campaign of flattery and guilt to get the ladies to come out. It seemed that no matter how hard she tried, the others just weren’t as interested in Mary’s ideas as they ought to be. So she was pleasantly surprised when no less than a dozen women showed up.
Of course, the impressive turnout probably had something to do with the fact that the meeting was being held inside the kitchen of the unfinished Jade Hotel.
“Now, who was assigned to report on this month’s book?” Lucy asked, holding up the new copy of Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman she’d managed to procure using some of the coins Trevor had left her to cover incidental expenses. She would have loved it if the group were able to obtain enough copies of their reading material so every member could read each month’
s selection. But as it was, scarcity meant that one member was assigned to read and make a report to the group.
Everyone looked around except one woman, Matilda Williams, governess to the children of the Duke of Denham. She looked at the floor.
“Miss Williams?” said Lucy, hoping against hope.
“My oldest is getting ready for her come-out, see,” she said, at least having the good grace to look chagrined. “It’s been extraordinarily busy.”
Lucy tamped down her irritation. She had to remember that these were not her pupils. They were her colleagues—women who instructed the next generation. If she could get them interested in Mary’s ideas, they could help spread them. But she needed to remember that she had no power other than persuasion. If she wanted to share Mary’s ideas, she had to proceed with care and not drive anyone away with her adamancy.
“It’s no matter, Miss Williams. I shall summarize.” Clearing her throat, she straightened her spine. “This is one of Mrs. Wollstonecraft’s two novels. As you may know, her husband Mr. Godwin published it posthumously. You’ll recall that we were going to discuss whether this publication, as with Mr. Godwin’s infamous memoir, did its author any good. First, I should probably summarize the book.”
“Ahem.”
She looked up. “Yes, Miss Kipling?” Attempting to keep her tone neutral, she smiled at the woman, whom, frankly, she would just as soon not have in the group. Suzanne Kipling, governess to the Viscount Greening’s daughter, always had to be shushed and never did any of her assigned work. She was one of those members who appeared to give not a whit about the reading but showed up solely for the social nature of the meetings. It was maddening.
“Perhaps we could have a tour first, Miss Greenleaf?”
The question triggered a collective outburst of feminine enthusiasm as members murmured their agreement. Two even stood. Having the meeting at the Jade had probably been a mistake. She should have just held it in the park as usual, but she hadn’t wanted to miss a delivery of baking supplies scheduled for today. She was determined to get those lemon biscuits right, before Trevor returned.
The Likelihood of Lucy (Regency Reformers Book 2) Page 5