by Rose Lerner
He nodded. “The water will be cooling in half an hour. If you want me before then, shout.”
It was a marvelous half-hour. Sukey splashed about, humming to herself, exploring the tub, glad no one was looking at her. She liked John looking at her, of course, but sometimes you wanted just to be yourself. She floated, drowsy and dreaming, until she was half afeared she’d fall asleep and drown. Sitting up exposed her breasts and shoulders to the cooler air. It felt nice. She was pink all over, flushed with heat.
She grew almost bored, but she resisted calling for John. This was a pleasure she’d have only once, or at least only once in a very great while. She ought to wring the last drops from it. Washing her hair with soft soap, she marveled at how much cleaner this felt than bending one’s head over a little washtub. Curious, she soaped her breasts, liking the way her hands slipped over them. Behind her, one of the candle-ends guttered out with a hiss and smell of smoke.
John knocked. She laughed and ducked under the water, washing her bosom clean. “Come.” She stood, water dripping down her. John froze for a moment before he remembered to shut the door behind him. He leaned against it, silent and still.
Paralyzed with lust, she thought. For her.
Then he rushed forward and handed her a towel. “You mustn’t catch a chill.”
“I’ll not be this warm again till June,” she said as she stepped out of the tub, although in that moment she felt she’d be warm forever. There was snow on the ground outside, but she was burning up. Even putting on her shift would smother her. “Isn’t there anything you’d like me to do, now I’m naked in the middle of the room?” She dried her hair as well as she could, glad it didn’t fall much past her shoulders. She’d finish it before the kitchen fire later.
He wound a damp tress round his finger. “You smell like roses.” When he let go to spread out their bedroll, her hair retained the curl, remembering him.
All of her remembered him, was homesick for him. The air stroked and petted her when she moved, curling around her shoulders, her belly, the back of her knee. John lay down on the pallet. “Come here.”
He arranged her upright and straddling his thighs, only the insides of her knees brushing his pantaloons. She liked the way she towered over him. “It’s not often I’m taller than you.”
“Are you wet?” His voice was hoarse.
“Of course,” she said innocently. “I just got out of the bath.” She’d never felt so clean, as if she’d emerged from the water new-baptized and he was christening her with his eyes. Marking her as his own.
“Answer the question.”
She slipped her middle finger between her folds, testing. “Yes, a little.”
“Make yourself wet enough to take me.” Unbuttoning his pantaloons, he drew his cock out. Stroked it until it was hard enough to spear her with ease.
She watched him watch her, finger circling her pearl, slow at first, then faster, rougher.
He held his cock upright in his hand. “Now.”
She crawled forward and lowered herself onto him, feeling her cunny stretch. He took his hand away and left them joined just there, between their legs, making no move to touch her. “You like to watch me, don’t you?” she asked.
His mouth curved. “You said it yourself: you won’t be this warm again until June.”
“Do you think you’d like to watch another man fuck me?” she asked, very daring. Too daring, maybe. “You wouldn’t miss a detail then.”
He lay still beneath her, but his cock twitched.
She leaned over him. Drops of rose-scented water fell from the tips of her hair onto his shirt. “Or a woman, maybe?” The idea of John fucking another woman had made her furious at the servants’ ball, but if she was there too… “I’d like that, I think. Suckling at her tits while she cried out from your cock in her.”
Yes, she thought, she would like that. To make the other girl mindless, desperate, pushed beyond the bounds of ordinary sensation. She’d like to touch a female body that wasn’t her own and see how it responded to her. She’d like to feel John’s eyes on her while she did it.
John’s hips began to move. Sukey fumbled, but soon they were moving in harmony, grinding against each other. He kept his hands clenched at his sides.
Another candle-end guttered out. It made her feel very fond of him, somehow. She loved the way he wrinkled his nose. “Would you like that?” she murmured, still touching herself.
The sound he made was half a laugh, half a moan. “Where would we find this obliging person?”
Sukey shrugged. “I could ask a likely looking woman to help carry my basket home from the market. That turned out well for me last time.”
He shut his eyes. “You wouldn’t really, would you?”
She cuffed him on the arm. “Of course not! I do think of my reputation, you know.” She leaned forward so her pearl was pressed between her finger and his belly with each stroke. Shutting her eyes, she teased her nipple with her free hand and imagined that another woman was doing it, that another woman was crouched by them, watching her shake, coaxing her to her peak, eager to see her wracked with pleasure.
“Then yes,” he growled. “I’d like it a great deal, as you very well know. Then I could see what you look like with someone’s tongue between your legs. God knows it always sounds terribly impressive.”
She nearly fainted with the force of her pleasure. She awoke leaning over him, arms trembling as they held her up. She was hot and worn out, and her hair was drying at the tips, waving slightly. John was watching her.
She did love him. It was just a stupid word and it didn’t mean forever or sure or safe, but it meant how she felt.
Well, there was no use in crying over spilt milk. She smiled at him—or meant to. Her mouth wobbled a little. Her second try was better. “Did you see everything you wanted to?”
He shook his head. “I never will.” He held himself back from spending with an effort, every muscle tensed and unmoving save his hips, tilting up barely at all with each thrust. “There’ll always be more of you to see.”
“You shouldn’t be so sweet. You’ll encourage me to henpeck you.”
He bent his knees and sat, startling her. She nestled in the cradle of his lap now, his thighs at her back. “Kiss me,” he said.
He was too tall. She had to rise up on her knees to do it, half off his cock. But she kissed him, her tongue against his. He wrapped his arms tight around her naked body and spent like that, only half inside her but all around her anyway.
* * *
Hal! John almost said to the footman in green-and-gold livery standing on the vicarage steps. But remembering himself, he only said, “Good day,” and held out his hand for Lady Tassell’s calling card. He had handed over hundreds of these in his life. Thousands, probably. Strange to be receiving one, and to say, “Shall I inquire if the vicar is at home?”
“If you would, sir.” As the countess, standing at the foot of the stairs, could see John’s face and not Hal’s, he could only bow in answer to the footman’s friendly smile.
“Lady Tassell is here to see you, sir,” he told the vicar, who was lingering over his luncheon with a new book from London. “Will you receive her?”
“Indeed I will. I have been expecting her. Ask Mrs. Khaleel to make up a tea tray, will you? Is the fire lit in the living room?”
John felt that the vicar might have mentioned this expectation. “Yes, sir.”
“Then I will receive her there.”
So John took his former mistress’s muff, tartan pelisse and furs and showed her into the living room. “The Right Honorable the Countess of Tassell,” he announced her, and depositing the overclothes by the laundry fire to dry, he hurried to the kitchen to inform Mrs. Khaleel about the tray.
Hal accompanied him, removing his wig with relief and swinging it by its queue as he walked. It was a ha
bit in footmen John’s father had always deplored, as powder inevitably got on the hand and leg and from thence, everywhere else. “I heard you got married. We all wish you joy.”
“Thanks,” John said, after which any delicate attempt to inquire into the countess’s business was forestalled by Mrs. Khaleel’s eager questions as to the type of sandwiches and cake her ladyship preferred.
He knew more about her preferences than he did about the vicar’s.
As he carried in the tea tray and laid out the cups and plates, he felt her watching him, as serenely triumphant as if he marched before her in chains through the streets of Rome. He strongly disliked knowing that she must think him come down in the world since leaving her employ, as if his present home and his marriage were a wretchedness she had forced him to.
Larry, settling the urn on the cloth, contrived somehow to press his hand to the hot silver and made a pained hissing noise. John kept his face impassive as he dropped two slices of lemon and a lump of sugar into an empty cup, but he saw the corner of Lady Tassell’s mouth quirk up and felt hot with embarrassment.
“Just how I prefer it, thank you, Mr. Toogood,” she said in a surprisingly friendly way. “I should like to speak to you before I go, if your master will allow it.”
John pantomimed polite surprise, mind racing inwardly. Surely she wouldn’t go so far as to request Mr. Summers to dismiss him from his post. But then what could she possibly want? Perhaps she merely wished to convey his mother’s greetings. That seemed long odds, but he could think of no other innocent reason. “Sir, if I may?”
“Naturally, Toogood. I know better than to stand in her ladyship’s way.” The two gentlefolk laughed as if it were a joke and not the literal truth.
John waited in an agony of impatience for the vicar’s ring, and then waited another count of thirty; promptness was a virtue, but in this case, he wished to avoid any appearance of listening at the door. Mr. Summers’s face was long, but he kissed the air above Lady Tassell’s hand as he stood, old-fashioned and courtly. “I cannot wish you luck, my lady,” he said, “but I will wish you a fair hearing.” He made a good-natured flourish to John in her direction and went out.
John came to stand before her, hands behind his back. “My lady.”
It had been so long since he’d seen her that he had forgotten the full force of her. She was small, but it was not only her petticoats and frills and tall hat that gave her the appearance of height. Ice-cream faces, Sukey had said of Dymond boys. Nothing to stick in the mind. Lady Tassell was blonde, fair-skinned and even delicate of feature, but the angular jaw that gave Lord Lenfield the air of a capably executed statue of an Olympian was unforgettable on her, and pleasantly so. John had always liked her. She was autocratic, but she was good company and her rules were simple. Until recently, he had followed them and got on well with her.
But he admitted to himself for the first time that Nick Dymond had always been his favorite of the Dymond boys precisely because he did neither.
She smiled, gesturing to the vicar’s vacated chair. “Sit, Mr. Toogood. I don’t plan to give you orders.”
John didn’t like it, but he sat.
“Please allow me to wish you joy on your marriage. Your wife is Susan Grimes, isn’t she? My daughter-in-law’s maid?” She shook her head, laughing at life’s absurdity. “Like master, like man.”
“Thank you, my lady.”
The countess’s face grew grave. Eyes on her hands, she crumbled a piece of cake in her fingers. “You look so much like your father,” she said at last, and then was silent another half a minute. “He was at Tassell Hall before my husband was born, you know.”
John felt a sudden pang of fear. “Is he—is he well?”
She pushed away her plate of crumbs and met his eyes. “He has had no sudden decline, and he isn’t ill. But he is becoming an old man. I’m an old woman, and he has a score of years on me at least.”
John said nothing. It was only what he already knew.
“I know I can’t expect such an active man as your father to sit in an easy chair by the fire, any more than I’d do so myself. But I’ve asked him and your mother to go and manage our house in Rye Bay. It’s lovely there, and there’s only a small staff. Not much larger than the one here.”
“That was very kind of you, my lady.”
As he spoke, he remembered Sukey’s imitation of an upper servant: wooden face and silence. His wife probably imagined that great folk expected the demeanor as a show of respect. That it was a suppression of oneself to please one’s employer.
He’d always thought of it differently. The larger the staff, the smaller the importance of each member in his mistress’s eyes. How much less inconvenient to replace one among dozens! Better to present a smooth surface with nothing to snag or seize upon. The less Lady Tassell knew, the less she had to use against him.
He wondered if that explained the Dymond boys’ ice-cream faces.
“Your father can’t manage Tassell Hall anymore,” she said. “I’ll muddle through one more summer if I must, but after that… I don’t wish to hurt his pride. More than that, I want to repay him for his years of loyal service. He wants you to replace him. Will you?”
John could not have been more astonished if Lady Tassell had thrown herself into his arms and embraced him.
He wanted to refuse at once, unequivocally—but how could he? “It is a position of great trust. Is your ladyship certain you wish to offer it to me?”
She sighed. “Here we come to it,” she said frankly. “You’re angry, I suppose, at my treatment of you.”
“I understood your reasons.”
She laughed unhappily. “Until your child refuses to see or speak to you, until one of the suns of your existence informs you that it will henceforth be dark to you—no, I don’t think you do.”
“I’m sorry matters between you have come to such a pass.”
“I thought he was susceptible, and you failed to protect him. Susceptible, ha! I never would have thought he could hold a grudge so long.”
John thought Nick Dymond had resolutely turned his face away from his mother long before he stopped speaking to her. That she hadn’t recognized it was not to her credit—but hard truths were hard to face, and perhaps she was right that he wasn’t a parent, and could not understand.
She leaned in, distracting him from wondering if he would ever be a father himself. “Your talents are wasted here. You were an exceptional footman, and then an exceptional valet, and you are quite clearly an exceptional butler. But as good-hearted as these people are, one day you will want more scope for your genius than a quiet vicarage. I know you, John. You read the papers, you follow the debates in Parliament. You and I, we want to put our stamp on the world. Elections are won and bills introduced at Tassell house parties. That is what you were born for, and you know it.”
As simply as that, doubts crept in. He knew all the reasons why he wanted to refuse her, and yet he hesitated, tempted. He tried to form his next sentence. My wife is not accustomed…
No. He would not tactfully warn the countess of Sukey’s failings. He refused to imply in any way that he was not entirely proud of her. “And my wife?”
She shrugged. “I won’t make her housekeeper, but if you want a place for her at the Hall, we’ll find one.” Then she told him the wages she offered. He wondered if she knew he knew they were ten pounds more per annum than his father’s. “You might even set her up in lodgings nearby and start a family.”
His heart failed him at the thought. Sukey in a snug cottage, singing and entertaining her friends. Cheerfully living her own life—one in which he naturally had some small place, but not a particularly essential one.
Greedily, he wanted more than that. He wanted what they had now. They had fought hard for it, sniped and confided and quarreled and kissed their way to it. Things were going so well between them,
and here Lady Tassell was, to set everything on its ear again.
If the countess hadn’t, out of spite, told her friends not to let their sons hire him, he’d be valeting for some rising MP. It would be a more peaceful existence, even, in some respects, one with more gaiety in it. But he’d made the best of things, and the best had turned out to be better than he’d dared hope. Why should he accept her offer?
His conscience readily supplied the answer. His father was ill and old, and had persuaded Lady Tassell to humble herself before John.
It didn’t surprise him that she’d agreed in the end—though he noticed she’d put it off until the very last week of her stay. Repaying loyalty with loyalty was both principle and policy with her, and no one could have been more loyal than Mr. Toogood senior.
No, he was surprised his father had argued with her. Plumtree had told him, and John hadn’t believed him. Privately, he’d been sure his father would never side with him against the Tassells. That he could never again be proud of someone who had betrayed Lady Tassell—and who, perhaps worse, had embarrassed him before her.
To say no was to throw his father’s olive branch in his face. It was to refuse his mother her retirement. And it was to deprive his hardworking wife of a chance at leisure.
The chance was unlikely to come again.
“I don’t know, my lady,” he said at last. “I would need to discuss it with my wife.”
“Good man. This concerns her as well.” She settled her skirts more comfortably about her legs. “Mr. Summers informs me that he will be in London for most of February.”
The vicar planned to see his children and to present a paper to the Society of Antiquaries. Things were complicated by the defection of his curate, but the rector of a nearby parish had agreed to make a loan of his. John had been looking forward to a restful month of catching up on everything.
“He has agreed that while he is away, you and your wife may journey to Tassell Hall to visit your parents. I will be glad to cover your traveling expenses, if it means I may have your answer by Lady Day. But then I would need you to come at once to Tassell to help your father with the summer house parties.”
