A Return of Devotion

by Kristi Ann Hunter

  And that was all it took for that frisson of anger to fade away. Perhaps he didn’t know how to express himself properly, but his intentions were in the right place.

  Besides, he’d just offered her use of that marvelous piano she’d been missing so much. She could teach Sarah again, express the emotions she never knew how to voice or was too scared to acknowledge. She couldn’t stop the smile that spread across her face, even if she’d wanted to. “You’re letting me use the music room?”

  He cleared his throat and avoided her gaze. “At appropriate times, of course.”

  Meaning no more midnight visits with music and candlelight and soft words and memories that were better than any fantasy and dared her to dream much bigger than she ever had before. “Appropriate times,” she agreed. “And when the house duties are done, of course.”

  He didn’t acknowledge her statement as he reached for a biscuit. “What art is your favorite? Where should I have Mr. Thornbury start?”

  She’d never given much mind to the art. When they’d first walked into the house, the gorgeous, glorious piano had been all she cared about. “I would probably have him start in here.”

  “The library?” he asked in surprise. “Not the portrait room or that strange little drawing room I’m afraid to even enter because I feel like breathing too hard would make everything break?”

  She coughed to cover her laugh but then gave in to the small giggle. “You should try being the one who has to dust it all. But yes, I think he should start in the library.”

  Mostly because it was the room with the most treasures that had remained out while the children had lived in the house. If anything was going to be damaged, it was likely to be in here. Best to start with the room in potentially the worst condition so it wasn’t so obvious later on.

  “The library it is, then. Probably a good idea. It will keep him out of the way of the workers on the upper floors. The garret rooms should be completed by the time Mr. Thornbury arrives, so they’ll be back to working on the other rooms.”

  And Daphne would be out of excuses to continue living in the cottage. She would no longer have a room in the proper portion of a house. She would be living out of the way in the servant quarters. Her fall from polite society would finally be complete.

  She tried to tell herself that that was actually comforting. Finally facing it would have to be better than fearing it.

  They lapsed into silence again, but Daphne didn’t worry over this one. She even felt relaxed enough to reach for a biscuit.

  It was hard to believe that biscuits and tarts and anything else Jess felt like making appeared on a daily basis now. In years past, biscuits and puddings had been a rare treat, but now that the larder was filled with any supplies Jess requested, it was a different story.

  The silence stretched until it went from comfortable to strange. Should she carry the conversation a bit? Since it had been so long since she’d engaged in polite society, and even then she’d always just sat quietly while the other women talked around her, she wasn’t sure what to say. Should she ask him what his favorite art was? No, that was what he’d asked her. If she was going to pretend herself his social equal for an hour—something she had never been even at the height of her dismal Season—she could do better than mimicry. Silence was better than admitting that she had never really had any conversational skills.

  “Have you traveled?” she finally landed on.

  He tilted his head. “A bit. My father thought I traveled a great deal.” A small smile tugged at his lips. “In reality I was over in Ireland.”

  “Ireland? Whatever were you doing over there?”

  “It was more about what I wasn’t doing. I wasn’t becoming my father.”

  “How did he feel about it?” she asked quietly. William had cut his father out of his life by choice, whereas she . . . well, she supposed it had been a choice she’d made that had created the divide between them, but she’d never meant for it to have that consequence.

  “I think he was relieved, to be honest,” he answered just as quietly. “It made it easier for him to pretend his new family was the only one he had.”

  Daphne looked down into her cup, turning it this way and that so the dregs of tea and the small flecks of tea leaves drifted about into different patterns. Her father had been fairly young when Daphne had been born. It wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility for him to have married again after she left London. He’d obviously gone on with his life and been very successful. Why not start a new family?

  “Daphne.”

  Her head snapped up and her eyes met his. The way he’d said her name . . . it was the same way he’d said it at the piano, when she’d suddenly realized that everything was real. There was a tenderness, a strength that she couldn’t replicate in her mind. She couldn’t imagine anyone saying her name with that sort of caring behind it. “Does my father have a new family?”

  “No.” His blue gaze stayed steady on hers. “I think that he regrets what happened. I think he’d like to see you again. He’s a good man.”

  “I know he is. He always has been.” Daphne placed her cup and saucer on the tray and began cleaning up. “Thank you for the tea,” she said around the sudden thickness of her throat. “But I think it best if I remember my place from now on. I’m a housekeeper.”

  “Daphne.”

  No, she would not be taken in by that again. She would not savor the way he said her name and memorize every nuance so that she could try to recall it later when she was alone. She was a housekeeper. A servant. Someone with whom her father would never associate. As much as she’d railed against the strictures of society that would force her son to pay for a sin he hadn’t committed, she understood them now. A clear understanding of classes meant everyone knew their place. Hopes didn’t rise up only to be crushed later.

  She didn’t say anything more. She simply gathered up the tea tray and left the room. As she did, a single tear escaped and for the first time in a long time, Daphne tried to stop it.

  The look on Daphne’s face stayed with William the rest of the day. He’d made a muck of things, and he didn’t know how to make them right again.

  When Cyril, the new footman, appeared in the dining room to serve his dinner, it felt so wrong that William had to bite back the urge to dismiss him immediately so that Daphne would have to deliver the remainder of his meal.

  He held his tongue, though, because he shouldn’t care. Yes, his attempt at a sort of peace offering had failed, but wasn’t the attempt what mattered in this case? It wasn’t as if he could make any sort of substantial reconciliation.

  One look down at his plate revealed that at least one person belowstairs thought it mattered a great deal. The edges of the unidentifiable meat were burnt. One taste revealed salt in enough abundance to make his mouth burn.

  His cook was admittedly another mystery of this bizarre house, but he’d eaten enough of her food to know that this was deliberate. She was willing to risk her position in order to make a statement about his behavior.

  It showed an admirable but confusing level of loyalty. She’d been here only a few months, hadn’t she? He’d been under the impression that she’d been hired soon after he sent word that he intended to live here.

  He was fast coming to learn that what he thought he knew meant next to nothing around here.

  He sawed through the meat on his plate, hoping that trudging through this meal would be enough penance and he could leave the entire day behind him. After chewing long enough to make his jaw hurt, he was finally able to swallow. The effort stole what remained of his hunger and he shoved the plate away, nodding at the footman that the plate could be removed.

  “Shall I bring up your pudding, my lord?”

  William ran a hand along his jaw. “Does it look edible?”

  “Yes, actually,” the man said, giving the plate a strange look. “If I may be so bold, sir, it looks considerably better than this.”

  Which probably meant she’d pois
oned it with something that would make him miserable for the next two days. “No, I don’t think I’ll need it tonight.”

  The man nodded and cleared the table, leaving a glass of port in front of William. His motions were efficient and quiet, just as a servant’s should be.

  It bothered William.

  Cyril left the room to return belowstairs, presumably to eat his own dinner. The servants’ portions were probably perfectly cooked and correctly seasoned.

  A dish of exquisitely browned baked custard landed on the table in front of him, a spoon slammed next to it.

  “Food is a necessity,” said a woman’s voice, “but pudding is a luxury.”

  William looked up into the cold face of the little blond woman he’d barely seen since the first day. He didn’t recall her looking so fierce before. If anything, the rare times he’d seen her she’d been almost meek.

  “If I take the time to make a dessert,” she continued, “I’m going to make it right.”

  He cleared his throat and picked up the spoon to poke at the top of the custard. “Is it going to make me ill all evening? Perhaps wracked with cramps and seizures for the next three days?”

  The smile that tilted one side of her mouth looked sinister and deadly. “If I’d wanted that, I’d have put it in the sauce over the chicken. Pudding is too obvious.”

  William coughed and dropped his gaze. That had been chicken? He wasn’t sure he believed her. “There was no sauce on the meat.”

  “Precisely.”

  She stood there, staring at him. Was she going to wait until he’d taken a bite?

  He dipped the spoon in the dish and took a small bite. The perfect creamy texture rolling across his tongue gave him a moment of culinary bliss he hadn’t thought he was going to get tonight.

  She spun on her foot and walked to the door. “Your family has stolen enough from her. It isn’t too much to ask that you leave her sense of purpose and identity alone.” She paused at the door and looked over her shoulder. “But thank you for offering her the use of the piano. The harpsichord in the cottage sounds terrible.”

  And then she was gone.

  What did she mean? He ate his pudding slowly, sifting through her words. He’d done nothing to Daphne’s sense of purpose. If anything, he’d more firmly established her as the housekeeper by giving her a staff that would actually do the menial work and leave her to do the rest of it. That was good, wasn’t it?

  But maybe to her it wasn’t. She’d been caring for this house for years. Had she raised Benedict in that little cottage? Perhaps she’d hired the children to ease the emptiness left by his going to work with Mr. Leighton.

  He wasn’t going to get rid of the new maids. For one thing, Mr. Banfield had hinted that the girls came from families that were in rather desperate need of money. For another, keeping an occupied house clean had to be more difficult than maintaining an empty house. The work would eventually become too much for Daphne and Sarah.

  But the idea of Daphne being unsettled about her sense of purpose and identity made the defeated look she’d worn earlier make a bit more sense. He’d never seen her defeated. Even when her father had appeared unexpectedly and she’d wanted to flee badly enough to climb out a window, she’d looked determined. Even the night she’d thought herself alone as she poured out a gloomy song on the piano, she’d eventually succumbed to some innate sense of positivity.

  She’d built a new life after the loss of her old one. He didn’t want to destroy it. He just wanted to make it better. Obviously, he wasn’t going about it the right way.

  As he scraped up the last of the custard and sipped his port, he tried to do something he’d never done in his life. He tried to imagine what it would be like to be someone else.

  Chapter twenty-eight

  There wasn’t room to fit any more people around the servants’ dining table. With five maids, two footmen, two grooms, three groundskeepers, one cook, one housekeeper, and one valet, it was a bit of a tight fit, but Jess refused to do it any other way. So here they sat, shoulder to shoulder, eating perfectly cooked chicken.

  Well, everyone else was eating the chicken. Daphne assumed it was perfectly cooked by the way everyone enthusiastically cleared their plates. The children sat to Daphne’s left and murmured amongst themselves about how good it was, while one of the footmen kept glancing in Jess’s direction with a look that fell somewhere between awe and fear.

  Jess, who had disappeared for a moment after making sure everyone had their food, didn’t look at anyone while she ate, but a slight smile curved her lips as she chewed.

  As the meal finished, she stood. “There’s baked custard for everyone tonight, so if you’d like some stay seated. Eugenia and I will bring it out.”

  “You made dessert for everyone?” Daphne asked as Jess set a bowl next to Daphne’s still-full plate.

  She nodded and flashed a smile full of white teeth. “Yes. I did.”

  “I know we have more supplies now, but—”

  “Don’t worry, Daphne,” she said with a glance toward the ceiling. “He won’t say a word about it. Besides, most of it is milk and eggs. We have more than enough.”

  “Oh.” Daphne poked at her own custard and listened to the chatter all around her. The new staff members were from town or the surrounding area, handpicked by Nash to fit in at Haven Manor as best as possible. One or two of them Daphne knew by sight, but she didn’t really know any of them and they had never spoken before yesterday.

  It was like London all over again except with less-comfortable chairs and plain painted walls. She sat in her corner, saying nothing so that no one would send their attention her way.

  Her world had been this house and the small group of people who lived in it. It had been a happy little world where she was secure and knew her place.

  Now she wasn’t sure she belonged anywhere.

  The small room near the kitchen had once been used to hold clothing that was waiting to be mended. With twelve growing children, there was always a lot of clothing that needed attention.

  Now it was empty, and Daphne had reverted it back to what had likely been its original purpose as the housekeeper’s office. The new footmen, Cyril and James, had brought in a small table from the larder, and Daphne had pulled one of the chairs from the servants’ dining hall. There were pencils, papers, and even a ledger book for tracking household expenses.

  The ledger book was currently blank because, until today, their household expenses had consisted of food supplies for the kitchen. Now there was staff to pay, and she should probably start keeping track of the cleaning supplies they used. Right now, though, there wasn’t much to put in it.

  So, she sat in her new office, wondering what in the world she was supposed to do with herself. Delegating duties didn’t take her long. She should probably look in on the work the maids were doing and make sure it was up to her standards. But that was something that required venturing back into the main part of the house, and she was not ready to do that.

  If Lord Chemsford saw her, if he tried to make her feel better about her lowly station again, she just might forget that she’d always been the calm and happy one. When Jess had insisted on teaching everyone in the house how to defend themselves, Kit had been enamored with the lessons, even if she was not very good, but Daphne had tried to avoid them. She didn’t like the idea of hitting someone or thinking about what sort of situation would necessitate her doing so. She hadn’t always been able to avoid the lessons, though, and so if it came to it, she knew she could give the marquis a decent whack.

  Of course, then she’d find herself in the unenviable position of being homeless. Again. Having nowhere to go once in her life had been enough, so she would stay in her new little office until this unusual urge passed.

  Now she just needed something to do.

  If Jess planned out meals beforehand, Daphne didn’t know it, nor was Jess likely to start allowing Daphne to organize such a task. With two footmen in the house, Daphne didn�
��t even have to go into town to do the shopping anymore.

  She frowned out the little window set high into the wall of her office. When she was standing, she could look over the bottom sill across the grass and see the edge of a section of garden that was in the process of being tamed. That wasn’t her domain either, was it? She knew how to milk a goat and collect eggs from chickens, but tending the garden hadn’t ever been an area where she felt very confident. She wouldn’t know the first thing about what to tell them to do with the lawns or the trees.

  Daphne dropped into her chair with a groan. How had she been able to stand all the idleness in the days she’d been in London? Had she really been able to fill her time with taking tea, reading books, and playing the piano? Surely she’d done something else. Those last few years there’d been lessons, of course. Since she’d been without a mother most of her life, her father had brought in tutors to teach her everything from dancing to pouring tea.

  Now she had time to fill her day with lessons once more, only this time it would be in preparation for teaching instead of simply learning.

  She pulled the first book out of the basket she’d retrieved early this morning. There was no particular logic behind the books she’d chosen. She’d simply looked for titles that sounded like subjects taught in school. It was all she had to go on since she hadn’t a clue what Kit had been teaching them before.

  Two hours later, her head and neck hurt from hunching over the table, but she knew a lot more about mathematics than ever before. Even seeing letters instead of numbers was starting to make a little sense, as long as she stuck to the basic ideas.

  There was something thrilling about knowing she could calculate how much of an ingredient Jess needed to make a large recipe. Not that Daphne could actually do anything with that knowledge.