Once and Always

by Judith McNaught

  As if he read her thoughts, he added stiffly, “If you have any problems with the staff, miss, bring them to me. As head of the household, I will endeavor to see that they are rectified immediately.”

  “I’m certain I won’t need to do that. Everyone here is very efficient,” Victoria said kindly. Too efficient, she thought as she wandered into the sunshine.

  She walked across the front lawns, then shifted direction and went around the side of the house, intending to visit the stables to see the horses. With a half-formed idea of using apples to befriend them, Victoria went round to the back and asked directions to the kitchen.

  The gigantic kitchen was filled with frantically busy people who were rolling out dough on wooden tables, stirring kettles, and chopping vegetables. In the center of the bedlam, an enormously fat man in a spotless white apron the size of a tablecloth stood like a frenzied monarch, waving a long-handled spoon and shouting instructions in French and English. “Excuse me,” Victoria said to the woman at the nearest table. “May I have two apples and two carrots if you can spare them?”

  The woman glanced uncertainly at the man in the white apron, who was glowering at Victoria; then she disappeared into another room adjoining the kitchen, returning a minute later with the apples and carrots. “Thank you, ah—?” Victoria said.

  “Mrs. Northrup, miss,” the woman said uneasily.

  “How nice,” Victoria replied with a sweet smile. “I’ve already met your husband, the butler, but he didn’t tell me you worked here, also.”

  “Mr. Northrup is my brother-in-law,” she corrected.

  “Oh, I see,” Victoria said, sensing the woman’s reluctance to talk in front of the moody fat man, who seemed to be in charge. “Well, good day, Mrs. Northrup.”

  A flagstone path bordered by woods on the right led to the stables. Victoria walked along, admiring the splended vista of rolling, clipped lawns and lavish gardens on her left, when a sudden movement a few yards away on her right made her stop short and stare. At the perimeter of the woods, a huge gray animal was foraging about in what appeared to be a small compost pile. The animal caught her scent and raised its head, its feral gaze locking with hers, and Victoria’s blood froze. Wolf! her mind screamed.

  Paralyzed with terror, she stood rooted to the spot, afraid to move or make a sound, while her benumbed brain registered haphazard facts about the terrifying beast. The wolf’s heavy gray coat was mangy-looking and thick, but not thick enough to hide its protruding ribs; it had terribly large jaws; its eyes were fierce. . . . Judging from the animal’s grotesque gauntness, it appeared to be nearly starved to death. Which meant it would attack and eat anything it could catch—including herself. Victoria took a tiny, cautious step backward toward the safety of the house.

  The animal snarled, its upper lip curling back, baring a set of huge white fangs to her view. Victoria reacted automatically, hurling her apples and carrots to him in a desperate effort to distract him from his obvious intention of eating her. Instead of pouncing on the missiles she’d thrown at him, as she expected him to, the animal jerked away from its garden feast and bolted into the woods with its tail between its legs. Victoria spun on her heel and raced into the house via the nearest back door, then ran to a window and peeked out at the woods. The wolf was standing just inside the perimeter of the trees, hungrily staring at the compost pile.

  “Is something wrong, miss?” a footman asked, coming up behind her on his way toward the kitchen.

  “I saw an animal,” Victoria said breathlessly. “I think it was a—” She watched as the gray beast trotted stealthily back to the garden and gobbled the apples and carrots; then it ran back into the woods, its bushy tail still between its legs. The animal was frightened! she realized. And starved. “Do you have any dogs around here?” she asked, suddenly wondering if she’d been about to make a mistake that would make her appear exceedingly foolish.

  “Yes, miss—several of ’em.”

  “Are any of them big, thin, and black and gray in color?”

  “That’d be his lordship’s old dog, Willie,” he said. “He’s always around here, beggin’ fer somethin’ to eat. He ain’t mean, if that’s worryin’ you. Did you see him?”

  “Yes,” Victoria said, growing angry as she remembered how the starved creature had been gobbling spoiled vegetables from the compost pile as if they were beefsteaks. “And he’s nearly starved. Someone ought to feed the poor thing.”

  “Willie always acts like he’s starved,” the footman replied with complete indifference. “His lordship says if he eats any more, he’ll be too fat to walk.”

  “If he eats any less, he’ll be too weak to live,” Victoria retorted angrily. She could perfectly imagine that heartless man starving his own dog. How pathetic the animal looked with his ribs sticking out like that—how gruesome! She went back to the kitchen and requested another apple, some carrots, and a plate of table scraps.

  Despite her sympathy, Victoria had to fight down her fear of the animal as she neared the compost pile and spotted him watching her from his hiding place just inside the woods. It was a dog, not a wolf, she could see that now. Remembering the footman’s assurance that the dog wasn’t vicious, Victoria walked as close to him as she dared and held out the plate of scraps. “Here, Willie,” she said softly. “I’ve brought you some good food.” Timidly, she took another step forward. Willie laid his ears back and bared his ivory fangs at her, and Victoria lost her courage. She put the plate down and fled toward the stables.

  She dined with Charles that night, and since Jason was again absent, the meal was delightful; but when it was over and Charles retired, she again found herself with time on her hands. Other than her trip to the stables and her adventure with Willie, she had done nothing today except wander aimlessly around with nothing to do. Tomorrow, she decided happily, she would go to work. She was used to being busy and she desperately needed something more to fill her empty hours. She hadn’t mentioned to Charles her intention of earning her keep, but she was certain that when he found out, he would be relieved that she was carrying her own weight and sparing him future tongue-lashings from his ill-tempered nephew.

  She went up to her room and spent the rest of the evening trying to write a cheerful, optimistic letter to Dorothy.

  Chapter Six

  VICTORIA AWOKE EARLY THE NEXT morning to the sound of birds chirping in the tree outside her open windows. Rolling over onto her back, she gazed at a bright blue sky filled with huge, puffy white clouds, the sort of sky that positively beckoned her outdoors.

  Washing and dressing hurriedly, she went downstairs to the kitchens to get food for Willie. Jason Fielding had sarcastically asked if she could push a plow or drive a nail or milk a cow. She couldn’t do the first two, but she had often seen cows milked at home and it didn’t look particularly difficult. Besides, after six weeks of confinement on the ship, any sort of physical activity was appealing.

  She was about to leave the kitchen with a plate of scraps when a thought struck her. Ignoring the outraged stare of the man in the white apron, who Charles had told her last night was the chef and who was watching her as if she were a madwoman invading his pot-bedecked kingdom, she turned to Mrs. Northrup. “Mrs. Northrup, is there anything I could do—to help here in the kitchen, I mean?”

  Mrs. Northrup’s hand flew to her throat. “No, of course not.”

  Victoria sighed. “In that case, could you tell me where I will find the cows?”

  “The cows?” Mrs. Northrup gasped. “What—whatever for?”

  “To milk them,” Victoria said.

  The woman paled but said nothing, and after a puzzled moment, Victoria shrugged and decided to find them herself. She headed out the back door to search for Willie. Mrs. Northrup wiped the flour off her hands and headed straight for the front door to find Mr. Northrup.

  As Victoria neared the compost pile, her eyes nervously scanned the woods for a sign of the dog. Willie—what an odd name for such a large, ferocious-lo
oking animal, she thought. And then she saw him, lurking just inside the perimeter of the trees, watching her. The short hairs on the back of her neck stood up, but she carried the bowl of scraps as close to the woods as she dared. “Here, Willie,” she coaxed softly. “I’ve brought your breakfast. Come get it.”

  The huge beast’s eyes flickered to the plate in her hand, but he stayed where he was, watchful, alert.

  “Won’t you come a little closer?” Victoria continued, determined to befriend Jason Fielding’s dog, since she could never befriend the man.

  The dog was no more cooperative than his master. He refused to be coaxed and kept his threatening gaze focused on her. With a sigh, Victoria put the plate down and walked away.

  A gardener directed her to where the cows were kept, and Victoria walked into the spotless barn, her nose tickled by the scent of sweet-smelling hay. She paused uncertainly as a dozen cows looked up, regarding her with huge, liquid brown eyes as she walked along the row of stalls. She stopped at one with a stool and bucket hanging on the wall, thinking that this cow would surely be the most likely prospect for milking. “Good morning,” she said to the cow, patting its smooth face reassuringly while she tried to bolster her courage. Now that the moment was at hand, Victoria wasn’t at all certain she remembered exactly how one went about milking a cow.

  Stalling for time, she strolled around the cow and plucked a few pieces of straw from its tail, then reluctantly took down the stool and placed the bucket in position beneath the animal’s pendulous udder. She sat down and slowly rolled up the sleeves of her gown, then arranged her skirts about her. Unaware of the man who had just stalked into the barn, she stroked the animal’s flank and drew a long, hesitant breath. “I may as well be perfectly honest with you,” she confessed to the cow. “The truth is—I haven’t actually done this before.”

  Her rueful admission stopped Jason in mid-stride at the entrance to the stall, and his eyes warmed with fascinated amusement as he gazed at her. Seated upon the milking stool with her skirts spread about her as carefully as if she were seated upon a throne, Miss Victoria Seaton presented a very fetching picture. Her head was bent slightly as she concentrated on the task before her, providing him with a delightful view of her patrician profile with its elegant cheekbones and delicate little nose. Sunlight from the window above glinted in her hair, turning it into a shimmering red-gold waterfall that tumbled over her shoulders. Long curly eyelashes cast shadows on her smooth cheeks as she caught her lower lip between her teeth and reached down to move the bucket an inch forward.

  The action drew Jason’s gaze to the thrusting fullness of her breasts as they pushed invitingly against the bodice of her black gown, but her next words made his shoulders shake with laughter. “This,” she told the cow in a revolted voice as she stretched her hands forward, “is going to be as embarrassing for me as it is for you.”

  Victoria touched the cow’s fleshy teats and jerked her hands away with a loud “Ugh!” Then she tried again. She squeezed twice, quickly, then she leaned back and gazed hopefully at the bucket. No milk dropped into it. “Please, please, don’t make this difficult,” she implored the cow.

  Twice more she repeated the same process, and still nothing happened. Frustration made her yank too hard the next time, which brought the cow’s head swinging around as it glared reproachfully at her. “I’m doing my part,” Victoria said, glaring right back, “the least you could do is yours!”

  Behind her, a laughing masculine voice warned, “You’ll curdle her milk if you glower at her like that.”

  Victoria jumped and whirled around on the stool, sending her coppery hair spilling over her left shoulder. “You!” she burst out, flushing in mortification at the scene he had obviously witnessed. “Why must you always creep up on people without a sound? The least you could do is—”

  “Knock?” he suggested, his eyes glinting with laughter. With slow deliberation, he lifted his hand and rapped his knuckles twice upon the wooden beam. “Do you always talk to animals?” he asked conversationally.

  Victoria was in no mood to be mocked, and she could see by the gleam in his eyes he was doing exactly that. With as much dignity as she could muster, she stood up, smoothed her skirts, and tried to walk past him.

  His hand shot out and caught her arm in a firm but painless grip. “Aren’t you going to finish milking?”

  “You’ve already seen that I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  Victoria put her chin up and looked him right in the eye. “Because I don’t know how.”

  One dark brow lifted over an amused green eye. “Do you want to learn?”

  “No,” Victoria said, angry and humiliated. “Now, if you’ll remove your hand from my arm—” She jerked her arm free without waiting for him to acquiesce. “—I’ll try to find some other way to earn my keep here.”

  She felt his narrowed gaze on her as she walked away, but her thoughts soon shifted to Willie as she neared the house. She saw the dog, lurking just inside the woods, watching her. A chill skittered down her spine, but she ignored it. She had just been intimidated by a cow, and she adamantly refused to be cowed by a dog.

  Jason watched her walk away, then shrugged off the memory of an angelic-looking milkmaid with sunlight in her hair and went back to the work he’d abandoned when Northrup rushed into his study to inform him that Miss Seaton had gone to milk the cows.

  Sitting down at his desk, he glanced at his secretary. “Where were we, Benjamin?”

  “You were dictating a letter to your man in Delhi, my lord.”

  Having failed to milk the cow, Victoria sought out the gardener who had directed her to the barn. She went up to the bald man, who seemed to be in charge of the others, and asked if she could help plant the bulbs they were putting in the huge circular flower beds in the front courtyard.

  “Stick to your duties at the barn and get out of our way, woman!” the bald gardener roared.

  Victoria gave up. Without bothering to explain that she had no duties at the barn, she went in the opposite direction toward the back of the house to seek the only kind of work she was actually qualified to do—she went to the kitchen.

  The head gardener watched her, threw down his trowel, and went to find Northrup.

  Unobserved, Victoria stood just inside the kitchen, where eight servants were busily preparing what appeared to be a luncheon of stew complemented with fresh seasoned vegetables, flaky, newly baked bread, and a half dozen side dishes. Disheartened by her last two attempts to make herself useful, Victoria watched until she was absolutely certain she could actually handle this task; then she approached the volatile French chef. “I would like to help,” she said firmly.

  “Non!” he screamed, evidently believing her to be a servant in her plain black dress. “Out! Out! Get out. Go attend your duties.”

  Victoria was heartily sick of being treated like a useless idiot. Very politely, but very firmly, she said, “I can be of help here, and it is obvious from the way everyone is rushing about that you can use an extra pair of hands.”

  The chef looked ready to explode. “You are not trained,” he thundered. “Get out! When André needs help, he will ask for it and he will do zee training!”

  “There is nothing the least bit complicated about making a stew, monsieur,” Victoria pointed out, exasperated. Ignoring his purpling complexion at her casual dismissal of the complexity of his culinary skills, she continued in a bright, reasonable tone, “All one has to do is cut up vegetables on this table here—” She tapped the table beside her. “—and toss them into that kettle there.” She pointed to the one hanging above the fire.

  An odd, strangled sound emerged from the apoplectic man before he tore off his apron. “In five minutes,” he said as he stormed out of the kitchen, “I will have you thrown out of zis house!”

  In the crackling silence he left behind, Victoria looked around at the remaining servants, who were staring at her in frozen horror, their eyes mirroring everything
from sympathy to amusement. “Goodness, girl,” a kindly, middle-aged woman said as she wiped flour from her hands onto her apron, “what possessed you to stir him up? He’ll have you thrown out on your ear for this.”

  Except for the little maid named Ruth who looked after Victoria’s room, this was the first friendly voice Victoria had heard from any of the servants in the entire house. Unfortunately, she was so miserable at having created trouble when she only wished to help that the woman’s sympathy nearly reduced her to tears.

  “Not that you weren’t right,” the woman continued, with a gentle pat on Victoria’s arm, “about it bein’ that simple to make a stew. Any one of us could carry on without André, but his lordship demands the best—and André is the best chef in the country. You may as well go and pack your things, for it’s certain-sure you’ll be turned off the place within the hour.”

  Victoria could scarcely trust her voice enough to reassure the woman on that head. “I’m a guest here, not a servant—I thought Mrs. Northrup would have told you that.”

  The woman’s mouth dropped open. “No, miss, she did not. The staff isn’t permitted to gossip, and Mrs. Northrup would be the last to do it, her bein’ related by marriage to Mr. Northrup, the butler. I knew we had a guest stayin’ at the house, but I—” Her eyes darted to Victoria’s shabby-genteel black dress and the girl flushed. “May I fix you somethin’ to eat?”

  Victoria’s shoulders drooped with frustrated despair. “No, but I’d—I’d like to make something to ease Mr. O’Malley’s swollen jaw. It’s a poultice, made of simple ingredients, but it might lessen the pain of his infected tooth.”

  The woman, who said her name was Mrs. Craddock, showed Victoria where to find the ingredients she asked for and Victoria went to work, fully expecting “his lordship” to come stalking into the kitchen and publicly humiliate her at any moment.

  Jason had just started to dictate the same letter he’d been dictating when he learned Victoria had gone out to the barn to milk a cow, when Northrup again tapped on the door of his study.