Daphne’s head popped up, and she blinked at him before turning to look at the ladder. When she faced him once more, she couldn’t help smiling.
“As you wish, my lord. I won’t use the ladder.”
He nodded and turned on his heel to exit the room.
Daphne watched the empty door for a while longer, unable to shake the feeling that something in their relationship had just shifted.
Chapter twenty-one
After three days at the house, there was nothing left to discuss. William could think of nothing to ask that would keep the men there longer. At least, nothing that pertained to the factories.
When they departed, they would take his last distraction with them. Nothing else would be pressing enough to help him push away thoughts of Daphne.
She came into his head at strange times and left him confused and unsure of himself. He didn’t know what to think of her, didn’t know what to do with her. No matter where he tried to put her, what role he attempted to give her, nothing fit right.
Of course, the obvious title to give her was housekeeper, but she’d never quite fit as a typical servant even though she performed the duties of a lowly maid. She was the daughter of a man who was becoming a business colleague and possibly even a partner in this new venture, and she was the mother of his cousin’s illegitimate child. Neither of those were titles he could acknowledge openly, so how should he think of her?
William didn’t like living in this state of bewilderment. He didn’t like not knowing what to think of situations or people.
He really didn’t care for the fact that he couldn’t stop thinking of her as a person.
Yes, he’d always known his servants were people, but he’d always believed it was better for everyone if their encounters maintained a professional distance. Two weeks with Daphne Blakemoor in his life had proven him right. If he hadn’t been thinking of her and her feelings and her future, he’d have dismissed her a long time ago and his life would have been ever so much simpler.
He had to sort this out and that wasn’t going to happen here, with the possibility of her showing up around any corner.
“This meeting has been even more productive than I expected.” William gathered up the papers and turned to the two gentlemen. While one was a reminder of his current conundrum, they were still the better option at the moment. “I say, if you could spare another few days, come to Birmingham with me and look over the property where I’m considering building this factory. You can talk to the man planning my steam engines. We might both benefit from a visit.”
“We’d be happy to,” Mr. Blakemoor said with a smile.
“Our factory foreman has things well in hand. My return can certainly be delayed another day or two,” Mr. Gherkins agreed.
“Excellent.” William kept his smile cool and professional but inside he could already feel himself start to relax, just knowing he was going to get a bit of distance from his current dilemma. Getting away was exactly what he needed.
Once he was no longer immersed in the strange occurrences of this house, everything would shift into perspective. When he returned, he’d set about doing whatever else was needed to make this place into a normal aristocratic estate, as he should have done from the very beginning.
A normal house would bring normal servants and Daphne would find her correct place. He just wished he knew where that was.
Daphne twirled her way through the front hall, skipped across the central hall, and flitted around the saloon to drop onto a sofa with a happy giggle.
Jess followed at a more sedate pace, shaking her head while Reuben, Sarah, and Eugenia trailed behind, grinning.
“You wouldn’t possibly be happy to have the house empty, would you?” Jess asked as she sat in one of the chairs.
Daphne dropped her head back to rest on the sofa. “Yes. I am so very happy. And he said they weren’t returning for at least a week. An entire week!”
“You know this doesn’t change anything, don’t you? He’s coming back.”
Daphne popped her head up. “Of course it changes things. Perhaps not permanently, but for the next few days we’ll have our own schedule, without any sneers from grumpy Mr. Morris. The pace will be slower. We’ll have more time to visit with one another like we used to.” Perhaps she could even convince Benedict to talk to someone. If not her, perhaps Jess or one of the other children. “And”—Daphne pointed a finger at Sarah, trying not to let worry over her son ruin this moment—“we can play the pianoforte in the music room.”
Sarah clapped her hands in glee, looking for the first time in a while like a child instead of a young woman. Somehow, Daphne was going to have to find a way to inject moments of joy back into the children’s lives, ones that wouldn’t disrupt working in the house. Drudgery was going to catch up with them soon enough. She didn’t have to rush it.
“Remember there’s new people on the grounds,” Jess reminded them.
Daphne wanted to stick her tongue out at her friend, but Jess made a good point. There were two men going about the grounds, taming some of the landscaping and creating a plan for his lordship to approve upon his return.
Those men had little to no reason to come into the house, but they were still going to be around. There would be no pretending everything was the way it used to be.
But, oh, what if it were?
What if they’d been able to live in this house with all this glorious furniture?
There were only three children now, where there had once been twelve, but as Sarah, Eugenia, and Reuben ran off to explore the house they’d recently been denied, it was easy to imagine all of them back here.
What if this sofa had been right here instead of tucked away in a storage room? They could have enjoyed the view in comfort while sipping tea and eating biscuits. Life and laughter would have filled the house along with the splendor of the enormous art collection and grand, if occasionally ugly, furniture.
There could be more artwork designed by the children, like the paper filigree–covered box on the side table. The house could be filled top to bottom with beautiful, wonderful items she enjoyed and loved. She’d bring in more children, allowing them to live life a little closer to the way it should have been for them.
Wouldn’t that be nice?
“You’re drifting again.”
Jess’s voice pulled Daphne from picturing Eugenia as the daughter of the house instead of the maid. The girl would look lovely in satin.
“I know,” Daphne said, pushing up from the sofa. “But there’s no harm in it.”
Jess looked like she wanted to argue the point but didn’t. Instead, she decided to stomp Daphne’s popped dream under the boot of reality. “We need a plan.”
Daphne frowned at Jess, who stared steadily back until Daphne sighed. Jess was right, of course. Just because Daphne didn’t like to think about the future didn’t mean it wasn’t coming at them with the speed of a runaway stagecoach.
“I can’t see as we’ve much else to worry about. He knows about Benedict and he’s given me permission to avoid my father.” Daphne smoothed her skirts and stared at a particularly worn area of seam. “I don’t think anything can go wrong at this point.”
“You don’t?” Jess arched one eyebrow as she sat back and crossed her arms over her chest. “Try and imagine something.”
Daphne frowned again. What good was escaping into one’s imagination if the world’s problems came along for the ride?
“Try.” Jess reached out a foot and nudged Daphne’s knee.
With a huff, Daphne crossed her arms. Her eyes slid closed and she pictured herself here, in this room, in this dress, not the way it had been before with children and a comfortable, homely atmosphere, but as it was now. The elegant furniture. The almost daily dread that something horrible was going to happen, that she’d only managed to delay the utter demise of her life by a few years.
She squirmed. This was truly not what she wanted to be doing with her imagination.
“I’m thin
king,” she murmured, so Jess would know she wasn’t sitting here ignoring her.
“There’s a knock at the door,” Jess said. “Morris is too busy to answer it so you do the honors. Who’s there?”
Daphne pictured herself walking through the house and throwing open the door. A wide smile split her face. “Kit and Graham. They’ve returned from their wedding trip. She’s practically glowing. I can’t wait to hear about her travels.”
“Daphne,” Jess groaned. “Fine, fine. Kit and Graham have come and gone, the visit was lovely and such. There’s another knock at the door. Who wouldn’t be quite as much fun?”
“Anyone from London,” Daphne mumbled. She tilted her head as she imagined the most horribly snobbish women she could remember entering the house. “Although,” she said more firmly, “that’s really only uncomfortable on my side. It’s not as if any of them would recognize me. I’d simply be a housekeeper to them.”
“True,” Jess murmured. “And I could easily avoid anyone who might recognize me. Still, I don’t think we’ve considered every potential bump in the road yet. Try one more time. Close the door.”
“This is like a very strange traveling fair game,” Daphne said with a grin.
Jess responded by nudging her foot into Daphne’s knee again. “Hush. And close that imaginary front door.”
Daphne waved a hand in the air in surrender, trying not to take too much pleasure in slamming her fictional door in the face of the horrible women. “It’s closed, it’s closed.”
“There’s another knock. This time you feel dread at the sound. You do not want to open that door. Not under any circumstances.”
No, Daphne did not want to open that door. Something about Jess’s voice, about the tension flowing beneath the words, wrapped around Daphne’s throat and took all the fun from the game. It felt real. She pressed a hand to her stomach, hoping she wasn’t about to truly be ill.
“You refuse to reach for the door,” Jess continued, lowering her voice another notch and letting it become a tense whisper. “But it opens anyway. Who is there?”
Daphne saw, in her mind, the door swinging open even as she reached forward to close it again.
It revealed a man on the front porch.
Her eyelids flung open and she propelled herself off the sofa so fast she sent the furniture skidding backward an inch or two. She paced across the room to stand by the doors looking out over the back lawn and the lake below. With her hands wrapped tightly about her middle, she turned back to Jess. “I don’t want to play this game anymore.”
Jess’s eyes were wide as she stood slowly and eased toward Daphne. “Daph?”
“I thought about it,” Daphne said in a rush, “but I never thought about it. Even though Lord Chemsford and I discussed the unlikelihood of that man ever coming here, I never thought about what it would actually feel like if he did come, if I saw him. But it would be horrible. It would be so very horrible.”
“Daph?” Jess came to her side and laid one hand lightly on her shoulder. “Who did you see?”
Daphne swallowed and forced her gaze to Jess’s, if only because she was real and Daphne needed very much right now to remember what was real and what wasn’t. After a deep, shaky breath, she said, “Benedict’s father.”
Silence stretched between as they stared at each other. Whether it was five minutes or five hours, Daphne didn’t know. A sudden knock on the door echoed through the center of the house, drawing a muffled scream from Daphne and even a slight jerk from Jess.
“Oh no,” Daphne whispered. “No, no, no, no. Jess, if this little game somehow brought him here, I’m going to pick out all the seams in your dresses and make you resew them yourself.”
A bubble of laughter escaped Jess’s mouth before she clamped her lips shut. Daphne glared at her before leaving the room to answer the door.
It wasn’t Mr. Oswald. It was Mrs. Lancaster. Daphne wasn’t sure when the last time was she’d been so thankful to see that sweet, smiling, wrinkled face.
“Mrs. Lancaster, what are you doing here?” Daphne wrapped an arm around the woman and ushered her into the house. “You know you can’t come to the front door anymore. We don’t—well, this isn’t our house now.”
“Of course it is, my dear.” The old woman patted Daphne on the cheek. “It will only stop being yours when you don’t care about it anymore.”
That wasn’t likely to happen. Daphne had too many memories here, had grown too much as a person here to ever not feel connected to this place.
“Besides,” she continued as she shuffled past Daphne toward the saloon, “I saw your young man come through town. He rented horses instead of taking his own so that he could change them out and travel faster.”
“Oh.” Daphne considered taking Mrs. Lancaster to task for referring to the marquis as “your young man,” but what was the point? In the fourteen years Daphne had known the older woman, she’d always done precisely as she pleased.
Jess shook her head as she tucked herself in the corner of the saloon near the windows. She’d never been quite comfortable around Mrs. Lancaster, something the woman took delight in.
The children all piled back into the room to get hugs from the shopkeeper.
Mrs. Lancaster plopped a fabric satchel on the sofa and began pulling out small paper packages to hand to the children. “I’ve brought you each a little bit of your favorites. Don’t eat it all at once now.”
This was followed by another round of hugs and giggles before the children sat on the floor to peek into their paper bags.
“Did you walk all the way out here?” Daphne asked, helping Mrs. Lancaster to a seat.
“Of course not. These old bones are spry enough to get around town, but that hike is beyond me.” She waved a hand toward the window. “Nash is putting his donkey in the barn for a spell.”
Reuben pushed up from the floor and folded the top of his bag down before shoving it into his pocket. “I’ll go help him. I’m getting to be good in the stable. Mr. Pasley says I have a way with the animals.” Pride and confidence puffed up the boy’s chest in a way Daphne had never seen before. “I’ll milk the goats while I’m out there.”
He didn’t wait for Daphne’s approval before opening the door and trotting down the outside steps. When had he grown so independent? Reuben had always been a bit hesitant and reserved. He waited until being asked and then always tried to go beneath notice. But now he was claiming a skill? Did she even know him anymore?
Jess pushed off the wall. “Girls, since it will be only us for dinner tonight, why don’t you see what you can accomplish on your own?”
Sarah and Eugenia skipped off happily, squealing in the stone stairwell to make it echo.
“Handily done,” Mrs. Lancaster said with a nod in Jess’s direction.
“Why are you here?” Daphne asked. “Not that I’m not happy to see you. You’re always a welcome guest, but—”
“You think you can just stop by town with a man who looks like Benedict twice over and get by with a vague remark?” A wrinkly finger pointed in Daphne’s face. “No.”
Daphne sighed and collapsed back into the sofa while another short laugh escaped Jess’s control.
“I know.” Daphne eased down into a dejected slump. Why did everyone keep making her relive her mistakes? “Can we at least wait for Nash? I would rather not go through this twice.”
Chapter twenty-two
William should have known having Daphne’s father with him while he tried to straighten out his head would only make his life more complicated instead of simpler. She had to have gotten the skill from somewhere.
“I don’t think you could have asked the good Lord for a better situation,” Mr. Gherkins said as the three of them stood atop a hill, looking down at the place they’d settled on to build the factory.
William looked down at the piece of land that was part of his childhood home and nodded in agreement. It was basically perfect. Close to the water, within easy walking distance of
town but separated by a large copse of trees and a slight hill, which should keep the noise level down. It was a rather significant distance from Dawnview Hall and even far enough from his sheep pastures to keep from disturbing the animals.
Mr. Blakemoor laughed. “I find myself a bit jealous that this will be your foray into manufacturing, to be honest. It’s going to be a considerably easier place to build and start working than our first place.”
“Do you still want to be the one to move out here and oversee the start? We could hire someone.” As a businessman, William was more than happy to work with the two gentlemen, particularly since his father would never have even given them the time of day, but personally everything felt wrong.
In the two days they’d spent surveying the land and discussing the potential of various sites in Birmingham, a partnership had formed. It was in William’s best interest because he was going to have to hire someone to oversee the factory anyway.
The truth was, he had no desire to actually learn the ins and outs of working a factory. He simply wanted to make sure he was keeping the marquisette modern. There were a lot of people depending on him. With this factory, there would be even more.
As beneficial as this partnership was from a business perspective, William didn’t think it was going to make hiding the man’s daughter from him any easier. It irritated him that he even considered such a thing when making his decisions. He’d left Marlborough so he would stop thinking about his housekeeper, hadn’t he?
Mr. Blakemoor nodded, mouth pursed in thought. “Eventually we’ll hire someone, but it will go smoother if we start it ourselves and then train our management accordingly. I’ll be happy to come out here once the structure is built.”
The discussion turned to the construction particulars, including how often one of them should visit the site and whom it should be. Everything was moving faster than William could have hoped.
It should have elated him.
“I’ll arrange a set of rooms for you to live in while you’re here,” William said, “unless you’d rather stay at Dawnview. You’re welcome there, of course.” He made the offer more out of obligation than any true desire for Mr. Blakemoor to stay in the family home for an extended period of time. William couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to stay beyond the few days’ visit the gentlemen had already made, but then again, to most outsiders the house was simply a grand estate and the mistress of it a competent hostess.
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