The Silver Lord

by Miranda Jarrett

“Because the Trelawneys’ solicitors told you you must.”

  “Because I wish it this way.” He reached out and placed his hand over hers with the keys, gently pushing both back towards her. “Because it is right.”

  She stared down at his hand over his. This time she didn’t pull away, and though she was silent, he could sense her warring with herself, fighting her own judgment.

  “Because,” he said. “Damnation, Fan, because you belong here.”

  She raised her gaze to meet his, letting him glimpse that same vulnerable, lonely girl he’d discovered earlier in the graveyard, the one that was so carefully hidden behind the guise of the stern, competent housekeeper. He felt her turn her fingers against his, not to grasp the ring of keys more firmly, but to find the comfort of his touch.

  “Because you want me to stay?” she whispered, the depth of her daring bright in her eyes.

  “Because I want you to stay,” he repeated, and to his confused surprise he realized he’d never wanted anything more in his life. No, that wasn’t exactly true. What he wanted more was to take her into his arms, to feel the roughness of her woolen gown and the softness of her skin and learn how her hair would come undone and spill over his arm as he turned her face up towards his to kiss her. That was what he wanted even more.

  But though he was known as a brave man, with medals and gold braid on his coat to prove it, he wasn’t brave enough to kiss her that boldly, not now, not yet. Instead he raised her hand, the keys jingling together, and pressed his lips to the back of it, closing his eyes to savor the scent of her wrist there at the edge of her sleeve, to feel the strength and the gentleness of her neatly curled fingers.

  That was all, and for this evening that would be enough.

  He wanted her to stay, and now she would.

  Chapter Five

  Sleep did not come easily to Fan that night, and by the time she heard the old case clock in the front hall chime four, she doubted she’d closed her eyes for more than a quarter of an hour altogether. It was not that the newcomers to Feversham had made noise to keep her awake—they were all in bed and asleep long before she’d doused her own candlestick—but simply the knowledge that she was no longer alone in the house was enough to make her toss and turn and worry herself into exhaustion.

  Add to that the scene of George kissing her hand in his bedchamber—his fingers cradling hers as gently as if they’d been made of spun glass, his lips warm against her skin, the way he’d murmured her given name—playing over and over in her memory, and she doubted she’d ever be able to find peace in sleep again.

  George. A saint’s name, the name of kings, and now the name of Feversham’s new owner. But oh, when did she begin thinking of him like that, as George instead of the string of his titles? She was his housekeeper, his servant, not his friend and certainly not his lover. To address him with such familiarity would be the one more slippery step downward to her own ruin, with no way ever to climb back.

  That kiss on her hand had been another. Why, why hadn’t she pulled away with the same decisiveness that she’d mustered when he’d taken her arm in the village? Could she only protest when there were others watching? Or was she so weak that she’d cared more for that shiver of heady pleasure that came from his touch? So weak that she’d welcome his attention even after he’d confessed that he’d kept her here only because the Trelawneys had ordered it?

  So weak, or was she simply that lonely?

  With a groan of frustration she pushed back the coverlets and rolled from the bed, reaching for the flint to light her candlestick. There seemed little point in trying any longer to sleep, and besides, no matter how early it was, she could always find much to do. She’d squandered yesterday afternoon aimlessly riding Pie along the flat stretch of the beach at low tide, looking for a possible new rendezvous spot of the Company that was off Feversham land and trying to sort her muddled thoughts. But all she’d succeeded in doing was wasting time that she could ill afford to waste, and making herself even more miserable in the process.

  She blew the coals in her fireplace back to life, and hooked the kettle over them to heat water for tea while she dressed. With only herself in the house, she’d fallen into the habit of cooking and eating here, in her bedchamber, rather than lighting fires in the enormous kitchen hearth. Her aunt would have been horrified, accusing her of living in one room like some wretched poor cottager, but Fan had found cooking for one below stairs too bleak and solitary, her father’s tall-backed chair at the oak table too painfully empty.

  That would change now. She wasn’t certain exactly how many men George had brought with him, but she could guess that, being men, they would be expecting their breakfast when they woke. It would be a new challenge, no doubt, but she was ready to take it, especially with this early a start on the day.

  But she did wish she knew what George liked for his first meal so she’d be able to please him. Was he the sort of gentleman who eased himself into the day with a dish of milky tea and a plate of raisin buns, or did he prefer to make a hearty conquest of his breakfast, with the sideboard laden with meats and pies, pots of butter and marmalade and rafts of toast? She would have to learn his preferences, in this as in everything else.

  Swiftly she washed, dressed, and braided her hair while she sipped at her tea, then took the candlestick to light her way and hurried down the back stairs to begin the kitchen fire. A single, mournful bong from the tall clock echoed her footsteps: half past four.

  Early, yes, but not as early as Fan had believed. Even on the stairs she could hear the sounds of pans crashing together and a man’s off-key singing and swearing, one blending seamlessly into the other. She could also smell the scent of roasting meat, and see the bright, flickering light from the fire, a large and wasteful fire, too, from the brightness of it. She frowned, determined to stop such blatant disregard for the cost of wood, and marched sternly into the kitchen.

  And stopped abruptly at the sight before her. What her poor, dear aunt would have made of this in her kitchen!

  Looming over the hearth was a stout older man with one leg missing below the knee, the stump supported by an elaborately carved wooden peg turned like a newel post at the base of a staircase. The man had no hair left on the top of his head, but from the nape he still could grow the gray queue that hung down the middle of his back, nearly to the strings of the leather apron tied around his barrel-shaped waist. In his hand he brandished a long-handled meat-fork like a kitchen-king’s scepter, and beneath his bristling white brows was no welcome for Fan at all.

  “What d’ye be gawkin’ at, missy?” he demanded.

  “And what are you doing in my kitchen?” she demanded back, settling her hands on her hips. Not only was the man making free with the hearth and larder, but he’d also changed things that hadn’t been changed in Fan’s lifetime: the woodbin had been shifted from one side of the room to the other, the ancient black iron kettle with the mended handle had been replaced by one of new copper, and twin rows of new blue-and-white chalkware plates now filled the shelves of the Welsh dresser in place of the familiar battered pewter chargers. “What is your name?”

  “I be John Small, His Lord Cap’n’s cook and warrant officer of His Majesty’s frigate Nimble, and twice the man as any you’ll ever know,” said the man, jabbing his fork at a chicken roasting on a spit over the fire. “Who the devil be you?”

  “I am Mistress Winslow, the keeper of this house,” she said warmly, giving an irritable little shove at a packing-barrel filled with wood shavings and more new dishes, “and I have no love for ill-mannered old men, whomever they pretend to be. Why are you here at this hour, meddling where you don’t belong and waking the house with your blasphemy and caterwauling?”

  “I be makin’ His Lordship’s breakfast, as even a fool in black petticoats could see if she used her eyes for seein’.” With the long-handled fork, he turned the strips of bacon sizzling in the iron spider, one deft twist of his wrist that kept the fat from splattering into
the coals.

  “As for this hour or that hour,” he continued, without deigning to look her way, “why, it be smack in the middle o’ morning watch, and if His Lordship’s not to go begging for his eggs and bacon, but to have them proper, when he wakes, then this be the hour when they gets made.”

  Fan flushed, for this was not how the morning was to have begun. Here she’d contrived a pleasing dream of surprising George with a fine-made breakfast, while this dreadful old man had already done so and better, and in her own kitchen, too, making her feel like a lazy, worthless slug-a-bed in the bargain.

  “Now if you wish to make yourself useful, missy,” continued Small, cracking four eggs in quick succession into the glossy sheen of melted butter waiting in another pan over the coals, “then there’s His Lordship’s chocolate still waiting.”

  “I am not here to take orders from you,” said Fan tartly, but still she looked to where he was pointing with his fork. On the table sat a tall, cone-shaped contraption like a pewter coffeepot without a spout or handle, but with a long wooden paddle that protruded through a hole in the lid. Beside it on a trivet sat a pan of steaming milk, and a dish of grated chocolate.

  “Get along with it, missy,” he said impatiently. “Put the chocolate into the mill, then the milk, slow and easy, to keep out the lumps. His Lordship don’t care for lumps in his chocolate, not at all.”

  Fan studied the chocolate mill warily. No one she knew drank chocolate, not with tea so readily available, and she’d never seen a chocolate mill before this one. Not that she wished to admit that to John Small.

  “I don’t take orders from the kitchen staff,” she said defensively. “As Feversham’s housekeeper, I give them.”

  The man’s eyes gleamed. “That don’t be it at all,” he said, his contempt palpable. “Do it now? Nay, it be that you don’t know how to make chocolate, do you?”

  “Of course I do,” she said swiftly, though of course she didn’t. She lifted the lid on the mill and poured the milk inside, around the wooden paddle, and then the chocolate, before she snapped the lid down tight. She reasoned that somehow the chocolate must be blended with the milk, and taking the mill in both hands, she gave it a tentative shake.

  “Do you be daft, missy, or only pretending to make a righteous idiot of yourself?” Small yanked the mill from her hands and set it on the table. He centered the handle of the paddle between his palms and rolled it briskly back and forth until the milk and chocolate became a frothy, fragrant mixture. “There now, that be how fine London gentlemen drink their chocolate.”

  “But this isn’t London,” she protested. “This is Kent.”

  “Oh, aye, and I be needing you to explain the differences?” He snorted as he deftly flipped the sizzling bacon in the skillet. “I’ve seen cockle-shell galleys with better kitchens than this. Where’s your proper stove, I ask you? Cookin’ over a fire like this be well and fine for grannies and cottagers and such, but if His Lordship expects grand dinners for his mates, then a proper Robinson range we must have.”

  “Perhaps you should be making do with what you have rather than pining after what you don’t,” said Fan defensively, striving to keep her voice from turning shrill with frustration. She’d no more knowledge of what “a proper Robinson range” might be than of how to operate a chocolate mill, and the more John Small ranted and railed, the more ignorant she felt.

  She couldn’t deny that Feversham had grown shabby under the Trelawneys, but the kitchen had always been sufficient for her aunt and her mother and a score of other cooks before them, and to hear it attacked now by this one-legged old sailor—why, it seemed disrespectful and wrong.

  “Perhaps you shouldn’t be looking to change everything just for the sake of changing,” she said, “not when—here now, where are you going with that?”

  A beardless young sailor with a calico kerchief tied around his head and his arms full of firewood stared blankly at her.

  “There’s plenty of wood in the woodbin already without you traipsing in here with more,” she said. “Besides, dry wood like that costs good money, and we’ll not be wasting it keeping a great roaring fire all the day long in the kitchen. Take it back to—”

  “Stow it here in the woodbin, Danny,” said Small as easily as he’d arranged the breakfast tray. “No use runnin’ short o’ twigs, is there?”

  “No, Danny, don’t. Where do you think that wood comes from, Mr. Small?” asked Fan, feeling her housekeeper’s dubious authority slipping away from her with every word. “Who shall be accountable at the end of the month, when the books show how much wood was wasted in the kitchen fires?”

  “Why, missy, I do believe them twigs come from trees,” said the cook with a sly wink and a grin. “As for the reckoning, His Lordship will care a hell of a lot more for his chocolate and fresh bread than he will for a few more shillings one way or t’other for the firewood to make them.”

  “Then I shall ask His Lordship myself.” Boldly she seized the tray like a prize away from the cook.

  “Here now, you can’t take that!” exclaimed the cook, lunging clumsily across the table for the tray.

  “I can, Mr. Small, and you cannot,” she said, her heart racing at her own daring. “Cook and her—his—staff never come above stairs.”

  But she knew better than to press her advantage, and instead hurried off with the tray before her, up the stairs to George’s bedchamber. This all needed to be settled now, on this first day, before matters grew even worse.

  Yet with each step both her audacity and her indignation seemed to fade. Most likely Small was right. Most likely his master did care more for his meals and his comforts than for the costs. Why shouldn’t he, when he was now wealthier than most princes?

  She was the one who, from long habit, felt the need to count shillings and pence. She was the one who seemed so woefully out of place now, the only woman in a houseful of men, the country housekeeper who didn’t know how to use the chocolate mill, cast adrift in a sea of hostile sailors.

  Yet hadn’t George himself asked her to stay? Hadn’t he shown her kindness, and laughed with her, and shared confidences, when no one else would? Hadn’t he kissed her hand, and spoken her plain given name in a whisper that had made it fit for a princess?

  And wasn’t she the one who seemed to have lost all sense of judgment where this man was concerned, unable to tell right from wrong, proper from wicked? Everything had become tangled and confused, and she’d no experience to tell her where to begin to sort it out.

  No wonder that when she came to stand before his bedchamber door, she was so on edge with doubts that the spoons and forks rattled together on the tray in her hands. He had asked her to stay, and she had believed him because she’d wanted to.

  And she’d learn soon enough if he’d meant his request any more than he’d meant that kiss to her hand.

  She glanced down at the crack beneath the door, making sure from the strip of faint candlelight that he was indeed awake. She’d no intention of returning to the kitchen with the tray still full, but she’d also no wish to come crashing in on George while he was still asleep. Old Mr. Trelawney had kept to his bed the last three years of his life, and Fan had thought nothing of serving him there or tending to whatever querulous requests his manservant had neglected, but to do the same for George would be an entirely—entirely—different proposition.

  Balancing the tray against her hip, she rapped her knuckles sharply against the door. Unlike last night, this time his permission to enter came swiftly, and with a deep breath for courage, she unlatched the door and pushed it open.

  He was sitting at the long table that he’d turned into a makeshift desk, papers and open books scattered over the top. Unmatched candlesticks of varying heights stood along the desk, some balanced precariously on top of books. The candles’ flames wavered in the drafty room, dancing the light and shadows over the walls while the wax dripped and puddled over the papers. But George himself seemed too engrossed in his work to noti
ce, his pen scratching rapidly across the paper before him.

  “Set it down wherever you can,” he said absently, without looking up. “The floor will do well enough.”

  “The floor will not do!” she exclaimed, scandalized. “You are an English lord and officer of the king. You cannot eat from the floor like some mongrel gnawing at his scraps!”

  “Fan!” he said, startled. “That is, Miss Winslow. I did not, ah, expect to see you.”

  That was clear enough. She seemed unwittingly to be making a habit of this, surprising him by popping up in the place of someone else. But this time, as he automatically rose to his feet from well-bred habit, Fan was equally startled into stammered incoherence at the sight of him.

  Though she’d found him engrossed in his writing, he obviously wasn’t long out of bed. His hair was as tousled as a haystack, his jaw stubbled, and his blue eyes still muddled with sleep, or perhaps the lack of it. But instead of the severe, dark uniform that she’d always seen him wearing before this, he’d barely taken the time to dress at all, pulling on an old pair of threadbare canvas trousers that seemed to hang from his narrow hips—an observation Fan couldn’t help but make, considering that he hadn’t bothered with a shirt, let alone a coat.

  Instead he was wearing some sort of long, loose dressing-gown of dark red silk, open and unbelted, whose details eluded Fan. How could they do otherwise, really, when the shimmering dark red silk seemed to exist only to frame his bare throat and chest and the dangerous, fascinating area directly above those low-slung breeches? The candlelight flickered across the broad, taut muscles and the pattern of dark, curling hair that tapered into the fall of his breeches, the only flaw the jagged, seamed pucker of an old scar: an unintentional display that, even in her inexperience, Fan recognized as intriguingly, flagrantly male.

  Startled as she was, she stared only for a single stunned moment before she dropped her gaze to the tray to stare, unseeing, at her reflection in the domed pewter covers over the plates. But the impression of what she had seen was already seared into her consciousness, enough to make her cheeks burn and her whole body feel peculiarly warm.